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Original post by Stompy9999 What sunandshadow is working on sounds interesting.

If you think it's that interesting, we're recruiting. ;)

morrowwind is close (and i think better then what you are proposing). However the story wont progress unless you progress it. You wont know what npcs will progress the story (however you can get an idea if you pay attention to what ppl say), nor what quests, nor if an npc is even important. You could even kill a vital npc making it difficult to complete what is considered the last quest. Killing people in the town makes you a wanted criminal if seen in the act. you can steal from who you wish, and if yoru good you wont get caught (yes actual pickpocketing for the rouge class). you can even stea from the shops (though some of the better shops are gaurded and difficult to steal from). You can enter a castle, and go to the armoury and steal whatever was availible. you coudl pick doors that were locked (though some locks are harder then others). A sequal is coming out sometime this year i believe.

The best part was the game allowed interaction with the npcs via multiple choice. So you could get some items without questing (ie if you had the money or perhaps already had the item the npc wants). In some cases you could be hated by the npc (because of affiliation). So you might need to steal the item, or if your a warrior kill the guy and his buddies then take the item.

you should also check out knights of the old republic, it also has a very open ended gameplay.

dont forget that too much interactivity reduces direction and increases workload for possible little gain or a loss in immersion. By raising the players expectations you can ultimitly take the plaer out of the game even when its much more interactive compared to the competition.

Also zelda: majoras mask (i think, the one with time travelling) basically had a time based game where you needed to complete things within a time limit. you coudl chose not to and lose the game because the world was lost/destroyed/becomes a bad place to be. though i suspect this is not what you had in mind.

personally making a timeline for teh story is stupid. the player should be able to play at their leisure. A time constraint can make the game unbeatable if the player is just enjoying teh side quests or exploring the world. You dont want the player to miss the vital parts of the story. A better system is a system that progresses the story when the player does certain quests. Any number of previous quests can affect which quests that the player can complete, and can cause the player to need to finish more quests in between the "important" quests that are teh main storyline. You could create a very complex branching storyline, it just requires time and forthought to ensure that any quests that are availible to the player wont break things (ie only activate quests that make sense considering the quests the player already has completed).

content is the most difficult part.

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Has this concept already been done before?

In contrast to what ishpeck said, my short answer is yes.

There are several properties regarding this topic, including:
- degree of player freedom
- responsiveness of the game world
- diversity of outcomes
- diversity of intermediate plot elements

These are spectrums. It is rather meaningless to discuss trying to achieve infinity in any of these properties (i.e. it is meaningless to say, "I want the player to have COMPLETE freedom")

The simplest form of interactive stories are text-based adventure games. If you think about it, the interactiveness actually declined. There were interactive stories in the beginning, with not just multiple endings, but multiple plots and all the rest. It is only due to the increasing emphasis on gameplay that diluted the complexity of the stories.

Furthermore, any strategy games also fall into this kind of formations. In a strategy games, the plot elements are not presented in dialogues and cutscenes, but in events, such as rushing an enemy base, securing a resource, hiding from the enemy to build an expansion, etc.... (And the player has to perform all of these 'acts').

Interactive stories are games of strategy. In this perspective, designing the mechanism for interactive stories is the same as designing the game elements and AI for a strategy game. In general, these are the things that you need to declare:

1) Forces and objectives - In a strategy game, the objective can be simply to destroy the others.
2) Action freedom - pertains to what units can be built, where they can move.
3) Reaction Rules - this is the overall AI of the forces, such as the building order, what kind of troops to use, what to attack, etc...
4) Perceivable Actions - things that the AI will assess and observe in order to make decisions.


Relating these to the design of a story: (an example)

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Cardinal Prime This is a multiplot, multi-ending, non-combat, mystery, romantic, interactive game. In this game you plays a jaded professional thief who recently lost the lover. You have been hired to steal an artifact, the Cardinal Prime, from a museum within a week. If the player follows the usual routines of getting prepared, go into the museum, steal it, and turn it in, the default ending is the player being assassinated or that life continues as another day like the day a week ago. In other words, the time frame is set to be seven days. Within the time frame, the player is invited to make sense out of the situation, by exploring the past, the present, and to make decisions for the future. The player is expected to play the game through multiple game-runs to get a complete interpretation of the story out of many interpretations. In terms of the 4 elements described above: 1) Forces and objectives You, your client, your lover. Your given objective is to steal the artifact for your client. However, the story (as well as the ending) will gives hints to you that that is not the actual objective of the game. Your other objectives include finding your lost lover, discovering the identity of your client, the identity of the Cardinal Prime, and your past (there is no amnesia. this is about the one player discovering the past about the PC). Depending on what you have explored and how you interpret the situation, the identity and the objective of your client changes. Your client can range from being the rightful owner of the artifact, to someone taking revenge against you. The objective of your lost lover also changes from helping you to going against you depending on what you do. 2) Action Freedom This pertains to what you can do within the seven days. The standard actions include: getting equipments, visiting your client, sorting through the stuffs of your dead lover, visit the museum, and to steal the thing. Other options are available as the player declares thoughts, perspectives, and suspicions. Addition actions include: Searching for info about the artifact and the client, sneaking into the client's mansion, visiting your lover's birthplace, visiting an artifact expert, and visiting a weapon dealer. 3) Reaction Rules This section is large. In general, after you have interacted long enough, the identity and objectives of your client and lover will be set (around day 4). After that they will follow timelines to perform the rest of their deeds. Before that, the events follow a fixed sequence that can be interpreted differently. 4) Perceivable Actions These are based on the reaction rules. Since I didn't actually show the rules this section is not very meaningful. However, this section includes how when you visit your lover's birthplace she is able to know that you went there. In this game, since the time frame is short, a discrete approach is used to assess the player's perspectives and throughts.

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My idea for an interactive story would be a story that happens regardless of whether the player has done anything or not. The story would take place over a certain amount of time leading up to a single event. At any point during the story, the player can act in ways that will affect this timeline. But, if the player does nothing, the timeline will continue. The player has complete freedom and can do whatever they want. If they are asked to save the world they can simply say no or if someone important is talking to them they can simply leave the room. There would be no cutscenes, and the player can do anything available to them in their environment.

I had thought of something similar for a little personal project, and sunandshadow's _Xenalure_ does have some interesting elements of its own. ;D

I would have gone on a large jaunt as to how it would be implemented, and what it would involve but Estok seems to have summed it rather nicely, GJ!

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Very interactive storyline is Half Life 2. There are no cutscenes and you basically can choose to follow or not follow the storyline.

?? I guess this was ironic :)
HL2 is an example of a game _completely_ linear, where you have no freedom at all (except freedom of movement), everything is scripted, and you can fool these scripts quite easily using some tricks like flying, bunnyhopping and grav-jumping...
even if you are free to move wherever you want, the storyling is completely static and predefined, you can't do anything else but follow it (or die), you can't even kill these damn "friendly" NPCs that get in your legs all the time and sometimes get you killed because they're so dumb that they block you in some corner and you basically can't move...

this is an example of a game as linear as it could be. you have absolutely no choice in the story, it always starts the same, continue the same, and ends the same, as long as you finish the game, no matter how you played...

here is a small add from me, since i'm on gamedev i was basically saying what estok says, but i'm SO bad in english...

IMPACT CHARACTER
one way to add drama into game and turn it into a dinamic story is impact character. If you don't know what is it, sunandshadow talk about them in a sticky in the writing forum go seek it!
Impact characters set the dramaplay of the game, dramaplay is the stake of the gameplay, depending on the drama, the game would be perceive differently and then wouLd be play differently. The idea is to mesure valence of the player's action according to impact character (estok's forces),you should have many different impact character to map all the problematic area of the game.
To mesure the dramatic tension in the world, you could simply compare the ressource of each impact character in game, then according to this tension set an event that affect the way this tension would evolve to control the pace of the story.

ex: the first time i try it it was a simple scenario, the world was set with two impact character, the empire and the rebel, the player was a rebel and had some influance the game would flow. Actually the system was set that whatever the rebel do, the empire add an overwhelming force that would crush them slowly. Since action had effect, you had an illusion that you actually could have a control other the situation, but things could only get worse, at some point, when the ressource of the rebel was low, we toss an event like that, the daughter of the emperor rebel herself and switch side, this hindering the empire effort. Actually whatever you do, the princess switch because it's in characterisation that she couldn't stay passive while the mount of victims RAISE(thus making a pressure on his behaviour), according to flow of event, you could see came into argulent with his father according to event that happen (base on the ressource of the rebel, of course these ressource is set that they could affect the princess dramatic jauge (care of the weak), for example casuality which is inevitable from the empire acts), and according to the way you play she would have a different behaviour towards you but still accomplishing his goal in a dramatic sense (bas on affinity she may threat you hard being a foolish bringing people to casuality or threar you well because you play wisely).
Each impact character have their gauge on how they evaluate the world, these are these gauge which decide which state the world could be toss.

Key word are events, ressource and impact character.
I could expend the thought, or maybe not because i'm so bad at english, but this theory had me skip two years in a famous gamedesign school while recruitin new student!

SUNANDSHADOW is really close to this.

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Original post by Estok Quote: Has this concept already been done before? In contrast to what ishpeck said, my short answer is yes. There are several properties regarding this topic, including: - degree of player freedom - responsiveness of the game world - diversity of outcomes - diversity of intermediate plot elements These are spectrums. It is rather meaningless to discuss trying to achieve infinity in any of these properties (i.e. it is meaningless to say, "I want the player to have COMPLETE freedom") . . .

Very well put.

I whole-heartedly agree that the design must find the spot that he is most comfortable in upon these spectra.

What you said encapsulated something that I was trying to say. I guess I shouldn't talk on the phone, write code, and post on the forum all at the same time, eh?

Some of the things you said about strategy games are prime examples of the solution that I propose: Provide a meaningful context under-which the gameplay can implicitly and adequately convey the game's storyline -- thereby making the story's development seem more interactive.

It's also important to understand that a story must be flexible and lucid enough that, regardless of what the gameplay does, a story (no matter what routes it takes) will develop.

If storyline is going to be a major incentive for designing the game, it should be good. You can't just rip-off Star Wars and call your plotline complete. Properly developing such an element may even be beyond the scope of this forum -- because this is not a story writer's forum, it's a game developer's forum.

One thing that helps make a story feel more alive is making the story driven by characters and their personalities. Rather than say: "I want to have two nations go to war, so let's put a jerkface king in charge of one. . ." Start with the characters and say: "We have two rulers of different nations. One is a quiet, unassuming fellow who struggles to be a just and respected ruler, to be worthy of the title he bears; he constantly struggles with his own megalomania but managed to keep himself in check. The other ruler has survived a grizzly civil war that left him and his nation rather jaded or perhaps even a bit morbid." Then develop the situation from there. By allowing all characters (NPC and player alike) to drive their own goals, it gives the world and story more life, making it feel less linear.

Simply by scripting all the relevant NPC's in the game with coherent personalities and appropriate activities, the virtues and abilities of the game will shine brighter than its limitations.

For an example of good NPC/story interactivity, see . . .

Star Control 2: The Ur Quan Masters (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/)
Ultima 6: The False Prophet (http://www.uo.com/archive/)

A little something I have been playing with

The system is based around sprites that actually have to do things on their own (cant just teleport between towns, has to walk) and can become “persistent” , that they try to do a task but continue even when they’re off screen. You could order a follower to do a task in another town but rather that just have a 25% chance of success he would have to got to the next town, he could success, fail or just get killed by a random encounter. The idea is so anything you do could dynamically generate one of hundreds of possible outcomes, they would also be more realistic, EX if you killed most of the monster in an area this would make it easier for your guy. But by treating all persistent sprite like the player sprite you could devise a complex plan involving them that wouldn’t break down the second you think of something the programmer didn’t.

You would have most enemies being the non-persistent just attack anything type but you could have a few special ones, EX a monster that attack a village every night, you would be abele to do this without it being 100% pre scripted (how many games have bosses that just sit in a room waiting for you) also if you wanted to pursues it you would actually have to cache up before it got away

Yes, I know having even a few persistent sprites with basic AI+ path finding would be unrealistic in a real game scale but it would be a interesting experiment.
It might work though since off screen without graphics their action would just be pure number crunching and although all NPC sprites could become persistent they would normally be treated the usual game way and do nothing when off screen. They would only become persistent as the result of the action of the player or a already persistent sprite

I doubt this system could handle a storyline but it might be able to have a fairly interactive world with somewhat inteligible npcs and continuity

[Edited by - Kaze on February 9, 2005 12:58:32 AM]