I am playing Fable: the Lost Chapters right now. I like the game, but the advertisement of Fable is focused on the freedom to choose your destiny, be good or evil, and I don't think that this is done well in this game. Most of the destiny choosing in Fable looks something like this: choise: Press A to watch the good cut-scene and earn some good points. or Press B to watch the evil cut-scene and earn some evil points. Sometimes its: choise or Walk away to watch the good cut-scene and earn some good points. or Kill [person] to watch the evil cut-scene and earn some evil points. When the designers feel creative, they do something like this: choice Talk to [person A] to watch the good cut-scene and earn some good points. or Talk to [person B] to watch the evil cut-scene and earn some evil points. My point is, that this is too simplified. You choose in the begining of the game if you want to be good or evil, and than in every choosing point in the game, you press A or B according to your choice. Also, there is no judgement needed, since you can easily distinguish the good choices from the evil ones (lets see, killing the surrendered opponent, which is your friend, in the arena counts as good or evil?). Knights of the Old Republic had a better destiny choosing system, since different choises usualy leads to different quests. However, it still gave me the feeling of choose in the begining of the game, choose the same thing over and over. Well, at least the make it clear in the sequal's trailer("one choice can...") Now, lets move to Deus Ex 2:Invisible War. In this game, you didn't had to choose between good and evil, but between different factions. If you do some quests for one faction, and then a quest for the opposite faction, you will be betraying your old faction. Nobody likes traitors, so every player will choose a faction, and stick to it's quests. ----------for those of you who are just scrolling on this long----- ----------post, here is where I stop complaining and start suggesting----- Now, what if every conflict you have to interfere in will have it's own factions? Instead of making each choice a choice between the side of the international green spies and the side of the universal mafia, make the choices more like choosing between the side of farmer Jack and farmer Joe, which are fighting for a piece of land. When you reach the next conflict you have to resolve, any loyalty you feel to Jack or Joe will affect your decision. That way, the player can really choose his path in the game. But, you say, the playes decisions will have no effect on the story in that way. The player will only decide based on the reward he will get for each decision. There is still minimal judgement involved. Well, I thought about it as well(otherwise, I wouldn't be mentioning it in this post). After each decision, the game engine will determine what other people think about the conflict and how it ended. NPCs in faraway places might not hear about small conflicts("What? Jack and Joe fought over a piece of land in Debilia? Who are Jack and Joe? And where the heck is Debilia?"), but in the next town, shopkeeper Linda can hear about the story. If she thinks Jack should have got the land, and she hears that you helped Joe, she will be less friendly to you, resulting in higher prices. Other people can support Joe, and be nicer to you for helping him. I know what you think. You think I want to let the player choose, and then let the game randomly determine the result of his choice. Well, I thought about it, and I have a solution. Actualy, I have two solution, but both can be implemented. Both solution determine the reaction of the world to the each of the player's possible choices randomly before the choice is made, and if he wants to know what the game determined, he have to do some investigation and talking. He might still stick to a faction, but choosing will not be so fast, and will involve more challange. The first solution is quite simple. Each character has a political opinion, made of several values. The values can be stuff like socialism vs. capitalism, nature-protecting vs. globalization, etc. The personal opinions of each NPC does not have to be black and white. each value can range from -100 to 100. So, -100 in economic opinion is total socialist and 100 in economic is total capitalist, but a NPC can have values like 75, -13 and stuff. If you talk to a character, the engine will sometimes make him say one of a large list of pre-set sentences that represent his opinion. So if you hear a character saying something like "It's a shame they cutted down the large forest east of here", you can guess he tends to nature protecting. Now, each conflict will have something to do with one or more of the political elements. For example, after doing some talking to Jack, Joe, and the other people in the area, you find out that Jack is a rich farmer, and that he rented the land to Joe. Joe's crops didn't growed so well because of a drought, so he don't have enough money to pay to Jack. Joe thinks that he can earn enough money in a couple of years, but Jack want to take the land now. That land is Joe's only source of living. After hearing all of this, the player understand that supporting Jack will make the capitalists more friendly to him, while supporting Joe will earn him the respect of the socialists. Now, if he talked to shopkeeper Linda and found out that she is a capitalist, the player can understand that if he want lower prices from Linda, he should support Jack. The political tend of each conflict does not have to be random, but it can be nice if it will be. My other solution is more complicated. I have given it the bombastic name "macro social engine". The idea is to determine a graph of relations between characters in the game. Each relation will be made out of two people, a title, and a closeness value. The title can be stuff like "friend", "brother", or a set of two titles: "father"-"son", "boss"-"worker". The closeness will determine how close the two people are. The larger the number, the more friendly the two people in the relation are to each other. There could also be hostility relations, with negative closeness values. The engine will make more relations between people in the same area. The player can find out about relations by talking to people. We will use a pre-set sentences list like we did before, but this time, the sentences will also have places to put names and titles. So a sentence in could look like "Yesterday I went fishing with my [title] [person]". So if Joe is a uncle of the guy you are speaink with, he will say "Yesterday I went fishing with my uncle Joe" if that sentence is chosen by the engine. There can also be sentences talking about other people, like "Earlier today I saw [person A] and his [person B] eating a pizza." Each title will have a range of closeness values, so you don't get a relation with an "enemy" title and a 500 closeness value. Also, each sentence will have a range of closeness values, cause you don't want to hear stuff like "Next week I'm going to eat launch with my worst enemy Bill. I am looking forward to this.". The player wont be able to see the closeness values, but he can guess them from the sentences he hears by talking to people. Now, the next part is pretty obvious. Each NPC in a conflict will choose the side of the NPC closer to him. So if you hear Jack saying "I'm plannign to visit my sister Linda next month.", you can understand that Linda will favor Jack in the land conflict. For those of you who like a dynamic world, new relations can be made while the game is in progress, and other relations can be changed or deleted, but there must be a way to inform the player about this. That was long. Hope you managed to read it all. This idea is not going to be implemented in my next game(I don't think it will suit into a tennis style game), but I want to post it here while it's still fresh in my mind. So, what do you guys think?

I like it!!!

It'd be quite easy to spread the influences out by simply looking at all of Jacks relationships and applying the changes to them and maybe then their relationships and spreading it to their friends (gossiping). You could also have interesting feedback.

If Jack tells John, Jimmy and Jeff about it and then they chat to each other about it then it amplifies the affect (meaning your actions will have a bigger influence in small comunities)

This works for short chains but what about global celebrities e.g. the prime minister or some film star. Say the player insults them publically, how will this spread out. You don't really want data in every NPC to describe what they think of these people? For this I'd suggest your actions alter the players values based on the fame of the NPC.

e.g. +5 capitalism * fame of john = 0.001 or something stupidly small so that NPCs don't magically know that you favour capitalism but +5 capitalism * fame of big oil baron = +4 so NPCs will magically know (as if they heard news about it) that you cut a big deal with the baron.

I was also thinking about using bards and tracking their movemets and repertory or songs.

I agree on the whole Fable thing.

It's somewhat of a misnomer when games are touted as "freedom to do what you want", because there's never a tagline of "...within the translucent boundaries of the sandbox we've defined". :) Of course there are marketing reasons why it's done (not to mention that, relative to other games released around its release-time, the 'freedom feature' was unique).

In a large-scale game where the player may affect many different organizations, it might be wise to use a factioning system, akin to the system used in Freelancer, to manage how different people belonging to said factions relate to the player.

For example, if we define 4 factions, the reds, the greens, the blues, and the blacks; reds and blues are in a warring state, blues and greens are in a warring state, and everyone else is friendly.

Any time a player completes a quest, the results of the quest may affect a particular group in a positive or negative fashion. Additionally, favor with allies or enemies of said faction may increase or decrease as well! In the above setting, killing a member of the blues would result in a favor decrease with the blues, and even though the player did nothing directly for the reds or greens, has his favor increased with them in a sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend" mindset. When encountering a particular member of a given faction, the NPC's reaction would adjust accordingly.

Example:
Day 1 - Encounter a 'red'. 'Red' basically ignores player, as their faction notoriety is neutral.
Day 2 - Player completes a 'kill the Blue' quest. Faction notoriety changes.
Day 3 - Player encounters the same 'red', who cheers the player on as he walks past.

This could be applied in many different game-styles where more than one faction exists, as a method of managing favor and neutrality.

In addition to the closeness, you should have something telling how likely one person in a relationship is to obey or respect the other. For example, someone may love his little brother very much and do everything he can for him, but he isn't likely to let his little brother make the big decisions. In contrast, someone may do everything his boss asks but personally detest his boss.

<q> I was also thinking about using bards and tracking their movemets and repertory or songs. </q>
It would be really cool to have bards sing of your accomplishments once you become famous in the world.

These ideas would really help bring a world alive. They would require complex AI, however, perhaps something like what's promised in Oblivion.

Keep in mind also of the myriad of responses required of the NPC that will depend on their standing with the player. You could whittle it down to, say, a positive or negative response. Even a positive/neutral/negative. But if the discussion continues on for some time, it tends to become exponentially difficult to keep track of NPC-player relations, especially if the player just picks a random answer every time and the relationship status swings back and forth from good to bad. This was one of my biggest obstacles when wanting to implement something similar, thinking up a range of responses from NPCs based on their opinion of the player.

What I ended up settling with was more of a 'hidden' question approach. Instead of asking the player flat-out whether they wanted to kill someone or spare them, ask them instead in a more roundabout way so that the player will have trouble determining which option is 'the good one' and which is 'the bad one'. Theyll have to rely more on role playing, picking the answer they think their character would choose.

Well, I don't think the relations between a player and a NPC should changed drastically when they talk. The relations will be based mainly on what the player do.

RPG's players are used to NPC's saying the same thing over and over. Instead of making every NPC say the same sentence over and over, I want to make a big list of sentences, which all NPCs will say.

Omegavolt, you are right. An NPC's response when he is hostile to the player should be different from the response when he is friendly to the player. I guess a player-friendly range can be added to each sentense.

Great idea - really love it!

However, how exactly will you transfer information to the player without being too much "in his face"? Guess something like "Aye, here's that Mighty Sword Of Ogre Decapitation you asked for, and by the way, I will go out fishing with my cousin next week - thought you might want to know, buddy" would be a bit too obvious.

I think Morrowind offered the possibility to ask NPCs about other characters, but then again, all you would do is working off the list of names you are provided, which leads to another problem - how would the game decide which names you should be able to ask for? In a small village, figures aren't that high, but in the capital of the kingdom, your list would become quite large. Not to mention that the 40th "No, never heard of him, pal" would be quite annoying to hear.

Any good solutions for that one so far?

The Education Arcade group at MIT (games for education), did a really cool mod on NWN that did a lot of this stuff.

http://www.educationarcade.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=9&page=1

Revolution is basically an RPG set just before the US revolution, with a number of PC characters (in a coop multiplayer environment) playing different characters in this town..

They've implemented a lot of the ideas bantered around in this thread, in addition to some really cool extras:

- Social standing, and NPC understanding of social boundries.
(so if you're the town magistrate, you cannot meaningfully talk to slaves. Women and men share different social networks, and depending on location and context, cannot always talk to each other, etc)

- Information spreading
(as information is discovered, it's broken into nuggets, and the NPCs spread the information nuggets to each other in call-response sequences as they move around. For example, say your character decides to rob a house. If noone saw it, he gets away. If someone sees it, that person will start spreading the news. Each person that they encounter will add the new information nugget to their repertoir, and there's a chance they'll broadcast that next time THEY meet someone).

- Flexible valuation
(each information nugget contains both the call/response set for that nugget, as well as delta-values for some of the NPCs internal states. For example, if I'm seen stealing stuff, the nugget for that would decrease my standing with the NPCs that receives that nugget).

- NPC standing
(there are several different factions; loyalists, patriots, slaves, etc. The chance of an information nugget being accepted depends on who the information spreader is relative to me, and who the information is about. For example; as the influential pro-revolution lawyer, I am stealing people's underwear. A british loyalist sees me, and starts spreading that nugget about me. Each NPC that receives the nugget will evaluate it based on who it's about, and who spreads it. So if he tells a fellow loyalist, they'll probably accept the nugget, and their opinion of me falls. If they try to tell it to a revolutionary, the nugget may very well be discarded as biased).

There were a lot of other cool stuff happening in the background as well; I especially loved the way information-nuggets were spun into a background chatter as you moved through the city; with both good things and bad things being visible to you. The nuggets were also available as conversation topics, so you could ask some NPCs what they thought about the rumour that your character was seen stealing underwear, etc :)

I'd love to see that in a commercial RPG, or even in an MMOG.

Allan

Quote:

Original post by c-Row I think Morrowind offered the possibility to ask NPCs about other characters, but then again, all you would do is working off the list of names you are provided, which leads to another problem - how would the game decide which names you should be able to ask for? In a small village, figures aren't that high, but in the capital of the kingdom, your list would become quite large. Not to mention that the 40th "No, never heard of him, pal" would be quite annoying to hear. Any good solutions for that one so far?

I think this is the best place for a visible distinction between the real world and what's feasible in the real world -- since RPG players don't want "Nope, don't know x, either!" over and over again to find out where the *&%! Cave of Lostitude is, the player would only be given dialogue choices about people the NPC knows, and quests they know about.

It wouldn't make much sense to ask the Old Hermit from The Floating City Occupied by Only One Person where you can go for a student loan to get into Subterranean U.

Just a thought.