Most RPGs have a single goal: save the world or save the princess. Everything is pre-scripted so matter what you do it gonna happen when you get to that point. Every body has spent 6 hours killing trolls in the forest to level up but when you get to the castle gates that's when the wizard's troop starting marching toward you. But how about something different (well I'm hoping it's never been done before) how about you're just a person. And you pick what you want to do. Farm, fight, be a lover, a thief, royal cook. Whatever. You're a person in a world that's ever evolving. Things are happening everyday. Battles go on as you milk the cows. Or your village is under martial law while going to do your apprenticeship at a blacksmith's. Even while training for special forces, your mother dies and your home gets sold to the merchant. Now of course there will be pre-scripted events. Wars will happen at certain times. NPCs will have certain goals and do certain things when particular conditions occur, etc. But for the player, it seems dynamic. You're just a person who gets to pick what he/she wants to do. You don't have to save the world. You don't have to care about the world. You could be the guy the hero walks up to and asks "Where's the elder's hut?" Hell, you can go to the other kingdom, be the bad guy, rise up through the ranks, and raid your former kingdom. Do you think this is too much for a game to handle? Can this (upcoming) generation of games handle that sort of "dynamicism"? Please discuss. [Edited by - Alpha_ProgDes on June 29, 2006 11:30:44 PM]

From a gameplay perspective, a game without goals is likely to be pretty dull. Whilst an RPG doesn't necessarily need to have a winning position, I think you need quests of some description.

A game where you can interact meaningfully with the society around you would certainly be interesting. The complexity of this is simulating how people would behave. In most RPGs, NPCs are only smart enough to behave reasonably towards an adventurer. A freeform RPG would entail having NPCs which would know how to respond to a variety of different PC roles.

Additionally, the world suddenly gets a lot more complex. No longer are towns black boxes into which you insert dead troll heads and receive bounty payments. If you're going to be a merchant king, then the economic simulation needs to be complex enough that you can actually do that. (For example, you need to set up caravans between towns, which also means the computer needs to predict when and where bandits will attack the caravans.) If you're going to be a farmer, then the game needs to account for what happens when you don't get enough rain, or an army tramples over your field.

Having things happen in the background is a good idea, whether or not you're a farmer. A feature of many RPGs is that you and your party are the only people in the entire world who are trying to do anything about the Evil Archmage who opened the Gate Of Doom (TM). It might be interesting to actually get to interact with a party of high-level adventurers who didn't want to kill you (and don't even know you're an adventurer, if you are).

I think the basic problem with ultrafreeform RPGs is content creation and world simulation. Which is pretty much the entire program. I think there is a safe middle ground, where you're still an adventurer, most quests are randomly generated (although they may be constrained by one or more story arcs), you can trade items worth up to a few thousand dollars (rather than, say, buying a forest for a million), and where pretty abstract "Civilisation" level simulation of the world powers generates wars and trade pacts and whatnot.

Thank you for posting.

My initial idea is that the player would be put into a world where something is happening. Two kingdoms are negotiating terms for a truce to 3 year war. That way it's not just "randomness". Now through that the game can take several paths: The war can end and people can bring about reconstruction. The negotiations could break down and the war starts again. The war could end in a stalemate and the two kingdoms could be in a Cold War.

These scenarios will have scripted events throughout the game. But they won't happen because you happen to be at particular place. It will happen as game time passes. You, the player, just live in that world and can interact with it. So the player can join the army, become a merc, be a bandit, or just be a regular townsperson. There are goals but they're not concrete goals. You pretty much follow paths which lead you to different events as they occur depending on your location and occupation.

I can think of atleast one "rpg" that does this, EVE online. Sure it has missions and such, but much of the premade storyline can be ignored in favour of pure PVP.

Something similar could be done in a single player, letting you move around the world, finding things to do. (find a bandit camp, kill them, get money, move around a large world, trading and such)

I believe I would have a lot more fun trying to save the world in a setting like this than one where I'm supposed to save the world. But it's not likely it would need saving. Else, what happens if you don't want to save it? Does it get taken over by the undead army? Does someone else try to save it after you let things get bad enough? If someone always steps up to fix a situation that the player leaves alone, it might make the player feel a bit unnecessary. And if they don't, everything will fall apart, since he can't be everywhere at once. And lastly, what happens if the player starts a quest that an NPC is already trying to accomplish? Do they fight for the right to do the right thing?

Also, are we talking MMO? It sounds very MMO.

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Original post by Kest I believe I would have a lot more fun trying to save the world in a setting like this than one where I'm supposed to save the world. But it's not likely it would need saving. Else, what happens if you don't want to save it?

In my fantasy world, a group of NPCs could easily be the "heroes". So technically you don't have to be.

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Does it get taken over by the undead army?

It could.

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Does someone else try to save it after you let things get bad enough?

Well see that's the thing, you're not "letting things get bad enough." Unlike every other RPG you're not responsible for saving the world. If you want you can but you can just let the "actual heroes" take up that task.

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If someone always steps up to fix a situation that the player leaves alone, it might make the player feel a bit unnecessary.

Again, you assume you're the "hero". You're not. You're the Person. Period. What you do is your choice.

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And if they don't, everything will fall apart, since he can't be everywhere at once.

Again, the world moves with or without you. So things are going on without you being there. Say you decided to be a farmer in the game. You'll hear through the game day that battle happened at the ridge or the castle walls took a beaten. Do you think the town is gonna expect the farmer to pick up a sword join the good fight? No. You're a farmer. And you get to stay that way until you decide to be something else.

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And lastly, what happens if the player starts a quest that an NPC is already trying to accomplish? Do they fight for the right to do the right thing?

Well again in my fantasy game you can walk in on a fight between the NPC good guys and the NPC bad guy(s). Choose to fight, watch, assist, or leave. Again your choice.

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Also, are we talking MMO? It sounds very MMO.

Actually I was thinking single-player, but it could be (not too)MMO.

Hell, I'd play it. Probably try playing that Blacksmith's Apprentice option you mentioned. :)

I second the recommendation to try the Elder Scrolls series, especially the recent entry (Oblivion). The main factor I can see, is that you will have to write up A LOT of script/story to accomplish this, and will have to spend A LOT of time mentally stepping through all the possible paths to make sure you don't leave any massive gaps that could ruin gameplay. A quest oriented system seems like a good plan, with some quests' availability tied directly into the path your character takes. (Being the above mentioned apprentice, for example, should open up quests associated with training events, fulfilling the wishes of eccentric clients, travelling to visit other masters when you make journeyman rank, etc.)

There's also the concern of writing up A LOT of AI code. Should most likely settle on or design a scripting engine for such a game, with the majority of activity written in said engine, and the actual game being essentially a driver for that engine. (This also can make it easier to release expansions later, if done right, or even to allow player-created extensions.)

You should have a look at EVE (www.eve-online.com) It's a MMORPG that's very much like this. There are no specific quest, the only thing that's similar to quests is that you can go to some company or government and ask for a temporary job, aka a mission. It's really fun and you can do anything you want, ileagal, legal or neutral.

the main problem with the rpg where you can do anything is having enought content for the anything the player chooses to do, keeping the world moving only adds to this problem as more of the content will be mised, dynamic conten could help but it still not devloped enough to be the main driving force of a game

In fact, I think what OP was trying to get to, was more a Game in which things happen no matter the amount of implication the player is ready to get, instead of a game in which you can trully do ANYTHING.

The interest of such a game is that it allows the player to feel, through replayability, that he is indeed moving things forward.

Let's take a stupid example. A ten hours long adventure.

You are the son of a Blacksmith who is going to be sacrificed for religious and political reasons in ten hours. How are you going to spend those ten hours?

You can try to make your father escape, and survive the ten hours. After that, the sacrifice cannot happen anymore.
You can try to show the rest of the world how useless those sacrifices are, by unearthing old cases.
You can try to murder the high priest and gain some time.
You can try to find friends to help you.
...

But no matter what you do, time is running, and you will only have ten hours worth of play.

I'm using the ten hours long adventure example because ten hours of scripting is quite long, especially if it includes multi-pathing, and thorough AI simulation. If you want to make it one hour longer, it will require in fact, to add one tenth of the over all work on it, which might just be beyond the scope of ANY professional team. (but not beyond that of indie dreamers, though...)

Let's say you pre-script the entire storyline as a branching tree of nodes. By choosing one path early on, you prune branches for later on. Or maybe not, you instead OPEN more. By taking this route, you make those ones unavailable. By killing this unsuspecting character at 1 hour of play, you don't find him on your way around nine hours and a half, waiting for you. By poisoning the waterwell early enough, you can hope to reduce the strength of the guards by 70%, by you will have to rescue your father before 8: 45 if you want to see him alive anyway. Plus you'll have to have accomplished the side quest of finding the antidote...

I think a branching story made of side-quests could be scripted. In fact, I know such a thing can be made, because I already did it for a TableTop PnP RPG, so I know it can be done. It demands around a hundred times more preparation than any other sort of RPG, but when you have it done, it works wonders, and you can play "the Butterfly effect" or "the GroundHog Day" as much as you want. I think, in fact, ten hours of play is way too long. You should have it a three or four hours at most, so that the players can do it in just one sitting, and can also fool around noticing interesting facts if they don't want to be serious about that.

BUt, of course, a four hours long RPG might be a little short for any console-RPG addict, while being exactly what the TableTopers want... Or not.