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Original post by Wavinator I have GOT to play this game.

Yes, you should. It's awesome. Go download it now!

It's interesting to see this thread, because I've been imagining something similar, inspired by a combination of Dragon Age: Origins, and Dwarf Fortress. And I was having a similar problem: For those of us who can enjoy unstructured sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress, it's fine; but many people want more goal oriented gameplay. Even I find that unless I can keep coming up with new and ever more preposterous projects for my Dwarves, the game quickly starts to feel pointless.

Some ideas I've brainstormed:

Achievements:
Offer achievements for accomplishing certain tasks. If these are sufficiently varied they can offer motivation for playing the game in a range of different ways. Of course, it's still up to the player to choose which ones to pursue in a given game.

Legends and Artifacts:
Your character's story gets added to the world's lore DF style. Characters can also create artifacts which can then be collected by later characters. Those artifacts, although powerful, may have some kind of curse associated with them, perhaps related to how the character who created lived and/or died. Character stories could also be uploaded and used in other player's lore generation process, in a similar fashion to Spore's creatures.

Quest Generation:
Generate quests based on the evolution of the simulated game world and previous character's influence on it. Generate a few of them too, so the player can basically choose whichever one appeals most to him.
I like the idea of getting the character generation involved here, as that gives players an opportunity to nudge the game in a direction that interests them.

Sounds really interesting, I’ve always disappointed the free form games don’t have that personal story element to them or an end for that matter. To play through the game complete a specific goal, see a nice epilogue of the events, and then be able to play the game using a new character in the existing world would be a very memorable gaming experience.

Even if it’s a couple of short paragraph a la Conan like:

“TechnoGoth’s bloody quest for vengeance met with an equally bloody end. The flames of hatred that burnt strong since his family was killed by the empire during the bombing of Proxima 4 fuelled a crusade of death and destruction across the Empire. No one was safe from the terror his pirate fleet brought as they made no distinction between military ships, and civilian colonies. All who wore the imperial eagle trembled at the sound of his name.

The final moments of TehcnoGoth’s life will go down in history, as a massive fleet of a thousands pirate raiders attacked the imperial capital. Fire rained down from heaven and the mighty guns of the Empire rang out endlessly and the ships burned. But it was all just a distraction as TechnoGoth snuck through the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the Capital. The Emperor betrayed by one his closest allies the Grand Vizier, was caught unaware as TechnoGoth stormed the command shelter. The first shot was all it took striking the Emperor a killing blow before the Imperial Guard could react and cut TechnoGoth down where he stood. On that day an Imperial hero and Empire’s greatest villain died.

The aftermath was no less destructive. The Empire lay divided as self righteous nobles fought amongst themselves, tearing apart an Empire that had lasted a thousand years. Extinguishing the light of reason, and plunging the galaxy into the darkness of the warring houses Era. But that is a story for another time.”

The character creation process I would see as involving choosing an origin story and a background by selecting the key events of the characters life from the games own lore and attaching a modifier. Then choose a life goal or set of goals.

An example of a Key Life event background option would taking the a game event of the Bombing of Proxima 4 and then choosing a one of the following modifiers

Imperial Hero – Bonus to Imperial Fame, Courage bonus, Imperial Rank Bonus, Reaction Penalty when dealing with Separatists.

Family Killed – Hatred for members of the Empire. Massive bonus to Resolution.

Stranded – Negative to all social interactions, Penalty to physical stats, bonus to survival skills, supplies last twice as long.

Grizzled Veteran – Start with a random bionic, and a grudge.

My character’s life goal might be to assassinate the Emperor.

Rather than letting players respec their life goal, maybe “level ups” could take the form of Turning points. At a turning point I can choose to continue towards my life goal gaining a bonus or go down a different path. What might be interesting is if abandoning your life goal inverted the bonuses and penalties you gained from previous turning points along that path.

So, if at turning point 3 in my life goal of owning my own moon I chose to abandon that path to become a monk, then my competitor now becomes a friend, and that monthly mining contract payout now becomes fee.

Events generation would probably consist generating gameplay elements as the result of intended changes, and interaction to world element nodes. So a decline to Sigma 7’s prosperity might be the intended change, an interaction with the local pirate forces the Actor, and the event the creation of a game play element consisting of a pirate fleet to plague Sigma 7.

Maybe what's needed to propel plots in a sandbox style game is an omniscient, neutral(?) character that appears from time to time to try to push the player in a particular direction. From what I understand, that was the role of ancient trickster gods. Not sure what'd work in a sci-fi setting. Maybe a computer program or a news network or something. Somehow having a short old guy in red robes popping up all over deep space might be hard to swallow.

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Original post by JDS0 The problem with using rules rather than story templates is that without the rigidity of templates, you will get very confusing and unplayable events, just like real life: for example, you could have a war between three guys named Henry, and due to the rules, one of the Henrys keeps on oscillating his religious alignment.

You're right and this is something I've seen in strategy game AI, which is the well that I've been thinking of drawing from.

I am probably oversimplifying the problem here, but (thinking from a rules based AI perspective) if you've decided to change state-- religion in your example-- shouldn't the evaluation system, which is likely weighted / biases toward certain choices, be able to heavily weight / bias future choices? So if one religion is chosen the game needs to make the weighting of all other religions much lower, and there would need to be some set of rules for how religion gets changed and why it's important in the first place.

With a template I definitely believe things will be more stable and logical. But they won't be fluid. You couldn't, for instance, have the change of philosophy / religion be a major source of conflict, have a Henry covert to a religion, then throw in a major foreign power invasion which ends up with all former enemies allying and maybe losing and having to change religion to that of the victor.

That is, unless you wrote that specific scenario. OTOH, aside from repetition you may end up with changes that don't tie events up into a neat narrative bow. That's probably a bigger problem.

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Another advantage of having such story templates as an explicit structure in your game logic is that story templates can keep track of how many times they have been invoked:

Good point but you can also do this with event generation provided the level of abstraction is high enough. What gets harder is determining the results.

However, it's possible to have a hybrid approach. Already I was thinking that I need to quickly resolve events that are far away, and you could do this with either changes of events or more explicitly defined templates.

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"Gee, you'd think the developers would quit having the Ruxian Winterland invaded every Tuesday!"

Again good point and you see this happen all the time with the AI in strategy games. This is another example of oscillation.

I'd again like to think rules would help here. I ask, "why does this not make sense to people but make sense to the AI or event generator." Narrative doesn't like repetition unless it's summarized. Gameplay often doesn't tolerate it either. So maybe locations are fought over because they're valuable, and either they lose value in the process or else the game approximates some of the factors, like morale, public support and resources, that typically constrain war.

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As for an ultimate goal, I'd take from mythology and have the ultimate goal be for the player to become the supreme ruler of whatever it is you want him to rule.

Dangerous. I like it, but as a concept I don't think it could be implemented unless it was abstract.

A game like this should probably avoid putting the player in a position that lets him "peek under the hood." If you make them supreme general, for instance, then they'll be going head to head against some strategy AI which will be anemic for the fact that it's not a pure strategy game.

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The player, from his vantage point, can use his authority to shape the world, effectively making this a "level editing" stage.

When you level edit it's with an eye for playing or having others play. Where would you get challenge?

In terms of gameplay I think you'll have wanted to provide the same gameplay throughout the entire experience (roughly). You don't for instance, want to go from making intense character related decisions and tactical squad combat (hypothetically speaking) to making grand strategy choices unless you had grand strategy choices you could make when you first started the game.

Anyway, had a bit more about this specific example but I'm pressed for time so I'll add to this later.

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Original post by TechnoGoth To play through the game complete a specific goal, see a nice epilogue of the events, and then be able to play the game using a new character in the existing world would be a very memorable gaming experience. Even if it’s a couple of short paragraph a la Conan like:

I read through your first paragraph and laughed, thinking "okay, cool example." But it wasn't until you went on that I realized how important it would be to not only chronicle what happened but to provide some sense of direction and movement. It's not just a chronological listing of events, either. If you could create an epitaph like this it would need to show that events were heading in one direction until you, the player, changed them.

I can't see trying to collect this from the context of lots of simulated variables, but I can see generating something like this if locations fell into very rough states. Proxima, for instance, could have some sort of a narrative state like "hegemony" which could translate to several sentences having to do with suffering under the reign of evil empires and whatnot. Then the player affects a key character, like your emperor or vizier, and the state changes.

It seems to me this sort of thing almost needs a list of discrete, linked stages. Something like Hegemony leading to either more of the same (so you get your "eons of oppression"), revolution or civil war. Revolution and civil war could lead to each other. There could be links to stasis stages, stagnation and prosperity. Foreign intervention could be hanging out there, too.

Ugh. I dread trying to map all this out. :P

(Cool story though, thanks for the imagination!)

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The character creation process I would see as involving choosing an origin story and a background by selecting the key events of the characters life from the games own lore and attaching a modifier. Then choose a life goal or set of goals.

I like this. I've been trying to avoid quests that require very specific chains, but I'm not against some sort of object focused approach where you treat major people or items like objects that can change the game world. I could see applying the idea of life goals to this, maybe even to the point where it starts getting a bit into level design. For instance, would it make sense to be able to put a quest for some powerful event in the game with the attached story text about it being some family knowledge or something? If you didn't chose it, then maybe the event wouldn't happen.

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An example of a Key Life event background option would taking the a game event of the Bombing of Proxima 4 and then choosing a one of the following modifiers

Yes, that makes sense. I like how you approach this because if I did this then the character traits could be grouped with the events. So "hard life under the thumb of oppression" goes with some negative event like Hegemony but never appears in a more optimistic scenario, like First Contact or whatever.

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Rather than letting players respec their life goal, maybe “level ups” could take the form of Turning points. At a turning point I can choose to continue towards my life goal gaining a bonus or go down a different path.

Okay, I see where you're going with this. Hey, you could even do something cool like chapters in a person's life, each with more short-range goals than what I was thinking. So in your teens you could have something like "Make something of yourself" or "join the academy" or whatever life goals would resonate. Later goals might be things like "serve your people" or "make a great discovery" while still others might be things like "found a lasting legacy."

These might in fact be generic, available to anyone, whereas the more event specific would come up based on what had happened to the world and your character's life.

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What might be interesting is if abandoning your life goal inverted the bonuses and penalties you gained from previous turning points along that path.

This one I'm not so sure of. If you can't kill your family's murderer and you became a monk, instead, then is there a less mechanical way of representing that? Or what if you tried and tried and just failed again and again. (I'd love to see something like, "Haunted by your failure to kill your family's assassin, you seek solace in the distant mountains of Proxima 4. One day, you meet a monk...")

It does go back to the question of costs. Failing a goal should cost you something. I just want to be careful of making it mechanical. We're probably talking about modeling (in gameplay) stuff like the human price of obsession, for instance. What does that really do to you? What does it do to you to become consumed by vengeance? And how could that matter in terms of gameplay?

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So, if at turning point 3 in my life goal of owning my own moon I chose to abandon that path to become a monk, then my competitor now becomes a friend, and that monthly mining contract payout now becomes fee.

Then again, for sanity's sake and player prediction, this might be the smarter thing to do. At least with this you know what might happen. I just object that it would end up being predictable, or that you might even choose goals so you could fail them.

Thanks for the great thoughts, by the way!

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Original post by kseh Maybe what's needed to propel plots in a sandbox style game is an omniscient, neutral(?) character that appears from time to time to try to push the player in a particular direction. From what I understand, that was the role of ancient trickster gods. Not sure what'd work in a sci-fi setting. Maybe a computer program or a news network or something. Somehow having a short old guy in red robes popping up all over deep space might be hard to swallow.

I thought about this at some point (actually, still do). If you used a super powerful entity, like some sort of transcendent galactic AI or hyper-advanced beings who for some reason had a vested interest in your doings, it could work.

One thing I did not like about it was that it made it very difficult-- for me, anyway-- to balance the idea of a very strong plot and lots of freedom. Take a save the world plot, for instance: If you go screwing around mining worlds and exploring while the short old alien in red robes [grin] keeps popping up and telling you that the galactic core is about to explode, your actions will be dissonant. Here you are doing your thing while everybody is supposedly about to die but never does.

If, in the service of a dynamic universe, you actually do rig it so that in such and such a time the core does explode, then you've just stomped all over the player's freedoms.

Now if the plots are far less epic, then they might almost as well be personal stories. Otherwise, why drag folks from all walks of life through the same set of mundane events?

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Original post by Sandman Some ideas I've brainstormed: Achievements: Offer achievements for accomplishing certain tasks. If these are sufficiently varied they can offer motivation for playing the game in a range of different ways. Of course, it's still up to the player to choose which ones to pursue in a given game.

I think this is a good one as it's right in line with the spirit of the game. I really like Achievements that confer some specific, though moderate bonus. The achievement you get in Civilization, for instance, of being the first to circumnavigate the globe comes to mind-- all your units get a slight movement bonus which is enough to make it worth it but not so much that it's mandatory.

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Legends and Artifacts: Your character's story gets added to the world's lore DF style. Characters can also create artifacts which can then be collected by later characters. Those artifacts, although powerful, may have some kind of curse associated with them, perhaps related to how the character who created lived and/or died. Character stories could also be uploaded and used in other player's lore generation process, in a similar fashion to Spore's creatures.

I like this. It would be very interesting to explore this possibility of trading a lot further, maybe even trading chains of events. So you could say trade with your friend what happened in your universe and how your hero solved it.

Not even sure how it would work but I'd love to see people swapping characters that somehow create events, at least in an abstract way. Imagine being able to trade villains like people might trade gear designs.

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I like the idea of getting the character generation involved here, as that gives players an opportunity to nudge the game in a direction that interests them.

Thats the main thing I was interested in, as well. I'd like to see something like this almost take the form of game options or game goals, sort of in the spirit of a card game like Flux, where players can play cards that change the game goals or game rules. TechnoGoth's idea of turning points might work very nicely here, as you get a chance maybe to select new goals at set phases. If the goals are very closely linked to the things that are happening in the world (like the looming threat of war, for instance) then I think it would make the player think of the world in view of how their character could influence it.

I have 3 suggestions:

• Character classes have general goals
  
• Enemies/bosses are determined based on path
  
• Characters CAN be the goal

With this, the game can give the illusion of dynamicism.

Let's say you have 3 classes: Warrior, Politician, Scout. Now all Warriors have the goal of becoming a general and winning a great war. All Politicians aspire to be Emperor. And all Scouts have go to find a new country. The Warrior goes to kill a Black Knight who has taken over 5 towns. During this campaign, the Warrior accidentallly kills the Mayor and allow the Black Knight to escape. The Politician hears of this and plots to have the Warrior killed for political gain and clout. The Scout finds the country where the Black Knights originate from, but hears of the Warrior's killing of the mayor. Now the Scout recruits other warriors to his party to go after the Warrior. The Warrior chooses (in the game) to rule over the town. Because of this set of events, the Warrior is now the enemy and the immediate goal of the Scout and Politician is to take down the Warrior.

Follow me?

One of the problem would be in a persistant game -- what does your char do after finishing the 'lifes quest'. Some might be open ended (a paladins quest to destroy all evil...) but others would have a definite finish (kill thursla doom...).

The game path might be 'now start another character and get a new lif quest' but unless you have reasonably fast character development people may get bored of burning through the same advancement sequences (where you go thru the same parts of the too small world and through the same basic quests).

Unfortunately even the 'life quests' will likely be limited in number of flavors (if any intricacy to it, the game mechanics/scripting must be build to support it or otherwise you will just go thru a sandbox with no special demarcation of progress/stages/custom content keyed to your 'great quest' (Congratulations you have killed X, here is your laurel and hardy handshake, now your life has no purpose so go make a new char and keep playing and paying...)

You might take a while to play thru all the flavors (if you dont die of boredome on char advancement) but after that repeating any would be just more of the same.



So pretty much we are stuck with generic sandbox 'create your own life quest' OR limited flavors (which every Nth player is doing similar to -- to the point that you might run out of unique 'epic' targets).


A complex (magnitudes more complex than we have so far) snadbox might offer alot more 'find your own life quest' opportunities (and just more to do in the more mediocre explore/exploit/extinguish activities )

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Original post by wodinoneeye One of the problem would be in a persistant game -- what does your char do after finishing the 'lifes quest'. Some might be open ended (a paladins quest to destroy all evil...) but others would have a definite finish (kill thursla doom...). The game path might be 'now start another character and get a new lif quest' but unless you have reasonably fast character development people may get bored of burning through the same advancement sequences (where you go thru the same parts of the too small world and through the same basic quests).

Yeah I've got some concern about this. My world is quite large so I don't think that will be a problem, however it may turn out to not be deep enough.

I think the only real solution will be to make the core gameplay-- the steps to getting to the goal-- outshine the narrative framework of the goals themselves. What I mean by this is that, yes, you'll probably see "avenge for father" type life goals lots of times if you play lots and lots of characters. But provided the steps to doing this are fun in and of themselves that might be fine. I use something like Strange Adventures in Infinite Space as a possible example, where your goal is simply to grab up everything at X locations, but the game is randomized enough such that no two are really the same. The game goal almost becomes secondary, and things like the ten year time limit, random gear, randomized map and movement constraints as well as random enemy placement act to make you ignore the fact that game after game your goal is the same.

Your point about fast advancement though really bears paying attention to. One reason SAIS works is that each game is so fast and you're not really called to dwell on the narrative surrounding the goal or the universe at large.

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You might take a while to play thru all the flavors (if you dont die of boredome on char advancement) but after that repeating any would be just more of the same.

I don't think this is avoidable. If you'll pardon the philosophic left turn, I think every game that tries to exhibit some sort of world (RPGs, especially) faces a sort of existential trap: Either you validate player actions with an emotionally resonant game goal and end the game (preferably on a high note) or you give the player the freedom to keep playing until their experience is meaningless. Actually, you can do both, like Morrowind, but doing so ultimately risks the latter.

Short term goals aren't going to utterly fix that. But if the world is dynamic and there are enough game goals the personal stories where character "lives" end but the world keeps going may have more meaning that either a strictly goal based game or open-ended game with no goal.