I''ve always believed that no matter what the medium that the best thing you can do to make people care is to flesh the character out. Not necessarily in personality but in convinceing people that the enviroment they interact with is real, even if it is a fantasy one. Things like having them eat, or evidence of things they have eaten (apples with bites), books they have read, a color scheme in their automobiles and clothing. Little things like that that lie on the sidelines.

Of course long time exposure and similarities to the player will always help but still.

I think part of the problem is also with the way characters are leveled up. All you can do in most RPGs I have seen is fight to get experience. So the just throw tons and tons of creatures at you(a la Diablo) and you have to be able to save and start over because you fight so many things that sh*t happens.

To make the character more emersive you can give experience for other things, like doing alignment or class related stuff. If you are good and you climb down a well to save the kid who fell in, you get XP. If you are a Druid and you save the forest from fire or something, you get XP. This is a lot harder to program, but I think it would define the character more and make him/her seem more tangible.

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Anyway, this is an interesting idea in a game (one of the first really good ones I''ve seen in these forums; everyone else just complains). Very untraditional. One big challenge, however, is the fact that players can save their games and reload them. Do you see the problem, there?

This means that the idea of being able to save anywhere and everywhere in a game, like in Duke Nukem 3D and a number of others, must be eliminated.

I have seen some games in the past, that will not allow you to continue after you have saved the game. The save game is basically a tool for you to be able to leave the computer and go to bed or whatever. So next time you load the game, the save file is deleted. If you die, you are dead.

---
Make it work.
Make it fast.

"Commmmpuuuuterrrr.." --Scotty Star Trek IV:The Voyage Home

Heh heh... fun thread. Something we should keep in mind, while trying to figure out how to make the player weep at the death of a character...

Whatever happens, It''s JUST a GAME!!!

Players don''t HAVE to care- unlike just about everything else in the real world. That''s one reason so many people spend so many hours playing video games, in the first place. The near-total lack of "need to care" is one of the things that make it FUN.

---email--- Tok ----surf----
~The Feature Creep of the Family~

quote:
Whatever happens, It''s JUST a GAME!!!
Players don''t HAVE to care- unlike just about everything else in the real world. That''s one reason so many people spend so many hours playing video games, in the first place. The near-total lack of "need to care" is one of the things that make it FUN.

Ooh, that could make some gamers mad, what do you mean just?
Real life is just real life, and you dont have to care

Hi!

I haven''t had the strength to read thrugh all the posts in this thread so i don''t know if this has been mentioned allready, but i have given this some thought too...

Too feel something emotional when you loose a character, you must have a strong positve feeling about that character. And you will gain that thrugh a relationship. One way i think is in a multiplayer like diablo where you can work together with a friend through the levels. And if the friend dies, you will feel something, and probably more if you have worked through more levels together. Another thing is that when you die, you die and will not just load the last saved game and replay that level like someone pointed out earlier... I believe Counter Strike took the fps games one step in that direction. With Quake you didnt care that much if you died because the servers had respawn. The most anoying thing was that you may lose you rucksack (backpack or whatever). In CS you are more careful with your character because you have more to lose. I meen, you may have to wait for several minutes before you may play again.

Another way to feel emotional is if like you will play the role of a vigilante (no spellcheck =(). Let''s say our hero Duke nukem or laura craft has been assasinated and it''s up to you to nail the bastards who did this! But then its more like saving the world feeling i think... Hope you understand what im trying to say.

Ahhh... not another looooong post... Sorry about that!
/Peter - cheers!

One game that was kinda interesting (I don''t know if it has anything to do with characters dying.) was Azure Dreams. As I remember, you went into the dungeon with your monster (It was kinda like monster rancher except you venture far into dungeons.) Once your monster dies though thats it. But that is all aside from the point. They had an interesting system with girlfriends. You (as I remember) answered some questions, and they gave you quests to get a girlfriend. The last time I played it, my girlfriend was a sick girl, and I had to bring her some plant from in the dungeon. But by answering questions, it kinda tried to talor the girlfriend that they think you''d be attached to.

-=Lohrno

I gotta couple of things to say on this...

From a psychological point of view, I think we''re talking about loss. If you take a favourite toy away from a baby, he cries due to the loss of the toy. This is present in an adult mind too (however refined).

So, the key is to first make the object favoured (i.e. attach the player to it) and then remove it in a way that the player considers it to be ''really gone.'' If the baby can see the toy in front of him, he''ll just pick it up again; but if you take it and hide it behind your back, it''s ''out of sight, out of mind.''

I reckon that a good approach to this would be to somehow generate a character randomly, each time the game is played; and then to use an idea like the erase-old-savegame thing someone suggested previously.

Randomly generating a character is, I know, no small feat; and I don''t just mean a random personality, either. Randomly mixing/matching skins, adjusting vertex positions (e.g. muscularity), character changes, and a storyline that reacts to the character. That''s an interesting concept - a storyline that branches not on the actions of the character, but on those of an NPC.

Superpig
- saving pigs from untimely fates
- sleeps in a ham-mock at www.thebinaryrefinery.cjb.net

I think believability is the key. I know that''s a vaugue term. I suppose it''s a matter of detail.

For instance, in Thief, when I killed a guard I felt more remorsful than I would in Quake by far. I think it''s because they seemed deeper. They didn''t even have to be deeper in terms of story. They seemed deeper cause they would talk to each other, cough, clear their throat, and generally react in a believable way.

Hmm, how about this for a system...

If your character dies, any saves saved within the last half hour or hour disappear (so, you CAN load, but you lose a lot of personal work), or you can opt for the second "spirit" action.

Basically, your soul comes out of your body, and goes to the nearest temple to get you resurrected... however, the further you are from the temple, the more "pollution" that can occur to your soul (the more spiritual energy your soul has to fly through, and the more it is bound to rub off on you). Your stats, skills, advantages/disadvantages get all tweaked (increased or decreased randomly by small increments) for every 100 yards or so you have to travel to the temple. Then, you''re resurrected and lose the monetary cost of the resurrection and an amount based on the distance for them to go fetch your stuff (or have to go into debt to the temple, and not be able to get help there or many other businesses in that town until you pay them off). So, you''ll still have your equipment, but you may not be able to use it as well (or, in extreme cases, at all).
The adjustments can all be done via a big table which is rolled against 1 time for every 100 yards (I''m using the 100 yards as a distance, but it really doesn''t matter).

If you wanted to, you could have a "karma" stat of sorts, which not only determines your in-game "luck", but also helps determine the distance increment you would use to roll against this table (so, a person with a high karma may only roll one time every 2 miles, coming out relatively unscathed going to a temple that''s 10 miles away, while a person with low karma could end up rolling every 10 feet, making their once-knightly character a green-haired freak who lost his ability to swordfight, but amazingly is now one hell of a seamstress).

-Chris

making a game that is about people and not things.

(c) 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd, 0:1