Are RPGs the way to go?

[Goldmund]

There is one important consequence of allowing the player to choose to do any action they like with the player character - the game writer is no longer able to define the personality of the player character.

You have a very fine point, Nellie. Still, there are usually some safety measures: for example, if you decide to act like a bastard in Ultima, town guards (a very tough bunch) attack you all the time, so it's virtually impossible to finish the game. A game usually punishes you for deliberately playing against it and its story.

That's an interesting question as well: how many RPG players actually decide to play as extremely rotten bastards?

And Karimi, I absolutely cannot understand your comment about Fallout's graphics. I strongly doubt you can come up with or point at graphics better suiting it's gameplay. What more can you want?

[Czar]

well fallout is athing for itself. The game has no matches.

And talking about [strikethrough]good[/strikethrough] great RPG's, KOTOR comes to my mind. That game is one of the rare games that i actually played in the last few years, and it was so great.

RPG can really be good. (sorry, but i read only the first post).

[Captain Mostly]

Freedom in a game COULD be looked at as totally redundant. If it were possible for a person to do whatever they want in a game, it stops being a game because there's no goal, since if you're doing whatever you want then you're not constrained by any direction or purpose.

I've yet to read or hear anyone ANYWHERE in magazines, the industry or on-line come up with a reason why giving people more freedom in a game inatly makes the game better. There are good RPG's with masses of player choice (with regards to how to solve a problem) but there are also loads of great adventure games which give the player almost none.

It's would be very easy to be tempted to take the adventure game into a branching-story-line, player-choice-lead experience, but I would really ask what the motivation for doing it would be. Great adventure games present a specific story, and giving players the satisfaction of sloving a dastardly-but-ultimatly-"all-so-clear-now" puzzles. The rewards in a good adventure game come from spotting what you're meant to be doing, and feeling clever when you've done it. If you present the player with the option to do things their own way you cut out a major part of what makes it and adventure game.

I'm not saying that RPG's that let you act how you want to act aren't great (Planescape was mind-bogglingly good) but taking the adventure game genre forward by emulating aspects of another kind of game seems lazy when, with a little origional thought, there could be millions of ways you can jiggle the formula to leave a recognisably "adventure" game that feels fresh and gets attention for it...

That's what I'm trying to do at the mo' anyway... Maybe I should get off my hight horse.

[Babar]

Freedom in a game COULD be looked at as totally redundant. If it were possible for a person to do whatever they want in a game, it stops being a game because there's no goal, since if you're doing whatever you want then you're not constrained by any direction or purpose.

Not necessarily. In Morrowind (another great game with respect to the freedom it gives you), although you can completely leave off the story and follow your own path, performing small quests, guild jobs etc., the story is so subtely and vastly interconnected, that no matter what you do, you would end up following at least parts of the story.

I've yet to read or hear anyone ANYWHERE in magazines, the industry or on-line come up with a reason why giving people more freedom in a game inatly makes the game better. There are good RPG's with masses of player choice (with regards to how to solve a problem) but there are also loads of great adventure games which give the player almost none.

You do have a point there. Just because a game gives you complete freedom, does not make it GOOD. There is no point in having freedom in your game just for the sake of it. That would just make it boring. However, if the freedom thing is taken and integrated into the story to advance the gameplay, no one can complain. It would be interesting to see an adventure game that gave the player freedom to do what they wanted, mostly because it would be something unique.

That's an interesting question as well: how many RPG players actually decide to play as extremely rotten bastards?

Playing evil is fun, just for the sake of it . It is interesting to see how far I can get in Morrowind stealing things, killing people for their armour and gold, and then escaping

[Goldmund]

Freedom in a game COULD be looked at as totally redundant.

Oh, I cannot agree more when it comes to the overall plot, but look how you get the same main story out of Torment no matter what's your character's alignment.

[Shinan]

Just because a game gives you complete freedom, does not make it GOOD. There is no point in having freedom in your game just for the sake of it. That would just make it boring.

The perfect example being the Sims 8^)


I myself am very pro-choice so to say. Having many solutions to one problem is a nice way of doing things. And since I don't like the battle systems that usually bog CRPGs down so much I very much like the idea of Adventure Games being "Choose your adventure" games rather than "Click on the page to go further" games.

I, myself, have yet to make a single game but I'm working on it. And one idea I had was an investigation (inspired by the Blade Runner game) that would run over a week or so where the investigator would have that week time to interview subjects, gather clues and come to a conclusion. All in a very free-form kind of way.

[Captain Mostly]

Morrowind's an interesting one. There is a lot of freedom, and there's so much you can do if you put your mind to it! I ended up with some sort of crazy fort being built for me by pointy ear'd things that were basically elves but not called elves.

The only real critisism I could make of Morrowind is that because of all the freedom, the way the story is told suffers.

Since you can go where you like, and spend as long doing what you like as you like, the plot development ALWAYS takes place in the form of "get me this from here" or "go here and kill this". This gets dull after a while.

They managed to keep my interest for AGES just wandering around and feeling rewarded for all the interesting places I un-covered. It was a shame that by the time I decided to go back and do the main plot, I just walked through it because my character had become so un-feasably rock-hard. Plus, I quickly ended up with more money than there were things to spend it on...

BUT: Morrowind was a really REALLY good RPG.

Why should adventure games try to be RPG's though? The genre didn't become great by offering freedom to players.  I'm not saying we should just leave the genre the way it is, but people don't play adventure games for the freedom. Why not think about what people DO like about adventure games, and look at developing that further instead, with some origional thought.

I'm just playing devil's advocate though. It's kind of easy to see all the games these days shoving freedom down our necks, telling us that without it we may as well be reading a book, so I just wanted to sort of argue against it, simply because there's no point building a game around a feature, just because it SOUNDS good.

Freedom COULD work in an adventure game, but it would have to be REALLY carefully thought through, and if people didn't think about exactly WHY they were giving the player freedom, and what it's ACTUALLY adding to the game, balanced against what it's ACTUALLY taking away from it, then I feel they'd be SERIOUSLY diminishing their chances of making a good game.

It is NOT the case that a good game with a lot of freedom in it is better than a good game with next to none in it.

[Goldmund]

My Captain, but now we're entering very theoretical grounds. Of course, I greatly respect you approaching with suspicion things that are taken for granted, this is a noble and fruitful stance.

Let's start with this "freedom" you keep bringing up (although I was just proposing some - in my mind - beneficient borrowings from cRPG genre). Of course, it is and always will be just an illusion of "freedom of choice", limited by the things put in by the designer, or rather: freedom to use the tools provided by means of GUI, where the number of tools (GUI options) limits the said freedom.

What I'm saying is: in adventures, you give the tools but jump in all the time with "YOU CANNOT AND WILL NOT!"
In cRPGs, the player uses the tools how he/she fancies, which is not only more fair, but also demands more work from the designer (as I mentioned before, this is usually balanced with simpler graphics).

Let's say that RPGs are protestant whereas Adventures are catholic at heart: somebody pops in from time to time (not an author, and not the protagonist, some sort of a guardian spirit or a priest) and advises you how to play well (or just nothing happens, which is most often the case with AGS games).
[on a side note,  I prefer catholicism for its grandeur, bloodiness and style, but...]

Now, you might have noticed that it is the general trend in modern computer games that THE MORE IT RESEMBLES REALITY, THE BETTER. This applies to graphics, 3d sound, kazillion polygons, smoke and mist and realistic fire and what not.
Of course, nobody ever told us why a game should resemble reality. It's just something everybody takes for granted.
As for the freedom in exploration, though, and freedom to kill this good old mystic that is there to help you - I will still say that it enriches the gameplay and makes it more involving.
(by the way, "involving" is probably the reason behind this graphics' trend I described above - climbing the mountains in Gothic or wandering through one of its forests is an unforgetable experience)

Involving - because you feel the number of things that could have happened, even though you decided otherwise. Most people will spare the helpful mystic, but I just feel more interested when I know that I still can hack at him.
The second reason that "freedom" is important to a game is a marketing one - it's more likely you're going to replay the game, just to try and make things go slightly different.
But I value higher this feeling that this play isn't going to be safe, that I can screw it, ruin some NPCs "lives" if I go wrong, that this game is like a minefield of events that could have happened, even it they did not.

[Kinoko]

I think that experimentation in all these areas is great and people should use whatever aspects from whatever genre of games they like to make their own individual game better or more interesting, or just as an experiment.

I know this is just a discussion, and I think it's a really good one, but it's not like just because we agree something could be good, that it's necessarily going to take over the genre and kill adventure games as we know them. In fact, I think that most unlikely ^_^

Er... I guess I just think that all of these ideas are valid really, as long as you can make a good game out of it. There's no need to worry about whether it's an adventure game, an RPG or some crazy wacky game with that doesn't fit neatly into a genre (mm, my favourite). I like plenty of games that are COMPLETELY linear and give you no freedom. They can be great, they can be bad. I like plenty of games with lots of freedom - in fact, has anyone played a Nintendo game called Animal Crossing? My friend and I got really into it, it gives you a LOT of freedom with plenty of goals you can achieve but you don't have to. It's a game so addictive it will destroy your life. However, we'd be constantly discussing how good it would be if this, or if that... a 2D, open source version of the game would be wonderful and crazy ^_^ It's something I dream of making one day, and up until the other day, knew exactly how it could be done. Then I hit a snag I realise just won't work in 2D so... I guess I'll sit on it for a few more years.

*ahem* It's a fun game. It doesn't fit into any genre and has aspects of both adventure games, RPGs and a whole bunch of others. Giftpia is another amazing game in it's own genre altogether. Ahhh, it's like the Golden Peach of Perfection, that game.

[Alun]

Well... the thing about both adventure games and RPGs is that they're trying to balance a number of disparate elements.  And different people prefer to put emphasis on different elements.

Graham Nelson, creator of the Inform programming language (for text adventures), has said that an adventure game is "a narrative at war with a crossword".  He may have been talking primarily about text adventures, but I think it goes for graphic adventures too.  What he meant, basically, is that there are two different, somewhat contradictory elements in an adventure game: the puzzles, and the story.  Some balance must be struck between them, and different games make that balance different ways.  But there's a third element, too, that I think Nelson was neglecting in his quote, which is the element of immersiveness, of feeling like you're actually in the gameworld and have great freedom of action.  It's that third element, Goldmund, that I think you're referring to.  It's always been a part of adventure games, but it's usually been largely sacrificed for the other two parts, puzzle and story.  But yes, it's certainly possible to give more emphasis to that part.

RPGs, too, I think consist of three different elements that, like the three elements of an adventure game, can't simultaneously be maximized.  One of those is the building up of the character, the taking advantage of the rules and of experience to improve your character's stats and abilities.  Another is the game's story.  The third is the immersiveness of the gameworld.  Notice that the last two of these are the same as two of the three elements of adventure games.  I think that's why RPGs and adventure games lend themselves so well to crossovers... they're two-thirds the same genre anyway.    It's just that adventures, in addition to the story and the immersiveness, add in puzzles, and RPGs add in building up characters.  Of course, there may be some puzzles in an RPG, and some character-building of a sort in an adventure game, so sometimes which genre a game belongs to is a matter of degree.

So really, when you talk about increasing freedom of action and the complexity of a the world of an adventure... that's not really borrowing an element from RPGs.  That's just emphasizing an element that adventure games have had since the beginning, but that hasn't usually been in the forefront.  Just as it hasn't necessarily been in the forefront of most RPGs... there are some that do have such freedom of action, yes, but they're in the minority; most RPGs concentrate on the story and/or the character-building and don't bother to leave that many options open.  The difference, I guess, is that some RPGs have gone to some lengths to open up the gameworld... and no adventure games really have, yet.  As I said, this immersiveness is an element that's always been part of the genre, but not one that's ever really been brought to the forefront.  But I agree that it would be nice to see some games that did make more use of this element, and that did leave the player's options more open, and have a more complex gameworld.  I don't think the entire genre needs to move in that direction... but yes, it would be nice if some games did.

(It wouldn't be easy to do, though... keep in mind that really giving a lot of freedom of action and leaving open a lot of choices means a lot of work for the game designer.  The same goes for building a complex and dynamic gameworld.  It can be done, but there's a reason it hasn't been (in adventure games).  That being said, if you want to try... more power to you, and I certainly wish you success!