What the point of playing here? Which game world is more appealing: One where crucial events are always happening, but you have to be in the right place at the right time; or one where crucial events only happen in your vicinity? In the first example, you could miss neat things all the time even if you could hear about them. The game might devolve into nothing but you hearing about other people''s exploits and feeling like a looser because you keep missing them. This could be frustrating. The second is what we typically have in most games. The player''s presence triggers events, and usually nothing happens without him. The player misses nothing, but the universe comes to a halt when they don''t act. This can end up feeling artificial and makes it hard for the world to feel realistic. Thoughts? -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership...

You could let the player know what is happening where and at what time and has to explore/interact to learn this. This way the player can still be present when something big should happen, but doesn''t feel artificial.

Realy big events should ofcource be easier to hear of and the player will be more likely to be present.

I would say I would like the former the best even though it''s incredibly rare. I guess the closest game I''ve seen like that would be Daggerfall. They didn''t take it all the way but at least went a bit in that direction. I think Thief gave you the feeling stuff was happening around you but not always directly related to you too.


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Good point, AP. I like the idea of the player being able to find out about major things that will happen ahead of time at least sometimes. Although, I think at least sometimes the player could have to go out of their way to find out the info if it''s secret or something like that.


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Is there any reason you can''t do both?

I prefer it when crucial events happen without me, but I sure as heck would want to be able to make a few things happen myself. Every major city has got to have something that I can my hands dirty in or watch take place. Especially if I know about them in advance. I know all the hollidays in my culture, I know where I need to be for important days, why can''t my character? A lot of spontaneous stuff can happen, but everyone usually knows a bit in advance where to be or how to find out.

First, there should be hints and signs that stuff is happening out there beyond the character''s influence, just as in real life.

But, interesting stuff should be imposed on the player as well. An author naturally imposes interesting stuff on the protagonist of a story. The author can get away with this because she can argue that in hindsight, that character (the protagonist) was the interesting one to write about, as opposed to some other person which led a life of dullness.

The Last Express is an adventure game which has the former point. Conversations and events happen whether you're present or not so you can be in one place talking to someone while a murder is committed in another room (just an example..I haven't played it in a while). Or on the other hand you can witness/stop the murder but miss out on some clue you could've overheard in a conversation.
It was actually a very open ended system but something like this requirs extra programming for all the different paths. Another big problem I found in that particular game was sometimes you'd sit around waiting for the next event to happen with nothing to do.. But I don't think this would be too much of a problem in an RPG where you can always go out and kill some goblins to pass the time

Edited by - Mumboi on May 4, 2001 10:13:47 PM

The more I think about it, the more I realize it's not very fair to make sweeping generalizations on such important game design decisions as these. It's really going to depend upon other aspects of the game as a whole whether one works better than the other.

But here's a few other observations:
The first example that Wav made made can be related to games such as Pac-Man. You know that there are 4 ghosts and 4 pellets and a bunch of dots. There are no custom things generated or triggered by the player's actions that don't happen any other time. This allows for the player to use different strategies to achieve goals.

The second example is more along the philosophy of books or other narrative media where the object is to create an interesting series of narrative events. Although I still question how useful it is to us to think of story-based games as always using methodologies of books & movies and such linear media.



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Edited by - Nazrix on May 4, 2001 11:19:01 PM