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[frypan]

George-Kinsill wrote...

While I like the Witcher handling of consequences of choices, it is obviously not going to work that well in games that read previous saves from other games, like Mass Effect. Therefore, I would recommend that developers embrace teh quad morality system over the bi-morality system. There is the typical good versus evil bar combined with lawful versus chaotic scale.

This is used in table top RPGs and could create a large variety of role playing techniques. This would allow people to disregard the law at times like a renegade, but to serve good, or hide behind the law to escape justice as a lwful evil character. In any case, I think it may solve the messed up morality system we currently have. A chaotic good character could combfortable shoot TIM.

I agree, the system adds a level of complexity that is familiar to us old D&Ders. I enjoyed the system when it was used in some of the older games such as BG2. It also added a layer of complexity to Planescape - I lost some lawful points and couldnt use a holy avenger sword late in  the game - the pain was great, needless to say but it kept me on my toes.

I suspect the system was dropped due to difficulty in managing the extra two morality vectors, or maybe it was too close to AD&D and there were legal issues. Be nice to play a game with it again though, if only for nostalgia.

@edisnooM.

I didnt know Weekes commented on the paragon interupts in LOTSB. Its good to know he admited a problem, something that makes the issue less annoying. Wonder if that could be applied elsewhere?

@Drayfish

Yes, only those of us who love Eurovision may mock. Am with you on the Hump too, so sad. I always want my birthplace to do well, but they keep offering up poor shows. Luckily, the sentimental favourites always punch above their weight - Estonia for 2013! 

EDIT: And here I am in a most unworthy top place. Been a while, so I choose..... Hall of the Mountain King, by Grieg. Think of reapers sleeping away the aeons in dark space, only to awaken as the crescendo builds to its climax.

Modifié par frypan, 06 juin 2012 - 04:53 .

[frypan]

@Delta_Vee

Nicely argued, its hard to dispute your points. Guess it comes down to personal taste, just like Eurovision. I like the mechanics for some reason, maybe from my DMing days and administering such things, although a more fluid, dynamic system also is nice. Maybe my problem is that the less rigid structures have always involved rubbish decisions or costs I dont care for - see the Destroy option at the end of the game for an example of imposed moral quandries.

Nevertheless, the way you describe the Liara interupts really captures the emotion of the scene. You've prompted me to moderate my dislike of that scene, for which I am grateful as it was the only blot on a fine piece of DLC.

Whatever the situation, as long as gaming offers up alternatives and keeps experimenting with the options, so that we get to try a bit of everything, it will be a good thing.

The only issue will be if any one play system gets to dominate rpgs, such as the multiplayer scene. While it has its own advantages in regards to examining morality- DayZ being a great example you note, like the galaxy of ME3 post synthesis, we may come to rue the lack of diversity if it gains too much sway.

Modifié par frypan, 06 juin 2012 - 05:17 .

[Jorji Costava]

Everyone here gets +8 paragon. But I can't promise they'll be any more valuable than they are in Whose Line Is It Anyway? Next time, if you turn down the paragon interrupt, you'll have an opportunity to take a renegade interrupt where you say "I've had enough of your uninspired meta-jokes" and punch me across the face. Unlike Khalisa Bint Sinan Al-Jilani, you only need one punch, because I duck really slowly.

@George-Kinsill

Thanks for the bro-hug! Extra paragon points for you!

@delta_vee

I'm very sympathetic with your concerns about the P/R system. Let me add this: One strange thing about the system is that it allows me to figure out the best thing to say to a particular character in a way that is independent of any of your knowledge of that character. If I'm talking to TIM and I have a blue option available, it's better than any of the non-colored options. The same goes if I'm talking to the Quarian admirals, or Ethan Jeong. That's a little odd, since these are completely different people. Like you mentioned, DX:HR did a good job with this. Another good example might be the conversation system in Alpha Protocol: Some characters prefer for you to be direct, some prefer a more 'suave' approach, etc. You have to figure out which is best based on what you know about the character you're talking to.

Still, like Hawk227 mentions, the P/R system does have some benefits. As much as we complain about being moved in the direction of making all paragon or all renegade decisions (and I do share these complaints), there is some value to rewarding consistency, since actual people do behave in a relatively consistent manner (although see the situationist literature in psychology for a counter-argument to this). To take an extreme example, if you decide to play as Monty Python's man who is alternately rude and polite, it could potentially break the narrative with its implausibility. The P/R system at least provides some disincentive for doing this.

At the end of the day, my own preference is for systems like DX:HR or Alpha Protocol, because I'm not as worried about finding mechanical ways to 'enforce' consistent role-playing. Filmmakers don't try to think of clever ways to prevent audiences from fast-forwarding certain scenes in their movies, even though this is arguably an 'improper way' to watch movies. The whole point of video games is that the designers are entrusting us, the players, with a significant chunk of the storytelling. If certain players want to play the game in a silly way that creates narrative implausibilities or radically breaks immersion, then they'll reap what they sow: namely, a story that isn't very good. If your game is designed well, then players that don't do this will have the more satisfying experience, not necessarily in virtue of the masking mechanisms used to prevent meta-gaming and the like, but simply in virtue of the story content they helped create.

/night

[George-Kinsill]

@ Seijin8

On the topic of the Witcher, they had what I thought was one of the better morality choices exemplified in chapter 2. (Incoming SPOILERS!)

You had to decide whether or not to give supplies to elvish freedom fighters. Having seen the discrimination against them, I decided to give them the Weapons.

Later on, though, when I went to find a shady character that could give me useful info on my investigations, he was shot dead by the freedom fighters before I could talk to him. It turned out he sold highly addictive drugs to children and with the weapons I gave them, they assassinated him.

This drug dealer's death made my mission really hard. It took my a couple hours of side questing to get information that I could have otherwise have gotten easily and even got denied a side quest based on that character.

I know some might think that this is just punishing the player, but I felt rewarded. Because of my morality and choices, my actions led to the death of a despicable character before he could harm more children. To get the good ending for the chapter and keep a clean conscience, I had to work for it. Thus when I get my preferred ending, I felt satisfaction.

While I know not every game can use the Witcher's consequence system, it's a step in the right direction.

@frypan

Yeah, the DnD morality system may be a little to complicated for current gen systems, but hopefully next gen can institute it? As many have said, the dual morality system is no longer cutting it. It needs to be improved in some way or abandoned like in the Witcher.

[delta_vee]

@frypan

I guess it's not even the structuring of morality itself that I'm concerned with - I can always ignore it if it's simply a matter of scoring or bookkeeping. This is an objection I have to more real-world moral, ethical, and political classification, as well. I'm what gets called a "principled pragmatist", but if you ever try to pin me down on a left-right spectrum I'll usually break the scale. (The situationist perspective osbornep mentions is close in a lot of ways to how I've constructed my ethics over the years.) So when it's merely a matter of accounting for my game-pronounced sins, I feel quite free to disregard it. (This applies equally to D&D's alignments as well as the paragade system, by the way.)

What I object to is the game removing options from me because my actions don't fit its scale. Remember how I said I couldn't keep Tali from exile, thus denying me the chance for peace on Rannoch? Perfect example. That Shepard had a pretty balanced paragon/renegade score, and ME3's total-only reputation score* would've unlocked the win-conversation buttons during the trial scene. When I got to Rannoch (and checked online in a panic), I was pissed. Essentially I'd been punished, not for completing too little, but for not being rigid enough in my decisions. I've heard the argument that Hawk227 mentioned about consistency leading directly to reputation, but I believe that narrows the idea of what kind of reputation one can have. If one is paragon to one's crew and allies, and renegade towards enemies and fools (here's looking at you, Conrad), I think the reputation for being Mal Reynolds or Rick Blaine would be just as valuable as being thought of as Aragorn or Byron.

* Once I learned they'd implemented it this way in ME3, I was happy. Finally! And then there were so few neutral options, it almost seemed like a waste.

@osbornep

It's not even the requirement of consistency, per se, so much as the narrow view of what that consistency entails. It's my argument against every morality scale ever devised, in games or outside them. I think it would be fascinating to see the data on various ME throughlines, and compiling various (semi-)consistent moralities which evade the paragade dichotomy.

As for the "best thing to say", I can sort of understand why they did this. Moving the responsibility of optimal dialogue choices onto the player, a la DXHR, was a conscious design decision - they made conversation into a combat minigame. This makes player skill a direct factor. The ME system made player skill a more indirect factor, abstracting the ability to find the best thing to say away from the player themselves and onto the avatar (ME1 even had it as a discrete skill, with charm and intimidate both requiring skill points). The player skill element came in completionism (rewarded in multiple categories, so at least in line with the game as a whole, regardless of my own reservations) and consistency (to which I object strenuously, for the reasons above - and somewhat ameliorated in ME3 with the unified reputation score, but too late to save my Tali from exile (yes, I'm still pissed)). Ultimately it's the same class of mechanical tradeoff as the ME1 -> ME2 combat transition, with the arguments about RPGs and abstraction of player proficiency of a specific kind.

Where I believe the paragade system fails is perhaps a matter of taste, but I think listening to and comprehending the characters and context we're presented with is supposed to be a primary mechanic, if not the primary mechanic, and having the option to essentially "win" decision nodes by brute force seems like it undermines the primary game itself. To be able to achieve a best-case scenario simply by completing enough of the game to unlock the red and/or blue "best thing to say" seems like it misses the point, and devalues the act of learning about (and from) the characters you're interacting with.

@George-Kinsill

I don't think a 2D morality system a la D&D is too complicated, per se. Whatever the scale, the constraint isn't tracking so much as the content creation overhead of branching narrative and the effort required to attach sufficiently comprehensive metadata to decision nodes. It isn't a programming problem or an engine limitation, it's a matter of writers and animators and voice actors. More procedural games can pull off surprising complexity in that regard - see Crusader Kings 2 and its deep simulation of personality of various characters (or so I've heard, as CK2 is sitting on my hard drive queue).

/night

Modifié par delta_vee, 06 juin 2012 - 06:34 .

[frypan]

@George-Kinsill

I didnt side with the elves but found the decision really hard to make. That particular story makes me wish I'd given it a go.

One thing that does bother me is if we move away from a moral system and its predictable results, where does gameplay sit in terms of predictability? I like a story that surprises me with reversals and so forth, but in a game it could lead to frustration if taken too far.

I have no problem with a fundamentally "right" decision that most players will choose. The simple fact of knowing there is a wrong one serves to validate it, as we discussed in regards to the knowledge of what happens to Tali if we chose wrong in Rannoch.

By contrast, if I do a good deed and find it often leads to unpredicted negative outcomes, it kind of defeats the action/predicted reaction dynamic that as a player I seek. This applies even if there is no alignment type system. For instance, if I save someone and they then turn evil or destructive (as could happen with the young mage in DA2) I am effectively having my input into the game deliberately reversed in terms of expections.

If this happened with other aspects of gameplay (ie you pull a trigger and sometimes start healing the enemy, without being able to predict when) it would rapidly become tiresome - see the reversal of controls at the end of BG&E for an annoying example.

This seems a case of narrative butting heads with gameplay. As Delta_Vee notes, us power gamers turn moral choices into simple scorecards, in my case as I like my black and white choices. I have trouble seeing a way past it that doesnt involve frustrating many players. Complexity is good ie Tuchanka, but is it fair to have unpredicable negative outcomes? Unpredictable positive outcomes are good, as they create a pleasant surprise, but if they involve an unforeseen consequence that undermines the decision, the game designers are effectively shafting us for no other reason than to create an emotion through frustrating our desires.

We have to remember too that what happened at the end of the game was an effective application of this principle of undermining our expectations based on game choices. No matter what we did, we got three rubbish choices that could not have been predicted based on what we had played so far. In effect, while giving us that meta dialogue wheel, the whole system of input we used to determine our in game choices was subverted at the end. Not so much in the decision made at the time and the evil three propositions, but in terms of the long terms consequences. Like our DA2 mage, the ending wa adopting the non-predictive model of cause and effect that was a problem for me in that particular instance.

This is only a quick nut out of ideas. There are some issues with what I'm stating, for instance how do we add tension to the decision making process without obscuring the results somewhat? The fate of Bethany in the deep roads is a good example in DA2, as we need those shocks and surprises.  As I said I like being surprised - but only so far, and like to know that in general my decisions have the meaning I attribute to them or at least that I can reach that goal somehow on another playthrough. What I (think) I'm sayin is that a moral system helps add to that predictability that is part of gameplay.

QUICK EDIT - we crossed posts there Delta_Vee.  Hope I havent gone off on too much of a tangential rant.

Modifié par frypan, 06 juin 2012 - 06:52 .

[frypan]

delta_vee wrote...

@frypan

Where I believe the paragade system fails is perhaps a matter of taste, but I think listening to and comprehending the characters and context we're presented with is supposed to be a primary mechanic, if not the primary mechanic, and having the option to essentially "win" decision nodes by brute force seems like it undermines the primary game itself. To be able to achieve a best-case scenario simply by completing enough of the game to unlock the red and/or blue "best thing to say" seems like it misses the point, and devalues the act of learning about (and from) the characters you're interacting with.

As usual good points delta_vee and I agree on this very much. The shame is that clever intuitive dialogue choices often didnt allow the result we wanted, so we got into the habit of using the "press to win" button.

I can attest to adopting this approach increasingly over time and paying less attention to the minutiae of the conversation and choices.

EDIT: I keep posting twice in a row. Apologies folks am not trying to be greedy.

Modifié par frypan, 06 juin 2012 - 07:04 .

[delta_vee]

Gah, I should be in bed. Ah, well, that's what coffee's for >

@frypan

Nah, you weren't tangential. The predictability of outcomes is a major concern. The only solution, though, is cohesion and sufficient information. Tuchanka's complexity worked because we'd spent three games mulling over the krogan, with multiple perspectives from within and without. We know Wrex. We can grasp Wreav's stupidity by comparison. We understand Mordin's logic, both at the time of the genophage's little upgrade and at the precipice of its undoing. We have enough information to take a calculated risk or to judge the possible consequences too great.

Compare with the rachni decision in ME1, where we have next to no real information aside from biased history and what the queen promises. I'd be perfectly fine with the decision to save the rachni blowing up in the player's face, given how little rational reason we have to let her live aside from a conviction that she can be redeemed, based solely on a handful of minutes with her. It's rash. Rash decisions carry greater risk. And to remove risk is to make the universe too deterministic for my taste. I'm not sure I actually like how Witcher 2 handled the decision with the elves, specifically because of the opacity of the choice.

This ties in with CulturalGeekGirl's comments on Fapmaster5000's doomed campaign, in a fashion. The game has to provide feedback, has to let the player know what kind of story they're in. That requires a consistency of vision with regards to morality and cause and effect. And I suspect that's really the only effective mechanism for guiding the player's choices without turning it into rote optimization.

Addendum: I agree in full that the lack of preparatory information and the opacity of result in the final choice in ME3 is a major component in its failure.

Modifié par delta_vee, 06 juin 2012 - 07:07 .

[Hawk227]

While I really liked the idea of the conversations in DX:HR, I wasn't a huge fan of the execution. I found them either too easy, or too unpredictable. The conversations with Taggart and Darrow towards the end both had antagonist responses that felt out of place. Conversely, the conversations at the beginning were rather easy, with most throughlines leading to victory (if I remember correctly). In this sense, the ME mechanic works a little better for me. Build a reputation for being a paragon, unlock the ability to charm. Conversation wasn't the game mechanic the way DX:HR's was, but the pay off for previous choices. The biggest failure was in how strongly it was weighted in ME2, basically negating the Mal Reynolds of the world.

This got me thinking, I rather liked the morality system of Red Dead Redemption, if you can call it that. It actually was two dimensional, in a sense, because you gained fame but also independently gained reputation for your good or bad deeds. This resulted in differences in how NPC's responded to you. If you were a hero and went to thieves landing, you were libel to get shot at. If you were a villain, you would be periodically chased down by law enforcement. This also made me realize that I didn't actually like the ending of RDR that much. It was fitting in that he was killed for knowing too much, but for me it didn't have that poetic feel of coming full circle. I had always interpreted Marston not as a relic of a dying west (though he was to an extent), but a man willing to adapt. He had quit the gang and started a farm before being dragged back into it by the feds. He was also a gentleman and a faithful husband and friend, and unlike most RS games, you couldn't even sleep with the prostitutes.

Tangentially, while I liked Max Payne 3 just fine, the emotion it elicited the most out of me was a desire to play RDR. Not quite a ringing endorsement.

Modifié par Hawk227, 06 juin 2012 - 08:32 .

[Seijin8]

@George-Kinsill: To be honest, while I have played through The Witcher 2, I don't have strong memories of it, beyond tedious fetch questing. It really failed to pull any of my emotional strings, and was a pretty, but generally lackluster experience to me.

I do recall giving the weapons to the freedom fighters, and the assassination you speak of. I can't say it ever occurred to me to go back and redo it, or to care much at all. The pacing of the story was muddled, and many of the events from one chapter to the next failed to make me care much.

The Quicktime events against bosses were godawful, reminiscent of Simon Says. Essentially a cutscene that required your input to continue right, and that annoyed me (clearly).

So, thanks for your example, and I am glad others caught your meaning, but TW2 was just a "meh" game to me. I appreciate its structure and methods of narration, the apparent story versatility, but it didn't work for me, and not always for reasons I can articulate. It is strange, really, because I liked the first Witcher enough to get two of the books, one of which was excellent (The Last Kiss) and one which felt very drawn out (Blood of the Elves, I think). Sort of like my experience with the game titles.

[Sable Phoenix]

I have less of a problem with morality “systems” per se and more of a problem with their mechanical implementation.  Morality is one of the few aspects of games where I believe that the less information given to the player, the better.  Planescape:Torment, as mentioned earlier, did this perfectly.  Of course it used the “alignment cross” of Dungeons and Dragons, but you never saw that cross, and there were no numbers indicating your position on the scale.  The only alignment feedback you got during the game was the label of your alignment, say “chaotic good”, on your character screen, and the occasional random “+5 Law” or “+5 Evil” message after performing an action or finishing a conversation.  Even more importantly, I think, the game never told you ahead of time whether what you were doing or saying was going to give you an alignment hit or not; you only found out after the fact.  This avoided the granulairty inherent in a system like Paragon and Renegade bars, and meant that if you were consciously shooting for a certain alignment, you had to consciously moderate your behavior to, well, align with it, and you had to do that all the time.  To be lawful good (a very challenging prospect in that game!), you really had to behave in a lawful good fashion.  You couldn’t just wait for the next blue or red conversation option and metagame your answer.  Making morality hidden results in a much more realistic approach to gameplay.

The other important aspect is that your alignment did not restrict actions.  Any morality-changing response in any conversation was open to you (invisibly) whenever you had the conversation, regardless of your moral stance in previous conversations.  Persuasion was based on your CHA score, not your morality.  Instead, morality impacted items you could use (and thus, your power level) and the way other characters felt about you.

I remember finding two Tears of Saleiru Dei, the crystallized tears of a deva (basically an angel) that gave a permanent +1 to CON and could only be used by lawful good characters.  If I played towards what I felt was right I had an awful lot of chaotic actions and tended to rest on the neutral good section of the cross; it was some serious work to pop briefly into lawful, and I chowed down on those tears the instant I did because I knew I’d be sliding back to neutral as soon as I didn’t have that goal to work towards.  That was a pretty rewarding experience, though... obviously, since I remember it after all these years!

As an aside: you can turn off the awful quicktime events in The Witcher 2.  Thankfully.

[Seijin8]

@Sable Phoenix: You can turn them off? Is that a new feature with the Enhanced Edition? (Or, alternate theory: I am just daft.)

[Sable Phoenix]

It's been in there since I bought the game, and I pre-ordered. 

[Seijin8]

So the IAD theory proves true. I *am* daft. Thanks for the intel :-/

[George-Kinsill]

@ Seijin8

The example I used of the freedom fighters is actually from the Witcher 1, not 2. Have yet to played 2, although I did just get it for 360.

@Sable Phoenix

I do believe a hidden morality bar would work. I myself found myself just going for the blue option sometimes and not reading the rest of the dialogue. While I did this because I find it hard to be an evil character (I could never shoot Mordin) the color blue became a crutch for me. There is even a thread on BSN talking about how somebody accidentally chose control since they thought it was destroy as they believed destroy would be paragon.

As you say, a hidden morality system and not correlating good/evil responses to a certain part of a dialogue wheel would force players to think about what they say, which could only be beneficial to games.

[Seijin8]

It was Witcher 1? Uh... not the dude that got killed on top of the waterfall thing? Nevermind, I'm'a unna go hide under a rock.

[frypan]

Apologies to Delta Vee and Hawk227 for dropping out mid discussion last night, bit of bad form but unavoidable. I am about to further show bad form with a wall of text to be feared.

DeltaVee raised an interesting point about the Rachni that had me musing away the late hours though, so I hope folks don't me going back to it a bit.

“Compare with the rachni decision in ME1, where we have next to no real information aside from biased history and what the queen promises. I'd be perfectly fine with the decision to save the rachni blowing up in the player's face, given how little rational reason we have to let her live aside from a conviction that she can be redeemed, based solely on a handful of minutes with her. It's rash. Rash decisions carry greater risk. And to remove risk is to make the universe too deterministic for my taste.”

This is a good point, and it should all be bolded. Such a decision would be risky at best, and if real lives were potentially at risk we might decide to remove her. Similarly, there must be risk for the choice to have meaning.

I suspect that if it were realistic, we might find another way, such as using our spectre status or clout with Parasini to have the creature taken somewhere else or otherwise quarantined. However, a game has to present simpler dichotomies, so I’ve been working through the idea of choice and consequence based on killing or letting the Rachni queen go.

One problem is that if we foreshadow that letting the queen go will be beneficial, we reduce the risk involved in the decision, for instance by finding other codex based information that shows the Rachni were not all bad. This creates a problem as it makes the decision to let her go a “right” one, and the only reason to choose renegade is if you don’t like bugs or just enjoy watching her fry. In effect, any direct evidence of the risks involved makes the decision less risky, as a result can be predicted.

What is needed is the real possibility of a risk being taken, at least for first time run throughs, which means tying the decision to either a precondition, or result, that are not immediately obvious but that a player can say “aha”, to in retrospect. If I had to choose an example, that means not having the Rachni go on a rampage as this is an obvious bad consequence.

Instead, what about tying the Rachni with Krogan relations, so that releasing her has an effect on the Krogan situation? Release her and Krogan relations become strained as they take umbrage at it, or kill her and gain some Krogan allies who appreciate the ruthless affirmation of their sacrifices. Allow a player an unforeseen consequence that further develops the kind of story they wish to engage in, and which on future playthroughs they still have to weigh up.

The key is that having the decision blow up in the character’s face simply creates a new “right” decision, but having it create a set of alternatives that ultimately support a players worldview is good, especially if the consequences of letting her go or die were initially unforeseen. Risk is there, without going down a “you made a rubbish decision” path. Retrospectively the player still enjoys the decision as the end was unexpected, but a reaffirmation of their play style.

It might even be possible to go down the Rachni rampage path – in that if you release them, you later get a mission that involves resettling or destroying them as they came into conflict with some colonists. This realises the potential risk involved, but allows a character to ultimately reaffirm their paragon choice by pushing on with the peaceful resolution, or to decide that they were wrong and engage in a final extermination that at least is now based on immediate evidence.

The only issue here is that initial renegades who killed the queen miss out. There is no way to create a Rachni problem for the renegades to solve if they already resolved it. Maybe someone else has an idea here. All I can think is that another dilemma, maybe on Feros or Therum, gives them a longer consequence based mission, just as renegade types tend to get more crime based missions in games. I can only add here that care must be taken, as managing such things could spiral out of control and be hard for a game developer to manage within budget.

Overall, this view of consequence is like the Mordin vs Wrex issue, and why it worked. If I go back and play the series, I ultimately have to weigh up who I want to save, and the choices still have resonance. There are nuances to the decision, but the initial result is unexpected (Mordin or Wrex die unexpectedly) but I can play through again and try out the other options. In the end, no purely “bad” consequence detracts from my enjoyment of the game. This may also explain why this mission worked even for those of us who did not want Mordin to die. The result was unexpected, but a direct “good or rubbish” choice was not apparent in the choice or consequence.

As Delta_Vee notes, the Rannoch mission had more of a “right” solution, which while satisfying to many of us, did not seem to have that level of complexity and unpredictability in the choices.

I guess what I’m saying is that risk and predictability play a fine balancing act in the game, and the problem is that a direct negative consequence such as a Rachni rampage could be self defeating. The best way to address such consequences is to have the decision lead to the opportunity for a player to affirm or deny their decision, at least in the case of real important decisions. At the end, the player has to be satisfied rather than given a bum “you lose” result, something that does have its uses, but went out of fashion with the old adventure games probably due to its unpopularity.

The devs just have to decide which storylines this applies to, and the Rachni were one where they promised such a result in ME3.However I suspect they ran into trouble due to players who chose the renegade path, and the limitations they imposed on themselves to ensure everybody played the Rachni mission in ME3.

EDIT: Just to clarify, the idea I am pushing towards has a cascading effect through the game as missions create their own consequence path through the game that weighs in to an end result. I am not simply trying to advocate a "everybody wins" scenario, even if that is also applicable in this case.

Modifié par frypan, 07 juin 2012 - 03:52 .

[Seijin8]

Being a formerly professional game mechanics guy, I'll take a stab at that element:

X = Determine a maximized playthrough with all of the longest mission-chain choices were made had "X" number of discreet missions.

Y = Determine minimal mission-chain choices that are still using all available resources (completionist), but the choices made lead to the minimum-length mission-chains ("Y").

Develop (X minus Y) number of radiant/modular missions that are inserted randomly or during specific narrative arcs. These should also reflect choices the character has made, but with minimal cutscene development and dialogue, can simply be ambush scenarios at critical mission hubs, probably recycling mission assets (maps, mostly) from those missions the character did not encounter.

But all of this assumes that the game design intends to give players an equal length game based on their choices. I would argue not to do this. If the goal is to tailor the experience without necessitating a "right" path, then duration of play may likewise be fluid, based on choices the player makes.

To draw from discussions on this thread: some people have expressed a love for exploration elements from ME1, which could easily eat up a dozen hours of gameplay just scratching at the nooks and crannies of maps. For such players, simple (procedurally generated) maps may be adequate. Conversely, other players might prefer dialogue-driven scenes with minimal action. Taking an out-of-ME example, there was an Oblivion mod called "Companion Vilja", which included a sometimes-follower with extensively voiced dialogue and her own motivations. She would strike up conversations at random intervals and seemed to have a strong knowledge of the worldspace. Character interactions such as this can add a huge element to the game without necessitating enormous resources in production, simply by letting a voice actor with a strong character concept ad lib for hours. This could be intergrated to existing map environments as similar to a loyalty mission. Not everyone would want to listen to this dialogue, and so it would be optional. Others might well bring this character everywhere to get their take on a given mission or situation, while others would favor more capable characters.

In essence, I like the idea of "no ideal playthrough", but would take it a step farther and add "no ideal gameplay" as well. Allow the player to do and gather whatever they like. If sixty side missions driving a space buggy over mountain terrain is engrossing to them, then allow for those radiant missions to be created, weighting their value in "completionism" equally to more action-oriented missions.

Since multiplay is also on the table (with its integration - for good or ill - to the EMS values), add the ability to complete some "quest lines" with other players in a similar fashion to an MMO, but without the constant necessity for online interaction.

Minigames could also be included. I played the heck out of Final Fantasy X... Blitzball!! I can't even remember the rest of the game.

This diversity might lead to a more sandboxy open-world game, or could be tailored to be time-sensitive, so that it would take multiple playthroughs to fully experience the many facets of the game.

Modifié par Seijin8, 07 juin 2012 - 09:34 .

[FamilyManFirst]

 Hey, drayfish!  Is this yours?  Nice article, whether it's yours or not.  Keep up the good work, sir; I love your prose, whether I agree with it (which I usually do ) or not.

[Cinnabar6]

Thank you for posting this critique. It is by far the most lucid and useful one I have read to date. But, I gotta say, "burble"? I love it.

[BigglesFlysAgain]

FamilyManFirst wrote...

 Hey, drayfish!  Is this yours?  Nice article, whether it's yours or not.  Keep up the good work, sir; I love your prose, whether I agree with it (which I usually do ) or not.

Hmmm at the bottom of the page...

"Drayfish is a Lecturer in Literature at Campion College of the Liberal Arts, Australia"


Yeah its probably a different guy...

Modifié par BigglesFlysAgain, 07 juin 2012 - 10:01 .

[drayfish]

Hi FamilyManFirst. Nice catch, and yes, that's me; in all my lazy glory, simply retooling a post I had inflicted upon all of you kind folks weeks ago. I hope it came across, but I meant it (as I did when I first wrote it in response to KitaSaturnyne and edisnooM) as a loving nod to everyone in this thread, and their kind welcoming of me into the discussion of the game.

[drayfish]

I must say I am really enjoying the exceptional discussion going on about of the many morality system at works within several different games. I wish I had something more substantive to contribute, but I am finding it very interesting, and Seijin8's breakdown of game design is always fascinating. If ever the members of this forum thread gather together and design a game themselves, I demand first play through. ...And merchandising rights.  Because that game would be spectacular and I would become a rich, rich fool.
 
I have seen Malcolm Reynold's name mentioned a couple of times over the past few pages (or 'Malcom' if you go by the Operative's shoddy database in Serenity ... okay, I may have just scared away even the nerds then; sorry) and I agree, I would have loved to have seen more gradation in that morality scale in Mass Effect. For the most part I liked it, having Shepard's persuasive powers (at least theoretically) snowballing and gathering strength, with the universe at large whispering her reputation ahead of her, whether a stone-cold renegade or a bounteous, merciful paragon, but it was a shame that the game couldn't allow for a more nuanced response, enabling more of the wildcard personality. My own Shepard is much like the figure delta_vee described earlier, fiercely loyal to and supportive of her crew, but not hesitant to kill a fool who would threaten anyone under her protection (sorry, went a little Mr.T for a second there). She's Mal, but without the magnificent coat. And it's a (minor) shame that the games couldn't better acknowledge a character who straddles the line between virtue and rebellion. 
 
In fact, given the fairly bipolar personality divisions of the game, does anyone know how much variation there was in the message that Liara recorded to be shot into the stars? From recollection, the one for mine was fairly generic – 'Shepard did what was right; was inspiring; had kind of weird plastic-looking hair' – but in my play through it was all coloured with a complimentary romantic tone, so the specifics were hard to pin down. What does she say if you were more ferocious? Or if you were a more complicated mix of both?
 
I should make clear, I have no issue with the message as is, I was quite moved by the scene, and obviously Liara is recording a character portrait for all history, so it's obviously going to be something of a thumbnail sketch. She's not going to remember everything: 'Shepard was bad at keeping her fish alive; she liked standing in the cockpit of the Normandy and needlessly opening and closing the shutters for several minutes at a time; even though she had her own bathroom there was never any evidence that she showered or went to the toilet for several years, like Jack Bauer from 24...' But I do wonder how adaptive it is to catalogue each individual player's experience?
 
 
Also, I know we've all already spoken of this before, but I did find it unfortunate that the Racchni decision became so arbitrary in the final game, reduced to one slightly re-skinned mission and a handful of EMS numbers. It's sadly ironic that this should be one of the signatures of how arbitrary some of the choices in the game became (even more so than the Anderson/Udina thing), because I remember agonising over that decision in my first run through of the first game, the dialogue wheel spinning back and forth, petrified to commit in case I condemned myself to ruin later down the track. (Although I could hardly have suspected...) And my agony back then was precisely because, as delta_vee states, we have so little qualifying information at that point. A whole history of bad PR and accusation, versus the desperate, melodious poetry of a superficially repellent space bug. (I felt a tingle of that return in Mass Effect 2 in the reactivation of Legion, but certainly not to that extent.)
 
I like how the original Racchni decision hinged on the scales of your optimism or pragmatic realism. Do you take the chance, do the hopeful Trek–inspired thing, or do you embrace the Battlestar Galactica, kill-or-be-killed thing?  It was at that moment that I realised Mass Effect had the potential to eclipse any of the other sci-fi franchises I had experienced, because it could (at least in theory) respond organically to your personal ideological engagement with the universe. You might even be able to set the parameters of your narrative's tone... (Which, perhaps is why some players who played Renegade variations are satisfied with the conclusion of the game, because in picking Destroy their universes and their thematic ties fortunately remained consistent.)
 
But then comes the end of the game and the Racchni are off-screen doing whatever they do (engineers? really?) and the Crucible fires and, well, we know the rest. Our universes weren't what we thought they were and Starsky invites us over to the End-O-Tron which (for many, not all players) blows up more than just the Mass Relays in the tsunami it unleashes through the narrative.

Modifié par drayfish, 08 juin 2012 - 12:38 .

[frypan]

@FamilyManFirst.

Nice workspotting that - now we know why Drayfish has been slacking off on the posts - busy flying the flag bravely for the cause. Cheers to all!

@Seijin8.

Thanks for the feedback. Nice to read about the technical side, and to gain a bit of insight into the mechanics. It would seem that X and Y were largely dealt with in the game, but the X-Y stuff was not filled in well, on top of the ending issue. Hence we had Cerberus missions, fetch quests and so forth.

Is it possible this is due to the prioritisation of game elements? Or could the open world stuff have been undersourced, or sourced to a different team? The dichotomoy between some central high moments and the rest of the game is certainly explained by this.

@Drayfish

Well stated article, I thought I recognised some elements there regarding sadistic plumbers. And to think I bought that game for kids!

I wish that we, as consumers had more say over who is advocating for us, so its nice to see you out there stating our case. At present I feel like the media and developers are increasingly engaging in a discourse with each other rather than us.

When this blows up in any way, as it did this time, the response is to shut us down. I hope in the long term this creates a counterculture that opposes the mainstream press on a more organised level, as places like IGN have not been fulfilling their allotted role in the system - we get plenty of PR hype from the publishers without needeing them doing more.

This also applies to the printed press and magazines we pay for. If I pick up any gaming magazine, I am dismayed by the emphasis on previews that are just free advertising, and the lack of critical analysis in reviews. A good example is the length of games, initially criticised by journalists, but I now find that short games are lauded as "just the right length" without consideration of value for money or other purchasing criteria.

Moriarty and his diatribe are just part of the problem - he is defending a vested interest and engaging in a ham fisted persausion of the mainstream gaming public. As Stanley Woo admitted on another thread, they view us, the more specialised interest groups, as much less important. I think people at Bioware do care about us, but the morass of journalistic, business, and mainstream tastes have created a disjunction in their objectives. They are ignoring the feedback that represents those who are engaged with the innovative end of the spectrum.
 
EDIT: To fix the above sentence. if you read it before, you would know why and may need therapy for the eye pain.

As we have seen in history with such propagandistic hammer blows, they will work on a generally conservative public (hence Moriarty's support from many folks) but will alienate the artistic and less passive elements of consumer society. Hopefully, as I stated, these will form a counterculture that might not so much eliminate his kind, ascontinue to marginalise them from the front end of innovation.

Shame is there was a time when Bioware was representative of that cutting edge, with its AD&D games like KOTOR. By contrast, ME3 is a reactive game, often attempting to pander to percieved general tastes rather than forging its own path. Its not all bad, but its is not driven by the criteria that placed Bioware in its pre-eminent position.

Its not the end of all things though. PC gaming started as what I would attempt to define as a nerd counterculture, only breaking out post-Doom and the like. There are enough talented folks bleeding from the big devleopers to ensure a thriving industry. We just have to learn to avoid IGN and their kind who often kick the little guy to show their so called journalistic chops.

To bring this back to the game ending though, this explains the bombast and emotional manipulation in the final scenes. It followed a formula that was familiar enough to the journalists, and even though I think many didn't get that far when reviewing, they could be guaranteed that the end would tick certain boxes as the game was designed to meet certain expectations.

In this case it met their expectations but not ours, and they have shut down debate on the topic as this is not part of the dynamic they are familiar with.

EDIT: fixed some formatting and the like.

EDIT 2. As a quick aside, maybe this explains the citation of glowing reviews in response to our criticism. They might, as pointed out in Mike gamlble's email and other correspondence, be genuinely surprised to find that there is strong opinion in disharmony with the mutually beneficial relationship they have with the media. 

Nobody is being critical regarding development of games, opting instead for glowing previews, so no feedback was forthcoming to suggest a problem might arise from the direction taken.

Modifié par frypan, 08 juin 2012 - 01:41 .

[Seijin8]

@frypan: I should state that my work in game mechanics was never video-game related, but the logistical crunch and asset management in regard to the greatest number of invested player hours, etc, etc. remains valid (I think).

Most of my statements were on future game development. I don't know that a more open-world approach would have worked for ME3 without making the already-odd leisure time while Earth is burning seem even more disconnected from the greater game reality. As has been mentioned, making the Reaper attack occur later in the narrative would have allowed for this much more.

@drayfish: I thought this whole thing was an interview process for a game development team. You mean to say it isn't? And what is this crap about being a consumer? You're lead writer, aren't you? QA head at the very least. Isn't CulturalGeekGirl the project manager? Hawk227 is already managing game assets.  I thought Sable Phoenix, frypan and KitaSaturnyne were storyboarding? I know some people good at coding, and I am sure we can lure them away from their cushy government jobs (programming killer robots) with the promise of long hours and no money for the forseeable future. Every game designers's dream, right? Right? Folks?

Modifié par Seijin8, 08 juin 2012 - 02:20 .