168 réponses à ce sujet

[Riverdaleswhiteflash]

[quote]Fast Jimmy wrote...

[quote]Riverdaleswhiteflash wrote...

So do I. Especially with the "no recourse to hunt down the traitor" thing. Why is that a good idea?[/quote]

I want to address this, as it seems more than a few people have raised questions about why I said this. I don't think it would be bad if we could hunt down the people's responsible... but at that point, it just becomes a questline. A cool sounding questline, don't get me wrong... but it involves more content. If doing a side quest results in a bad thing and you can then follow up and seek vengeance, that's not really having something bad happen. That's just setting up more content. 

I wouldn't want a player to feel punished that they can't see content without losing half their gold. And I wouldn't want to have a quest where you lose half your gold, chase down the people responsible, strike down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger, and get all your money back (plus some XP and a sense of righteous awesomeness). That would completely defeat the purpose of what I outlined. The general gist is that "taking every quest, without any thought to if you should or not or if that quest really does represent something you think is right may not, in fact, be the best thing for an adventurer to do, despite nearly three decades of video games telling us differently." [/quote]

You mean like the guy in Red Dead Redemption you encounter on the roadside, who pleads for your help and then steals your horse?

Because I enjoy the challenge of trying to put one in his head before he gets away. And I'd be kind of annoyed if he had plot armor.

[quote]
[quote]I'm not sure I understand your suggestion here. Do you mean that each quest has a chance to "go bad" via a 50% dice roll? If so, I do think this is interesting. The problem I see with having quests that are set with bad endings is that on repeated plays people will avoid them because they have that meta knowledge. [/quote][/quote]

Like how I usually make Bhelen king, rather than Harrowmont, for instance?

Actually, that's probably a good example of what he's thinking.[/quote]

This is not exactly what I was going for, no. 

In your above mentioned choice, many people feel that choosing Bhelen is the "good" ending, since Harrowmont winds up either making things worse for the castless, or even eradicating them completely if he controls the Anvil, which are seen as pretty bad things. 

But, no matter how many times you choose Harrowmont, these bad things happen. No matter how many times you choose Bhelen, he helps out the casteless. All is good (or bad, as the case may be) with the world.

I'm talking about where a quest like smuggling lyrium for the Carta to the Circle, except instead of everything going just as planned the entire time, there was an X% chance of things going bad. Let's say a greedy Templar muscles in on your Circle contact, making them unable to buy your lyrium, meaning you've just taken it in the teeth for the money you paid (because your average vendor doesn't buy pure lyrium for much at all, coppers on the sovereign to what you get by completing the quest). Or say the dwarven carta thug winds up paying you not in sovereigns, but in a "rare piece of equipment" that winds up being next to worthless or even has a curse on it that hurts your character's stats.

Point being, it would add variability, so that you never knew, even with meta-game knowledge, what actions were safe and which ones were risky. This wouldn't apply (in my mind, at least) with main quests, only with side quest content. But just a twist where things don't play out exactly rosy as they do most times when you complete a quest. After all... how many games have we all played over the years that just winds up being running around to try and squeeze money and gear out of the Quest Giver vending machine?

But many people in this thread have already lambasted that idea, hating it. Saying that a random percentage they have no control over is not enjoyable at all. So it may be pointless to keep discussing it.
[/quote]

I would actually be interested in that kind of thing. But I think it came up a couple months ago, and one of the devs, I think it was Mr. Schumacher, said it wasn't happening.

Modifié par Riverdaleswhiteflash, 12 février 2013 - 04:58 .

[StarcloudSWG]

There were options to do something about Leandra, in that Hawke did pursue and investigate the situation. What there wasn't, were proactive options. No option to call in the guards and have the foundry thoroughly searched from top to bottom, which would have uncovered the trap door, which would have led to the crazy necromantic bloodmage's hideout. No option to warn Leandra when Hawke hears that she'd like to be courted again. Nothing that could actually cut short the plot.

[Vilegrim]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

nightscrawl wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

If those options DID exist, yet still resulted in Leandra's death, would it be more palatable in general?

YES!

Lets go even more extreme.  Would it still work for Mass Effect 3?

There are choices in the ME Series that did come back to bite you (or help you) , but the choices mattered...right up until the end when it was pick a b or c, something that in interviews, been ruled out, and a decision that made all previous decisions pretty much moot.  Yes I have played EC , no it didn't help, no I didn't spend any more money on anything ME3 related.

Having 'save/kill Wrex/the Rachni Queen/ whomever' come back and bite you in the ass, was consequences, having a super AI of doom, pop up completly out of nowhere and change the themes of the series and making all you efforts up to that point feel empty and worthless, was another entirely.

[macrocarl]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Foolsfolly wrote...

I just beat Telltale's The Walking Dead game (bleeding fantastic. Although I don't think I have the emotional fortitude to replay it for some time) and in that game there were a few choices I made that bit me in the ass. I didn't think the game was out to get me for it.

What gives?

Is it the setting? The characters? The sheer amount of bleakness anyway in the game? I mean some choices I made seemed to decimate the group and others I'm entirely unaware of how my choice helped anything.

The setting itself probably does contribute.  The Walking Dead is definitely not a warm and fuzzy setting where bad things happen to good people all the time.

Still, it's tough to gauge an anecdote.  You didn't mind, but were there other people that got upset?  I remember some people getting upset because some characters seemingly just went insane and started acting "out of character" (it was on this forum actually)

Do you mean the charaters that frequent this forum went insane? j/k

[Raven_26]

I wouldn't mind having a few quests, that would require that you would
be forced to make dissions that can really hurt you in the end.

An example from BG2, is that whiles you are looking for Bhall's Tears at
the end of the game, one of your NPC's (usually the one you really really
don't want to lose) will be taken away and the only way to get him or
her back, is to walk thou 3 doors that will permanently remove some of
your attributes and such.
Question is, are you willing to sacrifice
some of your attributes like con, dex, str, wis or int? And hurt your
chances at the hardest fight in the game? Or lose a NPC that you really
need, like your Cleric, Mage, Fighter ect? Again either choice will
leave you at a disadvantage. Not to mention, the NPc(companion) might
just be your sister or Romance option lol

I love thous old games
for make you really really consider your option, and not just rush thou
because you just have to fight if want to save someone.

Eddit spelling, sorry english isn't my main language

Modifié par Raven_26, 12 février 2013 - 08:10 .

[darrylzero]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

An example of this is the Fighter's Guild questlne in Oblivion, where you are asked to spy and infiltrate a rival group, the Blackwood Company. As your initiation, you are sent to kill goblins and are given a special potion to help your prowess in battle. Turns out that the potion is a hallucinogenic and the band of goblins you killed was actually an entire town of innocent villagers.

This quest is pretty brutal in that, by your actions, you have actually ruined (and ended) the lives of innocents. In the very next quest, you use this information to take the organization down. Still... the fact that the game gave you the option to take the quest makes it questionable if you should do it at all. After all... that village would have remainied alive if you never activated that quest line...

That sounds like a good quest to me.  I think there's a logical trap there that the video game reinforces, though.  Obviously, if you use your imagination, you can see pretty clearly that the Blackwood Company was going to keep doing that kind of stuff whether or not you infiltrated them, which means someone probably would have wiped out that village eventually.  So, infiltrating them and taking them down is a net good, though probably extremely painful for your character.  However, the static nature of the game makes it appear that unless you the player infiltrate Blackwood the characters survive.  

I have a pretty easy time handwaiving that kind of thing.  I believe my character realizes that Blackwood would be able to keep doing this kind of thing if he didn't stop them.  He's probably wracked with guilt anyway, but it's an outcome I would find satisfying.  It would probably be better, though, if there were consequences for not infiltrating Blackwood.  In a lot of video games that's going to be impossible, because you don't want some kind of time limit to taking up the quest, so that definitely makes it complicated.  Maybe corpses that are somehow identifiable as Blackwood victims showing up every so often would work -- not very dramatic but illustrative of the what the choice not to infiltrate means.

It does tempt metagaming, though.  When do I take the quest?  Before or after I get x, y, z thing from the village?  Those kinds of questions.  If there's some crucial or uniquely desirable thing you can only get by not infiltrating Blackwood, that could be really frustrating.  If I really liked the way the story of the game developed because of taking the quest, I would do it anyway, but it's a potential concern.  I loved that vampires could attack and sometimes kill various characters in Skyrim if you got Dawnguard, but it raised a number of issues, and there were certain smiths that I just couldn't let be killed, even if it meant reloading.  

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Leandra's death is something unavoidable, and arguably a quest gone wrong. Much of the criticism is simply that it cannot be avoided. Other criticism is that there's no option to try to do something about it. If those options DID exist, yet still resulted in Leandra's death, would it be more palatable in general?

Yes (though I wasn't really bothered by it in the first place, except that the lack of emotional response on my part highlighted how much trouble I had connecting with Leandra as a character), so long as it made sense.  I feel like the railroading in these kinds of situations can sometimes be pretty obvious, which always leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  I think the efforts have to mean something, though.  Maybe you can't save Leandra, but you can stop him before he kills the next person, or you can stop an accomplice as well who would otherwise continue killing (doesn't make a ton of sense for the specific case at hand, but you get the idea).  

Fast Jimmy wrote...

I'm talking about where a quest like smuggling lyrium for the Carta to the Circle, except instead of everything going just as planned the entire time, there was an X% chance of things going bad. Let's say a greedy Templar muscles in on your Circle contact, making them unable to buy your lyrium, meaning you've just taken it in the teeth for the money you paid (because your average vendor doesn't buy pure lyrium for much at all, coppers on the sovereign to what you get by completing the quest). Or say the dwarven carta thug winds up paying you not in sovereigns, but in a "rare piece of equipment" that winds up being next to worthless or even has a curse on it that hurts your character's stats.

Point being, it would add variability, so that you never knew, even with meta-game knowledge, what actions were safe and which ones were risky.

I like this in theory, as things like smuggling are clearly risky activities in which it is easy to be taken advantage of if you are not strong or clever enough (or both).  In practice, I think you have to balance it first and foremost against roleplaying.  This means two things, to me:

1)  Several people have pointed out that situations in which you can see a betrayal coming a mile away but can't make your character do anything about it are very frustrating.  I would want the ability to attempt to safeguard myself against this kind of a failure, even if failure could be ultimately inevitable.  However, once you have a character attempting to protect themselves against this kind of deception, you run into (I would imagine) some pretty tricky situations about why the character's efforts were insufficient.  Not insurmountable, but too often I find that these kinds of situations just turn my character into sucker, without much in the way of my permission, which I don't enjoy.  Now, maybe I just shouldn't take those quests, but that leads me to my second point:

2)  How many opportunities will I have to do something similar?  

In DAO, my character on my primary playthrough (city elf) chafed against the restrictions put on him by society and was a little pissed off about being forced into the Grey Wardens (any character I played would probably share those traits to some degree).  I didn't have the same problem that In Exile did, because my character felt pretty vulnerable and played things pretty close to the vest (so he wasn't about to go advertising his frustrations to everybody), and he probably wasn't idealistic enough to feel too strongly about the Wardens as an institution either way.  He got on with the business of rousing armies reluctantly, but he was mostly worried about saving his own skin -- from Loghain first and foremost but also from the Blight, and eventually the Calling and the possibility of future poverty (it remains my greatest regret about the various add-ons to DAO that I was never able to make a sustained effort to cure myself of the taint).  

That smuggling mission is one of the great selfish but not particularly violent money-making opportunities in the game.  My character is looking for those types of opportunities on the side, but he's not completely amoral and the idea of killing for money doesn't sit quite right with him (that's not to say he'd never do it, but he's not just going to start picking up a bunch of assassination contracts) and he's definitely not going to do a bunch of chantry board quests to go kill bandits or whatever, since he's also pretty risk-averse.  In fact, the smuggling mission does go wrong for him in many ways, since he ends up amidst a bunch of abominations in the mage tower, which he'd been avoiding because the rumors of what had been going on made him pretty nervous and he didn't want to be caught in the company of an apostate anyway there of all places.

OK, that's probably a lot more information than you needed about my DAO character and how I tend to play video games, but I think it helps flesh out why that quest in particular being a dead-end would be very frustrating for me (and other players who play different kinds of characters probably all have their own version of this).  Give me a lot of opportunities to smuggle, and I'm happy to see some of them go south.  Give me just one, and I'm pretty sad, because one of the few opportunities to role-play my character is sort of tarnished.

TL;DR:

Trick me, rob me, make my character do bad things by accident, but keep perspective, don't railroad me or make my character look like an idiot for not being able to do something I really want him or her to do, and try not to interfere with roleplaying possibilities.  

Modifié par darrylzero, 12 février 2013 - 08:55 .

[Swagger7]

Dave of Canada wrote...

Swagger7 wrote...
Wait, your college offered a board game design class?!?  (Insane amounts of jealousy) 

Having taken a similar course, it wasn't as fun as it sounds.

It probably would be for me, since I'm constantly making up my own board games and working out the logic & math behind the rules anyway.  It would be nice to get some more training on that.....

[Plaintiff]

Riverdaleswhiteflash wrote...
You mean like the guy in Red Dead Redemption you encounter on the roadside, who pleads for your help and then steals your horse?

Because I enjoy the challenge of trying to put one in his head before he gets away. And I'd be kind of annoyed if he had plot armor.

I just call the horse back and laugh as it bucks the guy off and trots back to me.

And then I lasso the douche when he tries to run away, drag him around behind my horse for a bit, then hogtie him and leave him in the desert.

Mini-events that pop up randomly on the map, ala Red Dead would be fantastic.

Randomising the outcome of scripted sidequests is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea.

[Fast Jimmy]

Plaintiff wrote...

Riverdaleswhiteflash wrote...
You mean like the guy in Red Dead Redemption you encounter on the roadside, who pleads for your help and then steals your horse?

Because I enjoy the challenge of trying to put one in his head before he gets away. And I'd be kind of annoyed if he had plot armor.

I just call the horse back and laugh as it bucks the guy off and trots back to me.

And then I lasso the douche when he tries to run away, drag him around behind my horse for a bit, then hogtie him and leave him in the desert.

Mini-events that pop up randomly on the map, ala Red Dead would be fantastic.

Randomising the outcome of scripted sidequests is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea.

That seems to be the general consensus among many. However, it was not the only suggestion outlined in my OP.

[Plaintiff]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

Plaintiff wrote...

Riverdaleswhiteflash wrote...
You mean like the guy in Red Dead Redemption you encounter on the roadside, who pleads for your help and then steals your horse?

Because I enjoy the challenge of trying to put one in his head before he gets away. And I'd be kind of annoyed if he had plot armor.

I just call the horse back and laugh as it bucks the guy off and trots back to me.

And then I lasso the douche when he tries to run away, drag him around behind my horse for a bit, then hogtie him and leave him in the desert.

Mini-events that pop up randomly on the map, ala Red Dead would be fantastic.

Randomising the outcome of scripted sidequests is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea.

That seems to be the general consensus among many. However, it was not the only suggestion outlined in my OP.

Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. I'll go back and sift through the rambling mess you call a post. But only because your kiss makes me weak in the knees.

[Fast Jimmy]

What can I say? Green guys with a beard make everyone go weak in the knees.

[Dhiro]

It's true. I'd be all over that were not for fear of Plaintiff's retaliation.

[Plaintiff]

Having now read most of it, I have no problem with quests that offer little or no material reward, or with quests that have a negative outcome in a purely narrative sense. I play a lot of JRPGs, so I'm used to characters constantly screwing up for at least the first half of a story. Losing plot items, characters getting kidnapped, etc. All that stuff is fine.

I don't think I would appreciate losing "normal" money or gear, at least not permanently. If a quest had some guy luring me out of my base so he could rob my store chest, for example, I would want the quest to be resolved by me stabbing him through the neck and getting my stuff back, maybe with an option to nail his corpse above my door so that conmen know not to **** with me in future.

Games are a time consuming hobby, if a trivial sidequest caused me to feel like my time was wasted, by yanking away all the rewards I'd been steadily earning, I would not continue to play that game. A game that frequently screws you over for no good reason isn't fun.

Modifié par Plaintiff, 16 février 2013 - 12:25 .

[Plaintiff]

Dhiro wrote...

It's true. I'd be all over that were not for fear of Plaintiff's retaliation.

Fast Jimmy is the Spike to my Buffy.

You can have Lotion Soronnar.

[Dhiro]

Plaintiff wrote...

Dhiro wrote...

It's true. I'd be all over that were not for fear of Plaintiff's retaliation.

Fast Jimmy is the Spike to my Buffy.

You can have Lotion Soronnar.

Deal.

[Fast Jimmy]

I feel very... used.

EDIT: Also, if we're talking Buffy lore, I'd always pictured myself more of a Wesley.

Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 16 février 2013 - 01:19 .

[Plaintiff]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

I feel very... used.

Awwwwwwwwwwww.

You're a good sport, Jimmy.

[RubyTheDragon]

*spam deleted: Do not repeat posts in multiple topics, it is considered the same as spam*

Modifié par Selene Moonsong, 16 février 2013 - 05:12 .

[Malsumis]

Allan Schumacher wrote...
I'm keen on betrayal type of stuff, but I am not sure if most are.

I very much enjoy the theme of betrayal, but it shouldn't be just reserved for companions betraying the PC, but also the PC betraying their companions. Especially since this game is (probably) going to be having Templar/Mage companions. Betrayal both ways seems to fit hand in glove to me.

Haven't seen this enough in games, Jade Empire did this well if you didn't break your companions.