83 réponses à ce sujet

[bEVEsthda]

In Exile wrote...

Also, it seems, you're mistaking "freedom" for "everything you wish for magically happens".

No, I'm pointing out that I can't create my own story. I'm as hardcore on the rails in Skyrim as I am in DA. I can just make up reasons for the stuff I'm doing on rails in Skyrim. That's the only "freedom" this mimimalist approach to story actually offers. 

Keep in mind that you were talking about emergent gameplay and personal stories, and not things like exploration or interactivity (with physical objects in the world). 

You can't "create" your own plot, you can't "create" your own NPCs, you can't "create" any world-setting, just by playing the game. Of course not. Of course you cannot! Who suggested you could? Who suggested you should? It is possible. You need tools for that, but by now we're way beyond merely playing the game...

But the emergent story certainly becomes a personal story. And it's not at all the same a different character experiences. I really don't see how you can be so confused about that? Also, I find the words "on rails" incredibly contrieved, for an incredibly contrieved "point", when used in the context of Skyrim. If you experience yourself being "on rails" in Skyrim, that's entirely you, I would say. I suppose you run off chasing everything that looks like a "quest" then?

'Reasons' are not something insignificant. It's the driving and shaping element. I wouldn't use the words "make up reasons". It's the reasoning and feelings of my character, that I have defined, and how those have evolved by events, which form the motives for anything that my character does. And, no, I do not chase away after each thing that looks like a quest. I do not lift every stone. I do not look into every barrel. I do not rob every house. I do not steal everything. I do not venture into every dungeon. I don't enjoy playing games like that. TES gives me the freedom to not.

Finally, freedom is always a relative property. Always was, always will be. In RL as in games.

Yes, but what I'm objecting to is the idea that writing fan-fiction is narrative freedom. 

You're the first to mention writing fan-fiction. I don't see how that belongs into a discussion about playing games?
But, well, I do think that writing fan-fiction is indeed a lot of narrative freedom. At least in comparisons to what playing a game offers.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

Race options and good face customization
Crappy weddings!
Free Roaming (and waste too many hours)
The Ability to kill everyone!
The ability to have a house of your choice.

[Endurium]

Better character customization (Skyrim)
More varied races and species
More armor types
Open world
Dynamic weather & day/night cycles
NPCs follow schedules rather than standing around like scenery objects
Short, mostly transparent cutscenes that don't take us out of the game
Nonlinear questing
Minimal handholding
Purely optional companions who don't talk our ears off
No awkward romance scenes (sans mods)
Vastly greater collections of mods and mod resources available for PC players

This said, I have played both game series and enjoy DAO.

[In Exile]

bEVEsthda wrote...

But the emergent story certainly becomes a personal story.

No. It doesn't.  Unless you want to tell me that XCOM:EU has a personal story? 

And it's not at all the same a different character experiences. I really don't see how you can be so confused about that? Also, I find the words "on rails" incredibly contrieved, for an incredibly contrieved "point", when used in the context of Skyrim. If you experience yourself being "on rails" in Skyrim, that's entirely you, I would say. I suppose you run off chasing everything that looks like a "quest" then?

The game isn't reactive. It doesn't nothing with what you do. Compare it to TW2 - that's a game that has an emergent story that reacts to your choices. Your actions directly change the world around you, from the start of the game. Nothing is more powerful than seeing the difference in Floatsam between letting Iorveth go and capturing him. 

TW2 is brilliant, and has emergent gameplay that creates a personal story. 

Skyrim is a wasteland with worker ants, and while I can come up with lots of creative reasons for my killing, looting corpses and grave-robbing, the game never reacts to anything that I do in terms of my killing or my grave robbing. 

'Reasons' are not something insignificant. It's the driving and shaping element. I wouldn't use the words "make up reasons".

Reasons are absolutely significant. That's why saying that Skyrim allows you to have reasons is absurd. It doesn't. It demands that you make them up, and then never reacts to them, because otherwise the game world has no purpose beyond being populated with AI worker ants. 

It's the reasoning and feelings of my character, that I have defined, and how those have evolved by events, which form the motives for anything that my character does. And, no, I do not chase away after each thing that looks like a quest. I do not lift every stone. I do not look into every barrel. I do not rob every house. I do not steal everything. I do not venture into every dungeon. I don't enjoy playing games like that. TES gives me the freedom to not.

Every game gives you the "freedom" not to play it. That's not freedom. 

You're the first to mention writing fan-fiction. I don't see how that belongs into a discussion about playing games?

Because you're talking about inventing reasons for your character that are never part of the game that the game never reacts to. That's fan-fiction.

Modifié par In Exile, 27 juillet 2013 - 03:58 .

[AventuroLegendary]

The Mad Hanar wrote...


*sigh* Anyways, what I feel TES offers that Bioware doesn't is you feel like you actually are taking an average person and turning him or her into a hero.

Are you serious? The fact that my character is a descendant of some famous line of dragon hunters is hit home with the subtlety of an anvil.

[Cyonan]

The Mad Hanar wrote...

LegendaryAvenger wrote...

The Mad Hanar wrote...


*sigh* Anyways, what I feel TES offers that Bioware doesn't is you feel like you actually are taking an average person and turning him or her into a hero.

Are you serious? The fact that my character is a descendant of some famous line of dragon hunters is hit home with the subtlety of an anvil.

But your character is a wimp at the beginning. I've never felt like that in Dragon Age.

To be fair, I never felt like that in Skyrim or Oblivion either(I haven't played Morrowind yet).

I mean, the first 10 minutes of Oblivion is basically Captain Picard telling me how special I'm going to be.

Modifié par Cyonan, 27 juillet 2013 - 07:53 .

[AventuroLegendary]

The Mad Hanar wrote...

LegendaryAvenger wrote...

The Mad Hanar wrote...


*sigh* Anyways, what I feel TES offers that Bioware doesn't is you feel like you actually are taking an average person and turning him or her into a hero.

Are you serious? The fact that my character is a descendant of some famous line of dragon hunters is hit home with the subtlety of an anvil.

But your character is a wimp at the beginning. I've never felt like that in Dragon Age.

Well, you kill experienced soldiers, monstrous spiders and a bear at the beginning. The special snowflake-ing of the main character feels relatively the same. The only times I felt like I was playing a mere mortal in TES were in the games before Oblivion.

[Haplose]

Well, certainly not a "Gothic" kind of wimp...

But the progress and how much you can achieve is impressive nonetheless.

Modifié par Haplose, 27 juillet 2013 - 08:20 .

[Liamv2]

Better mod support
Longer
Larger world
Awful storylines

[bmwcrazy]

Maids.

[Addai]

At the end of the day, they're two different approaches to games and visual storytelling. On the one hand a dynamic world with open levels (if not entirely open world), first person perspective and emergent storytelling, on the other hand a more cinematic and linear third person game.

I'll take the former any day. DA is moving away from the kind of game I like, but fortunately devs like Bethesda, Arkane and Irrational are still making them. CDPR is a better one-to-one comparison because they're also making cinematic third-person games and well, they're smashing Bioware to bits, probably because the latter submitted to EA's cash-in mentality and it really shows. Also Bioware hasn't been too great on developing long-term story arcs. Elder Scrolls does a fantastic meta-narrative through their game lore. Mass Effect devolved into a confusing, hole-ridden mess and Dragon Age development hasn't been much better.

[Il Divo]

In Exile wrote...

Because you're talking about inventing reasons for your character that are never part of the game that the game never reacts to. That's fan-fiction.

This is exactly why I've always argued against the idea that emergent narrative, or at least the TES approach,  is role-playing.

As a P&P player, I maintain that role-playing is dependent on there being an external source to the player/character able to acknowledge his actions. Hence you are taking up a single role/perspective in the story.

Once that's gone, you're no longer role-playing a character, you are now writing your own narrative, since you control multiple aspects of the story. You are now deciding how encounters play out.

Things like imagining party member conversations that never happen, making your own companion characters, etc, I don't see that kinda stuff as role-playing at all.

Modifié par Il Divo, 27 juillet 2013 - 09:06 .

[In Exile]

Addai67 wrote...
I'll take the former any day. DA is moving away from the kind of game I like, but fortunately devs like Bethesda, Arkane and Irrational are still making them.  

There is no way that either what Ken Levine did with Bioshock or what Arkanane did with Dishonoured is at all comparable with TES. The entire method of delivering the story is different, and much closer to what Bioware does. There's no emergent gameplay of the kind that you're talking about in a TES game (involving free exploration or free chocie re: what quests to complete), and the story is told to you via cutscenes. They're not "freeze control of the player" scenes, but it's all done via character dialogue and interaction, not exploration. 

If you want to pick a company that ran with the TES gauntlet, it has to be Obsidian and what they did with New Vegas. 

[Bfler]

Khajiit and Orcs -> my prefered races as PC

[Get Magna Carter]

completely different approaches to games with different strengths and weaknesses.

Elderscrolls is exploration-centred with plenty of freedom for the players to define their characters and their approach toresolving the quests.
Dragon Age has more emphasis on story and better NPC and romances.

[LupoCarlos]

In my opinion, the storytelling way of TES games sucks. I personally love movies and shortcuts and DA have more immersion in your character's personality.
I would love to see a bigger way to explain lore in DA:I like books in TES.

[In Exile]

simfamSP wrote...
No. It isn't. I approach ES with the same amount of imagination to all my RPGs. "Inventing" motives is essential to the RP experience. BioWare doesn't give you a motive, they just have a story which nudges it along. Though the ES lacks that narrative linearity which is sometimes essential for character growth to continue, it is all up to the player as to how linear it can be.

I love creating character motivations - but that doesn't mean anything when those motivations amount to nothing more than post hoc justifications for all of the murder, looting and grave robbing that I'm engaging in. 

See how different they can be by just that one use of harmless imagination. Is it fanfiction? No! That's how PnP games are done: through imagination.  

It's not different. There's no substantive difference between games that do either first, since you see the exact same content, and picking A first over B second doesn't change anything. 

Here's a different example, that's actual substantive: if your pragmatic Warden leaves Redcliffe to burn instead of not... then the game's reacted to your pragmatism. 

Not answering the Greybeards has absolutely no meaning in-game. It just freezes the world. Alduin sits around and waits for you, and so on. There's no choice you're making. You're just not progressing in that linear quest-line. The choice only has meaning because you've invented this entire story. 

These three "inventions" can not be expressed through any means of dialogue and can not be reacted to in any way because they are not part of the game world, I understand, yet, how am I supposed to create a deep character with a good amount of character growth if I limit myself to the understand and variables of the game world?

A necessary condition isn't the same thing as a sufficient condition. I agree that you need to have a more complicated set of internal motives to understand and polish a character than you can express in-game. But there's no "character" unless the game reacts to those motives. 

If I were to take each response from the silent PC as a set response, and say, *not* imagine how the PC actually *says* the line, then there are even more limitations to contend with, and thus, even more damned restrictions for my character.

And if I were to imagine that my character bleets like a goat , he'd still be the most persuasive person in the land because I clicked the [Persuade] bleet. 

Modifié par In Exile, 28 juillet 2013 - 01:52 .

[Addai]

In Exile wrote...

Addai67 wrote...
I'll take the former any day. DA is moving away from the kind of game I like, but fortunately devs like Bethesda, Arkane and Irrational are still making them.  

There is no way that either what Ken Levine did with Bioshock or what Arkanane did with Dishonoured is at all comparable with TES. The entire method of delivering the story is different, and much closer to what Bioware does. There's no emergent gameplay of the kind that you're talking about in a TES game (involving free exploration or free chocie re: what quests to complete), and the story is told to you via cutscenes. They're not "freeze control of the player" scenes, but it's all done via character dialogue and interaction, not exploration. 

If you want to pick a company that ran with the TES gauntlet, it has to be Obsidian and what they did with New Vegas. 

There is plenty of way.  Environmental, contextual storytelling in an open world (open levels in the case of Dishonored and Bioshock), player freedom, and first person perspective.

The story is NOT all told to you through cutscenes.  If you don't pick up the recordings in Bioshock, employ the Heart in Dishonored or read notes and journals in Bethesda games, you're going to miss a lot of the story.  That depends on exploration and player-driven pacing.

Modifié par Addai67, 28 juillet 2013 - 03:15 .

[In Exile]

Addai67 wrote...
There is plenty of way.  Environmental, contextual storytelling in an open world (open levels in the case of Dishonored and Bioshock), player freedom, and first person perspective.

Open "world" is not "open levels", because if they were, then TW2 counts on that front alone. This isn't even mincing words - it's just comparing unlike things. 

"Player freedom" doesn't even describe anything, and in Bioshock you don't even have the freedom to make any choices, because you're on rails 100% of the time. Bioshock 2 didn't even have as much choice as Bioshock 1. 

The story is NOT all told to you through cutscenes.  If you don't pick up the recordings in Bioshock, employ the Heart in Dishonored or read notes and journals in Bethesda games, you're going to miss a lot of the story.  That depends on exploration and player-driven pacing

Using the heart in Dishonoured doesn't depend on exploration. It either gives you a fixed message in a particular area, or you have to point it to an important character, and all those characters are fixed in place.

The closest you get to a parallel is between the recordings in Bioshock and the books in Bestheda, except that the records in Bioshock are actually allow about the narrow plot that you're playing instead of the massive lore. 

And now "player-driven pacing" is a thing? Great, I pick the order of my quests in DA:O and DA2. "Player-driven pacing" at its finest, really. 

I don't object to your enjoying Skyrim or New Vegas a great deal, but I do object to trying to draw a parrel that doesn't exist between a set of unrelated games. 

Modifié par In Exile, 28 juillet 2013 - 04:44 .