3 réponses à ce sujet

[spike08]

Actually weight to decisions like witcher. Getting differently developed paths of quests regarding morrigan if the Dark ritual was accepted, not dialogue alone. Save Connor? Maybe he turns into an abomination anyways and there is an arc to stop him. Didn't save him? Don't have to worry about it.

I'm not saying to do this for everything but you know what I hate in import stories? Save the Rachni queen? Have this quest. Didn't save her? Have the same level/quest in the same area, but different dialogue. And oh yea later in passing, get betrayed in EMS numbers. Woulda rather there be no Rachni quest if you killed them. As a consequence.

Wouldn't it be possible to write a script where the game can end in different locations, in different times, with different quests? Yes the climax might be a big boss showing at a fixed time and place. But why not allow past decisions in the game decide how much further that conflict goes. Maybe I stop the baddie on top of the fortress. Maybe I was more prepared and  stopped him on the ground. Maybe I wasn't prepared at all and he flew off to a mountain which I must now trek with the survivors a month later.

TLDR. While keeping main themes converging at end, have more divergence of time, location, specific final levels.

Modifié par spike08, 12 août 2013 - 08:18 .

[Allan Schumacher]

The biggest aspect for this is valuing breadth vs. depth.

I like mutual exclusion (even if I didn't actually replay The Witcher II, knowing it was there was still valuable).

Even if we do a completely different level, it means that we take from the overall length of any single playthrough. It's a balancing act, because for some they have to feel that a playthrough takes X hours for it to be satisfying.

For example, assume we have enough budget to do about 40 hours of gameplay. We could do 40 hours of straight linear, or we could have the first 10 be roughly the same, have two different 10 hour splits in the middle, bring it back together for the final 10. (Similar to the Witcher).

For someone that plays through once, they get about 30 hours. Which may be okay, may not be okay. For someone that replays, they'll get 60 hours, and presumably a more enjoyable 60 hours than the 80 hours they'd get replaying the "40 hour linear" version.


I like branching, it's just challenging to do without combinatorial explosion. Unless you account for said explosion by making the game shorter. I do think it'd be interesting to have a game that takes 2-3 hours to play through, but has dozens of ways to branch through it.

[Allan Schumacher]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

Conversely, it could be looked at as saying "we have budget to do 40 hours for X level of Production. But that same budget could be 120 hours of Y level of Production. So we could do 10 hours intro the same, have 10 hours of Branches A, B and C, have secondary branches of 10 hours doing D, E and F, then have endings reflecting variations of five hours each integrating the above six combinations, resulting in Endings G, H, I, J, K and L.

Now THAT would be a game to see. Even if it was a lower budget, isometric-IE type game.

Your moving into "changing the point of the discussion" with this though.  Be careful with hypotheticals because it's easy to hypothetically imagine that the things you want go as seamlessly as possible and without diminishing returns.  I contend that it wouldn't be a "lower budget, isometric-IE type game" but rather a "higher budget, isometric-IE type game" since, by your analysis, the budget was unchanged and just applied in a different way.

It goes without saying that the amount of content depends on the quality of the content.  I just picked a number to help illustrate, as it also reasonably fell in line with The Witcher 2.

[Allan Schumacher]

Point is, instead of looking at mutually-exclusive outcomes for mutually-exclusive content that is almost always underwhelming, why not focus more on more reconciliable choices with a follow-through on changing the tone, making the same content seem different? Instead of 40 is 30, in which a set of distinct units is less than the sum of its parts, we could give the illusion that 30 is 40, making the same units seem different.

Mutual exclusion doesn't have to mean different levels though. On some level if you provide any degree of choice, unless your reconciliation effectively brings it back together in the same way, the expectation will make things different. Which effectively runs the same risk of "my choices didn't matter" for some people (a perspective I agree/disagree with depending on the context of application)


The "40 is 30" exists whenever you grant any degree of reactivity. If we have the game respond to you in Orzammar because you went to Brecilian Forest first, that is content that only someone that did Brecilian Forest did first will see. As such, those zots could have been put in a way that ALL players would have always seen.


Rarely is it a clean cut case of "40 in 30" but more "take a few minutes here and there from a ton of places." A lot of little things, like a dialogue line acknowledging a player sex/class/background or something like that.