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[Sylvius the Mad]

You are describing KotOR2 pretty well, though. This is why KotOR2 was a terrible game.

[XxPrincess(x)ThreatxX]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

You are describing KotOR2 pretty well, though. This is why KotOR2 was a terrible game.

KOTOR was terrible, KOTOR2 was just unfinished.

[EmperorSahlertz]

What many need to realize is that actual roleplayers are a minority. Msot people play a game and doesn't even bother about their characters background. BioWare is trying to make the games more accesible to these players. And I can't say I blame them, considering that this group of players are the obvious majority.

[Enigmatick]

EmperorSahlertz wrote...

What many need to realize is that actual roleplayers are a minority. Msot people play a game and doesn't even bother about their characters background. BioWare is trying to make the games more accesible to these players. And I can't say I blame them, considering that this group of players are the obvious majority.

An obsession with wide appeal along with overinflated budgets for AAA games is the cancer killing video games :innocent:

[Sylvius the Mad]

EntropicAngel wrote...

I'm restating my arguments poorly.

I mean to say that the character DOES have a past, as evidenced by those dreams, that has informed the character's personality, that the player is yet not privy to until the middle of the game. After you've already formed the majority of your charcter, and thus the character is (potentially--just like auto-dialogue only breaks if it contradicts) broken.

Except there's no requirement that that secret past have influenced the character's personality at all.  The character has a complete past of which he's aware, and that's the past that the player can write and have influence the character's personality.  That that past isn't real doesn't matter; the personality it created persists.

Never does KotOR tell you that the PC knew all along who he was, or that he understood what those dreams meant, or even that he remembered those events as if he took part in them.

[Sir JK]

Ieldra2 wrote...

Ah, I see. That's how I play as well. I have a rough concept that I refine by playing. That's why *most* of what I get in the cinematic scenes works ok for me. To some degree, I let myself be influenced by the options provided, and there are problems only if the options provided don't mesh with my basic concept. That still happens often enough, since it also applies to not being able to express traits I consider core traits, but a non-cinematic design wouldn't change that, since if no options exist which express what I want it doesn't matter if they're spoken or not.  

This is why I find the lack of emotion in, primarily, Silent Protagonists disappointing or even aggravating. The character lacks the ability to lash out emotionally when I want them to. Instead I have to settle for vague lines.

I want a little pathos in my characters dammit.

Fast Jimmy wrote...

It still is better than choosing the
sarcasm icon and the misleading paraphrase and find out you mockingly
just insulted someone's recently dead wife. 

Well sure... but that sounds more like the problem with one specific paraphrase rather than the entire system.

Pasquale1234 wrote...

I disagree, but my opinions about the actual meaning of tone and what it conveys is likely unique.

For roleplay purposes, what I really need is to be able to make in-character choices, regardless of how the world reacts.

I don't need to decide the fates of kings or whether the colour of the tower of archmages should be gold or red. But I do expect people to notice when I insult them to their face.

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

I'd be interested to see that argument.

I would disagree.

But
further, I would argue that it's not possible, from an in-character
perspective, to determine whether the game is reacting to your choices. 
In-character, it always looks like your choices matter.  If you say
something sarcastically, you have to expect that the other characters
heard that.  You can then interpret their reactions in light of that
context.

If two different Wardens say the same thing two
different ways to Alistair, and Alistair reacts the same to both of
them, I suggest that those two Wardens should come away from that
exchange with different opinions of Alistair, because they've actually
seen different behaviour.  In one case, Alistair reacted to stimulus A
by doing X.  In the other, Alistair reacted to stimulus B by doing X. 
The A-X relationship leads to different conclusions than the
B-X relationship does.

Allright.

Naturally, I couldn't compare the experiences between one warden or the other. Nor am I terribly interested to do so. I don't really need Alistair to be different between playthroughs as such. It's perfectly possible for him to respond with the same line to two different lines as long as both my lines as his is ambigous enough.

The problem comes when I don't seek ambiguity. If I insult someone to their face and intends for them to understand that I am in fact insulting them and they laugh it off as if I joked with them then I will be increadibly frustrated. If I was subtle, then it's another matter. It'll come across to me as if that someone isn't listening to me at all (and if that's the actual case, then fine).

But if it presents me with a choice and then reacts as if I made another choice then I will consider it a false one. Much like how I consider choice of haircolour to be a false one (since it has no impact whatsoever). A true choice need not neccessarily, in my mind, have a reaction that is radically different from any other... but it needs an acknowledgement. Maybe it leads to nothing, maybe it leads to sweeping changes. The important bit in a choice is that it is acknowledged that I made one. Similarily, I am fine with not changing the nature of the stting, but I'd like to be able to express an opinion of it and have people acknwledge (or dismiss) that I made that choice in particular. Just not ignore it.

In the case of my example, that the victim of my insults either realises that I am insulting them -or- that their lack of realisation is somehow explained or emphasized.

A false choice is thus an unacknowledged one. A true choice has an acknowledgement.

My character's might not know whether Alistair would react differently in another universe, but they will know when Alistair is seemingly not listening to them.

That's why a [Sarcasm] that's not acknowledged is a false choice to me. Because I can't react to them failing to get the message afterwards.

Modifié par Sir JK, 28 janvier 2014 - 09:39 .

[XxPrincess(x)ThreatxX]

EntropicAngel wrote...

Threat300 wrote...

KOTOR was terrible, KOTOR2 was just unfinished.

Did you miss the many times your character has a flashback to something that the CHARACTER remembers they did but you the player are only then just learning?

At worst, your character is railroaded into having done certain things. At BEST, you don't learn those things until partway through the game (so you can't facilitate them into role-playing, like you can in Bioware backgrounds).

KOTOR was just terrible & overrated imo, especially the extremely obvious plot twist you can see coming a mile away.

[Cainhurst Crow]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

Italics to emphasise the word, to make it stand out to illustrate that it's something special about the word. Such as that it is in fact not true.

Or describing how the line is delivered:
Sir JK sighed. Closing his eyes and pinching his nose he said patronizingly: "That is a fantastic idea".

Point is: that line couldn't, even with the full text available, help you reach the conclusion that it's mocking sarcasm. Here the supposed solution would completely fail to achieve it's purpose. Insteda it'd only provide it's aggravating side-effects.

Text based CRPGs solutioned this over a decade ago.

JK: <SARCASM> That is a fantastic idea

Problem solved.

To be honest it feels like this was already in the mass effect series and dragon age 2 game. I remember at least something similar that let me know the tone of my remarks and whether it would lead to an action or not.

Can't remember such a feature in origins though.

[Sylvius the Mad]

EmperorSahlertz wrote...

What many need to realize is that actual roleplayers are a minority.

These are roleplaying games.  Permitting roleplaying should be their primary design goal.

Everything else is secondary.

If they want to make games that aren't roleplaying games, fine, but as long as they keep calling them RPGs I'm going to keep expecting to roleplay in them.

[Pasquale1234]

EmperorSahlertz wrote...

What many need to realize is that actual roleplayers are a minority. Msot people play a game and doesn't even bother about their characters background. BioWare is trying to make the games more accesible to these players. And I can't say I blame them, considering that this group of players are the obvious majority.

I would argue that the addition of VO and cinematics has little to do with accessibility and more to do with telling a specific story in a specific way.  It feels like a genre shift.

As for minority / majority / sales #, look at Skyrim or Fallout.  Both sold well and have a lot of loyal fans - and neither of them require players to second guess what their PC will say.

[EmperorSahlertz]

EntropicAngel wrote...

EmperorSahlertz wrote...

What many need to realize is that actual roleplayers are a minority. Msot people play a game and doesn't even bother about their characters background. BioWare is trying to make the games more accesible to these players. And I can't say I blame them, considering that this group of players are the obvious majority.

I believe it's possible to "appease" both groups. To a degree.

Certainly to a degree. But the second that someone starts complaining that "their cahracter would enver have done that!", is the moment a casual player jsut raises his eyebrows in confusion at what the rolepalyer just said.
At the end of the day developing games is a business, and BioWare has to do what is lucrative first, then what they want themselves second, then what the fans want third.

If a roleplayer really wants a roleplaying experience tailored to his demands, then he needs to go to the more specialzied suppliers of RPGs.

Enigmatick wrote...

EmperorSahlertz wrote...

What many need to realize is that actual roleplayers are a minority. Msot people play a game and doesn't even bother about their characters background. BioWare is trying to make the games more accesible to these players. And I can't say I blame them, considering that this group of players are the obvious majority.

An obsession with wide appeal along with overinflated budgets for AAA games is the cancer killing video games [smilie]http://social.bioware.com/images/forum/emoticons/angel.png[/smilie]

Au contraire mes ami, those AAA games are the reason games have become such a lucrative business, and are directly responsible for the fact that an entire market of specialized games could arise.
However, for the AAA games to remain lucrative they have to sell the most copies. Selling most copies are not done by catering to an extremely small minority of the fans.

[In Exile]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
Except there's no requirement that that secret past have influenced the character's personality at all.  The character has a complete past of which he's aware, and that's the past that the player can write and have influence the character's personality.  That that past isn't real doesn't matter; the personality it created persists.

Never does KotOR tell you that the PC knew all along who he was, or that he understood what those dreams meant, or even that he remembered those events as if he took part in them.

Not only that, but the force is clearly a mystical thing that could conceivable alter the fundamental "being" that a person is (if applied in some specific, undetermined way). The game foreshadows from the start that the force can strip away everything that a person is and replaced it with something else. 

KOTOR has a predetermined protagonist in terms of the (largely unexplored) background that you're given, but that never features in the gameplay. KOTOR 2 not only gives you a predetermined background, but makes significant parts of the game turn exclusively on predetermined choice you made but never knew about. 

The designers try and get you to play through a segment before the chocie is "relevant", but that completely ignores the fact that there are downstream effects of making a choice 5 years ago on your present mindset. 

[Cainhurst Crow]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Darth Brotarian wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Skyrim has the protagonist you create.  It can be whatever you'd like.

My last Skyrim character was a Nord girl who'd run away from home as a teenager, who'd then gone on to be a street urchin and then burglar in Cyrodiil.  At the start of the game, she was fleeing Cyrodiil and trying to return home to her parents in Riften.

Thats a nice fanfiction you wrote there but if you cant actually act on thst in game then whats the point at all?

Sure you can.  What do you do at the start of Skyrim?  You escape from your execution.  Then what?  Where do you go?

This is where your character creation takes effect.  It informs your choices.

That character struck out immediately for Riften.  The rest of the story grew from there as she encountered adventure along the way.  But she didn't find her way into the main plot of the game for some time, or even into the civil war.  And when she got to Riften and found no sign of her parents, she had to decide what she wanted to do with her life, now that she knew she was truly alone.  And the things she'd encountered on the way to Riften helped inform that choice.

And I will ask again, if you can't actually act on that in game, with a dialoue option to state you were a runaway as a teen, or where you came from, or even what you were arrested for, nor if it is ever brought up in game at all for you to express, then what is the point of making a backstory when the game refuses to let you act on that backstory?

In a table top game such back stories are important because the DM or GM, whichever term bests fits, can incorporate such details into the story, or you yourself can express them in simple chit chat or conversation. But in a video game such excercises amount to a lot of wasted time that with the press of a button can all go flying out the window, spoken word or not, because there is no GM or DM or anyone else to express your backstory with, just an apathetic box that doesn't give 2 squirts about what you think your character is.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Sir JK wrote...

Allright.

Naturally, I couldn't compare the experiences between one warden or the other. Nor am I terribly interested to do so. I don't really need Alistair to be different between playthroughs as such. It's perfectly possible for him to respond with the same line to two different lines as long as both my lines as his is ambigous enough.

The problem comes when I don't seek ambiguity. If I insult someone to their face and intends for them to understand that I am in fact insulting them and they laugh it off as if I joked with them then I will be increadibly frustrated. If I was subtle, then it's another matter. It'll come across to me as if that someone isn't listening to me at all (and if that's the actual case, then fine).

But if it presents me with a choice and then reacts as if I made another choice then I will consider it a false one. Much like how I consider choice of haircolour to be a false one (since it has no impact whatsoever). A true choice need not neccessarily, in my mind, have a reaction that is radically different from any other... but it needs an acknowledgement. Maybe it leads to nothing, maybe it leads to sweeping changes. The important bit in a choice is that it is acknowledged that I made one.
In the case of my example, that the victim of my insults either realises that I am insulting them -or- that their lack of realisation is somehow explained or emphasized.

A false choice is thus an unacknowledged one. A true choice has an acknowledgement.

My character's might not know whether Alistair would react differently in another universe, but they will know when Alistair is seemingly not listening to them.

That's why a [Sarcasm] that's not acknowledged is a false choice to me. Because I can't react to them failing to get the message afterwards.

I see a difference here in our motivations for action.  You have external motivations, and I have internal motivations.

If you insult someone, you're doing it for them.  Your objective is that they feel insulted.  That they notice they've been insulted, and do so in a way that you can perceive that awareness, is why you did it in the first place.

If I insult someone, I'm doing it for me.  My objective is that I have insulted someone.  I don't particularly care whether they notice.  Whether they do will again help inform my opinion of them, but my success or failure is determined by what I do, not by what other people do.

[In Exile]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

It still is better than choosing the  sarcasm icon and the misleading paraphrase and find out you mockingly  just insulted someone's recently dead wife. 

The problem isn't just the icon, it's the brand of sarcasm. I'd absolutely insult someone's dead wife in a sarcastic way. The disconnect isn't as much the link between the speech and the icon, but that to some players the line itself couldn't be sarcastic. 

[Cainhurst Crow]

Noctis Augustus wrote...

Darth Brotarian wrote...

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Noctis Augustus wrote...

I don't understand why they defend voiced protagonists so badly. Skyrim was much more successful than DAO and DA2 combined and it had a silent protagonist. And that game was incredibly oversimplified to pander to the non-RPG players.

Skyrim barely has a protagonist at all.

Skyrim has the protagonist you create.  It can be whatever you'd like.

My last Skyrim character was a Nord girl who'd run away from home as a teenager, who'd then gone on to be a street urchin and then burglar in Cyrodiil.  At the start of the game, she was fleeing Cyrodiil and trying to return home to her parents in Riften.

There are no actual dialogue options in Skyrim.

What are you talking about?  Of course there are.

Thats a nice fanfiction you wrote there but if you cant actually act on thst in game then whats the point at all?

That's called background. And if you seriously don't see the point of "role-playing" in a role-playing game then something is wrong with you.

Is it? Is it roleplaying? Or is it pretending you have a choice in your background when really, the only reason you even can have such fantasies is that the game simply didn't fill that part in nor care enough about it to address it.

The rules of roleplaying that apply when interacting with other sentient, sapient individuals, like in a actual campaign or text based roleplay, don't apply to role playing video games, because of the removal of a conscious outside party in telling the story.

It really is a game where you can't actually roleplay, and more like a choose your own adventure book. And sure, you could roleplay the backstory of the protaganists of said book and make up all the unwritten details, but in the end you are still stuck to picking from options premade for you, and simply following the pre-made paths of the author, not making any choices on your own or having actual impacts on your character outside of what was actually programed.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Darth Brotarian wrote...

And I will ask again, if you can't actually act on that in game, with a dialoue option to state you were a runaway as a teen, or where you came from, or even what you were arrested for, nor if it is ever brought up in game at all for you to express, then what is the point of making a backstory when the game refuses to let you act on that backstory?

I'll answer that with a question.

Without a backstory, how do you decide what your character does next?  How do you know what he wants to do?  How do you know what he likes or dislikes?  How do you make any decisions for him without having a firm grasp of who he is as a person, and what he wants out of life?

Building a coherent backstroy is a vital piece of my gameplay, because without it my character has no motivation to do anything.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 28 janvier 2014 - 09:43 .

[In Exile]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
If two different Wardens say the same thing two different ways to Alistair, and Alistair reacts the same to both of them, I suggest that those two Wardens should come away from that exchange with different opinions of Alistair, because they've actually seen different behaviour.  In one case, Alistair reacted to stimulus A by doing X.  In the other, Alistair reacted to stimulus B by doing X.  The A-X relationship leads to different conclusions than the B-X relationship does.

Except that the stimulus is not A or B. The stimulus is always A, the argument that it could be "B" being justified on the basis that it could be possible for two people to react in perfectly identical ways (persistent and consistently) despite two entirely different forms of outside stimulus, only because the literal content of the speech being emitted at them is the same. 

Not only is this demonstrably false as a matter of empirical reality, but it's conceptual gibberish as a matter of the basic function of speech and human interaction.  

[In Exile]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...
Without a backstory, how do you decide what your character does next?  How do you know what he wants to do?  How do you know what he likes or dislikes?  How do you make any decisions for him without having a firm grasp of who he is as a person, and what he wants out of life?

Based on preference and attitude. I don't need to have a reason for hating unequal power dynamics. I can just hate unequal power dynamics. I can then be opposed to slavery on the basis of that belief. 

[Sylvius the Mad]

In Exile wrote...

Except that the stimulus is not A or B. The stimulus is always A, the argument that it could be "B" being justified on the basis that it could be possible for two people to react in perfectly identical ways (persistent and consistently) despite two entirely different forms of outside stimulus, only because the literal content of the speech being emitted at them is the same. 

Not only is this demonstrably false as a matter of empirical reality, but it's conceptual gibberish as a matter of the basic function of speech and human interaction.

The stimulus is A or B, based on tone.  And the tone is determined by the player.

And there is no empirical data to contradict my conclusion, because we only get to see it once.  Alistair reacts one time.  We can't control for variables and try again.  In that particular in-game reality, we get one shot.

There's no way to draw meaningful conclusions from that.