Top 15 computer RPGs

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 7:32 pm

Kobe wrote:And the second act of the game was just phoned in.

I don't quite believe that; I think the game designers were trying to do things so that you could complete any of the subplots in any order... so had to leave them relatively unconnected and average out the difficulty of the encounters.

I mean, you can clearly see the effort put into making the individual subplots work (Locke's, Cyan's, and Shadow's were the best) and I think that the arc from Celes finding Sabin to finding Edgar to finding Setzer was probably the best in the entire game. But the idea of having the character arcs being able to be done in any order was a bafflingly awful decision. FF6's greatest strength was character interaction and when you remove the potential for these you drag the game down into the depths of mediocrity. I mean, take the Shadow and Relm thing. You'd expect something great to come from that. But you can't have it because it'd kill the idea of doing either or none of their stories. Same for Sabin reuniting with Cyan, the latter's best friend. Total. Fucking. Horseshit.

This is before we get into the other issues of the second half of the game, such as the lack of villain presence (not using the series' best villain for the entire second half is a damn shame) and the completely broken combat system. Final Fantasy VI has probably the second-most broken combat system of all of the post-FF3 Final Fantasies and the issues with the system really becomes apparent after you get the second airship.

That said, I still really like the game.

Kobe wrote:I'd rather play VIII than VII because of the better eye candy.

No one should play Final Fantasy VIII for whatever reason in the entire universe. The eye candy does not make up for the brain-meltingly awful story and characterization. Seriously, the writing in that game is probably the worst in the franchise. And I'm including Final Fantasy: Dirge of Cerebus (which at least had the bright points of Cid and Hojo) and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (which had a plot a 6-year old could come up with).

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 8:03 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:No one should play Final Fantasy VIII ...., the writing in that game is probably the worst in the franchise.

X-2

While Yuna and crew with the whole job system was cute trying to get Titus back....it was a forced story from the francise to reuse Rikku, Yuna, Big Tits, and throw in a chick to replace Big Tits since she was pregnant and couldn't adventure which led to emo-scene-goth Pain being included in the party.

It was cute, and I like it, but really it is the worst story because it broke from the franchise by going back for a dead character where no other game did save for getting Aerith back in the original VII. It really was all about Yuna having an empty vag without Titus to fill it and showing a still underage Rikku in skimpy clothing. The only good thing about it was Big tits having a kid and showing even game characters can be faithful sometimes.

Might have well just taking the characters from DOA Volleyball and threw them in a FF game if you just wanted a skin-flick.

Archmage · Post by **Archmage** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 9:06 pm

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Did anyone else play way too much Realmz?

I played through the default City of Bywater module in limited shareware mode like ten times for some reason, levelling dozens of characters to the cap of 7 and wondering what the game would be like if I could just get a registered copy when I was a kid with no credit card.

Though as far as shareware PC RPGs go, I liked the Exile series a lot better. It's too bad that the "enhanced" pseudo-3D Avernum remakes sucked dong. The interface in those games was just atrocious.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 9:32 pm

shadzar wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote:No one should play Final Fantasy VIII ...., the writing in that game is probably the worst in the franchise.
X-2

While Yuna and crew with the whole job system was cute trying to get Titus back....it was a forced story from the francise to reuse Rikku, Yuna, Big Tits, and throw in a chick to replace Big Tits since she was pregnant and couldn't adventure which led to emo-scene-goth Pain being included in the party.

It was cute, and I like it, but really it is the worst story because it broke from the franchise by going back for a dead character where no other game did save for getting Aerith back in the original VII. It really was all about Yuna having an empty vag without Titus to fill it and showing a still underage Rikku in skimpy clothing. The only good thing about it was Big tits having a kid and showing even game characters can be faithful sometimes.

Might have well just taking the characters from DOA Volleyball and threw them in a FF game if you just wanted a skin-flick.

While I totally agree with you that X-2 is a... pointless game with a story that can be summed up as "Tidus is alive and through girl power got him back!" I'd accept that over what FF8 was. At least it looked better and I didn't absolutely hate the sexed up characters. I didn't particularly pay attention to Rikku in X or X-2 and I don't know/care who Paine is/was and couldn't be lulled into even trying to... but at least the characters nor the game make my head explode like FF8 did. I can not describe in coherent words my deep deep hatred for having wasted any of my life playing FF8.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 9:38 pm

Also X-2 had a better battle system.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 9:43 pm

MGuy wrote: I can not describe in coherent words my deep deep hatred for having wasted any of my life playing FF8.

Do it anyway.

Daddy Lago needs his daily hate injection.

Here, here's some residual FF8 hate to help you get started.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 10:00 pm

I have a lot of hate for FF8 and a lot of annoyance for FFX and FFXII. I mean I've played worse games then those but there is a lot that just bugs me about them.

Oh, time to call the Spoony One on this hate.

http://spoonyexperiment.com/category/fi ... tasy-viii/

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 10:08 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
MGuy wrote: I can not describe in coherent words my deep deep hatred for having wasted any of my life playing FF8.
Do it anyway.

Daddy Lago needs his daily hate injection.

Here, here's some residual FF8 hate to help you get started.

I can't even REMEMBER the game that well. I touched it one time more than half a decade ago. I'd need to dig it up just to remind myself of why I hated it so much.

That being said there are a few things that ring in my mind. Squall meets his father in an invisible kingdom and does what amounts to a pout. No one even TALKS ABOUT IT AFTER!!!!

There was some explanation given, and my memory permitting, it was "I knew something somewhere was going to happen in the future where somebody will do something that effects the past so I, without telling you, left home and through unclear means, founded this kingdom to help the plot along when something happens."

Another thing that keeps up in my mind is that the kingdom his father is running has mastered fucking space flight! The only reaction to this is a "wow really?!" and it is never heavily questioned nor does it DO anything but help the plot along and allow for space cuddles.

Seifer who was supposed to be a villainous rival is a PUSSY! After the beginning he can't even be taken seriously anymore and has to get lightly bitch slapped aside EVERY time he is seen along with his pointless cronies. This is compounded by the fact that he is hardly ever thought or talked about, cementing the fact that despite him showing up often he doesn't DO shit.

Quistis is supposed to be an experienced mercenary but outside of merely "knowing" more about what's going on she hardly acts experienced at all.

Irvine and Selphie do nothing for the plot. At all. Ever but exist as people with thumbs. In the mentioned sniping attempt I think that was Irvine's GREATEST chance to do SOMETHING other than be there and give reaction shots. But he failed... Selphie... is just a girl. That is the only point of her character. And the fact that she is a girl is never dropped. All of her dialogue, all her motions, all the events that have her involved readily remind you that she's a girl and I think she is supposed to be a spunky one...

The entire school is a mobile ship... I'm... not sure what else to say about that. No one in the game really made a big deal over it so I guess that's that. Oh YES! the school ship is replaced later on by a ROCKET SHIP!

The plot involves Time Travel shenanigans and was not Chrono Trigger (which I am happy to say I got to play again on the DS). And really BAD Time Travel shenanigans that involved creating a loop of some sort that didn't make sense. If my memory of the game is sustained I think it went something like this: The witch(?) disease (?) thing is something that HAS to occur... It occurs naturally such that there is always one... So... when you kill the witch in the present you somehow go back in time to infect your own mother with it... so she can become a witch, though there should have already been someone suffering from the affliction at that time so you'd effectively have two witches. so that in the future all this shit can happen and then... profit?

But that's just what very very little I can even remember about the game. I'll maybe wiki it or something later to clear it up later but that's all I got for now.

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 10:44 pm

Archmage wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote:Did anyone else play way too much Realmz?
I played through the default City of Bywater module in limited shareware mode like ten times for some reason, levelling dozens of characters to the cap of 7 and wondering what the game would be like if I could just get a registered copy when I was a kid with no credit card.

^- +1 to this.

Vnonymous · Post by **Vnonymous** » Sat Jan 30, 2010 10:52 pm

Making a list of 15 computer rpgs is dumb because there really has been only around 5 or so.

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_role-playing_games/

You also don't have one of them actually on your list - Deus Ex was more of a roleplaying game than system shock 2 ever was. And even if you removed every aspect of character customisation from Deus Ex, it'd still be more of a roleplaying game than System Shock 2.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:10 am

MGuy wrote:
shadzar wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote:No one should play Final Fantasy VIII ...., the writing in that game is probably the worst in the franchise.
X-2

While Yuna and crew with the whole job system was cute trying to get Titus back....it was a forced story from the francise to reuse Rikku, Yuna, Big Tits, and throw in a chick to replace Big Tits since she was pregnant and couldn't adventure which led to emo-scene-goth Pain being included in the party.

It was cute, and I like it, but really it is the worst story because it broke from the franchise by going back for a dead character where no other game did save for getting Aerith back in the original VII. It really was all about Yuna having an empty vag without Titus to fill it and showing a still underage Rikku in skimpy clothing. The only good thing about it was Big tits having a kid and showing even game characters can be faithful sometimes.

Might have well just taking the characters from DOA Volleyball and threw them in a FF game if you just wanted a skin-flick.
While I totally agree with you that X-2 is a... pointless game with a story that can be summed up as "Tidus is alive and through girl power got him back!" I'd accept that over what FF8 was. At least it looked better and I didn't absolutely hate the sexed up characters. I didn't particularly pay attention to Rikku in X or X-2 and I don't know/care who Paine is/was and couldn't be lulled into even trying to... but at least the characters nor the game make my head explode like FF8 did. I can not describe in coherent words my deep deep hatred for having wasted any of my life playing FF8.

I guess 8 wasn't as bad for me because it was a "new" plot for FF, as if all of them aren't the same anyway right? Clusterfuck of people that must save the world from natural disaster by aliens....

But the premise of x-2 just made the asinine gameplay worse. If you didn't have to get 100 score on those stupid side quests to get the half-assed full story which you pretty much summed up, then it might have been better with the cute things in it...aside form the fact it was the Spice Girls of the FF series.

8 just seemed more like something in it I looked for from TTRPGs. It did for once in the FF series start the party out together for the most part as they knew each other than most where you meet random person along the way at a tavern and have to figure out how to recruit them ala D&D and figuring out how to get people together as a party....

Granted the Gardens are about all I remember about it right now since it won't play in a PS2, but Rinoa Heartlily and Squall were at least more interesting than the Pokemon in FFIX with Orca from He-Man thrown into it. I just flat out refused to play that!

So Edea and the others didn't bother me as much to remember anything really bad from it as compared to X-2. Maybe I just had too much fun with the gunblade, but recall the train timed bomb shit to be a game let down, rather than story one, but had already gotten use to the story being recycled throughout the entire FF series.

Each new FF game, does look better. But it has to have a good story such as Xenogears did that made me want Xenosaga.

Now going back and playing 8 now, my view may change if I could, but at the time it wasn't that bad. Might had been VII that made me forgive 8, but still as fun and novel as is it is (dressing like a moogle...WTF?), I have to say the worse in the series is X-2.

So I may be going on story, whereas you may be judging it by controls or something else that could lead us to different views. ~shrugs~

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:37 am

Planescape: Torment actually has roleplay in it, so it wins.

Baldur's Gate falls into the uncanny valley: it has just enough freedom of choice to make me angry about not being given enough freedom of choice. Also, I like my actions to have consequences, so when I found out that most annoying fuckers I have put down in 1 are alive and well in 2 I quit.

The Gold Box series is remarkable for being sort of balanced, given that it's based on 1e. Death Knights and Gateway were especially awesome.

Arkania 2 was buggy but I don't complain much since I didn't buy it. Same with Darklands.

TES: Arena and Daggerfall hurt my eyes and made my head ache.

Arcanum: awesome.

Anachronox: neat.

Beyond Divinity: good idea, so-and-so execution. Still, time and money well spent.

Heroes of Might and Magic V is the best CRPG of the series. I like II more as a game.

Witcher: Existential musings in your power-tripping fantasy? It's more likely than you think. Didn't like it for this very reason (zomg existence is pointless - thanks, but I can have my fix of that from Passage or ID).

Anvil of Dawn and its predecessor Summoning - hack-and-slash with good writing (and pretty pictures, in case of the former).

Krondor: these cocksuckers killed my favorite character. Fuck them.

Kobajagrande wrote:it comes completely natural to you to refuse the throne

What, and leave it to that incompetent chick? No way. Faced with a choice between the stick in my ass and the fate of the country, I chose the country.

Oh, and Immortal Defense has the best story ever (better than Planescape: Torment, seriously), which is ironic since it's not an RPG.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:44 am

Vnonymous wrote:Making a list of 15 computer rpgs is dumb because there really has been only around 5 or so.

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_role-playing_games/

While that guy has some decent points, some of what he says is far off the mark (like "never let the players roll the dice for themselves"). More importantly he does not know why no one is producing games with enough choices to truly allow for roleplaying - it is too expensive. Hand-crafting a believable world is simply not feasible. Each Bethesda game takes years to produce, and realistically you would want much more complex worlds than that. Until procedurally generated worlds hit the market we are basically stuck. Not because the westerners only care about number crunching, not because the japanese want to turn our beloved RPGs into evil movies, not because MMORPGs are mindless grindfests - though all of these are somewhat true. We don't get giant nonlinear worlds filled with believable NPCs in which we get to choose our own story because producing such a game would be prohibitively expensive.

On the bright side though, it is now possible (in terms of computing power) to at least generate terrain algorithmically so perhaps in a couple of years we can get those games. Until then, no matter how much game designers want to build these games, they will fail, if nothing else because of money running out (see: Horizons). And even when we do have them someone will still be producing Dungeon Crawl XII or Final Fantasy XV. Properly done, storytelling, dungeon crawling and world exploring can be fun, even if they are not "real RPGs". Then again, what is?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:49 am

Yeah, the article has far too much "real roleplay" to it for my tastes, with comments about how it doesn't matter what your combat system is, ect.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 2:16 am

Murtak wrote: We don't get giant nonlinear worlds filled with believable NPCs in which we get to choose our own story because producing such a game would be prohibitively expensive.

Bullshit.

My emulator version of Ultima V (with saves) takes up 1.76 MB on my current hard drive.

That was huge for the time - taking up four double sided floppys for the Apple II and pushing the limits of the media.

And while there was only one story, it was a nonlinear world filled with shallow, but interesting NPCs.

Going to amazon, and looking at the first thing they have as a computer RPG Mass Effect II takes up "12GB or more" on a HD.

I have zero clue what Mass Effect II involves, but I'm guessing that the TENTHOUSANDFOLD INCREASE in content compared to my old favorite Computer RPG does not offer much, if anything in the way of increases to nonlinear worlds, believable NPCs nor getting to choose your own story. It's probably all just shiny graphics and loud sound effects tacked on to the same old rail-straight linear plot of most such games from the mid-80s.

Ultima V was produced at a time when Origin Systems only employed about a dozen people, and as per wikipedia, "most of the coding" for Ultima V was done by one person.

As per wikipedia, Mass Effect II had a team of about 30 people developing and coding it, and used 90 different voice actors.

So in the past 25 years, we've seen not only a ten thousandfold increase in the data of games, but notable increase in the number of people working on individual games.

With today's technology, one guy alone could code games like Ultima V as a sideline hobby. (That's how Spiderweb Software got started).

If you used the resources of modern development team to build the most open-ended adventure setting with the deepest NPC characterizations but held the graphics, physics, sound and overall "shiny" level" to the mid 80s. (instead of the path where we held plot and character to the mid 80s while advancing shiny), you could have a game world 10x the size of Ultima V, where each NPC had 100x as many potential responses in conversation trees while also allowing the player to complete the game through any one of a dozen different mega-quests.

While I would accept a watered-down version of your assertion - not that such games are prohibitively expensive, but that the market does not support such games - I can't help bu notice other Denizens' comments about Torment and the Elder Scrolls games on this very thread. Clearly, there is a real demand for computer RPGs with increased role-playing, meaningful choices, more open-ended worlds and NPCs with deeper characterization.

The question then becomes why game companies are not giving these sorts of design goals enough priority to satisfy this demand?

Is it because the Denizens here are not a representative sample of the market?

Is it because game companies have to compete in the "shiny" race before they can pursue other design goals?

Is it because game companies are unaware of such demand?

Is it a plot of the illuminati to keep the world used to ultra-linear railroaded RPGs?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 3:30 am

Josh, you are fucking retarded.

It is "prohibitively expensive" Does not mean we do not have the Harddrive space.

First of all, your ultima explicitly fails to be what the pompous guy is talking about, and secondly, the point is that there are two ways to generate a giant fucking world:

1) Procedurally, AKA, we don't have the tech to procedurally generate interesting NPCs and a viable world.
2) By hiring a fucking epic design team that literally hand crafts the entire fucking world.

Look at Morrowind, there are like zero people in the entire world who have explored that entire game world because it is so huge, but it is hand crafted, but that's still not a full RPG, because what they can script in is very limited and not fully expansive.

So the steps to creating a fully expansive non linear world is:

1) Build a giant ass morrowind size world by hand.
2) populate it with a shit ton of NPCs that are all handcrafted.
3) Hand script everything that NPC will ever do for the (in game) years that someone might play.

That's more work than is even remotely manageable.

And by the way, at least 400 fold of that increase in harddrive space is a 3d environment with 360+ degrees of freedom on 360+ planes of movement.

Yes if you say there are only four directions you can get a lot more on a harddrive, but fuck you I like jumping and flying and scaling cliffs and buildings and otherwise taking advantage of more than the four cardinal directions.

Your golden age of gaming crap is fucking annoying. Those games impose severe limitations on the character that are in many ways worse than not having 400 dialogue trees.

I'd rather play Morrowind with a non shitty character advancement system than play ultima with ten times as much space ten times as many NPCs and each NPC dialogue having ten times as many prescripted bullshit statements that still don't actually represent what my character would do in that situation.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 4:26 am

Yeah, the Ultima games really didn't have all that much depth to them. They had a great deal of complexity and size, but not really depth. For instance, there was basically one way of solving your problems. One guy who could tell you the mantra of compassion, one way to get the red stone, and so on. And you had to pretty much follow that exact thing to do it.

What the Ultima games offered however is non-linearity. While you had to do all that shit, you didn't actually have to do all that shit in any specific order. There were no fixed quests that you happened to be on, and you could pretty much pack up and leave at any time and start doing something else.

But there really wasn't much roleplaying involved in them. You couldn't decide to accomplish the quest how you wanted to accomplish it. And it got tedious. Really tedious. It basically amounted to you running around asking every NPC in the city "Mantra" or "Dungeon" or whatever phrase you were trying to get information about. You also had to have a long list of NPC names and where they were, because some guy might randomly send you to talk to Dimitri without telling you who the fuck he was or where he could be found.

Now granted those games were really impressive when they first came out, but I don't feel like they've aged well at all. Not just because of graphics. But because of gameplay. Nobody really wants to play games where you have to keep extensive notes on everything you find anymore. They want things similar to the oblivion journal that keeps track of what they're supposed to do.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 8:10 am

Josh_Kablack wrote:If you used the resources of modern development team to build the most open-ended adventure setting with the deepest NPC characterizations but held the graphics, physics, sound and overall "shiny" level" to the mid 80s, you could have a game world 10x the size of Ultima V, where each NPC had 100x as many potential responses in conversation trees while also allowing the player to complete the game through any one of a dozen different mega-quests.

While there is something to be said for "more story instead of more eye candy", advocating going back to two-dimensional 16 color worlds is lunacy.

That aside, you are severely underestimating the effort involved in building a dynamic world. And you are probably overestimating the amount and depth of content in those old games. Really, we have come a long way since the 80s. Anyways, this is my feature wishlist:

A world the size of at least a small country
At least one true city (read: 1000+ NPCs)
NPCs with their own agenda - I want to see caravans forming up, armies being recruited, children being born and mines being dug
Changing terrain
Seasons and weather
At least 100 possible party members
Interactions between those party members
Multiple main plots
A reputation system that matters
Graphics good enough to let me appreciate the world. That pretty much requires seeing for miles from the top of a big tower.
3D so I can actually use a levitate spell or shoot someone through the kitchen window from a nearby roof
Sound good enough to hear the world around me (weather, NPCs, combat, ...)

Having a thousand NPCs with their own dialogue tree is nice and certainly a requirement for a believable world, but it is not nearly enough. Unfortunately, pretty much every point on my list influences every other point. And suddenly the complexity explodes and a list of individually doable tasks (say a couple of man-years each) turns into an impossibly complex monstrosity. It is simply not possible to even keep track of such a project, much less develop it.

But what might be feasible is to generate terrain algorithmically, to let the computer assign likely places for settling, spawn ten thousand random NPCs and then let them run for a while. If your NPCs are capable of molding the world you should, given enough time, have villages, trade routes, abandoned mine shafts and so on. Then you stop the simulation, edit the world manually for those parts you wish to fix, set the evolution speed to slow and let the player into the world.

All you need are some good programmers and a willingness to sink a couple million of dollars into a totally new way of making games which will have nothing to look at for 99% of it's development cycle. So that pretty much won't happen. Perhaps we can get a scaled down version in the meantime, with the game merely simulating a small hamlet in the mountains, a hundred NPCs and a single plotline. But I can't imagine anyone manually building such a game, not with the kind of detail I want such games to have.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 10:15 am

Hack was a favorite of mine back in the day. I remember playing it on some very old computer, and ruther enjoying it.

Kobajagrande · Post by **Kobajagrande** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 10:16 am

Murtak wrote:Anyways, this is my feature wishlist:

...Actually, this sounds something Peter Molyneux would try to make. Which means it would suck, because the guy never made a good game since, like, Syndicate.

But more seriously, what that huge pile of bs article completely misses is that computers present a different medium. computer RPGs should not aim to give players ultimate ability to express themselves, because such expression will be limited with programming - and every player will be able to see those limits.

What computers can give you is an ability to play through a story. The freedom to interact with the world should be used to immerse the player in the story, without breaking the narative. Add to that the ability of the games to use simmilar storytelling techniques as the movies, and it is clear what way CRPGs should take.

And games that do try that way are inherently better, more popular, and more successful. That's why you still have people having fond memories of BG and Fallout, while considering Morrowind merely an ok game, and no-one remembers the shit like Fable.

Starmaker wrote:What, and leave it to that incompetent chick? No way. Faced with a choice between the stick in my ass and the fate of the country, I chose the country.

That is why Rakeesh is the man, and you are not.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 10:42 am

I actually liked Morrowind. I love being able to explore a world and I dislike being stuck on rails. I still like some games that basically tell a single story, but I like them despite sticking me on rails, not because of them. If I want to have a story told to me I will watch a movie. When I am playing I want my choices to have meaning - which is why my rant on automatically generating worlds is important. Without having large parts of the game preconstructed no game will have enough available paths for my tastes. Heck, many games have a single path. That sucks and pretty much means your choices do not matter at all.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 11:10 am

Murtak wrote:I actually liked Morrowind. I love being able to explore a world and I dislike being stuck on rails. I still like some games that basically tell a single story, but I like them despite sticking me on rails, not because of them. If I want to have a story told to me I will watch a movie. When I am playing I want my choices to have meaning - which is why my rant on automatically generating worlds is important. Without having large parts of the game preconstructed no game will have enough available paths for my tastes. Heck, many games have a single path. That sucks and pretty much means your choices do not matter at all.

I never really got into Morrowind. It was one of those games that I just felt totally overwhelmed by the size of it and the fact that you really had no basic quest to do. You pretty much just wandered around aimlessly. And to me, that was really boring because I didn't feel part of the world or the story. I was like some random dude wandering around a landscape. And I'm just sitting there wondering "Why am I here? What am I doing?"

It's one thing to have rails, but Morrowind didn't even have anything.

I had the same problem with PS: Torment. I really had no idea what the hell I was doing, so the game was just me wandering around aimlessly. And that sort of thing tends to bore me quickly.

I found BG2 to probably be the most immersive CRPG. You had companions that talked and questioned your decisions, bickered amongst themselves and the game itself just felt more alive. You really felt part of the story in that game, something that you just didn't feel with most RPGs. I think the Final Fantasy series does this pretty well too, which draws its appeal. Though FF, unlike BG2, has the problem of offering no player choice at all, seeming to more or less pull you along rather than actually offering you choices the way BG2 does.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:38 pm

I loved Morrowind. I loved the fact that your actions affected what you could do, and that if you killed important NPCs you didn't lose: the world just carried on. You actually had freedom to do a lot of what most games don't let you, and to start with you actually felt like an adventurer doing their best just to stay alive.

A big problem is that if you have even hundreds of NPCs with conversations then they need to react convincingly to events, and information needs to pass between them at a reasonable rate, which requires the computer working out procedurally the motivations and actions of all of them. Oblivion tried but it ended up just doing the NPCs in the current town and mostly doing the same thing day in and day out. Trying to model meme flow across a fantasy world is prohibitively difficult.

Just the case of you committing murder and a bounty being put on your head requires the computer to record the NPC's view of you, if you were disguised, them getting to the guards, the guards sending messages across the countryside, whether or not other guards recognise you...

What I'd love in an RPG is a real feeling of time passing. One thing I loved about Shenmue was that time did pass. The first time I played it I got stuck on the section where you try to sneak into the warehouse and completely missed Christmas.

I'd like something like Fable, but with an area the size of Morrowind and Morrowind's openness in being able to take any quest and kill anyone.

In terms of time passing I'd really like seasons: say a day is 2 hours, a season is six days and a year is four seasons. Meaning that each year is 48 hours. Then, you could have the PC actually need to eat and sleep, age slightly, and be able to have things like your own buildings and house, have marriages and kids, have a time limit on quests...

Basically I want to feel that you aren't a Mary-Sue character with no human needs that the whole world revolves around but who can't affect it, in a static world with occasional weather. And that the inhabitants aren't morons with no memory and a hive mind in terms of legal justice, who are locked in a simple day/night cycle.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 1:48 pm

Sandboxing is plenty difficult. But as the GTA series showed, it's totally possible. Doing it in a fantasy setting that "feels big" is only slightly harder than doing it in Vice City.

One of the huge let downs of Ultima VI was how frickin tiny everything was compared to Ultima V. And that's largely because they went to a system which had a world map that zoomed in when you found shit (like Fallout 2) to a system where you're walking around in essentially the same grid all the time (like Fallout 3). It really ended up feeling like the monsters were living right next door to the cities because the actual distance just wasn't that great.

But that's solvable. It's solvable by just generating a lot of wilderness area that has bears and manticores patrolling it at random.

So really you only need to hit a few points:

Connect the PC to the A plot right away. Like in Torment, where you get a rant about the A Plot as soon as your character wakes up in the morgue. Not like Final Fantasy VIII where I don't even know what the A plot was because I found the Draw system annoying as fuck and never got past the first disk.
Allow the PC to trigger a number of different quests.
Have random shit going on that the PC can intervene with or not.
Have a big cast where characters in it can die without making the storyline fall apart. Have some of them die randomly without the PC's intervention to bandits or gargoyle attack or something.

-Username17

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Sun Jan 31, 2010 2:03 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Sandboxing is plenty difficult. But as the GTA series showed, it's totally possible.

I have only watched over people's shoulders while the played, so I don't really know the game but how much of what we are talking about does GTA actually do? About 2 or 3 out of 10 bullet points, and each of these points is on rails (or rather streets), right?

Because that is about 1/10000th the complexity of building even a small fantasy setting. I think we may be getting to a point where parts of my list are theoretically doable. But it certainly is not "only slightly harder" than GTA-style interaction-on-rails.

Of course if GTA actually has, say ... an evolving world you can influence beyond explicitly coded rails disregard what I said.