About having a rival in RPGs

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BROs, honest question: Apart from Pokemon, has any RPG ever used the concept of having a rival?

Putting the "lol poketard" aside, I thought it was very interesting to have the biggest enemy in the game start together with you on a race to the top. It was something new, as you didn't face the "evil final boss" at the end, just your bro/rival Gary.

Imagine if the Vault Overseer had sent 2 dudes after the Vault Chip, the player and "Gary". He would never be under your control, and will appear from time to time talking to you, giving advinces or being a jerk, completing quests that you arrived too late or missed by doing others firs, and even recruiting party menbers before you do! (Gary got Dogmeat, NOOOOO!)

Simple example: you start the game and go to Shaddy Sands. If you finish quest of saving Tandi, Gary passes by and says that Vault 15 had no chip and that you are a asshole for focusing on helping tribals instead of the Vault. If you go to Vault 15 first, "good Gary" would save Tandi and no one would cares about you. If Gary is "bad", he would side with the Khans and you would find a slaughtered village / or have to defend Shaddy Sands against him.

It would completly change the game, and every playthrough would be unique and with new things to see. And is something that movies, comics and animes do all the fucking time, BROS that became rivals and them became BROS again at the end, yet I never seen it on a game. The closest I can think is Sarevok in Baldur's Gate, but he is more a Evil Boss that becomes party member (like Magus in Chrono Trigger) than an rival. Vergil in DMC 3 is just a enemy that happens to be your brother.

Even the most bland & done-to-death generic high-fantasy game could be completly unique just by using this concept. Imagine all that Codexian C&C, your actions shapping not only your character, but also your bro/rival. Will he help you? Hate you? Do the old-but-gold cliche of putting differences aside for the final battle, or just be the final boss himself? Join? Die?

So, what you guys think? Great concept that lazy developers can't do, or shitty ideas after watching too much Hokuto no Ken?

DISCUSS!

It's kind of a good idea, but at the same time it's kind of gimmicky. The odd game or two like this would be interesting, but it's not something you'd want to see in every RPG. It would also be better if your rival ran purely off AI rather than being scripted.

Baldur's Gate 2 kind of did this -- with constant encounters (directly or indirectly) with Irenicus. Torment, in an awkward "you fighting your past" type of set-up. Tactics Ogre, with Vice. It seems that the game itself would have to be written around the concept, which could work out well, otherwise you'd just have a recurring enemy you deal with, which can also be fine.

It would be an interesting concept if the game tailor-made the rival character's build to be really difficult for your character's build to fight, although I guess that'd be difficult to program.

Sounds like Wizardry 7 (damn, I have to play that game)... Well, the Dark Savant wasn't a BRO, but it sounds like the same concept.

BTW, Blue is not Gary.

Edit: Also this http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=3665

I like the concept, as personal beefs where a guy is trying to top me (the audacity!) are a more interesting motiation than stopping a bad guy who may or may not care about my existence.

They tried the rival concept in Fallout 2, with Kaga KAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. You can try it with the Restoration Patch mod. Apparently it's not very good though, since while Kaga is very butthurt, the player doesn't really have a reason to hate him (maybe that's why it wasn't implemented).

Sorta related, I always found it funny some fans see Zero from the Megaman X series as a rival, even though they are colleagues always helping each other to achieve a common objective. Vile on the other hand, is a villain who has a (one-sided) rivalistic fixation with X, but no one seems to write Vile x X slashfics (no, I haven't searched). The concept is kind of muddled.

Aside from those examples, the only times I've ever seen it done has been for parody purposes. Much more common are foils or simply strong antagonists. Also, it's just a huge extra workload to do in anything but a super-linear game, and probably not worth the effort from a development standpoint.

Good idea but it's hard to implement.

Depends on which Vile you're talking about, Vile from the origina MMX or IHX. Both were psychotic maverick hunters.
MMX Vile was Sigma's crazy right-hand man.
IHX Vile was a genuine rival, and also very crazy, wanting to both defeat X and Zero and kill Sigma while he was at it.

Zero is not a rival, he's a collegue who was actually made to be a walking, sentient WMD by Dr. Wily, and may go crazy and turn into a walking WMD again. Megaman X2 gave us a small hint of Zero's true origin, then Megaman X3 foreshadowed the fact that Zero and X may come to blows, then Megaman X4 confirmed the theory that Zero was made by Dr. Wily and showed us how Zero went from walking WMD to Maverick Hunter and Sigma went from Maverick Hunter leader to Viral Robot Hitler and Megaman X5 was all about turning Zero back into what he originally was.

Then MMZ shows us Omega, who's what Zero was supposed to become.

Eh, this is how Drow originally functioned in D&D "back in the day" (before mine, tbh). They were made to be resistant to standard party-tactics, came with uber-gear that went poof if exposed to sunlight, and often came in "balanced" parties.

Not too hard to have an auto-generated foil, it probably can't take into account every aspect of your character but you can create some basic archetypes and counters to them and have it throw a few at you as soon as you get to a certain point. Or do the mirror-match, where you face-off against yourself with all of your abilities -- I always thought these were ideal scenarios for ToEE (and in one case you do come across another adventuring party, which you can fight if you want -- rather fun.)

I think the rival thing is more about tension and personal motivation to succeed tho, not just "guy who is strong". If there's actual reason to compete on-time (they can take resources, steal party members, etc.) then all the better. Makes me think of some sub-emergent game where a series of characters compete for resources in a shared playing field, forming alliances and hostilities with one another. Think Lord of the Realms or some other 4x game but only in RPG-land, which allies, bonuses, bases, etc. up for grabs. Heh, maybe Dragon Commander will turn out something like this (probably not).

Obnoxious Douche Alt?
http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/Sullivan

...and then there was the gay lisping Avatar groupie from Ultima IX. :facepalm:
EDIT: This guy http://codex.ultimaaiera.com/wiki/Evidious

I think the idea is great in theory, but it's difficult to pull of in practice if you really want a rival with the same impact on the gameworld that you are having.

I think Chris Avellone's idea in Van Buren involved a rival party that was also roaming the world and doing quests and you could often go to a place and find the rivals had already been there and it had changed a bit. When you finally met the rivals you could either join forces or just kill them etc. It sort of came back in the form of Ulysses in the FNV dlcs but Ulysses was a bit too predefined to really do that concept justice.

Personally I can't really wrap my head around how something like that would be implemented but if it was done the way Avellone originally conceived it, it would be really fucking cool.

A party of min-max characters with ubergaming powerlevel and optimized tactics.

I am still thinking about 4 mages throwing fireballs/Hail/thunderstorm/poisoncloud right at start of battle. And second move will be 4 magicmissiles aim at one character.

I think it could be an interesting idea under condition that it's possible to off them and there's a chance that they'll randomly fail at some random point of the game, possibly messing up stuff for the player (imagine coming to the Glow just to discover that the other VD already plundered the keycards).

Yeah, definitely. If someone did use this gimmick, I'd actually prefer to see a certain amount of distance between the player and the rival/fellow traveller. Perhaps they keep just missing one another, and the player can either leave helpful caches for them or set them traps, even tell other NPCs to pass on messages to them if they arrive afterwards - then have one final face-to-face encounter (or the player can return to an earlier area and find the rival's mangled body in one of their traps), even pick each other up on radio and chat - develop either a mutual respect or vow to hunt down and kill one another. I feel like having the rival turn up repeatedly and tauntingly underline what the player's missed out on, especially if they're going to be cutscene-unkillable, would be a bit heavy-handed and frustrating.

Isn't that a bit like Shodan in System Shock 2?

Rance is a rival. Arios Theoman is the "Guardian Hero of the Universe" of Ranceverse. In the end Rance completes his quests before him, defeats the foes and rapes his all of his girlfriends.

It could be taken to much more complex situations. You could perhaps find him there and trade the keycards, or even kil him, why not? That's the whole difference, even from what MCA planned in Van Buren. The rival is the focus of the game, is about about 2 bros and their impact on the world. Perhaps even 3 bros, you, good bro and bad bro, alla Hokuto no Ken.

The most importat and never done before concept is to be able to change your rival/bros actions. Seifer was a good rival on the start of FF VIII, but its a JRPG, he will always be "evil" and to the same stuff at the same time. Thats not so fun, if you could have points in the game where you chose to help him or not, or simply not romance Rinoa, so he won't get bitchy and butthurt, then you could have some C&C as to what kind of relationship you have with him.

Cool, didn't knew about that concept in Van Buren. Still, you are talking about that as a side plot, I'm talking about it being the main focus of the game, so it could have much more effort put into it.

Honestly, I woudn't mind a more "linear" game, in the sense of not being able to start game and run to the Master & win if instead I have a insteresting game more focused that kind of relationship. Baldur's Gate 2 had that kind of approach, being a open-world b ut also divided in chapters. Imagine that instead of Thief's Guild vs. Bodhi, you only moved foward after solving issue X with rival. Like Bodhi he could appear many times to taunt/brofist you, maybe even do a quest together, like that huge fan-service of killing vampires with Drizzt, and the choices you made will affect his relationship with him on the next chapters. You could even just kill him from the start and get some plot items from his body, but that wil have SEVERE consequences at some point...like he cursing you with X and also appearing as a undead/ghost b

I'm using Pokemon Yellow as reference.

That would only work in an RPG with cut-scenes scripted events and linear story, basically only in a console RPG. If it didn't you would kill your rival in the first opportunity and the whole plot would be over. But having to hunt for a rival and find clues about his location and what he has done there would be a very interesting premise for a game. In a way a revenge story where you hunt someone from place to place finding people who know him and learning his back story until you meet him in a final confrontation where depending on what you have learned things would develop differently.

It doesn't need to be that dumbed down. If the guy is not your always evil/asshole rival, but a interesting character instead, the players would really want to see where this would lead to (at least on the first playthought). And if you kill him, the battle should be really hard, and as I said above, he would curse/haunt you, perhaps still appearing as ghost visages a a possible undead boss. This could even be done in a positive way if he is your BRO but dies somehow...the spirit of your dead BRO helping you from beyond the grave.

IIRC Breath of Fire 4 is more or less like this, but in a standard no-choice/linear JRPG format. As you can see, it's been done before, but always felt like it could be so much more...

It's an interesting concept, but limited to certain scenarios.
The initial Fallout one wouldn't make much sense, because why should the overseer turn the desperate struggle for survival of his vault into a contest of ego-stroking between two guys?
In a typical fantasy-scenario likewise two good-alligned groups would hardly battle each other in their quest to stop the big bad, but rather work together.

More than having a rival, the thing about the world changing on its own, and not just from your input, is interesting. Basically I'd like RPGs to be more like strategy games, where you have to efficiently plan your actions and be fast, or your enemies will grow too strong and take over the world or whatever. Or better, have many different factions/actors that work in a somewhat randomized way, where land and McGuffins occasionally change hands and the world forces you to react to its happenings in an unpredictable way.

Yes, Wizardry 7 did this. Sometimes quest items would be missing, having already been recovered by a rival party. It was a nice idea/feature, but tbh, I never really noticed it when I played the game. I knew it was there but hardly saw it.

Da hell do you mean?

Seifer is a poor sap who got suckered into helping his old matron to fight his classmates. Oh sure, he's certainly a rival for Squall for about 40% of the game, but he's out of radar after the big fight at Balamb town. Callin him evil is stupid. Sucker? yeah. Romantic fool? yeah. Big time jerk in the jrpg tradition? oh yeah. Big bully who doesnt hesitate to take on the whole group of classmates and beat them senseless? fuckyeah.

Evil? No.

In a sense, Seifer is a pretty welldone character.