Armchair CRPG designing, the thread

[adrix89]

What I want from a cRPG is a fantasy world like in the fiction books, a dynamic living world that I can affect and be immersed by.
So procedural narrative/quests all the way.

What I think the key to achieve this properly lies in the mission design.
Most of the missions in games are hopelessly boring and amount to go there kill that, get the mcguffin, clear the dungeon and talk to whoever.

With a bit of dynamism and simulation you can do much more. Lets say your mission is to hunt a character, lets say there is a bounty. In most RPGs you would get a quest marker to a location, you go there and you kill them or you die.
But you can do much more with this, first of you don't know where he is, maybe you know a general direction but he can move around. What do you know about him? Maybe you know he is a bandit so most likely he attacks caravans and stuff. Maybe you ask around and hear about any attacks around the road or maybe you join a caravan as a bodyguard in the hopes of being attacked. Lets say along the road you find an ambush of bandits. Maybe you kill everyone and the target is among them, maybe you should leave a bandit alive and ask about your target, maybe your target now knows he is hunted and is more careful so you have to put even more effort.

Can this kind of thing be done procedurally? I am pretty sure, and it can even have a number of modifiers. Who is the character? Maybe he is a spy and you have to get a document he has, his behavior can change depending on various factors, requiring more through investigation and a creative approach to problems.
Or you could be the hunted, having to bypass patrols of powerful factions and infiltrate locations. The AI could try to find you, predict where you would go and lay ambushes.

Another idea is to have a strategic simulation level where the AI plays a strategy wargame(like Mount and Blade) but you are still at most a party with limited options that can only follow the AI's movements, impede a little or try to find opportunities and exploits so you can capitalize on its weakness.

Outside of forms of direct character combat power, status, infamy, money and relations with people of power and influence can tip the scale enough for one of your gambits to work. Assassinate the right person and the house of cards can crumble just like in a game like Crusader Kings. Poison the drink of the commander of an army and the battle next day might not go so well.

Crusader Kings, Hitman, Silent Storm, Age of Empires. Games with systems you might not think have anything to do with RPGs.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

RPG development (and video game development in general) is very stale now. What was amazing about the early days of our beloved genre is that they would have teams of talented people just start with almost blank slates every time, and come up with new ideas, approaches, mechanics and gameplay. Everything was new, there were no established genres like today, and people were just painting their ideas on a blank canvas.

These days, it's all genre conventions and cliches. Every game is broadly like every other game, with only the fine details being different. Fight some evil, talk to some static NPCs, slog through some loot-filled dungeon... So if you want to make something good, just erase all that crap from your board, start anew. Ignore conventions, try to do something completely different.

A lot of these "different" ideas aren't even very difficult to arrive at. Just look at what everyone is doing and do the opposite. Instead of fighting evil and saving the world, have the protagonist(s) be some regular person(s) caught in important events beyond their direct control. It's a lot more interesting to be a pawn in a grand game of chess than to be the king in some lifeless dull prop set. Also, just doing this alone will force you to have to come up with an interesting story to some degree, because you can no longer rely on the classic crutch of "fight evil king/wizard/monster/despot".

Also, your idea about non-combat gameplay being more complex is spot-on. But don't settle for stupid mini-games. Design actual in-depth and interesting systems. FFS, just use the stealth system from Thief or Hitman games, they already designed it for you. Come up with similar systems for diplomacy, magic, computers/hacking, etc.

 

[MRY]

Let me begin by saying cRPGs do a lot of different things, and different cRPGs do well in different ways. It's silly to say, "If only RPGs were like this rather than like that" because, for example, if the price of adding a stealth mechanic to AOD was losing other content, it might not be a good trade.

With that caveat, I want to look at a specific category of RPGs, which are RPGs where dialogue is the primary or exclusive non-combat system. This covers Bioware, many of the IE games, many of the Kickstarter RPGs, AOD, etc., etc. The problem, I think, is these RPGs are often interested in conveying particular kinds of stories through compelling writing. Doing so is fairly inconsistent with gamifying dialogue because gamifying dialogue often requires some degree of abstraction. In combat, you can have game systems combined with compelling presentation because you can use the same animations for every attack and often the same sprites (or paperdolls or rigging) for large classes of enemies. In dialogue, however, you cannot get away with such an approach without losing compelling writing. Using the same responses over and over again is terrible in its own way (e.g., TES) and crafting unique responses to a huge variety of systematic inputs is overwhelming and prone to bugs (e.g., Arcanum, which nevertheless still relied on the basic threshold-check model). A solution would be to abstract away from direct dialogue (e.g., "You attempt to persuade the knight to let you through, but he is indifferent to your pleas") or even from text at all (e.g., Dropsy or LBA (?)).

While I think it's basically impossible to gamify dialogue on any large scale, I think at the end of the day, the lack of such a system is why dialogue in this type of RPG falls flat. Even with extensive skill-checks, it's like a combat engine where you are the only one attacking: you can hit or miss, and sometimes hurt yourself by missing, but the other side never strikes back. AOD does a decent job of having NPCs try to deceive or persuade you. But they are trying to deceive or persuade you the player, not Caius the PC. It's pretty hard for an NPC to outwit the player, and in any event that's something really different from having an interactive dialogue. What you never see, outside of the odd gimmick (e.g., mind control in V:TM:B or Star Control II), is an NPC using dialogue skills on the PC.

As a consequence, dialogues hold no peril and inflict no attrition. No one ever says, "I need to get out of this dialogue before I lose" or "I have to be careful about asking too many questions."

What I'd love to see is a dialogue system where the PC and NPCs have "beliefs" (with hit points) and a "mood" (perhaps defined in terms of humors or something). Maybe the PC also has some kind of willpower stat pool that lets him override his beliefs and mood at a cost. But basically when you talk to an NPC, he can persuade/deceive you into gaining or losing a belief. What options you have in dialogue depend on what you believe. In other words, you can't get your PC to do things that go against his beliefs -- the way alignment is sometimes used in Bioware or AD&D games, but with a lot more specificity. For example, you might have a belief, "Elves are subhuman scum." A persuasive elf might change your mind about that, and as a consequence the player can no longer take options that would violate such a belief -- or, in any event, taking such an option would require an expenditure of will power.

Your available options would also depend on your mood, so, for example, if you were intimidated you wouldn't be able to attack or refuse an NPC without expending will, if you were sad you wouldn't be able to do certain things, etc.

Conceptually, this appeals to me a lot, although I can see all sorts of silly metagaming that might unfold as a consequence. But in practice, I suspect the system would destroy the ability to have actually interesting dialogue from a writing standpoint because at the end of the day, it would be hard to write sufficient variants for how all of these scenarios would play out.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

...

Good post but I think if devs really tried to "gamify" dialogue in RPGs, it could be done. One realistic way to do this is to realize that unlike combat, dialogue is not necessarily a self-sufficient system in real life. Some people talk better than others, but I don't think anyone can come in into a hostile environment and just talk those people into doing as they wish based on the strength of their speaking skills alone. Typically what happens instead, is people try to obtain information, which they then use during dialogue to get what they want. This could range from obtaining sensitive information to blackmail others to learning about them in order to best appeal to what's close to their heart or learning their attributes so you can manipulate them.

So in an RPG, you could have a diplomat/manipulator type skillset where it's not just about fancy talk, but about setting up a network of paid spies or speaking with various NPCs in order to collect important information, which you then use to deduce how to best manipulate some important NPC. So in other words, in order to navigate your way through dialogue successfully, you would have to engage in gameplay systems beforehand. And that's just one way to try to implement it, I am sure others are possible as well given some effort and imagination.

 

[CryptRat]

This game has a win/lose dialog battle system :

The game doesn't seem good, but I would probably still try it if it wasn't Steam exclusive in order to see what the system really is.
MRY

EDIT : I didn't realize that you only choose a way to speak and not what to say so it's not a dialog at all and it's horrible. I am sorry for bothering you with this crap .

 

[Fairfax]

MRY
"I need to get out of this dialogue before I lose"

I think FO1 did a good job with that in one regard: the location of the Vault. Not nearly as much as you're suggesting, of course, but a good example of how it can be done.

I like your idea about beliefs, but I don't think the mood mechanic would work in most CRPGs, specially the ones where you can create your character. While beliefs are more objective and easier to design, moods and emotions would require too many assumptions. It could also frustrate a lot of players in instances where it doesn't work. "Wtf, my character would never feel sad about that", "My character should be pissed off here!", etc.
And as you said, metagaming would be quite silly, although it could make a lot of funny headlines out of context. "How to stay happy and never feel sad" , "Tips to remain calm in every situation".

 

[MRY]

PorkyThePaladin I think you're underestimating the complexity and work involved in doing this. AOD already represents a small miracle of interwoven skill-based dialogues, and it is fairly shallow in terms of what you're talking about. I mean, I think it would be cool -- I sort of picture an inventory of information that can be used in ways limited by belief and mood -- but I think it would ultimately have to be the game, not a subsystem in the game, and even then it would probably require a pretty contained design.

CryptRat I dunno. That isn't really what I was talking about. I mean, that's like minigamifying dialogue, but it doesn't appear to be tethering the win/lose dialogue to the actual content of what's going on. I'm fairly sure I've played other games where you can do dialogue-based "attacks" in a jRPG-type combat system (Undertale is sort of like that, the little I played of it), but I'm thinking of something subtler where you're not just engrafting a minigame in place of mechanical skill checks.

Fairfax The mood mechanic would be tough. It might have to operate more in terms of like status effects, where "Intimidated" is like a status ailment. I guess you could also perhaps just use beliefs in this regard, like you acquire a belief, "Fairfax is too tough for me to fight."

Ultimately, I think the whole thing would be pretty goofy. For years I've been trying to figure out how it could be cracked, but I never really found a way.

 

[NotAGolfer]

What I'd love to see is a dialogue system where the PC and NPCs have "beliefs" (with hit points) and a "mood" (perhaps defined in terms of humors or something). Maybe the PC also has some kind of willpower stat pool that lets him override his beliefs and mood at a cost. But basically when you talk to an NPC, he can persuade/deceive you into gaining or losing a belief. What options you have in dialogue depend on what you believe. In other words, you can't get your PC to do things that go against his beliefs -- the way alignment is sometimes used in Bioware or AD&D games, but with a lot more specificity. For example, you might have a belief, "Elves are subhuman scum." A persuasive elf might change your mind about that, and as a consequence the player can no longer take options that would violate such a belief -- or, in any event, taking such an option would require an expenditure of will power.

Your available options would also depend on your mood, so, for example, if you were intimidated you wouldn't be able to attack or refuse an NPC without expending will, if you were sad you wouldn't be able to do certain things, etc.

Conceptually, this appeals to me a lot, although I can see all sorts of silly metagaming that might unfold as a consequence. But in practice, I suspect the system would destroy the ability to have actually interesting dialogue from a writing standpoint because at the end of the day, it would be hard to write sufficient variants for how all of these scenarios would play out.

Well, that certainly sounds interesting and I don't see why it should be impossible to reconcile such a system with naturally flowing dialogue. Of course you have to limit the number of beliefs/world views that your PC or NPCs can be manipulated into believing to just a handful or it would be overwhelming to design. Just pick a couple that are closely related to the story/theme or setting and always pick at least pairs of opposite beliefs.
One fun thing emerging from that could be for example that if the player created a low will char AND decides to try to talk his way through more situations than are good for him (or better his char), that then the game will become a clusterfuck of him chasing after ever goal that charismatic/convincing NPCs set him on, maybe ultimately alienating everyone in the game.

But anyway, I think it can work together with interesting, personal dialogue. One option to do it would be handcrafting nearly everything so you have to make an incredibly detailed and frayed out mind map.
But for some things automated systems like faction reputation or fame/notoriety can make it easier.
And maybe you need some sort of gossip mechanic or something, meaning that depending on distance from each other or accessibility NPCs know it when other NPCs have changed their beliefs or agenda or whatever. In a lot of games they don't know which creates all sorts of sillyness, implausibilities and awkward situations. IRL nooneone exists in a vacuum and we all are aware of our surroundings and what the people that know we exist expect from us and what to expect from them. So I guess in a game that tries to simulate NPC NPC relations in the context of a player-driven narrative where everyone reacts to your PCs actions you better think about what the dynamics of the world you're building should play out like and who should react how on situation changes or enemy factions gaining or losing power for example. And if the reactive ingame systems you created to simulate some of that conflict with your mindmap then change those systems until they do what is expected from them.
A low-key narrative is of course better for all that since you don't need to consider as many NPC NPC relations and most NPCs will ignore what the player will do.

Standardized dialogue options or NPC lines will only go so far though, I don't believe that you can create truly interesting narratives with those. But if the story is just a backdrop for adventuring anyway (and it is in the majority of CRPGs) then they could be good enough I guess and create some interesting dynamics and maybe even emergent gameplay on their own.

edit:
I just realized that I went even further than you with that belief mechanic, since you don't include NPCs changing their views in it. And maybe you're right not to, since that really is a lot to ask for. But if pulled off successfully then it would certainly help the world to feel more alive. And it would make it possible for such a dialogue system to be complex and rewarding enough to hold up well in comparison to different approaches like combat or stealth. Still, I don't want it to be the to go to route for "pacifist" chars, I want it to be elemental for all classes, since all of them spend a lot of gameplay time clicking through dialogue trees anyway...
While I'm at it: Revive the parser! Those were fun back in the day. Maybe augmented by voice input/speech recognition.

(so create a good stealth mechanic if you want to implement stealth, the AoD approach for example is just lazy imo)

But unique animashuns!!! Fallout could do all skills with just 1 animation, but not AoD!

Superior RPG by superior number of animations!

Well, I had a rather enlightning conversation with Elohim in another thread, who told me that for much of the development process the dialog editor was the only tool that worked reliably, so I don't hold that against AoD anymore. Another thing he told me is that they're remaking the thief path in a more point-and-click fashion for the next update, so there's hope for AoD still. Now, if only they did the same for loremaster path...

I will definitely buy it if that's the case. So far I hesitate because I expect combat chars to be the only ones that are fun to play (for me at least).

 

[shihonage]

I agree with 68% of the OP, including "making the quests less prominent", which is one of the biggest issues. I spent a lot of time thinking how to balance this with the inherent qualities of an RPG where player will still do TASKS, and the game has to keep track of these TASKS (for many reasons), and if you load your savegame 3 months from now, you should be able to CONTINUE without feeling hopelessly lost.

Player-led journals are cumbersome.

I believe the proper solution is in retaining the old quest system, but it is of CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE how you name your quests, and how much you reveal and in what manner. It makes all the difference between immersion and constant breaking of the 4th wall.

Pretty much all games fail at immersion in this manner. Their writing betrays the presence of a writer. It's not transparent.

For example, naming your quests like episodes of a TV show, is fucking retarded. When your quests have names like "Blood Ties",you know there was someone who came up with this shit. Quest names should also avoid being a "synopsis".

So, when you agree to investigate a leaky plasma conduit, the quest journal should say "Investigate plasma conduit for NPCNAME". Maybe some more detail, but nothing about foreshadowing, nothing clever, just a directly phrased task. And if you want more "lore" around this task, you'll just have to go and talk to NPCNAME again.

Oh and avoid plastering quest names on the screen in big letters, with epic sounds in background. It too, breaks the 4th wall. Everything should be contained within the interface, matter-of-factly, without blaring about its importance.

 

[MRY]

Just pick a couple that are closely related to the story/theme or setting and always pick at least pairs of opposite beliefs.

I think you'd need to also have quest-specific "local" beliefs (e.g., "I believe MRY is the murderer!" or "I believe that Bunny Lebowski kidnapped herself.") for the system to work.

One fun thing emerging from that could be for example that if the player created a low will char AND decides to try to talk his way through more situations than are good for him (or better his char), that then the game will become a clusterfuck of him chasing after ever goal that charismatic/convincing NPCs set him on, maybe ultimately alienating everyone in the game.

Right. This is kind of how I pictured it -- I think you could do interesting things with alienation, dramatic irony, etc. Some of the stuff that VD was doing with the Commercium questline in AOD, but less constructed.

I just realized that I went even further than you with that belief mechanic, since you don't include NPCs changing their views in it. And maybe you're right not to, since that really is a lot to ask for. But if pulled off successfully then it would certainly help the world to feel more alive.

Oh, yeah, I think it would apply to NPCs as well, but I don't think you'd need to really have it be symmetrical. RPGs already have NPC beliefs in place (every time you [Persuasion] them, you're changing their beliefs). You want to dress it up to look symmetrical, but my guess is that it would really just be handled by NPC flags and reputation counters.

 

[V_K]

In combat, you can have game systems combined with compelling presentation because you can use the same animations for every attack and often the same sprites (or paperdolls or rigging) for large classes of enemies. In dialogue, however, you cannot get away with such an approach without losing compelling writing. Using the same responses over and over again is terrible in its own way (e.g., TES) and crafting unique responses to a huge variety of systematic inputs is overwhelming and prone to bugs (e.g., Arcanum, which nevertheless still relied on the basic threshold-check model). A solution would be to abstract away from direct dialogue (e.g., "You attempt to persuade the knight to let you through, but he is indifferent to your pleas") or even from text at all (e.g., Dropsy or LBA (?)).

One could also look at procedural text generation - a rather preposterous thing to suggest to a writer, I know, but we are talking about getting out of comfort zone here, aren't we? Anyway, generative grammar algorythms have become fairly advanced in past years, I've seen a few pretty impressive generative poetry projects. And in case of RPGs we're talking more about procedurally changing an existing response, to make it sound unique, rather than generating from scratch. Could actually be a pretty interesting challenge - to write NPCs not in terms of actual text but as a collection of stylistic preferences that would showcase their personality. And you can also fall back on pre-written texts for plot-critical conversations.

 

[adrix89]

What I'd love to see is a dialogue system where the PC and NPCs have "beliefs" (with hit points) and a "mood" (perhaps defined in terms of humors or something). Maybe the PC also has some kind of willpower stat pool that lets him override his beliefs and mood at a cost. But basically when you talk to an NPC, he can persuade/deceive you into gaining or losing a belief. What options you have in dialogue depend on what you believe. In other words, you can't get your PC to do things that go against his beliefs -- the way alignment is sometimes used in Bioware or AD&D games, but with a lot more specificity. For example, you might have a belief, "Elves are subhuman scum." A persuasive elf might change your mind about that, and as a consequence the player can no longer take options that would violate such a belief -- or, in any event, taking such an option would require an expenditure of will power.

Your available options would also depend on your mood, so, for example, if you were intimidated you wouldn't be able to attack or refuse an NPC without expending will, if you were sad you wouldn't be able to do certain things, etc.

That wouldn't work. Not only it would hopelessly frustrate the player but most players are goody two-shoes that accept any NPC requests so there is nothing to convince the players. And in the case of conflict between NPCs the player will chose whatever anyway. And if he can't that is frustration and setting the players against all NPCs to get their revenge which is the other extreme.
Its one thing I don't like about Codex mentality and why I am not an "old schooler", which is the obsession with stats and skills. Its the restriction of your choices and sometimes making your choices before you even see them. You aren't really making "your character" or role playing, you are just preprogramming a robot to act in a certain way.

While I'm at it: Revive the parser! Those were fun back in the day. Maybe augmented by voice input/speech recognition.

Burn in hell.


That said.
Procedural Dialog Systems. The Insane Stimulationist Perspective.

-------------------------------------------------​

When you think about a dialog system a few factors comes to mind. A NPC trust/suspicion in a player, a player's status/infamy versus the NPC status/infamy. A NPC's mood, patience in the conversation and its goals and desires.
But the meat of my conversation is the Information,Context, Events and Character Traits.

What is Information? Just data, bits and pieces that can be used in that they have some function or meaning to someone. I really liked the new Shadowrun etiquette works even if it is pretty pointless in-game, but if you imagine it could be expanded so that all your conversation options are based on information and skills you have.
How it could work is based on the options you have and what your opponent likes or fits you can succeed or not. What I think is important is to keep the format short like a chat and span over multiple responses as opposed to the current philosophy of long eloquent responses.
This way you can get some actual feedback from the opponent and unlike skill-checks here you incrementally build up your advantage, or squander it if you don't find the right ones no matter how charismatic you are. It can even be a double edged sword as it might trigger in the NPC larger reactions to what you say.

The conundrum in this system is it has to procedurally generate results that players want and helps in their current mission. Players could want different things from a NPC. Find information about their mission targets or locations. Convince a NPC to join them in their quest or trigger a specific behavior. Get money or other resources or who knows what else.
It would need a tricky algorithm to account for both what a player has on hand and what he might want, probably heavily tied tot eh current mission.

I don't think the procedural dialog itself is that much of a problem with proper categorization of the bits and pieces, a writer on hand churning out a number of responses and some creative substitution here and there.

We can do really interesting things with information. Events are really just a log when you think right to it. The location,the participants and their actions.
Lets take a player party attacking a bunch of bandits(8) along the road. The full event is just the combat log you find in any other RPGs. But it can be treasure trove of information.
Maybe there was a witness that has seen the battle and can spread it around. Maybe that witness can exaggerate what happens and instead 8 bandits there are 20 and your special shield bash skill that you used during the battle has become an epic move that took 4 bandits at once. With these by analyzing the log, the bits and pieces NPCs can be impressed or intimidated. Maybe just fighting the bandits is a point in your favor.
Or maybe things could be more specific as one bandit that you killed was the lover of another character and now when they find out about the event they are out for revenge.
Information can propagate from a character to its social/status groups(family,friends,faction, the King's court) as well as location. Every time it propagates details can be lost or exaggerated both positively or negatively, minimized or manipulated by characters that have their own agenda.
Maybe this kind of events are not unique to you and you have to investigate and understand what happened in that event. With a bit of simulation you can do that.
Information can have believably as a factor based on how much they trust the ones that given them the information. Sometime they might blindly believe you no matter the exaggeration. Sometime they would have doubts on the details. Sometimes it could be just rumors, make believe events that never happened. With a bit of simulation magic you can do that.

Context is that information that is common in a local area or group that informs their decision. Finding the overall situation could be just as important as the particulars.
Character Traits are more personal things that affect their behavior, personality, personal objectives and desires as well as strengths and weakness they have. It is what makes them different from the other characters. Sometimes they can be simple, sometimes they could be complex and be tied to the story of the players.

 

[NotAGolfer]

What I'd love to see is a dialogue system where the PC and NPCs have "beliefs" (with hit points) and a "mood" (perhaps defined in terms of humors or something). Maybe the PC also has some kind of willpower stat pool that lets him override his beliefs and mood at a cost. But basically when you talk to an NPC, he can persuade/deceive you into gaining or losing a belief. What options you have in dialogue depend on what you believe. In other words, you can't get your PC to do things that go against his beliefs -- the way alignment is sometimes used in Bioware or AD&D games, but with a lot more specificity. For example, you might have a belief, "Elves are subhuman scum." A persuasive elf might change your mind about that, and as a consequence the player can no longer take options that would violate such a belief -- or, in any event, taking such an option would require an expenditure of will power.

Your available options would also depend on your mood, so, for example, if you were intimidated you wouldn't be able to attack or refuse an NPC without expending will, if you were sad you wouldn't be able to do certain things, etc.

That wouldn't work. Not only it would hopelessly frustrate the player but most players are goody two-shoes that accept any NPC requests so there is nothing to convince the players. And in the case of conflict between NPCs the player will chose whatever anyway. And if he can't that is frustration and setting the players against all NPCs to get their revenge which is the other extreme.

I don't like the mindset of the player type you describe here. Sure, most CRPGs encourage that sort of thinking but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. You can always choose the goody two-shoes role if you want on char gen ... if the narrative is so dumb and simple that there is actually just the good and the evil option most of the time.
Anyway, all that was just an imo good idea from MRY to solve a big problem dialogues in CRPGs have when presented as an alternative to combat: They simply are boring as a mechanic.

Its one thing I don't like about Codex mentality and why I am not an "old schooler", which is the obsession with stats and skills. Its the restriction of your choices and sometimes making your choices before you even see them. You aren't really making "your character" or role playing, you are just preprogramming a robot to act in a certain way.

Why, no, that would only be the case for the type of "games" Sacred82 advertised itt, where there are no game mechanics requiring player skill or better player work (come on, even among the old school games, how many require skill? Only a few really, the rest is grinding and working for those sweet levelups) beyond the basic RPG frame. I don't think such a game even exists btw, except for Progress Quest of course.

Sure, in the type I and I think most here favor you already make more or less uninformed decisions about how you have to play the game and which systems you will have to use before you even start your adventure, but there are ways to make that less frustrating, first and foremost giving detailed explanations about what which skill/trait does during char gen. Or you could create a tutorial that showcases how the different builds the game allows for are supposed to be used.

In the end the most controversial point would be if you want a design where each "quest" or let's better say opportunity to meaningfully influence the gameworld (with some kind of impact on the narrative - collecting all the buckets in the gameworld and then declaring yourself a monopolist without any ingame char caring doesn't cut it) is symmetrical for all builds or not. Should there be a way for every sufficiently specialized char to be able to solve that problem or not? I think not, I think each char should just do what's naturally possible for him given his stats and be able to finish the main storyline. And there should be roughly the same amount of content for each char type.

While I'm at it: Revive the parser! Those were fun back in the day. Maybe augmented by voice input/speech recognition.

Burn in hell.

[Perception] I gather you don't like parsers very much.
Could you elaborate why? I freaking love the system, especially in adventures and CRPGs.

 

[Neanderthal]

Simple what I want:

1. Ultima like world and thematic depth, NPC schedules, living world, environmental interactivity, magic so fucking useful an integrated.
2. Mixed set an created character done right, probably someat like Origins or AoDs opening bits.
3. Combat like ToEE, but harder an wi more long term effects, lots o punishment, injuries an long term conditions that define you.
4. Attrition, something like what Darkest Dungeon is doing, but not invalidated by characters being so easy to get.
5. Weird or unusual setting, dunt have to be odd necessarily but has gotta be well realised an be a character in game like Sigil in Torment.
6. Art style like Poe, best part o game for me, though it needs some more details, backpacks, scabbards etc.
7. Talky stuff an alignment bits interlinked like Torment, probably perks instead o alignment though, which plays into next point.
8. Reactivity like Alpha Protocol, you are what you do.
9. Journal like in first Witcher, written from protagonists point o view.
10. No save the world, no doing shit for other people, make it personal an protagonist self interested, fuck everybody else, wheres my money cunt?
11. Protagonist not chosen by anybody but having a good reason for being involved in plot, like NWN 2 main character an Nameless One, rather than NWN 1 protagonist.
12. Tits, arse, chainmail bikinis, exotic whores from all climes an women flauntin emsen as they hav dun throughout time. An for parity hav protagonist be able to strip down Conan style an use shamanic magics or living tattoos to protect himsen.
13. Life is precious, if you want more in you its gotta come from somewhere, necromancy an healing are deeply connected an if you want to bring someone back from brink o death then someone or somethings gonna have to take their place. Fuck potions.
14. Fate points like WFRP? Split on this.
15. Different body types, an mechanical an narrative reaction to that, like in Jade Empire but givin mechanical bonuses, penalties or just quirks, should apply to scars, birth marks an other stuff that makes you distinct.
16. Voice actor, if you gotta have one don't make im another fucking boring everyman, match Legacy of Kain voice acting and hire them voices that are distinct an good, look at what Dawn of War does as well.

Not so simple after all, right get to it somebody, chop chop, earn your corn.

 

[CryptRat]

Its one thing I don't like about Codex mentality and why I am not an "old schooler", which is the obsession with stats and skills. Its the restriction of your choices and sometimes making your choices before you even see them. You aren't really making "your character" or role playing, you are just preprogramming a robot to act in a certain way.

Solving issues with the own weapons of your character(s) is one of the most fun things in RPGs. You should play Heroine's Quest if you're not conviced of that.

I have got a question regarding keywords/parsers : are there some games with keywords or a parser or similar system including some good dialog battles with a long dialog (like the boss dialog battles in PS:T)? I have the feeling that one reason they aren't many of them is because developers think that the entire game will have to be thought with that idea in mind and it would be an overwhelming work, while even in a game focused on dialogs like Torment in a lot of dialogs you just "have to" choose the first option (choosing one appropriate keyword would be the same) and only a few dialogs in the game are really long battles with a lot of branching.

 

[NotAGolfer]

Martian Dreams comes to mind. Great use of both simple adventure style puzzles and parser input. The parser dialogues are often just information sources to know what you're doing though. But I like that, as I said, I don't care for "diplomat" solutions to challenges.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Didn't Richard Garriott try to bring parsers back in SotA? I have no idea how successful they are with that though.

 

[Jaesun]

Didn't Richard Garriott try to bring parsers back in SotA? I have no idea how successful they are with that though.

Yes. I briefly played the alpha/beta of SotA and the parser was a part of the game. So was using keywords like name job bye as well.