Game News Dragon Age semi-annual update

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Just wanted to comment that this is an outstanding analysis. If anything, more should be done with death, it should be integrated into the fabric of the game. Other party members could comment on a party members death that happened much earlier, there could be a grave or memorial you can visit, it could influence the game world (consequence). Things like this would greatly enhance the worth or the connection you feel towards party NPC's.

I feel great about that! That's what!

Hell, why not cover FPS games too then? After all several people here erroneously consider DeusEx an RPG, so why not subject Quake to the same standards?

What part of "We cover anything that claims to be an RPG" is too difficult for you to understand?

Deux Ex claimed to be an RPG; Quake didn't.

Well, we can't make fun of Quake for being just a plain shooter, can we?

Agreed, but the player is just as robbed when he reloads.

In pretty much every game I know of, the death of a character is bad for the player in almost every respect:
It's a setback for the party. (fine)
It means missing out on much more content than is gained. (not fine)
The party and the world fail to react convincingly. (not fine)
The player expects these things, and expects to be able to succeed, so reloads (usually).

In most games with relatively complex characters, continuing past a party member death is like intentionally choosing the much less interesting path at a fork in the road.

If you want to include death, it needs to be treated as a non-linear "choice": the path where the character dies should usually be about as interesting as the one where he survives.
I agree that the impact of character death on the player is important, and powerful, but this needs to be supported by the game world. If it isn't, you're requiring an ESF view of roleplaying - just imagine there are consequences/responses...

That's a rather different situation. The player being leader of all factions is blatant nonsense (without a boatload of intricate plot to support it).
Player characters happening to survive on the brink of death is not nonsense - it's just a little unlikely if it happens often (which it shouldn't if there are penalties).

First, the Oblivion player lost something important because he loses any way to define his character as an individual (rather than a carbon copy).

Second, the "in order to gain something else" is important here. Almost exclusively, character death is just a loss for the player.

Of course it usually ought to be just a loss for the player's party (perhaps with one or two indirect benefits, but usually a big loss on balance). That's quite different from being just a loss for the player.

What makes it just a loss at the moment is that the player has all the emotional response of losing a party member, but the game does nothing to support this. At most you might get a "Oh how horrible! X is DEAD!" from an NPC or two, but after that it's business as usual - the character might just as well never have existed as far as the game is concerned.

If you're going to do death effectively, the player needs to be rewarded (with interesting story in an involving, responsive world) when a character dies.

Agreed, but again, a reloading player is robbed. A load of design effort needs to go in to making sure the player doesn't want to reload.

I don't think a bit of short term "flavour" is enough here. The character's death ought to make a real difference over the long term. It ought to take a few plot elements in different directions; it ought to elicit coherent responses from other NPCs; it ought not to be forgotten by the game world in a few minutes.
In short the game needs to support it properly as a non-linear "choice". [then probably make damn sure that it's likely to happen for at least one or two characters]

If death is properly supported, I agree entirely.
Where it isn't (i.e. everywhere currently) I don't see the value in a feature that acts as a reload trigger for almost the entire audience.

Those aren't opposites though - they go together.
To include death (of interesting, fleshed out characters), you need to discourage reloading, or it's a pointless addition. To do that, you need to support death - not leave it all up to the player.

And with it? .

I see. Horrible, and not confidence-inspiring.

I find it difficult to say how distasteful I find this idea.

Unless the concept of "saving" makes sense in the setting [theorectically possible, but not in any conventional RPG], including any form of "save token" just turns the world into a nonsensical joke.
Limiting saves through a menu (e.g. as in Hitman: Contracts) is slightly less intrusive, but I still think it entirely misses the point.

There are two ways to limit saving:
(1) Prevent the player from saving (under some circumstances).
(2) Prevent the player from wanting to save.

Option (1) is unreasonable, incoherent and annoying (in an RPG). It puts "When should I save?" constantly on the player's list of stuff to think about - even though saving has nothing to do with the game world. This is bad for immersion.

Option (2) is far better - though difficult to achieve, of course. It places the emphasis on drawing the player in to an involving world that he doesn't want to leave. It requires that the game be interesting for the player whatever choices he makes / unfortunate events happen.

The aim is not to think once about saving - thinking twice is a step backwards.

It gave "meaning" to losing the game (and a corresponding increase in challenge etc). This is probably fine for such a game - where death is absolutely central to the genre. However, it did not give meaning to death in the game world, since it never happened (once you reload). It's got as much "meaning" as death in Pacman.

Don't get me wrong - it's a central and good mechanic in Pacman, and I guess in RE1 too.
However, talking about meaningful death in an RPG should not be primarily about tension and replaying challenges. It should be about death being an important and influencial part of the game world.

No it didn't. In fact, if you look at the <a href="http://www.eidosinteractive.com/games/info.html?gmid=50">official website</a> it claims to be a Strategy/Shooter (1st person.)


Of course it does claim to have TEH ROELPLAYING! in one of it's bullet points, but even they don't think that TEH ROELPLAYING makes a game an RPG.


<b>Vault Dweller</b>

You cover other games which you keep saying are on the same level as Quake, so why not?

At the risk of being flamed, I think the original NWN had roleplaying, such as it is in CRPGs in general and not by your definition. Even more so if you employ the DM Tool. I just didn't find it particularily inspiring in the OC. The player-created modules, however were a lot more promising, esp. when they were developed with the DM Tool in mind. At least, that was the idea. I have never actually played a NWN module with a DM so I can't say whether or not it was that close to the tabletop experience. Has anyone here played with it and can comment on it?

I don't disagree entirely with some of the things you say here... it certainly has some merit. But I will say the following:

1. The question we ask is not "Aren't players just going to reload?" but rather "How can we remove the need to reload while still allowing combat to be challenging and have consequences?" Whereas you seem to suggest that the death must be part of the goal: "How can we let death be a consequence?"

2. If your choice is either to reload or proceed with that party member gone forever, that's not really freedom in any significant sense. If my choice is to be punished or try again, what's good about that? There seems to be this notion amongst some that punishing is somehow more compelling, and that the lack of it devalues the experience. "If my party members can't die, then combat holds no threat." But you can lose... and if there are other serious consequences to combat other than death, then the chances that the player would actually proceed are greater -- as opposed to the idea that only by giving the true, macho roleplayer the option to proceed handicapped without resorting to a reload can true freedom be achieved.

3. That said, ideally I'd prefer to leave it to the player's option with a difficulty setting. Let some players elect to have fewer consequences, and others have much harsher ones. Indeed, I suppose we could even have a setting that allowed the non-critical party members (which is, again, most of them) have the possibility of dying being their consequence for going down. I just don't think that the argument that its lack makes for a less compelling system or setting holds much water, realistic or no -- simulation, after all, is not the goal.

This is the Codex. To the Codex, the only thing that matters when evaluating NWN is the OC. To them it doesn't matter for shit how great some of the player created modules were, or what the DM tool lets you do.

Although I should clarify my stance on roleplaying at this point. You can roleplay in a multiplayer game, because you can interact fully with other people who are roleplaying. You just can't in a video game, because everything that can happen has to have been planned out months or years before you decided on a role to play.

Can we make that "significant medium/long term consequences"?

That's a false assumption.
You are assuming that your party member dying punishes you as a player. This needn't be the case.

It punishes your party. If it makes the game interesting and involving in ways it wouldn't have been with the character alive, it rewards the player.

I'm not suggesting this is easy to do, but the reason not to do it should be because it's considered too demanding of resources etc. - not because it's impossible, since it plainly isn't.

I'm not much of a fan of that. I'd rather see you stick to one option and put everything into making it as effective as possible.
What's the use of a player option menu if you don't have the time to fully support all the options?

I like the idea of the fallen character being injured and requiring convalesence before they could return to full active duty. This could mean that they need to sit out the next mission or incur penalties until they do. And if they are not giving healing time within a couple of missions time, they could develop a permenant injury/handicap i.e. a limp, stutter, etc.

Even so, I don't see how anyone could say that the OC did not offer roleplaying in the CRPG sense. I wasn't a huge fan of it on a personal level - I didn't find it to be much fun - and I wouldn't say that it was the ultimate in roleplaying for the PC, but you can't say there was no roleplaying at all.

I don't mean that death should happen to players; rather, I mean that players should be able to make some choices (probably very poor ones) which should result in death. It should be undesirable (except maybe in very extraordinary circumstances, like the option to sacrifice a party member at the end of BG2), but it should still exist; you shouldn't have a design goal of killing characters, but removing death as a potential consequence really impoverishes the game.

I realize we're discussing this in kind of an information vacuum, because I can't know the details of the consequences you're obliquely referencing. :wink: I agree 100% that there's no meaningful freedom between the alternatives of a valued companion's permadeath or simply reloading the damn game, and it's possible that I'll love your idea of appropriate consequences (short of reload-inducing death) for failure in combat. Since we can't go there, I'll return to the death's door rule as imlemented in ToEE (again, with my parties of point-bought, non-minmaxed, merely average heroes; in other cases, maybe this system wouldn't have been appropriately balanced).

This system added genuine but non-permanent consequences to every significant encounter. My party members were immediately threatened, but I had the opportunity to save them (stop the bleeding); their drop to 0 HP or below forced on me the separate and very urgent goal of keeping them alive. For me, this worked for two reasons: it enriched the tactical considerations of battles (safeguarding characters close to 0 HP, moving around resources [party members with reasonable Heal ranks, yet whose other skills might be necessary to win the encounter] to save characters below 0 HP), and it fundamentally made sense. Death was always a possibility, but there were consequences short of death which I could successfully manage and which actually made the game much more challenging and enjoyable.

Of course, part of the reason this worked so well was the slower pace and greater tactical depth of the turn-based combat system, as well as the high likelihood that injuries would drop my characters to between 0 and -10 HP (rather than immediately killing them by dropping them to -10 HP or lower), so I don't know how well something like this could be replicated in DA. But it gives an idea of the sort of system I'd like to see - something realistic and potentially reload-inducing, but also forgiving and even rewarding from a gameplay perspective.

If my smart tactical thinking hasn't avoided any important negative consequences, I'm not rewarded. My achievement is lessened.

Simulation may not be the goal, but reasonable analog should be. I could be wrong about this, but I suspect that very few players open up a game like KotOR (or DA) and expect their characters to not die; on the contrary, that simply doesn't make sense, and is probably viewed by most players as simply an artifical convention that must be accommodated to play that game. Unless you can come up with a compelling reason for death to be irrelevant to the player (as TNO was handled in PS:T), it simply means you have an artificial and inconsistent gameworld where death applies to enemies but not to player-controlled characters. I'd lay odds that most players find that just as jarring as the die/reload cycle, and my overall point is that the die/reload cycle shouldn't happen very often in a well-balanced combat system unless the player is making some obvious mistakes.

That said, I might be satisfied with this being configurable, as NWN could be toggled between "Normal" and "Hardcore" (i.e., real ) rulesets. But the logic of this is undermined by the fact that you've (apparently) designated a few vital characters as unkillable, and that's a separate decision with which I strongly disagree.

Well, you did have to manage the inventory every once in a while... so maybe Jed thinks there was TEH ROELPLAYING! in there.

The general consensus though is that the "choices" amounted to Good (don't ask for money to do something), Neutral (Do it but ask for money) and Evil (Do it and ask for MORE MONEY.) That is apparently not considered choice-y and consequence-y enough to be TEH ROELPLAYING! Sorting your inventory to make room for that third suit of Platemail +5 though, now THAT's TEH ROELPLAYING!


EDIT: Mispelled TEH.

Plenty of good replies already, but I'll add my own take:

I'll agree that that is a step up from previous games, like KOTOR. I imagine you are referring to some kind of "injury" system, that will hamper the player until he properly heals or rests (at least that's what I would come up with). While that does add a welcome layer of consequence, it still limits the narrative potential of the gameplay.
The problem really arises from the way BW designs it's NPC's. They are highly designed with a lot of attention given to their character, their interactions, and their involvement in the plot. That makes them indespensible. Are there no ways to make more emergent / modular / random NPC's that can bridge the gap between being interesting and being dispensible?

At a fundamental level, I think it's wrong to see death as a punishment. I agree that in many games it is, but as others have pointed out, there is no reason it has to be. It's the same cool old idea that made Daggerfall so interesting. In previous games, you would reload if you got caught stealing, becasue there was no benefit, and probably sever punishment for not doing so. In DF you got a trial you could influence, and eventually an invitation to the thieves guild. You got rewarded.
I could imagine many ways to make NPC deaths a dramatic, tragic, interactive event, that would be very rewarding to the player.

i'd rather prefer the idea outlined above. When you start seeing forum posts that report about the cool thing that happened after a certain NPC died, and see other posters go "whoa, I have to try that too" and another one"no, I like the guy too much, I'd rather reload", then you have won.

Ah, but it should be (just speaking for myself here). RPG's need a good dusting of simulation, because by their nature they are portraying worlds, and to make convincing worlds, you need simulation.

Holy Shit. Were you raped by an inventory system as a child? Did you have a seizure trying to decide between two pieces of armor in diablo? It's entirely possible for a game to have shitty dialogue choices and an inventory limit - err BG2 for instance.

The aim is not to think once about saving - thinking twice is a step backwards.

It gave "meaning" to losing the game (and a corresponding increase in challenge etc). This is probably fine for such a game - where death is absolutely central to the genre. However, it did not give meaning to death in the game world, since it never happened (once you reload). It's got as much "meaning" as death in Pacman.

I guess I should clarify (if not rewrite... and I blame my limited english). What I wanted to say was'nt that restricted saving gave meaning to "death", rather that it gave a reason to be careful while playing. With the unlimited quicksave option presented in most games you never ever have to feel any tension. You're always a quickload away from doing the right thing. A dungeon riddled with traps is a prime example. Will you use your thiefs timeconsuming "detect traps"-skill in every damn hallway or will you quicksave, walk through it, and then quickload if there was a trap? I know that not all players would do the second thing, but I'm one of them that would and it bugs me. I'm fucking addicted to quicksaving.

Now, your idea is of course the better one. It's a grand idea. But I'm betting it's a lot harder to implement... probably to the point where developers won't see it rewarding enough to do so. Not until thoughts are instantly transformed to code. In a game like dragon age, with ten or more joinable npc:s, there will be a lot to keep track of if five or six of them have die along the way.
And what if all of them die? Should there be a big "Game over - do you want to start a new game"-sign then? If not, you're back at quicksaving/quickloading.

And to clarify again, I'm not voting for tokens with "consoles ftw (tm)" written all over them. It could be anything, a reviving ritual requiering expensive utlities. A cloning process requiering scarce energycells. I don't know, I just feel that there should be some punishment (yes, I like to get punished) for playing like a dumbfuck and getting killed.

OT: What the hell is the difference between "to" and "too"? Never been able to learn that... among (alot of) other things.

Nah, just having fun with Jed's vehemence for such a small aspect of a game.

But a game is made of small aspects that when combined well can make a great game. What you are discussing are the gameplay bricks of rpgs. If it's such a small aspect then why bother so much removing it? Why all the fuss with preventing death when any smart person can just learn how to use saves? Why limiting teams or removing skills or whatever? Just because you think these things are useless doesn't mean they are. The nazi sterilization of rpg features made by clueless game designers (no this aren't Dgaider ideas this is stuff imposed to him by Bioware) has only served to shift crpgs focus from worlds where we can play different character types with interesting gameplay to crpgs focused on a story where gameplay is irrelevant and only serves the purpose to entertain the player for a while until the the next episode of the story. The best thing they could do to innovate these games is to have a button to ignore the gameplay and play the damned story.

I think this is largely a case of getting the design right in the first place - so that you don't feel like skipping elements or reloading.

For example, with your thief's detect traps skill, there should be two options:
(1) Make it very quick (perhaps with game time passing in a second), and very simple (if not automatic) to activate.
(2) Make it an intesting process.

Making something which is an annoying, time-consuming, uninteresting process is bad design. It should be fixed.

If you are addicted to the point where you start doing it automatically in new games, I think you'd enjoy things more (eventually) by making a conscious effort not to. [try doing 20 or 30 pushups/situps for each reload - soon enough the pain will be too much to even consider reloading - and you'll be getting excercise: it's a win-win] [[[yes, I've done this. Yes it is worrying]]]

From a design perspective though, the fact that many players want to load the game up half the time is a design problem.
In the case of the trap detection, the activity should be made interesting, over very quickly, or entirely passive. In the case of (near) death, all outcomes should be fully supported and interesting for the player.

Sure - which is why I initially supported (and still do) the idea of non-lethal combat, so long as it's handled properly.

Ideally I'd like to see a game with real death fully supported and integrated into the setting / story, but that seems unlikely. Well handled near-death seems a lesser evil to me than save-reload.

There'd certainly be a lot to keep track of - it effectively means a non-linear story (in some sense).
However, if your story is centred around characters and personalities, then death is a very powerful tool. It can be used to take other characters and relationships in new directions, as well as to influence events.
It'd take some thinking and planning, but death could be a tool, rather than a punishment.

With the "What if all of them die?", I think you're in danger of polarizing things. Of course the ideal would be to cope elegantly with all deaths, but it's not unreasonable to aim to structure things so that many deaths are unlikely.

This can be done in a variety of ways.
For example, off the top of my head:
(1) Have important dead characters replaced with less important mercenaries (or equivalent). [perhaps only after a few important characters have died] This way, the odds of more important characters dying is reduced, since it's as likely for a merc to be killed as a character (probably more, since the player will want to preserve his important characters). It wouldn't be too hard to come up with reasons for the "mercs" to be very brave, very committed to the cause, etc., so that their fighting on the front line would be reasonable.

(2) Have important plot enemies view the party as less of a threat since character(s) X is dead. Have them be less careful / overextend themselves / less concerned with attacking the group... as a result.

(3) Have character death reduce allies' confidence in party success, so aid the party either directly (like (1) but more so), or indirectly (perhaps leading to (2) if the enemies are suitably distracted).

(4) Increase the behind-the-scenes odds of a near-death (e.g. hp -10 to 0) result in a combat, rather than actual death. This would need to be subtle, so suddenly stopping any chance of actual death would be silly, but dropping odds slowly from say 30% [situation dependent] to say 5%, might work.
For instance, the average odds of real death (rather than near-death) could drop by 5% for each major character who dies, or perhaps be multiplied by e.g. 70%.
This is artificial, of course, but if kept smooth and subtle, it could help.

I'm sure there are many more ways to do it too.

Oh I missed one:
(5) Why not scale every enemy and encounter in the game world to the sum of the party's levels!!?

It's a thought, but I think you'd have trouble making any such solution seem at all credible.
The only way I can see such a system be convincing to me is if the game world is presented as an actual real world in some sense, rather than as a representation of a world (i.e. a load of abstract weirdness rather than people etc.). In that case, saving the game can reasonably be considered part of the game world, since the game world is "real".
Since RPGs are pretty much exclusively representations, I can't see it making sense.

Sure, but the party being punished is enough (presuming everything possible has been done to stop the player wanting to reload) so long as the player cares about what happens to them.
Punishing the player directly by making the game less interesting - either through needless repetition or lack of content support for an option - is over-doing things IMO.

"too" refers to an (excessive) amount or degree:
e.g. Too much, too high, too late, too bad etc.

It can also mean "as well": "I live here too" = "I live here as well". "Me too" = "Me as well".

If you don't mean these things, or the number (two = 2), you'll want "to" - which means everything else .

You may want to look up Association Fallacy.

In any case, the point is that whatever you might gain from a really, really, BESTEST EVER inventory system is not going to compare to focusing that development time on other aspects of the game. I'd much rather have them spend time on adding skills, or finding ways to allow larger parties than to have them come up with a great inventory system. Especially since the inventory system will drag the game down for most people.

The inventory system is a small, isolated game system that can be changed independently from pretty much every other aspect of the game.

The same certainly can't be said for adding skills or party members (unless you mean fixing the GUI for more party members - that notion still has me in shock).

In particular, skills and party members need to be decided before much work is done on content. An inventry system does not - so long as care is taken to make sure it can cope smoothly with any reasonable number of party members.

Assuming you can take time out of inventory development and simply add it to other game aspects, isn't reasonable.

Your notion that it will "drag the game down" is exactly the reason that more time needs to be put into getting it right. There's no universal law stating that ease of use and interesting management are impossible to combine.

It's only a good guess considering that all these rpg feature crapping hapens in a similar way in many different crpgs. It's not realy hard to guess that game designers are allowed little marging to do anything original.

Investing in a good game inventory would be making one that doesn't drag the game down to the player. Having an rpg without an inventory system however would be nonsense or at least they would have to come up with some very good and original way to compensate for that.

Even the paht lwet is important. Greed is a big human driving force. What would be of an rpg without combining greed with great rpg moments? But i agree with one thing that Dgaider said. If people don't care they should not have to get stuck with it. In the same way if people care they should not get robed of the fun of collecting and managing their phat lewt.

What the heck does loot have to do with roleplaying? I think the whole thing should be collapsed into the character development system, equipment can cost points the same way skills do. This is the way all wargames do it (heavily armored troops cost more than lighter armored the same way experienced troops cost more than raw ones). All the temporary stuff that doesn't work with that, item degredation, ammo, limited-use items like wands, potions and what-not, should be scrapped.

If I never have to see

"use potions to help out in battle"
"your weapon/armor degrades when you use it, stop frequently to repair them"
or
"if you use a missile weapon, stock up on arrows"

it'll still be too soon. None of that has any place in heroic fantasy. Arthur does not buy excaliber, sigfried does not sell his invisablity cloak, there are no stores that carry barrow-wight blades, conan doesn't feel the need to down a healing potion after a fight and Morgaine and Vanye never worry about paying for things, because they don't. If I really wanted to play quartermaster, I'd quit grad-school and get a job running a warehouse for UPS.