Warren Spector against tyranny of choices

[Vault Dweller]

Warren Spector, the champion of morons, has done it again! You may remember him from such games as Deus Ex II and Thief III, adapted and produced for mentally challenged. Anyway, according to this article, Spector gave a speech at Game Developers Conference about stories, open-endness, and choices. Since choices are the trademark of RPGs, I decided to post it here:

For Spector, open-endedness is not the be-all, end-all. As a story design widens out to a free-form system, he argues, the "emergent narrative" (story that's partially created by the player, rather than completely designed by the developer) ends up with a relative lack of direction and emotional resonance. There are fewer exciting, "holy crap" moments, since the narrative can't be designed as easily to flow towards those moments as effectively. Meanwhile, the "tyranny of choice," as he puts it, can threaten to make the player freeze up because they're simply given too many options for things to do and places to go. The player doesn't know the particular rules are of the game--what he or she can get away with, what the long-term repercussions are of "bad" behavior, and the rewards of "good" behavior.

Uh, how about the good ol' trial-and-error method? You do something, and see what happens. No? Too much mental work? Yeah, we understand, Warren. The tyranny of choices and the tyranny of fun gameplay have to be stopped.

[Spazmo]

Spector does have a point insofar that total freedom makes a weak or non existent story--see Everquest. But the thing is that you can have a degree of choice sufficient to allow... choice while still having a compelling setting and narrative with a decent number of "oh, shit" moments--see Fallout. It didn't matter when or why I arrived at the Mariposa Military Base, I still went "oh my sweet Jesus" when I found out what was happening there.
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How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

[Araanor]

How come I even know of this clown's name?

[Vault Dweller]

[Volourn]

Daggerfall had a story? WOWSERS! I thought the purpsoe of the game was to walk into random dungeons?

[psorcerer]

Only weak or non-existent stories make stories weak or non-existent.

I thought only mental challenged people doesn't know that story and choise are exact opposites and can be combined only by sacrifacing some part of one or another but in most cases - of both.

I thought only mental challenged people doesn't understand that gameplay choises become more and more obscure as the game complexity increases.

And only mental challenged people can propose to do trial-and-error when you suppose to live in the RPG world.

P.S. Seems like Warren Spector is smarter than I thought.

[Sol Invictus]

I totally agree with the infamous Warren on this one. Morrowind was too much of a 'free for all' for it to be any fun. There was just too much to do with very little point to any of it.

I might not have liked Invisible War or even regarded it as a good game, but Warren's certainly correct about this.

[Vault Dweller]

[Vault Dweller]

[Guest]

Er, Morrowind's problem was that you had freedom, but any decision you made was instantly linear. This broke whatever good quests or stories or anything.

PeeSorcerer, you're a moron.

What he's saying is 'omg you cant have a story with non-linearity, you gotta have your hand guided' like Final Fantasy games. Untrue to me, when you do that you're just playing some bullshit animated storybook with pretty pictures.

Building a good story and still retaining options is what makes things great, see Arcanum.

[Diogo Ribeiro]

[Elwro]

If you think that the only way of creating a gripping plot is by making it linear, you should give up designing games.
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Strong winds bring sea spray. I stand on the cliff, trying to endure the pain within me, growing stronger. Ever stronger

-Tyrax Lightning

[merry andrew]

[fnordcircle]

Why can't you have both?

Seriously. Look at Flatspace. Make an RPG with the whole seeded/random universe thing expanded with some more complex questing. This is the 'Open-Ended mode.' Then add in a plot-driven somewhat-linear 'story mode'. Bam, you have something that pleases the Morrowind crowd and something that pleases the KotoR crowd. Sort of the RPG equivalent of an RTS' Campaign mode and Custom-Game mode.

[Sol Invictus]

The problem with Deus Ex 2 is that even though you had a lot of choices, all of them lead to the same conclusion. I just think that emergent gameplay has its merits but Spector himself hasn't been able to properly pull it off yet, except for a few parts in Deus Ex 1. It would have been better if the choices you made throughout the game had some bearing on the game's ending.

[Volourn]

Yeah, VD, that shows me the depths of DF's "story'. WOWSERS! Best story every accoridng to that site. I should go replay DF because that site has shown me the error of my ways.

Anyways, as for the main subject, This Spector dude is wrong. Period.

[psorcerer]

[Sol Invictus]

Making a game completely reliant on the so called "emergent gameplay" is certainly possible. All that would be required is a whole lot of effort and a whole lot of possible outcomes. It's really that possible to call Fallout and Geneforge games with 'emergent gameplay'. They certainly didn't have the kind of open endedness featured in Morrowind and Daggerfall but neither were they completely linear, as in Final Fantasy.

Now, you might argue that it was possible to walk straight to the Cathedral and blow everyone away, but this certainly wasn't possible if you had never played the game before or if you didn't have some sort of guide to instruct you on where to go. Also, loading and saving every couple of squares in order to avoid messy encounters could be construed as 'cheating'. In all reality, it wasn't possible to make the trip that far from the very beginning, especially from a more honest, role-playing standpoint. That said, Fallout wasn't as 'non-linear' as some of you make it out to be. You had to discover from NPCs the coordinates of those locations before you could actually proceed there from 'within the game'. If you were playing 'outside of the game', you were more or less cheating.

Emergent gameplay is nothing new, it's just a fancy catchrphrase to set games like Fallout apart from the likes of totally non-linear games like Morrowind.

[Vault Dweller]

[Sol Invictus]

Was it? I'd hardly call it a memorable experience. All I recall was trudging through a million or so lookalike dungeons and finding garbage.

[psorcerer]

Role-Player

[Volourn]

VD, better check your link. :wink: As for the story, Exitium put it best. The stoiry doesn't reallt exist/. What little striory there is nothing more than to give youe xuses to explore the enxt dungeon ala IWD yet IWD and heck even TOEE did a much better job of it. When praising any of the ES series betetr stick with the one thing they do right - large wrolds where you have the freedom to go anywher eand a decent character system. Nothing else is woth mentioning.

[Vault Dweller]

[Sol Invictus]

There were no memorable characters in either Morrowind or Daggerfall. More linear games like Knights of the Old Republic, Fallout, Torment, Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy and even TOEE had much more memorable characters because the game areas were relatively 'small' in comparison to the free-basedness of Morrowind. The game was simply too big for any manageable grasp on the game's pivotal characters, as it had none. Everyone was doing 'their own thing', and this simply made the whole lot of them very, very uninteresting.

I'm sure most of us can remember characters like The Lieutenant, HK47, Dak`Kon, Sephiroth, The "Coo" guy, Irenicus, and countless others. I can't remember any characters from Morrowind - except for the one guy at the start who hides his loot cache in a tree trunk - but that's only because I met him every time I tried a new character, not because of any lasting impression.

[Diogo Ribeiro]