6 ms·

How do you even play those games? Roaming the wilderness is clearly not a fun option.

nix23 4y ago
What Daggerfall Could Teach Future Elder Scrolls Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qyxSfUceE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qyxSfUceE
- aparticulate 4y ago
  It's quite a tired engine at this stage but Bethesda have actually been rather tech forward in the past. Especially with MS acquisition, some kind of procedural cloud-assisted world would make a ton of sense. However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side. Heck, I think Bethesda copy/pastes too much now compared to something like New Vegas which has barely has any repetition.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. Less immersive than an ostensibly grand city that only has a handful of named NPCs and a few guards? The best and worst city Bethesda have made thus far is still Vivec. Best because it has enough NPCs and redundant economy to feel like a plausible city. Worst, simply because the structure of the cantons is poorly conceived, and because the exterior is barren.
    - aparticulate 4y ago
      Vivec was probably magical at the time but I literally cannot navigate from memory. Every canton blurs together and traversal is time consuming. I think Whiterun or Megaton are quite well designed. Deprecating authored settlements in Fallout 4 was quite disappointing but Boston is probably the most impressive technically, diamond city etc nestled amongst the sprawling and surprisingly explorable ruins of the city.
      - robonerd 4y ago
        Boston itself was great, but Diamond City seemed undeserving of the name to me. It's just a handful of people. Also the setting of known size, the baseball diamond, throws off my suspension of disbelief that maybe distances and population sizes in Bethesda games are simply compressed. Cities like Whiterun and Balmora are the size of a small villages but are presented as a cities; I can accept that as some sort of distance compression. I can't do that with Diamond City because I know how big a baseball field is. That 'city' must really be 1:1 scale, or at least close to it. Basically if I can't get lost, it doesn't feel like a city. I can get lost in Boston or Vivec, those feel like cities. The others require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but Diamond City particularly makes that hard. I concede that Vivec is dated (although I first played Morrowind about 2 or 3 years ago and still enjoyed it.) I consider Witcher 3's Novigrad as an example of a modern game getting it right. There's not exactly a ton of named NPCs in Novigrad, but there are enough buildings, alleyways, etc to get lost when wandering around. Also there is redundancy in the town's economy; numerous smiths, taverns, etc.
        aparticulate 4y ago
        I think all of those games are absolutely tiny when you take into account human scale. You can't traverse any real world city in the few minutes or so it would take for Geralt to circumnavigate the entirety of Novigrad. Agree that you should get lost in a big, redundant world. Bethesda have their work cut out for their next games. DayZ (and it's ilk) is probably the only game that comes close to 1:1 but is not to most players tastes to take a human amount of time to walk across rows of empty fields. That game is absolutely enormous. It's a pretty niche game though.
  - jhgb 4y ago
    > However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side. Do you think that in the 2020s, we can't do better generators than what existed in the 1990s?
louissan 4y ago
it all depends ... once upon a time, WoW was a bit like that. XRoads wild PVP, free-for-all ambushes in the wilderness, a reasonably sized world (not too big but not too small). Back in 2004 it did convey a sense of relative immensity. Which was part of the magic imho. Every subsequent iteration ("evolution") felt like its main goal was to minimise the "downtime" between the farming/"phat loot" sequences (raids, instances, etc). At the time, you could get a demo run a stone so at least some of the party could join quickly. But that took human interaction, some synchronisation ... it was nice and involved. Disclaimer: I havent touched WoW in more than 10 years, but from what I know of it today -- it's teleport all the way, straight into the instance, with pre-made aor automatically composed groups. You pop in, you loot, you get out. Rinse and repeat. Some people will enjoy the "instant gratification" part of this. I'm probably amongst those who did not, who don't and who probably never will. It is my opinion (widely shared? no idea) that immersion has been killed by all those "QoL" improvements. My 2p.
- dwringer 4y ago
  The dungeon-group finding tools with instant teleport detract from immersion but they are a life-saver if you don't have a lot of time to dedicate per session, or don't have many friends who play at the same times you want to, yet still want to go dungeon-crawling with a party. There's really nothing stopping people from going the extra mile for role-playing and immersion, it's more the local server communities that have been harmed by these tools but WoW classic brought back a lot of that "old-school" feel for those who seek it. I'm not really up on the current state of either but I think there's merit in both approaches, I personally found both enjoyable.
- ziml77 4y ago
  > not too big but not too small Debatable. I wasn't around for Vanilla but I played Classic up through AQ. The game felt like a walking simulator. Current WoW is certainly more streamlined, but you still have to earn the ability to travel around faster in current content. One of the Shadowlands zones didn't even let you mount (except for a rare drop for a special mount) until one of the content patches. And that and another zone still don't let you fly. When you use the matchmade dungeon/raid finder, you do get teleported right into the instance. But for Mythic+ dungeons and Normal or higher raids you still need to manually gather a party and 2 people need to get to the summoning stone. All of the city portals and the 15 minute hearthstone cooldown do make me a little sad though. My mage portals aren't appreciated nearly as much! :)
thom 4y ago
I like exploring! Wizardry, Ultima, Elder Scrolls, whatever, I like to go straight off the path and into the weeds. I think great RPGs let you tell as much of the story in your head as possible, and this is hard in very story/dialogue heavy games (especially since the advent of voice acting in games).
- boplicity 4y ago
  At some point in the near future, I think we might have "good enough" AI voice acting. That could open some interesting possibilities, eh?
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Quite apart from the voice acting, what about the writing itself? As a starting point, how far are we from having bots that can DM a plausible tabletop session?
    - ryanbrunner 4y ago
      Yeah, I think this is the secret. For me, I sort of bounce off things if they're too procedurally generated, since the tech isn't there to not make things seem too samey after a while. I like discovering my own stories, but I want those stories to be how I fought off a dragon to save a town, not how I went into a dungeon for no reason whatsoever and came out with some more treasure and otherwise made no impact on the world.
      - mikepurvis 4y ago
        Absolutely, but like, how cool would it be for a bot to be generating you new quests with an awareness of the full world state and everything you've already accomplished in the game thus far, plus seeding in bits and pieces that will tie into an overall arc? I could imagine that potentially being extremely immersive, and doing it for a pure text-based interface would be a great first step on eventually doing it for a 3D open world game.
  - 4y ago
klibertp 4y ago
You're evidently don't belong to the CRPGs' target player base :) The basic idea of CRPGs is to give you an avatar that is as different or as similar to you personally as you want and let you experience the avatar's interactions with the world they live in. It might seem that it's currently the case for 90% of the games, but please remember that early CRPGs competed with Pong, Pacman, and Asteroids, not Quake. You'd have a hard time identifying yourself with a paddle or imagining spending your entire life in a maze being chased by ghosts. You would have a much easier time with an Elven archer roaming Middle-Earth, especially if you've read and memorized the Trilogy by heart. From that basic premise, I'd roughly distinguish two main ways of realizing it: via numbers or words. By numbers, I mean a situation where your avatar can be described as a bunch of numbers, as is the world, and you're supposed to find your own meaning in those numbers. Which ones matter to you, which you don't care about, or which represent an ability to do things you care about. You are then given an array of activities that both require the numbers to be aligned in a particular way and allow you to improve the numbers for you. By words, I mean a situation where your avatar is presented to you via description. The numerical values that underpin the avatar identity and the shape of the world are still there, but you experience them only indirectly, through the description of the environment, your avatar actions, and their consequences. There are not many "pure" realizations of either way because, taken to the extreme, the number case turns into an Excel sheet with all column and row names garbled, while words simply become a book or novel. Of additional note is the issue of effort on the game creator's part. You generally can't procedurally generate descriptions above a certain length, especially not if you want the descriptions to be meaningful, not only readable. You'd need AGI for that. Procedurally generated content is crucial because it allows you to lengthen the time the game is played. You can read a good fantasy novel in a few days, while you can easily lose 200 hours to a single CRPG. Back to exploring the wilderness. Morrowind leaned towards the numbers-based gameplay if my memory serves me right. You were required to perform an action repeatedly to improve your skill in that action. Take jumping, for example. I remember locking the spacebar in a depressed position on long treks between cities because jumping raised your strength. On the other hand, it did have a lot of hand-crafted, meaningful locations that you would visit multiple times. It had a few different plotlines you could follow and some memorable NPCs and you were given quite a lot of freedom in how you wanted to interact with the world. These are all features closer to the words-based gameplay. Still, most of the game consisted of repetitive, although more tactical than dexterity-based combat in the wilderness or dungeons. Some people have a stronger preference for one gameplay style, and for them, Morrowind found a perfect balance. Relatively high freedom in what you could do, the plot, and the NPCs who sometimes even spoke more than a few words, were enough to give them a plausible reason to go and have real fun... By killing skeletons for 5 hours, nearly dying for 4h 50m, then getting a level-up, a corresponding dopamine rush, and going on a skeleton-killing spree in the last 9 minutes. You'd probably die to the boss lich in the last minute, allowing you to rage-quit the game and go back to beating skeletons again the next day. Is it fun? Yes. It's one of the kinds of fun CRPGs are designed to give you. Since the early days - and I mean the times of ADVENT[ure] and Zork - the CRPGs evolved tens of subgenres, took advantage of the progress in hardware and in the general inflation of game makers' budgets, enlarging the scope, but the basic idea is still the same. To give players either: enough of the descriptions to make grinding meaningful or enough grinding not to frustrate them into not finishing the story. One note: obviously, at some point nearly all CRPGs became graphical and later multi-media, one way or the other. That didn't, and still doesn't, change much. You can present the description of the world with words alone, with words and images, words and animation, images alone, images and music alone, and so on. What's important is that you are describing a world, an avatar and its actions within that world. Another note: multi-player changes things drastically in the case of CRPGs, especially if it is not co-operative or is "massive". The metaphor is still the same, but the cost-benefit ratio of various game features is completely unlike the single-player version. MUDs were early multi-player CRPGs evolved as a cross between BBS and IRC, and their rise and eventual brutal demise under the weight of op-wars and spam a warning widely heard by CRPG makers. The MUDs persisted, barely clinging to existence in some niches, and later gave us MMORPGs, which are also completely different from single-player (or 1-4 people coop, later on) games. So I don't think talking about WoW is very relevant to the topic, ie. Morrowind.

What Daggerfall Could Teach Future Elder Scrolls Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qyxSfUceE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qyxSfUceE

aparticulate 4y ago
It's quite a tired engine at this stage but Bethesda have actually been rather tech forward in the past. Especially with MS acquisition, some kind of procedural cloud-assisted world would make a ton of sense. However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side. Heck, I think Bethesda copy/pastes too much now compared to something like New Vegas which has barely has any repetition.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. Less immersive than an ostensibly grand city that only has a handful of named NPCs and a few guards? The best and worst city Bethesda have made thus far is still Vivec. Best because it has enough NPCs and redundant economy to feel like a plausible city. Worst, simply because the structure of the cantons is poorly conceived, and because the exterior is barren.
  - aparticulate 4y ago
    Vivec was probably magical at the time but I literally cannot navigate from memory. Every canton blurs together and traversal is time consuming. I think Whiterun or Megaton are quite well designed. Deprecating authored settlements in Fallout 4 was quite disappointing but Boston is probably the most impressive technically, diamond city etc nestled amongst the sprawling and surprisingly explorable ruins of the city.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      Boston itself was great, but Diamond City seemed undeserving of the name to me. It's just a handful of people. Also the setting of known size, the baseball diamond, throws off my suspension of disbelief that maybe distances and population sizes in Bethesda games are simply compressed. Cities like Whiterun and Balmora are the size of a small villages but are presented as a cities; I can accept that as some sort of distance compression. I can't do that with Diamond City because I know how big a baseball field is. That 'city' must really be 1:1 scale, or at least close to it. Basically if I can't get lost, it doesn't feel like a city. I can get lost in Boston or Vivec, those feel like cities. The others require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but Diamond City particularly makes that hard. I concede that Vivec is dated (although I first played Morrowind about 2 or 3 years ago and still enjoyed it.) I consider Witcher 3's Novigrad as an example of a modern game getting it right. There's not exactly a ton of named NPCs in Novigrad, but there are enough buildings, alleyways, etc to get lost when wandering around. Also there is redundancy in the town's economy; numerous smiths, taverns, etc.
      - aparticulate 4y ago
        I think all of those games are absolutely tiny when you take into account human scale. You can't traverse any real world city in the few minutes or so it would take for Geralt to circumnavigate the entirety of Novigrad. Agree that you should get lost in a big, redundant world. Bethesda have their work cut out for their next games. DayZ (and it's ilk) is probably the only game that comes close to 1:1 but is not to most players tastes to take a human amount of time to walk across rows of empty fields. That game is absolutely enormous. It's a pretty niche game though.
- jhgb 4y ago
  > However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side. Do you think that in the 2020s, we can't do better generators than what existed in the 1990s?

louissan 4y ago

it all depends ... once upon a time, WoW was a bit like that. XRoads wild PVP, free-for-all ambushes in the wilderness, a reasonably sized world (not too big but not too small). Back in 2004 it did convey a sense of relative immensity. Which was part of the magic imho. Every subsequent iteration ("evolution") felt like its main goal was to minimise the "downtime" between the farming/"phat loot" sequences (raids, instances, etc). At the time, you could get a demo run a stone so at least some of the party could join quickly. But that took human interaction, some synchronisation ... it was nice and involved. Disclaimer: I havent touched WoW in more than 10 years, but from what I know of it today -- it's teleport all the way, straight into the instance, with pre-made aor automatically composed groups. You pop in, you loot, you get out. Rinse and repeat. Some people will enjoy the "instant gratification" part of this. I'm probably amongst those who did not, who don't and who probably never will. It is my opinion (widely shared? no idea) that immersion has been killed by all those "QoL" improvements. My 2p.

dwringer 4y ago
The dungeon-group finding tools with instant teleport detract from immersion but they are a life-saver if you don't have a lot of time to dedicate per session, or don't have many friends who play at the same times you want to, yet still want to go dungeon-crawling with a party. There's really nothing stopping people from going the extra mile for role-playing and immersion, it's more the local server communities that have been harmed by these tools but WoW classic brought back a lot of that "old-school" feel for those who seek it. I'm not really up on the current state of either but I think there's merit in both approaches, I personally found both enjoyable.
ziml77 4y ago
> not too big but not too small Debatable. I wasn't around for Vanilla but I played Classic up through AQ. The game felt like a walking simulator. Current WoW is certainly more streamlined, but you still have to earn the ability to travel around faster in current content. One of the Shadowlands zones didn't even let you mount (except for a rare drop for a special mount) until one of the content patches. And that and another zone still don't let you fly. When you use the matchmade dungeon/raid finder, you do get teleported right into the instance. But for Mythic+ dungeons and Normal or higher raids you still need to manually gather a party and 2 people need to get to the summoning stone. All of the city portals and the 15 minute hearthstone cooldown do make me a little sad though. My mage portals aren't appreciated nearly as much! :)

thom 4y ago

I like exploring! Wizardry, Ultima, Elder Scrolls, whatever, I like to go straight off the path and into the weeds. I think great RPGs let you tell as much of the story in your head as possible, and this is hard in very story/dialogue heavy games (especially since the advent of voice acting in games).

boplicity 4y ago
At some point in the near future, I think we might have "good enough" AI voice acting. That could open some interesting possibilities, eh?
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  Quite apart from the voice acting, what about the writing itself? As a starting point, how far are we from having bots that can DM a plausible tabletop session?
  - ryanbrunner 4y ago
    Yeah, I think this is the secret. For me, I sort of bounce off things if they're too procedurally generated, since the tech isn't there to not make things seem too samey after a while. I like discovering my own stories, but I want those stories to be how I fought off a dragon to save a town, not how I went into a dungeon for no reason whatsoever and came out with some more treasure and otherwise made no impact on the world.
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      Absolutely, but like, how cool would it be for a bot to be generating you new quests with an awareness of the full world state and everything you've already accomplished in the game thus far, plus seeding in bits and pieces that will tie into an overall arc? I could imagine that potentially being extremely immersive, and doing it for a pure text-based interface would be a great first step on eventually doing it for a 3D open world game.
- 4y ago

klibertp 4y ago

You're evidently don't belong to the CRPGs' target player base :) The basic idea of CRPGs is to give you an avatar that is as different or as similar to you personally as you want and let you experience the avatar's interactions with the world they live in. It might seem that it's currently the case for 90% of the games, but please remember that early CRPGs competed with Pong, Pacman, and Asteroids, not Quake. You'd have a hard time identifying yourself with a paddle or imagining spending your entire life in a maze being chased by ghosts. You would have a much easier time with an Elven archer roaming Middle-Earth, especially if you've read and memorized the Trilogy by heart. From that basic premise, I'd roughly distinguish two main ways of realizing it: via numbers or words. By numbers, I mean a situation where your avatar can be described as a bunch of numbers, as is the world, and you're supposed to find your own meaning in those numbers. Which ones matter to you, which you don't care about, or which represent an ability to do things you care about. You are then given an array of activities that both require the numbers to be aligned in a particular way and allow you to improve the numbers for you. By words, I mean a situation where your avatar is presented to you via description. The numerical values that underpin the avatar identity and the shape of the world are still there, but you experience them only indirectly, through the description of the environment, your avatar actions, and their consequences. There are not many "pure" realizations of either way because, taken to the extreme, the number case turns into an Excel sheet with all column and row names garbled, while words simply become a book or novel. Of additional note is the issue of effort on the game creator's part. You generally can't procedurally generate descriptions above a certain length, especially not if you want the descriptions to be meaningful, not only readable. You'd need AGI for that. Procedurally generated content is crucial because it allows you to lengthen the time the game is played. You can read a good fantasy novel in a few days, while you can easily lose 200 hours to a single CRPG. Back to exploring the wilderness. Morrowind leaned towards the numbers-based gameplay if my memory serves me right. You were required to perform an action repeatedly to improve your skill in that action. Take jumping, for example. I remember locking the spacebar in a depressed position on long treks between cities because jumping raised your strength. On the other hand, it did have a lot of hand-crafted, meaningful locations that you would visit multiple times. It had a few different plotlines you could follow and some memorable NPCs and you were given quite a lot of freedom in how you wanted to interact with the world. These are all features closer to the words-based gameplay. Still, most of the game consisted of repetitive, although more tactical than dexterity-based combat in the wilderness or dungeons. Some people have a stronger preference for one gameplay style, and for them, Morrowind found a perfect balance. Relatively high freedom in what you could do, the plot, and the NPCs who sometimes even spoke more than a few words, were enough to give them a plausible reason to go and have real fun... By killing skeletons for 5 hours, nearly dying for 4h 50m, then getting a level-up, a corresponding dopamine rush, and going on a skeleton-killing spree in the last 9 minutes. You'd probably die to the boss lich in the last minute, allowing you to rage-quit the game and go back to beating skeletons again the next day. Is it fun? Yes. It's one of the kinds of fun CRPGs are designed to give you. Since the early days - and I mean the times of ADVENT[ure] and Zork - the CRPGs evolved tens of subgenres, took advantage of the progress in hardware and in the general inflation of game makers' budgets, enlarging the scope, but the basic idea is still the same. To give players either: enough of the descriptions to make grinding meaningful or enough grinding not to frustrate them into not finishing the story. One note: obviously, at some point nearly all CRPGs became graphical and later multi-media, one way or the other. That didn't, and still doesn't, change much. You can present the description of the world with words alone, with words and images, words and animation, images alone, images and music alone, and so on. What's important is that you are describing a world, an avatar and its actions within that world. Another note: multi-player changes things drastically in the case of CRPGs, especially if it is not co-operative or is "massive". The metaphor is still the same, but the cost-benefit ratio of various game features is completely unlike the single-player version. MUDs were early multi-player CRPGs evolved as a cross between BBS and IRC, and their rise and eventual brutal demise under the weight of op-wars and spam a warning widely heard by CRPG makers. The MUDs persisted, barely clinging to existence in some niches, and later gave us MMORPGs, which are also completely different from single-player (or 1-4 people coop, later on) games. So I don't think talking about WoW is very relevant to the topic, ie. Morrowind.