Are big-budget RPGs doomed to have less choice than their predecessors?

The Game Room
1

I finished Fallout 3 recently, and while I was very impressed with a lot of things, I couldn’t help but notice how shallow it is in terms of conversation trees and the possible ways to solve quests, in comparison to past Fallouts. With some exceptions, they mostly felt like they had to get right to the point with no subtlety to them; “YES I WILL SAVE YOUR TOWN” “NO AND I WILL EAT YOUR BABY” “I WILL DO IT FOR CAPS”. And people don’t react to choices you make, either. You can disarm a nuclear device, and no one in that same town seems to give a crap.

I think the main problem is that every choice you make and every piece of dialogue they put in takes so much more in resources to accomplish nowadays than it did even ten years ago. If they insist in voice-acting every line, then they simply can’t put in even half as much dialogue. Programming in the scripted sequences that result from your actions now takes teams of animators, modelers, and programmers hours to make., while before, all you needed was a text pop-up, or a simple animation that took one dude 10 minutes. Games in the past didn’t necessarily take advantage of the ease in providing multiple options, but now the barrier is far higher. Would Planescape Torment have been made the way it was, if EVERY line had to be voice-acted, complete with 3D animated lip-syncing?

We’re losing out on choice, of how to talk to people, of affecting the way quests and plot resolve, and of seeing the world react to our deeds. I mean, we do get much prettier games (which I love, don’t get me wrong) with much enhanced animation and combat and physics engines, but instead of 5-6 possible scripts/dialogue of consequences, we’re railroaded into 1-2. Instead of NPCs being able to react differently depending on whether any of 10 different variables has been set, they’re only programmed to react to 2-3. And so on. FPS don’t much care, but RPGs do, and suffer for it, at least in this (important) aspect.

Does this make sense? If not, please make me feel better by pointing out how wrong I am.

And somewhat appropriately, I’m off to a semi-depressing pub, where hopefully the bartender has rumors about strange goings-on in the cave right outside town and the restless princess who dreams of adventure. :wink:

2

I think the best way to resolve this would be to create some sort of speech algorithm. There ought to be a way to get a computer to generate realistic speech on the fly. I’m not saying necessarily being able to read well (as everyone knows how great that sounds), but being able to take the voice acting and stretch it further. At least they ought to be able to generate mouth movements on the fly, to avoid the painstaking animation.

3

Not necessarily. Having a certain line budget is a good thing, as it forces them to cut pointless meandering. In a movie, you only have so many lines per minute. The art is to make each word mean something.

Bethesda is good at a lot of things, but writing dialogue isn’t one of them. In the olden days, the design teams were smaller and so game creators would share multiple roles. The programmer could also the game designer, and the artist could also write the dialogue and score the soundtrack. That’s not the case today, as big games require specialized careers like 3D modeler, animator, UI designer, multiplayer programmer, etc. Problem is they don’t have specialized writers yet.

If game designers want to truly compete with Hollywood, they need to hire real writers. People who went to school to study writing. They think writing is easy so they give the task to the designer on the team who is most literate, but probably has very little experience. You get Fallout 3 as a result.

4

I don’t think games like Planescape, that require huge amounts of reading, are really popular with a general audience. Most people want to spend more time playing than reading (except for a distinct minority who really get into that kind of thing. But it’s definitely a minority).

5

In a word, yes. As production costs go up, cuts have to be made somewhere, this is only natural. The cost for a paragraph of text is far lower than a paragraph of text + voiceover work + studio time + sound editing, so its quite natural to expect a reduction in the amount of dialogue in a 100% voiced game.

Minor nitpick… Lip syncing is done automatically with programs off the audio track, so that aspect at least takes zero extra effort.

QFT. I understand this appeals to some people, but quite frankly, if I want to read a book, I will just read a book. Theres probably enough to fill 5 novels in Planescape.

I’ve seen quite a few films from hollywood, even AAA titles, where I thought the exact same thing. There are plenty of games with stellar plots. The issue is a game cannot be perfectly paced like a movie is, and as such is not an ideal platform for actually conveying a plot. Just as books have a hard time with action sequences, plots really aren’t a games strength. They are a medium for interactivity.

6

And yet, not a one of them was wasted and it was far better damn near than any book I’ve ever read, and was something no book could ever have matched in terms of depth.

7

Exactly, Planescape is considered one of the best games ever made but it was financial flop when it launched.

8

I can understand your concerns about this, but I believe that eventually technology will catch up. As they develop better and smarter tools for game design, the time investment to do these things will decrease, leading to deeper and more fully-developed games. Plus, as gaming gets more popular and profitable, the budgets will likely increase as well. I say just give it time – games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 only prove that the bar keeps getting raised.

9

Have you played Mass Effect 2 yet? It’s more an FPS in its combat than an RPG, but the dialogue/ choice options are the deepest I’ve seen since the heyday of PC RPGs.

10

Obsidian claims they are going to improve the dialogue for New Vegas. We’ll see how it plays out.

11

Yeah, Mass Effect 2 bucks the trend of voice acting inherently meaning less character development. Fallout 3’s weakness is one endemic to the developer - even in their days of text-heavy adventures, Bethesda was never much of one for branching choices and deep content. Arena & Daggerfall were very bare-bones in both departments, focusing instead on an open world. The change in development teams is responsible for most of the huge difference between Fallout 2 and 3.

But ME2 can’t have been cheap to make. I have to wonder if some day such games will go the way of the dodo like military simulations have. When publishers can simply crank out yet another short, scripted linear modern-themed action shooter game and rake in millions, why should they spend all the money on writing, cinematics and talent that such a game requires?

12

Considered by who? A great many games are considered one of the best games ever made by some group or another. It’s a fairly meaningless statement.

The dialogue was certainly better written than most games but deeper choice? Milquetoast choice, neutral choice, asshole choice. Occasionally with paragon and renegade triggered choices added to it. And rarely ever having an effect on anything outside of the conversation itself. Better than average certainly but great or good? Not really. It’s about where average would be if the video game industry weren’t so full of suck.

But as the bar gets raised the tech may well find itself perpetually playing catch up. Just like with graphics in video games and special effects in movies. Far from getting cheaper and faster it gets more and more expensive and takes longer to fill in all the details.

13

I actually was dissapointed when RPGs started getting voice acting for this reason. Plus I usually end up skipping the spoken dialogue anyway since it takes too long to sit through it, I just read the captions. So I’d rather games just go back to having text conversations anyway. I doubt it would ever fly with the console crowd though. WTF IS ALL THIS READING SHIT BRAH?

14

The talking heads in Fallout 1 and 2 are one of the many great aspects of those games. Not all dialogue needs to be voiced - just do the important stuff and do it well.

15

I sincerely doubt any console gamers averse to reading are playing RPG’s to begin with. Most of the current batch of RPG’s on consoles, (Fallout, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, etc.) require a substantial amount reading to begin with.

16

That’s exactly what’s missing; the ability to change the game world (to both greater and lesser degrees) via your actions. Fallout 3 had a lot of dialogue trees that ended up in the exact same place; it sometimes felt quite pointless. However, it did actually have a few good examples of being able to affect the world, such as nuking vs. not nuking a town (although the set-up for this was quite random and non-sensical), or rigging (or not) an election in one town, causing the current leader to pack up and leave (or not).

The problem is that these chances to affect the world were generally shallow, and too few and far between. Contrast that with Fallout 2, which had many such events, and sometimes had complex interconnecting webs of choice that were mind-boggling (check out this walkthrough on the New Reno portion of the game!).

I believe that what’s stopping modern games from this level of interactivity and choice is the resource investment required to program, model, and animate these scripts and voice these dialogs. It’s not that game designers have gotten worse, it’s just that every scripted event has become way more of a pain in the ass to make. It’s much easier to just make one (or at most two), which everyone will see.

Do you think they will fill in the details, though- specifically the details that I care about, when games that don’t (or at least not to the extent that certain past gems did) sell like hotcakes without?

The funny thing is that I think we are generally getting better games than ever before, except in these few areas that are what make or break RPGs for me.

17

and related, many people want to spend more time playing then listening to an NPC yap away about backstory and exposition that really will not affect play. The most excruciating part of Fallout 3 that I found was the opening stuff where I had to sit there and listen to people (loking at you video game Dad) blather on and on without being able to skip or advance until the end. Watching it once or twice to get the flavor of the game is nice, but by playthrough 10+ it gets awfully tedious, but I guess they need to justify the expense of hiring Liam Neeson somehow.

18

This is actually untrue. Exact sales are not clear, but Feargus Urguhart himself went on the record stating (before Black Isle was cannibalized by Interplay and sucked into the event horizon of the latter’s swirling damnation) that it did better than people thought and they were planning a sequel. Obviously, that never got very far, partly due to rights issues with Wizards of the Coast, who kneecapped nearly every DnD setting until they were running out of crap to produce. Still, the potential was there.

Given that Planescape was a very, very strange game which appealed to what was then a relatively small niche market (owing to the general demise of RPG’s in general), and was essentially building its own market half from scratch, this is actually a considerable success. Had it been allowed to develop into a franchise, we might today have a stronger fantasy repetoire to choose from. Why take your longsword and go hack at orcs when you can take your freaky spiky thing and wail at parglabadouses, the beasts of a thousand terrors (a.k.a, the Diablo Effect).

19

Did older RPGs really have that much choice?

Besides the Black Isle games, I can’t think of anything that really had any choices. Non-linear seems to be the big thing.

20

Wizardry and Ultima come to mind, I believe (they are both series older than I am).

Edit: Even in the day, of course, there was a lot of stuff that was little more than a pre-Diablo which got called an RPG, too.