When confronted with such forks, I usually take the main one, the one that will satisfy the game’s prime directives (unless there’s the promise of something super sweet at the end of this road). I then end up going back after the main game is finished and sweet up the loose ends, kind of like the recent Grand Theft Autos.
I think i’d like more forks because it makes for more stuff to sweep up after you finish the main game. I wouldn’t really be looking for smiple, easy ones, I’d be looking for some weird, complicated ones with perhaps some specialized tasks.
I’m a masochist when it comes to games. I like it when there’s TONS of crap to do afterwards. It’s a good thing when you see “Game 55% completed” after you finish the main game.
Failing that, I’d like to see a return to wildly original and nonconventional game ideas. It gets a bit tiring to see most games end up either as racers, FPS, RTS, or fighting games. I miss the off-the-wall ideas, like Make Trax, Joust, or Marble Madness, and it gets more depressing when the rare bit of modern wackiness comes along, like PaRappa the Rapper or Katamari Diplomacy, just for how rare such games are.
Better writing. It’s pretty astounding how bad the writing is in most games, even games with great stories and decently-developed characters. I just mean really hackneyed and embarrassing dialogue and exposition. This is usually exacerbated by terrible voice acting.
Adult games. I don’t mean “Adult” games, but rather games that actually seem to aspire to be legitimate, mature works of art or statements. The closest I’ve seen in years is Indigo Prophecy (“Fahrenheit” for those in the UK or elsewhere). More adults play games than any other demographic, yet we still have a teenage-or-younger approach to content. Why hasn’t there been a game with a legitimate, mature, non-sensational sex scene? Why is the AO rating the kiss of death when “R” isn’t for films?
It’s not a roleplaying game, but battles in Medieval: Total War do work like that. The basic premise is that swords beat spears beat cavalry beat swords, and anything beats archers if they can get at them. So your battle line will have something like spears to hold off cavalry, swords to break enemy spearmen, archers to engage at range and cavalry to stamp on anything that isn’t spears or chase a fleeing enemy from the field. Add in an automated morale system that factors in things like whether or not the general has a reputation for being a coward or a hero (or has just got himself killed), whether there’s something creeping around on your unguarded flank, whether you’re being shot at by something scary like catapults or cannon, and whether the enemy is starting to break and run, and you have a mighty realistic system.
One of my favorite games is Crono Cross, precisely because there were several branches. I also love the Fallout games, and Arcanum, again because I can make wildly different choices.
The SF game you want is Psi 5 Trading Company. It was made for IBMs and Commodore 64s, which shows you how old it is. As captain, you pick your crew and your mission. If one of your crewmembers bought it, you could sort of take over their tasks…but you weren’t as effective at it as the specialists were. There were other spaceships flying around you, some friendly, some pirates. I loved that game. It’s almost enough to make me want to hook up my old C128 again.
Because AO is analogous to NC-17, which IS the kiss-of-death for movies.
[hijack]This reminds me of a 1UP podcast episode where the hosts were whining about the ESRB rating system and kept comparing it to the MPAA rating system, and Hollywood in general, which they obviously knew nothing about.
They had misconceptions like thinking ratings board had strict rules guilding them to their objective ratings, when in reality it’s just a bunch of parents (yes, only parents are allowed to be raters) who take in the movie as a whole and give their subjective rating based on what they think American parents in general would rate it.
They too didn’t realize that there was a rating in between “R” and the practically defunct “X”. Lastly they were ignorant of the well-known truism that “R” ratings are desired by filmmakers, unless they’re specifically making a “family” film, and thought they were stumbling upon an epiphany that the equivalent “M” rating might actually be good business.
Mainly, they were oblivious to the fact that ratings are of exclusive concern to parents, and irrelavent to game-playing or movie-going adults. That means that any opinion they have about the rating system is both pointless and worthless to anyone invovled. I was like, “Why are you idots going on and on about something you don’t know a thing about?! STFU!”.[/hijack]
I certainly understand that my desire for plot-branching represents extra work and budget for the game designers. I know I won’t get it unless someone comes up with some sort of world-design engine that takes care of a lot of this stuff semi-automatically.
But I think you’ve missed what I mean by plot-branching. Both in your description of the castle approach methods and here in your quote, you are talking about minor branches on the same path, which is what current games are like.
What I’m talking about is if you decide to make friends with a particular warlord, you have free passage in his area but you can never enter the castle of his enemies without a fight or stealth. But if you decide to stay neutral towards the warlord, he’ll expect you to pay tolls to pass through his lands, but his enemies will still be amenable to parlay with you. If you choose to insult the warlord, you can never go into his lands without some sort of fight or stealth.
In other words, on a single play through the game, certain choices actually make some forks impassable to you. In order to explore those forks, you need to play the game again with different choices. It makes the choices meaningful. If you are given 3 choices that all lead to the exact same plot point in the next room, the choice you make doesn’t matter at all.
I second. This is why I don’t play RPG’s today. MMORPG’s are better, but require WAY too much time. Nothing beats a good GM that can handle your unexpected solution to a problem or choice.
Again, you get that in Medieval (sorry to sound like I’m proselytising…). Any unit will break and run if it takes too many casualties, and possibly under other circumstances (e.g. a friendly unit close by is running away; especially if the generalship in the current battle is poor). Archers can be (and usually are) set to “skirmish”, which means they’ll seek out fire opportunities but continually back out of hand-to-hand range. This tends to mean that if you really want to kill enemy archers, you need to send horse after them, as they can skirmish away from infantry, which keeps them from doing any shooting but doesn’t actually kill them off. Any missile troops can be set to “fire at will”, when they’ll automatically target the most applicable enemy within range and fire as long as they have ammunition. (You often do not want, say, longbows to actually do this, as they can empty their quivers very quickly, and you might have wanted to save them for a more suitable occasion. But you don’t have to set them to fire at will.)
Also, units tire if they’re in battle or running around for a long time; heavily armoured units tire very quickly in the desert, weakening them in combat and worsening their morale (so Chivalric Knights with armour upgrades have just as much trouble on desert crusades as you’d expect). And so on, and so on. And I hear M:TW2 is going to be even more sophisticated.
I was thinking more along the lines of “click-fest” type RTS’s. I never had a problem the Total War series because you can always pause and issue orders.
I talking about games like C&C or Warcraft.
You build up your forces to assault the enemy base. It becomes a furball. You notice that your healer/repair unit is just sitting there or attacking. I would like to be able to tinker with the unit and group AI so that I have the healer units stay X distance behind main force. If unit health drops below 50% retreat to healer unit, once healed re-engage enemy.
If this becomes too popular a tactic, someone can choose to program his aerial units to find and destroy healer units as top priority.
The only game like this that I know of was Fleet Command.
I’m just getting off a long Civ 4 bender, and this occurred to me:
I’d like smarter AI. In my experience the computer, in virtually all games, is rock stupid. In Civilization 4, all the highest difficulty levels necessitate the computer opponents actually playing under more advantageous RULES than the human players; the programming simply does not exist to make them anywhere near as smart as a human. You don’t notice this is really simple geometric games like chess, of course, where a computer’s raw power is enough to outsmart most people, but in a big complicated game like Civ 4, or most other strategy games, the computer just isn’t smart.