Here's an interesting article:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-21-levine-reveals-plans-for-a-new-approach-to-narrative-structure?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=european-daily
Ken Levine, the writer of Freedom Force, is looking at procedural branching narrative systems, so that you cna play through a story driven game multiple times without it being the same every time.
Interesting. I remember discussing requests for branching missions in the Mods forum way back. I've generally been against systems like this for a number of reasons, mainly that I think they dilute the player's experience of the writer's work. But, Ken's got the writing nous and team and resources to pull this off if anyone has.
Yeah, I found a couple of articles where they mentioned Levine's idea, but this article gives a better portrait. A filiation could be established, among others, with the Elder Scrolls series, I guess. Obviously, while this tackles a different problem – AI behaviour rather than questing – I couldn't help but think of Patriot City. The tow concepts together would make that holy grail, the infinite-replay game, much closer to reality.
As an aside, on a much smaller scale, anyone remember the FF branching tutorial mod by Jiistme and Dvorak (http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedomforce/files/)?
I really liked that idea of 'passion sliders'.
A base level of that idea can be seen in games like dishonored or deus ex. The more violent you are, the more violent the world becomes.
Now imagine you have npc's that respond differently to different levels of 'world violence' or 'allegiance'. The parameters of the quest may change, the risks and rewards may change too.
This can be done fairly easily in text, but it's nearly impossible for a full voice acted game.
Banner Saga did a good just with choices changing the narrative, in sometime less than obvious way that had no effect until much later. And these were harsh consequences too. Like being force to kill half a dozen of your own characters when you only have twice that. Not for sissies.
Quote from: catwhowalksbyhimself on March 27, 2014, 02:45:46 AM
Banner Saga did a good just with choices changing the narrative, in sometime less than obvious way that had no effect until much later. And these were harsh consequences too. Like being force to kill half a dozen of your own characters when you only have twice that. Not for sissies.
Banner Saga did look like a game worth picking up. You recommend it, Cat?
Quote from: detourne_me on March 27, 2014, 12:34:27 AM
This can be done fairly easily in text, but it's nearly impossible for a full voice acted game.
Especially since good spoken dialog and voice acting seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Even decent/good work gets incredibly annoying when recycled (hello Elder Scrolls), which would be the case here. Instead, I think the best solution for this kind of game would be to use text and Sim-like mumbling speech. This pseudo-language could be used to generate custom voices on the fly: voice type based on character, character class and gender; rhythm and emotion based on tagging of the text. Procedural quests, procedural behaviour and procedural dialogs.
A major issue with modern games (the so-called "triple-A" ones, at least) is going for extremely high production values. Competing with Hollywood means Hollywood-like costs and Hollywood-like risk-taking (a.k.a. as little as possible). This is after all what got Levine to close IG, as the risk of losing a huge amount of money was way too high for the creative leeway he wanted.
Quote from: Epimethee on March 27, 2014, 03:36:14 PM
Quote from: catwhowalksbyhimself on March 27, 2014, 02:45:46 AM
Banner Saga did a good just with choices changing the narrative, in sometime less than obvious way that had no effect until much later. And these were harsh consequences too. Like being force to kill half a dozen of your own characters when you only have twice that. Not for sissies.
Banner Saga did look like a game worth picking up. You recommend it, Cat?
I like it, but it probably isn't everyone's cup of tea. The tactical combat system is interesting and very very different. A lot of the game plays like a text adventure, though, with much time spent reading text and making choices. The choices have real and sometimes very harsh consequences. Fortunately the writing is excellent and the world this take place simply fascinating, which makes all that text worth reading.
Thanks for the info, Cat. It indeed looks like I'll have to check Banner Saga out once my backlog of purchased-but-unplayed games is a bit smaller.