Mass Effect 3

[Merusk]

There's a big difference between giving players tools to reshape a game experience (as in Elder Scrolls modding) and trying to deliver two fundamentally different aesthetic concepts in the same game. That reflects an incoherency of vision, which usually leads to two under-designed, unsatisfying modes or forms within a game that make neither potential audience very happy. You can have your mini-games in an open-world environment; you can have your combat engine inside of an RPG. Or you can have RPG elements in an FPS. Trying to do both equally--or let players choose a 'pure' form of either element--is almost never going to be a good idea.

This is what I was getting at.

RPGs have been about story AND game.  Wanting to diminish one in favor of the other turns them in to something else entirely.  I have the same objections to wanting to remove or diminish the storyin ME3 in favor of making it a shooter experience.

Sure; i just don't think allowing the player to skip the part(s) which don't interest them actually diminishes anything -- these parts have to be good for the benefit of these who don't skip them, after all. As verification, consider how the quality and 'importance' of the cutscenes in the game isn't being diminished by the ability to skip through them.

Of course skipping them diminishes their importance, how could it be anything else?  Skipping them is the very apex of, "I don't care about this shit, why is it here?"  It's a barrier in your way, thus why you're skipping it.

If you're playing for the story and not a game, is it still a game or is it an interactive novel and something entirely different from "a game?"  I'll argue the latter.
Ditto if you're playing a J-date and skipping all the choices to get to the mini games.  You're not in it for the story.

Also, to illustrate where I'm coming from, I hate "world" games and want more gamey elements.  Worlds are a setting for me, not the purpose for playing.  Thus why I can hop from DIKU to DIKU or TBS to TBS game.  It's about the mechanics, NOT the story for me.   If I want a pure story there's much better mediums for it out there.

[Merusk]

I don't personally buy the assumption that making a section skippable means that they'll half-ass it and make those sections suck. You can skip past all the voice acting in these games, and yet they still put a tremendous amount of effort into making that stuff good.

Which just adds to the spiral of, "fuck these things are expensive.. broaden their appeal!"   It's a lack of focus and thoughtful design that's going to fuck everyone over in the end.

[caladein]

I don't personally buy the assumption that making a section skippable means that they'll half-ass it and make those sections suck. You can skip past all the voice acting in these games, and yet they still put a tremendous amount of effort into making that stuff good.

I agree completely.  I have friends who are spacebar heroes in SWTOR.  I wouldn't want to do missions with them, but they're enjoying the parts of the game they like and ignoring the rest.

I'm all for taking games on their own terms and accepting that some games might not be "for me", but if a developer is taking the stance that you can just play the parts you care about without the need for subterfuge, that's progress.  It also shows a confidence that both parts of the game can relatively stand on their own for different people.

[HaemishM]

I am a writer. I play RPGs and turn-based strategy games. I play for the story. I'm not particularly good at shooters and other twitch games. Our tech designers? Most of them were really good at shooters - especially the new crop we hired for ME2. As I said somewhere upthread, I was hardly the only person in the company with this problem. It was a recognized issue that the better we got at designing combat to satisfy our new audience, the more frustrated and alienated our old audience of die-rolling arr-peers became.

BioWare would probably prefer to sell games to both the old and the new audiences. I don't think that's an unreasonable desire.

That sounds to me like the techie guys didn't design enough granularity in difficulty, not that they should be bolting on these weird ass game modes that invalidate entire swaths of gameplay. I have no problem with "make shooty easy gud" design. I do have a problem with "Make shooty go away" design.

The second paragraph you quoted is certainly reasonable from a profit standpoint. It's also what's wrong with this industry.

[Ratman_tf]

This links been burning a hole in my pocket...

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/narrative-mechanics

[caladein]

That sounds to me like the techie guys didn't design enough granularity in difficulty, not that they should be bolting on these weird ass game modes that invalidate entire swaths of gameplay. I have no problem with "make shooty easy gud" design. I do have a problem with "Make shooty go away" design.

That just goes back to the story about someone dying in the tutorial.  Do you want to draw a line at some point and say, "I've made it easy enough, if you can't do it now, get lost."?

[Ingmar]

Further, 'shooter mode' and 'story mode' don't actually do what we've been discussing as the logical extreme here. They don't just utterly cut the other sections out outright.

[caladein]

Further, 'shooter mode' and 'story mode' don't actually do what we've been discussing as the logical extreme here. They don't just utterly cut the other sections out outright.

Well, at least in the case of Story, it is just the new Easy.  Action does actually automate the conversation stuff (but doesn't auto-skip).

[HaemishM]

That sounds to me like the techie guys didn't design enough granularity in difficulty, not that they should be bolting on these weird ass game modes that invalidate entire swaths of gameplay. I have no problem with "make shooty easy gud" design. I do have a problem with "Make shooty go away" design.

That just goes back to the story about someone dying in the tutorial.  Do you want to draw a line at some point and say, "I've made it easy enough, if you can't do it now, get lost."?

Yes. I do, because I think at some point you DO have to draw a line and say "This isn't for you. Sorry." Otherwise, you get watered-down games that waste their potential.

[MahrinSkel]

Again, if you're skipping all the gunplay to get to the story dialogue trees, why are you playing the game exactly? Writers need to be concerned about how players are getting to their dialogue, because it should be giving them context for what they are writing.

If you're skipping the gunplay and want to focus strictly on the story in combination with pretty CGI and some puzzles, there's an entire genre just for you and the other people that want to play that way. It's even having something of a comeback, lately.

--Dave

[HaemishM]

Yeah, that's my point. Removing the shooty bits of Mass Effect (or rendering them so inert they may as well not happen) is essentially changing what type of game you're making.

[caladein]

Yeah, that's my point. Removing the shooty bits of Mass Effect (or rendering them so inert they may as well not happen) is essentially changing what type of game you're making.

I don't understand how you could think that unless you accept arguments of the form "The time they spent making the game 'more X' could have instead been spent making it 'more Y'." which in my opinion are a horrible, unknowable morass.

[Venkman]

This is what I was getting at in my last post.

ME is a squad combat game with decision trees that can affect some outcomes. You can't "skip the combat" and have the same game. You make that kind of thing at the design/funding stage. You don't sit down to make a choose your own adventure game then years into development tack on a combat engine. The design drives where you spend your development resources. You have flexibility in how you achieve the goals, but tossing out entire premises generally means going back to the design stage.

That's why "ME combat mechanic" and "SWTOR voice acting" are completely false equivalencies. Removing the voiceovers from SWTOR makes it the exact same game just without voice overs. Removing the combat from Mass Effect changes its genre.

[Ratman_tf]

That's why "ME combat mechanic" and "SWTOR voice acting" are completely false equivalencies. Removing the voiceovers from SWTOR makes it the exact same game just without voice overs. Removing the combat from Mass Effect changes its genre.

What's Mass Effect's genre?

[UnSub]

People aren't coming to Mass Effect for the gun play mechanics or the the driving sections or the resource management bits. All of these elements are well below best of breed in the market.

They come for the story and characters. So a ME title that lets you drop combat entirely and focuses just on story is arguably what BioWare should be doing because that is their strength.

In many ways the combat is the barrier to getting through more of the story - you have to gun down 80 mooks and 1 boss in order to get the next bit of dialogue.

If ME is a 'squad management game' then it is a very poor one. The squad AI is exceptionally limited and the instructions you can give squad mates pretty much involves you taking control of the character (or at least I do, because I got tired of characters using their extra abilities in less than optimal way).

[rk47]

So it's a dating game? 

[Sheepherder]

Mass Effect is an award-winning, bestselling series of action role-playing video games developed by the Canadian company BioWare and released for the Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows and, from the second installment, for the PlayStation 3.

[Merusk]

People aren't coming to Mass Effect for the gun play mechanics or the the driving sections or the resource management bits. All of these elements are well below best of breed in the market.

Again, it's the gestalt not the parts.

If I wanted one or the other, there's better options. It's the blend that makes it an RPG and a good over-all game.  Give me just the story? Why would I pay you instead of watching it on youtube?

[Sjofn]

Bring on the fast forward. I don't give a fuck if people rush through the dialogue sections (it's THEIR playthrough, not mine), they shouldn't give a fuck if I want to just faceroll through the fighting parts of the Deep Roads on my fifth playthrough because I'VE ALREADY FUCKING DONE IT FOUR TIMES, JESUS CHRIST. People play Bioware games for the story, or they play it for the combat, or they play it for both, I don't see a problem with letting people focus on the part they like, even if it's the very part I would skip. I personally play Bioware games for both (I enjoyed ME2's combat in particular), but on my nth time though, I have shot all the people that really need shooting, and would not mind at all having an option to speed through, say, Horizon. And then switch it back to normal for a fighting section I particularly enjoyed. Or whatever. Options are good.

I say this as someone who actually likes the fighting parts almost as much as the talky parts (especially in ME2). But how many people would LIKE to play through ME1 again, or DA:O, or whatever, to see how the story changes as you pick different things, but just cannot be arsed to do all the fighting bullshit again because while it's fun the first time, it gets boring wading through darkspawn or driving the fucking Mako or whatever?

[ffc]

Everything UnSub said can be seen in the demo:  combat is a chore, sprinting through an area without slipping into cover against an object is a miracle, squad just serves as an extended hotkey bar, etc.  This is not a good blending of combat and story; the non-story parts are detracting from the story parts.


Regardless, it can look cool.

[tmp]

This is what I was getting at in my last post.

ME is a squad combat game with decision trees that can affect some outcomes. You can't "skip the combat" and have the same game.

The counter point to this is, a part of playerbase simply couldn't care less what the design doc and the Vision of the game is. They enjoy certain elements of the full offering but if you force them to also suffer through the parts they don't like, that will diminish the entertainment they get out of it rather than help. It may even prevent them from getting that entertainment, if some of these forced elements they plain can't stomach or physically handle.

As long as the design actually allows these people to get their fun in such manner (and BioWare games do) this should be imo accommodated. Because the game itself doesn't care how it's played and won't quit itself in disgust or out of boredom. While the player does, and may, and that won't be a benefit to anyone.

[kildorn]

I found ME2's combat to be a lot of fun, but I don't see how it would diminish my enjoyment if someone else said "I'd rather not do this, but I dig the story"

edit: in a single player game, I guess I just don't give two shits about what other people get their enjoyment out of, as long as my fun part stays fun.

[tmp]

Of course skipping them diminishes their importance, how could it be anything else?  Skipping them is the very apex of, "I don't care about this shit, why is it here?"  It's a barrier in your way, thus why you're skipping it.

The thing is, if i have a desire to skip some elements then that's because to me individually they are shit i don't care about based on their own merit, not on the ability to skip them. Their importance is to me already precisely null, whether i can skip them or not.

But it should be kept in mind that this skipping and not caring is just something that happens in my own house, with my personal copy of the game, during my own time i spend with it, out of individual preferences. So if i don't think these elements i'm skipping are important... what do you care? It doesn't diminish how much you personally value these elements when you play your own copy of the game in your own house, does it?

[tmp]

By giving me a "fast forward through combat" button, you're telling me that the gameplay is essentially completely divorced from the story, not because of technical difficulties or funding issues but because the designer deliberately wanted to do it that way.

The details of combat (gameplay) are completely divorced and separable from the outcome (story).  It isn't something that someone wants deliberately but rather something that can't be avoided. It's there no matter if there's a button which acknowledges it, or not.

The series of motions, actions and swings that go into individual act of killing can always be summarized with "Colonel Mustard in the Kitchen with the Lead Pipe" for someone who is interested in the outcome, rather than the minutiae.

edit: this is mainly due to the fact that games --much like the mocked movies and books-- are generally made with only single allowed outcome for each combat encounter in mind -- the player wins, or it's game over (and reload until the player does manage to win)   It's different case when the story changes but is continued even through the defeats.

[kildorn]

Single player seems awesome from the demo. If you're sticking to cover 24/7, you're trying to hold down Storm/Run, which is also the "stick to cover" button. A bit silly, but I think similar to ME2?

Multiplayer needs about 3 months of work on the lobby interface, but looks like fun after that. Basically, it tosses groups together which promptly all quit and dump you into a mission that will kill you in about 5 seconds solo.

[Miasma]

If you like the story, side quests and exploring you will level faster, gain more xp and skill points, get more money to buy gear with and find unique gear - all of which quickly makes the combat fairly trivial.  It's a self correcting problem.  Your first missions could have difficult combat but by midway through the game you just point at things and they die.  Or at least that has been my experience with the mass effect games.

[Ratman_tf]

edit: this is mainly due to the fact that games --much like the mocked movies and books-- are generally made with only single allowed outcome for each combat encounter in mind -- the player wins, or it's game over (and reload until the player does manage to win)   It's different case when the story changes but is continued even through the defeats.

Exactly. There aren't even very many grey area combats, where the story can be affected by how you kill some dudezors. Not even something as simple as an FPS map with two exits instead of one. ME2 kinda sorta walks up to that idea with Zaed's loyalty mission. But that's dwarfed by the amount of linear FPS in the game.

[Kail]

By giving me a "fast forward through combat" button, you're telling me that the gameplay is essentially completely divorced from the story, not because of technical difficulties or funding issues but because the designer deliberately wanted to do it that way.

The details of combat (gameplay) are completely divorced and separable from the outcome (story).  It isn't something that someone wants deliberately but rather something that can't be avoided. It's there no matter if there's a button which acknowledges it, or not.

To a degree, yeah, but it's something which developers can attempt to avoid, to a degree at least.  I'm not concerned about outcomes being fixed by the plot, but about how the plot is delivered.  You can tell a static story through gameplay rather than cutscenes, if you want to, and there's some movement towards that, but it's countered by games which are trying to deliver a "cinematic" experience, meaning everything happens in cutscene, which is boring and uncreative and done better elsewhere (see: movies).  This kind of "gameplay skipping" thing seems to be the apex of that philosophy, because now you HAVE to deliver the story through cutscenes or it won't make any sense to a player who skips the gameplay section.

[tmp]

This kind of "gameplay skipping" thing seems to be the apex of that philosophy, because now you HAVE to deliver the story through cutscenes or it won't make any sense to a player who skips the gameplay section.

I tend to view it in reverse, sort of -- that is, if your game is already built in certain way (plot relies on fixed outcomes of encounters, exposition generally through cutscenes or mission screens, etc) then there's no harm in adding the skip button there. It's just an extension of the difficulty slider by one notch rather than some radical design changer in itself that someone would make the cornerstone of their design.

For what's worth, even the games which do deliver the story through cutscenes still allow the player to skip through them, so the worry how the player can become confused about the plot seems at best secondary to these developers.

[Fordel]

People joke about it or mock it and shit, but if Bioware actually made a westernized "Dating Sim" that shit would make BANK and sell a billion copies.


A BILLION!

[tmp]

People joke about it or mock it and shit, but if Bioware actually made a westernized "Dating Sim" that shit would make BANK and sell a billion copies.

A BILLION!

i'd buy two copies of Hatoful Turian Boyfriend.

Hell, make it three.

edit: on second thought, the uncanny valley could make the whole dating thing pretty scary. Here's a high res Ashley screenshot from the demo:

[rk47]

People joke about it or mock it and shit, but if Bioware actually made a westernized "Dating Sim" that shit would make BANK and sell a billion copies.


A BILLION!

It's essentially their most rabid and vocal fanbase too. So they're being catered and happy. Hamburger helper can be the director of that particular dev dept.
The rest can go back to making RPGs sans romance.

[kildorn]

People joke about it or mock it and shit, but if Bioware actually made a westernized "Dating Sim" that shit would make BANK and sell a billion copies.


A BILLION!

It's essentially their most rabid and vocal fanbase too. So they're being catered and happy. Hamburger helper can be the director of that particular dev dept.
The rest can go back to making RPGs sans romance.

What RPGs has bioware made in recent history that lack romance, exactly?

[Sjofn]

edit: on second thought, the uncanny valley could make the whole dating thing pretty scary. Here's a high res Ashley screenshot from the demo:

I am so glad she's dead in my playthroughs. Not that I really expect Kaidan to be any less creepy.

[Fordel]

People joke about it or mock it and shit, but if Bioware actually made a westernized "Dating Sim" that shit would make BANK and sell a billion copies.


A BILLION!

It's essentially their most rabid and vocal fanbase too. So they're being catered and happy. Hamburger helper can be the director of that particular dev dept.
The rest can go back to making RPGs sans romance.

What RPGs has bioware made in recent history that lack romance, exactly?

Did BG1 have a romance?