Bioware Austin.. damm more Dragons.. or Lightsabers?

[Slyfeind]

Random dragon by itself isn't interesting.

I figured that went without saying, so I didn't compose an entire design document to go with my little hypothetical encounter system. ;)

[Xilren's Twin]

But I think this is also to miss the point - it's not seeing the forest for the trees.  The same mechanics can both be used AND be interesting with the right circumstance.  Take the issue of 'choice' for example.  Access to both scripted storylines (which are instanced / replayable for everyone) and to templates can vary depending on whatever criteria.  So one person gets "Save the Princess" templates and another gets "Kidnap the Princess" templates.  Random Dragon becomes interesting if a thousand things have to be done before he's killable, and all of them involve other missions, scavanger hunts, player-created missions, wars, whatever else.  Random dragon by itself isn't interesting.

Right, which is why i said something like 'the end of a story arc has a big boss battle'.  If the series of steps to get to that end encounter are all branching choices that have diffent gameplay elements, your certainly would give the illusion of each character's or group's path through the game is far more unique than we have now.  Branch after branch gives you an exponetial amount of paths through the game.

The key is making the moment to moment gameplay fun, and the content development decent without sucking up all of your resources.  Some content is resuable in branching anyway (i.e. town A run by orcs, town A run by humans, town A destroyed, town A with a magic fountain, all uses "town A" resources with some variations), it just play's hell with overall world continuity and friends playing together without oddness.

On the plus side at least they've already stated they're going for entertainment over simulation.

I would be perfectly happy with branching plotlines (ie. content locking) if the gameplay was fun and plots at least interesting.  Then again, Im not a powergamer looking to min max my equipment and stats to the absolute best thottbot says is possible.  Which is where the "good but not largely successful" line stems from...

[Soln]

Looks like a company that has ignored the truth: amateur hour is over, WoW shows the way to make fantasy MMOs that players actually enjoy and are willing to pay for.  If you grab some pre-WoW industry retreads to make your game, your game will probably suck.  WoW succeeded because it escaped that tired old mud-dev circlejerk; any game vomited up by fossils like Walton and Vogel will probably suck, just like any game made by any of the old-guard will probably suck.  None of those people came up with a game that didn't feel like it was put together by a bunch of college kids in their mom's basement, and people aren't going to put up with that shoddy workmanship anymore. 

Maybe Walton and Vogel have had a come-to-Jesus moment in the recent past; but given the loud and repeated reactions of more vocal members of the pre-WoW MMO designer cabal -- to bury their heads as deeply into the sand as possible while chanting "I was right the players will come back to me someday I just know it" I'm a bit skeptical.

Bioware's less-than-stellar history of technical excellence is also a concern.  MMOGs are very demanding on that front.

Still, I'll buy it and check it out because I do that with every damn game it seems.  Such a sucker am I.

FWIW Vogel at the AGC had some pretty rational things to say about managing architecture for scale. ie. by not solving the problem with more hw.

[Righ]

Hopefully they'll have some dungeons to put their dragons in. Looking for new RPG adventure meme, PST.

[Lum]

Maybe Walton and Vogel have had a come-to-Jesus moment in the recent past

I'd say that World of Warcraft served as a come-to-Jesus moment for the entire industry.

Polish is rewarded, who knew?

[Strazos]

There sure is a lot of negative criticism floating around on this game, sight unseen.

[tazelbain]

There sure is a lot Bioware fanbois giving them a free pass for a shitty interview.

[LC]

All I got from that interview was: "We have dynamic quests that take place in a static world."

It sounds like a polished turd already. Any bets on the special prizes they will offer for beta participation? "Participate in dragon age beta for a chance to win a PS3 or one of 200 signed copies of Baldurs Gate."

[Strazos]

I'm not giving them a pass for the interview. Really, I just don't care about the interview, and at this early point of development, I would not expect much from an interview. I'll reserve judgement until I see something playable.

[Trippy]

Maybe Walton and Vogel have had a come-to-Jesus moment in the recent past

I'd say that World of Warcraft served as a come-to-Jesus moment for the entire industry.

Polish is rewarded, who knew?

Yes polish is rewarded but the game actually has to be, you know, fun as well. Otherwise we'd all be talking about FF XI not WoW, and that game also blows away the "omigod must spend 100 million dollars to create a polished MMORPG" FUD/meme that's been spreading around.

[waylander]

I'm not giving them a free pass either, but I have bought every game they've put out thus far and have liked them. So from a non MMORPG standpoint, my experience with bioware games has been positive. So I expect that they will make an mmorpg that will at least get a retail sale out of me along with a month or two of subscription fees, and much longer if I end up liking the game that they make.

I judge a company by my experiences with their past products, and bioware hasn't failed to make me happy yet.

[Venkman]

Quality alone won't matter if the game mechanic is iterative of WoW and the IP isn't compelling.

Having said that, if it's KOTOR Online, even with diku, that could be a big hit. Sci-fi, "SWG done right", Bioware's comparable reknown for quality (though in different spaces than Blizzard), and their ability to manage accountability through storylines and branching choices. That could be huge.

I get none of that from this interview though. Personally, they'd have been better off not saying nuthin until they can talk IP. They can't get criticized for silence really. I can see a lot of reasons for why they can't announce their IP (particularly if it is Star Wars), but dropping hints rooted in Tolkien-esque fantasy at a time when the genre is replete with knockoffs and getting a LoTRO in 2007 doesn't seem the right place to start. People don't remember branching storylines from that interview. They think "I've been there already" and wonder what uniqueness Bioware brings to the table.

[Trippy]

Quality alone won't matter if the game mechanic is iterative of WoW and the IP isn't compelling.

Having said that, if it's KOTOR Online, even with diku, that could be a big hit. Sci-fi, "SWG done right", Bioware's comparable reknown for quality (though in different spaces than Blizzard), and their ability to manage accountability through storylines and branching choices. That could be huge.

Argh! Stop it with the "branching choices" already. KoTOR and the like don't have true branching storylines. The storyline in KoTOR looked something like this:


       +               +               +
      / \             / \             /
+----+   +-----+-----+   +-----+-----+
      \ /             \ /             \
       +               +               +


where every once in a while the story would slightly diverge if you picked the light or dark path but immediately afterwards would put you back on the same linear storyline until the very end where you had two different endings.

Wing Commander, of all games, had a true branching storyline where success or failure of each mission would send you down different paths though they cheated as well by having the various paths recombine at certain places but you still had more "paths" than KoTOR ever did (I can't remember the details but I think 4 was the max in WC). I.e. it looked something like:


                          +
                      /       \
                     +         +
                    /  \     /  \
                   +   +    +    +
                    \  /     \  /
                     +         +
                    / \        |
                   +   ------- +
                              / \
                             +   +



The problem, of course, is that having real diverging branches (rather than branches that immediately recombine) means creating lots and lots of content -- e.g. in the worst case scenario even just two separate branches means double the storyline content -- which is why people don't do it, it's just too much work.

[stray]

I hate to say this, but I think I prefer charts ;).

What the hell is that up there?

2 points for mentioning WC though.

[lamaros]

I thought KOTOR was boring as hell.

Baldur's Gate too.
Never finished either of them.

I expect this to suck, sight unseen.

[Trippy]

For KoTRO the "+" is a conversation decision node and the lines are the paths you take. So for the "+"s with branching paths those are places where your light or dark response actually changes the storyline, at least temporarily. In WC the "+"s are missions and the paths are whether you succeed or fail in a mission.

Edit: actually for WC it was only three distinct branches at most, not four:

[Strazos]

I thought KOTOR was boring as hell.

Baldur's Gate too.
Never finished either of them.

I expect this to suck, sight unseen.

I guess you just don't like good western RPGs then.

[Margalis]

Remember how HTML was going to usher in the "hypertext novel" with "interactive storylines"?

Trippy is right, real branches mean much more work. A single branch halfway though a game means 50% more content that people won't experience unless they play twice.

You can do what a lot of games and choose your own adventure style things do, which is have branches that meet up again. Maybe they meet up and then zoom off in other directions again but basically what you are doing is cobbling together 10 different stories from 5 unique parts, just assembling them differently. The problem with that is that it can become tedious as you get to learn the parts.

Choose your own adventure is a good analogy. They are pretty fun (well...if you are 9) the first few times you read them, but then they are just busywork to find the few branches you missed.

----

I'm not mad about this interview, it is just nothing. Might as well not have given it. It's the same thing everyone else says. And that is the downside - they are already establishing themselves on a well-worn track.

[lamaros]

I thought KOTOR was boring as hell.

Baldur's Gate too.
Never finished either of them.

I expect this to suck, sight unseen.

I guess you just don't like good western RPGs then.

Not so. Fallout I loved, and many others (BaK is high up there), Baldur's gate had a crappy system that felt like D&D - boring rolls and unspried gameplay, and KOTOR was.. I dunno it was just boring. Mechanics were dull, world was insipid.. I didn't get far in.

[Strazos]

Why do you hate Canada?

[stray]

KoToR was a game that kept me interested almost by purely through character interaction and voice acting (yeah, yeah, laugh all you want). Wasn't the setting. Wasn't the thought of being a Jedi. Definitely wasn't the combat and gameplay. I just kept plowing through to hear what the characters and story would tell me next.

[ajax34i]

A single branch halfway though a game means 50% more content that people won't experience unless they play twice.

Actually, I believe that all content is experienced. 

With a single player game, every branch just extends the "replayability" of the game.  This may be a sucky mechanic to implement, but in the end it doesn't matter, because once you've bought the game, the dev doesn't really care how many times you play it.  The devs can claim "this game offers 60 hours of gameplay" whether it's a completely linear story, or a branching one where you only get your 60 hours if you re-start from scratch 6 times.

With MMO's, all content is experienced; some percentage of your playerbase will pick one of the choices and experience it.  Perfect example:  Horde vs. Alliance, split content right there, and the result wasn't that 50% of the content wasn't experienced.  The content WILL be experienced by at least some people.  It's not wasted; in fact, instead of "splitting" your game by having 2 sides, 8 classes, 4 races, you could have 1 side, 1 race, 1 class, and 64 branches in your plot, and they would ALL be experienced.

[Endie]

I thought KOTOR was boring as hell.

Baldur's Gate too.
Never finished either of them.

I expect this to suck, sight unseen.

I guess you just don't like good western RPGs then.

While I loved BG, I have to say that I agree with lamaros and others about KOTOR: it was dreary.  It managed to combine the feeling of a big game-world with a confined and constrained sensation, which is quite an achievement.  There were huge areas, but they were only there to run through on the way from plot location to plot location.  Potemkin space-villages.

The combat was meh, too.  I quite like that turn-based thing sometimes - ToEE was buggy as hell on release but the combat was fun - but KOTOR defied all three of my attempts to get into it.

[Strazos]

Actually, in both BG games, there were many areas that were entirely optional.

[AcidCat]

A single branch halfway though a game means 50% more content that people won't experience unless they play twice.

From my experience, WoW has shown that people will gladly play through multiple times to see different content - when your leveling speed allows people to reach maximum level in a reasonable amount of time, which WoW does. Pretty much everyone I know that plays has done at least one Horde and one Alliance, and usually more than one character within each faction. So such choices act to enhance that replayability.

[Xilren's Twin]

With MMO's, all content is experienced; some percentage of your playerbase will pick one of the choices and experience it.  Perfect example:  Horde vs. Alliance, split content right there, and the result wasn't that 50% of the content wasn't experienced.  The content WILL be experienced by at least some people.  It's not wasted; in fact, instead of "splitting" your game by having 2 sides, 8 classes, 4 races, you could have 1 side, 1 race, 1 class, and 64 branches in your plot, and they would ALL be experienced.

Same deal for DAOC and their 3 realms.  All MMORPGS have some locked content whether its by race, class, relam, whatever, but very few seem to have much content locking by choices made while playing.  EQ2's quest series to change your alleigence from Freeport to Qeynos comes to mind, but they are the exception, not the rule and it's also the same quest all freeport characters can do.  Plenty of content unlocking, but not the reverse.

True branching like the WC example based on choice (and not win/lose) leading to a large variety of outcomes (rather than combining reults back to a few paths) seems to be right up ther with server divergence on "list of developer things to avoid"...

[El Gallo]

With MMO's, all content is experienced; some percentage of your playerbase will pick one of the choices and experience it.  Perfect example:  Horde vs. Alliance, split content right there, and the result wasn't that 50% of the content wasn't experienced.  The content WILL be experienced by at least some people.  It's not wasted; in fact, instead of "splitting" your game by having 2 sides, 8 classes, 4 races, you could have 1 side, 1 race, 1 class, and 64 branches in your plot, and they would ALL be experienced.

Wasted from the point of a view of a particular character.  It seems like a pretty basic resource-allocation issue to me.  Say you have 500 man-days to make cool quests.  You can spend 500 days making one mind-blowingly interesting and detailed linear quest path that rivals the Odyssey, of you could spend one day each on 500 different quest paths that have all the depth and continuity of an episode of Cop Rock.  Obviously, there's a lot of space in the middle, but it seems equally obvious that every time you branch a story, you cut the amount of time you can spend on every other branch in half, which very quickly gets you to not much time at all.

I've re-read Hamlet close to ten times by now, and I'm sure I'll re-read it at least that many more times before I die.  Each time is a great experience, even though I know what is going to happen to each character.  On the other hand, I don't think I've re-read a Mad Lib even once.  Linear and good is just plain better than branchable and bad.  Branchable Hamlet might be even better but good luck coming up with that.

The problem is mignified by the fact that even in games don't have much branching, we aren't really getting stories that rival the Odyssey.  Watering down a potentially great story into two merely decent branches is one thing, watering down a merely decent story into two shitty branches is something else.

[Soln]

isn't the point that no matter how good the text/story is, if it doesn't impact the character progession it doesn't matter?

what are we arguing about again?

[El Gallo]

what are we arguing about again?

Whether they should add precasting to SWG I think.

[tazelbain]

SB.exe, good or bad?

[WindupAtheist]

BRING BACK PRECASTING BEEYOTCH!

Alas, that hasn't been a good catchphrase for UO ever since...  well ever since they brought back precasting.

Beeyotch.

[Soln]

MinscOnline.Com


bring it

[Venkman]

Argh! Stop it with the "branching choices" already. KoTOR and the like don't have true branching storylines. The storyline in KoTOR looked something like this:

The branching choices I was talking about was Faction. Yes, it wasn't a truly branching storyline with 200 different endings. But your character at the end was absolutely affected by the choices you made throughout.

Right now, there's a strict linearity to MMOGs that Relic could innovate against. This isn't about lore. This is about pure accountability within the game world. Forget KOTOR. Think Ultima IV and the 'Air of <whatever>' that would permit or prevent access to various places. Like Air of Thievery prevented access to Skara Brae, but they loved you in Bucc's Den.

EQ1 is the only one that came closest to that, but Faction there was easily game-able because it was just another XP bar.

[Lum]

Yes polish is rewarded but the game actually has to be, you know, fun as well. Otherwise we'd all be talking about FF XI not WoW, and that game also blows away the "omigod must spend 100 million dollars to create a polished MMORPG" FUD/meme that's been spreading around.

FFXI was neither low budget nor particularly polished (the PC version was a direct port of the console version).

[Engels]

I think it depends on what you were used to. I had a friend who took to FFXI like a duck to water, since he also played console games. Myself, being a PC-only person, found FFXI a royal pain in the posterior.