Choice Games

Miscellaneous non-TR related discussion.

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sasquatch2o
Developer
Posts: 325
Joined: Tue Jul 15, 2014 1:56 pm

Choice Games

Post by sasquatch2o »

As cranky, old gamer I've become bored with most games and, when I do game, I find myself gravitating toward the shorter, more casual games I enjoyed as a kid. I enjoyed arcade type gameplay but what really captured my imagination and held my interest were games where storytelling, adventure and choice were central to the experience. Stripped of modern graphics, those old games I enjoyed most were like a good book but had a storyline that I could control to shape the Destiny of my character and the world. So many recent games have failed to deliver great story telling and sense of adventure while still allowing the player to exercise freedom of choice. Often gameplay boils down to go here, do this, see that, often without even the most basic of choices to create even the illusion of self determined outcomes. Often it's the case in open world games that the size of the environment and massive number of tasks, few of which the player can really control, become a bore and the lack of a story the player can influence can create a sense of weak purposeless wandering. Many games seem to fall into two categories; those with a single strong storyline that may or may not branch out toward the end or games where player is given a large amount if freedom but extremely limited influence.

I recently been playing choose your own adventure games on my mobile and have really enjoyed that sense of self determined story and personal choice. They allow me to exercise a type of gameplay and oddly provide a clear sense of purpose and adventure that I haven't found in most games I've played for many years.

The reason for this post is to layout the importance of allowing some free agency in the stories we create. By allowing the player to feel they are creating their own story, even if it is a clever illusion, makes the experience so much more enjoyable. At its most basic level an rpg should be about story and choice. A handful of major "real" interactive questlines would be an awesome addition to TR. Obviously multiple, huge branching questioned would take a long time to develop. Maybe there is limited interest in adding a feature like this or completing a really deep interactive storylines and reactive environments are impractical for TR, but Id still like to see choice-based gameplay have an influence on future questing.

If you havnt, give these a try:
https://www.choiceofgames.com/

I really enjoyed the broadsides and robots stories. Some free user-made ones are available to play from the site as well.
my opinion.
klep
Lead Developer
Posts: 229
Joined: Sun Nov 23, 2014 3:14 am
Location: Europe

Post by klep »

With no doubt I feel very much the same about most modern games as you do. I think your view on this is great and it may end up adding invaluable player interaction to TR. I'm going to have to reply more detailed at a later time because I need to think well before I do so.

I think it's a shame that your double posting has resulted in the off-topic post being left behind, as this forum doesn't get the attention the others do. Maybe it could be moved to a more suitable place?
EJRS
Developer
Posts: 161
Joined: Wed Aug 14, 2013 10:10 am

Post by EJRS »

The dialogue-system of TES3 lends itself pretty well to this kind of storytelling.

It needn't even be about long, epic questlines: even with small everyday quests this adds a lot of flavour. The way I'd like to see something like this optimally implemented is having each major settlement have a small implicit story arc aside from the faction-quests, loosely told through the various minor quests centered around the location, structured in tiers, where the choices made in the first tier has a small or large effect on the quests of the second tier, which in the end ends up making small changes to the location, such as moving npc around or adding some minor building etc. Sort of like the Ienas Sarandas-quest of Ald-Ruhn, but with real choice and more quest tiers. To me, the main character of TES3 was never the player character, but Vvardenfel itself, and this would be a nice way to bring that in an upgraded form to the mainland.

Good examples of this done in other games would be the Deus Ex-series and the Gothic-series.
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