game too linear. Would a triangle work?
Tigersag
Member Posts: 52
another idea I had playing the game..
what I notice in Baldurs gate is that it's very linear. You are always driven towards the intended line. I find this to be very limiting for non-good characters who don't want to save the day but just want to make a quick buck or become ULTIMATE RULER OF ALL THERE IS (including hamsters!)
Maybe I want to kill the good king and not the evil bad dude who is always at every game like this. Also I think there are consequences to acts of good and evil which made me come up with a triangular approach to a game. It's still a line but you can go either way and I guess then there would be three endings, three middle parts of the game and three "beginnings" where the evil protagonist starts at a different point then the good protagonist simply due to the inital choice of good or evil alignment.
okay.. i'm still a bit vague about this idea but I just wondered if a game could be designed like Baldur Gate that isn't a straight line but a triangle instead.
call me nuts... but I once suggested multiplayer Knights of the old republic II once back in the day........ and now it's online ( not because of me.. but who knows, right? )
so just wondering and just wanted to contribute this idea so that games are made that allow for a character to go in two and maybe even three directions in a RPG game/trilogy.
what I notice in Baldurs gate is that it's very linear. You are always driven towards the intended line. I find this to be very limiting for non-good characters who don't want to save the day but just want to make a quick buck or become ULTIMATE RULER OF ALL THERE IS (including hamsters!)
Maybe I want to kill the good king and not the evil bad dude who is always at every game like this. Also I think there are consequences to acts of good and evil which made me come up with a triangular approach to a game. It's still a line but you can go either way and I guess then there would be three endings, three middle parts of the game and three "beginnings" where the evil protagonist starts at a different point then the good protagonist simply due to the inital choice of good or evil alignment.
okay.. i'm still a bit vague about this idea but I just wondered if a game could be designed like Baldur Gate that isn't a straight line but a triangle instead.
call me nuts... but I once suggested multiplayer Knights of the old republic II once back in the day........ and now it's online ( not because of me.. but who knows, right? )
so just wondering and just wanted to contribute this idea so that games are made that allow for a character to go in two and maybe even three directions in a RPG game/trilogy.
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The mod location is:
http://www.gibberlings3.net/alternatives/
And No matter how you cut the options, you are fighting for your life, and you can fight whomever you want throughout the entire series (especially now with the mod).
What I propose is a trilogy, a shaped plot where you can start the game at three points and move from either point to the other. I'm thinking a tale of two cities for instance who are fierce rivals. You choose a side, an alignment and start on your road to the next point in the story which could either lie at point B or C if you started the game at A because that's the first game you bought, for instance.
You could also start at point C, the other city and be driven to wipe out the 'evil' dudes on the others side, or you might start out as a paladin at point A, be betrayed by your comrade at the end of that plotline and let the character fall to the dark side, so to say..
btw When I mean evil, I don't necessarily mean hacking up everything into bits and acting senselessly to everything. Someone mentioned in another thread I started here there should be "more jerks in the game". We can all be jerks but it doesn't make us "pure evil"
the thing that disapoints me about PLAYING evil in a linear game like Baldurs Gate is that I find myself with no clue as to why I am doing what I am doing. Why am I helping people? Why do I really care about getting rid of the end of the game bad guy? Even if the game says I can take his place, after doing so much good to get all that extra XP or sacrificing it to make sure I'm true to my character, the game ends and I never get much satisfaction from it.
I want the story to go on! I want it to go on with the character I built and not just the portrait and where you have to start at level one again (like in Mass Effect. That was annoying and the same as my disapointment when I bought Neverwinter Nights and couldn't import my baldur gate character).
Having said that, I would like to rephrase my initial question. Is it possible to create a non-linear RPG game that is capable of being produced, marketed and sold commercially?
Personally I feel it's the next step because a game is not a movie or a book. It's an interactive experience and it should be an open one.
After reading what @Tigersag is saying it sounds like creating a world where you can ignore parts, and almost creating episodic instance in the same game that have more than short-term affects. Baldur's gate 2 has the whole Stronghold idea, which is episodic in nature, but imagine taking it even further. Instead of just to get main, you raise your thieves and steal a ship, from there you could sail your ship to Spellhold, or ignore Irenicus and your Sister entirely, and have irenicus capture you while exploring the city, or being thrown into spellhold after stealing or killing a large portion of an area. Instead of holding Nalia's keep for safeholding, you could forcefully take it and fight off mercs and the Reynolds, and be a usurper. The possibilities are endless.
The Problem is, the production cost of a game that size would be crazy. The reason games bottleneck story is because having to create areas, story, script and characters would cost a good bit of money, not to mention the cost of producing a game that in depth. I think it would be possible, market-able maybe (look at how much people have been burned on games like Fable that promise something like this, but end up selling us a game that takes choice in as much as the original ending to ME3. (Spoiler, nothing you did mattered.)).
Tangents, sorry it's 3am. Regardless The production cost would be around the price to create an MMO, but with a much smaller target audience and without riddling it with DLC you'd be looking at almost certainly taking a hit when it comes to recouping the costs. Why create a game that diverse, when you can target the largest part of your audience (in this game people who like being the White Knight), and spend 1/4 the time and money?
http://www.gibberlings3.net/wheels/
Have not played it myself yet, but defenitly will in the furure.
I did miss having something of a storyline in it. The game revolved around killing X of this and killing X of that and so on and so on. If you progressed far enough you could kill each other too, but still not much of providing a story. I've heared the Old Republic online game is the same too.
I admit I'm dreaming away a bit but I think instead of having a story that proceeds along a straight line, you could have a story that is not shaped like a line, probably in three seperate games where you actions in one directly affect the other.
Could one person write it? and how long would it take?