What is the point of "You must gather..."?
chimeric
Member Posts: 1,163
Maybe there was originally a technical reason for making the party travel as one, and it adds to the atmosphere of camaraderie, adventure and steel-on-steel, a little bit. Then again, a group would want to stick together on the whole without any incentives. Not dying as much is a strong argument, I think. And as far as new-chapter mystique is concerned, well, Cloakwood is locked until after the Bandit Camp, whether the whole crew would want to brave it or just Edwin and Kagain. And vice versa, if an area is turned off for plot reasons, it becomes closed to everyone. And when a quest transports the whole party, as, say, to the Lycanthrope Island and back or to the Ice Island and back, the scripts already grab all of the party members, even without a "You must gather..." After all, by the old logic no Player6 may be left behind, it case there is a Player6; scripts don't run checks to first determine party size when moving it somewhere else, so Players 1-6 will be taken care of. As for NPC, they speak to the first PC they lay their eyes on, as though representing CHARNAME in every case. It would be strange if they didn't - just stood there, bandits, mad sorcerers and all, and waited for Player1 or Protagonist to show up. They don't do that, and they can just as well react to a single wanderer as to many.
So I ask, why do we need the group travel feature now? Wouldn't it open up more possibilities for split parties and different spells - being left in stasis somewhere, lost to sirens' charms, polymorphed, you name it, not to mention give a real application to teleports, which are just conveniences now - if we flagged off "Party required" for all map borders? Or at least for all overland maps. Maybe the presence of Player1 is required indoors at places, at plot points, but the World map, I think we can free it for ranging. And imagine: when a couple of the characters bring that tome of great value to Candlekeep, the rest are absent. The two are taken in, and the gates close. They must now take on the catacombs with reduced strength, but the others can try to navigate the caves from the other end (whenever the entrance opens, at the start of the new chapter, probably) and meet them. Or perhaps a wizard could join them on the grounds with Dimension Door. Possibilities.
XP distribution? Let all characters earn XP for the party, wherever they may be. A lone character may not be able to do much anyway, or he might - through Charisma, by shopping and returning with full bags of holding, by Intelligence, if enough dialogues are written to register that (and now there would be a reason to), by taking new quests from NPC while the rest of the party does the grunts' work. And separating a character would allow a kind of customizable solo play when wanted, but without detriment to the rest of the party experience-wise. "Can I take these Doom Guards with my mage alone? No? Well, if I do, the points will be shared, so I won't doom myself to solitude and the others won't become useless weaklings."
The party can't rest while scattered, it's true, not normally. But then, they don't need to do it normally most of the time, just every so often for dreams and romances. We can introduce separate resting, in fact I've made a mod to that effect myself.
So I ask, why do we need the group travel feature now? Wouldn't it open up more possibilities for split parties and different spells - being left in stasis somewhere, lost to sirens' charms, polymorphed, you name it, not to mention give a real application to teleports, which are just conveniences now - if we flagged off "Party required" for all map borders? Or at least for all overland maps. Maybe the presence of Player1 is required indoors at places, at plot points, but the World map, I think we can free it for ranging. And imagine: when a couple of the characters bring that tome of great value to Candlekeep, the rest are absent. The two are taken in, and the gates close. They must now take on the catacombs with reduced strength, but the others can try to navigate the caves from the other end (whenever the entrance opens, at the start of the new chapter, probably) and meet them. Or perhaps a wizard could join them on the grounds with Dimension Door. Possibilities.
XP distribution? Let all characters earn XP for the party, wherever they may be. A lone character may not be able to do much anyway, or he might - through Charisma, by shopping and returning with full bags of holding, by Intelligence, if enough dialogues are written to register that (and now there would be a reason to), by taking new quests from NPC while the rest of the party does the grunts' work. And separating a character would allow a kind of customizable solo play when wanted, but without detriment to the rest of the party experience-wise. "Can I take these Doom Guards with my mage alone? No? Well, if I do, the points will be shared, so I won't doom myself to solitude and the others won't become useless weaklings."
The party can't rest while scattered, it's true, not normally. But then, they don't need to do it normally most of the time, just every so often for dreams and romances. We can introduce separate resting, in fact I've made a mod to that effect myself.
Post edited by chimeric on
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Presumably you are still required to bring your entire party from certain areas to lessen the amount of data the game has to keep in memory at any given time.
If you made every area transition in BG like PST, where the whole party always travels together across area transitions (well, almost
@subtledoctor , As I said, any script that takes the whole party is going to refer to objects Player1-Player6. There is no "whole party" or "all PC present" object, after all. Wherever those scripts put the party, they are going to pluck each party member from his present position. It may be surprising when the whole party appears on the Ice Island if someone was in Durlag's Tower just now, but you can easily enough believe that they had joined the rest. As for the technical reasons in the original game, I acknowledged them, but they don't apply any more.
@Ardanis , No, I don't agree that a split party isn't compatible with quest narratives. Why should only the whole party enter an adventure? You can't assume what needs to be proven. In fantasy books characters meet and separate and join again all the time, and while some are away, they are off adventuring, not standing around in an inn. Those stories happen in parallel. For example, in Dragonlance's Dragons of Winter Night Lorana, Sturm, Flint and some others sail to Icewall to find a Dragon Orb, while Tanis, Raistlin, Caramon etc. recover another from Silvanesti. Later while most of the characters are fighting the Dragon Overlords, Gilthanas and Silvara go to Sanction and discover that draconians are made from eggs of good dragons - and this information, when they return, convinces metallic dragons to join the fight. Or, if you want examples of travelers parting ways from the Forgotten Realms, there are the Time of Troubles Books, the Moonshae trilogy... Any number of sources.
Obviously in these games the scale of everything is about 1/10 of books' glory. But it would still be glorious if some two characters, like Edwin and Kagain, defeated the Demon Knight in Durlag's Tower and brought out the dagger while the others investigated Sarevok, wouldn't it?
@AstroBryGuy , I'm proposing that we eliminate all or most "Party required" transitions, together with that feedback and the usefulness of it. Parties would still want to travel together most of the time, but I see no reason to require this. Why can't just four characters enter Bhaal's Temple and face Sarevok? Why must they all step in? When Sarevok speaks to the interlopers, he doesn't require the character who appears to be Player1 or Protagonist. He will talk to Alorra as if she was Charname. So why not leave Charname out of it? Perhaps this really how it happened - the terrible Sarevok was laid low not by the celebrated hero but by his companions. It's not like this would be very different from letting them fight and kill him while Player1 stays in a corner invisible, which is something we can do now. Whose handiwork is the victory in that case?
Most of which are scripts/dialogues, where Player1 is often assumed present. Dorn for example, will begin a dialogue with CHARNAME the moment he steps into certain areas, whether or not CHARNAME is present.
The InActiveArea() trigger can be used to keep track of which area the Player is currently viewing.
Weather is another issue - it is constant across all active areas(that allow weather). If multiple areas were scripted to set the current weather, they would conflict.
Also, keep in mind this game was released in 1998. Looking back, I’m amazed we could do what we did back then. (And we had it great compared to the old-timers.) The real reason is that resources (computing power, manpower, time, money, etc) are always limited, and choices have to be made. And to be honest, it’s not the worst choice I’ve seen.
The second one... areas would conflict. How exactly? Would they crash?
@tbone1 , They might be messed up, but not as often as it might seem, and not quite as you describe. In your example of Edwin/Minsc/Dynaheir, the dialogue checks not for who is present, but for who is in the party. If Edwin was somewhere else, but in the party, Dynaheir would still react as if he was present, actually Edwin would try to speak up (let's assume he can do it from another area) and demand that you kill her. Now that's strange, even if it were to work. It would also be strange with PartyHasItem() checks - but not fatally strange. I mean, if Kagain and Edwin hold the Demonknight's dagger in Durlag's, it can be assumed that they have or would or are bringing it out of there, so that dwarf in Ulgoth's Beard can be satisfied. Does he take the dagger? If he does, then the dagger would be teleported mysteriously from Durlag's bottom to him in the village, ahead of Edwin and Kagain returning, but since they would bring it anyway, I don't think it's such a terrible stretch.
@AstroBryGuy , I've thought about this. What should be done, if the rest of the issues were possible to handle, is a check for baldur.bcs for Players1-6, based on ActionListEmpty(), applying very slow regeneration and fatigue removal to those who stand around. It should activate as soon as a character is doing nothing. Then if the currently active characters travel the map for 12 or 24 hours, the rest of the party will be found healed and refreshed in the meantime. Perhaps even spells should be refreshed after 8 hours of idleness.
To implement this idea, you'd need to go over every script and dialog trigger in the game and look for circumstances where allowing party members to be scattered across the map will cause issues and fix the scripts & triggers.
Whichever Weather() action triggered last would override the weather set by the other, nothing game-breaking.
I would say it's about two things.
First, it means altering many dialogues and scripts (thousands of them, quite literally). It's doable, but will it be so positive as to justify dozens of hours of work? I certainly wouldn't spend that much time on it but that's up to you.
Then, and more importantly in my opinion, does it even make sense? Baldur's Gate is a RPG in which you embody Gorion's Ward, not his/her companions. Indeed you have limited control over them, but the only guy you really control is the PC.
The only part of a NPC behavior you control is where they move and how they fight, which are fields on which PC can give precise instructions. Sending one guy on a reconnaissance mission at the other end of the map can make sense, as it represents a few minutes of "independence", and PC can cover the possibilities and give instructions on how to react if this or that happens.
But there are things about NPCs you cannot control. What they say, for example, is their line, which is written to fit their personality. You have no control over that.
So while it can make sense that you send them on an errand like bringing a quest item to a quest giver and then coming back, you shouldn't have control over them while they're gone. So either you make them leave the party, temporarily, like Jaheira does when she leaves you in BG2 to attend to her Harper job, and make them rejoin after a certain time, or make them unavailable for the same period of time.
When creating a mod or editing the game behavior, there are three questions you must think on:
Is it technically feasible?
Does it make sense?
Is it worth the time spent on it?
To the first question the answer will be "yes", or at least "it'll be clanky but yes" most of the time.
The second question will often be "why not, depending on how it's implemented".
If you answer "no" to either of these questions, then the mod won't work.
If you answer "yes", then question 2 will also have given you a way of implementing the feature you want to mod. That way of implementing implies an amount of work. In this particular case it represents a real lot of work for a rather small improvement. It's like being paid half a euro/dollar an hour, for a long, long time. Why would you bother working for so little?
All right then. To everyone else I can say that I won't, of course, do anything like rewrite hundreds of scripts, or any scripts. If a reference to Player1 somewhere crashes the game or ruins a conversation, there is no way to find every little thing, and in a mod that would result in unacceptable bugs. If, on the other hand, the system as it is works while characters are scattered, I can take on the change of pace and style. Obviously parallel adventuring makes the game more sophisticated, obviously it compromises the simple core idea of Baldur's Gate from 1998 - main character son/daughter of Bhaal, good/evil, bunch of companions with personalities defined by a single adjective, go together from point A to point B to point C. The sequel didn't develop that in the slightest, even though it was later, bigger and supposedly better (that's why Shadows of Amn felt old straight away). The question is, is that core concept enough? Enough to keep our interest, now, and even just then immediately after we first conquered BG. Starting over with a new character was already like turning the same gemstone at another angle to get a new glint out of it. We should have wanted a new adventure with new technology, new party politics straight away. And there wasn't one, but now, so much later and with all these tools, to stick to that concept? I know I want more.