I have to ask: is anyone adding sophistication to the games?
chimeric
Member Posts: 1,163
I'm trying to make some more spells for the Infinity Engine - for BGEE for starters, and then maybe for the others. It's hard going, as I try to stay away from obvious things like damage and look for interesting magics in AD&D sourcebooks and journals. But as I put my ingenuity in those spells, I can't help but think that there is very little I can do or anybody else can do, jump as high as we might, to expand the gameplay, unless someone else adds better dialogue, more quest endings, alignment shifts and, in a word, sophistication.
I didn't want to think about that. I've done enough dialogue-writing for mods in other games, and just writing elsewhere, so I decided to stick to mechanics, like spells, this time. But the wall is looming right up close.
Take "social" effects, ones that aren't about fighting or convenience. There is not even a handful of spells of that kind in the games. We have, for example, Friends, which had a rather interesting action in pen-and-paper, but in these games simply raises Charisma. Try as I might, I can't, or hardly can, think of any way to influence interactions with other characters except through something that will again raise or lower Charisma. That's all there is. It's really lame. And why is it this way? Because the interactions are so basic. Torment aside, we don't have nada in these games - no reaction adjustment, like in original AD&D, no initial NPC reaction based on Beauty and later standing based on Charm, like in Arcanum, no colored conversation options, like we got with Empathy in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. And no alignment shifts as in Torment.
For modders to influence aspects of the games, there have to be those aspects in the first place. And unless Beamdog really steps up its engine-updating, sophistication has to come from content alone. It has to be intensive, not just extensive. We can't keep stuffing the maps with custom NPC (as I wondered: where will Beamdog put Dorn's encounters?) Somebody has to dare and seriously touch those conversations, nostalgia be damned. Yes, it was fine marching to trumpets against Sarevok and evil goblins when we were 18 or 12, and our hair was long. But we are all rather grown up now. And we can't make games of our own, that's the fact of it - because we simply don't have the artistic resources and staff to paint up something as beautiful as these backgrounds, to make the music like Mark Morgan did back then. He's just a rare talent! We might produce something under different circumstances, but looking at the RPG field now you see that even exceptional titles like Tides of Numenara struggle with second-handedness, with the aging of the genre, gamers' attention deficit and the awful emphasis on convenience...
So we are stuck with tweaking and revamping this old stuff, at least for now. Then let's do it! Somebody has to add Charisma and Intelligence-based options, and more effects of Reputation, too. And quest endings. This goes for all of the games, even the Icewind Dales, which don't have to be slashers. The major mods I have seen so far, like Dark Side of the Sword Coast for Baldur's Gate, change some one side of the experience, or they make gameplay into something else completely, expand (Big World and so on). And then there are smaller, private quests. It may be because modders are reverential. That attitude, unfortunately, has to go - not just for us here, but for whatever Beamdog decides to make next, after they have finished updating the IE games. But we're here yet, and, hopefully, we learn something and get a little smarter every day. We read books, maybe even meet new people. I don't know all of the mods, or what's in production. So I must ask modders: is anybody trying to make the games smarter and more mature and profound?
I didn't want to think about that. I've done enough dialogue-writing for mods in other games, and just writing elsewhere, so I decided to stick to mechanics, like spells, this time. But the wall is looming right up close.
Take "social" effects, ones that aren't about fighting or convenience. There is not even a handful of spells of that kind in the games. We have, for example, Friends, which had a rather interesting action in pen-and-paper, but in these games simply raises Charisma. Try as I might, I can't, or hardly can, think of any way to influence interactions with other characters except through something that will again raise or lower Charisma. That's all there is. It's really lame. And why is it this way? Because the interactions are so basic. Torment aside, we don't have nada in these games - no reaction adjustment, like in original AD&D, no initial NPC reaction based on Beauty and later standing based on Charm, like in Arcanum, no colored conversation options, like we got with Empathy in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. And no alignment shifts as in Torment.
For modders to influence aspects of the games, there have to be those aspects in the first place. And unless Beamdog really steps up its engine-updating, sophistication has to come from content alone. It has to be intensive, not just extensive. We can't keep stuffing the maps with custom NPC (as I wondered: where will Beamdog put Dorn's encounters?) Somebody has to dare and seriously touch those conversations, nostalgia be damned. Yes, it was fine marching to trumpets against Sarevok and evil goblins when we were 18 or 12, and our hair was long. But we are all rather grown up now. And we can't make games of our own, that's the fact of it - because we simply don't have the artistic resources and staff to paint up something as beautiful as these backgrounds, to make the music like Mark Morgan did back then. He's just a rare talent! We might produce something under different circumstances, but looking at the RPG field now you see that even exceptional titles like Tides of Numenara struggle with second-handedness, with the aging of the genre, gamers' attention deficit and the awful emphasis on convenience...
So we are stuck with tweaking and revamping this old stuff, at least for now. Then let's do it! Somebody has to add Charisma and Intelligence-based options, and more effects of Reputation, too. And quest endings. This goes for all of the games, even the Icewind Dales, which don't have to be slashers. The major mods I have seen so far, like Dark Side of the Sword Coast for Baldur's Gate, change some one side of the experience, or they make gameplay into something else completely, expand (Big World and so on). And then there are smaller, private quests. It may be because modders are reverential. That attitude, unfortunately, has to go - not just for us here, but for whatever Beamdog decides to make next, after they have finished updating the IE games. But we're here yet, and, hopefully, we learn something and get a little smarter every day. We read books, maybe even meet new people. I don't know all of the mods, or what's in production. So I must ask modders: is anybody trying to make the games smarter and more mature and profound?
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If you have high charisma thee are several different possible conversation outcomes in SoD I can think of.
In other words, fantasy has a kind of life inside of it, just not the sort of life we see around, but a very real one all the same - the races, classes, kingdoms... There is no reason why every halfling and kender has to be called Something-foot! But it's all submerged in inferior fiction we are inured to, the WoTC softcover awfulness, and power-gaming.
Then it all fell apart, if you ask me, when they made the bloated Shadows of Amn, which, regrettably, set the standard for munchkinism and simplicity Beamdog is carrying forward now. It's what is expected of them. Still, the games are too suggestive of bigger and better things from pen-and-paper to be just about fighting. They paste crudely or at least mention so many exciting features from the D&D universe. And they have brought some people, as I've read on these boards, to the pen-and-paper game, invited them to imagine stories, characters, maybe to write. Who knows what else? The important thing is to have freedom, action and imagination, and that's more than a coat of paint on a "basic form and structure." To my mind, what you think is the essence of the games is only an imperfect and weak and obsolete implementation of that power of role-playing. Fighting is, at the very most, a skeleton that carries the rest of the body; and the skeleton is a support for organs, it's a hat stand. So let it do what it's for. But if it becomes an obsession, that indicates a posture problem and gets in the way of more important things. So here, too, I believe, Bioware had so much fighting because they couldn't make the process better and different and couldn't even think to. But we can make the games more imaginative rather than less - splash more paint on the walls, if you want to call it that.
This is why I'm going to do that apparently foolish thing Bioware did and quote AD&D spell descriptions, at least in part, as they suit my spells, and I will keep strange school attributions. I will keep Burning Hands as an Alteration spell and won't make it Evocation. The logic at work in AD&D is not so straightforward, and straightening it out is exactly the way to kill the spirit of the game (there are some people who don't understand that the spirit can't be separated from the body, i.e. the rules, harmlessly). If I make any quests, I'm going to be suggestive, mysterious and maybe break some rules or upset balance - as a way to submerge these bare bones we see so much of in the flesh of adventure again. I remember that when I played BG for the first or second time, I didn't ever think about whether a long sword +2 in the first chapter is too much or not; I didn't care, because there was still so much to discover. I didn't know how to play the game "the right way," min-max, I just did what came naturally. So I think that with mods, instead of streamlining things further to the complete squad perfection of Jagged Alliance, Shadowrun or whatever, we need to twist them and break them. Instead of eradicating exceptions, which is all too easy, we need to put the exception in the center of gameplay.
The way to do that is primarily by treating every situation, quest, conversation separately. Just as in life, nothing follows a template. The pleasure of order is a sweet self-decay, but surprise keeps people on their toes and those toes strong. And that's what I call for here - a bold rewrite. Somebody who is in love with dialogue and quests must do this one NPC at a time, from Candlekeep all the way to Sarevok, or the same way again for Icewind Dale, if they prefer it. As for me, I'll try to do a little of that with my spells. That's my modest contribution, in addition to walls of text. For example, my Mending spell, though I can't make it very useful in the games, will, in addition to its modest main power (which is ready), let players in BGEE fix a certain ancient suit of armor that may fall into their hands. I'll have to edit a conversation and some globals for that, test, it's a very particular application, but that's the sort of thing that gives life to a fantasy and some meaning to what we do here.
To be honest I've contemplated doing this kind of mod before, but it is a rather daunting prospect to commit to such a large undertaking when I'm already just barely able to keep my existing mods updated and running.
This, by the way, brings to mind another question - why doesn't Beamdog really go ahead and make a different game on a new engine? Let it be 2D again, for economy or for effect, just not with this horrible old programming. Then they could make some departures from the IE formula that they have to more or less stick to right now, or they'll lose players. And it's not really necessary to go out of one's way and invent hyperbolic worlds like in Torment: Tides of Numenara to make something interesting. I've realized that what games really need these days are good artists - not writers or designers, but painters, drawers, musicians, classically educated... Any of us can be decent writers or designers, it's the dearth of people who can really draw and really make good music that's crippling the industry. Remember Disciples 2? That one wasn't even an RPG, but it was an experience. Or the music in the Heroes of Might&Magic series.
Something beyond ingenuity. Besides, any fine writing or design will be bottlenecked, I think, by the CRPG genre, so no great heights are even required here. But the other things have a place...
Tomorrow I'm going to get back to Romain Rolland and "Colas Breugnon," I swear it here to make an ass of myself. Maybe I'll actually improve.
Only in the sense that back then I didn't even consider the possibility of getting hired by a game dev company. The task of seriously overhauling existing quests just turned out to be that big and tedious, that, despite years already devoted to the modding, the end result still no longer seemed rewarding enough. E.g. I abandoned the idea because it seemed too underwhelming, rather than "I could do it, but with the job offering on horizon I'll instead focus on that".
The Infinity Engine is a product of its time, and although Beamdog has done a fantastic job updating it and opening it up for modders to go crazy, at the end of the day it is still a 20 year old game engine. I have spent more time than I am willing to admit fighting the engine into doing what I want, and it often requires roundabout and complicated methods to do so.
Calling music and the visual side set dressing, I think, misstates the point for games as much as it would, to use your metaphor, for theater. What is a theatrical production if you take away backgrounds, clothes, make-up, props... don't stop there, take away also the curtain, music, sounds, lighting and the stage itself, and the acting, too, because that, after all, is only presentation. Leave the essence, the play. What are you going to have in the end, theater? No - literature. And that's something else. Theater, or movies, or games are exactly literature made available to the senses. We don't praise a stage production of Hamlet because Shakespeare has written a good play, and we don't praise a movie because it's based on a solid screenplay. We can compliment the writer separately, and it's a nice foundation, good form, but it's before the job of the director, camera man, actors, composers begins to actually fabricate the movie.
The reason I separate writing from the rest is because the best prose or the best poetry are a thing in themselves and they don't transfer easily or completely from the page, so rather-good writing is probably the most a game can hold. Games are a popular genre, after all. Have you played Morrowind? The 36 Lessons of Vivec were seriously excellent poetry, how many players understood them? On the other hand, some years after, I realize that Planescape: Torment had only rather-good writing. If it were any better, the game would be unplayable completely.
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, mechanics are useless. Just like games themselves are useless, if they are only time-wasters. I don't want to waste my time. Baldur's Gate, Torment, the Fallouts, Morrowind, Vampire: The Masquerade, Faery Tale Adventure 2 and other games I loved were eye-openers for me at the time, because they represented real achievements in some ways. They did something special, they were art. I don't remember them for their mechanics, though, of course, they delivered their "message," made their impact through mechanics. So in that sense mechanics and writing are important. But I wonder more and more whether all of those possibilities games show us can't be discovered first-hand in real life or in literature, music, the visual arts directly. If it weren't for the diminished ability to immerse ourselves in novels and imagine us as characters there, would we really care for these interactive worlds that are imagined for us? So it may be possible to grow out of even the best games. The reason I make mods now rather than play is because it's more interesting for me to see what real-life effects my work is going to have on the people who play them - what response, what interactions and inspirations.
silverscreen. There is something amazing about a ranger appearing in a computer, still. But, though the mechanics are good, it's whether a game is worth spending time on on that account is what I'm asking. Mechanics are like a fish hook, they draw players in, catch them by the interest. But what is that interest? Is this any different from how a drug works? Mechanics hone in on some weak point in us, something lacking that we make up for when we play. Might&Magic VI had flying. Flying! Over a 3D landscape, towers and people. Was that ever a wonderful thing. I couldn't do it anywhere else at the time. And, for that reason, the mechanics are a trick. It's the same with some movies. Hitchcock was a master of grabbing and holding attention, and there was a time I was very impressed by him, you can say I still am. But I don't go back to his films, ever, because they are just trickery. BG1 is wonderfully smooth and immersive, it works well, but to be excited by that alone is to sing praise to the efficiency of opium.The real magic is not in cleverness, it's in what it paves the way to. In the case of the first BG I can count off these real strong points, the ones that make emotional impact: a story about the darkest and most gruesome thing, murder, and someone who decided to become a god of murder; an interesting world and area of the world (the Forgotten Realms are original in a few ways, the Sword Coast was not then as explored and known as, say, Waterdeep); realistic, harmonious, detailed and smart backgrounds and animations; music; spacing of maps and action; taste and measure; the discrete nature of encounters; even the writing, which was sometimes immature, at other times sophisticated or penetrating, and maintained the right level of boyishness for an AD&D adaptation. Now, of course, I cry "Change the writing, give me alignment shifts, different quest endings!" But that's because years have passed, and I've grown up somewhat, and those good things are all too familiar or too obvious now. The bare bones of mechanics show up from under the flesh of gameplay. And when people, yourself for example, laud these bones so much, that's somewhat strange for me to hear. It's like praising the strength of the beam that holds up the roof of a house - how great it is, how efficient it is. Well, what's fair is fair, but when the rest of the house and the people in it are called "paint on the wall" or "stage dressing," now that's peculiar.
Btw, since you mentioned M&M, it's still my most favorite game series. And not because of outdated art (I prefer 7th and 8th parts) or the sound (I often play with audio dynamics switched to radio, lol), but for the robust gameplay mechanics that no other game had yet to offer
Honestly, despite MM9 and HoMM4 having been my introduction to the series (as well as to RPG and TBS genres as well, respectively), I don't consider them canon. That's when the solid MM universe has begun to fall apart and lost its warm charm, imo. Sequels may have better graphics, but they're just a hollow shell without humorous ironic writing style and tiny design elements to enhance the gameplay. Alchemy, arcomage, challenge pedestals, genie lamps, ore, bounty etc. - all of these enriched the basic monster-killing dungeon-cleaning process with a ton of little things to do. If any decent designer and writer could do it, we wouldn't have had hundreds of RPG titles consisting of hack-n-slash combat and find-n-fetch quests.
Any decent designer and writer can indeed come up with these elements or others like them, but a) as Galadriel says in the LOTR movie, much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. The majority of gamers and designers are just too young and ignorant, too corrupted by games for mobile devices, touchpads and about two decades of intentional brain damage and attention deficit* inflicted on us by big-name brands. And when I say ignorant, I mean it. Most people these days have read nothing and watched or listened to little more. So where are they going to get good ideas from? And b) as Tolkien has said, it is easy to invent a green sun, it is more difficult to come up with a world where a green sun would be natural. One has got to create a game where a mini-feature like Arcomage would not feel out of place or a waste of time. That requires a comprehensive vision, discipline and a team of like-minded people. In a situation when games are either dumb AAA titles or crowd-funded and crowd-pleasing obscurities, it's just very difficult to assemble the money and talent for something middle-of-the-way - calm, original, intelligent, daring to take departures, just easy-going and funny...
Look at the adventure genre. Broken Age is a wonderful game, but the same Tim Schafer's Grim Fandango from happier times feels so much more relaxed and liberal, and so makes a longer-lasting if not a deeper impression...
* Well, that's enough of playing Captain Obvious from me, one only needs to look around to recognize the cultural sinkhole we are in, but I'll just say that even Beamdog fell victim to this imagined need to save players' time and add convenience. In the original BG it took Taerom a tenday to make the ankheg armor, but in BGEE they must have thought that was too long a wait; three days! Or just one day with a little more gold. How do you explain to these people that changing tempo this way throws off the rhythm of the game, it changes accents? A suit of armor you have to wait ten days for is much more rewarding when you get it than the one you can snap your fingers for and get tomorrow. Or how can you explain that cramming maps full of encounters is a bad idea? There is no explaining it to most people who are in game design now. This is all neurosis, unease, urban exasperation, a twitching eye, a desperate effort to make ends meet...
Tedious doesn't equal rewarding either, in a game with no time limit and the ability to sleep for 1 week straight for the modest cost of 24 gold(that's 2 long swords), adding artificial time delay doesn't make much sense.
You seem stuck with rose-tinted glasses on, not every AAA title is dumb (hello TW3) and because simpler games were more exciting for you back then doesn't mean newer games are less exciting for people in similar situations as yours 20 years ago.
By artificial, I meant artificial within the game, because this waiting time can be skipped over with no consequences at all, you could make it be months of in game time and it still would be artificial as you could spend these months at an inn for a fraction of the armor's cost.