Modern Games: Endless Landscapes! 1,000s of NPCs! Amazing Sandboxes! Shallow, Empty, Primitive.

[TPiddy]

Sorry, you want character and interaction, play Mass Effect or GTA... you want free-roaming adventure and fun? Play Skyrim or Saints Row....

Different tastes appeal to different gamers... if every game was small, linear and had good writing I would hate gaming... there has to be something for everyone...

Wake the fuck up. Just because a game is an open free-roaming game, isn't an excuse for shitty writing and boring quest design/characters. Like ppl are saying, at NV.

If you personally found the characters boring.... I suppose that's really just your problem then isn't it? I don't need every fucking person I meet to be filled to the brim with personality. I rather enjoyed some of the stories presented, but to most fans and players of Skyrim, the story takes a backseat to adventuring and exploration.

If adding more personality to random NPC's in stupid shops will sacrifice scale or other game mechanics then you're the one that needs to wake the fuck up and realize that with today's tech limitations you can't have it both ways.

Mass Effect is character driven, well acted and well written. In return for that you hand over a lot of creative freedom in your character's choices, you shrink the size of the world and your combat options are very limited.

So please let me know if you ever come across a game that manages to pull off both at the same time.

 

[jonyboy13]

Where is it? I'm sure I've put it somewhere here. Ah, there it is:

Obviously, Skyrim is not as bad as DA2 when it comes to characters but still, the dialogue is quite depressing. I didn't hear a speech that made me excited, I didn't see a character that I went straight away to the wiki to read about out of interest (except Daedra Princes but that doesn't count) and I didn't have the options of dialogue that I wanted. Is an engaging dialogue with not a one sided character too much to ask for?

 

[Trotgar]

-snip-
Ha, no worries, I'll put a different one up when I get a sec. This was just the only avatar I had handy on my desktop.

Thanks a lot! I might be a little overprotective of "my" avatar, so it's great if there's no harm for you in changing it.

Thanks again.

 

[ResonanceGames]

Hopefully no one else has Yagrum Bagarn...

The genre hasn't progressed in that manner since Ultima 7, which had individual dialogue for each NPC.

But getting rocks and empty stretches of grass to look right is more important than creating personalities to interact with.

Yeah, Ultima 7 is a great example. I think we're finally moving back toward that level of depth (though maybe not that level of feverish commitment to simulation, which is a shame). I understand Bethesda's dilemma of trying to juggle the demands for better technology and more realism with more detailed world building, and while I think there's a lot more to be done, they're still doing a fairly decent job.

Coincidentally, the comparison between Ultima 7 and Skyrim is one of the topics on today's Gamers With Jobs podcast. It's worth a listen at least, comes somewhere near the end:

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/110563

 

[Machocruz]

So please let me know if you ever come across a game that manages to pull off both at the same time.

Divine Divinity, Ultima 7, Ultima 5, Gothic 1, Gothic 2, Risen.

 

[Wolfram23]

So please let me know if you ever come across a game that manages to pull off both at the same time.

Divine Divinity, Ultima 7, Ultima 5, Gothic 1, Gothic 2, Risen.

I played Risen this summer, so fucking good! Lots of characters, each place has personality, some definite gameplay choices nestled into a pretty tight narrative adventure, and good gameplay/combat!

I'll probably have to play that game again sometime. Looking forward to the sequel.

 

[Machocruz]

The genre hasn't progressed in that manner since Ultima 7, which had individual dialogue for each NPC.

But getting rocks and empty stretches of grass to look right is more important than creating personalities to interact with.

Yeah, Ultima 7 is a great example. I think we're finally moving back toward that level of depth (though maybe not that level of feverish commitment to simulation, which is a shame). I understand Bethesda's dilemma of trying to juggle the demands for better technology and more realism with more detailed world building, and while I think there's a lot more to be done, they're still doing a fairly decent job.

True. I understand the compromises too, but when a game is being touted as the best thing to ever happen to its genre, then it has to meet the highest standards of that genre in every crucial department, imo anyway.

Open world games have always been jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, though. Ultima 7 set the standard for world simulation in CRPGs, but had bad combat. Elder Scrolls has great environment building, but medicore combat and NPCs. Divine Divinity is decent to very good in general, but not top-of-the-line in any one area. Fallout 1 had world class quests and RPG mechanics, bad TB combat.

 

[predatorpulse7]

I've been running around Skyrim the last few weeks, and I'll gladly admit that I'm having quite a time. Between the massive environments and seemingly unlimited quests and characters, there's practically no end to the things I can see and do.

Unless I want to have a remotely convincing interaction with another character.

The visuals and world design have reached a pretty high standard at this point, but the actual gameplay, the conversations and interplay between the inhabitants of the game? That stuff hasn't advanced much at all in the five years since Oblivion. You still get the same small handful of canned responses. The quests are still mostly fetch. The characters are overly scripted, and the scripts are terribly short.

I've felt this way for a while, but Skyrim really cements it: game design is moving in the wrong direction. They're building these massive worlds and populating them with thousands of people, but none of them are remotely convincing. Your interactions with them are repetitive and predictable. Blame it on poor AI or limited writing, but there's no denying that the substance of gaming hasn't progressed at the same pace as the style.

Before everyone burns me at the stake, imagine Bethesda announces TESVI tomorrow. The setting is a single village and the surrounding countryside, forest, mountain, etc. The cast of characters numbers maybe two dozen. Quest lines? Let's say ten. Sounds just awful, right?

But they're going to give this game the same five years they gave Skyrim. They're going to pour the exact same budget and effort into this single location, this intimate cast, and these paltry few quests. Can you imagine the detail? The authenticity of the environments and your interactions, the depth of writing and character for each and every person, the depth and length of your quests...

I guess the easiest way to put it is this: games have expanded into massive open-world sandboxes with thousands of characters before bothering to master the basic interaction between just two people. If they'd focus their efforts on smaller locations and fewer characters, we'd at least end up with more detailed and convincing slices of a world. Then, with that base established, they can think about expanding the scene.

Just some random thoughts. Feel free to discuss or ignore.

It's because Bethesda is pandering more and more to the BRO crowd and they are impressed by NUMBERS.

I played Skyrim a lot, liked it very much but after 1-2 weeks I get the same dejavu I get the same feeling in almost all of these advertised HUGE worlds - that there is actually little to do, but you do it OVER AND OVER AND OVER again The main story always ends up mediocre at best,the focus stays on EXPLORING and it is the strong suit of such games(and it was for me with Skyrim as well).However the problem is that it becomes overstretched, spread too thin if you will.

I am 100% type of gamer and I LOVE to explore. I am the kind of nut that searched all the flags in AssCreed 1 and I didn't have a map like in AC2. In such massive worlds, the shallowness of the experience starts to come out after playing for a while. It gives you the feeling of immersion but only for a while. You want to see what is beyond the horizon but after the gazzilionth copy pasted cave/ruin(though to their credit it's not as copy pasted as oblivion) you get tired. So you head out to the towns to see the people of the land. To my horror, Skyrim's offering for personalities was almost as shallow as Oblivions. Sure, you have a lot of people in a lot of towns but you have maybe 4 personalities between them, though thankfully with better VA than in Oblivion, and that isn't saying much.

As I said, it becomes a grinding game, though the experience is enchanting while it lasts.

I like Bethesda cause they have some very good games but I would rather prefer a smaller world, with the focus staying on exploration, only with more meaningful stuff at my destination plus people that actually seem to have personalities.

I admire their efforts but they need to keep the overall model and make the world a bit smaller. I don't think anyone would notice if you would cut a third out of the skyrim landmass.

 

[predatorpulse7]

So please let me know if you ever come across a game that manages to pull off both at the same time.

Gothic 1, Gothic 2, Risen.

Risen is a Gothic lite but while it does bring back SOME of the Gothic charm it can't compare it.

Otherwise I agree. While having some clunky combat at times, these games are stunning in terms of player progression. I still remember the first time I downed my first orc(tough bastards) while in the far more shallow(and with a HUUUGE world, probably 2-3 times bigger than Gothic 1 or 2's world) Gothic 3, I was killing many orcs in the first 10 minutes or so. Or the time you gain access into a certain camp or clear a cave of shadowbeasts. And as far as I know the first 2 Gothics had no level scaling.

If the graphics were better and the combat was tighter, Gothic 1-2 would have been the perfect RPG's for me.Cool story, interesting characters(that became parodies of themselves by the time Gothic 3 rolled around), a big world yet with interesting content, interesting factions that favored replayability and so on.

I would like Bethesda to go the Gothic route, keep the TES lore but make the world smaller with more meaningful content.

 

[BreakfastMan]

So... All modern games are trying to emulate Skyrim now? Good to know.

Also, if you want detailed characters, why are you playing Skyrim, a game focused more on letting the player explore and interact with the world than the characters? Just seems a bit silly...

 

[Joccaren]

If you want good dialogue and convincing characters, play Bioware games.

Lets see if I can find that gamer heaven pic that is so true...

Ah, here it is, only the top half of the pic I'm thinking of though:

If that ever happens, I think I may die of happiness. The games that could be achieved if all those companies worked together towards one game...


But really, giving a team 5 years to work on a small area wouldn't be worth it. One year, maybe, but there is only so much you can do in one area, and for 4 of those years they would be sitting around thinking 'What the hell can we do now?', and start adding more quests in to add more content to the game.

 

[Apollo45]

Spoiler

And the worlds are designed by Bethesda.

Seriously, if you're playing a Bethesda game for the characters you're in the wrong place. They make their games this huge because it's a sandbox. Sure, the characters aren't that great, but they don't limit the amount of times you can talk to them, or where you can talk to them, or whether or not you can kill them (for the most part). They don't limit where you can go, what you can do, how many things you can kill, and so on. Sure, Lydia can carry your burdens, but if you talked to Juhani as many times as you do to Lydia you'd find her dialogue fairly repetitive too. Not as much so, sure, but there are also about 50 characters with any dialogue in your average Bioware game. Compart that to thousands in your Bethesda game.

All in all, they focus on different things, and I'm fine with that. I love my KOTOR and ME just as much as I love my Elder Scrolls. Bioware does characters, Bethesda does environments. If you want any more proof of that... Well, have you been down to Blackreach yet?

I totally want to live there...

So, while the characters might not be the best, and the game would be absolutely, immeasurably better if they put the same detail in to them as they did their environments, I don't think I want to wait another three years for the game to come out, ya know? Until they can make their environments the way they do in less than a year, and then get a couple hundred voice actors to act out hundreds of lines of dialogue for each individual character, I'm not sure there's a whole lot more that can be done. Personally, I'm content getting my story from Bioware and my worlds from Bethesda.

One more thing though... Bethesda has a modding community the likes of which has never been seen before. The construction set hasn't even been released yet and there are already hundreds of mods out.

 

[Vault101]

snipperoo.

not all modern games are skyrim

personally Im more of a Bioware person...preference and all that

 

[Vault101]

Where is it? I'm sure I've put it somewhere here. Ah, there it is:

Obviously, Skyrim is not as bad as DA2 when it comes to characters but still, the dialogue is quite depressing. I didn't hear a speech that made me excited, I didn't see a character that I went straight away to the wiki to read about out of interest (except Daedra Princes but that doesn't count) and I didn't have the options of dialogue that I wanted. Is an engaging dialogue with not a one sided character too much to ask for?

forgive me for my stupidness...

but he was talking about skyrim..not DA2.Obviously (regardless of what everyone thourght of DA2) it had its focus in other places

and as much as I think plascape tormet was great...all that text fried my brain

 

[Raddra]

Spoiler

What games are those?

OT: I really do agree, I was feeling this way when playing Skyrim earlier.

At the very LEAST they could have given us interesting, varied and evolving dialogue with our marriage partners and our followers.

However I've had deeper dialogues with forgettable NPC's than I have had with them...

I can't even talk with my wife. I can't ask her how her day has been. I can't arrange to have a meal with her in the tavern. I can't even talk to her. I get 'can I have some money from our store' and 'cook me some food'.

Its sad.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

not all modern games are skyrim

personally Im more of a Bioware person...preference and all that

So... All modern games are trying to emulate Skyrim now? Good to know.

Also, if you want detailed characters, why are you playing Skyrim, a game focused more on letting the player explore and interact with the world than the characters? Just seems a bit silly...

There's Skyrim on one end of the spectrum. The other end is highly-scripted and cinematic linear games like Final Fantasy XIII or Modern Warfare. So I don't think either is a "trend" in gaming.

I quoted these three just because they were the first few I noticed...

This wasn't my point at all. Skyrim's characters aren't as well developed as your companions in most Bioware games, but that's not the issue here. Your interactions with even the most well-rounded, well-written characters in modern games are still completely unconvincing, stilted, wooden, etc. The actual meat and bones of human contact within the confines of these games hasn't changed in half a decade or more.

You're still choosing from a handful of pre-written responses whenever you engage someone in a Bioware game. Your options with regard to your enemies and your companions are still embarrassingly limited. Today's notion of "freedom" in gaming focuses entirely on the exploration of a sandbox with a lot of minigames and maybe some token non-linearity when it comes to where you go first.

What if Bioware condensed the cast of characters down to, oh, three people. Imagine putting all of that time and effort into just that small group of NPCs. You'd have pages upon pages of dialogue, countless interactions of all sorts, tons of options and behaviors. Why isn't anyone going this direction? Why is it basically "okay, this NPC has a recruiting quest, a backstory quest, a resolution quest, three romantic stages, and one token conflict with another NPC - next character..."

I feel like the scope of games has very rapidly outpaced the attention to detail. Sure, things look shinier and have voice-acting, but no one seems interested in creating convincing artificial people. Yes, the environments are gigantic with tons of predetermined stuff to do, but why aren't they trying to master the basic physics and behavior of the objects and materials within in a single room?

Maybe the answer to all of this is "size sells", and that's fine. I just wish we'd see one of these great big developers try its hand at a far more intimate game world with a more limited cast and a massive expansion of game behavior, a.i., and true freedom.

 

[Disgruntled_peasant]

Anyone sayings 'having a big open world means you cant have interesting characters, you just have to choose' (or words to that effect) have not played new vegas. Ok in fairness, you only had a handfull of interesting characters and the rest were generic, and ok yes, the old titles still did better characters- but its a damn sight better than oblivion or fallout 3 did.

But yes, Betheseda really need to create some interesting and memorable characters in their games, having a wide open world doesnt mean you cant hire great writers and devote more resources to making more characters unique and interesting rather than "im a woman, kill some bears" or "I'm a bloke, go fetch"

 

[Zhukov]

Yeah, I agree.

(I made a vaguely similar thread about Skyrim somewhere.)

I think at least a part of the issue is that it's easier for a developer to produce quantity than quality. Basically, writing just one well defined character with varied and interesting interactions over a narratively satisfying arc is infinitely harder than stamping out 300 NPCs that say hello and send you on a fetch quest.

Writing is a skill and 99.9% of game developers don't have it, Bethesda included.

 

[Vault101]

not all modern games are skyrim

personally Im more of a Bioware person...preference and all that

So... All modern games are trying to emulate Skyrim now? Good to know.

Also, if you want detailed characters, why are you playing Skyrim, a game focused more on letting the player explore and interact with the world than the characters? Just seems a bit silly...

There's Skyrim on one end of the spectrum. The other end is highly-scripted and cinematic linear games like Final Fantasy XIII or Modern Warfare. So I don't think either is a "trend" in gaming.

.

really? I didnt have that many problems with Biowares charachters, what exactally do you want? the reason they dont have only 3 NPC's is because..well it doesnt exactally serve the story does? (that said I think you could make a game with 3..like say a survival situation mabye)

anyway what do you think the reason is? Id say is has somthing to do with the fact we swaped text for voice acting, and personally I prefer voice acting

yes, thats right, I prefer voice acting, makes the charachters seem more real and actually there,

also "they arnt convincing" is "somwhat" subjective...I find tali and Garrus from mass effect very convincing charachters, or the cast of followers from fallout NV...in fact fallout NV was very good in this regard

anyway my point is, even though you may not mean it I still think you were using skyrim as a template in whih to judge all other RPG's...a little too much, everyone loves oblivion but thye arnt going to gush over the charachters

 

[Nimcha]

Not a very good title, this is a problem very specific to Skyrim.