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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    AssassinGuy

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    Default Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    As in the sole survivor is building settlements while trying to convince everyone they meet that they’re urgently looking for whatsisname. Meanwhile Geralt is chasing question marks and playing gwent while similarly turning the continent upside down looking for that girl he knows.

    Am I to conclude that an open world game with tons to explore just should not have a main plot that implies urgency? Because I do enjoy chasing question marks and exploring all the cool stuff the devs put into the game. But then I progress the plot a bit and I’m supposed to snap out of that and feel like we’re desperately trying to do something or another.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    I don't think I've ever liked a game with a (hidden or visibile) main quest timer that I liked. So, yeah, probably. "I'm chasing my abducted baby, but first let me chat to this cool robot about helping them with repairs" always takes me out of a game.
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    BlackDragon

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Yes, main quest which is supposedly super urgent and then having all that side content doesn't really match up well. I think the Witcher 3 handled it reasonably well, though, because (a) you're a Witcher and it's kind of your job to deal with monster problems and (b) you didn't really have a clue where to find Ciri anyway. Fallout 4 is the one with the biggest disconnect between main quest urgency and sidequest messing around, IMHO.

    It works best where you genuinely have no clue how to carry out the main quest and therefore speaking to everyone you meet and agreeing to help them in order to try and get more information is actually a strategy you can see someone using.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Your game can be free, or it can be urgent. Pick one.

    If you want to make an open world game, it's unhelpful to give it a "plot" that, explicitly or not, gives your character an urgent, overriding motivation. Fallout 4 is one of the worst examples. And this is sad because the previous two Fallout games (3 and NV) threaded this needle much more elegantly. Both give you reasonable levels of personal involvement and motivation, but without the urgency.

    There are enough games that manage this balance well that, when a particularly bad example comes along, it does get called out.

    If you want to tell a compelling linear story, make a linear game. It's not hard.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    In the case of Witcher 3 it's also very on brand.

    The last three books in the novel series basically amount to Geralt bumbling around the continent doing sidequests until Ciri literally teleports him to the final dungeon.

    And yeah, if you're going to have a wide open sandbox world full of sidequests, have a narrative that encourages you to engage with it on those terms. (That said with Fallout 4 I use an alternative start mod and aggressively ignore the main quest because it's real bad.)

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by veti View Post
    Your game can be free, or it can be urgent. Pick one.

    If you want to make an open world game, it's unhelpful to give it a "plot" that, explicitly or not, gives your character an urgent, overriding motivation. Fallout 4 is one of the worst examples. And this is sad because the previous two Fallout games (3 and NV) threaded this needle much more elegantly. Both give you reasonable levels of personal involvement and motivation, but without the urgency.

    There are enough games that manage this balance well that, when a particularly bad example comes along, it does get called out.

    If you want to tell a compelling linear story, make a linear game. It's not hard.
    Yeah. At many point in 3 you have absolutely no clue where you're going IC, so it make sense to wander around, searching for clues (or stumbling across the plot by accident; I ended up in Vault 112 completely by chance on my first playthrough), and in New Vegas the plot isn't urgent at all, at any point. Revenge is a dish best served cold, after all.

    In 4 you get weirdly railroaded at some points and then let loose at others, and it gives the game a bizarre herky jerky pacing. The Witcher 3 doesn't stumble this bad, but there definitely is some disconnect between plot urgency and side stuff at a few points. I know I let some sidequests pass close to the end of the game when the pacing picks up in heading to the climax.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    I will be honest, its never bothered me much. I grew up playing games like ff7 where there is a literal meteor heading for our world and yet I feel the need to spend lord knows how long breeding chocobos till I get my gold one. Ive learned how to compartmentalize the incongruity between incoming world destroying threat and running side quests. I dont like actual timers though. I dont like being rushed outside of short events like, again, ff7, when you have to flee the mako reactor before it explodes.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Certain racing games have successfully combined free and urgent, where the finish line is on the other side of town and you can go any way you like as long as you get there before the other drivers. Granted, the task is always the same, but it definitely rewards exploration if you spend time getting to know the turns and traffic patterns before a challenge comes up.

    On the other hand, Crackdown was interesting in that if you linger after clearing an area of the city to gather power ups, collect cars, or whatever, civilians inevitably come to harm, negatively effecting your rep. It ultimately mattered very little, but it seemed like the design intent was to impose an urgency to move on based on societal pressure rather than to thwart impending doom before it's too late.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    As poorly as Morrowind has aged otherwise, it more or less nails this. The first thing Caius Cosades tells you is to go join a guild or two, earn money, hone your skills and build up a reputation and a network of contacts. Which is what we're actually meant to do in this game. He also tells you to go do your own thing pretty regularly afterwards.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    One that always bites me and annoys me is Star Control 2--there's a hidden timer that's just a hard loss condition. And you really have no way of knowing about it until you fail. I understand the idea, but it's still a bit contrived that now is the point where this centuries+ old stalemate hits the "ok, one side just wins over the course of a few months" point.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Both Tyranny and Expeditions:Vikings gives you a time limit to both wander and complete the main plot.

    Expeditions:Vikings gives you a time limit twice, the first in the First Act in order to get your expedition in ready in time to sail to England, and the Second Act gives you a couple of seasons either to make allies or to gain enough power and prosperity to properly present your claim to the king.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    I think Fallout 1 did a pretty good job at it, but the timer was pretty lenient for the size of the world. But yeah, a lot of games do a very poor job making things actually feel urgent. I think it doesn't help that the passing of time is really uneven and not well conveyed outside of a simple day timer that you probably don't actually notice. Like having many missions take 8 hours of real world time but those 8 hours take most of your actual play time and then 2 weeks of in-game time passes in a few seconds of travel.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    They don't have to be mutually exclusive. To use Fallout 4 as an example, sure I'm urgently looking for my missing son, but that doesn't mean I know how to find them. Give me a reason to explore instead of following a trail of breadcrumbs. It takes very little rewriting to make the exploration aspect make sense. A lot of games just have bad writing and don't bother.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by Brother Oni View Post
    Both Tyranny and Expeditions:Vikings gives you a time limit to both wander and complete the main plot.

    Expeditions:Vikings gives you a time limit twice, the first in the First Act in order to get your expedition in ready in time to sail to England, and the Second Act gives you a couple of seasons either to make allies or to gain enough power and prosperity to properly present your claim to the king.
    Tyranny only has a timer on the first act, and it also teaches you something about the edicts with it (to whit: they are extremely specific in ways that allow you to work around their wording).

    The edict says that the valley must fall before Kairos' Day of Swords, which is one week away. If you wait a week then read the edict the timer is now a year.

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    BlackDragon

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by Anteros View Post
    They don't have to be mutually exclusive. To use Fallout 4 as an example, sure I'm urgently looking for my missing son, but that doesn't mean I know how to find them.
    Yeah, that's a big issue in FO4...you're pretty much told to go to Diamond City and speak to Nick Valentine within the first hour or two of the game. If you had to really hunt around to find that info and, as I said above, had to get in the good books of the people you meet in order to do that, doing all the side content would make a lot more sense!

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    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Kobold

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by Anteros View Post
    They don't have to be mutually exclusive. To use Fallout 4 as an example, sure I'm urgently looking for my missing son, but that doesn't mean I know how to find them.
    In that case there need to be a lot more dialogue options, whenever you meet a character - any character - who is even half-way sympathetic. If I were looking for my missing son, I'd be pumping absolutely everyone I met for clues, leads, rumours, theories...
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    I don't mind visible timers too much, if they're long enough. Fallout 1 was mentioned, and I'd throw in Kingmaker... you know you have to do X before the timer runs out, or you lose. But the timer is a long way away, X is not necessarily "The world is on fire" urgent, and so you can explore a bit. With Kingmaker, you have a series of timers, but, again, once you finish with X, you're free to explore until the timer resets again.

    The timer is there, it provides some urgency, but it has enough leeway that you're not questioning why you're saving kittens from trees when you could be saving the world.

    Invisible timers drive me nuts, as do urgent missions that you can forget for a year of game time and complete when you want.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    I have even more of an issue with fake timers. Where the game tells you you have x amount of time to complete a mission, but then halfway through the timer take you by surprise and have an unexpected time skip. Not many games like that, but the one I can think of is Fable 2 (I think), where the timer to handle to big incoming bad will suddenly get cut short without warning.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by veti View Post
    In that case there need to be a lot more dialogue options, whenever you meet a character - any character - who is even half-way sympathetic. If I were looking for my missing son, I'd be pumping absolutely everyone I met for clues, leads, rumours, theories...
    That would get dull very, very fast, since you'd just be hearing variants of "don't know" from tons of NPCs. Plus if the doesn't tell you go talk to Bob to advance the story, you have to talk to every schmuck you meet, most of whom can't help you, and you're effectively stonewalled. And if the game does tell you to go talk to Bob, we're right back where we started.


    One thing I find curious is that I can't think of any non-strategy sorts of open world games that use something like XCOM 2's Avatar timer as a source of urgency. That gives you a timer, but also a lot of time to believably pursue other side objectives. The enemy may not be very close to completing their plot device, or you might want some particular weapon or upgrade for the next set back the enemy mission, or whatever.

    I suspect the major issue is that very few non-strategy games really have loss as an endpoint. You might die and restart a boss fight or whatever, but losing the game isn't a meaningful concept in the way losing XCOM is. It also might be pretty difficult to integrate a timer (and the missions to lower it/events to raise it) into a more literal one-to-one game world like you see in most open world action games. XCOM can plunk a mission anywhere it wants because the game has no fixed tactical geography, and is abstract enough that giving you a menu of bad things to prevent offscreen is totally viable. But something on a fixed map would realistically have to procedurally generate missions, and be able to have the enemy do things like retake bits of the map. Thats really hard to do on a fixed geography, and even worse, risks disempowering the player.

    And that's probably the ultimate problem with timers, they remove power from the player. And nothing passes players off .ore than that. Pretty much the entirety of open world game design is structured around constant player empowerment.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    That would get dull very, very fast, since you'd just be hearing variants of "don't know" from tons of NPCs. Plus if the doesn't tell you go talk to Bob to advance the story, you have to talk to every schmuck you meet, most of whom can't help you, and you're effectively stonewalled. And if the game does tell you to go talk to Bob, we're right back where we started.


    One thing I find curious is that I can't think of any non-strategy sorts of open world games that use something like XCOM 2's Avatar timer as a source of urgency. That gives you a timer, but also a lot of time to believably pursue other side objectives. The enemy may not be very close to completing their plot device, or you might want some particular weapon or upgrade for the next set back the enemy mission, or whatever.

    I suspect the major issue is that very few non-strategy games really have loss as an endpoint. You might die and restart a boss fight or whatever, but losing the game isn't a meaningful concept in the way losing XCOM is. It also might be pretty difficult to integrate a timer (and the missions to lower it/events to raise it) into a more literal one-to-one game world like you see in most open world action games. XCOM can plunk a mission anywhere it wants because the game has no fixed tactical geography, and is abstract enough that giving you a menu of bad things to prevent offscreen is totally viable. But something on a fixed map would realistically have to procedurally generate missions, and be able to have the enemy do things like retake bits of the map. Thats really hard to do on a fixed geography, and even worse, risks disempowering the player.

    And that's probably the ultimate problem with timers, they remove power from the player. And nothing passes players off .ore than that. Pretty much the entirety of open world game design is structured around constant player empowerment.
    You don't have to hear "I don't know" exactly. They can drop breadcrumbs to lead you to other interesting areas and quests. "No, I haven't met your son, but there's an orphanage up north. Maybe check with them?" It's not that difficult to write.

    My personal problem with timers is that they make you miss content. Unless your game is extremely short, I'm not going to be replaying it just to do the side content I missed because some dev arbitrarily decided the main plot had to be done in 20 hours instead of 23 or whatever. I don't care if making me miss content makes narrative sense. That just means you wrote a poor narrative.

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    BlackDragon

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    See, I hate timers in video games generally, but it's absolutely not because it makes me miss content. I'm absolutely fine with content getting gated off for entirely logical reasons--e.g. my meathead barbarian with a two-handed weapon fetish and a hatred of all magic should *not* be able to become the arch-mage of the College of Winterhold, Skyrim! Long timers are actually somewhat worse, to my mind, because if you somehow don't manage to achieve the objective in time, that's so much more game to play through to try it again, and I just don't like repeating the same section of game over and over again. Missions in X-Com 2 that might take an hour to play through and then you fail them because one of your team is outside the rescue area at the end of the final turn--hell, just take off with the rest of them and let that guy die, he's clearly dead weight anyway, don't force me to replay the whole thing from the start!

    I guess what I'm saying is that the consequence for running out a timer should not always be immediate game over or forced mission replay, unless you just screwed up *that* bad that you can't possibly continue at that point.

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    Ettin in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    That would get dull very, very fast, since you'd just be hearing variants of "don't know" from tons of NPCs. Plus if the doesn't tell you go talk to Bob to advance the story, you have to talk to every schmuck you meet, most of whom can't help you, and you're effectively stonewalled. And if the game does tell you to go talk to Bob, we're right back where we started.
    All adds up to a good reason not to use that sort of quest hook, doesn't it? "A missing baby" is both several orders of magnitude more important and more urgent than every other quest the game can throw at you put together. It makes it really hard to justify spending time on anything that you don't think is going to aid you directly toward that objective, and no other.

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    One thing I find curious is that I can't think of any non-strategy sorts of open world games that use something like XCOM 2's Avatar timer as a source of urgency. That gives you a timer, but also a lot of time to believably pursue other side objectives. The enemy may not be very close to completing their plot device, or you might want some particular weapon or upgrade for the next set back the enemy mission, or whatever.
    I'm thinking of strategy games now, where you can lose a battle - and that has consequences, sometimes dire - but that's not the end of the game. There's plenty of chances to recover.

    The problem with this in (what's laughably called) an "RPG" is that it rapidly multiplies the number of states the world can be in. As well as "quest done" and "quest not done", there's also (one or quite possibly more) "quest failed" states. Which means more dialogue has to be written and voiced - and by design, large portions of that dialogue are mutually exclusive with other portions, meaning you can't hear them all on the same playthrough.

    (Alternatively you can just have nobody ever mention the failed quest again. But that kinda detracts from the "consequences" idea.)

    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    See, I hate timers in video games generally, but it's absolutely not because it makes me miss content. I'm absolutely fine with content getting gated off for entirely logical reasons--e.g. my meathead barbarian with a two-handed weapon fetish and a hatred of all magic should *not* be able to become the arch-mage of the College of Winterhold, Skyrim!
    I wish there were timers in Skyrim. For instance, if you start the college quest and then spend too long retrieving the Staff of Magnus, Ancano could have triggered a big enough - whatever that thing is - to actually destroy Winterhold. Keep messing about, and it could spread gradually across the map, becoming more destructive and requiring more complicated missions to shut it down as it goes.

    (Edit: better idea, let more 'rifts' open at random places across the map, emitting those 'magic anomaly' critters at intervals, and gradually turning sections of the map into wastelands that can only be repaired using the Staff. Kinda like Oblivion's gates. That would add a kind of personal urgency that would be increasingly hard to ignore.)

    Or with Potema. Once you hear about goings-on in Wolfskull Cave, if you choose to spend the next, let's say, seven days doing nothing about it, Potema should actually have been raised and bound by then, and you'd be faced with a zombie apocalypse - starting in Haafingar, but gradually spreading across the map the longer you leave it.

    But as both of these options show, it means adding a lot of conditional complication that many players are never going to see. That, more than anything else, is why studios won't do it. (A modder could, but it's a big job.)
    Last edited by veti; 2021-09-23 at 08:18 PM.
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by veti View Post
    All adds up to a good reason not to use that sort of quest hook, doesn't it? "A missing baby" is both several orders of magnitude more important and more urgent than every other quest the game can throw at you put together. It makes it really hard to justify spending time on anything that you don't think is going to aid you directly toward that objective, and no other.
    I mean I can't say it really bothers me; weirdly ignorable main quests have been part of cRPGs since about forever, to the point where I'll just consider it a genre trope. Sort of like how you can predict, with 100% certainty that the heroine and the hero are gonna end up banging and/or married by the end of any given romance novel. If you don't like it, don't read 'em.
    I'm thinking of strategy games now, where you can lose a battle - and that has consequences, sometimes dire - but that's not the end of the game. There's plenty of chances to recover.

    The problem with this in (what's laughably called) an "RPG" is that it rapidly multiplies the number of states the world can be in. As well as "quest done" and "quest not done", there's also (one or quite possibly more) "quest failed" states. Which means more dialogue has to be written and voiced - and by design, large portions of that dialogue are mutually exclusive with other portions, meaning you can't hear them all on the same playthrough.

    (Alternatively you can just have nobody ever mention the failed quest again. But that kinda detracts from the "consequences" idea.)
    This is incidentally why I tend to prefer strategy games to straight RPGs. A good strategy game has the possibility for outcomes like tactical victory/strategic defeat that make the decision space very rich. RPGs just have win -> gain power -> repeat ad nauseum, which tends to reduce their decision space to straightforwards optimization. I just find optimization much less engaging that strategic consideration in the face of uncertain outcomes.

    I was really thinking more along the lines of games like Far Cry or Assassin's Creed when I wrote that comment though. Sure those games have outposts to capture and convoys to raid, but it's all very pantomime; nothing happens if you don't do those things beyond not unlocking the silencer for a gun you never use or whatever. Adding that touch of strategy game could be delicious... but then you could actually lose, or at least be substantially hurt, and at this point I think games have gone so far down the RPG track of engagement through constant power increases it'll be a long time before we're likely to see something like that anywhere outside of indie oddities like Mount and Blade.
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    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.


    Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    That would get dull very, very fast, since you'd just be hearing variants of "don't know" from tons of NPCs. Plus if the doesn't tell you go talk to Bob to advance the story, you have to talk to every schmuck you meet, most of whom can't help you, and you're effectively stonewalled. And if the game does tell you to go talk to Bob, we're right back where we started.
    Not really. Let's look at the main beats of FO4's story.

    1.) Exit the vault.
    2.) Return home (Codworth directs you to Concord)
    3.) Go to Concord (Mama Murphy has a dumbass psychic vision and directs you to Diamond City)
    4.) Go to Diamond City (Piper tells you to talk to Nick)
    5.) Go to Nick's agency (assistant directs you to where he was last seen)
    6.) Rescue Nick (Nick interrogates you, gets a lead on Kellog)
    7.) Find Kellog (railroaded into using Dogmeat, who you theoretically have not even met)
    8.) Kill Kellog (Nick directs you to the Memory Den)
    9.) Go to Goodneighbor and read Kellog's mind (memories direct you to Glowing Sea)
    10.) Talk to professor whats-is-nuts (he directs you to MIT campus)
    11.) Get signal, join any faction to get into Institute
    12.) Choose whether to side with Institute or not
    13.) Story branches from here (urgency lost; son has been found)

    This is a decent story flow on paper. The problem is the direct "Go here, do this" NPCs give you.

    Starting off this is fine. Codsworth saying he saw a group of people arrive in Concord recently is a good, natural starting point. Mama Murphy's psychic vision is dumb, but if all the settlers just told you "Well, Diamond CIty is the biggest settlement around here, surely someone could help you", it'd be fine.

    Arriving in DC is where it gets egregious. NPC you cannot miss talking to tells you straight up to go to Nick. Best to move Piper inside the city, make talking to her optional. Asking around town a bit lets you know there's a detective in town, and he specializes in missing persons! Rad.

    Go to agency. Assistant tells you Nick is missing and she doesn't know where. Enter another round of investigations. Irony. Find the detective who specializes in finding missing people. Have assistant tell you he last took job from old friend in Goodneighbor. Go there, ask around, get a lead, follow it up.

    Etc., etc. This kind of story path would still ultimately get you to the same places, but would give you a REASON to interact with sidequests. Maybe have Bobbi No-Nose have a lead, but she wants your help with her heist first, etc.

    Not really that hard.

  25. - Top - End - #25
    Ettin in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    One of the main problems with timers in games, at least on a first playthrough, is that you have no idea how tight that timer actually is. Is it actually really restrictive or just a facade and you'll never actually reach it until you hit a certain point where it just jumps to the end of timer. You don't know much you actually have to hurry.
    There is also almost nothing worse in a game than getting 10+ hours in and realize some mistakes you made 8 hours ago means you essentially can't finish the game, that you have essentially lost a long time ago but just don't know it yet.

    Not related to urgency, but in playing the first Dragon Age I got to a point fairly late in the game where I had to do a lot essentially solo and I happened to pick a class/spec that simply couldn't beat the mission. After trying it a number of different times, and going back a save or two to see if I could change things, I just couldn't do it. I never played the game again or any of the later games.

    The "you lost a long time ago, you just don't know it yet" is also what put me off of Phoenix Point. It is a bit more expected in that genre of game, but the lack of real feedback from the system as to where things went wrong and how were bad.

    Which mostly just illustrates the difficulties of actually adding urgency to a game.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    I mean I can't say it really bothers me; weirdly ignorable main quests have been part of cRPGs since about forever, to the point where I'll just consider it a genre trope. Sort of like how you can predict, with 100% certainty that the heroine and the hero are gonna end up banging and/or married by the end of any given romance novel. If you don't like it, don't read 'em.


    This is incidentally why I tend to prefer strategy games to straight RPGs. A good strategy game has the possibility for outcomes like tactical victory/strategic defeat that make the decision space very rich. RPGs just have win -> gain power -> repeat ad nauseum, which tends to reduce their decision space to straightforwards optimization. I just find optimization much less engaging that strategic consideration in the face of uncertain outcomes.
    Eh, a good RPG can have different kinds of winning or losing. Win but spend too many resources. Win, but a favored companion dies. Win, but in a way that makes a certain faction hate you. Win, but in a way that makes your companions like you less. And so on.
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    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    What are peoples’ thoughts on things like the cultist squads in Dragonborn or the Dark Brotherhood assassination attempts in Tribunal? They seem like a logical way to ramp up the urgency but they’re kind of distracting.

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    What are peoples’ thoughts on things like the cultist squads in Dragonborn or the Dark Brotherhood assassination attempts in Tribunal? They seem like a logical way to ramp up the urgency but they’re kind of distracting.
    I feel like the common sentiment is "free loot" or "speedbumps".
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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    What are peoples’ thoughts on things like the cultist squads in Dragonborn or the Dark Brotherhood assassination attempts in Tribunal? They seem like a logical way to ramp up the urgency but they’re kind of distracting.
    The logic to compel the player is good and well, but in both of those cases the implementation is definitely more distracting and immersion breaking than it should be (tales of the DB assassin's impossible appearances are legendary). They're also both blatantly telegraphed by the simple fact that you must have either manually installed their existence into your game world or were well aware of them and the entirety of the additional content when you purchased a GOTY edition. When you can choose to postpone that kind of urgency at the title screen, it loses something.

    I do appreciate the notion that as the character advances and gathers renown, or steps out as the chosen one, the BBEG devotes more resources to stopping them, which does tend to spur the hero toward the final cofrontation. But if those attacks cease, or are too easy and never increase or the BBEG seems like he's patiently waiting on the player thereafter with no real threat to the rest of the world/story, the urgency dies. Miraak swooping in to bogart your souls is little more than annoying when dragons are throwing themselves at you. I guess part of that is on the player, because by that point I had ground out more than enough souls to unlock any remaining shouts and was totally into sharing the wealth. "Go ahead, you take this one. You need it more than I do."

    It makes it downright funny how Breath of the Wild makes the Yiga more aggressive after a certain point, thus prompting players to likely delay that part of the story on subsequent plays. It certainly doesn't feel like increased urgency afterwards, but more like gratitude for the frequent delivery of bananas, rupees, and slick weapons.
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    Ettin in the Playground
     
    GnomeWizardGuy

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    Default Re: Urgency in free roaming games, and/or lack thereof

    Quote Originally Posted by Morty View Post
    I feel like the common sentiment is "free loot" or "speedbumps".
    Or just plain annoying. If I am tooling around doing sidequests, I don't want the game the snap a leash on my character and say "Go beat the game, NOW". I only want games to enforce a timer on me if the rest of the game is built with that expectation in mind. If the game is relatively contained, I don't have an issue with it forcing a timer once the story hits a certain point. Mass Effect 2 did this, instituting a timer once you had done a certain number of missions. Since the game wasn't Open World I didn't have a problem with this. Suddenly dropping a timer on you in Mass Effect Andromeda would be much more irritating.

    Generally speaking, I prefer that games have an obvious "advance the world state" quest. You do the main quest, you side with Faction A, now Faction B's quests are unavailable. That's perfectly all right, as long as it's obvious something like that may occur. It means I can do all of Faction B's quests before doing the main quest, then advance the story. If I'm sidequesting for Faction C, and then Faction A wipes out Faction B off-screen based on a hidden timer? That makes me upset.

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