The fourth place is the menu where all the inventory management, map viewing, crafting, skill point allocation occurs. In some games it feels like an integrated HUD (Pip Boy) and others a disconnected application in itself. Some the world pauses others you’re still vulnerable. Some the sound cuts and it feels cold and sterile or tacked on. If I’m spending hours in there rearranging furnkle berries into a corner not sure if I ought to throw them out yet, putting gems in sockets and comparing +3 modifiers on some purple enchanted drop — make it a nice experience! Some feel like business to business software. The trading system with NPC overlaps here. An area ripe for more creativity in my opinion. Have that mutant acid ostrich egg I’ve been carrying get cracked and burn a hole through my bag while ruining half my provisions.
Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#42I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…
I have commented on Todd's failure to deliver on such promises in skyrim before. But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust. I'd love exactly the same; the game should still tell a story or have a point (unless it's a complete sandbox), so key plot points can be included but otherwise it's a simulation and the player can do things with their agency, but so…
> But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust.
The problem is most deployments will likely be sloppy shovelware and every now and then we’ll get half decent games with it, maybe a great one every few years. Just like how we see now with garbage unedited LLM outputs flooding the internet and dominating searches as “articles” or “blogs.” It is just far too easy flood us with trash while any decent work gets buried in it and can’t be found.
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#43I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…
It sounds like you want to play EVE Online, but as a guy with a sword rather than a guy in a spaceship. There is a story, but it doesn't really matter and there's no direct way to interact with it. Systems are given safety ranking from 0.0 to 1.0, depending on how fast the NPCs show up and destroy your ship. Even in 1.0 space you're not really "safe" from someone deciding they just want to blow you to smithereens.
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#44I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…
I don't think you're _wrong_ for wanting these things, but I think the largest game developers avoid them and provide more "on-rails" experiences for good reasons.
The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants and needs, and they would take actions to fulfill those wants and needs regardless of whether or not the player was even watching. It sounds like it would lead to a very interesting world, but in practice it led to criminal NPCs being dead before the player can meet them. (The truth to this story is debated: https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/)
Likewise, the concept of an MMO where you aren't necessarily safe from other players in a town sounds interesting, especially in a game with a relatively small community. Applied at scale to something like World of Warcraft, I think that it would either be penalized so heavily that no one would do it, or not heavily enough so that new players have difficulty getting anywhere in the game because they are murdered by high-level trolls as soon as they log in.
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#45I really like the balance that Morrowind offered: it all felt like one big world and going from town to outside to dungeon was smooth and unannounced. You really felt like you were discovering a place, and you really got lost in a pre-gmaps sense. A modern version I like is Bg3. It has a much more linear playthrough than Morrowind and Toen/Outside/Dungeon is more clearly marked, but it's still smooth. Also, you have…
I remember "finishing" Morrowind and then accidentally becoming a vampire and finding out there was more to the game... then guild stuff.. then political stuff. Massive game.
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#46I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…
It sounds like you want to play EVE Online, but as a guy with a sword rather than a guy in a spaceship. There is a story, but it doesn't really matter and there's no direct way to interact with it. Systems are given safety ranking from 0.0 to 1.0, depending on how fast the NPCs show up and destroy your ship. Even in 1.0 space you're not really "safe" from someone deciding they just want to blow you to smithereens.
Not quite. I want a story. I want that story to unfold as I play in an organic way.
I played Eve a lot when it first came out up until about 2010 or so. The Alliance politics isn’t my cup of tea. The sandbox is great though. It’s just sad that gamers no longer see that and only want quests or missions or some direction on what to do next.
I’m hoping that with LLMs and AI, we’ll break free of this “waiting to be instructed” mentality of the youth and we can make games that are more diverse and open. Rock Star Games does some wonderful little scripted events and things in their games, they know how, but they still force you down this linear story arch. RDR2 was as close to the kind of game I’m talking about except for that fact. The fact that each “chapter” was a linear progression across the open world map.
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#47I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…
Ah, UO memories. PK killing as a Great Lord, Blackthorne shield in hand. Visiting town was all "bank" "bank" "bank" "lfg" "bank"
Everyone I played with had a macro key program that when you pressed F11 would chat “bank guards!” So when you were in Briton, you just spam F11 for safety.
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven’t played it, but my understanding is that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 works this way. Meet a person who tells you something’s happening tonight, and you better get there tonight if you want to see/do it. Maybe someone who’s played the game can chime in.
It’s a great game, much like its predecessor. However, it’s still linear in most ways. You miss out on those small side quests but that was true of the first game too. I’d love for a game to set the stage like: “Bad person/thing does bad stuff to good town” like intro, then it’s just you in a field by a small village where you live that is now in ashes due to bad event that happened while you weren’t there. Game On……
One problem is that the more you have happen without it being caused by/linked to player interaction, the more you need to have be possible to happen. Then you're either wrestling with a small chaotic world that doesn't make much sense, or you need to scale it up so much that there's no way the player will actually get to experience most of it. If you have 10 villages in your game world, then how many off-screen events can you realistically fit in while the player is away and have it still be interesting for the player when they come back?
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you want to play EVE Online, but as a guy with a sword rather than a guy in a spaceship. There is a story, but it doesn't really matter and there's no direct way to interact with it. Systems are given safety ranking from 0.0 to 1.0, depending on how fast the NPCs show up and destroy your ship. Even in 1.0 space you're not really "safe" from someone deciding they just want to blow you to smithereens.
Not quite. I want a story. I want that story to unfold as I play in an organic way. I played Eve a lot when it first came out up until about 2010 or so. The Alliance politics isn’t my cup of tea. The sandbox is great though. It’s just sad that gamers no longer see that and only want quests or missions or some direction on what to do next. I’m hoping that with LLMs and AI, we’ll break free of this “waiting to be instr…
I'm not sure how LLMs or AI could solve that. If anything it would make the problem worse, because kids will be more used to getting instantly generated plots.
Either way, if it does come to pass, I hope it doesn't become the norm. I am not interested in playing a game nobody was interested in making.
Re: Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
#50I want events to occur while I'm down in the dungeon. Maybe a neighboring village got attacked and now it's in ashes and down trodden. Maybe a castle is being besieged. I want a "play your own adventure" where the story just kind of happens. No main plot other than maybe certain events happening at a specific time. Games today are too linear. Even "open world" games. They zone it out so there's a progression, go to t…
I don't think you're _wrong_ for wanting these things, but I think the largest game developers avoid them and provide more "on-rails" experiences for good reasons. The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants a…
Dwarf fortress proves you can totally do things off script without player interaction. Poor Ragnar.
As for the scale issue with criminality. You are describing exactly what happens when you put people on rails. They all end up in town. At the same time.
If a game cluster has a population of 200,000 players monthly - it should have the space for it. No instancing. No sharding (other than maybe regional boundaries). Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time. Change it depending on their character creation choices, backstory, profession, etc. Let them naturally come to towns. Let there be enough land to support 200,000 inhabitants. These kinds of things I wish for. Space games are the only ones that manage to have enough room for everyone to live angrily ever after.
Ashes of Creation is trying its best in this area.
Land scarcity becomes a thing. Like in UO. You see what Eve has done, just let structures live so long as no one blows it up. In UO, they introduced decay timers so if you abandoned the game, you forfeit your lot. Games were smarter back then.