[Mandrake]

The ideas I've been thinking up lately have been trying to stike a balance between the great plots/storylines of Console style RPG's, and the level human-world interaction of the non-linear PC RPG's (eg, Ultima Underworld, Ultima 3, 4, Bard's Tale, etc). The problem (in my eyes) is that since the game world is focusing on the player as main character, the story must focus on the player, or have no story at all.

I think this is why I enjoy Chrono Trigger so much- it points at a way of creating a balance. It's not complete yet, but it does show us that you can have an indepth story that doesn't revolve around the player. Most of the actions of the player are sideline actions (until the death of chrono), most plot exists outside of the player. The player is the main character in the game (he is the one who rescues characters, etc, and is the catalyst for the world's events), but the actual *story* and *plot * (by plot I mean it in a novel-sense, not as in an excuse for character x to do thing y) focuses on the minor characters. You never hear the history of Chrono, where is from, etc. He never has dialogue in the animation sequences...he never does an action that the player does not control.

Yet, there is a story. A very good one.

Could it possible to take this another step? Could we add in a completely player created character and have the story focus elsewhere? You could get the adventure and sense of being in a world that you can only get form nonlinear games combined with the story of a good square-enix rpg.

Ideas?
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"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[Hajo]

Since I never played the console style RPGs this is foreign land for me.

I'll try to share some of my experiences and thoughts with PC RPG games.

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Lately I've been playing Divine Divinity. It's a PC game with a fairly consitent world and a ok storyline. There are 100+ quests, more or less linked to the story. The game is very nonlinear, the only problem is that some areas are harder than others and so you can't adventure anywhere, at some point the enemies get just too hard. So you'll have to adventure somewhere else first and come back after you gained better stats or better equipment.

From the 100 quests, only 20-30 or so are directyl linked to the storyline. The rest is there to stuff the world and let the player do adventuring independant from the story. Maybe I'll not finish the main story, there is a twist that I don't like. I'll do all the 'good' (in contrst to evil) quests that I can reach, and then start a different character to play from a different perspective again (warrior instead of thief).

The game world is sensible, interactive and responsive to players actions. IMO it's very good in this area.

If you ask me, Divine Divinity is the best synthesis from story and freedom that I found so far.

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Another idea is from First Encounters. There is stuff happening in the world. You can get newspapers and see whats happening. This way you can have a story which is not linked to the player, but you can allow the player to participate if he/she wants to. Arcanum had newspapers that reported the players actions (sometimes).

I think the newspaper idea is good for indirect storytelling.

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You could have story elements, and use markov chains to link them. The probabilities depend on the players actions or eveolution of the world in gernal. This way you can have a new story from the same set of elements each time the player plays the game. This is fairly revolutionary, I've seen only one game that does this so far: GearHead, by Joe Hewitt, an indepenadn game developer.

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Ok, that's it. Maybe it helps?

c.u.
Hajo

[Mandrake]