Fallout: New Vegas Dev: Recent RPG Advances "Undermine" the Genre

[Lukeje]

To an extent I have to agree. New Vegas was a lot more engrossing before I realised I'd done something stupid thus making the resolution too big for the screen. The cut off removed most of the compass, thus meaning I had to listen to character's descriptions of where to go rather than just following the arrows. This is also why I enjoyed Morrowind much more than Oblivion.

 

[Calico93]

Perhaps, Skyrim is a bit easy, until you get to around level 20 ish, or you stumble onto a dungeon and you cant beat the last boss thing because your level 6.
But then again New Vegas was a similar difficulty. Idk I think the difficulty is fine for Bethesda RPGs.
If you want a challenging RPG go play Dark Souls.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

His point rings true, but at the same time, one thing we have today that they didn't back then were these large, enormous worlds. With the map so large, it's by far easier to copy out a few textures for most of the whole map. And since so much of the world map looks identical in terms of desert/city/mountain/forest, it's hard as hell to build regions into our minds. You look at old RPG's, where every place you go is distinct, with it's own regional environments, and you can easily realize that you can go out and find things in specific places by getting hints like near the water, on the beach, or on the path south of some forest hermit's cave, and you know the region where to look. We can't do that today, not to the extent we could before. We'd be talking about damn near the whole map, if we weren't extremely explicit. So, instead of exploration now, we put up map markers to distinguish things.

We all have games where we know every twist and turn, whether it's a map on a shooter, an old RPG we've played over and over again, or something retro like Pac Man. But we look at how open the world is now, and we know that we'll never see all of it. We can't go from the forest to the plains to the hills to the mountains to the desert to the ocean, anymore. We go from semi-mountainous terrain to slightly more or less mountainous terrain. There's no distinction.

I have no contention with a journal system, though. A place that records and logs small snippets of things, hints for lootable places, unmarked locations, and interesting places I'm all for. I'd love to see a system where things have a way of assisting your GPS on a gradient, with a minor cross referencing system. If you found a scrap of paper saying "HEy JohNNY, Hid the CAsh in Our UsuAl STAsh, TERRi", you'd have no marker. But, if you then found a note/audiolog/whatever saying something like "Terri, after we escape, hide stuff by the old tree outside of [town name], Johnny", then if you already knew where the town was, a marker or minor quest note would appear in your log. If you didn't, then nothing would happen until you either stumbled across the town, or found someone who knew where the town was. Maybe a library feature, where you could go and search out specific information. Hell, they could even make that a quest, Fallout 3 style, where you're mapping locations of places because maybe there was a fire in the library, and a lot of the locations of things are missing.

But, having the current graphics system where everything looks the same, without an indicator system is a recipe for unpleasantness. Not being able to get around, relying only on luck and coincidental memories mean people won't be having as much fun, because most of their time will be spent looking for the fun they're trying to have. So really, what's holding us back from the in depth games of our past, is that we're limiting our environments.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

1. Dude looks like the evil Others leader guy from Lost
2. He is my hero for being part of the Torment dream team but he just isn't thinking correctly about the "convenience" features.

They need to be integrated into the game so they increase immersion rather than break it. For example the excellent old school [link href="http://basiliskgames.com/"]Basilisk Games[/link] series Eschalon has a Cartography skill. This skill is required to have any automap and the higher the skill is the more detailed the automap is generated.

Now instead of the feature being ho-hum I as a player am making a gameplay choice. Do I invest skill points in automap or use those skill points to increase my sword damage? And that choice provides an opportunity for roleplaying. I can decide that because my toon is a dumb warrior he wouldn't bother with cartography, writing stuff is for nerds. My smart wizard would definitely chose the skill, my sneaky rogue wouldnt get the skill but would spend his ill gotten loot buying map parts to better scout potential jobs.

Same with fast travel, quest markers, etc. Require the toon to have enough provisions before he can fast travel and consume them at a greater rate. Instead of quest markers have an optional npc guide the player can hire. The guide is a civilian so he is fragile and requires babysitting but he points out everything important so the player is motivated to protect him for convenience. Maybe the guide is only available if the player was nice to that faction so if he pissed them off earlier he has to do an obnoxious "atonement" quest.

He is absolutely wrong about full voice acting. He says it is a positive for the player but then you look at all the Bethesda RPGs and you see the voice doesn't add anything to the games. It doesn't add anything to the gamer's experience to hear Shepard's voice for throwaway lines like "Tell me the history of your people." and "Why did you join up with Cerberus?". Or worse like Skyrim where every damn innkeeper and blacksmith has the same voice which completely takes me out of the world.

He needs to replay Torment to see the correct use of voice, less is more. It is better to have a few important dialogs in voice to emphasize their importance in the plot. New recurring characters have a single paragraph or so to establish themselves. Then after that they say a few repeated words in voice when you first talk to them to remind the player of that first speech. Tertiary characters don't need voice at all, let them fade into the background. Fewer, higher quality voices are WAY better than ubiquitous crappiness. Skyrim is the poster child for "lets fully voice but to save money we will pull in the first 5 people who walk by the studio!".

 

[Kahani]

Do you think RPGs are too easy these days? Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Fallout: New Vegas developer Chris Avellone agrees.

Except that none of them were particularly hard. Fun, certainly, but no harder than any recent RPGs. If anything, Torment was one of the easiest RPGs I've ever played, since it's virtually impossible to die (and arguably, dying actually means you've won anyway). If you got stuck you could just go and do some more exploring and side quests, and by halfway through you'd be happily wading through everything the game could throw at you with one arm tied behind your back. And as a mostly linear, relatively small game world with a decent journal, there was never any trouble working out what to do next or where to do it.

Nostalgia is all very well, but criticisms like this really need to be thought through a bit more. If you've made an easy, linear, albeit awesome, game, then criticising other games for being easy and telling you where to go just sounds silly.

Of course, the other thing all these people complaining about journals, fast travel, and so on seem to forget is that these are, for the most part, single player games. If you don't want to use all those things, then don't use them. If you lack the self-control to play a game the way you claim you want to play it, that is in no way the fault of the developers. Skyrim is a perfect example. If you actually want to play without a guiding, you can just keep all quests unselected and never use the map for fast travel. But instead of just doing that and enjoying the game in their own way, people insist on whining about optional features that allow other people to enjoy the game as well. Your inability to play the game in a way that is very easily possible is not a problem with the game, it's a problem with you.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

On the point of quest compasses and journals...firstly journals have almost always been in games, I think that's not even noteworthy. Quest compasses/markers I can kinda see where he's coming from.

Using Skyrim as an example, with the thieves guild quests we always knew precisely what we had to steal and where it was. No rifling through desks needlessly, increasing the time spent burgling and thus increasing risk of getting caught. At the same time, even with the markers, it was frustrating enough trying to find a particular cave mouth or door.

In WoW, I remember spending ages trying to decipher journal entries and resorting to online sites, ALT-Tabbing out of the game to find where the bloody objective is. It works in games like Baldur's Gate II, but in something like Skyrim, it is necessary.

I think the ideal use for such a feature, would be to guide the player to the area, then leave them to get on with it and work the rest out for themselves. It should be absent for certain quests, f.ex Thieves Guild/Dark Brotherhood style quests, encouraging exploration to find the jewel/victim, increase chance of making a mistake, etc.

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

This is why every RPG needs a 'Hardcore Mode' or maybe a selection of how 'Hardcore' you want it to be.

Imagine a tick box screen at the beginning of a game (which would be completely optional to even open) which lets you select; whether everything you carry counts as weight on your person, or a reticle for your gun/ sword, or a compass, or a need for food or sleep or even going for a piss.

'Hardcore' RPG players would rejoice in the fact that their game has been made incredibly difficult, and 'Casual' RPG players would still be happy because they don't want to get lost for 3 hours, every 8 hours of play time.

And how much time would be needed to implement this?

Thats a great idea that I would love to see tried maybe in the next fallout game, but can you imagine the shitstorm from "hardcore" gamers? I've read so many posts about how theyre insulted personally by Bioware because Mass Effect 3 will have an RPG, Shooter, and Story modes, giving a list like this would be comparable to kicking their dog.

Although i might enjoy watching it happen..

OT: ""I'll say the 'advances' have been more for player convenience, sometimes good, sometimes bad, in my opinion. Journals, quest compasses that point directly to the goal and show you the route, auto-maps, etc. are helpful; at the same time, I think it undermines the thrill of victory and discovery and a lot of what makes an RPG an RPG (exploration, notably)."

I distinctly remember New Vegas being guilty of these, however it was an amazing game, honestly I dont think that its that big of a deal, so what? You have an objective marker, its better than stumbling around and being frustrated whilst looking for something.
While yes you could please both parties by having a quest journal that outlines what you have to do without giving markers and making it so that communication with other NPC's would be the way to find your objectives, it just seems like with games the size of Skyrim it just wouldnt be feasible to write that for every single quest and to record that much dialogue. If the game was solely text based I could see it working but one of the big draws for games is voice acting, and for a big name title coming out the lack of voice acting would seem like a step backwards to many.

 

[RyQ_TMC]

*snip*

*snippity snip*

Nothing wrong with journals per se. The problem is that the "journals" of modern games are just pagers with a GPS function. Nobody expects you to actually take notes. But some of us would like something less immersion-breaking.

Which brings me to...

As for Journals, They would be fine, if They were more...authentic in their feel. Rather than provide and explanation of what that NPC just said to the player character, let it be written by the character, in a way that requires from player at least minimal level of thinking to understand it. Preferably with some more fluff in between the lines.

This. When NPCs in Albion spouted five paragraphs of background at you, or Betrayal at Krondor took pains to carefully describe every single encounter, fishing relevant details out of the text wall quickly became tedious. But Baldur's Gate gave you the Bhaalspawn's journal, which included all the quest information, along with some not-actually-important entries about NPCs you've met, the main character's feelings - it felt right, like a proper journal. BG2 and Torment made improvements to the formula, sorting entries so you didn't have to look for a specific detail which came up in the previous chapter. You had functionality AND immersion!

As for quest pointers... I actually got irritated by it this very morning. This being December '11, I was playing Skyrim. I was given the task of finding the Thieves' Guild hangout. Supposed to be a challenge, in fact when I asked the questgiver, he angrily replied that being lead by the hand is the weakling way. He did give a painfully obvious clue to the location, but I let that slide. For a second the old school RPGer in me thought "Goody! I'll probably have to ask around, cash in some favours with the local beggars... maybe I will be forced to use thief skills? Fun!" But that was quickly replaced by bitter disappointment, when a big-ass arrow pointed me exactly to the door I had to go into. Bloody hell.

 

[ninja51]

Bethesda said he didnt know what he was talking about when trying to explain the PS3 bugs with Skyrim.

He is lashing out in a hissy fit of critical comments aimed exclusively at Skyrim.

Obsidian has never made a game that I would say is truely excelent. KOTOR 2 is their best one, and its missing an ending.

That was Joe Sawyer, this quote came from Chris Avellone. Different people, dawg. Avellone wrote Planescape: Torment, worked on Fallout 2 and Icewind Dale, he knows his RPGs.

I stand corrected. Though I still dont agree really with his outlook. It resounds very much of a "You kids today have ruined our rock n' roll!" arguement. Having a map, having a compass, even having markers does not dilute an RPG. An RPG is about playing a role, not having a more tedious questing system. Whether or not one prefers to be given exclusively oral directions and tacking them down to a place or following a quest marker does not make one person a more "hardcore" RPGer. Its all about preferance

 

[Durgiun]

I'll be honest, I think the compasses in F3, FNV and Oblivion make the game WAY too easy. If you know the name of the person, know the name of the town, know the name of the object, you should be able to find it yourself.

 

[lord.jeff]

Then make your games harder, don't go criticizing other developer that have found a formula that works for them and their audience.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

I agree with him somewhat. The compass markers in recent TES and Fallout games marking exactly where a quest item is bit silly and hand holding, how is my pipboy able to do this? I kinda liked in morrowind where there was only a basic map and to find certain places you needed to rely on directions given to you. Although I wish the npc had been better with the directions they give. I spent no little than four hours walking around in circles because I could not find the exact cave I was looking for, only to find out the cave was located across a river not far from where I started looking and I would have seen it if I had looked left instead of right from the start.

And whats wrong with journals? I like to think I've got a good memory but if I tried to remember every active quest I was doing in Skyrim I'd spend ten minutes trying to remember why I came to this cave exactly everytime I loaded a save.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

The Planescape Torment guy has a problem with journals?

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

On a side note there was a great mod for new vegas. It turned off indicators for areas you haven't discovered yet or some npc didn't tell you about. That let you explore at leisure while still letting you see stuff your character knows is there but you might not remember as a player.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Maps are not the problem......logs are not the problem... piss easy game play, lack of depth in game play/skills/equipment lack of depth in story.....these are the real issues...not ultra basic stuff that should be in all games.........

 

[Strazdas]

RPGs are too easy. then again, msot games nowdays are. so nothing new, they jtsu move along with the industry.

"Lastly, fully voice-acted characters has been something to adapt to since Knights of the Old Republic 1, and the amount of localization, recording and audio work required is substantial, but I feel it's a net positive for the player," he continued.

Because people nowadays are too braindead to play a game where characters speak english?

 

[Baby Tea]

If I played Skyrim and was told to get to a dungeon out in the middle of now where, without a map, I'd get SOOOO lost.

You'd probably head over to the wiki, and pull out their map. So yea, might as well make it ingame.

But if I'm reading this right, then the problem isn't all the branching out and morphing the RPG is doing nowadays - the problem is that they're missing an RPG that smacks you if you so much as ask for directions. Sounds fair I guess. Might in some cases be as easy as a mod. Script detailed quest text for Skyrim, take out all markers, including the map markers for places you've only heard of, and you're set to go.

Morrowind simply pointed you in a direction and said "it's somewhere thataway." I'm not sure I agree with that design, but I would like it kept as an option.

I would like a bit of middle ground. Skyrim's Treasure maps are good that way. Point to an obvious starting position, and offer clues to get to your destination. I remember finding my first treasure chest. Real sense of discovery, despite having the map.

 

[Alandoril]

He fails to realise that the majority of the people that played those old school RPGs were kids then, but adults now. Adults who, for the most part, don't have time to spend aimlessly trundling around environments in the hopes that they are doing something productive (in game terms.)

 

[CombustibleKoala]

Sometimes I really do just want the game to tell me where to go and what to do. I want it to hold my hand and tell me when to pull the trigger. It's comforting. It's mindless. Sometimes.

But 95% of the time, I want to be able to figure it out myself. If I don't get stumped and wander around the desert shooting things out of frustrated pique once in a while, I get sad.

The happy compromise? Slightly more customizable difficulty settings. Do you want to have to remember to eat every few hours? Do you want your journal to tell you what you need to know, or do you want to have to slog through the account of in game characters in order to glean that information? Do you really want that leg to just grow back?

Of course, I am crazy.