The Eggplant said:
Er, so. Opinions, Escapists? Do you enjoy being able to put your own personalities into RPGs, or is any roleplaying good roleplaying?
Part of the problem with completely free-form roleplaying is that it's functionally impossible with today's technology, programming, and so on. For there to be fully freeform possibilities, a game would have to have fully functional, sentient A.I.
For example, let's take a game like GTA IV. Even being an open-world setting, with freedom to play how the player likes, there's still a very limited number of options a player has when interacting with NPCs. NPCs can react to violence or crime by fighting or running, minor squabbles by complaining, or threatening to fight. The random NPCs have about fifteen options they can take to any given stimulus, which are pretty much limited to "Mug, fight, steal car, ignore" for the player. That means there are about three to four responses for every one thing a player can do.
Expanding on that, what if story important NPCs could be affected the same way. They can be punched, or shot in the foot. This may make the NPC like or dislike the player character more, depending on what happened to who, and so on. This would mean they story-important NPCs will need a long-term memory. So they can remember if they need to be offended at a player, or think that he's a good person. Or so offended that they'll try to kill the player on sight.
If that's the case, the player can't complete the story through that NPC, which means another potential storyline chain needs to be available through other characters. Which also need to have a preset series of cognitive thought in order to maintain suspension of disbelief. All of this needs to be planned ahead of time, and have a response for whatever stimulus they're given. It means that every potential story needs to be pre-thought, pre-examined, and then programmed. The only alternative is to make a fully functional, intelligent, free-thinking AI program that decides how characters think and act.
Another quick example. Think of the dialog chains in
Mass Effect like a choose your own adventure book. Each chain is a potential future, with three options available to the player. Even keeping to the strict confines of the narrative (Soldier, three possible decisions), that means the equivalent of three chapters per decision. Seeing as there are at least five major decisions for the story, that's 15 pivotal decisions to write separate narratives for, each which have minor outlying decisions which impact the narrative in little ways, a total of probably 30 chapters worth of content. In other words, for a single game, it takes 30 chapters of writing for one of the five major paths, or a total of
one hundred and fifty chapters per book. It's a lot to write and program for.
Simply put, the sort of free-form pen-and-paper narrative and role playing session is functionally impossible with today's technology. Just like we can't have writers beamed into persons' heads to write books custom for every decision the reader would make. Instead, they write characters into situations, and act as the character would act. Expecting games to be completely different isn't impossible, just nigh improbable. Maybe if we one day create truly sentient AI, maybe if we drastically increase the hardware capabilities of home computers, and maybe if we have a developer so devoted that he'll throw away time and money so endless that it would cost more to code the NPCs than the rest of the game. Until that time, though, I'm happy enough that games try to make multiple roles, so at least one can fit different players. I may not empathize with Master Chief or Gordon Freeman well, but I can clearly get behind the guy from
Feel the Magic.
So, while games like Knights of the Morrow Effect try to bridge the gap and make a game's narrative more interactive, it's impossible to truly free a world that has to be programed. Although, to be fair,
Animal Crossing comes closer than nearly any other game on the market.
