Ok, I have another noob question (not about TES, please): what do you guys think is the perfect balance between the sandbox elements of an RPG and its quest elements (main or side)? Are they best implemented as separate features of a game, or should one be absolutely dependent on the other?
I don't see why a plot cant be sandboxed entirely. A single protagonist RPG is essentially an intarective biography, and over the course of an RPG, you'd expect some fairly exceptional events in that character's life. Why developers feel compelled to stick to some deluded notion that their poorly written epic is better than a programmatic account of the player actions is beyond me.
My Ultimate RPG Sandbox(tm) would be a world where my game starts as I reach manhood/womanhood, and set out into the world. It ends when I die of old age, and then recaps the epic saga of my characters life.
As they stand, the Civilisation end game replays are interesting, since they basically mark on a timeline, the expansion and development of your society and culture, but think about if it was more detailed and personal. Of course, that's only the end-game.
What freeform RPGs like Morrowind and Daggerfall fail to do, is implement any world dynamics capable of generating significant events for player actions to revolve around. The failing of most procedurally generated quests, is that they're their only purpose is to give the player something to do. That design principle is fundamentally flawed, and needs to be done away with.
Procedural quests shouldn't be completely random, they should be emergent. The individuals, factions, towns, and society as a whole should have certain needs that are only self-balancing in the extreme through the use of exponentially effective negative feedback systems, and otherwise rely on player intervention to maintain homeostasis. The range of interventions the player can take can be either directly requested from NPCs, or just encouraged through peripheral game systems.
So for instance. Town A is hungry. The peripheral systems to combat this problem, would be raising the buying price of food, encouraging the player to trade foodstuffs from other sources. Or, the player might decide to start murdering fatties, and decrease the demand on food sales. Maybe the player decides to hunt the wildlife in the area, and upsets the natural balance, creating other unique problems.
Or, factions connected with the town might ask the player to intervene. An official council might request the player attain x units of <food> to beneift the town. A less scrupulous faction might ask the same of a player, so they can sell the food to the masses at grossly inflated prices, which causes it's own problems.
That's what sandboxing should be about. As well as providing theoretically unlimited things for the player to do in the world, giving meaning to everything a player does, or is asked to do increases it's worth as a narrative element. It's all considerably more complex in implementation than a typical RPG, but that just means more manpower dedicated toward the game systems, and less toward explicit scripting.
I'm very glad to see Vault Dweller is on the same page with:
Depends on the implementations. If a game forces you to have a party (I believe in Star Trail during your descend to a certain dungeon you must leave one party member behind to operate a lift mechanism on each floor -> you must have at least 3 people in your party, and that's assuming that the remaining person can handle the dangers of the last floor all by himself which is unlikely) then going out of your way to look for promising recruits makes a lot of sense. Otherwise...
Side quests shouldn't easily separable from the game as a whole, giving a reason like the example VD mentioned is infinitely better. Questing really should never be comparable to rewarding a neat dog trick with a Scooby snack. The player should have reasons and motivations for their actions beyond the tangible rewards.
By the way, the same flaw was in Fallout 2: I got the same "IMPENDING DOOM!!! but first, do some sidequests" feel, becasue you basically could play in this sandbox (or, "wastebox"? ) for years and the Enclave was totally motionless this whole time. I think BIS shoudl have added a timelimit in FO2, just like they did in FO1.
Complaints about the timelimit in Fallout to me were pretty much unfounded, but brought on through the ever present "main quest" notion. The most legitimate of the complaint is "I fucked around doing other stuff, and so now
I can't complete the game." Which is pretty terrible from a players perspective, even if they brought it upon themselves. It's another tick for the idea of sandbox. You didn't get the water chip, the vault dies. Tough. If there's otherwhile worthwhile narratives to pursue and
create in the game world, that's not a problem.
Fallout 2 would have been far better off without tribes, prophecies and the pointless "fetch the GECK" quest. Given that finding the GECK offered the player little motivation or direction, and was completely eclipsed by "HOLY SHIT! I want to explore this crazy fucking wasteland!" it would have been better to work with that as a strength.
And what was the Main Quest about?...
The problem was, the threads it gave the player to unravel weren't anything to do with that for quite some time. Getting started on the main quest was utterly counter-intuitive.
"Hey prisoner! We're forcing you, to work for the oppresive regmine that imprisoned you for god knows what. Go talk to some dickhead that nobody seems able to find, or even call by the right name. And don't go wandering off! Nevermind the fact that we seem to be the single most ineffectual and apathetic spy faction you've ever seen. We'll hunt you down. Er, if we could move."
And what's the first thing Caius tells you to do? Something else. So basically, the initiation into the main quest is to point the player in any direction other than the contrived series of non-events that somehow eventually lead to prophecies of ultimate power. In fact, if the guild quests had've been up to par, I doubt many people would have even remember to go back to Caius.
--
Player: "Dude, you'd better have something interesting for me to do. The fighters' guild wants me to kill bandits, which is marginally less boring than the mages guild, who want me to find items for them."
Caius: "I want you to talk to some guy at the mages guild, who wants you to get him an item."
Player: "Aw..."
Caius: "The item is guarded by bandits, if that helps."
Player: "Ah fuck it, okay then."
<runs off to get dwemer cube>
Player: I got your man-cube.
Hasphat: Great! Here's your reward.
Player: You're paying me with a fucking history lesson? Fuck all that shit.
--
At least Oblivion immediately introduces the seed that perhaps advancing down the prescribed path might yield something a bit more epic than a chain of FedEx assignments. Not that I necessarily agree with the way it's imposed.
Urinary Sepsis VII: "FUCK ME DEAD! IT'S THE FUCKING CHOSEN ONE! RIGHT HERE IN OUR PRISON CELLS! THE PRISON CELLS WE'RE USING TO MAKE A DUBIOUS ESCAPE FROM SOMETHING TERRIBLE AND EVIL! SHIT, MAYBE YOU SHOULD FOLLOW US, AND SEE WHAT OTHER COINCIDENCES OCCUR! O FUK TEHY GANK ME!"
So, yes, Morrowind was LINNNEEEAARRRRRRR, but people did NOT just play it just to "complete" the game, they played it to make new characters and role-play them in different ways, and many times they even ignored the Main Quest. So yes, there is only one way to beat the game, but the purpose is NOT to beat the game.
I've never even gone close to completing Morrowind. I'm actually trying at the moment, believe it or not, but then I again, I said that about 5 uninstalls ago. It's just far too easy to "hit the wall." If you're freewheeling, you run out of challenges pretty quickly, and that just leaves questing for the sake of it. That's about when I decide my HD space would be better spent on pornography.
) for years and the Enclave was totally motionless this whole time.
