Multiple Quest Solutions
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ธ.ค. 2023
- I talk about multiple quest solutions using an example from Fallout. I explain how some solutions are systemic, arising from the existing game rules and needing zero effort from the developers to create.
I reference two videos:
1. My talk at Reboot 2017: • Reboot Develop 2017 - ...
2. Generated dialog in Arcanum: • Arcanum Generated Dialog - เกม
Yes, I experienced Garl thinking I was his dead father. Didn't know (then) that was a solution, I had gone to challenge him to fight. And he was like, "Dad?!" It was pure luck I met the prerequisites. Great stuff.
I actually think there were probably quite a few players who found it organically, just because (even though I tend to play dialogue-oriented characters) I remember that quest being at a point in the game where the leather jacket was the best armor accessible.
@@aNerdNamedJames You generally go to the khans after you did vault 15, in which you get your first armor (leather jacket). The next upgrade, leather is either from killing the khans or from junktown. You still have to sink a lot of points in luck and speech though.
There we go. The characteristic that defines true RPGs to me - multiple quest solutions. Choices and consequences. Player agency. Reactivity. Or summed up in 3 words - _truly your story._
Kinda cringe ngl
@@krele14Trite but true!
@@krele14 wtf is cringe in what he said?
Is Legends of Grimrock a true or fake RPG?
@@LN.2233that's a dungeon crawler with rpg elements imo
What i really like about it is:
-Diplomacy through caps. You dont want violence? Enough money can often solve issues. You have played and earned caps and now you can buy her freedom.
-if you got speech you can bluff (or correctly tell) Garl he is in way over his head. If you fail you can still use the above option.
-Stealth option. You can by talking to the khans pacify them for the moment. Then pick the lock and lead Tandi out without violence if you time it right.
-Stealth as you desribe it from the rear of the building.
-The duel!
-Guns blazing.
-The lol option of looking like Garls dad that he killed.
Lmao it such a great area.
I also like the world building and you can save the women he has a slaves as unmarked quest and get xp. Stuff like this is what made Fallout 1 so amazing.
This is why I love Fallout New Vegas, the multiple quest choices and outcomes.
They did a fantastic job.
@@fredrik3880 In 18 months. Sure, sure. Using an existing engine, some existing assets, etc., but -- dang! -- 18 months. And still managed to cover as many possibilities as humanly possible in the gameplay and quest design. Was it flawless? Nope. But what work of Kintsugi ever is? :)
@@lrinfi yeah mate it was incredible
Having Cree Summer voice Tandi was great too, her voice is music to my ears. Hell all the VA's were great in Fallout. Jim Cummings is still my all time favourite VA mostly because of The Master (and growing up on Disney Afternoon). The whole cast is pure perfection.
Howdy Tim, wondering about your thoughts on "Survival" or "Hardcore" difficulty modes in games. I like the concept, but feel they often make the game more tedious instead of immersive. For example: limiting fast travel while offering no options other than traveling on foot, limiting your ability to save the game, and making the enemies bullet sponges.
It's all about the feel. If distance is big enough to feel tedious and there are no unique encounters or places you unlock organically (metroidvania style), it's just bad design. Witcher 1 for example had different encounters during night and day and you usually just moved around one big area but places of interest weren't spread too widely unless you weren't meant to go and come back to same place, many times.
Save and difficulty are connected too. If failing is easy and we expect player to fail, he should be able to easily come back to same place. If distance is too big and there are other challenges placed on the way, it's a bad design. If it's small challenges that are good training to have before bigger challenge placed on player's road, it's understandable.
As for enemies having a lot of HP, it really depends how difficult they are. Having a lot of HP should be reserved for boss/elite enemies that are huge skill check and very rewarding afterwards. If enemy is big but not dangerous, you should be able to avoid fighting him (no incentive = wasted resources, bad or no reward) and maybe focus on this avoidance which can also become challenge on it's own. Fighting same enemy for longer time gives you more chances to make mistakes. Length should be adjusted basing on how these mistakes are punished and how easy it is to figure encounter out/memorize sequences.
@@anonimowelwiatko9811 I take it you understand the difference between feeling natural and feeling (supposedly) real.
Case in point. I hopped aboard a bicycle in 7 Days to Die and...felt like I was moving in super slow motion. Was it a technical constraint that was causing my avatar to move soooo slooow...ly? The sheer demand of a (partially) online multiplayer game that has to take into account the various "pings" of various players in various localities, etc.? What?
I don't know. I only know that going into the XML files and upping the speed of the bicycle by only a single point made it "feel" perfectly natural.
@@lrinfi Hmm, I rather thought about feeling in matter of long term (travel time) perception. As for movement, fluidity and dynamics seems to be the key. You don't want to feel like your character is moving slowly (unless it's justified within the game, to show some themes or result of your actions, for example Zack in final battle in FF VII Crisis Core or characters that are carrying too much heavy stuff, Baldurs Gate I believe), specially when he is in hurry. You want to sprint, jump, ride a horse, carriage or fly on a gryphon. It specially matters when you are playing action based game.
Good example is platformer. If action is too slow, you feel like game is sluggish. Speed it up, give more weight/increase gravity, show impact, require faster input and give ability to connect movements, maintain momentum, boom, you got dynamics, fluidity and now movement in is fun.
@@anonimowelwiatko9811 "You don't want to feel like your character is moving slowly (unless it's justified within the game:) -- Agreed. I expect my avatar to be moving slowly when he's fractured a limb or some such doing something incredibly stupid, but not necessarily when simply riding a bicycle.
You could say the different implementations make Fallout feel inconsistent. But you could also see it as being more realistically diverse about how such interactions might play out between different people. I think what you did with Arcanum was great (and very interesting to hear about). But I don't actually think there is anything wrong with having the "structure" of asking for money/being asked for money/not being able to afford something be different from situation to situation. I actually kind of like it!
The advantage of using dialog generation is that if you need to balance the money amounts (say, you decide everything costs 20% more for economy balancing), it’s trivial to do. You don’t need to track down every different implementation to change.
If you want variation, you can build it into the dialog generation. We did that with most of them, especially the greetings.
@@CainOnGames I understand that. It makes a lot of sense. I only meant to comment on how you said it felt inconsistent in Fallout how sometimes the player would say "oh actually I don't have money", the NPC would say it, or the option to offer payment wouldn't appear at all in the first place etc. Maybe you only meant in the design sense. I interpreted it as you saying it also felt inconsistent from a player's perspective, but maybe I misunderstood it in that regards :)
"The easier you make things, the more your designers and other developers will do more things. SO MORE TOOLS MEAN MORE THINGS (emphasis mine)."
That is a great thing to always keep in mind when making games, especially at the beginning. It leads me to many more follow-up questions about building tools for other devs and teammates. What's that process like? What do the various tools look like for different departments? What problems can they cause and how could they be avoided? Basically, as much information as you're willing to give on making development tools. I like the idea of being a programmer for game mechanics themselves and for the tools my teammates use, makes me feel like a team player.
Thank you for all your videos and insight!
Coming tomorrow…a tools video!
@@CainOnGames Thank you! Can't wait!
The generated dialogue was the most immersive thing about arcanum. When I was playing through the game, the NPC's responded to my race, gender, technological affinity, things I had done in the story... just the acknowledgement or recognition by NPC's of choices the player had made itself made the world feel alive. I am also a person who loves to make a super charismatic smooth talker and resolve events with no casualties, there are so few games where that type of playthrough is possible to say nothing of such a playthrough being "fun." The extra work that was put in to making "the diplomat" viable is what made Arcanum one of my favorite games of all time... maybe because so few games have bothered.
I DID FIND THAT 7TH ONE!!
I think it also worked with combat armor. It seemed like the option for the person who wandered off from shady sands without getting this quest and stopped back in the later game.
Also, it was really easy for him to lose it and just go violent... Although, this is similar to fallout 2 so I would not be shocked if I considered something.
Hey Tim, would you explain the position of a Technical Designer, or perhaps even go through every designer type briefly (Gameplay, System, Technical, Narrative, Level, etc)?
I had that Garl thinking you're his father scenario happen to me while playing normally once, witout knowing about it beforehand and I thought it was hilarious.
I am not developing games nor do I plan to. But this video makes me appeeciate the craft of game developing even more.
"Birds of a Feather" My favorite quest in Fallout New Vegas bc they're were so many quests are ties into that one quest.
I think, you can finished 3 or 5 quests in that one new Vegas quest.
It was mindblow me how dynamic that quest was. It's was like, "kill two birds with one stone"
Thank you for going through this quest. This is the reason I have been playing RPGs for so long (since 9 yo really). The variety of quest solutions needs to be a prerequisite to classify a game as "role-playing" :D
+1000 to the use of additional tools and appropriate-level simulation to get extra solutions out of the box.
It is worth mentioning however that the character system was very well designed to allow expressing said diverse solutions. Having the right stats (attributes, skills, traits, etc) seems important in enabling said expressivity. I'm curious about what other elements Tim finds important for building such quests.
Thanks again for the great video (and for evolving the cRPG genre with fallout). Have a great day! 😊
This is why i love f1, f2, fnv, i honestly did not know about luck check for tandi quest untill today. I hope one day you can make another RPG masterpiece.
Lol i got confused the first time it happened to me. I thought what the hell are they talking about.
A FNV 2 could be awesome. But after seeing starfield, 76 and many other new games maybe it would be hollow plastic. But the idea of another legendary game....yeah that would be great!
@@fredrik3880 Probably the only game I would be hyped for at this point to be honest. But given how soulless Bethesda has become, that's never going to happen.
Hi Tim, what are your thoughts on skill usage outside of dialogue? I don't see this implemented in many RPGs but I adore it when I see it and it motivates and inspires me to experiment. What I'm talking about is something like the following: using the Medic skill on an injured animal, using the repair skill on a "broken" or "malfunctioning" piece of machinery. It reminds me of point-and-click adventure games, and I adore it when I see RPGs embrace this. I know that the modern Wasteland games do this and it's something I wish I saw more often in RPGs.
Tides of Numenera, UnderRail
Probably my favourite part of rescuing Tandi was the multiple possibilities. I gave every solution a try, knowing what I needed to do because I first played the first real Fallout like about two years ago (yeah, I know). I prefer the more violent solutions simply because I have a vengeful streak wide enough to be a bridge between America and Europe. And if you kidnap the teenage daughter of a settlement leader, a settlement not capable of defending itself from real threats at that, to hold her for ransom (which policemen will tell you rarely ends well), you are going to make me mad. That Tandi was one day going to be the President of the New California Republic did not enter into it for me. I saw a young woman being held in an environment that could reasonably lead her to the idea that she was going to be sold off as a sex slave, and I acted according to that.
I have had more than two dozen playthroughs with Bloody Mess enabled.
Hi Tim! It’s me, Dave and today I want to ask about quest choices. 😁
Where do you think the balance should be between presenting players with agonizing moral decisions with no right answer versus allowing them to potentially mitigate that choice by either uncovering extra information, thus making them feel clever and rewarding their additional exploration, or by passing a skill check, rewarding them for investing points in dialogue skills?
Thank you very much for all this amazing information. I love Tim’s story time!
Totally makes sense to want a streamlined system for programming (talking about the dialogue scripting for 'money' example), but it also makes sense that not every NPC would react to you the same way. Some can respond wanting money and you have to tell them you don't have it (makes more sense than someone else telling you you don't have money, how do they know?! but at the same time you get those merchants who are like 'you're too poor to buy my goods bythe looks of you' vs. others who have no reaction it simply doesn't let you purchase or have the options)
I think it was my second playthrough when Garl thought I was his dead father. Just happened that way. Man that was a favorite moment of replay-ability .
Love that quest. Yeah the khans are not hostile until you make em angry. They point you to Garl. You can also make them angry if you say something stupid when you talk to them
And i really like that the khans are not hostile at start. Wish more games did stuff like this. They cut talking to the 3 fiend leaders (violet etc) in New Vegas. Why??? And they cut talking to the raiders in the combat zone in fallout 4, why?????
Fallout had many good quests, e.g. I liked that instead of killing the scorpions we could just blow up the cave entrance. BTW, Age of Decadence is the best example of a game with multiple solutions, all quest had at least 4 solutions and many 5 or more. Colony Ship isn't bad at it either.
Love RPGs that give you so many solutions for quests like this, Garl thought I was his father when I last played Fallout but every dialogue option led to combat despite me having Speech at about 50 and 9 INT, might've been the low Charisma though
My VERY FIRST playthrough of Fallout I got the Garl secret solution. I played FO2 first so I knew I wanted to play a critical build (Go for the eyes!) so I just straight up pumped LK to 10. That was a very wild encounter lol Also it kinda ruined some future playthroughs for me because it actually overrides all other dialogue in the bandit camp, so if you get that option you HAVE to go with the last solution to the quest. But it's still cool and i love the fact it's in the game.
Hi Tim! In Fallout there was a "Tell me about" feature.
What is your opinion about it today? Would a development studio dare to implement this kind of feature in a modern game or dialogue trees completely eliminated it?
Would be kind of interesting as an optional "are you paying attention?" kind of thing.
Or maybe it have a chance to make a return with an neural network generated dialogue fine tuned for a specific NPCs in the future.
That's a great topic ❤
Only a few companies can do these games. The main archetypes for completing things:
1. the strongman brute force approach of killing everything that gets in your way. If you have strong STR build then it stand to reason to act like the hulk and break open the doors and blow up walls.
2. charismatic talker using diplomacy to persuade people to your way of thinking like a politician. If you fail you may have to assassinate people that won't listen
3. Ninja: sneak past guards using your ninja ability to hide and open locks. The ghost option.
4. Cunning wolf: trick the bad guy into not being there so you can complete the mission. It's the same as sneaking but you use a distraction to get the guy out of the way. (like how you use a bait to lure a bear into a cage) This variant may not need sneak skill because you can be there without hiding from people. (it's in basically all game with guards: you send a partner to draw attention away while you quickly rush in to do the mission. By the time they get back, its too late. You are long gone. "Conan the Barbarian in thief role")
5. Bromance through autism: knowing what to say to people by learning lore. (nothing to do with persuasion but just knowing enough about the particular character to say the right stuff to get them to like you.) This is not a skill but a test of the players awareness of lore and paying attention to what characters like and hate and then using this knowledge to not say the wrong things around them. If there is a book about them and you read it, you might use the knowledge to pick the right thing to talk about and they like you because you show interest in their same topics they do. Eg you meet the leader of assassin and comment on his choice of weapon and technique and name the gear he has to convince him you are smart and aware of the taste in gear. He notices you pay attention to fine details and thinks of you as a brother that understands him and the reward is that he warms up to you. This breaks the ice so you can continue to talk. It is not the same as persuasion since you can't use charisma to get them to like you but only a display of deep knowledg to impress them. The test is not a test of your Player Character's persuasion skill, but a test of the PLAYER'S (the guy behind the keyboard not the character he built) knowledge about lore topics so autistic people can be rewarded for deep research.
6. Mission Impossible: doing something out of the established class system. (in many rpg you can stack objects or move things to act like barriers for example. IF you are in a fight, using the abilty to push objects in front of doors so nobody can follow you or blowing ujp a bridge so nobody can cross helps avoid fighting. Nerdy non-combat sciencey guys who just use brains to exploit the game's features use this. Dues Ex games is one example. Grab big object to block the view of security camera from seeing you. Stack object to jump higher to roof to open the roof entry to sneak through vents etc These unconventional methods are like being Tom Cruise from the Mission Impossible movies. Most will ignore it because they forgot the game lets them do these things but doesn't let you know that it does. The recent Zelda BOTW and TOTK games are famous now for that. The more you experiment the more you can "break" the game. Although in truth the developers knew you would try it that's why they built those systems. If Dungeons have "dungeon puzzles", then the overworld has "overworld puzzles" where the player exploits the play mechanics. The solution to overworld puzzle has nothing to do with your class, your skills, your race etc. It's the game that lets you do stuff to break the established methods of getting to the goal.
Emil could learn a lesson or two 😂
Oh yes , but his ego prevents him to actually learn something .
Nah you don't make games so you have no right to critique their games. All you're good for is buying the slop served to you.
@@Zeropointill 🤣 you're right, back to the trough for me...
Is Emil the new boogieman for nerds now?
@@LN.2233 new? Not for some of us who have been disappointed since FO3
erasing most of my mess and a weeks worth of only my business later i think what im after is locating the guy who my dad (alive) is and who also cannot be found in either western or japanese game development history. so ill work on that. ill watch any of the game dev stuff for my own private curiosity later i guess. thanks for the hard work as a perhaps final note on my accidents here online.
With Fallout 1 (and even moreso with 2), most things that required high luck was arguably some sort of joke, easter egg, or pop culture reference.
I discovered the i am your father ending many times (didnt know what triggered it) as i very often rolled with 9 in luck years before i read about it.
I played a low intelligence build recently, notably low stats being 1 Endurance Charisma Intelligence I picked them off one at a time and took out Garl in a tent and took his metal armor, then the last 2 guards ran away, very bewildering until I looked up what was going on.
I had no idea the 'secret' solution works with a Stealth Boy as well. Even the wiki thinks it's restricted to Leather Jacket (and the other factors needed, of course).
I like that you can wait them to be far way to dont hear the noise, just wondering how many miles they have to walk 🤣
Organic quests really what made fallout.
I'm interested in how quests work in systemic games. Do you have any advice on designing/implementing quests that support systemic solutions? Are there any ways you would or wouldn't implement quests to ensure they could be completed multiple ways? Are their any quest designs that you would advise against because they don't work well with systemic game play? (I hope these questions make sense).
Describe what do you mean by systemic games, systemic solutions, systemic gameplay.
@@anonimowelwiatko9811 A systemic game is one where the rules are consistently and predictably applied through a game. This typically leads player to being able to plan around these rules and express multiple play-styles. In a non-systemic game, you might need a flare to burn through a pile of wood; In a systemic game that pile of wood might be be 'burnable' and have an amount of health. You could use a anything on fire to light the pile of wood; or you could use use a dynamite to blow up the pile of wood. In non systemic games you typically need to find the answer the designer thought of; in a systemic game you need to find an answer that works.
A systemic solution is a way to complete a quest that uses the consistently applied rules (and does not break the quest). There are probably multiple solutions to quests in a systemic game; and these might not be things the designer thought of. So I'm curious as to how that is managed.
Systemic gameplay is player experiences centered around the consistently applied rules that allows a player to express a style of play. DOOM isn't a very systemic game (even though rules are consistently applied) because the style of play is pretty much narrowed to shooting demons. Skyrim or Divinity: Original Sin II are more systemic because they allow for players to express a style of play.
There is a 'cultural element' to what a systemic game is. Most players wont call a game systemic unless there are mechanics like stealth, lethal vs non lethal damage, open-world level design, and fire/electricity propagation. Systemic games tend to be more prone to 'broken builds' and tend to single player games. NPC dialog isn't typically considered part of a 'systemic game' but there is no reason it couldn't be consistently applied.
I'm sorry this is really hard to describe because its really qualitative and there are not any strong definitions that I know.
Hi! I have a fundamental problem with this, I think. Should a player, at every quest, have to think - but what are the better ways? Mostly, I don't know the solutions to a problem like the one who poses the problem. I want to play a Persuasion Character, for example, but I don't know whether I ticked some obscure boxes to do that. Immersive/systemic quest solutions are great, but in most games, I can't be sure that they are there, that I didn't miss them. I have to look up the quest in some wiki to really know my options. Oh, you haven't talked to this NPC while wearing a leather armour? Well, you're out of luck. How can a game have all these options and still inform the player about them?
Or, to be more direct - how can I ever have a fulfilling solution to a given quest when I have to constantly second guess if there may be a better solution that I just didn't find? I don't want to play games while looking up the wiki, but I also don't want to miss the cool solutions that might've been there
Never knew of the luck-dependent Father thing. I'd have gone with a brother/sister that disappeared years ago, as we could create a younger character and it seems weird for some raider to think a 25 year old looking rando to be his pop.
Can anyone confirm the idea of "killing the guards in the back quietly"? I have never heard of a noise system in Fallout 1 in all these years, so I sort of doubt this exists. I think the only way to do it is using tons of super stimpacks on an NPC.
So I have a question. Looking back it's always easy to see how a problem could be solved when designing a game, however trying to solve problems before they become problems can result in wasted time. How do you strike a balance or how do you identify a problem as something that needs solved right away?
7:43 - Todd likes it
7:39 It just works!
"They just worked" 🤣
How do you decide whether to make an Attribute check (Charisma) or a skill check (Speech)? What about games where it's possible to reach 100 of a skill while having only 1 point into an attribute?
That’s a problem that special never seemed to solve since it encouraged dump stats.
Great rule would be: "Quest can be solved by ANY character build at least one way"
Technician, brawler, scientist, diplomat etc all should have chance.
...But I am asking too much 😏
Do you think tools like Inworld AI will help developers make more realistic NPC behaviors in the future?
It will definitely be necessary for some games. You can't give a detailed and unique personality, story and voice to every single NPC on an open world with hundreds/thousands of them (or on procedurally generated worlds) without AI. Too much work for a team of humans, and too much storage required to save all of the thousands/millions of voice lines
Ideally you'd want a model better than GPT-4 and capable of being run on consumer hardware though, so we're not quite there yet. Maybe in a year or two. It could be offloaded to a server instead, but then there's latency, you need to always have a good internet connection and there might be censorship
the khans were stand-offish. you could talk to the leader and 1-2 others, like their armourer. the rest give you yellow/red one-liners
Hi Everyone Its me Tim
Sow what is the reason that they dont make games like this anymore?
I discovered everything except last one option ( dad) :) .
Can you please please please make your content accessible by having closed captioning? 😢
I have auto closed captioning turned on, and I see them working. Are they not appearing for you?
@@CainOnGames the auto closed captioning are not a good substutite to properly formatted captioning, if you turn it on and have it on mute, you'll find yourself keeping an eyes on the bottom of the screen as each word pop up every time it is spoken.
A good example if you turn this one on, you'll find it far easier to read, and much more accessible to not only Deaf people but for everyone else, like Fallout which have been a major part of my life due to it's captioning enabling I to enjoy it in a world where captioning didn't exist at the time.
th-cam.com/video/xeYk9T8yOic/w-d-xo.html