Re: Exploration of Procedural RPG worlds [was Re: [pygame] Buried In Game Ideas]

[Laura Creighton <lac@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In a message of Tue, 29 May 2007 18:28:14 PDT, "Dave LeCompte (really)" writes:
>There was a recent interview with Ubisoft's Clint Hocking at gamasutra.com
>where he discusses exploration in RPGs (think "Oblivion"):
>http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070514/ruberg_01.shtml
>
>In particular, he says:
>
>"I can only assume if your open-world game doesn't do well, you didn't
>support exploration as well as you should of. If you don't design systems
>that support the exploration, you have a giant empty game. Then it?s you
>walking around in space for a little while until you get bored and then
>you give up."
>
>The discussion of Daggerfall's dungeons being boring and repetitive sounds
>like they failed to properly provide incentives for reaching the deeper
>parts of the world, and they didn't provide enough variation in their
>dungeon generation procedure.

Daggerfall was Bethesda's first game in the series whose latest hit
is Oblivion.  And its greatest problem was that it crashed all the time.
Despite that, it was absolutely compelling.  Indeed, for me it was
unique in its level of addiction.  You would play the game, and it
would crash, and you would scream and vow never to play this again,
and there you were, 2 nights later, at 03.00, saying "... well, maybe
one more time ....".

What was hard in the game was telling the difference between NPCs that
might possibly have something useful to say, and ones that didn't.  So
getting clues to advance the main plot line was a chore.  One of the 
charms of the game was that as you developed your own character,
you became more attractive to the nobles, or the peasants, or the
bored youth, or the ... I forget now what other factions there were.

And there was no way to remain in favour with _everybody_.  But it
was quite possible to end up in a state where nobody who knew what
you should do next to advance the main plot was willing to share
any secret knowledge with you.  This didn't bother me so much because
I was having so much fun with the quests and journeys that didn't
have anything to do with the main plot at all, but I knew some people
who found endless-exploration feature very off-putting.  But then,
they don't like Oblivion either, so in some very real sense, I 
cannot understand them, because our 'is this fun' detectors are
wired in very different ways.

>One thing to think about when considering procedural generation is that
>"Infinite Game Worlds" are not infinitely satisfying. If you haven't
>explored your own world pretty comprehensively, you may be surprised to
>find the players exploring the island at (42, 0) that has neat stuff, and
>then going off to the island at (44, 1), which has a large supply of
>pointed sticks, which they use to attack the natives at (47, 4), which are
>meant to be really tough, but have an unfortunate weakness against pointed
>sticks.

Daggerfall was very vulnerable to this.  I don't recall being particularly
unhappy about it at the time -- indeed finding such things was one of
the things that I thought made the game cool.  I wonder if I would feel
the same way now.  

>
>-Dave LeCompte

Laura