Last essay I talked about grinding. I did that to set up this essay, in which we talk about "writing" for open world games, especially RPGs.
In classic oldschool RPGs, there's a whirl of four kinds of gameplay, but each kind is very dull. Talking to folks, exploring maps, managing powerups, and fighting: individually, each of these elements is weak. Even combined, they're pretty weak.
A lot of RPGs have tried to become more interesting by changing out one or two of those elements for more interesting variants. That never seems to work. Why?
Look, RPGs are about the grind. There's no way around it. Even when you decide to stop grinding and fight a boss, you're still doing the exact same play, just with a different goal.
And that's the secret.
The power of an RPG isn't in the gameplay, it's in the pacing. You can grind as you like, and then when you're done grinding, you can easily prod the sleepy storyline into feeding you the next bit of content, the new grist for your grinder. New monsters, new target numbers, new setting, new people, new party dynamics.
All our effort has been spent on more realistic characters, lusher settings, better gameplay, adaptive music... but we've never really talked about new ways to feed the player.
We need to talk about grist.
How to make it, how and when to feed it to the player, how to tell how well they're absorbing it.
The term "roguelike" comes to mind. The computer generates the dungeons, and you walk endlessly through them. That is a roguelike's "grist": the neverending parade of dungeons. At first glance, you may think that's a linear RPG's grist, too. Maybe even an open-world RPG's grist. But it's not.
An RPG lives or dies based on the experience of spending time in that world. If we think like that, we can see that our grist isn't dungeons or random quests or generated characters: our grist is experiences in the world.
These are the things the game feeds us as we move forward in linear RPGs. A new town, new people, new plot elements, new character dynamics, new monsters, new world map, new dungeon, new background music, new spells, new equipment, new boss at a new level.
The difficulty is that grist has a flavor. If you deploy this stuff randomly, the player will get a mouthful of garbage. Arranging plots and characters and places and dungeons and monsters and bosses can't be done randomly. It has to be done sensibly.
I think there are three simple ways to choose sensible grist.
One is content packs. If you go to an icy place, you get an icy town, icy people, icy monsters, icy plots... the downside is: the more you do this, the less replayability and variation there is.
Two is arcs. By creating a progression across several grist packs, you can build a sense of permanence. IE, being chased by an imperial task force across three planets will give each planet's grist pack a connection to your experience, even though the planets are individually quite random.
Three is player response grist.
This one is important.
A big part of my enjoyment of old RPGs is having an "understanding" of how the major party members and NPCs "felt" about any given thing. The canon responses were limited, but I would fill in the gaps on my own. Essentially, I could write fan-fiction in my head as I played the game, imagining the characters responding to the random crap the game threw in my way. "Oh man, are you kidding? Another group of ten zombies?" grumps Lucca. "I will handle this group," Robo bleeps.
These stupid internal vignettes were a big part of how I enjoyed these games. My personal response as a player could be mirrored into the game world by the characters, discussed and properly contextualized.
I don't know how many players are like this, but it's important to me, so I'd like to talk about how to let the game help me do those things.
Dragon Age is an example of how to do this explicitly. The characters will frequently comment on random happenings, they banter among themselves, it feels very organic. However, in the end, this actually limits how freely I can shape the story of these characters.
None of the characters can have bad days, because their banter clearly shows them not having a bad day. None of them can have romantic relationships with each other, since their banter shatters that idea, too. None of them can become jealous, angry, happy, sad. None of them can find something interesting, or repellent, or confusing, unless the devs programmed them to.
Back in ye old days, the characters were unchanging, but they were blurry little pixel people who said maybe three lines outside of their personal arc events. You could imagine them doing or feeling anything you like, because they were too small and blurry to prove you wrong.
As our tech improved, we brought the characters into focus, but we left them as unchanging marionettes, simply increasing the number of personal arc events. When I drag Liara and Garrus around a starship for an hour, they never have any opinions or emotions, never feel anything, and I can see it very clearly due to the high quality of their modeling and voice acting.
Sure, games like Dragon Age try to get around this by filling the game with more voice acting and emotions, scripted by the devs. But that works against my enjoyment in many situations. I can't evolve the story as I grind the gameplay, because the devs don't know which direction I'm trying to take it.
There is a way to improve this situation. A surprisingly straightforward way.
We can see it in relatively mainstream games like Fire Emblem. Fire Emblem's devs don't know what sort of people we'll want to hook up with what sort of people, but they give us a mechanic where people that talk to each other in battle will advance their personal arcs. Not everyone has an arc with everyone, but it still allows the game to reflect the player's storytelling impulses.
As an even more mainstream game, we could use the recent Saints' Row or GTA games, where you can always just call people up on your phone to hang out with them. While they don't have programmed emotions while they hang out with you, you can drag them around into pretty diverse situations and they'll react interestingly - both due to their personality and due to their screwy AI that makes them freak out at random moments.
It's not hard to imagine scaling this up by offering more methods to guide the NPCs to behave in specific ways, either long-term or short-term, to reflect the player's personal story.
For example, a version of the GTA framework where the two people you call over will have an event together after they've left, and you'll get notified of the new social situation. A quick text with a picture of the two of them standing on top of a boat, for example. The event can be determined by how much money you made while they were following you around, or how much adrenaline you spawned, or how much damage they took, or where it left off...
Or let them get drunk or high as you pass them various inventory items. Or you can bring up something from their past by showing them a photo or taking them to their old house. Or you could just let the player freaking select how they want the NPCs to feel from a menu.
Wedding this kind of shaping into the grist of an RPG should allow-
Oh, yeah, grist. We're still talking about grist.
The player selects how the characters evolve. That can easily be limited so the characters stay "in character" and/or lined up for their long-term arc. Even with that limitation it's a powerful way to let the player trigger tasty grist.
When the player pushes a character to act in a particular way, why not have that character drag in a bunch of other content based on that? You get the berserker drunk and leave him stumbling around the rooftops, you're going to have a story event where he's caused trouble. It's a good excuse to introduce local law enforcement, a rich person whose roof got broke, people chatting about the weird, shadowy figure which must have been a werewolf stalking through the city at night, and several options as to how to break your buddy out of jail.
This is "piecemeal" content. It can be injected into almost any setting. If the town is big enough to drunkenly jump from roof to roof, it's big enough to support the subplot. It doesn't mean anything in the long run, although the NPCs you introduce here might recur later in other contexts. You can just throw it in and have fun.
Of course, the subplot should have variable long-term results - change the opinion of the town, change your karma rating, etc, who knows.
Fundamentally, this kind of random content is not too hard. Certainly not as hard as generating a good dungeon for a roguelike. The difficulty lies in making sure the actions the player can choose in order to reflect their personal take on the story can spawn these events without seeming overly random.
All of the moments that introduce grist in existing RPGs are already like this. You get new grist when you step on a trigger, and normally you can tell what is a trigger and what isn't. We're talking about the same exact situation, except that the content we introduce is generated instead of scripted.
The challenge is whether we can make that generated content "flow" from the player's situation. That applies for this piecemeal personal response content, but it also applies for arc content and content packs.
...
Well, in the end, I'd like to talk about how to set up the grist properly.
In my mind, we can radically improve RPG design by spitting grist in based on content pack chunks, arcs through multiple chunks, and introducing grist based on the actions of the player... as measured by actions we allow specifically to let the player choose how they want characters to develop.
What do you think?
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