Games like KOTOR or Fable offer players a "choice" to play as how they want to play, but it's usually only 2 ways good or evil. Why not make a game where you're not even realizing the choices you make affect the game, because the choices you make wouldn't be 2 opposite extremes but small choices that are more like the choices people make in their everyday lives. Things you decide to do in the game could affect things hours in and you didn't even realize it, but if you went back and played a 2nd time the game's story would change because you did something differently earlier. Here's an example: You have the choice of guarding an important bank vaylt, but you noticed something going on with a customer you know you're not supposed to leave but you do anyway, you come back and everything with the vault is fine... but inside the place is being robbed (by very skilled people). All because you decided to leave your post.

It's tough to write a story or end-game instance for everything any player could ever think of. Maybe impossible.

I heard that Bioware tried to do exactly that with Jade Empire. I haven't played the game so I wouldn't know for sure. However I did read an article at one point where the developpers mentioned that they wanted to blur the lines between good and bad.

As for making a system that could handle "everything" a player could think of, I don't think that is possible. I believe that it would be possible to give the player enough options to satisfy them. Most people will go for obvious possibilities, some people will dig deeper and only a select group will try every possibility they can think of including the absolutely insane, illogical, and impossible. Since the majority of your game audience is more than likely going to be in the first or second category, you can plan several step ahead. As long as the logic isn't too flawed, it should be enough to satisfy.

What you described could easily be handled with scripts.

I believe that Indigo Prophecy tried to do that. I've never played it, but from what I've read, it ended up allowing you to make alot of choices, but they ended up comming out to pretty much the same conclusion.

I believe that having the player accidentally and unknowingly make choices is bad game design because it cripples the player's ability to play strategically, and isn't strategy what games are all about? But, the core element of Xenallure (my game design project)'s design is that it is an interactive story game where giving the player many choices to make creates a web of possible paths through the game and lots of possible endings. The player is expected to replay the game multiple times taking different paths through it, and this expectation is expressed through a "new game +" feature, where at the end of the game the player is given the opportunity to play again, retaining some of the progress he/she made during the first gameplay.

One thing: dont make it like games like ZORK where if you destroy an item or you bypass something, you cannot finish the game and you'll have to restart the entire game to finish it.

I dunno. People always seem to take the "give the player choices" thing the wrong way.

What if you had a world where the actions of all the objects were determined by their surroundings? Kind of like a massive scale cellular automaton without the rigid grid? Individual characters and objects play a role that may be virtually unknown to them in the grand scheme of things, but based on the wide rules set forth to govern the world, things fall into place (Cellular automata).

You'd have a simulation of the real world. In a cellular automaton, the rules for interaction between cells are set once and globally. Yet, by setting only the starting position of the "universe" the automata produce spectacular effects. Adding in the human element - or even nothing but some random alterations - and you have deterministic unpredictability (sounds paradoxical, no?) - random changes will occur, but the results of those changes will follow the rules of the world.

Cellular automata are the perfect model for describing what a game that factors user action into the game world would operate like. You don't account for every situation, you don't plan ahead - you set rules that tend to provide the player with a fun experience, and always provide the player with a plausible one.

It's obvious that it can be done - take a look at the real world. I think that you'll find that more people quit at boring, linear games than people quit at the most realistic one of them all: the game of life (not the Conway game of life :)). Instead of creating a world to achieve an effect - you set some boundaries and let something interesting grow.

Where's the teleology which makes the plot of the game dramatically satisfying to the player? Real life is IMHO inferior to fiction, and so if you try to design games to be more like life you will get an inferior playing experience.

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Original post by sunandshadow Where's the teleology which makes the plot of the game dramatically satisfying to the player? Real life is IMHO inferior to fiction, and so if you try to design games to be more like life you will get an inferior playing experience.

Well, you wouldn't mirror the content, of course. No one wants to play a "clean your cubicle" office sim. Of course, if you could play a game where you had to fight against evil hordes of zombies that had taken over the office, wouldn't having a detailed and procedural office backing up your storyline be better than just having a couple scripted simulations?

Fiction tries to mimmic reality with dramatic and interesting changes. Just because you have the mimic reality portion more down pat, does that mean it has to be less interesting a story?

Were physics engines a bad addition to realistic games? If you could have a huge procedural fantasy world with a written storyline or a linear, limited fantasy world with the same storyline, which would you choose?

It's just AI for the game world. It adds in a kind of realistic fuzziness without requiring static scripting of every possible event. It's like comparing Doom 1 to Doom 3 (engine-wise, not storywise). Doom 3 is everything Doom 1 was and more. You don't lose things by adding functionality. I personally liked the style of Doom 1 better, but that doesn't mean that the detail of Doom 3 is bad. There are also things that I wish Doom 1 had that Doom 3 can bring to it. The fact that Doom 3 (IMO) was more gory and had less of a fun factor than Doom 1 doesn't mean that the physics, engine, and concept of the game were bad. Real life may be more boring than fiction for games, but this doesn't mean that the way that real life works is bad for games.

Look at Will Wright's Spore. The game is completely procedural. If you wanted, you could create lifeforms that would evolve into traditional looking lifeforms, or you could create something zany and weird. Would it be better if everything was prescripted, instead of procedural? You can have your cake and eat it too - using procedure doesn't limit the fiction of a game, it broadens the capabilities. I don't know about you, but I personally enjoyed playing on a completely new map every time I played Diablo II - either the creators could have designed an infinite set of maps, or it could be done procedurally - like things form IRL. Of course, Diablo II is simple compared to most titles that benefit from little level design quirks, but the random maps were no less detailed than the ones generated by hand.