Any news on phasing?

Haven't heard about this in quite a while and it isn't in any of the lists for the next quarter or in the top 10...

I just completed a quest in Divinity: Original Sin 2. In this quest I had to reunite a boy with his mother, who was attacked by monsters across a bridge. An lo and behold it was possible to reunite them, see how they meet again and were happy to see each other again *gasp*. Such a joyful, satisfactory and fulfilling ending with a sense of really being able to achieve something in the game. A lasting and visible consequence to my actions in this story-driven game with a real single-player narrative.

 

What is phasing? Are you trying to say that once you complete a quest like returning Charlotte to her mother that Charlotte should always appear next to her mother to continue the illusion of your completed quest?

Also, I'm not sure your screen shot is accurately portraying your sense of satisfaction or fulfillment. I'm pretty sure that regardless of if you select option 1, 2, or 3, the same thing is going to happen. The NPC's are going to provide more dialogue that doesn't advance the story any more than what SOTA would.

You've described a fetch quest, in this case it's "the daughter" and so I wonder if Divinity Original Sin 2 simply has more of what you're looking for because it has:

• Voice Actors.
• UI that is more familiar.
• Comic (less realistic) Style of Artwork, which tends to stand the test of time better.

The quests in Shroud are bad/worse than Divinity, sure. But nothing you've presented in the OP is materially different than what we have here. It's just packaged in a more familiar way, and it has some flashy bells and whistles. You can return Charlotte to her mother here, but I guess you can't "clear your throat" afterwords?

If we're going to compare SOTA to other games like this, I would hope that we'd show more evidence of "better" so that the development team could action this feedback and improve on existing content.

 

No, Charlotte and her mother are never reunited (on screen) in SotA. You don't see them meet. You do in Divinity. You can also meet mother and son later together in the barracks and talk to them again.
In SotA I never meet Charlotte again although her mother says that she was sent to Ardoris.

There is a fundamental difference here. Just having an NPC tell me that something happened off screen is not the same as seeing it happen while I am there. In Divinity the boy runs towards his mother and they talk to each other. You can then talk to them too and the narrator tells you that they embrace, shed tears etc. This is a totally different experience than just having the mother tell me that she met with her daughter but had to send her away and you never meet her again.

As for phasing: What I mean is a technology similar to The Elder Scrolls Online where scenes can change according to my decisions and NPCs can die and only I see it etc.

 

Have you seen wings, color changing dye, headless masks, and pumpkin heads? There is nothing realistic about SotA. It's pretty much Second Life.

 

Phasing, as was discussed several times, is the ability to have multiple world States in a multiplayer game. SotA even tried implementing this by replacing the minister of the Lotus with “his aide” after the minister was killed in a quest. Other proposals were that the npc dialogue in Adoris changes depending on the avatar’s actions in the black arrow quest.

Right now most quests don’t have any impact beyond some dialogue being different: The Kobold Shaman’s grimoire reappears after you stole it from the Kobold commander, The Vigilantes continue to hunt Elves after you finished the Bloodriver Outskirts quest, the black arrow murderer doesn’t go to jail and the npcs don’t react...
Phasing, or player specific scene / npc states, are critical to have quests that leave some impressions in the world.

 

I was talking about the art "style" being realistic. Not the game world. Obviously we have magic, odd physics, steam punk, kobolds and elves, etc...

 

Phasing is very good as a solo player. Have played ESO alot and having the world change around you as a consequence of your actions (eg drive out bandits or undead from a town and it stays that way) is great. The problem arises if you play with other people who may or may not have completed the same quests. Then you have the twin problems of other players seeing a different "reality" to your character and you not being able to help with a quest you have completed if you cant see the bad guys anymore...

 

The comparison is also bad for the fact that Divinity is pretty much a solo/co-op game. IF Divinity had a multiplayer component along with a single-player component (such as with SotA), then I would say it would be fair to compare the two. I got into a big argument on Reddit last year about this comparing "apples" to "oranges". I mean, lets please not compare a Ford Fiesta to a high-end BMW/Mercedes, other than to say, "yes, they are both cars".

Suffice it to say, some people just couldn't agree to disagree or even just say "you know, I see your point". Instead it devolved into a heated mess...but I digress.

 

Yes, the helping bit can be solved by bringing "party members" into the leading player's world.
The invisibility / different state issue will remain, however it will often not be visible. E.g. a cave that is blocked for player A might be open for player B - and A could see B vanishing in that cave. But other effects like different NPC, dialogues or graphics (burnt down house vs rebuilt house) can only be discovered in a side-by-side comparison.

@Lord_Darkmoon - is there any phasing technology in Single Player Offline? From the discussion with the devs it sounded more like that the technology overall was not implemented, not even in the single player modes where world persistance is less of an issue.

 

I've always heard of multiple states being based on scenes, not on players.

So that if you visited Solace Bridge, for example, you may see a scene that is war torn the first time, but the next time you may see a change in state based on where you are in the quest line. Another good example of this would be sieges.

If they planned to have a more robust system for single player mode, I haven't heard that. But I doubt they are planning anything beyond what we have today for the online modes. I'm also not sure this would be such a benefit that it would make the quests more satisfying. I think a fetch quest is still a fetch quest, even if the daughter walks around and talks to her mother.

 

The comparison is fair because of the term "single-player narrative" SotA uses and because it also has an offline mode which basically would allow all those visible consequences.
A game that boasts to have a "single-player narrative" has to endure comparisons with other games that have a "single-player narrative".

There is no phasing in all of SotA. At least not that I am aware of. And at least the offline mode would really allow for visible consequences.

 

Different scenes currently exist for the starter scenes only: Solace Bridge, Bloodriver and Highvale. The discussion even made it into one of the video/calls, the quest waving actually was supposed to be a test run to have npc interaction be more player specific.

With regards to improving the quality - it is a big issue for me and probably would be one of the few unique selling points SotA as a small budget title could have. Well written quests with a rich lore that actually shape the world would set it apart from other titles that have better graphics, bigger player base and more polished mechanics.

 

I wouldn't say it's completely unfair to compare SOTA single player to other single player RPG's. I would however suggest that the comparison should be accurate.

Yes, Charlotte doesn't physically walk over to her mother. There is a weird parlor trick where you hand a Charlotte Whistle over to her mother and the mother says thank you. That's lame, I don't like it, but it doesn't ruin the game. It doesn't make it LESS of a single player narrative. If we took that stance then every text based RPG would be a horrible single player narrative and that's simply not the case.

Likewise, it's not the act of the daughter visually walking over to the mother that tells the story. It's the dialogue and the actions the players take (in this case they're just fetching one thing and delivering it to another). I feel like you're giving Divinity Original Sin 2 a pass on this simply because visually they show you what SOTA does not. That's not how good stories are told. Good stories are good stories. Graphics and UI really have little to do with it.

The Witcher 3 is a perfect example of a "story" that the player has very little impact on. You basically just watch a ton of cut scenes and listen to the voice acting. I can "play" that whole game by watching everything on youtube. There's no real point to me picking one thing to say over another. This to me is the important part of questing I want to see SOTA get right. (we're not close to being there yet) I want to see the choices I make have an impact on the world. I'm not particularly interested in seeing one NPC family visually reunited, as much as I am seeing my player character held accountable for the choices that I make. I want to see the world allow me or disallow me to have access to power and "success" based on these choices. I want there to be some kind of collective (in multiplayer) impact on the world based on all the choices we make.

It's just not that big a deal to me if I see NPC's hugging after I complete a quest. That seems like a poor way to invest our resources and time.

 

It is ok, if that is not such a big deal for you. But for me, seeing such things, being a part of it, creates a better gameplay experience. It makes me feel like I achieved something in the world. That I really made a difference for Charlotte and her mother. And I think that others agree with me.

Imagine the scene in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf is reunited with Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas in Fangorn forest. It is a great, exciting and emotional scene. Seeing how they meet Gandalf the White after he seemingly died in the Mines of Moria is great.
No imagine that we never witness this scene. Instead Aragorn just tells that they met a resurrected Gandalf in the forest. For me this would not have the same emotional impact as seeing it happen.

 

The more quests we have implemented as overworld engagements the easier it would be to implement quests that could show change as part of the quest progression.

That gypsy wagon on over world map that pulls you into a scene could have several different plot lines, tailored to the current instance of the scene.

Wagon under attack by bandits or wolves
Gypsies attack and try to rob you
Gypsies want to barter with you, tell your fortune.

All with an impact on a moral system depending on how each person reacts to the plot line.

Babies could be returned to their mothers. Even flag a player a quest complete and never wee that plot line again.

 

Yeah, it's a great scene. And I agree with you, I think many players expect and want that type of "show". I think that's unfortunate though.

I remember years ago telling @Sir Frank that I believed his version of roleplaying was more like day dreaming. That he and others that enjoyed games like Elder Scrolls had a very different bar for what makes a good roleplaying game than I do. For me it's about choices and impact to ME the player. For (I think) a lot of modern gamers it's about cut scenes and advancing the narrative while being entertained very much like you would be if you were watching Lord of the Rings.

Instead of focusing on stories that the player can evolve, games began to use voice acting, theatrical music, and cut scenes to make "movies" that focused more on their own characters and less on individual players. I don't want that. I want to be the star of the show. I want to be important to the narrative. I don't want to watch "the important NPC's" doing things as I help them out in the background just enough to keep the story moving. I want to BE the story.

So if you're going to attack SOTA quests on that front, I'm with you. But if you're trying to make SOTA into yet another RPG that tells its own static story that doesn't care if I'm a part of it or not, I can't support that. I don't want that. I don't want to watch Gandalf reunited with other heroes, I want them to watch ME. I want them to be impacted by ME. I want the story to be told through my actions, and I'm already perfectly capable of walking and talking to anyone I need to.

Games like Divinity Original Sin are fine. But they're dead worlds, full of NPC's that can only play their very small part to help advance the story. The moment you exhaust what they were put there for, you just move on to another one. In the end, there's very little purpose and meaning to any of it. And I think that's where you and I differ greatly, I get zero satisfaction from that. I actually see it as a grind because I know that if I just click through everything I'll eventually get to the next part of the quest, NPC's will "do things" and I'll move on through the narrative.

 

I think I know what you mean. Maybe SotA would have needed a different approach for quests. But what we got are those typical NPC quests we know from so many other games. Be it reuniting a child with its mother, finding a murderer, finding an artifact, whatever. Maybe an approach like in Ultima Underworld would have been better: just give a task and let the player solve it his way. I don't know. Maybe we would have needed a really new approach to storytelling, something that hasn't been done before and that would have somehow allowed for us to be the focus somehow. And actually I thought that we might get something really new in terms of storytelling after Richard Garriott told us that he found a new way to tell a story in a multiplayer Environment - after he himself seemed to be aware of the problems of "regular" storytelling in an MMO. But that is not what we got.

What I know is: the presentation of the quests we got in the game is not good. It is not satisfactory and we don't get a sense of being able to achieve anything in the world. Basically we got single-player like quests that can't really play out well. They don't work the way we are used to from other SP games - namely showing consequences etc.
Such quests work well in an offline environment where everything can change, where cities can burn to the ground or NPCs can die. But telling such stories in a MMO-environment is very hard to do. And sadly SotA fails at this imho.

 

That is not what we HAVE currently.

I think they're in a good position to improve things.

I don't think it being an MMO-environment makes much of a difference. I think you're giving way too much credit to single player environments actually.

Who cares what the story was in ESO or Elder Scrolls Offline? Not me. It's a world that doesn't care if I'm in it or not.

Pillars of Eternity, same thing. Great game, but the story moves on with or without the players.

 

Dunno. Aside from the portraits (which i really wish SotA had), the graphics in the SS look easily as realistic as SotA's ever have. More so, in fact, because of the camera depth effects.

 

You wouldn't exist in other people's games because the instances would match players based on the "reality" that they're in. Unlike WoW, you won't see players suddenly disappear and/or reappear because that part is done during loading.

The original GuildWars did this in 2004 (assuming no other game did it prior): You create a reality that matches everyone involved in the party. Upon entering an area, the game checks for quest triggers for each member. If everybody but you killed the lich, the lich won't ever be there (for you) until you either go on your own or go with a group of people that haven't killed the lich yet because you've grouped with people who's realities involve a dead lich.

GW1 did make a distinction between "Missions" and "Side quests", though, so side quests were tracking people's past actions while missions were static... as you're willingly going back in time to re-kill the lich.

Right now SotA only uses instancing for single-player online, friends-only online and population management... it would be nice if SotA utilized the tech for improving the story elements of the game which includes more permanent consequences to player actions.

I'm still waiting for that "selective multiplayer" where the game is supposed to populate my game with friends and people I've previously met like they've talked about.

Presentation is less about the graphics and more about what it does with them.