Any news on phasing?

Also, what happened to this here, what Tracy Hickman said:



How does the gameplay of SotA and the Story differ from other games I'm wondering...

 

I appreciate what you post and I think we can expand on it...

That old dictum "show, don't tell" is used in talking about pure writing and it means something different in that context. For anyone who's interested, here's a short explanation. It's also not a hard and fast rule, but designed to make people mindful about how they tell a story.

The dimension of "showing" in games is different. A book is also an interactive experience (even though most people like to think it's not), but games add another dimension with interactive visuals. One of the implicit things we accept as gamers is that the visuals are never going to respond fully or capture everything that the story tells. It's part of the medium, just like it's a part of a book that the writing may not tell you everything you want to know about a character. That's where our imagination comes in, and even in games we employ it to fill in the gaps. I think there's never going to be a point where this won't be true. Even if we imagine a hyper-realistic game, it all depends on what the devs can put in (resources, etc.). There's no way a game could respond to an infinite variety of choices by the user. There will always be gaps.

So, gaps are ok. Books don't tell everything, games don't tell and show everything. Not even the best games. DOS2 has a scene with a witch and a disgusting kiss, described in text, not shown on screen. As I've already mentioned, DOS2 has a lot of examples where they "show" things with text only. I was standing close, but not next to her when this happened. For me, and apparently a lot of other people, that's just fine. There is enough interactivity in the visuals to satisfy people. Some may not agree, but no book or game ever manages to please everyone.

I hope games continue showing with text. If we're limited to visuals, the story is going to be thinner. Most people accept the gaps that have to be filled in by imagination. It's not having a hard and fast rule like show, don't tell, that matters. It's always a question of how much... how much can readers/gamers accept of each. And even then, people won't agree.

Applying this here, the story needs to explain more than the visuals can. The devs need to be thoughtful about how much. That's where some real skill in game writing can shine. They also need to decide for the text, how much they "show" and how much they tell. That's where writing skill and experience comes into play. "Flavor text" is not wholly good or wholly bad, and visuals are not "wholly good". Game mechanics can expand the palette or options, but that's always a budget issue. When there are less visual options, the text needs to do more, not just be content with being limited by whatever visuals can be shown. Heck, I can think of quite a few scenarios where you wouldn't want to have visuals, but just text in a game. Gamers accept that, always have, always will.

Being thoughtful about these choices, having a vision behind and a reason for the way things are done, is where you start to see quality game crafting. In my opinion, agile development can sometimes push off these question in favor of just getting things done, leaving you stuck towards the end of the project having discussions like these.

 

I think one of the dimensions was definitely supposed to be how to tell a story that is satisfying to a single player in a multiplayer world. Like we said, that hasn't come through yet, even if they have an idea for it.

Otherwise, I haven't heard the devs discuss anything that really differentiates it. Promo vids/marketing - an age old problem.

 

Yes, but the problem here is that they got money up front because of what was said back then...

Yes this scene with the witch would never work in SotA. They could use a regular kiss emote which would not really show what happens. It wouldn't fit.
So in SotA we would basically not be able to have such cool scenes because they cannot show it and they don't want to tell it with words - bummer.

 

That's precisely the problem I'm referring to. SotA will rise or fall based on whether they attract enough people who think it adequately meets their expectations. It's the same for any product since the beginning of time, money is exchanged with expectations. That point is clear, it's been made, it's the way the world works. I don't think that's an interesting point of discussion. The more interesting point is to hear on these forums, "How/Why do I think SotA does or does not meet my expectations?" And I'm not asking for additional information because I hear and understand your position on that. I'm just saying - let's keep talking about the specifics, not the nature of marketing and how risky exchanging money for goods/services always is.

I agree that sometimes people get too hung up on using the visuals in computer games, perhaps the lesson people can learn from DOS2 is that people can thoroughly enjoy a game where the visuals take you part way into the story, but the text brings you fully into it. I would argue this is the way all RPGs must be as I explained above. However, it's not like SotA doesn't have any tool to show things - the solo instances work that way. Whether they need more at this point is the question of the thread. I think you'd agree that if the writing was improved and told a compelling story, most of us would probably be ok without more mechanics to show visuals.

 

Yes, the writing could add a lot of what is missing right now. Maybe not everything but it would add very much to the game.

 

Look at Esmerelda’s dialogue in the Highvale Outskirts’ quests and come back and tell me how “awesome” is it...

 

I think I know what you mean... Those are walls of text with info, no one needs... It is tedious to read all of this. And then to see those strange emotes and hear those even stranger sounds the NPC makes. It is even a bit scary... But it is not immersive or interesting.
And by the way... Captain Blowhard?

 

@Vyrin Having written text in a visual medium to describe an action that is actually going on in front of you is the very definition of "telling and not showing".

Really old adventure games like the King Quest series are a good example of games that accomplished this by separating the narrator from the dialogue. Dungeons & Dragons Online had narration as text that appeared in the middle of the screen to mimic the Dungeon Master's way of describing things to the players but they don't dare interfere with dialogue.

There are proper ways of doing things.

I was specifically referring to her narrating her own movements (through flavour text) when she sprinkles frost-dust on you but the overall experience is lack-luster.

There's so much wrong with her dialogue:

• Walls of text (that don't seem to always fit the dialogue window) prohibits the players from looking at any emotes the character may be doing because they're too busy reading the text.
• Any emotes that might be happening aren't triggered in sync to where the player might be reading... it's nearly impossible to use a static timer for this because players read at different paces. I read extremely slowly; especially so when I'm struggling to understand what is going on with particular events.
• The objectives that she gives (like any other quest giver) are vague. When she says "Find me a Hexes core OR Elder skull", I'm expecting that I need one or the other... but you need BOTH to progress the quest; they're just not related. You only figure that out after doing one objective leads you to a road-block.

Fixing the game's issues related to story requires a lot of adjustments but here's what you (SotA devs) can do to alleviate the issue:

• Don't write walls of text.
• When emoting, make sure that it's triggered after the player clicks "continue" and only displays the remaining dialogue AFTER the emote is completed. So the players reads, clicks continue, looks at the emote, then continues to read. Break up the dialogue more if you have to.
• Every quest designer for any game (including SotA) should buy a copy of the "Betrayal at the House on the Hill" board game. Read the how the various manuals explain how to play each scenario... ingest the technique and DON'T EVER DO ANYTHING LIKE IT. It boggles the mind how many Wizard of the Coast writers were working on this and they still had horrible writing. After many hours of deciphering, I had to rewrite the entire manuals so that other players could understand what to do. Don't ever write quest dialogue that leave players wondering what their objectives are like so many SotA quests do. If players are struggling to understand, they're focused on that and not the story.
• If you absolutely have to use flavour text (narration) in your dialogue because of whatever crazy reason you've managed to convince yourself in believing, use a different font colour.

I did get a chuckle out of "Blowhard". My only grippe is that the Captain wasn't enough of a recurring character for me to remember his name (I still don't) so when I first read her dialogue, I was a bit indifferent to the situation. I chuckled because it was unexpected, not because she called him that.

 

I wonder how you would do a situation like with the witch in DOS 2? How could such an event be brought to life in SotA?

The witch demands a kiss and it is a very nasty one, leaving worms in your mouth that crawl towards your innards and you have to spit them out.

How would such a situation play out in the SotA we have now?

 

I'm not familiar with any of the tools the devs have created (the tech, as they call it) to craft their quests, so I apologize in advance if my response isn't satisfactory. From the way I've seen the game behave, I don't think it's possible to properly achieve that kind of thing in SotA without some modification in the code. Like I've said before:

If you can't do it right, then maybe you're better off not trying to do it until you can.

The devs simply prioritized building the world and being able to play in it instead of focusing on how to accomplish proper story moments. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but that's just the reality of it.

With that said, I'll try to tackle the challenge with a "relatively quick" example of how I'd do it:
Place the witch character in a wide open room; it helps for camera purposes later on. Since this particular scenario is forced onto the player, I'd make it so that once the witch character finishes talking, I'd display the "continue" button in the dialogue window like SotA currently does.

Once the player clicks on "continue", hide the dialogue window (or minimize it so that it only displays 2-3 lines of text) and, without giving player control just yet, show an emote of the witch pulling your character closer. Zoom the camera in for the kiss and do a close up of whatever disgusting effect you want. The closer you are the kissing action, the less you have to animate and the more disgusting and awkward it becomes. Use the (optional) 2-3 lines of text of the dialogue window to serve as subtitles or something.

Basically, it'd be an in-game cinematic. It could be as long or as short as you'd want. All avatars have the same bone structure and scale so they can easily just have your avatar load in the animation like a screen-play and they wouldn't have to worry about animations looking weird on for certain players (unlike, say, World of Warcraft with taurens and gnomes).

Then, revert the camera back to how it was before and either give controls back to the player or put them right back in the dialogue. The player is already "on pause" due to the dialogue, so he/she won't feel too disoriented by it.

This isn't the only way, but it's a reasonable approach considering the limitations.

In terms of tech, it requires dialogue options to trigger "control lock" and "control releases" as well as trigger animations for the characters involved. It also requires you to allow the game lerp the camera back and forth.

In terms of workload for artists, it requires whoever animator in charge of doing the silly emotes to stop and actually do aminations for story moments. If he's busy with monster animations and the like, just ask him to block out the poses.

Speaking of blocking out, why not just have drawn illustrations for these moments? Could even be as place-holders.

 

If this could be done like this then this would be good. Even cool, atmospheric drawings that would illustrate story moments would be cool - like in Pillars of Eternity.

I think it would be really sad if we could not experience such really cool story-elements, moments and scenes...

 

Not just fine, for me is one of the best ways to provide a richer roleplaying experience. In a game like DOS2 (same for Fallout 1/2, PST, Baldurs Gate and thousand more), where you are not looking in first person view, the text is really helpful, and we did not talk about other things that adds a lot to the scenes (like the the sound, once again dos2 did a great job). But this is not just for games like these ones, this have been used in tons of games (remember Morowind? I missed so many things from morrowind in oblivion and skyrim)

When you don't have the budget and trying to build a game with a strong visual perspective (close third-person view like SotA, or first-person rpgs), you must play smart and adds anything that could help to create the best atmosphera. All these things helps to the overall experience, and quiality.

Trying to make all visual like a triple A game can be a big mistake for an small team. We all know what they will need for this; basically lot of time and resources to get good quality animations. Something that you are not able to do with just one animator.

Why not try to mix all methods and get something good? We need more animations? sure, we need better texts? no doubt. Take only one direction is not always the best approach.

pd: great posts Vyrin.

 

I don't know if "telling and not showing" is a phrase that is helpful here. In pure writing, "telling not showing" means something different than how you're using it. If you are going to talk about the use of text vs. visuals, or for the text, descriptions vs. dialogue, or some other nuance, it might be good to use a different phrase since that one is so common in the writing world. And in the writing world, most authors use the rule but aren't excessively rigid about it. I don't think you can have hard and fast rules in a game either.

I agree with all your points about Esmerelda's dialogue, but I think you miss the mark on the witch example. They could do that, but it simply would not be as good an experience as the text was. I would have to spoil it to tell you how involved the kiss was, how it would be impossible to show with graphics (think about something happening inside the body), how it fit the characters, and how it fit the scene. If we were talking about SotA, it would mean not including that little vignette because they don't have the resources to do any kind of visual to match it. DOS2 didn't choose to spend their resources there either. So, if the choice was:

1) simplistic visual that can only convey a simple sense of an event (at this point in time, all project budgets/graphic tech have real limitations)
2) leaving out the vignette since you don't have the resources to develop a visual for it
3) tell the vignette with well-written text in the right way at the right moment

I will choose 3 every time. DOS2 is just the latest example that shows that people actually enjoy that approach too. Gamer imagination proves quite fluid in moving between visuals and text, unless you convince yourself that you're not going to enjoy anything in a game that isn't shown to you. Moving between a graphic interaction into a text-based interaction just shows that text-based adventure never really dies, it just fades. There are good reasons for this. The limitations on resources for the visuals are real limitations. But you don't have to allow it to limit the quality of the story you tell.

 

You're making it more complicated than it really is.

Telling: You're using words to describe an action.
Showing: You're seeing the action.

Nothing more; nothing less.

Now, which is better?

Rules are established because, academically, some people put some brain power to figure out that works and what doesn't. It doesn't mean that what doesn't work will never work; it's just usually not worth the effort (yet). That's what science is all about. Everyone could argue that rules are just a set of guidelines and that you don't HAVE to follow them... but that doesn't get us anywhere, does it?

I'm more or less immune to spoilers... so, please, explain to me how "I missed the mark" in a spoiler tag (so not to spoil it for everyone else). With enough visual and sound, people get queasy easily enough.

Your argument on budget would mean that Portalarium didn't invest on telling a good story the right way. They invested all this money on decorations, animated emotes, instruments, housing, dye-able clothing, crafting, jumping platforms, giant vistas and combat mechanics yet they can't invest on providing a good (scalable) story-telling mechanism? C'mon man.

Again, if you can't do it right, don't bother doing it. I'd rather play a video game with no story than a poorly written one with mangled dialogue.

No RPG should EVER tell me how MY character feels. That's the mark of a bad DM; that's MY job as the player. Any story that contradicts that rule is a really, badly written story.

A lot of people liked the "Suicide Squad" movie... doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, does it?

I could also argue that some people are willing to dismiss a game's short-comings if it's delivering enough enjoyment in other aspects. If the story is good, for example, I'm willing to forgive really bad voice-acting. Diablo 3's story is atrocious, but I enjoy the shootin' and the killin' well enough. I'm not about to excuse a developer from delivering bad voice-acting or atrocious story-telling or encourage them to do it on the premise that I still enjoyed their games.

You say people "enjoy that approach" but people also enjoy exclamation marks over people's heads and quest markers, why stop there?

There are no good reasons for this. If you're limited on resources then you should've worked with those limitations in the first place; not use them as an excuse for a sloppy job. They keep telling us that they're stingy on where they spend the money... tell me, where's the money gone to? I have a good idea; it's not on story-telling tech.

In Pillars of Eternity, they do the flavour text thing that's really annoying (for the same reasons it's annoying in SotA)... but then they also do the cool thing where they sometimes throw an opened scroll in front of your face that has illustrations of particular events. Simple black & white doodles and all accompanied by fairly large portions of text. THAT's how you properly do flavour text. It's not part of the immediate gameplay, not part of the dialogue; it's simple and efficient.

You don't blindly mish-mash it in the game assuming that it's going to work, you make it it's own thing. You change how the game presents itself.

 

That depends on whether or not the "showing" has the ability to convey the story and emotions.

 

Goodness, I don't think you are even paying attention to the fact that telling vs. showing is a common phrase that isn't used in games, but in writing. And there it's only words describing things. But if you want to call a giraffe a zebra, we can still work with it as long as we know what you mean. The point on rules gets us somewhere because at least you acknowledged, as I tried to state, that they shouldn't be applied rigidly. Your point on showing, however, sounds pretty rigid.

Assuming as you rigidly suggest there is one right way, that's not my argument. But I will agree they haven't invested in telling a good story to this point.

We didn't mention that until now, but ok, yeah I completely agree. And if you read my feedback on the path of the oracle I tell them the same thing.

Considering the metacritic score for SS is 40, and DOS2 is 93, it doesn't really make your point.

Who would? I'm not sure how you'd enjoy a game with atrocious storytelling.

Um, I hope I don't have to explain to you why this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Point of all this is I don't quite know who or what you're arguing against at this point. No one is arguing for crappy story-telling. The only point is that text done well is not the demon you make it out to be. Likewise, a game that relies solely on visuals and spoken dialogue can limit the ability to tell a story.

I think in essence we want the same thing, but I think the design choices and options that the medium presents are somewhat more dynamic than you describe them to be.

 

The same way that whenever or not the "telling" has the ability to keep the player's suspension of disbelief.

My main argument on this is "If you can't do it right, don't do it at all". If "The Matrix" was a stage-play, it would kind of lose its punch, don't you think? Because you can't effectively do "inside the computer" with cardboard boxes, you know? The special effects works hand-in-hand with the story to make it all interesting.

Don't do "The Matrix" when you should be doing "Tron" instead. That's what I'm getting at.

It doesn't matter how good the story is if SotA's presentation is terrible. It's a harmony of all components so the game-play needs to be able to support the story. So Portalarium needs to make the necessary changes to support their story. If they can't, then the story needs to be changed so that it works well with the game-play.

We're not talking about books... if writing a book involve using words in a particular and obscure meaning, you should probably stop talking about books.

You show an action to your audience, instead of telling your audience that it happens. In cinema, video games, comic books, theatre and oral presentations, "show, don't tell" have the exact same meaning because the meaning of those words are self-explanatory.

I'm using basic english words here. I only majored in cinema, theatre and game design so what do I know?

It's not rigid because every developer can do whatever they want. Doing whatever the devs want doesn't necessarily yield the best results. That's the distinction.

Oh, I didn't know I had to use metacritic scores to argue a point... hang on... A lot of people like Final Fantasy 7... That's got a, what? 92 on metacritic.. and it's probably the most grindy, convoluted, on-rails, "plot-centric" J-RPG on the market where one of the most memorable moments is the death of a character that somehow can't be brought up to life because "story" happened. One guy has rail-guns for hands... how does he reload?

Are you suggesting that DoS2 is 1 point better than the atrocity that FF7 was? Yeah, okay, a lot of people like 'em. I guess that's a thing worth pointing out.

It's called game-play. It happens in video games sometimes.

Here's the thing about comparing things: the whole point is to find similarities and differences. The whole "you can't compare apples-to-oranges" argument is asinine because, well, they're both fruits, edible, round, brightly coloured, etc.

That depends on one's execution. A stage-play can be better than a movie because the audience gets to pick what they want to focus on, but the movie can be better than a stage-play because it can direct the audience to specific moments.

"Text done well" is exactly what I'm talking about when I talk about presentation. The demon is inserting that text IN THE DIALOGUE.

 

I think you did not get his point. We not talking about numbers, all the critics about DOS2 are incredible good (even better than PoT), you can go and search in any community, forums, videos, etc, its not just about the metacritics rating, its about a shared opinion all over the world. We saw this with some other rpgs, like Witcher 3. You will not see anyone saying W3 is a bad game, even if you don't like the combat system (for example). We can agree that some players prefer a turn-based combat system, but all agree about one same thing, the game is really good.

Important to say that even if you don't like FFVII, this doesn't mean the game is bad, in fact is a really good designed game. Personal preferences and quality are not linked, like art.

This is the phenomenon happened with DOS2, everyone is saying is one of the best rpgs in last decade. This is why some people here talked about good rpgs like DOS2, with the purpose to see a better SotA. You don't need to play just MMOs to get good ideas, thats one of the biggest mistakes as designer.

This is something Starr said more than once; you get references and ideas from anything out there, not just playing same games always.

IMO its totally fair to compare questing, story, dialogues, etc from SotA with a game like DOS2.

 

I missed that part and I wanted to reply to it:

I believe you're doing a very rookie mistake by underestimating the influence that game-play has on a narrative. Camera perspective, game-play pacing and UI are key influencers and if something as insignificant-looking as "flavour text" works in one game, it's because those elements are tuned to support it.

As the example provided with Esmeralda's quest dialogue in the Highvale Outskirts shows, adding flavour text does nothing to fix the underlying problems that SotA has for its story-telling.

I understood his point well enough: "Flavour text works better because it's cheaper to produce and, based off meta-critic scores, people seem to like it when games do that". Am I wrong?

I pointed out FF7 as an example of a renown game that not only contradicts nearly everything that SotA tries to do, but also fails as a believable world within its own established mythos. I wasn't implying personal tastes, here. I'm stating that, just because some games have a high meta-critic score, it doesn't mean that it's worth mimicking.

You mentioned the Witcher 3... One of the best aspects of the game is the way it's handling story-telling and, last time I checked, character dialogue didn't have flavour text narrating their actions to the player. They were acted out. They invested the time and money to get a good animation system in their dialogue (there's a whole GDC panel on it) and they spent even more money to get some voice-acting in. "Show, don't tell."

Something needs to change in SotA for the story to really shine:

• Change the story so that it fits with the current tech (that would also include re-writing the poor dialogue).
• Change the current tech to support the story (add cinematics, more character interactions, etc).
• Change the way the game presents itself to allow the flavour text to be utilized without giving the players a jarring experience (do something similar to Pillars of Eternity's scroll/parchment events). That means changing changing the camera perspective and UI's presentation and functionality.

That's all there is to it.

I never said the contrary.