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Post by SofaJockey on Mar 11, 2018 13:37:57 GMT
This was a pretty interesting question from MJ, so I made a thread... In a shared world game, how impactful can choices be?
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Post by Fogg on Mar 11, 2018 13:43:24 GMT
In SWTOR you have personal instances where the singleplayer fights/dialogue choices happen. Works decently.
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Post by Lazarillo on Mar 11, 2018 17:28:08 GMT
Yeah, SWTOR is probably the best example, though it's worth noting that the choices are pretty much meaningless and/or nonexistent in the part of the game that is actually shared, and as a result, those shared aspects are a pain in the behind with regards to integration into content that is actually story driven (and vice-versa, somewhat).
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Post by Heimdall on Mar 11, 2018 17:52:26 GMT
Yeah, SWTOR is probably the best example, though it's worth noting that the choices are pretty much meaningless and/or nonexistent in the part of the game that is actually shared, and as a result, those shared aspects are a pain in the behind with regards to integration into content that is actually story driven (and vice-versa, somewhat). Even so, I would argue that even in Bioware’s singleplayer games the choices have very limited impact on other story content most of the time.
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Post by Lazarillo on Mar 11, 2018 18:08:39 GMT
Even so, I would argue that even in Bioware’s singleplayer games the choices have very limited impact on other story content most of the time. True enough. Even in SWTOR where the elements are frequently separated, ultimately, choices amount to window dressing, but do very little to adjust the flow of the overall story. When I talk about poor integration, it's more about playing "story" content only to be shoved into a "shared" mission as the arc goes on, or having a piece of shared or story content assume the player did content from the other side of the game whether their character did or not. A lot of that's aside to this specific topic, but it does sort of draw attention to the...immaterial nature of most of the game's choices.
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Post by Wulfram on Mar 11, 2018 18:28:44 GMT
I wonder if it would be possible to have cosmetic differences in a shared area. So if you made choices that led to the conquest of an outpost, say, you could switch up the textures, the skybox, even some of the NPCs to reflect that choice, but you can still play alongside another player who has made different choices because all the functional parts are the same.
edit: Though really, I think the biggest issue with choices in SW:tOR isn't so much the shared world nature as the need to carry on with an ongoing story. Any big choice has to be brushed aside if it would interfere in your character playing the next expansion. Though maybe if SW:tOR had been a bigger success they'd have been able to afford more to respect prior choices.
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Mar 11, 2018 18:38:46 GMT
A lot of this was covered in the "seamless multiplayer" thread, but fwiw, I can imagine several mechanisms for doing this.
But before I get into that, I will make a prediction: they will not replicate the SWTOR mechanism. They may learn from it and evolve something from it, but I don't think they'll take it more-or-less unchanged and plop it down into Anthem. I don't really have a good justification for why I believe this, other than Bioware tends not to repeat ideas, even good ones. Particularly if the champion of that idea is no longer with the company. It's almost as if the studio goes out of it's way to ignore the past, for the sake of change.
Anyway, on to ideas:
Destiny-style SP campaign
Basically, there is an SP story that you can solo, and it shares many maps and locations with the shared world, but nothing you do in the story has any impact on the shared world or vice versa. It's one step up from being bolted on the side of an otherwise 100% MP game, like a COD SP campaign.
It's your world, and your friends can make limited changes to your world, but only at your invitation.
This is a bit like the Mass Effect model, except instead of NPC companions, it's your friends you add to your squad. But subtract any side-effects quests have on companion loyalty, romance, etc., none of that would apply. Your friends are just additional firepower, that's it. Some quests may be designed with a squad in mind, so either you have to hire NPCs to join you, or you git gud at doing it solo (because, let's face it, Bioware isn't known for unbeatable bosses or quests.)
If your friend had already played through that area or quest, they can potentially spoil it for you. Or be very bored.
It really is a shared world, and it's first-come, first-served.
You and your friends intentionally create a shared world. Access to that shared world is limited to a mutually agreed upon circle of friends. Whoever gets to a quest first, gets to affect that change to the shared world. If your friend gets their first, tough luck, that quest is no longer available to you or any of your other friends. You can theoretically do all the story quests solo, but you have to beat your friends to it. Or maybe create a shared world (start a "New Game") with a circle of one.
However, the Hub will have some kind of "tall tales" story mode, where your friend can do a Let's Play walkthrough of the quest for you and any friends who missed out, with video clips and all, automatically recorded by the game. Even better would be if you, as the left-out friend, can replay the quest along with your friend, as a sort of disembodied observer.
(This is unlikely for the same data management problem mentioned below. Segmenting world states across ad hoc groups of players and keeping them all in sync and consistent would be a nightmare.)
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Mar 11, 2018 18:41:46 GMT
I wonder if it would be possible to have cosmetic differences in a shared area. Very unlikely, since that's a data management nightmare, technically speaking. It would mean that you and your friends would need a dedicated database that holds your shared assets. Assuming an average of 4 friends per world and 1 million concurrent active players, that's 250,000 database servers. That's a lot. Or, if it's peer-to-peer, you have to go through a potentially long game start-up sequence, while every peer checks with and exchanges missing assets with every other peer.
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Post by Lazarillo on Mar 11, 2018 18:46:54 GMT
However, the Hub will have some kind of "tall tales" story mode, where your friend can do a Let's Play walkthrough of the quest for you and any friends who missed out, with video clips and all, automatically recorded by the game. Even better would be if you, as the left-out friend, can replay the quest along with your friend, as a sort of disembodied observer. That sounds, to be honest, absolutely terrible to me, but I find the whole "Let's Play"/streaming concept alien enough to make me feel like a codger anyway. Then again, in those cases, at least, they're free. Why would someone pay to watch someone else play a video game?
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Mar 11, 2018 18:53:49 GMT
However, the Hub will have some kind of "tall tales" story mode, where your friend can do a Let's Play walkthrough of the quest for you and any friends who missed out, with video clips and all, automatically recorded by the game. Even better would be if you, as the left-out friend, can replay the quest along with your friend, as a sort of disembodied observer. That sounds, to be honest, absolutely terrible to me, but I find the whole "Let's Play"/streaming concept alien enough to make me feel like a codger anyway. Then again, in those cases, at least, they're free. Why would someone pay to watch someone else play a video game? Setting aside the fact that, at least on YouTube, LP's are not actually free, there is a precedent for this. Battlefield 2 (FPS MP game of yore) used to have a replay mode. It would record the entire simulation state of the game server and save it to a file, so that anyone could go back and observe the game session from the POV of any player. It was wildly popular. This was all before LP's on YouTube were popular. I guess, in a way, it presaged the popularity of LPs. People like voyeuring other people playing. It's just a thing.
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Post by Lazarillo on Mar 11, 2018 18:55:49 GMT
People like voyeuring other people playing. It's just a thing. I guess it must be.
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Post by SofaJockey on Mar 11, 2018 19:46:51 GMT
I'm going to regret bringing The Witcher III into this but here goes... That game is heralded for its huge game-changing choices. Yet much of the nuts and bolts of the game is the same for each player excepting tightly controlled decisions that do impact (in a very satisfying way) right at the end. BioWare used to complain that some decisions they allowed people to make were seen by so few players that it was a lot of development effort for little playback. I think that balance between perceived agency and the development time it takes to make branching outcomes is the key issue. In the days of isometric text games, those branching outcomes were a lot easier (and cheaper) to make.
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Post by Sanunes on Mar 11, 2018 20:10:42 GMT
I'm going to regret bringing The Witcher III into this but here goes... That game is heralded for its huge game-changing choices. Yet much of the nuts and bolts of the game is the same for each player excepting tightly controlled decisions that do impact (in a very satisfying way) right at the end. BioWare used to complain that some decisions they allowed people to make were seen by so few players that it was a lot of development effort for little playback. I think that balance between perceived agency and the development time it takes to make branching outcomes is the key issue. In the days of isometric text games, those branching outcomes were a lot easier (and cheaper) to make. The problem I have with using comparisons from The Witcher 3 is not everyone has played or completed it. Speaking for myself I got a few hours in walked away to do something else and never went back so I really have a hard time with examples from that game for I cannot agree or disagree. Now with that out of the way. BioWare has never really had choices have a big impact on their games. Even looking at Mass Effect 1 I remember after it was release there were plenty of complaints of "my choices don't matter". At least my experience with BioWare games is that the vocal people want huge world shaping events to happen in their games and that just won't happen. Now if you are looking at maybe how a NPC reacts to you I think that is always possible, but I don't think it would go much beyond how one or two NPCs interact with you for otherwise there could be unseen consequences in future aspects of the game. Things like iignoring an entire faction for a new quest line because if you did something that angers all of them there might be people that cannot interact with that content and BioWare has always seemed to have been against that.
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Post by majesticjazz on Mar 11, 2018 20:26:44 GMT
In SWTOR you have personal instances where the singleplayer fights/dialogue choices happen. Works decently. But outside of those instances, how were those choices acknowledged and what impact did they make? In KOTOR, ME, and DAO you saw in many cases how your choices created consequences. That NEVER happened in SWTOR. You would make a choice and that choice was NEVER referenced ever again.....as if it never happened which renders the choices meaningless and purely cosmetic as they didn't really change the world around you because you had to share that same world with people who made other choices. The only choices that had lasting impact were the class stories which were meant to be played solo which is why it worked. However, Bioware has not confirmed if there will be class/player specific stories that coincide with the greater world story. SWTOR isn't the best example.
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Post by majesticjazz on Mar 11, 2018 20:30:48 GMT
Yeah, SWTOR is probably the best example, though it's worth noting that the choices are pretty much meaningless and/or nonexistent in the part of the game that is actually shared, and as a result, those shared aspects are a pain in the behind with regards to integration into content that is actually story driven (and vice-versa, somewhat). Even so, I would argue that even in Bioware’s singleplayer games the choices have very limited impact on other story content most of the time. Not really. There are many times when your choices are reflected throughout the game. Take DAO for example, how would Anthem handle a situation where I decide to allow the Warewolves to slaughter the Dalish village and you decide to instead kill the warewolves? How would Anthem reflect the consequences of that choice in a shared world? Again, E3 2018 will shed more light, but unless Anthem is heavily instanced, I do not see how choices carry much weight in the world.
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Post by Heimdall on Mar 11, 2018 20:44:25 GMT
Even so, I would argue that even in Bioware’s singleplayer games the choices have very limited impact on other story content most of the time. Not really. There are many times when your choices are reflected throughout the game. Take DAO for example, how would Anthem handle a situation where I decide to allow the Warewolves to slaughter the Dalish village and you decide to instead kill the warewolves? How would Anthem reflect the consequences of that choice in a shared world? Again, E3 2018 will shed more light, but unless Anthem is heavily instanced, I do not see how choices carry much weight in the world. I would imagine they would handle it the same way they do singleplayer content in Destiny or SWTOR. Story content, inevitably, takes place in mission-specific instances where those sorts of choices can be reflected. In SWTOR, a character you spared could come back in a later story instance and impact your character’s story. So I really don’t see why Anthem couldn’t reflect your choice as much as a game like DAO did, where the only real difference imparted by the werewolf choice was what allies you could call on in the end.
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Post by Heimdall on Mar 11, 2018 20:45:19 GMT
In SWTOR you have personal instances where the singleplayer fights/dialogue choices happen. Works decently. But outside of those instances, how were those choices acknowledged and what impact did they make? In KOTOR, ME, and DAO you saw in many cases how your choices created consequences. Outside of ambient dialogue, could you provide some examples of what you mean? Frankly, that isn’t far off from every Bioware game I’ve ever played.
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Post by majesticjazz on Mar 11, 2018 22:24:52 GMT
Not really. There are many times when your choices are reflected throughout the game. Take DAO for example, how would Anthem handle a situation where I decide to allow the Warewolves to slaughter the Dalish village and you decide to instead kill the warewolves? How would Anthem reflect the consequences of that choice in a shared world? Again, E3 2018 will shed more light, but unless Anthem is heavily instanced, I do not see how choices carry much weight in the world. I would imagine they would handle it the same way they do singleplayer content in Destiny or SWTOR. Story content, inevitably, takes place in mission-specific instances where those sorts of choices can be reflected. In SWTOR, a character you spared could come back in a later story instance and impact your character’s story. So I really don’t see why Anthem couldn’t reflect your choice as much as a game like DAO did, where the only real difference imparted by the werewolf choice was what allies you could call on in the end. But what about when you and I both back to that same village later on in the game? If I decided to have everyone killed and you decided to have everyone spared, how does Anthem handle that? What about the 3rd person who has yet to get to that point in the game?
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Post by Heimdall on Mar 11, 2018 22:44:13 GMT
I would imagine they would handle it the same way they do singleplayer content in Destiny or SWTOR. Story content, inevitably, takes place in mission-specific instances where those sorts of choices can be reflected. In SWTOR, a character you spared could come back in a later story instance and impact your character’s story. So I really don’t see why Anthem couldn’t reflect your choice as much as a game like DAO did, where the only real difference imparted by the werewolf choice was what allies you could call on in the end. But what about when you and I both back to that same village later on in the game? If I decided to have everyone killed and you decided to have everyone spared, how does Anthem handle that? What about the 3rd person who has yet to get to that point in the game? Dependent entirely on instances and how the game world is structured, which still isn’t clear. If such settlements are areas where you have to exit your Javelin to enter, they could easily be instanced and thus allow for the sort of reactivity you’re looking for. That’s really what I would expect given the way the fort seems to be acting as a hub. I doubt we’ll find many freestanding settlements outside the wall given how dangerous it’s been made out to be. That may very well be part of the reasoning behind that design. If we each have our own game world you invite friends into, then the responses would be dictated by the hosting player’s game state.
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Post by simit on Mar 12, 2018 0:42:04 GMT
I'd rather they just never did them, if there so called choices do anything its cripple potential story with the actual choices amounting to sweet FA.
Warden has a child with morrigan? tuff some dont Warden is prince_regeant or queen? tuff some aint GORDONS ALIIIIVE? sorry wrong place Chargers alive? tuff some killed them
The list goes on, the choices in BioWare games amount to nothing but headcannon or fan fiction, im happy some like them an in a sense they also add to my replay value but i'd rather have them cut completely out an a better overall narrative with clear cliffhangers that will be explored either in patches, updates or dlc
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Post by Pounce de León on Mar 12, 2018 8:11:57 GMT
It'snot really how "impactful" decisions are on the fictional world. It's more about how it's narrated and maybe how "impactful" they are for the character and his relations.
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Post by majesticjazz on Mar 12, 2018 12:57:10 GMT
But outside of those instances, how were those choices acknowledged and what impact did they make? In KOTOR, ME, and DAO you saw in many cases how your choices created consequences. Outside of ambient dialogue, could you provide some examples of what you mean? Frankly, that isn’t far off from every Bioware game I’ve ever played. I cant recall any specific examples off the top of my head. I will do so later on but there were many times in KOTOR, DAO, DA2 where later on in the game, you would be confronted with a consequence of a previous decision. I know people are trying to downplay the significance of choices now because Anthem may not be the best vessel to utilise this feature but it was important in many of the earlier Bioware games.
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Post by SofaJockey on Mar 12, 2018 13:06:39 GMT
I know people are trying to downplay the significance of choices now because Anthem may not be the best vessel to utilise this feature but it was important in many of the earlier Bioware games. I think choice remains important. BioWare have been bold in pitching for a 'Bob Dylan of video games'... It's going to be so interesting to see whether we end up with: - Dylan: "The Times They Are A-Changin'" or
- Not Dylan: "Achy breaky heart"
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Post by Sanunes on Mar 12, 2018 13:30:23 GMT
I know people are trying to downplay the significance of choices now because Anthem may not be the best vessel to utilise this feature but it was important in many of the earlier Bioware games. I think choice remains important. BioWare have been bold in pitching for a 'Bob Dylan of video games'... It's going to be so interesting to see whether we end up with: - Dylan: "The Times They Are A-Changin'" or
- Not Dylan: "Achy breaky heart"
Choice is important, but the expectations of how it will be used impact to the game vary greatly from what I have encountered over the years. To me I like the small nods in the games where its a line or two of dialogue from a NPC or a special but non-unique reward. I think Conrad Vernor in Mass Effect 3 is a good showing at multiple levels for me not only does it acknowledge you doing small tasks in Mass Effect 1 it also gives a nod to the discussions about thermal clips versus overheating on the message boards. I think that approach could work well in a game like Anthem for its a shared world so I think people would react poorly if NPC's started to disappear for reasons. Just like the expectations I saw of some expecting a massive CGI battle in Mass Effect 3 based on who they saved during the trilogy. I think even if BioWare implemented different segments such as having one for the Rachni if they lived it would still not have been accepted by people because the outcome would have been the same if they weren't there like the side mission where it was the same mission if you saved the queen or not in Mass Effect 1.
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Post by biggydx on Mar 12, 2018 14:23:36 GMT
They probably have to be pretty insular, and wholly contained between the player and the NPC's involved. You wouldn't be able to have changes to The Fort (the games main hub), or decisions that would significantly change your status with it; as it is your home base. I could see missions being replayable enough to offer different outcomes (in the form of side mission). Kill a bad guy during one of the games main missions, and the game moves on. Leave the bad guy alive, and you gain access to a side mission.
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