Comments on: Game Idea Wish List #1: Interactive Fiction

By: darrin

darrin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:12:53 +0000

Great ideas, mcloki. If I was independently wealthy or if I had the writing and video editing skills, I’d get this game made myself

By: mcloki

mcloki — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:44:54 +0000

Darrin. I think that to have this work you would need to take a world that had already been created. Asset wise and rework the AI engine. Maybe a better example would be GTA. The city is there. All the assets are done. It would just be a story of Niko One year later. Or add a few more character stories. Like a Jacob DLC.
On the WOW front It’s the heavy community elements that fit your requirement.
Mysterious and transparent. Could be better.
Unique stories. Your party number varies from group to group. The people you interact with vary. Each story is unique. Your’re still in the WOW world, but it is your unique story.
Complex and Subtle. Armoring up is complex and subtle and has an effect. Don’t and you die.
I think what you really want is going to always be a bit out of reach.

What you really need is a persistent world. This was a good question. I’m thinking about how it could be done. Take care

By: darrin

darrin — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:11:49 +0000

Zork is lots of exploration, inventory management, stat fights, and puzzles. WOW is completely different: stat building, stat battles, heavy community elements, and very mass market friendly pulp fantasy. I want to see something that focuses on narrative and elaborate branching storylines: More like a high-tech ambitious choose your own adventure style game aimed at an older audience.

Obviously creating tons of content requires tons of resources, and studios don’t like to do branching because that means a lot of their costly content isn’t seen by most players. But it seems completely feasible to me: studios spend tons of resources on action mechanics and customized action-centric art assets. I would think that a branching story line game could be done on a reasonble budget and with the industry so focused on innovation and new ideas, a good proof-of-concept could easily secure publisher funding.

By: Emrah

Emrah — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:59:55 +0000

For deep branching to work, you’d need extremely good AI (behavioural AI, not just path finding) which is almost fully autonomic, along with it state of the art animation system, and superb speech generation, because you can’t record every possibility. It can happen in 10 years, then again my imagination is scarce!

By: mcloki

mcloki — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:55:02 +0000

It’s the business plan that needs the work. A Never ending story like the one you propose would need an never ending supply of cash. So the game you propose would need to be a subscription game. WOW seems to be what you are asking for. OR am I not getting the gist of it.

By: Henning

Henning — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:23:18 +0000

Meh, I don’t care too much about storytelling in my video games. As long as there’s enough there to glue the game together, that’s about all I need. I never got into adventure games or text adventures like ZORK.

By: Glitch

Glitch — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:40:51 +0000

Actually, I would love to have the whole adventure genre to make a comeback. But I am not sure many people have patience for those games.

I remember back in the eighties, when I coul play a word adventure game for weeks making maps and being frustrated because I couldn’t guess the right word to get further in the game. That was actually fun.

I know, that you’re not asking for text adventures, and I don’t think that they will be played outside of a very small cult following.

But what I would like to see is perhaps a merger between rpgs and graphic adventure games. that is rpg battling and levelling up, but with the classical problem solving from the adventure games.