Chris

Idle Thumbs 80: Happy Dishonored Halloween

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I don't get why you think lowering the weapon is such a bad thing. The Hounds Pit is by and large a place reserved primarily for advancing the narrative. There's no point in giving you the option to kill friendlies if all it does is inconvenience you and bring you out of the game.

In a game like Morrowind where you're not being led through a linear story, fine, make it possible to kill everyone and screw things up, that's great! But if, as a game designer, you're trying to tell a specific story, you have to tie off possibilities otherwise telling that story will be impossible.

Like I said, I think games like Stalker do it best by inserting the warning into the narrative that they don't want you swinging your gun around friendlies. It reminds me of playing DayZ where you'll often get shot by a human for pointing your gun at him. The game should give you the choice to put your weapon away and then respond negatively only if you refuse to follow the ample warning given.

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I'm on the lowering weapons side of the fence. It's kind of a contextual thing, but it doesn't bother me if I can't do something that literally cannot possibly help me and can give me a game over. It's conventional enough that even if it's not the most elegant or appropriate approach, it's still pretty acceptable.

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I'm on the lowering weapons side of the fence. It's kind of a contextual thing, but it doesn't bother me if I can't do something that literally cannot possibly help me and can give me a game over. It's conventional enough that even if it's not the most elegant or appropriate approach, it's still pretty acceptable.

I remember being so pissed off by it in Half Life 2 (which maybe makes sense as Half Life 1 let you just murder everyone), but at this point, especially in a game like Dishonored, I'd really rather the game just said "it's actually not worth it to even try and shoot this person, it would just be dumb and the game would stop, so here you go."

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I remember being so pissed off by it in Half Life 2 (which maybe makes sense as Half Life 1 let you just murder everyone), but at this point, especially in a game like Dishonored, I'd really rather the game just said "it's actually not worth it to even try and shoot this person, it would just be dumb and the game would stop, so here you go."

Half Life 2 is also kind of inconsistent with that too, like if you lost the buggy by driving it off a cliff it would also reach a narrative fail-state. Would have been cooler if it just made you walk.

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... Half Life 1 let you just murder everyone...

Except that there were those very few NPC's that would give you a "Failed to properly utilize assets" game over screen because they needed to open a door or something for you. But you could still kill them after that, so, sort of averted?

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I heard the opening greetings to this podcast and all I could think was, "Hello, John."

Skip to 0:31 to see what I'm talking about.

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I didn't know either, but it makes sense.

I was going to watch that video, but then it opened up with the phrase 'rangefag'. :(

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Had a hard time keeping track of the Claim Made part.

You should design a diagram or some other kind of Claim Aid to help me keep track of those most memorable Klei Maid's.

:P

THUMBZ

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Had a hard time keeping track of the Claim Made part.

You should design a diagram or some other kind of Claim Aid to help me keep track of those most memorable Klei Maid's.

:P

THUMBZ

I'm still not sure what the initial intent was, because I assumed it meant "Klei made" from the start.

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Had a hard time keeping track of the Claim Made part.

You should design a diagram or some other kind of Claim Aid to help me keep track of those most memorable Klei Maid's.

:P

THUMBZ

Vell händled. :tup:

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I'm so glad that Sean is comfortable with his fandom of DOTA 2 and its competitive scene. The turmoil he was going through when it first started was making me sad.

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I'm really enjoying Xcom though I just picked up the latest Forza game, but I'm just wondering if Chris has run in to any of the bugs that are cropping up? Also any issues in Dishonored. Not that it really takes away anything from the game, but when you are the one who is dealing with shit bugs it can really kill your buzz for the game.

In Dishonored I had a bug where it would auto alert a certain NPC's guards/buddies even when I had killed someone so I had to go back about to a save that was around an hour previous to restart the mission and it seemed like that fixed up. In Xcom I've run in to a few issues but none more infuriating than an issue where when firing a rocket from an elevated position the rocket basically went way off of where I was aiming. I was deep in to an operation and no matter what I did the elevated position meant my shots were missing from the rocket launchers on my heavy so I had to scrub the entire thing. These aren't game ending bugs but it starts to bum you out when they make you lose progress.

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I will start watching sports on TV the day they launch eESPN. I'll call my uncle over and tell HIM a thing or two about how it's played.

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I was eating dinner while listening to this, and the airplane story almost made me choke on my food, as did Dishonored Halloween. Some people listen to podcasts while driving, but to me, that just seems like a bad idea.

Also, I'm a little surprised at how much discussion there is about lowering your gun vs. game over screens. What is it about the situation that makes it so important to people? It seems like both options break immersion to some degree.

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First, it's cool to hear you guys talking about the Overseer poisoning scene. Also cool that someone experienced the scene from under the table, since that's how I saw it 90% of the time when I was first setting it up. It's rewarding to hear the different approaches to the scene and having it shake out in different ways. You set these things up and send them off into the wild, and there's always this nagging feeling there's something you missed and it's all going to fall apart when it's on a real retail machine.

It's interesting to see the discussion spring up around Game Overing the player vs weapons down vs invincible NPCs. I think they're probably all valid in different contexts, and it's mainly a matter of picking which one works for you and then supporting it properly. I personally think that once the player realizes that killing a plot critical NPC ends the game, then it's as effective as a weapons down while maintaining a cohesion between "narrative space" and "gameplay space". This means the player's internal system model can bleed over between the two, and in my mind at least it means that these guys are more "real". They're part of the same simulation where you as the player go around affecting things.

We have a lot of plot critical characters out in the mission spaces as well, and "weapons down" isn't feasible when you can lob grenades, summon rats, etc. It is definitely a much contended topic though, and it's been viewed differently at different studios I've worked at. The topic probably deserves more time than I'm cramming into this post, and a lower latency back and forth than a forum can afford. :)

Also, I believe the boatman that takes you to the pub in the first visit tells you all about the two guys you're going to meet inside, so the assumption was that players would know they were friendly. The potential for evesdropping is a cool idea though.

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Oh, I forgot to say! I did that mission in a way that lasted almost 5 minutes longer than the ways Chris and Sean described. I experienced a situation that had me panicking just as much, but for completely different reasons, and it was just as awesome to be scrambling through it.

If NEITHER of them has a drink, the High Overseer must turn to Plan B.

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I didn't have to do anything to save the guy from the poison. I was hiding in the corner, both guys came in, then they ran off like lunatics for no apparent reason and I got credit for saving him. Very mysterious!

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Oh man, Dishonored developer shows up in the thread to talk about the game. Awesome.

When you guys were joking about Dishonored having a really weird silly contextual thing pop up when you play it on Halloween I thought about Arkane's first game, which actually did have something pretty wacky. In Arx Fatalis in one of the dungeons you could make your way to an out of the way room that had a chicken in it. If you cast a reveal spell on it you'd see the chicken identified as a man. So that's weird. Then if you explore more in another part of the game you'd find a book about Lord Inut who discovered a way to transform into a chicken. So then if you grab a leek, a carrot, a dragon egg, and a bottle of water, then go to a tavern you found near the beginning of the game and mix them together in a cauldron, you get a potion. Then when you give the potion to the chicken it turns him back into a man and gives you a ton of XP. Then if you talk to him again he'll give you a weapon and then explode.

Between that, the Thief easter egg, and the shoutouts to Steve Gaynor, Tynan Wales, JP LeBreton, and other BioShock 2 designers in the first assassination mission, I wouldn't put the crazy Halloween stuff past Arkane :D

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First, it's cool to hear you guys talking about the Overseer poisoning scene. Also cool that someone experienced the scene from under the table, since that's how I saw it 90% of the time when I was first setting it up. It's rewarding to hear the different approaches to the scene and having it shake out in different ways. You set these things up and send them off into the wild, and there's always this nagging feeling there's something you missed and it's all going to fall apart when it's on a real retail machine.

It's interesting to see the discussion spring up around Game Overing the player vs weapons down vs invincible NPCs. I think they're probably all valid in different contexts, and it's mainly a matter of picking which one works for you and then supporting it properly. I personally think that once the player realizes that killing a plot critical NPC ends the game, then it's as effective as a weapons down while maintaining a cohesion between "narrative space" and "gameplay space". This means the player's internal system model can bleed over between the two, and in my mind at least it means that these guys are more "real". They're part of the same simulation where you as the player go around affecting things.

We have a lot of plot critical characters out in the mission spaces as well, and "weapons down" isn't feasible when you can lob grenades, summon rats, etc. It is definitely a much contended topic though, and it's been viewed differently at different studios I've worked at. The topic probably deserves more time than I'm cramming into this post, and a lower latency back and forth than a forum can afford. :)

Also, I believe the boatman that takes you to the pub in the first visit tells you all about the two guys you're going to meet inside, so the assumption was that players would know they were friendly. The potential for eavesdropping is a cool idea though.

Hey man, thanks for stopping by. I have to assume all the potential alternatives we batted around were discussed to death in the design pit during development. It's one of those seemingly intractable design problems.

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Yeah. A lot of that discussion had ossified before I signed on as well. It's a battle between the verisimilitude of satisfying player expectations and the production concerns of handling the fallout from letting the player touch your stuff. I think "guns down" or the bullet proof glass of the Bioshock games is a good way to unask a lot of interactivity questions and the player generally accepts it and moves on. In most cases there will probably be a contingent that disagrees with the way it's handled.

Academically and aesthetically I admire and support the attempt to bring narrative elements into the simulation, but you could potentially fall down a rabbit hole trying to cover the contingencies. Branching content based off of key character deaths is practically impossible early in the narrative arc of a AAA content based game, but I think that kind of thing can be handled if you start off structuring your story delivery with that in mind, redundant quest givers, sand box objective structure, procedural story gen (better with text based stuff), "oops all side quests", etc.

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Just imagining the work involved making a branching narrative game to begin with, and then adding on the work of creating additional branches not only based on conversational/character choices but based on whether a character lived or died or whether you were the murderer... holy shit. The thing is, even if it was possible, how good could that story be? It would be stretched so thin that short of writing it for a decade it would end up feeling weird and unresolved. Which is actually a good argument for why the Mass Effect main story points are so unsatisfying. They had to write for dozens of paths (maybe more?) and so when they try and tie those paths into a central narrative the narrative feels far less compelling than the paths and the individual components of your particular playthrough. And there wasn't even the possibility of killing a character outside of specific points.

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