Dynamic Stories?

[LittleSandcat]

Okay, so a main feature of my game is going to be a dynamic story.

What this means isn't just multiple endings, but the entire story can change directions depending on choices taken, and this starts very early on in the game - now, I ask you, what is your opinion on this? Too complicated? Fun? It's all in the eye of the beholder, so I'm going to you guys.

 

[kerbonklin]

Very fun if you can do it right, and adds lots of replay value which is a major plus.  It's fine if each choice leads to the same direction, but changes how you get there. However it takes much longer to properly playtest and debug, and working the eventings of cutscenes to not mix them up.

 

[iRonan]

Would be fun , I would play it. You are going to do this with advanced scripting or with the simple switches/variables?

 

[Mouser]

It's great if you can do it: Games I can think of that did this well are Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and Star Ocean 2.

The problem with it is keeping the 'linear' game structure while still allowing the players 'wiggle room' as they go along. If you let the players change too much, you end up trying to make separate games, which is a lot of work that will probably go unnoticed. You can make lot of choices in the middle, but you still have to end up facing the bad guy in the end - even if you're a 'bad guy' yourself at that point.

 

[LittleSandcat]

Would be fun , I would play it. You are going to do this with advanced scripting or with the simple switches/variables?

Switches and variables is the way to go for me.

It's great if you can do it: Games I can think of that did this well are Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and Star Ocean 2.

The problem with it is keeping the 'linear' game structure while still allowing the players 'wiggle room' as they go along. If you let the players change too much, you end up trying to make separate games, which is a lot of work that will probably go unnoticed. You can make lot of choices in the middle, but you still have to end up facing the bad guy in the end - even if you're a 'bad guy' yourself at that point.

I haven't fully figured it all out, yet, but I was thinking along the lines of something like that, maybe a little different.

I was probably going to go the way off a different boss depending on how you've ended up (think Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together, where the story ends up going two ways based on endings to each chapter), but also something such as the littler choices may be able to determine things such as who is or isn't there in the ending.

 

[wallacethepig]

While it may be fun for players, I would advise against it as it becomes a HUGE hassle you'll have to take care of time and time again. By the time you get around to the third choice, you'll probably be sick of looking at your project and scrap it. Don't do that! Better to have a game with a linear story that is playable than an unplayable game with a dynamic story. Sure, choices can be made. But try and keep them limited to changes in dialogue, things that don't matter except during big cutscenes and crucial plot points. Don't make different games for different choices.

Honestly, it depends on the game: how many battles you'll have, length, and the number of important NPCs are all factors. Whatever you go with, make sure it won't take too much out of you.

-Wallace

[Note: I'm not trying to discourage you from making a dynamic plot, I'm trying to show you the best way to utilize a plot like that and big pitfalls you should avoid. ]

 

[Mouser]

To throw out some counter examples: Knights of the Old Republic 2 shipped in a very unfinished state as Obsidian was unable to tie all the threads back together before ship date. Neverwinter Nights 2 (again by Obsidian) suffered pretty much the same fate. In both of those games you can tell what was cut (In KotOR 2 some plots were even expressly mentioned that never led anywhere). Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines by Troika suffered in part due to the separate dialog and plots for Malkavian (they did a similar thing in Arcanum, but got it to work there), though that was in large part due to Activision rushing the ship date: you can tell exactly where in the story development became 'rushed'.

You don't have the 'ship date' problem in the same way that they do, but if you work too long on a project you risk burnout and just other things in life coming up preventing you from finishing it.

Just food for thought from the other side. If you do it, go in with eyes wide open.

 

[cabfe]

To throw out some counter examples: Knights of the Old Republic 2 shipped in a very unfinished state as Oblivion was unable to tie all the threads back together before ship date. Neverwinter Nights 2 (again by Oblivion) (...)

Just wanted to say it's Obsidian, not Oblivion.

 

[SLEEP]

Branching story paths can quickly become too much work for a writer. If you can pull it off, you... well you can't. I'm gonna be blunt you can't do this. Unless you make it a really short game designed to be played over and over, like the Standley Parable... and even then it would be a lot of work.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

If you're up for the work, then by all means do so...

 

[Lars Ulrika]

I strongly advice you to check HONESTLY if you feel able to achieve such an astronomical amount of work. I passed through that with my first (awful) attempt at making a rpg on rpg maker 2000, I was all motivated, all happy, all into "let's make it like a changing universe" with reputation system leading to different endings and last bosses etc.... guess what? 
I finally scrapped every little bit of that to make a more linear story because of burnout and confusion on who was supposed to do what etc.

I would advice you to go on a "middle way". Make some choices , some characters that might appear or not but for side quests only. It will already improve the replay potential a lot without taking the risk of blowing up your whole main plot and getting confused in the process. 

 

[aozgolo]

The thing to realize is how much more work it is over a regular RPG. I had a concept for a game where you alternate control of different people (not in a party but totally separate stories like Suikoden III) and halfway through the game, depending on choices you make, one of them dies and you play with the survivor. Which of course completely changes the second half of the game. So at first it was going to be 4 characters, and 2 die, while the surviving 2 team up, if I had my way of making it as dynamic as I wanted that means 6 different scenarios for the second act, so now instead of making one game's worth of content I'm making 6. If I were to add in an option where anywhere between 1 and 3 people die then that ups it to 14 different scenarios, each additional dynamic choice can cause you to have to more than double your amount of work.

HOWEVER you can circumvent this by changing things on a smaller scale, but if you do enough of those it makes the whole world feel dynamic. For example let's say you find a village that's plagued by bandits, well you can either help the town or help the bandits and your choice only really affects that one town dynamically (switches the map to a ruined version of the town) and the townspeople say different things depending on your choice, this is still simple as you're only making 2 variations of everything, and only for a single town. Let's say though you wanted these things to impact the world in a larger way though. Well you can still do that simply, let's say maybe this town is a silver mine (which explains why bandits want it). Well if you get rid of the bandits, there's a greater output of silver caravans going all over the place, so suddenly silver weapons are cheaper, by contrast if the bandits take everything the sudden scarcity raises it. If you sided with the bandits perhaps the remaining townsfolk place a bounty on your head and now when you sleep you have a % chance to be awoken by a bounty hunter, or perhaps if you wiped out the bandits one of the surviving bandits comes back for revenge making the assassin encounter unavoidable (unless you didn't choose to help either side). Regardless you're still able to have multiple different outcomes and events tied to a single 2 point variable, the town is raided or it isn't (and a third 0 variable being the state before you do anything)

In this way you can do smaller scale dynamic events across the whole game, which will double your work, but it won't become exponentially more and more effort to do, and the subtlties of it make it much more dynamic, you can even code multiple endings based off which combination of dynamic events you've done.

 

[Mouser]

Just wanted to say it's Obsidian, not Oblivion.

Ach! I knew that...

editted the first post to correct it.

 

[Misaki]

My favourite replay value game.

Book of Mages: The Dark Times

Everything that happened there was so much fun. Things would happen on my choices. Things would happen whether I win or lose a fight(If you lose, there isn't death or anything, just continuation of the story). Things would happen if I decided to visit different places at different times.

 

[Tai_MT]

Oh ho!  Someone trying the same idea I had!  Here's my only advice to you:  GOOD LUCK!

No, I'm not joking.  Good luck.  Ten minutes into trying to program it and you'll realize why AAA titles and Indie Developers do not attempt to do it.  The first reason is that it's a large, cumbersome, complicated mess that requires craploads of notes for even 2 hours of gameplay.

So, let me see if I can help you out by pointing out the areas I had issues with:

1.  Create all your stories and branches on paper BEFORE ever programming a thing.  I am not kidding, the programming, mapping, Database, everything else is much easier if you get your story, your branches, your characters, and everything else out of the way first.  Do not even open your program before doing this, or you will be spending a lot of time doing "rewrites" and "reworks" of characters, areas, NPCs, systems, and even your story more than you'll be actually making your game.

2.  Have a design plan right out of the gate.  What systems you use and how you tackle things like stats, weapons, armors, battle, and even choices are important.  These are so important that right after you do the story, you should work on this.  You will avoid a lot of my pitfalls if you do.  By "Pitfalls", I mean having to rework the database a bajillion times, having to reorganize things within the maker, having to delete or omit systems because they didn't pan out or didn't work as you wanted them to, and reworking how skills, items, or weapons/armors work.

3.  Realize that there's no shame in limiting the amount of choices and "paths" in the game.  It becomes easier on you if you do limit some of these paths.  Trust me on this one.  Nobody is going to give you points for "trying" to create that kind of game.  They only give you points if you can pull it off... and even then, only if you pull it off in an "above average" manner.  Right now, I have so many paths and choices that it's quite literally a nightmare.

4.  Before you commit to any kind of system, make sure you can actually do what you want it to do.  If you plan something and there's no way to execute it with the engine (or with current scripts), then you'll have to rework the system or drop it altogether.  Make sure you know what your options are here, in case something does not work out as intended.

Beyond all of that...  I don't think I can really offer you any more help.  Whether you make it or not is really up to how much ambition and time you have for the project.  A project like this requires a lot of time and a steady stream of ambition.

 

[DeadCities]

I would advise anyone looking to do this to play The Walking Dead series by telltale games, the story is linear but you get the impression of having complete control over it.

 

[Tai_MT]

I played the first episode of that.  The game programmers basically trick the player into thinking they have control.  It's one of the reasons the game has zero replay value.  Once a player figures out that no matter what they do, nothing actually changes, there's no reason to play any of the episodes more than once or to reset upon "making a choice I didn't want".  I played the first episode twice.  That's all it took for me to go "Yeah, it's not worth buying the entire game just to have the devs basically trick me in an attempt to fool players that there's more content in this game than there actually is".

The Walking Dead is basically a game that could've been coded in Flash in about 5 months time.

It also doesn't help that the game has a lot of "arbitrary story deaths" just for the sake of having them.  You know, things like suddenly characters forget they have a brain in order to facilitate the really shoddy narrative.

EDIT:  Honestly, if you want a game about choices done well, just go look at the Mass Effect franchise.  They do it much better than The Walking Dead and they don't even have to resort to tricking the players to do it.  You know, none of that "So and so will remember that" crap, which they actually don't, and doesn't have any real bearing on the plot...  It's just there to make you THINK it's important.  Mass Effect, on the other hand, actually shows you what your choices do.  Especially if you ever reach the third game.

 

[Vinedrius]

EDIT:  Honestly, if you want a game about choices done well, just go look at the Mass Effect franchise.  They do it much better than The Walking Dead and they don't even have to resort to tricking the players to do it.  You know, none of that "So and so will remember that" crap, which they actually don't, and doesn't have any real bearing on the plot...  It's just there to make you THINK it's important.  Mass Effect, on the other hand, actually shows you what your choices do.  Especially if you ever reach the third game.

Except the ridicilous ending.

 

[Tai_MT]

I actually didn't find the original ending that ridiculous.  I actually understood it and was pretty satisfied with it.  But, then the fanbase when and cried like little children who skinned their knees, so Bioware went and fixed it for the crybabies.  The new ending is less vague (and thus requires less thought) and those same crybabies still aren't satisfied with the new ending despite Bioware delivering everything that had been complained about.

Basically, there's no pleasing those people.  These are the same people who never learned how to drive the Mako (which is fantastically easy, by the way) and also thought the second game was the best in the franchise.  Nevermind that these same people whined about "my choices didn't mean anything by the end of Mass Effect 3!" and then went on to deliver heaps of praise upon The Walking Dead which makes every choice you have absolutely worthless with pretty much zero impact upon the game.

I dunno, I found the ending fine.  Even thought it was pretty thought-provoking and that it might provide some kind of discussion amongst people who played the games.  Instead, we got a lot of gnashing of teeth and temper tantrum throwing until Bioware just gave in and let their fans have what they wanted.

Not gamers finest moment.  Do we spend our power to get really crappy games like Call of Duty off the shelves or made somewhat decently and cheater free?  No.  Do we stop really terrible movie tie-in games?  No.  Do we stand up against absolutely pointless DLC and micro-transactions?  No.  Nope, we pull together in order to force a game company to change the ending of their game because "It wasn't what we wanted".  I mean...  just wow.

 

[Vinedrius]

I don't think really think the same people praised Walking Dead's fake story branching unless they are hypocrites but regardless, it is an undeniable fact that Mass Effect 3 players have all the right to go mad at that ending. The game emphasizes on player choice all the time and gives the impression that it will affect the outcome but in the end, it gives you three preset options out of no where and that is it... What happened to all the choices we made along the way? At least they gave us different colors for the explosion, yay! XD