| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Tuesday 3 August 2004: |
| A bit of thought on game plot design, brought to you by my playing the two parts of Ultima 7 (Black Gate and Serpent Isle) consecutively. The plot of Black Gate is conceptually quite fun, but in execution really quite boring and annoying. It's essentially following a murder mystery model. You arrive on the scene of a crime, and spend the rest of the game investigating things and hunting things. What this means in practice is that you spend the rest of the game wandering around semi-randomly trying to stumble upon useful clues. You have an overall goal, and you spend the game trying to find the path that leads to that goal. There are some irrelevant side-plots, which are fun but essentially pointless, and some plot-advancing side-plots which are necessary and essentially might as well be linear (though you can probably do them in a different order, and this is marginally more interesting than if they were purely linear). Serpent Isle, on the other hand, foists a plot upon you from the very beginning. You start out with a goal to head towards, but the instant you start heading towards that goal you get impediments. Your companions disappear and all your equipment gets magically scattered and needs to be recovered - you have clues as to where each item is, in the form of what it was replaced with. One of your companions turns out to be in jail, and to get him out you have to become a knight. In becoming a knight you get poisoned, and thus have to go and find the ingredients for the antidote. At any one time there are several minor goals you can be trying to achieve, all of which are steps towards putting you back on the path to the overall goal. Unlike in Black Gate, there is no reason ever to be wandering randomly looking for a clue. I think the game-design lesson I take from this is that building problems upwards is more interesting than building problems downwards. Black Gate goes "here is a goal that's really far away. Here are some other things you have to do to reach that goal. Here are some other things you have to do in order to do those things." Serpent Isle goes "here is a goal that's really far away. But here's a problem that you have, right here, right now! And here's another one. And here's another one that you have to deal with to resolve that one." The problems are immediate, which means the solutions are apparent and nearby (though not necessarily simple). If you build the problems "top down" like Black Gate, you leave the player stumbling around looking for the problems they're supposed to be dealing with, rather than looking for solutions to the problems that have been dealt to them. Looking for problems doesn't make for a fun game. Of course, it's harder to make a coherent whole from a "bottom up" plot, since making the impediments themselves lead the player gradually to the destination is harder than adding impediments in the way on a path which already leads to the destination. But I think it's worth it - not just because it's more fun, but also because it makes for a more compelling plot. A story in which someone goes to a place, does something, and wins (with some problems along the way) is not as good as a story in which someone who doesn't really know where they are going or what it is they are dealing with ends up foiling the bad-guy precisely because the bad-guy, in trying to stop them, leads them to their goal. If you have (access to) the Ultima 7 data files, you can play the games on a modern machine, Windows or Linux, using the Exult engine, because it won't run playably on modern machines otherwise. I preferred Ultima 4 and 5, myself, though. Quick, a movie review! Batman - Mystery of the Batwoman is alright. Essentially just a long episode of the Batman animated series though. [11:34] |
| Aaron |
| I've been meaning to play Ultima 7 on the pc for some time now (previously my only experience has been with the SNES version). I think I agree with you, almost completely, on the "bottom up" game design principle. Morrowind (which was good, but not as good as Daggerfall) managed both in it's design, and I definitely had way more fun completing the "bottom up" quests, especially when they tie together conveniently in ways that are obvious after you've seen how they tie together. Or maybe they never tied together to the extent that I think they did. Anyway, Morrowind's "main goal" used the top-down approach and left the vast majority of players feeling like they were aiming mindlessly, not sure of exactly what to do. In fact, that's a common problem in many modern "roaming" games that give you a huge piece of virtual-real estate to play with. Actually, grand theft auto 3 would be an example of another game that used the bottom up design (when you follow the story) but otherwise had a top-down design and wound up being boring and pointless. Well, for me anyway. But good insight. Hopefully that's something I'll be able to keep in mind as I make my fortune creating games for a living! Mwuhahahaha! |