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It Takes a Simple Man to show the Complexity of Role-Playing

July 20, 2012August 9, 2020 Matt Thrower 9 Comments

By happy coincidence, I happen live and work in Bath, which is not only a lovely city but a mere stone’s throw from where most of the UK’s best video gaming magazines get written and published. So, obviously, I keep a pretty close eye on the material they put out. And thus I came to discover in CVG the saga of Olaf, a simple denizen of Skyrim, and his quest to accumulate enough gold to buy a manor house without adventuring, just exploring and doing day-to-day jobs like hunting, mining, chopping wood and picking cabbages.

Olaf’s tale is incredibly compelling. Of course the narrative arc and writing style are good but what makes it particularly absorbing is its innate contrariness. Skyrim is a game environment crafted to allow mighty-thewed warriors and wise mages to become famous through deeds of high and daring adventure, not a cabbage-farming simulator for peasants. That the intent of the game designers can be subverted in such spectacular fashion is perhaps the acid test of genuine “role-playing” in a computer RPG, a genre that’s more commonly synonymous with stat-crunching power builds than actually stepping into the shoes of a fantasy character. Previous experience with Bethesda’s open world RPGs has demonstrated that simply giving players freedom is insufficient: most will still power-game, and most non-adventure related activity quickly becomes boring.

So what makes Olaf different? The answer is that he has very clearly defined rules to his role-play, and an equally clear goal. When you look at what’s going on, it seems so simple as to make you wonder why people hadn’t done it before. And it turns out they had. Olaf was inspired by the Living in Oblivion series, where a journalist tried to live the life of a non-player character in the predecessor to Skyrim. The rules employed weren’t quite as a draconian as Olaf’s, and the goals less clearly defined. but the intent was the same. But having learned this lesson, what struck me is how difficult it is to come up with a set of rules and restrictions that allow you to role-play and still have a fun time doing so.

I had assumed that Living in Oblivion began as a random leap of imagination. But it turns out I was wrong. Its creator, Chris Livingston, got the idea after finishing the main quest in Oblivion but, not yet feeling ready to leave the game world behind, spent time exploring the houses and non-player characters in the game. While doing so he discovered that one particular NPC actually went on holiday: she would periodically visit someone in a different city. During that time her house would stand empty, and she would be found in the dwelling of her distant friend. Inspired by the idea that NPCs could have social lives of their own, he decided to create his own NPC, an ordinary citizen doing ordinary things whilst trying to survive in a dangerous fantasy world.

So it took a particular trigger and a special flash of inspiration to send someone who was both an experienced journalist and an experienced Oblivion player down that path. The lesson is that role-playing imaginatively, outside the usual confines of the game, is hard work. We can’t all suddenly just come up with our own versions of Olaf and Nondrick. The last time I tried something like this in a video game was in the predecessor to Oblivion (seeing a pattern here?), Morrowind. Rather than follow the main quest (which I never finished with any character) I built a mage and set out specifically to immerse myself in the immoral but curiously fascinating world of the House Telvanni, one of the noble families of the game world cast in the long fantasy tradition of secretive, insular, power-hungry wizards. It was great fun for a while, but ultimately it fell flat. There was too much temptation while out and about to go poking my nose into places it didn’t belong and start exploring side-quests, or getting sucked away into the main quest by one of the many points of interface between the House and other areas of the game.

Effectively the problem was that I hadn’t placed sufficient restrictions upon myself. But the more rules you put in place, the harder it is to find a fun combination. I suspect that, unless I’m simply terminally unimaginative, there aren’t many interesting paths through open-world RPGs other than ones similar Olaf’s, or ones that involve sticking fairly closely to the original intent of the game.

But it got me thinking. Ultimately one of the things that makes Olaf absorbing is that in spite of all his rules, he has an awful lot of freedom. Without the need to follow a scripted path, or to indulge in the usual RPG pastimes of stat-building and inventory-accumulating, his story becomes far more compelling and his actions actually more open-ended. Casting my mind back through all the role-playing games I’d ever played, I tried to think of others that had had that same effect, and encouraged me to simply explore and experience rather than pressuring me to build and collect. There were surprisingly few, and none of them were Elder Scrolls games. In fact I could think of only three: Fable, Ultima VII, and a relatively obscure old 8-bit game called Questron.

What those three games had in common was that the story was sufficiently compelling to make me not care about making a power-build. Instead I wanted to rush from quest to quest, to consume the plot, uncover the next twist and turn in the same way that cunningly written thriller novels do. In fact it’s interesting that two of those three games – Fable & Questron – are actually pretty weak as far as gameplay goes. But they still succeeded admirably in capturing my imagination.

As I have observed before, open-world games like the Elder Scrolls series suffer from that lack of focus. What I’m observing here is that they also suffer from trying to please gamers with both a realistic world to explore and a compelling plot to engage with. They’re trying to be all things to all people. This doesn’t make them bad, or not fun, it’s just that ultimately a game that’s spread so thinly across so many different goals is going to have trouble being truly satisfying for most players.

So it made me wonder, how would an Elder Scrolls type game be if it just gave up on an overarching quest and became an open sandbox world for you to play in? There would be quests, of course, and sometimes quests that interlinked into short stories. But without a plot the player would be truly free, truly encouraged to set their own rules and their own goals. They could act like the Nerevarine, Morrowind’s mythical god reborn, or they could be Olaf, or Nondrick or a follower of House Telvanni or anything they wanted, free of the constraints imposed by having had to craft a world in the service of following a particular heroic plot. They’d be free to role-play in the proper sense of the word. The question is, how many players would really be ready for that challenge of making their own value from a game instead of having it imposed from outside. Sadly, I suspect the answer is very few. Are you one of them?

Less Content, More Game

June 1, 2012August 9, 2020 Matt Thrower 45 Comments

Last weekend, I had the enormous pleasure of gathering up all my old Xbox stuff and passing it on to a friend for his children to enjoy. Pulling my old games off the shelf, I encountered Morrowind and quite suddenly was struck by what an enormous waste the game represented. A fantastically detailed, living, breathing fantasy world over which you could walk or fly in its entirety, exploring to your hearts content. And yet, in spite of running several characters over many hours of play, I never finished it because the game was fundamentally flawed.

Some of those flaws are well documented. The character building system was fatally undermined by the ease with which you could build super-powerful characters, and by the way it sidelined mages. A senseless economic system that forced players to either beggar themselves or utilise built-in Easter Eggs. But those, surely, should be nothing more than a minor annoyances in a game that’s defined largely by its immense scope and story. As I stood there gazing down at the box it occurred to me that the game was in fact simply crushed under the weight of its own ambition.

Morrowind sold itself on creating a realistically immersive fantasy world, and invested immense time and effort to that end. Every square inch of the island was mapped, every inhabitant named and given a home, different people in different places had fates that would intertwine in unusual and evocative ways. I cannot begin to imagine how on earth all that detail was authored and programmed and managed before making it into the game. But the illusion which all that detail was supposed to maintain was constantly shattered at fundamental levels. When you talked to all those individually named people, they just repeated things from a tiny stock of phrases related to their location and allegiances. Many of them never left their homes, or never went in them. No-one ever went to bed. When you were on a quest, the quest giver would wait in perpetuity for you to complete the task. Worse, you could often completely undermine the quest and still complete it. Wherever you went, whatever you did, you were constantly reminded that you were just playing a game in a computer generated world, with all the limitations that implies.

Skyrim was supposed to change all that with its radiant story technology, but it largely failed to live up to its promises. What was supposed to happen was that characters in the game world would react to your actions and reputations in a more realistic manner. What actually happened is that the game engine tied itself in knots over trying to understand your intentions, exemplified by the lovely anecdote from one player about the time he accidentally stole a book, put it straight back on the shelves, and then spent several hours fighting off hired thugs that the bookstore owner kept sending after him to recover the book. And radiant stories could do nothing about the fundamental unrealities that still riddled your interactions with the game environment, such as the now infamous exploit where you could put a bucket over someone’s head and they would stand quietly while you looted their house or shop. Simply put, modern technology has never been, and is still not, anywhere close to the level where it can mimic a vaguely realistic web of human interactions on the level that Bethesda keep attempting and as a result the central conceit of the Elder Scroll series has always been, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, false.

The same is true of the wealth of side quests in the game series. One of the key reasons I never progressed very far in Morrowind is that I spent inordinate amounts of time wandering off the beaten track and fulfilling tediously boilerplate side quests for petty rewards. The game sold itself on the number of these sorts of things on offer, but the reality was that they felt rushed, being badly scripted and badly balanced and usually adding nothing to the wider narrative of the game.

The point I’m driving at here is that when it comes to game design, all too often less is actually more. Contrast the Elder Scroll series with, say the Fable games. The Fable designs failed in equally fundamental ways being generally too easy and having certain powers and abilities that were far more useful than others, resulting in stereotypical figher/wizard character builds but in their limited scope they succeeded far more than the Elder Scrolls games in creating believable, entertaining fantasy worlds. They were incredibly shallow worlds, of course, but in a curious way the fact that you were literally unable to poke them and find out they were only skin deep stops you from noticing or caring about that fact. By contrast, the attempt in the Elder Scrolls games to make them seem believable when computer technology is still so far short of that capability just leaves them looking ridiculous. If all the effort that had been put into radiant stories and side quests had simply been put into plot, imagination and characters instead, the result would have been a more believable, immersive and simply better game.

This doesn’t undermine the validity of sandbox games though. It’s simply that there’s very little point in trying make a sandbox game realistic: instead the value is in making it as reactive and as explorable as possible, a lesson that Rockstar seems to have learned but Bethesda has not. The Grand Theft Auto games have always been fundamentally daft, and very little effort was made to make them seem otherwise. The result was that designers were able to leverage that stupidity to make their task easier, such as the closing off of central bridges for long periods of time in order to draw out the thrill of discovery, while the player was still largely free to explore and destroy things to his hearts’ content, which is basically the essence of a sandbox game.

One possible solution to this problem is simply to limit the scope of the sandbox. Limiting the scope means less to model, which in turn means less to go off the rails and end up looking ludicrous. This seems such an obvious fix that I’m amazed it hasn’t been tried more often. One game that does fit this model is Dead Rising, which I’ve never played but when I read about it, I was struck forcibly by how limiting the action to closed shopping mall filled with mindless zombies and only a very limited human cast inherently overcame many of the problems with realism in a sandbox world. It sounds as though the failings in the game had very little to do with its environment and I’d be interested to know if there are any other extant or planned examples of this approach. And again, it’s worth repeating that it’s yet another example in which a game is actually made better by putting less content in it and tightening the focus on what matters.

I can’t resist closing this column by contrasting the problems that video games have in creating a believable setting and atmosphere with board games. Oddly this is because board games are a less immersive and immediate environment. A video game occupies all your attention and makes you feel like you’re right there in the world that it’s creating, so even small anomalies can destroy the suspension of disbelief. In a board game most of the work in terms of setting and narrative is done by the imagination of the players and as long as you’re engaged with the game and enjoying it, that imagination will fill in all the blanks for you as you go along. Perhaps that is ultimately the reason why less is more when it comes to content in video games too. If so, then it’d do everyone good to avoid games like Skyrim in favour of more crudely drawn, but ultimately more thrilling fare.

Peter Molyneux – A Brief Retrospective

March 7, 2012September 10, 2020 Matt Thrower 3 Comments

So you probably heard that Peter Molyneux announced today that he’ll be parting company with Lionhead and Microsoft, changing his involvement with Fable: The Journey from “Creative Director” to that of consultant and starting his own new venture 22 Cans along with another former Lionhead alumnus Tim Rance. Given that Molyneux is both British and one of the more colourful and divisive figures in the gaming community, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a few thoughts.

In my head, Molyneux’s career thus far can be divided into two parts, mirrored by his involvement with two different studios. The first part he spent at Bullfrog, perfecting the “God Game” genre with games like Populous, Powermonger and Dungeon Keeper. A lot of these early games were wildly overambitious, a trait which has become synonymous with his name. Take the Populous games for example: they were a lot of fun to start with but quickly became repetitive, collapsing under the weight of the enormous scope they were supposed to represent on the comparatively limited hardware of the time. The same problem spoiled the otherwise awesome Magic Carpet (a game I’d love to see re-worked for iOS). Things improved a lot toward the end, with Dungeon Keeper combining a novel premise, interesting game play and an engaging story arc to keep players playing until the end.

The second phase, with Lionhead, can be characterised by an obsession with imbuing games with a sense of morality and consequence, as well as an even more inflated sense of ambition. This was first evident in the Black & White games which were promised as the ultimate, open ended God Games but which I felt were deeply frustrating and annoying. In hindsight it seems clear that there’s a dichotomy at work between the desire of game players to have possibilities of an open-ended sandbox world to explore and the desire to control what’s happening into a meaningfully strategic game experience. That understanding debuted in the Fable series with its frankly rather silly approach to morality in which the player was entirely in control of his own ethical fate through a series of obvious binary choices and was offered little or no incentive to explore more than one path. I actually loved the Fable games but that was in spite or, rather than because of, the focus on morality. I just found the design, evident humour and seamless combination of light RPG and third-person battler a delight.

So can we assume that 22 Cans will mark a new chapter in the Molyneux canon, with new obsessions and themes? I hope so. It has to be said that for the most part his games falls short of the expectation he sets for them and that his desire to push game play into dimensions it can’t easily explore tends to backfire but I’m glad he’s out there, designing games. People with that combination of creative flair and wild self-promotion aren’t that common, and while they often end up producing over-hyped, under-achieving product they do succeed in pushing the envelope that everyone else is stuck in. If there’s anyone who can take the industry beyond Call of Duty, it’ll be someone like Peter Molyneux.

So while we wait to see where the fickle winds of unfulfilled genius will blow our hero, I’ll leave you with this wonderful selection of Molyneux quotes.