Consequences of violence -- have your say!

[Wilbefast]

I love the pictures

I'd think it would be the dogs who'd more likely fight you one on one, for the sake of honour. The wolves are supposed to be barbarians! The rats, meanwhile, would operate at the opposite side of the spectrum, only fighting when they well-and-truly outnumber the enemy.
Thing is, how do you encode "honour" into a game? Honour tends to be a codified concept so can be reduced to formal logic fairly easily. Perhaps not joining a fight when the (perceived) odds are in your allies' favour? One-on-one duels would emerge as a result of this, but how do you encode "odds", perceived or otherwise, in the first-place?
Morale is too simple a resource to cover all these things: if you give dogs high morale they'll be unlikely to hang back out of fear, but low morale and they'd run.

Then you get into even more complicated territory: if your enemy behaves dishonourably, should they still be treated honourably?

What we need to work out is a set of psychological attributes that each characters can be assigned (ex: honour, courage, brutality) and a set of rules which define how characters act based on these parameters:



Doing thing in this generic manner allows for characters to be defined arbitrarily, and Wolfire have said many times that they want to make a lot of unconventional characters which don't fit their racial stereotypes.

[h2ostra]

Do all "decision"-type actions really require an in-game result? (this isn't meant as a rhetorical question). In Lugaru, the Alpha wolf makes some comment about Turner not being able to defeat him if he hadn't had a sword. As a result, I never use the sword in that fight, because in light of the cutscene, it just feels cheap. This doesn't affect any of the rest of the game, only how I approach that specific fight, and not because of any sort of in-game reward, just the satisfaction I take away from it. I guess the problem with this is that it is very player-dependent, and depending on how it's handled the player will only take away what they came with.

I suppose what I'd like to see is not just a look at the cultural effects of violence, but also the personal effects. Is turner losing sleep over all the people he's killed, or is he becoming increasingly jaded and emotionally cold? What is he gaining from his struggles, or is he just losing pieces of himself along the way? How is he justifying all the death he is causing?

[Wilbefast]

I suppose what I'd like to see is not just a look at the cultural effects of violence, but also the personal effects.

Turner says "do I have to kill everybody (...)" at one stage, even if you haven't killed anybody. Based on kill-count I guess you could swap dialogue in and out as in Iji, though perhaps based on more than just your kill-count. I also played a Warcraft 3 mod where set lines of dialogue where assigned to characters on the fly, based on who was still alive.

Finally, there's this:


Of course, it all requires writing/dubbing several version of the dialogue. I don't see any other way though: it's not like computers are yet capable of writing narrative

[AAorris]

Thank you thank you, your picture is beautiful as well!

We're working with a state machine, so we should consider composing and updating a list of states/actions that would express all the actions we want to see. Then we can hook them up into the proper parameters, and hook -those- up with the right stimulus!

and h2, your lovely ideas are less mechanics and more firmly set in Wolfire's hands. Although, you've opened up some great ideas! If for example, the storyline had a soft goal, you could explore going through all the same parts of the game, but keeping in mind that you might have killed or deserted your friends... forgotten everything you used to fight for... gave up for cheap tricks... or regret everything in the end. These all don't require new level design, or branching storylines, because they could happen based on what had, and hadn't been done

Rewarding the player with different dialogue or cutscenes, and/or providing them with a summary of the way they played through the game would be two things that could make overgrowth not only viral, but a true story. It would intensely boost replay value as well!

[Jacktheawesome]

I really, really hope David and Aubrey have their eyes on this thread.

[greader]

I think the rats are probably going to be the race Turner has to chase down for info. Wolves are obviously going to attack in packs; that's just another aspect of their deadly-ness. However since rabbits are not large prey, they probably won't feel the need to team up unless Turner is the uber-rabbit and a) has a reputation or b)kills one of them

Another mechanic that's important here is the ability to call for reinforcements- dogs + wolves can howl and cats can yowl, but rabbits and mice can only squeak. So if you killed your dog hostage in front of his buddy, he would immediately howl for backup. (Assuming the value system is in use, he hasn't fled because you didn't kill the hostage yet.) If a wolf sees you and deems you enough of a threat, he immediately howls for reinforcements so his buddies can join a lovely game of Kill the Rabbit. Cat yowls for guards, and rabbits and rats run flailing their arms.

This would give more incentive to chasing down those fleeing from battle, as they may come back w/ reinforcements. However, it could also be a good move to leave the area. The first way ends with you killing everyone, the second leaves survivors. To balance this, escaping the area is going to be more risky once you've alerted everyone, but you get be more legendary. If you kill everyone, you don't need to worry about stealth anymore, but gain a bad reputation because you hunt people (er... animals?) down and kill them without mercy. Different kinds of famous, I suppose.

[BotheredMe]

Something I thought about while reading Aaoris's last post, a bit off topic, but I thought up a couple attacks mixed with parquor styling for when an enemy Rabbit, or Turner himself, feels they are being over-run with badies and begin to flee. One bit I half imagined David would have implemented into the free running would be swings from ledges or poles. I thought that Turner could be able to vault over a short wall or a large rock and perform a powerful kick, similar to the motions in this gymnastics excercise.



Also, I'm not sure if David will add swinging from poles Prince of Persia style, but you could get the same effect executing an attack from a swing perhaps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 6J1I#t=23s

Just a couple thoughts, I figure they'd be a very tactical approach when dealing with large groups by forcing them into a one-on-one situation while still being able to maintain one's fleeing from said large group. This could be helpful in possibly prison escapes or escapes from an arrest. But I digress.

Ultimately, what I'd like to see from the narrative is an immersible RPG where you can choose to be a well-renowned and/or feared warrior, a stealth fighter whom avoids combat unless absolutely necessary, or any hybrid therein, giving a sort of Hitman esque to the gameplay, having how you choose to play the game actually have and effect on how the story plays out (One great example was True Crime, that game had 7 completely different endings ranging from a fight on top of a skyscraper with a mobster to a Dragon boss fight in an Asian restaurants basement. Maybe not that much of a difference in how gameplay effects the story, but you should understand what I mean a little better.)

It's asking way too much, so I don't expect the perfect game from Wolfire, but I do know it's going to be bitchin awesome no matter how it ends up.

[BotheredMe]

Also, just a side note, this thread is developing really well. I'm liking most of the ideas that are being put out

[Wilbefast]

I forgot to mention the Suffering: like Iji it's a game with purely linear progression, ergo no need to build multiple versions of levels, but you still have interesting choices that do make a difference:

[+] The Suffering ending

In The Suffering you define the main-character's past by how you behave, that is by whether you kill off friendly NPCs to steal their ammunition or help them to safety.

"Bad" ending:


"Good" ending

I quite like this way of doing things: have a set of situations the player-character will encounter but have them comment on these situations based on how you've defined their personality.

greader: a good way to simulate running for help might be to share morale between characters encountered. So say a rabbit is running away with -10 morale and meets another rabbit with 6 morale: both will continue running with (-10 + 6)/2 = -2 morale until they meet another rabbit who can fully dilute their fear.

As for different kinds of reputation, I seem to remember having drawn up some kind of graph with brutality/pacifism on one axis and honour/sneakiness on the other. You'd start at (0,0), that is not known for being anything in particular, and your actions would move you around the graph. Characters would have alternative dialogue options to give based on your position on the graph: a simple distance calculation would suffice.



Note that this would work even in n-dimensional space, but would be far harder to graph

[johndh]

I suppose what I'd like to see is not just a look at the cultural effects of violence, but also the personal effects. Is turner losing sleep over all the people he's killed, or is he becoming increasingly jaded and emotionally cold? What is he gaining from his struggles, or is he just losing pieces of himself along the way? How is he justifying all the death he is causing?

There may be mothers and children in this den... and I'm not so sure that I care anymore.

[Wilbefast]

There may be mothers and children in this den... and I'm not so sure that I care anymore.

Another line of dialogue that's none too coherent with a pacifism run... then again trying to be pacifistic was a bit difficult in Lugaru. It was hard not to accidentally "break" the enemies sometimes

I'd like it if Overgrowth they were a bit more solid: as in you'd have to really want to kill them (ie. use weapons on put bodies off cliffs) to do so.

[AAorris]

There may be mothers and children in this den... and I'm not so sure that I care anymore.

Another line of dialogue that's none too coherent with a pacifism run... then again trying to be pacifistic was a bit difficult in Lugaru. It was hard not to accidentally "break" the enemies sometimes

I'd like it if Overgrowth they were a bit more solid: as in you'd have to really want to kill them (ie. use weapons on put bodies off cliffs) to do so.

Indeed. In a context sensitive control setup, that would be a rather important context to pick up on from user input. I wonder if there would be an easy way to express such intentions in the controls?

[Wilbefast]

The attack button is a binary input unfortunately, but the weapons are a useful tell. I know of two games that have used sheathing and drawing of weapons as a way of making decisions in-game. Here's the oft-cited example:



It would be useful to be able to strangle enemies while carrying a knife (you could do this in Splinter Cell: you always had a knife) but I don't think there are enough buttons left Actually maybe "sheath" while holding knife to throat could transition to strangle? Intuitive, reuses buttons, would require extra animations though...

[Noz]

I think reputation for fighting skills would keep you safe from cowardly or weak enemies (most cats and rats) and put you in danger of attacks from wolves, dogs and other enemies who are trying to prove their mettle. Shows of strength in the game could hinder weaker enemies and spur on stronger ones.

I think that in Overgrowth, different choices that the player makes pertaining to violence and how to deal with it could ally you with a different race. Do you weaken your enemies with ranged attacks, employ confusion tactics, and strike one by one? (cats) Do you sneak up from behind and slit throats? (rats) Will you accept defeat and fight with restraint? (dogs) Are you a berserk head chopper who jumps into crowds of enemies without caution and who uses the most excessive shows of strength to claim a position in the pack? (wolves)

Maybe this would add more to a choose-your-own-path game than "Do you kill this guy or that guy?". I think that branching possibilities would be much more believable if they were determined by how you play. Lugaru challenge levels already had a way of measuring how you play.

[Night_S1ash]

Whether a weapon is drawn or not could also factor into this equation. Turner may have a rank of, let's say 1, and a guard has a rank of 1, so they'll fight one on one, but when Turner draws a sword previously on his back, his rank may go up to 4, causing the guard to A: Seek help, B: Flee, or C: Find his own weapon to even it up. This could mean you can threaten a small group when you don't want any trouble, if you know there are no other weapons and only 1 guard, you can leave him alive by using the weapon to outrank/scare him.
Just an idea I had during the conversation.