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As someone mentioned above (sorry I'm not sure who) if we take the Fallout 2 route to open-ended gameplay then the player can 'fail' things.

Actually I prefer the idea of no concrete successes or failures - only temporary victories or defeats (except for death, but thats a whole other issue which I may go into later). This allows the naturally flowing development of a story by linking the consequences of these victories and failures into the larger world.

This has the interesting effect that in certain places it can be better to lose or fail in a task you have been set if the design of the scenario has negative long term effects.

Personally, while I would like to see an interesting and developing plot, if it can react or develop despite failure on my part then I will be much happier than if it required me to redo the "magical reset".

I honestly think thats what killed San Andraes for me. So many nice ideas in that game, but one of the missions has you fly a plane out to stop the hitmen from landing. I'm utterly awful at flying so naturally I failed. The hitmen landed. Only my failure meant nothing. They weren't on their way to kill the mafia king and I couldn't try and make up for my mistake. Instead the story forced me to redo something until I got it "right".

I stopped playing.

In short: I would rather put up with the consequences of my actions than be forced to play the story in the exact same manner as everyone else. That, to me, is the true nature of open-ended gameplay.

Open-ended gameplay is a good idea in theory, but few times is a pulled off to good effect. From the games I have seen, in any case.

Nevertheless, even though I hated that aspect of Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas, I didn't think it enough of an annoyance to stop playing the game. I found it quite fun. I see where you were coming from, though.

Pretty much any game that wants to use the multiple paths lay-out can only be well designed with a butt-load of pre-scripting (and that usually doesn't happen). It's usually real subtle changes like in KoToR, you can choose to be good or evil, but the real thing that decides it all is how you go through the very last dialgue. Metal Gear solid is soley based on whether you decided to save Meryl or not, and Snake Eater is decided on if you aimed at Ocelot or not (there's actually 3 I think, you either don't have the gun with the bullet, you decide to shoot him, or you miss completely. Not sure if sniping The End while he's in the wheel chair counts as a change to the plot). But that's expected, creating a branching plot would take forever to do and I'm not sure if people would care so much about it. This ain't really going against anyone's ideas since no one really cared about a crazy do-what-you-want plot-line 9which basically makes this paragraph pointless), but real dramatic plot changes seems impossible to do.

To have real free flowing plots like Fallout 2, they had to break everything up into a bunch of side quests. Not only that, but these side quests you did had to be created as to not contradict each other, so they could be completed in any order (unless it's a long step-by-step quest, or a requirement based quest). The only things that really needed to change were the dialogues a little, such as acknowledging you were a boxer or a citizen. And man, that game was just crazy, it had like a horrendouse amount of quests, even though finishing the game only required you to power up the ship and kill the enclave. I have no idea how long that would take, but crap, imagine playing through everysingle quest to test it out. It's like each one had to be fitted with all these options to beat it like, talking your way into getting what you want, killing all of the opposing forces, and then just sneaking,stealing, and lock picking your way through the mission (that's just the general overlay, lots of missions had to be tailor made to either fighting and talking, or fighting and sneaking). The way quests got screwed up was when they made you get into a situation where you can fail right off the back, I think they made it do that on purpose (like talking to the depressed guy at the beggining of the game, totally screwed you over when you had to do the "ghost farm" mysterey).

But nevermind that, Lugaru 2 should work well with a main story-line and some side-mission I think. Fallout 2's style must have taken them a whole year to do. Crap, what was I talking about?

Wow, a game taking a whole year! No way!

Half Life 2 took five-six years.

Renegade_Turner wrote:Wow, a game taking a whole year! No way!

Half Life 2 took five-six years.

Umm, I think I was talking about the content for the game, but yeah one year is pretty short. But as for Lugaru 2, if it's slated out to be due this year, they won'thave time to do a year's worth of content. But no matter, it seems like content loading is going to be extremely easy to do as far as Jeff's GUI is concerned. Also, there's the fact that the Fallout 2 guys probably didn't have the greatest map editor compared to what Lugaru 2 will have (that sounds very speculative, I know. But do you really doubt it?). That's probably what I was thinking, taking a whole year just designing the levels for the game, not the engine itself.

Man, I had no idea Half-life 2 spent a whole 5-6 years worth of creating! I mean, they must have started Half-life 2 right when they finished Half life 1.
Jeeze, they didn't really try anything new, did they? Hell, the content was great but damn, was it worth that long developing? Seesh people beat that game pretty quick.

What about the Escape Velocity games? They had a really neat way of branching the plot. I loved them, especially nova.

And what I liked about Nova was that they didn't have to have a huge amount of side-quests besides the six main storylines to keep it diverse.

As for the save game system, maybe use the same sort of way the EV games handled it, where, if you died you simply went back to the last 'safe' place you were last. In that case it was planets but it could still work, say villages, towns, and your own camp(s) could be 'safe' places where it saves automaticly. Also it would be cool if at the beggining of the game you could put on the 'Strict Play' option where if you died, you died. No reincarnations.

Kalexon wrote:Also it would be cool if at the beggining of the game you could put on the 'Strict Play' option where if you died, you died. No reincarnations.

Then I want an escape pod!

Silb wrote:

Kalexon wrote:Also it would be cool if at the beggining of the game you could put on the 'Strict Play' option where if you died, you died. No reincarnations.

Then I want an escape pod!

Stud Beefpile doesn't use an escape pod, neither should you!

The escape pods bothered me, since I never played on strict mode, and would rather just start from the last planet.

Anyway, that sounds like a good idea. Starting from the vilages, I mean.

Zantalos wrote:

Renegade_Turner wrote:Wow, a game taking a whole year! No way!

Half Life 2 took five-six years.

Umm, I think I was talking about the content for the game, but yeah one year is pretty short. But as for Lugaru 2, if it's slated out to be due this year, they won'thave time to do a year's worth of content. But no matter, it seems like content loading is going to be extremely easy to do as far as Jeff's GUI is concerned. Also, there's the fact that the Fallout 2 guys probably didn't have the greatest map editor compared to what Lugaru 2 will have (that sounds very speculative, I know. But do you really doubt it?). That's probably what I was thinking, taking a whole year just designing the levels for the game, not the engine itself.

Man, I had no idea Half-life 2 spent a whole 5-6 years worth of creating! I mean, they must have started Half-life 2 right when they finished Half life 1.
Jeeze, they didn't really try anything new, did they? Hell, the content was great but damn, was it worth that long developing? Seesh people beat that game pretty quick.

Not worth the devloping time? Uhh, they did make pretty much the best-rated game to ever come out on PC. It had a 9.6 press rating average (out of 66 press ratings). It got a 9.7 rating on IGN and the readers, who entered 163 reviews, gave it an average score of 9.5. How was that not worth the development time? It was scheduled to come out a year earlier, but there was a leak and the source code got leaked to many people. The release was pushed back from 2003 to 2004. Valve's release dates have always been taken with a grain of salt. Still, it's the best game I've ever played, and in terms of not doing anything new, their physics engine was top notch (have you never used the Gravity Gun?). How wasn't it worth the wait?

... Well... ok I guess, that's good then.

They didn't try anything new... uhh... past the ragdoll physics, but then again most games don't really try anything new to the FPS genre. Because I would have guessed it wouldn't have taken that much time (comparing to David, I think Blackshades took him like 3 months), to try designing the aiming system to actually work like it should, or maybe even going farther from, just ragdoll physics, to something like those physics-based "death-animations". You know, anything like that.

But anyways, that's not really what I was going for when I said that. I was trying to guess the time it took the Fallout 2 team to design all their levels and stuff. So I approximated something to like a year of designing content for that game (can you imagine spending a year just designing levels? I may have overshot that guess). And then somewhere along those lines, I figured "Half Life 2 took five-six years," had to do something to what I was talking about, not just talking about how long it took... for whatever they did (I know, I already tried explaining what I was talking about the first time. It seems my uh, "clear ups" weren't exactly clear though). And so, since I was talking about designing levels and you were talking about everything else, that's where I got the notion that you were telling me they took like 5-6 years just designing the levels and stuff. They could have made it with all sorts of branching levels and like, weeks worth of gameplay. Course now that you think about it it really doesn't amke sense for thinking they spent 5-6 designing the content. Man, you have to stop taking sentences out of context! I was only concerened about levels when you said that, that totally messed up what I was talking about.
Oh and for the record, I do believe Half-life 2 uses a great engine. Dark Messiah is using the same engine and has to compete with next-gen games, you can't even tell that game is like 2 years older than current games.


Oh and about the dying stuff. David just said like two days ago that he wanted try something different.

David wrote:I don't think we will be using either of those options. Dying and being seriously injured will have serious consequences in L2, but won't be nearly as common as in L1.

These options were, doing the old, Teleporting you back to a safe-zone thing. And Lugaru's death sequence that just teleported you back so you could redo the whole battle again.

Now we have to try to guess something that doesn't involve these two options. Crap, I totally forgot any games that didn't use these two thingys. And not only that, but you can't use the load save point either when you die, Jeff made it really clear how lame it is to make a quick save before you try anything risky.

Oh, you guys ever heard of this new game coming out called Prey? (it's using the Doom 3 engine - July 10, 2006) Anyways, in that game, when you die, you have to take a quick 30 second thing to try and prove to your "indian ancesestors" or some crap like that, that you deserve you can come back and live again. I think you basically kill stuff for like 30 seconds and how good you do determines how much health and "spirit bar" you get when you come back again. It's kinda wierd how they explained it (but much more thorough than how I said it), but that's just an option for revival, I seriously doubt that would pass in a game like Lugaru though.

It takes a long time to make content. If you take a totally linear game like Xenogears, you have hundreds of pages worth of dialog. Much longer than a movie. Level design usually involves coming up with an idea, testing and revising until it's perfect or you run out of time. Almost always it's the latter.

This process of revising over and over is called iterating in the biz. The more this can be done the better and less buggy your game will be. In the case of HL2, they didn't even bother texturing the levels until they were near finished. They just used placeholder textures because they may replace whole sections or props while testing out gameplay.

Could Valve have made weeks worth of gameplay in the 5 or 6 years they spent on HL2? Of course, but it wouldn't have been as good. I don't even like my games to be much over 10 hours long. I only have so much time for gaming. The Valve guys understand this, and there is simply no way they are going to make 500 hours of crappy gameplay when they can make 15 hours of some of the best gameplay out there.

Smaller teams like ours can't afford to make games the way those big companies do. Lugaru 2's animation system is cool gameplay wise, and looks awesome in-game, but the real benefit is that it frees us from having to do special animations for every little cut-scene and character. How long would it take to match the variety alllowed by David's system using traditional methods? FOREVER.

Think about this; Final Fantasy games have a team of around 200 people working on them. Probably 3/4 of them are involved in content in some way (not engine programming or marketing or something else). The Japanese regularly work 60 to 70 hours a week, and it takes them 2 years to make a game like this. that's about half a million hours of work. In other words, I would have to work non-stop from the moment I popped out of the womb, never sleeping or eating, and then maybe I could complete a Final Fantasy game on my own by the time I was in my 60's.

So does it take a long time to make content? Yes. And it takes much much more time to make actually good content.

Well shit, then I'm sold
In retrospect, it's just my opinion that I can't tell the difference between games that take forever to make and ones that can be speedloaded out. Because for me, I have a feeling I prefer games that are ambitious than to games that are fine tuned, don't really know why this is because you would think games that take this long would be a whole heck of a lot more ambitious than they turn out to be (not saying they aren't, but you'd think only games that are designed for years and years would have brand new technology unheard of. But as Ninjas said, yeah they undoubtably have the best content compared to others).

And I got this impression just now. I just mentioned the new game Prey and dude, that game has been in development since 1995! It doesn't use it's own engine like Half-life 2 but (like before, it uses the the Doom 3 engine), I think it does work more on content than anything else, it tweaks the gravity around and features some neat portals to give you some crazy ass situations. It was going to be a smash hit with the 1998 E3 demo, but apparently, it got delayed for so long it got canceled until human head studios decided to ressurect it (apparently 3D Realms quit or something). That must suck, developing all this content to begin with, only to spend so long you have to switch to a whole new engine. Sheds a whole lot of light as to what happened to Half-Life 2, it makes sense they had to spend a whole 5-6 years on it.

To show more on what Ninjas was saying about Final Fantasy. (Hey, I was right! Fallout 2 took exactly one year after the Original Fallout's release. Pretty sure it uses the same engine. Hey, imagine David acting like these guys (not fallout, the Half-life boys), scrapping Lugaru 1 and redoing it with things he's making for Lugaru 2. Thank god he's not insane like these people! Despite everyone's need for perfect content, I still believe that smaller more ambitious developers like you guys know what you are doing) Anyways, here's Final Fantasy's history and you'll see what he means.

Aww crap, hold on...
No I'm just going to cut and paste
-Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (PS2)
Release Date: Aug 22, 2006
-Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
Release Date: October 2006
-Final Fantasy III (DS)
Release Date: Sep 12, 2006
-Final Fantasy XI (X360)
Release Date: Apr 18, 2006
-Final Fantasy IV Advance (GBA)
Release Date: Dec 12, 2005
-Final Fantasy XI (PS2)
Release Date: Mar 23, 2004
-Final Fantasy XI (PC)
Release Date: Oct 28, 2003
-Final Fantasy X-2 (PS2)
Release Date: Nov 18, 2003
-Final Fantasy X (PS2)
Release Date: Dec 17, 2001
-Final Fantasy IX (PS)
Release Date: Nov 13, 2000
-Final Fantasy VIII (PS)
Release Date: Sep 7, 1999
-Final Fantasy Tactics (PS)
Release Date: Jan 28, 1998
-Final Fantasy VII (PS)
Release Date: 1997
Final Fantasy III (SNES)
Release Date: Oct 20, 1994
Final Fantasy V (SNES)
Release Date: Dec 6, 1992
Final Fantasy IV (SNES)
Release Date: Jul 19, 1991
Can't really see at first, but all the great games took along time.
Particularily FF7, 3 years for the switch to 3-D.

Am I the only one who wasn't really impressed with Half Life 2? It was more like a movie than a video game. Episode one especially.