I'm not usually that keen on modding (it locks you in) and I do have a project I'm working on at the moment, but I'm doubtful OG will be released any time soon, so I've been thinking of perhaps using Overgrowth for an experiment when it is. The idea would be to design a game with truly non-linear progression. I want to challenge a few gaming conventions:
Narrative at the expense of interactivity
As I've said many times, most action games pretend to be movies: there's always a bad guy, and between you and him (or her) there are several hundred thousand nameless goons. The might be multiple endings, but the overall structure is generally the same.
Okay, so obviously if you have 2 choices n times, that's 2^n times as much more level, at least in theory. But why not, instead of having 16 levels connected in a linear manner, have 4 levels, each with 2 possible endings?
Technically you're still making the same amount of content, maybe even less, it's just that any given player won't see all of it in a single play-through, which doesn't look so good on paper. Still, it's something I want to try.
I'm confident these things will have been considered, but just in case they haven't, I wanted to throw it out there:
- The ability to choose the next level dynamically.
Failure, repetition, hostage content
I did a post about this a while ago. I sometimes think that this tendency, for games to make the player restart over and over again until they "get it right", is evolutionary baggage inherited from the arcades. Obviously back then it was simply the way you made money, but does it make sense now?
The guys making Amnesia talk about this a lot, and why it's a problem, but have never been clear about how they plan to do things differently. I've never played Heavy Rain but I think the idea of letting the player control a series of different characters, who can all die, is definitely something worth exploring.
Suppose the player has a certain number of lives, only each life is the life of a different character, and each time a character dies, you which to the next. When all the characters are dead, the game ends.
For this to work though, you need two things:
- No hard-coded "death = failure = restart"
Cut-scenes and dialogue options
I think games are far more effective as exposition than as a narrative medium: they're really good at setting the scene - far better than books which rely on words and the audience's imagination. Why then do so many games use dialogue to tell the player what their world is about? The brilliance of Half Life 2 is that you understand what's going on just by looking at world around you - the characters don't need to spend time dumping exposition on you.
Valve also succeeded in telling their story without once removing control from the player, except for a the few seconds and the beginning and the end:
But how do you give the player the ability to make decisions when there are no dialogue screens? Why, the same way in Half Life 2 you can choose between picking up a can and throwing it in the cop's face:
Scripting should make it possible to detect when the player has approached an NPC, but also whether the player character is armed, and whether they have a weapon drawn: all these factors contribute to giving the AI some idea of the player's intentions, and this enables the player to make decisions without breaking their suspension by having them select options from a dialogue screen.
In most games NPC are either completely harmless or will track you down until you're dead or they are - it'd be nice to see something more like the passive-aggressive combine.
- A way of detecting the state of the player's weapon, or lack thereof
Conclusion
There things may seem like bare necessities, but, well, they weren't supported for Lugaru, so I thought I'd just throw it out there in case they haven't been considered - after all, it's hard to think of everything that modders could possibly want to use.
So to reiterate, I'd like to see:
- No hard-coded "death = failure = restart"
- The ability to choose the next level dynamically.
- A way of detecting the state of the player's weapon, of lack thereof
Would you guys play a game like that? I'll give you a few ideas of what sort of thing I'm considering when I have a bit more time.