Main plot: MUST there be one?

[Bloodshard]

well technically no a game dose not need a main plot but they can get very confusing if you don't have one. the game Legend of Mana sis not have a "main story" but instead had 5 plots that wove all the quests together. I liked LoM but most people where lost by the 5th nonlinear quest.

[Fuzi0n]

Imagine Fallout or Baldur's Gate without a main plot... There is your answer.

This is not a good idea imo.

Skyrim has a main plot?!

Of course! You have to uh... kill the big old mean dragon, who is really bad and hates everybody. Because he is a real meanie.

lol

[Phaederuss]

Fallout's "main plot" isn't very strong in the first place. I think this is a good idea if it's implemented in the right way.

[Drool]

Of course! You have to uh... kill the big old mean dragon, who is really bad and hates everybody. Because he is a real meanie.

...because he is a demigod of destruction and part of the Nord mythcycle involving the end of the world.

[CaptainPatch]

Of course! You have to uh... kill the big old mean dragon, who is really bad and hates everybody. Because he is a real meanie.

...because he is a demigod of destruction and part of the Nord mythcycle involving the end of the world.

And at present he keeps going to Sovngard to "recharge his batteries" by eating the souls of the dead, denying them their Afterlife. The longer the Dovahkin takes finishing that particular quest, the more souls get eaten. All because Dovahkin thought it was more interesting to go off and see more of the world and wander off on one side quest after another.

[Drool]

Yup. I'm a dick. But they're dead anyway, so who cares? I mean, I've got Nirnroot to pick!

[Fuzi0n]

Yup. I'm a dick. But they're dead anyway, so who cares? I mean, I've got Nirnroot to pick!

Don't waste your time pickung nirnroot, you don't need it. Just grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind..... grind your alchemy skill and make healing potions. The game is broken and made for morons you know, you don't need anything else.

Oh, and here is the walkthrouugh to beat the end boss of Skyrim (on the hardest level):

"Run up to that big old mean dragon and press the left mouse button 8-10 times."

THE END!

[Color Blotch]

There's nothing worse than playing an RPG and having no motivation. When you come to an NPC and he asks "what do you want?", "nothing at all" shouldn't be your first thought. Main plot kind of helps to glue different parts of your adventure together and keep you inside the loop the entire time. I can't imagine a solid way of achieving the same result without it. Starting the game with initial vector as you motivation could help in the beginning, but what happens when one of your follow up story lines ends without linking you to something new? Is it possible to design all the substories so there are no loose ends?I don't feel like finding myself having nothing to do and traveling somewhere not because I need or want something, but because I just look for more quests. I would prefer not be in such situation if possible.

[CaptainPatch]

There's nothing worse than playing an RPG and having no motivation. When you come to an NPC and he asks "what do you want?", "nothing at all" shouldn't be your first thought.

Isn't that what ALL quests do? Give you a goal to pursue? The initial quest doesn't necessarily need to be a "Main Quest"; just something that gets you started. Something that leads/sends you to here where you are exposed to other potential quests. In a quest-rich environment, you should/would never lack for things to do. Unless you are of a personality that insists on "I don't want to do A, B, C, D,....S, or T! I want to do W! If I don't get a W right _now_, I'll say this game sucks!"

"The essence of Wealth is choice. The more choices you have, the richer you are."

[Color Blotch]

There's nothing worse than playing an RPG and having no motivation. When you come to an NPC and he asks "what do you want?", "nothing at all" shouldn't be your first thought.

Isn't that what ALL quests do? Give you a goal to pursue? The initial quest doesn't necessarily need to be a "Main Quest"; just something that gets you started. Something that leads/sends you to here where you are exposed to other potential quests. In a quest-rich environment, you should/would never lack for things to do. Unless you are of a personality that insists on "I don't want to do A, B, C, D,....S, or T! I want to do W! If I don't get a W right _now_, I'll say this game sucks!"

"The essence of Wealth is choice. The more choices you have, the richer you are."

Yeah, quests do give you motivations. The question is whether you have motivation to get quests in first place. If you come into a town full of automated quest dispensers (aka NPCs) and you start initiating dialog with every available person to open up all available quests, this means you don't actually have plausible motivation. Now if you have a more general goal, like acquiring an item or finding a person in that town, you then have a reason to start asking around. Suddenly you see streets populated with living characters.

For some reason, clicking through all active NPCs on the screen "just because" never seemed particularly beneficial for maintaining mood or providing sufficient background for roleplaying.

So the question is, can the game provide you with enough general goals without having at least some kind of central plot.

[CaptainPatch]

The question is whether you have motivation to get quests in first place.

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." If _they_ choose to not seek a quest, it's not the game's fault that they have nothing to do.

If you come into a town full of automated quest dispensers (aka NPCs) and you start initiating dialog with every available person to open up all available quests, this means you don't actually have plausible motivation. Now if you have a more general goal, like acquiring an item or finding a person in that town, you then have a reason to start asking around. Suddenly you see streets populated with living characters.

But that's pretty much how most of the quests in Wasteland were presented to the player. When you got to Highpool, you didn't learn about the quests to take out Rex the rabid dog, rescue Jackie, or fix the water pump until you _literally_ stumbled into info that those needed to be done. In Quartz you didn't find out about the kidnapped Mayor Pedros and his wife Felicia until you bumped into NPCs to fill in the blanks. In Needles you didn't have any NPC _tell_ you what to do, until you ran into info sources like dead bodies and an evangelical NPC that lead you to The Mushroom Cult.

What I am suggesting isn't all that different from what was being done before. Just no hokey "Save The World!" quest to force me to go into one specific direction.

[Lucius]

The question is whether you have motivation to get quests in first place.

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." If _they_ choose to not seek a quest, it's not the game's fault that they have nothing to do.

If you come into a town full of automated quest dispensers (aka NPCs) and you start initiating dialog with every available person to open up all available quests, this means you don't actually have plausible motivation. Now if you have a more general goal, like acquiring an item or finding a person in that town, you then have a reason to start asking around. Suddenly you see streets populated with living characters.

But that's pretty much how most of the quests in Wasteland were presented to the player. When you got to Highpool, you didn't learn about the quests to take out Rex the rabid dog, rescue Jackie, or fix the water pump until you _literally_ stumbled into info that those needed to be done. In Quartz you didn't find out about the kidnapped Mayor Pedros and his wife Felicia until you bumped into NPCs to fill in the blanks. In Needles you didn't have any NPC _tell_ you what to do, until you ran into info sources like dead bodies and an evangelical NPC that lead you to The Mushroom Cult.

What I am suggesting isn't all that different from what was being done before. Just no hokey "Save The World!" quest to force me to go into one specific direction.

Your motivation though to explore those places was a result of the vague main quest in the beginning. You literally had no information to start and no direction. It was up to the player to wander around and figure it out. If there was no main quest then there would be no motivation to leave ranger center (within the game world).

Now, I like Wasteland's vagueness. It works perfect in a sandbox, allowing the player to explore and discover what the main quest is all about on his own. But I still think the player needs that initial kick in the rear to get things rolling, then everything coming together at the end to wrap up that elusive, ambiguous mission you were given from the start.

[CaptainPatch]

Your motivation though to explore those places was a result of the vague main quest in the beginning. You literally had no information to start and no direction. It was up to the player to wander around and figure it out. If there was no main quest then there would be no motivation to leave ranger center (within the game world).

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go the the Wasteland/California border and see what there is to see where this guy that ended up on our doorstep came from. Try to make detailed maps, and keep an eye out for a decent place for us to establish a outpost."

There. You've got a "Main Quest" to get the party started.

[Marty Czosnyka]

Every good story has the basic elements. A main plot being one of them. Say yes to main plot!

[deus]

Focus on story and plot is often a wasted effort, especially for a freeroeaming RPG.

To best way to avoid dissonance between the current narrative of any given time to overall story or plot line is to make the storyline as unobtrusive and simple as possible.


http://kotaku.com/5900248/david-gaider- ... -the-world


Avellone explains why he's a bro.

Avellone's response, meanwhile, challenged the idea that the story a game designer can write matters at all. Instead, he explained, the systems that designers put into a game can let the player tell their own, more compelling story. He had found that perhaps the best role of a narrative designer was to "ultimately let the systems and the player's interaction with those actually create their own story." He cited experience with Fallout: New Vegas, describing the way a player brought more to the game than he could ever have intentionally written in:

One particular example that comes to mind is .. Josh Sawyer, who was playing through Fallout New Vegas for the second time. And he decided to piss off both factions in the game, who hate each other. And when you piss off either faction in the game, assassins will attack you, which is pretty typical for showing reputation mechanics in games.

But because he had chosen to piss off both factions, which is something we hadn't accounted for, he woke up in the Mojave Wasteland one morning to find that both assassin squads had spawned in but rather than attack him, they launched at each other, murdered each other, and Josh just went by, whistled, looted all their corpses... And I could have spent like a month and a half trying to do a narrative design solution that would set up that situation, but because of the mechanics Josh was able to have a story all his own because of his actions in the environment.

[Color Blotch]

One particular example that comes to mind is .. Josh Sawyer, who was playing through Fallout New Vegas for the second time. And he decided to piss off both factions in the game, who hate each other. And when you piss off either faction in the game, assassins will attack you, which is pretty typical for showing reputation mechanics in games.

But because he had chosen to piss off both factions, which is something we hadn't accounted for, he woke up in the Mojave Wasteland one morning to find that both assassin squads had spawned in but rather than attack him, they launched at each other, murdered each other, and Josh just went by, whistled, looted all their corpses... And I could have spent like a month and a half trying to do a narrative design solution that would set up that situation, but because of the mechanics Josh was able to have a story all his own because of his actions in the environment.

And for every such lucky occurrence there's a dozen of unlucky ones. If you enter Benny's casino and gun down his men, you can then proceed right to him and initiate a dialog, only to find out that you should be reasonable and move to the VIP lounge as he suggests, because otherwise you stand no chance against his men (lying around him in pieces) with all those joke guns you could possibly smuggle through the guards (all while looking down the barrel of your 10 mm SMG).

Yes, I'm all for stories that player makes for himself. It's just that most of these end up as rabid lunacy that even David Lynch would be ashamed to put in his movie.

[deus]

One particular example that comes to mind is .. Josh Sawyer, who was playing through Fallout New Vegas for the second time. And he decided to piss off both factions in the game, who hate each other. And when you piss off either faction in the game, assassins will attack you, which is pretty typical for showing reputation mechanics in games.

But because he had chosen to piss off both factions, which is something we hadn't accounted for, he woke up in the Mojave Wasteland one morning to find that both assassin squads had spawned in but rather than attack him, they launched at each other, murdered each other, and Josh just went by, whistled, looted all their corpses... And I could have spent like a month and a half trying to do a narrative design solution that would set up that situation, but because of the mechanics Josh was able to have a story all his own because of his actions in the environment.

And for every such lucky occurrence there's a dozen of unlucky ones. If you enter Benny's casino and gun down his men, you can then proceed right to him and initiate a dialog, only to find out that you should be reasonable and move to the VIP lounge as he suggests, because otherwise you stand no chance against his men (lying around him in pieces) with all those joke guns you could possibly smuggle through the guards (all while looking down the barrel of your 10 mm SMG).

Yes, I'm all for stories that player makes for himself. It's just that most of these end up as rabid lunacy that even David Lynch would be ashamed to put in his movie.

You don't need to write/adjust a story to fix that, you just flesh out the encounter and write more dialogue/narrative to account for a state in which his men are dead. Such options and variations are easier to write when you are not concerned about specific plot implementations.

Again, a story is everything from beginning to end. Narrative deals with the NOW!

[Mandemon]

Pretty much every single instance in sandbox games, that allow certain level of freedom, need to map the situation.

In this case, there are several situations that need to be considered when player enters The Tops Casino.

Has player found enough evidence?
Will player follow Benny to his room?
Will player agree with Benny?
Will player kill guards?
Will player kill Benny?

Certain situations take precedence over others (like killing guards), but writers need to map out all possible outcomes for these. Sometimes they get all, sometimes they miss some. It's all hit and miss, especially if coding is not perfect. If certain flags are checked and acted before others, you get nonsensical situations at best, bugs and glitches at worst.

[Color Blotch]

Yes, I'm perfectly aware that such a problem could be accounted for with more careful design. What I was trying to illustrate in my example is that pretty much all the sensible stories you going to get from your game should be written in it by somebody. The game world itself is a very bad storyteller.

[CaptainPatch]

Certain situations take precedence over others (like killing guards), but writers need to map out all possible outcomes for these. Sometimes they get all, sometimes they miss some. It's all hit and miss, especially if coding is not perfect. If certain flags are checked and acted before others, you get nonsensical situations at best, bugs and glitches at worst.

The basic problem is that writers can only anticipate a finite number of paths that the player could have taken to reach a certain point in the plot. Just how many variations can a staff of 10-12 writers envision? How much time can/should they put into scripting potential situations, when the probability is really, really low that the situation will ever come up? In contrast, there are several million players that have the opportunity to be as warped and twisted as players can ever be, "pushing the limits", "thinking outside of the box", or simply being as chaotic as Chaotic can be. There WILL be situations that the writers never scripted into EVERY game. Period.

A hard-wired Main Quest makes it a greater likelihood of having unscripted situations to arise. 90-95% of all players most likely will follow a path that was anticipated for by the writers. But what gets all the press are the situations like the Josh Sawyer story. Off-the-wall situations that get that kind of press make people ask, "How could they have missed such an obvious possibility?" Have you been in any auto accidents recently? How could you have failed to anticipate that the other driver was going to obviously swerve in front of you or slam on his brakes? "Obvious" is generally only obvious in 20/20 hindsight. Most of our actions are predicated on the assumption that other people will behave in a sane, rational manner. If we tried to anticipate EVERY possibility, we would never get moving. So the rational thing to do in this case is, cut the writers some slack. Oddball situations WILL happen in games. Shrug your shoulders and move on.

All that said, I still feel that a game can either be a story with a THE END tacked on, or it can be an experience that allows players to get a feel for what it would be like to actually live in that environment as they actually roleplay the character they've developed. Only in exceptional cases can it be both ways. MY preference is to actually roleplay in a RPG. But that's just a preference, not a demand.