Essays

[NotAI]

I'll be writing up some essays on games more formally, starting this month. Couple pages each.

Posting the short thesis of each essay for feedback here as well.

The first 20:

1. 1995-2025, we saw most studios making roleplaying games fail. I want to argue that the market shifted to brands, not products, and consumers only select what they like from brands they know, and do not search. To succeed, you had to create a brand, not a superior product, but that means raising a lot more resources and growing big, to have enough resources to reposition a competitor's brand and take their spot. The thing about brands is that the first five or ten well known ones get any attention from the mainstream consumer, who does not search. Contrarian consumers do search, but income from them is too small to provide the marketing budget to reposition the brands of already large firms that are `competitors' but release individually inferior products.

2. What is an RPG. Definitively answered with a high signal to noise ratio. Three sentences. The player actually determines consequences by combinations of ingame actions their role plausibly allows, in a consistent manner throughout the entire game. If the game ever allows doing this and that, the player can always do this and that, and the player can always do both in any event, and whatever can be achieved by a combination of actions is the story outcome. The outcome is not selected from a list provided by the developer, cannot be artificially restricted, and the game continues with that outcome the player actually manages to achieve ingame; character stats come in by affecting what combinations of actions the player can perform and cleverness in selecting a combination of actions does the rest.

Gothic 2
Baldur's Gate 3

Corollary. Immersive sims are simply first-person roleplaying games.

Corollary. Some pure dungeon crawlers, turn-based, with stats, are not roleplaying games, but stat-based action games.

3. Why roleplaying games do not have any well-defined difficulty and are not measured by their challenge at all. Only non-roleplaying games can be challenging games. The third category of games is also without any well-defined difficulty, these being choose-your-own-adventure games.

Witcher 2
Witcher 3

4. There are well-defined degrees of how much a role-playing game is a role-playing game. Surprising but true. Defining it.

5. There is a well-defined defined measure, likewise, of skill in playing a roleplaying game, even if difficulty is not well-defined. Defining it.

6. True roleplaying games should have some quests that are better not found, and not attempted, not even failed, ignored, rejected, or completed, to get the best story outcome. Surprising but true.

7. Pacing is a major problem for roleplaying games. One solution is that completing some quests should always help progress others. This can be implemented systematically to prevent an exponential amount of development being required to implement that.

Gothic 2

8. The player should be able to select the exact dialogue option he wants to his character to say, not a summary, not a tone, not a faction answer, not a morality, etc. However, there is a way to let the player make choices in terms of a summary of what will be said, or the skill used to say it, or the alignment of the response without know the detailed response. It requires an additional system that is actually missing from most games that use this approach. This system is somewhat labor-intensive to implement. So doing it right won't save much development effort. Saving effort by allowing easy dialogue edits until the very end, however, is the main reason why dialogue selection is sometimes implemented as a "Be Nice", "Be Mean", "Be Neutral" instead of actually lines. Oh, well.

9. You can do smooth, natural verticality in a top-down 2D game. At least two different ways to implement this.

10, Chests can have instant KO traps and still be fun, but it has to be done correctly. Some ideas on doing it correctly. Hint: Most of them require a party-based game.

11. Larian is still good at making games. I will convince you. I did predict that they will outsell Bethesda in Starfield vs BG3.

12. We will see some very interesting and successful games with some very simple graphics in the future. I will explain why I am predicting this for the near future. We're talking possibly red, green, blue moving pixels simple.

13. We should not rely, ideally, on initiative stats in turn-based roleplaying games.

14. You can make a 2D game with the flavor of Gothic that writes itself. Exploring what makes Gothic ... Gothic and why did Piranha Bytes miss the mark on recreating the flavor they had invented.

15. Stealth games are missing something important for the modern market. The answer is pacing, and being fun to watch, not infuriating, on a stream, and some thoughts on how to fix that.

16. Cooldowns for spells can be done well. They are not always bad.

17. Once-a-day type spells should appear more often in roleplaying games. With some caveats.

18. Some roleplaying games need a lot less dialogue and more actions that can be done during dialogue instead. ("Look over there!'' ends dialogue, slows down the time, and let's the player jump out a window or kick the bandit in the shins. In fact, control over the player character should not be lost during dialogue at all.)

19. Player should be able to commit his character to certain choices well in advance, and be able to lock that in, even at character creation, to really let the story change. Why this is needed for more interesting stories in roleplaying games. How to implement this in a way that is not infuriating for the player, however, is important.

20. Music needs to be handled much more carefully in roleplaying games. Outside of cutscenes. More on that.