SpookyXJ said:
Ah but thoes games with the exception of the Fallouts are not really complete sandboxes. There is a good bit of linearity to there progression. I guess you could consider them sectional sandboxes. Fallout 1 & 2 are great examples though. On a side note you have great taste in games.
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Yes the other games have a bit of linearity in them, but alot of the stories in those games are not presented linearily: they give you certain points the player has to go/do in order to procede in the story, but what you do in between (and even in those points) is up to who plays. That is exactly the scheme PS:T used since not only you could do whatever in between those 'checkpoints', but you also could change how those same points were done. And most of the story is presented in sidequests and the character interaction is amazing, especially with your party: it truly helps the player have a more immersive experience.
Btw, anyone who played Planescape: Torment without checking the side-stuff should be shot, buried, revived and forced to play it again.
naznatips said:
I agreed with the rest of the post that open-endedness doesn't have to kill story, but these 2 lines at the end bothered me. You haven't played 100% of JRPGs. You don't like JRPGs, and are a PC gamer. You haven't even played 10% of JRPGs. So please don't make a claim like that. As far as The Witcher, it probably would have told the story better without so many translation issues. Still a reasonably good game, but man the story was just gratingly awful sometimes. |
I've not played all them (nowhere near that), but I have played almost all of the so-called great jRPGs, so I have a pretty good idea. I love all types of RPGs, but from my experience Western RPGs are mostly superior to the Japanese counterparts. I don't think there would be a jRPG in my modern top10 (I mean despite the year it came out)
I've actually started playing RPGs because of jRPGs. My first experience was on Megadrive playing one of the Wonderboy games, and FF8 was the game that trully made me a RPG fan and was my favorite RPG for awhile until I played Diablo 2, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum. Western RPGs easily took over my favoritism and jRPGs just seem flawed by design.
I'm a firm believer that a non-linear RPG can have a better story than a linear, because interactivity has a serious hold on immersion.
As for the Witcher, there's a update coming out in may/june that will fix and re-write over 5000 dialogues aswell as voice-works, add 100 new facial animations for a more natural look, and a couple new sidequests, fix loading times and improve combat precision.
@Bodhesatva
The developer's role in a non-linear fashion is to create a consistent gameworld where there's as much choices a player can take as possible. Basically it's just a bunch of linear paths entangled together. The developer still has full control of the storytelling because every single path has been envisioned already by him and he knows how the gameworld will behave from the paths that can be chosen, only leaving to the player which linear path go to. I can't explain it simplier than this.
And yes, we want as much interactivity as possible, as long as it doesn't break the games' world, immersion and believability. That's why we, thankfully, aren't able to turn into a dog in Mass Effect.
As for Planescape, I explained above.
And Oblivion is a Terrible example of an open-ended game:
1-The main story is 100% linear and is a crap story.
2-The side-stuff are also mostly linear (meaning there's only 1 outcome/path), and have crap/boring stories.
3-Add 1+2 and you have a free-roaming game with almost NO real choices. Hell, you can even kill as much NPC's as you want, and you only need to bribe a guard to get the bounty off. "A choice without consequence is not a choice"
Basically, in Oblivion the only tangible choice you have by design is from which order you do the quests.
