quote:Original post by Diodor
Simulating a physical world reduces what the player can express in that world to physical actions - just because the player must move, fight, take, drop, climb, jump, aim, look, search, dodge, avoid in order to do anything, the game must be about those physical things. Anything else is condemned to be merely a distraction.
Simulating a physical world doesn''t prevent a game from having a dialog system, so unless you''re classing conversation as a physical action like walking, the physical world in no way "reduces" player expression in the game to physical actions. Instead the physics system handles physical actions, the dialog system handles dialog, the diplomacy system handles diplomacy and so on.
Simulating ONLY a physical world would do what you''ve stated, but just having some sort of model of the world in the game does not condemn everything else to being merely a distraction. Do you honestly believe that?
quote:If Fallout and Ultima are anything like ADOM, they''re about fighting - pick 10 random moments in the duration of a game - what is the player doing in 9 of those moments? Even in Thief, I bet 9 players out of 10 black-jack their way through the game.
Fallout and UUW2 are both dialog heavy RPGs. I haven''t played ADOM but if it''s a Rogue-like then I doubt it''s similar to Fallout or UUW2. One of the main features of Fallout that its fans highlight in their reasons for liking it is that a character can talk their way through the entire game without ever attacking an NPC or creature. Character interaction and problem solving certainly isn''t "condemned to be merely a distraction" in either game.
quote:There is deep gameplay - each decisions requires (or even better - allows) a lot of thinking and there are complex rules - simply learning the game is a lot of work. IMHO, the former is desirable and the latter is not (though the two sometimes go hand in hand and sometimes, as in the D&D example, learning the many rules is a fun endeavor in itself).
I enjoy the learning and discovery aspect of games, and you don''t just learn the explicit rules of a game but also the gameplay rules which allow you to win. Learning those are a major part of games and add to the complexity of the game beyond explicit rules or mechanics of the game world. That knowledge forms part of the decision making process that you desire. As the player learns the game he creates his own rules from experience and thinks about them when making decisions.
quote:How about a game that is not as much about what resources each of the players control (be those countries or RPG stats and items) but instead about what each of the NPCs think of each other and the player, what each tells each other, about the relations between them and so on and so forth.
If the NPCs don''t have resources (goods, armies, weapons or money) then what does it matter what they think of each other? They can''t harm or aid each other or the player, so what have any of them to gain in such a game and how would they do it?
If NPCs do have resources, then either the world is abtracted to the level that all resource transfers are condered equal (still a physical model, just very simple) or a physical representation provides more detail by simulating the world to a greater degree. This doesn''t prevent the features you mention but could provide a reason for them. Keep your heavily armed neighbour happy for example, or play NPCs off against each other by providing (possibly false) information.
Fulby
), but it was also possible to go through Fallout killing every single NPC and still win the game. A player playing that way would have 0/1 out of 10 screenshots in dialog. Note that this single game can play in two entirely different ways even with the same physical simulation system.
