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Mystic Tropical Climber
c6ec33
>>22331
The problem with examples like Skyrim is that the more open you get, the more things you have to program for, the more things you have to test for, the longer it takes you to develop the game, etc. In the case of Skyrim, for example, everything was fully voiced, which means that once you settle on a plan in advance, it's a real pain to call all the voice actors back in to make changes if you suddenly decide "Oh man, wouldn't it be cool if you could do THIS here?"
And, even when you're happy with the amount of freedom you've given players, there will always be players that want more.
Sadly, the only realistic way to do huge open video games like that is to de-couple individual questlines as much as possible. Trying to tell a complex narrative and have involving questlines while planning for every eventuality is pretty much impossibru without a certain degree of railroading. So basically, you can do whatever you want for minor quests, but as soon as you start trying to tell a big story where the player is actually central to the events involved, the story falls apart unless you railroad a little. Alternatively, you can make the player a passive witness / participant to significant events with no way to influence them. That's its own form of railroading, but I think a lot of players find it less offensive than having restrictions on how they play their own character.
I think that you both bring up some excellent points, though. A video game like Skyrim doesn't have to feel like railroading if it's done particularly well. For example, if you're in an RPG where you can kill players, you should be able to kill significant quest characters or be prevented from doing so by realistic methods, not arbitrary "it's not time to do this yet" reasons. If the character's role (but not the character themselves) is significant to the story, you can just replace them in an organic fashion. I think a good example of this is in Fallout: New Vegas, where you can kill Caesar if you want to. It didn't stop the war, but you got the satisfaction of doing so. In Skyrim, you can kill the Dark Brotherhood if you want to instead of completing their quest lines, although doing so gives you maybe 30 minutes of gameplay instead of hours.
Also, when talking with characters, your dialog should not be 3 variations of the same thing. Players want to have vastly different choices, because everyone has a different play style. Dirtbag, like you said - The DragonBorn is supposed to be this fucking badass, but he's repeatedly forced to take shit from the civil war peeps and the Blades. I can see him taking shit from the Greybeards and Paarthurnax, though.
On the plus side, Skyrim is so fucking huge that you can literally get 150+ hours of out it by ignoring the civil war and blades quest lines. I ended up losing interest in Skyrim because I'd pretty much done everything *except* those quest. I didn't like either faction in the civil war, and I didn't feel like going on a dragon-murdering questline, so I just said fuck it and didn't participate. I was railroaded into a ton of choices I didn't want to make, so I just declined to play the quests. While it certainly would have been *fun* to do something different with the same plotlines, and I AM missing out on a lot of content, I feel satistfied that I got my money's worth out of Skyrim.
I mean, how cool would it have been if you, as Dovahkin, could become the master of the dragons, broker peace between the Nords and the Imperials, and push the Thalmor out of Tamriel?
When you're a DM or quest author, you don't have to worry about such limitations to the same degree, because you can be more flexible. They still exist, of course, since you need to railroad a little (at least subtly) to tell a story, but everything's a lot more dynamic because you don't have to plan out *everything* in advance.
Going back to trying to be on topic... I do like the way that Prequel is run. I think that when a character has their own motivations and isn't just a puppet for the suggestors, you build a BIGGER emotional bond with them than if they were a puppet with no individualism. That bigger emotional bond makes me enjoy such stories even more, as long as the author doesn't abuse it to railroad things TOO much or too often. I think Katia's struggle with alcoholism is a good example of a part of her character that is frustrating to players, but that is done realistically and adds to the character.
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