Top 15 computer RPGs

[Username17]

Sandboxing is plenty difficult. But as the GTA series showed, it's totally possible.

I have only watched over people's shoulders while the played, so I don't really know the game but how much of what we are talking about does GTA actually do? About 2 or 3 out of 10 bullet points, and each of these points is on rails (or rather streets), right?

Because that is about 1/10000th the complexity of building even a small fantasy setting. I think we may be getting to a point where parts of my list are theoretically doable. But it certainly is not "only slightly harder" than GTA-style interaction-on-rails.

Of course if GTA actually has, say ... an evolving world you can influence beyond explicitly coded rails disregard what I said.

The GTA world doesn't just change weather randomly or have different stuff coming on the radio. Although it does do that. And different missions unlock different discussions on talk radio and such.

It also has the ability to get off the streets. You can run around in back alleys, climb buildings, run around in the park, swim in the ocean, and all kinds of crazy crap. And there are optional missions where you take one gang's side over another gang's, and depending on how you do in them, different gang's thugs will start showing up in different neighborhoods.

I mean, it's basically single player. You don't have "party members" you just have a mission here and there where there is an extra dude who you have to drive around, save, or on rare occasions: an NPC who will helpfully shoot enemies for you. It's not a fantasy game, it's not even trying to be. But it does cover most of your demands.

-Username17

[Murtak]

The GTA world doesn't just change weather randomly or have different stuff coming on the radio. Although it does do that. And different missions unlock different discussions on talk radio and such.

It also has the ability to get off the streets. You can run around in back alleys, climb buildings, run around in the park, swim in the ocean, and all kinds of crazy crap. And there are optional missions where you take one gang's side over another gang's, and depending on how you do in them, different gang's thugs will start showing up in different neighborhoods

Yes, that is pretty much what I thought. It is still on rails, but the rails intersect at points. What I want is a game where everything is covered with rails and where every rail is connected to each other one. Well, or rather where there are so much and so well-connected rails that they start to disappear.

Technically speaking GTA does what I want, yes - I just want so much more of it, that you can't really compare the concepts. When playing a game like GTA I want to blow up a building and then, a month later, watch them rebuild it, or take the opportunity to build a skyscraper and if they do I want security tightened up in that district and the people on the street to gradually change as housing becomes more expensive. And I don't just want random cars on the street, I want to have a family going to Disneyland and given enough patience I want to be able to follow them to Disneyland.

Of course this is a gradual process. Maybe I will be content with much less. But every game I have played so far has left me straining at the rails. I just want the rails to disappear so far into the obscure corners of the game I don't see them anymore in casual play.

[Kaelik]

Yeah Murtak, other than the +100 party members part, I'm with you all the way, that's why I was so interested in Stalker before it came out, the story of the tech, and who it supposedly procedurally simulates the actions of all the monsters based on actual goals and most of the NPCs before they scaled it back a lot.

That sort of tech applied to Morrowind would make a huge advancement in the genre, but of course, not sure how true it really was of Stalker, and the simulated creatures were mostly monsters with simple processes.

But yeah, Procedural terrain generation, ability for characters to modify terrain, NPCs with real goals they actually follow through on, that works out to creating an actual trade network and shit, that's all I really need.

Well, that and full 3d, Oblivion pissed me off when it took away levitate.

[Username17]

100+ characters is not only not required, it's not even desirable.

Compare the depth of characters in Torment or Chronotrigger to, say, Chronocross. Have a couple of dozen characters you could have in your party just makes all your characters boring and interchangeable.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Lemme re-iterate my prior point.

Of course this is a gradual process. Maybe I will be content with much less. But every game I have played so far has left me straining at the rails. I just want the rails to disappear so far into the obscure corners of the game I don't see them anymore in casual play.

Me too.

My beef is that in the games I played as a teen, most had really on-the-rails plots and also really crappy, pixelated 2d graphics.

In the 20-25 years since then, we have reached the stage where the pixelation has nearly disappeared into the background. Yes, of course when it comes right down to it every graphic ever is composed of pixels, but nowadays you only see them if you screen cap and magnify or otherwise go specifically looking for them. The general illusion of nonpixelation is pretty damn good in graphics today.

In the 20-25 years since then, we have reach the point where the plots remain almost exactly as much on the rails. There have been some minor advancements with the inclusion of convo trees and loyalty meters and such, but nowadays most games are really still as linear as the games I played back in the goddamned 64k dark ages. Had anywhere near as much effort and resources been put into developing non-linear settings as has been put into other areas of such games, we would have much more immersive, dynamic, less-linear worlds in computer RPGs today. We don't have anything close. And yes, of course, when it comes right down to it the nature of any pre-built adventure (such as a computer program) means that all possible adventure paths and choices will have to be "on the rails" - but one could damn sure work to provide a better illusion of open choices than we have now.

[Murtak]

100+ characters is not only not required, it's not even desirable.

Compare the depth of characters in Torment or Chronotrigger to, say, Chronocross. Have a couple of dozen characters you could have in your party just makes all your characters boring and interchangeable.

-Username17

So "has not been done before" = "can not be done"? I will certainly agree if you say it is harder - in fact that has been my entire point and it is, I believe, the reason it has not been done yet. But clearly, if you can write a story about Dan and Mike and Jessica you can also write a story about Dan and Jessica and Zoe. If that means Jessica and Zoe are necessarily boring and interchangely you are also saying that every character in every roleplaying game ever is necessarily interchangeable and boring. And clearly, that is not true.

Again, I am not sure that many characters are actually needed. But many games feature a fixed cast and sometimes I just can't see my character hanging out with one (or any) of them. I do want enough choices to not feel forced into a certain party composition, and I still want quality interaction between my party members.

[Kaelik]

In the 20-25 years since then, we have reach the point where the plots remain almost exactly as much on the rails. There have been some minor advancements with the inclusion of convo trees and loyalty meters and such, but nowadays most games are really still as linear as the games I played back in the goddamned 64k dark ages. Had anywhere near as much effort and resources been put into developing non-linear settings as has been put into other areas of such games, we would have much more immersive, dynamic, less-linear worlds in computer RPGs today. We don't have anything close. And yes, of course, when it comes right down to it the nature of any pre-built adventure (such as a computer program) means that all possible adventure paths and choices will have to be "on the rails" - but one could damn sure work to provide a better illusion of open choices than we have now.

And my point is that Morrowind is far less on the rails than any game you ever played in the dark ages. Morrowind is explicitly half of what I'm talking about in the sense of a completely nonlinear world done perfectly.

The only thing it lacks is the ability to make that non linearity proactive in the AI department, because the world itself is completely nonlinear.

[Murtak]

In the 20-25 years since then, we have reached the stage where the pixelation has nearly disappeared into the background. Had anywhere near as much effort and resources been put into developing non-linear settings as has been put into other areas of such games, we would have much more immersive, dynamic, less-linear worlds in computer RPGs today.

I am not sure of that. Most of the graphics improvements have been handled by Moore's law. Some well-programmed games even got better graphics for free as computing increased (Quake for example). It has only been in recent times that hundreds of designers and millions of dollar have been blown on graphics (granted, "recent times" = "half a dozen years"). Bethesda has shown that you can also blow millions on world building and the result, while nice, is not what we want.

But automatic world building is computationally expensive. I am not sure the computing power of 10 or even 5 years ago would have been sufficient to build these hypothetical games, even if all the code had already been written. Have you noticed path-finding AI in games becoming ridiculously better in the last 5 years? I believe that is a direct result of finally having enough processing power available to do it on the fly. Generating worlds will rely heavily on being able to do just that. Remember a short burst of games with "digital DNA" or whatever they called self-modifying algorithms for the press? Someone though it was a way to model mass panics in football stadiums and the like, so they just threw a couple thousand of them in a virtual arena. But that took supercomputers or clusters of ordinary PCs.

[Username17]

But automatic world building is computationally expensive. I am not sure the computing power of 10 or even 5 years ago would have been sufficient to build these hypothetical games, even if all the code had already been written. Have you noticed path-finding AI in games becoming ridiculously better in the last 5 years? I believe that is a direct result of finally having enough processing power available to do it on the fly. Generating worlds will rely heavily on being able to do just that. Remember a short burst of games with "digital DNA" or whatever they called self-modifying algorithms for the press? Someone though it was a way to model mass panics in football stadiums and the like, so they just threw a couple thousand of them in a virtual arena. But that took supercomputers or clusters of ordinary PCs.

No, it is not. Having a world with a cast of thousands that all run around doing stuff isn't computationally difficult at all. Each dwarf mining, eating, swinging his pick axe, or whatever is defined by less computation than the voxels representing his actual pick axe.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Have you noticed path-finding AI in games becoming ridiculously better in the last 5 years?

No.

But that probably has more to do with me personally not having the time, budget or machine to handle current games for the past several years than with the fact that most traversal algorithms were written in the 1950s.

I'll check out Morrowwind though.

[Murtak]

Good, now find an example where that dwarven miner has a history, relationships to other NPCs, has dialogue, will attack a lone orc on sight or run and alert his settlement at the sight of an orcish army. And while you are at it pick a game with a threedimensional world please. Twodimensional tile-based pathfinding and threedimensional free pathfinding are about as similar as platypuses and lions.

[shadzar]

I am not sure of that. Most of the graphics improvements have been handled by Moore's law. Some well-programmed games even got better graphics for free as computing increased (Quake for example). It has only been in recent times that hundreds of designers and millions of dollar have been blown on graphics (granted, "recent times" = "half a dozen years"). Bethesda has shown that you can also blow millions on world building and the result, while nice, is not what we want.

But automatic world building is computationally expensive. I am not sure the computing power of 10 or even 5 years ago would have been sufficient to build these hypothetical games, even if all the code had already been written. Have you noticed path-finding AI in games becoming ridiculously better in the last 5 years? I believe that is a direct result of finally having enough processing power available to do it on the fly. Generating worlds will rely heavily on being able to do just that. Remember a short burst of games with "digital DNA" or whatever they called self-modifying algorithms for the press? Someone though it was a way to model mass panics in football stadiums and the like, so they just threw a couple thousand of them in a virtual arena. But that took supercomputers or clusters of ordinary PCs.

The problems with AIs is the graphics. With flat 2d games there is a length and width usually expressed on some grid and that is the most reach an AI needs.

When you add the 3d dimension you add difficulties for AIs to have to figure that as well as take processing power away from being able to devote to the AI.

AIs were getting real good, before the rush for eye candy. Any AI worth its salt should be able to do pathfinding around anything, not just a predefined path.

Unless this isn't what you are meaning by on-the-fly, and automatic world building.

I think of the Roomba vacuum. It can be placed anywhere and follow simple rules for finding places it can and cannot go without getting stuck. Sure you can have a low lying object that it might get stuck on, but those things are getting better with that too.

Likewise a games AI should be able to learn as it goes as well, otherwise you get into older AIs that were too hard because they have all the "secrets" programmed in and available to them as part of their pathfinding.

Maybe I am just missing something in what you two were talking about?

[Murtak]

Have you noticed path-finding AI in games becoming ridiculously better in the last 5 years?

No.

But that probably has more to do with me personally not having the time, budget or machine to handle current games for the past several years than with the fact that most traversal algorithms were written in the 1950s.

I distinctly remember regularly cursing my units in Starcraft (and several games prior). I also remember being pleasantly surprised when this ceased to be an issue in pretty much any modern game.

By the way, research into pathfinding continues to this day and as far as I know state of the art algorithms like D* hail from around 2000.

[NoDot]

While there is something to be said for "more story instead of more eye candy", advocating going back to two-dimensional 16 color worlds is lunacy.

Indeed. We remember the failure of Megaman 9. In fact, they're making a Megaman 10 in he same style.

[IGTN]

Good, now find an example where that dwarven miner has a history, relationships to other NPCs, has dialogue, will attack a lone orc on sight or run and alert his settlement at the sight of an orcish army. And while you are at it pick a game with a threedimensional world please. Twodimensional tile-based pathfinding and threedimensional free pathfinding are about as similar as platypuses and lions.

Dwarf Fortress miners have names. I'm not sure how deep the dwarf relationship engine is, but they do get married, have kids, and so on. The world also keeps a history log of everything that has happened, so that dwarven art can represent it. They don't really have dialogue AFAIK, but the way the game is normally played (one player plays a whole mine) they don't need it. They have fight-or-flight responses to monsters and animals (anything from a goblin army to a carp to an amphibious zombie whale).

Also, Dwarf Fortress is 3d now. Each fortress tile represents a cube, not a square, and the fortress has multiple levels you can scroll between. It's still tile-based and will stay that way for a while, possibly forever.

So you're woefully underinformed about Dwarf Fortress. Also you're shifting your goalposts. You said automatic worldbuilding was computationally expensive. Frank posted a game that proved it wasn't. You switch to complaining about the pathfinding, of all things, and being woefully underinformed about the game you're criticizing.

Also, if we're just talking an automatic worldbuilding engine, the conversations should really be the last thing added. The dwarves of past generations don't need conversations.

[Utterfail]

There are conversations, they're just rather bland right now. Adventurer mode puts you in the role of a single adventurer. You can talk to people, but its pretty simple stuff. "What do you do." "Give me a quest" etc.

There are one or two options that are more interesting. They can tell you about surrounding locales "Don't go to the frothing badlands, lions roam freely there." or their family "My aunt Matilda died from at the hands of the orc Kill-Maim on the 2nd day of Granite." or even their own town "This is the Peaceful Villiage, we are ruled by the council of soap."

Right now Toady (the developer) is mostly adding stuff to the generation process. The relationships between people are actually pretty complex, and the history in the world is neat, but the NPCs just cant tell you about much of it. Yet.

[Murtak]

That is better than I expected actually. I am not going to play it because while I can easily tolerate replaying Simon the Sorcerer or the likes I can't stand ascii "graphics". But nevertheless, that doesn't sound too bad as far as as generating a couple hundred NPCs is concerned.

As for "shifting the goalposts":
Look, it is nice to actually have NPCs, but they need to actually move around. A lot. Pathfinding is needed, and while pathfinding is trivial in a twodimensional grid it is decided not so in a threedimensional environment. So while this game has a decent start on NPC dialogue and history it does not have a start at all as far as NPC goals are concerned. Want your NPCs to settle down and build a house? Were to put it? Pathfinding. Want to actually have a spot close to their friends, near water, near other supplies? Pathfinding. Tons of it. Want to have them build it? Pathfinding. Want to know what they do when you block their way into the city? Yet more pathfinding. So by deciding on a tile based map you are lowering your computing workload by a massive amount right there. The same goes for generating terrain. Trivial in 2D, somewhat hard in 3D. Finding a good spot for a settlement? Moderately hard in "D, damn hard in 3D. Oh, and once again it involves pathfinding. Lots of it.

And goddamnit, "multiple fortress levels" is not the same as a threedimensional game.

[Kaelik]

Dwarf Fortress is in many ways an excellent game, and it would even be worth playing if figuring out how to play it didn't take more time and work than reading every D&D book I own, finding four other people willing to play, and then playing a game of D&D.

The point of a computer game is to make things easier to play.

And that's the point. A lot of the "graphical bells and whistles" that are being complained about are things like 129600 degrees of movement, or an interface that isn't ass, or the ability to perform things in real time, or the realistic representation of things in the game.

I mean, from looking, I can see what kind of armor a character in Morrowind is wearing, and I don't have to hit fourteen keyes in a row to go into 6 sub menus to query the status of the orc over there represented by a # sign.

Shiny Graphics is not that important, and lots of people do waste more than they need to on it, but Dwarf Fortress is never going to awe people the way Morrowind does with text graphics and an interface that is way to fucking complex to ever even run in real time.

[Surgo]

I am pretty much Bethesda's bitch at this point when it comes to RPGs.

I found Fallout 3 was incredible in every sense, to the point where I'd rather talk about what I want to see from it because that's way easier to describe.

It would be pretty great if they had in Fallout 3 (or at this point, a future game) taken a page from Daggerfall's book with the randomly generated content. I don't want to imply that Daggerfall did that well or that was a good idea ever, but think about how we could put it in Fallout 3. There are those abandoned, boarded-up houses and buildings all over the place in cities and ghost towns. You can't enter them -- they're just boarded up. It kills immersion a little bit.

So why not make them into randomly generated interiors, like the randomly generated dungeons of Daggerfall? That would be a great use for the concept, help immersion, and add so much to the game.

[Juton]

There are ways to optimize 3D pathfinding, in a softer implementation sense and a rigorous Computer Science sense. Unless the pathfinding is unusually atrocious it won't detract from the game.

What I think the ultimate goal of cRPGs is a game world where all the NPCs have unique motivations, drives and plans. Not only that but be able to react dynamically when the PC goes off-script, be able to use some type of knowledge to create a new plan that they are capable or think they are capable of implementing to fulfill their own goals.

So in the classic scenario where an evil wizard is plotting to take over a kingdom every NPC, from King to commoner is aware of it and has their own plans to either stop the Wizard, aid the Wizard or just survive. The PC should be just another entity in the system, the King would only call on him because he's the best at wizard-killin' not because he's the PC. If the PC isn't the best at wizard-killin' the King should send whomever is, the PC should be free to help or hinder that champion, or do whatever else he wants while it all unfolds in real time.

In an earlier paragraph I touched on knowledge representation. That's a field that's still developing in academia, so the reason you haven't really seen anything like this isn't just because of the computation needed, we don't really know how to do it yet. If you where able to implement a system like I mentioned I think you could get at least a doctoral thesis and a dozen papers out of it, which is a pretty good score if your an academic.

[IGTN]

If you where able to implement a system like I mentioned I think you could get at least a doctoral thesis and a dozen papers out of it, which is a pretty good score if your an academic.

[Utterfail]

Pathfinding, is indeed one of the larger difficulties that DF has. But it is 3d, which is why its so damn hard.

Also, dwarf fortress does address a lot of the things you mentioned already. It doesn't generate a "few hundred" npcs, it generates many thousand. The first step in playing dwarf fortress is to generate a world, you can even set the paramaters (I WANT 30% OF THE OVERWORLD TO BE VOLCANOES, etc). It then generates some terrain, adds rivers, decides the weather patterns for different areas, and makes forests and lakes and all that based on weather and altitudes and whatnot.

Then it seeds 30 or so generated people for each civilization and lets them do their thing. It lets them run, and frolic, and multiply, and kill each other for about a thousand years or so. So when you start a game you start a game where theres ruined cities, and human settlements are near rivers, and 200 years ago the Goblin King Urzuk conquered the Human Empire of Smallflowers or whatever. So, in the "overworld pathfinding" sense, the NPCs really do go out and build houses because they settled down after a lengthy career of slaying megabeasts.

Where pathfinding breaks down is real time. You show up at a town, and it looks like it makes sense. But if you actually wall someone in a house in real time they cant figure out what to do.

[Doom]

And goddamnit, "multiple fortress levels" is not the same as a threedimensional game.

It's close, though, and the extra layer of dimension, even if not continuous, is a major hurdle when it comes to pathfinding. There are some important mathematical theorems that say, basically, "a drunk ant will find it's way home eventually, but a drunk bee might never do so" (and by 'might' is meant 'the probability it gets home is 0, but could still theoretically happen).

Granted, the mathematical theorems assume going possibly infinitely high or low, and Dwarf Fortress caps out at something like 20 levels, but that's still close enough to 3D for that game. Keep in mind, ANY computer game handles the third (and second) dimension discretely, even if it appears continuous to the human eye/mind. DF might be crude, but it still has a third dimension.

[Kobajagrande]

What I want is a game where everything is covered with rails and where every rail is connected to each other one. Well, or rather where there are so much and so well-connected rails that they start to disappear.

Transport Tycoon is the game for you:



More rails than you could ever dream of!

Even more rails

And as an additional treat, some more rails

[cthulhu]

Edit: LOL I CANNOT READ LOLOLOL