The social interaction which can be offered by a computer is pretty hollow, and most games don't provide a whole lot to replace it. The problem with the whole notion of the "computer role-playing game" is that this cannot happen the same way in a computer game. Players express their imaginations through their social interactions and their creative approach to the problems of an adventure. Sitting around the table at a gaming "run" is a social activity and an exercise in imagination. We play all the same games you do, and we know as well as you do that "Computer Role-Playing Game" is a contradiction in terms. We're role-playing gamers, fantasy/sci-fi fans, and computer game developers. Our goal is a fantasy action/adventure game in the Underworld tradition, which draws on our experience as game developers and players which merges the lessons we've learned from "paper" role-playing games, from the development in the computer game industry since System Shock, and from our own previous first-person games and which charts a course to the future of adventure role-playing in virtual fantasy worlds. We on the Dark Project have decided that it's time to exceed them. Despite the advances in technology since those days, there are still some ways in which the examples of Underworld (and its follow-on System Shock) have never been equaled. The Underworld team brought a background in military simulators to bear on the turn-based, square-by-square model of role-playing games which was popular at the time, and established a new standard of freedom and realism. Bet you didn't think I was ever going to tie this back into the old "personal expression through creative improvisation" theme, eh?And here's the full version:įive years ago, Looking Glass revolutionized the first-person role-playing game with Ultima Underworld. Once your players can surprise you like this, you know for damn sure they're being creative. We actually like it when our playtesters manage to defeat a problem in a way that we never thought of, despite the bugs it sometimes causes, because game-design-wise these emergent behaviors are like free money from heaven. This "emergent behaviors" business happens unintentionally in all sorts of projects, but if you're aware of it it's something that you can purposefully design for. Why should the 3D graphics guys get all the fun playing with brain-grinding science?) (No shit, we really think about stuff like this. This is the essence of the concept of "emergent behaviors," a notion we picked up from the fields of Artificial Life and Systems Analysis, and about which there's probably lists of Ph.D. But paradoxically, the connections between subsystems lead to interactions of interactions, and these multiply to the point where even we the designers don't fully understand the big system. By setting up consistent rules for each such system, and designing interactions between them in a common-sense but controlled way, we end up with what is in essence one big system.īecause of the way this big system is constructed, it remains fairly manageable (so we can ship games as close to on time as ever happens in this business). These systems include things like the physics simulation and player movement, combat, magic, and skills, and our "Act/React" concept of object interaction. To unlock this potential in our games requires designing not just puzzles and quests, but interacting systems which the player can experiment with. This is fun up to a point, but it generally disallows the element of improvisation which is such an important part of an RPG's creative challenge. The common approach to this problem involves scripting a variety of object behaviors, so as to construct puzzles for the player to solve. Inventing the situation is our job as writers the response to the player we have to leave up to the computer. A good game master is creative enough to invent a compelling situation, and flexible enough to adjudicate whatever response the players can come up with. The hard design problem is to put the computer in the role of the single, most important person at the gaming table - the "game master" or referee. This feeling of being there is essential to the role-playing game, and it's what Looking Glass' "immersive reality" philosophy is all about. You don't have to imagine the fantasy world you're supposed to be in because you can see it, hear it, and in some ways almost feel it. The social avenue of expression we have at a weekend party game might be lacking, but the power of the computer to free our imaginations is great. Role-playing is about imagining yourself in a situation, maybe a strange, wonderful situation, and expressing yourself in relation to that situation. Adapting a paper game genre to the computer requires the designers to change the way they think about the genre and discover the power of the computer as a medium.
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