Role playing scenes

[thorgal]

In the in-game videos I’ve seen so far are beautiful cutscenes of pickpocketing, opening the chest, preparing the potion, sharpening the weapon, dialogues, etc. And I love that realism! Some of them may even take quite a long time and I still like to watch them. But it have a condition. It have to be possible to skip it or turn it off as after 30+ hours of game play it will get a bit dull and when plaing again from start (and you want to level up quickly) even annoying.

And as for the role playing it self here are few suggestions that may be interesting to have in game:

• Sitting, sleeping and cooking by the camp fire and setting it on fire and extinguishing it. With the advantage of repeling the wild animals but attracting robbers.
• Not only pickpocketing but also lock picking of doors, treasury chests and even furniture, as most of the personal property was kept locked. And I would definetly like to have it interactive, player controled and skill dependent, like the combat system as being an excellent thief almost as hard as being a good warrior.
• Sneaking is similar point. I really don’t want to press CTRL and become ultimately quiet and invisible. That is a common RPG bullshit. I have to watch my steps, be properly dressed, when hunting animals stay against the wind, etc.
• Usualy omited in RPG is skinning of the animals and taking trophies. Again it is not like looting the dead body. It takes a huge amount of time and require some skill and practise. Though it is a bit morbid and would require delicacy when displaying.
• In alchemy I would like to see it may go terribly wrong. Not only potion may be weaker, It may become poisonous when not prepared properly. It may even blow up during the preparation or leak when wrongly handled and stored.
• In combat the player and characters should role play wounds until healed! Some wounds may even have permanent consequences like limping, lower weight capacity, reduced mobility of arms that won’t let the character do some tricks or even loss of limb. Some crippled war veterans begging by the church doors would by cherry on top.

Anyway big thanx to Warhorse for the great job They have managed so far and a lot of enthusiasm for the huge amount of work that awaits them!

[Leontius]

Are you sure that even villagers spent their money on locks? They are quite difficult mechanism for the beginning of the 15th century. There certainly shouldn’t be lock on every toilet like in Skyrim.
I’m still bit sceptical about alchemy…

[ProkyBrambora]

It seems you dont know what you want.

On the one hand you want to be able to disable RP animations but on the other hand you would add skinning that would take a lot of time. (which would be also annyoing)

[thorgal]

TO Leontius: Well, I do not have any paper on this topic but of one thing I am am sure. If some one was wealthy enough to have a personal chest, he had a lock on it. And I would consider chest as a common piece of furniture for a citizen in the 15th c. Ofcourse villagers who had only one dress and carried all valuables with them had no need for such kind of protection.

I would consider alchemy as either a medicine, small boost, explosives or a deception to quickly earn big money and silently dissapear. And ofcourse it have to be side by side with astrology and mysticism. As such it would be quite close to the usability at that period.

TO PROKYBRAMBORA: I know perfectly what I want. I would like to have a lot of role play of the player as well as other characters. The same cutscenes may be used in game for common folk. From what I’ve seen so far from Warhorse (like the guy who hit his hand while chopping the log) they even have a wicked sense of humor . And I like that. I think it is good to have opportunities to admire such details, like animated skills of your character, when you are new in the game, because it add a lot of atmosphere, but as you are getting closer to the end and these activities are becoming a routine for the gamer, I see nothing wrong in skipping them or rather playing them faster and slow the time at the moment when the activity is done to preserve the world’s continuity.

Honestly, when some activity is taking the NPC two hours of the game time it should take the hero similar amount of time depending on his skill. Would you rather like to see the infamous Microsoft’s “Please wait…” dialogue while looting the dead body? I would rather see him working and pray he won’t chop his fingers off :D.

And again the Skinning may be interactive and require some gamer attention to be succesfully finished or you may let the computer finish it automaticaly depending on the hero’s skill while risking a failure or getting less experience.

[ProkyBrambora]

So you are saying you want to have great RP experience through lot of animations and posibilities. But you addmint that these elements you suggest will get annoying so you want to skip them.

Well sorry mate but this sounds little schysophrenic.

[N1k0]

Alchemy for poison and treat wounds to avoid infection… I hope they don’t make healing potion because is very unrealistic but find another way to handle healt and stamina thing =)

[Cerberus]

No, please, no.
The skinning in Far Cry 3, although it had nice looking animations and was not complicated in the least (you just press a button and wait till the animation ends), was getting annoying after a while. And you say, you want to make it even more complicated and tedious? And at the same time you want to skip other stuff? Yeah, as Proky pointed out, that sounds rather schizophrenic.

[Hellbuoy]

Dan Vavra once said that locks were common even in villages at that time.

[213]

they’re not cutscenes, they’re gameplay, so you cannot skip them.

[Troianii]

Some good ideas, but some not so good. Here are the bits I like:

-camp fires, especially advantages and disadvantages of
-sneaking pointer is good. It’s overdone in many rpg games. I’d hope that, for this, it’s less about ‘skill’ and more about what is actually done, which is what I’ve gathered to be the case from videos.

Ideas I don’t like:
-picking locks. From my understanding, locks were pretty rare, and most important things were guarded with men.
-skinning animals. Dude, play Red Dead Redemption. Kill a couple animals. You’ll get so annoyed with the cut scenes. It’s really cool at first, but eventually it’s just annoying. I’d say it’d be neat as an optional feature, for ‘added realism.’
-long term wounds. It’s a game, most people don’t want that, though I can see the potential for added realism in that. I’d suggest adding that only as an optional feature for ‘added realism’.

I might add
-the ability to fight w/o being upright. If say you were sleeping and some animal came up and bit you, most games would make you go through some annoying slow motion stand up, pause a half second, then you could do something. Most games avoid fighting at odd angles, but it would be cool, especially given the emphasis on realism.

[SerCabbage]

That is mostly because you were gunning down animals at every left and right constantly though. With a slightly more realistic approach to hunting they should be fewer and harder to hunt, that should make an animation like that way less tedious when you’re not doing it every two minutes.

[thorgal]

It is probably because I am running out of my English vocabulary, so it is not explained well. I understand what you and PROKYBRAMBORA are talking about. I understand how annoying may cutscenes or gameplay scenes become after some time, but you have to understand how unrealistic is skinning of an animal in about 5 seconds. Even when there will be a ratio of 300:1 of real time to game time.
So my points are:
1, When you kill a hog or deer, you should get about 100-150kg of food and skins big enough to make a small dress! You would have to have a carriage or helpers to take that amount of weight to the market.
2, You would have to process it or sell it in few days otherwise it is worthless.
3, Such amount of food would feed a small village for a day or two so why would player go for a hunt? Definetly not for his personal need.
4, Who would merchant buy from the player more food (or skins) than he can actually sell in the village before it expires?

I am pissed of games where you are running through forest like an idiot shooting 60 deers in a hour of game time, loot them, from each get 1 steak worth 20% of you HP and a skin, bring it all to the market, sell and run back to the forest …

So my solution is to display the cutscene or if you don’t want to watch it, “skip” it or rather “fastforward” it so the world will keep its continuity for the other characters. Such script definetly have to be there, atleast for butchers, so why not for the player too.

And also Warhorse should become clear on how realistic is this realistic RPG going to be…

[213]

it depends on situation. it’s very likely that you may simply hunt the animal then transport it back to town for a butcher or other specialist to process it.

it very much doubt it was sane to just skin and gut the animal on the ground where it dropped. you likely had to take it back to town and put in indoors for safekeeping and working away from dirt and elements.