Zero sum game in KCD?

Gameplay
#1

I just read a German article about a speech of Ken Levine at the GDC (and I hope Dan was sitting in the audience), which is quite interesting for the development of Warhorse Studios and I want to know if that is included.

Ken Levine talks about a zero sum game when it comes to relationships between the player and the NPCs. He comes up with the idea that each NPC has 10 preferences but only 3 of them are visible for the player. Those preferences include persons, races, items or generic actions. If you act like you’re favoring this certain person, you get a bonus (cheaper stuff, military support, you name it). However another person might not like what you have been doing, so this person’s not going to like you anymore (means more expensive items, no sale to you and the like). So that means if you’re in favor by another person, another one might dislike you, which then means a zero sum game.

I guess there are even more articles having that GDC talk explained somewhere. However I was wondering if that kind of zero sum game is included in KCD and also to what extent? In this article the auther clearly states that the world doesn’t need the “good-or-bad dichotomy” that is used for example in the Fable series by Peter Molyneux. An approach like The Walking Dead series, where you have four choices and even more depending on who you talk with would be my personal preference.

Here’s the link to the article for my German sheeps and anyone else, who wants to see pictures of the explanations: http://heise.de/-2152516

Cheerio
Yuusou

#2

Here is the speech in technicolor:
Narrative Legos with Ken Levine - GDC 2014

I’m glad he poked fun at his powerpoint-skills himself or otherwise I’d have done it. :smiley:
Whatever, I have to watch it in its entirety to have an oppinion. later


1 Like
#3

@Fimbul Hey that’s cool, thank you :slight_smile:

#4

From thematic and design standpoint, I don’t think Levine is in any position to really educate or lecture the general public and his peers about anything game development related. I haven’t seen his company do anything original since SWAT 4, that’s 8 or 9 years ago. Seems he’s simply packaging a very simple concept in NPC relationship design into a buzzword “zero sum”

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#5

Every design idea existed somewhere and was later on dropped during the development. Instead the game designers lately used the same approach for the same feature. Just take a look at the TES-series. What exactly has evolved in the character design and the dialogues? I don’t see anything particular.

I wasn’t THAT impressed by the speech either because he made several mistakes. One of the main reasons I don’t like his speech is that he has left some errors in the sheets. The 10 piles of gold was one, the other was the favor of the whole elf village, while talking about a positive relationship to a dwarf. Another statement which I believe is not true, is that players don’t want to know more about each character’s passions, even though they can’t change some of them. IMHO it’s good to lose control of what you know because that leads to unexpected gameplay experiences. If you do know, what you can do to be favored by someone, isn’t that a bit too easy? Most games visualize those relationships in bars and the like but not in the NPC’s behavior itself. This is what I was missing in this talk. Also this talk was not much about narration but more about relationships.

You know I would even listen to Peter Molyneux, even though his games (like the recently developed Godus) are not very intriguing. All people have design ideas and even the greatest idea may lack in the execution but it doesn’t mean that someone else can’t pick up the idea for their own project and deliver a great gameplay experience. Speeches shall not be revolutionary at first but might result into something revolutionary which the speaker didn’t expect. The GDC is about sharing ideas and approaches and Irrational Games for example just developed games they were good at developing, but it doesn’t mean the developers had no other rough ideas for game concepts of other genres. Even you or me could be giving a speech about game design because we’re gamers, judging games by their design and thinking of ways how to make them better. Especially the modding community knows what I’m talking about. I don’t think it’s good to evaluate a speech by the speaker but by the content.

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#6

Okay so my first thought is “what’s so groundbreaking about that?”, because there seem to be a lot of games with systems that are at least similar to his. Especially Dragon Age: Origin comes to mind. But when I think about it, those systems are more about forking the narrative or about party relations. I’m not really sure but I think what he’s proposing is to build the entire narrative on this system to create unseen replay value. He seems to aim on giving sandbox games a strong narrative. Traditionally you either have a strong narrative or great freedom, but not both. Most sandbox games fix the narrative problem with a main story line, but then it’s hard to explain everything else that is happening around it.

What I don’t like about this system, and this is also adressed by the german article and someone in the question and answer part after the speech, is that this system is prone to build either a world of good and evil, or a world where everyone is indifferent to you because you don’t want to go to extremes.
In my opinion there should be ways in between. Sometimes I’d rather go against both sides of a conflict than to choose a lesser evil. I loved to lift the curse of the werewolves in Dragon Age: Origin or to save the Geth as well as the Quarians in Mass Effect 3. Those paths were the least obvious and you had to know the motivation of both factions to strike a compromise.

#7

I don’t know he looks like someone I could have a good time with
don’t look at me like that he looks like a fun guy. Ahem that aside. I think a zero sum game would be (or should be) a stretch certainly if I’m a friend with someone’s arch enemy (NPC B) then my relationship with NPC A might be ruining the plots of NPC B so I could expect some inadvertent resentment even though I never wronged NPC B directly. That would be close to a zero sum, but say NPC C doesn’t like NPC A, but has no problem with Player 1 NPC C has no grudge against Player 1 and so Player 1 is friends with both NPC C and NPC A even though they might not like each other. Though as three-ways go a major crisis could come about in a persons life (like running out of beer) that the then demand you to choose who you’re going to be friends with. Will player 1 give his beer to NPC A forever becoming his best friend or to NPC C forever becoming NPC A’s enemy. You see things are better when complex.

#8

If you mean in-between TES series, quite a lot actually. Daggerfall and Arena had an extremely simplistic system, where
 Heh, now that I think about it, they probably didn’t really have any disposition system whatsoever. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong there.

At any rate, Morrowind actually added proper disposition later on - but all its disposition was was a number, sort of displayed somewhere in the corner, and you could influence it using a bunch of dice rolls. IIRC disposition in Morrowind is a game of numbers, completely devoid of anything else whatsoever, and usually only used in quests where NPCs will only tell you something at high enough disposition (or attack you when low enough and you get their fight value to a sufficient level by taunts). Oh and some of their reactions tend to change as well, and it changes merchant prices.

Oblivion improved upon all of this quite significantly - it still uses disposition as a number ranging from 0 to 100 (altho it can be increased over 100), and the game uses disposition at a lot more occassions. It still works at merchants and changes reactions, but it’s used for the NPC decisionmaking a lot more (like when a guard who catches you doing something illegal likes you enough, he will pay your fine for you). And there are loads of similar little details that you will never, ever even notice. Also, in Oblivion (and I think in Morrowind as well), disposition decides whether or not somebody is hostile towards you or not - so if you make enough charm spells and are sneaky enough, you can recruit bandits to fight their comrades at your side, or just befriend the entire bloody dungeon. Extremely contrived and frustrating tactic, but viable nontheless. And it still does everything Morrowind’s disposition did. Even the terrible persuation minigame felt a bit more better than what Morrowind did, at least to me - I just wish it was more influenced by character skill, Oblivion basically did the exact opposite of Morrowind which is not great either. Oh well.

Disposition in both Oblivion and Morrowind is influenced by a lot of factors, like your personality skill, your race, your fame and so on. Similarily, it could be raised both via persuation skill, by buying a lot from the same merchant, or by completing quests.

And then Skyrim came and completely rehauled everything. So first of all, disposition is not a number that you can see in-game, which makes it feel a lot more natural. However, it’s still a number - ranging from -4 to 4 including 0. I’m pretty sure this was done to allow for easier implementation of disposition into more parts of the gameplay and
 Well, so it is. NPCs disliking you can still lead to them attacking you obviously, but changes in the ‘above 0’ part are much more significant - for instance, friends let you take cheap things from them like food or such. The more above 0 you are, the more expensive things you can take freely, and their reactions to you are influenced quite a bit as well.

Now, persuation minigame is gone, and the only way you can raise disposition is by completing quests, via conversations in general, or you can lower disposition by killing someone who likes the killed character. So basically, raising disposition is a lot more difficult, but it has a lot more direct gameplay benefits to it, including the possibility to marry whoever that person is (generally, I have noticed disposition being used in quests quite a bit in a less unnatural fashion than it’s been in Morrowind.)

So
 yeah, I’d say that a lot has evolved in dialogues, mechanically speaking :stuck_out_tongue:

As opposed to you, right? :smiley: Send me your game design portfolio and let me be the judge of that :stuck_out_tongue:

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#9

Reminds me a bit of Fallout: New Vegas. If you got popular with one faction, you automatically lost popularity with others. I always try to please everyone (in real life and in games) and I could never finish FNV because you HAVE to choose a side in order to proceed to the final quest. (You can choose to be on your own side, which was a nice touch, but then you have to stab someone in the back.)

I agree it can add some realism (you can’t please all the people all the time in life), but if overdone, it can actually reduce the sense of realism. If it just comes across as contrived, then I’m afraid it will seem gimmicky.

Sometimes you CAN be nice to everyone. :slight_smile:

I suppose it depends on the factions / NPCs and whether or not their animosity toward each other is believable.

#10

So
 yeah, I’d say that a lot has evolved in dialogues, mechanically speaking :stuck_out_tongue:

So the disposition makes the whole story to you? What I actually meant was the dialogue itself. Point and Click adventures had those branching dialogues but as far as I remember Skyrim, there was no “branching”. Instead you had either all choices at once our you had to click the “tell me more” or “leave me alone” options to progress. Very creative. I even “like” dialogue options with only one option. By the way: You can’t offer help to someone, if s/he doesn’t have anything to do for you. It’s like the dialogue options are telling you, when you’ve reached a new disposition level or certain chapter in the story which allow further interactions. But in real life you’re more often asking someone to help without knowing if that person needs any help at all. Mount and Blade: Warband did quite a nice job because sometimes you’re asking once and don’t get any task, but after 5 or 6 times, you’re getting a request. Sometimes you’re getting an immediate request, even before you have the chance to ask them anything. However the people don’t run into you, you still have to be proactive.

With “no change in characters” I mean the way NPCs act. As you say, it’s favor or hatred, but nothing in between, only good, neutral or bad and therefore no other variables. For example someone only gives a quest to you if you’re liked by (or at least neutral for / a stranger to) that person. But to be honest (as my current work life experience shows): There are people who treat you nice when you’re around but when you’re gone they’re bullshitting a lot and still ask you for help if they need it. This is what I’ve never seen before in the game; someone who’s hating you is asking for a favor. It’s because the designer said “Sidequests are only for nice people since quests in general include rewards.”. That would imply that a person is not in need of any help which is actually not true since they’re giving you a quest. I would prefer to have an AI to “think about” the advantage of the quest’s result before denying any help.

I have started playing the TES-series with Morrowind. I should have mentioned that earlier. Still changing a system the way it works doesn’t change the core mechanics for the gameplay experience. I’ve also used Peter Molyneux as a designer example for a certain reason: all of his games are about good and evil (at least during his time at MS). He changed some features or the way of implementation, but not the core mechanics and ideas in the whole concept. Dungeon Keeper was good vs. bad, although you played the bad role, Black and White and the Fable series let you choose the sides. My problem with these games (including TES) still is, that the outcome of your actions is pretty obvious, which decreases the value of your decisions. Of course in Skyrim there are some “surprises” but they appear nearly immediately after a certain action, which doesn’t give you any thought about the question “Why did this happen?” because you’re usually told right away.

#11

That is what mr. Levine is talking about tho, isn’t it? I will admit that I have cought only about half of his presentatio as I’ve had work to do, but as far as I understand, his proposed system (while of course way more complex due to the proposed mechanic of passios) is basically a disposition bar, relatively close to what Skyrim does. In Skyrim, if you do quests for a guild, guild members will like you more, if you save the world, you will be liked more by the general populance, if you act like a dick, it’ll work the other way around. It lacks the complexities, sure, but the basic idea of dynamic development based on your actions is there - and there aren’t many games which would do such a thing, so in a way, TES series are as close as we can get.

All of these interactions are 100% scripted in most RPGs like Fallout or Witcher, and even then, disposition has absolutely no influence on the NPCs mechanically, it only influences their dialogues. Because, as I understand it, what mr. Levine was trying to say is that it would be cool to have dynamically evolving player-NPC relationship in an open game, with as little hard scripting as possible, which, as I already mentioned, Skyrim attempts to do.

What you are describing, on the other hand (NPCs being dicks behind your back, delayed consequences of your actions etc.) is very much already done in games filled by hard scripting - but in games like Skyrim? Well, not really, as it’s extremely difficult to do and The Elder Scrolls series purposefully avoid investing too much into single mechanic (thankfully)

#12

It is and this is where his concept lacks. He’s not talking about narration but about relationships, as I stated in my first post.[quote=“YuusouAmazing, post:5, topic:15378”]
Also this talk was not much about narration but more about relationships.
[/quote]

Since KCD is very story-driven, I just posted the question to what extent this kind of disposition system is used.

Anything is possible if you put some thoughts in your script and narration. The reason why I’ve never completed the main mission in any TES game is because of the many sidequests distracting you to fullfill your quest and sooner or later you don’t even remember, which quest was actually the main quest. Who needs hundreds of different sidequests, which don’t have a connection to any other? In the hours I’ve played Skyrim I couldn’t say that a person was “re-used” twice for completely different quests.

#13

I’m not overly fond of zero-sum-game ideas. Life isn’t a zero sum game and never has been and making games that way always feels extremely artificial to me. Certainly it does happen sometimes for some people but I certainly have friends, close friends even, who are good friends with people I don’t get along with at all. It doesn’t bother me that they are friends with this other person or that they have ideas I disagree with. As human beings we aren’t really built on a zero-sum psychology. We sometimes see things in terms of “us and them” but that’s not a black and white relationship. For most of us the levels of “us and them” exist on a wide range of shades of gray.

So to my mind it would be better to have, say, a sliding range for how an NPC “likes” you. Maybe if you like someone they dislike their view of you will go down some, but it won’t just be like flipping a switch. In other words if you get NPC A to like you then get NPC B to like you it seem false to me to have NPC A simply flip a switch to their disliking you because they happen to dislike NPC B, taking their “like” rating of you from 100 to 0. Instead maybe you got NPC A to like you to the 90% level, but your getting NPC B to like you dropped NPC A’s like level to 80%. Maybe there is an option later where NPC A can ask WHY you’ve befriended NPC B and if you tell them it’s to betray NPC B later and that’s something they would like to see happen NPC A’s rating would shoot up to 100%. Of course if they think betrayal is a bad thing, even of someone they dislike, their rating would drop and maybe they would talk about it to other friends, word would get back to NPC B (after some reasonable amount of time) and NPC B’s rating of you would drop significantly. That would be more like what I would expect rather than a zero-sum game.

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#14

Of course it’s possible, there’s no doubt about that. I’m saying it’s harder, and a game of sheer gameplay scope as TES games have can’t really afford to invest too much into single mechanic without the other ones suffering, that’s why you’ll get so many people complaining about how shallow they are - they’re actually incredibly complex, you just get to see a small part of that complexity at any given playtrough. I’m actually able to write pages upon pages about The Elder Scrolls design and why do they work as they work, but I feel that’s not where you want to take this discussion, so I’ll just go ahead and stop here.

Aaaanyway, I feel that the real question you want to ask is a different one entirely. From what I have seen, the direction Warhorse is taking KC: D is pretty much The Witcher 2 path, with different mechanics obviously. And The Witcher 2 - successfuly I might add - simulates NPC relations via heavy scripting. It’s a game with a very limited scope, so it can afford to do so. And since all the relationships are hand-picked and manually created, their quality is as good as quality of the game’s writing, which is very high up in this particular case. So, to the question itself: Do you want Warhorse to divert resources from this heavily-controlled, yet in the end more natural and responsive system, to develop a dynamic system which would supplement it? Is there even a point in doing so?

From what I understand, I don’t think mr. Levine is actually suggesting everything should be 100% balanced, just that different NPCs should have different priorities and react accordingly - the buzzword ‘zero-sum’ he has used seems to be a rubbish name for a simulation of personal interactions.

#15

So, you do good deed for the butcher, he likes you a bit more, but the baker doesn’t like the butcher so the baker likes you a bit less? A relationship file that changes based on the PC’s interactions and how they play the game, with data fields for every NPC, organisation and entity? Daggerfall had that. Daggerfall came out in 1996 (I think). AFAIAA, every reputable game since about 2002 has included it - maybe not to the thorough extent that Daggerfall did, but still included.

#16

I don’t like this ‘Zero sum game’ idea.

Real life is ‘Zero sum game’ only if you get caught.:wink:

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#17

Zero sum, uh? I don’t think it is visceral enough, requires more levelution perhaps.

#18

So then it’s not part of the game, I guess or else you wouldn’t mention it that way as designer :wink:

#19

Actually, it’s more complicated. I’d have to watch his speech to get what he means, but if zero sum game really means - +5 with trolls + ( - 5 with elves) = 0
 then I don’t like that idea, as you can help somebody in disguise or use your influence for both of them -> peace & trade treaty
 so yeah, I have to watch it

#20

Sounds more like someone read something on game theory and decided to start blabbing about something in which he has zero experience.

Game theory is a theory of large numbers and imperfectly understood social interactions
 neither of which map particularly well in cRPGs.

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