RPG: The Separation of Game and Plot

One of the obvious downsides about trying to tell a focused story in an RPG is the fact that at some point you are going to have to give the player control.  And if there is one thing that should always be assumed it is that the player hates you, and is going to try his best to break the nice little narrative corridor you’ve set up for him. The trouble is that the mindset of a game player is very different from that of somebody watching a film or reading a book. With these media you know right from the start that the goal is for somebody else to tell you a story, so your only objective is sit down and pay attention. A video game, on the other hand, offers the player control. It gives them objectives like “Get to town A”, “Find the magic key” or “Kill that boss by striking at its weak point”. You know the saying ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a yard’? That’s exactly what game players try to do; they want to exploit your system for maximum gain. This has a habit of throwing the pacing off.

What tends to happen in most plot driven games then, is a very severe separation of these two elements. Small chunks of plot development serve as the player’s reward for accomplishing an objective, and in this kind of game these moments will be spread out to about one every fifteen minutes or so of gameplay. Many genres face very similar issues, and there are a fair few attempted solutions, although most of them boil down to essentially the same thing. In action games like Bioshock (2K Games, 2007) or Dead Space (Electronic Arts, 2008) the Audio Log has become a more and more common solution. Whilst these tend not to progress the plot of the game, they do serve a very solid purpose of establishing back story and context for the player’s actions. They can also be listened to on the move, so the player can continue playing the game whilst learning some interesting narrative information. A similar system can be found in populated areas of similar games with Non Player Characters having discussions with one another, that the player can then eavesdrop upon. A strong recent example of this can be found in Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Square Enix, 2011), where NPCs in hub areas will often talk to each other about relevant events occurring at that moment of the story, or guards will have discussions with each other during missions.

The problem with the Deus Ex approach is that these conversations can’t be listened to on the move. So if the player is interested in these narrative details, they will break up the flow of their mission to stand around and listen. Many people who have played Portal 2 (Valve, 2011) will be familiar with this issue, as they stand around for minutes waiting for Wheately to run out of new dialogue clips. In those games, the implementation of GLaDOS’s lines is far less detrimental to the gameplay, as they are generally designed to last almost exactly the length of time it takes the player to traverse corridors between puzzles, or they play after accomplishing particular objectives. In this situation the player quickly learns that there is no need to hang around in one spot waiting to see if she has anything else to say, and instead enjoy the content in the background as they continue to play normally.

From the RPG side of things, these solutions don’t tend to work quite so well, as the player is commonly travelling with a number of other people. The important plot to develop here is between these characters. Mass Effect (Microsoft Game Studios, 2007) and similar games get around this to a small extent by having the characters in the player’s party say a line or two after relevant events. If they pass into a new area, for example, or in the case of the original, during those extremely long elevator rides. The difficulties with this approach are that the characters cannot be given too much to say, otherwise the player will simply stop playing in order to listen, as with Wheately. So the amount of narrative development using this approach is rather limited. For console RPGs, Star Ocean (Enix, 1996) led the way with the Private Action system. These were essentially cutscenes or small sections of gameplay that can be optionally viewed. During regular play an icon will appear informing the player that they can either cut away from the main action to view the event if they choose. This became a staple of the series, and something others such as Final Fantasy IX (Squaresoft, 2000) would experiment with as well. The pros and cons of this approach are similar to the eavesdropping on conversations mechanics, in that the player has to stop the gameplay in order to view the event. Also, as they tend to be complete and lengthy cutscenes or gameplay events, they are a significant disruption to the section of gameplay the player is in the middle of.

A similar but somewhat more elegant solution can be found in Tales of Vesperia (Namco Bandai, 2008), which features its own take on private actions called ‘skits’. These work in fundamentally the same way as the events Star Ocean pioneered in that they force the player to stop playing in order to view them, but they are far less involved then the complete cutscenes in private actions. Vesperia skits rarely last longer than 30 seconds, and feature an animated face of all the characters involved in a conversation. This allows back story, character development, interesting plot details and so on to be discussed in a less intrusive way than a Private Action. As they are much smaller in scope, they can also be used at more regular intervals. Tales of Vesperia players can look forward to two or three skits between each objective, but because the next skit is not available immediately after the lats one has finished, there is no real incentive for the player to stop playing and waste time in order to see them all. The frustration by doing so would simply make the game too unenjoyable to be worth it. Obviously the fact that the gameplay is interrupted during these sections is a problem, but due to the separation of combat and exploration in these games, there is no real way of copying the Dead Space approach of dialogue playing over the game.

The other upside to having a large number of these skits is that players will find it much harder to mess around with the pacing of the game. In Tales, it doesn’t matter whether a player spends half an hour grinding to reach a new level or whether they go straight to a new level, there will always be some narrative breaking up the gameplay to keep them up to date with their goals and caring about their characters. Vesperia has stumbled upon a near perfect balance to reduce that horrible effect of ‘gameplay corridors’ that lead to the next bit of story. I think a further good touch would be to introduce more character interaction during battles, as these are situations where it could conceivably be played over the game in real-time like the audio log system, although balancing the length to make sure everything got said before the fight was over would be a constant challenge.

Now… I wonder how I could implement a skit system into Vita Essentia, where we won’t have any voice actor? Some real-time chatter at the bottom of the screen perhaps during exploration.

- Luke

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