Monday, 05 November 2007
Dan Hemmens muses on What He Learned About CRPG Design from The Witcher and Kana: Little Sister.
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A week or two ago, Polish publishers CDProjekt Red released a stunning new non-linear fantasy CRPG called The Witcher to widespread critical acclaim. In this game you play a professional monster slayer (a "Witcher", in fact) by the name of Geralt of Rivia. Apart from the usual tossers who complain that any game in which you don't get to pick your character's race, class and hair colour "isn't a real RPG" (you know, the ones who didn't like Torment) it was well received, being praised particularly for its dark fantasy setting, moral complexity, and "time delayed consequence system". In case you're wondering, "Time Delayed Consequence System" is the revolutionary idea that when your character does something, instead of getting a sign pop up immediately saying "Your Alignment Has Shifted Ten Points Towards Evil", something actually happens instead, and because they're not obsessing about giving you immediate feedback about whether you're on the Path of the Closed Fist or the Path of the Open Palm, it sometimes doesn't happen until much later.
The graphics are also system-hoggingly beautiful, replete with those completely meaningless but rather wonderful moments where you say "oh my god, the ceiling is actually reflected in the marble floor" right before you turn off the ray tracing because it's slowing the game down too much. The combat system is innovative, and unusually for a CRPG is actually quite fun in its own right, without being an RSI-inducing clickfest. All in all it's an excellent game and I could talk at length about any number of aspects of it.
The aspect I want to talk about, though, is the collectible sex cards.
The Witcher is based on a series of (apparently absurdly popular) fantasy novels and short stories by a man named Andrzej Sapowski and starring the same character as the game. Like many fantasy heroes, the Geralt of the books racks up a rather impressive list of sexual conquests, and the computer Geralt follows suit. You're not five minutes out of the tutorial before you're banging the redheaded sorceress in the Witchers' fortress, and from then on you can score with peasants, prostitutes, witches, wenches and barmaids with pleasing regularity.
Whenever you make a new notch on your bedpost (which you presumably carry around with you for just that purpose) you are treated to a soft-focus cutscene of Geralt getting it on with a generic woman, and you are presented with one of the afore-mentioned collectible sex cards. Superimposed over the top of the generic "shagging" cut-scene, you get a lovingly rendered 2d picture with roughly the dimensions of a tarot card, showing your current partner in a suitably lewd position. Your journal is then updated, adding a little heart-shaped icon to the character's journal entry, which you can click to view the "card" whenever you wish.
Part of me, of course, finds this horribly embarrassing. I still (as you may recall from my previous article) like to pretend that I play CRPGs for the story, not for the sex (I'm sorry - "teh sex") and that such tacky images are an attempt to pander to teenage geeks who can't get a real woman.
Another part of me thinks that they're a fantastic bit of game design.
A CRPG is basically one gigantic puzzle-box. You fiddle with it for as long as you can stand, trying to unlock as much as you can before you get bored and decide to just finish the damn thing. You perform a series of tasks, and you get a series of rewards. The reason we put up with CRPG combat despite the fact that it's almost always as boring as all hell is that it gets you XP, which in turn allow you to unlock yet more exciting parts of the game, giving you new cool powers which you will use exactly once to see the pretty graphics before realising that they actually aren't that good.
Sex is notoriously difficult to deal with in this regard. You could hire prostitutes in Torment, but doing so got you precisely nothing. You fade to black, you lose some cash, that's it. Fallout did slightly better, in that shagging the right people could occasionally unlock stuff: there were even a couple of New Reno endings you could only get by having unprotected sex with the right people. The problem is that it's hard to reward sex in RPGs, because it's sort of an end in itself. Awarding XP for it just seems risible, and it unfairly penalises those who don't want to play colossal mansluts. Besides, since XP basically translates to bonuses in combat, it seems silly to get it for a wholly non-combat related activity.
The collectible sex cards are a fabulous way of rewarding an in-game behaviour in a manner totally commensurate with the behaviour they reward. Or to put it another way, the instinct that makes you think "hmm, I wonder whether I can actually shag the prostitutes in this game" is very closely related to the instinct which makes you say "wow, a soft-core picture of a naked chick, cool!" The sort of person who likes to have sex in CRPGs (that is to say, me) is probably the sort of person who likes the idea of collecting semi-naked pictures of hot fantasy chicks.
What I think it comes down to is this: games, particularly CRPGs, are about making choices. Modern CRPGs make a huge song and dance about this, in fact, and write "choices choices choices, consequences consequences consequences" all over their packaging. The thing is that most choices in most RPGs mean jack shit. Sure you can have sex with the hookers in Tormen, or kill absolutely everybody you meet in Fable, but the game is doesn't respond to this behaviour in any meaningful way (and a clue for all you game designers out there: "it shifts your alignment" is not a meaningful consequence). When you think "I wonder what happens if I have sex with this person" in most CRPGs you find that the answer is either "oh, I can't" or "absolutely nothing." Both of these are annoying responses that make you feel like you're wasting your time. But if having sex with random members of the public leads to your being rewarded with a little cut scene and a piece of artwork which somebody has obviously put time and effort into, you feel like your decisions are supported and your input is appreciated.
I think the trick which CDProjekt have worked here, and which other game designers miss, is as follows: instead of responding to player choices by saying "hmm, now what should logically happen in the game-world as a result of this action by the player" they instead say "hmm, now how can we give the player something for what they just did, without penalising anybody who didn't do it." You don't lose anything by not collecting the sex cards, but the fact that somebody bothered to implement them makes me feel that the design team supports the options which they included in the game. If you can pick up a girl and nothing happens, you feel like it was pointless, if you get XP, you feel like you're punished for not doing it. The sex cards are actually an excellent way to deal with the issue.
This leads me, in a roundabout way, to acclaimed hentai game Kana: Little Sister. Kana is a genuinely moving story about a boy growing up looking after his little sister, who is dying of chronic renal insufficiency. As you progress through the game, your choices affect the way that your sister grows up, they affect the events that happen in her life, and ultimately they affect whether she lives or dies (she dies in five out of six possible endings, for what it's worth).
Like the Witcher Sex Cards, the decision making in Kana is very much about giving you the outcome you play towards, rather than the outcome that would flow naturally from your actions. When my girlfriend and I played through the game, we concentrated on making our sister smart, and preparing her for the very real possibility that she was going to die. We never lied to her about her condition, and we got her to spend time with our chronically ill aunt. We also decided not to have sex with her. The ending we got, therefore, was one in which our sister died (although since you can't unlock the ending where she lives until your third run through, I don't feel too bad about that) but in which she had achieved a genuine sense of peace.
Compare this to - say - Kelgar's arc in Neverwinter Nights 2. For those of you who need to be reminded, in NWN2 you meet a dwarf named Khelgar whose overwhelming ambition is to become a monk. In order to help him achieve this ambition you must teach him to learn to control his temper, stop solving all his problems with violence, and accept that maybe he was wrong to have left his clan. To achieve all this you have to gain "influence" with him. To do this you have to do things which he will like. Chiefly this involves supporting him when he loses his temper, encouraging him to solve all his problems with violence, and telling him that leaving his clan was totally the right decision, and if they think otherwise they're just a bunch of whiners.
Now okay, it's a stupid example (although not stupid enough for Obsidian to pick it up in playtesting) and you could argue that at some point they made the deliberate decision that Khelgar would be a headstrong person who wouldn't respond well to a confrontational approach to his personal development, but that's sort of my point. If I'm taking the "no, Khelgar, I don't think you should be doing that" options it isn't because I want Khelgar to hate me, it's because the arc I want is one in which I persuade him to be less violent by actually reminding him to be less violent, instead of one in which I encourage him to act like a psycho and he decides to be less violent of his own accord.
In Kana: Little Sister you choose between six story arcs, all of them equally well written, engaging and entertaining (and all of them involving some gratuitous sex at some point, because while it might be a genuinely beautiful game, it's still eroge after all). In the average CRPG plot you get to choose between two story arcs, one of which is "you fuck it up."
I don't play CRPGs for the story, I play them to play a character (quite possibly a pregenerated character like Geralt or the Nameless One), and that means that I want to make character decisions and have those decisions supported. I don't want to waste my time second guessing which one of the options laid before me fits the designer's preconceived ideas about how his world should work. Of course if I did play them for the story, then I'd want the story to be good even if I didn't do what I was supposed to do during the game, and I'd expect the "story" about the guy who goes around screwing random bar wenches to be every bit as well written (or well illustrated) as the story about the guy who saves the world.
The graphics are also system-hoggingly beautiful, replete with those completely meaningless but rather wonderful moments where you say "oh my god, the ceiling is actually reflected in the marble floor" right before you turn off the ray tracing because it's slowing the game down too much. The combat system is innovative, and unusually for a CRPG is actually quite fun in its own right, without being an RSI-inducing clickfest. All in all it's an excellent game and I could talk at length about any number of aspects of it.
The aspect I want to talk about, though, is the collectible sex cards.
The Witcher is based on a series of (apparently absurdly popular) fantasy novels and short stories by a man named Andrzej Sapowski and starring the same character as the game. Like many fantasy heroes, the Geralt of the books racks up a rather impressive list of sexual conquests, and the computer Geralt follows suit. You're not five minutes out of the tutorial before you're banging the redheaded sorceress in the Witchers' fortress, and from then on you can score with peasants, prostitutes, witches, wenches and barmaids with pleasing regularity.
Whenever you make a new notch on your bedpost (which you presumably carry around with you for just that purpose) you are treated to a soft-focus cutscene of Geralt getting it on with a generic woman, and you are presented with one of the afore-mentioned collectible sex cards. Superimposed over the top of the generic "shagging" cut-scene, you get a lovingly rendered 2d picture with roughly the dimensions of a tarot card, showing your current partner in a suitably lewd position. Your journal is then updated, adding a little heart-shaped icon to the character's journal entry, which you can click to view the "card" whenever you wish.
Part of me, of course, finds this horribly embarrassing. I still (as you may recall from my previous article) like to pretend that I play CRPGs for the story, not for the sex (I'm sorry - "teh sex") and that such tacky images are an attempt to pander to teenage geeks who can't get a real woman.
Another part of me thinks that they're a fantastic bit of game design.
A CRPG is basically one gigantic puzzle-box. You fiddle with it for as long as you can stand, trying to unlock as much as you can before you get bored and decide to just finish the damn thing. You perform a series of tasks, and you get a series of rewards. The reason we put up with CRPG combat despite the fact that it's almost always as boring as all hell is that it gets you XP, which in turn allow you to unlock yet more exciting parts of the game, giving you new cool powers which you will use exactly once to see the pretty graphics before realising that they actually aren't that good.
Sex is notoriously difficult to deal with in this regard. You could hire prostitutes in Torment, but doing so got you precisely nothing. You fade to black, you lose some cash, that's it. Fallout did slightly better, in that shagging the right people could occasionally unlock stuff: there were even a couple of New Reno endings you could only get by having unprotected sex with the right people. The problem is that it's hard to reward sex in RPGs, because it's sort of an end in itself. Awarding XP for it just seems risible, and it unfairly penalises those who don't want to play colossal mansluts. Besides, since XP basically translates to bonuses in combat, it seems silly to get it for a wholly non-combat related activity.
The collectible sex cards are a fabulous way of rewarding an in-game behaviour in a manner totally commensurate with the behaviour they reward. Or to put it another way, the instinct that makes you think "hmm, I wonder whether I can actually shag the prostitutes in this game" is very closely related to the instinct which makes you say "wow, a soft-core picture of a naked chick, cool!" The sort of person who likes to have sex in CRPGs (that is to say, me) is probably the sort of person who likes the idea of collecting semi-naked pictures of hot fantasy chicks.
What I think it comes down to is this: games, particularly CRPGs, are about making choices. Modern CRPGs make a huge song and dance about this, in fact, and write "choices choices choices, consequences consequences consequences" all over their packaging. The thing is that most choices in most RPGs mean jack shit. Sure you can have sex with the hookers in Tormen, or kill absolutely everybody you meet in Fable, but the game is doesn't respond to this behaviour in any meaningful way (and a clue for all you game designers out there: "it shifts your alignment" is not a meaningful consequence). When you think "I wonder what happens if I have sex with this person" in most CRPGs you find that the answer is either "oh, I can't" or "absolutely nothing." Both of these are annoying responses that make you feel like you're wasting your time. But if having sex with random members of the public leads to your being rewarded with a little cut scene and a piece of artwork which somebody has obviously put time and effort into, you feel like your decisions are supported and your input is appreciated.
I think the trick which CDProjekt have worked here, and which other game designers miss, is as follows: instead of responding to player choices by saying "hmm, now what should logically happen in the game-world as a result of this action by the player" they instead say "hmm, now how can we give the player something for what they just did, without penalising anybody who didn't do it." You don't lose anything by not collecting the sex cards, but the fact that somebody bothered to implement them makes me feel that the design team supports the options which they included in the game. If you can pick up a girl and nothing happens, you feel like it was pointless, if you get XP, you feel like you're punished for not doing it. The sex cards are actually an excellent way to deal with the issue.
This leads me, in a roundabout way, to acclaimed hentai game Kana: Little Sister. Kana is a genuinely moving story about a boy growing up looking after his little sister, who is dying of chronic renal insufficiency. As you progress through the game, your choices affect the way that your sister grows up, they affect the events that happen in her life, and ultimately they affect whether she lives or dies (she dies in five out of six possible endings, for what it's worth).
Like the Witcher Sex Cards, the decision making in Kana is very much about giving you the outcome you play towards, rather than the outcome that would flow naturally from your actions. When my girlfriend and I played through the game, we concentrated on making our sister smart, and preparing her for the very real possibility that she was going to die. We never lied to her about her condition, and we got her to spend time with our chronically ill aunt. We also decided not to have sex with her. The ending we got, therefore, was one in which our sister died (although since you can't unlock the ending where she lives until your third run through, I don't feel too bad about that) but in which she had achieved a genuine sense of peace.
Compare this to - say - Kelgar's arc in Neverwinter Nights 2. For those of you who need to be reminded, in NWN2 you meet a dwarf named Khelgar whose overwhelming ambition is to become a monk. In order to help him achieve this ambition you must teach him to learn to control his temper, stop solving all his problems with violence, and accept that maybe he was wrong to have left his clan. To achieve all this you have to gain "influence" with him. To do this you have to do things which he will like. Chiefly this involves supporting him when he loses his temper, encouraging him to solve all his problems with violence, and telling him that leaving his clan was totally the right decision, and if they think otherwise they're just a bunch of whiners.
Now okay, it's a stupid example (although not stupid enough for Obsidian to pick it up in playtesting) and you could argue that at some point they made the deliberate decision that Khelgar would be a headstrong person who wouldn't respond well to a confrontational approach to his personal development, but that's sort of my point. If I'm taking the "no, Khelgar, I don't think you should be doing that" options it isn't because I want Khelgar to hate me, it's because the arc I want is one in which I persuade him to be less violent by actually reminding him to be less violent, instead of one in which I encourage him to act like a psycho and he decides to be less violent of his own accord.
In Kana: Little Sister you choose between six story arcs, all of them equally well written, engaging and entertaining (and all of them involving some gratuitous sex at some point, because while it might be a genuinely beautiful game, it's still eroge after all). In the average CRPG plot you get to choose between two story arcs, one of which is "you fuck it up."
I don't play CRPGs for the story, I play them to play a character (quite possibly a pregenerated character like Geralt or the Nameless One), and that means that I want to make character decisions and have those decisions supported. I don't want to waste my time second guessing which one of the options laid before me fits the designer's preconceived ideas about how his world should work. Of course if I did play them for the story, then I'd want the story to be good even if I didn't do what I was supposed to do during the game, and I'd expect the "story" about the guy who goes around screwing random bar wenches to be every bit as well written (or well illustrated) as the story about the guy who saves the world.
Themes: Computer Games, CRPGs
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I've got to admit, (having managed to completely overcome my initial shame) I'm massively into the Witcher sex-cards, even if this basically makes me a horny 14 year old geekboy with a collector fetish.
I was a bit disturbed by the village witch, however, who was depicted crouching stark naked on a pile of skulls rubbing fresh blood into her breasts. This was somewhat disconcerting since I'd just killed an entire village on her behalf... believing she was being unfairly persecuted by the ignorant peasantry. Also she was hot and I wanted to bang her.
It's one of those 'is it a different race or a different species?' questions, because although they can clearly have most of the important features of narrative, they're also just about the only narrative form (as far as I know) in which the audience can substantially (pace Kyra's point about readers choosing when to skim and when to stop reading) alter the sequence and selection of events in the plot.
But now it sounds from what you're saying here as though a game which is designed with the object of conveying a plot can be less rewarding than a game which is designed to create an authentic experience of character. That looks to me like a point against games, or at least RPGs, as a form of narrative art (whatever other type of art they may or may not be). It also perhaps explains why plot in games works so differently from plot in traditional narrative forms: because in a good RPG (I'm hypothesizing based on your experience since I haven't enough of my own) the audience determines (or at least influences) character and character (or at least influences) determines plot.
So the changes in the plot are only important in that they are outward expressions of the decisions which the player makes, which are themselves expressions of the character he's playing. And if a game tries to impose a plot which doesn't capture the experience which the player feels ought to result from the character he's trying to play, then it's an unsatisfactory game even if the plot in itself is a good one. Whereas Aristotle would say that in tragedy, an example of a traditional narrative art-form, the audience's experience is satisfactory only if the plot works, and no amount of convincing character can save a bad plot.
Could any of that be right? I have no idea.
This, incidentally, is probably why computer games tend not to make good movies: once you lose the gameplay, it becomes apparent that the story told simply isn't as interesting if it isn't revealed bit-by-bit as a reward for getting past a bunch of fight scenes and puzzles. Most computer game stories are actually kind of shallow, at least partially because the medium isn't especially good at delivering nuanced narratives. Some text adventures (like A Mind Forever Voyaging), graphical adventures (The Secret of Monkey Island) and CRPGs (Planescape: Torment) are exceptions, but text and graphical adventures have slipped into the realm of hobbyists and nostalgia junkies, and Torment is no exception to the "99% narratively pointless fight" rule that CRPGs tend to hold to.