Figuring out how to neatly merge some of these styles is the big challenge for the next generation of game designers.

I think some games have already done this well. Deus Ex, for example, blends storytelling and gameplay almost seamlessly. You do have to make some character development choices, but the game is flexible enough to accommodate almost anything you do. Planescape Torment and Dragon Age also worked fairly well.

It will be interesting to see how BioWare handles these issues in SWTOR. Presumably the game will attract people interested mostly in the story as well as traditional MMO players interested in min-maxing, raiding, and so forth. If story choices affect your character’s abilities (as BioWare has implied) then people might end up gaming the story, which would be unfortunate.

So in DAO, if you beat Ser Whateverhername is, you miss the dungeon escape segment but get whatever stuff she drops. Losing there isn’t really non-optimal in any major sense, in fact it’s designed so that you probably will lose. And are you playing the game non-optimally if you don’t romance every single romanceable character? Or is it a better story for your character to be totally in love with one of them and ignore the rest, or even to hate all of them but give your life for them anyway? It’s your choice, but you see how the story might be more compelling if you don;t just chase every possible achievement.

In a tabletop game, although it is possible to design a scenario so that there is one and only one true pathway through, it’s often hard to do. And the reason is that players will ALWAYS think of something you hadn’t expected (it’s like a law of GMing) and you will have to decide on the spot whether it might work.

I’ll give you an example of this: I ran a scenario where a mad vampire needed players to collect some random stuff (a time honored backup scenario for a GM who is short of time), one of which was a house of cards 5 storeys high. I even gave the players a real pack of cards in case anyone felt like trying to act out what their characters were doing in game. But nope. My players ignored the cards and decided instead to steal a van, ramraid a bookshop and nick five copies of ‘House of cards” with the aim of stacking them up (ie. 5 stories high). This is the sort of stuff real players will do if they have enough freedom And it is also a way for the players to help drive the story — they wanted to act like nutty hoodlums, so that’s what they did.

I do think that players who engage with the /game/ instead of engaging with the /story/ fret overly about minmaxing and achievements. Sometimes, a really good story requires you to be able to choose to sacrifice these things. And in return you get a different, but equally compelling and possibly more appropriate game experience. And games like DAO are just starting to recognise it.

This kind of bothers me; it’s possible I’m merely thinking about this from a slightly different perspective but ultimately gaming environments do not, or tend not, to, support failure in the same way they do success. I don’t think this kind of thing is players being foolish or hidebound, I think it’s the fact we’re inevitably steeped in a meta-textual awareness of The Way Things Work. Ultimately what you get out of a game for playing “non-optimally” either from a story or a mechanics perspective is LESS STUFF. I don’t mean less phat lewts and character improvement, but you generally get to experience less of the game, and you get less ‘story’ for your trouble too.

Now, I’m not a table-top roleplayer like Chas having played like one game of D&D in my entire life BUT again one of the problems with both the medium (and, ahem, I would suggest your average GM) is that success is rewarded by action and failure is met with inaction i.e. “you do that thing and this happens” versus “you fail to do that thing [and consequently nothing happens].”

To take a spurious analogy taking the non-optimal path in a game would be the equivalent of reading a book but none of the dialogue, or just stopping reading on page 193. I think to some extent this is just a natural limitation of what a game is, and what it does, but I don’t actually think it’s because players aren’t engaging with story-telling games ‘properly’.

Do they use the same sort of levelling up scheme in Morrowind? (I realise I am now sounding like the fussiest player ever but it really put me off. Like I say, I don’t much like min/maxing, especially when it involves not doing something that would be intuitive otherwise.)

Its just a little bit of a Mind-melt compared to even its pretty but dumb offspring Oblivion that really your playing a sandbox game that has a main plot in there somewhere. Go Explore…

It’s parent Daggerfall was even more like this with a truely EPIC world…I spent a year playing it before I realised I could freely journey to other countries….lots of them. Pity it was so buggy

Most story driven RP games were Torment-style – branching interactions that gave more illusion of choice than actual choice since most choices folded back into one or other of the same paths.

Morrowind was much more open. You could say screw the main plot and go work for the Fighter’s Guild. Or become a Vampire. Even certain apparent losses such as getting jailed could open up interesting and unexpected story elements.

Morrowind is a good story telling game that had more full stops (save and reloads) than a linear game because it had more flexibility.