Really? Ok, I guess if that’s the default then we really should be pausing the game to have a Clippy-style thing pop up with pointers & highlighting to show people that red-ish = fire, purple = void & that breathing through your nose is better (unless you’re scuba diving).
I guess. Going by that logic I should be confused as to why I can’t play my Marksman like an FPS then, since I’ve got a ranged weapon & that’s how most games with ranged weapons work…
Never!
Wouldn’t the character, who has never experienced time travel before, be a little bit discombobulated by being sucked up by some timey wimey shenanigans?
Show me an aRPG where the player “decisions” actually affect the story in a “meaningful” way & no choosing whether to rescue the Smith or the other one in GD doesn’t count, nor does choosing a faction in one of the 2-3 places you do that. It’s an aRPG, not an RPG.
Since when was LE touted as an interactive story? Or any other aRPG for that matter?
No, you’ve said two contradictory things. That the game “inserting” itself & stripping away your immersion is bad but that you then want the game to “throw the game guide in the player’s face”… Please, pick a lane.
Actually, many aRPGs do have an effect on the story. Not diablo-likes, though. It’s an important distinction. Diablo-likes are a sub-genre of the aRPG sub-genre.
Elden Ring, for example, has several different endings.
Any game with a story is a interactive story. You interact… with the story, you just don’t consume it.
Fair, but your character also has done that severa times by the end of Act 2 and it never changes how it’s handled.
Not quite how I meant it, it’s kinda hard to put into words.
You know the Story of PoE 1? Simply since I played it the most I know the details quite a bit still. Your character is wronged and Exiled so your character makes the decision to go and give the one wronging him a bit of a bitch-slap. It’s not the world or others deciding it form him. That’s one way of telling it.
And while fairly simply after beating that guy… he finds out someone else was actually behind it… so more bitch-slapping… leading to gods being resurrected, which were the whole reason, so your character goes along and dishes out slaps left and right for those.
Basically, your character makes the decision at any time, not others leading the character along.
In LE it’s the second viable option, a character gets flung into a situation, in that case the piece of the Epoch… though from there the character should need to make personal decisions in some way to make it a story you can immerse yourself into.
Act 2 and 3 is still nice because your character wants to get back simply, so the Epoch is sought out, all fine, all dandy… but… what About Act 4 forward?
Why would your character care about the Emperor? He doesn’t exist yet in your timeline! Changing your timeline will make the Emperor not exist in the first place… so why the heck is any sort of caring there? The whole process there is nothing else then a worthless wild-goose chase. Sure, the Void is important to be stopped… but that comes from before the Imperial time for the cause. Heck… the whole issue is also happening before the Divine Era, and your character should know that fully well.
The Epoch allows travel through time, and it also allows to get back to the time Eterra was alive and humanity not yet let free while the gods also didn’t do war with each other. So why the heck isn’t your character going back before shit hits the fan and deals with stuff there to not make it happen? Your character has that power, showcased by actually freely accessing timelines through the Monoliths. But nah, instead you dimple around following everyone’s suggestion of ‘Hey, we got this issue, will you solve it for us?’ rather then going for the character’s own goal. You play pre-school teacher leading unknowing kids along while your school-house is burning and should be fire is in need to be quenched.
That’s bad storytelling despite having a great story available.
Not mutually exclusive.
Pop-ups and the likes are ‘in your face’ with what is meant there.
A character telling you about things is simply there and happening, fluidly implemented into the progress of the story.
You don’t go ‘I wish the game wasn’t so ‘in your face’ with stuff’ in Ori and the Blind Forest either when you get the ability to jump along those lantern thingies… you get the power and it provides you a way to progress simply. No pop-up, no tutorial, no nothing. The only pop-up is the initial explanation of what the ability does and what you need to press, that’s it, which is acceptable and fine.
Hence the same type of thing is used in many other games. If ‘Bob’ on the side yells in a shooter ‘They have rocket launchers, take cover’ and in front there’s a few walls which break line of sight then you’ll rush over there. If instead a pop-up comes telling you ‘Your enemies have rocket launchers, use the walls to take cover’ you’ll be annoyed.
It’s not the content which is an issue… it’s how it’s presented. The same thing can lead to immersion or rip you out of immersion, and decades of game design have found a myriad of ways to deal with that stuff better or worse. I’m not a master in those things, but even I know that there’s a good chunk of options available to at least improve the situation without sacrificing something rather then leaving the status quo like it is.
I literally don’t. I’ve played PoE1 campaign dozens (hundreds) of times by now and I haven’t the foggiest idea what is happening. You wake up on a beach (seems to be a GGG staple), you kill stuff, at the end you kill a big bad and move on.
Any diablo-like that presents me the story via written dialogue doesn’t hold my attention for long. Same thing happens with GD or LE.
I know the story of D4 because most of the story is presented with cutscenes and voiced dialogue, so I can pay attention to that. But the way it’s done in either of those 3 games just doesn’t grab me, even if the story is great.
Yeah, no. By that definition a book could be an interactive story since you’re “interacting” with the book…
So, just how discombobulating is time travel? Should the character “get used to it” or should they always be thrown & have difficulty adjusting? Plus, there’s no guarantee that the character has done it “several times” by the end of act 2 (which one’s that again?), if I’ve driven a car “several times”, does that mean I’m skilled enough to pass my driving test?
Do they though? I thought the player character was just struggling to survive & not be killed.
Not really. At no point is the character offered a choice to slap or not to slap, the story is on rails, I’ve never seen a dialogue option (like there is/was in LE with mono Liath) that lets the character (ie, me) choose whether to slap someone or not & there’s a difference. Every “choice” in PoE is “do you wish to slap this Bad Man/Woman?”
Yes
Fuck Yes
Regarding the story, I guess having been brought up on Dr Who & the like, I’m used to time travel stories & the like, so it doesn’t really bother me.
I would argue that it’s just not linear, we start in the middle & jump back & forth a bit (& possibly sideways).
Is that the stuff that most people just click through?
You don’t ‘interact’ with the story, you consume it with a book.
The earliest interactive stories were Pen&Paper as well as those short-lived books with multiple choices to see different outcomes.
It’s kinda developed faaaar away from it nowadays but games with a storyline are interactive stories. Some more story then game, some more game then story.
Nowadays relatively pure interactive stories are called walking simulators. ‘Stanley Paradox’ is basically one of the most complex interactive stories out there when we go for the closest original implementation of when they were created.
You… kinda should?
But besides that… we’re playing a H&S game, basically the ultimate ‘zero to hero’ type of game. You would expect your character to deal with that stuff rather then struggling heavily, kinda ruins the whole aspect of becoming a hero if you’re just dragged along without any sorta control. Stories told in that way also don’t do well unless the elements play into big personality changing revelations along the line.
Nah, you were exiled in PoE 1 and your active goal is to go back and take revenge on the guy doing it in Act 3. That guy becomes a demon though and you find out someone else in the upper ranks is respsible, Maligaro in Act 4. Which also becomes a demon and says the world will be plunged in darkness so to say… which leads to Act 5 killing the leader of the ongoing religion… which revives the old gods, Kitava foremost, which is the god of corruption, having caused all the stuff since the power corrupted those people in the first place, so being inherently at fault for all of it.
You fail to kill Kitava though and have to flee, so you learn through Sin that the only way to deal with Kitava is to absorb the powers of the other leftover gods to become closer to a god, finally also unleashing Innocence again and then fighting together with Sin and Innocence to ultimately destroy Kitava once and for all.
You’ve basically become a hero rescuing the world from an apocalypse in PoE 1, and then you move on to do the same in the Atlas, which makes Wraeclast depicted as only a small part of a interconnected vast sorty multiverse style existence.
It’s not about the choice.
It’s about the character having the control over his fate and decisions, not being pulled along.
In Last Epoch you do the job for everyone else, your character never changes his stance from ‘I wanna go back’. And even when he goes back he just gets randomly involved in crap… also always failing.
All other H&S games depict the player character as the hero, Last Epoch is actually the only one where you play the most useless character ever depicted. It gets so bad that your whole goal simply fails because of the whimsy of a single NPC not telling you where the one - I forgot actually the name, that’s how worthy of remembering it is - you try to catch has run off to, leaving you stranded and lost entirely without purpose.
That’s kinda… not really leaning into any sort of power fantasy usually showcased I would say?
And they’re great! Love em too!
But please not from the perspective of someone who’s not doing anything at all and can’t solve a single thing.
As mentioned above, if it happens reliably and regular from the start then ‘no’. But since we don’t have a reason to listen to anyway ‘since nothing even remotely matters’ we click through it.
I usually take in the story once at least… after Act 5 I started to click through stuff since it become so boring, only finding out about the details afterwards when I decided to read up on it.
For making story interactive, you don’t necessary need multiple branches of the story, it’s enough if you feel like your actions are part of it. For example, in Act 3 of Poe 2, when that archaeologist girl Alva goes with me through temple, asking to find soul cores, I can feel that my actions are part of the story, while I am searching for soul cores; I am not just killing monsters there. It’s kind of hard to ignore that girl
Even though story itself in Poe 2 is absolutely the same as in any other ARPG — you are saving world from the evil, but you are engaging in that primitive narrative more, you feel differently in each act and it’s part of the story. Like, in Act 2, you can’t ignore that you are interacting with the caravan and going through desert with them, everything including gameplay mechanics changes to that theme. (And btw, I’m sure they will make introduction to the Expeditions in Act 3 later, which will make gameplay even more thematic)
Ofc, if also story itself would be very interesting, it would be absolutely awesome, but I guess that’s to much to ask from the video game (though I don’t really see why not).
That’s not interactive to me though. If my choices have no impact on the thing then it’s not interactive to me, I’m just a passenger, like the difference between a car journey (I choose the start & end points/time and route versus a bus).
It’s like the 3 states of a moving vehicle. You’re either outside watching it drive by, so you get the ‘story’ but you’re not ‘a part of it’ at all. Then without changing the outcome you’re a passenger inside that car still… or… you can take the wheels and steer it into a direction.
All 3 are definitely different feelings. One’s a book. One’s a game without variable outcomes and one’s a game with variable outcomes.
Well, it’s the difference between being the audience to a story or being ‘in it’. Like a passenger. It’s not perfectly fitting as rather it’s you on the wheel and someone beside you giving you the basic things to do like ‘turn left, turn right’ but the one making it happen is still you at least. Which is the interactive part.
Ok, so you accept that in all of the games I listed you’re a passenger & have no control over where the story goes (I’m ignoring that you get to choose factions 'cause the don’t change the story)? Therefore none of those games have an “interactive story”. They’re no more interactive than the film Hardcore Henry (which is shot in first person), “you” are the protagonist but you the person watching can’t change the story of the film any more than you can change the story in any of the games I mentioned.
You’re the driver but someone else tells you where to go. You still do the driving. It’s you causing the goal to be reached.
Basically just the difference between ‘take in information’ of a book or a movie or ‘exert effort’ like a game. That’s the only difference, hence ‘interactive’, because you don’t ‘consume’ the medium, you ‘interact’ with the medium.
So while you only ‘consume’ Hardcore Henry (Nice movie btw.) you ‘interact’ with Last Epoch. Otherwise it would be no difference to watch it as a movie or read it as a book.
COMMANDING URGENTLY SUPERBLY DEMANDED. I greatly command and demand that video game players stop using car metaphors when trying to explain their points, because superbly greatly this not help at all, only generating more severe noise in the communication.
Please, update, expand and evolve thy vocabulary, superbly urgently.
You have impact on how this part of the story goes — like, how you will find those soul cores, how you are fighting monsters there, because that fight is part of the story, and you are writing it as you go.
Ofc, it’s not like story will go in different direction after all, but it is kind of interaction too, probably even more interactive than if you are just making few choices where story will go, because in this case you are still the passenger which just decide which branch of story he will watch, you are not driving the car at all. For making it more interactive, it would require much more freedom in the making story, not just choosing the branch.
With AI as dungeon master it could be possible, I’m very excited about having the game where AI will write story as you go. But ARPG is not the genre where such games will appear first (I would bet on classic roguelikes adapt it first). There actually already exist RPG where you are describing world, just in free form, write whatever you want, and AI generates graphic and story. For now, that game actually looks quite lame, but it is cool attempt, and obviously there will be more attempts in the future.
In quite far future, when some ARPG will adapt AI interactive story, imagine how reach and diverse endgame could be… And who knows, maybe it’s not even that far.
It’s a bad thing to have important knowledge on a screen most people don’t care about or are bothered of. We have a tutorial zone. Why is there no finish line where you get another prompt showing a “if you have more questions then first use the ingmae guide by pressing button “whatever bound to”.”.
For your question: Yes how it is handled in LE it’s a bad thing. Then again I could’ve tryed to be a lil less bitchy about it and word it more clearly.
