So let's discuss what makes a good ARPG

[mr punk]

For D2, the main problem is that the story provided by cut-scenes has nothing to do with the story that you play through.

true and it was metzen and his army of writers and the cinematics team job to make sure it didn't happen. anyway, it's not surprising if d2 dev was anything like SC (and it probably was). apparently, left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Spoiler

Q: I watched the StarCraft I cinematic CD with the developer commentary (have you seen it?) and it was hilarious. Some of those cinematics where hammered out in 24 hours with absolutely no clue on where in the game it would go. They excelled in trying different lense flares...

Blizzard has always struck me as putting a lot of time into their games and they change direction a lot in development until they arrive at what they see as a good game. Through your research did you see a positive trend of going from a more haphazard approach to gaming development within Blizzard to a more focused style? Do you have any insight into how their development process has changed for better or worse? I'm curious because like someone else on the thread has said, in the past Blizzard could do no wrong, but now (as in D3 and SC2) they appear to be making strange choices in the final outcomes of their games.

A: Excellent question. As you read the SAAL series, you will see Blizzard Entertainment's style change over time. They started out flying by the seat of their pants, and the reason they evolved to a more focused, regimented development style over time had a great deal to do with the growth of the company.

In the early days at Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North, meetings were held in hallways, in the kitchen, and by gathering a few guys and spreading out in an office. Blizzard Entertainment was interested in growing an empire, and saw the need to organize design discussions when the teams started growing. It's one thing to let everyone speak up when you're 15, 20 guys. It's another to try to let 60+ people speak at once.

One of the ways they solved that problem was a concept called the strike team, a gathering of leads from the disciplines (art, programming, design, etc.) on each team. The strike team would hash out ideas and problems, make decisions, and carry verdicts back to their teams. As you might expect, some resentment occurred from guys who had been around during the earlier days when everybody got to put their feet at the table. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1pw3bk/ David Craddock's IAmA

Cuz in other ARPGs, if you don't like the story, you can ignore 99% of it. D3 keeps shoving its story in your face like it believes it has something really amazing to tell you.It makes me wonder how most people inside Blizz really feel about the story. I think at this point, Blizz has made some acknowledgement of almost all off the common complaints about D3 but they've never come close to admitting how badly they botched the storytelling aspect (though I take the creation of Adventure mode to be a silent admission of some sort).

Spoiler

Q: TL;DR: Is there any plan to add a "free play" mode after clearing an act/difficulty where all bosses are alive, all way points are up, and no quests are required? I find the forced repeat of the story adds a great deal of tedium and diminishes replay value.

jay p wilson: No plans for this currently. We wanted the game to have a greater focus on story, and so decided to have a linear quest flow so we could advance plot and world changes. Creating a free play mode would be a major reworking of all our content.I'm not opposed to us adding a 'auto-skip' cut scenes option at some point.

Q: About the dialogue and story. You brought in some nice talent to do the voices for the game (some examples being Jennifer Hale as Leah, Steve Blum as Zoltun Kulle, and my favorite, Claudia Black as Cydaea). However some of the lines of dialogue in the game just made me cringe. I know at Blizzard, gameplay always comes first which is great and I think you did a fantastic job, but that doesn’t mean story isn’t important; So uhh… no offense intended, but really, what happened? Did your QA team not say anything or what?

jay p wilson: Agree to disagree? We get lots of compliments on the story and dialogue. It's a hard area to make everyone happy, and a lot of things we do to make goals obvious for some players make them feel over-stated to others. We never tried to make War and Peace, just a decent pulpy story about heroes fighting demons. http://www.reddit.com/user/JayPWilson?count=26&before=t1_c4x77w6

apprarently, it is verboten to skip on-rails, linear design in a blizz game. in any event, i think blizz heavy emphasis on narrative isn't anything particularly unusual among modern games. it's simply a byproduct of how these games with their eye-popping cinematics and huge development teams spread themselves too thin and impresses no one by trying to make sure there’s “something for everyone†in their game.

The other thing that makes Dark Souls' story so good is that the backstory is incredibly vast, incredibly detailed, and everything is interconnected and explained in-game (though most of the information is off of the beaten path, or comes from item/spell descriptions). Dark Souls does not completely explain the story: a lot of stuff remains a mystery.

well, "less is more" is not just a PR catchphrase with Miyazaki. also, he not only writes all the dialogue and item descriptions. he also worked closely with the localization team to make sure what needs to be explained or foreshadowed in english. lastly, he also directs and collaborates with every artist working on the game. apparently, he is "tough but fair" as a game director like his game.

Spoiler

On a somewhat different note, I'm so pumped for Dark Souls II.

i'm not. certain changes by shibuya and tanimura are troubling.

 

[Wolfpaq777]

Are people still complaining about D3's story?

Repeat after me: I do not play arpgs for the story. Please write it on the board 25 times as punishment for making this redundant complaint.

I have played practically every ARPG I could get my hands on since D1 made me love the genre. D2 & xpac, Darkstone, Dungeon siege 1 2 & 3, Sacred & Sacred 2, Titan Quest & xpac, TL1 & TL2, Path of Exile, D3... I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting. Most recently with grim dawn, I tried to pay attention, i really did, but killing monsters is just so much more fun than trying to comprehend whatever the story is that I ended up spam clicking my way through dialogue as usual.

None of them have had a story that was compelling or even vaguely interesting. The only mistake D3 made was forcing us to experience the story again and again every time we wanted to play the game, a problem they are fixing in RoS. To be fair, many other games forced this as well, but none of them have the replayability of D3 so it wasn't as glaring.

TL;DR don't play ARPGs for the story, don't complain when the story is bad, and the problem has already been solved for RoS.

 

[ShadoutMapes]

Just because most of us probably does not play for the story, it doesn't mean that a "good" story isn't strengthening the experience. And a bad story is taking away from it.

 

[HardRock]

Darkstone

Man, how I love that game. To stay on topic, for me, part of what makes a good ARPG (or a game in general) is music like this: http://www.releaselyrics.com/e878/audren-the-darkstone-will-shine/

Even though I didn't have to, I always payed a lot of gold to hear the bard in town play this music for me.

 

[TheNix]

Repeat after me: I do not play arpgs for the story. Please write it on the board 25 times as punishment for making this redundant complaint.

Although I think that a storyline is more or less secondary (tertiary?? quaternary??) to good gameplay, I also believe a game without a good story is like a band playing with out of tune instruments. What the hell, it's still music isn't it!!

 

[Disciple of Erebos]

I think story is one of the most important parts of a game, but it's not particularly important to ARPGs as a genre. What makes stories good is usually having interesting, complex characters, having a well-thought out and well-written plot, and then raising the stakes so that the audience cares what happens.

The problem with this in terms of ARPGs is that gameplay focuses on killing monsters for loot drops, and playing the game like a loot lottery, usually to the exclusion of everything else. Also, the main reason for play is different in ARPGs compared to other types of games. In non-ARPGs, the reason you play is to progress through the game; however, in ARPGs (and also MMOs), it is expected that you will finish the game's content fairly quickly, and then continue grinding at the top end to get the best loot, or remake characters to try different builds, or do PvP, or whatever. Regardless, the main motivation for play is not to finish the game: the game is supposed to be 'endless,' a game that you can play for years.

This, on its own, does not exclude the possibility of a great story. However, due to genre conventions, it does make it very difficult to write a good story. Consider the 3 things I said you needed for a great story: good characters, good plot, and making everything feel important so the audience is drawn in. Due to the genre conventions of ARPGs, it's really hard to do that. By and large, the main character only interacts with NPCs who fulfill one-or-both of two functions: quest-giver or merchant. Also, the only time you interact with them is when you go back to town, and you're generally in town only to drop off items before returning to battle. Finally, there are almost never any cutscenes with NPCs, meaning that they will only have whatever characterizations they are given from dialogue (which many people just skip). In fact, most ARPGs don't have many cutscenes to begin with. Overall, this makes it difficult to give NPCs real character development, because the player will only see them in the 10 seconds when he/she goes back to town to drop off loot. In addition, for a lot of ARPGs, this problem is compounded by the Act structure. If your character moves between different acts, but the NPCs don't (and they usually don't), then you get a bunch of different sets of NPCs. All of them perform the same function, and are basically 3 or 4 different versions of the same characters. Because of this, even if you gave one set of NPCs character development, it wouldn't matter, because at the end of the Act you'd go somewhere else, and your somewhat-developed NPCs would be replaced by another cast of functionally-identical NPCs, sans character development.

Secondly, the main character in ARPGs is almost always a blank slate character, due to the fact that it is often hard (or at least unusual) to develop multiple classes and still have real characterization for the main character. What makes most stories good is that the main character develops in some way throughout the story: you follow the character through trials and tribulations, and you become emotionally invested in the character's well-being (or, in the case of the villain-protagonist, you hope really hard that he/she gets what's coming to him/her in the end). However, in almost every ARPG I've ever played, the main character has absolutely no personality, no dialogue, and indeed no characterization whatsoever.

Because of this, almost every ARPG fails in the characterization. None of the NPCs have interesting character, and even if they did, you wouldn't find out unless you were specifically looking for it. The main character is even worse: his/her motivation for beginning the quest to save the world usually begins and ends with a single word: lewt.

As we have established that none of the characters are usually characterized very well, if at all, this makes it extremely hard to make the stakes of the plot feel important. All of the characters are bland, so it is hard to feel any connection with them, or concern for their future in the plot. As a result, even when bad things happen to the main NPCs (which, by the way, happens pretty rarely), nobody cares. D3 is a good example of this: with good characterization and pacing, Leah's death could have been a big moment in the plot, where a main character died and the stakes were raised to the maximum. Instead, since was so bland, her death meant absolutely nothing.

Basically, due to the above problems, the only thing traditional APRGs can really have going for them is a good plot. However, having a good plot on its own, without good characters and important situations within that plot, is not enough to create a good story. If you take out all of the characters and situations, a good plot on its own feels empty and meaningless. This is usually why blockbuster Action movies tend to be called out for having bad stories. The plot can be well-written, but the characters are often bland and uninspired, because more time is spent having action scenes rather than developing the characters. The ARPG genre is basically the blockbuster Action movie of video-games: you could develop a really good, interesting story, but that would take players away from the action.

Now, to use Dark Souls as an example of an ARPG that really did make a good story, it has all three aspects I described. First, the NPCs you interact with in Dark Souls have their own problems and internal struggles, and even through your best efforts, you cannot always help them. Furthermore, characters are not always who they introduce themselves as. For example, Griggs of Vinheim initially seems like a friendly disciple of Big Hat Logan; however, later you learn information that suggests that Griggs may be a spy sent by the lord of Vinheim to watch Logan. Another character, Petrus of Thorolund, initially appears to be a bumbling but well-meaning cleric; however, later, he betrays and kills the people he swore to protect, and if you attack him, he describes himself as a 'wolf in sheep's clothing.'

The plot in Dark Souls is very well-written, if (in my opinion) to obscure and relegated to back-story. The plot is set up as a series of conspiracies and gambits throughout 1000 years of history, with your actions during the game being merely the conclusion of one, or more, sets of gambits. As a result, even though the main character has no personality, the plot is driven by the actions and motivations of the other characters. In fact, the main character of Dark Souls is really nothing more than a pawn, being manipulated and used by two conspiracies. Because of this, even though the main character has little characterization, the heavy characterization of the NPCs and bosses, many of whom are manipulating the main character, are still able to drive the plot.

Finally, the stakes in Dark Souls are always incredibly high. All of the main NPCs are Undead, who lose a bit of themselves whenever they are reborn, and will eventually go insane and become mindless Hollows. Furthermore, the main character and attack and kill NPCs and merchants, and they do not respawn ever if you kill them (until New Game + that is). Furthermore, all of the character arcs for each NPC are related to their mental state, and how close they are to Hollowing. As a result, not only are the characters well-characterized, by every action feels important, as it could be driving them into insanity. In addition, finding out about the dueling conspiracies, and how you factor into them, greatly raises the stakes of the game's main plot. Overall, Dark Souls' story succeeds because it hits all three points, having complex, interesting characters, harrowing situations for all of them, making their plights both sympathetic and difficult, and a really good plot that ties everything together.

Finally, at the end of all of this, the main reason I'd say that APRGs don't tend to have a good story, is because the developers usually don't care about writing a good story. For games known for the story, look at games like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy. Everything is created for the purpose of advancing the story, and the player is drawn in partially from gameplay, but also mainly out of interest in the fates of the main characters, and the world in general. For ARPGs, on the other hand, developers want to create a good game that people will play forever. Since most of the gameplay is focused in non-story areas, devs don't really care about crafting a good story, because ideally, players won't interact with the story that much. I think that this is a pity, and that story should be a much larger focus, but that's just me. Personally, I'm a bigger fan of games like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy than I am of ARPGs. I have played more hours of D3 than I have of Final Fantasy X or XII, but I'd consider both of them to be much better games, primarily because I am a story-driven person, and both games had an excellent story with really good characters (...and Tidus).

Sorry for the long rant. I'm done now.

 

[zaphodbrx]

2) No Modding. This is one of the few things on the list I think is important. I personally think that mods tend to play a large part in revitalizing games. I only played D2:LoD for about 1.5 years, but after that I played Median XL for about 4 years. I personally consider Median XL to be a much better game than D2, and if BrotherLaz had been on the design team for D3, I think it would probably have been a better game overall. I've heard similar things about other popular games such as Dark Souls and Skyrim. Mods can change up gameplay completely, and add in new areas and challenges. The only thing I'd say against mods, at least on this topic, is that I feel that if a mod changes the game too much, then it stops really being the same game. I qualify Median XL as being a different game than D2, because all of the classes have a very different feel, and the game runs on many systems such as the advanced crafting recipes and Uberlevels that were not part of D2. However, I still feel that modability is an important part of ensuring a game's longevity.

That said, this isn't about game design writ-large, this is about ARPGs. I think that being moddable is good game design in general, since it gives inspired, constructive players a method of creating a unique gaming experience for the community. However, I don't think it is necessary to have in an ARPG, merely helpful. Also, in point about the reason D3 isn't moddable, I highly doubt it's because the devs were afraid of being upstaged by modders. Rather, I think it's a lot more likely that since the AH was available back then, they were afraid of enterprising players hacking the system and using the AH to steal a lot of money. Frankly, considering the account-hacking AH-glitching that happened before the AH went down, I think this was probably a fine idea: people proved themselves to be very willing to steal money, or steal gear to sell for money. I think, though, that the devs should make it possible to mod D3 now, since the AH is scheduled to be shut down permanently, so there should be no problem of theft.
.

Thank you, nice to see someone else who agrees on the mod thing.
Most games ( even the ones created by blizzard ) do have mods or other forms of custom content, and they ARE important. For example the custom map DOTA-Allstars became so popular that it has become it's own game at this point rather than a warcraft 3 map. And this is true for any number of games, so many have custom expansions or mods that are often better than the game itself. Median XL is a good example as well.

I don't really understand the logic that the auction house was why they didn't enable mods. If they had designed it to be moddable from ground up, they could have ensured that while you can make a sword have 10000 dmg, it'll only work on your computer, and not in multiplayer / and not be able to sell it on action house. Too much work for them I guess. They only had ten years to make the game after all..

 

[Disciple of Erebos]

Thank you, nice to see someone else who agrees on the mod thing.
Most games ( even the ones created by blizzard ) do have mods or other forms of custom content, and they ARE important. For example the custom map DOTA-Allstars became so popular that it has become it's own game at this point rather than a warcraft 3 map. And this is true for any number of games, so many have custom expansions or mods that are often better than the game itself. Median XL is a good example as well.

I don't really understand the logic that the auction house was why they didn't enable mods. If they had designed it to be moddable from ground up, they could have ensured that while you can make a sword have 10000 dmg, it'll only work on your computer, and not in multiplayer / and not be able to sell it on action house. Too much work for them I guess. They only had ten years to make the game after all..

I think that the problem was that modding requires knowing the source code, in order to modify it. Since the AH was written into the source code, the devs were probably afraid that giving players access to the source code would allow them to mess with the AH. If the AH only dealt in gold, then I doubt it would have been a problem. However, since the AH dealt in real cash, if you knew the source code, you could probably mess with the AH's script in order to steal money.

The problem persists in RoS, since game devs rarely ever write anything out of the source code. If the devs got rid of the AH completely from the game's source code, then releasing the code and allowing modding would be a great idea. However, since the code still has the AH in it, even if it's been 'turned off,' if the devs release the code, then modders would have the ability to re-enable the AH, which would allow the afore-mentioned stealing efforts.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the devs should completely write the AH out of the code, and then release the code for modding. I'm a big fan of mods, and I'm sure that a lot of great modders could do cool stuff with D3. If nothing else, I'd love to see D3: Median XL. However, unless the devs explicitly remove the AH coding from the game, I doubt we'll ever see the code. It's usually not a good idea to open up things dealing with real cash to modding stuff, since it has the chance of enabling theft.

 

[yovargas]

Nobody ever stated that the AH was the reason for no mods.

 

[Wolfpaq777]

Just because most of us probably does not play for the story, it doesn't mean that a "good" story isn't strengthening the experience. And a bad story is taking away from it.

You're welcome to disagree. My opinion, strengthened by years of experience, is that all ARPG storylines are more or less terrible, so paying attention to them only to be disappointed by them is an exercise in futility.

Although I think that a storyline is more or less secondary (tertiary?? quaternary??) to good gameplay, I also believe a game without a good story is like a band playing with out of tune instruments. What the hell, it's still music isn't it!!

haha I love this analogy.

Man, how I love that game.

Me too. Something about it was simply captivating back in the day.

 

[Steven Hazani]

If they were that worried about protecting the AH they'd follow the first rule of security programming - never trust the client. Remember when you could adjust your computer clock to (time of posted auction + 5 minutes or sooner) and that'd allow you to cancel auctions back when you couldn't otherwise? And the zero bid bug is STILL there. Blizzard just kind of gets all awkwardly silent and hopes people forget that one. This means at the absolute minimum people can steal items and sell them for actual cash even if they can't break into the RMAH itself (which probably uses the same code).

 

[Disciple of Erebos]

Fair. For what it's worth, I'm terrible at computer stuff, and the one time I ever tried taking Computer Programming (back in high school) I narrowly scraped a D. In that case, I'm not really sure why the D3 team didn't make the game available for modding, and I would have to agree with all of you that this was a terrible decision.

 

[Steven Hazani]

Fair. For what it's worth, I'm terrible at computer stuff, and the one time I ever tried taking Computer Programming (back in high school) I narrowly scraped a D. In that case, I'm not really sure why the D3 team didn't make the game available for modding, and I would have to agree with all of you that this was a terrible decision.

Mostly because modders would outdo them. Also most of the modding stuff in D2 was literally modifying a spreadsheet. If you wanted to alter the game code itself for Median XL type stuff that was a bit more involved but the vast majority of mods (and the ones that'd address the problems with D3) are new items/areas/etc which is relatively simple.

 

[Nagafen]

Mainly an ARPG just needs three things (with parallels to PoE):

1) A solid engine with combat that feels good and skills that are programmed well. This is important because, unlike most other types of games, ARPGs make you spend nearly 100% of the time just fighting. In a game like Skyrim, a lot of the time is travel, dialogue, exploration, stealth etc. In MMORPGs, a lot of it is farming or trading, communication, preparing for big fights. No other game type really has you constantly knee-deep in combat for nearly the entirety of every playsession. D3 has the Blizzard trademark engine in place while PoE does not, often feeling cheap and low-quality, uninteresting skills, and everything plagued by lag.

2) A lot of character build options that are at least vaguely equal. It doesn't necessarily have to be quite as absurdly complex as PoE's gems and skill tree, but D3 is way in the other end of the spectrum with practically no meaningful customization and only a couple of worthwhile builds per class. A huge failing for D3 while PoE is the poster child for build diversity and mechanical depth.

3) An itemization that can both keep rewarding you and keep you playing. I feel that neither game really has this, but PoE is closer to the mark than D3 is. D3's loot has always been the game's achilles heel with utterly soulless itemization and a loot system that just expected you to find upgrades that had higher amounts of the same stats. PoE is the opposite, having a very interesting and diverse itemization with a lot of depth but designed such that loot is ridiculously, gamebreakingly rare. As a result, you can play for days and weeks without finding anything good and are forced to trade in order to progress your character in any way. I think D2 had it right here, with the perfect balance of rarity and progression for unique items. This was largely because the uniques weren't so rare that you could never find them, but even once you had them, you could still keep striving for perfectly rolled ones. PoE reaches the point of "you don't get anything anymore" way, waaaay before it feels like you should be there, and D3 just has boring items and a loot system that feels artifical.