"She's a bit whimsical, loves a romance
She sponsors comebacks, gives just one more chance
His is the tension, the plotting, the strife
He smiles as he writes, like the edge of a knife"
Mary Crowell - Pas De Deux
Having secured the Eastern marches for the Northern Empire unto the Southern comfort of a Best Western, I turned my Bannerlord's attention to securing my clan's succession only to discover goin' a-courtin' with charisma as your dump stat doesn't warm the sheets in any particular hurry.
Having struck out with my most promising prospect, I turned my attention to the ruling family's two youngest princesses. And struck out again. But! Third time's the charm (especially when you cheat a couple times by reloading) and I finally wooed the lovely young Gala of the Osticos, grand-daughter of now-defunct Emperor Lucon. I repaired with my blushing bride to my own territory, eager to begin producing heirs. First order of business: plant a few javelins in Gala's uterus in a tournament.
A-yup.
Them's sum medieval romance, alright.
(Hey, at least I won the tournament.)
There's a favorable comparison to be drawn between this amusing situation growing out of otherwise disparate game elements (marriage and tourneys) and in counterpoint a much worse game called ELEX. Both are ostensibly open world adventures but where Bannerlord owns its sandbox, ELEX tries to copycat Skyrim's winning formula of mixed open world and nannied questing. Too bad that implies talent here absent.
Yes, in the fine tradition of "lesser magic missile" and goldfish named Goldie, their small healing plants are called: "Small Healing Plants" which should give you an impression of their overall creatvity. Granted, just last year as I wrapped up my old playthrough I criticized Skyrim itself for imposing scripted quest status on what should have been freeform exploration, but at least Bethesda's flavor text tasted less rancid. ELEX's unimaginative lore has you fighting painfully generic mutant rat-dogs as an even more generic mercenary-super-mutant-spy-rebel-psychic-soldier-wizard-cyborg in a science fantasy mishmash of all the usual fireball-slinging, boomsticks and space lasers given no particular rhyme or reason. I can't even explain the need for a named protagonist, as "Dax" had all the personality of a freshly divided amoeba. All this wasn't as bad when just running around the landscape, but every scripted quest just focused your attention on the Bollywood-quality scripts, and ELEX was utterly obsessed with denying the player control over the action, in everything from quests to camera angles to randomly teleporting enemies to stepping on a knee-high boulder.
In much the same vein, my recent complaints about Ancestors Legacy focused on its undue focus on fixed construction sites, scripted story missions and over-the-shoulder action scenes, despite it being an inherently fluid, top-down RTS. But hey, don't take this to mean I'm in any way opposed to story-based gameplay, when properly executed. Narrative-driven adventure and RPGs have provided many of the most memorable titles in computer games' short history. The skillfully penned Tyranny, for instance, with its more mature setting, multifaceted characters and complex interactions, managed many instructive counterpoints to the above two's intrusive control.
Technically, the above is just a minor reputation event, allowing you to cozy up to your snarly bolverk, Kills-in-Shadow. Despite being entirely top-down scripted, its ultimate effect grows naturally up from the situation at hand and the player's overall grasp of beastwoman mentality. Unfortunately, rare is the computer game with the literary talent to back up a preset plot.
Both scripting and random generation have their limits, but in both cases you're supposed to be fueling interactivity, not just making a show of your artistic/programming prowess. Draw the line too far on either side and you end up tripping over it. I've also been trying my hand recently at ADOM, a text-based dungeon crawler from thirty years ago given an RPGMaker-ish graphic interface.
1) Giving the algorithm too much freedom, resulting in random deaths, inaccessible locations and otherwise broken content.
2) Giving it too little freedom, resulting in everything feeling suspiciously monotonous despite a few pieces being shuffled around.
The end result being that it's boring until it just kills you for no reason, and given roguelikes' obsession with permadeath you're also expected to get bored all the way around again, every time, until the dice go against you. Aside from the one monster type that seems immune, (floating eye) I've crawled my way to level 10 so far using exactly one spell (magic missile) against everything. Appropriately for a game made the same year as Arena, the randomized combat prompts much the same summary: "as you trot about [dungeons] at night, figures jump out of the shadows at you:
rats, goblins, thieves, wolves, orcs, swashbucklers, mages... it doesn't
particularly matter, as excepting the odd fireball toss, they'll all
perform identically" - and in ADOM I've yet to see a fireball.
Still, you'll never quite get away from automatically generated content in games, because when it combines properly with other elements or player choice, the result is usually more memorable than mere preordained storytelling. Take RimWorld's encounter-generating AI, which normally pisses me off for its inherent level-scaling nature. One of its dirtier tricks is teleporting enemies into your base past your defenses, in one case dropping through my roof into the artificially lit, indoor corn field at the back of my base.
I rallied a panicked defense and reloaded a couple of times until I noticed the attackers had managed to light the corn aflame with their crashlanding and first explosive volley... in a space that, apart from their own hole in the roof, was nearly unventilated. Pull back, close the air vent, and every raider simply died of heatstroke, cooked to death by their own stupidity. Given my foresight in positioning a fire extinguisher in the middle of the field, I even lost less than a third of my crop.
Or take my last Stellaris run as a Void Dweller Fanatic Xenophile and Pacifist, a combination I just could not make work for several attempts due to a combination of scattered habitat inefficiency, low population capacity during early game and the near impossibility of capturing territory. Even when I wheedled my way into the galaxy's most powerful federation, my allies kept declaring offensive wars (pacifists can only claim territory when defending) and getting rich at my fleets' expense. I almost threw my hands up in despair until noticing the fatter my federation mates got, the more their political influence was worth. And these people liked me. Trusted me. It was easy to get favors from them via espionage.
With my huge tracts of land cordoned off early on, xenophile mixed breeds providing well-adapted population boosts late game and most importantly a slew of political favors and a dozen emissaries tripling my votes in the Galactic Community, I simply outvoted the rest of the known universe and crowned myself Galactic Emperor, dissolving the federations providing my competitors with economic and score bonuses. Shah mat, biznatches, long live the new eternal shah!
And while we're talking about tracts of land:
Pons Aelius is under attack by dastardly Persians! How shall we reinforce it, your adorable majesty? The Apennines funnel reinforcements from the south into a desert pass which cannot be improved with a road. The Carthaginians are more than happy to allow faster passage... to both Rome and Persia. We keep getting weakened by those damnable sky-darkening Persian archers behind their lines and can't break through on the main front, with reinforcements either slowed to a crawl or whittled down before they reach the action.
Luckily, in order to ambush our reinforcements the enemy also has to circle around the volcano of Thera... and their archers, being closer behind the mountain, are quicker to take the bait. Solution? Let my front line crumble while baiting their ambushing archers into exposed positions, then rally a cavalry charge to flatten them. Without support, their infantry's now easy prey.
Responsiveness. It's a beautiful thing.
Pounding my new wife's uterus with javelins? Freakin' hilarious, and not a scenario you'd find written into official content. She even congratulated me on my win afterwards. Fattening my allies up for a galactic coup? Only one cRPG I can think of in recent years toyed with such a plot. Enemies roasting themselves by setting fire to their objective? In a story-driven game that would actually be anticlimactic, but when it arises organically from a player being able to respond to threats in multiple ways (like closing a vent) it's a completely novel experience. Sure, you could write a convoluted plot about Roman legions getting bogged down in a sandy mountain pass or baiting Persian archers onto an exposed volcanic flank for a heroic cataphract charge, but it can also grow out of the middle ground between customization and randomization.
You'd think game designers would more often remember their product's principal advantage over other media: adding player creativity to the creators' own.
Stop prompting one right answer. It's supposed to be a dance, not a recital.
If you want to control every challenge, then you'd damn better have access to some Tyranny-quality writing to make it interesting, or you'll strangle every plot by every damn trite, predictable twist (super Greedfall spoiler: noble savages are noble.) If you try to randomize everything... then once again you end up needing to control the parameters so tightly that you just end up with fifty breeds of interchangeable melee mooks to be magically missiled in a mundane monotone. Talented writers can do better than algorithms, but good writing remains taboo in an industry still refusing to acknowledge any other audience besides shithead tweens. So at least put some effort into giving players the tools to make their own fun, and let the interesting scenarios you're too incompetent to orchestrate... orchestrate themselves.
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