Infinite Character?
I've recently come to the revelation that strong characters in movies, TV series, books and games are the biggest hook that makes me come back to the trough for more. The Uncharted series, Ratchet and Clank, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, to name a few, give life to some truly wonderfully crafted characters. Characters whom I would like to spend more time with in future.
The upcoming Heavy Rain for PS3 looks to be the most character driven game yet. Over the past four years Quantic Dream has been crafting an experience that has thousands of different variations that can spring from the players actions (or lack of them). It's been an ambitious project from the start and if they manage to pull it off then it will be an amazing achievement.
"The results are that there are only as many scenarios as the developers had time to create, and that eventually the player will exhaust all of the options."
The issue arises when you consider the process of making a game such as this. Every event and all of the many variables have to be scripted. Every action, every reaction and every piece of dialogue has to be built specifically. The results are that there are only as many scenarios as the developers had time to create, and that eventually the player will exhaust all of the options.
In almost any Bioware game the supporting characters will have a set amount of dialogue and when they run out of meaningful things to say they will simply parrot the same dismissive line to the player again and again. At this point any work that has been done to establish this being (as a believable and interesting character) disintegrates to reveal the cardboard cut-out underneath. This never becomes a problem in other types of media because their stories are linear, but games allow for player freedom and therefore some of the developers control over story and characters is lost.
What if you could essentially program that being's character with some level of AI? What if developers could set certain traits and attributes of an NPC? Rather than there being options A, B or C with which Bob (our test dummy) could react to the players actions; program them with the capacity for love, hate, friendship, loyalty, fear, etc. They could possibly react more organically to your actions. And if there could be a way to procedurally produce dialogue they could possibly never run out of things to say.
As games get bigger, they get more expensive. Something like this could potentially free up development time and provide deeper characters for future games. Don't know if it's possible, but wouldn't it be cool?
