RPG Story frameworks

23.08.2009

Driftmoon will be a roleplaying game with a story. Many modern RPG games don't have this luxury, as action oriented RPG's have become more commonplace in the latter years.  Action orientation effectively means that the story is some sort of a ruse to get you to fighting. There's always some excuse to fight, no matter how idiotic. And there's never a choise to not fight. Some years back I played Diablo 2 through about 4 times, and I still cannot seem to recall what the story was.

Then there are the sandbox RPG's, where you can do anything in the vast game world. You can become a smith, or you can carry mail between places. And obviously mostly you'll be going to all of the dungeons and ruins you can find and kill everybody there. A sandbox RPG is pretty limited in what the story can be. Bethesda's famous Oblivion didn't have much of a story because you could essentially skip it. When I played it I really ended up doing some sort of tedious work doing some little thing here and another there. I do that for a living, I don't want to do that in a game!

In my opinion a vast improvement, Bethesda's Fallout 3 did have a large sandbox play world, and it had a story. Though it suffered from the same problem, many of the quests in the world were tedious work, most of them related somehow to the main story, and deepened the world as a whole. That is not to say I didn't get sidetracked so badly that I never found the main plot again.

And finally there are the games where the story limits where you can go to, and more areas open as the story progresses. A good example is Baldur's Gate. This is the kind of story driven gameplay I'm going for with Driftmoon. You will have a chance to explore the areas that are open to you, and more areas will open as the story goes on. There's obviously the chance you'll get stuck, as opposed to fully open world games you don't know that you're stuck. But it will also be a lot less railroaded than for example Half-Life.