I spent quite a few hours this weekend playing Oblivion. It’s reasonably entertaining so far; the size of the world and the number of possibilities for gameplay really are impressive.

The thing that continues to amaze me, though, is the amount of dialog in the game. Seriously, they must have had dozens of people writing dialog what must be thousands of virtual inhabitants. Characters’ dialog changes based on what’s going on around them and their disposition toward you. It’s all so well conceived. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.

Here’s a little exchange illustrating how I often feel while shooting the breeze with denizens of Cyrodiil (paraphrased for your entertainment):

Me: Hello!
Sour-looking lizard man: What do you want?
Me: I’m new in town. What’s with that paranoid elf guy running around town all the time?
Sour-looking lizard man: I don’t know you well enough to talk about that.
Me: [Here I tell jokes and boast about my prowess as an adventurer to get the lizard man to like me. Then...] So, about that paranoid elf guy?
Sour-looking lizard man: Oh him. I think he’s following me. He looks at me strangely sometimes, and often carries on about a conspiracy. I try not to let it bother me, but he really creeps me out.
Me: Tell me about the town. Did I say I was new here?
Sour-looking lizard man: The town is ok, I guess. Hey, can you help me gather a rare root to throw into a magic potion?
Me: Uh, sure.
Sour-looking lizard man: Great! I think there are some roots near the trees outside town.
Me: Right. Roots near trees — got it. I’ll let you know when I find some. Good-bye.
Sour-looking lizard man: Leave me alone.

Open-ended dialog systems are a great idea. In theory they create a real sense of place and give the impression that you’re experiencing a living, breathing world. The trouble is they involve too much filler and not enough coherent conversation. Real conversation is much too complex for games at the moment, so relationships between the player and non-player characters (NPCs) — or even between NPCs — get distilled into grossly simplified numerical values like “disposition” or “reputation.”

For a class once I created a dynamic dialog system designed to address some of these issues by scoring relationships between characters using several attributes instead of just one (for example, trust, loyalty, friendliness, anxiety). The idea what that everything you said to or did for an NPC would affect those attributes. Over time you would actually build a “relationship” by spending time with NPCs, and the quality of that relationship would have a dramatic affect on what kind of information they would share.

Aside from the obvious practical issue of writing all that dialog, my grand system and others like it face a pretty serious challenge — there’s too much dialog.

The beauty of closed systems (where dialog is delivered through cut-scenes or one-shot statements) is that they can be more carefully crafted. Sure, they may sacrifice “realism,” but let’s face it, 90% of the words we utter are unbelievably mundane. Anyone reading this knows it’s certainly true about me. A truly open-ended, flexible dialog system would be prohibitively expensive to create and populate with content.

I haven’t given up on Oblivions NPCs yet. Right now I find their moodiness kind of endearing, but who knows how long that will last. I’m fickle like that.

As expected, my new Xbox has found a way to cut into my game development time. There are, of course, many excuses I can employ to rationalize this. The simplest one is to blame the Xbox, as if it had a mind of its own or was being controlled remotely by Steve Ballmer himself.

That, of course, is ridiculous. Steve Ballmer would never control my Xbox himself–he would certainly get a low-level lackey to do it.

Ok, maybe it’s my own fault that I’m playing so much, but at least I can tell myself that it’s as much research as entertainment. How can I expect to make compelling games if I haven’t even played the latest and greatest? Yes, it’s definitely research.

I have learned several important lessons during this crucial research.

1. Every good first-person shooter must have an alien invasion, either from outer space or some other dimension–the more hellish the better.
2. Said aliens must have the ability to infest human corpses. Several methods are acceptable, including face grabbing, which clearly gives the alien rudimentary control of the host’s motor functions, and fungal-like infestation, which transforms the host’s upper body into something lumpy and terrible.
3. The zombie-like creatures that result from alien infestation must be slow-moving, hide frequently in dark corners, and be extremely hard to kill. Shotgun blasts to the head (or what’s left of it) tend to be most effective.
4. Once knocked down, zombies must have the ability to get up and attack you again. While it may seem unnecessary (why not just send twice as many zombies?), it’s very important to kill alien zombies correctly. A resilient zombie is a scary zombie, after all.

With such valuable insights, I’m sure you can see now why my research is so important to me. I’m also sure you’ll understand if my progress on SPUDZOOKA slows down just a little bit while I study.

Well, I’m finally finished with all my January traveling, so I can get back to a regular schedule for blogging and working on SPUDZOOKA. The only problem is my Xbox 360… I’m worried it will find a way to eat into my productivity. The best way to handle it is probably to limit my gaming time and only play once I have made progress on my own game. It will be tough, but I think I can pull it off.

So what do I think of the Xbox so far? I love it. 2007 saw a great batch of games released, and while I can’t afford them all at once, I feel like I’ve finally stepped back into the main flow of the gaming world. I’ve been so consumed with creating games, I haven’t played very many of them. That’s good in a way, since being creative seems a more worthwhile pursuit; however, it’s vital to stay current on the best games so I know where the game industry is heading.

Ok, I can’t call myself current yet. Here are the games I’ve got for the 360 at the moment (aside from the giveaway games that came with it):

• The Orange Box
• Halo 3
• Oblivion

Yeah, that’s it. The Orange Box has been fantastic so far. Portal, as I mentioned before, blew me away. I’m loving Half Life 2. The setting is wonderfully rich and detailed, the story is brilliantly told, the levels are well designed, and (this is the main thing), the sense of immersion is never broken. There are no cut-scenes that take away control. The people you meet will talk to you, but you don’t have to listen. Even loading screens maintain your point of view.

Sure, there are some things that aren’t very realistic, like the age-old shooter convention of carrying around an arsenal of weapons and ammo. Where exactly does Gordon Freeman store the gravity gun when he’s not using it? Maybe I don’t want to know.

The one-man arsenal problem is actually one of the cooler aspects of Halo. Specifically, they avoid it. You can’t carry more than two weapons at a time. Sure, you’re seven feet tall, have a five foot vertical leap, and are essentially immortal, but at least you can’t carry around too many weapons. Still, it adds a nice variety to the gameplay, since you don’t always have the option to choose the best weapon for a specific situation.

Oblivion is quite fun as well. I’ve never much gotten into extremely open-ended RPGs (since story has always been my primary interest), but I find that the more I play, the more I enjoy the freedom the game gives me to explore. The leveling system has some nice elements to it, but I also think it has some problems. I’ll save my thoughts on that for another post.

So there’s a quick update on my Xbox playing so far. As you can see I have quite enough to keep me busy for a few months. There’s quite a list of other games I want to play. Maybe someday I’ll actually be caught up with the rest of the gaming world. On second thought, nah.

————-

On an unrelated note, I want to congratulate one of my life-long friends and his wife, who have just had their first child. I know they are very proud. Now I just need to find a time to meet the little guy.

Picked up a copy of Guitar Hero 3 tonight. Haven’t played it yet, but it’s only a matter of moments until I crack open that bountiful trove of rock.

This latest installment includes a co-op career mode that is quite exciting. You see, after years of eye rolling and summary dismissal of video games as a waste of time, my wife finally agreed to play Guitar Hero 2 with me (she even bought a guitar controller for herself), and she was puzzled to discover how much she liked it.

So, it’s with much anticipation that I prepare for a rare period of gaming bliss when the guilt vibes are replaced by those heavenly words, “Let’s just play one more song.” It will only last a few weeks, so I plan to enjoy it.