 Sigil Developer Tracker
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Please remember that these developer posts
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I'm not really talking yet about the content side of Diplomacy. Hopefully you all will be pleasantly surprised.
As for Akherat's concern, yes, it's a valid concern. Setting expectations is a big deal in this industry, but more important is managing them.
Diplomacy is a new gameplay style - its in its infancy, and will likely only be grown to a bright child at launch. As the game grows, you'll see Diplomacy grow as well.
But there's things that simply will not happen. One of them is facial animation. Bethesda used a third party system to be able to play their face-morphing game (which was a fun mini-game for a while). Our system is more abstract than that, and based around personal skill and strategy.
The cues I refer to up above are things like clothing, names, titles, location in the city, rumors you hear in other Diplomacy, etc. etc. etc.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Tesh
I think that abstracting the dialogue is a great idea, as anything else would probably be doomed to memorizing sequences of responses.
Aside from obvious differences in flavor, I'm curious how diplomacy sphere is going to play different then the adventuring sphere? It seems that in both you have an opponent, a set of abilities, and presumably you will have to use the abilities according to hints you get from the mob just like in the adventuring sphere. Are we going to see a lot more Player vs. Player content in the diplomacy sphere (even for non-PvP servers) where player can work to sway various things to different possible outcomes?
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Some of this stuff you're asking is super-sekret sauce, so I don't want to jump my bosses on this, but I do want to talk about "how it will play different."
In the end, Adventuring, Harvesting, Crafting, and Diplomacy all are functionally similar in that you have abilities, and you select them to make things happen. Where the differences come in are mainly twofold:
1) Timescale - Diplomacy is turn-based, which means it is the slowest of the four gameplay styles by default.
2) Look'n'feel - Diplomacy looks different in a lot of ways from the other spheres. There's a playfield, and a place where you set up your abilities. Diplomacy moves at a more sedate pace, so unless you're in danger of being attacked, I'd expect players to arrange the windows around the NPC, not worrying about keeping a lookout around them for mobs. This means that your focus isn't on the world any longer - it's the playfield and everything that happens on it.
And the kicker is a big difference:
3) Flow - In Diplomacy, it isn't a relentless race straight from start to finish. On any given parley, you'll be winning for a bit, and losing for a bit, then winning again, and so on. When you get good at the gameplay, you'll crush an NPC you've specially prepared for, but you'll still have a couple turns in which you are "losing" while you prepare for the big push.
I played a new NPC I created the other day and was shocked when my random factors put me in a position in which I was losing, despite my strategy being much more sound than the one I gave the AI. The opponent got within one point of victory, with me having made almost no progress, and I came from behind with smart playing and beat him. It felt really good to be able to do that, knowing my skill in using my abilities made the difference.
I have another test-dude named Mysterious Gent who regularly destroyed testers for what appeared to me at the time to be no good reason. But... the gauntlet was thrown down - who could take on the Gent and take him out? I knew Diplomacy was going to do just fine when I saw a couple guys put their heads together and come up with a plan. They each tried a version of it, and it worked!
Soon the word was out. Mysterious Gent had a weakness. Use THIS type of ability to starve him out. Use THIS type of ability to stay ahead of his power curve.
It makes me a little sad seeing him standing in his little tent in my testing area, knowing he is no longer the powerhouse he once was, but that's the essence of this system - you'll lose a few times, learn their weaknesses, then defeat them. And when you get REALLY good, you'll just look at them and be 90% of the way there to knowing what you'll have to do to beat them. That's the point where you're a master at Diplomacy.
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Originally Posted by Bolshoi
This really does sound awesome. The only thing that has me worried is that once someone finds the weakness, the mob is powerless, just like in your Mysterious Gent example. This information will obviously make it out to spoiler sites, and then no one who reads it will ever have any problems with diplomacy. Is there going to be some kind of random factor that will prevent a single strategy from working every single time? Or (and this is a very long shot) maybea learning program, that will strengthen it's defenses to a certain tactic, while weakening itself to another, so that the same strategy doesn't always work?
It sounds like it's going to be a load of fun, I'm just worried about it becoming too easy once the code is cracked.
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Check out my post again, because I knew this would come up. I'll quote the part that should ease that concern...
"I played a new NPC I created the other day and was shocked when my random factors put me in a position in which I was losing, despite my strategy being much more sound than the one I gave the AI. The opponent got within one point of victory, with me having made almost no progress, and I came from behind with smart playing and beat him. It felt really good to be able to do that, knowing my skill in using my abilities made the difference."
Even though I went into that parley thinking it should have been a straight up win for me (and I was testing something COMPLETELY different), it turned into a life and death struggle due to the random factor built into Diplomacy.
I'm not worried about spoiler sites for another reason...
I haven't even talked about WHY you would be doing diplomacy and what you'll need to pull it off. For instance, you don't start with all the abilities you could possibly get. The combinations of abilities needed to play the most interesting strategies are going to take effort and dedication. The most interesting diplomats will be well-traveled and savvy about the subtle clues we're leaving on every mob we touch about who they are and how they will oppose you.
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Quote:
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Originally posted by Dreamer
I'm sure I'll get myself into trouble here.
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How is this intuitive "feel" for communication translated to diplomacy gameplay?
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Not exactly as you imagine, I suspect. Since this is a player-skill based system, your "feel" for communication is the assessment YOU make, as a player, about the NPC's abilities based on the clues provided.
A cocky bard wearing finery in the court of the king will most certainly be a flattery-based opponent. You, as the player, will thus choose to prepare yourself to defeat such a contest with anti-flattery abilities.
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Quote:
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Originally posted by hipEflip
What do you think we should do regarding current situation in Middle East?
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Humorously enough, I was a finalist to join the U.S. Foreign Service (went through the day long interview/testing/roleplaying/security check session and missed by .05 points). I was VERY close to a career as a professional diplomat.
For better or worse, I went into game design instead. The Department of State will have to muddle on without me. 
So if you want my opinions on the current political situation in Thestra, THAT I can assess. The Middle East? Not qualified. 
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There's a lot of questions that aren't really in my arena to answer. I'll try and hit up a few diplomacy comments here and there, when I can.
In response to Doddy's question, the sad reality of putting several hundred to a few thousand dialogues into the game means that the dialogue is abstracted in the gameplay.
What this means is the connection between dialogue and gameplay is in a reward/game structure. The dialogue is your reward, doled out one line at a time each time you score a "point" in parley.
Believe me, we've tried a lot of ways to bring dialogue and the gameplay closer together, but in a fight between "realism" and fun, fun must always win out.
The gameplay of Diplomacy is an abstraction, just like everything in a game is an abstraction. The role of the designer in this case is to take the abstraction and highlight (or sometimes caricature) those things you think are important, while still remaining fun.
Variety of response is fun. While the ability you use may not have a one-to-one correlation to the progress of the dialogue, it's more important to have variety than to have a "player must do angry ability because the dialogue is going to get angry" situation.
Deadlyne, answering question 1, you get loot for things you do in Diplomacy. Some of it is abstracted, some of it is logical (when I entertain nobles, they tip me for my efforts). There's another system I'm working on that is a money-maker too, but we're not ready to talk about that.
Ok, I'd better get to work. Take care!
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Well obviously I can't answer EVERY question, and I'm mostly concerned with letting folks know that we're hard at work on Diplomacy and that there's a lot we'd like to tell you when the time comes.
When thinking about how to make a game out of argument and discussion, my personal job was more on the "real world" side of things - how does manipulating THIS number represent a discussion? How about THIS one representing winning a discussion?
It turns out that just like making numbers out of conversation, we already make numbers out of a lot of stuff. How well does a shirt protect me from dragonfire? How about chain mail?
So you can apply this to Diplomacy. How well does a comment about your mother work on you? How about a careful listing of evidence for my cause? How about if I hit on you a little first?
Possibilities are endless.
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