So yeah. Procedurally generated story is now a thing, apparently. The system used in the above game (called Toska) is the product of 10+ years of study and development, ranging through all sorts of complex subjects like neuro-something, and behavioural-thingy. I forget the names, but they sound legit. From an interview with Gamustra, I gather that Gyre: Maelstrom will have a dynamic “3-act story” and tone based off the player’s play style, a procedural character (or “actor”) system, and an adaptive dialogue system which drops relevant and meaningful choices into the player’s hands.
Basically, it’s like all my birthdays came at one go.
I’m not sure if Toska will be compatible with unity out of the box, but the very fact that it exists is cause for celebration. With an endless story on top of endless world’s, the longevity of games will be doubled, maybe even tripled. Better than that, taking arduous story planning and extensive, linear choice trees out of the development process will allow us devs to concentrate a lot more on making the gameplay tip-top. It will free up our time to enhance the worlds we create, to make them more interesting and innovative. It’s a huge weight off the backs of people who just want to build a fun world, and not get bogged down with the intricacies of plot points, or character motivations.
What do you think of this? Are you excited for procedural story? Are you going to buy Gyre: Maelstrom when it comes out (I am!)? Or do you think it will confuse players, or get suppressed by the big gaming companies?
(As a side note, sorry for any typos: It’s late and I’m excited. [:P])
We’ve seen the individual subsystems for a procedural story generator in past games for a while now. Dwarf Fortress generates a world and the lore for it, Skyrim assigns quests to points of interest in the world, RimWorld creates events based on the current state of your base, etc.
I know, I’ve seen what those games can do, and it’s nothing to what Toska promises. While they offer nice little bits of differentiation to a games world, the difference between them and this new engine is that they don’t actually drive the story. Toska allows for open world exploration, yes, but it will also craft a cohesive narrative that has a start, middle, and end. It builds a plot, and it gives it substance. Comparing DF or Skyrim to it would be like comparing procedural images to a real artist’s work.
I don’t believe that’s entirely fair. Well okay it is in the case of Skyrim. Dwarf Fortress though isn’t a roleplaying game so much as a simulation. If the author truly wished for a coherent story I have little doubt he could accomplish it and very likely surpass anything else out there including this. That said it isn’t his goal last I checked his list.
Ultimately most role playing story lines are not that complex. It’ll remain to be seen how much it actually does.
Oh, no, I wasn’t intending to insult or downplay the creators of those games: their work is amazing, at the least. Nonetheless, the random (or procedural) story elements are just that: random/procedural story elements. Toska creates a cohesive, deep, and dramatic narrative for the players to play through. It’s like having a Mass Effect that keeps on giving, instead of having pre-coded choices.
Right, but how is that any different with Toska? It literally states on the website that it is a procedural story generator.
Very little information is available concerning the system and official websites are about generating hype. The only news article I was able to find mentioned that it isn’t able to completely replace writers. Until I see more concrete information I’m doubtful that it can replace a properly written story line like that found in Mass Effect.
It’s likely designed to supplement an existing story line but once again that concept has been around for some time now.
Games like RimWorld also state: “RimWorld is not designed as a competitive strategy game, but as a story generator. It’s not about winning and losing - it’s about the drama, tragedy, and comedy that goes on in your colony.” (quote taken from official site, main page).
Yet I’ve never seen any story RimWorld create you any story. All their ‘storyteller’ does is throw events from list onto your head depending on amount of colonists you have. Story is what you, as player, create while roleplaying. It’s not something RimWorld generates.
What I’m saying is: before hyping, give us actual examples of stories generated.
Current tech only allows to piece minimal fragments together, not creating something new and logical at same time. So those stories created (assuming they will be creating stories unlike rimworld) will still be constructed from templates and I’m wondering if they managed to make very large amount of templates and how they link them with each other logically.
That sounds to good to be true, if they really manage to create a procedural cohesive story that allows the player to feel that they are playing a different world each time they start a new game, them I’ll hype and buy it.
Story is what you experience. That’s it. Roleplaying has no part in it whatsoever. If you experienced a series of events, you have experienced a story.
I disagree because story must have basic parts like introduction, climax and logical links between its parts; some random events that aren’t linked or lead to any conclusion aren’t story. At least unless you’re roleplaying (=artificially creating links between events where they don’t exist and pretend it’s okay because it’s fun to do so, pretend your characters develop and change with time, etc).
While this is true, there’s a difference between a deep story and a not-so-deep one. I’m experiencing a series of events when I zap my way through waves of aliens in Space Invaders, but it’s a shallow and meaningless “story” compared to the heartbreaking struggle against your own purpose in Reaper: Tale Of A Pale Swordsman.
My favorite stories are character-driven, where the purpose of world-building is to support the characters’ stories. This will be a hard challenge for procedural story generation. Ultimately it will probably be more about art than tech. It’s going to take a lot of narrative wisdom to define worlds and characters that provide the right raw materials for procedural generators to create engaging stories.
I’m strongly in the procedural camp, so don’t take this as an argument against what Toska is doing. (Although their claims of being first are a bit dubious. Versu doesn’t get the credit it deserves. And this has been an active field of academic research for close to 20 years, with games like Facade coming out of it. But that’s marketing hype for you.)
But that can mean a lot of things, from Skyrim’s primitive mad libs technique, to games with a lighter hand such as This War of Mine, to academic projects that generate complete three act stories. I guess we’ll see how far Gyre takes it in a commercial game.
I’m fine with that. I think what’s compelling is not that procedurally generated stories are complex, but that they react dynamically to the actual game state, not to what a designer tries to anticipate the states will be.
I think you’re not considering that it is not so much the specific events themselves as it is each person’s interpretation of those events. Perception alters and probably actually creates the story for each of us. So in this way the story even in Space Invaders would only be as shallow and meaningless as the imagination of the person. It’s the same kind of thing where a dozen people can witness an accident (or whatever) and each reports a different story of what happened. With people it is never so much about specifics or even reality as it is about interpretation and how they are perceiving what they are watching, doing, etc. Their perception creates their reality.
Most games tell shitty stories. It’s not exactly betraying expectations to say it’s not a well understood field.
The three act structure is the introduction of a conflict, the steps taken to resolve that conflict, and the state of the world now that the conflict is resolved. Look at games and how you play, and I’m willing to bet you can find it everywhere. Hell, just look at feedback loops that are about showing the state of the world, having the player act upon the world, and returning the new state of the world.
When you have some people saying “procedural storytelling is impossible” and other people saying “procedural storytelling is already here”, you can tell we’re all using the same words to talk about different things.
Before we go ahead and expect that a game might procedurally generate a story as rich as interesting as Game of Thrones, we might want to start with generating any story at all, even bad ones. I’d say there are games like Crusader Kings 2 that generate stories that are pretty interesting and fun, even if they don’t have the three act structure of good theatre, or the poetics of good literature.
This game is probably building on a lot AI breakthroughs that came before it. I’m interested in what it actually does, once you get passed the hype machine.
To be fair, they haven’t really been hyping it at all. [:P] It’s probably just that everyone’s getting that impression from me fanatic-ing out over it. [:P]
So I poked around the engine website for a bit. http://evodant.com/ What I’m not finding is any examples of stories. Seems like the best way to show off a true story generator would be to generate a story with it…
So I’m picking this is not a story generator at all. Just a way to integrate narrative events. With possibly some scope to adjust events to make the story appear to escalate.
Not expecting Shakespeare at all. But a few lines retelling a story that was created in game by the system would be nice. Basically an account of how a story panned out (with a beginning, middle and end) that wasn’t preprogrammed in by the devs.
So far there are just empty promises and no examples of how it actually worked.