Lordcraymen, a friend of mine and I recently had a nice talk about what could be “the next big thing” in role-playing games. I think, self-repairing storytelling systems would be a very neat feature.
Okay, what am I talking about? 
A good example came from real life. As you may know Lordcraymen is currently working in Japan and we visited him a week ago. He wanted to call a co-worker to ask him if he wants to join us for a small tourist trip the next day. But he couldn’t find the phone number. (shock! horror!)
In a normal video game you could have a real problem now - but the game of life had a simple solution for it. We just met his co-worker on the streets of Tokyo on our way to the train station in Shinjuku.
You see, do you think in the near future video game quests could be self-repairing to avoid tedious actions? Do you think this feature makes sense at all?
The world is complex and it still makes sense most of the time (…ok…work with me here).
The fact that it makes sense doesn’t mean it’s easy to portray tho.Cause sense means complexity and you know what that represents in videogaming…
So, basically, there should be more than one way to complete a quest? If one way doesn’t work, then the player can attempt a number of other methods of achieving his or her goal.
Sounds good to me, especially if it allows the player to think as he would in the real world, rather than “as the game thinks”.
I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon. A system like that could NOT be automated with current tech if we were to see it work in non generic quests and storylines and on the other hand for it to be done “by hand” it would require an enormous ammount of work… It could be done now for certain few cases within a game but for a whole game to work in this way…
Anyway, if that guy wasn’t your friend and you didn’t even have his phone number how could you ever know where to go in order to meet him? So this case wouldn’t work for a lot of situations in a game. I know it’s just an example but I’m also using it as just an example to what I’m trying to show. I hope you guys got it, I don’t feel like explaining it more thoroughly 
I think there’s always going to be a certain amount of programming involved when creating any kind of game story, so the game itself wouldn’t know, it would ultimately have to be prescripted in there somewhere. That’s what I thought Senor Kaffee meant, anyway. The game’s scripting language would essentially come down to a whole heap of “what if’s”, like RPGs do now, but with much more added complexity and possible outcomes.
Going back to Senor’s example, even though lordcraymen might not have known that his friend was going to the train station, “lucky” encounters like these can happen in real life and seeing that in a video game would be pretty cool.
