Interactive Drama Prototype 'Facade' Released

rafg writes "In most story-based games where you get to talk to characters, interaction is limited to selecting conversation options from a menu. Facade calls itself a one-act interactive drama, and is an attempt to create realistic 3D AI characters acting in a real-time interactive story, where you can talk to them via a natural language text interface. The player is cast as a visiting longtime friend of Grace and Trip, a couple in their early thirties, and ends up in a verbal crossfire resulting from their failing marriage. More info in the press release, an older conveniently mirrored NYT article and an Idle Thumbs review. It's available in the form of a rather chunky 800MB torrent."

Comments

First impressions

[PIPBoy3000]

Well, no one here appears to have downloaded and installed Facade. Thanks to Evil Avatar, I picked this one up over night and just installed it.

First off, make sure you have a 1.6 Ghz machine. It's not just a recommendation - the install won't work if you don't meet that requirement. And the install is very long as you might expect.

This is a very audio game. If you're deaf, I'm not sure it's even possible to play. The first really odd thing is that the characters call me verbally by my real name. It's "Adam", which isn't too uncommon, but strange nonetheless. I suspect they have a hundred or so common names they've recorded.

The controls are weird - a combination of keyboard arrows, typing, and the mouse. There's also some limited manipulation of objects (e.g. picking up the phone and throwing it around). You can also hug and comfort the two people with a click of the mouse.

The main interface, however, is the keyboard. You'll do a lot of typing, trying to guess what the magic keys and phrases are.

I haven't finished it. Heck, I feel I've barely scratched the surface. Even though it's in a single room, the illusion of open interaction with two humans is pretty good. Well, enough Slashdotting. Time to play a bit more.

Re:First impressions

[PIPBoy3000]

Okay. I've finished my first play-through. It took about twenty minutes. Some of it is fairly clunky. Some of it is extremely compelling.

I restarted after my first posting and noticed some differences right away. The first time the phone rang. The second time it didn't. I ended up kissing Grace when we met and she seemed more positive afterwards (I have that effect on women).

Emotionally the game is great. You get a ringside view of the emotional train wreck of these two people's marriage. You can guide their conversation, take sides, and watch them reveal painful secrets.

Being a fast typist helps as you regularly need to type out long strings of text. Moving around is awkward with the mouse and arrows, but fortunately you don't need to move around much. Your decisions are remembered and the actors will comment on the previous things you've done. The 800 MB download makes perfect sense now as there must be hours of sound files to cover every contingency.

This seems like the sort of game that would strongly appeal to women. It's very free-form and is exclusively about social interactions. The only catch is that I'd imagine it's extremely labor intensive to create something like this. The writing, voice acting, and tracking all the branch points seems a daunting task.

Still, I can see how people herald this as the future of gaming. It would be amazing if you could hit this level of character interaction in ordinary games.