Cyberpsychosis and you: how should it be implemented?

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*nods*

I think that dovetails with what Terralventhe suggested, back on page 6 of this thread (post # 54.) The gradual slide into cy-psy, rather than meeting a magic threshold, and suddenly, everything looking like Yellow Submarine, except trying to kill you.

If everything suddenly started looking like Yellow Submarine, it wouldn't need to be trying to kill me for me to want to open fire.
 
Well, it could work with the target radar on the mini-map or smart-gun optics that gradually the NPC without metal are shown as hostiles.....the player would at first not necessarily realize that it is because of Cy-Psy, but rather because they are agents of the enemy...until everybody is hostile , again not because of Cy-Psy but because there is a bounty on him for bumping off so many people lately....
While hallucinations would be a clean threshold-less way to do it, it would not represent what cyber psychosis is.
 
They don't... because I hear music every time I see a nice pair of dirty pillows... it's like a seraphim choir..... nobody else hears that?

...yknow, I was joking when I first said it, but now I actually can't help but picture a FBC stripper at some sort fullborg joint, tweaking the tips to supply her own music as she works the pole onstage, starting by shedding her outer costume, then lingerie, then peeling her "skin" off like an extra costume layer, ending with a flourish as the stage lights reflect and flash over her chrome.

Damn, I wish I could draw.
 
...yknow, I was joking when I first said it, but now I actually can't help but picture a FBC stripper at some sort fullborg joint, tweaking the tips to supply her own music as she works the pole onstage, starting by shedding her outer costume, then lingerie, then peeling her "skin" off like an extra costume layer, ending with a flourish as the stage lights reflect and flash over her chrome.

Damn, I wish I could draw.

Damn, I wish you could...that sounds almost sexier than actual real world strippers/pole dancers
 
Damn, I wish you could...that sounds almost sexier than actual real world strippers/pole dancers

Maybe, but I generally don't blue-balls over toasters. :p

Anyway, on topic: For some reason translating cyber psych into a video game gives me some vague resemblance to the sanity system used in Amnesia. Where it starts as a slow fog, headache, blurry vision, and advances into full blown hallucinations. I think something similar to that would be pretty cool. Cyber Psych could essentially result in people looking like bad guys (though maybe not acting hostile, only looking like a baddie as to provoke you, but not force bad things to happen) or simply adding hallucinations that you attack only to realize that they vanish and you were swinging at nothing all along.

Just a thought, not sure how well it would hold up in relation to actual Cyber Psychosis.
 
Maybe, but I generally don't blue-balls over toasters. :p

Anyway, on topic: For some reason translating cyber psych into a video game gives me some vague resemblance to the sanity system used in Amnesia. Where it starts as a slow fog, headache, blurry vision, and advances into full blown hallucinations. I think something similar to that would be pretty cool. Cyber Psych could essentially result in people looking like bad guys (though maybe not acting hostile, only looking like a baddie as to provoke you, but not force bad things to happen) or simply adding hallucinations that you attack only to realize that they vanish and you were swinging at nothing all along.

Just a thought, not sure how well it would hold up in relation to actual Cyber Psychosis.

That could work. Part of cyberpsychosis' affect on the mind, from what I've seen of its protrayal, tends to be either of the super-arrogant "I am the new death god" variety or the "I have to kill them before they kill me" extreme-paranoia variety.
 
The problem I have with a lot of these suggested options is that they have a, well, garish way of dealing with a serious -fictional, sort of - mental illness. Lights, wireframes, sound effects....

I think I'd rather see subtle changes, so you don't really notice your character going bonkers until it's too late to go back. Dialogue, increased damage, less and less non-fatal attacks, less and less non-violent options presented, cyberware seems to cost less and less humanity and seem more and more reasonable, normal human voices get just a little bit louder and more raucous...

Until you look around the train station platform and realise these bags of meat and water are hemming you in and you have to breathe...
 
The problem I have with a lot of these suggested options is that they have a, well, garish way of dealing with a serious -fictional, sort of - mental illness. Lights, wireframes, sound effects....

I think I'd rather see subtle changes, so you don't really notice your character going bonkers until it's too late to go back. Dialogue, increased damage, less and less non-fatal attacks, less and less non-violent options presented, cyberware seems to cost less and less humanity and seem more and more reasonable, normal human voices get just a little bit louder and more raucous...

Until you look around the train station platform and realise these bags of meat and water are hemming you in and you have to breathe...

That'd be perfect if CDPR can nail it.
 
This will probably annoy the die hard fans but completely change the way Cyberpsychosis works. At least from my under standing of it.

Instead of a attribute that determines empathy players get two bars. One bar is stress level, it starts at one hundred points. When ever you take damage your character makes a cool check, if they fail they lose some points from the stress bar. Other things can effect it such as getting insulted, playing high stake card games, exhaustion, killing or what ever else you can think of. All that stuff rolls against your cool so you don't lose points. Resting resets your stress bar to max.

The other bar is how much your character has been augmented. Every time a quarter of your body is augmented you take .5 to the stress bar every day. Once you get some where between 51-75% of your body being augmented resting no longer removes any stress lost that are caused by mental strain augments cause you.

To off set the eventual mental break down, cybernetic augmented players can be given a few options, but allot of it depends on player housing. Allow players to have a pet, longer players have a pet the more stress the pet can remove. Other stuff could be weight lifting, tending some type of vegetation like flowers, stuff that is small but is suppose to make the person still feel human. Positive stress building could lead to buffs, having stress lose reduced significantly or better performance in various areas. From this I'd want ability to skip over the lift weights or water garden scenes, as a mechanic it sounds good to me but its not some thing I'd want to watch after the third time.

This could also open the game up for addictions like alcohoelism or drug use. Where doing some thing like taking drugs might reduce stress, but over time you may need more of it. Which could result in some thing that is suppose to remove stress being a stress causer on its own.

Now for the good stuff, mental instability. Stress bar should have a thresh hold part, maybe last twenty five percent of it. Going into the red causes you to take penalties to your cool checks. In none combat situations, it could force you to have more irritated/aggressive dialogue selections or just out right attack some one. In combat effects should be rolled at random, depending on how low your stress is you could suffer multiple conditions at a time. Inability to no longer take cover, having to attack the nearest enemy NPC, perceiving all NPC's as a threat, penalties to combat rolls, bonuses to combat rolls, needing to run into nearest hard cover, being unable to fight at all, players characters hurting them selves, or maybe just spraying an area down randomly in bullets. Never knowing for sure how bad your character will react makes games like xcom fun, one moment your blocking bad guys away next your shooting your characters are gunning each other down in a panic.

To better serve up the effect add direct miss information to be given to players. If we have location based damage, make it appear that maybe a cybernetic implant is malfunctioning like a arm. This adds to the effect that not only is character panicking that their arm is broken, but that their player might also panic trying to fix the characters arm when nothing is wrong with it.
 
It's a bad idea and bad game design to take control away from the player in a videogame. So forget about "being forced to attack" or "being forced to take cover". If this was Baldurs Gate or any game in which you control a party it would be OK, but in a first/third person RPG that's out of bounds.

Cyberpsychosis should basically affect your dialogue options and social skill checks. That can lead to combat more often as you lose some conciliatory dialogue options and fail them more often even if you still get some. When out of hand, it's a very cool idea to start marking civilians as hostiles. But also to change NPCs dialog to reflect the distorted reality you perceive.
 
I agree that nothing should be forced, but the player's perception of the world can be changed.

Having more agressive dialogue options, losing smart or streetwise ways to solve an issue and relying more to violence is good. But cyberpsychosis is also about considering all the fleshbags as sub-par and underperformers.

Cyberpsychosis surges should also be put in the game, you want all the chrome in the world, you might get crazy and attack a CorpSec while armed with a dildo...

Simply put: too much chrome will fuck with your mind
 
Forced actions is bad design, I agree. The stress bar is a good idea, providing the bar is hidden, same as the empathy level should be hidden and inaccessible.
Changed dialogue options to more and more unfeeling and aggressive responses is good, altering perception of the world is good if it is subtle and un-noticable to the player (civilians marked as hostiles, ID match scanners indicating random people as someone who caused emotional trauma or just anger (if no such otic option installed, the psychosis can just make people look like someone who hate...like your girlfriend who stole all your credits and ran off with your best friend....), Target markers on the minimap lead you to the orphenage where you've grown up instead of the drug factroy you are supposed to burn down, etc...).
It needs to remain in the hand of the player how he reacts, but how the world is perceived must become warped...let the dialogue options start having the player call NPCs Meatbag and Organic Waste...or better even, don'[t put that into dialogue options, but as voices in the background comming through the speakers "damn meatbags. someone should clean the streets of this organic waste..."(sounding the thoughts of the character). NPCs and even other PCs can "hear" those mutterings as well, even though it does not show in the chat bar nor is in dialogue options...
 
This will probably annoy the die hard fans but completely change the way Cyberpsychosis works. At least from my under standing of it.

Instead of a attribute that determines empathy players get two bars..


Yes. We hate it and, now, you. Die.

I have no problem with your mechanic, actually, other than your obviously console-based, ( spit!) urge for players to see the bars. Maybe if they had a Biomonitor implant.
Anyway, I like the mechanic you propose - Humanity was awfully simple for such a complex idea. Yours is more juicy. On the other hand, forcing player actions is rarely a good idea, unless it's done as a choice or encouragement.
 
Yes. We hate it and, now, you. Die.

I have no problem with your mechanic, actually, other than your obviously console-based, ( spit!) urge for players to see the bars. Maybe if they had a Biomonitor implant.
Anyway, I like the mechanic you propose - Humanity was awfully simple for such a complex idea. Yours is more juicy. On the other hand, forcing player actions is rarely a good idea, unless it's done as a choice or encouragement.

In PnP RPGs, forcing players to take a certain action is called "railroading", and is universally loathed. Putting railroading on the videogame version of those RPGs will be the same sort of deathsentence.
 
So...you'll be voting FOR being able to finish the game without killing anyone then, 'Wolf?

You damn hippy.
 
The option to get through without a single kill should be there, if you got the stomach, nerves, stamina and patience for that. but of course it should be just as possible to play through successful while leaving a bloodbath behind you...and any variation in between on that scale slide.
 
Thought I've been kicking around: would cyberpsychosis automatically be about killing everyone around you? Couldn't it result in some sort of vigilante-ism? Maybe some sort of Super-hero or messianic complex?
 
Thought I've been kicking around: would cyberpsychosis automatically be about killing everyone around you? Couldn't it result in some sort of vigilante-ism? Maybe some sort of Super-hero or messianic complex?

Considering that one possible aspect of Cy-Psy is just a bloody7 god-complex and sense of superiority over mere meatbags, sure, why not?
 
I would think forced actions would be along the lines of crowd control effects. Look at a game like league of legends where champions have effects that can force characters to do certain things that are not beneficial. Stuns makes some one unable to move or fight back, fear makes person run into random direction, there are effects to decrease player screen vision. Balance comes from duration of the disable the player character is under.

Difference here being player can control crowd control they might suffer through stress management. Giving players tools like drugs that remove stress which might also remove any disabling effects could open up different game play styles. It might make things interesting if NPC suffered from stress also, identifying leaders in NPC to kill first to cause lessor NPC to panic.

From what I under stand about Cyberpsychosis it needs to be severe. Like screen cutting out for a second, and when it comes back on your surrounded by corpses with the cops forming a gun line down the street to blow you away.
 
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