![]() vanilla Oblivion and Skyrim went after this threaded pacing problem with dynamic leveling / leveled mobs in dungeons.The side quest feels like a chore because its entry expectations are totally out of sync with the character. You don't want the player to reach the end stage of a main quest's apocalypse, and then go kill some basic level 1 rats as a guild rookie. encourages the player to follow quest chains at an even pace, which is important if the quest lines intersect / if quests are at fixed difficulties.It's like the game's telling you to take a break and follow your other quest chains. Sometimes they don't even tell you how long it will take, and you have to wait for a courier NPC to show up randomly to notify you. Systems-wise, this forces you to pause that quest chain and do something else. Diegetically, the NPC has to prepare a machine or potion, or get supplies, or whatever. During big long quest chains, there are periodic quest stages where you have to wait 1-2 in-game days before checking in with the NPC again. side-tangent: RPGs should reward you more for making NPCs hate you, because that conflict is often a more interesting narrative beat? reminds me of a central Nordic LARP tenet that more video games should adopt: "playing to lose"Ĭatch-up time / temporal branch and bottleneck. ![]() when actually, it's a much better story if a bunch of your allies betray you / fail / die I think this was a problem in Mass Effect 2, where you feel pressured to make everyone like you, and have that play out in the final mission with an optimal outcome. ![]() Destroy the player's expectation that relationship mechanic = main cast member. When the game shows you how some of your hard-earned relationship grinding will just "go to waste" anyway, then I think the player does something more interesting - they care less about optimizing everyone for a perfect ending, because any character could be expendable. and then a bunch of these NPCs leave and/or die. You know how NPCs can like / dislike your different dialogue choices, that adds up to a score, and you hope you'll get to fuck at the end? I think Enderal had maybe like 10+ different NPCs who respond to your dialogue. It is much better than the boring shot reverse-shot cutscene stuff going on in AAA RPGs these days, and makes Skyrim's "sit" mechanic more meaningful.Įxpendable companions. It also sets the tone for some social contexts - sitting at a big tavern table to share a meal, or sitting in front of a powerful person's desk. This is a convenient diegetic way of locking the player in-place for a cutscene, while also priming the player for an extended cutscene. Sit and listen. Whenever an NPC is about to dump backstory and exposition on you, they'll ask you to take a seat. This is a business model I've always wondered about - make a big complicated game, but then earn revenue from selling ads on the wiki for your own game? It's probably not worth the hassle for a solo indie. WE SHOULD ALL DO THIS / STEAL THIS:ĭev-owned wiki. The dev team "SureAI" operates the official Endreal strategy guide and lore wiki. there's a tropical biome!) and my notes are obviously going to spoil some of the game's structure, but all these spoilers are pretty vague and anyway I don't name any names.Īnyway, here's my notes. I'm told it's inspired a bit by the Gothic series, which I've never played, so maybe a lot of my observations are more about Gothic than Enderal?īe warned that some of the screenshots are a bit spoilery (e.g. It does a lot of interesting things but also less-than-good things. Reworked and improved crafting, spells, and much more.I'm playing a giant Skyrim "total conversion" mod called Enderal. ![]()
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