Q&A #1

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Betonabrosz asked:
If this game is going to be 'heavily story-oriented', does that mean it's also going to be completely linear?

And the answer is, nope. This is not going to be an adventure game where this sort of thing is perfectly accepted - some of the titles I recently played are very good examples of this: the new episodes of Sam and Max on PC and Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney on the DS. The replay value in adventure games lies not in the many different options, but in the storyline and humor, and there is a sort of delay to this... you most certainly wouldn't replay Sam and Max twice in a row. But a couple of years later, it's a real possibility - when the Lucasarts Classic titles started appearing in gaming stores, I happily re-played most of them.

But what I am ranting about right now is not an adventure game, it's a RPG - role-playing in the sense that the players get to make some real choices.

In computer RPGs, you can introduce choice by having a multitude of different characters to pick for your party. EotS is going to have that. (Characters are always cool to design!)  The limited amount of characters you can have in your party and their different ways of reacting to things add to replayability... but you can have the "character variety effect" and a mostly linear storyline with a fixed ending, as in Final Fantasy VII. EotS is not going to have that.

But since a large portion of the game is about political machinations, which build on each other (psychologists call these "enabling events"), the gameplay cannot be nonlinear to a significant degree. What to do? I do not claim to have invented anything radically new... Games like Knights of the Old Republic or Jade Empire have the same structure that EotS is going to have (with a twist): both enabling events and the ability to choose between outcomes, thus reducing choices to a manageable level (from a coding and plotline POV) but still giving the player considerable leeway.

Now, I'm a gamer myself, and what I don't like in such games is that the choice ends up being "good vs. bad" most of the time. (I don't know about Jade Empire - I'm still waiting for the PC port - but based on the reviews, it still seems like a 'left hand path' vs. 'right hand path' thing to me, to bring an analogy from occultism... Which is not that far from good vs. evil, one has to admit.) EoTS will not have any of the good vs. bad sort. As Isaac Bonewits put it, evil for evil's sake is pretty dumb and will not get you too far.

Anyway. The game is not going to have a good vs. bad system, what'll the choices be instead? Let me introduce the Loyalty System! Players can choose sides, which are just as exclusive in the conflict as good or bad. But just like in a real life conflict you wouldn't call eg. the Hutu good and the Tutsi bad or vice versa (unless you are Hutu or Tutsi yourself), in the game you also wouldn't be able to call any side "bad". Both sides will do some pretty mean things, yes... things that make complete sense and are "good" from their own POV. But the other side will probably not see it so... And the poor player character is going to be caught in the crossfire and forced to choose sides.

(BTW, party character choice is also going to depend on the player's side, but this has been seen in many games already.)

More Q&A coming up: Varpho asked about flags, and I promised an outline of Ereni occultism to the Doctor.