“Your actions in no way affect the world of the game so you can do whatever you want!”
Is this supposed to be a selling point? Giving such freedom so as to make all of your choices meaningless?
They didn’t say it’s meaningless, just suggested that failing every quest leads to some type of conclusion to the game’s plot. It might not be a good conclusion, but the story ends.
To me, this just sounds like failing a quest doesn’t mean the game is over or that you need to reload a previous checkpoint or save to keep playing.
this sounds like baldurs gate. There is little to nothing that actually ends the game.
I’d rather kill NPCs I don’t like.
But seriously, looks interesting! I’ll keep an eye out for this one.
If you’re a vampire like the title makes it sound, killing people you like makes sense. You’re simply… making friends.
You know what, very valid point. …I like you.
Opposite of Starfield I see. I would love the chance to cleanse Paradiso of life.
It sounds like New Vegas in a way. You can kill pretty much everyone you see on the spot, and Yes Man gets you to the ending no matter what you’ve done.
Morrowind remains the gold standard. Even if you kill a plot-critical NPC (the game lets you do this freely and simply warns you afterwards that you broke the plot), there’s a hidden back route to complete the main quest. Even side quests tend to have an alternate route if a necessary NPC is likely to be killed as part of another quest.
I think there’s only a single NPC that’s actually required to beat the game, and even then you can work around his death by abusing some wonky gameplay mechanics.
I think how New Vegas does it is way better than how Morrowind does it. Morrowind is simply so loosely scripted that the games doesn’t really care if you break it. If you look at Morrowind speedruns there are actually no story beats that you need to hit to finish the game, you can just brute force yourself to the end. But you do have to know how to brute force it because it’s not intended to be finished this way.
In New Vegas Yes Man is a deliberate design decision to let you kill whomever you want and still have the option to finish the story as it’s told. You can do your first playthrough like a maniacal murdering machine, kill everyone in your sights and still finish the game in the intended way. It makes sense from a narrative perspective, it makes sense in a gameplay way (because technically you can kill Yes Man, another one just replaces the one you killed) and it gives you excellent control over the story. You don’t have to go through all the factions to deal with them one way or another, you can just say you don’t care and go straight to the final battle. I think it’s a brilliant solution to quite a few problems that most games outright ignore.
Fallout 1&2 were pretty ok with that also.
I remember killing Vivek just to see how far abusing soultrap could take you. I got the message that I was now living doomed world. If you can get around that, that’s awesome.
Vivec drops the “weird dwemer artifact” when you kill him, which is broken. Only a real Dwemer craftsman can fix it, but, unfortunately, they all vanished from existence, so it can’t be fixed…
…
…wait, Divayth Fyr has WHAT in his basement?
spoiler
___I wonder what the work around would be since Vivek gives you the tools you need to defeat Dagoth Ur. Other just using the console to spawn the items in.
I really like it when quests can fail and failing actually opens another path to something. Possibility of failure in general is good as well.
Agreed; the idea of “you can kill any NPC, do anything you want, and still beat the game” doesn’t sound appealing to me. If there really is that much freedom in how the game is “completed”, then it doesn’t sound like it’s earned in any way. Just make it a sandbox game with no end at that point.
I’d much rather the freedom to do anything you want, but then have consequences and close off possible routes or even the ability to complete the game altogether. Maybe that is what this game actually does, I don’t know, I admit I didn’t read the article. But the idea of “do anything, still win!” isn’t something I want.
I really love the game desing behind this system. The game is on a timer, but instead of time going foward all the time, the quest “cost” time.
Way of the samurai games did this kind of trick back in the day. In those games the day was divided in to four parts, morning, noon, evening and night. Player had unlimited time to wander the game world, but once they did something big, the time would go foward and depending on what you did the story would go in to different direction. After 5 full days the game would come to a finale, but how you acted, effected who was alive and wich side of the final conflict you would be.
The game ending and story coming to a finale does not necessarily mean you win.
If the game is fun to play and one play trough does not take forever to finish, i can see my self playing the game multible times trough and trying to find the way to make everything end the way i want.
That added context puts it into a different light for me. Don’t think it would be something I’m interested in, but can see what the appeal is for other people
You may like TTRPGs.
I do! Especially not overcomplicated with rules. Monster of the week is one of my favorites.
Possibility of failure in general is good as well.
To anyone that likes learning, yes. Then there are the people who are still crying about Dark Souls not having a difficulty slider.
Unfortunately there will always be more of the second group than the first.
The title is really missing a keyword from the actual quote… (emphasis mine)
Not only that, but it’s possible to kill almost any NPC in the game…
I would love for this game to be as good as its marketing wants me to believe, but I’ve seen far too many large teams form to put out a first project that seriously underwhelms, regardless of the pedigree of the people who formed that studio. I remain pessimistic but would love to be wrong.
Skyrim with mods. Hehe.
It’s true, the game gave me so much freedom I completed it despite not owning or playing it! 🏅
