![]() What we do is we introduce gambling, the probability of success for each choice, but it's not all random. And it's all good, and our solution is we don't do quick time events, you have all the time you need, we don't mislead you, you always know what's coming and you have a chance how to avoid it. Another solution is the challenge in guessing what the writing has mislead the player into and what will happen, and other solution is to provide morally grey situations, etc. What is the challenge when I'm just choosing how the story should progress? And there are various solutions designers have come up with, one of them is quick time events, so the challenge is in pushing buttons. So we think the problem in the design of narrative games you basically don't have to challenge the player. That's why we always foreshadow what's coming. It leads to a different experience, not necessarily a bad experience, but we want to provide a different one. They do it on purpose, and you kind of get used to it as a player, but we think it breaks the immersion you have and how much you identify yourself with the protagonist. So we think what many narrative games get wrong, like Telltale, is that they break this unholy alliance. He says it like this: "I will pretend you are a good player and you will pretend my game is real." There was a talk that inspired me at GDC, I think it was 2010, the psychology of game design (you can check it out here), where he describes the principle of an unholy alliance between the designer and the player. ![]() Our writing principle is to never mislead the player into a messy choice or to no good outcomes, as we believe it breaks the immersion in storytelling in games, so the player goes "oh, okay this is a set up and they put a trap there for me, and now I don't really believe them anymore, I can't immerse myself in the story and engage with the character, I have to distance myself." At least this is what we get from designers like Sid Meier. You have the time to explore the situation and we expose the whole numeric role-playing game ruleset and model, so you know exactly why you're having a low chance of success in a situation and how to improve it next time around. It's a turn-based game, it's not twitch-based. One of our design principles is we want the player to be in control.
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