Continuing the search for my contexts I have reached to a very weel recieved text-based RPG game, Roadwarden. It is a freshly old-style RPG that transports us into a dark fantasy world, where we try to survive and traverse and document the mysterious peninsula.
This game gripped me from the very begining. The story, the characters and the style of narration was something that I didn’t know I needed and it was immensly refreshing, after playing the RPG behemots, such as Bladur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk. All are instresting and worthwhile, but Roadwarden achives a similar level of relevence with so much less.
The thing about Roadwarden that comes to mind when thinking about my design is the intertwined plots. While travelling the peninsula we encounter its various dwellers with their issues and opinions. The opinions are varied and tell you a lot about others but also the ones that hold them. People do not trust strangers and you need to work hard to access those opinions. But they make the world alive. The opinions and issues are sometimes in conflict with each other. Some people want you to take sides. It always have some sort of impact on the world, locks you out of some perks or options.
Moreover, Roadwarden beautifully describes the grey morality of your choices. Sometimes you need to choose your integrity over some material gain. Sometimes you need to treat someones life as a commodity in order to gain someone else’s trust. You cannot keep your hands clean, bacause doing so would mean abandoning the task you have at hand but also abandoning your own ambition. Some choices are obvious but some of them are not, and with added time pressure, sometimes an obvious choice can turn into a very difficult one. Is gaining someone’s trust quickly worth betraying your word?
To sum up, Roadwarden highlights for me such things as:
– adding external elements of pressure (time, resources, etc.) can make obvious choices more intresting
– decisions excluding some elements and favouring other elements can increase their impact in the player experience
– to make choices more meaningful, they can influence more than one thing, interconnectivity makes the world more alive and belivable