This is typically done in games by introducing the PC as having pre-existing relationships with story-relevant NPCs, building the player’s relationships with them early on and when the story kicks off it directly affects them, so the player’s emotional investment makes them want to follow the plot you’ve laid out. This is how all non-interactive fiction works, as the audience must form a human connection to a work of art to care about it (art being a reflection of human experience and whatnot). The first is to make the player care about NPCs in the world.
#Pillars of eternity final act how to#
So with this essay I’ve decided to examine the five main ways an RPG can motivate its players and invest them in its story, how to make them work effectively for your game and how PoE flubs each and every one. The worlds and character models are fabulously detailed but without an emotional investment it’s all for naught. Call of Duty expects the player to care about the fate of the United States every time it’s under attack from vaguely defined swarthy foreigners, Assassin’s Creed long ago ditched any attempt to make the player central to the story and Tomb Raider assumes that battering the player character will engender audience sympathy just because they puppeteer her between cutscene beatings. It’s one of the biggest story problems you can have, expecting the audience to automatically care about the world and characters set before them and making no effort to convince them to do so, and yet it’s everywhere in modern gaming, particularly in the AAA market. Despite this, I and a not insignificant number of others have found it a surprisingly unengaging experience, which appears to be due to it suffering from one of modern gaming’s most damning flaws: assumed empathy. Funded by tens of thousands on Kickstarter (including myself) it is by all the usual metrics a success: 89/100 on Metacritic, awards from major gaming publications and the usual laudatory praise heaped on any game professing more narrative sophistication than your average Call of Duty sequel. It’s something I’ve been wondering for a while now, and never more so than while playing Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian Entertainment’s ode to the computer RPGs of the nineties like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Why do you play videogames? It’s a simple question, but every time you put down £40 for your latest toy you commit yourself to tens or hundreds of hours sat before a screen, so what is it keeping you interested and stopping you from putting the controller down and going back to finish Sense8?
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