DEATH PROBLEM

Hello friends!

As you know we work hard for our game to become as convincing as possible, that’s why we’ve put a lot of effort into adding one of the most important features — total mortality.

This mechanic is a real challenge for us because if any character can die, there will be so many scenarios that it will be impossible to control them! Besides, in our game there are quite a number of spectacular cutscenes. If a character dies and then appears in one of the videos, the logic of the narrative will be broken. It put even more difficulties into the search of the solution and even made us think of giving up this feature.

And yet we wanted our players to have an opportunity to considerably influence the storyline. That’s why we’ve made a serious research on how mortality looks in other games. For example, if you kill an important character in Divinity 2, there will be a note on his body. It will help you go on with the quest. In Morrowind the game suggests using your latest save to proceed. After analysing all the approaches we developed a flexible hybrid system considering the death of every character — almost all the events in our game are interconnected, and the death of one NPC can influence some quests.

How does this hybrid variant look?

There are three variants of dealing with mortality. The first one relates to the death of a very important character. In this variant we think about the alternative ways of the storyline — for example, if the Herbalist dies, Jack can find his apprentice anyway. With this method we make sure that the players don’t lose big chains of events even if one link was lost. Of course, it’s a hard and expensive variant demanding a lot of work, and we can’t use it everywhere. But it helps to replenish the content and the quests don’t feel empty — that’s why we use it with significant characters.

In case the killed character isn’t that important, the logic just excludes them from the rest of the quests — so if you kill local bullies of the Edge, Pimples and Knuckles, nobody mentions them and you won’t have to intimidate these guys to stop them from harming the locals.

And finally, the third variant — the one we use really carefully to keep the immersiveness — is natural restrictions. You can undoubtedly attack any character — for example, a strong or a powerful one. But it’s highly believable that such NPCs will have tough armour or loyal guards. A mercenary or a professional fighter will be mighty and skillful. So you will have to reach quite a high level to challenge them. In that case the restrictions are pretty natural but you can always try!

So we tried to introduce soft restrictions and made sure there is a lot of various and interesting content in the game and the logic of the quests isn’t broken. But we still advise you to decide carefully — every character has their history and even a couple of secrets to share if you come to the agreement!

By the way, we’re still testing different branches of quests, so don’t hesitate to inform us about any mistakes in the comments and in our Discord so that we could correct it for the next build. And don’t forget to drop by our devblog where we share the latest news!And what do you think about mortality in the games? Share your thoughts in the comments and add your game into the wishlist!

Have a nice adventure on K’Tharsis, space cowboys!