Soon the gates of N'Mar Castle will open to the public

Today's blog post will be shorter, since as you might know I'm busy doing the final touches to Loren's expansion "The Castle Of N'Mar". I hoped to have it ready for the 15th August, but I didn't make in time. In reality it's not missing much, but we want to polish it and test well to make sure that there aren't stopping bugs early in the expansion.

I believe it's the last time will do such a non-linear RPG. For visual novels is much easier, but for a RPG is really a painful experience! Or do like Walking Dead game from Telltale (my favorite game this year) that is achieve non linearity through linearity. How is that possible?

Make a linear game that looks non-linear

In practice, doing a true non-linear plot in a RPG, with multiple solution quests is insane. The best example of this is Fallout. Typical scenario is: character A gives quest to kill character B. You stumble intoto character C and he says that he wants B dead too. Then (and here comes the fun) when you meet characte B, he makes a counter-offer: kill characters A,B and he'll give you a <insert precious rewards here>.

And the example above is just one of the simplest scenarios possible, when you don't have quests with multiple steps! Now, Fallout is one of the best RPGs series ever made, but honestly I don't think will do such a thing again in future.

For two simple reasons:

1. I'm not a multi-millionaire company with a team of 50 people :D and only testing all those multiple solution quests takes LOOOOOONG time!
2. I am not sure, in my specific case, that it can be better for players, since if I have the mutliple solution quests, the plot length will be necessarily shorter. And I think there's a solution to make a linear plot look less linear.

Point 1 is obvious, but what about point 2? I want to reconnect to Walking Dead game mechanics: you can have a story that while in practice in its structure IS linear, it appears not (or at least, appears that player's choices have a big impact on the game world).

For example in Walking Dead, during several key points you have to take "tough decisions". In one you have to decide if to attempt to save a person attacked by a zombie, or a kid nearby. No matter what you choose, the person dies - so you might think "bah not only the plot is linear, but the choice is even pointless". I know it might seem so, but in reality not! Because even if the outcome is the same, the characters related to that person and the kid will remember who you tried to save, and all the future dialogues will change to reflect that, resulting in a more immersive experience, so that the story won't feel linear at all.

I think that's the road I'll try to follow to make longer RPGs but still with several possible outcomes. And now, I'm going back working on Loren :)