Greetings Adventurers!
We have so many topics to discuss in the upcoming dev-blogs, but as they were being planned, we realized there’s a big, important, central thing that comes up so often that it only makes sense to make that the subject of the first one! That’s the Influence System.
With Witchstone, we want to give the player a lot more choice than other games do, and make those choices matter more to the overall world you’re playing in than you’ve seen in other RPGs before. A central way we’re doing this is through the integration of what we call the Influence System.
Above you can see a more traditional skill use prompt, which will exist in Witchstone to be sure, but what we’re building allows players to go beyond. Simply put, the Influence System is a large collection of options that can be used to influence people and events outside of scripted dialog, planned quest lines, and predetermined interactions in the game. Having the skills you’ve developed or chosen play a part in interactions is a common use of that mechanic in other games, but what we’re doing is designing it so that instead of only waiting for a dialog prompt or a pre-designed puzzle that tells you when a skill is relevant, we allow you to use those skills at any time, in any conversation, in whatever way you can think to combine them.
The concept of the Influence System will seem familiar to anyone who has played a tabletop RPG, as well as anyone who’s played a game such as the Fallout series, where various dialog options are gated behind a skill barrier. What we wanted to do is give the player more opportunities to use these skills, because one of the inspirations for Witchstone was the desire to give more agency in a wider range of situations. This goal is a direct result of having played a lot of the games that use skill-gated dialog systems and finding to our frustration that the number of times each skill would be relevant was so dependent on the choices made when designing the storyline of the game that it could feel stifling. We wanted to see how a game would play where more events were a result of previous player choices, or really anything outside of the pre-designed game path driving events than we had found in other games.
Want to try to persuade a bandit to give up and leave mid-combat? You can try. Assuming you’ve got the skills and a little bit of luck, you might even succeed. Want to convince the town guard to follow you to the location where you know those bandits are waiting? Decide how you’d approach it, and roll the dice. It’s totally possible to use the Influence System to create situations of your own devising that short-circuit, or even entirely change any sort of pre-planned quest or event and that’s by design. The idea of player agency over-ruling the “plan” is a time-honored tradition in tabletop RPGs that we wanted to bring to the electronic experience.
Beyond simply using things like persuasion or intimidation to influence behavior of the NPCs in the game, the toolbox provided by the Influence System will allow you to have a wide array of options when tackling any interactions in the game. The list in the screenshot above isn’t by any means exhaustive, but a good peak at the range of commands available through Influence. Creating emergent gameplay has many facets, but merely designing a game that throws randomized situations at a player wouldn’t achieve what we’re working towards. What we want is an experience where the player feels in control of their choices in vastly more situations than before, making each interaction a choice-point instead of hoping there’s a predetermined option that will maybe let your play style shine.
As we’re working on the game, the true power of the Influence Systems on the changeable, dynamic story of Witchstone itself becomes even more clear, and we’re very excited about how much variability it opens up. In a future dev-blog we’ll definitely come back to the Influence System to talk more in depth about it as we get even farther along in the development because it has so many parts, it would be impossible to really do it justice in a single post. This is just a quick taste of one of the ways we’re hoping to make Witchstone something fresh and new while still being fun for players looking for that traditional RPG experience.
If you’re interested in supporting the game right now, adding us to your wishlist goes a long way to help us!
As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback so consider following the game on Twitter! https://twitter.com/WitchstoneGame
If you want to be notified when we send out the newsletter with info about the studio, and general updates you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dilhNP
Until next we meet Adventurers!
-The Spearhead Team