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Chapter Thirty



A few weeks in, I sat down with the level designers to debug mission logic in the first third of the game. The question was, how do we keep the player involved in the story, and how do we make the story seem to unfold naturally around the player? As the players travel through the world, new plot developments must spring up seamlessly; nonplayer characters (NPCs) must react naturally to whatever players choose to do. A fiendishly complicated set of triggers, metrics, and tripwires would set the bits necessary to move all the scenery and cue all the NPCs in exactly the right way. Collectively, this apparatus was referred to as the plot clock.

Most of all, we focused on keeping the player from breaking the illusion of reality we were projecting. There were players out there who thought of nothing else, who took every game as a challenge to outsmart the designers and do exactly that—break our game. It didn’t take long before we developed a siege mentality. Everything became about containing players in their all-out assault on the bones of our alternate reality. They wanted, deeply and viscerally, to break our world, and we needed to make it bulletproof.

What if the player walks by and doesn’t talk to the old man? No one opens the gate until the talking takes place.

What if the player collects all the boulders in the world and makes a giant pile and climbs over the wall? Ask Lisa.

What if the player decides they don’t like the princess? Make the princess really nice so this doesn’t happen.

What if the player finds all the gloves in the world and takes them back to the store and sells them and the income is enough to buy a Sword of Nullification? A large supply of gloves depresses the local glove market, so the glove sale yields diminishing returns. Also, let’s reconsider the Sword of Nullification.

What if the player sets the store on fire, then takes everything when the owner is going into the “I’m near fire” AI behavior? The player can take the stuff, but city guards are set to hostile.

What if the player casts Genocide on all shopkeepers? Genociding any human type results in player death.

What if the player uses a wand of cold to freeze the sacred pool? Note: Sacred pool immune to cold.

What if the player casts Fireproof and walks through the flame barrier? Note: Change flame shield to force barrier.

What if the player teleports back past the doorway once it’s sealed? Teleportation requires line-of-sight.

What if the player drops the chalice into the lava? Chalice disappears, but we spawn another chalice at the altar.

What if the player does it again? There are infinite chalices.

What if the player jumps off the cliff and has so many hit points that they survive, and then they bypass the entire scene with the princess and they go on to the castle and don’t know what they’re supposed to do there, and the AI doesn’t have any kind of scripting for that? Put an automatic-death trap at the bottom of the cliff.

What if the player puts on a ring of fire resistance, casts Fireball, and the explosion hurls them over the wall, so they don’t need the key? Good for them.

What if the player summons a genie, stands on its head, wishes for another genie from a bottle, steps onto that genie’s head, and thus builds a staircase out of the level? Add genie bottle to the list of things you can’t wish for.

So he tells you to meet him in the cellar. Can’t he just walk to the cellar? Pathfinding.

So then when you leave the room we just teleport him to the cellar, and it’s like he walked there? When you pass a certain radius, yeah.

What if you double back? He’s already gone to the cellar.

But there’s no other exit. He should have passed you, but he hasn’t. Shut up.

What if the player kills the princess? We make her immortal.

What if the player kills the lady-in-waiting? We make her immortal.

Why doesn’t the player stay home and let the immortal princess and lady-in-waiting kill every single monster in the dungeon? Because the artists didn’t make any combat animations for them.

What if the player puts a bag of holding inside a bag of holding? What if he turns it inside out? Cuts it open? Sets it on fire? Quit f*cking around.

What if the EXACTLY WHAT KIND OF ASSHOLE ARE WE DEALING WITH HERE?