The Broken Hourglass Interview
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How about a quest example? Something to tear apart and criticize your design skills?
One of the side quests we recently completed pleases me on a number of levels. It makes good use of the opportunities we created with the fact that the normal flows of time and space have been compromised, offers a range of different solutions and resolutions, and overall is just a slick way to spend a few minutes while tromping around Mal Nassrin, including a couple of unintended consequences. Its internal title is "The Price of Friendship."
While walking down the street, the player overhears an argument taking place between a man (Hekton) and woman (Ezara) on a nearby balcony. We join the conversation in mid-stream but the upshot is that the two seem to be former business associates, he accuses her of stealing from him, she denies everything and in turn accuses him of fraud, which he denies as well. Things are just starting to boil over when she waves goodbye... and disappears in a burst of light. Infuriated, he stomps back into his home.
If the player follows him to investigate, he is agitated and rambles a bit about theft and deception. If the player shows some interest, we get the bigger picture an explanation of their business relationship (they ran a cleaning-and-repair business together. He provided the capital, she provided the management and the ideas), and an explanation of the problem. Although he clearly remembers buying out her minority stake in the business years ago, after which she moved far away from Mal Nassrin, she has been appearing to him recently in abrupt bursts, alternately berating him for cheating her and gloating over the money he now seems to be losing as his business mysteriously deteriorates. The PC gets a chance to volunteer to help, so when next she appears, a runner is sent to fetch the party.
Werkan and Ezara are having another row when the player walks in. She makes her case he took unfair advantage of her, only giving her a minority stake in the business when she did most of the work and then buying her out for less than "fair" value. She explains that she is from a time somewhat before the buyout, when their partnership was still young and the business not so successful, but learned of these actions after discovering a small rift which, for limited periods, takes her forward a few years into the future. So rather than be cheated (as she sees it) again, she has been using the rift to steal information about the business and retroactively poaches customers from him, making him a comparative pauper in the present day. Werkan, meanwhile, maintains that everything was handled fairly and he could have been successful without her.
After some exposition, we give the player a chance to use that fancy mind and fancier dialogue skills he or she has invested in. In all, there are six different outcomes to the quest:
- If the player doesn't answer the summons, or is completely passive in the "showdown", or is otherwise unconvincing, then Ezara's plan continues unabated and Werkan loses more and more of his business.
- If the player convinces Werkan to pay Ezara what she considers to be a fair share for the business in the present day, she takes it back to the past... and uses it to buy out Werkan instead, meaning that in the present day she is the abusive employer and he the underpaid, underappreciated lackey.
- If the player convinces Ezara that meddling with time is dangerous, she stops her attacks but she doesn't do anything to repair the damage, either, so Werkan is still no better off than he was when we met him.
- If the player successfully plants the seed in Ezara's mind that Werkan might find a way to retaliate against her, manipulating time to *her* undoing, she agrees to leave him be but instead of going back to the way things were, she abandons Werkan in the past, and we find out that despite his confidence that he could have done a good job without her, he is unable to run the business successfully, and is going through bankruptcy in the revised present.
- If the player decides to end Ezara's meddling through violence, Werkan is appalled (he wanted her dissuaded, not killed) and doesn't get what he wants in any case. It turns out that he did need her after all, and losing her guidance and talent too soon meant losing control of his business. A new character, Hekton, appears and is the "new" owner of the company, with Werkan merely his aide.
- Finally, if the player convinces Werkan and Ezara that the only way to solve the problem is to ensure that Werkan-in-the-past treats her better, in the present day they end up friends and equal partners, and live as happily-ever-after as the resolution of the rest of the game allows.
Looking over the list I just wrote, it occurs to me that in no resolution does Werkan actually get what he asked the PC for, which was a successful future free of Ezara. Either he gets success and the unexpected benefit of a renewed friendship, or ends up (at best) no better off than before the quest started.
Did Werkan really "deserve" to end up made whole by the end of the quest? It's unclear. I think we did a nice job leaving it up to individual interpretation just how in-the-wrong both of them are. History is littered with friendships put in jeopardy by business partnerships, and he-said-she-said is a huge part of that. And the heart of the matter is a question as big as "does he who puts his capital at risk really deserve the biggest share of the proceeds?" which is far, far bigger than a humble video game can really answer on its own.
