Iron Tower Studio Colony Ship Game Design Update #7
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In a seventh update, Iron Tower's Vince D. Weller continues to keep us up to speed on the team's design goals and the decisions they've made thus far in the earliest production moments of their forthcoming colony ship RPG. I can always get on board with any role-playing game that has a means of playing through with little to no combat:
While combat should always be the main pillar of RPGs, allowing the player to avoid combat and progress in different ways opens up more role-playing and story-telling opportunities. Also it makes killing your way through the game YOUR choice rather than the only thing to do.
AoD allowed you to talk your way through and in the CSG we’ll add a stealth path through the game. Here is what it means design wise:
Combat should be avoidable in most cases. Enemies shouldn’t turn hostile on sight, which means that filler combat is out, which in turn makes the game much shorter. Populating a map with “enemies” is easy. Providing paths to sneak past and writing fitting intros and dialogues with logical speech checks (you can’t just ask them nicely and passionately to let you through) for each encounter, as well as reasons for them to be there in the first place isn’t. It’s also very time-consuming and heavy on scripting, which is always an issue for a small team.
Even playing Pillars of Eternity I was surprised how much filler combat the game had and wondered if cutting it out wouldn’t have boosted the game’s replayability as I’d rather play a shorter game several times to explore different options than run through an endless bog of generic encounters that serve absolutely no real purpose.
Keep in mind that combat is an active gamepay aspect – basically, its own game with its own rules and complex mechanics. Dialogues are a passive aspect. You choose a line, click and see what happens. Unless dialogues are the main and only gameplay element, it will always be inferior to combat on a system level, much like no RPG has managed to offer a stealth system that rivals that of Thief.
Thus the talking and sneaking paths will be much shorter by default but the assumption is that it’s part of the meal not the meal itself, i.e. the full experience will require several different replays, combat AND non-combat, which brings us to the next item: replayability.
