Hard to be a God Diary #1

Hard to be a God product manager Vladimir Kovner has penned his first developer diary over at RPG Vault, focusing on how the action RPG's unique setting and plot has evolved since it went into development.
We weren't completely satisfied until our third pass at developing the narrative. In particular, I'm referring to all the quests the hero has to deal with. It became obvious which stages of the storyline were more filled with the gamers' actions, and which were quite opposite, inclined to simply reading the dialogues and getting in the loop of what's going on.

Following that, we started balancing the gameplay, introducing necessary changes and corrections to the plot. If the gamer had to speak a lot to characters and read documents, we would add more action to the quests, such as accompanying a key character, protecting peaceful citizens, forcing his way out beyond the city walls, etc. And on the other hand, those scenes where the gamer had to fight a lot received other amendments; for instance, the hero would get information during combat through finding important objects and talking to neutrally behaving characters.