Here’s a thing about me: I get notions. In RPGs, I get very specific images in my head of who I’m playing and how I’m playing them. It’ll be a cold day in hell before you catch me using anything but a revolver and light armour in New Vegas, or dual flintlock pistols (and light armour) in Pillars of Eternity. These are the tools that seem coolest to use, so I stick with them, more or less in perpetuity.
Which is a real drag if you happen to be New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity director (and Obsidian design director) Josh Sawyer, who has spent a decent chunk of his career trying to design armour systems that compel players to make interesting decisions. In a recent video—which is well worth watching in full to get Sawyer’s thoughts on, for instance, where Avowed succeeded and failed with its armour system—Sawyer noted that one of the things that makes it hard to design an armour system he thinks is interesting is, well, players like me.
Sawyer cites Darklands, an early-’90s historical RPG, as a touchstone for his armour ponderings. In Darklands, armour works according to a kind of rock-paper-scissors model: certain weapons are good against certain armours and worthless against others, to the point that they might not damage health at all. It means you have to make a decision about which weapons and armour you use for each encounter, rather than settling into a universal template.
“I think there’s something kind of nice about that,” says Sawyer. “I don’t think it makes things tactically brainless. You still have to think about what you’re doing, and there’s a lot of other considerations, like: no weapon is just about the penetration and the damage that it does, there’s a lot of other factors that go into it.”
So why isn’t this a staple of all Sawyer’s games? Ah, well, that’s where people like me come in. “When I, as a designer… tell, in various ways, the player, ‘Hey! It’s time to not use this weapon’ … some players will get into this kind of crisis, because it interferes with the concept of their [original character] or their Blorbo.
“They’re like, ‘I only use swords. I never use maces’,” says Sawyer, which can be an issue. “At some point I have to make you make a tactical decision that involves changing your behaviour,” says the designer. “Sometimes those things feel like they’re more of an infringement on the player’s roleplaying ideas or character identity than others, and it’s difficult to know sometimes where those boundaries are.”
That’s not to say stubborn players are the only reason it’s hard to make interesting armour systems, but they certainly don’t help, and I couldn’t help but feel slightly responsible for Sawyer’s design woes when he brought people like me up. Sorry, Josh. Next time I do a Pillars of Eternity run, I promise I’ll try to use a mace.
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