‘Sidequests are almost my reason for doing videogames in the first place:’ The dev behind one of the coolest upcoming RPGs says its word count is ballooning because they just love side stories so much

The early access RPG Entropy would be cool enough in a vacuum: Experimental, JRPG-style combat in a bizarre, fallen world. But it’s also a second outing from the devs of one of my favorite RPGs in recent memory, Dread Delusion.

Dread Delusion was a first-person homage to the Elder Scrolls that, true to its inspirations, had some absolutely killer sidequests, like an ethical dilemma surrounding vegetarian zombies or a seemingly Blade Runner 2049-inspired investigation into a person erased from history (and their loved ones’ memories). With Entropy’s subgenre shift, I wondered if developer Lovely Hellplace would keep up this side stuff streak.

I needn’t have worried: Speaking recently with lead developer James Wragg, he told me in no uncertain terms that he and the team can’t help themselves. They love sidequests too much to not make them.

“Side quests are almost my reason for doing videogames in the first place,” Wragg told me. “A big inspiration for Dread Delusion was playing Elder Scrolls games almost willfully ignoring the main quest, and getting lost in all the side content.”

Wragg finds that RPGs really come alive in their side stories, partially because they’re allowed to be strange, and to provide a contrast with the main plot. Wragg estimated that he wrote “about a third” of what’s gone into Entropy, and that he likes to create outlines or broad strokes directions for areas and plotlines that other writers then fill in.

He praised Dread Delusion writer Harry Tuffs for bringing the zombified Kingdom of the Endless to life in exactly this way: “I knew the Endless were going to be like, vegetarian vampires,” said Wragg, “and I gave this to Harry, and he made it way better than my original dumb ideas.”

Wragg also shouted out returning writer Io Brindle, who spearheaded that investigative quest I loved so much in Dread Delusion, Missing Persons. Even still, before starting Entropy, Wragg had a notion that it would be less verbose than Dread Delusion⁠.

“I started off Entropy with the idea that we were going to write way fewer words,” Wragg said. “I was like, ‘Dread Delusion is like the length of a novel. This is crazy. This took so much work.’ So for Entropy, I really wanted to cut the word count down loads. We were going to trim the fat and make it more succinct.

“As we’ve been writing it, we’ve found that we just like really getting into characters, and we just like fleshing stuff out with interesting themes, and that does actually take a fair amount of words.”

Even though it will take a significant lift from Entropy’s writing team, Wragg sounded more excited than anything else, and believes that Entropy’s side content will hit the same high marks with players as Dread Delusion’s.

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Some of this writing work is also being put toward companions: Entropy has a large party size and allows for hiring more anonymous mercenary characters, but there are also story-centric party members with their own plotlines. All of them, mercenary or story-based, will be subject to permadeath, something I loved in the recently-released Star Wars Zero Company.

“We love making weird and wonderful stories, and we love deep characters who we can get into chats with and find out all their beliefs and backstories and stuff,” said Wragg. “I think that one of the most interesting things about videogames is just how you can actually talk to the characters in a way that maybe you can’t in a novel or a film. Just being able to meet a strange character and ask them some stupid questions is incredibly rewarding as a player.”

Entropy is out now on Steam in early access for the very reasonable price of $12/£8.99, and it also has a quite generous demo that won me over to the game months ago. If Dread Delusion is anything to go by, the final game will see a significant expansion over this initial release, but I found Dread Delusion’s initial early access launch to be a great introduction to the project.