In the end Pentimentact one, I am faced with a difficult choice. In order to save a dear friend who stands on public trial for murder and faces execution, I must incriminate myself. Using the clues I’ve found over the course of several days, I present a weak case against a respected monk with occult connections. His head was beheaded in the town square while the citizens looked on in horror. When I return to the town of Tassing years later, I am coldly received by those same townspeople, shunning me for destroying their peaceful way of life.
Pentiment – Official Trailer Announcement – Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase 2022.
While choice may play a major role in many modern games, it is more important than ever in Pentiment. It’s not just something that determines whether his head journeyman, Andreas Maler, is good or evil — every decision shapes the course of the small town’s history. To get that feeling right, the tiny development team inside RPG giant Obsidian Entertainment should get involved in what choices actually have an impact in the game. According to senior producer Alec Frey, who spoke to Digital Trends ahead of the game’s launch, the secret to its success comes from a less-is-more approach.
“It’s about choices being important, not about being everywhere,” says Frey.
A lean team
Pentiment is a unique game because of its development history. The narrative adventure was a passion project for Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer, who wanted to create a historical game. Sawyer was inspired when he played indie titles like Night in the forest and Mutations and tried to do something in that 2D style. Frey explains how the idea for Pentiment they came together when Sawyer and his team decided on a particular point in history that seemed natural for a crime deduction story
“[Sawyer] he came across this time period of 16th century Bavaria, which is a really interesting time where the advent of the printing press gives people access to more text,” Frey tells Digital Trends. “More and more people are learning to read and information is starting to be pushed to more people, much like the internet has affected us in our generation. Looking at that time period and that area of the world, we thought, man, if we set a murder mystery and then some scandal in this area, and maybe pick some art styles from this era, we could come up with something cool.”
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Despite being developed by a major studio, Pentiment had a small development team. In fact, it initially consisted of only four developers. This increased to eight before settling at 14 by the end of the game’s development. The team would start by building an hour-long prototype to reduce the sense of movement before breaking down the entire game’s approach to choice-driven gameplay.
Although Obsidian is used to working with huge teams, the much smaller approach has had some positive effects on the project. First, it allowed team members to have more personal influence over aspects of the game because one person could be responsible for an entire section. The biggest difference, however, comes from the added flexibility that comes from cutting red tape.
“A big part of having a smaller team is that communication is a lot easier,” says Frey. “We don’t need that overhead hierarchy of producers and managers to make sure everyone’s communicating, and we just know that you can trust your team members to trust another person to handle these things… That allowed us to turn the game around very quickly.” If we had ideas or wanted to try something, it was something we could put into our chat channel and everyone just does it.”
The small team approach gave Obsidian more leeway when implementing development choices that would radically shape the game over a three-year development cycle. Funnily enough, it mirrors that process perfectly Pentiment itself, a game in which players must make significant decisions that will shape the course of history.
Change over time
I return to the execution I was responsible for at the end of the first act of the game. In another game, that moment might be accompanied by a cutscene explaining whether I found the real culprit or framed the innocent. That doesn’t happen in Pentiment. Instead, I’m left wondering if I messed up as time passes and the people of Tassing are forced to carry on without one of their own. Frey explains that the decision to hide the “solution” from the player plays a key role in Pentimentaccess to decisions.
“Josh thought it would be compelling not to talk about the right and wrong of it,” says Frey. “It is often more convincing to be as if we are here in the world and making decisions, and those decisions have an effect. It’s not about being right or wrong; it’s about the impact you have on the world.”
From there, the question became how to give players choices that actually felt like they mattered, rather than just quick morale checks. Obsidian is no stranger to this type of gameplay thanks to its background in RPGs, but Pentiment would require a different approach. After all, the player’s decisions shaped not only Andreas, but the entire town of Tassing, permanently.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Frey says the studio had one secret weapon up its sleeve: time. By creating a story that spanned multiple decades, the team could actually show the real ways Tassing has evolved over time instead of having to keep the world in a consistent state of research like, say, Outer worlds. This would bring the focus back to how decisions cause a ripple effect a generation later, rather than drawing the player’s attention to right or wrong answers.
“Something we knew we were doing pretty quickly was that the game takes place over a long period of time,” says Frey. “The span of 25 years is something that we were, we want to tell the story of this city at a time of socio-political and religious changes. It’s much easier to show that change when you have time to show it, because that’s the reality that history is. When we talked about choices and how to make them feel good, we said, we have something that we don’t normally have in games… we have 25 years. When you make a decision early and execute someone in the first act because you accused him, in the second act it will come up again and someone will say, ‘You killed my husband! I won’t help you with this!’ The feeling that as time goes on is something we wanted to ensure. How can this be good seven or 18 years later?”
Less is more
What is particularly highlighted Pentiment and its approach to choice is how it works at the system level. Decision making is often imperceptible to the player, as seemingly mundane dialogue choices can affect the direction of the story much later. This is thanks in no small part to the game’s persuasion system, which is the most RPG-like idea.
Whenever Andreas talks to a character, there are key moments that these NPCs react to. The widow might remember that Andreas showed her kindness in Act 1, which in turn made her trust him with some crucial information years later. In my playthrough, I accidentally alienated a group of Tassing residents in a tavern after making a joke about how I picked up the bill. Someone in the room found it rude and it bit me later when I tried to shake them for key information.
It’s not about being right or wrong; it’s about the impact you have on the world.
While the system is one of PentimentThe most important system choice, it didn’t come together until this year. Frey and the team had to rework it several times to make it look less like a mathematically driven RPG system and more like organic human interaction.
“In the beginning, we didn’t really have a persuasion system,” says Frey. “That system probably got more iterations during development than any system in the game. When we started we had global variables where we tracked anything like in any normal game. Then Josh suggested this persuasion system where there was a narrative mechanic where you can persuade people and we can make the player feel the impact. We didn’t want this game to ever have numbers or RPG systems like that. That system didn’t become what it is now until six or five months ago, and it’s something we first put into play almost two years ago.”
Those moments of reassurance don’t come around often Pentiment. I only experienced a handful of them while playing, but every time I failed one, I became hyper-aware of how even my throwaway dialogue choices could have disastrous consequences for Tassing. Frey notes that the secret to the game’s success as a narrative adventure is its less-is-more approach to those moments. It allows Obsidian to ensure that every decision matters.
“Something we try to aim for is not that you have a million choices; it’s about having a few compelling ones,” says Frey. “IN Pentiment, you have many choices during the game and you have choices within the conversation, which affects persuasion checks. But then we have these impactful endings that hit you with ‘This is going to affect the rest of the game or the future of this city.’ We want you to feel it the hard way.”
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Frey notes that the team relied on the larger team at Obsidian to make sure they were on track — a useful resource given the company’s RPG expertise. They would throw compilations of the game to the company, which would send feedback on how important individual moments seemed. If players were clicking through dialog boxes without thinking, it was a return to the scriptorium to make that decision more deliberate.
Without going into details, Pentiment brings this idea home in its final act. Changing the narrative only allows players to make a few choices, but they carry more weight than some of the life-or-death ones in the game. In the finale, my decisions will not only shape the lives of the residents of Tassing, but the town itself will forever be remembered in history. They become three seemingly low decisions Pentimentthe most challenging ones, because they force me to think outside the confines of the game’s 25-year time frame.
What will Tassing’s legacy be? Your choice.
Pentiment is now available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC. It is available on Xbox Game Pass.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn