While playing Hero's Adventure I said that I'd do a post on what I think makes it so good and why it has such extensive player freedom. I thought on it for a bit, and it boils down to being able to kill anyone in the game.
This came up again recently in the Avowed thread. Outer Worlds, even as terrible as it is, is still a much better game than Avowed. Tim Gayn required that every character be killable while working on Outer Worlds, and this causes a major design shift in the game because the developers must account for any character simply not existing.
What makes BG3 feel so reactive? You can kill — get rid of — anyone, and the game must account for this.
What is a major reason Starfield is so much worse than Morrowind? Nearly everyone is flagged essential.
The fact that at any point any character other than the PC could simply not be there fundamentally changes how a game is designed. This requires the developer to inject player freedom into a game, even if the player has no intention of killing anyone they will benefit from the added reactivity. Characters that otherwise would be mandatory parts of a game can now simply be told to **** off, because it's just a small addition when the game was already designed with the idea that they simply may not be alive. Once developers are forced out of their linear box into thinking nonlinear they even start adding this sort of reactivity everywhere because they begin imagining various ways scenarios may be approached that they otherwise would have not thought of.
Every questline must be adjusted and have multiple redundancies for advancing. The game takes on something close to an emergent storyline, the player feels his experience has become unique.
I know someone is going to point out 'akshually X game has one or two unkillable NPCs!', I don't care. But it probably made the game worse for it.
What's your favorite game where anyone is killable?
