Warhorse - Overkill Design

[RPGWatch]

Dan Vavra from Warhorse Studios writes about his obsession with design details - and the overkill that can result. As ever, Dan is an interesting read. First, an example of the problems he sees using an FPS design and the problem of waves of enemies with unlimited ammo:

Of course you can set the enemies so that they run out of ammo. But then you have to think and program for what will happen when they run out - will they run away, beg for help, take a new weapon from a corpse, jump on you with a knife or maybe all of that together? This is all extra work, but when someone finally does it, I'm convinced that gamers will cry out in joy. Just remember the plaudits for the first Medal of Honor, where precisely these kinds of things happened -enemies threw grenades back at you, hurled themselves at you when you got too close and generally did things never seen before. Coincidentally, the concept of this game was not the work of a game designer, but that of the filmmaker Steven Spielberg. We all know what happened to this franchise after Steven sold it to EA don't we? What is sure is that nobody invested much into the AI after that.

So, on to Dan's struggle with their RPG:

For instance, a while ago I started to plan the legal system of our game. I didn't want to end up like all the other RPGs, where you are either executed for stealing a pair of socks, or nobody notices the piles of dead bodies you have killed in the town square. I wanted to create a system where the NPCs will adequately react to the player's misdemeanors and crimes.

The moment the design document reached thirty pages and I was about to consider ways of preventing the player from killing off an entire town so cunningly that nobody saw him in that and therefore nobody would arrest and prosecute him and, at the same time, so that the handful of survivors in the middle of the pile of corpses wouldn't act as if nothing was happening, it occurred to me that I might have crossed a line and I was beginning to get entangled in something that was not in the plan at all. In some RPGs, they don't worry about even much more important things and when something happens, the resolution of which makes my brain beginning to melt, the game simply stops working. My colleagues in the office had funny expressions, but they didn't try to stop me, so I persisted, though significantly concerned that perhaps I was creating something that was absolute overkill, which we'd throw out in the end and instead do what all the others do, because the result is entirely inadequate to the efforts invested in the attempt of a perfect solution to the problem.