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Suggestions / Now It's Personal: Improving the writing in Deep Caverns
« on: August 10, 2020, 01:57:25 am »
I'm expanding on something I wrote in a Reddit thread:
Much has been said about DC and its frustrations, but the harshest one for me is the final quest's context, or lack thereof. You are ordered by Six to kill a creature with which you have no direct contact or antagonism, and thus the player character has little to no motivation to comply, in or out of character. Your questgiver Six becomes intensely dislikable and untrustworthy, because when you ask for clarification on who he is, what's going on, and why you should do what he says, he all but refuses to answer, and berates you for asking questions.
It's total whiplash. The world building in the rest of the game is top notch, a large part of which is that you can ask questions for more context, development of the character speaking and the world around you, reinforcing the game's stellar atmosphere.
What's worse is that there are plenty of great reasons to kill Tchort aside from those that are presented. "He has the MacGuffin" and "You can't leave until you do" both come across as contrived, which shattered my immersion and suspension of disbelief. I stopped thinking about the world or its characters, and began thinking about how the plot is constructed; the artifice of the story was laid bare and I was left to conclude that Six was merely a transparent plot device, merely an ad-hoc tool for the authors to tell players what to do without providing the requisite narrative motivation.
So, my suggestion is to do just that, in a way that changes little about the game, its world and the rules of its fiction. When the player arrives in Deep Caverns, Tchort psionically contacts you, wanting to know why someone is entering his domain (that isn't a full Tchortist). He then attempts to force you to join him (or maybe eat you, considering he's hungry), and he attacks you for resisting. Then, before your death, Six saves you with his time lord powers, then you wake up outside of Hollow Earth and he can launch into his existing dialogue.
This is an improvement for several reasons:
1. The player is given a personal hostility with Tchort, and thus they are motivated to fight against him. The final fight will be more climactic, since there is a clear antagonism between you and the villain.
2. It makes Six more sympathetic, and makes the player more willing to hear him out.
3. It doesn't change too much about the existing dialogue or structure of the game. You still go on a mighty scavenger hunt to open the path to the final boss. Indeed, the added motivation for revenge might make the player more willing to struggle through DC's harsh challenges.
4. It builds upon, and is foreshadowed by, previous encounters in the game. Between Ezra's Neural Overload lesson and Dr. Mason's hallucinations in the Lemurian Health Centre, telepathic contact is very well established. It's perfectly believable that a soup of Biocorp scientists would have the same kind of psionic contact as the totally-not-a-Biocorp-scientist Ezra.
Let me know your thoughts, and if this gets enough interest I might write a prototype for how the interaction could play out.
Edit: changed reason for why Tchort would contact the player.
Much has been said about DC and its frustrations, but the harshest one for me is the final quest's context, or lack thereof. You are ordered by Six to kill a creature with which you have no direct contact or antagonism, and thus the player character has little to no motivation to comply, in or out of character. Your questgiver Six becomes intensely dislikable and untrustworthy, because when you ask for clarification on who he is, what's going on, and why you should do what he says, he all but refuses to answer, and berates you for asking questions.
It's total whiplash. The world building in the rest of the game is top notch, a large part of which is that you can ask questions for more context, development of the character speaking and the world around you, reinforcing the game's stellar atmosphere.
What's worse is that there are plenty of great reasons to kill Tchort aside from those that are presented. "He has the MacGuffin" and "You can't leave until you do" both come across as contrived, which shattered my immersion and suspension of disbelief. I stopped thinking about the world or its characters, and began thinking about how the plot is constructed; the artifice of the story was laid bare and I was left to conclude that Six was merely a transparent plot device, merely an ad-hoc tool for the authors to tell players what to do without providing the requisite narrative motivation.
So, my suggestion is to do just that, in a way that changes little about the game, its world and the rules of its fiction. When the player arrives in Deep Caverns, Tchort psionically contacts you, wanting to know why someone is entering his domain (that isn't a full Tchortist). He then attempts to force you to join him (or maybe eat you, considering he's hungry), and he attacks you for resisting. Then, before your death, Six saves you with his time lord powers, then you wake up outside of Hollow Earth and he can launch into his existing dialogue.
This is an improvement for several reasons:
1. The player is given a personal hostility with Tchort, and thus they are motivated to fight against him. The final fight will be more climactic, since there is a clear antagonism between you and the villain.
2. It makes Six more sympathetic, and makes the player more willing to hear him out.
3. It doesn't change too much about the existing dialogue or structure of the game. You still go on a mighty scavenger hunt to open the path to the final boss. Indeed, the added motivation for revenge might make the player more willing to struggle through DC's harsh challenges.
4. It builds upon, and is foreshadowed by, previous encounters in the game. Between Ezra's Neural Overload lesson and Dr. Mason's hallucinations in the Lemurian Health Centre, telepathic contact is very well established. It's perfectly believable that a soup of Biocorp scientists would have the same kind of psionic contact as the totally-not-a-Biocorp-scientist Ezra.
Let me know your thoughts, and if this gets enough interest I might write a prototype for how the interaction could play out.
Edit: changed reason for why Tchort would contact the player.