As the latest title by Hidetaka Miyazaki, creator of the Dark Souls series, Elden Ring has garnered much attention since its release, both positive and negative. For many, it's already the greatest game of this year, and while the year has only just begun, it's difficult to think of a title as heavily anticipated in recent memory as Elden Ring.
One point of contention among gamers, game designers, and game journalists regarding Elden Ring is how it structures NPC Questlines. For some, the cryptic series of events required to progress some of the various NPC stories only elicits a sigh and a trip to the wiki. Others, however, thoroughly enjoy the feeling of unaided discovery, witnessing the journeys of each character unfold organically. The self-paced and aloof nature of narrative progression makes each NPC story feel as if characters are truly living in the world regardless of the player's actions. I myself enjoy this style of storytelling, but it's clear that there are issues with the current implementation when it comes to arming the player with the tools to discover each story for themselves.
Several times when playing Elden Ring, I would forget that a given NPC even existed, let alone what they said. Unfortunately, unrepeatable or missed lines of dialogue can contain critical information when it comes to completing NPC questlines. This can result in a player feeling utterly lost with no way to actually work towards a given story thread with any sense of intentionality. For some, this is certainly a problem. Now, a traditional questlog would resolve this issue, but at the cost of destroying the illusion of a living, breathing world by way of a checklist. A UI element directing the player to "Deliver 1 Shabriri Grape to Hyetta" severely cheapens the narrative of Hyetta's questline, and there are ways to gently inform players of potential next steps without resorting to such blunt methods.
One option is to have an dialogue record, likely accessed within the world itself via an item or landmark. Here, players who are looking for direction may find any past pieces of NPC dialogue they have encountered, allowing them to piece together possible next steps themselves. By providing this additional source of information, players may still engage with the narrative on their own terms and feel clever for discovering the next step in a questline while being less likely to flounder and resort to searching for the answer online.
Another method is to use a helper NPC to give the player advice on potential progression. This is more commonly used than a dialogue record, but should be handled with care if you intend to preserve the discovery-driven nature of the current narrative structure. While the helper NPC should give out advice, it must only be at the request of the player. In addition, asking the helper NPC should never be outright required for progression. Finally, any advice given by the helper NPC should still be in the form of helpful, but cryptic dialogue or text, and rarely in the form of a map marker or other UI support. In actuality, this sort of system already exists in a smaller capacity in the form of notes purchased from merchants. By expanding the note system or supplementing it with advice given by NPCs such as Melina, the player can seek out stories for themselves on their own terms.
While raising the amount of information easily accessed by the player is important, this sort of discovery-driven narrative ultimately relies on the player figuring things out for themselves. Should the player be given answers outright, they may feel as if the game is treating them like a child. One self-paced narrative which fumbled in this manner was Deathloop. The premise of that entire game relies around creating a perfect scenario where you must assassinate eight key targets in a single in-game day, and doing so requires a lengthy setup process. During this time, the player is lining up the pieces themselves, discovering how they all fit, yet when the player finally has all the prepwork completed, the game outright tells them the route they need to take in order to finish the game. Any satisfaction a player may have felt by figuring the plan out by themselves is tossed out of the nearest window.
Ultimately, the strength of discovery-driven, self-paced narratives in games is that it increases player satisfaction by making players feel that they themselves played a role in the narrative, rather than merely witnessing it through an avatar. They play to the strengths of games as a medium.
I've spat out these less-than-coherent ramblings for long enough, now. Next time, I will be tackling another design idea present in both Elden Ring and Deathloop: Player Invasions.
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