80.lv: Speaking of easier, the whole idea of Pathologic 3 is playing with time. The motto of the first games was “you can’t save everyone,” but Dankovsky can now simply replay the day and save some of its progress. Why did you change it? Also, why can players now exchange stuff with children only at certain places and not just stop a random kid on the street?
I think we shouldn’t forget that a game isn’t just a place your avatar walks around, where you shoot people in the head, build fortresses, or plant cabbage. A game is also the main menu, the inventory screen, and the save system. Video games have always had a complicated relationship with time.
If you’re playing Civilization and you decide to build the Pyramids, but Mahatma Gandhi beats you to it, you load a save and build the Library of Alexandria instead. You change the past. Even in a game like Darkwood, where you can’t rewind time through save loading because progress is saved automatically into a single file, you can still copy that file, store it somewhere, and restore it later – effectively jumping back in time. We simply decided to bring these off-screen player actions into the game itself.
You know, if players in a competitive shooter like to sit in bushes or behind crates, patiently waiting for their prey, maybe you shouldn’t punish them by removing bushes and crates through level design. Maybe you should build the entire game around the fact that there could be a patient hunter behind every bush.
As for the reduced trading system – that’s a fair question. Here’s how we see it: trade and exchange inevitably lead to resource accumulation, because once trade exists, capitalist logic follows – this resource can be obtained here and sold there. That would pull the game away from the feelings we’re aiming for. Overall, you could say we have a fairly leftist economy in the game. We give the player a kind of universal basic income in the form of a set of medical supplies each day – but only once per day. We provide moderate abundance by placing items in locations, and then we stop adding more.
A player who manages resources wisely won’t feel scarcity. A player who wastes them will create serious problems for themselves. If any character could become a trader, the pressure of potential scarcity would disappear, replaced by a sense of infinite resource circulation.
