I’m pausing my playthrough of The Blood of Dawnwalker to address studio Rebel Wolves and other RPG developers directly: Stop taking the coward’s way out. Know that I say this with the utmost love and respect for your craft and your work, but I need you to take off the kid gloves and punch me in the face. I want you to hurt me, and by hurt me I mean let me live with the hard choices I’ve made instead of offering a “get out of consequence jail free” card.
There’s this thing that happens in RPG quests in which the player will be offered a choice: You can do X thing which will have Y consequence or you can do something else. Often Y consequence will involve somebody dying or leaving the party permanently, or some other net-negative result. But! If you poke at the game long enough, level up a meter high enough, or do some optional, harder content, you can erase the Y consequence en total.
In Dawnwalker…wait, hold on—
That’s better. In Dawnwalker, this RPG mainstay manifests when it’s time to kill one of the big bad guy’s lieutenants. Said lieutenant is a vampire who a helpful character named Iulian revealed likes to feed before going into a battle, with Iulian being the vampire’s preferred blood bag. The plan was to poison Iulian so that when the vampire fed on him, he’d be weakened during my fight with him, making him an easier kill, but the poisoning ritual will eventually kill Iulian, too.
I’m trying to play as a more-or-less good person / vrakhir—only drinking from animals and enemies in combat—and sacrificing someone seemed antithetical to that goal. But my conversation with Iulian challenged my whole “goody two-fangs” vibes. Iulian boo-hoo’ed about how much he hated himself for not standing up to the vampire and said that he didn’t mind that this ploy will kill him. But amidst his self-loathing he also revealed he had a wife and child who’d be left without his protection if he died. And while I’m playing a “good” person, I’m also a lazy one—the prospect of an easier fight was powerfully tempting. I really liked that the game was asking me to choose between my comfort and morals and another person’s autonomy—even if that autonomy is being used to self-annihilate. Figuring out which one was worth more to me offered a great bit of internal friction.
However, I accidentally stumbled on something that undermined everything. As the quest progressed, I learned that Iulian had befriended a local witch who used her expertise to come up with the formula for the poison, but had been killed in the course of her research. Iulian is broken up by her death, confessing they had been lovers and reaffirming his commitment to his own death. However, in addition to developing the poison, the witch discovered that harvesting a gland from some fuck-off huge lizard would counteract the poison’s deadly effect. Kill the lizard, slip the organ into the brew, and Iulian would get to live.
Learning that kinda let me down. Yes, I still had the choice of what to do, but learning there’s a secret, third option was like opening a release valve on all the delicious tension. In gaming, having choices is good. But having hard choices is even better. It’s why the fact that you can’t save both Ashley and Kaiden in Mass Effect hits as hard as it does. You are made to live with that choice throughout all three games and it’s as great as it is uncomfortable. I think gamers need to be forced to live in their discomfort more, to make hard choices that have no easy solutions. The whole mechanical point of Dawnwalker is essentially that already, with time limits forcing players to choose the quests they complete versus those they have to abandon. (Which is why that mod that removes quest timers is grade-A USDA certified bullshit.) I know games cannot be real life and that trying to imitate real life often doesn’t make for a fun time, but life often doesn’t have that perfect solution and I wish Dawnwalker had committed to making me uncomfortable.
