PunchWorldwide

...but by simply giving the player access to the lives of the characters (and of course, good writing) and letting inertia do the rest. I appreciate all this both as a player and a human worried that curiosity, empathy, and critical thinking are falling out of fashion.

thanks @roottrees.com

I spent 15 hours doing this with fictional characters in The Roottrees Are Dead and at the end felt like I was saying bye to old friends whom I had developed a kind of fondness for in spite of their flaws. this wasn’t accomplished through emotional manipulation or any sort of overt pandering...

all this not in pursuit of any stated goal—not to prove or disprove anything, not to receive some type of reward or bright flash of color indicating that I’ve “done something” but just to increase the resolution of (the image of) the person in my mind.

but for a moment there I got to feel the type of meditative churn that comes with listening to what a person is saying, reading what they’ve written and just trying to see them as they were in their lives, and how they affected and interacted with other people and were affected in turn.

lot of people hated that version of 76, found it pointless and lonely. complaints rolled in, Bethesda’s robotic (human) NPCs began to repopulate the landscape and today we’ve got an arcadey GaaS-ified mess to play dolls in. good work.

finished up The Roottrees Are Dead last night (easy recommendation to fans of Obra Dinn, go play it) and got to thinking about how the game manages to make curiosity its own reward - and in that moment I thought of the early days of Fallout 76, crawling around the Wasteland listening to audio tapes.