Introduction

My first attempt at game development was a game about a man trying to cross the ruins of a post-apocalyptic United States in order to find his wife. Along the way, he would meet individuals that had their own lives to live and would join him on his search, sometimes for just a brief moment, and sometimes for the whole journey. It was my first attempt at designing an experience that involved characters that weren’t there for the main character, but because their lives just so happened to intersect with his for that moment. In some ways, it was a prototype for what I’m now calling Project Sojourn and a way to test out an idea that I don’t think storytellers employ very much if at all in interactive media.

I’m not trying to say that RPGs, where players can travel with companions, have shallow characters whose main purpose for existing is to pander to the player character. I think RPG writers do a very good job of creating believable and three-dimensional characters that are fun to travel with and add depth to the experiences that players have in the game world.

The Restriction on Believable Characters

The characters themselves aren’t my issue, it’s their execution. The common trend that I’m seeing is that even if those believable characters have personal goals and ambitions, they always end up staying with the player character until the finale of the campaign. The trend can be seen in JRPGs, down to Bioware games, and exaggerated by Bethesda games. The player character starts their journey, progresses and attracts a following, and finishes their quest with the people that they met along the way. Did you meet a sharpshooter who wanted to live a simple life but needs to exact vengeance for his butchered family? Help him in his quest and you’ll have bought his undying loyalty for all the rest of his days! How about that swordsman who’s following you around because it’s her job? What’s that, you’ve killed twelve villagers today and she’s still following you around?

I do wonder how much of it could be pinned on the plot and the design of those experiences as a whole. After all, the RPG genre has been mostly geared toward empowering the audience and giving them the capability to accomplish their heart’s desires. It makes no sense to allow them to meet a beautiful swordsman who’ll journey with them for a quest or two, only to have her leave because she’s tired of carrying all their items, or because she doesn’t think they’re worthwhile to follow.

It also puts a hamper on the design and narrative of the experience. It’s difficult to take into account ALL the choices that players are going to make throughout their play. Imagine a Bioware game where players were able to upset a companion to the point of them leaving forever or a Bethesda game where Lydia could leave an abusive player and find a better Jarl to follow.

At a certain point, putting restrictions on characters is important to gameplay and plot progression, but at what point could we begin to explore different possibilities for this industry-wide practice? Is this design choice implemented so much only because of the fact that players are placed in powerful roles? How different would it be if players were put in the shoes of an ordinary person meeting and traveling with other ordinary people? Or is there another reason why character companions are continuously designed this way?

Why Character Companions Don’t Feel Alive

Imagine this: you’re a general leading a ragtag group of swordsmen, archers, and cavalry. You’re charismatic, so when you look at people they immediately want to be a part of whatever you’re doing. But you’re amazed to see that every now and again, there are people you come across that you can’t swoon with your RGB-tinted eyes. So you work your hardest to try and get them to rally to your cause. You give them flowers, chocolates, and gold, all in a bid to have them as a loyal follower. But they won’t have it. “Material things are of no consequence”, they say. So you ask them what they want.

It turns out that their parents are locked up in Evil Lord 9’s castle. They’ll join you so long as you help them get their parents to safety. Along the way to the castle, your prospective follower unloads their life story on you. Years and years of pent up exposition come out in torrents of sobs, laughter, and dramatic flairs. Through this time you get to know them more: what makes them tick, what gets them up in the morning, and why they don’t like strawberry jam. In a moment of clarity, you realize that they’re alive and are dynamic actors in a world filled with dynamic actors, and for a split second, you wonder how many more of your other followers have stories just like this.

But you don’t get much time to dwell on that thought because as soon as you get your prospective followers’ parents out of Evil Lord 9’s castle, they fall in line with the others and that’s all you hear from them.

As soon as they follow you, they stop becoming dynamic actors in a living world. They no longer affect or can be meaningfully affected by the world that they live in. You can ask them to do things on your behalf, but they seem to carry out that task in a separate space than from where they would be expected to. As their leader, you can send them on quests of their own, quests that they’ll come back from with nothing to show for aside from more numbers for the progress bar. Imagine a person like this. They’re not very believable or feel alive, huh?

The main problem is that we treat character companions as mechanics rather than dynamic characters.

They are extensions of backpacks, an extra bit of damage-per-second, or a boost in the main character’s party statistics, all wrapped up in a heartfelt exposition or two. The only time this formula is justified are in games like Bioshock: Infinite, Resident Evil 4, and The Last of Us, games where the character companion has been crafted to the same degree of importance to the narrative as the main character. In almost every other case, however, the companion is just a clever excuse for letting players have a few more abilities or more carrying capacity for their long adventuring hauls.

If we were to replace those companions with their utilitarian counterparts (a floating gun for extra damage, or a spell tome that gave players more abilities, or a bag with a pair of legs for extra weight) and justified it narratively, I wonder just how many games we could apply this to and not have the gameplay affected at all.

If the answer is “way too many to count”, then we need to rethink the way that we utilize companions in video games.

Designing Believable Companions

In Project Sojourn, players take on the role of a merchant exiled to a land they know nothing about. From the ground up they must build an empire of gold and connections in order to get back to their homeland or to carve out a home for themselves in this new world. Along the way, players have the opportunity to meet characters with their own lives to live and stories to tell. Sometimes these characters will travel with the player for a few miles. Sometimes they’ll stick around for months on end. The distinction between these characters and the others that I talked about before is the idea of dynamic progression. Nothing is absolute.

A man who was left to die on the roadside can be nursed back to health and given the opportunity to join the player’s caravan (with a wage) or be sent on his way:

If players decide to keep the man around, they can get to know him more: learn his quirks, his desires; what makes him get up in the morning and keep striving for another day. This can lead to “quests” for the man and even more opportunities down the road for more character development and player interactions. As players make choices, the man makes choices as well in a push-and-pull design. If players come across hungry children and don’t choose to feed them, the man might.

If the player chose to let the man go, then he affects the game world in a different way. Perhaps on his way home, the man comes across starving children who he helps. He goes on his own personal quest to bring those children back to their parents, to find that they are the children of a powerful family. The man is knighted, given his own land and servants as a reward, and heralded as a hero. Players will be able to come across this man again, and while they may not remember who he is, the man certainly does.

In both of these cases, the player made their choice and the characters took their decisions and made something out of it. There’s a level of complexity with this design, but a world of possibilities opens up. The player is a part of a living, breathing world, with characters that have their own lives to live and stories to tell. They aren’t just pawns to be sent around to do things for the player character. They’re not items to be used for a simulated power trip. They’re characters with goals, ambitions, and their own life, whether the player likes it or not.

The Drawbacks

Are there issues with this design choice? Definitely. Not only is it complex to take into account all the decisions that players are going to make, it’s also time-consuming to make not just one, but a branching tree of outcomes for players to explore. The time spent in one branch might not even be seen by a majority of the player-base, as well.

But it adds believability, and it adds a sense of immersion to a world where the player’s choices aren’t the end-all-be-all.

“Heresy”, you say, “games are supposed to let players do whatever they want to whomever they want”. Are they really? Or have we just gotten too used to that design choice?

Maybe it’s time to shake the cage a little.