Chris Avellone Interview, Part Two
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Q: The plots of both Planescape and KOTOR II involved a fair amount of potential tragedy. What is your approach to producing emotional investment and a sense of loss in players?
A: Well, a player always starts the game with something to lose sometimes it can be just numbers, powers, levels, or experience points, but to create emotional investment, you need to introduce objects, places, and NPCs the player feels some empathy for.
For characters, this can be done by giving them strong support roles (CNPCs with useless powers or skills have a hard road to winning a player's affection), and a non-abrasive, sympathetic personality (nobody likes working with total assholes). Note that the support roles shouldn't overshadow the PC (nobody likes having companions that have overall better stats and powers than they do) and it's not always necessary for the character to be fully sympathetic or non-abrasive, as long as they change or learn to respect the PC over the course of the game (Annah in Torment, for example). (Dogmeat) in Fallout probably represents an ideal archetype for making you feel emotionally invested in a CNPC he's valuable in combat and he's fiercely loyal, and never causes you grief. The fact he's a dog makes it even easier for players to empathize with him.
That said, it also helps to go in the opposite direction and give some characters a lot of depth and ways to find out their secrets and gain their trust we tried this by introducing the Influence System in Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, where the more you interacted with your CNPCs, the more you helped with their vision quests, and the more your actions lined up with their beliefs and values, the more you could get out of them, both power-wise and personality wise.
It also became another mini-game where not only would you have to choose responses and actions and determine whether they would affect your character's alignment, but you'd also have to think about such responses would influence your companions, either positively or negatively. Again, we're carrying this system over to Neverwinter 2 to give the players more to play around with with their companions, if they choose.
For creating emotional investment to areas, I don't generally try to do that in stories, since making players feel something for a game world is usually a lot more difficult than making them feel something for their character, which is more personal to them (that was the track we took in Torment nobody was out to save the world, what was happening was a very character-centric problem).
I think a player begins to feel attachment for areas the more work they do to change an area or fix it up, solving its quests, and generally making it a better place to live even drawing people to the location. This is a trend we're trying to take full design advantage of in Neverwinter Nights 2. Our lead designer, Ferret Baudoin, one of that to be one of the cool features of the sequel, and he's doing the design work to make it happen.
