#metadurge

[eastgaysian]

curious if u have more thoughts on the 'durge as a metanarrative' thing

i have a vague sense that i saw someone mention this idea in a post or article, thought the idea was super interesting, and have been rolling it around my head ever since. however i don't remember who wrote that or if i just imagined it so if anyone else has seen this pls link me...

so broadly speaking, when it comes to giving players freedom of choice in an rpg, i think the most difficult player behavior for a developer to work with is npc killing. if you let the player kill every npc they run across, that's probably going to fuck up your design in some way, if not create a full softlock. those npcs provide information, serve mechanical purposes as merchants/healers/gatekeepers or openers, give out quests and then powerful or story-significant rewards for those quests, etc, etc. allowing players to kill everyone they meet while making sure that doesn't break the game requires a lot of work put into contingencies that most players won't see. but if you don't let players kill npcs/make certain important npcs unkillable, you limit player freedom and break immersion. todd howard what do you mean i can't kill the guy who introduced me to windhelm by being racist in the middle of the city. what greater narrative purpose does he serve

on the player's side, though, someone who's going around killing the story-essential npcs probably isn't playing the game 'as intended,' which is to say having fun by immersing themselves in the world of the game and making choices based on the character they're roleplaying. someone who's going around killing every npc possible is almost definitely playing against the game, just doing it to see what happens and find out if the game has a breaking point - and they're probably not even really having fun with it, because they're not only cutting themself off from the game's content, but going through the time and labor-intensive slog of killing hundreds of npcs spread across the entirety of the game world.

i think the dark urge as a concept offers some fun potential to play with both the developer and player side of npc killing. it's a fully intended, deliberately designed way of experiencing bg3 that hinges upon you as player and as character being encouraged to murder people, and it gets kicked off by an npc getting killed without your input - an npc that can have a presence throughout the entire game as well as offer you an extremely powerful quest reward. after that, though, every kill is up to the player. sceleritas fel urges you along and promises rewards, but there's one (1) dc 14 check between you and a murderless durge playthrough.

so the dark urge provides a story template where it becomes immersive and in-character for you to kill everyone possible, unlocking new story beats and rewards by killing npcs and losing out on their content, but it's also completely possible to interpret you, the player, as the irresistible dark urge making your in-game character kill as many people as possible for the hell of it. the moment in dak-wai's playthrough that got stuck in my brain forever was when i killed isobel, just to see what would happen (i saved before with the full intent of loading it back up and doing a Good Run), and realized that this hadn't broken their paladin oath. i'm still uncertain if this is an intended aspect of a dark urge playthrough or just a quirk of the flags surrounding isobel's death/kidnapping, but combined with the dialogue options that allow durge to insist that they kill as a result of compulsions against their will, the implications fascinate me.

in a durge playthrough, the game allows you to fully separate the decision you the player made from the decision the character you're playing would have made, and it makes sense in the story. that's cool as hell! i would've loved if larian leaned into this a little more. not necessarily in a way that fully breaks the fourth wall, but more 'evil run' content that is exclusive to a game where you've killed the good guys would add a lot of depth to this idea, as well as more exploration of the extent to which The Urge can be separated from your character, and just straight up more scenes where the player gets to fully choose whether to lean into or resist the urge. in-universe, it's bhaal's fault, but out of universe, that's all You babey. you, the player doing a kill all npcs run for your youtube channel, are the murder god who spawned a child designed to cause as many deaths as possible. don't you think that's neat? i think that's neat