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Obsidian Entertainment's Josh Sawyer - the director behind Fallout: New Vegas and historical whodunnit Pentiment - reckons developers sometimes have a bad habit of smoothing over their games to the point of "removing friction," and it's a balance he tried to find in classic RPG Neverwinter Nights 2.
The RPG veteran's comment came while answering a question during a recent YouTube Q&A about the Spirit Eater mechanic in Neverwinter Nights 2's Mask of the Betrayer expansion, which was essentially a dark presence that infected your character and weakened them if not fed properly.
"I remember it was challenging," Sawyer says about the system's development. "And the challenge is that sometimes these ideas, these sort of like mechanical ideas that work well [because] they have ludonarrative consonants, let's say, they're good. They reinforce things that are relevant to the themes of the story that you're telling, but sometimes players just get very aggravated by them, especially if there's a maintenance aspect involved."
"It was meaningful, [but] it didn't make the experience overall a bad one," he adds. "It's not that it shouldn't create friction - again, I've talked about friction before. I think that sometimes game designers go overboard in removing friction. I've done that certainly in the past." While the Spirit Eater was designed to add friction and difficulty, Sawyer says doing that is also a "fine balance." Lean too much in one direction and that friction turns to annoyance.
"Like many mechanics, you want it to feel relevant, but not wear out its welcome," he says. "We wanted it to feel like it was integral, but we didn't want to overwhelm the player with it."
