Why is it that in a role-playing game where the stakes are usually ‘the end of the world’, the end of the world always has to wait for us to finish our sprawling to-do list first? There’s no way you’ve never encountered this. I came across it most recently in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which, after a thrilling end to Act One, effectively turned to me, the player, and said, hey why don’t you focus on some companion quests now instead, eh? The world was still ending, the danger hadn’t diminished or passed in any way, it’s just the game needed a pace change and for me to see some of the other cool stuff in it.
Egregious though it was, The Veilguard is far from the only BioWare game to have done it – I think, throwing my mind back across a dozen of them, they probably all have. The Reapers are going to destroy the galaxy! But don’t worry you’ve got time to go scan some planets if you want, first. BioWare games are far from the only RPGs to have done it either. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you have a tadpole for crying out loud, one that you know will turn you into a mind flayer probably pretty soon, and yet still you have time for, well, anything you want to do. In The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, you’re racing to find your daughter-of-sorts Ciri who’s being chased by a menace of legend, yet you’ve got plenty of time to become the bareknuckle boxing champion of the continent, or Gwent champion, if you so wish. This approach is so common in RPGs it’s like dwarves with Scottish accents; a better question to ask would be whether there’s an RPG that do it – one that hurries you up instead?
I’m thinking. It’s tricky.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.
Pentiment? It doesn’t quite fit the RPG template but it’s one of the only games I can think of that has a sense of passing time, and of either-or choices associated with it – you won’t be able to do everything so you will have to choose. It’s a game in which time feels like time – time that’s as inexorable and immovable as we know it be. Couldn’t a system like that work in a more fully fledged RPG?