Old friends can disagree about the smallest things. In The Lich Wars, Aleks and his three lifelong companions have rather more serious memories to argue over. Their lives stretch across nearly thirty years of war, and not everyone remembers those years in quite the same way. We spoke with the developers about their unusual approach to storytelling, the challenges of writing such an ambitious RPG, and why they decided to leave the open world of The Necromancer’s Tale behind.
A Past Nobody Can Agree On
Four people can live through the same terrible events and come away with very different accounts of what happened. It’s an intriguing idea for an RPG, especially one that follows its characters across several decades. The developers have drawn inspiration from classic Gothic literature, where even the person telling the story might not be entirely trustworthy.
We are approaching The Lich Wars as a proper literary work of gothic fiction, rather than just a game with a gothic atmosphere. There are a number of themes which classic gothic literature explores, including the concept of the unreliable narrator (Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft would be good examples of this). This is one of the themes in their work which I find most powerful: it puts you in the shoes of someone under so much psychological stress that they can’t even believe their own memories.
The reason we chose to push strongly in a literary direction is that we saw how strongly our writing in The Necromancer’s Tale resonated with players, and it was the story and narrative that won most awards. We saw that there is a genuine market for well written game narratives which explore these sorts of ideas.
Although the overall story arcs have been mapped out for the game, we are still only in the first war in terms of completed writing. It is this war which produced the horrific events which characters remember differently. We haven’t yet written the later scenes where events are discussed. The intention is that the player will indeed be able to debate and discuss what “really” happened.
We’re curious to see how those disagreements will play out, particularly when the characters have had years to convince themselves that their version of events is the correct one. The game’s unusual presentation should complement that approach, although its origins are rather more straightforward.
The core idea – of the illustrated 3D book – carried through from The Necromancer’s Tale. In that game, there is a brief (~30 minute) prologue presented in that format. We have had a lot of players say how much they enjoyed the format and many saying they’d love a full game done that way.
The table is a separate idea, of course. It’s a low-key replacement for an open world: an opportunity to show key scenes in a more impressive way than would be possible in a pencil sketch. We’re attempting to deliver a visual novel with top-end multimedia quality as well as top-end writing.
The book and table also suggest the idea that the protagonist is somehow in a later time, reflecting on events of the past – the book and table are representations of events, rather than actually being the events. This ties in with the idea of unreliable narratives and self-justifying constructions which justify the things we do and ease the things that we can’t quite accept from our past.
Decisions That Follow Us Through the Years
Of course, remembering the past is only part of the equation. We also want our decisions to matter, particularly when we’re following the same characters for such a long period. Keeping track of those relationships is a considerable challenge, and the developers have chosen to focus on smaller changes that can influence how people treat us later in the story.
The core story arc doesn’t change, it’s the details within it which do. I guess the answer to keeping early decisions meaningful is to always be on the look out for opportunities to interconnect events. Also a lot of our relationship modelling is carried by a Relationship number (which the player has for each significant NPC and for the military hierarchy itself.) The key then is to carefully balance the changes to these numbers, and then to identify psychologically meaningful ways to branch the story in small ways based on them.
The fact that some pretty momentous things happen early on in the story also means that early player decisions will naturally reverberate throughout the following years.
The way we experience those decisions has changed considerably since The Necromancer’s Tale. The developers aren’t attempting another open-world adventure, although they acknowledge that a more controlled narrative brings its own problems. It’s a decision influenced by both the story they want to tell and the realities of independent game development.
Although TNT was a traditional open-world CRPG, it was heavily text/narrative-driven too: more like Disco Elysium than Baldur’s Gate. The most praised features were the writing and story, so we are leaning into that directly with The Lich Wars. In this respect, The Lich Wars is less of a change of direction than it might seem.
Another factor in our decision is the amount of work involved in making an open-world game – it took 5.5 years to make TNT, and we were hesitant to commit to such a big project immediately after it, or to keep fans waiting so long for the follow-up. The main thing we miss from the previous game is exactly that: the open world. In an open world, a lot of the pacing is controlled by the player as they move about and decide who to talk to next and what lines of inquiry to follow. In contrast, The Lich Wars risks feeling stifled and lower-agency; we are implementing specific features to mitigate that – for example, during less intense times in the story, the player is offered a menu of small ‘side quests’ to engage with or ignore as they wish.
The Lich Wars is also a big, sprawling story which covers not only 30 years but also brings the player on tours across much of Europe. The story we wanted to tell was best served by an approach that isn’t constrained by a traditional open-world format.
We can understand that decision, although we’re interested to see how much freedom the final game will offer. Having opportunities to spend time with different characters or pursue smaller activities could make a welcome change of pace between the more dramatic moments.
Fighting Wars, One Paragraph at a Time
Combat is another area where The Lich Wars takes a different approach from traditional RPGs. A dramatic battle can be difficult enough to make interesting with detailed animations and elaborate environments. Doing much of that work through written descriptions presents an entirely different challenge.
Combat choices are offered in the regular narrative text, as options for the player to pick from. A combat choice combines one or more skills/stats (e.g. Strength, Agility, or Readiness or Morale) into a percentage chance of success, and then between two and six graded outcomes might happen based on how strongly the dice-roll succeeds or fails. The beauty of this system is that every single combat sequence takes the form of custom-wrritten narrative, and thus every decision in combat is unique and never repetitive and is not constrained by 3D models or animations. More traditional combat in games has a tendency to get predictable, whereas we can offer unexpected outcomes and (we hope) the player will engage with each combat as a unique experience.
It’s certainly an old-school approach: much more like a tabletop RPG than an action RPG.
That sounds promising to us, particularly the possibility of having encounters play out in unexpected ways. Of course, it also means a tremendous amount of writing, and keeping everything consistent across a branching narrative is no small task.
We were interested in how the developers organise such a complicated project, especially with several writers contributing to the same story. Given everything they learned while making The Necromancer’s Tale, their answer was rather surprising.
In fact, we are following the exact same process! It worked really well the last time, although I do acknowledge it was a process that we evolved into through necessity rather than by design.
Essentially, the way it works is that we have a well-developed high-level story design – with all the plots and character arcs specified – and with individual scenarios scoped loosely as single paragraphs. The entire document is 55+ pages. We work with a team of writers (currently 5, including me) who ‘claim’ individual scenarios to write whenever they are ready – this allows them to specialise and pick the scenes that appeal to them most, and it also means nobody is put under too much pressure to deliver to a deadline. We meet every two weeks and discuss what we’re working on and what comes next, so there’s a lot of cross-pollination going on.
The writers deliver their work to me (the editor) as regular Google Docs, and I enter them into our branching narrative tool (Articy: Draft). Although this is somewhat onerous on me, it forces me to read very carefully as each piece is entered, so it leads naturally to a well-edited, high-coherence narrative. Articy is an excellent node-based visual tool which means I can easily spot errors and additional opportunities to add bits to the scenes as I put them into the game.
It’s interesting to see how much freedom individual writers have within such a carefully planned story. With so many characters, decisions, and events to keep track of, we can only imagine how complicated that 55-page document might become as development continues.
We’re looking forward to seeing how The Lich Wars develops, but we’re especially curious about the planned conversations between Aleks and his friends. We’ve played plenty of RPGs where our decisions determine who survives a battle. Having to face someone years later and argue about what really happened sounds like a rather different kind of confrontation. And quite possibly a more uncomfortable one.
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