Gamers are known to be the most capricious creatures in the world. They don’t like games to be too easy. And I don’t like it when they are too complex either. And no matter what you do, some part of them will still be unhappy.
Developers of a Lovecraftian fishing simulator Dredge We encountered a similar situation immediately after the release:
We have hooded characters in the game. They don’t have any special dialogue, but they do ask you to give them a certain fish. When we first released the game, there was a hidden timer that started when these guys asked you for fish.
After 10 in-game days, the unlucky NPC was dying of hunger. If you failed a quest, you forfeited a small reward, but it was inevitable that people would fail at least one of them because in Dredge you often get distracted. And we didn’t tell people they didn’t have much time. We just told them these guys were hungry and that was the end of the explanation.
It would seem that the curious and very immersive mechanics should have appealed to gamers. But no – negative reviews began to appear on Steam in which people complained that hungry NPCs would die if they were not fed. As a result, just three days after the release, the studio removed the timer:
Within three days, we removed this timer because it was the number one source of negative reviews on Steam.
It’s not such an alien concept. This happens all the time in Dark Souls when you do something on one side of the map and on the other someone dies because of your actions. So we thought we could get away with it. Our team even made it so that failing a quest would still count as completing it for achievements. We thought it was fun, but people fucking hated the mechanic.
In the first few days, the Internet was flooded with articles on “How to keep these guys from dying.” In one of the DLCs we added another hooded figure and people were panicking: “Oh no, they added timers again.”
Fortunately, gamers’ dissatisfaction with timers did not prevent the game from becoming one of the best indie titles of last year and gaining 95% positive reviews on Steam.
