The Blood of Dawnwalker lets you complete areas in any order, kill any NPCs you like, and still complete the game after failing every quest: 'We're giving even more freedom to players'

Prisoner gets off the boat, hops a wall before even doing any paperwork, robs an apothecary and does god in with a single right jab.

Thats the shenanigans I lived for

this sounds like baldurs gate. There is little to nothing that actually ends the game.

Would be awesome if it comes with a base building mechanic, where you “hire” people (or enslave them?) to work for you. Either in your base or around the world, like a strategy game. I doubt this mechanic is in this game, but now I want to play such a Vampire Empire game.

I also prepare food from things I like the taste of.

You know what, very valid point. …I like you.

That NPC isn’t even required. He just makes it easier.

You need wraith guard else the weapons needed to beat the game do absurd damage to you. If you do the msq you get it, of you murder hobo everyone you have a single back up NPC the game doesn’t tell you about and even lies to your face about his existence that gives you a secondary option to get wraith guard.

But fuck it just kill him too. Then go drink an absurd amount of potions, cast god tier spells, and man handle the weapons while they do their best to kill you. But you have more God juice running though you then vivic ever could fucking hope to have.

Who cares that your taking 100s of damage every second. Just have a million hp. Its fucking Morrowind.

YOU ARE THE ONLY GOD HERE AND THE ONLY GOD THAT MATTERS DEGOTH UR. NOW GET FUCKED.

I think how New Vegas does it is way better than how Morrowind does it. Morrowind is simply so loosely scripted that the games doesn’t really care if you break it. If you look at Morrowind speedruns there are actually no story beats that you need to hit to finish the game, you can just brute force yourself to the end. But you do have to know how to brute force it.

In New Vegas Yes Man is a deliberate design decision to let you kill whomever you want and still have the option to finish the story as it’s told. You can do your first playthrough like a maniacal murdering machine, kill everyone in your sights and still finish the game in the intended way. It makes sense from a narrative perspective, it makes sense in a gameplay way (because technically you can kill Yes Man, another one just replaces the one you killed) and it gives you excellent control over the story. You don’t have to go through all the factions to deal with them one way or another, you can just say you don’t care and go straight to the final battle. I think it’s a brilliant solution to quite a few problems that most games outright ignore.

Fallout 1&2 were pretty ok with that also.

I remember killing Vivek just to see how far abusing soultrap could take you. I got the message that I was now living doomed world. If you can get around that, that’s awesome.

Go play Morrowind. Its literally this. And doing it where you murder everyone and fail every quest. Is easily the hardest path and very much the most earned.

I really love the game desing behind this system. The game is on a timer, but instead of time going foward all the time, the quest “cost” time.

Way of the samurai games did this kind of trick back in the day. In those games the day was divided in to four parts, morning, noon, evening and night. Player had unlimited time to wander the game world, but once they did something big, the time would go foward and depending on what you did the story would go in to different direction. After 5 full days the game would come to a finale, but how you acted, effected who was alive and wich side of the final conflict you would be.

The game ending and story coming to a finale does not necessarily mean you win.

If the game is fun to play and one play trough does not take forever to finish, i can see my self playing the game multible times trough and trying to find the way to make everything end the way i want.

I do! Especially not overcomplicated with rules. Monster of the week is one of my favorites.

Not the original commentor, but i think they meant more narrative failure than mechanical failure.

Like “You failed to save person from burning house, and the failure changes how the story unfolds.” Not “You died to a boss and you need to try again.”

First example of narrative failure that came to mind is from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. There is objective where you need to protect a chrashed pilot from enemies, but if you fail the game does not fail and load previous save. The game goes on and characters death effects the dialogue and a certain story point later in the game.

In souls games, no matter how many times you die, the narrative does not change. Dying effects you only in mechanical sense, where you might loose some recources, but you will never lose them permanently, but there are narrative moments that you can fail. Like in bloodborne if you summon certain npc to your haven, he starts to murder other people you have brought there.