Branching Main Quest

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Unedjis
Schurke
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Hi everyone,

yesterday I finished my first playthrough of Enderal, and the ending did not disappoint - imo it fit very well with the overall theme and game design. Enderal has been one of the most enjoyable game experiences I've ever had, and the most enjoyable related to TES / Skyrim.

One design choice, however, I have a problem with. I'm a pen&paper role player, so I like my freedom, so the following are the ramblings of "someone who wanted to be free" (hint hint). Around the time I left the Aged Man's manor with the Word of the Dead, I began to seriously question whether building the Beacon was the solution to the Cleansing - or rather the conduit that makes it happen in the first place. Turns out, I was right all along, but I was never given a dialogue option or a possible course of action to voice my suspicions. This bugged me, especially after meeting the High Ones in person for the first time (on Moonshine Island), and a whole lot more after Lishari's death. I wished for a way to question Tealor's line of argument, to investigate Lishari's death and find her real murderer. Tealor doesn't lift a finger and is then surprised by all three betrayals because he doesn't see, he doesn't listen, he is self-absorbed to a point where he is naive in trusting the few people he feels support his cause. No background check on his Nehrimese allies?

Now, of course you could say that, since Tealor is nothing but a tool of the High Ones, they would have made him that way. But not the player character. The Prophet may have been a creation of the High Ones, but obviously has the power to act against them, to exercise free will - to the extent the plot allows.

Now, here's what I would have tried to implement, had I been part of the dev team:

1) At some point during the Second Act (probably best during "Interlude") give the player a chance to question the narrative about the High Ones and the role of the Beacon. With Tealor, this would be fruitless as he would brush off your concerns because he is so convinced that he's right that he doesn't listen to you, or anyone. However, at this point Jespar might listen to you. Calia as well, but she probably won't trust you enough yet at this point.

2) After first meeting the High Ones and then being imprisoned by Coarek, I got really bad vibes. Getting back to Ark, Lishari hints at a traitor within our own ranks. There should be a way to press this issue further while talking to Tealor - only to have him brush you off again.

3) After Lishari's death, make it possible to investigate the murder. Talk to people:
- Question the innkeeper when Yuslan came in, if anyone else was up there, if anyone heard anything.
- Go to the commander of the City Guard, report your findings to her, get her to actually do something or task you with the investigation.
- Option A: In the end, get a strong suspicion that it was probably one of the Nehrimese without any solid proof. Talk to Tealor about it, hear him deny everything because they serve his cause and he needs them, so without solid proof there will be no arrest and no action taken.
- Option B: Some not-so-solid clues (left by Yuslan on purpose) point to some innocent and expendable member of the Order. Tealor is all to happy to jump on that and arranges a trial in which the innocent is sentenced to whatever. During that trial you get the strong feeling that, whatever else the wrongly accused has said or done (stuff that goes against the Order or Tealor's agenda), it has nothing to do with Lishari's death. You confront Tealor with that, but he won't listen because he is convinced that he's right (he has to be - he needs the Nehrimese for his mission).

4) If your conviction has grown enough that the Beacon might not be what Tealor makes it out to be and that the Order is rushing blindly towards their doom, you have a choice: Either you follow Tealor regardless, thereby rejecting responsibility (that way the main quest will proceed as usual), or you start pursuing your own agenda with the goal of ascertaining the real purpose of the Beacon, and then acting accordingly. To do so, you can do the following:
- Gather supporters, starting with Jespar and Calia. With them, you can discuss your own plans, and they may weigh in on them. Others may include the Truchessa and Signet Leader Jorek Batarr.
- Find out what will happen once the Black Stones are connected to the Beacon (Ark's defenses will momentarily be weakened).
- You still don't know if the Beacon is good or bad, so you push both outcomes. On the one hand, you keep working for the Order by bringing them the Black Stones and therefore advancing their plans to rebuild the Beacon. Maybe you'll find out about the Numinos before they do, so you're at least certain that they can't / won't use the Beacon straight away. On the other hand, you need to get your hands on a means to destroy the Beacon once and for all. So you become a double agent to further your own goals
- Enter Coarek. He must have whatever it takes to fully destroy the Beacon and prevent another one from being built. You contact him, gain his trust (as far as possible), make a deal to help him get into Ark: You'll convince Signet Leader Jorek Batarr to open the gates, and you volunteer to spearhead the destruction of the Beacon. In return, Coarek has to give you whatever is needed to destroy the Beacon. Coarek says that the ideal time for an attack would be right after putting all three Black Stones in place.
- After Coarek invades the city, it turns out that he is a d*ck (surprise surprise) - he doesn't have the thing yet, but he tells you where to find it: in the Star City. So you continue to help Tealor and the others by getting the necessary parts for the Starship.
- Once in the Star City, you not only search for the Numinos but also for the thing that is required to destroy the Beacon. You may also realize that to prevent another Beacon from being built, you need to erase the knowledge of how to make one from the world. You use the Starling Archives to find all the locations of Beacons from former cycles (at least those the Starlings knew of).
- Back on Vyn, you give Tealor the location of the Pyrean Beacon, but you get the locations of the other Beacons to Coarek so he can send out parties that try to find and destroy all the remnants of other Beacons around Vyn.
- After your return, Coarek prepares to mount another attack on Ark. You know it's coming, so you can try to warn people you care about (mostly minor NPCs - Calia and Jespar won't leave your side).
- You go with Tealor down into the City of Floods. When the High Ones play the vision of Tealor and Irlanda, you can confront Tealor about it. He'll get angry.
- You get a chance to stop Yuslan's betrayal, but that means you also don't get the Numinos because none of the others know how to contain it. Regardless of whether you stop Yuslan's betrayal or not, Tealor decides he must activate the Beacon without the Numinos.
- Option A: If the betrayal has happened, you are stunned / knocked out and cannot chase after Tealor immediately. You enter the portal, and Fleshless and the rest plays out like in the original.
- Option B: If you prevented it, you can chase after him right away and try to convince him that his plan is folly. Of course you'll fail to do so. You now have a quick decision to make: Either attack him (in that case you have a chance to actually kill him), or hesitate, which gives Tealor a chance to lock you into a sort of stasis bubble long enough for him to light the Beacon. Once you are free of the bubble, the events leading up to Fleshless and the rest of the game play out like in the original.
- Option B --> KILL Tealor: Fleshless is skipped, you never meet the Black Guardian. You can now choose to search for your love interest, and of course find them.
- Eventually, you teleport back to the Sun Temple (possibly with your love interest in tow) only to find that Coarek and his armies have managed to get into the temple's courtyard. You arrive in the middle of Coarek's speech in which he announces that he will now make the Cleansing happen. The High Ones appear and reveal that in order to do so, Coarek must LIGHT the Beacon without the Numinos instead of destroying it. Coarek is taken aback but accepts the new narrative after the High Ones explain why they lied to Coarek before (so basically they explain their Plan A, which is the regular ending with Tealor lighting the Beacon because he thinks that's the solution, and they needed the pressure of Coarek's army to push Tealor towards a rash decision).
--> NEW POSSIBLE ENDING:
1) Fight your way through Coarek's men to get to the Beacon. You may have your love interest as an ally if you saved her, and in any case the one you didn't choose to romance breaks out of the Curarium with a small group of surviving Keepers and Novices. A great battle begins in which everyone can die, including your love interest and your other friend. If they do die, you'll get a chance to talk to them in their dying moments, to say goodbye.
2) You realize that in order to destroy the Beacon, you have to sacrifice yourself. Depending on whether your love interest has survived or not, this may be an easy or difficult decision to make.
2a) If you decide to sacrifice yourself, you can task any surviving friends with finding and destroying the Beacons and all records thereof throughout Vyn. If none of your friends survived, you'll have to trust in Coarek's men to do so.
---> The epilogue reveals that the struggle against the High Ones is far from over, as they will try to get other humans to build another Beacon. A race between search parties begins: those who want to destroy the remnants of old Beacons, and those who want to find them in order to build one.
2b) If you decide that your love means more to you than the salvation of mankind, you can just leave (to the Star City, where you'll be safe from the Cleansing that is almost inevitable as long as the Beacon is intact and there is no Numinos).
---> In the epilogue you observe the Cleansing from the Star City, but it is hinted at that humankind now has a fresh start to become better than before.

This has been a very spontaneous thing, so it's entirely possible that there are still some plotholes. While I know that nothing like this will ever be implemented (partly because Tealor Arentheal's voice actor died and this plot wouldn't be possible without new recordings for that character), but I still tried to construct this alternative in a way that would leave most of the normal main quest intact but give you some additional choices with an actual positive-ish ending that still requires enough sacrifice (almost the entire population of Ark slaughtered by Coarek's men) to stay true to the general dark tone and theme of Enderal.

Cheers, and huuuuge thank you for this absolutely amazing game,
Unedjis
risiblewilbury
Gauner
Gauner
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I get why you'd question the beacon, and that would be cool. But remember, nobody was actually wrong about the beacon. It does have the power to destroy the high ones. Their game is a dangerous one, having you build a machine that could destroy them, only relying on one betrayal to stop that happening.

I don't think an ending with Caorek lighting the beacon would fit the narrative at all. He's not a fleshless one (I don't think), even if he is, he's not the one who is supposed to light the beacon, as per the other cycles. Also I don't think having an arbitrary ending, where ppl still fight over whether to use or destroy the beacon is nice either, it would make the player wonder if there was any point to what they did.

I like the current endings. I understand the wish for more freedom, but what I took from the game is that you have the ultimate freedom to stop the high ones at any point: stop playing. If you play the game a second time (highly recommended btw) you'll see just how many hints, and straight up spoilers, are thrown at the player before the endings come to pass. It is made very clear that the only way to stop the high ones winning is kill the prophet. The only way you can do that is stop playing. I don't know what greater freedom the player could have than that tbh.
Unedjis
Schurke
Schurke
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Interesting view on freedom within a game! I wouldn't have thought of that, as for me the point of playing a game is to actually *play* it. ;) So rather than moving on to the meta level and choosing THAT path of freedom, I'd still appreciate an ingame way to achieve something similar.

As for your first point, yeah - nobody is wrong, but nobody is completely right either, so in my opinion it would be only logical to have some kind of backup plan in case things go south.

Regarding Coarek not being the one who's supposed to light the beacon - does it matter who is *supposed* to do it? As long as the High Ones win, they should be fine with whoever does it. Besides, I don't really buy into the idea that in EVERY cycle there is a betrayer, and that it always happens in the same way (as illustrated in one of the last visions of the Pyreans). Fleshless ones or no, there's always someone close to the Emperor who should see that betrayal coming and try to stop it. I simply do not believe that they keep failing to stop that betrayal over and over again. To me, this is a plot decision that is just as arbitrary as any of the alternatives I tried to outline. It only works for the High Ones because the plot requires it to do so.

And the whole point of my alternative outline was to give the player a feeling that their decisions DO matter. Of course, if in the end you decide that destroying the Beacon is the way to go, then all your efforts to try and get it running have been for nothing - except that in the course of assembling the Beacon, you also gathered the knowledge to make you question its real purpose, ultimately leading to your suspicion that it's the key to mankind's destruction and subsequent decision to destroy IT rather than let IT destroy YOU. Personally, this would give me a much greater feeling of "having achieved something" because I actually broke free of the High Ones' influence despite all their efforts.

But don't get me wrong - I do not *hate* the existing endings at all. It's just the pen&paper role player in me that wants more freedom, that wants his decisions to matter both along the way and in the end.
Buccaneer
Paladin
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But this not a pen&player role player game or any kind of role player game - it is a linear cinematic game in which you are playing a masterpiece of a story. Gothic 1 & 2 as well as Mafia 1 & 2 were that way, not to mention titles like Beyond Two Souls, Life is Strange, etc. That's the genre Enderal fits in and if done well (which Enderal was), there is nothing that should be changed except for mechanisms of how to get there. You can make up your own story in Skyrim because there is none and that's fine because it fits the rpg genre. Enderal is a linear cinematic game, you do not nor should not make up your own story. You are playing the Enderal team's (i.e., Nicolas') great story and vision, which is why it is so special.
risiblewilbury
Gauner
Gauner
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10.06.2018 14:30Unedjis hat geschrieben:
...as for me the point of playing a game is to actually *play* it. ;)
Years of elder scrolls games have taught me to ignore gameplay wherever possible :lol:
10.06.2018 14:30Unedjis hat geschrieben:
Besides, I don't really buy into the idea that in EVERY cycle there is a betrayer, and that it always happens in the same way (as illustrated in one of the last visions of the Pyreans). Fleshless ones or no, there's always someone close to the Emperor who should see that betrayal coming and try to stop it. I simply do not believe that they keep failing to stop that betrayal over and over again.
Have you seen the invisible gorilla video? Most anyone would watch that a thousand times and never see anything out of the ordinary. Maybe this is just taken from my own play style (I get sucked into the story, and my brain turns off. I never really think about my choices in games like this), but I feel like the average person (which the prophet is supposed to be) wouldn't really see the betrayal coming like you maybe did. Could be wrong on that though, and I definitely see where you're coming from
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