My feelings on the spirit meter have changed over time.
One of the original incentives for the spirit meter was to “fix” the rest system in NWN2, which I hated. It drove me nuts that players could rest after almost every fight in NWN2, which completely removed the need to conserve resources (spells, powers, etc.). In games where you can’t rest whenever you want, you are forced to use your spells and abilities strategically – for me, that was always a significant part of the fun. But in NWN2, you could blow your biggest spells on practically every fight. The only “dangerous” battles were the ones that could potentially wipe out your party. So we wanted to design a system that introduced a genuine cost to resting.
The other incentive was to make the player’s curse meaningful. If players were just told that they were cursed, but they didn’t experience any actual in-game consequences of their affliction, we all agreed that the whole plot would feel a little silly.
The system that Eric Fenstermaker designed was meant to mimic an addiction. The more you used your powers, the more rapidly the curse would progress, and you would have to feed more and more frequently. Plus the player’s level of corruption would continue to increase during rest, which created an incentive to rest less frequently. I loved the concept, and at the time, I felt like it addressed both of our goals.
But here’s the problem. Many – possibly most – RPG players like to take their time exploring the world, talking to NPCs, discovering secret areas, and completing side quests. The spirit meter actively discourages this style of play, encouraging the player to stick to the main quest and resolve the curse as quickly as possible. So unless players found a way to “cheat” the curse (which many did), they were discouraged from exploring our side content and enjoying the game the way they wanted to enjoy it.
Years later, I had some discussions with Josh Sawyer about this, and I now find myself on the opposite side of the debate. I think a player’s sense of being “cursed” could be reinforced in other, less heavy-handed ways – for example, NPC reactions, scripted events, visual changes, and settlements that won’t admit the player (forcing you to find a more dangerous way inside and be “on edge” at the prospect of discovery whenever you are there). I think we could also have found less fatal ways to create the sense of a curse that is “draining” the player – for example, your abilities deteriorate if you don’t feed, but you don’t actually die, making the curse impactful but not a game-stopper. Or maybe even a “hard core” mode where the curse was fatal, and a “normal” mode where it wasn’t.
Ultimately, I want players to be able to enjoy the game without having to resort to cheats or exploits, and for many players, I feel like the spirit meter became an obstacle to enjoying our content.
) are completely popamole shit though.
