Good day Mr. Ziets, if you could go back in time and change Spirit Eater mechanic in MotB, would you change how it works or leave it as it is? Or maybe have thoughts on how it should work in your opinion?
My single biggest objection to the spirit-eater mechanic is that it discouraged exploration and side questing… because if you explored at a leisurely pace (and didn’t know how to exploit the system), it could literally kill you. So that’s the issue I’d want to solve, while still retaining the threat that the curse represents.
The easiest fix to the spirit meter might have been to remove the death component. You’d suffer effects over time if you didn’t devour spirits, but those effects would stop short of killing you. They could still impact your abilities and cause status effects. Maybe they’d affect your appearance, too. If things got bad enough, NPCs might try to drive you off, and you wouldn’t be allowed back into town. (We actually discussed something like that during development – it reminded me of the vampire and werewolf curses in Elder Scrolls.) But you could always devour a spirit to temporarily reverse these effects, and they’d never actually end your game.
While that sort of fixes the problem, I don’t like the fact that the gameplay and the narrative are at odds (i.e., the narrative says the curse is fatal, but it’s really not).
Another possibility is to make the progress of the curse be story-based, rather than timer-based. Mask of the Betrayer, like many game stories, was arranged in a series of story steps – e.g., step 1: escape the Barrow, step 2: prepare for the battle with Okku, etc. Instead of basing the progress of the curse on a ticking clock, we could have advanced the severity of the curse with each story step. At each stage, the player could arrest their condition - to a greater or lesser extent - by devouring souls/spirits or finding ways to suppress the effects of the curse. (Additionally, we could have controlled what options the player had available to feed or suppress the curse at each stage, and what impacts those options would have if the player chose to take advantage of them.) If the player failed to adequately address the curse on any given story step, their condition would deteriorate further on the next story step. Eventually, if they allowed the curse to progress too far, they’d actually die.
I like that solution a little better because within each story phase, the player has infinite time to explore, take side quests, etc., but the curse is still potentially fatal if the player doesn’t address it.
Just for fun, I also ran this question by Kevin Saunders, since he and I both worked on the high-level vision for the game. Here's what he said:
“Overall, I really liked the design Eric Fenstermaker devised and I thought it achieved our goals for the system. I do think we could have helped players better understand how to manage it. But I think the primary reason some disliked the spirit-eater mechanic was because of psychological impact, not the practical gameplay effects. Just knowing that you're under time pressure changes how you approach the game and makes it feel less like a Neverwinter CRPG. So what I would want to change would be to give the PC some true respites from the effect -- I'd want to approach the area design differently, so it's an active mechanic in some specific sections of the game, but irrelevant in others. This separation would have allowed us to improve the overall pacing and have the tension caused by the spirit meter be more deliberately woven into the design of specific areas without altering the feel of the game in others.”
I like Kevin’s idea a lot. The curse would still have gameplay consequences, but they’d be limited to situations that we controlled via area design. As long as we prepared enough of these situations for the player, they’d feel like the curse had a meaningful impact on their game.
Essentially, this is a content-based solution, and it avoids the constant maintenance mechanic that (I think) a lot of players disliked. So something like this may have been a good choice for us too.