This post contains a number of plot spoilers. If you have not played "Champion of the Gods" to the end yet, you may want to read the post "10 Things You Should Know About Champion of the Gods" first.
Now that "Champion of the Gods" has been officially released, it seems a good time to take a look back at some of the revisions that were made to the game along the way to publication.
The changes help shed some light on the unique storytelling requirements of interactive fiction, in particular fantasy--and at least one of them makes it quite plain that Choice of Games's beta testers can scent a lazy designer at 500 yards.
Just click on a portentous category-header to learn more...
+ Love
In the original version of the game, your character had two romances: one with the apprentice shepherd, and one with the heir. But those romances were not optional--that's right, you had to love the apprentice shepherd, and you had to love the heir, like it or not.
I justified the mandate by telling myself that in the mythic adventure genre, the protag's romances generally are obligatory--the myths are rife with love-at-first-sight and "crash" romance in general, so I felt like I was hitting the right tropes. Plus, with destiny being a prevalent theme in "Champion", I felt like a certain amount of railroading was thematically appropriate.
But if you're one of the game designers who just cringed while reading that last sentence, you already know what I didn't: that agency is not just a feature of good interactive fiction, it's the main attraction. And there's probably nowhere agency matters more to players than in matters of the heart.
So when our beta testers spoke up, new branches were added to the game. First, your character was given the choice to opt out of loving the heir (as well as the choice to feign affection for them, for strategic purposes). Then, they were given the choice to initiate an 11th-hour love affair with their fighting companion, who had never been on the kissing menu before. And finally, after much foot-dragging on my part, your character was given the choice to opt out of their teen romance with the apprentice shepherd--freeing players to explore one, two, three, or none of the game's affairs.
The lesson here: in the second person, as in life, nobody likes to be told who to love.
+ Truth
In "Champion", an integrity/deception stat helps you keep track of how good you are at lying, and it's central to a number of choices--especially those related to your interactions with the gods.
But this crucial stat was not in the original version of the game, and would not have made a difference even if it had been--because in the original version of the game, the gods could read mortal minds, making it impossible to lie to them.
All that changed when the writing started getting closer to the final chapter. By that time in the process, it was becoming all too clear that your character would need some way to deceive the gods; they had become too gray, and it wouldn't take a beta test to know that some players would want to move against them. So the gods lost the power to mind-read, and the players gained the power to lie.
The strange thing was, when I went back to layer that stat into the game, I realized that many choices already contained lying in them, even ones in the early chapters.
Destiny, you say? My obsession with confidence tricksters, more likely.
+ Death
In the published version of "Champion", the final chapter is intended to resolve the story, whilst gently creaking open the door to a sequel. But it may interest you to know that there was once another chapter immediately following that chapter, and that you were dead in it.
That's right folks, in the formerly-final chapter of "Champion", the story jumped forward to the night of your funeral, where your disembodied spirit awaited its release from the earthly plane. In this lowly state, you looked back upon the years after your battle with Daggoras, and made a series of retroactive choices that helped determine your legacy. Then the attendants set your body on fire, and your everlasting soul was off to the Underworld.
I am not going to lie, I loved the smack-in-the-face quality of this chapter--there's nothing like turning the page to discover you're dead to put a little zing in your commute. But this funerary chapter, however startling, also made the reader feel short-changed. As one early tester pointed out, it introduced a lot of epic action and then promptly skipped right over it. It was like passing Disney World while trapped on a train bound for the junkyard.
So, the day before I submitted the files for beta testing, I emailed my editor asking for his OK to cut the chapter; shortly thereafter, it was taken out. But it's worth noting that there was a time when you never made it out of "Champion" alive.
+ Magic
In "Champion", your character has been called upon to rid the world of three corrupt beings: "vestiges" left over from the unruly First Age. But in the original version of the game, these enemies were not from some far-off time--they were just three random foes, each of whom stood in the way of uniting Agossa.
The lack of a shared backstory seemed to work fine for a while, but as the game evolved, the sheer randomness of these three enemies began to bother me--especially because two of them wielded magic. And sure, magic is pretty common in the Greek myths, but I kept wondering where it came from, and why on earth the gods would have allowed humans to have it in the first place.
Needless to say, the concept of the "vestiges" was devised soon after that, and the enemies fell in line behind it. But that's not all that changed once the vestiges showed up...
+ Destiny
In the published version of "Champion", destiny is a controversial phenomenon. There is a lot of debate about whether it should exist at all--if you make the right choices, you can even destroy it.
But in the original version of the game, you couldn't harm destiny intentionally, because to do so would empower the Chaos God--who was more of a straight-up villain back then. So, even if you disliked the gods intensely, you flat-out lost if destiny fell.
All of that changed when the concept of the vestiges was introduced to the game. Their backstory of near-extermination at the hands of the gods did so much to highlight the gods' callousness that destiny itself became a grayer affair, and Daggoras morphed into a more relatable villain. Suddenly, not only did destroying destiny not feel like a failure, it felt like something a player may really want to do--they may even want to team up with Daggoras to do it. So, options were added to afford those possibilities, and destroying destiny was no longer a simple "fail" scenario.
This last change highlights one of my favorite things about the Choice of Games titles: the way they encourage the development of worlds where a player has a lot of ethical leeway, worlds where there's no "right" way to look at things.
It was certainly my goal to do that with "Champion", and here's hoping that some of its choices put you on the spot.