Sacred Fire - Kickstarter Update

Hurls spotted Kickstarter update #21 for Sacred Fire - an interesting discussion about hiding success percentages is going on:

Update #21: Design Focus: Are probabilities ruining role-playing experience?

Hello everyone,

We’ve got a great question from Kamen42 in the comments section of our Kickstarter. He was rewatching Sacred Fire trailers and had an intriguing idea: wouldn’t it be more fun if we hide the success probabilities of choices in Sacred Fire? And the idea seemed so interesting, that Andrej wrote an insightful answer that deserves a full-blown Design Focus update.

If you’d like to refresh how probabilities work in Sacred Fire, you can watch our developers commentary here.

First, here’s the question from Kamen42. It’s a shortened version of his original comments. And below it is Andrej’s take on it.

Kamen42: With each action there are percentages of success. I was wondering if there will be a mode where these percentages are not visible. I think it would be really interesting to play without knowing what chance of success your actions have.

When players have several options how to act, they usually have one that they like the most. However, when they see the chances of success, they might be discouraged and end up doing something else.

I caught myself doing this several times when playing games like Torment. After that I sometimes had a feeling that I don't play the game, that I am merely doing what the game suggests I should do.

Sure, turning the percentages off would definitely lead to making some bad decisions, some that are doomed to fail, but that way the story is entirely in the player's hands. We would be the ones making the decisions. And if we fail, at least we fail doing something we believed.

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