/u/Kinetic_Waffle:
So... bit of a more general question here...
What's your favourite part of the game? Both what you've worked on and are most proud of, and what you've played with for the most enjoyment? What're the bits of the game that just came out better than you guys expected and you look at and think, 'Yeah. We did that right.'
Eric Fenstermaker:
For what I got to work on, I'm excited for the reactivity in the game. I was sitting in our narrator's voiceover recording session a few months ago, and almost all of it was lines of epilogue, because of all the various permutations of player choices that can be made in the game. We got to the end of the session and he was only like halfway through the script. On the one hand, I'm thinking, I'm gonna get yelled at because we had (at the time) only scheduled and budgeted for one session for him. But on the other hand, I'm thinking, damn straight we need two recording sessions for this ending. That's an RPG, son.
And we went kind of overboard with player backgrounds and development, too. One of the big goals for the narrative was to make sure the player was able to really roleplay the character they envisioned. So we started with 17 backgrounds, but then we added several additional layers of nuance to better define that background. You're a drifter, sure, but are you more of a swindler who gets chased from town to town or are you more of a roving psychopath? You make those choices early on in a conversation with an NPC, and then they show up in a procedurally generated biography. Then you play the game and the bio keeps getting longer with every major choice you make. By the end of the game you've got this entire memoir that you wrote by playing the game - a chronicle of the character you've been defining the whole time. And the odds are that because of all the different possible choices throughout the game, no two biographies will turn out the same.
In terms of my favorite part to play... difficult without spoilers, and I'm biased toward the first half of the game, which I've played more, but there's an area where you're sneaking around a place you're not supposed to be, and you can either go in guns blazing or you can be more clever about it and sneak through incognito. In the latter case, you're prompted for a password when you're right in the belly of the beast, and when they ask it there's a wisecrack you can give instead of the real answer, and I usually can't resist and it leads to a really challenging and fun fight.
