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Did That Just Happen? Game Mechanics That Make Your Head Turn

There are certain game mechanics that are normal occurrences, most of which do not provoke a reaction out of a player. However, there are some mechanics that cause you to scratch your head and ask yourself "what the hell just happened?" I am going to discuss the game that first ever made me feel this way. 

While it has become more common among open world role-playing games, the idea of killing someone and them staying dead no matter what, was a shock to me when I first played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Most of the games that I played, if you killed someone that held any importance or dictation of the story, they would respond the next time you visited their location. With Skyrim, I was flabbergasted when I realized this was not the case. When playing the game, I was screwing around and accidentally stole money from the blacksmith in Riverwood. After I stole the money from him, he attacked me, so like any logical person I defended myself and killed him. I left the city and thought nothing of his death. I returned to buy something from his blacksmith shop and he was not there. Initially I thought this was a glitch or something, but to my disappointment, his death was definite, and now I was down one of the best blacksmiths in the entire game; I was pissed. That situation was my first encounter with a game mechanic that I found unique and a bit head-jarring. 

This mechanic was interesting to me because it completely alters what you are able to do throughout the game. If you were in dire need of supplies near Riverwood in my case, too bad you have to go somewhere exponentially farther away. Also, in some cases, these characters could be important for specific missions, but once they are killed those missions could disappear or remain incomplete because of the death of that character. This happened to me in Skyrim on a couple different occasions and I never got used to it. Another reason I find this mechanic interesting is because it is way more complicated to develop then having the character simply respond every time you enter their location. This interests me because Bethesda Games, the creators of the Elder Scrolls series, takes the time to create an in-depth experience with specific aspects of realism, and I really appreciate that type of dedication in game making. 

With this idea, I want to give a little take on what I think games could do with this mechanic in the future. In my opinion, it would be interesting to see if a game would allow for main characters to be killed in role playing games, creating a more adaptive go-with-the-flow style of game that has a remarkable amount of avenues to complete a story. Obviously it would be difficult to kill the main protagonist, but lets say one of the main non-playable characters, who dictates major missions in the plot, dies, it would create a whole new line of missions that only comes if that character dies. However, if he survives, you will stay on the normal path of missions. If this has been done, I have not seen it. I think it would be such a cool mechanic to implement in a game. 

I am going on hiatus for awhile with my writing, so there is no preview for my next post. Thanks for reading over the past little while. Talk soon. 

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