One of the most important design concepts in Children of New Eaden is the player’s ability to tailor the nonlinear story by their choices. This concept, seen in games such as Telltale Games’ The Wolf Among Us (2013), and Supermassive Games’ The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes (2021), is an inevitable part of delivering a memorable and bonding player experience as it enhances player immersion and their perceived agency.
To achieve such a concept, Children of New Eaden incorporated a dialogue system that offered a couple of different approaches towards uncovering the truth. The players need to consider their behaviour, phrases they use, and information they share, all of which affect the mood of the non-playable character they are speaking to. In the future development, if the players are successful at interrogating the suspect, the relationship between their character and their ally would improve and that would lead to different outcomes later on. The same would happen if they are unsuccessful, but that would damage the relationship instead.
NINA ALVIR 