Avellone says that his definition of a role-playing game hasn’t changed at all over his two decades in game development, the integral element being a focus on what industry figures often term “choice and consequence.”
“An RPG allows you to take on a role,” says Avellone. “It allows you to make decisions about your character and your place in the world that are meaningful, and it allows you to grow in some fashion — either XP or otherwise — and present challenges to overcome that allow for that growth: combat, narrative, or otherwise.”
Avellone draws a line between these core tenets of RPG design and other elements that he views as equally important but not essential to it being an RPG. For example, most of the best RPGs out there are loved for their evocative worlds, like Fallout’s vision of an America soaked to the bone with nostalgia and radiation, or the mountains of rusted-out machines that make up Monte Cook’s Numenera, the setting for the spiritual successor to Planescape. More controversially, Avellone says that he regards customisation elements like base-management or even building your own character from scratch as a modern addition to the formula that he finds personally appealing, but ultimately not “key to [every] RPG.”
He points to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as an example of a great RPG that doesn’t feature character creation — though you can give Geralt of Rivia a nice shave, or let his white hair flow long and free, you’re ultimately stuck in his role as a social outcast that hunts monsters for a meagre living. “What’s important about Witcher 3 is that it allows significant choices,” Avellone says. “And what’s even better about it is that the questions it asks of you are ones where there isn’t a clear answer — so it’s less about what the game can tell you, and more about asking yourself what you would do in that situation, as a player."
"What I mean is this: suppose you are presented with a decision, but exploring the game world has told you that choice X is Chaotic Evil and choice Y is Lawful Good. That’s less of a role-playing decision to me, versus when it’s not so clear-cut, because you have to do more searching of what values you have as a player, and what risks you might be taking in making a decision — even with how much you trust what you’re being told by the person you’re talking to. The Witcher 3 presented that world. It had a lot of complexity and made you give a lot of thought to your decisions – for that, I thought it was a great RPG.”
Avellone says that he appreciates the wealth of choices modern games allow him to make about gear, fighting style, and general combat capabilities. But to return to his favourite example of The Witcher 3, the game’s wealth of branching questlines is what makes it “a great RPG. In games, the willingness to integrate choice comes down to the budget of the game and the expenses involved with the choice... The more expensive the game, the more resistance there can be in the development process to showing choice in player agency, because branching assets can be very, very expensive.”
