i'm listening to ludonarrative talks and thinking about how deeply the expectation of "player agency" and valuing "less authored" game narrative is cultural. like, JRPGs tend to be very heavily authored. there are a lot of monologues that players love to pick apart.

i love authored content and i think that anime games have already proven that they can succeed. yet american studios are jumping into procgen like linear content is the old fad of yesteryear

here's what i learned from making LIONKILLER: if you assume that providing player choices is inherently better than authored content, then you miss out on a lot of amazing opportunities to hit juicy story beats.

if you assume that choices are inherently good, then you end up designing narrative choices for their own sake instead of designing choices because it's "right" for the story