Why do players shed tears for—and sometimes vow revenge against—soldiers and colonists, for whom there are countless replacements even if they die? Conversely, why are the heroes in *Darkest Dungeon* designed in such a way that players don’t develop an emotional attachment to them?
At the “Game Industry Conference (GIC)” held in Poznań, Poland, Jonas Pastors, a researcher at Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas), gave a presentation titled “To Care or Not: Designing Characters for the Right Emotion.”
These are entities that players command, yet are not themselves. Pastors termed these “crew characters.” There are two types: the “author-designed type,” which creators meticulously craft, and the “procedural type,” which is generated by the system.
Using examples such as *Fire Emblem: Three Houses*, *RimWorld*, *XCOM 2*, and *Darkest Dungeon*, he explained the differences in the emotions each type evokes and how the two can be combined.
What Is the Role of NPCs in Games?
Pastors explained that the inspiration for his talk came from a conversation with a friend. When he remarked, “The companions in *Baldur’s Gate 3* are wonderful NPCs that can form bonds with the player,” his friend pointed out, “Are they really NPCs? The player commands them and can even control them. Aren’t they just a strange kind of player character?”
In response to this observation, Pastors reorganized his classification of characters. First, “bots” are entities like the guards in *Skyrim*—their faces are hidden, they cannot be identified as individuals, and when they are defeated, they are replaced by someone else.
An “NPC” is an entity that can be identified as an individual but is not controlled by the player; the Joker from the *Batman: Arkham* series was cited as an example. The reasoning is that it would be strange if players could control a villain.
A “player character” is a character with a story and inner life who is fully controlled by the player. He drew laughter by noting that while he usually uses Kratos from *God of War*, he chose Geralt from *The Witcher* for his lecture in Poland.
An “avatar,” on the other hand, is a character without a distinct personality—merely a means of interacting with the game—with Steve from *Minecraft* serving as an example.
According to him, companions like Karrak from *Baldur’s Gate 3*, soldiers from *XCOM 2*, and settlers from *RimWorld* don’t fit into either category. He defined these characters—who seem to be under the player’s command yet are also distinct entities, existing in this “gray area”—as “crew characters” in his research.
Why Crew Characters Are Important
He explains that crew characters possess a trait rarely found in NPCs: rather than merely standing on the sidelines of the story and occasionally speaking during cutscenes, the time spent with them constitutes the gameplay itself. He explained that because players spend so much time with them, the potential for a relationship is strongest, and if designed well, they can become a powerful storytelling tool.
He also points out that two very different types of characters coexist in this category. The question arises: why are the intricately designed Carack and the visually simple settlers from *RimWorld* grouped together?
He categorizes these two types as “author-driven” (handcrafted) and “procedural” (system-generated).Author-driven characters are individually crafted by writers or narrative designers, who give them a specific narrative arc or “hero’s journey.” Since each one requires balancing and testing, and consumes design resources, their number is limited.
Procedural-type, on the other hand, is a method of creating a “system” that generates characters by combining narrative components rather than crafting individual people. Instead of testing each individual character, we verify whether the system is producing interesting characters. Its strength lies in the ability to generate an unlimited number of characters. These two types are said to have “different emotional strengths.”
Strengths of the Authored Model: “Like Getting to Know a Real Person”
The author-driven approach is the most mainstream and familiar form in video games.It features compelling individuals—or at least the “creators’ earnest attempts to craft them”—which makes it easier to establish realistic conversations. It allows for excellent scripts and performances, and character arcs can be designed to lead to a satisfying conclusion for everyone. The author describes this as “an experience of getting to know someone, just as you would get to know a real person.”
He cited *Fire Emblem: Three Houses* as an example. This game is a tactical RPG where players place characters on a grid to battle.The player takes on the clear role of a “teacher” within the story, primarily instructing 34 students while also taking them into battle. These 34 students are divided among the player’s class and two other classes; the player can invite students from the other classes to join their own by asking, “Why don’t you come to my class?” and, if certain conditions are met, they can be recruited as allies.
The most significant emotional aspect is a sense of responsibility. Since the series features its traditional permanent death mechanic, a wrong decision could result in a student’s death. Consequently, players strive to keep everyone alive while deepening their relationships along the way.
At each stage, support conversations between the player and the students are unlocked, allowing relationships to progress from friendship to romance and, in the later stages, even marriage. Students also develop relationships with one another, and their friendships deepen as the player guides them.
He says the latter half of the story left a particularly strong impression on him. In the first half, there is a peaceful rivalry with other classes, and the experience remains harmonious.However, in the latter half, political circumstances come into play, forcing the player to actually fight against those who were once close friends—and in some cases, even kill them. The player remarked that even though he usually doesn’t care much about enemies, “in this game, I genuinely tried my hardest to keep everyone alive.”
The Price of the Authored-Style Game: Vast Amounts of Text and Unchangeable Characters
However, experiences like the ones described above come at a cost. First, it’s necessary to write dialogue for every possible pairing. Support conversations primarily consist of C, B, and A stages, and S-rank conversations are also available between the protagonist and specific characters. Since these conversations must be prepared for multiple pairings, production requires an enormous amount of effort.The number of possible pairings among the 34 characters is too vast to calculate, and he pointed out with a laugh that gameplay sometimes turns into an audiobook: “I’ve sat on the sofa, with the controller set aside, and just listened to a conversation between two characters for 20 minutes straight.”
Next, to ensure interesting conversations in any combination, the characters must not be too similar to one another, so each one is given a unique “personality trait”—such as a glutton, a slacker, or someone who’s always mistaken for a child.
Third, he noted that the characters cannot undergo transformation. Mr. Pastols explained that because all conversations must be internally consistent, the game cannot depict “character development”—such as a lazy character making a friend and overcoming their laziness.
“Anyone who knows how to write stories should know that character development is at the heart of storytelling,” he pointed out. Furthermore, the cost of killing off a character whose dialogue and voice acting have been meticulously crafted is extremely high; for this reason, the game includes a rewind mechanism so that players don’t have to bury their companions.The analysis suggests that the combination of characters’ inability to change and the difficulty of killing them results in a loss of narrative flexibility.
Strengths of Procedural Design: “From Nameless Entities to Trusted Companions” in *RimWorld*
So, what about procedural systems? The colony management simulation *RimWorld* was cited as an example.
Visually, it’s very simple: tiny colonists carry out tasks assigned by the player. They might disobey if they’re in a bad mood, but they usually comply. Potential colonists are automatically generated one after another, so even if one dies, you can welcome a new character (though this does affect the game’s progression).
The game itself positions itself as an “emergent story generator”; even though the mechanics used are the same, the events that actually unfold are unique to each player.
The emotional experience here is referred to as the “Nobody-to-trusted-companion pipeline,” and it unfolds as follows: Twenty enemies attack, and the residents repel them with machine guns, leaving only one survivor. You capture that enemy, tend to their wounds, and lock them in a cell.Then, thinking, “This guy has useful skills,” they recruit him as a companion. That person might later become the colony’s leader or a key figure. In other words, a character who was originally meant to “die from a gunshot” transforms into someone whose name and face you remember—a figure you grow attached to.
This game also gives rise to dramatic interpersonal relationships.The residents are “incredibly shallow”; if someone gets a scratch on their face, that alone is enough for everyone else to start disliking them a little. Depending on their personality traits, some are prone to berating others or starting fights. As players interact with them, they may grow attached to their quirks—or come to dislike specific characters.
An incident that occurred during actual gameplay was shared. Gobbas, a perfectly ordinary settler with no notable abilities, had a wife in the same colony. One day, he encountered a grumpy alpaca, got into a fistfight with it bare-handed, lost, and suffered brain damage.
His movements slowed, he could barely work, and his usefulness to the player dropped significantly, but out of sentimentality, the player kept him in the colony. A few weeks later, when checking the relationships screen, it appeared that his marriage had not been affected by this incident. The two still loved each other and seemed very happy. At that moment, the player reportedly thought to themselves, “This is the ideal couple.”
The Price of Procedural Generation: *RimWorld* Goes Against the “Show, Don’t Tell” Principle
Of course, experiences like the ones described above come with a cost. The first is that the text is extremely simplistic: “Humps chatted with Jenny about food,” “Humps and Axel chatted about learning roulette,” “Humps said a few words to Ludo about books.”These aren’t actual lines of dialogue, but abstract descriptions—and they aren’t voiced either.
Second, there are few emotional cues. The golden rule of storytelling is “Show, don’t tell,” but this game does nothing but “tell” emotions through submenus.Take the example of the slave settlers: it’s indicated in text that they feel happy when children are running around, and dissatisfied when their clothes are in poor condition or they’ve been insulted. The only way the game visibly shows the player that a character is in a bad mood is when they suffer a “mental breakdown.”
The third issue is diminishing returns. With an endless stream of characters who die and are reborn, at what point do players stop forming attachments to them? In his own research, the author noted that the longer a player has been playing—especially those with over 1,000 hours of gameplay—the less likely they are to perceive the settlers’ “humanity,” tending instead to view them as tools or means for role-playing.He cites playstyles such as “This time, a benevolent colony” or “This time, a cannibalistic colony” as examples.
A Design That Deliberately Prevents Attachment: *Darkest Dungeon*
The roguelike RPG *Darkest Dungeon*, in which characters are generated automatically with minimal customization, has deliberately turned this drawback into a strength. The game’s theme is “becoming a monster,” and treating characters harshly—rather than forming attachments to them—aligns with this central concept.The game even features the voice of a long-dead ancestor (the Narrator) to encourage such behavior.
The developer’s own experience was one of suddenly snapping back to reality while playing: “I fed four people to a giant monster for a small in-game benefit. What am I doing?”
This experience is engineered by the game’s mechanics. To defeat all the bosses, players must rotate between multiple teams, and since they end up managing many heroes at once, the time spent with any given character becomes uneven. Furthermore, characters of the same class look almost identical, and with only a limited number of color variations, it’s difficult to distinguish them as individuals.
He explained that while such an experience can be created using a pre-designed system, it’s far easier to achieve with a procedural system that allows for an infinite number of characters.
Combining the Two: The ‘XCOM 2’ Expansion DLC
So, is it possible to combine the strengths of the author-based and procedural approaches? *XCOM 2* was cited as an example of a game that addresses this question.
*XCOM 2* is a turn-based tactical game where players move soldiers on a grid to battle, similar to *Fire Emblem*. The difference is that the enemies are aliens who use guns instead of swords. Basic soldiers are randomly generated and are clearly distinct from story-driven NPCs who have dialogue and voice lines.Players build bonds with their soldiers through gameplay.
In the “War of the Chosen” expansion DLC, two types of authorial elements are added on top of this.
The first is hero soldiers, who have names and backstories. The game dedicates an entire mission to introducing them, giving them voice lines, distinct personalities, and cutscenes to make a lasting impression. However, once the introduction is over, they are treated the same as regular soldiers; even hero soldiers who have completed their introductory events are subsequently integrated into standard troop operations and can be killed in combat.If they are lost, the player can welcome another hero soldier depending on the game’s progress and conditions. We called this “smart design” and praised the fact that narrative resources are concentrated in the introduction, ensuring that the content created isn’t wasted even if the hero dies.
The second example is the handcrafted archenemies, “The Chosen.” There are three named enemies who reappear repeatedly; until the player finally defeats them, a cycle continues where they fight, are driven back, and then resurrect. While their traits are randomized, their dialogue is carefully crafted. The developer explained that by managing death through the concept of indestructible archenemies, they are preserving narrative resources.
He then cited the Chosen’s ability to recognize context as an example of how these two elements reinforce each other. For instance, if you fight a Chosen using the weapon of a sibling you’ve defeated, it will say something acknowledging that fact.
Furthermore, if a randomly generated soldier whom the player had grown attached to is killed by a Chosen, the Chosen transforms from “just another enemy to defeat” into “a personal nemesis who killed a friend.”
An Even More In-Depth Example: *Shadow of War*
As a final example, I introduced *Shadow of War*. Set in the world of Tolkien (*The Lord of the Rings* and *The Hobbit*), this action RPG follows a man possessed by an elf as he defeats and subjugates orcs.While there are story-driven NPCs, the title refers to the automatically generated Orcs and the emotional relationships the player builds with them.
You fight the orcs; even if you’re killed, you fight again, deepening your rivalry until you eventually defeat them. I classify this game as a “story generator,” just like *RimWorld*.Warner Bros. is said to have obtained a patent for this overarching mechanism of “modularizing richly crafted content and applying it to procedurally generated characters,” and noted that it is also very interesting from a design perspective.
Equipped with pre-written dialogue, the orcs recognize context and events; an orc that has killed a player will say, “I thought I killed you. Why are you here?” when they meet again. There’s a sense that the orcs, too, are building a personal history with the player.
On the other hand, this game also has its weaknesses. While a great deal of effort has been put into interactions with enemies, interactions with allies feel rather shallow. He sarcastically described the “way to make friends” in this game as, “Knock out an orc, enslave him with ghost powers, and voilà—a friend.”
Orcs you’ve recruited as allies can be used like tools—deployed as bodyguards, made to fight in the arena, or placed in positions of authority within your organization. While they may betray you or sacrifice themselves, they don’t trigger dialogue every time they appear, as enemies do. It was explained that orcs who become allies “become the heroes of *Darkest Dungeon*.”
Furthermore, he points out that while the core gameplay in *Darkest Dungeon* revolves around sending out and controlling its heroes, the allies in *Shadow of War* are merely tools to be deployed a limited number of times only when necessary.Additionally, the game shares a similarity with *Darkest Dungeon* in that mechanisms that encourage players to treat them harshly, combined with the high turnover rate, cause players’ attachment to them to fade.
Furthermore, he points out that while the heroes in *Darkest Dungeon* become the focus of gameplay themselves once deployed, the allies in *Shadow of War* are merely tools that can be deployed a limited number of times only when necessary.Furthermore, the game shares similarities with *Darkest Dungeon* in that its mechanics encourage players to treat allies carelessly, and the high turnover rate diminishes players’ attachment to them.
Summary: Intentionally Deciding “Whether or Not to Foster Attachment”
At the end of the presentation, the strengths of each approach were summarized based on three axes: characters, story, and narrative stakes.
The author-driven approach allows for deep exploration of specific individuals and the creation of well-crafted, impactful stories, but the narrative stakes tend to become predictable.The procedural approach fosters a sense of ownership over an infinite number of individuals, giving rise to emergent and unpredictable stories, where the narrative stakes feel genuine and their timing is unpredictable.
Combining the two yields emergent stories featuring an infinite variety of character-like individuals, accompanied by high-quality writing, as well as meaningful narrative stakes that are unpredictable yet significant.
Finally, the speaker listed the following three points as key takeaways from this presentation: Crew characters are not merely secondary elements; they are independent design subjects that require specific design decisions.
Both author-driven and procedural approaches have their strengths, and they can be combined through skillful game design.
And, you must intentionally decide whether to make players feel attached to the characters, how to achieve that, or whether to avoid it altogether.
