|
>>
|
6808dd.jpg
Shining Fluff
6808dd
well, the entire quest changed entirely bc of a few suggestions.
killing loretta was one of them, and that was kind of a group decision. it made the quest get a lot darker than i think i ever really intended it to be very quickly and before that happened i had not considered the possibility of the quest having such a dark turn as the styx ending. so i guess you could say that in a way the decision to murder loretta was what really made this ending happen.
another thing that really shook the game up, and to an even greater degree, was the single suggestion to ask ulric whether or not he still liked pimento cheese sandwiches.
ulric was never supposed to be an ally. even if the styx ending didn't happen i was planning on writing him as a dangerously obsessed jilted lover, and i was planning to have him be enraged no matter how you guys answered his questions (just to different degrees, i guess?)
if you gave him an answer that was insulting enough, he would have attacked you then and there, and if you guys had made decisions that allowed katherine to survive that he would have chased you throughout the remainder of the plot, making it much, much more difficult to get an end in which katherine didn't die (this would have been a case in which the quest did NOT take place in an afterlife/limbo situation).
otherwise he would have simply stalked you, making the quest much more unsettling until there was a final confrontation that may have ended up being the climax of the quest.
but i loved the suggestion of asking that so much, and how delicately it referenced their relationship and how it appealed so well to making everything come full circle and sort of ...... gosh, i dunno, it was just very much in line with the melancholy tone of the entire quest and i decided i liked it so much that i scratched the entire plotline of ulric-as-crazed-predator altogether.
sometimes i kind of wish i hadn't, because unfortunately that got us trapped in this sort of dull lockstep of talk to person -> get hard shard -> move to new area -> talk to person, which i think was kind of boring and would have been broken up a lot by the addition of a very real, very aggressive antagonist.
as for other endings:
like i said before, i never REALLY wanted there to be an ending where katherine got the last piece of her heart back. but there could have been endings in which katherine confronted him. to be honest i sort of decided to block those off as soon as things started getting darker. i wanted the disappointment of katherine going the entire time with the intent to do so and realizing that there would be no closure. i also didn't really want him to ever appear onscreen, i guess? i wanted him to be a shadowy figure who was only defined by the perceptions of the other characters in the story, especially katherine's own flawed perceptions of him.
there could have been, of course, an ending in which katherine decides to live happily ever after with ulric. that seemed really bland to me, though, so i think even if that had happened i may have made some hinting references at the styx ending. i actually started tucking in a lot of references to it, or at least vague symbolism, so maybe at least an inkling of it would have gotten through no matter what.
also, i never really thought this would happen and of course it didn't, but if you guys hadn't talked katherine out of suicide i probably would have had a much more explicit afterlife narrative take place there - where she actually does die and has to confront that fact.
|