Here is what my experiment will look like. I'm designing a video game revolving around an adventure in this fantasy world. The player has a lot of freedom in this world and can choose to live however they want, but they will be more encouraged to interact with the world more rather than just being there. How I plan on doing this is adding one huge plotline that will have an overshadowing presence in the player’s journey, and every single character’s story, even the side ones, are going to converge together into a single narrative point in the end. There’s a final event that the player will get caught up in, whether they choose to involve themselves or not.
(My game right now...)
Originally, I was going to set this world outside of reality, or some dimension existing inside someone’s mind. After this talk, I’m going to set it in the real world, just so there’ll be more interaction with outsiders. I thought about following up with my political conflict idea from Experiment 1, and make the overarching event about these two kingdoms with severely high tensions, near the brink of war. I considered setting the player to come across this tension, maybe even being asked to pick a side. There’ll be some key events that will have a huge impact on how the story goes, along with all these minor side stories that are just there for fun. So, that’s what I have so far: an open world game with some large-scale political drama in the background.