"Who would enjoy Kenshi?
More long time gamers than new gamers because I designed it for myself. You need a gateway game to get you to understand games.
Otherwise, you'd just be thrown into something too complicated.
I think you need to play a few other games first as er...training. I think there's a certain kind of person that has like a kind of humour, like a sense of humour at being punished.
Like someone who quite enjoys that level of difficulty and being punished as an entertaining thing. I think you need to have that.
Like whenever we've been at game shows and people are playing the game, you can kind of tell when someone's going to gel with it, or when someone's just going to like get straight back up.
And then it's the sort of person that's kind of curious and just open towards dying constantly.
Well, it's not even about always dying - it's about being defeated. Like a lot of them get up and leave, but their character's still there lying on the floor unconscious and gets back up later and he's just standing there unattended and then some other player comes along and carries on playing.
The game isn't about, um... it's not like Dark Souls where you...
You die, you start again, You die, you start again.
The idea is that you keep going because that's what stories are about, right?
That's the whole basis of writing a story. You don't write a story where a character gets up in the morning, has a goal, and everything goes really well, and maybe End.
No, it never happens, right? Character gets up, starts something, has a goal, starts it. And you as the viewer watching this story, movie, whatever... You're like:
"What's going to go wrong?"
Definitely something's going to go wrong, otherwise there wouldn't be a story.
Then something goes wrong.
It's the basis of storytelling, which applies equally to game design, except the player is the main character in the story. So, a writer's job is to torment their protagonist. That's what a lot of writers will tell you.
And so I just adapted that.
The idea... too many games let the player succeed.
You go "Oh it's a power fantasy" and you just run along mowing down enemies and succeeding. And that's it, that's the whole game.
And that's mind-numbingly boring to me.
You need to encounter problems.
You need problems thrown at you from left field. And you're like, "Whoa, a whole new level of problems."
That's what a good story has, right?
Any of those TV shows you've been bingeing because you're addicted is 'cause wild shit keeps happening to you, to the character I mean.
Why did you want to make a game where you're not the chosen one?
Oh I hate being the chosen one.
Like, how relatable is that, being the chosen one? Who's ever been the chosen one?
No one, not even one.
So, like, stories are supposed to be relatable, right? They can be, like, power fantasies and stuff. But I know being the chosen one is just stupid.
I also don't, I don't want to be a king or a noble or a superhero.
I want to see a story about a regular person who struggles. So I mean struggle is the basis of good story.
If you get too powerful and have it too good, then the struggles either become difficult to invent or unrelatable struggles.
How do I save my kingdom from this dragon?
That's not very relatable either.
So I think stories get way better when you're just someone struggling for food or money or avoiding getting stabbed.
Like, it's simple but I feel it a lot more.
And I think a story is better for that.
Did you expect players to have such high play times when making Kenshi?
Yes, because that's what I designed it for.
Right, I designed it to have lastability 'cause I want a game that I don't get bored with after 10 minutes.
But I underestimated the average gamer's... or the above average gamer's capacity, to put in hours.
A lot of the high hours - thousands and thousands of hours, ones I can't believe.
After you get a calculator and see what that really means and then I'm like "How did they do that... Did they not sleep?"
I still don't know how they do it.
I'm not sure if some people must leave it running.
That's the only... I've kind of figured that must... But it's very cool that they... Not that I want to encourage people not eating and sleeping properly, but it's nice that people are playing it so much.
Actually, I feel like my work now is more geared towards people playing it for that long so you're trying to make things not repeatable.
So I find for Kenshi 2, we're more aware now, of people spending that long amount of time, so we kind of, try and adapt a bit to it so that people can play it that long and it's not like repeat...
It doesn't repeat and stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I designed the game to be addictive like that, but in a good way.
Because you can have evil addiction and good addiction.
Evil addiction is like your typical free-to-play, maximise engagement kind of mentality from the designer, where they just want to keep you playing as many hours as possible and steal your money and your attention at any cost.
Whereas my type of addiction is you're addicted because you're having fun and you're achieving things, and you're encountering problems and challenges.
And even when you're away from the game, you're thinking of this challenge.
"How do I overcome this thing?"
Maybe you're at work thinking "How am I going to get my guy back from those slavers?"
It's a fun challenge, right? That's a fun thing to do.
It's not like, "Oh, I can't wait to get back to gambling", you know?"
Post edited August 07, 2025 by Swedrami
