You gotta let people have fun with their lightning cannons and railguns.
If you asked me to list PC gaming’s contributions to the hobby at large, it wouldn’t take long for me to hit emergent gameplay, that hallmark of immersive sims and other PC-centric genres where a developer makes a sandbox deep enough to celebrate genuine player freedom and creativity—Baldur’s Gate 3 is one recent emergent gameplay champion, and so is the smash hit co-op shooter, Helldivers 2.
Speaking with PC Gamer editor-in-chief Evan Lahti, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt revealed that both games drew from a similar font of inspiration: tabletop RPGs.
“We all together imagine it, and then we talk about it as if it was real life,” Pilestedt said of the open-ended magic of games like Dungeons & Dragons. “We can joke about it decades later: ‘Do you remember when you blew me up with that spell?’
“In this game, we tried to visualize it, but it’s still the same kind of tight-knit group that had the shared experience. And it’s going to be something that connects those four that were there to a very special moment.
