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The Illusion Of Choice in RPGs
PhilthePill
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I was recently reminiscing how awesome Torment is, and what made it such an freaking cool game - and I remember how after I finished it feeling like
Which made me think back on the idea of choice in games (particularly RPGs), and how little we usually get - games want us to believe the choices we make are affecting the game world, but usually it's just a ploy to make us feel involved. The game usually is going to go along some linear(ish) path anyway.
Examples which shoot to mind are in almost every SNES rpg I played, and how some character (usually some whiny girl) is asking to help save the village: WILL YOU HELP US? YES / NO. And even though the stupid girl is whiny, even if you say NO she just says something like "Aww...Well maybe you'll change your mind.." and you can go walk around for a while, but ultimately you have to go back and say "SURE WHINY GIRL, I'LL HELP YOU."
So, I want to play more RPGs that actually have choice which affects things which feel a bit real. Black Isle (formally) and Bioware seem to do this well. Anything else I should be playing? Mass Effect did this a bit, but the Paragon/Renegade thing by the end didn't feel particularly unique.
Do the recent Final Fantasy's do this at all? I haven't played the last few.
Recommend! Or reminisce on games that did this extremely poorly.
every dialogue choice in the game somehow affected who I was, and therefore how the game ended. Which made me want to play it again. And again.
Which made me think back on the idea of choice in games (particularly RPGs), and how little we usually get - games want us to believe the choices we make are affecting the game world, but usually it's just a ploy to make us feel involved. The game usually is going to go along some linear(ish) path anyway.
Examples which shoot to mind are in almost every SNES rpg I played, and how some character (usually some whiny girl) is asking to help save the village: WILL YOU HELP US? YES / NO. And even though the stupid girl is whiny, even if you say NO she just says something like "Aww...Well maybe you'll change your mind.." and you can go walk around for a while, but ultimately you have to go back and say "SURE WHINY GIRL, I'LL HELP YOU."
So, I want to play more RPGs that actually have choice which affects things which feel a bit real. Black Isle (formally) and Bioware seem to do this well. Anything else I should be playing? Mass Effect did this a bit, but the Paragon/Renegade thing by the end didn't feel particularly unique.
Do the recent Final Fantasy's do this at all? I haven't played the last few.
Recommend! Or reminisce on games that did this extremely poorly.
I'm gonna sing the DOOM SONG now. DOOMY doom domm doom doom doom doom doom doom doomy doom-doom...
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Edit: About the Witcher, the only real important choice is in the end. That determines what ending you'll see. You could spend most of the game going one way and then right at the end decide to go the other and get that ending.
Goddamn. And that was maybe the least morally ambiguous choice in the game
Also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlOXAtPvMDk
How much remains to be seen.
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That may be true, but you can see the effects of most of your choices as you progress through the game. For example:
I think that little things like that are what the OP is looking for. Choices that actually can change the course of the game. Even if it's only slightly.
One game where I was sorely disappointed with morality was Jade Empire. Oh, Bioware hammered the idea of Open Palm/ Closed Fist home in every preview and interview. The final product, though, was just a variation of good vs evil or being a nice guy vs an ass. Only ONE instance in the whole game seemed to live up to what they promised - midway in the game, you come across a fat blueblood who is trying to enslave a family. The Open Palm option let's you jump in heroically and beat the crap out of the fat guy. The Closed Fist option is you throw a knife at the feet of the young daughter and tell her that if she doesn't want to be a love slave, she has to free her own damn self. She then stabs the slaver.
*Dark Side points gained*
What I'd like to see in an RPG is NPCs take advantage of a nice guy's good will to the point where he's a whipped dog constantly running fetch quests and rescuing cats stuck in trees. Quest givers should walk all over unreasonably nice guys. "Oh, was I supposed to give you a reward? I'll give it to you next Tuesday when I have a little more money. That's okay, right?"
Neverwinter Nights 2: The Mask of the Betrayer takes it beyond the first game and has more immediate results of your actions. Especially at the end, who you decide to help (or if you help them at all) and when affects your companions' endings. Also your choices affect who will join and who you will meet in the game.
It really isn't sadly, imho. If you played Fable 1 you know what you are in for- but its a step forward.... But its a pretty leisurely game.
Hmmm. Well, last time I believe anything Peter Molyneux says.
(I say 'seems' and 'looks like' because it's just previews and interviews for now)
Final Fantasy games never really give you choices aside from optional characters and the occasional dialogue choice (mostly in the earlier ones, since there was no VA). I like 'em for the story, but don't play them if you're looking for ambiguous morals in your main characters, or some deep philosophical musings. I haven't played through XII, but from VII to X I noticed a lot fewer player choice options, and the 5 or so hours of XII I played were basically on rails.
Mass Effect I really enjoyed because they seemed to strike a balance between 'choose your actions' and 'here is a fleshed out character'. Although Shepard was your puppet, he still seemed like a living, breathing character as much as the rest of the cast, which wasn't the case (at least for me) in KotOR, or Fallout 1 and 2.
Didn't dig Fallout 3. Yeah you could make choices, but most of them don't seem to change much. But it has more problems than just that...
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
Pretty cool when they include things like that.
I think the second Matrix game Shiny made had something like that. You could take the red pill or the blue one but taking the blue one was instant GAME OVER.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c5BSaCuTaU
The choices it does make actually are pretty good, and it does them better than many games do. Because there generally are real, tangible punishments for taking the high road rather than stooping to evil.
The Geneforge series can be an interesting study in mutually exclusive quests, especially 5. Nothing quite like going through a series of quests for a faction that I want to join, only to be told that I can't continue because the guy I was supposed to go to next had recently been murdered.
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Well, I trust your judgment... now hopefully Microsoft decides it's worthy of a PC port someday.
This isn't true. There are plenty of quests and even a whole NPC that are only available to you if you choose certain dialogue trees. What you can say is even affected by your stats. Yeah, maybe the quests there are don't differ depending on your actions but what quests you are able to undertake are certainly determined by what you say to people.
For example, in Soul Nomad and the World Eaters, "wrong" answers have little skulls next to them.
But in, say, Persona 4, there are six MULTIPLE CHOICE questions, and getting even one wrong means you get the Bad Ending, and you don't even get to fight the final boss.
The really annoying thing I'm finding about Mass Effect, which I'm playing for the first time (literally, right now -- i just put the controller down for a break) -- is that it just seems to spit the divide even more. Yes, there are the Paragon/Renegade options, but then every other dialogue choice they have is even worse than most RPGs -- they'll give you three choices of responses, but usually 2/3 of them are the same response. And sometimes, even no matter what you choose, the dialogue is literally the exact same thing. There is no branch, and I'm not even talking about real gameplay consequences! Just the dialogue bits!
It's hella annoying.
edit: Khavall, that video is fantastic.
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
Hey at the beginning you can say fuck this I'm not saving the world, followed by a mini epilogue saying the world dies (which after playing game 2 makes no sense) and then a menu asking if you want to go make the choice again
That is a good video Khavall. I'm so subscribing to this guy.
While true, in Torment there are multiple dialog choices that have the same mechanical effect, only reading differently. (For example, THAT question. You know the one I mean.) I still pondered my choice, even when I knew that there would be no consequences. While that likely requires a certain quality of writing, it is a good example of the illusion of choice, as it creates a level of nuance in the dialog that is unsupported by the engine.
1) Illusion of choice: Every time you're offered a choice it either doesn't matter (Golden Sun's many Yes/Nos) or you're forced back into saying the "correct" answer (tons of RPGs).
2) Inkling of choice: You follow the same story no matter what you choose, but based on choices you'll get different text or possibly times where you can get a game over by answering incorrectly (Super Paper Mario). There's still only one ending, but there may be a scene or two different based on decisions during the game (Star Ocean 3's relationship cutscenes after the end of the game).
3) Two-sided choice: You get to pick between two extremes: good or evil generally (KotOR, inFamous, etc). It boils down to an ending for each extreme, each path possibly including things from type 2, tweaking the ending slightly based on just how good or how evil you managed to be.
4) Open-ended choice: Instead of a linear "reputation" system, you've got a multi-variable combination of statistics to figure out exactly how an NPC will interact with you. Conversation trees are fully fleshed out with multiple choices that each interact with different pieces of the reputation matrix. There's multiple paths to your goals and your individual path taken to achieve them will directly affect the ending--if there is one--making it possible that failing your overall quest is a possible ending rather than just triggering a game over.
You have no choice but to
The only real major choices you can make are
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Nah, not letting you get away with that, Pancake. I shall endure your withering sarcasm and challenge you (or anyone else) to
Name. Them.
As far as my playthrough went (and I chose a relatively decent moral path, as far as the game allows)
1) Your dog's of barely any practical use whatsoever. You can pretty much comfortably do without any of the basic items it brings you, and it's utterly forgettable in combat even three or four levels up.
2) There's nothing to distinguish your family from any other random NPCs, nor anything to suggest this is some kind of meta-narrative gag (to say nothing of the bugs).
3) Combat is so tediously easy (whether you're doing "well" or just muddling through, and there's little impetus to do well) it's practically impossible to die without consciously trying, so scars aren't a factor. Beat the game without picking up a single one.
4) Oh God, no, my time in the Spire making painfully cliched moral "choices" with no real weight is going to rob me of my precious experience points...! Except I've pretty much picked them all up again before I even left and hardly noticed.
5) Apparently my wife pretty much doesn't care if I cheat on her. Nor does she possess the long-term memory to even remember - and no, she wasn't promiscuous or randy or over-sexed or anything else like that. I thought the moral choice would be to let things take their course (you know, given I can't actually come clean myself) - then not only do I get the game trying to take the piss out of me, nothing happens!
6) Not to mention even the lasting effects, well, don't. Ho noes, I chose to save an innocent life and now my hulking, ogrish visage is forever ruined! Except my wife doesn't seem to treat me any differently, people don't run from me in the street and last but not least the ending removes it anyway.
7) And the ending. Oh, please. I'll take "Be good for trophy", please, Molyneux. Ta.
I could go on, but I admit I'm being somewhat facetious. :P I enjoyed the game enough to beat it, and it did get the occasional smile or twinge of guilt out of me. But it was too easy, even taking Lionhead's design philosophy into account; too smug, too twee, too "British"; too relaxed, too unthreatening, too safe. It fails to offer any hard choices whatsoever and any thoughts it provokes are largely down to filling in the blanks rather than any dialogue or anything that actually happens in game.
Oh, and the only time - the only time - the game actually got a genuine "Aw, shit!" out of me (in the good sense) was when
I'm sure any responses to this will range from "Well, I disagree" to "You're mean!" to "You're an asshole!", but hey - I did play, and beat, the game... so I'm not just spewing hot air. Punish the player, Peter. Take something away they'll have to really, really work to regain, something they'll really notice when it's gone, and better still make them lose it for good. As in for good, not "If you use one of your three wishes, you can have it back again!". And make them friggin' cry, not
There is nothing, nothing, nothing in Fable II that even comes close to the ending of Torment - the pain I felt at
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Well, I recall that there are entire plot lines which you cannot solve unless you have the right stats to do so. I guess it's not really a moral choice, though. It's more of a case of the way you shape your character determines what sort of play experience you have on a given playthrough. I guess another good example of this sort of thing is playing a low intelligence character in the Fallout games (except 3 which is poo.) You know that famous Let's Play, featuring just such a character? The dialogue is completely different and quite hilarious for a character with very little Int. While not a choice between "right" or "wrong" it does give an example of a choice made by the player (I suppose, rather than the player's character) that brings about real, tangible effects on gameplay, even if only to a somewhat limited degree.
ME did a really good job of creating the illusion that you greatly affected the course of the game with your conversation choices.
It also makes modding in new stories (in games that allow it) a huge hassle that is very tough to get around.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
It depends on how you conduct yourself.
I see what you did there.
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Well, yeah. They pay professionals the big manies for a reason. Convincing animation and great voice acting aren't typically found in the amateur-hour mods. FWIW I've seen better level design in a lot of 'for-fun' projects then many commercial games though.