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On the Process of Effecting Mass
Dean Takahashi, of the San Jose Mercury News, has up a lengthy interview with Mass Effect project director Casey Hudson on the almost four-year-long development of the title. The two men go into some detail on BioWare's approach to game creation, as well as discussing the numerous technical and storytelling leaps they made with the game. "Hudson said, 'One thing I'm hoping people see in it is how much more there is for a player to make decisions on. It makes it really hard for us to develop, given the customization that we make possible in the game. For example, from the beginning, you are not pre-made as a character. You can play Commander Shepard. But you can also create your own character, male or female. You can choose your special abilities. Those are ways to make your game different and unique. These are things that make it much harder for us to make the game so that it is consistent all the way through, given your choices.'"
Man, what is with these spellening errors. Clearly you mean is affecting...
Bow-ties are cool.
The problem is that, until someone invents an AI GM that can at least pass the Turing test, what you ask is simply not feasible. Someone has to design and code all those states you changed.
I mean, let's pretend we design a game where each quest truly changes the game's world.
E.g., you can decide that instead of saving Bastila on KOTOR, you capture her and sell her to the Sith. (Sure, _Malak_ would probably kill you if you ran into him face to face, but there's no reason you couldn't go be the dark apprentice of some Sith who's never anywhere near Malak.) And the game branches from there. Taris is never destroyed. You never get the Ebon Hawk, even, since the Sith lift the blockade and Canderous doesn't need you to get off the planet. You never fly to Dantooine to become a Jedi. Etc. Let's say the whole story can fork like that at any point.
Well, now let's say we allow only 3 solutions to each such point: good, evil, don't do it. (After all, it's unrealistic that I _must_ do something at any point in the game.)
After the first such quest, there are 3 possible paths. The next one multiplies them to 9. Then 27. Then 81. Then 243.
Sounds good, right?
Well, it would, if the devs had infinite funds. In practice you can look at it more realistically like this: they'd have to code 243 outcomes and 1+3+9+27+81=121 quests, just to give you... a chain of exactly 5 quests. And you'd think "gee, this game sucked, it had a whole 5 quests."
Alternately, if they made it a completely linear game, you could see all 121 quests. And probably think, "bestest game evar! It had more quests than KOTOR 1+2 combined."
For the same development money, the linear solution will actually be the better game.
The problem with that branching is _literally_ that the chain you see is a logarithm of the total number of quests they have to code. Which gets shittier with each level you add to that pyramid. Adding a 6'th quest to the chain seen by the player, in a truly branching game would raise the number of quests you need to code by another 243. It's a mammoth cost and effort just so the player sees a total of 6, no matter what kind of character they play.
Worse yet, most of that immense number of branches will never be taken by anoyne. Most players play consistently all good or all evil, at least on the major issues. Branches and quests that would be only visible if you play good once, evil twice, neutral once, and good again, would be seen by maybe 0.1% of the players, so they'd be a major waste.
That, in a nutshell, is why everyone avoids branching like the plague.
KOTOR didn't truly branch either. Heck, even in Oblivion or Morrowind, open-ended as they are, the story doesn't really branch. The world, in fact, doesn't change much as a result of your actions.
What good designers really do is
A) contain the effects. Sure, they might tell you that you just got the Republic kicked off Manaan, but it won't influence the rest of the game at all. Yeah, you just got told that you gave the Sith a major advantage, but it's not like now they'll finish the conquest before you reach the Star Forge.
B) create an illusion of having some consequence. Sure, you'll get an alignment number, NPC's talking about you like you're Mother Teresa or Jack The Ripper, etc, but that's all an illusion that doesn't influence anything else.
Basically that way they can give you all the quests and a number of ways to solve each, without the possibilities exploding out of control. The trick is to keep it all an illusion.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't know who wrote all these codex entries, but they must have put quite a bit of effort into them. Unfortunately, this isn't always matched with the rest of the game. For example, one of the weapons entries explains the "unlimited ammo" aspect of the game by the nature of the guns themselves. Rather than fire "bullets" as we think of them, the complex computers in each weapon actually shave an appropriate small mass of metal off a large solid block "cartridge," with its mass based on the velocity it will be fired at, the desired effect, the range to the target, and adjusting for other factors like wind, gravity, and planetary conditions. It's a pretty clever way of explaining a lame game convention. Unfortunately, the other game designers must not have gotten the memo about this, because in the equipment section the ammo is shown and treated exactly as if it were conventional bullets in conventional shell casings (the ammo graphics all show bullets and the text all refers to "rounds").
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Portal. That game is designed around coercing the player into figuring things out themself. Play it through, then play it again with the commentary on and see how many times they taught you how to do something without you even noticing.
Traditionally, in an RPG, you start out weak, and build up skills and abilities as the game progresses. Which is fine if you're some naive farmboy who's come home to find his family killed and his house burned down, and who has vowed to make those evil (plot points) pay for what they've done. Start with a leather jerkin and a quarterstaff, and build your way up to being a parahuman by the end of the game.
But how do you handle level progression when you're supposed to start the game as a fully trained whatever-it-is? In Mass Effect, you start out as a highly-trained uber-warrior who's supposed to be hard as nails, yet you can't shoot straight, your weapons are ineffectual shit, and you'll get beat down by just about anybody until you put some points into your combat skills. Bioware had the same problem with Jade Empire - 15 years in a martial arts school as their star pupil in the pre-game scene-setting, but weedy as hell in the actual game until you spent some points. At least KOTOR and KOTOR2 had reasons in game why you didn't have, or couldn't remember your actual abilities.
It's just that everyone's going on about the brilliant story, and yet completely missing the fact that in order to shoehorn it into a traditional RPG engine, they've had to bend it all out of shape. Why would you make your elite troops buy their own guns with their own money? Because hoarding gold and trading it for stuff has been a mainstay of D&D since pencil and paper days. Why would you issue special forces soldiers with guns that overheat after firing three rounds? Because shitty starter weapons are generic to the classic RPG advancement-based structure. Doesn't fit the storyline at all, but it's a tired old staple of the genre, so just make the player do it.
Even being given the option of having all the character-design points at the start of the game would have been a good idea. Once your character's created, that's who and what he's going to be until the end of the game, because that's who he's become in the last 15 years of special forces training. The events of the game last about a week in game time - tops. What are you going to learn in one week that's going to override everything else you've ever learned?
The actual plot and characterisation, and the sheer scope of the game is fantastic - showing what they can do with a KOTOR-style game when not tied to the Star Wars universe. But the overall framework of the story makes no sense at all, and that just rankles. I'm sure that due to the massive financial success of the game and all their others, they're perhaps not too worried about one gamer's opinion, but everybody else seems to be queueing up to suck Bioware's corporate cock over this damn game, and I feel like the only person who's spotted that nobody could have heard Kane say Rosebud...