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Balancing Choice With Irreversible Consequences In Games
The Moving Pixels blog has an article about the delicate balance within video games between giving players meaningful choices and consequences that cannot necessarily be changed if the player doesn't like her choice afterward. Quoting:
"One of my more visceral experiences in gaming came recently while playing Mass Effect 2, in which a series of events led me to believe that I'd just indirectly murdered most of my crew. When the cutscenes ended, I was rocking in my chair, eyes wide, heart pounding, and as control was given over to me once more, I did the only thing that I thought was reasonable to do: I reset the game. This, of course, only led to the revelation that the event was preordained and the inference that (by BioWare's logic) a high degree of magical charisma and blue-colored decision making meant that I could get everything back to normal. ... Charitably, I could say BioWare at least did a good job of conditioning my expectations in such a way that the game could garner this response, but the fact remains: when confronted with a consequence that I couldn't handle, my immediate player's response was to stop and get a do-over. Inevitability was only something that I could accept once it was directly shown to me."
Look, if I wanted my actions to have consequences, I'd be living real life, not playing video games!
Just give me a good, linear narrative with lots of explosions.
I recommend sleep.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Gaming 101: Never quit until the screen says "Game Over"
...the game.
But seriously, on my first playthrough i lost 5 of my 9 crew. i lived with the consequence and this is the game i will be bringing forward to ME3 (if the option is there)
Im currently on a second playthrough of ME1 with different sex character, when it comes to ME2 maybe things will be different this time but i probably wont use this game in ME3 until ive finished it with the first one.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
I lost Kain at the end on my first play-through, but then on second play-through I just didn't send him through the vents and all survived. But I think you're talking about the fact you didn't upgrade your ship before entering the jump gate, which is where a lot of players fail first time out. The thing is, there aren't any irreversible choices in games these days; most of them have check-points or a save facility, which a lot of players use constantly. With judicious loading and saving, you can effectively move your character along an optimal path (well ok, a little like A*, rather than actually optimal!). The only problem is if you're forced to make such choices early on in the game and then have to retrace your steps all the way back there.
Anyway, the real question is whether you virtually boned Jack or Miranda...
All it means is that you are a pussy. Seriously.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
When the cutscenes ended, I was rocking in my chair, eyes wide, heart pounding
I call that a successful RPG game/experience & I wish most cRPG's were like this. If I want linear storyline, I'll pick an FPS
Back when I still had enough time to play games, I used to play FPS on hardest mode, tried to use as little ammo as possible and re-started from the latest save game when I lost a single health point. That one time in Half Life where you walk along a pipe which crumbles and you fall onto a table cost me a week to master.
That poison gas in Doom 3 had me running around for ages, trying to find a hazmat suit before I resorted to running through it as fast as possible.
Weird? Yes. Rewarding as a hobby for me personally? Also yes.
I've played some really unforgivable games in the past, one of them being Elvira II. The game always players to create spells based upon objects that they find. One of these objects is a prayer book, but there are 2 of them in the game, one that personally belongs to a priest and the other that is just a regular object.
Towards the end of the game, you ask the priest to perform a task for you, which he'll only do if you can find his prayer book. Surprise surprise, you created a spell from his prayer book and he won't accept the other one as it's not his.
These are the kind of game breaking events that I really don't like. I don't mind games where you can miss a secret in a game and after a certain point you can't access it anymore (I've put several into my game), but you should always be able to finish the main quest.
Summation 2
"If you mess this chance up 3 times, your Game will be irrevocably made unplayable and you'll have to pay us more money to restart."
Though it can probably will be worked around, but then as the article itself says, most things can be anyway and it'll probably be a better shot than the Flash game.
Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance -- Mr. Miyagi
Seriously? You were that involved in the game that the only thing you could consider was a reset to make sure it didn't happen?
I have been pretty heavily invested in games but never had an emotional reaction like this one.
As for choices in games... Very few offer any real choices at all. All too many appear to offer a choice, but the outcome is the same either way. A few offer choice that has a different immediate outcome, but you can put in some work to make it come out the same in the end. That last of them give choices that actually make a difference.
Mass Effect 2 is actually a good example of that. Towards the end, there's a time when you can choose to head to the end-game. Do so too early and you risk losing members of your crew along the way. Too late and you lose other crew members. And then they make you choose crew members to do perilous tasks. Again, if you choose the wrong ones, or fail to do your job well enough, others die. And the ending itself has choices that will affect the next game, since the ME games import from the previous game's save.
The choices in ME 2 were strong enough to make me think about actually playing again.
Fallout New Vegas also has serious choices. The choices you make will shape the city's present and future. They matter immediately and in the long-run both.
DragonRealms (a MUD) has a long history that has been shaped by players' actions. They once failed to protect the Warmage's guild and it now lies in a smoking ruin, and a new guildhall had to be constructed. They once failed to prevent an invasion and their towns were held hostage... They were forced to obey the laws of their captors or be arrested and sentenced to death.
Playing those games, even though I haven't -really- done anything that matters, I feel like I have. And that makes the game more fun.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
If you can't deal with your actions having consequences in a game, maybe you need to play a different kind of game.
I think depending on the game, actions SHOULD have consequences. They sure did in the adventures of past days, especially Sierra's; sometimes, this was done wrongly (which usually meant that there was only one right action, and you had to figure out what it was by trial and error - annoying if the wrong choice meant death, highly frustrating if it made the game unwinnable later or something similar, without you knowing), but more often than not, it was done the right way, too.
And guess what, it added replay value, especially if there was no single right way through the game: you could play more than once, and experience what was essentially a different game each time.
One obvious example would be Indiana Jones IV, which, at some point, offers you three paths: the "team", "wits" and "fists" path. They all had their common points, of course (it was still the same game), but they differed significantly. But there were also many other games where smaller choices you made led to different outcomes later on.
I think this is the most potentially dangerous aspect of games. You can't re-load from a save, or do-over in life. Once you're dead, you're dead. I work at a university, and sometimes it seems like people don't really grasp that if you make a stupid choice, it might be permanent. I sometimes worry that video games might contribute to this attitude.
The post certainly fits with the contradicting feelings I have on this issue. I have found the issue even more pronounced with some of the decisions in Fallout 3 & Fallout: New Vegas. I love the comparative level of choice the games present, but rarely end up taking too much advantage of it.
To give a spoiler based example from Fallout 3. I worked to get a snobby hotel to accept a bunch of Ghouls as residents. I avoided requests to kill of the Ghouls, to help the Ghouls break in instead and negotiated their admittance. Next time I visit the Ghouls had murdered the original residents. Obviously this wasn't the outcome I had intended, and my desire to go back and alter my decision nearly got the better of me. I still admire Bethesda for putting all those decisions, and the potentially unexpected consequences in there. It was a well crafted kick in the balls showing me that I was playing god and got it wrong.
I love Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2 even moreso. However when it came to the consequences of my actions I took two different approaches and for different reasons. Spoilers ahead gentlemen! At the end of the first game I let the council die. It was for all the right reasons, there was a giant spaceship Cthulu about to destroy all life as we knew it and I didn't want to lose vital military assets and threaten the survival of the Galaxy for some symbolic gesture. Turned out to be the 'wrong decision' in the overall theme of being the good guy and uniting all races in mass Effect 2 but I stuck with it because I would always have made that decision with the knowledge I had to hand and it also made the storyline and reactions to you on the citadel more interesting in the 2nd game. In the 2nd game though at the end there was one thing I had to change. It was the 'you have to respond to the capture of your crew instantly' part. When the crew was captured my first reaction was to finish the one mission I was in the middle of anyway because due to standard RPG meta-gaming I figured that the rescue would wait for me. When I turned up a little too late and half the crew was turned into mulch because of it I felt cheated because there wasn't any clue given that this would be the result of my actions. Even the 'crew kidnapping' event was kicked off by completing another mission meaning that you could only finish all the side-quests by leaving the important 'must do' thing until the end. With that I had to go back and correct my choice. It's easier to sit with the consequence of an action if there a good indication before-hand what that consequence is. In the case of Dragon Age there was no problem though. Want salt on your fries? SALT GOLEMS ATTACK THE CITY IN REVENGE! No salt? NOTHING CAN STOP THE GIANT SLUG DEMONS! Yes, the consequence of every decision you make will be bad regardless :)
Darn! Next time tag it!
Intricate plots, twist-endings and philosophical speculations are a must for any media nowadays.
- Michael Bay
A world where your choices have essentially no effect is just a rail shooter, with slightly greater or lesser twistiness in the rails. The "shooter" mechanic(whether it be literal shooting, RPG, or whatever) had better be compelling. If it is, great, you've got a game that is perfectly decent, if probably not the most emotionally involving of all time. If the mechanic sucks, you've just created another game to put on the pile of examples of why "rail shooter" is practically a four letter word in gaming circles...
On the other hand, there are some Really. Fucking. Annoying. ways to do "consequences"(many of them mirror life; but if I wanted that I wouldn't buy your damn game). The worst is probably "one true path(we just aren't telling)": this unwholesome bastard abomination is what you get when the only winnable path is, in fact, as linear as the rail shooter scenario; but the world is enough of a sandbox that you can easily deviate from that one true path in myriad illogical ways. Punishments for stupidity are fine; punishments for failure to use your telepathic powers to intuit, during level one, which apparently useless bits of scene clutter you'll need to have on level ten is bullshit. Also annoying are the "completionist heaven" ones. Homeworld, an otherwise pretty brilliant game, suffered from this. Since each level started you out with what you had accumulated the level before, you were quickly led to realize that after "beating" a given level you were semi-required to set your harvesters to work and wait until every RU in the entire level was in your coffers(extra credit for telepathically knowing which ships you should pre-build so as to not die early in the next level, and which you should avoid building because some deus ex machina is going to give you the superior replacement...)
Unguessable insta-death is also extremely irksome. The original Alone in the Dark suffered from it in a bad way. Hey, I'm in a scary house. I have to go around opening doors... Woops, opening that door immediately drops me to a cutscene of my dying horribly, with no possible clues by which I could have inferred that it was different than any other door. I guess it is time to save-and-check my way around the entire damn place...
Both the first and second fallout gave you an opportunity to kill EVERYONE.
Even essential characters.
You even gained reasonable profit for it.
However, the problem was that you never knew when someone you killed was actually important for something later on.
So, in the end, killing people was risky business.
I hated fallout for that.
I wonder if he lost some of the major NPCs by assigning them the wrong tasks and/or the crew of the ship.
:>
Spoilers ahead!
On my first play through I messed around for a bit before starting the final mission and lost the entire Normandy II crew in a horrible, graphic way. I really didn't expect it and actually felt bad for them. Second time playing only Thane bit the dust because I don't want to see him in ME3
I had the same reaction in Dragon Age: Awakening when I thought I'd caused the destruction of my keep and everyone I'd left in it. Personally, I like it. Mindless hack 'n' slash has its place, but it takes some real work to provoke real reactions in games. Fallout and Fallout 2 had that ability. That's why I'm kind of looking forward to their MMO- I usually don't get into them much, but if Bioware puts this kind of element into it, I think I'd really like it.
I really am not worried about what happens, it's fun and I'd like to see it all. But I want to be able to clear/see it all without playing 2-3 hours of the same stuff again for just one scene. That's just a horribly annoying thing many publishers caused in the past.
Good-evil-neutral is about as much as will work- three playthroughs is about as far as marginally different events and more or less entirely different dialogue will carry, and while the storyline need not be predictable I need to know whether I'm still on track to the things I haven't seen yet.
Heavy Rain for the PS3 is all about the coices you make. You end up playing as 4 different characters throughout the game, and if you are careless, some of them will die. The game auto-saves though, so you are forced to continue playing to see the outcome that you have created. It give you quite a bit of those "aww crap! I should have done that differently!" moments.
All this talk of choices and no one has mentioned Alpha Protocol? Egads, that's a damned travesty.
If you want a game where choices matter, where the conversations are interesting and also how you conduct them matter, where even your play style impacts the game, then get Alpha Protocol. There are so many variables in that game that I'm on my 3rd playthrough and I'm still having a blast. The writing and voice acting is consistently fantastic and it's a shame that more people haven't played it. It's easily one of the best RPGs of last year but then, what else can you expect from Obsidian? Sure their games are glitchy but those guys know how to create an engrossing world better than anyone.
Does anyone remember the old days of Everquest? Now THERE were consequences. You've played played the character for YEARS as opposed to a measly 50 hours, and you kill one random fish and "Feel the hatred of an entire race"... Or part of your epic quest requires you to sacrifice being able to enter your home city without being attacked. So people worrying about small forks in a game where you can always just start over make me chuckle inside. Oh, how soft we've gotten... and I'm sure the Barbarians of Halas still hate my ranger, as well as the High Elves, just for killing that Royal Fish in Lake Rathetear... Consequences make you care.
You cant reset other people memories about what you did.
**SPOILERS!**
I remember that scene, and it was the worst scripted part of the game; not only do all the main characters *suddenly* hop onto a shuttle for NO REASON (other than to avoid their capture / death) when you start whatever mission you were planning to do, but once they've gone (including Shephard) and the attack begins, control of the game inexplicably shifts to another (albeit cool) character. It makes no sense what so ever, seriously disrupts game flow, and was the only thing I disliked in that game. I think OP should play more games so he/she can tell when something fishy and out of your control is about to happen (e.g. end of HL2 EP2), to me the biggest hint that bad things were about to happen was the departure of every single well known character from the Normandy on a shuttle to do the next mission, when there was no reason to do so.
If you are faced with such dramatic and irrevocable choices, clearly you are not so much playing a game as "following a script".
In a game - like say chess, Oblivion or EVE Online, the real firm choices are made at the beginning - what color do you want to play? What race do you want to be?
The rest of the experience is a cumulative result of many little decisions that have minor consequences but are not necessarily game changing in themselves.
Taking a pawn or losing a pawn will usually not cost you the game. But lose enough pawns and you'll get enemy pieces in your rear. You don't HAVE to join the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion and it's not necessary to finish the game, however it will affect your perception of the game world. Training the wrong skills in EVE won't cripple your character, but it will cost you time.
Whereas in a script that passes itself off for a game, which sadly includes most "games" today, you are often faced with forks in the path you are going down and have to choose A or B, with immediate and irrevocable consequences. Developers will argue game balance and coding issues, but you have to remember that these "forks" ONLY exist to try and cover up the fact that the game is a linear, boring piece of shit and they are trying to make it a little more interesting.
Guess what kind of games I like to play?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Speaking of choices in games, every now and then I wish that games would have a "reality" setting. In FPS games, this might manifest as "Oh look. I shot a police officer and now every police officer within a couple of miles is gunning for me." Maybe the other guy is a good shot too...oh, head shot? So sorry.
Maybe every 20th game should automatically start in reality mode.
This is not a diatribe against violence, simply the occasional reminder that virtual violence and lethality are very different than their real analogs.
...is lazy with side quests. It's your own lazy fault if your crew dies there. I actually didn't find out that would happen until someone told me, because as a good RPG gamer, I did every side quest I could get my grubby little mitts on before finishing the main quest line.
Real-time strategy games have lots of irreversible consequences. It's the fact that you take them all the time which makes it easy. The clock is running, and your enemy is building an army too. No choice is also a choice. To construct that new base means you take a risk. Not to build it is also a risk. Those are all make-or-break moments.
The only difference is perhaps that a single game doesn't last all that long, and therefore a failure is not too bad. Also, it's often possible to hit pause and save the game before making an important decision in a big game against AI.
I used to play a lot of Harvest Moon games, where you can court and eventually marry someone in town. In some of the games, it is easier to get the girls to fall for you, and this has been my downfall. While trying to be a basically nice guy to everyone, three girls fell head-over-heels, and I felt like a complete tool when one of them confronted me after I proposed to a different one. I never quite finished that game, and I never again proposed to anyone in a Harvest Moon or Rune Factory (spin off) game. The graphics aren't immersive and the people are a bit stereotypical, but the consequences to your actions feel real when you toy with emotions. I enjoy raising farm animals, but it's easier to handle regular, linear RPGs without feeling like a jerk.
If kids are expecting a reset button in real life because of video games they need more parenting time and a lot less Halo. Being unable to tell the difference between expectations and rewards in video games and real life means there's something seriously missing from their early education.
That goes for everything: movies, friends, even the internet. Parents don't even have to be experts, just caring enough to teach what to get out of an experience. Not to say it would be awesome to one day school my teenager in their favourite FPS, but that's a different tale. :)
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
No discussion about irreversible consequences in games can be complete without mentioning it:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/raitendo/you-only-live-once
Aye, that's what I tell people who insist I should quit smoking and drinkin. Mah daddy didn't raise no quitter ;)
More seriously, wtf? That strikes me as an incredibly stupid idea. Life is full of situations where quitting is actually the logical alternative.
Trivial example: sending yet another thousand to that poor Nigerian widow, for yet another unexpected bank fee. Less people would end up in huge debt if they just quit instead of throwing more good money after bad.
Equally trivial example: business. Keeping dumping more money in a business that loses them hand over fist can be an a bad idea, and quitting can actually be the sane thing to do. If you think otherwise, tell that to all the stagecoach companies in the 19'th century.
But really, the same goes for war, gambling, or just about anything else.
Even in games, one of the first things you learn in Go is to not throw good pieces after bad, i.e., to know when to quit trying to save a group that's beyond saving. Not only you'll typically end up increasing the other guy's score if you keep at it, but even if he does let you save that group, it's because it's giving him time to take the rest of the board. Knowing when to let go of a group or stop following a ladder is the first step to graduating from noob, so to speak.
Which brings us to entertainment. WTF? If the purpose is to get entertained, what kind of idiot would argue that you should continue doing something that stopped being entertaining, just in the name of some idiotic "not being a quitter?" Would you argue one also shouldn't change TV channels if some uninteresting crap just started? Why or why not? It's as much being a "quitter" as changing the game disc in the computer.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Because you probably DID kill off your characters. It's not hard to save everyone in Mass Effect 2 as long as you 1) Fully upgrade your ship and 2) keep everyone loyal. If you don't upgrade the ship, then people who aren't with you end up dying. If you take the people you care about with you (For me it's Tali and Garrus) then they won't die even if you don't upgrade the Normandy. If characters aren't loyal, they may die once you're actually in the collector base.
Diablo 2 Hardcore. (Or any online RPG with a Hardcore mode)
There's no do-over button when you play on the realms. You play, you take your death like a man, and you start over. At least you can blame it on your lag if you get fragged.
I do wonder, however, whether they teach children to look for the reset button.
Players who reset in any Animal Crossing game are in for a sort of harassment that's far worse than the "You forgot to shut down; now wait for a ScanDisk" in Windows 98.
I played my first play of New Vegas without making a save except for when finishing the game session (and the autosaves). The only times I loaded a save other than at the start of a session was when the game crashed (which happened a fair bit nearer the end so I played shorter sessions). If I died I was going to start all over (without such a limit on myself most likely) but didn't need to.
It did make for some "oh shit" moments though fewer than I was hoping (Boone getting himself killed was the biggest one).
I'd be annoyed with a game that forced me to do that though, sometimes you want to see the results of two late choice paths without having to play through the entire start of the game again...
The problem is that a desire for irreversible consequences is in direct conflict with game replayability. If you can play the game again from a saved state, or even fresh from the start, you can do things differently. In fact, for most games, it's the only reason to restart. There aren't a whole lot of games I know of that are worth replaying because it's exactly the same.
Even action games aren't replayed exactly the same so long as the player's skill improve.
More Twoson than Cupertino
This is exactly the reason why I'm so looking forward to the Bioware MMO. These people to me are the absolute masters of story-based RPGs, and to have every conversation option you take be irreversible seems like just what that genre needs. Let's hope they make it a great game.
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
This is partially why I enjoyed the game Demon's Souls (a infamously hard JRPG with heavy WRPG themes from the makers of King's Field). When you die in Demon's Souls (which you will, alot), the game almost immediately auto-saves to the hard drive. It takes some kneejerk resetting in order to get past this. While the game has no big decisions to make, and is almost purely combat, this really encouraged me to watch my step and added a great deal to the atmosphere of the game.
Another game that has a similiar fuction is the Way of the Samurai series, which prompts you to save your game after you die. You CAN ignore it and simply load up your last save from before your death, but the game gives you benefits if you start over. (The game only takes 3-4 hours at most to beat on the longest story path, though.) This
There are ways to deal with the reset button issue, but it's hard to do so without infringing on the experience and just making new frustrations for the gamer to deal with. The games I've mentioned above are a step in the right direction.
Technology is a tool. The hands that use that technology are what are significant. The same theoretical base is used to create weapons that can destroy cities or power them. DNA can now be revised to rescue children from debilitating conditions... or create viruses that could kill everyone (or RNA, but anyway). The environment can be molded to our liking either in a building through climate control or outdoors through selective planting / irrigation / pollution management. Nerves can be transplanted now (I don't have any medical journals to point you too since this was something considered impossible when I was little, but my neighbor had this done after a rather bad motorcycle accident) but at the same time, people can use the same technology to harvest organs. Technology is neither savior nor demon -- it simply is. If it simply is there to be used, then how the individual acts is important--modeling himself after a messiah or a devil.
Yes, but going on about how it's like reality, is kinda silly in a thread where that's actually the whole complaint. If I wanted something that's exactly like reality, I'd be in reality, not in a computer game.
What I want from a game is something _entertaining_. Realism or any other considerations are not the primary qualities there. They're only good if they help make a more entertaining experience, and should just get the fuck out of the way if not. It's that simple.
In fact, I'd go on a limb and say that even those chanting the silly "but it's like REALITY" mantra, wouldn't really want a game that is exactly like reality. An actual true-to-reality simulation of a medieval adventure would probably be more like:
You're not some noble adventurer, you're a serf (about 80% of the population was.) If you get off your master's demesne to explore anything, you're now a wanted fugitive. You'll likely spend the rest of your miserable life ploughing, reaping and helping maintain the castle and roads in the meantime. The most you'll contribute to a war is having your grain plundered by the enemy or "levied" by your own side. You'll probably die of a horrible disease before reaching 40 years old. Game over.
Well, ok, that's not much fun. Let's try something else. *Flips through the list of Nethack classes*
Ok, you're a knight. Most of the year you're supposed to manage 5 peasant families, and see to it that they produce enough to pay the taxes _and_ survive until next year, and maintain the roads, and pay for your horse and armour, etc. Most knights actually ploughed and reaped themselves too, to make ends meet, especially if they lost a battle differently and are still paying their own ransom. Think: like being saddled with a mortgage for life, except it's just for doing your duty to your king, not for buying a fancy car or house. In the only time when you're not doing that, you're supposed to be doing battle for your liege lord.
Even a scratch during one of these battles can infect and kill you. But that's ok because on such campaigns you're more likely to die of some disease (even kings died of dysentery) than by the sword. And whatever doesn't kill you, will hurt like hell and make you less healthy, not stronger.
The only time you'll actually have enough free time to go exploring dungeons is after 40, which even for most knights means you're a "senior citizen", basically. And probably by now thankful to _not_ risk your life every year. But that's ok, because there are no such dungeons to explore anyway.
And if you do find one, see above: even a 1 inch deep poke with a sword can outright kill or disable you, not just lower your HP for a while. And even a scratch can infect and again kill you.
Hmm, ok, maybe that's not it either... *Flips through the classes some more* Rogue. Well, that's easy, you'd be poor, do a couple of thefts and get hanged. You don't get to explore any dungeons either.
Hmm, well, let's be generous and pretend the rogue is actually a mercenary, which is a more realistic medieval role, and we just decided we want realism:
You're a mercenary, just by virtue that you were the second son and got kicked unceremoniously on the street when your elder brother inherited the family estate. You got treated like dirt by the knights all your life, and used as "wall fodder" in every single assault, before the more valuable troops. You're very unlikely to survive more than a couple of campaigns and causes of death include not just the enemy and disease, but also historically documented cases of the knights on your side charging through the mercenaries at the enemy. E.g., at Crecy, the French knights actually actively hacked down their own retreating crossbowmen mercenaries. In some battles you actually get to fight without pants so you can shit yourself while fighting. Yeah, dysentery was that bad. (See, Agincourt.) Each battle brings you a reminder that if captured, the nobles and knights will be ransomed, but your kind will get hanged. Y
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There are some people who want their games to be a linear progression and who dislike the stress of making a "wrong" decision. On the other hand, some games are improved by having a branching tree quest logic. Fallout: New Vegas is a great game with a non-linear progression system. One of the first decisions in the game involves deciding whether or not to help the town that has saved you from the wasteland defend someone who has taken refuge there. The other side of that coin is to help the "bad guys" who are there to kill him. I probably spent a good two hours putting off that decision by doing every other quest besides that one. In the end, I made the (morally) right decision and saved the weakling from the bullies.
The next time I play the game, you can bet that the weakling and the town foolish enough to protect him will all die together. For me, that is the fun of open ended games. They have replay value, and they change as you replay them. I tend to play them through the first time doing what I think the designers want me to do to further their idea of what the story line should be. The second time through, I make every "wrong" decision imaginable, just to see how far off track the story will go.
In a typical game, the choices are simple. Either you make the right decision and live, or you make the wrong decision and die. In a well written game, any decision you make furthers the story. The difference is that the ending will not always be the same. Decisions should lead to outcomes and not be a simple pass or fail logic.
I think what is really going on here is that video game designers have to limit the possible game outcomes due to their resources. So they do a good job of disguising the rails. I mean, whether you do A, B, or C, X is going to happen. But they spend a lot of effort making A, B, and C look like real choices. And they spend a lot of time making X look like a consequence. But an unavoidable event is not in fact a consequence.
Those aren't choices. Real choices usually have a lot of context and don't have completely surprising outcomes. How many times have you been playing a game, made a decision, and when you saw the outcome you were, "Huh?"
I hadn't read anything about the plot before I played this game, and when I was forced into the cut scene that wrecks your ship, and when I realized that it was not part of the quest I was trying to complete, but a time based event after having completed another event and then some N number of side quests, I actually did reload to my save before the original triggering event. I hadn't completed all the side quests, and I found out that, basically, for every side quest I continued to go on from that point without going to the end-game event, people on my crew were going to die. I decided that was some BULL SHIT. I had done the event that leads up to the end game sequence because I was interested in the plot. But I was also interested in the plot of the majority of the side quests. I didn't want to be punished for WANTING TO PLAY THE GAME.
Playing one and three quarters of a game's storyline (ME1 and 3/4 of ME2) where time literally means nothing and you can gallivant across the universe at your own pace, only for time to suddenly have meaning, but the game not communicating it to you in any reasonable fashion, is bullshit. If there had been sequences like this in the previous game, or previous parts of this game, or if the urgency was actually put on the player using some kind of UI or explicit dialog (and no, "we need to do this right now!" coming out of a character's mouth in an RPG does not constitute explicit dialog, because they say that shit about their mission all the fucking time and then let you waste hours on end raising chocobos and racing them with no punishment whatsoever, so the character would have to say something like "oh shit, we only have time for maybe ONE MORE MISSION before we need to deal with this" or something equally explicit and possibly 4th-wall-breaking).
I particularly remember Zork III as being easy to get in unwinnable situations, though text-based games are a lot quicker to run through once you figure out the correct steps.
I think a lot of time games try to make your individual decisions important. I don't think that is really a good idea. While it happens in the real world, it is normally considered luck. If you have no reason to know the outcome of your actions, (good or bad), then the fact that something happens down the road is not a direct result of you. You could have been a random number generator.
What I think is better is how your decisions add up in aggregate. In MMOs, and RPGs there are many times 'factions' where each action you take pleases some people and angers others. In everquest, there were zones (PoG) where certain classes wouldn't kill anything because the faction decreases caused them to be unable to participate in their class. Similarly in RPGs, you can make friends with different factions and alienate factions which can lead to everything from higher prices on goods, inability to access quests, and outright hostility by a NPC that might otherwise have sold you a loaf of bread.
Additionally, in most games, there is something you can do to get back in the good graces. Normally it is tedious, monotinious, and takes a long time. This is how it should be. You screw up? You pay your dues.
Ultimately, making very random, minor actions at the beginning of a game turn in to game changing problems later doesn't benefit anyone any more than a guy choosing to stay home and having his house get hit by an airplane does. (And I appologize for the poor spelling throughout this post.)
I do security
Eh, it could be worse. E.g., another Bioware specialty, the impulsive turncoat who you _do_ get to put out of his/her misery yourself because he actually joins the bad guy and starts attacking you.
I mean, my end battle of NWN2 went something like this. Mind you, not _literally_, but a decent "artist's impression":
So you've spent countless hours gathering your team, solving their side quests, listening to their sob stories, and training and arming them for the final confrontation with the incarnation of supreme evil. Just as you're done listening to his mandatory gloating and command your team to draw your weapons, your druid interrupts:
Druid: "Err, actually I'm joining him against you."
You: "What the...? This is the guy who killed all your friends, desecrated your sacred grove, and tried to kill you. Repeatedly. And you're joining him?"
Druid: "Err, yes, but you never bought me a pony!"
You: "Lady, there are no ponies in this game."
Druid: "Excuses, excuses. And you only listened to me sob about how mom loved my sister more than me 100 times, disregarding my emotional need to do that before and after each rest."
You: "Lady, it's D&D. We've been hitting rest every 5 minutes so you can remember your spells. Far from me to suggest seeing a neurologist, but... anyway, there's no freaking way anyone'll start _that_ talk again every 5 minutes."
Druid: "Hrmpf! That's just the kind of insensitivity I'm talking about! Well, I'm off!"
You: "Damn! Ok, anyone else feel like sharing anything like that?"
Paladin: "Actually, I'm switching sides too."
You: "What the hell? Dude, why? I thought we were like brothers!"
Paladin: "Your blatant disregard of the lawful good ethos, that's why. I counted no less than 5 cases of jay walking, 2 broken promises to find someone's lost kitten and respectively heirloom underpants, 4 cases of public drunkenness..."
You: "Ok, ok, I get the idea. But that guy is chaotic evil and your sworn arch-enemy!"
Paladin: "Eh, I'll just atone afterwards."
You: "Fuck! Anyone else?"
Rogue: "Me too."
You: "But... but... didn't I buy you all that stuff, and go on all your silly quests to find your long lost puppy and chuck eggs at your ex-boyfriend's house, and all that?"
Rogue: "Yeah, but you never read me bedtime stories, and made fun of my cap with cat ears, and seemed to enjoy telling me that there's no Santa."
You: "Lady, you're twenty-eight years old. That's twenty years overdue to learn about Santa."
Rogue: "Hrm. Meanie. Besides, just look at him. He's sooo dreamy with those bulging muscles and red glowing eyes..."
Evil Boss: "I'LL RIP YOUR HEART OUT AND EAT IT!"
Rogue: "Oooh, kinky!"
It may even seem palatable when it's, say, the immature nerd stereotype of a sorceress that does an impulsive jumping ship because she thinks you (as a male character) like the male mage more than her. It's more of a WTF when it's the mature, level headed mage guy who is on a mission to stop the Evil Boss deserts to him and fights you, because he thinks you like the sorceress more than him.
I mean, fuck, I'm even all understanding about other lifestyles and orientations and all, but trying to kill me for liking the girl more is a bit extreme ;)
Or like in KOTOR where, because Bastilla got kidnapped and tortured by Darth Malak, while I on the other hand am on a quest to save her, of course the next time I meet Bastilla, she tries to kill me for Malak. I mean, gee, Stockholm Syndrome is good and fine, but when you start killing people for the guy that kidnapped and tortured you, you're taking it a tad too far ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
DO NOT EAT THE CUSTARD PIE.
Many gamers will not only go into that part of the game but go as far as the game allows them too. They are not put off but instead laugh gleefully as they find they can kill their crew and the cute cat they are supposed to love.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Well, it's probably not a bad name for it, but in all fairness it's not just the women.
E.g., I explicitly mentioned the Paladin, and he's not just a guy there, but one of the hardest cases to wrap my mind around. I mean, they spend the whole game characterizing him as the guy who does what's right for the people, and fights evil just because he's a Paladin... and then, bam, he'll refuse to fight the Ultimate Evil Boss (TM) because I talked to the Ranger more than to him. WTF? What kind of a two-year-old's reaction is that? And where's that whole paladin ethos now?
And it's pretty much gotten worse recently. I mean, far from me to suggest it's because they were also selling a DLC with presents to improve the mood of party members, but in Dragon Age otherwise pretty much the only role you could actually role-play and have your party members stay with you was that of a sycophant. You had to pretend to be the good and honourable guy to one character, the might-makes-right insensitive prick/cunt to the other, while reassuring another that you too love backstabbing innocents and kicking puppies, while being the mopey goth who hates all humanity to a fourth, and so on, while also managing who's within earshot when you do that. Pretty much any having a consistent personality of your own is punished by the game swift and hard. And even then you get random unpredictable twists like the devout fundie party member throwing a fit and liking you less, if you bring some soldiers religious symbols to raise their morale before a fight. (She thinks real faith has to come from within, see?) So better save often and try with a different party when that happens.
But yeah, you're right, that's my problem: I'm starting to find it difficult to take some characters seriously any more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Joe's Bar, Upper Sandusky, Ohio, Earth
You begin the game in this, er, fine establishment. The urge you feel is the urge to urinate. Pick one of the bathrooms (women northeast, men northwest); this will determine your character's sex for the game"
Now THERE's REAL CHOICE!!!
Plus, you can use the scratch and sniff card to smell pizza!
"For Your Amusement:
Don't go to the bathroom.
Buy a beer before relieving yourself.
Play as a man if you are a woman, or vice versa.
After selecting one bathroom, try entering the other.
Urinate somewhere other than in the toilet (e.g., the sink).
Flush the toilet.
Eat the pizza. Then vomit. "
why is this forum post a main page slashdot article?
Obligatory: http://www.kongregate.com/games/raitendo/you-only-live-once
I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas a lot recently, and it's directly because of the different paths I can take. In real life, my options are pretty clear-cut as far as theft and murder, as are the consequences when caught. In a video game, I always play through the first time as a "good" player: not stealing anything marked as owned, and not killing anyone until they "show red." It makes playing the game a little easier, knowing which characters you can kill with no repercussions and which will give you bad karma and standing.
In New Vegas, it's generally clear when I'm working for the good guys (NCR/democracy) and when I'm not (Legion/slavers). I play the game as good, by doing good things. If something bad happens, it's generally not because of any choices I've made, unless that's just the way the story goes.
While I do prefer the linear storyline concept, I also like the semi-randomness of an open-world. Yes, the choices I make should make a difference in the way the game reacts to me, but I don't think that one false move should cause me to restart my game, either. If I spent a few hours playing an evil character (killing good guys, not killing bad guys, stealing and looting) and something bad happens as a result, that's cool - Hollywood logic. I guess the problem occurs when a random event happens despite what you do (zero control) or counter to what you do (inverse control).
People have to keep reminding themselves that it's just a game, that game designers make choices to try and differentiate the game-play from all the other games out there, and sometimes they make decisions that don't fit your style or expectations of a good game. Having said that, I think there needs to be a full-blown sequel to both Red Dead Redemption and Borderlands. Those were fun games, but the narrative story was way too short with somewhat limited replay value for me. I did like the zombie pack for Borderlands, though....
I did the same kinda thing with Metro 2033 - the first scene kills the character, no matter what. Then it cuts back in time and the game actually starts. As I was getting killed in the first scene, I was thinking "HOLY $ this is the hardest game I have ever played!!!" Then on the screen came "3 days earlier..."
I'm seeing an awful lot of comments about games that were obviously badly written and badly thought through.
What about when game designers make a conscious decision to make the player responsible for his/her failures without making the cause of failure something needlessly beyond the player's control?
For example:
Alien VS Predator had a mechanism by which the player was allowed only three saves per level. Three. No more. The player was never told how long the missions were going to be or what kind of enemy he/she was up against. If the player died on the last save - tough. Game over, man. Game over.
Naturally, gamers whined and whined until Rebellion caved and released a patch allowing unlimited saves.
Ironically, years later gamers would whine and whine about games like Bioshock removing all consequences of failure entirely.
Fuck the whiners. Take responsibility for your actions (good or bad) and prepare yourself for the consequences. That's what real heroes and heroines do.
I stopped playing right there because when I control a character I make the choices.
I guess there are a lot of games where you don't get far, given the prevalence of the But Thou Must pattern in video game design.
a decade ago when games were simple, I/we had discussions about restarts and there was a real suggestion that If you died then you would have to start the games from the very begining, no levels, no saved games to fall back on. That the choices that you make are irreversible. But as it has already been said, these are games, not real-life(tm).
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I remember many years ago playing Elite II on my beloved and much missed Atari STE, I'd got a little bit bored doing the usual trade runs, robots spare parts etc, and I decided to do a couple of slave runs in a couple of finge systems. Anyway, after buying my first consignment of slaves I took off, and once in orbit I did the usual checks, Fuel, Navigation, and Inventory etc. I did a double take when the inventory showed I had 20 tonnes of fertilizer but no slaves! Had I been ripped off by the trader (obviously unscrupulous slave trader) on the surface? Was that even possible in the game world? After much head scratching I still couldn't work it out so I checked the price of fertilizer on the trading boards to see if I could cut my losses slightly, the answer was a resounding no, so I dumped my cargo. To my great surprise I saw that the 'fertilizer' looked remakably like hundreds of human bodies floating through space.
After another round of checks I found out what happened, I had not installed the cargo hold of my ship with life support! At the time I was very impressed with the attention to detail that went in to that game, I still am today, I could have gone back to another save point and done it again but that would of pissed all over the intentions of the game, it would wiped out something and negated the thing I was supposed to learn, my experience and my immersion in that game would've been tainted.
I've got probably got at least half a dozen little 'intersting'(depends who you are i guess) anecdotes from that game and I haven't played another game in the last 20 years(my god it really was that long ago) that has given me an experience like Elite II. I wish I still had the maps (came in the box) and an emulator so that I could play it without suffering those godawfull frame rates if you were treated to if you fought anything larger than a boiled egg! Sigh....
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
"If you mess this chance up 3 times, your Game will be irrevocably made unplayable and you'll have to pay us more money to restart."
This form of gameplay died with video arcades.
You said your heart was pounding and you got all wired up over....a cut scene?
That's pretty, ummmm, I don't actually think there's a word for it in the English language, but its nothing good.
Not really. I don't get a second chance at the couple of hours of redoing since the point when I should have taken some gizmo or did a party member's quest differently. I still have X hours a week to get entertained, and no reloading will give me those back.
And really, I could use them to redo that stupid game, or I could use them to do something more entertaining. If such a more entertaining thing exists that I could dump those hours into, then it's a stupid use of them to dump them into the less entertaining alternative out of just some stupid idea of not being a quitter.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, no, that's false. Virtually _all_ Go games end in recognizing that there's no point in continuing.
Another thing that separates the newbies from those who have at least minimal clue is to recognize when the only smart move is not to play. Yeah, you may recognize that from the movie Wargames, but it's also how Go works. It's very valid to just pass your turn, to _not_ make a move at all, if it's actually more disadvantageous to make one.
A Go game ends when both don't want to make a move any more, even if often that means one of them being fully aware they're conceding defeat. Just because continuing would at best achieve nothing, and at worst just increase the opponent's score some more.
Then you move to scoring, which again consists of both players conceding whole chunks that they consider impossible to defend. Yeah, sure, that group of my pieces are dead even if they didn't get removed from the table, just add the whole chunk to your score. If there is a disagreement as to whether a chunk can be defended or not, they resume play for it, but again that may actually be the worse choice if they are indeed impossible to defend.
The notion of hanging in there to the bitter end and not being a quitter is pretty stupid in Go, all around.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Playing Red Dead Redemption, I understand perfectly well that John Marston is not a good guy. I know he has one goal and he'll do just about anything to capture his bounty to see his wife and child again, buuuuuuuut...
I really didn't want to work for Allende and de Santa. I had a really hard time shooting the rebels, I purposely failed the missions in different ways to see if I could evoke a different consequence, but no. As far as I could tell, I was stuck with the fascists, who of course betrayed me, then I joined the rebels I'd been fighting.
I understand it's how stories go, how role-playing works. I got over it, I played the "more bad guy than a moment ago", but it was unsettling being required to do something like that to progress in the storyline while the pro/ant/pro/ant/protagonist ambiguously resists then submits to everything not-good but adultery.
I tell myself I'd refuse, but I can't help but feel like the non-existent victim's torturer in Milgram's experiment. It's just a game, right? right? Is it really?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
You could, you know, be reasonable and just look up the game FAQ and see...
Is it really that hard for people to read through to their current sequence without reading ahead for spoilers?
I do this all the time for my games, namely because after 30 mins of being stuck in the same hole not sure what to do the thing turns from a game into a frustration for me.
Much as I loved ME1, it did for me have one big flaw: completing the side-missions didn't fit with the story. The main storyline is a rollercoaster that should have you pelting at full speed to the next major plot world, and if you do buy into this you feel obliged to leave all the side-missions until you've completed the main campaign... at which point they're no longer available to you.
I mean sure, I replayed it, but it did strike a bum note the first time around.