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."

Comments

Re:Unforgivable games

[curare19]

The worst adventure game I've ever played like this is "Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender". Now, this was a fun game (as you can probably tell by the title). The dialog and concept was clever. You start the game by crashing into the ocean in your spaceship. In true adventure-game style, you search the ship for items. In a small, almost invisible drawer on the ship is a tube of superglue. After you leave the ship and swim to shore, you can never return to it.

In the final moments of the game, you have to borrow a broken-down spaceship to leave the planet. The spaceship has a crack in the windshield, repairable only by...get ready for it....SUPERGLUE! Without the superglue, the ship has no integrity and your head explodes when you take off. There is no alternative item to the superglue, and it is never otherwise mentioned in the game.

You should have seen the look on my face when I realized, after dozens of hours of gameplay, I forgot to grab the superglue from the ship in the first scene. I was ready to hunt down the game developers, one by one, Rambo-style.