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

Successful game

[mvar]

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

Re:If I wanted consequences

[arivanov]

Or playing nethack.

No reset, no checkpoint, no turning back. Unless you cheat every decision is final and will result in you, the game or both changing somewhat.

The only "reset" is to start from scratch which however will result in a completely different game.

The key word is "balance"...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

Re:If I wanted consequences

[kainosnous]

When I first started playing nethack, I was frustrated by how almost everything was irreversible and game changing. I would quickly kill myself when sometihing didn't go the way I thought it should.

I have since resolved to play out each game the best I can no matter how unlikely the odds seem to be. In the process, I've learned to be more careful with each choice that I make. This has the advantage of adding a more real sort of fear that gets the blood pumping. I get a real tingle up my spine when I "sense a wave of psychic energy" at the bottom of the Gnomish Mines.

Another upside is that I find that I have more unique characters which sometimes require unusual tactics to get by. When you overcome these challenges, you have a story to tell that likely has never been experienced before.

Re:Seriously

[hibiki_r]

My issue with ME2 is that some of the decisions were very random: For example, if you don't do the loyalty mission of a specific crew member, then you can't get a ship upgrade that saves a different crew member from death. Therefore, doing the loyalty mission of the second without doing that of the first makes all the effort spent on the second to be wasted. Now, if those crew members were related in any way, or if something made it very obvious that some crew member's missions are more important, it'd make sense. Instead, they happened to give that important mission to a character that is flat and boring, so if people just start doing missions for the characters they like the best first, that mission will be missed.

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.