Why your choices don't matter
- Thread starter Revlid
- Start date
- Essay
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
Yeah. The ultimate bottleneck isn't in working out the possible choices but in executing their outcomes while keeping the game balances. That's why I suggested that whatever game you do this in would have to be relatively short, both to constrain the number of choices, and so that players will be inclined to view the barred content on second or third play throughs.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ultimately I feel this is a sideproduct of how game development has progressed in the MOAR GRAPHICS cinematic direction, which keeps inflating the production cost of everything and until relatively recently didn't even cross the uncanny valley besides. If you had a game with a AAA budget but which went for stylized retro graphics you could probably afford to have a complicated gameworld. But instead we dedicate resources to ensuring that nostril hairs flow fluidly in the wind or whatever.
Overall though I feel the real potential for organic storytelling will come from players. One idea I'd like to see done is a MMORPG in a post-apocalyptic setting where there are no fixed settlements and missions and NPCs are recruited and employed by players. Want a settlement? Build it. Want to send trading caravans to your neighbor? Do it. Want to be a roving motorcycle gang that raids the caravan? Go ahead. Want to be the tyrannical settlement next door that hired the gangs to torment your rival? Have fun.
Last edited:
Considering that converting story lines and 'fake' choices have been a thing since text adventures and choose your own adventure books I don't see what graphics have to do with anything. Sometimes things are just hard to do and also kind of niche. Also story choice has nothing to do with gameworld complexity as thousands of text adventures will tell you. Choice of Games don't have complex simulations of a game world running in their games it is just a few stats and boolean phrases and it never reaches the complexity of even WoWs armor system mathematically.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
Though it should be kept in mind that Choice of Games games tend to vary in the amount of story branching they possess. Robots or Alexandria seem much more varied in terms of grand story arcs than, say, Empyrian or Pirate. The latter seem to use fake choices heavily (the spy and the plane mission, anyone!?), while the former have options to radically change what's contained in the story depending on what one chooses to do (e.g. pre-empting the USA-PRC war, or the sheer divergence of what the story is about in the penultimate part of both CoR and CoA).
How good your writer(s) is/are matters a lot, and will give different strengths and weaknesses to the game in question.
Last edited:
blast flame
How far will we go if it means lighting the way?
- Location
- Perth, Australia
- Pronouns
- They/Them
As far as choice goes I'm far more interested in moral values, choosing what to fight for and basically defining the sort of character I'm playing than shooting the big bag before it's revealed their the bad guy and short circuiting the plot.
Take Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You can argue that the choices in that game were meaningless insofar that they didn't change things fundamentally. But if the game had been written without choice it probably would have involved the character moping through the whole thing complaining about how he didn't ask for this and then ending with the self-destruct ending. I don't want to play that character, I don't want to play that game. But by allowing me to choose, by giving me the option to choose the Sarif ending instead, they gave me the option to make a character I wanted to play as and to involve them in a plot arc I wanted to experience.
Take Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You can argue that the choices in that game were meaningless insofar that they didn't change things fundamentally. But if the game had been written without choice it probably would have involved the character moping through the whole thing complaining about how he didn't ask for this and then ending with the self-destruct ending. I don't want to play that character, I don't want to play that game. But by allowing me to choose, by giving me the option to choose the Sarif ending instead, they gave me the option to make a character I wanted to play as and to involve them in a plot arc I wanted to experience.
Dream Logic
An offseason swallow
- Location
- In transit
One of the major things I've noticed is that the choices shouldn't be something I can renegade on.
Forcing me to live with them goes a long way. As does tying it in with the themes of the game.
Pyres a great example because it naturally develops a sort of tension in the rites. While you don't change the end results it's never about that, it's the personal journey of the nightwings.
Katawa Shoujo might be my favorite Visual Novel example for a really dumb reason. You get on the routes for the girls by demonstrating you're the type of person they would be interested in and vice Versa. There's never a prompt to go out with them and it feels nice and like you had a relationship grow naturally.
Doki Doki literature club also had an odd one for me. The poem mini game, you can write poems specifically to impress the girls...or you can be like me and just choose what you think sounds interesting! Not sure if it was intended but I got a kick out of using the mechanics as a form of self expression.
Forcing me to live with them goes a long way. As does tying it in with the themes of the game.
Pyres a great example because it naturally develops a sort of tension in the rites. While you don't change the end results it's never about that, it's the personal journey of the nightwings.
Katawa Shoujo might be my favorite Visual Novel example for a really dumb reason. You get on the routes for the girls by demonstrating you're the type of person they would be interested in and vice Versa. There's never a prompt to go out with them and it feels nice and like you had a relationship grow naturally.
Doki Doki literature club also had an odd one for me. The poem mini game, you can write poems specifically to impress the girls...or you can be like me and just choose what you think sounds interesting! Not sure if it was intended but I got a kick out of using the mechanics as a form of self expression.
Last edited:
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
I think that a big problem with how a lot of game devs think is that they haven't learned the 'limitations can be good' lesson when it comes to player choice and simply fetishize the idea of it so they fail to identify parts of their stories where robbing the player of actual options could be both more impactful to the story and help shore up the gaps in writing caused by needing to give the player choices.
Like, I'd argue that in a hypothetical alternate universe Mass Effect it would be better for the story if they simply didn't have a choice whether Kaiden or Ashley was going to die. Or if they even just made who lives and dies determinate on who you choose to stay with Kirrahe or with the bomb before the mission even starts and even making the choice to save one of them possible, but not possible for the character to actually accomplish. I think this would have been way more impactful than Shepard magically choosing who lives and who dies. Give the player the illusion of making a choice, but ultimately take the consequences for making that choice out of their hands.
Sooo, okay um...
TURNS OUT I REALLY REALLY WANTED TO TALK ABOUT NIGHT IN THE WOODS BUT DECIDED TO START WITH A NEEDLESS PREAMBLE ABOUT A GAME PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CAN'T STRUCTURE AN ARGUMENT FOR SHIT I'LL TRY TO TIE IT BACK TO MASS EFFECT I PROMISE
ALSO SPOILERS-ISH
Another game that I think uses the illusion of choice in a pretty cool way is Night in the Woods. This is far less of a choices = consequences kind of thing, but a way that the game uses choice to drive the relationship between the player and the protagonist and to effectively characterize that protagonist.
Like in a lot of Adventure game... things like Walking Dead and Life is Strange the game gives you options in how the protagonist Mae reacts or responds to what other people say. And in these kinds of games the player is effectively directing the character's behaviour and probably wants to guide the character towards a better outcome or behaviour that the player thinks is right for the situation. This is doubly appealing for NITW because Mae's (the protagonist) presented personality is highly childish, social inept, and impulsive. One of the dominating elements of a lot of different playthroughs I've seen of NITW is attempts on the part of people playing to try to moderate Mae's issues via dialogue choices.
Which becomes pretty hard when Mae's dialogue goes out of it's way to refuse the player's influence on her personality. It doesn't prevent the player from choosing what she's saying, but it always keeps what she says within that consistent characterization. Sometimes the game will genuinely give the choice for Mae to act like a normal huma- cat being. But other times the line you choose is a preamble to Mae saying something dumb, or both options basically say the same thing, or it's a choice between two bad options. Sometimes the game will carry on a conversation without a dialogue choice for a little too long for the player's liking. Sometimes the game will purposefully fuck with you by giving you a seemingly good option and bad option where the actual result is the exact opposite.
On a character level this is excellent for giving Mae a consistent and lived in characterization that isn't diluted by the players choices. On a ludonarrative level this amounts to building a relationship between Mae and the player. Because the player is the one sitting there choosing Mae's words and their influence being rejected the fiction of Mae's behaviour in the story bleeds into reality as cringe on part of the player. And when in some parts where Mae actually does things the game won't actually give you a choice, just catapults the player into decisions they otherwise wouldn't make. It's genuinely magical watching lets players squirm in those moments, and it's does just as much for making the character relatable than the good writing and characterization. It makes Mae by my standards worth a thousand Adam Jensens or Clementines or Shepards.
And the ideas here could very easily be done by other games to create more interesting "choice" based protagonists. Like what if Renegade Shepard and Paragon Shepard didn't come off as two completely different people, but a similar person acting in different ways? Or if they occasionally took the actions of the character out of the players hands based on their renegade/paragon scores? What if Shepard could hold a conversation for more than ten seconds without the player having to choose their next line?
Hell, take Dragon Age 2. Where they changed the axis of the dialogue wheel to focus far more on personality. Everyone who plays DA2 plays funny Hawke, because he's the most entertaining one, and he manages to have a semblance of varied characterization within that personality. Now imagine if Hawke was more equalized so that each dialogue option portrays more of a facet of one personality rather than a different one entirely.
Okay, uh, TLDR. Intentionally taking control from the player on how their character acts can be good, and in a lot of cases lack of choice can be even more valuable as a storytelling tool than any number of divergent choices.
Like, I'd argue that in a hypothetical alternate universe Mass Effect it would be better for the story if they simply didn't have a choice whether Kaiden or Ashley was going to die. Or if they even just made who lives and dies determinate on who you choose to stay with Kirrahe or with the bomb before the mission even starts and even making the choice to save one of them possible, but not possible for the character to actually accomplish. I think this would have been way more impactful than Shepard magically choosing who lives and who dies. Give the player the illusion of making a choice, but ultimately take the consequences for making that choice out of their hands.
Sooo, okay um...
TURNS OUT I REALLY REALLY WANTED TO TALK ABOUT NIGHT IN THE WOODS BUT DECIDED TO START WITH A NEEDLESS PREAMBLE ABOUT A GAME PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CAN'T STRUCTURE AN ARGUMENT FOR SHIT I'LL TRY TO TIE IT BACK TO MASS EFFECT I PROMISE
ALSO SPOILERS-ISH
Another game that I think uses the illusion of choice in a pretty cool way is Night in the Woods. This is far less of a choices = consequences kind of thing, but a way that the game uses choice to drive the relationship between the player and the protagonist and to effectively characterize that protagonist.
Like in a lot of Adventure game... things like Walking Dead and Life is Strange the game gives you options in how the protagonist Mae reacts or responds to what other people say. And in these kinds of games the player is effectively directing the character's behaviour and probably wants to guide the character towards a better outcome or behaviour that the player thinks is right for the situation. This is doubly appealing for NITW because Mae's (the protagonist) presented personality is highly childish, social inept, and impulsive. One of the dominating elements of a lot of different playthroughs I've seen of NITW is attempts on the part of people playing to try to moderate Mae's issues via dialogue choices.
Which becomes pretty hard when Mae's dialogue goes out of it's way to refuse the player's influence on her personality. It doesn't prevent the player from choosing what she's saying, but it always keeps what she says within that consistent characterization. Sometimes the game will genuinely give the choice for Mae to act like a normal huma- cat being. But other times the line you choose is a preamble to Mae saying something dumb, or both options basically say the same thing, or it's a choice between two bad options. Sometimes the game will carry on a conversation without a dialogue choice for a little too long for the player's liking. Sometimes the game will purposefully fuck with you by giving you a seemingly good option and bad option where the actual result is the exact opposite.
Like for example during the fight with Mae's mom the game gives you the choice between Mae saying "Mom, this isn't funny." and "You know what? Eff off." This is a trap. Naturally non-trollish players will avoid telling mom to fuck off like the plague but what actually happens if you choose it is that Mom just brushes her off as being childish, but choosing the first, better seeming option escalates into Mae saying some genuinely shitty stuff to her mother. It's genuinely one of the cruelest tricks I have ever seen in a video game, and it's glorious.
EDIT: Turns out I misremembered this particular conversation slightly, the conversation still gets really bad either way. But it still represents the game trying to give the player an out that proves to be false.
EDIT: Turns out I misremembered this particular conversation slightly, the conversation still gets really bad either way. But it still represents the game trying to give the player an out that proves to be false.
On a character level this is excellent for giving Mae a consistent and lived in characterization that isn't diluted by the players choices. On a ludonarrative level this amounts to building a relationship between Mae and the player. Because the player is the one sitting there choosing Mae's words and their influence being rejected the fiction of Mae's behaviour in the story bleeds into reality as cringe on part of the player. And when in some parts where Mae actually does things the game won't actually give you a choice, just catapults the player into decisions they otherwise wouldn't make. It's genuinely magical watching lets players squirm in those moments, and it's does just as much for making the character relatable than the good writing and characterization. It makes Mae by my standards worth a thousand Adam Jensens or Clementines or Shepards.
And the ideas here could very easily be done by other games to create more interesting "choice" based protagonists. Like what if Renegade Shepard and Paragon Shepard didn't come off as two completely different people, but a similar person acting in different ways? Or if they occasionally took the actions of the character out of the players hands based on their renegade/paragon scores? What if Shepard could hold a conversation for more than ten seconds without the player having to choose their next line?
Hell, take Dragon Age 2. Where they changed the axis of the dialogue wheel to focus far more on personality. Everyone who plays DA2 plays funny Hawke, because he's the most entertaining one, and he manages to have a semblance of varied characterization within that personality. Now imagine if Hawke was more equalized so that each dialogue option portrays more of a facet of one personality rather than a different one entirely.
Okay, uh, TLDR. Intentionally taking control from the player on how their character acts can be good, and in a lot of cases lack of choice can be even more valuable as a storytelling tool than any number of divergent choices.
Last edited:
Dream Logic
An offseason swallow
- Location
- In transit
Ok. This jump started a weird thought about how the SoulsBorne games make gameplay interweave the themes.
Dark souls makes you feel like your choice to keep playing matters because the Undead only truly hollow when they give up. So both the player and character(as scant as their characterization is) are placed on the same plane.
Oh and it includes a choice conveyed by mechanics that was pretty neat.
Bloodborne probably did my favorite way to unlock an ending though. Two Of them are a simple yes/no choice but the third requires searching for specific items, and using them. Normally I'd call this frustrating and unintuitive design but the fact is that what you're doing is poorly understood and esoteric so it makes perfect sense the ending is so hard to come by.
Dark souls makes you feel like your choice to keep playing matters because the Undead only truly hollow when they give up. So both the player and character(as scant as their characterization is) are placed on the same plane.
Oh and it includes a choice conveyed by mechanics that was pretty neat.
first this area is off the beaten path so you need to seek it out, but at the end you meet the half breed Priscilla, bearer of the God killing Life-Hunt. She asks if you wouldn't be willing to leave. The exits right behind her and she just wants to be left alone.
Its just you and her in the vestiges of her decaying world. No one will know besides you two and there's no reward for sparing her.
Its just you and her in the vestiges of her decaying world. No one will know besides you two and there's no reward for sparing her.
Bloodborne probably did my favorite way to unlock an ending though. Two Of them are a simple yes/no choice but the third requires searching for specific items, and using them. Normally I'd call this frustrating and unintuitive design but the fact is that what you're doing is poorly understood and esoteric so it makes perfect sense the ending is so hard to come by.
So you mean, "What if I just went and played Alpha Protocol instead?"
Yes, that would certainly be something you could do. It gets you dialogue written by Obsidian rather than Bioware.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Something I've thought since waaaay back when I played Jade Empire is that many games concerned with choices would work a lot better, in the sense of actually conveying a sense of choice, if they remembered that they are role-playing games. That is, you don't have to change the world around you so long as you can strongly define the sort of character you play.
Let's take an example. There's a quest in Jade Empire involving a cannibal demon cult that preys on a nearby town from an inn on the outskirts. If you enter the inn the demons, disguised as humans, will give you a quest to destroy the 'Forest Shadow', the fox spirit guardian of the surrounding forest, who has supposedly been sickening the trees and driving business away - actually the work of the demons, whose presence taints the land and who eat their customers. If you follow the quest along, you'll meet the fox spirit who will give you the full story, and you can choose whether to help her in her weakened state, or do the demon's bidding and slay the forest's guardian.
Here it should be noted that Jade Empire claimed to use a more eastern-inspired morality system, where instead of Good you had the 'Way of the Open Palm', concerned with staying in harmony with nature, your surroundings, and the Celestial Bureaucracy by assisting others and resisting tyranny - a follower of the Open Palm fights monsters and helps people not because it is morally right to do so, but because it is your place to do so as a kung fu hero. Meanwhile instead of Evil, there was the 'Way of the Closed Fist', a discordant philosophy of self-improvement through adversity, teaching that the world is shaped by power, power comes from strength, and strength grows by proving it - a follower of the Closed Fist may refuse to help people to force them to strengthen themselves by solving their own problems, or alternatively they may take on the challenge in order to strengthen themselves.
At least, that's the theory. Bioware never has been great with making karma meters that aren't just straightforward Nice/Jerk dichotomies, and this is one such case; helping the fox spirit is the Open Palm option and helping the demon is the Closed Fist option, because it's a demon and so slaying it is Good. The designers wanted to give the player 'choice' in the form of more gameplay by letting you choose which boss to fight, but in doing so they undermined the world they were trying to build.
So, how would I have implemented player choice in this case? Simple; make the quest linear, but expand your reasons for following it. Whatever choices you pick, you will agree to help the fox spirit and destroy the cannibals, but I'd offer half a dozen dialogue options for agreeing to do so; an Open Palm player can say that they are honoured to serve the will of Heaven, while a Closed Fist character would instead agree because they relish the challenge posed by such a powerful monster. If you want to emphasise this further then you can tie it into the boss fight, where you slay the demon in its cavernous lair by destroying load-bearing pillars of rock to collapse the mountain on top of it. A follower of the Open Palm might express regret for the damage done, or choose to focus on how the forest will recover without the demon's discordant taint, while a follower of the Closed Fist could exult in how they have literally reshaped the land by the strength of their fists.
I suspect this has a lot to do with why many 'evil' options in games are so unsatisfying. As Yahztee said in his review of Alpha Protocol;
Let's take an example. There's a quest in Jade Empire involving a cannibal demon cult that preys on a nearby town from an inn on the outskirts. If you enter the inn the demons, disguised as humans, will give you a quest to destroy the 'Forest Shadow', the fox spirit guardian of the surrounding forest, who has supposedly been sickening the trees and driving business away - actually the work of the demons, whose presence taints the land and who eat their customers. If you follow the quest along, you'll meet the fox spirit who will give you the full story, and you can choose whether to help her in her weakened state, or do the demon's bidding and slay the forest's guardian.
Here it should be noted that Jade Empire claimed to use a more eastern-inspired morality system, where instead of Good you had the 'Way of the Open Palm', concerned with staying in harmony with nature, your surroundings, and the Celestial Bureaucracy by assisting others and resisting tyranny - a follower of the Open Palm fights monsters and helps people not because it is morally right to do so, but because it is your place to do so as a kung fu hero. Meanwhile instead of Evil, there was the 'Way of the Closed Fist', a discordant philosophy of self-improvement through adversity, teaching that the world is shaped by power, power comes from strength, and strength grows by proving it - a follower of the Closed Fist may refuse to help people to force them to strengthen themselves by solving their own problems, or alternatively they may take on the challenge in order to strengthen themselves.
At least, that's the theory. Bioware never has been great with making karma meters that aren't just straightforward Nice/Jerk dichotomies, and this is one such case; helping the fox spirit is the Open Palm option and helping the demon is the Closed Fist option, because it's a demon and so slaying it is Good. The designers wanted to give the player 'choice' in the form of more gameplay by letting you choose which boss to fight, but in doing so they undermined the world they were trying to build.
So, how would I have implemented player choice in this case? Simple; make the quest linear, but expand your reasons for following it. Whatever choices you pick, you will agree to help the fox spirit and destroy the cannibals, but I'd offer half a dozen dialogue options for agreeing to do so; an Open Palm player can say that they are honoured to serve the will of Heaven, while a Closed Fist character would instead agree because they relish the challenge posed by such a powerful monster. If you want to emphasise this further then you can tie it into the boss fight, where you slay the demon in its cavernous lair by destroying load-bearing pillars of rock to collapse the mountain on top of it. A follower of the Open Palm might express regret for the damage done, or choose to focus on how the forest will recover without the demon's discordant taint, while a follower of the Closed Fist could exult in how they have literally reshaped the land by the strength of their fists.
I suspect this has a lot to do with why many 'evil' options in games are so unsatisfying. As Yahztee said in his review of Alpha Protocol;
As Revlid pointed out at the start, the story of Telltale's Batman does change depending on whether you choose to try and save Harvey or Catwoman, but the problem is that what change is who Bruce Wayne is, while the game seems to promise that you can change the world by preventing Two-Face from ever coming to be. Ditch that conceit, ground the story and the marketing firmly in a sense of the player defining who Bruce Wayne and Batman are, and the whole thing hangs together much more cohesively. Heck, it's even more practical for the designers - the extra dialogue required is easily outweighed by the gameplay and modelling you don't have to make.
Last edited:
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
This maps with my personal experience as a GM. The players in my current Star Wars game aren't as concerned with changing the galaxy (Though I do give them opportunities to make meaningful decisions that ripple to their favorite NPCs) as they are getting their characters drunk and airing out baggage so we all gain a better understanding of who they all are, where they've been, and where they want to go.
It's influenced my thinking as a GM to the point where my NPCs spend less time expositing stuff at the PCs and more finding ways for them to ask Uncle Iroh's big question: "Who are you, and what do you want?"
Acatalepsy
Firewall Proxy
- Location
- The Diamond Age
Another take on it from Frictional Games (Punumbra, Amnesia, Soma) - that consequences are central to games because consequences as a result of player action enable players to make plans. Ultimately most of the "game" takes place in neither the mechanics or the narrative, but in the player's mental models; players disengage when the mental model you are trying to get them to construct runs into the actual system and finds the system wanting.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
FTFY:
Like you mention markets and it makes me think of how League of Legends was a huge hit (the most played game in the world, moreso even than World of Warcraft) and it achieved that by taking the shamelessly obtuse and user unfriendly Dota and
Well we won't know because those triple AAA games with budgets comparable to blockbuster movies spent all that money on animating nose hairs or exquisitely positioning chest-high walls, rather than thinking about the most efficient and economical ways to give players interesting choices and options.
This is making me think of Stellaris and other Paradox Interactive worlds. The games lack a formal plot, but do have emergent storytelling coming from the complexity of the gameworld, various packaged events, and the player's own attitudes and choices. Such is I guess somewhat like a single player sandbox to the aforementioned MMORPG sandbox stuff.
"The player cannot change who you are."
That said there is a trade-off between "the PC is just a font for the player" and "the PC is the vessel for the player ride in, but is still clearly their own person" and reasons for either. Furthermore neither of those options is inherently favoring more or elss choice. Both 'font' and 'vessel' PCs can be put in stories where they are railroaded or where there is real agency for the player and/or the character they play as.
Last edited:
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
Ultimately I think every character must have some of their player in them or else they'll feel hollow and plastic, but the character must also be a window through which the player can explore aspects of themselves or completely invent new ones. The character must be related to the player, essentially, but be distinct in the way that siblings or cousins or parent and child are distinct.
Using myself as an example, a lot of my characters gravitate towards some kind of leadership role because I have a controlling personality and in real life if people don't make decisions then I try to herd them until they do (WHERE ARE WE EATING
). But there's a lot of space for character exploration even once I've narrowed it down to "person who is a compulsive but reluctant and kind of bad leader".
Using myself as an example, a lot of my characters gravitate towards some kind of leadership role because I have a controlling personality and in real life if people don't make decisions then I try to herd them until they do (WHERE ARE WE EATING
). But there's a lot of space for character exploration even once I've narrowed it down to "person who is a compulsive but reluctant and kind of bad leader".
Last edited:
Money isn't going to fix the problem because the problem is not amenable to money. If you want a structured story with a coherent plot instead of 'one damn thing happening after another' then every single 'meaningful' choice will ripple out exponentially and worse it isn't easily parallelized. You can't keep throwing writers at the problem because very quickly you have created so many interconnected webs that it makes Secret Wars 2 look quite reasonable and restrained in keeping disparate stories telling a coherent whole. Also we have over 30 years of work on how to add emotionally impactful choices into a game's story in the most efficient way and it is the way we are already doing it. Collapsing choices to a single point, siloed choices, things that only make things harder or easier but don't cut off content, offering earlier game overs, reputation scores that boil down to hate, neutral, and love and more are all things that are done and work amazingly well for people who don't try and push their suspension of disbelief.
Also emergent storytelling is inherently different from structured storytelling. In structured storytelling you have an author telling a story will storytelling techniques. In emergent storytelling it is a player pulling together a story out of a large mess of events. When someone tells a dwarf fortress story they are picking out of thousands of system interactions per minute the fraction of a fraction of a percent that leads to something that is interesting. This is something that happens with real life sports to. Emergent storytelling is making the player be a reporter who plucks a good yarn out of chaos and 'one damn thing after another'. It isn't a bad thing as my hundreds of hours of Crusader kings 2 tells me but it is a very different thing.
Also you are having a very wierd focus on nostril hair in this thread.
I think you nailed why you aren't going to have a popular null sec styled competitor; LoL got where it was by being way more casual than the competition. The whole point of null sec EVE is that in game, there's no "toxic", just get rich or get ganked trying. No way casuals are going to flock to a game where people who want to burn it all down can. And if you can't burn it all down it's not really a true sandbox
- Pronouns
- He/Him
1: But... they haven't. In the present, Bioware was having you pick a couple choices from a dialogue wheel. Go back a decade or two and... you actually had more dialogue choices in things like Baldur's Gate or Planescape Torment come to think of it. I don't think developers have invested any serious amount of their development on storytelling vs aesthetics and game mechanics. You can tell because aesthetics and game mechanics keep getting refined where storytelling choice stuff really hasn't. The stuff you mention was all there for decades. Ultima 4 invented the Karma Meter in 1985.
2: There's already been a fair degree of discussion of how to create more choices in this thread. Much of it doesn't involve exponentially expanding dialogue webs. Ultimately it depends on story type. Text based adventures like Choice of Whatever have the most freedom to go fully freeform because you don't spend anything on aesthetics or mechanics at all, and don't require a coherent gameworld for the player to wander around in poking at things. But as has been discussed in the thread, if you are careful and think about what you actually want, there are plenty of options.
Its mostly my way of emphasizing the focus on the fetish of increasing detail over other things, even though it drives up the cost for everything.
Reading this is reminding me of Antichamber, which is a game entirely about punching the player's mental model in the face over and over till it dies.
True. But I think there's a difference between "FFA sandbox that is extremely complicated and user unfriendly, which wasn't necessarily even the focus of game development" and "'FFA sandbox that is not those things". For example I'd recommend aiming it to play like a arcade-ish roguelike in gameplay. You log out, your character dies. Enough time passes, your character dies of old age. Most likely your character dies well before that. You'd maybe have the option to 'respawn' by taking over another NPC of the first character's family or group. The gameworld would allow players to build things of relative permanence, cities and trading caravans and roving raider bands, but the PC isn't, so there is no "OMG the dreadnought I spent a spent dozens of hours on/hundreds of real life money towards got blown up". I mean yes ultimately no matter what its going to be more freeform and rugged than something like LoL and not have the same kind of sheer numbers or anywhere close, but there's more of an audience for sandboxes than Eve Online's one.
This is a post-apocalyptic setting, life is fragile, your sand castle will get knocked over. Who knows, maybe you might play an intrepid explorer combing through the irradiated zombie infested ruins of the nation you helped build a few sessions back. Maybe the village you knocked over as a raider at the behest of a city-state a few sessions back is now the core of a mighty empire that the city-state is fighting a pitched battle with. Ultimately I'd think the real question for a sandbox MMO is how much permanence and stability you want to have in the setting. Too little, and it might feel like nothing you do matters, too much, and it might feel like nothing you do matters.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I'd take that a step further and argue the player's mental model is the game. It's very common for games to manipulate the player's mental model with the goal of making them perceive gameplay differently than how it "actually" is. That method can be applied to storytelling as well.
If the player finds a fork in the road and chooses to go left, it doesn't matter what's on the right. Linear games work best if the player wants to stay on the path, because then the fact that they can't choose doesn't actually matter. Designing choices isn't about what the player can choose, it's about why they would choose. When the player approaches that fork, it doesn't matter if the two paths lead to different areas or the same one. What matters is why they'd favor one path over the other. Only their justification for the choice needs to hold true.
Acatalepsy
Firewall Proxy
- Location
- The Diamond Age
I don't think that's really true. If there's a fork in the road and the player chooses to go left, it matters whether or not there was anything to find on the right.
Players are relatively savvy and understand the construct. They know the difference between a fork that was actually a fork, and a fork that was just set dressing...and they don't really register the set dressing as part of their mental model. Locked doors used to give the illusion of space, for example, don't register as "choices" because the player knows that they're nothing there. If you've made it so that there's an actual choice, they will (or at least should, if you're communicating to the player correctly) notice that there's a choice, and engage in planning to make a decision (to clarify, planning might be mostly unconscious or intuitive, but it's distinct from simply registering the existence of a non-choice). This raises the possibility that they might go right, which means that, if the choice is real, something needs to be there. If what's there is "go back and make the other choice", then you've probably created frustration by negating the decision they probably see as valid and probably booted them out of the mental model. And if it's something that the player will register as an actual choice, you can't ensure that they choose the 'right' one each time.
A linear game gets by without having any real choices in overall structure. Which is fine, but illusory choice isn't actually choice, and the gameplay and engagement in such games come from the moment to moment decision-making which does have an impact (if only a short-term one). A good linear game doesn't have real forks, it has a fork that the player implicitly recognizes isn't real. Their mental model doesn't include an option to stray from the path; they can create justifications for it (roleplay, atmosphere, narrative), but they also don't engage in planning that includes the non-existent forks. Engaging in planning is fundamentally different from engaging in rationalization of illusory choices, and while it's not necessarily better, it's a core experience that an illusory choice in a linear game cannot deliver.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
You've missed my point. What I'm talking about is nothing like an inaccessible side door. In a game, what's at the end of a path isn't determined until the player reaches the end of the path.
By definition, planning comes before the choice is made. Give the player evidence supporting both options, let them decide which one they believe is right, and then have the one they choose always be right. (or always be wrong in some cases)
The only advantage "real" choice offers is replayability.
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
If I make a choice based on evidence, and make the wrong choice I expect that I'll be able to reexamine the evidence and see where I made the mistake in interpreting it, and learn from the experience so that next time I'm more attentive/analytical/etc. E.g. if in a game of go I have a fork and choose between losing this or that stone and choose to save A, then suffer a chain of further losses, I can look at the board and see that "Oh! I didn't realise that there's a bunch of weaknesses in my defence next to stone B that will cause more damage!". I can see where my planning went wrong and make conclusions about what to watch out for. And I'd rather have a game that allows similar self-improvement on the computer too. Instead you seem to be offering computer games to whack the board and upset all the stones after a move has been made, preventing such postmortems of plans.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Choice can be used in more ways than "gate off content so you are forced to play the game twice to see everything". It can be used as a way for the player to express themselves and feel like they have agency, to help humanized and develop the character they play as, or to develop the world into something that feels more alive and real then an obvious railroad.
I mean let's say you have an FPS where you can shoot your way in, sneak in, or just blow a fucking hole through a wall to get in. All of those choices might lead to the exact same outcome (you enter the bad guy's base and defeat him), just with different snarky dialogue from mission control, but it lets players feel like, well:
I've seen stories on this forum and elsewhere where players get frustrated over being committed to sneaky, violent, or diplomatic approaches when they didn't want to, or when they felt their character wouldn't have done so. And this is different from "every choice is somehow right" in that it feels more natural, especially if sometimes one or more approaches is more difficult or nigh impossible compared to the others given the circumstances.
If you enable people to become attached to something they will throw ten fits worth of shit if you allow another person to blow it up. If you make a democratic government and some guy comes in and ruins your fun with a troll campaign, well, either that's part of the game (with the casuals then leaving) or the devs step in (in which case it's not really a freeform sandbox).
Then again, I believe Rust has accomplished the reasonably freeform goal by just having fairly limited in game actions so there's obviously a balancing you can make