... and I don't mean minor sidequest stuff, and please remember that I'm not talking about skill trees, tactics, or routes through a level. I'm talking about the large decisions that affect the overarching story and outcome within a game.
I was just rewatching the trailer for Dragon Age: Inquisiton, which ends with Morrigan saying something along the lines of "Will you stand against the darkness, or lead this world to its bitter end?", and it reminded me of a conversation I had a while back with a friend about leaving large narrative decisions up to players. I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I'm generally against it. You can preface what I'm going to say from here on out with "In most games...", because of course there are exceptions.
Giving players the means to radically alter the outcome of a game (like in DA:I) dilutes the story of a game. It hurts characterization by necessitating that NPCs and the worlds they inhabit in large part go along with the player's decisions, and spreads their defining actions, lines, and attributes over a range of scenarios that are impossible to hit on a single playthrough. It requires narrative compartmentalization in order to cope with the butterfly effect of player decisions changing too much. It spreads resources thin as developers are forced to deal with all the different possible branches and paths a player could take. It makes the act of choosing more important than the choices themselves.
Most important to me is the fact that it dulls the emotional impact of a story by giving the player the option to go back and rewrite the scenario. Think of your favorite movie/book/story. Scratch that, just think of one that had a segment that left an emotional mark. If it wasn't some divinely uplifting moment, it was probably someone dying or coming across some other terrible fate. I don't know about you, but after I read/see/experience something like that, my first impulse is to think back over what went wrong, how the character/characters could've been saved, how just a few words or nudges here or there would have radically altered things into a much happier ending, how if I could have gone back and changed things I would have.
If I was playing a game that lays narrative direction on the shoulders of the player, I actually could have gone back and changed things. And then that deep emotional mark would be gone, and I would forget all about it in the following days or weeks.
Imagine being able to redo last season of Game of Thrones, and you'll have an approximate idea of what I'm talking about.
I don't think there's a game out there that has all of these faults, but almost any game with significant amounts of consequential decisions fall prey to more than one. KOTOR and DA:O are compartmentalized. Mass Effect makes color-picking more important than story. Bethesda worlds remain unblinkingly dead-faced (outside of a few random lines of guard dialogue) after you lead 26 wildly different and incompatible factions, nuke a town, save the world, and commit an Argonian genocide. The Little Sister dynamic in Bioshock was stupid and entirely overshadowed by an instance that goes out of its way to show that the player is not in control.
These are just a few examples (that skew newer and Western), but they're also games that have been held up in recent years as some of the pinnacles of choice in gaming, and I think they all do it poorly in different ways. They're great games, but giving the player narrative control ultimately hurts each of them in one way or another.
Choice can be a good thing, but for all these choice-heavy games that tout their story, I say that I'll take an on-rails story any day of the week. JRPGs from when I actually liked them, Metal Gear before it went insane, the sea of indies that can take you on a heartstring-pulling emotional rollercoaster... hell, I even think that the first Modern Warfare's ending was a spectacular balance of on-rails narrative and player action (assuming you got it down the first time, and only until they retconned the most emotionally impacting moment of that scene).
I don't really have a concluding statement here, so... what say you, GAF?
I was just rewatching the trailer for Dragon Age: Inquisiton, which ends with Morrigan saying something along the lines of "Will you stand against the darkness, or lead this world to its bitter end?", and it reminded me of a conversation I had a while back with a friend about leaving large narrative decisions up to players. I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I'm generally against it. You can preface what I'm going to say from here on out with "In most games...", because of course there are exceptions.
Giving players the means to radically alter the outcome of a game (like in DA:I) dilutes the story of a game. It hurts characterization by necessitating that NPCs and the worlds they inhabit in large part go along with the player's decisions, and spreads their defining actions, lines, and attributes over a range of scenarios that are impossible to hit on a single playthrough. It requires narrative compartmentalization in order to cope with the butterfly effect of player decisions changing too much. It spreads resources thin as developers are forced to deal with all the different possible branches and paths a player could take. It makes the act of choosing more important than the choices themselves.
Most important to me is the fact that it dulls the emotional impact of a story by giving the player the option to go back and rewrite the scenario. Think of your favorite movie/book/story. Scratch that, just think of one that had a segment that left an emotional mark. If it wasn't some divinely uplifting moment, it was probably someone dying or coming across some other terrible fate. I don't know about you, but after I read/see/experience something like that, my first impulse is to think back over what went wrong, how the character/characters could've been saved, how just a few words or nudges here or there would have radically altered things into a much happier ending, how if I could have gone back and changed things I would have.
If I was playing a game that lays narrative direction on the shoulders of the player, I actually could have gone back and changed things. And then that deep emotional mark would be gone, and I would forget all about it in the following days or weeks.
Imagine being able to redo last season of Game of Thrones, and you'll have an approximate idea of what I'm talking about.
I don't think there's a game out there that has all of these faults, but almost any game with significant amounts of consequential decisions fall prey to more than one. KOTOR and DA:O are compartmentalized. Mass Effect makes color-picking more important than story. Bethesda worlds remain unblinkingly dead-faced (outside of a few random lines of guard dialogue) after you lead 26 wildly different and incompatible factions, nuke a town, save the world, and commit an Argonian genocide. The Little Sister dynamic in Bioshock was stupid and entirely overshadowed by an instance that goes out of its way to show that the player is not in control.
These are just a few examples (that skew newer and Western), but they're also games that have been held up in recent years as some of the pinnacles of choice in gaming, and I think they all do it poorly in different ways. They're great games, but giving the player narrative control ultimately hurts each of them in one way or another.
Choice can be a good thing, but for all these choice-heavy games that tout their story, I say that I'll take an on-rails story any day of the week. JRPGs from when I actually liked them, Metal Gear before it went insane, the sea of indies that can take you on a heartstring-pulling emotional rollercoaster... hell, I even think that the first Modern Warfare's ending was a spectacular balance of on-rails narrative and player action (assuming you got it down the first time, and only until they retconned the most emotionally impacting moment of that scene).
I don't really have a concluding statement here, so... what say you, GAF?
. Because of how the story arch ultimately played out, their ending *couldnt* focus on those great romances and tragic deaths because it focused on the bigger picture, which is lame because of precisely what you said. I liked the relationships and choices more than the galactic story, and that's what I would have wanted the ending to be about.