Patrick Klepek has an interesting interview with Greg Zeschuk of Bioware on consequence in gaming. “Everything is very low impact and there’s no real negative result that can occur. We’re going to start bringing that back but in a rational way, a way that doesn’t punish the player — but puts them on the spot.” Essentially he wants to encourage players to make a choice and stick with it, rather than explore all the options. And, since he’ll be running a Knights of the Old Republic Star Wars MMO, he’ll actually be able to do that.
Stephen Totilo discusses this conundrum in the context of the newest Spiderman where you can choose to be red suit or black suit Spidey. Totilo had a tough time making the choice, as he didn’t want to miss out on interesting extremes:
With a game like “Fable II” I can handle being given these life-path choices. I know enough about the differences between using magic or swinging hammers to know what I prefer. I can sense what the ramifications will be if I decide to be a family man or a robber or a combination of the two. But given the choice to be a Dark Jedi or a Light Jedi… I just get spun around in confusion.
Do the developers really expect me to choose? Are they just signaling that they want me to play the game again, the opposite way?
I think the key principle here is to not waste the player’s time. If a game is made to be played through twice to really get the full content it should probably be relatively short or have a new game plus mode that accelerates later playthroughs.
If instead the developer wants to us to pick a path and stick to it, then the consequences of choices, particularly choices that influence mechanics, should be quite clear what the implications will be. Letting the player try experiment some with different options can be a good way of doing this.
That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with secondary consequences, both good and bad, flowing from the choice. But they should be just that, secondary and with a logical if not necessarily easily predictable consequence of the choice. Alternately it could be the less directly related cumulative impact of several smaller choices, so long as there’s some foreshadowing and an opportunity to change paths if you don’t like where you’re headed.
I think successful consequences can lead to regret, but it should be the kind of regret shared between the player and the character. Missing out on the ‘interesting extremes’ as Totilo mentions is not how you want to do things, although with some universes like Star Wars it’s probably fairly inevitable. I think Patrick Klepek’s regret after choosing who to kill in GTA4 is a much more successful example of a regretted and one that deepened rather than weakened identification with the story.
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