Balancing Choice With Irreversible Consequences In Games 352
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."
Re:The key word is "balance"... (Score:4, Informative)
Unguessable insta-death is also extremely irksome.
Unless, of course, you're playing Nethack, where it's just one more feature. ;-)
The truth is that, unless they read a lot of spoilers before going in, Nethack kills newbies with delightful regularity. And even reading the spoilers doesn't always help, because you may not remember something crucial until it's killed you once of twice. The trick is to understand that you're really playing meta-Nethack, where each of those deaths teaches you something new about the world.
Eh, not even just women (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it's probably not a bad name for it, but in all fairness it's not just the women.
E.g., I explicitly mentioned the Paladin, and he's not just a guy there, but one of the hardest cases to wrap my mind around. I mean, they spend the whole game characterizing him as the guy who does what's right for the people, and fights evil just because he's a Paladin... and then, bam, he'll refuse to fight the Ultimate Evil Boss (TM) because I talked to the Ranger more than to him. WTF? What kind of a two-year-old's reaction is that? And where's that whole paladin ethos now?
And it's pretty much gotten worse recently. I mean, far from me to suggest it's because they were also selling a DLC with presents to improve the mood of party members, but in Dragon Age otherwise pretty much the only role you could actually role-play and have your party members stay with you was that of a sycophant. You had to pretend to be the good and honourable guy to one character, the might-makes-right insensitive prick/cunt to the other, while reassuring another that you too love backstabbing innocents and kicking puppies, while being the mopey goth who hates all humanity to a fourth, and so on, while also managing who's within earshot when you do that. Pretty much any having a consistent personality of your own is punished by the game swift and hard. And even then you get random unpredictable twists like the devout fundie party member throwing a fit and liking you less, if you bring some soldiers religious symbols to raise their morale before a fight. (She thinks real faith has to come from within, see?) So better save often and try with a different party when that happens.
But yeah, you're right, that's my problem: I'm starting to find it difficult to take some characters seriously any more.