When games make the most interesting choices for you

[clyde]

A while back, I was listening to someone on a podcast talk about Heavy Rain (I think it was Michael Abbott). He said that his problem with the game was that he watched interesting choices be made while he just did the boring stuff like opening car doors and pouring orange juice. This has stuck with me. I think of this all the time when I play games and fantasize

about making them. I ask myself "Is the player making the most interesting choices or is the narrative?"

Any examples of games that do this poorly or well?

[SecretAsianMan]

This isn't the best example but Mass Effect 2 for me.  Between ME1 and ME2, I moved and lost the memory card with my ME1 save on it.  Because I didn't want to spend 40+ hours playing ME1 just to spend 40+ hours in ME2, I started a new game.  Almost all the default choices were the opposite of the ones that I made in my ME1 playthrough.  I realize Bioware had to make some kind of starting point for people who didn't play ME1 or have a save, but I think they could have just asked you a few questions for the big decisions instead of just picking them for you.  It's part of the reason I never played ME3.  I was bummed I couldn't finish the story I started and didn't want to spend all those hours doing it again.

[Joewintergreen]

I think ME3 let you go through a list of choices from the previous games and choose the ones you wanted

[brkl]

No, it has a stupid comic book thing, but it's possible.

[clyde]

You can also buy some DLC that will let you make ME1 choices. It's a very blunt and expositional choose-your-own adventure with a few comic panels.

[clyde]

I think FTL lets the player make the interesting choices. I'm not thinking about the story choices of whether or not you are going to take on space-spiders, after you know what stat determines success for those events, it's not much of a choice. But deciding between hiring another crew member or buying essential ship repairs is an interesting decision. I also think that Having the potential to run from nearly every battle (with the understanding that you will have lost armor and ammo and gained nothing but the ability to run away another day) is a really great story choice the player gets to make. It would feel so different if when you got lower than 25% armor, the ship FTL powered up to escape automatically. That's my call, I'm the captain of this ship!

Oh man, the Mass Effect series would be so much better if you had to go through an FTL zone every time you traverse between Relays and target planets. I liked the series, but that would have been so cool.

GTA IV and Sleeping Dogs are offenders of not letting you make the interesting decisions IMO. Not only am I told what to do the entire time, not only do the decisions my character is making seem akward, but I'm given very few choices in how I accomplish the task. I suppose most computer games fall into that category; Zeno Clash, Scurvy Scalywags, Call of Duty campaigns, Legend of Fae, the Halo series. I wonder if designing significant choice in the narrative is inherently more difficult than choice in minigame mechanics or if there has just been so much more effort put into the latter that there are less development resources for it. I wonder if this imbalance will be solved by adding cut-scenes that include the effects of your journey through a dense simulation; or if developers will find really great systems for networking procedurally branching narratives in a believable way.

[youmeyou]

Witcher 2 let's you make some pretty sweeping choices that drastically alter your storyline. So it's a good example of the 'interesting' end of the spectrum.

 

That being said, I think Heavy Rain allows you to make some pretty interesting and intense choices. And some of those choices may lead to the death of your character at worst. So I don't think it's only about cooking eggs or calming babies.

 

I'd argue Heavy Rain was cursed by its own flexibility: why give you some choices and not all? Linear narrative driven games like Last of Us give you no choice and is not the worst for it. Yet in Walking Dead for example, a game which had plethora of choice, so many complained that the second act forced them to go hang out with the cannibals when they knew very well that it was a bad idea from the get-go.

 

It's a tightrope game designers must walk but I'll definitely applaud a game like Heavy Rain for attempting to give you a many different choices: those both mundane and life-threatening - even if the mundane one's grated more than they should have.

[Badfinger]

This isn't the best example but Mass Effect 2 for me.  Between ME1 and ME2, I moved and lost the memory card with my ME1 save on it.  Because I didn't want to spend 40+ hours playing ME1 just to spend 40+ hours in ME2, I started a new game.  Almost all the default choices were the opposite of the ones that I made in my ME1 playthrough.  I realize Bioware had to make some kind of starting point for people who didn't play ME1 or have a save, but I think they could have just asked you a few questions for the big decisions instead of just picking them for you.  It's part of the reason I never played ME3.  I was bummed I couldn't finish the story I started and didn't want to spend all those hours doing it again.

 

I don't think I agree with you. For instance, if you started with ME2 and then decided you liked it enough to go back and play ME1, if they just said "WREX Y/N" or other huge things at the beginning of ME 2 not only do you not have any context for what that means but as you develop that context you are potentially ruining things for yourself from earlier.

 

In fact, that's my perspective. I played about 90 minutes of the original ME and then played 40 hours of ME2 without any of that context and because I hadn't, I didn't know what I was missing. It was a totally fine experience. I actually like that BioWare laid out the conceit that there is something specific that ALWAYS happens unless you made the decision to change it. Isn't that what's happening with the new Infamous game? I've heard that players had an end-game choice at the end of InFamous 2, and they overwhelmingly chose one direction. Rather than let you import your save, the developer decided that's what happened as canon and that's how it will be reflected in the new game. Even if you chose differently I love that, and I applaud any developer that stands by their decision.

 

There are hex editors that let you fudge that stuff in any case.

[SecretAsianMan]

I don't think I agree with you. For instance, if you started with ME2 and then decided you liked it enough to go back and play ME1, if they just said "WREX Y/N" or other huge things at the beginning of ME 2 not only do you not have any context for what that means but as you develop that context you are potentially ruining things for yourself from earlier.

 

That's fair enough, but maybe they could have asked if you wanted the default choices or wanted to make the choices yourself.  Maybe that's not an ideal way, but in a series that's largely about choices and the results of your actions, not giving me any choice in this situation really annoyed me.  I don't blame Bioware since losing the game save was my own fault, and I'm glad they made the series because it was different and I really like that universe.  I'm just upset that my personal story got ruined in the way it did.  As for hex editors, I played it on Xbox.  

[youmeyou]

Interesting and relavent:
 
http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2013/06/press-f-to-intervene-brief-history-of.html
 

Because there is never a reason not to take something, you end up just pressing [F] regardless of the situation. It doesn't matter what you're looting or what you're eating or what switch you're activating, because there is no real choice and the effect is almost never detrimental -- just press [F] to consume or take this thing or activate it. Press [F] to progress and accumulate. You also use [F] to interact with Elizabeth, a sidekick NPC who is supposedly a fleshed-out character with emotions and everything. You end up treating her like a vending machine, a piece of the environment that happens to follow you. F. F. F.

[quantum_leopold]

My recollection of Heavy Rain is a little fuzzy at this point, there may be perfectly valid reasons the person you heard cited it as an example of denying the player the chance to make important choices, but to my memory, Heavy Rain features one of the most meaningful choices I can recall having made in a game.  Apologies for my haziness on the setup, but I generally recall that, when controlling the dad character, you're being given a series of tasks that you're told you have to complete to get information about where your kidnapped son is.  At some point you're told to go kill this semi-scuzzy guy, a drug dealer or a mobster or something.  You find him, a chase ensues, and you end up getting the upper hand.

 

As you put the gun to the guy's head, he pleads for his life, shows a picture of his two daughters, tells you that he has a family, and you see you're doing this in a child's bedroom.  I was genuinely stumped about how to handle this.  I usually like to be the good guy whenever possible, but I was thoroughly convinced that I was going to dramatically limit my chances of saving my son if I didn't kill this guy.  My recollection of this moment in the game is that something forced me to act unexpectedly, that the game gave some sudden indicator that I only had a split second in which to either pull the trigger or let the guy go free.  I'd been playing out the pros and cons in my head, thinking about what I wanted to do, but the prompting overrode all that and sent a signal to my brain to stop thinking and just act.  I pulled the trigger.  The impact was immediate, and brutal.  I felt shitty about it the moment my finger started to move.  I felt I had made the right decision, but still felt like an asshole.  It was a really affecting moment, both because of the way it forced me to react instinctually, but, crucially, with enough time to understand my options but not enough time to calmly plan my response, and because of the conflicted emotions it made me feel afterwards.  Too often choices in games are "Do nice guy thing and get Reward A" or "Do bad guy thing and get comparable Reward B."  In this moment, I felt like I was choosing between being good at the possible cost of my son's life, or doing something bad but with the hope of saving my son.  That moment has stuck with me more than just about any other gaming choice I've made.  Telltale's Walking Dead games are certainly the best other example I can think of for the choices where your options feel meaningful and there is no obvious response.

 

I should note that I just pulled this scene up on youtube and it doesn't play out exactly how I remembered it.  In the playthroughs I've seen, it seems like you have quite a bit of time to make your decision.  I am certain of my recollection, that something communicated to me that I had to decide whether to shoot or not at a moments notice, but looking at these playthroughs, I'm curious whether those people just didn't take as long as I did, and thus were never nudged towards action, or if some prior actions I'd taken in the game lead it to give me less time to decide, or if I was just mistaken when I perceived the game as saying my time was expiring.  In any case, the videos also reminded me that holy shit what was up with those accents???  I really hope Beyond isn't just Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe talking to people who sound like that.