A Discussion on Choices in Games: Their Effect on Fun

[Traveling Bard]

Hello, forum! Lately, my approach to gameplay and story, design-wise, is similar to choose your own adventure or "the Bioware effect". Give several very meaningful decisions for the player to make which will greatly affect the outcome of the game. It sounds interesting...but is it fun? Is having a multiple ending game based on decisions like kill this guy or save that girl or go this way through the forest instead of THAT way really FUN? 

 

I appreciate that fun is in the eye of the beholder, but for rpgs using rpg maker...the specific niche audience that we make these games for...is it fun to them? You see, games like Dragon Age Origins (which I have been recently playing) are fun, engaging, and interesting with the way that they deal with relationships and ultimate outcomes of situations based on your decisions.  However, I am not a fan of having to make so many little decisions in order to accrue favor from my party members. You have to take a good amount of time to figure out how THIS character will react to me making THAT decision which, for me, takes away from the enjoyment of the game. So I decided to try making my own game with fewer decisions but have more meaningful ones and what I've discovered is...

 

If I played a game like this, I would probably obsess even more over the decision.

 

"Omg...what should I DO?! I play games to enjoy stories and battles, not make life decisions!" <---typical DA personal response. 

 

Choices like, should I go with Bulbasaur, Squirtle, or Charmander is fun but still impactful to your game experience and the style you are going to play the game...at least for a while until you replace them with better pokemon (after my first playthrough I always pc'd my starter off the bat because I'm hardcore lol). Another path is to just allow the choices that the user makes be something that they DO/NOT DO instead of select a choice from a choice menu. Ex. In Suikoden II, you can choose to not walk down that secluded alley in Muse early in game either by ignorance or choice and by doing so you miss the ability to recruit Clive into your army. In my game, a character points you in the direction of someone who can help you find your kidnapped friend while also mentioning that the forest has been putting him on edge lately. You can ask him why which leads to him joining your party and a battle with a specific monster from the forest OR you can go about your merry way after he points you in the direction of the person who can help you only to find out when you return that he was killed by that specific monster from the forest on the outskirts of the village. 

 

Is straying from making a game linear, by adding choices that affect the game's story, ending, or overall gameplay, in order to make it more interesting actually making the game fun or is it just making it complicated and forcing the player to have to make big decisions which may take away from their enjoyment of the game? 

 

What are your thoughts, forum?  

 

[whitesphere]

I assume you're talking about a story-centric RPG.

If the choice can cause a permanent, severe disadvantage, and the "right" answer isn't obvious, it will cause a lot of players grief.  Some 1980s games did this, where a non-obvious decision early in the game renders an unavoidable player death hours later.  Avoid this because it is unfair to the player.

If the choice offers alternate but equal ways to play the game, for example play as a Thief for a more sneak-oriented game, as a Fighter for straight combat, or as a Mage for more hit and run, it could increase replayability significantly.  Or if the choice offers alternate endings, it can as well --- Chrono Trigger loved this with the New Game Plus option opening up quite a few optional endings.  This can add greatly to the game, by giving the player a reason to replay the game and experience everything a different way.

Be sure you avoid the Illusion of Choice --- where the player seems to have significant choices, but the choice doesn't really do much at all to affect the plot.  For example, if the player can kill the Evil King early in the game through treachery, the game had better have an alternate plotline to show the far reaching consequences of this action.

I also strongly advise avoiding "But Thou Must" where there SEEMS to be a choice, but the player is literally forced to make the "right" one.  Dragon Warrior (the original) LOVED this trope.  This is just a waste of the player's time.

Basically, if you're going to offer choices, you need to have alternate plotlines, or at least changed sidequests/etc to show the results of those choices, like you did (don't save the villager, he dies).  Otherwise, don't bother offering the player significant choices.

In conclusion, if the choices are fair and reasonable, and ideally the game hints of the consequences of the choice, and they make non-trivial changes in the game, they add to the fun significantly.  If they are poorly done, they make the game far less fun.  And it's easy to have poorly done choices unless you take special case with them.

 

[Tsukihime]

If the choice can cause a permanent, severe disadvantage, and the "right" answer isn't obvious, it will cause a lot of players grief.  Some 1980s games did this, where a non-obvious decision early in the game renders an unavoidable player death hours later.  Avoid this because it is unfair to the player.

Why would it be unfair?


If you make a bad decision in life, you may lose something. Or you may die. Didn't think stealing the sick kid's life-savings would cause you grief later on? Well, that's unfortunate.


I like to call this a "bad end" because you messed something up. You still finished the game; you just didn't get the good ending.


Don't leave your players hanging with an abrupt "Game Over, back to title". Provide a proper ending, whether it's good or bad.

 

[whitesphere]

Why would it be unfair?

If you make a bad decision in life, you may lose something. Or you may die. Didn't think stealing the sick kid's life-savings would cause you grief later on? Well, that's unfortunate.

I like to call this a "bad end" because you messed something up. You still finished the game; you just didn't get the good ending.

Don't leave your players hanging with an abrupt "Game Over, back to title". Provide a proper ending, whether it's good or bad.

The example you gave is quite fair.  It's pretty obvious it's a nasty move to steal the kid's savings.  And, yes, if someone does something that is nasty or whatever, there should be in game consequences.  In Dragon Warrior, if you take the obviously Evil choice to partner with the Dragonlord, you've asked for it.

When we make decisions in life, we have a pretty clear idea what the choices will do.  If I choose not to go to work today, I may end up being fired.  If I choose to speed, I might get a ticket.    This is fair to have in a game.

I had choices in mind where, say, a choice seems utterly useless ("Why bother fighting that slow moving suit of armor?  It's not doing anything.")  and the game developer then decides arbitrarily ("Oh, that suit of armor, for no good reason, suddenly drops on you and kills you") a long time later.  Or "Why do I need to pick up that twig?" early in the game, and in the Final Battle, the Boss is only weak to that twig...too bad the town burned down early in the game...creating an unwinnable game based on a bad early decision.

My point is to avoid choices that are not clear.  Or, if you have deliberately morally ambiguous choices, like "Do you kill the Evil King using treachery?", both results of the choice have their own plotlines. 

If you have a game where, say, your character can turn into a Monster (vampire/mummy/lich/whatever), then make sure the game allows you to continue playing as the Monster, unless that is the immediate Game Over condition.  Maybe there are the obvious in game results --- good luck talking to villagers, for example.  But a significant choice should have its own path.

 

[Traveling Bard]

@whitesphere, I agree with not bothering to offer the player significant choices unless there are actual significant consequences(positive or negative) to making that choice. There are too many games that I've played that the only real thing that you get is the character in your party...nothing specific is done with them other than witty zingers or some other text box filler. Maybe they have their own cutscene/side-quest but they don't affect the overall story which a person in a hero's party SHOULD. 

 

I enjoyed the Dragon Warrior reference since I agree that they did tend to give you the illusion of choice but I will say that that game offered a very "nice" choice at the end when you face the dragon lord which could result in your immediate death for choosing to take the dragon lord's offer of ruling the world with him. 

 

"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

 

Far reaching consequences of choices are nice but now that we are talking about it, I feel like if you give a player a text box with choices that THAT isn't so fun. It's stressful. At least to me. I stress over which choice would have been the better one to make in that situation. The two armies of curiosity and desire to not miss anything wage war on each other in my mind. Perhaps the correct way to go is to let the user make the choices via actions instead of selecting from a list?

 

I once played a game, which name escapes me, where at the very end of the game an alternate version of your girlfriend is being sucked into a dimensional rift during a cutscene. Now, I and the rest of the world at that time thought that that was the true ending of the game and thought it was sad....however, during this part in the cutscene, if you tried to move toward her out of reflex as though to save her the cutscene changed and you grab a hold of her...ultimately getting sucked into the dimensional rift along with her. This lead to a final scene where you are charged with now saving THIS world as you had just done with your own. 

 

What are your thoughts on this "progression via actions" approach as opposed to "most bioware game conversations/situations where you make specific dialogue choices" which may voice your opinion but typically aren't such a radical/committed response? 

 

edit: Funny how we both went for the Dragon Lord kills you for choosing to be bad reference lol

 


@Tsukihime, I think what he is saying is to avoid a situation like this:

 

During a session with a random group of people that gathered for a DnD game, a veteran player ate an apple given to him by a child at the beginning of the game. Unbeknownst to him, that apple was poisoned. So a few hours later, the DM announces that that player's character is dead due to the apple he ate earlier and how he had been steadily taking damage since he ate it. 

 

The player "lost his #$%@", as would most people. A case could be made that you should never take things offered to you by strangers, even innocent looking children, but still...this wasn't a bar brawl started by the player gone wrong or insulting a witch that turned him into a newt for the remainder of the game...this is a non-obvious decision that cost him a permadeath after he  went another few hours into the game. In this case, he should have died immediately (causing the user to never trust children npcs again and possibly not wanting to play anymore after that) or had some sort of instant status debuff that he was made aware of...or even brought up during the party's first encounter as a "gotcha! have fun at the out-house later!" moment. I mean, if you wanted a non-obvious decision to affect the gameplay, let it cost the player but not murder his game experience. That's how I interpreted that. 

 

[Scott_C]

A lot depends on how long the game is.

In a short one or two hour game lots of choices is fun. If I goof up and get a bad ending I can very quickly start over and try something different. Plus the short length of the game means it doesn't take long at all to see how my choices influence the plot. For a small amount of effort I get rewarded with a lot of new content.

But major choices in a long game can be frustrating. I hate spending thirty hours playing a game only to get an unhappy ending because of some choice I made halfway through the game. Plus having to replay ten hours of content I've already seen just so I can finally see if my new choices made a difference isn't fun: Too much work for too little payoff.

This might just be because I'm a relatively busy person. When I was younger and had more free time I absolutely loved games with tons of hidden and alternate content even if the only way to see it was by replaying the same old levels again and again in slightly different ways.

Anyways, this brings to mind a discussion from a couple months back: http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/33223-how-to-make-non-linear-games-not-suck/

 

[Wavelength]

I'm not a huge fan of the good/bad endings thing (everyone deserves the best ending you can give them), but besides that, I love any type of choice offered to me in a game - whether that decision is going to alter the entire course of the plot or just give me an item and change a couple of lines of dialogue.  This makes me feel like I am playing through the plot, not just watching it unfold for someone else, and makes me more invested in every other element of the game.  I do sometimes obsess over "should I break in the bad guy's front door or try to sneak around" or even "should I take Nanako's pudding from the fridge", and I love every moment of that obsession and every moment of finding out the results.  Per the great Sid Meier, "fun equals interesting decisions divided by time".

As far as the Role Play experience you mentioned... well, like video games, I feel it's best when the DM/game isn't out to get you.  Instadeath is always a great way to make the player feel you're out to get them no matter what medium you're in, and it tends to make decisions uninteresting.  I come from more story-centric roleplays than D&D, but if I'm going to introduce a poisoned food without telling the players, I'm doing it as a hook for an optional (in the sense that the players might never see it if they don't eat the food) quest or story arc - the character will start feeling ill, and there will be ways to figure out that it was the apple they ate that caused it and ways to cure the poison.  Failing the quest would be a much more reasonable way to kill a character, although I'm a softie, and I'd probably have the poisoned player roll to figure out the penalty, with permanent flaws/debuffs as more likely outcomes than death.

I feel like the same holds for choices in a video game - it's absolutely fine, even cool, to blindside the player with the results of a choice they made six hours ago, but if these results are going to cripple the player's ability to enjoy your game, you have catastrophically failed as a game designer.

 

[whitesphere]

The DM case by TravelingBard, to me, seemed like the DM being a royal rear end in a top hat.  I think the poisoned apple could have had so many more interesting possibilities that would have been fair, such as the "sidequest to heal the PC" or "the apple starts turning you into a Treant (that'll teach you to eat MY apples!)" or even the temporary status debuff with it being used for comedy.  And it should have given the player indications long before death.  I think most poisons don't just go from "you're perfectly healthy" to "you're dead" without the player getting ill or whatnot.

So I agree with TravelingBard.  It's fine to have non-obvious outcomes, but they really shouldn't totally demolish the player's fun.  I'd be more likely to do the Treant Transformation for the poisoned/cursed apple, myself.  But it would start giving weird symptoms (why is my skin so rough all of a sudden?) long before the transformation, to be fair to the player.  And the Mage would be able to detect a strong, weird magical energy on the apple, and on the player after s/he ate the apple.

It's like when you're writing a story.  It's highly annoying to have abrupt outcomes that completely change the story, when the outcomes weren't foreshadowed and don't make sense.   A good RPG should avoid Deus Ex Machina as well as Diabolous Ex Machina (the latter is "Really nasty thing happens to the party out of nowhere") after the very start of the game.  It's fine to have a Major Event trigger the entire plot, but from there the game should make sense.

 

[hian]

I would say that it's really hard to speak of "choices" in games and their effect on fun-factors, because "choices" as a concept is only just ambiguous at best.

Consider all the way choices can manifest in gaming -

- choosing what your character(s) is like (character creation, stat/skill-progression dialogue options etc)

- choosing how your character(s) plays (class choices, skill set-ups, team set-ups etc)

- choosing where to go and what to do (multiple pathways or challenges leading up the finish-point, or mutually exclusive quest lines)

- choosing how to do things (the way in which the game allows you to solve a problem using various character set-ups)

- choosing how the story develops (branching story-line based on choice)

At the end of the day, games can offer a lot of choices without the in-your-face Bioware approach to story-design, by looking at some of the above ways in which choices manifest themselves in game-play, and naturally, games can be plenty of fun without much except the most basic of choices in regards to play-style (most platformers are good examples of this)

The real issue, as always, is execution. The easiest way, I'd say, to qualify bad execution when implementing choices is to consider whether the choice adds to the ways in which a player can play the game, without reducing quality.

If a choice exists that enables players to do something additional within the game, without creating problems like breaking game-balance or story-quality, then it's always welcome, even if nobody ever uses it.

The reason I think this is the golden rule of choices, is because it doesn't imply that we need to implement choices for the heck of it (since many games can be just as fun with only a minimum of choices), while also setting out a general idea for just how good choices can be.

Let me illustrate -

Adding character creation to a player-driven single-player RPG, gives choice to the player (choice to make his or her own avatar) at no loss to the game I.E even if only one person of everyone who buys it ends up using that option, the players who don't use it won't suffer for it, but the person who does will be all the more happy for it.

Now, imagine we add character creation to a game like Street Fighter - now, we're faced with a problem. Since the core mechanics of the game is different, and it's a competitive fighting game, we now have to start considering how original characters will effect game-play. Having the choice might make certain people happy, but unless it's very carefully executed it can end up pissing off a lot of fans when they start facing off characters that look like Ryu, but have the move-set of Akuma etc.

Adding the choice of creation here will demand more of the devs to get the game well-balanced etc, and it's not even certain the choice adds much since there is already a pretty large character rooster with other customization options.

Looking at RPGs though, another example worth looking at is games like FF7 contra games like Mass Effect.

FF7 has a static story, with only minor scene deviations based on what choices you make - Cloud is Cloud, yet my Cloud is probably not like your Cloud. How Cloud expresses himself emotional for instance - which girl he shows romantic interest in, how funny and laid-back he is as opposed to being stoic and sombre - boils down to what choices you make, even if those choices don't have an impact on the overall mission. It does have an impact on how you relate to Cloud, and how you, as the observer, see him as a person.

My Cloud was a liquor-drinking ex-soldier who made jokes, had a juvenile romantic interest in Aerith, and took interest in people's problems.

That Cloud looks absolutely nothing like the Cloud you find in Advent Children, nor the Cloud I've heard a lot of other people talk about.

Furthermore, you have the choice of deciding what kind of fighter Cloud and Co. will be through the Materia system.

Certain scenes and parts of your quest never happen if you don't make the choice to explore and take your time with the game.

Yet, there is no doubt that this game is linear, and extremely so, compared to Mass Effect.

Here you get to create a character that is truly your own, and you get to take a much more active part in shaping the narrative There is more choice here. Yet, that does not somehow imply more fun.

It really depends on why you're gaming to begin with.

Simply put, with the risk of over-simplification, people play games either to experience a story, or to project themselves into one.

Often, when I play RPGs, I belong to the former rather than the latter camp, which is why I often enjoy JRPGs more than WRPGs.

I am looking to experience a story, and have fun while doing so, not necessarily to feel that I am a part of that story, and therefore I don't necessarily look for or appreciate the kind of choices that exist more to create immersion than simply to provide a little extra depth to the narrative.

The real difference, is that when I play FFVII I am playing Cloud, while when I am playing Mass Effect, I'm not playing Shephard - he is a representation of me, and as such, I am actually just playing myself in a new environment, and so I think there is a fundamental difference to the way you experience the narrative.

How fun either of those approaches are, largely depend on what you're looking for in a game, and how interesting you find the overall scenario and narrative.

So, if you're considering adding choices to your game, ask yourself first, what kind of game are you making, and whom are you making it for?

Secondly, ask yourself whether adding those choices will add something to the game without running the risk of creating frustration for other people, or breaking the game-balance.

As you said, naturally, some people will feel overwhelmed by many choices, and that in and of itself can ruin the fun-factor, but this falls back under the most basic aspects of knowing your target demographic.

Bioware doesn't make RPGs for people who feel overwhelmed by choices, just as SE don't make Final Fantasy games for people who're looking to project themselves into a fantasy story of their own making.

Make choice about what kind of game you're making, and then think about how well choices function within the general mechanics and story of your game.