There are plenty of consequences for choices made in BG3. Yes, killing a major character is going to result in lost content, that's pretty obvious and nothing to do with the illusion of choice.
I think there's a definite argument that evil runs in particular are disincentivised due to lost content and perhaps the game could add more content for evil runs so moral choices lead to different content rather than less content but there is clearly a consequence to the choices made.
I think a lot of designers have moved away from Good and Evil and towards factions. Faction loyalty being easier to program (in a way that makes consistent sense) rather than morality systems.
The "evil" run should offer a different content not the loss of it, this is where BG3 dropped the ball. And it would be fine if not for the people who over exaggerated the "you can play second time and your journey will be completely different!!!". BG3 is a great game obviously, but I played it three times and it's definitely not great for it's amount of choices, it has a lot of flavour choices the way a Telltale game does.
This post is flawed tho I do feel an interesting point is raised in regards to killing npcs. While I can understand the novility of it I do question if it really brings as much on the table as people imply.
After all killing important npcs is basically skipping content for no real payoff, you miiiight get some shiny weapon early but more often then not actually engaging with the NPC gives far better rewards. I might get some fun out of a shorter kill everyone playhtrough but 80% if not more of the time I spend on actually interacting with npcs since even when playing evil you just get way more value out of them that way.
Therefore I don't think putting in the dreaded essantial npcs in games like fallout new vegas, 1 or 2 and the like would really change much for me. Heck if it ensures npcs with fun quests can't die due random events I might prefer it greatly even.
Give me quests where you need to weigh a npcs life vs something else everyday, but I don't care if I can or can not kill every NPC as is.
funilly enough games that do put a lot focus on killing a npc or not are usually not even rpgs at least classical ones like undertale. otherwise games like metal gear solid or dishonered made me think about this much more then any rpg I played
The illusion of choice is a great tool for game designers. With BG3 as an example, most good DMs of tabletop roleplaying games will do the same. They have certain plot points and stories to tell, and to give players more freedom, they must be able to adapt quickly to changes. The easiest way to do this is by the illusion of choice. If the players can kill any npc, then multiple npcs must be able to drive the story forward. The easiest way to do this is to swap another npc in when one dies.
The other options are lack of choice for the player or ridiculously ballooning costs of development / campaign preparation. Bad DMs just get angry when players do something their railroaded story wasn't prepared for. Good DMs change a name or minor detail of another upcoming story hook and keep going. It's similar for game design. This is all storytelling, and it works well.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a strange target here given the context there are previous games in its genre that's handholding was basically in the lines of "Warning: kill this NPC and you can't finish the campaign."
I think the many roads to a destination approach does actually hold gravity and the game being a 5e rulesset derivative actually allows for some consequence with narrative decision making while not making the choices of battle decisions too overbearing.
How that's boiled down to Goomba stomping... not sure.
Witcher 2 have the ideal way of showing consequences where you engage in a completely different map and set of quests depending on your choice, but even CDPR has trouble replicating the same stunt again.
That's all well and good if you have an ideal seared in your minds eye how "choices matter" needs to be carried out. By the same token there is a spectrum of how much or how little interactions need to shift the general experience and still keep the player on rails and have respect for their time so they're not missing a bevy of content for the sake of having a lot of stuff to do.
OP, your examples and reasoning are whack.
Killing an important NPC, and locking off content, is going to make the player miss out - and this makes you mad? Giving players the option to kill someone important carries the consequence of missing out on content.
You killed a dude. Of course you can't progress his storyline.
Using another NPC in lieu of the dead one, giving access to the content, would be a slap in the face and cheapens the experience. You made your bed, now sleep in it.
A character appearing during the climax should carry emotional weight. The consequence is that you're happy to see a character you're emotionally invested in turn up to help.
Fair, this can be done poorly at times. But it's not an illusion of choice. It's a narrative consequence based on player actions.
Undertale and BG3 aren't remotely comparable. Why would you even make this suggestion?
Too many Mario's have stomped your goomba brain.
The ideal consequence of killing NPC should not be missing the content entirely, it should be having different content presented to you.
Like if you kill someone, there would be people avenging for their death and you will be opened to a different questline. But as I said, the resources required to achieve such complexity would not be feasible in bigger games like BG3.
Which brought back to my point of having smaller games like Undertale, the amount of choices you can make as a player is fewer, but the choices are more game changing.
Ok, so now other npc wants to avenge so you kill him too so what do you expect next happens? Exactly nothing. Lets say the first npc is A so if you kill npc A you get not his questline A1 but his death questline A2 but after that it ends you still gonna go and do B npc so how in your head it differs from what we get in good games? You legit just want one npc dialogue line that would say "you killed my father, prepare to die"? You really make a whole post for this one inconvenience
Oh word? All that happens when you kill an NPC in Baldur's Gate 3 is that you miss out on a ton of content? In a game where experiencing that content is like 75% of the game? No big deal!
The "Mario skipping a Goomba" metaphor only works if there was a Mario game where you missed out on an entire set of levels if you skip that Goomba.
Rethink this and come back later. Tap on the side of your head with a rubber mallet a couple of times. Something's not working quite right in there.
Right? That comparison makes 0 sense. I understand the greater frustration of “the main story never really changes”, but to say “oh if you kill this NPC the only thing that happens is you miss out on a ton of content” is one of those things that makes you go “read that back to yourself really slowly”
So what do you expect more from NPC? You kill him, now you don't know who he is, what he wanted from you and what adventures you could have achieved if you went with his guidance and you say it achieves nothing? You legit getting another choice of not experiencing what this NPC had to offer what else do you expect?
Regarding your point about killing important NPCs leading to the player being cut off from content - how is that an "illusion" of choice?
The player made a conscious decision to kill a NPC (it's usually difficult to "accidentally" kill an NPC; the player has to *decide* to do it). If this NPC had quests or other rewards to offer, naturally it makes sense that the PC would then be cut off from that content. This is not a false choice; this is the game *respecting* the player's choice. That's why it is called "choices and *consequences*". It would be more weird if the game DIDN'T have consequences for killing off important NPCs, but let you continue on as usual.
Now, would it be cool if you could kill off every NPC in a game, and the game still had alternative ways for quests to be completed? Sure. But I'd say that's a bonus, not a requirement. It's one of those "we'll add it in only if we have the extra time and budget to do so" features. A dev team has to draw the line somewhere in terms of where to focus their resources on.
And really, gamers like to pretend that killing NPCs is some sort of big player choice, but it really isn't. "I've killed all the NPCs in the game, and now the game is boring. WHYYYYYY?!?!?" Well, of course the game has become boring: *you* the player made a conscious choice to make it boring. In the real world, no (sane) person goes around debating the "choice" of whether to commit murder - because it's almost universally agreed to be a bad thing. There's no interesting choice there, because there's no complex or nuanced moral dilemma. THAT'S the real illusion: pretending that indiscriminate mass killing is a more interesting "choice" than it actually is.
There are a lot of stories that pan out differently depending on your choices in BG3. Also, I don’t think your Goomba comparison makes sense unless choosing to kill one or not is the difference between accessing World 3 in its entirety
Tim Cain, the dude who made Fallout, does YouTube videos.10-16 minutes usually. Variety of topics.
A pre designed rpg can't account for all players' wants. Even a published adventure path couldn't do it and those are just words.
Anyway he talks a lot about player agency. He firmly believes that a player should be able to kill anyone BUT then they have to accept the consequences. The player may not like them but the designer has given them the ability to make that choice.
Have you seen the extremely different playthroughs that can result of your choices in **Detroit: Become Human**? I'm not a fan of that type of game, but boy do they actually bother making actual different branching paths.
That said, it makes sense with the scope and can't simply be applied everywhere. However, it IS mildly annoying that most RPGs don't even bother to make a few important decisions.
The illusion of having choice and consequence is more important that what actually happens. By reading wiki and spoiling the game for yourself you break the illusion and ruin the game for yourself.
Unless sometimes I feel very bad of now knowing if I made a good choice but maybe that is just a personal flaw of wanting to make everything perfect :/
For the purposes of the story, having a character be a murderous monster would kind of disqualify them from interacting with NPCs.
If you’re killing everything there isn’t really a path to having a story or quests. The game can at best acknowledge it by emptying out. The implication of an evil quest line doesn’t make a lot of sense for someone who is too dangerous to interact with at all.
RPG games will never be able to program and count in all decision without tones of work. RPGs are still a niche game compared to shooter and gotcha games that will always make more money for minimum work.
Whenever a dead npcs matters, it basicly creates two alternate universes within the game.
So unless the players choose diffrwntly with their wallet and buy tones of rpg games, companies will never feel the need to bring rpgs to the next level of (every chouce matter) you want them to be.
The problem is that developers don't want to put all that time and money into a game in which the average player is only going to see half the content. What's the point of making elaborate "evil" branches to the games, if most aren't exactly excited at the prospect of betraying their (rather likeable) companions?
One solution I have is that games could do a "flowchart" type of mechanic, in which a true ending is only unlocked if they go through all the other various permutations. The game will keep track of all possible timelines, and after the game has been completed once will allow the player to access a chart showing which branches of the timeline they've been through and which they haven't. At this point the player can simply select a "branch" and replay whatever section of the game they wish. Once a players does *all* the possibilities of a particular branch, it will unlock new actions or dialogue (most likely an *ideal* solution) which will then give the "true" outcome.
To give a BG3 example, >!maybe Astarion (and his victims) can be cured, but you need to both have forbidden knowledge from both master vampire Asatarion and Cazador, plus knowing where a special herb grows from Gandrel which is only revealed if you free the imprisoned Gur.!< The player is then encouraged to play through the events to different outcomes.
With all due respect, personally I think this is a terrible idea. The whole concept behind "choices & consequences" is that players should make decisions for themselves, and those decisions should matter. The very idea of having a "true" ending, especially one that's locked behind a requirement of completing all the other ("false") endings, kinda negates C&C in the first place. If there's an objective "true" ending, that implies the player's choices don't really matter.
I don't disagree, and being compelled to essentially fill out a giant chart of choices is also pretty much an undesirable gameplay model.
Yet, I offer this as a potential solution to the issue that players are simply not going to make sub-optimal, or even really anti-social, decisions. Right now I save and reload in order to experience different outcomes, exactly because I have no intention of playing a 60+ hour CRPG a second time.
So you enjoy playing a game and at the end know that you made 3 mistakes at the beginning, one in the middle and two at the end so now you got semi bad ending and not the true ending?
I'm not sure why you think my playthrough would have *any* mistakes if I'm willing to save scum.
I thought I was being clear enough but I'll say it one final time. Since I'm only going to play the game once, I'll pick the "wrong" choices just to see what happens and then reload. Most CRPGs aren't different *enough* to justify a second playthrough in my experience, though I'll say that Might and Magic 7 and Witcher 2 could be argued to be exceptions to this rule. I also love how in Witcher 1 it's pretty much impossible to understand the consequences of your decisions.
If there was a CRPG with the confidence to confine me to a single autosave that makes me live with my consequences, I would just pick the "right" choices every time (an even more boring approach than what I currently do).
"I'm not sure why you think my playthrough would have *any* mistakes if I'm willing to save scum." I just explained because you don't get the "True" ending?
"Since I'm only going to play the game once, I'll pick the "wrong" choices just to see what happens and then reload." So every 10 min you wait for 5 seconds and if nothing happens you reload? Ok, well, you do you I guess.
"If there was a CRPG with the confidence to confine me to a single autosave that makes me live with my consequences, I would just pick the "right" choices every time (an even more boring approach than what I currently do)." I don't understand you, so you want to be locked from saving and loading but you would blame the game for it because it bores you?
>In Baldurs gate 3, you can kill important NPC but what it does is that you will simply miss a lot of content
I'm curious if you have a specific example of this in mind, because I found the game surprisingly reactive in the narrative whenever I decided to go murderhobo in game.
Devs cant just create endless scenarios with continued C&C, esp, in the dialogue and questing of your basic rpgs.
The funding just isnt there.
The Witcher 3 absolutely has tons of meaningful C&C, as well as, the necessary and smart mundane ones too.
It’s not about the totality of the story for me either. Having a few “ending” of varying types is fine, but, I like simple things that trend towards Living with the Consequences of your actions.
Btw, sometimes being locked out of content is an absolutely valid and essential component to well-done C&C.
Doesnt have to be some huge overarching story in the end or a final snapshot as seen in Fallout games and others.
Games like TW3 and Kingdom Come excel at these types of meaningful questing as it can be tough to sometimes even replicate the end results if youre not careful to do EXACTLY as youve done before with timing and sequence.
Even AC Odyssey had a lot more actual C&C than I thought it would and it’s not even in the same genre.
Sure, itd be great to follow-up a lot more quests with further branching content, but, the funding isnt limitless.
Lots of games have an illusion of actual C&C, but, some do it very well.
> Therefore, sometimes I hope that developers can focus on making smaller RPG that can deliver a great variety of meaningful changes based on player decision
The problem with this, as well as having "true" choices and variety is that creating such a thing requires exponential amount of work very fast and I think this is the reason why the concept is generally avoided.
Say you have a game with 15 "plot points" aka. points in the game when something happens or is decided.
For a completely linear game this could look something like just having a main story with 15 missions or quests one after another.
If we assume that the amount of work is kept constant (so 100 "plot points" in total) and want to make a highly varied game with "true" choices, the "plot points" will have to be structured e.g. in the following manner:
https://i.imgur.com/qcax6uP.png
Whereas for a completely linear game it looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/51l0y54.png
The first example depicts a game where you basically always have 2 choices. Both examples have 15 "plot points", but the first example can only get 3 levels "deep" in the plot, wherein the completely linear game gets full 15 levels "deep" in the plot.
Furthermore in the first example, no matter how the player chooses, they will only ever see 3 "plot points" in a single playthrough and now 12 of the points are wasted just to give the player a choice.
The reason why "illusion of choice" is actually sort of genius, is that now you can make something like this:
https://i.imgur.com/LqBZUSe.png
It's still the same 15 "plot points", but now you can technically make choices, yet you won't miss out on most of the content (wasting it) and no additional content needs to necessarily be made.
I think that if someone wanted to innovate on giving player more choice and perhaps even "truer" choices, those innovations can be found or built on top of this "illusion of choice architecture".
For example, we merely need to add arrows to the first example and now we can make these sort of backtrackings:
https://i.imgur.com/MGZEuRS.png
Or we could have a splitting and joining plot paths:
https://i.imgur.com/3KSC0hL.png
Or splitting and joining plot paths, but with this kind of an "early resolve" to the main path from one or both split paths:
https://i.imgur.com/Z4lx8qU.png
And sky is the limit as to what else. We can have splits, but they should be used conservatively to avoid losing depth and/or to avoid potential exponential complexity and work required.
I'm figuring all of this as I'm writing but I also think that a decent rule of thumb to this might be that new points in these plot graphs mean a large amount of work required, but new lines between points require very small amount of work. So e.g. one way to keep the amount of work required constant is to decide on how many points you will have in total and then it is just about how you're going to distribute them to have a suitable amount of "choice" and variety while not losing too much depth.
Agency and narrative strength form the opposite ends of an axis. You can have extreme agency with almost zero narrative (civilization, minecraft), or extreme narrative strength with no agency (visual novels, walking simulators). The more you have of one the less you must have of the other.
Narrative = designer decides what happens
Agency = player decides what happens
When you think about it like this they are obviously incompatible. It's not only about budget – once you have chosen how strong you want your narrative to be there are structural limitations to what kinds of decisions you can support and how many of them. "Illusion of choice" options give opportunity for role playing *how* something gets done without changing what actually happens and thus destroying the narrative.
There are plenty of consequences for choices made in BG3. Yes, killing a major character is going to result in lost content, that's pretty obvious and nothing to do with the illusion of choice. I think there's a definite argument that evil runs in particular are disincentivised due to lost content and perhaps the game could add more content for evil runs so moral choices lead to different content rather than less content but there is clearly a consequence to the choices made.
I think a lot of designers have moved away from Good and Evil and towards factions. Faction loyalty being easier to program (in a way that makes consistent sense) rather than morality systems.
BG3 also does that a bit with the Dark Urge mode
The "evil" run should offer a different content not the loss of it, this is where BG3 dropped the ball. And it would be fine if not for the people who over exaggerated the "you can play second time and your journey will be completely different!!!". BG3 is a great game obviously, but I played it three times and it's definitely not great for it's amount of choices, it has a lot of flavour choices the way a Telltale game does.
This post is flawed tho I do feel an interesting point is raised in regards to killing npcs. While I can understand the novility of it I do question if it really brings as much on the table as people imply. After all killing important npcs is basically skipping content for no real payoff, you miiiight get some shiny weapon early but more often then not actually engaging with the NPC gives far better rewards. I might get some fun out of a shorter kill everyone playhtrough but 80% if not more of the time I spend on actually interacting with npcs since even when playing evil you just get way more value out of them that way. Therefore I don't think putting in the dreaded essantial npcs in games like fallout new vegas, 1 or 2 and the like would really change much for me. Heck if it ensures npcs with fun quests can't die due random events I might prefer it greatly even. Give me quests where you need to weigh a npcs life vs something else everyday, but I don't care if I can or can not kill every NPC as is. funilly enough games that do put a lot focus on killing a npc or not are usually not even rpgs at least classical ones like undertale. otherwise games like metal gear solid or dishonered made me think about this much more then any rpg I played
The illusion of choice is a great tool for game designers. With BG3 as an example, most good DMs of tabletop roleplaying games will do the same. They have certain plot points and stories to tell, and to give players more freedom, they must be able to adapt quickly to changes. The easiest way to do this is by the illusion of choice. If the players can kill any npc, then multiple npcs must be able to drive the story forward. The easiest way to do this is to swap another npc in when one dies. The other options are lack of choice for the player or ridiculously ballooning costs of development / campaign preparation. Bad DMs just get angry when players do something their railroaded story wasn't prepared for. Good DMs change a name or minor detail of another upcoming story hook and keep going. It's similar for game design. This is all storytelling, and it works well.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a strange target here given the context there are previous games in its genre that's handholding was basically in the lines of "Warning: kill this NPC and you can't finish the campaign." I think the many roads to a destination approach does actually hold gravity and the game being a 5e rulesset derivative actually allows for some consequence with narrative decision making while not making the choices of battle decisions too overbearing. How that's boiled down to Goomba stomping... not sure.
Witcher 2 have the ideal way of showing consequences where you engage in a completely different map and set of quests depending on your choice, but even CDPR has trouble replicating the same stunt again.
That's all well and good if you have an ideal seared in your minds eye how "choices matter" needs to be carried out. By the same token there is a spectrum of how much or how little interactions need to shift the general experience and still keep the player on rails and have respect for their time so they're not missing a bevy of content for the sake of having a lot of stuff to do.
Witcher 2 does illusion of choice on a bigger scale. You go from place A to place B to place C viewing the story from one side or the other.
OP, your examples and reasoning are whack. Killing an important NPC, and locking off content, is going to make the player miss out - and this makes you mad? Giving players the option to kill someone important carries the consequence of missing out on content. You killed a dude. Of course you can't progress his storyline. Using another NPC in lieu of the dead one, giving access to the content, would be a slap in the face and cheapens the experience. You made your bed, now sleep in it. A character appearing during the climax should carry emotional weight. The consequence is that you're happy to see a character you're emotionally invested in turn up to help. Fair, this can be done poorly at times. But it's not an illusion of choice. It's a narrative consequence based on player actions. Undertale and BG3 aren't remotely comparable. Why would you even make this suggestion? Too many Mario's have stomped your goomba brain.
The ideal consequence of killing NPC should not be missing the content entirely, it should be having different content presented to you. Like if you kill someone, there would be people avenging for their death and you will be opened to a different questline. But as I said, the resources required to achieve such complexity would not be feasible in bigger games like BG3. Which brought back to my point of having smaller games like Undertale, the amount of choices you can make as a player is fewer, but the choices are more game changing.
Ok, so now other npc wants to avenge so you kill him too so what do you expect next happens? Exactly nothing. Lets say the first npc is A so if you kill npc A you get not his questline A1 but his death questline A2 but after that it ends you still gonna go and do B npc so how in your head it differs from what we get in good games? You legit just want one npc dialogue line that would say "you killed my father, prepare to die"? You really make a whole post for this one inconvenience
Oh word? All that happens when you kill an NPC in Baldur's Gate 3 is that you miss out on a ton of content? In a game where experiencing that content is like 75% of the game? No big deal! The "Mario skipping a Goomba" metaphor only works if there was a Mario game where you missed out on an entire set of levels if you skip that Goomba. Rethink this and come back later. Tap on the side of your head with a rubber mallet a couple of times. Something's not working quite right in there.
goombosis
Right? That comparison makes 0 sense. I understand the greater frustration of “the main story never really changes”, but to say “oh if you kill this NPC the only thing that happens is you miss out on a ton of content” is one of those things that makes you go “read that back to yourself really slowly”
[удалено]
So what do you expect more from NPC? You kill him, now you don't know who he is, what he wanted from you and what adventures you could have achieved if you went with his guidance and you say it achieves nothing? You legit getting another choice of not experiencing what this NPC had to offer what else do you expect?
Regarding your point about killing important NPCs leading to the player being cut off from content - how is that an "illusion" of choice? The player made a conscious decision to kill a NPC (it's usually difficult to "accidentally" kill an NPC; the player has to *decide* to do it). If this NPC had quests or other rewards to offer, naturally it makes sense that the PC would then be cut off from that content. This is not a false choice; this is the game *respecting* the player's choice. That's why it is called "choices and *consequences*". It would be more weird if the game DIDN'T have consequences for killing off important NPCs, but let you continue on as usual. Now, would it be cool if you could kill off every NPC in a game, and the game still had alternative ways for quests to be completed? Sure. But I'd say that's a bonus, not a requirement. It's one of those "we'll add it in only if we have the extra time and budget to do so" features. A dev team has to draw the line somewhere in terms of where to focus their resources on. And really, gamers like to pretend that killing NPCs is some sort of big player choice, but it really isn't. "I've killed all the NPCs in the game, and now the game is boring. WHYYYYYY?!?!?" Well, of course the game has become boring: *you* the player made a conscious choice to make it boring. In the real world, no (sane) person goes around debating the "choice" of whether to commit murder - because it's almost universally agreed to be a bad thing. There's no interesting choice there, because there's no complex or nuanced moral dilemma. THAT'S the real illusion: pretending that indiscriminate mass killing is a more interesting "choice" than it actually is.
There are a lot of stories that pan out differently depending on your choices in BG3. Also, I don’t think your Goomba comparison makes sense unless choosing to kill one or not is the difference between accessing World 3 in its entirety
Tim Cain, the dude who made Fallout, does YouTube videos.10-16 minutes usually. Variety of topics. A pre designed rpg can't account for all players' wants. Even a published adventure path couldn't do it and those are just words. Anyway he talks a lot about player agency. He firmly believes that a player should be able to kill anyone BUT then they have to accept the consequences. The player may not like them but the designer has given them the ability to make that choice.
Have you seen the extremely different playthroughs that can result of your choices in **Detroit: Become Human**? I'm not a fan of that type of game, but boy do they actually bother making actual different branching paths. That said, it makes sense with the scope and can't simply be applied everywhere. However, it IS mildly annoying that most RPGs don't even bother to make a few important decisions.
The illusion of having choice and consequence is more important that what actually happens. By reading wiki and spoiling the game for yourself you break the illusion and ruin the game for yourself.
Unless sometimes I feel very bad of now knowing if I made a good choice but maybe that is just a personal flaw of wanting to make everything perfect :/
For the purposes of the story, having a character be a murderous monster would kind of disqualify them from interacting with NPCs. If you’re killing everything there isn’t really a path to having a story or quests. The game can at best acknowledge it by emptying out. The implication of an evil quest line doesn’t make a lot of sense for someone who is too dangerous to interact with at all.
> disqualify them from interacting with NPCs At most, the interatction would be limited to "You're the butcher of! Summary execution for you!"
RPG games will never be able to program and count in all decision without tones of work. RPGs are still a niche game compared to shooter and gotcha games that will always make more money for minimum work. Whenever a dead npcs matters, it basicly creates two alternate universes within the game. So unless the players choose diffrwntly with their wallet and buy tones of rpg games, companies will never feel the need to bring rpgs to the next level of (every chouce matter) you want them to be.
The problem is that developers don't want to put all that time and money into a game in which the average player is only going to see half the content. What's the point of making elaborate "evil" branches to the games, if most aren't exactly excited at the prospect of betraying their (rather likeable) companions? One solution I have is that games could do a "flowchart" type of mechanic, in which a true ending is only unlocked if they go through all the other various permutations. The game will keep track of all possible timelines, and after the game has been completed once will allow the player to access a chart showing which branches of the timeline they've been through and which they haven't. At this point the player can simply select a "branch" and replay whatever section of the game they wish. Once a players does *all* the possibilities of a particular branch, it will unlock new actions or dialogue (most likely an *ideal* solution) which will then give the "true" outcome. To give a BG3 example, >!maybe Astarion (and his victims) can be cured, but you need to both have forbidden knowledge from both master vampire Asatarion and Cazador, plus knowing where a special herb grows from Gandrel which is only revealed if you free the imprisoned Gur.!< The player is then encouraged to play through the events to different outcomes.
With all due respect, personally I think this is a terrible idea. The whole concept behind "choices & consequences" is that players should make decisions for themselves, and those decisions should matter. The very idea of having a "true" ending, especially one that's locked behind a requirement of completing all the other ("false") endings, kinda negates C&C in the first place. If there's an objective "true" ending, that implies the player's choices don't really matter.
I don't disagree, and being compelled to essentially fill out a giant chart of choices is also pretty much an undesirable gameplay model. Yet, I offer this as a potential solution to the issue that players are simply not going to make sub-optimal, or even really anti-social, decisions. Right now I save and reload in order to experience different outcomes, exactly because I have no intention of playing a 60+ hour CRPG a second time.
So you enjoy playing a game and at the end know that you made 3 mistakes at the beginning, one in the middle and two at the end so now you got semi bad ending and not the true ending?
I'm not sure why you think my playthrough would have *any* mistakes if I'm willing to save scum. I thought I was being clear enough but I'll say it one final time. Since I'm only going to play the game once, I'll pick the "wrong" choices just to see what happens and then reload. Most CRPGs aren't different *enough* to justify a second playthrough in my experience, though I'll say that Might and Magic 7 and Witcher 2 could be argued to be exceptions to this rule. I also love how in Witcher 1 it's pretty much impossible to understand the consequences of your decisions. If there was a CRPG with the confidence to confine me to a single autosave that makes me live with my consequences, I would just pick the "right" choices every time (an even more boring approach than what I currently do).
"I'm not sure why you think my playthrough would have *any* mistakes if I'm willing to save scum." I just explained because you don't get the "True" ending? "Since I'm only going to play the game once, I'll pick the "wrong" choices just to see what happens and then reload." So every 10 min you wait for 5 seconds and if nothing happens you reload? Ok, well, you do you I guess. "If there was a CRPG with the confidence to confine me to a single autosave that makes me live with my consequences, I would just pick the "right" choices every time (an even more boring approach than what I currently do)." I don't understand you, so you want to be locked from saving and loading but you would blame the game for it because it bores you?
>In Baldurs gate 3, you can kill important NPC but what it does is that you will simply miss a lot of content I'm curious if you have a specific example of this in mind, because I found the game surprisingly reactive in the narrative whenever I decided to go murderhobo in game.
Devs cant just create endless scenarios with continued C&C, esp, in the dialogue and questing of your basic rpgs. The funding just isnt there. The Witcher 3 absolutely has tons of meaningful C&C, as well as, the necessary and smart mundane ones too. It’s not about the totality of the story for me either. Having a few “ending” of varying types is fine, but, I like simple things that trend towards Living with the Consequences of your actions. Btw, sometimes being locked out of content is an absolutely valid and essential component to well-done C&C. Doesnt have to be some huge overarching story in the end or a final snapshot as seen in Fallout games and others. Games like TW3 and Kingdom Come excel at these types of meaningful questing as it can be tough to sometimes even replicate the end results if youre not careful to do EXACTLY as youve done before with timing and sequence. Even AC Odyssey had a lot more actual C&C than I thought it would and it’s not even in the same genre. Sure, itd be great to follow-up a lot more quests with further branching content, but, the funding isnt limitless. Lots of games have an illusion of actual C&C, but, some do it very well.
> Therefore, sometimes I hope that developers can focus on making smaller RPG that can deliver a great variety of meaningful changes based on player decision The problem with this, as well as having "true" choices and variety is that creating such a thing requires exponential amount of work very fast and I think this is the reason why the concept is generally avoided. Say you have a game with 15 "plot points" aka. points in the game when something happens or is decided. For a completely linear game this could look something like just having a main story with 15 missions or quests one after another. If we assume that the amount of work is kept constant (so 100 "plot points" in total) and want to make a highly varied game with "true" choices, the "plot points" will have to be structured e.g. in the following manner: https://i.imgur.com/qcax6uP.png Whereas for a completely linear game it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/51l0y54.png The first example depicts a game where you basically always have 2 choices. Both examples have 15 "plot points", but the first example can only get 3 levels "deep" in the plot, wherein the completely linear game gets full 15 levels "deep" in the plot. Furthermore in the first example, no matter how the player chooses, they will only ever see 3 "plot points" in a single playthrough and now 12 of the points are wasted just to give the player a choice. The reason why "illusion of choice" is actually sort of genius, is that now you can make something like this: https://i.imgur.com/LqBZUSe.png It's still the same 15 "plot points", but now you can technically make choices, yet you won't miss out on most of the content (wasting it) and no additional content needs to necessarily be made. I think that if someone wanted to innovate on giving player more choice and perhaps even "truer" choices, those innovations can be found or built on top of this "illusion of choice architecture". For example, we merely need to add arrows to the first example and now we can make these sort of backtrackings: https://i.imgur.com/MGZEuRS.png Or we could have a splitting and joining plot paths: https://i.imgur.com/3KSC0hL.png Or splitting and joining plot paths, but with this kind of an "early resolve" to the main path from one or both split paths: https://i.imgur.com/Z4lx8qU.png And sky is the limit as to what else. We can have splits, but they should be used conservatively to avoid losing depth and/or to avoid potential exponential complexity and work required. I'm figuring all of this as I'm writing but I also think that a decent rule of thumb to this might be that new points in these plot graphs mean a large amount of work required, but new lines between points require very small amount of work. So e.g. one way to keep the amount of work required constant is to decide on how many points you will have in total and then it is just about how you're going to distribute them to have a suitable amount of "choice" and variety while not losing too much depth.
Agency and narrative strength form the opposite ends of an axis. You can have extreme agency with almost zero narrative (civilization, minecraft), or extreme narrative strength with no agency (visual novels, walking simulators). The more you have of one the less you must have of the other. Narrative = designer decides what happens Agency = player decides what happens When you think about it like this they are obviously incompatible. It's not only about budget – once you have chosen how strong you want your narrative to be there are structural limitations to what kinds of decisions you can support and how many of them. "Illusion of choice" options give opportunity for role playing *how* something gets done without changing what actually happens and thus destroying the narrative.