Choices in Games

I love games where you have choices to make that will matter in your experience of the game.

Yeah, that doesnt say much about what I really like since all games have some choices that players need to make to progress. There are different types of choices and I'm really interested in only 1-2 of these types when I play games or when i work on some.

Sports games let you make choices every second that will determine your success during the event you are involved. Hockey,Soccer and football games ask you to pass,shoot,hit,block,etc to determine your next move and asking you to react to the AI doing the same. Im not really interested in this one.

Other games give the players a blank slate and ask them to create something where the different elements must interact and survive to progress. Such games may include SimCity, Spore, civilisation (in some regards), etc... This is an interesting one for game designers because designing them is all about excel and balancing. i like playing these games but never good at them since i would need to really understand the system and i dont tend to play them long enough to do so. Im not really such a designer but i respect them a lot.

Other games give players the choice to play some mini-games or side missions that extend the game by many hours, offer players options to play the type of missions they like the most and reward them with the economy in place. Such games include Assassins Creed, GTA, Fallout,etc... This type of choices interests me a lot when the missions in place will tell players more about the story, the world they play in and go deeper in the philosophy of the game. This is something that I love to develop but on a bigger scale that i will talk soon.

Second to last type of game choices that I want to talk more deeply about is the one that includes games where players have the choice to decide how they approach their goals. Action Stealth games offer that type of options to player to come into a space where players can use stealth to go around the mission, use your guns to kill everyone in sight or use squadmates to go about to deal with your objectives. I enjoy those games that will give you options throughout their games, but I usually dislike it when they turn around and make you do the next objective a specific way that you might never have played before and will just result in many failures which results in frustration and these games might end up in the bin. Its fair to ask players to do it one way, but please offer other options if something goes wrong and not just end the players experience, developpers can increase the difficulty at this point or something else to make it an harder experience than it would have been if the player would have succeeded in the first place. At least, players will not feel like their experience just stopped because they didnt player the one way the designers intended it. Such games as Splinter Cell, Assassins Creed Brotherhood do that which is annoying i find. Other games like the Deus Ex, Thief series usually give a lot of different of this type of choices going in action,stealth, exploring around, hacking and even social aspects where you can avoid harder situation by trying to convince NPCs to let you pass or give you different elements to make it easier. Developping these games becomes a blasts because you build the world with options and often players will come up with crazy ways to figure things out and its great to see those. Also, it offers players a lot of replayability options when they want to replay to game. Players will often get new elements of the story by exploring the environments and searching through the world which is great if you are interested in the philosophy of the game and the story. Players also create their own narrative by deciding how to explore the game. I enjoy playing and mostly creating those games. Deus Ex offers so many ways to play the game, but in every boss fight you have to play the action way only ... so if you only decided to upgrade your hacking skills and stealth gameplay, well you are in for a good surprise in these fights...

The last type and the most interesting one for me is the choices that players make which will change the story of the game, the story for players and possibly the mechanics that players can use to succeed and progress through the experience.In this type, there can be some distinctions as well. Some games like some versions of Star Wars, Fable, Infamous offer players with the choice to be on the evil side or good side of the story. Choosing these give everyone the opportunity to live that fantasy that most got from watching the Star Wars movie for example,but not you get to experience it for yourself. The fact that choosing the path of your choice lets you see what it means to be such a character and see how NPCs in the world will react to your actions, using different powers and choosing the fate of different stories and characters within the main story lets players really live it. It changes the game for them and they experience the personal repercussions of actions that you wouldnt take in the normal world but the game reacts to your choices and changes the story as you go through your decisions. Other games use another system which is less black and white and let players have a bigger array of moral choices that seems to be more related to real world situations, give back more to players because they get somewhat touched by those small decisions that might become emotional decisions of a certain morality and in which players will see their decisions change the world the game lives in and will certainly change the way they feel about the game and the video game medium.Obviously some decisions might not only be about what is good or bad, but how you want to interact with the characters or events in the game. In games such as Bioshock,Farenheit, Heavy Rain, Deus Ex (in some ways),etc... offer some of this type of choices which is really what I want to do in a game. The story changes as you make your decisions about the different interactions in the game of challenges that come up. Different outcomes to your decisions will change the game and how you see yourself playing the main character. Some are harder decisions to take: do you harvest the little sister or do you help them?(yes there were issues with balancing) doing the first option, you might feel wrong but players are going probably for personal gains and becoming a stronger character, but the story will let you know how awful it is to do so, the powers you get will be different and the story changes in some aspects until the end comes. Do you make sure that all proofs have been removed after the murder? which is a different kind of choice, but it will then be harder to play as the police officers and find proofs and changes the game as well. Do you kill the other character to maybe save your kid or do you try to find another solution to the problem. This will make the game harder but the moral decision here is hard to take. Which way will you talk to main characters to get what you want in main quests or side quests? What type of characters are you as a player and we can see following these players and see what they are capable of in the setting of a game. These are really special and important to me and that is what I like or would like to do in the games I make where your actions will really change the way the game progresses or even end depending of how you played it and how you really thought of the available emotional decisions you had to take to accomplish your task. Making people think about what they are doing and what they actually did to NPCs in the world and how these actions or decisions had real impacts in those characters lives...

The reason why I wanted to talk about this subject today "Choices in games" is that some games pretend they are actually doing that, but in the end the choices you make dont changed anything in the game you are playing, but they try to reinforce that your changes really do have an impact or try to push strongly (and ineffectively) that the "moral" choices you took had a big impact in that world(in the game). Unfortunately those games fail so hard for me because they didnt try hard enough,but wanted to fake that they did ... im sorry, but that makes the game fail in the end even if you gave me so many options to play the game ... the end HAS to be good as well ... you dont need to let me choose my ending thats not what I desire... I desire an ending to my journey through my choices in the game. So let me choose my ending through my choices that you will actually care about enough to track during the many hours i enjoyed your game. Make games that matter and give options to players to change the way they play it and the decision they make actually matters. One example of this is unfortunately Deus Ex HR and the DLC Missing Link where you have to press button A or B to decide your ending ... thanks about that now I can get a different video at the end or a different speech ... it doesnt change the way you play it or even the options available to you in the end.

obviously I like other games as well and not all of them actually need moral choices, but id like to see these ones more and more and try to touch more people. Look at the japanese game Catherine where you get to answer different questions about relationships which changes the way the game plays and the story unfolds. The game is all about action puzzles but they found a neat way to make the players actually interact with the story and it gives a great experience depending of what you think about some aspects of love relationships.