My last post was on binary choices in games and how they can break immersion and narrative. Another immersion killer for me is side quests. I have a love/hate relationship with side quests; they are often the place where great quests that don’t fit into the narrative can be showcased (like the Mile High Club in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare), but they can also serve as the world’s most convoluted ATM. The greatest flaw though is that they break any sense of urgency in a narrative.
Sure, I have to retrieve the sword of shadows from the mountain of evil before Lord Kythun gets it to be sure that its power is never used for evil, but before I do that I have to run out and get ten wolf pelts for Johnny-Nobody here so he can pay me a copper.
It gets rid of any sense of urgency. You know that the world won’t end if you take ten years to complete the main quest. I spent maybe five hours exploring every world in Mass Effect despite the fact that I was on a manhunt (Turrianhunt?) for the most dangerous individual in the galaxy. The problem is, side quests are player initiated whereas the main quest is not. In most games the main quest is initiated by forces outside the player’s control and that are some kind of threat. Whereas side quests are within the player’s control and often do not change the outcome of the game by any great degree. We have an incentive to complete side quests: it makes the main quest easier, we have more money, better equipment or are more experienced but the story gives us an incentive not to do side quests. There is a great threat we have to deal with but there is a disconnect between the incentives of the story and those of the game. The game itself does not punish us for dawdling around despite the fact that the world is coming apart at the seams.
The ways I see to fix this is:
1) To have the parts of the main quest initiated by player actions. In other words remove the urgency from strategically placed sections of the narrative and in those give incentives for players to do side quests and in areas where time is not an ally punish (in a minor but realistic way) players for engaging in rather low-priority tasks.
2) Create a risk/reward system for side quests: you risk losing valuable time but your reward for successful completion of a lower-priority task is in line with how valuable time is in the narrative.
3) Remove time as a constraint of the story. This would be of course the hardest to pull off in a way that did not wreck the story but if you did manage it you would totally nullify the immersion breaker that is the side quest. An example of removing the time issue in a story would be a story of revenge. The main character is the one causing the narrative to move forward instead of outside forces.
Of course actually giving a time limit to complete certain sections of the main quest would be stupid. To actually give a time constraint is to make you play the game at its pace instead of your own. Which would get rid of a lot of the fun of gaming. No, we need to create a sense of urgency without actually tying ourselves to a fixed timetable.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Getting Rid of Binary Choices in Games: Or Why Dragon Age: Origins got it right (Sort of)
Despite being distracted by Modern Warfare 2 the only thing I have been playing recently is Dragon Age: Origins. Despite the fact that I haven’t gotten too far, (I have been playing five or so different characters), I have found what I really like about Dragon Age: BioWare got rid of their morality system. I got addicted to BioWare games back when KOTOR (Knights of the Old Republic) came out and have played every BioWare game that has come out since. In KOTOR, a morality points system makes sense. Star Wars is a very black and white universe. The conflict in Star Wars is between good and evil and the evil within the main characters. And, let's face it, we like Star Wars because there are no moral ambiguities, but when we make more mature stories, we don’t like clear cut differences between the hero and the villain because the world we live in is ambiguous.
Most story driven games have given us two choices: good or evil. (Fallout 3 gave us neutral and Fable 3 gave us good/evil pure/corrupted.) There has always been a very clear cut difference between our choices. The problem is not the basic idea of good and evil in games, but the way it is presented and how it destroys immersion. We can accept that there can be magic and still feel immersed because the universe we are playing in obeys its own rules, but there seems to be something wrong when all the villains either end up being royal jerks or really just misguided people with golden hearts (who end up helping you). What about the people who have the right motivations, but use the wrong methods?
The truth is that it is not morality systems that most people like me have trouble with. We have trouble with the fact that story driven games are stuck. We are able to produce games that look and can sometimes fell like movies (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune etc.) but they are stuck as those kind of crappy ‘B’ action movies (with exceptions) that have such great production values that you watch them despite the fact that a high-school comp student could write a better script.
It is not necessarily the general writing that is at fault, but the way in which we structure and write choices in games driven by them. They cost nothing to us or our characters (more on this later), but more than that they don’t engage us because they (almost) always have a good choice, an evil choice, a natural choice, and a bad choice. And we can see which one is which from miles away. The choices are the 800lb gorilla in the RPG room.
The problem is that they don’t engage our intellects. We know that they won’t have major repercussions. Our character will be good or evil (something which we most likely chose at the beginning of the game in our own minds), being good comes with certain rewards and being evil comes with different but balanced rewards. You can never be a good person who is really ruthless or a very clever evil person who only appears good, because 1) you are tied to a morality system and 2) the choices are binary or tertiary.
BioWare’s most recent release, Dragon: Age, has broken with tradition a bit. I have been thus far able to play a ruthless person who is so jaded that he is a bit cruel but is going to do his duty to the end because it is all he has left. I am of course dreading the climatic moment when typically in BioWare games you chose between being the hero or the anti-hero. If that moment does not come Dragon Age will be my number one game of the decade. (If it does, Mass Effect will.) Dragon Age had also given you a reason to pretend to be one way or the other: the opinion of your party members. BioWare, in my opinion, took the wrong route in allowing you to repair your party members opinions with gifts. I like the gift system, especially if you can give the right gift to the right person, but I feel as if the gift system should not allow you to change opinions so much. Let’s face it, I would get really suspicious if someone who was being a monster then started giving me gifts. I would start weighing the option of killing him/her/it to see if it would be ethical. And, maybe look into investing in a safe-house, and a stockpile of weapons and armor.
I think the solution is to abandon the idea of good and evil as static concepts in games. No one is motivated by evil; even the worst of human kind has had a goal that we can all understand, be it patriotism, fear, or the need to control. We are rational animals and we our selling ourselves short if we create one dimensional stories or characters. We need to understand that the good/evil dichotomy is too simple to be useful as a way of telling a story, or even exploring characters.
Most story driven games have given us two choices: good or evil. (Fallout 3 gave us neutral and Fable 3 gave us good/evil pure/corrupted.) There has always been a very clear cut difference between our choices. The problem is not the basic idea of good and evil in games, but the way it is presented and how it destroys immersion. We can accept that there can be magic and still feel immersed because the universe we are playing in obeys its own rules, but there seems to be something wrong when all the villains either end up being royal jerks or really just misguided people with golden hearts (who end up helping you). What about the people who have the right motivations, but use the wrong methods?
The truth is that it is not morality systems that most people like me have trouble with. We have trouble with the fact that story driven games are stuck. We are able to produce games that look and can sometimes fell like movies (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune etc.) but they are stuck as those kind of crappy ‘B’ action movies (with exceptions) that have such great production values that you watch them despite the fact that a high-school comp student could write a better script.
It is not necessarily the general writing that is at fault, but the way in which we structure and write choices in games driven by them. They cost nothing to us or our characters (more on this later), but more than that they don’t engage us because they (almost) always have a good choice, an evil choice, a natural choice, and a bad choice. And we can see which one is which from miles away. The choices are the 800lb gorilla in the RPG room.
The problem is that they don’t engage our intellects. We know that they won’t have major repercussions. Our character will be good or evil (something which we most likely chose at the beginning of the game in our own minds), being good comes with certain rewards and being evil comes with different but balanced rewards. You can never be a good person who is really ruthless or a very clever evil person who only appears good, because 1) you are tied to a morality system and 2) the choices are binary or tertiary.
BioWare’s most recent release, Dragon: Age, has broken with tradition a bit. I have been thus far able to play a ruthless person who is so jaded that he is a bit cruel but is going to do his duty to the end because it is all he has left. I am of course dreading the climatic moment when typically in BioWare games you chose between being the hero or the anti-hero. If that moment does not come Dragon Age will be my number one game of the decade. (If it does, Mass Effect will.) Dragon Age had also given you a reason to pretend to be one way or the other: the opinion of your party members. BioWare, in my opinion, took the wrong route in allowing you to repair your party members opinions with gifts. I like the gift system, especially if you can give the right gift to the right person, but I feel as if the gift system should not allow you to change opinions so much. Let’s face it, I would get really suspicious if someone who was being a monster then started giving me gifts. I would start weighing the option of killing him/her/it to see if it would be ethical. And, maybe look into investing in a safe-house, and a stockpile of weapons and armor.
I think the solution is to abandon the idea of good and evil as static concepts in games. No one is motivated by evil; even the worst of human kind has had a goal that we can all understand, be it patriotism, fear, or the need to control. We are rational animals and we our selling ourselves short if we create one dimensional stories or characters. We need to understand that the good/evil dichotomy is too simple to be useful as a way of telling a story, or even exploring characters.
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