I was playing Ultimate Alliance 2 with TK the other day and I've come to fully realize how black and white that game is. To a certain extent, it offends me.
If I wanted a someone to tell me what to think, I'd watch FOX News. I would hope that intelligent video game designers would have a better understanding of moral ambiguity. Although it may make for a more linear storyline, I hate when you're given a supposed "moral choice" only to be crowbarred back into the main story for Act III.
In UA2, you choose either Pro-Regulation or Anti-Regulation in a so-called modern civil war. In truth, your options are very clearly douchebaggery or the American Dream, respectively. Though the choice of obeying possibly questionable governmental laws versus violently rebelling in order to remain unidentified is very clearly ambiguous, the character dialogue makes for a very obvious dichotomy of right and wrong. The Pro-Regs are evil, and once you are "shown the folley of their ways" you are railroaded back onto the path of the righteous.
To put it another way, there is a game about Anti-Regulation with the option of playing as the bad guys for a few levels.
Why can't your choices ever matter? So many games have this "choice" feature that is as superfluous as the "customize" feature. Take Fallout 3, for example. You choose your gender and race free of any social persecution (for a world based off the 50s, that seems... inaccurate). You get down to choose every little detail right down to the width of the bridge of your nose. Of course, you cannot change height, weight, or any other physical feature of your character, but, hey, making a scale function in two dimensions is incredibly... uh, easy, actually. But I digress. The fact of the matter is the customization process has no effect on gameplay and neither does your "Karma." If you're bad, the good guys try to kill you. If you're good, the bad guys try to kill you. The townspeople act the same, Raiders will always attack, Mutants will always attack, the Enclave will always be your enemy. Nothing you choose changes anything. I understand that something like that becomes immensely complex, but for something like UA2, why not play out the ramifications of Pro-Reg winning?
To voice this argument another way, and to reference Zack's latest post, if an element is unneccesary, why have it? If the choice of good or evil doesn't change anything, who cares? If you can't join the Empire, why join the Dark Side? That would be like Luke doing everything Vader told him, but he still has to blow up the Death Star in the end.
As I said before, I understand that an impactful choice system exponentially complexifies a game. It's like having to design multiple games in one and weave them all together. It's hard work. But so is realistic physics, dynamic ambient light, interactive environments, multiple character choices, Co-op modes, user designed levels... the list goes on about features of a game that make it harder to make. But designers work on them and do them well. So why don't designers put that kind of effort into the "choice" feature?
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I think it comes down to the fact that most gamers don't want choice, they would rather be force feed linear single-minded experiences.
ReplyDeleteIf the industry is to keep going, we really need to see things like choice and what not become real factors when playing a game.
i think people play games as an interactive movie experience.
ReplyDeletehow would you like it if at the maw of Mt. Doom, Frodo looked at the camera and said "what do YOU think? should i be a bastard?"
people play the game (maybe not to see how it plays out even) simply to get to the end.
Heh, that reminds me of both the old baldur's gate games and, at the very least, the first neverwinter nights game. Being evil really had no change on the way you did things... though I do suppose your motives in BG2 did change if you play it and the expansion all the way through, but that's fairly subtle.
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