Has C&C become the cancer of RPGs?

[jf8350143]

The problem is they tend to go half way in instead of all the way in.

AC:Odyssey is a pretty good example, during their marketing they talks so much about C&C, but when you play the game you have a handful of choices that will change the outcome of the game, and then in DLC they give you a complete linear story with 0 variation no matter what you choose.

If you want to make meaningful C&C, you need to accept that the story is both the writers and the player's to control. But the writers in this age tend to think too high of their story and didn't want the player to take control of it.

 

[Tweed]

C&C in mainstream RPGs will never go beyond telling the player they did something because you aren't allowed to make the player feel bad or punish them without their consent. Any time you don't give clear cut information about what a choice will do they lose their shit and the same problem can be applied to morality in most games because everything is clearly defined in black or white, or if the writers are feeling adventurous, grey.

 

[Incendax]

Witcher 2 had the best C&C I’ve ever seen in an RPG. Tyranny also had amazing C&C. But that doesn’t mean C&C makes a good game by itself, or that a good game needs lots of C&C.

Honestly, I’m happy if I can play a game twice and see a fair amount of new content the second time through. Mass Effect Vanguard vs Renegade is good enough for me.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

With Cyberpunk and The Outer Worlds, they’re advertising major narrative and gameplay C&C. Whether they end up executing well is another story, but both games are pitching a level of interactivity that you rarely see in AAA video games, including RPGs. Well-executed narrative C&C is uncommon, well-executed gameplay C&C is very rare. They’re not hyping this stuff to bamboozle idiot journalists into giving them fawning coverage, they’re hyping it because it will probably be the best thing about either title.

There has been nothing to suggest that TOW or CB2077 are going to have any, much less well-executed, gameplay C&C, though.

Huh? Read the previews. Tim and Leonard practically invented this shit. I don’t have great hopes for Cyberpunk as an RPG, but it’s clear they’re attempting this, too.

Covenant fanfiction is a weird comparison. CRPGs that let you make narrative choices are trying to approximate the feeling of playing pen and paper RPGs that theoretically let you do anything.

The narrative choices that you can actually make are very limited, though. I appreciate the freedom of P&P RPGs, as it can make for pretty cool and unexpected experiences. Look at this story about a D&D group who abandoned their quest to focus on founding a Morgan Enterprises style empire built on selling massive quantities of salt (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tale_of_an_Industrious_Rogue,_Part_I), for example. That stuff's awesome. It became its own real adventure, with twists and turns and challenges. But we're decades from anything like that level of depth and complexity being possible in CRPGs.

Honestly, I don't think we've progressed significantly past MMVII (1999!) where you choose Light or Dark and can only use the type of magic of the side you chose. Everything else is just window dressing. Rather than the last quest being to go to map X and kill Flobius Zentrume, you have to go to map Y and hack Hrathi Beardsson's magic iPod instead, and then you get a blue ending instead of a green ending. Neat, but... so what?

I mean, what's the ultimate goal? What are you expecting 'great' C&C to be? If your RPG is about you being a bodyguard to a young heiress, but you decide to sack it off and go fishing instead, should the game become something more like Sega Bass Fishing, or Rune Factory/Harvest Moon? If you and the heiress decide to stop investigating the huge conspiracy against her and just go live under fake identities in backwoods Florida, should it become a dating game where the two of you slowly fall in love?

Or do you just want those options to be available, but if you take them you get a couple of lines of 'But that's... another story' and a faux-ending? Because that's shallow as fuck; it's purely the illusion of choice.

If anything, I think that what a lot of people claim to want is directly contradictory. The more focus there is on narrative, the less C&C there can possibly be. The more reaction there is to your unexpected decisions, the more development time grows until it quickly becomes unreasonable. Every path you add has its own branches that just increase the possibilities until you start arbitrarily limiting them. Ultimately, the requirements of the Consequences make the Choices unfeasible.

There are plenty of games that have done this well in the last twenty years. You’re talking like every CRPG is a BioWare game.

Fallout 2, Arcanum, Mask of the Betrayer, New Vegas, Age of Decadence, Kingmaker. Worse games that are great at C&C: Alpha Protocol, Tyranny, the Witcher series. Why pretend that this stuff doesn’t exist?

What’s the goal of reactivity/C&C? Well, why have any story at all? It’s to make the player give a fuck. The more interactive the story is, the more engaging it is. “These guys are trying to kill me because that’s the plot” is less fun than “these guys are trying to kill me because I made a choice that pissed them off.”

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

If you remove the combat from Age of Decadence, it stops being an RPG, however the opposite doesn't happen; if you leave only the combat it will still remain an RPG.

Combat is the primary characteristic of the RPG genre. Period.

Combat is one of the primary characteristics of the RPG genre, alongside exploration and character customization/progression. Remove any of them and what you are left with is not an RPG.

Age of Decadence was already limited in its exploration-related aspects, but remove them entirely from the game while keeping the combat and the character customization/progression/equipment/inventory and what you are left with is Dungeon Rats, a squad-based tactics game (with added customization/progression elements). There are many similar squad-based tactics games, even with the extra progression/customization elements borrowed from RPGs, and they form their own genre, or hybrid genre with the added RPG elements, and have for decades.

Of course, Age of Decadence as it actually exists allows, and even encourages, the player to have non-combat playthroughs, especially by following the merchant/loremaster path. Without combat, it does indeed become more akin to a computerized gamebook, i.e. a choose-your-own-adventure with RPG elements, than an actual RPG. Narrative "Choice & Consequences" can be found in CYOA books, gamebooks, David Cage computer "games", et cetera and are no substitute for combat or exploration.

 

[aweigh]

Don't forget "these guys are trying to kill me because I made a choice that pissed them off, and I have different ways of interacting with them and resolving that conflict". Personally speaking I place more importance on the last part, but having both is great.

 

[aweigh]

Combat is one of the primary characteristics of the RPG genre, alongside exploration and character customization/progression. Remove any of them and what you are left with is not an RPG.

Age of Decadence was already limited in its exploration-related aspects, but remove them entirely from the game while keeping the combat and the character customization/progression/equipment/inventory and what you are left with is Dungeon Rats, a squad-based tactics game (with added customization/progression elements). There are many similar squad-based tactics games, even with the extra progression/customization elements borrowed from RPGs, and they form their own genre, or hybrid genre with the added RPG elements, and have for decades.

Of course, Age of Decadence as it actually exists allows, and even encourages, the player to have non-combat playthroughs, especially by following the merchant/loremaster path. Without combat, it does indeed become more akin to a computerized gamebook, i.e. a choose-your-own-adventure with RPG elements, than an actual RPG. Narrative "Choice & Consequences" can be found in CYOA books, gamebooks, David Cage computer "games", et cetera and are no substitute for combat or exploration.

Yes. To me the core tenets of RPG design are something like:

- Character development and advancement (includes party building, classes, skillsets, attributes, levelling, spell systems, root of player agency).

- Itemization and Power Curve (includes encounter design, overall resource management, determines the general feeling of enjoyment found in the progression systems; player psychology and player attrition).

- Exploration, (level and area design, overall game challenge, many aesthetic disciplines like atmosphere, and general game writing).

There is inherent overlap in all of these 3 areas, obviously, and the best outcome is when all 3 lead into each other organically. I'd also like to add that Exploration has "general game writing" parenthesized because that's mostly how a story is framed for the player in coherence with the plot, or overall narrative.

A really basic example: you have 1 big castle in a somewhat large area, and there are 2 caves and 3 towns. there should be things (people, objects, something) in each one of those places that can potentially lead the player to each of the other areas, and additionally have that be coherent. Say you go into a cave and find something that belongs to someone, then you should also be able to meet that person beforehand and they can clue you into the fact that they are looking for something. But the real part, the real detail, is to make that little thing feel like it could happen in the overall "story", or game world; if it's a a ring then perhaps that person needs the ring in order to make a marriage proposal. Make it make sense.

Also the player should be incentivized to explore places on impulse in the first place, like how F: NV has all Points of Interest visible on the horizon, the Ranger Statues shine at night and draw the eye, as does the Strip, etc). I know this is a really crude example and I apologize, I just don't feel like drawing up something more complex right now. I just wrote that to point out how "Exploration" can encapsulate more esoteric aspects that tie into the game writing, level design, area design, itemization, the power curve (maybe the enemies are rough, maybe if you go by day it is easier? maybe harder at night?), etc.

Note that nowhere did I make a mention of including branching story states or paths. That shit is nice but I don't consider it necessary for an RPG, nor do I think it adds "replay value". TBH, I might even go so far as to say it's actually a waste of dev-time in the majority of cases and it will force the sacrifice of other more essential and material elements. Real replay value is in making the game have good overall gameplay, and for that you need the mechanical foundation to be solid, basically the 3 bullet-points above, since everything else stems from it.

I wanted to add that Exploration also consists of what you can physically do as well, such as finding secret doors, hidden items, new avenues or pathways, and obviously: navigating a maze. The spatial aspect, the physical aspects, these are also a core part of the experience. I felt the need to add this because maybe it wasn't clear. Want to break down this door? Well, do you have Strength for it? Want to climb a mountain? Etc. It doesn't have to be as granular as that, though. For example, Wizardry 1 accomplishes all of the things in the three tenets I outlined above, and in many ways to much better and more successful degrees than modern RPGs do.

I've always believed abstraction > immersion. It's like those people who refuse to play an RPG if it has random encounters, but will play anything that has "realistic encounters where you can see the enemies on the field". That's an argument I've had one too many times and it ALWAYS leaves me triggered.

Or how people refuse to play anything where you can't see your character because it's not immersive enough if you can't see them, etc. People simply can't put 2 and 2 together, that a random encounter is an abstraction of what's happening in the game world; if you enter a fortress and get a random encounter, that is an abstraction meant to represent patrolling guards. It's up the devs to make the game make sense, to be coherent, and it's not the fault of random encounters if they do it wrong. Abstraction is the bread and butter of video games, and specifically of RPGs. I believe simulation elements only bog gameplay down.

Branching paths or mutually-exclusive content is not C&C. If it was, then you can just go play a Visual Novel and get all the C&C you want, or go play one of those games by David Cage, those Beyond Heavy Rain pieces of shit.

God, it's such a dead meme at this point. Half the people who talk about C&C don't even know what it is they are talking about, or what it is they want. Being able to pick between two different story states is not a meaningful player choice; it has to affect the way the game plays. This is why "real C&C" is usually comprised of different character build and conflict resolution integration.

(This is why The Witcher games don't feature any real C&C).

Good example of a game with "real C&C", off the top of my head, would probably be Deus Ex 1. Traditionally we used to use another word for C&C back in the day, it was "gameplay". The game mechanics need to inform the choices, and the consequences needs to inform the gameplay.

There is definitely room for melding more narrative or plot-focused integration with the C&C meme, of course, I think Arcanum is one game that did it well enough, or at least enough so that I remember a few moments of going "huh, that's cool", because the the game's allowance for player arbitration were sufficiently coincidental to create brief emergent scenarios that dovetailed with story or quests.

However, the Arcanum examples serves another purpose here, well for my purposes anyway: it is a great indicator that gives lie to the fact that C&C makes an RPG "good". It's neither necessary for an RPG to be good, but I would go so far as to say it isn't necessary for an RPG, period. If the underlying mechanical foundation is crooked then you can't have "real C&C"; you can only have "fake C&C" which is mostly comprised of mutually-exclusive story states or branching nodes.

 

[Ventidius]

There are plenty of games that have done this well in the last twenty years. You're talking like every CRPG is a BioWare game. Fallout 2, Arcanum, Mask of the Betrayer, New Vegas, Age of Decadence, Kingmaker. Worse games that are great at C&C: Alpha Protocol, Tyranny, the Witcher series. Why pretend that this stuff doesn’t exist?

Pointing to the existence of these games does not address his point though, if anything it proves it. He's saying that C&C, as it exists precisely in the sort of cRPGs that you mentioned, is a rather inadequate attempt to emulate the player agency and freedom that is possible in PnP RPGs. C&C in the full sense happens, as Covenant pointed out, when consequences are able to keep up with choices. When all you get from a choice is an ending slide, an alternate campaign endstate, or some unique dialogue lines from NPCs, the sense of agency evaporates because it is all symbolic, a token.

True C&C means that choices drastically alter the ongoing gameplay experience and the consequences are not thus the end of a given gameplay experience but rather its continuation. This kind of C&C absolutely is possible in PnP RPGs, as illustrated by the off-kilter campaign story that Covenant linked to. Something like that would be far more fun and engaging than simply unlocking a different set of quests after a key choice, quests that by necessity are handcrafted and predetermined: the agency here is illusory, and that due to the constraints of the computer gaming medium.

The reason for this is that PnP games run on the engine of human imagination, while computer games would require a prohibitive amount of resources poured into them to approach even a fraction of that kind of player agency. Even if cRPGs were to attempt to set up that kind of platform for player agency, doing it in the Black Isle/Iron Tower style would be wrongheaded. Handcrafted quests and dialogue trees are not the gateway to more player agency, if anything they perversely tend to introduce a very peculiar kind of railroading that, while distinct from that seen in linear games, is just as insidious and restrictive as the latter because the only advancement options are through the quest network and there is no option for the player to strike out on his own and forge his own stories through the mechanics.

It is by introducing robust gameplay mechanics that PnP C&C can even begin to be rivalled. That was what Covenant was talking about when he mentioned Sega Bass Fishing, Harvest Moon, and dating sims. To match the emergent gameplay of PnP you'd need a mechanical diversification that allows the players to play out unexpected stories that the game designer would never even see coming. An RPG with fishing mechanics and a character system that allows fisherman builds would allow you to play out that particular story instead of giving you an alternate ending that says "and he dedicated himself to fishing for the rest of his days". If a game had Rise of Venice style mechanics that allowed you to build a trading empire maybe you could even come close to replicating that salt trading empire from the PnP campaign mentioned above.

In this sense, games like Deus Ex have come closer to true C&C than the likes of AoD, because they introduce a mechanical diversification into their engines that allows the player to express their role through the different ways of approaching problems and navigating the levels. Of course, these games have their failings too, as they often don't encourage the player to specialize, but the LGS/Ion Storm school comes closer to the spirit of PnP than the BIS school does.

There are two further points to clarify here. First, no, RPGs are neither fishing games nor commerce sims - and they'd be worse at implementing such specific mechanics than dedicated games - but they are the kinds of games where you'd have the choice to play as a fisherman or a trader (at least when sufficiently expanded, it goes without saying that no RPG allows these two options, plus the convential suite of combat options, not that I know of anyway). Second, yes this kind of thing would be extremely ambitious, and perhaps impossible to pull, but if one wanted genuine player agency, it would be the way to go. In any case approaching said agency through scripted quest/dialogue-based design would not be much more plausible, if at all.

If that is the case then, and matching the freedom of PnP is impossible for cRPGs, then it seems that the more logical course of action would be to take inspiration from the early, Gygaxian PnP modules that focused on tactical combat, character building, dungeon crawling and exploration, as these translated very well to the computer gaming medium from the very beginning, as the Wizardry franchise illustrates.

What’s the goal of reactivity/C&C? Well, why have any story at all? It’s to make the player give a fuck. The more interactive the story is, the more engaging it is. “These guys are trying to kill me because that’s the plot” is less fun than “these guys are trying to kill me because I made a choice that pissed them off.”

It seems that you think a narrative and/or reactive focus in RPG design is primarily about engagement. Leaving aside for the moment the tension that often arises between reactive and narrative-driven design, I am not sure I would say a good story or reactivity make for a more engaging game.

If engagement is about involving the player, then why not instead make the game focus on the gameplay mechanics? After all, the main difference between reactive narratives and linear narratives is that the former require more input for the player, while the latter renders him passive.

However, if player passiveness is the bane of engagement, then there is no reason to extoll reactive dialogue challenges and branching quests as a superior alternative to combat, exploration, and character building (the core triad of RPG gameplay), since the latter tend to involve more input from the player both in terms of the sheer amount of interactions that the player can undertake and of the variety and emergent value of said interactions. I personally find it easier to be engaged by a game with strong mechanics and thoughtfully designed combat and exploration content, even if it has weak storytelling/reactivity, than by a game where the opposite is the case. Bad combat and exploration can quickly put a damper on the moment-to-moment experience of a game, something that decreases the engagement of large swathes of a campaign.

Sure, some might say, "a good game should have both good gameplay and story", which may be true, but is rarely the case in practice. There are a few exceptions such as Fallout, but for the most part story-focused games tend to have terrible gameplay: PS:T, Kotor 2, Vtmb, Witcher 3, the list goes on. In practice, devs have to choose something to focus on and pour their limited resources in it. Games are never going to be as good as books or movies when it comes to storytelling, so the focus shouldn't be there.

Yes, games offer certain possibilities (through interactivity) that are not present in those media, but they are far too limited to compensate for what is lost by not going either for a dedicated narrative focus (as in literature and film) or a full commitment to mechanics-driven gameplay. Not to mention that, as we have seen, even in the case of interactive storytelling, videogames get trounced by another medium: PnP.

None of this is to say that a bit of C&C or story elements are bad for a game, on the contrary, they add to the experience when they are introduced in a way that is both harmonious with a game's core design and do not drain an inordinate amount of resources from the development process, but in the context of videogames at least, they should be considered primarily as flavor, or gravy, if you will. They should not be the design focus of RPGs.That place belongs to the triad of combat, character building, and exploration.

 

[aweigh]

Absolutely prestigious screed there by Ventidius.

I wanted to add a note concerning "story" and "plot": we as humans beings have our cognitive functions hard-wired to constantly decipher patterns and to constantly engage in symbolistic engagement. If you take a character and tell the player that he has to get from point A to point B, you can make a story reveal itself by utilizing archetypical design, and you can create a narrative by placing obstacles between the points. A story doesn't need to be a novel, or even conventionally plotted, to be effective; a wandering knight doesn't need a novel's worth of backstory and motivation to be an engaging avatar, the fact that he is wandering and that he is knight is more than enough to begin constructing a framework. I recommend discarding the the preconception of the game story as something that happens to the player, or as something that is told or shown to the player, and instead begin to assign internal values of increasing relevance as the game begins to frame itself around your character(s).

The adventuring party (or the wandering hero), as well the genre predication on management of resources and the focus on itemization, these are conceptualiztions of the transforming catalyst for the game world, and this is accomplished via deliberation of the core mechanics, and by the general aspect of management afforded by the layers of abstraction in the game itself.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I just wanted to say:

- Stories don't need to be novels or literate.
- RPG genre mechanics tend to be more psychological than instinctive, which is why it's something of a niche genre.

 

[DalekFlay]

I don't feel "cinematic" narratives really belong in RPGs. Developers should create worlds they put you in, and characters in that world should tell and cause "stories" to happen, but it should be as far from a movie style narrative structure as possible. Because of this perspective I have, factions and "C&C" are very important to me. Much more important than any kind of traditional narrative structure, which seems to be what the OP is looking to prioritize.

Though Witcher 3 did a good job of having factions, choice and consequence AND a cinematic narrative style, which is why so many here cream their panties over it. Shame the gameplay sucks.

 

[Nano]

Branching paths or mutually-exclusive content is not C&C.

Why not? It's in the phrase. You make choices and it's followed by the consequences.

 

[aweigh]

Why not? It's in the phrase. You make choices and it's followed by the consequences.

1. Things have to mean something. You can't just say everything you do is C&C because something happens afterwards. The context matters.

2. That particular kind of fake C&C isn't particular to the RPG genre. Any game can have that.

 

[FeelTheRads]

It's C&C technically, but it's also the easiest way to do it. It's the visual novel approach.
If you like to marvel at the ability of developers to script basic yes or no paths like an AoD fanboy, then hey, enjoy.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Don't forget "these guys are trying to kill me because I made a choice that pissed them off, and I have different ways of interacting with them and resolving that conflict". Personally speaking I place more importance on the last part, but having both is great.

For me, the core thing is having meaningful options, whether we’re talking dialogue decisions or speech/stealth/smash or just taking that bigass EMP gun from your brother at the beginning of Deus Ex. The options need to have some payoff, otherwise who cares? So stick a robot in front of the Statue of Liberty so that I don’t feel like a chump for lugging around that gun, or send a Legion hit squad after me if I shoot up Vulpes at Nipton.

When all you get from a choice is an ending slide, an alternate campaign endstate, or some unique dialogue lines from NPCs, the sense of agency evaporates because it is all symbolic, a token.

Come on. This is a ridiculously inadequate way to describe what’s going on. Arcanum just has a few extra lines of dialogue and different ending slides? Play as a wizard then play as a gunslinger/mechanic—it’s a different goddamned game.

In everything I mentioned, the consequences kick in long before the endgame and account for a hell of a lot more than a few lines of dialogue, or even a lot of dialogue. They open or close different quests, open or close different ways to complete quests, change who your enemies are (unlocking new encounters), in some cases they unlock totally different areas, in some cases there’s so much branching that you’re getting totally different content (act 2 of Witcher 2 being the most obvious example). In Tyranny (and I admit this wasn’t implemented well) your dialogue choices vis-a-vis the different factions gave you new abilities once you inspired enough fear or loyalty. The spirit eater gauge in Mask of the Betrayer speaks for itself.

This stuff is hardly cosmetic. Again, everybody’s talking like only BioWare makes RPGs.

Yes, games offer certain possibilities (through interactivity) that are not present in those media, but they are far too limited to compensate for what is lost by not going either for a dedicated narrative focus (as in literature and film) or a full commitment to mechanics-driven gameplay. Not to mention that, as we have seen, even in the case of interactive storytelling, videogames get trounced by another medium: PnP.

None of this is to say that a bit of C&C or story elements are bad for a game, on the contrary, they add to the experience when they are introduced in a way that is both harmonious with a game's core design and do not drain an inordinate amount of resources from the development process, but in the context of videogames at least, they should be considered primarily as flavor, or gravy if you will. They should not be the design focus of RPGs.That place belongs to the triad of combat, character building, and exploration.

Pen & Paper doesn’t substitute for video games, though. That’s like saying you should just play football instead of playing a football video game. Or, hey, why bother playing a dungeon crawl when you can go reenact the battle of Marathon with a few hundred buddies and some plane tickets to Greece?

The idea that there’s a huge trade off between good C&C and good gameplay is, I think, based on a misunderstanding. Age of Decadence has both! Kingmaker has both! Exhibits A and B for why games should try to do both, because it’s fucking great.

Why do they work? They were both designed for niche audiences.

CRPG gameplay sucks because there’s a huge audience of people who play these games for the story: they want combat to be easy and exploration to be spoonfed to them. It’s not like developers are skimping on the systems budget, they’re deliberately designing shallow systems to attract more customers. Market forces are a bitch. That sucks, but I don’t know that there’s a solution to it other than do like VD or Styg and make your own game.

 

[Black Angel]

So gameplay c&c is what rpgs typically have but with more restrictions?

I should've said, "specifically in cRPGs" instead of 'especially', and as Carrion mentioned in his post that's quoting me, "Most games are about making choices, though, regardless of the genre." Gameplay C&C aren't exclusive to RPGs, and in case of cRPGs consequences aren't only limitation and restriction (weaknesses), but *also* capability and competency (strengths). As I mentioned previously, while a fighter archetype character won't be able to do what rogue or diplomat archetype can generally do, a fighter would be VERY good at fighting, something that a rogue/diplomat won't really be good at.

Most games are about making choices, though, regardless of the genre.

I know, which is why I should've specified, "specifically in cRPGs".

Is it C&C if you use up your BFG ammo in Doom and have to make do with other weapons for the rest of the level?

It's definitely gameplay C&C, because you *decide* (choose) to use up your BFG ammo very early in the level until they're exhausted completely, so now you have to *make do* (consequence) with something else for the rest of the level.

It might seem like a shallow example, but it's as I specified in my last example before:

And then there's an example of certain moments during combat. Say it's my character's turn. The gameplay C&C here plays out on whether I use regular attacks to dish out damage, or I use aimed attacks to cripple my target. Based on the situation, just using regular attacks might result in my character's death if their health happens to be low, or being safe from any attacks because the target has been crippled from the previous aimed attacks to their arms.

These are an example from a turn-based RPG, while the Doom example is for real-time action FPS, since, as you said, most games are about making choices regardless of the genre.

 

[Alexios]

I know this is a really crude example and I apologize, I just don't feel like drawing up something more complex right now. I just wrote that to point out how "Exploration" can encapsulate more esoteric aspects that tie into the game writing, level design, area design, itemization, the power curve (maybe the enemies are rough, maybe if you go by day it is easier? maybe harder at night?), etc.

An even better example - Underrail in oddity mode: Say you come across a big group of tough enemies, or have to traverse a cave with Crawlers. You'll get no XP for killing them. They might drop an oddity, or some good loot, but there's no guarantee at all. You're forced to ask yourself whether it's worth taking them on or going around them, whether through another route or with stealth. This also depends on what kind of class you've made; a character with good science skill would benefit more from loot dropped by creatures than a character without those skills, so the science character might be more inclined to take them on. And then if you're strapped for cash, any loot might be worth getting so you take them on regardless of your class. This is the pinnacle of quality "gameplay C&C." At best, the average game would have some hardcoded dialogue option at the start where you could avoid combat with a skill check. That leaves just a single layer of choice/consequence and is very boring.

 

[aweigh]

An even better example - Underrail in oddity mode: Say you come across a big group of tough enemies, or have to traverse a cave with Crawlers. You'll get no XP for killing them. They might drop an oddity, or some good loot, but there's no guarantee at all. You're forced to ask yourself whether it's worth taking them on or going around them, whether through another route or with stealth. This also depends on what kind of class you've made; a character with good science skill would benefit more from loot dropped by creatures than a character without those skills, so the science character might be more inclined to take them on. And then if you're strapped for cash, any loot might be worth getting so you take them on regardless of your class. This is the pinnacle of quality "gameplay C&C." At best, the average game would have some hardcoded dialogue option at the start where you could avoid combat with a skill check. That leaves just a single layer of choice/consequence and is very boring.

Hell yeah, absolutely. The driving psychology that can drive Exploration in these games is constructed around conditioning the player to earnestly decide to forge ahead and in so doing begin in the taking ownership of the unknown.

The player is without respite and running out of resources: spells, hit points, potions, mapping directions; the accumulated vitality of the party. The true game takes time for the player to discover, but they will find its meaning in the contemplative moments between qualitative attrition; you have to decide whether to continue ahead and risk disaster or retreat to safety in order to restore; in those moments the suspension of disbelief is achieved and the true game emerges.

 

[JarlFrank]

Don't know which games they're talking about, but to me, gameplay C&C, especially in a cRPG, is this: you build a character with certain set of stats and skills, a fighter archetype for example, and that's how the character can be played as, a fighter. You can't use that character for sneak and/or diplomacy, but it's VERY good at fighting.
More specific example would be, you create a character with low INT, that character is going to be a dumbass who can't speak properly and thus gets dismissed by NPCs as a retard, like in Fallout and Arcanum.
Or you create a character with low STR, now that character can't carry as much items as characters with average or high STR.
And then there's an example of certain moments during combat. Say it's my character's turn. The gameplay C&C here plays out on whether I use regular attacks to dish out damage, or I use aimed attacks to cripple my target. Based on the situation, just using regular attacks might result in my character's death if their health happens to be low, or being safe from any attacks because the target has been crippled from the previous aimed attacks to their arms.

Most games are about making choices, though, regardless of the genre. While decisions regarding character building could definitely be seen as a form of C&C, the meaning of the term easily gets muddled when used too liberally. Is it C&C if you use up your BFG ammo in Doom and have to make do with other weapons for the rest of the level?

I mentioned New Vegas earlier, and for me the faction mechanics there are a pretty good example of gameplay C&C*. How you tackle a specific quest might affect your relations with a particular faction, potentially pissing them off and causing them to attack you on sight, as well as shutting you off from that faction's quest lines — at least until you can find a way to get back into their good books. In Deus Ex you have (mostly cosmetic) consequences for finishing a mission in a certain way, like characters starting to dislike you because of your gung-ho approach. It's also possible to kill some important characters earlier than you're "supposed to", without any prompts or other indicators that you're about to make some kind of a choice, and the game reacts to your gameplay decisions appropriately. If you look for more common examples, several party-based games have recruitable party members potentially turning on each other or leaving the party because of your actions. Many reputation and alignment systems also fall into this category.

* Of course, choosing dialogue options is technically gameplay too. It just isn't the only way to do C&C, and focusing too much on it can definitely make a game suffer on other areas. Ideally, all choices you make in the game should matter, not just the ones that come up in cutscenes accompanied by dramatic music.

Yes, the best form of C&C is the one that arises naturally from the gameplay. Deus Ex is a great example for this, but other "immersive sims" like the System Shocks, Dishonoreds etc are also good at this.

When your goal in Deus Ex is to infiltrate a hostile base and your options are to use lockpicks at the back door, stack crates to reach a broken ladder leading to the roof, or shoot your way through the guards at the front gate, there is direct gameplay C&C. You shoot your way through the front door? The consequence is that the base is now on high alert. You manage to stack crates and climb to the roof? The consequence is that you can easily reach your target on the top floor and skip most of the building. Etc. And you don't make these choices by picking one of several dialogue options. You make these choices by doing the thing you want to do. The designers present you with a situation you need to solve, you look at your toolkit - the weapons and consumeables you have, the skills and augmentations you invested in - and decide which of your tools to use for overcoming the obstacles. The flavor consequence of NPCs reacting differently depending on whether you go for a stealthy non-lethal or frontal assault lethal approach is also a perfect example of this. You don't choose to be a stealthy guy by telling people "Yeah I'm a stealthy guy" and you don't choose to be the rambo guy by telling people "Yeah I'm the rambo guy". You choose to be these kinds of character by solving obstacles with this approach.

Branching paths or mutually-exclusive content is not C&C. If it was, then you can just go play a Visual Novel and get all the C&C you want, or go play one of those games by David Cage, those Beyond Heavy Rain pieces of shit.

God, it's such a dead meme at this point. Half the people who talk about C&C don't even know what it is they are talking about, or what it is they want. Being able to pick between two different story states is not a meaningful player choice; it has to affect the way the game plays. This is why "real C&C" is usually comprised of different character build and conflict resolution integration.

(This is why The Witcher games don't feature any real C&C).

Good example of a game with "real C&C", off the top of my head, would probably be Deus Ex 1. Traditionally we used to use another word for C&C back in the day, it was "gameplay". The game mechanics need to inform the choices, and the consequences needs to inform the gameplay.

There is definitely room for melding more narrative or plot-focused integration with the C&C meme, of course, I think Arcanum is one game that did it well enough, or at least enough so that I remember a few moments of going "huh, that's cool", because the the game's allowance for player arbitration were sufficiently coincidental to create brief emergent scenarios that dovetailed with story or quests.

However, the Arcanum examples serves another purpose here, well for my purposes anyway: it is a great indicator that gives lie to the fact that C&C makes an RPG "good". It's neither necessary for an RPG to be good, but I would go so far as to say it isn't necessary for an RPG, period. If the underlying mechanical foundation is crooked then you can't have "real C&C"; you can only have "fake C&C" which is mostly comprised of mutually-exclusive story states or branching nodes.

Absolutely. C&C feels tacked on when it's forced into situations where you are confronted by an NPC and have to choose one of three answers, because it takes you out of the usual gameplay loop rather than being integrated into it.
When the game tells you "Oy, you need to make a choice now:
1. I join you
2. I oppose you
3. I stay neutral
You must choose now!"
It's not very organic.

Instead, the player should be able to contact the different factions, find out what they want from him, then make his decision by doing one of the quests, rather than by saying "Yeah I'll join" or "No I won't" during a dialogue prompt.

The Dishonored games are also pretty decent at C&C. Yes, the chaos system of these games is a bit simplistic, but it's entirely based on player actions. It's 100% gameplay. You kill a lot of people, you get high chaos. You kill few or no people, you get low chaos. Low chaos has fewer plague victims on the street and some NPC interactions play out more nicely, high chaos has more rat swarms and some NPC interactions play out more aggressively. Every assassination target can be taken out non-lethally, but the player has to find out by himself how this is done. It's not a choice of "I spare you" or "I kill you" that you pick during a prompt. For example, to non-lethally eliminate High Overseer Campbell in Dishonored 1 you must knock him out, drag him to the interrogation room, and brand his face with the heretic's mark to get him exiled. In order to even get the option, you first have to read about the heretic's mark so your character knows this possibility exists.

This kind of C&C will always be superior to simple "You must make a choice NOW! Here are 3 dialogue options!" prompts.

 

[Raghar]

Dishonored I is actually an example of how unrealistically bad can be one dimensional behavior. There are several choices between pro state, and collapse even with low chaos. And surprisingly the final outcome for some reason is either everyone happy, and everything shit. A choice where everyone is happy and evil queen is ruling them, or everything is shit and non evil queen is evacuated from failed country before stuff become better, that would require more effort from developers.

 

[Infinitron]

Regarding the OP - I think a focus on choice & consequence was an inevitable trajectory for RPGs. Once you introduced dialogue with NPCs to the genre, it was only natural to have dialogue choices. Once you introduced dialogue choices, it was only natural to have those choices matter. And once you introduced bigger and more epic stories, it was only natural for those dialogue choices to matter in big, world-changing ways.

Every modern RPG should have choice & consequence. I guess I can agree that at this point developers shouldn't be bragging about it anymore - not in the abstract. Instead, tell us what sort of choices we're going to have in your particular world.

 

[aweigh]

You don't need dialog to have C&C.

 

[JarlFrank]

Dishonored I is actually an example of how unrealistically bad can be one dimensional behavior. There are several choices between pro state, and collapse even with low chaos. And surprisingly the final outcome for some reason is either everyone happy, and everything shit. A choice where everyone is happy and evil queen is ruling them, or everything is shit and non evil queen is evacuated from failed country before stuff become better, that would require more effort from developers.

It may not be the best game at offering interesting consequences and gradual states rather than binary good or bad, but it's still good because everything is based on actual gameplay decisions rather than picking from a list and getting branches based on what item on the list you picked.

 

[DraQ]

Not being able to enter an ancient tomb because it's guarded by liches and having to to train more is interesting. Not being able to get a chest containing random loot because it's guarded by level 70 bandits and Geralt despite being a veteran warrior can only take on level 50 bandits is simply crap. However no many how many AAA games fuck-up leveling the character development won't become cancer.

Actually it sort of has. Not as general concept, obviously, but RPGs' biggest cancer has always been the so called "RPG elements".
Not RPG elements but "RPG elements". The former implies understanding of what you are trying to design and why, the latter are just a buzzword for specific flavour of cargo-cult design.

PnP RPGs, the historical root of cRPGs are a genre combining rudimentary mechanics (out of necessity) with flexibility and some social aspects. Computer games are rigidly defined ('coz algorithmic) formal systems that can often sport surprisingly rich mechanics and content ('coz it's XXI fucking century and both computing power and memory are both fucking cheap).
Most of the time cRPGs are a genre combining rudimentary mechanics (out of stupidity) with rigidity, because they are still computer games, but try to mindlessly ape PnP mechanics (by design intended to be patched dynamically by players and GM) instead of trying to find a way to replicate the intent without replicating the workings which would yield system playing to the strengths of the medium.
Then you have developers trying to keep simplicity but make things more videogamey, and further generations of devs repeating the process.
Mechanically cRPGs tend to literally be recursively bad, and they pollute other genres with their condensed badness known as "RPG elements" as well.

If only someone made a proper RPG focusing on RPGish goals instead of "RPGish" means...

Instead we have the OP and his thread.

(...) Make your own story is a logical conclusion of making your own character. Since differet chars fir different stories.

In addition to all the above. RPGs are story driven games and having a choice in the story can often make it more fun by itself. Hate how hero always just put villains in jail? Kill them at the first opportunity. Can't stand cringy romance subplot? Tell the thot to go fuck herself.

 

[Infinitron]

My contribution to the debate about C&C design:

I think that "choice & consequence", defined as the web of choices that you make throughout the game, should be "isomorphic" to the breadth and progression of the game's content.

What does that mean? When you're presented with a linear game where you don't have much choice as to where and when to proceed, giving you, say, a complicated "faction influence" interface with lots of permutations - when all you're doing is being forced into dialogue with NPCs and choosing A or B - feels kind of lame. More obviously, when you have a big open world which you can explore as you desire, filling it with static sidequests which you always complete in the same way is just as lame. The distribution of choices should correspond to the distribution of content.

Furthermore, while playing the game, the choice & consequence it offers should gradually become more transparent to the player as he becomes more and more familiar with its content. Ideally, the web of choices should eventually present itself to the player as a kind of "road map" towards shaping the world to his will, the same way he chooses what locations to visit and how to develop his character build.

Basically, I think the player agency of spatial non-linearity/open world design and the player agency of choice & consequence should be intertwined. They're two things that go together like peanut butter and jelly. As you introduce locations, you should be introducing choices, and once the player has seen and mastered most of the game world, it should be apparent to him what those choices are leading up to in the aggregate. Master the world, master its fate.

tl;dr Fallout: New Vegas C&C design uber alles. I'm not saying this is the only approach towards designing C&C, but I think it's the approach that the Codex finds most impressive and satisfying.

 

[DraQ]

(...)
That would make for a much better game than one where the story is deep and meaningful but it's entirely linear and you never get to have a say about your character's decisions. Why even make it a game then? Why not a movie or a novel? Those are much better mediums for telling linear stories.

If you want to put a complex, ambitious, but completely linear and immutable story in your RPG, just make it a backstory.