Yes, all choice in games is really just doing what they let us do. The trick is to give the player a sense of choice and consequence, a sense of being involved in the story. Gaider failed at that in DA2 but he's not wrong that it's the foundation of narrative design.
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Dragon Age: Inquisition Pre-Release Thread
- Thread starter Morgoth
- Start date
Yes, all choice in games is really just doing what they let us do. The trick is to give the player a sense of choice and consequence, a sense of being involved in the story. Gaider failed at that in DA2 but he's not wrong that it's the foundation of narrative design.
Gurkog
Erudite
ME1's story made me facepalm frequently, but Sovereign was pretty neat and the only good character in that pile of shit. ME2's sotry made me facepalm repeatedly, but the production values were enough to make it a decent B movie. Never played ME3 because I swore off online DRM infested games.
None of the ME series is above average. Dragon Age suffers the same symptoms of overwhelming mediocrity.
I highly doubt Project Eternity setting will be as banal shit boring as everything Biowhore made after BG2, but I can not rule out the possibility.
None of the ME series is above average. Dragon Age suffers the same symptoms of overwhelming mediocrity.
I highly doubt Project Eternity setting will be as banal shit boring as everything Biowhore made after BG2, but I can not rule out the possibility.
When the first Dragon Age came out though that shit was sweet, sweet mediocrity. We hadn't seen that quality level of mediocrity in a long time.
Hopefully some of this kickstarted shit is great so that mediocre can stop being worth the time.
grotsnik
Arcane
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Sure, but I think Lancehead's point (which I totally agree with) is that it's a bad foundational design philosophy, not that it's untrue from the player's perspective. I'd like to hope that in a narrative-heavy RPG, a good designer/writer should be constantly thinking, "I've set up the building blocks of the factions, the classes, the world, the storyline, the whatever. What are players going to want to do within this system (whether that's long-term goals of joining the villain or short-term goals of killing a merchant and taking his stuff) and how much of that can we realistically facilitate given our various limitations?"
The designer still has absolute power over the player in the finished product, of course, and it may turn out that the answer is, "actually, we can't do very much at all, player choice is going to have to be quite restricted," but it's a world of thought away from pragmatically claiming ownership of the game's narrative in your own head and then going on from there. Gaider's arguing that the player's ultimate impotence may as well translate into an immediate, albeit comfortable impotence - that the key should be to make the player "care" about his storytelling (and we've seen the fruits of this from plenty more studios than just Bioware, and they tend to be fairly rotten; sappy emotional tricks nicked from cinema, melodrama and maudlin music and corny NPC deaths, etc) rather than proceeding from the rather more sensible understanding that you can't make the player care, and that it might improve the storytelling - as a game - if you wrote/created from the bottom up rather than imposing your narrative of choice from the top down, one that's contingent upon the player caring, and then trying to make it stick emotionally.
One mode of thought states, 'How do I get the player to care about NPC X, who's really important for that twist scene in the fifth act which I got so excited about in the writer's room this morning? They'll need a really impressive introductory cutscene, for sure, one that hints at their fascinating backstory and troubled past!' The other states, 'The player may not care about NPC X. They may hate NPC X. We should probably give them an opportunity to kill them and take their stuff, if we possibly can.' The designer's diktat is still the sum totality of the actual game, but at least it's one that anticipates player desire rather than attempting to actively manipulate it, which is what I'd argue Gaider's pushing for.
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THE FUCK IS THIS?!?!?!??!? Video of 48 minutes of gaiderfaggotry...
"Are we requiring the female protagonist to work harder and sell more in order to prove herself?" asks Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider, in this GDC 2013 video about sexism and sexuality in games
Finally got around to watching the video and it's exactly as I feared; just Gaider beating that same old dead horse over and over again. At least he has a certain degree of self-consciousness to realize that despite all of his "strong women protagonists" soapbox drama Bioware is really no better when it comes sticking some tits & ass along with sassy attitude and calling it a day. Oh, he'll try his damndest to convince you Bioware is different because they make you care about their characters, but that really only applies if you buy into their pandering ways.
I love how Gaider just shrugs when he reads "It's ridiculous that I even have to use a term like Straight Male Gamer, when in the past I would only have to say fans."
Delterius
Arcane
And in manipulating the player's will, I believe, this design modus ends up loosing the whole point of player agency.
As someone from outside the programming literate circles, it used to be my impression that when BioWare promised player choices to carry from DA:O, they made a promise they couldn't keep on a technical level - they couldn't pander to every permutation of the original story, no matter how similar they were, on the grand scheme of things. This would be in part due to the structure of the narrative, it wasn't designed from the ground up as a branching story, but also because of their so called 'cinematic focus', keeping too much funding and time on frivolous things like full voice acting, a feature that only grew more expensive with the sequel.
But I think it is now clear that its only because C&C is nothing more than a marketing point almost alienated from the developers themselves. And its one that the writing team deals with negligence, if not outright hostility.
When the Awakening expansion saw the return of a 'fan favorite' that could have been killed in the original game, some would question that decision. It was handwaved that when you 'killed' him, you just knocked him out.
I can imagine the devs running their numbers (didn't the doctors exalt their glorious telemetry a few years back?) and finding out that less than 30 percent of all players actually went as far as killing Oghren. Add in the overlap of repeated characters and, voila, the writers can already feel justified in handwaving that little piece of C&C away, their manipulation of the player's agency worker - Oghren is, indeed, a 'fan favorite'. Further legitimacy comes from the relatively small ruckus people make on the BSN and the like, either the writers are right, their fanbase doesn't actually care much at all for cool things like C&C or, in the best case scenario, this was a small choice, and so was the desire for scrutiny.
The same can't be said for Leliana's resurrection in DA2. Though only part of the larger 'everyone hates DA2 movement, except the fanboys that will stick around afterwards making posts about how thankful they are to God that BioWare exists', it spew a somewhat bigger 'internet backlash' than Oghren's. And here's the summary of the opera:
Leliana's death was 'only' a 'reaction to your choice to defile the Urn of Sacred Ashes". And when Gaider says that players might be fooling themselves in 'thinking' that the bloodied body of a major character is dead, he's devaluing the entirety of the narrative, including that in which the player avoided killing Leliana or defiling the Urn. After all, isn't the whole point of a choice that you could have done something else? Actually, in BioWare, the point of a choice is only justified by the amount of people that took it, the experience of being a human in DA:O gains nothing if only 20 or 30 percent of total players chose to be a dwarf or an elf. There's no business making the experience of each race more unique. Not only most people preferred to be a human, its not like the writers see any value in player agency.
But that's only because the narrative was never meant to gain value from the player's agency, it is BioWare's mandate to act as the Master Storytellers® the Gaming Press£ claims them to be and tell their story. No one else's. And in a shoddy way too, even if Leliana actually died and was later resurrected by some shenanigans, then keeping that new plot point, that new suspense, is more important than keeping the value of past plot points, of the old narratives and the player's experience with them.
Its this sort of retcon happy writing that kept Blizzard from making something truly interesting with their IPs and I'm always only too happy to be rid of it.
Gurkog
Erudite
I rarely picked human because the origin story was masturbatory shit. I hate elves, but it is telling that I made more elves than humans because the human origin was so banal shit boring.
meanwhileInPoland
Arcane
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you promised us our decisions from previous games will have impact on next titles. i still have my gey wardnes saveso_O as if anyone fucking carred what did you do to zevran in origins or did you insert your little dwarven cock into morrigan. bioware make your fucking canon and just move on
Andyman Messiah
Mr. Ed-ucated
Eh, the origins don't matter all that much. I actually like the human origin the most because it was short and could be over in five minutes.
Cromwell
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I did to. I wish I could have done more angry elf chicks in that game. The Horse is right, as mostly everythign else the origins didnt matter much, so aside from achievments theres no point in playing any other origin.
Come to think of it if I ever play again it will likely be as a mage, so I would have to do the stupid mage origin.
C&C carrying over between games is overrated. They could use the resources needed for this to make the game/story better. As DalekFlay says, pick a canonical ending and call it a day.
Cool name
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At least for me that's one of the reasons I was never able to finish BG2. My favorite run through Baldur's Gate ended with most of the cast chunked. It was glorious. Miss Bhaalspawn stepping over all those corpses. Nay, all those little bloody pieces of corpses not giving a damn. Recruiting more meat for the grinder. And every time I saw one of them grinded I was, like, THIS IS SO AWESOME! MY PATH TO UNENDING POWER IS PAVED IN LOTS OF GLORIOUS CASUALTIES! Chunked by traps, chunked by Ogre-Mages, chunked by ME, stoned by basilisks and THEN chunked by me, zombified by demon dude.
And then BG2 revived them all and was, like, we are all your besties and had lots of fun adventures together.
No, we had not. You were all CHUNKED. You all died meaningless, painful deaths screaming like little bitches so that Miss Bhaalspawn could be awesome. The only point of your existence was to make Miss Bhaalspawn more cool and grimdark and sexy.
Fuck this shit. Ruined forever.
If you are going to force your fail canonical ending down my throat make the losers immortal and be done with it. If you give me the chance to MURDER SOMEONE I want that someone to still be chunked when I start the sequel. Or at least never be mentioned again so that I can imagine his little bits are still decorating some dungeon. >_<
RAGERAGERAGERAGERAGE
Ahem, so continued-from-saves is good. Or would be good if they weren't sex-starved spineless worms in love with the fantasy people they badly write about.
I just don't care, sorry. Whatever makes for the better sequel and better story is fine by me. For example the Morrigan ending of Dragon Age: Origins is super interesting, yet they can't do shit with it because it was one possibility among many. Think about how Fallout: New Vegas might have been worse if they felt they couldn't use the NCR because not all endings of Fallout 2 worked with it.
I can see making exceptions when something is really planned out as a continuing story over a shorter course of time though, like Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect. Those two don't bother me. With Dragon Age though it is fairly obvious they had no long-term story plan, or that plan got scrapped, so adhering to all the choices in the first game strikes me as rather stupid.
~RAGING BONER~
Learned
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Let's not kid ourselves...the Morrigan ending is the only ending that matters in Origin. It is arguably the only thing that matters in the entire game from a series perspective (aside from the death of the arch demon). Everything else is just "origins".
Cromwell
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When they do decide on a canonical ending they should craft their story to this purpose from the beginning. Fuck choices. In dragon age and the following games from that studo (at leats the ones i played) i felt like a nutcase because they offered me choices which where just not logical, one moment you decide on saving people out of the goodness of your heart, then you hide dead bodies and after saving some more people you decide to piss on the ashes of a prophet.
So theres no consistensy in my character if I always have the same choices, choices which my character after certain events and other choices never ever would consider but they are still there. That makes for very bad storytelling and ultimately leaves it to me as player to hold the story together in a believable way, but thats not my job. My Job is to play the story, so if you dont get to write a good one, with belivable choices and charprogression, just leave that shit out alltogether. Give me a good story and thats that, i have enough choices ingame on how i fight, what i do in which order and so on.
Cromwell
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I dont know. But in the witcher games as far as i have seen youre not some superhero who balances the fate of the world on his shoulders, so its easier to do a god choice heavy story when the choices dont effect the overall world to much.
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I think one of the most important differences between Dragon Age 2 and Witcher 2, both being comparable sequels in relation to their original games, is that latter escalated the story to a different level so that most of the choices from the original game didn't really matter and there are less loose ends that you have to keep track of. On the other hand DA2 has basically nothing to do with the original game story-wise, but Bioware felt compelled to tack on carryover references because they feel it's their "thing" now. On the more subjective side of things I can't shake the feeling that overall Witcher trilogy was put into draft script during the first game's production, albeit in broad strokes, hence why the end cinematic of Witcher 1 lends itself to Witcher 2 extremely well without some kind of abrupt separation between them.
I actually disagree in that small decisions are much harder to do in a morally ambiguous game as opposed to JESUS vs SATAN when absolutes are defined. I don't think it has much to do with the impact as much as how you perceive the choices themselves which is why Witcher doesn't necessarily immediately show you what decision A does instead of decisions B. Because the game wants you to think about the choice itself at that moment.
Cromwell
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Yes but if you for example, decide in wither one that a person dies, all the writers have to do is cut that person from the script in the second for people who chose to do so. Maybe add a few lines, the impact this has comes from the player and how he sees it. If you would decide to magically destroy a whole city as a choice, you have to design a script for people who can go there do quests there etc, and one without that city. you also cold never mention this city again but then people wold complain that their choice has no impact
Delterius
Arcane
If you treat the story of maybe games in general as a bit of co-authorship between the game developers, creators of the medium and all its possibilities, and the player, author within that medium; then I think it safe to say that one facet of each genre is how much freedom there is between that 'pact' - some focus on a guided experience and others, one might call them RPGs, try and accomodate the player's creativity. In shot, some are Avellones and others are most everyone else, while Gaiders themselves are in-between: its not that player choice isn't rewarded somehow, but its a sideshow - an 'illusion'.
All this babble is to say this: BioWare has absolutely no business choosing a canonical ending for DAs simply because your choices weren't ever supposed to matter all that much. Just as they are minor permutations of a similar story within Origins, they are going to be minor permutations within a DA franchise. And Morrigan's is no different. The only reason why they didn't tackle that in DA2 is because the whole affair would look like this:
When a more polished version may just not be much better than this:
Make your choice, Inquisitor/Grey Warden/Joel from Last of Us. Don't look at me, I'm just a sugar coated plot device.
Really, DA has been about telling a story while paying lip service to past permutations. That's it. And it sounds good on paper too: if you killed a given character, he's absent, if not, he appears out of nowhere to give you a sidequest. If you had the Old God baby, then he'll be there, taking his role in a larger story about the dragon Old Gods who may or may be related the Return of the Burning Legion from beyond the NetherVeil into the unsuspecting world of Thedamriel.
Shit happens when the writers start to think they need to choose a canon ending. When, instead of just making a new character, they insist on elevating the role of a major character to that of 'universal' importance. Leliana, a major but killable NPC gained a DLC all about her so that the players could 'bond' and forget that her schizophrenic carebear face could be slain at any given point.
This is marginally better than what Blizzard does with Warcraft, where 'fan-favourites' are resurrect (in the style of Superman et al) all the time because, and I paraphrase, its hard to make people care about new characters. But its still counter-productive because its arbitrary and its prone to retconing things, which while not unavoidable shouldn't be done lightly. Much less like its something the writers are entitled to.
When you say that you 'don't care' and 'whatever makes for a better story is fine by me', you're being contradictory. If you don't care about retcons, it means you don't care about what was good so far. Indeed, when things are like this, nothing stops someone at the staff room from just having this great idea about how Anders and Morrigan, apostates extraordinaire, should join in the apocalypse and even become a couple. Boom, players can keep their silly headcanon and we move on with our lives.
In fact, you sound like a particularly bullshity biodrone from the BSN, who would keep repeating 'I don't know what you're talking about, BioWare's doing a great job to me because, so far, I made the right choices'.
Cromwell
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That all doesnt explain why its so imported to present a player with choices? Why, in the case of bioware, is it needed that a player has the choice to do something? Make all Chars unkillable, give them the opportunity to choose men or woman (or whatever other genders are available in theese circles) and reduce the choices to which one of the party is the lucky one to get fucked by you. Everyones happy and you may stay consistent throughout tons of games.
Delterius
Arcane
Personally? I think its important for players to have choices in a RPGs' narrative. Its something that I've come to expect and something that defines the genre to me. To me, any RPG is 'lessened' into an strategy or a action game whenever there are no choices in how the narrative plays out. But that's an entirely different discussion. What is important is that since Fallout, C&C has become important enough to be a marketing cliché and one BioWare loves to throw around too.
The point I'm trying to make is that, as BioWare isn't about building a narrative through C&C, then any and every choice is of little consequence. This isn't necessarily a bad thing up until the moment they decide to fuck it up by retconing the player's agency - everything of important in the Narrative either is or should already be canonical, what little else can't be of major, paradigm shifting consequence. Even those choices that seem to be important, the endgame ones.
As Gaider puts it: choice is a illusion in BioWare games. Its not the same thing as the kind of 'cosmetic' choice that Bethesdan open world wastelands end up creating because they do help define attributes of the PC's personality. And if anything, this has worked for BioWare in the past. While they musn't ever elevate these choices into something like a multi-game branching of storylines, they musn't also overrule what happens in past games.
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