Jaedar
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2009
- Messages
- 9,839
I borrowed this post from another forum, but I(and the original author) thought it would be interesting to see what the Codex thought about it.
One thing that I really love, and I suspect most people on this board agree, is to be presented with interesting narrative choices during a game. At their best, these choices are real dilemmas, with no obvious right or wrong. Sometimes they have clear effects on the power balance of the game as well as simply determining which direction the narrative proceeds in. Sometimes they simply create a small side branch to the main plot, other times they actually change the entire resolution of the main plot.
So here's a question. What are the best narrative choices you remember in games that you've played? What made them great? And can you extrapolate that into some sort of general guideline for what kind of choices you enjoy?
I'll start off with a choice familiar to all of us: on my list, the Lebedev scene in Deus Ex ranks pretty high. It's a real dilemma in the classical sense of the word: UNATCO's mandate expressly forbids executing unarmed prisoners, yet you've been ordered by your superior to kill Lebedev, who is unarmed and has just surrendered to you. Compounding the situation is Anna Navarre, who will kill Lebedev if you don't (meaning the prisoner dies and you still get scolded), and the only way to prevent that is to murder her.
It's a great choice because it doesn't have a solution where you can get everything your way - you will always win some and lose some. If you want to be on your boss's good side, you have to kill the prisoner. If you want to save the prisoner, you have to kill your partner. If you refuse to kill anybody, you will be scolded by both your boss and your prisoner. Now, my traditional wisdom is that the effects of your choice have to last for a while, otherwise it won't be truly meaningful, but in this case, it's okay that only some of the effects are felt later. Juan Lebedev is never going to show up again if you save him from Navarre, but Navarre will show up later if you don't, and both Navarre, Manderley, Paul, and probably others at UNATCO that I forget will let you know what their feelings about your actions are no matter what you choose to do. That's cause and effect enough to make the choice seem significant.
Dragon Age is another example of a game that had some solid choices. At the end of every major quest arc, you had to decide how to resolve a precarious situation. (Spoiler warning!) A good one was whether to side with the werewolves or the elves in the forest arc. Both sides have clearly committed acts of poor morality, but they all had their reasons, and now you have to pick sides. There sort of is a good and a bad way to resolve it, which makes it slightly less powerful, but though you have all the necessary information to make your decision going into it, you won't really know the full outcome of either decision until you make it (you can't predict how the "losing" side takes it, basically). The decision is imbued with further significance by determining whether you get elves or werewolves on your side in the final battle of the game, which may not make much of a difference in terms of the effectiveness of your troops, but is nevertheless a considerable aesthetic and narrative change.
Unfortunately some of the other major choices in Dragon Age are less well executed. The Redcliffe choice was compelling, but relies on the fact that you have to make an uninformed decision - the setup hints that certain consequences exist which basically do not, which for example caused me to make a decision that was suboptimal because it was implied that the optimal solution had strong negative consequences which it didn't really. Of course the fact that there is a solution where everything turns out great makes the choice less interesting in and of itself, and concealing that fact was the easiest way to solve that. It just felt extremely cheap.
So, over to you guys. What do you like?