DeepOcean
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2012
- Messages
- 7,398
That is what I call the shopping list aproach to C&C, you have a list of choices presented to you and you have to commit 100% with what you clicked on. It is lazy design, I think there was a research that said that the vast majority of people who play RPGs only play them once and chosen being a good guy. I bet developers take that data into account so they dont invest on complex C&C as it would take time that could be used to script and write more sidequests. The more you make the quests complex in terms of C&C like allowing to play with the factions, for example, the less quests you can make and also, alot of this complexity can only be truly explored on replays that the majority of people dont do.In some of the worst examples, if you tell a quest giver you'll do X instead of Y, the game might not even let you do Y afterward. The absolute worst is when a dialog decision in town A makes everyone in town B a hundred miles away know that you chose the opposite of what they wanted. The dialog screen is often treated as the decision, not your actual gameplay actions, which can be restricted because of something you said but didn't mean.
Most devs just option for quantity over quality and cosmetic C&C that is the rational choice to make in terms of production is 90% of your players will only play once, that is the major reason why quests are kept as simple as possible with maybe two options at best (and maybe one of the options is just cosmetic) to make easy to keep a content pipeline.