Hello and welcome to a new edition of my column, today I am venting my frustration about another one of my favorite topics: freedom of choice in RPGs – or rather the “illusory freedom,” where you actually can’t choose anything at all.
To begin with, this is not about decisions that affect character development, such as talent trees, skill selection, class choice, and so on. I could probably rant about that for pages, but that’s a topic for another day…
“Life or Death?”
If you think back to the early games, especially in the RPG genre, there was almost no freedom from a storytelling perspective. Usually, the plot was strictly predetermined, and you could hardly influence it at all – it just played out like a movie, interrupted by combat, quest, and exploration missions where the characters gain strength. Honestly, I liked that. I could experience the story exactly the way the developers intended, and even though some events deeply shook me (Final Fantasy VII: Aeris. Does it ring a bell?) it was always the story that was pre-defined and unchangeable.
Newer games are trying more and more to incorporate freedom of action; some successful examples are Dragon Age or Mass Effect, where you can make many decisions that have noticeable effects on the storyline. You make decisions over several installments about which crew members survive, how they react to you, and what relationships you build with them. It’s fun, and you really have the impression of shaping the world a bit according to your ideas and decisions, characters reference past actions, and the game world adapts.
Half-heartedness is heartless!
A whole lot of game developers, however, seem to be desperately trying to incorporate some decisions, no matter how trivial or absurd they are. “Is my character going to eat the cheesecake or the chocolate truffles?” “Am I taking the red leash or the blue one to walk my dog?” And although you do feel a certain degree of freedom with these choices, they severely disrupt the flow of the game because the sequence is interrupted, and the “movie” is essentially paused. What annoys me even more are any mechanisms that make your decisions moot anyway. “Do you want to save person A or person B?” – “Oh, it doesn’t matter; they’re both going to die anyway, regardless of what you do.”
I found it particularly egregious in the game “The Walking Dead – Season 1” (Warning, Spoiler!): In the last 30 minutes of gameplay, they decided to get rid of all the side characters entirely, no matter how much effort it took to get them through the game. There is a series of events that results in all survivors dying one after the other, unfortunately in a very crude manner. It feels half-hearted and leaves me with a very bitter aftertaste for an otherwise great game.
Of course, sometimes demonstrating the powerlessness of the player character is appropriate – it can be an incredibly intense experience that no matter what you do, you cannot prevent the inevitable – but then you should do it more skillfully!
[quote_right]Not every game needs freedom of choice.[/quote_right]
So, my dear developers out there, keep this in mind (or your horns… or wings…): Not every game needs freedom of choice, and before you hinder the flow of the game or make all decisions irrelevant in the end, it’s better to leave them out altogether from the beginning. I prefer to be free from choices in a good game than choice-free in a bad one (and yes, I had to read that multiple times to ensure it makes sense).
