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It’s 1998. You’re a good few hours into Metal Gear Solid. After a dumb move by Snake’s squeeze Meryl you’re forced to backtrack half the game to find a sniper rifle. Upon returning to the scene you find her body replaced by a few blood spatters and the deadly-accurate laser sight of Sniper Wolf.
So you hit the deck, pop some pills, and harry the sh*t out of her with your own scoped boomstick. Once victory is achieved, you run to investigate where the hell Meryl may have gotten to, only to be ambushed by the surprisingly healthy Wolf and a whole gang of troopers. Why you’re not given the opportunity to fight back is unknown. What is known however is that you’re in a whole heap of trouble, trouble in the guise of BDSM pervert Revolver Ocelot.
You’re stripped, laid spread-eagle on a cold metal table, and spoken to by your weird English twin-brother for a bit. Then the fun begins. Ocelot begins to torture you. Specifically he zaps the crap out of you, and you have to resist giving in by mashing the square button fast and hard. This goes on for some time.
But your bearded, one handed gimp torturer is fair. He gives you a choice. Resist if you can, or submit. You’ll live, but Meryl will die.
Now for those of you like me who may have worn out your digit muscles playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon years previous, (or if you happened to be playing on the hard difficulties), this test of endurance became pretty difficult. I never was any good at the Track & Field games anyway, but this mechanic was truly anathema to my usually docile finger dexterity.
The temptation to quit was very real. But I struggled through, and by heck I saved Snake’s missus (for all good it did him; he wouldn’t see her again for ten years). It felt good to have done the right thing.
And this brings me to my point
Too often today we are given the “choice” to behave differently in games. Usually this choice is divided into one of three camps: the Chaotic Good option, the middle-of-the-road Buddhist Monk option, or Chaotic Evil -- the classic D&D trichotomy.
Modern games grant us multiple opportunities to choose our character’s destiny. But how much of this choice actually affects the gameplay? Beyond how NPC’s react to you, or a slightly different end sequence, is the game just not the same?
Perhaps, like in the Jedi Knight games, you are granted access to different powers depending on whether you choose to be light or dark. Or alternatively like in Neverwinter Nights, whether or not you bully 50 more gold pieces out of Little Jimmy after returning his Mother’s severed head from those nasty gnolls, it may make no difference to your skills, your abilities, or how the game really unfolds.
The choices themselves are also too often too heavily laden with overtly good or bad consequences and connotations. You’re either a Saint or the Devil. Whatever happened to the dont’-give-a-shit merc types who do things for the money? Fable is a grand example of this. No one wants to play Miles the boring office clerk, but some alternative to being caressed eternally by light or fire would be nice.
Fallout 3 presented us with another blank, expressionless character we could mould in our own depraved image. The choices we made were again radically opposite or dead in between. If I recall correctly there was only one perk which operated if you remained neutral. Now it was pretty tough, but compared to some of the stuff being good/evil got, it was very underwhelming. It was also insane how you received “karma” for doing different acts. There was also no “neutral” means of gaining negative karma or losing good karma.
Say for instance you’d recently saved some mutant fish boy from death. You may be edging over the neutral Sweden border and narrowly entering the “we’ll jump in when we’ll know we’ll win” American territory of karma levels. Now in order to reset the balance, you’d have to do some bad shit. You can’t just stop being bad. No. You have to shoot old people in the face. Or steal. It doesn’t make sense and isn’t a rewarding method of playing the game.
Most often it’s funnier to give the crazy unrealistic super evil option. Basically it usually amounts to responding FUCK YOU in so many words to every possible query. This is by no means restricted to Fallout 3 either -- other sandbox games suffer from this. But being so hilariously bad can only be so funny for so long. It’s kind of like choosing to rename Aerith (which you get the option to do for every FFVII character) Analvixen; it’s funny the first couple of times you see “Analvixen casts Healing Wind”, but it quickly loses it’s charm.
Yet another take on the moral compass-style gameplay choice is Mass Effect. While the character development and choices offered were much more complex compared to Fallout, they were only ever really presented in boring menu’s and conversation threads. Whilst it boasts much more “choice” than Metal Gear, Metal Gear Solid's one and only turning point came about as a skill challenge, a mechanic that is welcome to me in any game.
So is choice good? Does it make us play the game more often? I recall playing Star Ocean on the PSX. It boasted 88 different endings. Considering it was a typical JRPG and took at least 30 hours to complete, did the developers really think someone would want to spend that much time to see minute detail changes in the end cut-scene? How about a game where you get nothing but choice? Replace all your shooty gameplay with an innovative facial expression mechanic? Sound crazy? You obviously never played Sentient then.
Offering a balance is the best solution, I feel. Like everything in games, I'm happy for anything as long as it doesn't interupt the gameplay. Integrating player choices into the game world which move beyond the standard three response trope would be something I'd embrace, just as long as it wasn't sacrificing how the game was played. And vice versa. Why give us the choice at all if it does not impact the game in any way shape or form? Metal Gear Solid stands as a shining example of this practise. I’m all for choosing between good or evil, just as long as it actually makes a difference to the game I’m playing.
[PS, Initial image from http://thesketcher.deviantart.com/ ]
Contest:
12:00 PM on 11.22.2009
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Nice blog, though. Yeah, the karma stuff in Fallout 3 was a bit strange. You could slaughter a whole town, then raise your karma by repeatedly giving a dude bottles of water.
Yeah, that's what I thought too. I don't know in what direction it got my hopes traveling in, but it didn't take me anywhere good.
Still, second write-up of this that I've commented on today. It's officially a trend. Good stuff.
Also, Metal Gear rocks hard.
SMT Strange Journey appears to place more emphasis on the path you choose and what dialogs and quests open up will reflect your decisions, I think that's actually the best way.
I tend to veer to Neutral or if there's the option, play both sides against each other for my own gain.
MGS3 had a Meryl kind of moment, except it was with The End. You can shoot him the first time Snake sees him and never have to deal with him later. Its the very evil way of doing things, shooting him while he's asleep on the wheelchair, but he'll only cause me trouble later if I don't.
I really played 'the good guy' in Mass Effect the first time, and became a 'Renegade' in my second playthrough which was noticably harder... so they did it pretty well I think... I just finished Star Ocean 2 on PSP recently and though I really loved the game, I doubt I'll ever play it again just because it took me 45 hours to finish that first playthrough :-)
I didn't take the torture mission seriously, and thus wound up losing Meryl due to my incompetence. The game then made sure to make me feel terrible for my choice, with Campbell, Ocelot, Liquid and Otacon constantly reminding Snake that he will always be haunted with Meryl's death and that he is a weak coward. Even Snake, at the end, started crying about how it was all his fault. But never in the game did the idea that Snake was a bad person come across. The game told me I was weak and should feel bad, but not that my loss defined me as an evil person.
That's the sort of choice we need more of, because it's the only one that ever made me feel legitimately terrible, and it didn't even have to call me an evil man.
That aside, who are those women on the opening image, i know Meryl and The Boss but the other 2 i don't know.
Meh, you wrote it far better than I could've managed. Still, nice to know one of my ideas is front page worthy.
Congrats.
So, I can either save an orphan, and get goodness points, or I can rob him, and get evil points. Where's the inbetween? What about the cynical hero who has a soft spot for kids? Or the goody-two-shoes hero that secretly hates children? Archtypes like that certainly aren't saints, but they're definitely not orphan-murdering villains either. That's my beef with morality systems, they're never enough of shades of morality to really make decisions hard and make their outcomes unpredictable.
Hell, try to play Mass Effect while roleplaying the personality of Malcom Reynolds from Firefly. It's nigh impossible simply because the Renegade options are too evil and the Paragon options are too idealistic.
SMT was one of the first things I thought of as I read through this, but the earlier SNES games came more to mind. They're one of the few games I can recall playing where the choices given to you weren't just blatantly good or evil. Even with the Law/Chaos alignments they didn't represent the standard "Good" and "Evil" alignments. (Since both sides had their share of douchebags, including God himself. :P) Your alignment also fluctuated depending on the demons you used in your party as well, and not solely based on a few choices made in the game. (Of course that made trying to maintain a Neutral alignment a real pain in the ass.)
They still sometimes faced the problem that most games with moral choices faced though, where a choice pertaining to a specific alignment was too obvious, meaning you would just pick the choice that would move you toward the alignment you want.
I really want to see a game where your moral choices are real moral choices, and aren't completely obvious. It would be interesting to see a game where you could potentially end up down the path of corruption based on your choices without realizing it.
Good blog, I only recently got to play MGS and that part was brutal, but I refused to let him beat me, so I persevered through the pain. Moral choices really should be more incorporated into the gameplay instead of an option in a dialog tree, and it should include much more shades of gray instead of the "Good-Evil-Neutral" we have now.
http://thesketcher.deviantart.com/art/Why-Snake-and-Meryl-Broke-Up-86089095
*cough* Planescape: Torment *cough*
Monetarily perhaps, but most games really need some heavier consequences for being evil. You shouldn't be able to walk into a town and shoot everyone and get off practically scott free.
Metal Gear Solid made my thumb take a vacation
Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? put it into a coma.
Why? Because it's stupid game design. If you're going to promote your game as having "moral choices" that means your actions need to have consequences. There's no moral choice involved in shooting up a town of civilians, especially when there's no consequence for doing so.
Because that's the sign of a poorly designed game. If you're going to brag about your game's moral choices, then there need to be consequences. There's no moral choice to be made without consequences.
For most normal people and the rest of society, committing evil comes with fitting reactions, and I personally would like to see more of that in games. I find being evil boring if there are no retributions.
A moral choice is a choice based on your morals - you do what you think is right. What kind of consequences it has doesn't have anything to do with it. Basically every choice in a game should have some consequences - by obliterating a town you can get experience, money, items, you might make a quest or two unavailable (or create new quests...), someone might hunt you (or other people could be glad for doing that...), etc. But only because some choice is evil it doesn't mean that it has to have negative consequences/effect. Hell, maybe I'm evil and so bored that I wan't to kill all those people, but in the long run why couldn't such homicide turn out to be beneficial both for me and for other people in the game world? For example it could accidentaly free up resources which will be better utilized by other cities and allow them to flourish, or it could prevent the city from becoming the source of a strain of an unknown virus which would wipe out half of the game world - and thus by being evil I've done something good.
There is absolutely no reason to affiliate evil actions exclusively with harmful effects or consequences.
But even if we're talking about something more minimal, like stealing, there should be a more lasting impact than making you slightly more evil. If you do it without getting seen fine, but if you get caught you shouldn't be able to just walk outside and come back and have everyone forget you did anything.
My point that you shouldn't be able to do whatever you damn well please in a game and then the game treat it like it never happened. You shoot an innocent person in the street then you're murderer, and the game should treat you as such.
But I think shooting old people in the face should be considered good karma, not evil. Old people smell funny, walk slow and drive dangerously.
Plus, they're going to die soon and are probably in pain with a broken hip or something. My shotgun to the face made their death instant.
I'm all about the mercy. So good karma my retirement home spree, please.
inFAMOUS is another offender of the black/white dichotomy of choice in games.