One of the hardest things to do in a game is to reconcile the player's input into a game with its linear narrative. As games have become smaller in scope due to climbing budgets and longer development times, it has become harder to account for all possible inconsistencies and gameplay/story contradictions; when dialogue needs to be voice-acted, graphics need to be shiny, and stories are paced with far more intent, coming up with ways to explain why the player can or cannot do something is much more difficult.
BioWare, one of the West's premier role-playing developers, has struggled with this problem increasingly over the last several years. The need to deliver a quality narrative experience is oftentimes at odds with giving the player cool things to do and say, especially when both are at the core of what a BioWare game is. In Mass Effect 2, BioWare attempted to bring together a complicated story with player choice, but in doing so, they made a number of significant mistakes which ultimately hurt the game's overarching storyline, while at the same time revealing many of the flaws in the limitations of their player choice and consequence systems.
Making good choices and consequences is the kind of thing that seems rather simple, but each one is actually a multi-stage process, each of which needs to be designed in detail in order to avoid problems and come across as convincing. The ideal order, in my mind, looks something like this:
1) The game provides a situation to the player,
2) The game provides a number of options to the player,
3) The player is called upon to choose one of these options,
4) The outcome of the situation is influenced directly by the player's choice, and
5) The game provides clear feedback which responds directly to the player's decision.
Each of these steps isn't just a single task, either. For instance, handling step 3 above may include figuring out what time/place to present the options, how to frame the options, what order to present the options in, deciding which, if any options have sub-queries the player can make into them, and so forth. While it's not crucial for every decision to be examined and designed in the same detail, taking the same structured, rudimentary approach to each one will help avoid errors, especially when they may arise out of simple complacency.
When a game is successful at this process of choice and consequence, the player is satisfied with the outcome; he or she feels not just that an event has occurred, but that the decision made based on the given situation is meaningful, and, better still, that the game has passed some form of judgement on the player. This doesn't necessarily have to be significant - it can be anything from the player choosing to act kindly or poorly to an NPC, for instance - but no matter the gravity of the situation, the game has to show the player that the decisions matter.
Generally, in games, this sort of feedback cycle isn't particularly difficult to create. Figuring out a logical outcome to a situation that is consistent with the game's universe, style of play and the player's perception of who he or she is in the game is a task most designers can come up with fairly easily, to speak nothing of the players themselves, who are likely to have some good ideas of their own. But a key problem enters when story gets in the way of these sorts of decisions, and all of a sudden the game needs to place that individual decision in a larger context. This is doubly hard when you're building a role-playing game, and story is at the heart of the game - you can't just gloss over inconsistencies, or players are going to notice pretty quickly.
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