Choice and Consequence In Games

A discussion of games that fall short of expectations.

Allowing the player to make choices has become a common and often expected feature in today's video games. Some of the most anticipated games claim that every choice a player makes will have consequences, that every action will affect the in-game world. The question is: how often do these games live up to the hype? The answer is: never. Making a game that changes with every player action would require a nothing less than a magical genie, because no processor could handle it. Despite this fact, I've always dreamed of a game that at least has multiple paths depending on what choices you make and how well you perform, all leading to a distinct ending. This is what comes to mind when I think about in-game decisions having serious consequences. But in order for that dream to come true, developers would have to make multiple games and pay their writers to write multiple stories. The best they can do is to incorporate a tiny partial element of my dream game into theirs. Some games do it well, but many fall well below expectations.

Fable, a game famous for being over-hyped and under-made, is a great example of a failed choice-consequence system. The game's tagline was even "For every action, there is a consequence." This is a serious stretch. The only actions that have consequences are part of the tiresome good/evil binary common to today's games. You can decide stab a helpless woman in the face, grow a very intimidating ponytail, and wear some evil pants, and the consequence is that everyone will flee at the sight of you. On the other hand, you can be a saint, with saintly pants, and as a consequence everyone in town will demand that you buy them wedding rings. Beyond that, the world doesn't change much. Fable 2 is a little better about this. For example, deciding whether to buy things or steal them affects a town's economy, but this kind of system is only really interesting to an economist or a rabid completionist. But in defense of Fable II, deciding whether or not to give some money to a weird man before a particular quest does substantially affect the condition of one particular town. Unfortunately, that's as good as it gets.

Another game that deserves mention is Heavy Rain. It also claimed that it would deal out consequences for the player's actions. The problem with this one is that the player was given few choices. The game was only really changed by a player's failure. Screwing up enough quick time events might cause a character to die, which would only change the game by throwing out the rest of the sequences with that character. It also changed the ending by replacing the good cut scene for that character with a bad one. The final fight with the villain would play out a little bit differently depending on how many characters survived and figured out the answer to the mystery, which was kind of cool. However, in the words of Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, "There's one unbearably happy ending if you get everything right, so any other outcome just feels like a non-standard game over." And since the game allows you to go back and replay any sequence that you want, there's no reason not to get the best possible ending. What's the point of having negative consequences for failure if the player can and likely will go right back and erase their failures?

Of course, I can't talk about choice-consequence systems without mentioning the Mass Effect series. Unfortunately, the choices in these games suffer from the same annoying good/bad binary found in Fable, and the game even punishes you for being a normal human being, also known as "neutral." But Mass Effect deserves consideration for its save file transfer innovation.