When Choices don't actually matter

 Your actions have consequences

I actually remember my first time booting up Telltale's The Walking Dead and seeing that ominous message fade onto the screen amid a wall of black. 'Your actions will have consequences' blinked into life and hung for a time, ensuring the message really squirmed into your gut and nestled in your psyche. I'll be honest, it unnerved me. I wasn't throwing my head up and shouting "Finally, a game where things matter!", instead I was glancing to-and-fro, trying to exactly pinpoint how I typically like to play games and what sort of mess that might land me in. Could I accidentally screw up the entire story by not taking it utterly serious from day one? Would the main character instantly explode if I failed to select the perfect rhythm of choices? How serious are the 'consequences' we're talking about? I saw it as a threat directly against the laid back, see how things go, way I used to play narrative based video games, and maybe that was a jolt I needed in order to pay more attention and care about these games.

Obviously it didn't take long for a bit of experience with these types of games, all of whom started with that exact same plodding flash card, for me to realise that my 'actions' would only actually have a very limited set of 'consequences' and usually at highly specific moments where the actions are blindingly obvious. "Will you help the annoying guy or the useless woman in the middle of the zombie attack? Bare in mind, the other probably ain't gonna make it." Titles like these talk a big game about how branching the plot is, or how every single butterfly trod on will cause a cataclysm one world over, but in truth they're limited by the plot and the writers. You can't make every choice lead to some unforeseen consequence, else people will be too terrified to make any choices for fear that they'll screw everything up! (Not to mention the sheer vast range of options and story twists that would take in order to nail down to the wall perfectly.) But some fans can find this to be a bit of a betrayal in that they very much expected for their every choice to become a new plot point. So I wanted to explore some games who flounder or succeed on that very promise.

Take Cyberpunk for instance, being a game that very much sold itself on being a heavily choice-driven experience, but which famously didn't live up to that nearly as much as fans wanted. One of the most commonly quoted points of contention is the 'origin' system, wherein players would get the chance to choose who their character was before the storyline and that would influence the way they would interact with the story. Similar to how a lot of the more hardcore RPGs function. However, that origin ended up influencing only the very beginning of the story and as the plot went on, people found themselves only really being given an influencing part in the main plot at very sparring moments. Most annoying for some, being the fact that some conversations would give you a chance to offer an alternative option (even requiring a skill check to be passed in order to raise the point to begin with) only for your opinion to be overturned in favour of where the game wants you to go. Presumably the option is just there for characterisation in showing how smart or capable the player is then? It mostly just frustrated instead.

Pillars of Eternity is a game that doesn't suffer nearly the same amount of narrative hatred, even though it does actually handle it's origin choices very similarly. In that when you select where you came from, what your species is, and what you do; oftentimes that comes up very rarely in conversation, and when it does it comes as mere flavour text that is then contributes nothing tangible to the actual scene or interaction. The sequel does a much better job of this, but in the first game the only point I can recall where something tangible can be done depending on what your character is, was in the very beginning of the game where you find some braziers which can only be lit if your character is a fire god-like. But even that doesn't make any sense because you actually find torches littered all over the place, why can't they light the braziers? Of course, the rest of the game has a lot of choices and branching quests independent of your character creation choices, so this is more a 'drop in the bucket' problem for Pillars, but Obsidian did take steps to rectify it for the next game so it was definitely a recognisable problem.

On the other side of the spectrum we have games like Deus Ex, where we are presented with a world where choices do matter. Now by it's very nature, Deus Ex is a series where player choice shapes the experience, as this is a stealth-based immersive sim, and so building your character to be better at hacking defences and turning them against the enemy is going to change how you approach pretty much every area of the game. But choices effect the story too in that you're given chances to effect the progression or ending of practically every single encounter and mission in these games. A lot of these are self contained instances, wherein the matter is opened and closed within this quest alone and the wider narrative carries on unabated, but the effect still rings true in that the player feels like an active architect in their own fate.  On the otherside of the adventure, this means all these games have huge branching finales that can mean drastically different things for the future of the world and the people who live therein, encouraging replayability as these sorts of systems are designed to do.

So we've seen examples of both successes and failures in this field, but what of a successful failure? Mass Effect and Fallout 4 both have shades of everything we've already talked about in them, however when it comes to choices and consequence there is a shared criticism that these games illicit more than any other; the misleading dialogue option. With the very nature of how dialogue is handled in these games, a preview for the player followed by a full response from their avatar, there comes a few situations where the player will pick an option only for the response to veer in tone drastically from what they expected. This isn't necessarily an example of the writing lacking the scope to change the story, but can still feel like choice being invalidated due to the game interpreting your choices in a way that you didn't intend for. My example for this would be during Mass Effect Andromeda, where if you're too friendly with a swashbuckling smuggler side character the game will automatically assume you are pursuing a serious scandalous relationship there, which leads to some very awkward 'surprise intimacy' moments down the line. (I didn't know it was that easy to lead a guy on...)

I've touched upon a bunch of different types of promised consequence met by disappointing payoff, and what I've landed on is that mostly successful payoff (like Deus Ex) relies heavily on choice that has a distinct effect rather than choice that merely adds flavour; but does that automatically mean flavour options are bad? Whenever I was playing the Pillars games and an option would pop up to indicate that the experiences I'd had or the options I'd selected in character creation, would give me a unique option, I'd pick it. Personally, I saw these not as new paths to through the narrative that needed to branch into new questlines, but just an expansion of who I was, providing a unique perspective that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten to experience. But I think the key is balance. Don't promise your game will be a choice-important romp if the majority of your choices merely add context that the other person would have shared anyway.

There are a lot more examples of choice versus consequence in the interactive story games out there, but I found a lot of those example to be much more situational and specific than what I was talking about here. Although I bet it would be fun to pick out some of those games and really go to town on the key choices of certain episodes, maybe I'll do that sometime. My view on things is that choices and consequences shouldn't ever really be the key selling point of your game, but merely some spice thrown in there to mix up the pot, provide some replay value. Because when you put the weight of the game on it, then you open yourself up to criticism about "But what about this moment where I couldn't choose?" or "Why didn't this choice mean as much as that one?" At the end of the day the tag is performative more than anything else, no one really wants to make a story where every element of it can be pulled apart my some scrappy player who thinks they know the best solution to every problem. It's the writer's story at the end of the day and is limited by the shades that they want to explore, maybe that's a reality that game's marketers need to be more cognizant to in the future if they want to avoid unnecessary disappointment.