"Your Actions Have Consequences" ... aka "The Giggest Lie in Gaming Marketing"

Nickolaidas said:
I hate that guy's games. On purpose, I would play Heavy Rain and revisit QTE sequences and experiment. You know, the ones where there is a chase scene and you have like, 50 QTE button presses to make? Well, at least half of them are COMPLETELY useless and do not actually change the result of the sequence.
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True, but most games are like this. Play Call of Duty, get riddled with bullets, hide behind a wall until the red jelly fades. It's still fun to try to press the correct buttons, and looks cooler. You wouldn't just run from cover to cover in COD without pressing the "correct" buttons, because it isn't fun and looks dumb despite the fact that you can progress.
 
There's a certain JRPG in Steam called The Last Sovereign. It's gone basically unnoticed because 1) It's pron 2) It's free and 3) It's RPG Maker.

It's got the single most complex decision system I've ever seen in a game. It tracks hundreds of variables, relationship points, events, even money spending. Characters live or die, towns are created or destroyed, even countries fall and rise according to what you do in the game. It's seriously impressive and scratches an itch that most games don't.
 
Honestly, you're buying games from the games' industry. That's how capitalism works: whatever resources you pour into the making of a product, selling it needs to make more money. In the case of late stage capitalism in particular, selling it needs to make ALL the money it can. Which means producers walk around offices clutching their pearls X% of players won't experience a certain area of the game if a decision is made or that players will undervalue a game if they don't experience all of it on one go.

And then there's the player problem: most players don't want to play a game twice, which just justifies the notions held by aforementioned producers. For a game to have true consequences, playing through it several times to see everything is a necessity. And people are more than happy to just play it once and bitch about it online, in here or wherever else.
 
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yeah its bullshit.

I remember Mass Effect. I saved everyone in the first game and whatever it was in vermire?, and I also saved EVERYONE in ME2 and did all the paragon choices. It was very challenging but I thought it would be worth it.

Cue ME3.

wrong.jpg
 
Golden Sun on the GBA is soooo gulty of this. You had to make so many choices throughout the game, but if you didn't decide how the game intended, you were back to square one. It stopped the flow of the game all the time, for meaningless, stupid questions.
 
Remember Fable and "plant a seed anywhere in the world and come back later and there will be a tree growing?"

Then in the actual game, you ran around and made fart noises.
 
In all fairness, people who complain about "that game with 206 permutations" not addressing the very specific 207th variation they wished for" are a special flavor of delusional.
 
Fafalada said:
I was referring to the black-hairy things growing out of her arms (unless Gen Alpha adopted 'earrings' to mean something else - like mandibles).
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AI has already understood where to put the effort. Who cares if her hair become earrings or if her arms are broken at the elbow ?
 
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OK, so you want to set a village on fire. Cool. It burns down, several NPCs are killed, and the ones that weren't killed scatter for a while and eventually come back to rebuild. What if one of the NPCs in that town is important to the main story somehow? What if you get to Whiterun and decide to just straight up murder the Jarl because you don't like the way he talks to you? In your perfect "choices matter" scenario, you should be able to do that - but what are the consequences? Do the guards in town mindlessly attack you for killing their leader? If you're strong enough, you could murder them all as well - then what? Does the town hold an election to decide on a new Jarl? Is there a line of succession? What role does their form of local government take? The town needs its Jarl, right? Maybe there is political turmoil or restlessness for a while, but eventually things go back to status quo. Functionally, how different is the game now that you've killed the Jarl? You've either cucked yourself on missing out on all the quests he would have given you, or the game would simply re-create those quests with a different NPC at the helm. And this is just a single decision you could potentially make, in a game where you are potentially making many many decisions like this every few minutes.

Dungeon masters in D&D do this kind of stuff all the time. They want to give their players the full freedom of choice and consequences for their actions, but doing so typically requires at least a few hours / days between campaign sessions where the DM can go off and form new narratives around the decisions being made by the player(s). Sometimes entire stories need to be re-done and rewritten. Spoiler alert, most DMs usually will just recycle an existing story and massage it to fit the new constraints the player made for them. And while computers can do this kind of stuff faster than humans typically can now, building an entire machine learning narrative around a single player's single game play through (while also building new art assets, voiced dialog, etc. on the fly) is incredibly expensive. To make something like this financially viable in 2024, we would have to go back to the "pay per minute" model of gaming - even a monthly subscription fee wouldn't be enough to cover costs, unless the monthly subscription fee were closer to $500-$600, maybe more.

The issue, even with a proper AI / ML implementation, is always going to be crafting a narrative. Games like Morrowind had no problem letting you kill important NPCs (though it would warn you that saving after doing so would ultimately doom your save file to a non-winnable state). Something like this is almost certainly a requirement for a game that has proper "world changing" consequences. If you alter the state of the game in such a way that you're no longer able to complete the original narrative of the story (and there are a LOT of ways of accomplishing this), then you have to be okay with the game you're playing either telling you Morrowind-style "hey dummy, you cucked yourself out of moving the story forward" or you have to be okay with the game not having a story at all in the first place. Even if you do control these elements through ML, as in the game "makes the story for you and crafts it around your choices", then you're still just playing a sandbox game - albeit a more fancy one that anything we have today.

We'll eventually get there, but where we are technologically right now is something more like a text-based "choose your own adventure" novel. Even by the time the technology catches up to let us play something like your perfectly envisioned version of Skyrim you describe in the OP, there will be people complaining that the gameplay is too ancient as it's basically a 2010 game, and they wished AI could give them something more modern.

The real question should be "how far do we have to go to trick people into believing that their choices have consequences?" For most people, we're already at that threshold. Add another 1-2 layers of complexity, and you've now captured up to 99% of people on the planet. Why do something difficult and expensive, when most people will easily be fooled by an imitation?
 
Use your imagination OP.

If you take a side in Skyrim then role play that way, immediately battle with the other side when you see them. You can kill most vendors for instance, then you won't be able to shop there or enter that city without a fight.

IRL start walking around with a bow or a sword or casting spells, make sure not to shower either since there's no in-game way to do that.
 
jshackles said:
OK, so you want to set a village on fire. Cool. It burns down, several NPCs are killed, and the ones that weren't killed scatter for a while and eventually come back to rebuild. What if one of the NPCs in that town is important to the main story somehow? What if you get to Whiterun and decide to just straight up murder the Jarl because you don't like the way he talks to you? In your perfect "choices matter" scenario, you should be able to do that - but what are the consequences? Do the guards in town mindlessly attack you for killing their leader? If you're strong enough, you could murder them all as well - then what? Does the town hold an election to decide on a new Jarl? Is there a line of succession? What role does their form of local government take? The town needs its Jarl, right? Maybe there is political turmoil or restlessness for a while, but eventually things go back to status quo. Functionally, how different is the game now that you've killed the Jarl? You've either cucked yourself on missing out on all the quests he would have given you, or the game would simply re-create those quests with a different NPC at the helm. And this is just a single decision you could potentially make, in a game where you are potentially making many many decisions like this every few minutes.
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Fun fact: In Morrowind, you can actually do all that (somewhat). You could go to the capital of the Dunmer and literally murder Vivec, their god. You could also kill NPCs who were vital to the main quest, and the game would inform you if you did, giving you the option to keep on playing or load a save game. That said, no, doing all that stuff didn't have any consequences to the world, except well, okay, if you kill Vivec, every Dumner officer under the sun considered you the fucking antichrist and tried to kill you on the spot.

And yes, theoretically, murdering the Jarl of Whiterun should either go two ways: Depending on how many Whiterun NPCs you've befriended, you should have the option to role-play or fight your way through this mess - maybe you could bullshit your way out of this and convince the people that the jarl was an Ulfric sympathizer and was about to 'sell' Whiterun to the Stormcloaks. Or laugh at their faces and say you're their god now. Either way, the people of Whiterun should elect a new Jarl (there are at least three solid candidates for the position as is - fuck it, they could even nominate you), or they attack you en masse and you either flee or murder them all. In the latter, yes, have Whiterun be a fucking ghost town for a couple of weeks, then have bandits or monsters or vampires attempt to move in. The consequences do not need to be earth-shuttering, they just need to give you the impression this is an actual world, that there is an actual (social) ecosystem which is fluid and malleable. If you do truly stupid and horrible stuff, there should be truly horrible/game-breaking consequences for the main quest, but you should keep on playing. If you want to murder all the greybeards in High Rothgar, perhaps this causes Parthumax to show his hand earlier or creates an alternate story path with Miraak. A competent dev team SHOULD have backup plans if a major NPC is taken out of the game. I mean fuck it, if you go on a murder spree and start killing every fucking NPC under the sun, have Alduin fly down from the skies when you have slain 50% of all Skyrim NPCs and offer you a position as his disciple in world-eating. And you either accept and get some special shout powers while the armed NPCs of entire cities attack you, or you even challenge Alduin on the spot. Or both. I mean, if you make an RPG where murder hobo is an option, HAVE A FUCKING STORYLINE for that option. It is DOABLE.

And if you can't pull that off, do not claim that you have in your marketing speeches.
 
Nickolaidas said:
It is DOABLE.
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Sure, almost anything is doable with enough effort. One of the biggest reasons this doesn't typically happen in games (and that most games with "choices" are really just the illusion of choice) is that game developers don't want to spend an inordinate amount of resources and time dedicated to storylines that will only be experienced by only a few players.

So - Whiterun is in shambles because the Jarl's been killed. Now it's a ghost town for a few weeks before the vampires move in. Cool cool. Except now there is an entire branch of the game that has to be re-checked by QA to make sure there aren't any game breaking bugs or crashes that happen as a result of that massive change. And because it can happen at any point in the main story, it's got to be run through about 24 different checkpoints at various stages of story completion to again make sure that this doesn't cause some random variable to overflow or something to crash. Multiply this scenario out 10x or 100x depending on "what the player does next". Do you go in and kill the invading Vampires, or does this once-human city become a den of evil? Does having vampires in this city affect the Dawnguard storyline (it should) so again you have another branching narrative path that has to be run through QA.

It's also got to store the state of this change in memory, because like you said now maybe different NPCs have to react to you differently based on the outcome of this event (are you reviled by the townspeople, are you the new Jarl, were you popular but lost the election somehow?). This memory pointer has to follow your character for the remainder of the game in order for it to seem realistic. This pointer either has to be stored in local system memory (for fast access), local storage (possibly slow access), or server-side (even slower access and higher cost). System memory is extremely limited, especially on game consoles. A little more wiggle room on PC, but even still extremely limited when you're talking about the scope of the massive number of decision pointers you need to store in an open world game like this. And it's unrealistic to just do a Todd Howard and say "you just need to upgrade your desktop to 256GB of RAM in order to play this game". So - local storage. Cool, it's pretty plentiful (even not withstanding stuff like cloud save limitations). As a result, your save file grows up to be several GB in size. Problem is, now when the game needs this information it has to access the storage to get it. So if you're walking up to an NPC, and the game has to determine how they're going to respond to you (happy to see you, ready to murder you, many other potential emotional states in between), your console or PC has to read a several-gigabyte save file to determine the outcome of that interaction. This means freezing / stuttering - not good. So since space is a concern, you could store this value server-side and have the game access it over the internet instead. Your powerful data center servers could easily retrieve this information, but then you have to get it to the player. This means always-online, latency issues, etc. in addition to additional ongoing costs to support the game. Doable, sure - but not typically a good business decision.

And that's what this all comes down to - business decisions. I'm sure the people making Skyrim back in 2010 had a lot of really cool and wonderful ideas on how to expand the game to make it more realistic. Like being able to go back to the person who hired goons to kill you and threaten them - this is probably something that was realistically shopped by the devs but ended up on the cutting room floor because it would require too many system resources or business resources (dev, testing, QA) for something that only a percentage of people would do or see. As I said above, you could realistically program an AI / ML and data centers to handle these things for you but at a cost of hundreds (maybe thousands?) of dollars per player per month. Why do that, when you can give players a semi-realistic illusion of choice instead - and let their basic human instinct to use their imagination take over and do the heavy lifting for the rest?

I do agree that putting stuff like "a living, breathing world" in your marketing speak has always been 100% bullshit.
 
Jinzo Prime said:
Oh My God What GIF by SHOWTIME Sports


Can I get a TLDR please?
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I used AI and it gave me this:

When I was young, my mom would ask me whether I wanted apples or pears, but in the end, she always gave me both, making me question the illusion of choice. This experience resurfaced years later when I played Final Fantasy VIII and noticed how choices in the game led to the same outcomes regardless of my decisions. Similarly, many modern open-world RPGs boast about player agency, but often, the consequences of choices are shallow or purely cosmetic. True choice and consequence in games require more than binary outcomes; they need a dynamic world that genuinely reacts and evolves based on player actions, which current game design and technology often fail to deliver.
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You can put a choice in a game, but a lot of what makes it meaningful is up to the player. For something to be a meaningful consequence, I feel like it should be logical and foreseeable. It shouldn't be some moon logic plot twist. But is then something you expected all along meaningful on the level of emotional impact? That depends on how it is presented. And a dev might do playtesting that shows that many players are just bad at understanding what is going on or why they should bother making a choice in the first place. They decide that they should just purely focus on the presentation of making scenes that are emotionally impactful, in a way that anyone can understand with very little context. The big risk here is that you fail at making choices with consequence by not even trying and then also fail at the emotional impact, such as with Fallout 4 or Starfield.
 
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OP is a ****ing legend and he's absolutely right. We crave consequences in our games. It makes everything far more interesting. The future is bring though as I feel we're naturally heading in this direction anyway. I love you OP.
 
I like choice making in Triangle Strategy, they do have consequences but I also like some characters won't agree with your suggestion and you have try to convince them to your side and if you fail they wont go with your plan.

It makes that other characters have their own mind and they won't go whatever you decide.
 
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I like the idea of a protagonists actions having real consequences, but I just don't think it's feasible. Not unless it's within a very small scale.

I've always had in mind a game set in a small town, or village, where all the inhabitants have realistic daily activities, and where even the slightest of changes to a couple of routines can have major consequences. The premise could be super simple, like playing a private investigator searching for a missing person, or a killer. Kind of like the original Shenmue, but taken to the next level.
 
I was like you. Wanted to be cool playing those tough games. Gangsta stuff. And one day, it offered me if I wanted do some coke.

And then I got shot out of a catapult.


CONSEQUENCES!!
 
Supermassive's games (Until Dawn, The Quarry, the Dark Pictures series) sometimes manage this but their branching paths often converge again, stripping real consequences out of many choices. They give the illusion of meaningful choice more often than they deliver it. Multiple playthroughs really pull back the curtain.

In that branching narrative genre, Detroit: Become Human probably did it best. There are some proper game changing choices in that one. Easily Quantic Dreams' best work.
 
Jack Videogames said:
There's a certain JRPG in Steam called The Last Sovereign. It's gone basically unnoticed because 1) It's pron 2) It's free and 3) It's RPG Maker.

It's got the single most complex decision system I've ever seen in a game. It tracks hundreds of variables, relationship points, events, even money spending. Characters live or die, towns are created or destroyed, even countries fall and rise according to what you do in the game. It's seriously impressive and scratches an itch that most games don't.
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I'm truly happy that this got a mention. It's a shame that TLS will never get the recognition it deserves. Sierra has single handidly created a setting that puts commercial games to shame. Base building ala Suikoden? Check. NPCs with changing dialogue as the story progresses like Kiseki? Check. Political and religious intrigue? Check. No grinding? Check. Waifus? Check. DEI influence? Well, the sole dev is a female and most of the characters are female so I guess check.

The main story is going to move forward no matter what (well, not quite, there are game over states mostly related to combat) but the amount of things your decisions influence is crazy. And it's not just flavor text, you really see how the world changes. The Last Sovereign is a porn game that I'm not ashamed to have in my Steam library. Actually the setting is just so good that I want to skip the porn bits but those sometimes contain character and world building too.
 
I too once felt like a game underdelivered on the 'your choices have consequences' promise and then I turned twelve, thought about the concept for a second, and realized they'd have to write something for every contingency.

Also, I don't buy that stupid apples and pears story one bit.
 
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I agree. I tried playing Mass Effect recently and towards the start of the game I have the option of saying to someone:
a) Stay here
b) Come with me.

Doesn't matter which I pick as the person comes with me regardless of what I say. I only found that out because I had to do that section over for some reason and decided to go with the other option.
 
vaibhavpisal said:
think they still need to do a bit better, especially cleaning up quests, separating companion stories from main narrative so it doesnt become a mess.
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Absolutely not. The more any content feeds into the main game makes the whole thing much better and organic

Witcher 3 was pretty good at this. As is bg3 (but ultimately, bg3 kinda buckled under its own weight)
 
Raven117 said:
Absolutely not. The more any content feeds into the main game makes the whole thing much better and organic

Witcher 3 was pretty good at this. As is bg3 (but ultimately, bg3 kinda buckled under its own weight)
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Witcher 3 isnt exactly a game about choice and consequences. Which of its quests are main quests, which are side quests, thats debatable.

With BG3, each companion has major quest critical quests that are directly tied to main story. If you choose one way, other companion will leave your party. Almost impossible to do all companion quests in single playthrough.

Not a huge fan of this. I like to explore backstories of each companion. They tend to be interesting in most games.
 
vaibhavpisal said:
I would say its as good as something like Mass Effect trilogy, below New Vegas.
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Thats is complete and utter nonsense and factually not true. BG3 has far more choices than Mass Effect or New Vegas can dream of. Have you even played the game?

vaibhavpisal said:
With BG3, each companion has major quest critical quests that are directly tied to main story. If you choose one way, other companion will leave your party. Almost impossible to do all companion quests in single playthrough.
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You clearly havent played the game or you were just blind the whole time. You can do all companion quests in a single playthrough.
 
The Cockatrice said:
Thats is complete and utter nonsense and factually not true. BG3 has far more choices than Mass Effect or New Vegas can dream of. Have you even played the game?
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New Vegas gives a better distinction between good and evil play throughs. Your quests are different. Its better in that sense.

In Mass Effect you choose your companions, races you want to side with. On top of that whole setup is knit across a trilogy. This is same level of reaction I am getting with Baldurs Gate 3 as well.

The Cockatrice said:
You clearly havent played the game or you were just blind the whole time. You can do all companion quests in a single playthrough.
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I am at final choice. My main is Lazael. If I choose to do her quest, it will lock me into an ending.

Thats the sense I am getting.
 
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vaibhavpisal said:
New Vegas gives a better distinction between good and evil play throughs
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No it doesnt. It's simpler if thats what you mean, however that isnt a plus in my eyes. BG3 certainly deals with more gray areas than most games however it does have some truly evil shit you can do if you want to.


vaibhavpisal said:
I am at final choice. My main is Karlach. If I choose to do her quest, it will lock me into an ending.

Thats the sense I am getting.
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Not sure what you mean exactly. Her main quest is killing Gortash and dealing with her engine. If you mean you cant avoid killing him thats not true. You can, but just like any choice in this game, it will have some severe outcomes, that you may not like.
 
The Cockatrice said:
No it doesnt. It's simpler if thats what you mean, however that isnt a plus in my eyes. BG3 certainly deals with more gray areas than most games however it does have some truly evil shit you can do if you want to.
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Of course its mechanically simpler. Its a product of its time.

Still I would rate it higher cause of pocket quests that still are more reactive than a lot of main quests in games.

The Cockatrice said:
Not sure what you mean exactly. Her main quest is killing Gortash and dealing with her engine. If you mean you cant avoid killing him thats not true. You can, but just like any choice in this game, it will have some severe outcomes, that you may not like.
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Meant to say Lazael. I alternate between two.

Am talking about gith prince. Haven't finished it but feels like it will be a main quest choice.
 
vaibhavpisal said:
Of course its mechanically simpler. Its a product of its time.

Still I would rate it higher cause of pocket quests that still are more reactive than a lot of main quests in games.


Meant to say Lazael. I alternate between two.

Am talking about gith prince. Haven't finished it but feels like it will be a main quest choice.
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Every companion has multiple choices and outcomes in their quests. They're all main quests when it comes to your companions. In regards to the prince there are at least 4 choices that I'm aware of, could be more.
 
vaibhavpisal said:
Witcher 3 isnt exactly a game about choice and consequences. Which of its quests are main quests, which are side quests, thats debatable.

With BG3, each companion has major quest critical quests that are directly tied to main story. If you choose one way, other companion will leave your party. Almost impossible to do all companion quests in single playthrough.

Not a huge fan of this. I like to explore backstories of each companion. They tend to be interesting in most games.
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Do you want a game about choice and consequence, but then have it not matter with your party? This is the the exact point of choice and consequence. Is that What you are saying?

On this, bg3 got that right.

I like it when the all major side quests tie with the story. It makes the whole thing much more compelling. If diverging gets missed, well, that's a campaign for you
 
Raven117 said:
Do you want a game about choice and consequence, but then have it not matter with your party? This is the the exact point of choice and consequence. Is that What you are saying?

On this, bg3 got that right.

I like it when the all major side quests tie with the story. It makes the whole thing much more compelling. If diverging gets missed, well, that's a campaign for you
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Am ok with branching paths that take you to different routes and you miss parts of campaign.

But companion quests I consider essential and I don't want to get locked in a choice just cause I wanna see a companion story to completion.

Maybe thats a me thing, but I draw the line with companions. At least I need to see their story fully before I decide if I wanna keep them in party till the end.

This was even more annoying in Divinity OS2 where at a cut off point, all companions die that you didn't keep with you. And a whole bunch of main story was surrounding them, making you miss important story bits.
 
vaibhavpisal said:
Am ok with branching paths that take you to different routes and you miss parts of campaign.

But companion quests I consider essential and I don't want to get locked in a choice just cause I wanna see a companion story to completion.

Maybe thats a me thing, but I draw the line with companions. At least I need to see their story fully before I decide if I wanna keep them in party till the end.

This was even more annoying in Divinity OS2 where at a cut off point, all companions die that you didn't keep with you. And a whole bunch of main story was surrounding them, making you miss important story bits.
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Lol, i find it funny you want a story about "choice and consequence" but not really.
 
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