If there is one outcome, remove the guise of control. Have my character speak for me. I don’t fucking care. I’d rather feel like my character is doing or saying something I wouldn’t personally do than for me to be given a fucking pop-up that means nothing and is just there to reinforce a self-insert facade. At least make a bit out of it if you’re gonna do it. It’s genuinely one of the worst pieces of game design outside of legitimately predatory behavior.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    "Illusion of Choice" is one of, if not the, core of any pc game. If it's done well then the players think they were making important decisions all along, even though on the back end it's just as "but thou must" as any other game. If it's done poorly you get what op is talking about.

    Basically - if the player misses, or refuses, or is locked out of a quest chain then all the time spent developing that quest is a waste. Most players never complete on playthrough, so having multiple branching endings uses up resources with limited payoff.

    Any choice that seriously alters the course of the game can double the resource cost from that point on - now you need two complete story options, complete with art, locations, voice work, mocap, and god knows what else.

    And all of this eats in to your profits, which is why we must abolish the value form so we can have gigantic messy crowd sourced labor of love games that are in continual community development for decades with dozens of incompatible forks.