I recently wrote/shot a few editorials about Mass Effect 2 for Destructoid. I took a pretty fatalistic stance on the ending, and the fact that the entire game was one hundred percent winnable if you cared about your team enough. Rather than being able to simply get everyone out alive by choosing your team correctly and getting everyone loyal, I argued, it would have been less dramatically self-defeating if people had to die — if you had to make choices that, directly or indirectly, resulted in the deaths of NPCs whom you loved.
It wasn’t until I rewatched this great video that I fully understood why I felt that way. (Vague spoilers for Fable 2, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age.)
Structurally, Mass Effect 2 is not a choice, or a series of choices. It is a problem, with an optimal solution. There are varying degrees of failure to be found in ME2, ranging all the way from one or two dead teammates to the death of Shepard him/herself, but there’s an unquestionable win state (and one that’ll net you an Achievement, no less): get your entire team out alive.
Gameplay-wise, this makes perfect sense. Problems are great: they force us to think strategically, to feel intense triumph when we finally make our way to the solution.
Narratively, however, Mass Effect 2 — and the person who plays it — needs choice. I’ll admit that it’s been a while since I finished Story by Robert McKee, and even as I read it I didn’t agree with a hefty chunk of what the man said (though maybe that was just me trying to be loyal to Charlie Kaufman), but I remember one particular bit of advice really resonated with me: characters are defined by the choices they make. The more difficult and consequential the choice, the more we learn.
Luke Skywalker’s friends are in danger on Cloud City, but he hasn’t finished his training yet. Will he go save them, or stay with Yoda and risk their deaths? When Luke refuses to listen to Yoda and recklessly goes off to face an enemy he is unprepared to defeat, we learn an awful lot about who he is (even if Return of the Jedi completely fucks over and ignores the negative consequences of Luke’s choice to interrupt his training).
Games offer the player an even more alluring possibility: by being presented with difficult choices with no true “right” answer, we can learn something about ourselves. Not to suggest that Mass Effect 2 didn’t teach me a little about myself — I learned that I’m as bad at feeding fish as I am at picking squad leaders. But those few games I’ve played that gave me real, honest choices will probably stick with me for the rest of my life, even if the games themselves weren’t all that spectacular.
Fable II’s sandbox, action, and RPG elements don’t go particularly well together, but I will always remember the final choice I was faced with at the end of the game. I’ll always remember watching my hardass-looking avatar (dude had a Torchwood coat and a Nick Fury face) return to an empty house. An entire lifetime of doing sidequests and saving lives and buying stuff, and I suddenly had nothing to do, and no one to do it for. They built a statue for him, and all I wanted to do was find a way to commit virtual suicide. I’d done the moral thing, I guess, but I had nothing left.
I remember watching someone I cared for walk away from me at the end of Dragon Age, knowing that an innocent person would have to die because of it. Knowing that I would not be that person. I’d planned to play the game as a great guy, as a goody two-shoes. I’d play that way because I thought that’s who I was. But when the chips were down, I still let one of my earliest friends die a martyr so I wouldn’t have to. So that, maybe, I could import my character into Dragon Age 2 (which, come to think of it, probably won’t even happen).
As fun as it may be to be presented with a problem and solve it, I can’t help but feel it’s far more interesting, and complex, and enlightening to present the player with difficult, honest choices and allow the player to learn a little bit more about themselves as a result. What if, in Mass Effect 3, I have to choose between saving Wrex’s life and letting the Reapers destroy humanity (an aside: as wonderfully tense as it was to have my squadmates’ lives in jeopardy, why couldn’t the mission itself have been uncertain, as well? Why not make it possible for me to truly, utterly fail my mission and have the collectors win? Wouldn’t that add even more tension to the game?) — how will I react?
I honestly do not know.
But I desperately want to find out.
I think Mass Effect 2 does a pretty good job of giving the player difficult choices. The majority of the game is built to forge connections with these characters you choose for your mission, and then you are in a position to put all of them all in harms way. Now somewhere along the line of my first play through I was under the impression that someone was supposed to die no matter what, similar to Virmire in ME1(I blame myself for abandoning the internet to avoid spoilers). So I definitely favored certain characters and tried to keep them out of harms way. This backfired for me a bit (poor Thane…). Now if I was aware you could have saved everyone, I think it would have been less exciting. At first I was kicking my self for not spending two seconds looking at the “no one left behind” achievement, but I think I really got a better experience being ignorant of a 100% perfect game possibility. Now for ME3, I think the only organic choice would to have the big choices not only effect the survival of your team, but broader things; and for the sake of being practical, I think that can only be properly done in the last game of the trilogy where those decisions won’t have a direct sequel to impact.
I agree that it feels cheap for a squad member to die from a stray bullet after they’ve completed their mission without difficulty, but it’s probably the best way the situation could be handled.
If choosing the wrong squad member for tech-expert or fireteam-leader caused the mission to be failed and prevented you from continuing the game it would fail at being a ‘choice’ because it’s not a viable option to pick. Every player would HAVE to get everyone out alive because there’s no other way to complete the game.
Having an endgame scenario where squad members CAN die and you can STILL complete objectives allows players to have those moments of doubt and guilt and fear. Could these deaths have been handled better? Maybe, but maybe at the expense of every seeing them.
I don’t mean that the ending should have been structured in the exact same way as before, where you’re being judged on the efficiency of your squad decisions and only the consequences (NPC death vs total failure) are changed.
I mean to say, what if, rather than purely rating the player on how good they are at choosing particular people for particular jobs, the game was presenting you with lose-lose scenarios and forcing you to choose the lesser of two evils? Like, half your crew is about to get poisoned by Evil Collector Gas or something, but if you go back to save them, you triple the difficulty of the mission itself and greatly increase your chances of not being able to stop the Reapers. Not just, “if you make one poor decision, everyone dies forever.”
Wait, you felt bad for your Fable self? Protip: the wife and kids are not *actual* wife and kids. They’re polygons, texture maps, and actors paid to say charming things that would eventually loop on you.
So I shouldn’t care about Rorschach because he’s just ink on a page? Or whether Harry Potter lives or dies at the end of the 7th book because he’s just words on paper? Nor should I give a damn about Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Departed because he’s not a real person, just a character being portrayed in a film?
Actually, I didn’t feel too emotional over much in ME2 until after the final mission I headed up to the Captain’s cabin and found my picture of Ashley Williams was face down because I flirted too much with everyone.
Then I felt like crap.
A simplistic example, but one that came to mind nevertheless;
Grand Theft Auto IV. One of the few games I remember presenting decisions with neither choice rewarding nor condemning. Several times throughout the game, you were given an opportunity to murder an NPC whose fate had no bearing in subsequent gameplay.
Indeed, there were several optional executions that presented you with additional trinkets such as missions and encounters, many hours later, but what alienated me during my first time experiencing the game was the fact that the majority of decisions gave me nothing.
The finest example of this is the prologue to the endgame. (Spoilers, der.) Niko Bellic, the protagonist, has come to America. As you learn throughout the plot, he’s come for one reason only: Revenge. The entire game is fueled by this. Niko’s incentive to travel through Liberty City’s underworld and engage in these nasty odd-jobs is the hope that his employers would help him track down the man that betrayed him and his comrades ten years earlier. And alas, twenty-five hours later, Niko finally finds this man on his knees, hands tied behind him with Niko’s gun at his forehead.
By this time, you and Niko have squared off with many more shady characters, so you find that this isn’t all you have on your plate. More vendettas have been sworn, and there are places to be after this, but before you leave there’s this decision to make.
I spared the man my first time playing, and found myself watching the credits roll later that night, but what lingered in the back of my head was how there wasn’t any sort of pat on the back for allowing this drug addled war veteran live the rest of his days in a guilt prison. Apart from in-game dialog acknowledging what I did, no achievement notice popped up, and I didn’t get any wealthier. I even reloaded the save and killed him for the sake of experimenting, and again I found that there was no “right” choice.
After viewing the video you posted, that meaning of that segment has been much more articulated for me. I feel a closer appreciation for what that game presented; an opportunity for me to speak to myself about who I am and what I would do.
It’s just something that came to mind.
Here’s the solution, worked everytime for me: Send Legion thru the tube; Assign Garrus or Miranda as the second squad leader; Have that bitch Jacob take the doctor or the whole crew back; and have either Jack or Samara do the biotic barrier. This part does not care about your opinion of who is the best, they want only want who they think is the best. Legion is best tech because he IS tech, Garrus and Miranda are best leaders becuase they were team leaders, Jacob is a bitch because he’s a bitch, and Jack and Samara are biotic beasts becuase it says so in their bios. There, that should get you 100% survival.
I thought the choices were pretty obvious by the descriptions of the characters. My issue was that Mordin died for no reason; I had everyone’s loyalty, made all the right decisions, but he still randomly died at the end. That was kind of cool but still annoying. Ultimately I loaded a save, put him in my squad for the final battle, and he lived. As a consumer, I just couldn’t deal with the idea of not seeing one of my favorite character’s content in ME3. Ultimately, I do wish that I had just been forced to deal with it. I couldn’t decide if it was cool or not that one of my squad mates — one of my favorite squad mates — just caught a bullet and drop dead because, hey, that’s war, right? So my insecurity just kind of wrestled me into reloading a save and doing the safe, sure-thing. And I’m still not sure if I’m happy about that, either…
Ugh.
Stop saying “ultimately”!
*Spoiler reply!*
The ending of fable 2 was probably the hardest decision I’ve ever made in a video game, and within a few minutes I dreadfully regretted it, seeing as how my dog and my gypsy family was gone and I didn’t even have the money to buy the castle so I have to waste time on lame quests and gathering rent until I can buy it. I miss my dog…
I had an opposite experience with Fable to most of you guys by the sounds of it. In fact, for me, it wasn’t so much a choice as a problem, as to borrow the terminology of the video Anthony linked. At the end of the game, I still had stuff to do, items to collect, achievement to unlock. I knew I needed my dog back to get the majority of them, and I knew the game allowed free-play after the action was over. Sadly, it just wasn’t a decision. If I wanted to max the game out in a single playthrough (which I did, as I had a pile of games building up around me), I had to turn the choice into a problem.
In hindsight, it kind of sucks. And when thinking back to it from a narrative point of view (I’m a screenwriter, so these kinds of things weigh on my mind way more than they should), I should have chosen one of the alternatives; a decision for the greater good would have been more fitting for my character. But in the moment, I simply couldn’t. The rationality of my brain took control and I knew that if I wanted to attain everything that I still had remaining in the game, I had to be selfish. Shame, really.
That video was great, but I don’t see the need for a vague spoiler tag for ME2/DA:O. The video was made in March ‘09. There was that one quip about blue alien sex or the regular variety, but I don’t think that counts as a spoiler.
May I also add Army of Two: The 40th day. Every moral choice I took turned out to be bull. I beat the game twice and alternated with two friends so I found out both outcomes right after I did the other. Ultimately I felt cheated. Never did I think this really changed the story. Obvious choices were not what I thought. Just something to look up on youtube if you have the time. Pretty much anything I did someone died. Plus the morality system in that game seems largely cosmetic.
I understand where your coming from here. Making choices that effect things/people that you’ve known from the begining is one of the best things in video games. Still, it’s hard for games to come up with these dificult choices. Like in infamous, where all your choices boiled down to being a jerk or Mother Taresa. And even when you do get a choice that really shows what the player believes in, they don’t always appreciate it. I remember my parents talking about a game (they weren’t specific which) where you had a choice of fighting the last boss, or joining with him. if you decide to join him, he shot you in the back and you died after playing through the whole game. They said they were ticked off, but I can see why it was put in. It makes you think, “what if I could skip the fight and end the game now,” or, “maybe I do want to side with him.” I generaly enjoy having to make these choices. It’s the kind of things that make storylines worth playing.