What?s the point of making your own decisions in an RPG

[Fire Daemon]

Which RPGs exactly? I pretty much just play Fallout 3, and your choices certainly affect that game.

Failed on all counts. You kill megaton and you know what happens? Nothing really, sure you get some bad karma but its not like it follows you around really. The only thing your karma did is well, decide if a few people could join your party or if regulators or talon company mercs will get you.

Have you beaten the main story? What decision did you make at the end of the game? If you ask me, picking the good ending had a srastic change on the game by efectively ending it. Oh sure you could load up a previous checkpoint and abandon that quest but then you aren't finishing the game are you? That one choice at the end (trying not to give away too many spoilers) completely changened the game.

And blowing up Megaton did have a big change in the game. A lot of the quests came from Megaton. If you blew it up before talking to the guy about your father then you have no idea where he is pretty much leaving you to search the wastes untill you happen to come across GNR. And Megaton for me was my hub, the place I would go for supplies and just to relax, in my evil play through it wasn't there after I blew it up. I couldn't travel to Rivet city because being too low a level and having little ammo for my pistol there was little chance I could make it and I didn't have any Rad away so swiming down the river was off. Not having enough supplies meant that I had to live off the traders I killed as I traveled across the wastes unlike in my good character where I ignored those traders most of the time. My evil character was a scavenger who lived off what she could find while my good character was someone that would buy all of his supplies, a very different style of play don't you think?

 

[mark_n_b]

Well if the point of making these dialogue decisions altering the finer points of the way the story is presented (minor dialogue shifts) or the change in areas of game play (sneaking around base game instead of repeated fighting encounter through the base sorta thing) doesn't seem worth while to you, this is likely not the game type for you.

Fact of the matter is this is an ongoing issue with RPG's as they are currently put out in the market, for most of them different decisions don't do anything more than keep you from opening up an easter egg or two.

The point of it is to allow players more control over the role presented to them so that they can feel more connected to the central character enjoying the feeling of taking on a "role" in this role playing game.

There are scant few with a branching story / game-play dynamic in which different decisions do ultimately effect the way the game plays out (star ocean 1 and 2 do it quite nicely) or the entire game plot (the nineties blade runner was stupid awesome for that in my opinion) which is a grand tragedy in modern gaming, but with more people of this opinion it will change around eventually.

 

[Alex_P]

The mention of D&D reminds me...

The same issues often come up in pen-and-paper games, too (heck, the community has fancy terms like "railroading" or "illusionism" to describe them).

There are a lot of choices associated with different kinds of choices, different authority structures, different understandings of what "roleplaying" is.

-- Alex

 

[Alex_P]

If you want to try out different models of narrative choice in their pure form, without being distracted by game length, graphics, or issues of game-like choices (or having to part with money just to see an example of a technique), take a look at some interactive fiction.

These are all particularly short and sweet:
- The illusion of choice: Photopia
- A few simple binary choices used to produce thematic story: Voices (the ending)
- Truly wild, runaway choices like nothing else you've seen: Galatea

-- Alex

 

[Syntax Error]

I love choices in RPG's, even if they don't affect the outcome of the game. The best example for this would be Persona 3. There is a very deep dialogue tree in there, and most of the time, it's great to reload and look at the reactions for different dialogues (the scenario when Yukari and the Hero are sneaking in school late at night, trying to find the keys to the gym, and yes, in Hentai, that would mean something else).

 

[not a zaar]

On topic, I really dont care about choices in RPG's, because there actually aren't any. even in Fallout you are constrained as to what you do. Either way, a good portion of any RPG is the story and I perfere to leave it to the pros.

You truly are an idiot, aren't you? You clearly have no idea what the word choice means.

Let's give you an example.

Town A is under attack, and the hero walks by. You companion says "Let's save them!"

If you can answer "Yay, lets!" and nothing else. You DON'T have a choice.

If you can answer "Yay! Let's!" or "No, screw them." and you save them whatever you say, you have the illusion of choice. You still don't have a choice.

If you can answer "Yay, let's!" or "No, screw them." and whatever you pick is what happens, you HAVE a CHOICE.



It doens't matter if it's preplanned. It has to be. YOU STILL HAVE A CHOICE! How hard is that to understand, there's like three people, at least already in this thread who doens't understand that. If you can choose between different actions, or responses, and these change what happens in the game you have a choice. That's what a choice is.

Giving you total freedom is something completely unrelated, and you people should go back to school, because you seriously missed something in your education. Total freedom is good and all, but it's irrelevant when talking about choice. You have tons of choices in Fallout or Arcanum, no matter if every response is planned out in advance. They usually don't have any real effect on the real storyline though, just a few people at a time. That doesn't matter. They're still choices.

Yes, this. Japanese RPGs for the most part give you NO CHOICE. You're on a strictly linear story track. The only choice you get in these games is wether or not you take on the hidden side quests for ultra powerful items. On the other hand, in a game like Fallout you have more choices. Think for example about the water chip. You have several ways of getting it. You can sneak around Necropolis and help the ghouls, fixing their pump and getting the chip as a reward. Alternatively you can blow through the ghouls, sneak through their sewers and steal the chip from the pump. Or you can just go in guns blazing through the Super Mutant guards and steal the chip that way. You can play however you like and whatever way suits your skills.

 

[Silver]

That's not really much a choice though. Sure, it's a choice of how you approach something, just like you can pick different weapons in another game, or whatever. The only choice there is really if you want to side with the ghouls or against them.

The sequel has better examples, where you can go with Vault city and blow up the ghoul power plant, you can do something to Vault city for the ghouls, but I don't know what, or you can work out a peace treaty between them.

A choice should really have meaning. In Fallout a real choice would have been if you could sell the Vault out to the mutants, and then actually do something, not just get a game over. If you could actually change something.

 

[Alex_P]

That's not really much a choice though. Sure, it's a choice of how you approach something, just like you can pick different weapons in another game, or whatever. The only choice there is really if you want to side with the ghouls or against them.

That's the only moral choice there, perhaps.

Other choices are, arguably, just as important for characterization.

And "fight or sneak" is certainly a more meaningful gameplay choice than "fight these guys or fights these other guys".

-- Alex