Player Based Choices Options

[dorky106]

How many player choices is too many?
I know this is going to change from person to person but I'm really wondering on this one.

Mainly looking for input on this.

The type of choices I'm talking about are like this.
Choose to slaughter a village in your game so your get a cool weapon or are no longer able to get something later in the game.

Or

Being in a town and trying to figure out how to advance so you have different choices each way giving the player different characters in their party.

Even to the point of
after X amount of good choices you save the world instead of joining the dark side to destroy it.
Or if your neutral you can choose at the end of the game
if bad you join the bad dude to blow the world to kingdom come.

I know player based choices have become more popular in games, such as in fable or Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning (Where you have a F ton of choices). Basicly having a choice at almost everything turn. (Which to me seems a bit too much)

Cause you would of course want a balance no matter what you pick to do.
Bad Example: Fable
Want easy EXP and don't care if you go bad. Go Flame Circle in a town, killing everyone.

Good Example: Chrono Cross
Based on what you do as the game progresses you can get every character and try them all out to make yourself a uber team or play as you want and make the game harder on you.

(Can't think of any other ways of explaining this right now)

[Moonpearl]

To me it's not a matter of how many choices you get, but rather how you are presented with them. In many games, when you get to talk to a person, you get basical choices such as ask politely/insult them/ignore them - it doesn't take much intelligence to understand which choice is the best if you wish to obtain something from them. Thus, to make things a bit harder, some game designers make their choices very ambiguous or otherwise counter-intuitive (binding responses with unexpected results), so it boils down to guessing how the game designer thinks - which I personally find terribly annoying.

However, there are many other ways to give players choices, other than presenting them with a list of 2 or 3 items - which only implies an optimization process, a.k.a which option is better between X clearly known and outlined options). Let me take old-school adventure games as an exemple (think LucasArts's Monkey Island or Indiana Jones): in those games you have to combine actions with objects, thus making a very large amount of possibilities (especially since some interactive items are put in the scenery as "decoys", they play no part in the game's advancement). If we were computers we could easily crack such puzzles because basically you just have to try all options until one gets to work, and repeat the process until the game is completed. However, since it's too much a bother for us humans, we'd rather try and find a logical unfolding to our sequences of actions (i.e. I know I must open that door but I don't have a key, maybe I should get a NPC to give it to me, but I've got to find who and give them somethings in return...) So technically speaking it's still optimization between X, but that X is so large that it takes imagination to try and cut down all the possibilities to only those who seem relevant.

Another example is even older: text-based adventure games. It's essentially the same, except that you have to enter all actions/objects names manually with your keyboard. The difference is that you're no longer presented with options at all, you have to find them out by yourself. A simple example: you are locked up in a room with only a window to escape. The object is clearly outlined, but you have to figure the appropriate action by yourself. You try "open window", it says it's locked. You try "unlock windows", it says you'd need something to unlock it. The answer would be "break window". Computer processing-wise, it's still about finding the appropriate possibility in a finite array, since an action needs to be known by the game to be recognized - but in the player's mind, since he's not presented with all options from that finite array, he can't know its size and its elements for sure and thus it seems infinite. Then they need to explore new, unknown possibilities and that requires creativity.

While that last example might seem a bit extreme to nowadays players, my point is that it's not about the kind/number of choices the player is given, but rather what mental processes they call upon. Even very simple puzzles could prove tricky in old games because you had to figure the right way to do it, rather than choose between solve the puzzle/do something useless/wait and do nothing. That's what I tried to recreate with my keywords/verbal ineraction scripts. In my opinion, the best way to make a choice interesting is that the player doesn't realize it's a choice, or at least a deciding one. For example, you could ask your teammates for advice before taking decisive actions like going against a boss, and it would tighten your bond with them, thus opening to new possibilities in the future. You would not explicitly be presented with a dull and obvious ask teammates for advice/go for the boss right now choice, but rather hinted than doing so could be a good idea throughout the game - in the player's mind, it makes all the difference.