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)

[Icenick99]

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)

I for one didnt like fable choices because I felt it didnt matter in the end. In my opinion Good/Bad is so Black and White, I prefer Grey. Give the player real choices, maybe hes not obsessed with destroying the world but that village has to go. In your game by destroying the village your more inclined to destroy the world at the end of the game.

The best game I ever played with choices was for PS2 called Way of the Samurai. It did have the problem like I mentioned in Fable where the end was so similar it feels like all those choices were undone. But if you killed someone to get his sword, at the end of the game he wont come back and have your back in the final battle.

Anyway to get back to your question, Im a fan of choices that make sense, I would say no limit but make the choices count. In regards to kill this and get instant gratification now, im not a fan of, let the player choose the choice because he wants to personalize his story not because it grants him a new powerful weapon.
If that village pissed me off, and given the option to save them or let them burn, with no over powered reward, im going to let them burn. On the contrary if that village has people who helped me and had my back, I want to help them, but not forfeit the best weapon in the game.

Hope that helps.

[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)

I for one didnt like fable choices because I felt it didnt matter in the end. In my opinion Good/Bad is so Black and White, I prefer Grey. Give the player real choices, maybe hes not obsessed with destroying the world but that village has to go. In your game by destroying the village your more inclined to destroy the world at the end of the game.

The best game I ever played with choices was for PS2 called Way of the Samurai. It did have the problem like I mentioned in Fable where the end was so similar it feels like all those choices were undone. But if you killed someone to get his sword, at the end of the game he wont come back and have your back in the final battle.

Anyway to get back to your question, Im a fan of choices that make sense, I would say no limit but make the choices count. In regards to kill this and get instant gratification now, im not a fan of, let the player choose the choice because he wants to personalize his story not because it grants him a new powerful weapon.
If that village pissed me off, and given the option to save them or let them burn, with no over powered reward, im going to let them burn. On the contrary if that village has people who helped me and had my back, I want to help them, but not forfeit the best weapon in the game.

Hope that helps.

So by that your talking small things like how your character acts,
so after slaughtering a town(From miss info or something that is against your moral ideas) you feel like you must save all those in need from then on
or
finds it easier to take a life without any second thoughts after killing a couple dozen people.

To stuff like quest X opens if you help this person.
+X to stat

Cause personaly that is what I'm thinking myself.

[Icenick99]

So by that your talking small things like how your character acts,
so after slaughtering a town(From miss info or something that is against your moral ideas) you feel like you must save all those in need from then on
or
finds it easier to take a life without any second thoughts after killing a couple dozen people.

To stuff like quest X opens if you help this person.
+X to stat

Cause personaly that is what I'm thinking myself.

I don't quite follow, but if you got the idea thats great .
I meant like, have you ever played a game or watch a show, where a character perhaps your friend betrays you and you see the main character forgive him. Depending the act, I feel like that person should have killed him not forgiven him.

This is what I was trying to get at, destroying a village per say or killing a farmer, doesnt mean you have ambitions to wipe out the world. It may just be that that person wronged you and you want revenge. That make more sense?

Im suggesting you say away from the Black and White, at least add more options if you want to go that route.
Maybe have:
The Saint - All good alignment points, goal is to save the world
The Good - Mostly good, wants to save his village
The Loner - 50/50, wants to survive
The Thief - Some bad, looking to steal that rare treasure
The Mercenary - Mostly bad, kills when the price is right
The Evil one - Pure evil, wants to destroy the world.

Stealing from a merchant or killing some people doesnt mean your hero is bent on global destruction.

I never liked games that claim to give you choice but in fable to get the best skills you have to be completely evil or good. I find it very linear that way, you are either good doing all the good choices or bad doing all the bad.

This post has been edited by Icenick99: Apr 9 2012, 01:51 PM

[dorky106]

I meant like, have you ever played a game or watch a show, where a character perhaps your friend betrays you and you see the main character forgive him. Depending the act, I feel like that person should have killed him not forgiven him.

This is what I was trying to get at, destroying a village per say or killing a farmer, doesnt mean you have ambitions to wipe out the world. It may just be that that person wronged you and you want revenge. That make more sense?

Im suggesting you say away from the Black and White, at least add more options if you want to go that route.
Maybe have:
The Saint - All good alignment points, goal is to save the world
The Good - Mostly good, wants to save his village
The Loner - 50/50, wants to survive
The Thief - Some bad, looking to steal that rare treasure
The Mercenary - Mostly bad, kills when the price is right
The Evil one - Pure evil, wants to destroy the world.

Well was going to use a variable to show how good or bad you are somewhere (Though I would need a script for it.....)
And let the player choose his actions, if you feel like he wronged you enough to kill him than kill him if not set him free or take him to the village guard after dis-arming the person
And based on if the village burned or not, alters the amount of points toward good/evil

Say if the village burned to the ground you could kill him and change would happen
Where as letting him walk would be bad
and handing him to the guard would be good

Where you have to beat him in X turns for the village not to burn that much
That way its not as plain as good and evil.

[Icenick99]

That sounds good

[KD648]

Well, as someone who's game is based entirely around player choices, I'm going to say the correct number depends on how much you want your choices to matter. I haven't played Chrono Cross, so I can't comment on that, but to me it seems there's two ways to go.

1) You can have a bunch of little choices that sort of matter. I.E. the Bioware system. In Dragon Age and Mass Effect you get a bunch of little decisions and tons of alternative dialogue, but no matter what you do the player hits the same set pieces (essentially). You still defeat the reapers and have the exact same main quests, but you may have different party members and different dialogue. In this case, I'd say you can have as many as you want to program. The point of this system is so that the CHARACTER you're playing feels different. The game still feels the same, but each time you play it you feel like the events are happening to a different protagonist.

2) You can have a small number of choices that have a massive influence. My game uses this system, and I'm not going to pretend that it's the only one like it, but I can't think of any other examples off the top of my head. For example, I only have three big choices in my game, but each one changes not only the party members with you, but also the quests, dungeons, all dialogue, ending, etc. The point of this system is that the STORY seems different. There are some huge downsides to this though. For one, your game will be much shorter than others (mine is only eight to nine hours), and you're going to make a TON of content that people won't see. There are twelve "missions" in my game, and a player will only see six in one run. With this route you can only have a few choices (in fact, three was overkill in my case), but it's an entirely different experience each time.

Both are valid choices, and the first system is much more commercially viable because it takes a lot less work for a much longer player experience. And for what it's worth, with the "good/bad" options, I liked the system Fable 2 used (even though I wished it would have been more complex). It had a good/bad scale and a pure/corrupt" scale. It would make the player feel more unique if there were more scales and more complexity to a game's judgement of character. "Soft-Hearted/Ruthless" and "Traditional/Free-Spirited" are some examples that I fould find interesting without going straight for Good and Evil (I would find better words though, those were just off the top of my head).

[dorky106]

Guess it is really based off what your doing and how much time your willing to put into your game
Cause with the new VX Ace being out and having some more options and having more tiles, you could have alot of fun making a long game with a ton of choices along the way.
Though anything that changes the story would shorten it of course.

Cause hell if I'm making a game with 30 hours of game play with quests that are based on options as you play or like 3 different endings.

[WanderingWordsmi...]

There was an article about this on Gamasutra, recently. It went something like this:

Giving a person too much choice in any situation is considered a bad idea. Say your friend sends you to the supermarket to pick up some flour for cookies. When you reach the store and find the right section, you're faced with about 40 different bags of flour from various brands, of various types, sizes, etc. You don't know if there's a specific brand of flour your friend prefers, or whether one type is better than the other, and this kind of thought process becomes paralyzing to the point where you just give up.
Now, say you were in the same situation, except this time you go to a corner store. There's only three types of flour here; bread, cake, and all-purpose. This time it's much simpler. You know that cookies are neither bread nor are they cake, so the all-purpose is a safe bet and you get that, problem solved.

The idea here is that you shouldn't present your players with too much choice, because they'll become paralyzed by the sheer variety of options and the amount of conflict that they generate. At most, if I remember what the article said, you should present your player with no more than seven options at any given branch.

I'll try and find the article if you want, but I hope that helps.

This post has been edited by WanderingWordsmith: Apr 11 2012, 12:10 AM

[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.