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This is what I loved about Deus Ex, actions had consequences. Too bad it didn't catch on with later games.

gmueckl 5y ago
Deus Ex only had a few moments with slightly difference based on your actions. The first one is the boss' reaction to your first mission depending on how violent you are in your approach. You get a few lines of praise or a chewing out and the weapons master will issue you some different gear for the next mission. That's about it. Later on, there are smaller difference I think like whether to manage to get the code word to activate a kill switch, whether you save a hostage... but the consequences are fairly minimal and confined each time. I'm more impressed with the handling of consequences in Mass Effect 1 to 3. If you carry a single save game through all three games, the third game can become drastically different. One member of your party won't survive ME1 (it's your choice who that is) and the other one will substitute for them in ME 2 and 3. You can lose an almost arbitrary set of party members at the end of ME2. ME3 has a set of alternate party members to draw on when the main ones are gone. The fates of multiple NPCs can carry through all three games and end in very different ways (e.g. Karin Chakwas, Conrad Werner, Gianna Parasini). The controversy of the ME3 ending aside, the last entry of the series changes remarkably depending on your earlier decisions. Getting all of this straight must have been an enormous effort.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Mass Effect was still a massive disappointment though. So many choices, but they all converge into the exact same endings instead of diverging into wildly different possibilites. It really only determines how optimized the outcome is, the result is still the same. The only way you can fail is if you literally choose to do so at the very last moment.
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    Let's be realistic here: there's only so much that you can do on any realistic budget. A more elaborate and variable ending than what the ME series got at the end of ME3 would be a really big undertaking. I believe that the rest of the game would have suffered greatly from reduced resources if ending hadn't been as railroaded as it was. Maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but I got many hours of enjoyable gameplay out the series, so I can forgive an unsatisfying ending.
- djur 5y ago
  Deus Ex has a few more examples, like the fates of Paul and Jaime, but each of these things is explicitly scripted based on event flags, which explains why there aren't a whole lot of examples.
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    Right, I forgot about those! Still, these moments are designed to mostly be self-contained and have little to no interplay with each other. This keeps a nice lid on the complexity of the narrative. A game's narrative complexity can easily get out of control when impactful player choices are allowed to become combinatorial. Implementing that many different outcomes quickly becomes infeasible.
    - djur 5y ago
      In the interactive fiction world, where a great deal of effort has been put into complex, responsive storylines, a common structure is the "branch-and-bottleneck" -- allowing a variety of paths through a particular area, but all of the paths bunch back together into a single path at the end, with possibly a few major flags enduring for the rest of the narrative. As this article mentions, enforcing some structure on the narrative like this not only makes implementation easier but also tends to make the story more coherent for the player: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/ https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-...

Deus Ex only had a few moments with slightly difference based on your actions. The first one is the boss' reaction to your first mission depending on how violent you are in your approach. You get a few lines of praise or a chewing out and the weapons master will issue you some different gear for the next mission. That's about it. Later on, there are smaller difference I think like whether to manage to get the code word to activate a kill switch, whether you save a hostage... but the consequences are fairly minimal and confined each time. I'm more impressed with the handling of consequences in Mass Effect 1 to 3. If you carry a single save game through all three games, the third game can become drastically different. One member of your party won't survive ME1 (it's your choice who that is) and the other one will substitute for them in ME 2 and 3. You can lose an almost arbitrary set of party members at the end of ME2. ME3 has a set of alternate party members to draw on when the main ones are gone. The fates of multiple NPCs can carry through all three games and end in very different ways (e.g. Karin Chakwas, Conrad Werner, Gianna Parasini). The controversy of the ME3 ending aside, the last entry of the series changes remarkably depending on your earlier decisions. Getting all of this straight must have been an enormous effort.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Mass Effect was still a massive disappointment though. So many choices, but they all converge into the exact same endings instead of diverging into wildly different possibilites. It really only determines how optimized the outcome is, the result is still the same. The only way you can fail is if you literally choose to do so at the very last moment.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Let's be realistic here: there's only so much that you can do on any realistic budget. A more elaborate and variable ending than what the ME series got at the end of ME3 would be a really big undertaking. I believe that the rest of the game would have suffered greatly from reduced resources if ending hadn't been as railroaded as it was. Maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but I got many hours of enjoyable gameplay out the series, so I can forgive an unsatisfying ending.
djur 5y ago
Deus Ex has a few more examples, like the fates of Paul and Jaime, but each of these things is explicitly scripted based on event flags, which explains why there aren't a whole lot of examples.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Right, I forgot about those! Still, these moments are designed to mostly be self-contained and have little to no interplay with each other. This keeps a nice lid on the complexity of the narrative. A game's narrative complexity can easily get out of control when impactful player choices are allowed to become combinatorial. Implementing that many different outcomes quickly becomes infeasible.
  - djur 5y ago
    In the interactive fiction world, where a great deal of effort has been put into complex, responsive storylines, a common structure is the "branch-and-bottleneck" -- allowing a variety of paths through a particular area, but all of the paths bunch back together into a single path at the end, with possibly a few major flags enduring for the rest of the narrative. As this article mentions, enforcing some structure on the narrative like this not only makes implementation easier but also tends to make the story more coherent for the player: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/ https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-...