Those two terms do not have even remotely the same meaning. In fact the easiest way to ensure that no choices are bad choices is to have no meaningful choices.
It’s definitely a thin tightrope. Deus Ex had a swimming skill (or was it a cyber mod thing?) if I remember correctly. It was utterly useless for about 90 percent of the game. Why give the player that choice?
On the other hand, a game were every skill point i spend basically just gives me more damage, then why bother giving me a choice at all? (Or a bioware RPG where no matter what I choose, the NPC spits back the same dialog)
Yes…
This is basically the choice blizzard has (or well, they had before i left) taken in regards to class balance. Instead of making each class good in their own way, they just made them all the same and generic so you can barely tell whether you brought a paladin, a warrior or a cross dressing hobbit because they all look, act and sound the same.
In reality the ONLY way to ensure that a player isn’t punished for bad decisions is to lower the complexity. If you’re playing a robot battle game where the player can pick between a sniper hand (good at long range, bad at short range) and a mêlée hand (good at short range, bad long range), if the player insists on fighting pure mêlée battles while equipped with the sniper hand, there is nothing you can do but punish them… UNLESS you just make both hands have exactly the same stats, which is what some developers are starting to do.
The mark of a good game is that players are informed of at least some of the details of their choice. If players aren’t told that the sniper hand isn’t meant for mêlée, them mêléeing with it isn’t a stupid choice that is the player’s fault, it is an uninformed choice that is the developer’s fault. Obviously the more depth in the mechanics, the less hand holding you can have, but you basically have to inform the player at least somewhat and let them make the choice.
The DA2 thread is REALLY good example of this. You have some people who seem to purposefully want to pick a group of party members that don’t fit together well as a team and then complain that it punishes them because they didn’t deign to think about what each person brings to the table. This is basically the equivalent of someone picking 5 professional korean starcraft players to fight against professional MMA fighters on UFC and then being surprised when the starcraft players lose at a role they don’t have strengths in.
Bioware has been… prioritizing different things in recent years, but they are still one of the VERY few companies making rpgs where you can actually make meaningful choices. Bioware might have given up on advancing the genre, but they are still way ahead of others who quit long before them or never tried in the first place.
While of course there are situations where the outcome in dialog is decided before the player’s choice, these are not the majority of cases.
I like the robot arm idea to boil this down -
In your above example I don’t think anyone would have any problems with the sniper arm being shit at melee and vice versa. Well anyone whose opinion I’d respect in this discussion.
The problem is that CRPG developers have a habit of making some character choices extremely powerful and the others extremely weak.
It would be like chosing the melee arm for your robot and finding out 25 hours later that your robot just can’t cut it because melee is crap.
For a real life example try playing an archer/thief in unmodded Oblivion. 250 arrows later that Daedra still isn’t dead.
In my dream CRPG my choices aren’t one point into strength, one into dex, and two in health every time I level up. My choices are telling the story of my character “He disappears into shadows!” “She wields a sword as if it were her arm” “His bravery inspires those around him!”
These choices would shape the type of character I want to play. I enter as a blank slate and by the time I finish I’m either a melee god, an arcane powerhouse, or a nimble thief or some combination of the three to use classic RPG roles.
In tabletop RPG interesting choices and character flavor is awesome because you are interacting with a very flexible DM or game - in CRPGs munchkin or go home I guess.
*Edit
Also one level in Deus Ex swimming skill was totally worth it, so many areas to poke around in and explore and loot to be had.
Some games might suggest a bad party design isn’t the easiest choice, which is fine. I don’t think the the goal of every player is to have the easiest game possible. I do think that you should be able to make more challenging choices without hitting an immediate roadblock though… the bards tale thing. I think being able to switch party members can help with that though, or at least having secondary type skills you can fall back on.
Here is the club available in Icewind Dale–and yet you can choose clubs as a weapon skill …
Exactly the sort of bad decision that shouldn’t be offered to players. Baldur’s Gate actually had some good clubs so there’s no reason for Icewind Dale players to suspect that some weapon skills might not be itemized.
And, as I said up thread, I agree. The Icewind Dale, and Bards Tale examples are bad ways to punish players for poor choices.
It scares me that he keeps using the word “fun.” I play RPGs for the grand cohesive arc, awe-inspiring moments, varied challenge, depth, and sometimes for fun too. I want rewarding gameplay that can be described with more words than “it’s fun.” Get off the two dimensional line that runs between old-fashioned troglodytes and streamlined fun. Make something exceptional instead.
Or maybe that’s just the curse of Tom Chick rattling around in my brain.
Something something “Something awesome happens everytime you press a button” something something
Why is he citing so many old (Icewind Dale, Temple of Elemental Evil) or even ancient (Bard’s Tale? Cmon…) games to “prove” his theories?
His whole idea of preventing players from making bad choices is nonesense, in my opinion. He even proves it himself in other nitpicks.
Mass Effect’s marginal differences between weapons was surely an attempt to have a loot system, but not allow it’s “Mechanical Chaos” to put anyone at a disadvantage because he didn’t get any truly good loot.
The same applies to other game areas. If you want to have genuinely good choices, there HAVE to be other choices that are at least worse.
Game design should strive to make sure these roles switch occasionally.
For example, in many a rpg, mages suck early on, but get quite some punch later. Naturally, you SHOULD be able to survive with your mage early on and your warrior SHOULD NOT become totally worthless in the late game - but that’s down to how design your game.
While I don’t feel randomness is strictly necessary in any good rpg, I’m quite fond of it in a lot of cases. Borderlands was mentioned.
Loads of weapons, many useless to you under the circumstances, but a good frequency of weapons that at least had unique advantages.
I’d take that over FO3/FNV/Oblivion’s loads and loads of lootable containers with toally pointless, useless mundane items any day.
rezaf
In the presence of reloading, there are no bad decisions and negative results anyway.
You conflate character growth with stat inflation. This is a common misteak among ppl who have been trained to play games with level grind.
Oh man, next thing you know, you’ll be complaining about hit points.
Which is fun, for you.
Furthermore, ppl seem to think of choices in RPGs solely through the lens of what affects their stats. The most significant, meaningful, emotionally invested choice I’ve made in any RPG in the last 10 years was in Mass Effect, and it didn’t have any impact on my stats (well… not my shooty stats, that is). It didn’t even have any measurable impact on the setting (at least, not in the first game). I refer, of course, to the rachni queen. That decision stopped me dead for 10 minutes, and the moment is still vivid in my brane, despite it being utterly unrelated to what most ppl are talking about here. I will bet money that most ME players felt the same way.
Totally agreed. One of the things that really made “The Witcher” awesome was the decisions you had to make which felt much more like pure role-playing.
Yeah it almost seems like I don’t want to see direct in-game consequences for big roleplaying decisions like that. Otherwise I start thinking about how it will affect my character and my game instead of making it an emotional decision.
Dragon Age had a few major decisions like that: what to do with the Anvil of the Void “only” had a minor effect on the endgame and a brief blurb in the epilogue. Who cares? But it still stopped me in my tracks like hong with the rachni queen. It was a great moment.
If you show the effects, you run the risk of having less impact than if you left it to the player’s imagination. I’m worried about this in ME3: I thought long and hard about the geth and genophage, but what if that simply forces me down an alternate path and I barely notice the effects? They’d be reducing genocide to a cheap gameplay mechanic.
There’s a risk leaving the consequences to the imagination too. If you don’t properly build up the emotional investment, the decision is even less meaningful than an obvious gameplay device. I had that problem in ME1: I didn’t have enough time to get invested in the rachni, and I didn’t give a shit about Ashley or Kaiden when it came to the famous binary decision.
Wiz 7 did it right IMO. Switching wasn’t too painful because you got a decent amount of points on level up, and because it felt to me like the actual weapon skill component wasn’t as large a part of the too-hit equation as is typical in such games. I think there was a degree of success system (so that you could barely hit/fail and get one of those “you do no damage/don’t penetrate armor/etc” type outcomes). I’m not so sure there wasn’t a level based to hit mechanic at work as well under the covers (in addition to bonuses from ability scores, magic weapons, and even the secret skills).
It’s one of the few games that did, though.
Not true, even in the narrow stats arena. Let’s say you have a game where you are a mage, and it supports multiple paths of development – one is a simple fire mage sort, where you blast shit all the time; another is as a summoning mage, where you are creating new creatures and then managing them in battle; and another is an illusion mage, where you are messing with opponents’ minds and making your party members invisible so they can backstab and so forth.
Deciding between those approaches is a meaningful choice, in that it affects how you play the game, and some people are going to want to play one way or the other.
If the game is balanced well, none of them are bad choices. If the game is balanced poorly, such that being a fire mage means you insta-kill just about everything (or that you don’t hurt most important enemies at all since they’re immune to fire), then there are bad choices.
If there are bad choices, the choices are less meaningful because only someone who hadn’t read the FAQ would choose the bad path.
Gamasutra has an article on exactly these issues: news. He even talks about the Ashley/Kaiden choice, and why it’s not really so interesting.