Your choices matter (but aren't signposted)

When I think of Perfect Dark on the N64, I think of two things. The first being the hours I spent in multiplayer, making it by far the game I played most on that platform. It was, after a steady process of selling games off, one of the last I owned for the system before I sold it as well. (Star Fox 64 was the other, and we’ll come back to it briefly).

The other thing I think of when I think of Perfect Dark is the “Area 51: Escape” mission. At the end you, a friendly agent, and an alien who was the target of your rescue mission are in a hangar preparing to escape in the alien’s saucer. The only problem is that the craft only seats two. The friendly agent tells you to get in the saucer and flee while he covers you. As a kid when I played this mission, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, at least not immediately. So I sort of lollygagged next the agent, and lo – Joanna Dark, your protagonist/avatar, tells the friendly agent to get in the saucer instead and she’ll fight her way out. What follows is a madcap hoverbike ride through the halls of Area 51 and eventual escape. I was so completely thrilled by this entire turn of events. And what sticks with me most is how organic it felt in the moment. There was no indication at all that the game was going to give the characters another way out of their predicament besides the friendly agent heroically sacrificing himself.

I compare that to other games and how they handle choice and they seem uniformly to come in the form of PRESS X TO HARVEST/B TO RESCUE binary choices spelled out in the UI, or branching dialogue trees. A few adapt to, for example, how bloodthirsty your playstyle is like Dishonored or Infamous (maybe Fable? I’ve never played those so someone else will have to weigh in).

I mentioned Star Fox 64 because it used semi-hidden objectives to subtly alter your playthrough/which levels you would play. If anyone can think of other games that do this I’d like to know some examples.

So basically what I’m looking for ITT is examples of other games where there are, I guess, branching paths without an obvious signpost.

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cave story (letting curly keep her machine gun, ignoring booster in the labyrinth, giving the polar star back to the gun hermit)

the ending of dark souls (hilariously)

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Deus Ex is of course the one true canonical example of this.

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The bloody baron quest in Witcher 3 comes to mind

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Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has all kinds of subtle tracking of your actions, beyond just how you answer questions in the therapy sessions. If your gaze lingers on a poster on a wall, for example, that’s taken into consideration. Characters can have drastically different personalities, the “monsters” can take on different forms, and, of course, there are different endings.

It’s impressive to me just how many small details vary in that game between playthroughs. I should play it again at some point.

My all-time favorite example of branching paths in a video game is probably Shadow of Destiny (a.k.a. Shadow of Memories). Evidently the writer and director for that game, Junko Kawano, was also involved with Twinbee RPG on PS1. I wonder what that game is like.

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I feel like there was a relatively recent example of this which I should be remembering, but I cannot now recall–people crowed about how even something as simple as which direction you left a screen from would change the progression of events? Something like that, anyway. Can’t remember.

Do you mean Nier: Automata? You trigger some of the endings just by leaving an area in a certain spot. (I have seen only a handful of the endings, but I stumbled upon a couple like that.)

No, I’m pretty sure whatever I’m thinking of was 2D, not 3D. I might just be conflating half-remembered stories about different games into something new, though.

image

The choices don’t end up mattering that much, but

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whether you end metal gear solid with meryl alive or not is a choice predicated on the torture scene with ocelot iirc

Okay, 10 posts in and not one mention of Alpha Protocol, The Best at Making Choices Matter. You’re tutorialed through the first mission but then you’re set free to handle the next three areas however you like and the mid-story will be different because of this. The story will also be different by how you respond to dialogue prompts or how you went about a mission because it affects how other important characters “feel” about you. Maybe you’ve earned one’s trust and they’ll be willing to help out during a mission or completely put off by your smug attitude and flip you off.

The other big thing is that while you can pick dumb choices, you aren’t particularly punished by it. In fact, in some cases no matter what you’re given a different small incremental bonus to your stats. So there are no wrong choices but merely ones you want to explore during this iteration of the narrative. This is important because it allows the designers to not feel constrained by good/evil that other games fall into and have a gradient of subjective morality.

It’s a shame the core gameplay isn’t particularly great (boss fights especially) because it’s probably the best realtime Choose Your Own Adventure game that’s been created thus far.

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Deus Ex was marketed as being all about choice and gives you all sorts of signposted choices, but every now and then it throws something at you without a signpost and is amazing.

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imma be real with you select futon

i don’t really give a fuck if my choices in vidcons mean anything

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I mean, I thought deus ex was just as great as the next dude, but I think lots of games are pretty great. sometimes those games are a deus ex and sometimes they ain’t. which is a way of saying there is nothing intrinsically valuable about choice

doesn’t mean thread is invalid!!!

just, you know, thought that I should mention

As a kid I always hated Jonathon in Perfect Dark, but leaving him to die felt like the ‘incorrect’ way to do it. So I always chose the escape by hoverbike option, then shot Jonathon in the head (as well as Grimshaw because screw that guy and his dumb voice) during the Carrington Institute invasion mission, because the game doesn’t penalise you for doing so.

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Thanks

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The prison escape in Chrono Trigger is also an opaque choice. You can bust yourself out, or wait until the day of your execution and Lucca will show up to bust you out

You probably knew that, but it felt worth mentioning

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Wario land II for the game boy? Not sure if it’s exactly what you mean, but I remember playing it as a kid and being similarly delighted to discover there were multiple, non-signposted paths through the game. One in particular: at the beginning of the game, wario’s castle is under siege and you begin by pressing any button to wake him up. If you do nothing, though, wario stays asleep and after a minute or two some enemies break into his room and carry him out of the castle, still asleep. This effectively starts an alternative storyline with a bunch of new levels.

As a kid I discovered it completely by accident: I began a new game, went to the bathroom, and came back to find wario outside his castle, rather than asleep in his bed. I was like wtf but also super excited there was way more to the game than I initially thought. Also that it was a kinda dynamic world that actually responded in interesting ways to my (lack of) input.

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Does Mega Man X count as a fringe case because beating Chill Penguin’s level results in all the lava in Flame Mammoth’s level being cooled? Game never gives any indication something like that would happen. Do any other games in the series change the levels like that? I feel like their must be examples I’m not thinking of.

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So like,

Undertale?

I mean, it’s definitely a heavy-handed Press X To Kill Your Friends kind of game, but there are a lot of small things that you can do that impact your game later but aren’t really obvious. In particular, I’m thinking of flowey berating you for killing toriel, then loading your save game and sparing her.

Are we still spoilering undertale?

Anyway, most of the things that aren’t signposted are things that don’t really change your game in a significant way, but it changes or unlocks tons of weird optional text or encounters. The amount of detail in that game is incredible.

EDIT: Okay I found this thing: If you tell the frog that you don’t like yellow names, he’ll offer to get rid of them. (Monsters that you can spare have yellow names) If you then talk to him again and say you want them back, he says that everyone already threw away their yellow names, but they still have last year’s pink names they can use instead. For the rest of the playthrough, monsters you can spare have pink names. Later on, if you examine a garbage pile in the trash heap, it’ll mention there’s a pile of yellow names.

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