When I play RPGs I usually get into a pretty deep power
gaming cycle. Sometimes I'll take on the
persona of a character, especially when such matters are disconnected from loot
cycles (Star Wars: The Old Republic
is a great example of how to locate this particular sort of disconnect,
regardless of single player or multiplayer status) but for the most part my
carefully cultivated consideration of what my character might do goes out the
window when it opens up an opportunity for me to get an especially potent
anti-son-of-a-bitch machine. There are
exceptions to this rule: when it's clear that it will have some sort of impact
on the story, I won't use "phat lewt" as my primary determinant for
course of action, and when it's unclear if there will be any real impact on the
story, of if the payoff will be worth any potential impact on the story, I'll
also usually hold back.
Most RPGs are pretty transparent about things like
this. Potential rewards and relative
morality are usually established in pretty concrete terms. Do this thing, you'll get this reward, your
good and evil meters will move in one direction or the other. Good morality will usually lead to better
gear later in the game but no gear in the short run, bad morality will lead to
solid gear throughout the game but might curtail access to particularly sweet
pieces of gear in the long run.
Decisions range from "murdering puppies" to "saving
orphans," and the "morality meter" impact of these choices is
almost always really fucking obvious out the gate.
It's noteworthy when a game eschews this pattern, and that really
doesn't happen often. Occasionally the Dragon Age games managed to do so by
setting all of your decisions in a complex social environment, but the presence
of a number of morally black-and-white companions maintains a relatively
grounded moral filter for player actions.
So when I say that Shadowrun
Returns: Dragonfall, the expansion to the glorious Shadowrun Returns, forced me out of my calculating ways and into
some tough decisions that forced me to invent and invest myself in an actual
character, I'm speaking volumes about the quality of that game and its capacity
to construct a narrative frame.
I'm not just speaking of it by way of a conventional game
review, where I'd discuss how its systems represent an expansion of Shadowrun Returns' own turn-based combat
and skill-based dialogue trees that shores up many of the existing issues with
the previous game while simultaneously opening up some new holes that are never
satisfactorily filled. I'm not just
saying that the new system makes it tougher to min-max a character while
simultaneously encouraging that very kind of behavior. I'm not going to talk about how previously
useless skills are now crucial, and how pabulum combat is now tense and
exacting. I'm not going to break down
how this game is much more of a fluid, shadowrunning experience than the
previous noteworthy release, and how anyone who likes classic Shadowrun games even a little should hop
on the Dragonfall bus.
Instead I'm going to talk about how Dragonfall actually invested me in a story.
Shaowrun Returns:
Dragonfall opens with a botched run.
This botched run serves as a tutorial of sorts, guiding you through the
basics of moving, fighting, using skills and engaging with conditional
dialogue, but even as all of these commonplace early-phase RPG things are
happening, something else is brewing behind the scenes: you're talking to
members of your shadowrunning team, getting to know them, to understand where
they're coming from. The dialogue you
choose then, in turn, influences your relationship with these people. Seemingly asinine choices, like the phrasing
of how you announce you'd like to run away from a particularly unwinnable
fight, influence the course of the game.
Your poor phrasing while you're addressing the Troll sniper with a
military history might alienate her, and cost you an ally at a critical moment
in the future. Your polite deference to
your punk rock shaman might earn you a few points in his corner and get you a
lifelong friend. But none of this is
clear, and none of this is presented numerically by the game. Everything is buried; there are no meters
that fill up with "like" or "dislike," no clear cut win or
lose points choices. Everything is a
dialogue, and even statements that seem harmless can piss off surprisingly sensitive
career criminals.
Beyond all of this is a series of missions that feature
branching moral decision trees.
Generally, as someone who commits crimes, you're not really doing
"the right thing" most of the time, but as the game proceeds it
really starts to test ideas of morality.
Missions where freeing a prisoner seems like the best possible choice
might go awry when you realize that the prisoner you're trying to help is
actually a violent sociopath who deserves to die. Missions where you're acquiring prototype
technology for a potential employer veer into layered investigations of moral
certitude and professional ethos, as betrayals stack on betrayals on
betrayals. This layering, bereft of
anything but the context in which it is resting at a given moment, makes every
decision uncertain. That research data
you recovered from an especially harrowing run might be worth a pretty penny,
but is it worth risking your own life in the future, and alienating a potential
employer in the short run? Who knows,
those people might not even care if you sell the data, though you'll certainly
know if you don't.
The final missions culminate in a series of moral quandaries
that, to speak on them here, would spoil the entire god damn game. Suffice it to say, you're not picking a right
or wrong decision at any given point: you're picking a moral or ethical stance
in a world where such things are so relative in their construction, so
completely unbound from contemporary conceptualizations of morality, that you
simply cannot make a decision in a power-gamey way. Removed from the constraints of conventional
morality, bereft of any solid notion of just what sort of reward you'll receive
for a given action, there's nothing to be done but act in the way you think you
should and hope for the best. The end
result is a game that found me asking "what do I get out of this"
less and less, and more and more "what do I believe?" Is my belief in the sanctity of liberty so
profound that I'll free a murderous artificial intelligence? Or is the risk of letting a rogue AI out into
the world too great? It's difficult to
say, so I'm merely left with a notion of what my character, what my avatar in
this world might do. In order to make
decisions like that, I've really only got one choice: to really sink into my
character and act the way I think I would in this world. I'm forced to relate, in the absence of a
risk-reward system, in order to move ahead.
It's a strange notion: by largely decoupling moral choices
from visible rewards, Harebrained Schemes effectively constructs an environment
where projection on to another character becomes a key aspect of gameplay. Without the usual markers of progress that
inhabit RPGs as a genre to guide me, I had to actually take on the
"role" of a character in order to make difficult choices. I couldn't merely fall back on ideas of
"progress calculus," I had to sit and think about being a person.
Shadowrun Returns
didn't really pull this off at all, which is, in part, why Dragonfall's achievement is so impressive. The systems of the game don't natively
encourage this sort of association, and, as a result, it seems to emerge from
the writing and story structure of the game itself. Shadowrun
Returns: Dragonfall isn't just telling me a story, or presenting me with a
system. It's showing me a world, and
asking me to choose how I'll impact that world.
There are conceptual games that do similar things, sure, but they're few
and far between. By and large, games are
about securing and amassing advantage.
They're about achieving mastery of systems, even when they tell a
story. That story all too often unfolds
within the framework of a system which you're progressing through or presiding
over. It's rare to be asked to inhabit a
person within a framework, and rarer still to be given so much leeway within
that role while simultaneously being compelled to jump through so many varied
hoops. It makes me hopeful for any
content to come in the Shadowrun
universe, and for whatever Harebrained Schemes decides to do next.
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