Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Inconsequential Player!

Mass Effect 2 is a weird game. I’ve committed a stunning amount of time to it and and yet I would never recommend it to other gamers. It’s stodgy, dull, uneven, and while there is value to be found it’s buried under a mess of a design mired with a non-sense story which does everything it can to hit every note possible and leave the player feeling like the hero of...well, everything. But there are some interesting moments, moments worth watching. Some of them are the product of long, intense relationships and will make you say “Well done, Bioware!” and feel pleased. Some of them are the payoff for story missions and will make you say “What the fuck, Bioware?” and feel sort of angry. And many of them are throwaways, obvious giggles tossed in for good measure that will just make you feel tired.

One of the latter variety is a game salesman, a three pronged jab at the comic book guy from the Simpsons, Bioware’s own design team and many of their consumers. He’s a character who simply spouts off dialogue when you interact with him, adding “atmosphere” to the Citadel. For the most part he’s just kind of dull, but one of his comments, about how games have come to center around epic stories instead of forcing immersion, is sort of an unintentional indictment of Mass Effect 2’s design. Mass Effect 2’s obsession with big decisions and epic action is crippled by a desire to hold the player’s hand, to make sure that no matter what they do they get to feel like the hero. And this obsession with making the player feel good is, for me at least, one of the things crippling storytelling in contemporary games.

Games aren’t willing to force players to fiddle with minutia, to engage seemingly unimportant things for great rewards, or to offer player real power in how they shape the world they play in. They want to coddle their consumers, to insure repeat business and appeal to the broadest possible market set of gamers. They’re cowardly offerings, their weakness exposed by the few great games that still stand against the tide, the exceptions which illustrate just how harmful this trend is.

The first game Mass Effect 2’s shortcomings brings to mind is the original Baldur’s Gate. A rogue data point in the history of Bioware and Black Isle, Baldur’s Gate was punishingly difficult, open almost to a fault, and incredibly demanding. Very few games in this day and age would let you start out with two hit points just because you built your character that way. Petrification could kill your main character in an instant, death meant the end of the game and autosaving was, at best, a luxury, never something to be relied on. A bear or a wolf could defeat your entire party early in the game and while cheats were both readily available and essentially a game feature in multiplayer mode there was something incredibly rewarding about dragging yourself through the trials and tribulations of the early game to perform such broken feats as murdering Drizzt Do’Urden with poison arrows, boots of speed and your wits or dropping Sarevok without taking a single point of damage, and doing so (mostly) without cheating. If Baldur’s Gate hadn’t been so incredibly hard it wouldn’t had had such an impressive impact on me.

What’s more is that the desperation Baldur’s Gate served the story wonderfully. No game has ever made me feel more powerless and vulnerable from the start. Watching Gorion die, knowing that I could barely battle a band of hobgoblins let alone avenge his murder, established a sense of place and vulnerability and character and purpose that no game I’ve played since has ever equaled. Hell, Mass Effect 2 tried to kill me and it couldn’t even manage a fraction of the emotional impact Baldur’s Gate delivered years before. All the slaughtered villages and murdered starship crews I’ve encountered over the decades have been naught compared to that one encounter, late at night with that faceless man who killed my foster father, and it was all because of the powerlessness I had pressed upon me. Most games, regardless of genre, still equip you to deal with the threats you’ll encounter before doling them out politely, sequentially. Baldur’s Gate was fearless in its choice to punish those who rushed ahead, those who did not plan. The stakes in Baldur’s Gate were high, and they were high all the time. And, as such, it was impossible for me to keep playing and not care about what happened.

But Baldur’s Gate was almost completely linear. Certain choices could be made but for all its vaunted difficulty it was a game about passing through the same set pieces each time. While it was hard it suffered from the same issue of linearity Mass Effect 2 has despite its ostensibly high stakes. More recent games, however, have done wonders with the capacity for choice and its unforgiving nature. Bioshock as a series has offered up some stark ass choices with serious gameplay ramifications. Even Mass Effect had some serious ramifications for the decisions you’d made, eliminating characters if you chose poorly and allowing you to easily skip certain party members, even if Mass Effect 2 did its all to make these choices inconsequential. But the game that truly stands out in my mind has to be Fallout 3.

While the karma system in Fallout 3 is, at best, weak tea, the choices you make do have a remarkable impact on the shape of the D.C. wastes. Solving situations with violence will really eliminate characters, and certain situations simply lack clearly positive outcomes. The Antagonizer and the Mechanist’s plotline, for example, was a morally gray mire, and even if you could convince both heroes to cease their crusade the resolution was bittersweet. Convincing a mentally ill woman to wander off and die alone or convincing a mentally unstable repairman of his clear imbalance both lack the traditional “sunshine and bunnies” feeling that the “good” path normally offers up in RPGs. Paired with decisions like just what to do with Harold, ways to impact the murderous goth vampire troupe and how best to assist wasteland junkies, Fallout 3 was never afraid of putting the player in uncomfortable situations and forcing them to make a choice which lacked a clear outcome.

What’s more is that these choices had a serious impact on the shape of the world. The first and obvious example, the ability to destroy Megaton, was a brilliant twist. I cannot think of a single other game which would not only allow players to destroy an entire city but to visit its smoking ruins and trade with the lone, ghoulish survivor as well. But other, less prominent decisions could have similar results. Allowing the ghouls to take over Tenpenny Tower, dealing with the cannibalistic inhabitants of the waste and wiping out the slavers of Paradise Falls were all possibilities in Fallout 3 that not only presented “moral choices” but also changed the shape of the game world. Opting to remove any of these groups would eliminate one of the few remaining settlements of humanity and oftentimes with them the potential for trade. Even if some of these choices were black and white, such as just what to do with the Lincoln Memorial, each of them still changed the way the world looked as you explored it.

Even advancing along the main plot would accomplish this. After the Enclave arrived the Wastes became a very different place. Supermutants took a backseat to Enclave drones as the primary threat, and the weapons players could use shifted with them. Suddenly my Chinese assault rifle was replaced by a plasma rifle, my ranger battle armor falling into disrepair as mercenaries fell away to power armor clad government men. Although Fallout 3 more or less pushed players towards the same ending the freedom it presented in changing its game world was nothing short of exceptional, and it feels as if developers have missed out on many of the lessons it taught with all too cavalier an attitude.

There are glimmers of hope, however. Dragon Age: Origins: Awakenings: The Re-Origination, for example, allows you to destroy large segments of the countryside during play and, even though many of the choices are brought to light after the game ends it still impresses upon you the idea that the choices you made had a real and lasting impact on your little slice of Fereldin. And Bioshock 2 seamlessly wove the consequences of its choices into the game’s ending. Finding the fault lines which your moral choices generate is difficult from a single playthrough, and while you can guess at what lessons Eleanor might take from you if you’d chosen another path you can never know for certain. Even Far Cry 2 managed to make me feel like I could change the world around me by something so simple as destroying a bridge or flooding a diamond mine or shooting a large number of people in the face.

But even if these games do offer choices the high price of making games and the wantonness with which players will abandon actual challenges make for a difficult climate to create games which still offer up real consequences. Some games, such as Demon’s Souls, remain scions of the tradition of making wonderfully challenging and unforgiving games with real stakes, but the rest of them, it seems, can only offer up choices, choices which are becoming more and more prominent and which, assuming sales are not a metric for influence on design, could generate some very interesting shifts in the way we play games. As it stands, however, these choices are all too often inconsequential.