How to Create Intriguing Choices in Games
The Most Important Factor Behind Tough Choices in Games
What makes you put the controller aside and think hard before making a choice in a game?
Narrative choices play a significant role in role-playing games, but very rarely they will force you to think hard before making your decision. Many games tend to make it straightforward to predict which choice aligns with the desired outcome. Sometimes, though, the game throws you a curveball, and you have to pause, scratch your head, and resist the urge to Google the "best" choice.
I decided to analyze these moments and tried to understand how they achieved to make me think so hard before making a decision.
1. Lack of Context: Ambiguity
As Pawe Sasko, quest designer of Cyberpunk 2077, explains in his GDC speech, CDPR likes to force players make a choice in ambiguous situations.
In one of the missions called “I Walk the Line”, you have to make a choice between the two important factions in the game: Voodoo Boys or NetWatch. The problem is, however, you don’t know much about neither of those factions. All you know is both of them is trying to use you for their interests. With only small amount of cues and your guts, you, as the player, need to decide which one is more trustworthy and which one would be more beneficial for your cause.
Making the choice is hard since all the cues you have are unclear and open to interpretation. But that’s exactly what the game is trying to do: Forcing you to make a choice without enough context and knowledge. This is not something we can use for every choice in the game, but it can be a useful trick for forcing players to use their own interpretation and take risks.
2. No Obvious Good or Bad Choices: Uncertainty
Ambiguity and uncertainty often go hand in hand. What sets them apart is that in case of ambiguity, you don't have enough information to base your decision on. While in uncertainty, you have all the knowledge you need, but you still aren’t sure which one of the choices will lead to your desired results (it's a bit of a fine line, I know).
Some games will mark the choices “good” or “bad”, so the player will know choosing enough amount of “good” options will lead to happy ending, and choosing “bad/evil” options will lead to unhappy ending.
This absence of uncertainty makes decisions much easier and eliminates the crucial element of risk, which is key for making choices challenging.
3. Obvious Good or Bad Choices: Ethical vs Logical
Another trick is to offer choices that appear obviously "good" and "bad," but make the sensible option seem illogical for the player. A great example for this one comes from Roadwarden, a text-based RPG.
In Roadwarden, time is our most important resource. There is only so much we can do in our limited time, so we have to spend it carefully to ensure we reach our goal when our time runs out. When we find ourselves in situations where somebody needs our help, we need to decide whether we should spend our most important resource for helping them. Doing so is the “good” choice and will most certainly benefit us in some way. BUT, it also means that we will have less time for our main objectives and other things that require our time.
So now, we need to decide which one is more important: Our main objective or the goodness of others?
4. High Stakes & Big Impacts
In Pentiment, you need to reveal a mystery behind a murder to rescue your wrongly-accused friend. The game gives you several number of suspects and a very limited time to investigate them. However, your given time is not enough to investigate all the clues and suspects, so just like in Roadwarden, you have to spend your time very carefully. When your time is over, you need to give the name of the real murderer to judges with your proofs and save your friend from being executed.
But when the time of choice comes, you realize the clues you followed didn’t solve the mystery. All suspects seem equally guilty and not guilty. And what about other clues and suspects you didn’t have time to investigate? What if the person you accuse is innocent? What if your proof are not strong enough to convince the judges? What if your friend or someone innocent dies because of you?
Still, someone has to be executed, and it’s on you to decide who. Stakes are high. Impacts to follow are big.
5. No Correct Choices
The reality is, there are no inherently right or wrong choices in Cyberpunk, Pentiment, or Roadwarden. No matter your choices, there are both positive and negative consequences. Some characters may be pleased, while others won't be. It's possible that everyone in the game world is content, but as the player, you might not be, and vice versa.
What matters is you make a choice, good or bad, and by doing so you take a risk. Every choice will have some kind of risk attached to it: A risk of being wrong, losing or dying. It’s on the player to assess the risk and decide which one is worth taking.
The key is to set up the stakes properly, leave some room for player’s interpretation, construct moral dilemmas, and let the player take risks.
“Most times, you make your choice and never look back.” - Geralt
To-Do List
Read: Hard and Soft Choices and their Roles in Game Design
Watch: What Makes a Good Level Up System?
Learn: How Indie Games Texture EVERYTHING
Check out: Game Design and Programming Book Bundle
Game Devs Guild - Fiverr Like Platform to sell your Freelance Services
Me
Reading: The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell.
Watching: Still Blue Eye Samurai. (I’m very slow when it comes to finishing series).
Playing: Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals. Wasn’t as good as the first one, but it still managed to immerse me and damage me emotionally.
Listening:
Thanks for reading!
And that’s it from today’s issue of GameDev’s Journey. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. If you did, please like and leave a comment. Reach out for suggestions, objections, questions, or just say hi.
But regardless, thank you so much for reading, and have a great game dev journey.
