Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that gamers were promised "decisions that matter" and in the end everybody got the same pre-canned three endings. Stepping up 6 meta levels and asking "Yeah, but what's life all really about anyhow?" is, you know, fine and all, but also in way, profoundly missing the point. We want to talk about Mass Effect right now, not fundamental existential ennui.

Personally... I don't care in the slightest, because as someone who's been playing these games for a while and also as a programmer, I observe that what these companies are promising is basically impossible, so I never bought into this promise to be offended it didn't play out. It is not possible to have a true branching story where you can make dozens and dozens of meaningful choices and the story has fully rendered cutscenes with voice acting and unique locations and etc. etc. But it might be nice if the companies would stop promising this. Every year, as the standards go up, it is actually getting harder and harder to bring this level of responsiveness to a game.

(Sometimes I think that as impressive as the holodeck may have been on ST:TNG in terms of providing an immersive sensory experience, it's even more impressive in that it seems to have enough intelligence built in that it can actually do true reactive storylines and such. We'll probably have reasonable approximations of the former a long time before the latter!)

It is definitely possible to make choices matter. Imagine that in the final mission, if you helped the Krogans before at one point during an alien attack there will be a Krogan Squad crushing through a wall and helping you out (that's taken from an interview with a Bioware employee who described what went wrong and how the ending should've worked). Stuff like that is possible, even if branching storylines are hard to do (cut content for many players and all that, I'm aware). The Fallout games - with the exceptions of Fallout 3 - show how it is indeed possible to at the end of the game show the impact of your actions on characters and civilization. BG2 did as well! And ME1 and ME2 during and at the end and even ME3 somewhat during the game showed consequences of prior actions - just at the end of a trilogy focusing on choice not at all.

Stupid mistake and definitely avoidable. I'm convinced Bioware sealed their fate with that (making mediocre games after did not help them though).

You can build this (story goes right):

      *   *   *   *   *   *
     / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
    *   *   *   *   *   *   *-->*
     \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /
      *   *   *   *   *   *

And obviously elaborate on it.

You can't build this (story goes down):

              *
             / \
            *   *
           /|  /|\
          / | * | \
         *  *   *  *--
        /|  |\  |\  \ \
       / |  | * * *  * *
      *  *  *

and so on and so on.

The problem is, no matter how you disguise it, gamers sense in the first case that they're on some sort of rails. Then companies promise the second, whether they mean to or not. But they can't deliver across one game. I remember thinking when I heard the announcement about the Mass Effect trilogy laughing at the idea that they could do it across three. You just can't let the combinatorics explode that much and make decisions that change the story. (Note things like "whether or not a Krogan squad is there" are consequences, yes, but you'll note they do not impact the future flow of the story, so they don't contribute to a combinatorial explosion. It's a linear contribution; you have to model the event and voice act it, etc., but it's still just two story nodes not significantly interacting with anything else.)

Fallout 1 & Fallout 2 were structured as several parallel instances of the first example, which is probably the best compromise you can make to prevent exponential explosion while still giving some heft to the choices.

But ultimately, if you want your "choices to matter", you'd better stick to "classic" roleplaying. A Dungeon Master can react to your unexpected choices and set you in a standard "fetch the thing" quest but then react to you actually accidentally literally destroying the world when that wasn't written into their "plan", and then carry on with the resulting consequences if you like. Computer games are still a long, long ways away from anything like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-1WJtuzPg

I agree with your basic premise, but I think the complaint about ME3 was that it didn't reflect any previous decisions you made in the ending, not that the story failed to fork exponentially at every decision point. Indeed, IMO, ME3 did a really good job of making it feel like your decisions matter...until the very end.

Star Ocean: The Second Story is yet another example of an RPG that does this; it has 70-80 endings, many forking paths including mutually exclusive party member choices, relationships between characters, etc. The trick for making it feasible seems to be to make the ending modular so that it includes/removes different cutscenes based on what happened before. As I understand it there are quite a few old-school RPGs that do this.

Of course it is harder if you are talking about voice acting and super-detailed 3D assets. But assets aren't that hard considering you already made most of them for the rest of the game, and realistic voice synthesis is perhaps not that far away. So I don't think most people were expecting model (B), but even that could be viable if you controlled the number of forks carefully.

> The problem is that gamers were promised "decisions that matter" and in the end everybody got the same pre-canned three endings. The problem is that gamers were promised "decisions that matter" and in the end everybody got the same pre-canned three endings.

I don't think it is. The decisions made did matter, as much as anything matters, they just didn't effect the ending cut-scene you got. Is there an intentional philosophical message here? Maybe, maybe not. But there is opportunity to reflect on our relationship with decisions and outcomes. Is our time spent with the game less meaningful because of how it ended? Given a time machine, would we have chosen not to play if we knew the ending? If the ending is the thing that is important, why play the game at all instead of just watching cutscenes on youtube?

"The decisions made did matter, as much as anything matters, they just didn't effect the ending cut-scene you got."

Affecting the ending is part of the promise given.

We want to talk about Mass Effect and whether promises were kept, not existential ennui. Whether or not we can truly know ourselves or whether or not the good life is led by trying to live as an ubermensch is not particularly relevant to whether promises about the game were broken.

It's sometimes helpful to step up a meta level, but you're trying to derail the conversation by stepping up something like five or six. It's not helpful.

> We want to talk about Mass Effect and whether promises were kept, not existential ennui.

Yeah, you're right, I should have known better than to expect more from Hacker News.

Now I suspect you are not commenting in good faith, but trolling. Existential ennui is great to grapple with, but out of scope for a public forum discussion about whether Mass Effect delivered on the promises it made or not.

"But none of our choices matter, ipso facto the premise of this discussion is pointless" is something you could say in any discussion. If people enjoy the shift and engage, you talk about it. If they don't, you don't dig in your heels and accuse them of not understanding your viewpoint.

EDIT: You can enjoy the journey of a game and still be upset that you were sold a lie. You can enjoy the journey in part because you believe there will be a story-based payout. If you do this, the natural arc of the views enjoyment of the story is to be angry that the payout never came. Maybe you enjoy that feeling of being betrayed by a publisher, it's is a story experience. It's not the kind of twist that satisfies most audiences.

> Existential ennui is great to grapple with, but out of scope for a public forum discussion about whether Mass Effect delivered on the promises it made or not.

Honestly I couldn't care less about ME3, I didn't play it for completely different reasons. I just found the philosophical concept of "decisions matter" much more interesting to talk about. I misjudged how much Hacker News would rather have a bitch-fest.

> "But none of our choices matter, ipso facto the premise of this discussion is pointless" is something you could say in any discussion.

First of all, my point is that choice do matter even when they do not affect the ultimate outcome. And I'm not saying it to disregard how the commenter feels about the game, but to highlight that their description of why they feel that way is a bad rationalization, and that they could learn something about how they approach the world from examining it.

If I appear upset, it's because Hacker News, ever willing to consider themselves above redditors without justification, seem to have decided that I was defending ME3 during their collective bitching sessions and expressed their displeasure with downvotes.

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