Designing Choices in Games

Most recently released role-playing games have added moral choices or dilemmas as a core part of game-play. Unfortunately, few of these games succeed in making them interesting. They only offer "good" or "evil" options, which limit the player to being an angelic fairy of holiness or a complete jerk.


Choices need more depth than this

In order to make these choices actually elicit thought on the part of the player there are some basic requirements.

1. Make every choice viable to complete the game.
In some games you can make choices that make it almost impossible to finish the game. In Baldur's Gate, for example, the game has a reputation system which goes from 1 (extremely evil) to 20 (Heroic and noble). Unfortunately, only the heroic and noble option is viable to complete the game. If you are good, merchants will give you a steep discount on items and most people will react favorably to you. If you choose to make an evil party and your reputation drops below a certain point your game becomes a living hell. You will be attacked by the guards in every town, merchants will refuse to sell you items, and as you travel you will be ambushed by large war parties from the major cities.


The game is rather difficult to beat when a giant army of mercenaries attacks everywhere you go

It may be realistic that the major towns have a bounty on your head when you're evil, but from a game play context it's a nightmare. If you give the option to play as an evil character it needs to be a viable choice.

As an additional problem, every other character in the game who joins your adventuring party has their own alignment of good, neutral, or evil. Good and neutral characters will leave your party if you become too evil, evil characters will leave your party if you become too good. This means that if you use these characters in your group you have limitations to the choices you can make-otherwise you'll lose half of your strength and be unable to finish the game without a tedious trek around the world to find some more people of like-minded beliefs to join you.

2. Don't make one path grant benefits that are much better than the rest.
The worst route you can take for making a moral choice system is to offer unequal rewards. Players will almost always seek to take whatever route offers the best items, the most money, and the most experience. If you have a quest with one choice that gives the player a couple healing potions and one that gives the player a tremendously powerful weapon, why on earth would anyone pick the one that offers healing potions?


No offense meant healing potions, but you're just not as fun as a new sword

In the Baldur's Gate games, persuading an enemy not to fight or letting them go is almost always the worst possible choice. You don't usually get any experience points for releasing them and you also miss out on all the items and gold they might be carrying.

This isn't to say that you can't offer different rewards for different options, but they need to be properly balanced. Otherwise players aren't going to think about what choice is the best morally or pragmatically, they will think about what choice gives them the best loot.


Hmm I don't know if I want to kill hi-wait I get a TANK if I kill him? When and where do you want him dead?

3. Don't make good and evil moral compasses for players.
This is more of a personal preference of mine than anything else, but I despise games that choose to give you a good/evil compass. Many recent games use this device, such as Infamous and Prototype.


At least the cover of the game makes being evil look viable

The problem I have with these moral compasses is that they are again placing an artificial device in the way that will take precedence over your actual beliefs when it comes to making choices. To get the best armor/weapons/ending to the game you are required to play as a complete evil bastard or complete good hearted soul. If you pick a choice in between the two, a pragmatic option, you don't get the best toys to play with.

On the other hand, I can also see why a lot games choose this type of system. It makes it easy to design all of the choices-you just make an evil and a good option. If you add additional options, it adds a great deal of development time and expense to the game. If you have different endings to the game based off your choices throughout, it's also a lot easier to just have two or three to worry about as opposed to a dozen or more.

However, if you must use some sort of numeric value to rate the player's choices throughout the game, it is better to make it based off something other than good and evil. Two games I can think of that do this well are Mass Effect and Arcanum.

In Mass Effect you can make Paragon actions, which tend to be forgiving and generous to others, and Renegade actions, which tend to be pragmatic. You are allowed to make either paragon or renegade choices in some situations based off your level in that side. For instance, a paragon choice might be to let someone who tried to rob you go after you beat him up with a stern warning to turn his life around. A renegade option might be to throw him out of the window of a skyscraper.


The renegade/paragon scale of Mass Effect

The best part of this system is that you aren't limited to only one side or the other, you can choose to make paragon or renegade decisions whenever you like. The only disadvantage to not going fully down one track is that there are a few persuasive choices that you need extremely high renegade or paragon scores in order to accomplish. However, if your score isn't high enough to make them it doesn't ruin your game. Thus, you feel free to pick whatever option seems best to you.

Arcanum is a steampunk RPG where magic and technology exist in the same world. You can choose to have a character who uses swords, armor, and magic or a character who uses molotov cocktails, grenades, pistols, and shotguns. Or you can pick a character in the middle who uses elements of both.


Unfortunately the game is also so old that including any screenshots would be a bad idea

However, the game features a compass between magic and technology-as you choose abilities that let you use magic the compass tilts toward magic, as you choose technological abilities it tilts toward technology. Highly technological characters cannot use or be affected by magic as well, so if you try and use a healing spell on your character it will not be as effective. A highly magical character cannot use firearms or explosives effectively. If you pick a character in the middle, they can use items from both sides, but not to their maximum effect. This makes choosing abilities when you gain levels extremely interesting-there are many variables to consider, making it take a great deal of thought.

4. Make major choices have effects later in the game.
If you want players to care about each decision, it's good to make big decisions have a lasting effect on the game. That doesn't mean that picking between some money and a healing potion needs to change the ending of the game, but some certainly should have significance.


I told you we should have taken the healing potion!

Let me conclude with a few examples of well designed choices. In one of the downloadable modules for the first Mass Effect, a group of terrorists has taken over a mining facility on a large asteroid and have aimed it at the planet below where millions of people live. The terrorist's leader has locked up a group of the miners and scientists in a room with a bomb rigged to go off. He makes an ultimatum-let him go or he will detonate the bomb and kill all of the hostages. You can choose to release him and potentially allow him to make a similar attack again or you can go after him and all the hostages will die. You suffer no changes in loot or experience for picking either route-it's all up to you.


Although the hideous nature of Batarians does tend to bias me toward killing him

Another example-you are sent to kill the leader of a nation or city because he has been imprisoning a specific group of the population. However, when you go after him he explains the reasons behind his actions. Perhaps that group was responsible for terrorist attacks against the population and he's trying the best he can to protect his people. The leader isn't a caricature of evil, as most games make the bad guy, he's a realistic, human figure. What choice do you make now? Should you kill him? Let him stay in power? Take him prisoner?


A decision becomes much more challenging to make when it's about someone whose awkward situation you can understand

Even better, make the choice be about a character you've known throughout the whole game and grown to like. One of the members of your party was hit by a corrupting spell by an enemy sorcerer that causes him to go into a berserk rage every few days. The first time this happens he kills a few innocent civilians before you can restrain him and it wears off. Do put him in restrains and try and find someone to dispel the curse? Do you kill him outright for killing civilians? Do you keep him with you but restrain him before he's going to go berserk because you like the guy and couldn't bear losing him?

I want to see more games that offer complex choices like this, not simple ones that are biased by rewards or other ancillary factors of the game. Difficult options force me to think and care about the world that was created and will keep me coming back for the next expansion or sequel in the series.