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.

Inventory Systems

A well designed, simple inventory system can greatly improve a player's enjoyment of a game. This is especially true in games where players must frequently change their character's equipment to adapt to situations in the game, such as the Resident Evil series. So why do so many games design their system so poorly?

Here are some requirements for a good inventory system.

1. The inventory must be able to easily hold the items that are needed for regular use in the game. This includes things like weapons, ammunition, healing items, and especially plot items. If you do not have sufficient room for these "must have" items then the player certainly will not have room for other items that are of only situational value. You can certainly have a limit to how much stuff a player can have in their inventory, that limit just needs to be set with a realistic look at how much stuff players HAVE to haul around with them to be able to play the game.

For a game that does this well, look at Baldur's Gate II. You can have a party of up to 6 characters, each holding 12 items, in addition to three slots for weapon ammunition and three quick slot items (which can be magic scrolls, potions, and other consumable items) per character. Additionally, weapons and armor that are equipped on the character are not stored in those slots, they are put on the character's actual body. This system provides easy room for all of the needed items, allowing the player to use the remaining 12 slots per character for situational and plot related items. Additionally, the game offered some items, such as bags of holding, that could hold 20 or so items each, freeing up additional room.


The inventory system of Baldur's Gate

The game frequently requires players to hold on to items for a long time until the party can find a town to sell them at, so all of the inventory space is extremely useful. However, there is still depth to the system because even with all this room there are still many situations where players will need to decide what they want to keep. Additionally, items have weight so players need to balance where they put the suits of plate mail.

A game that executes this extremely poorly is Resident Evil 5. In this game, players have two characters with only 8 slots each that they can put items in. Every weapon takes up a slot, armor takes up a slot, every healing item takes up a slot, ammunition takes up a slot. So, if you want to have armor and three different guns, you only have one slot available for healing items. Additionally, the method for exchanging items between the two characters is extremely cumbersome when both inventories are full. This system makes the player frustrated when trying to strike a balance between necessary healing items and necessary weapons/ammunition.


The ridiculously small inventory of Resident Evil 5

2. Make the inventory easy to organize. In systems where items are stored in a long list, items that are used in combat, such as healing potions, should be at the very top of the list. This makes them easy to access when they are needed in a hurry. Ideally, the system should have options available to have the computer auto-organize the inventory for the player. This minimizes time spent moving items around on various menus to make room for the new sword that the player just found.

3. Pause the game when the player is accessing the inventory screen. There is nothing worse than being killed while trying to find a healing potion that is dug five screens down in a poorly designed interface. One exception to this rule might be that if the player is in active combat then it is fine for the game to keep running, to simulate the problems with trying to grab another weapon or something while you're in a fight. However, if the inventory is cumbersome this is not a good way to add tension to the game, you're only going to make the player mad.

4. Make the inventory menu large enough to easily see what you have access to. All of the Final Fantasy games do this extremely well. You have a lot of items, but the inventory screen fills the entire game screen so you can see everything in a few moments. Resident Evil 4 does this with skill as well. You have an attache case screen that shows all your weapons, ammunition, and such graphically and it only takes up one screen.

King's Bounty is a game that executes this extremely poorly. You have a screen with your character and below him you only have five slots with arrows on both ends to scroll through them. Unfortunately, every single item you pick up in the game, from armor to consumables, goes into this inventory and to use them you have to scroll through them one by one every time. This takes a lot of time and is needless-a separate inventory menu should have been created to ease this for the player.

5. Stop trying to represent item size in inventories by using grid based systems-such as making a battle axe take up 6x4 spaces. This is the method used in almost every action RPG-which is kind of funny because you end up being taken out of the action and trying to rearrange your items so you can pick up that new weapon you just got.

Have fun trying to fit everything in here!

It's much more convenient for the player to have a slot based inventory and let smaller items, like healing potions and magic scrolls, stack. Look at World of Warcraft for a decent system. If you must represent item size, use weight instead of grid hexes, as in Baldur's Gate.

There is one notable exception to this rule and that is in Survival Horror games. In these games, part of the tension is that you have limited resources in a hostile environment. In those cases, organizing your inventory actually adds to the tension because you have to consider whether every item is worth picking up. I'm low on shotgun ammunition, but I have to drop a healing item for it... is that worth it?

Resident Evil 4 had one of the best inventory systems I've seen for a game of this type. You have an attache case that you can spend money to upgrade to hold more items. This adds more strategy to the game because you can buy new weapons or improve those weapons, or you can spend the money to hold more stuff.


I'm not sure how Mr. Kennedy fits a rifle, a shotgun, a machine gun, and a handgun in this box, but it does work quite well with the game

With these five steps, every game should have a reasonably easy to use inventory system that minimizes the burden on the player and keeps the focus on the game, not on organizing your catalog of items.