Emergent Choices Are Cooler than Picking Results from a List
This will contain spoilers of a sort for people who are playing evil the campaign in the fantasy strategy game Age of Wonders. The events are the logical conclusion of the second big choice you make, but if you want to be in any way surprised by all means skip this. Heck, I even mention a well-known feature in TIE-Fighter, and a quest in Arcanum if you want to play those games fresh, too. The B...
The Branching Path as Dictated by Player Actions
I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the game TIE Fighter, but it springs to mind as a cool example of in-game choices. Rather than having you choose in the off-time whether or not you want to join a secret order in dialog options, you instead are given your list of objectives during the mission, and a list of secondary, non-vital objectives which are not necessary for the mission to be successful. If you fulfill those, you get one step closer to being a dark and brooding dude in a cloak.
There were problems with how that was implemented, because I wound up deciding I didn't want to join the Order at all, but wound up being forced to fulfill an objective that would give me a starting rank in the Order. Unless I missed something, there was no way past it.
That said, fighter sim games like Wing Commander had already exercised a cool precedent where you could, in the middle of a mission, choose to risk your own life and the mission to save a pilot in trouble. This had real story impact. You were also allowed to lose, creating a branch in the storyline that got worse and worse the more you lost, but as long as you survived you at least had a chance to save things.
Age of Wonders
While playing Age of Wonders last night, I finished the final mission in one branch of the evil campaign. You were given choices outside of the actual scenarios where you could choose between helping one faction or another, and I had reached a point where I was helping the people I was originally pledged to destroy. The scenario itself had the people who had started the war in the first place, and the people who were their protectors on my side, with all the other factions in opposition. The protectors also provided a hero who was destined to rule who was under your control, who could easily die as any other hero can.
One cool thing about the Age of Wonders campaign is that allies you made in prior scenarios carried over, so I was easily able to win many different NPC allies just through a little bribery rather than through open warfare. That was neat, and it reflects partially what I like about emergent choice: a robust scenario can have many outcomes based on choices you make throughout prior scenarios, making the game feel personalized.
This fell apart, though, in the last mission. I decided to see what would happen if, instead of helping the factions I was supposed to, I turned on them. I first beat the game normally to see what the ending would be. Then, I put the hero of the protector faction in a situation where he would get stomped, but I would still achieve a minor objective. Through a bit of luck, I managed to get the hero killed. Then I ran with my main hero straight into the lair of the protected faction that started all of this mess, and I assassinated their king in a quick strike. The whole stated goal of the scenario was to protect this guy and his faction, and to let the hero I let die rise to power. Both those goals were now impossible, even if the fiction of the game resurrection was usually only through unnatural means, so it couldn't be justified that way.
The other factions, who I was on peaceful terms with, did the video game thing and automatically turned on me once their enemies had been defeated, forcing me to beat them. If I could ally with them and have an alternate victory, the game didn't seem to allow it. I had killed the king that rose in the end, and had cut the head off the faction that was supposed to inherit the earth. There was no difference, unfortunately. This was a serious missed opportunity. Deciding to betray your faction SHOULD have huge consequences, but I think the structure of the scenarios themselves didn't allow for it. The potential was there in the story for such things to happen, but the game didn't seem to care. Games often do this, where instead of making a moral choice in the middle of a stressful situation (whether or not it's a turn-based game), you make it in dialog trees, often openly stating your intentions. I think game design could take a page or two from real life in this sense, to allow for actions to speak louder than words. I wonder if there's a game out there that does this well, that lets you make the decisions, but within the structure of the game itself, not removed from it. There probably are tons of examples, stuff that goes beyond killing the shopkeepers in an RPG or shooting your own base in a space-sim, stuff that has real story impact that's actually reflects what you did.
Arcanum
After becoming familiar with the city of Tarant, I noticed that in the newspaper there was an ongoing riot in a factory that used orcs as captive labor, paying them poorly. I was already sympathetic to their situation, so I ran to the factory to see what I could do. I was then presented with, apparently, one of three options: Coax the leader of the protest out to be executed by the city guard (or kill him yourself; either way that resolves pretty much the same), lead the orcs in an armed revolt that would consume the entire territory, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people and the permanent enmity of everyone in two major territories, or walk away and leave the quest unfinished.
The game seems to suggest the latter as being the only viable option, and maybe there's some resolution further down the line if you don't choose to meddle in the standoff, but it also seems to suggest that there are hidden alternatives. One I found was to kill the guards (and a congressman who goes violent if do), and as long as I don't talk about it to the orcs, there's no riot. But that's just leaving the quest hanging, with no real resolution and blood on my hands that I didn't want.
It suggests that the press is sensationalist, and doesn't care about the orc's plight. One dialog option is to convince the leader that the press is out there (it isn't) and that the city guard official wouldn't openly commit murder in front of the press. Its talk of the press seemed to be a hint from the game that I could talk to the newspaper headquarters in town and get someone to ACTUALLY cover the situation. All the elements were there, laid out for me.
I ran to the office and talked to the editor and... nothing. No dialog tree at all discussing what was happening. This would have been OK, I guess, if the press had not already been considered a major player in the events. If they were truly corrupt as the game suggested, the very least it could do would acknowledge this with a line of text from the editor saying he wasn't interested. Instead it left a bunch of loose threads that seemed to be emergent, and then told me none of them really mattered.
Where I'm Going with This
Both of these situations are emergent, in a sense. Through flavor text you're given a wide variety of potential actions, but the actions you're actually supposed to choose are few. Let me stress that I realize that NOT ALL PLAYER ACTIONS CAN BE ACCOUNTED FOR. I'm well aware of this, and I often get on people's cases for assuming that programmers have an infinite amount of time to fill in all the blanks. The issue with both of these situations, though is that they each set up definite paths of opportunity: The press in Arcanum was an active force in Tarant, and it was indicated several times, including writing the article that brought me to the scene; and in Age of Wonders the factions were clear, their importance fully realized, and the permanent death aspect was a prominent feature of the game, yet there were no consequences for turning on them.
I can live with these events, as much as they feel like missed opportunities to me. But imagine how much more satisfying it would be knowing that the game could account for major decisions in the middle of an incident, sort of like Wing Commander did, or TIE Fighter.
Weirdly, I think some strategy games and RPGs could learn a bit from old flight sims.
Positive Examples
One game that I think was absolutely phenomenal, that people don't even realize did this well, was the original Baldur's Gate. The first time I played through it, I was pretty sure there wasn't much to it. There were a lot of dialog options for good, greedy, and evil, and I thought that that was the extent of its player choice customization. But if you do things in a certain order, different dialogs appear. Some people never show up unless you do certain things, or go certain places. All of this is hidden in the code, and only by reading about other people's experiences have I learned how much time and attention were given to contingencies.
The two prior bad examples, as I've hinted at in this and previous entries, do sometimes allow for player ingenuity to be rewarded. In Age of Wonders I was supposed to be the enemy of just about every faction on the board after completing all the other missions in the campaign, but most of them liked me well enough that they were easy to control, all because I put the extra work in of bolstering those factions rather than angering them by wrecking their towns. Arcanum, for all its flaws, at times has shown real thoughtfulness in its quests, and I've found some gems in seemingly innocent dialog choices, although I'd say the ratio for these isn't as high as I would like.
I think the point of all of this is that I enjoy games more that reward player experimentation and choice without telegraphing the choices, making it a part of gameplay rather than a menu of outcomes you select from. Emergent choices treated with care tend to make a game feel well-crafted to me. Anyone out there run into any game that really did this right?
What's funny to me is that the term emergent gameplay as defined here doesn't really fit with what I'm saying. That's why I'm going to attach this to the general discussion in the forums. Emergent Gameplay fits in effect, but it talks more about a well-crafted basic engine that allows for cool interplay of variables. The thing I have in mind could just as easily be planned though a few if/then statements and a few extra lines of text explaining to the player what happened.