A good example of hidden consequences is in the first Falllout. Apparently, the entire main quest's on a timer until the vault dies out from thirst, but you can lengthen this timer by setting up a trade caravan for water. However, doing this shortens a second timer which counts down until super mutants discover and raid the vault.
Sadly this is only true on the 1.0 disc release of the original fallout. TLDR: players were pissed about the invisible timer and interplay butchered the game to take it out. Taking away a lot of invisible choices you had. Edit: I spruced up the long explanation so it hopefully doesn't confuse future readers. When you create a new game it also starts two timers. A 150 day time limit to find a water chip before the vault dies of thirst This is the first part of the main quest and you get a little tracker on your pipboy. It also starts a second timer of 500 days to kill the final boss and destroy his lab, if you don't complete the game in the 500 day limit, it's game over. This second timer is never mentioned anywhere outside of a teensy tiny hint you can easily miss. You get the opportunity to set up a water caravan which extends the initial quests timer by 100 days, giving you more time to find a water chip. however this also cuts 100 days off the invisible 500 day timer. Now while this all makes logical sense if you think about it (hiring the caravan attracts attention yada yada) apparently people were taking in the scenery playing fallout 1 cause a lot of people complained about the invisible time limit (in my opinion the 500 days is MORE than enough cause the game doesn't have THAT much content) This backlash prompted interplay to have the 500 day limit extended to 13 years and when they removed the 500 day limit in patch 1.1 it also broke the mutant invasions. The mutants are supposed to be doing spoilery things and the longer you take the more towns get destroyed as the days tick down. The game has a slideshow ending telling you what happens around the wasteland after the events of the game and half of those don't work cause the mutant invasions are broken
@@dosmastervideos6213 if that's right, unless I'm missing something the base game was absolutely nonsensical :L If there's a 150 day timer, and you can add 100 days to it, the longest you can play the game is 250 days. What the Dickens is the point of a 500 day timer, or even the 400 days if you set up the caravan, if you will literally never see the consequence of it? EDIT: it just occurred to me that the main quest probably isn't the water chip :L I apologize, and will be shutting down my account and living a life of penance up in a mountain.
@@MysterousBear Yeah, there are essentially two tasks you need to do to finish the game. The water chip isn't one of them, although I believe it opens the quests for the two main objectives. Finding the water chip is the initial main quest, however. No need to apologise for a mistake. The previous posters didn't actually explain what the objective to finish the game is.
@@MysterousBear No worries I admittedly did skim over too much info and looking back it is kinda confusingly explained Edit: I also realized I made an error saying the 1.0 had the timer but 1.0 also didn't, whoops. Don't write essays at 2 am kids
One of my favorite moments like this is in the first night of Disco Elysium, if you just held the run button all day to get around faster, your partner Kim will complain about how exhausting the day was and ask you why you’re always in such a rush.
And he bring it up again at the end of the game, saying that it makes so much sense now. Also, if you do the phasmid quest early, Kim will complain about it but later he will mention that because we did this, we already know the layout of that place.
@@Mewseeker Actually, we're doing Disco Elysium a disservice by bringing it up in the context of a single throwaway joke. All throughout the game, dialogue options appear or not based on the character's traits and previous choices and others comment upon various things accordingly. The basic things the character notices and comments about in the environment change too.
Invisible choices are even more impactful when they are put in a game genre normally full of explicit choices, like visual novels. I remember playing Steins;Gate and being completely caught by surprise when I reached a specific ending without making a single conscious choice - every "choice" stems from how you use you cell phone: whether you answer calls or not, and how you respond (or don't respond) to emails you receive for example.
yeah that was an example that came to mind for me as well. the problem with how steins;gate handles choices however is that its so broad that its kinda unclear why your actions lead to the consequences that follow, and its near impossible to achieve the specific outcome you want without religiously following a guide
@@rkken Personally, I like that Steins;Gate makes it almost impossible to hit the true ending without a guide. You're most likely to get it on a second playthrough after checking, which helps you feel the same emotions as protagonist Okabe, seeking a miracle in a confusing maze of timelines.
I don't know. For example, cyberpunk had a lot of invisible choices but since there are also explicit dialog choices people got the impression that they don't have many choices and complained about it.
Maybe for story-driven explicit choice games, Telltale’s “X will remember this” prompt would actually be useful if they used it like at the point when the consequence was happening instead of after the moment of choice. I’ve seen a couple indie visual novels do this, where when the game does a check for a previous action, they pop up a little notice reminding the player of the action they took. It makes the choices more explicit and impactful when you realized you caused this to happen, or how that choice cascaded to now.
Never thought about that, but that's way better. Of course I expect Characters to remember what I do or say but instead being reminded of it later when the consequences unfold stops the game from "spoiling" itself.
I remember Until Dawn doing this, a character flashing back to some action they took (as chosen by you) when the consequence rolls around. It doesn't happen very often, meaning that most of your choices don't get that kind of spotlight. It kinda also has the telltale version at the same time, with the "butterfly effect" page on the pause screen telling you that some choice you made was remembered, but it doesn't tell you what it is unless you specifically go into the menu to look it up
i think the best part of Telltale´s X will remenber this, is when they straight up kill X 5 min later, so X could not have done nothing about whatever you did to him after, but you still felt bad at the moment.
A subcategory of "The developer thought of that??" - anything that helps make a game feel more dynamic and less strictly scripted helps make the game feel *alive*. And if I try something that less than 1% of people are going to try and it actually *works*, it's like I'm having this secret conversation with the developer and it's extremely satisfying.
@@YexprilesteR Hollow Knight has a bunch of secrets, but most of the decisions are binary, so I don’t think it fits very well to this description. Sure, there are cool things that people might not realize would happen, like Zote dying if you don’t save him, but nothing to complex
I remember the first time I played Deus Ex, when Paul has his killswitch turned on, you are told to leave by the window and helicopter. But if you do this, Paul dies. Well, I stayed and fought! I got "killed" but it actually gets you captured and if you do it that way, or manage to beat the MIB, Paul actually lives when you meet him in prison! My mind was blown! I thought I broke the game!
damn i would never imagine to shoot the rope instead of the guys on that specops scene... mostly because i dont expect games to have this level of care/thought tbh...
I think the problem is that we expect an instant game over screen if we derive from the story. Fail the quick time event, and you will die, if you will.
Exactly. I've played so many games where the developers /didn't/ code in an outside the box solution that I would just accept the moral dilemma as part of the game's theming. In real life I'd be looking for some other solution, but in a game I just assume it doesn't exist
@@Kyderra Just like the recent gimmick used by Supermassive in House of Ashes, where if you pass all QTEs you can literally suffocate a character to death. You have to listen to audio cues from another character and stop pressing the button to succeed. That is kinda innovative.
Bonus Advantage: It keeps players on their toes about what actions are story-relevant. Surprising the player with a result from a hidden choice early on can make them double-guess whether it's reaaally of no relevance that they are stealing whatever they come across just because the game doesn't immediately declare it as theft.
Something I saw brought up is the exact counter point to that: some times it makes people feel cheated if they don't realize their actions could have consequences, since many games don't punish the player for just picking up every random thing they find.
This reminds me of a minor element in Skyrim: If you are witnessed stealing an object, it's a crime and you get a bounty for theft, right? But -- if you are NOT witnessed stealing an item, there's still the possibility an NPC will hire Thugs to track you down later, implying they discovered your theft after the fact.
@@aaronscott7467 Yes, one of my pet peeves is when a game punishes you for something that you previously never had any consequences for doing and is part of normal game design. Very much a bait-and-switch scenario where you're guilt-tripped for something you didn't even realize was a "choice." If there are invisible choices, then I think that their consequences should be presented early on in the game, as OP suggests.
@@aaronscott7467 That may be true, but that feeling can be a core design choice, too. (Do I really need to bring up Undertale and how suddenly every basic and intuitive gameplay mechanic becomes an invisible choice with awful implications)
@@RialuCaos It´s basically a related issue to the "hidden timers". The timers (hidden or not) can be considered a choice as well. You either rush the objective (and possibly advance the story where you can´t go back), or you explore as much as you can, gathering resources/power, but risk getting a worse outcome or straight up losing for taking too long.
The flipside is the Irrelevant Choice, where you replay the scene, do something different... and get exactly the same outcome (possibly with one line of dialogue different to get the player back to the main track). A lot of games have those, including the Telltale games...
I feel like every game I've played with this style of choice making does that. and god it's such a tired trope. HOW DO YOU RESPOND I agree ^ sarcastic < > funny v I disagree YOU PICKED "I disagree" you: "FUCK YOU MAN" well that wasn't very nice >:( anyways.. as I was saying
My favorite invisible choice is in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, at the end of the second part of the Seoul mission. You're tasked to get to a crash site of a spy plane that was shot down so you can provide targeting data for an airstrike to destroy the wreckage. When you get there, Sam (the player character) remarks that the pilots could still be alive in the plane, but your mission control character tells you to designate the target anyway. If you follow mission control, Sam says "God forgive me" as he designates the target, and the mission ends. However, if you want to save the pilots, you have to sneak past a tank and several armed enemies, and then carry both pilots to safety one at a time, while your mission control character says that you're risking your life needlessly, you won't get a medal for this because your presence here is secret, etc etc. However, if you do, Sam is much happier about designating the target. There's no bonus objective to do this, and like mission control says, if you do it, you don't get bonus completion or any recognition, just knowledge that those pilots are alive because of you.
I think this is not good for the experience. If saving those men means nothing for the game (no bonus etc), what's the pint to save them? Moral? These are just a handful of pixel, why do i need to care? Instead, the game should have let know the player has made a good decision with some kind of reward or bonus (even not linked to the gameplay).
My favourite invisible choice is in Pandora Tomorrow (spoilers OMG please skip this if you want to play it). In this mission you're working with the Syrian government's secret service branch, Shin Bet, to steal a viral weapon from a terrorist laboratory. You follow a Shin Bet double agent, Dahlia Tal, who was inserted into the terrorist group, across the streets of Syria to a hidden underground facility were the weapon is stored. After you get into the elevator that leads there, and the door closes, Sam's parting with Dahlia when Lambert says "Fisher, we need Dahlia Tal dead. Kill her. Don't think, just do it". Here's the thing. Shin Bet are attempting to betray the NSA. Once you gain the weapon they plan to kill you and steal it for themselves. How ever 3rd Echelon don't know this. They just think that Dahlia is acting suspicious. That's it. When the order comes up nothing seems out of the ordinary. It just comes as dialogue out your earpiece, like so many other orders you've gotten during the game. You can do what ever you want, like usual. The rub is that you've been conditioned to know that whenever Lambert's advice is given it's usually the best course of action. You're now allowed to use lethal force, you won't be seen by night vision if you're in the spotlight, you can enter from the roof, reinforcements are coming, etc. He's your tactics guy and handler. So you're already used to knowing that what he says will have an impact on your gameplay, and the militaristic tone of the game overall has also engrained in you a habit to "just follow orders". On the other hand, he's never given you an order like this. He's never told you to "just do" something. He's always talked to Fisher with respect and allowed him to make his own calls. So why now? Why Dahlia? Isn't she an ally? So there's a lot going through your mind. And when you make the choice you may not even know you just made a choice. You might just shoot because you've been following every other order Lambert gave you or. Or you might shoot her because you think it's a set part of the game and this is an order the game requires you to make. Or you might not realize you can shoot her and you just freeze. Or you might choose your actions consciously. The best part of this is that what ever you choose the game criticizes your choice. It you *don't* shoot her, the Shin Bet go through with there plan and the NSA and SHIN BET get into firefight, and everyone will know, including the Syrian government. You may even end up killing her in the fight. At the end of the mission Lambert says you're soft spot for Dahlia has set relations back in the region decades. You're criticized for playing as a black ops agent in a game performing high risk espionage operations and not wanting to follow orders because you wanted to keep your ethics in an unethical job, for thinking you, the player, knows anything about morality in this world of covert ops. If you *do* , Shin Bet never make there move. You're not told why you shot an ally and Sam Fisher directly compares YOUR actions to the terrorists, calling you out for acting just as evil for your country: Sam: "Tell me what I just did Lambert". Lambert: "The right thing. Hard work but it had to happen". DP Brunton: "Shin Bet wasn't playing a straight game". Fisher: "Killing unarmed women seems mighty close to terrorism". Lambert: "Shut up Fisher. Leave the ethics to us. Brunton, sign off. We need to talk". DP Brunton: "Get the sample as soon as possible. You're in a fifth freedom situation. All means are acceptable". That's it. You never find out why, so you're just left to sit with what you've done and wonder what it is you're even doing, and if you even trust yourself or the people you've trusted up until this point. And at the end of the mission Fisher asks if Lambert will tell him why he killed Dahlia and Lambert will just say "No, not yet. I know your not happy about it but preventative measures are never satisfying. Meet Cohen and get to Amityville". And that's it, mission over. The game will never tell you. You killed someone, just to be safe, because you were told to. "Preventative measures". So yeah that's my favorite choice. Ps: on my first run I shot her and had to deal with it. It was as if I was on auto pilot. I only found out years later about the larger story. Very traumatizing.
@@francesco2305 That's so unrealistic and divorced from reality. A lot of the time IRL, the moral choices you make do not reward you in any tangible way, the only thing you get out of the experience is how you feel about yourself. If your only goal in playing a game is to achieve outcomes, then none of this even matters to you, but if you want to have an *experience,* then it matters a lot.
This is not a particularly invisible one but almost every one I have watched play have missed it in Plague's Tale. You are in a tunnel and carrying a torch which means you are pushing away the crazy rats and there is an enemy guard standing near a locked door in front of you in darkness. If you simply keep moving forward you will have the rat swarm devour him despite his agony but you can shoot a fire ball near a lantern close to him which is turned off and it will save him and he will thank you and let you go.
I think what he means by invisible choice is that there are no UI elements appearing like in dialogue options or "press button to do something". Instead it's "if you keep going you'll kill him" which the characters explicitly tell you but if you spot the torch you can save him (which the characters don't tell you).
On the topic of "too subtle" I remember way back an old interview from the devs of Va11-hall-a who wanted something different to the whole explicit choices of many other genres and decided their solution would be for the player to instead of "choosing from a menu" you quite literally choose from a menu...of drinks. In many ways because the game is about hearing customers requests and then you proceeding to make any drink you want. However wrong choices mean you don't get rent money, which can directly end the game after some point, plenty of players pretty much just follow the requests as given...except the part where you can add "additional karmotrine (alcohol)" so people just opt to max that out whenever they are given a chance. Back on topic, much of the early critiques always seemed to note that despite how interesting the characters are, they only really point to Mark as noteworthy for """"subtley"""" mentioning he wants a girly drink before re-clarifying louder for a manly, macho one instead. This may as well be the most explicit choice via the given interface, but it also seems to one of the few that actually sticks. But the punchline really is that the player could do this from the VERY FIRST ENCOUNTER, by giving the incredibly anti-social Ingram a sweet drink against his hard alcohol preferences. This in-turn opens up a whole back story about his tragic family life, yet because A) pretty much nothing actually hints that characters will accept ANY different drink combination, most especially sweets and B) most people also only do 1 playthrough of a Visual Novel; again, a lot of really deliberate work is pretty much thrown out the window because Sukeban games didn't really "signpost" what the player could or couldn't do...nor really encourage too much exploration short of perhaps the most heavy handed ones. I ruminated a lot on their initial design philosophy for the past 5 or so years but after watching this vid I at least hope that there is some acknowledgement that lots of hard work really would go over-looked if devs actively hide a bread crumb trail in hopes of "truest player choice without ANY mechanical instigation". I guess people may just default to the path of least resistance unless they're told a less traveled path has extra goodies behind it.
Wow, thanks for commenting. I played Va11-Hall-A two years ago and had no clue you could even do this. I think it's because at the beginning of the game, they very clearly indicate to the player that making drinks your customer DOESN'T want will result in a negative outcome (i.e. the customer will get upset or you'll earn less money that day). The average gamer is going to want to avoid a "game over" scenario and play the game the way they were told to, so I (and a lot of other people) stuck to only making drinks the way customers asked because I was afraid that if I didn't I was playing the game "wrong". I'll admit I was even reserved with how much additional karmotrine I gave customers because I wasn't sure if it was a good idea to get them drunk (the only customer I recall getting super drunk was Streaming-Chan, and that was only because she explicitly asks for a lot of alcohol during one chapter). I'm actually kind of bummed knowing that if I had thought outside of the box I could've seen dialogue and scenarios that I completely missed. Going back to the whole "signposting" thing, I think it would've been really awesome if Sukeban had given you a character at the start of the game who was torn between which drink they should have, and then wrote the dialogue in a way that made it pretty clear you had the freedom to choose which kind of drink to make. If they'd done that, then players would have gone the rest of the game with that thought in mind, and may have occasionally deviated from the customer's requested drinks more often. I know Sukeban is supposed to be working on Nirvana right now (the sequel to Va11-Hall-A) so hopefully they learned from their first game and have improved their system for the second!
There are also a few cases where they'll give you a very general drink selection or not give you one at all, but if you paid attention and choose a drink you know they like you'll also get more story!
Prey 2017 is the most impressive I've seen in this regard. The game is like a constant succession of trolley dilemma type situations and every choice is important. When you get to the ending it evaluates everything you've done: people you saved, if you installed neuromods or not, the story paths you choose etc. The ending is especially interesting because it has a meta layer of analysing what means to interact with narrative inside a software construct.
I was honestly surprised to see it not mentioned in this video. I've found that some people got to the end of Prey and were pissed off by the ending they received because they didn't realize they were making invisible choices.
@@emnii My favorite choice was trying to cheat your way into an early ending. You can take the escape shuttle leaving everyone behind but the game gives you a fake out ending followed by a game over. This seems like an odd way to punish you for working your way towards this choice until you get the further context from the ending. Realizing that you picked possibly the worst choice imaginable for what the "test" was. There's a reason it's a game over, as in you died.
@@emnii That doesn't make much sense as you are not blocked from any type of ending until the very end. The epilogue comments on your choices but none of it really changes the outcome.
@@emnii preys ending kinda made me mad because the game ended with... (Spoilers ahead) .. it was all just a simulation. Which kinda ruined the immersion for me. Imagine if bioshock ended with: It was all just a dream lol. Also in the last few hours after the typhon attacks the ship, alot of areas become inaccesible. And the enemy become more tankier, deal more damage and respawn a lot more. And you have backtrack through the entire ship like another 2 times before the game ends. That kinda made me dislike the ending a lot because the lack of payoff. I do love prey and is one of my favourite, but the ending felt kinda rushed.
In Tyranny, when the third act starts, you're told to go to a specific place to be judged. But it being an RPG and there being other characters and quests I wanted to deal with, I took my sweet time visiting pretty much everywhere else in the world before going there. What do you know, the judge recognized that I ignored his summons for weeks, and an epic fight ensued. I was so pleased that an RPG finally recognized how much I was dawdling!
One game in the indie space that uses invisible choices is Forgotton Anne, an excellent puzzle platformer. I played the game demo at a Pax, and in an early interaction the game put up a message that said “this encounter could have gone differently”. It’s the only time in the game the message appears, and wanting to see what I could of done differently was a large reason I picked up the game. And the reason it was so impactful was because the choice was entirely based in gameplay.
@@Ryan-ey3qk i think it‘s just due to the sound. But this mistake always appeared weird to me. Especially as it seems to be done by native speakers, as well.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s single piece of DLC-“The Missing Link”-used an interesting tactic: it used a visible choice to HIDE an invisible one. (Spoilers for a 10-year old game to follow.) Near the end of “The Missing Link”, the player is confronted with a choice: a lethal poison gas is being flooded into both a prison filled with innocents (whom, before now, their jailers had been experimenting on), and the laboratory containing a whistleblower with enough evidence to see the jailers punished. Do nothing, and everyone dies. Redirect all of the poison to one of the two locations, and you save one party while killing the other more quickly. The game presents this as buttons on a console; basically the diegetic equivalent of Bioshock’s “Save” and “Harvest” prompts. (The ending of Human Revolution’s main game also ends with a choice presented in this fashion, though that choice was 100% visible.) HOWEVER, instead of interacting with the console at all, you can follow the cabling of the console to a hidden area containing the tank that is the source of the poison. Destroy it, and you save everyone. The video touches on the ability invisible choices have to make some options more obvious than others. It doesn’t mention that some of these choices can be what it would categorize as “visible” ones, or that visible and invisible choices can actually be used in tandem with one another. That said, this would only work up to a point. If “The Missing Link” had presented the options from the console non-diegetically (for example, via the game’s dialogue interface), I imagine it would’ve come across as the game lying to the player, rather than as a villain lying to a hero.
I love how you used Muffet from _Undertale_ as an example of a boss with invisible choices. She's actually one of the easiest monsters to spare, but only if you make a choice so early in the game and so mundane that you might not have even known it could affect the outcome of your playthrough.
I believe you can also spare her that way afterwards? **** since there was also some muffin stall near her room, even though now it's hiked up in price.
@@sponge1234ify You can spare her in a few different ways, actually, but the easiest is to buy a Spider Donut in the Ruins and then wait until her fight with you to eat it. She'll see you eat it, then she'll receive a telegram from the Ruins spiders saying you donated to their cause. If you can muster the 9999G for her bake sale in Hotland, you can buy her Spider Cider and skip her fight entirely. It's a steep price to pay, though. You'd be better off spending the money elsewhere. If all else fails, you can spare her in the usual way. After enough turns, she'll get a telegram informing her that you don't hate spiders. That telegram will differ depending on if you bought anything in the Ruins, of course.
That sounds like bad design with a backdoor to fix it and call it a "choice" most of the time only knowing after reading about it. Like Mario maker impossible levels that have a hidden block with a power up or a door, giving me the option to skip your terrible design is not good design whatsoever.
@@lasarousi I don't think that applies here; beating Muffet the "usual", non-muffin pacifistic way is still possible. It's just down to surviving a gauntlet of attacks that, to me, is still as fun and unique as the other bosses in the game.
@@lasarousi Not even close. You can just go through with sparing her the usual way, which is arguably easier than some of the other bosses prior to her. It's just a nice easter egg that has the added benefit of making the game slightly easier.
I love the inclusion of invisible choices in games, unless they’re used as a “gotcha” to the player’s detriment. It’s mentioned both in the vid and in some of the comments, but it always feels gross when the game taunts you for making the “bad” decision without any indication there was anything else you could do. I think the worst of these are missions that are secretly timed when other seemingly time-sensitive problems can be put on hold forever.
Disco Elysium did a bad one that soft locks your game on the first night, the clock stops and you don't know it's game over but there's no progression possible if you made a certain decision.
@@jayspeidell That was more a case of developer oversight (which they later fixed when it came to light), so it doesn't really fit what OP is describing. It's simply that the player could end up having made a series of choices that'd put them in a situation the developers never considered them getting into.
@@trianglemoebius I don't think they addressed any of the soft lock conditions except by saying it's a feature. I just think they should make those conditions trigger a game over screen.
then you have Spec Ops, where the game taunts you for making the bad choice of playing the game. Extremely polarizing, I know, but personally I found such meta commentary to be quite refreshing, particularly given its context.
That Chrono Trigger one you mentioned frustrated me a little. I remember them claiming that when I ran into Marle, I selfishly went to pick up her pendant instead of making sure she was okay. I was miffed at this because I wasn't trying to be selfish in picking it up. I did so with the intention of handing it to her.
One way to look at that, is it works perfectly for the game. The whole point of the trial scene is that you are being unjustly convicted. If you felt cheated out of justice because the prosecution misrepresented the intent of your actions... well that's exactly how the designers intended you to feel and all the more justification for you to make your escape
It would have been cool if you could perhaps argue that if they had tracked our choices even further- like if you pick up the necklace and then talk to Marle right away, but if you pick up the necklace and go around and talk to others or go fight Gato etc, THEN he can hit you with the thief swerve and you can't really argue that your first reaction was to take her pendant and bail on the scene.
I think one of the biggest challenges is making certain "verbs" available to the player. Games aren't perfect physics and intelligence simulations, in the example of Spec Ops the question is whether the player may well see shooting the enemies as an option, but are they *aware* that rope shooting is a valid physics interaction, or that moving past events without interacting is a valid choice? That education (while keeping the choice invisible) is it's own design challenge. Same for the crowd shooting towards the end. I can't remember whether civillians being scattered by gunfire was a mechanic within the game prior, though there are still more choices in that situation to stop players feeling cheated, namely the difference between shooting aggressive civillians to progress the scene and *continuing* to shoot retreating civillians. The difference between de escalation and revenge for the player.
Yeah. I love invisible choices, but plenty of games are poor at explaining you even had a choice. For example, there was a game I played where a robot companion caught a bullet for me and died. It wasn't until after I had finished the game that I realized that I had the option to inspect the corpse and retrieve the intact memory or personality chip to take with me to revive them. I don't recall such a chip playing a large enough role in the game up to that point to remind me that it was a valid option.
I feel like this is a broader problem than just invisible choices, and comes up a *lot* in puzzle games too. For example, 99% of obviously wooden objects don't burn in the game, but this specific one will (but only if burned with exactly the right item). Obviously one of the triumphs of a game like BotW is that it had very simple rules and then just let you be creative.
But its not as easy as telling the player that it is an option. These hidden choices are objectively a lot better and the dilemma wouldn't be there if there is not a challenge in thinking of that option. If the option is too telegraphed, the choice is not hard anymore. If you know you can just desturb the crowd, you are not challenged. What is important is not that you can disrupt crowds with shots in the air, that is common sense. What needs to be established is that the game allows creativity and that what you are pushed to do is not necessarily what you HAVE to do, that there are more options. If the game is consistent in that I think it needs to allow the player to feel smart enough to think of the solutions themselves and not have them telegraphed beforehand.
Another hidden choice is in Outlast 2’s ending. When you’re leaving the school and hear Jessica screams, if you run to her quickly, in the end, she will be normal. If you’re to slow, you will see her pale and with struggle markings. I think this represents Blake’s guilt of not saving Jessica. If you’re fast enough, the guilt is lower since you’ve done everything you could.
If I remember correctly, that difference comes from finding enough documents that explain the scientific background for the hallucinations, not from how fast you catch up to her, but maybe the article I read is the one who got this wrong 🤔
@@Nikkiflausch I wouldn't be surprised. This is the team that made the decision to hide the entire connection to the first game and the entire explanation for the events behind one document that is wildly out of the way and very easily missed.
@@Nikkiflausch well, since i didn’t knew about the docs, i did a little research 😂 I found out that the great portals like IGN tell it is all about the documents, but in user-directed pages like reddit, where some guys claimed have tested, it’s said that it is a question of the quickeness to reach Jessica. So i really don’t know now lol
@@Daniel-bi5ci It's also possible that it's a combination of both plus other factors; that the game keeps an invisible "score" system for different elements that, if triggered/discovered, add to it, and if you pass a threshold the game considers your character to "know enough to understand the truth", ergo you see the truth in the final cutscene.
I remember when playing Skyrim for the first time, I triggered the first quest to become part of the Dark Brotherhood. For those who don't know or remember, the Dark Brotherhood abducted you and you woke up in an abandoned Shack where one of the assassin asked you to chose between three persons to kill. I remember playing the following line in my head "You are wrong. There is a fourth person I could kill." before attacking the assassin. And, of course, it triggered a new quest but I had no clue beforehand (except experimentation in the game) to know that this was possible. I found it interesting to share. Thanks for the video.
I actually did kill one of the three people, but then decided that, to be the ultimate assassin, I would assassinate the entire brotherhood. So I did. Stole their clothes and hid the bodies in a corner. No one found out or cared but I got a cool hood. Skyrim do be like that sometimes.
[Spoilers for Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)] There's a scene in Black Ops II where you shoot a hooded prisoner to kill them and make it look like an assassination. You're given a sniper rifle and tasked to shoot them from a distance. Most players would immediately go for a headshot, which kills the target, after which it is revealed that the mission was sabotaged and you actually killed your best friend. However, the game has a branching storyline and multiple endings. If you *don't* shoot the target in the head, but elsewhere on the body, he is shown later on to have survived. One commenter claimed that he unwittingly got the "good" ending just because he felt like shooting the target in the balls, lol
And by the story the game hints you that there’s a choice here. In the future, Menendez is alive, so even your choice don’t matter or that is not Menendez. The latter was my thought, so, i’ve aimed to the legs.
another hidden moment in BO2 was in a mission where you had to go undercover at a resort to find a woman who was important to the plot and she gets kidnapped by the main villain's right hand man. and there's a chase sequence at the end of the mission to try and stop them from getting away. usually stuff like this is scripted and if they escape you gotta do a Spec ops Mission where you mount a rescue and try to get the kidnapped woman back, but if you are a good enough shot you can kill the kidnapper before he gets away and save the woman then and there, and now you'll skip the rescue mission in the Spec Ops.
Honestly, I think that calling them 'open choices' and 'closed choices' is more useful, because the main advantage to the former seems to actually be not in how it steers players but in how it enables developers. When developers write a closed choice, it is THE choice, whether you do Good Thing or Bad Thing or the like. A choice that explicit is difficult to expand on, especially in a team context where you effectively need to argue them out of the existing choices before you can have an extra one. But when it is an open choice, it is very easy for any developer to suggest 'why don't we let the player do X?' or 'could we do Y?'. Obviously time and resources add real limits to this, but it takes away the organisation obstacles. This is what the difference between a game like Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas is; Bethesda in dev interviews always talk about 'the choice' in a reductive way, whereas Obsidian are always excited to go 'what if' and will talk about the further options they wish they had time to include.
The distinction between "Invisible Choices" and "Explicit Choices" is descriptive and intuitive, they differ in ways of how they are presented, and has no bearing of the scope in which they deviate. The examples brought up in the video are exactly what this distinction is trying to describe. The terms "open choices" and "closed choices" plus your definition of them while interesting, are of a different topic imo.
@@phillyq4671 I thought the same at first when i read the comment. But when you think about it, the fact that a choice is explicit/invisible almost always stems from the way the developers approached it as a choice with a set outcome or with an outcome that is organic and open. And to me actually the more you think about it, the more the invisible/explicit part becomes irrelevant, because it's not always even possible to clearly distinct between the two. If the distinction was based purely on whether the player knows he's making a choice, then I'd argue that invisibility by itself isn't good at all. If I have an arbitrary, binary choice that I additionaly don't even know that I'm making it will lead to even more unsatisfying experience. It's more about the choices and the outcomes being organic. The invisibility of the choice is only a byproduct of trying to achieve that.
@@MrRumcajs1000 Interesting. I agree, "Organic" does sound more fitting here. While the other side of the "explicit choices" doesn't necessarily has to be completely esoteric and "invisible", the clear distinction would still be not to "explicitly" present the choices in a non-immersive manner (UI or Dialogue Option).
@@phillyq4671 Yeah, generally I agree. The only problem is that since game systems have to be in some sense arbitrary, things should be explicit to the extent so that a player at least vaguely understands which of his actions are taken into account and which aren't. It's easy to fall into a design-utopia where we strive to mimic the real world as close as possible and create 100% immersive world, but this idea is so far from the reality that pursuing it can cause a lot of harm. A promise of realism can be misleading to the player as he'll quickly realise that the game in fact isn't at all realistic and he needs some clues to know how he should expect the game systems to behave. But as for making the choices 'invisible' or 'organic' in the confines of the systems already presented to the player or at least hinted at - yeah, that's awesome.
I think the sorrow's encounter in Snake Eater is arguably more effective than Psycho Mantis because instead of just telling you "damn you kill a lot of people" it forces you to deal with that fact head on and makes the encounter much more drawn out for each body on the pile
It can also make it feel like a very odd poorly paced corridor when you go through it the first time without killing anybody. there is nothing there to tell me that the place is empty BECAUSE i didn't kill anybody, honestly that is the only fault i can think of in that boss, everything else is great.
@@guigondi7671 that's fair, I usually try to kill as few people as possible in stealth games but I'm not very good at them so usually the river has at least a few of the cobras wandering through it
It is the same across a lot of MGS games for certain parts. Dishonored is also very similar in the same way except across the whole game. The more people you kill the more rats, infected and guards you deal with it is fairly passive but increasingly noticeable as you get later into the game and can make certain things significantly easier and harder. There are also certain powers that you can get upgrade and use that are directly affecting by this fact and can increasingly change the way you play the game and upgrade yourself to deal with this which I found really neat how passively they integrated this increasingly impactful mechanic into the game. Funnily the least impactful part of the whole system in Dishonored imo is that it would change which ending you got if you murdered your way to redemption or killed only those necessary in the most indirect ways possible.
@@guigondi7671 Oof, yeah. Another invisible choice muck-up about that particular encounter is the solution to "beating" it. On my first playthrough, I had to trudge through the river no less than 3 times because it wasn't immediately obvious what it was I should be doing when reaching the end. Without spoiling the details for anyone who'd still like to enjoy it themselves: the game eventually just shows you in a popup in the corner what to do if you repeat The Sorrow's river too many times. I definitely got stuck in that part of the game for an entire day and it felt bad. Though in retrospect I still appreciate the presentation, even if the execution was a bit nebulous.
MGS 3 has some interesting invisible choices. SPOILERS FOR MGS 3: SNAKE EATER There are 2 extra ways to kill The End that the game doesn't tell explicitly. 1. You can just shoot and kill him the first time you see him before the fight even begins. 2. If you save the game in the middle of boss fight and wait at least 8 days, he will die of old age. This can also be achieved by changing the time on console settings. Also, if you just wait for few days after battle but less than 8 days, The End will shoot and tranquilize Snake in his sleep. Snake wakes up at an open cell, and can travel to the fighting area again. During fight,you can kill his parrot to make him angry. This makes him fight more aggressively.
I was baffled by a early scene in Deus Ex HR when your boss tells you to hurry to save some hostages in a factory, but as a good RPG you can wander and chill as long as you like in the Sarif building .... to then discover that yes indeed, the civilians were killed because you took too much time. And that each of the next 20 npcs will remind you that it was your fault.
I've always wanted to see a game that sets whether your camera control is inverted by just telling you to look up, and then setting it based on which direction you moved the stick without thinking.
This is already common and well known trick that games use, the original Halo game is the first instance of doing this. (I mean it's the game that defined *the* standard first person control scheme that virtually all other FPSs has used since)
One invisible choice that stood out to me was the ending of Nailsmith's quest in Hollow Knight. I was blindly following the instructions I was told and only later when I was watching a relative play the game I realised there even was another option. It felt really organic and as if it was judging the very way I play and approach games.
I left him alone, i knew what he wanted, i just didn't want a part in it, i assumed he would just kill himself and that left a bitter taste in my tongue when i came back, but when i discovered what hapenned... no regrets whatsoever.
I always thought Papers Please was the poster boy for excellent invisible choices and was surprised to see it go unmentioned (even if This War of Mine is a similar implementation). Papers Please also does an excellent job of reducing the complexity of consequences (sometimes having no observable consequence at all) and still making every choice feel impactful. That might be specific to the type of character the protagonist in that game is, though - someone put in a position of power over lots of people while being incentivized to not care about them. Another game that sparked that type of reaction in me was Paradise Killer, which really doesn't have any significant choices until the very end, but *damn* if they didn't make me think about the real-world power of prosecutors in what they choose to present, what to withhold, and more-or-less who to execute (while the in-game consequences are identical either way, upholding the system).
Papers Please has no invisible choices. You're clearly taught at the beginning of the game that you should decide to let people through based on your own ethics while knowing the rules of who are allowed. The choices are ALWAYS to let people through or not. That's it. However it has some Unexpected Outputs which yes surprise you as a player when some time later a person you left through will thank you, etc.
@@narukedag I don't know that you are incentivised to just let people through based on ethics though, because you will be punished if you let too many people through who aren't allowed. It's the game's own little way of making you priorities your choices because, sure you might want to let this person through, but what if someone who you think needs to get through more desperately comes after them?
@@narukedag I would argue it is because the game literally never tells you how to get any of the endings, you have to make choices, that may be intuitive, but don't tell you what they do.
@@KiatnissNZ Well you are tackling my main problem with this video. It is too incomplete by trying to summarize a complexe topic. What you're talking about is not invisible choices, because the choices is clearly exposed to you. However it is Unexpected Output. The result of your choices is unclear. Does that really matter? How will that impact the rest of the adventure? The game never clearly tells you that which creates surprise on how your run will end.
My problem with invisible choices is that I've been taught that games often don't have other options. Like, if I try to leave the room, the door is locked, or if I try to kill someone I'm not meant to, the mission fails and restarts. Because so many games don't have any room for alternative choices, it becomes expected that the game you're playing probably won't either.
So true, that's why a lot of games feel sterile. Little to no interactions with the world or the narrative. When you can have interactions people complain it's too slow, like Red Dead 2 for example.
@@zensoredparagonbytes3985 on the other hand tho, red dead 2 while having so much interaction with its npcs, has no room for any wiggle room in the missions, for example in one mission, the game wants you to hide and then i try to hide but the game wants you to hide in a specific designated spot where the devs want you to hide which is really dumb and feels very constrained
@@kislayparashar that is also true. They probably did it for a reason, but if you dont have the freedom to resolve situations in missions with the tools you have at your dispossal, it becomes nothing more than a glorified button prompt simulator. It feels more hidden in RDR2 because the missions are multi-staged, you're constantly moving around while at the same time being restricted. Personally I didn't have issue with it because the freeroam part outside the missions/story is truly amazing. You have so much freedom to go hunting, fishing, exploring, that it makes up for it in spades. But I can see why people would be frustrated with the restrictiveness if they'd only focused on the story and didn't wanted to do the side stuff.
@@zensoredparagonbytes3985 yeh i understand why they did it but i think it kinda clashes with the open world style of it that it is so restrictive in certain missions. i know it's supposed to be more cinematic and linear but the genre of an open world itself encourages player exploration and freedom. i just think the rockstar style of game is so frustrating because on one hand, they create such vibrant worlds with meticulous detail for the player immerse themselves into but on the other, they restrict the player so much
@@kislayparashar I suspect limitations in hardware. RDR2 was originally developed for PS4/Xbox1. There's only so much you can do with so little memory and have all those system mechanics loaded and running in the memory at the same time. The size and amount of scripts needed to make everything move must've been insane. NPC AI behaviour, animal AI behaviour, water in rivers and lakes, wind, trees, objects you can pick up or react to with almost real life physics, fire, everything on specific coordinates, dialogue to trigger at specific moments, etcetera. And then there's the mission scripts, on specific locations with specific prerequisites. I think it can be all too much on the hardware I mentioned, and they did a truly remarkable job. Remember Cyberpunk 2077 on previous console gen? Didn't go too well did it? If we compare similar games in scope, like for example Skyrim or Fallout 4, those are a bit more limited and simpler compared to RDR2 overall systems. But that's my opinion as a lay. I could be wrong though. Personally I liked with what they did with RDR2. Would I have wanted more freedom to resolve each mission? Absolutely. But I'm thankful for it anyway, because of the amount of work that went into it. And it shows because there's no other game like it out there. I can't just discard something on a few negatives while its positives are overwhelmingly much more plentyful. I've learned to accept a few flaws in exchange for satisfying what it set out to do. That is to provide an experience as a cowboy/frontierman simulator while telling a story about the human condition, Arthur facing his future demise that changed his existential perspective on life. That's as human as it gets. I hope we at least can agree on that.
my first game ever made as a developer was a text game, you were a hired mercenary whose goal was to execute a bad guy who lives in a mansion in the city, it was a "write your own adventure" kind of game, you had a bunch of options, on how you get there, what doors you pick, where do you go, who do you shoot, and so on. it was very simple. I had a bunch of these subtle invisible choices that they were TOO subtle. for example, at the start of the game you had to pick between a motorbike, an armored car or a van. My thinking is that if you pick a motorbike you are exposed and you will get shot as you approach very early and if you pick a slow van, that will be that slow that enemies will have so much time to prepare for you, that the high-value target just retreats to another outpost of his. Now looking back at it, I don't know how was the player supposed to know that enemies have this information, but the important bit here and related to the video is that all the choices were supposed to take a set amount of time, which I never told to the player, I thought they'd just figure out, which almost nobody did, that the slower your actions you pick, the higher and higher it's likely that you will get a bad ending and target escapes or you get shot. everyone who played it got back to me, called the game stupid and unfair. I learnt what had to be learnt from that experience as my first game and I moved on. If I were to remake this game, I'd put some notes at the start saying that some of the small details matter, like time spent and so on, I wouldn't wanna put exact numbers of the screen either, because I think it should still be more organic in this case than a fully-fledged strategy game
I've seen this done on a similar game, except you have a prominent clock which ticks and advances clearly after every action you do. You may not realize *why* time advancing matters, but you'll surely notice it. You can compound this effect by having some sort of comment about how the player didn't get to the bad guys in time, and things might have gone better if they'd gotten there sooner.
you probably needed a reminder, like how in human revolution the situation at the first real mission degrades if you spend time crawling through vents in the office being a loot goblin
Information conveyance is a serious (and seriously overlooked) issue in game design, yeah. Too much conveyance and the player can feel cheated out of figuring things out themself. Too little and the player is robbed of the ability to make meaningful decisions. I'm glad that you learned this lesson early on. Some big budget AAA releases still somehow botch conveyance miserably.
I think it's important to note that you can tell the player to keep an eye out for "invisible choices" at the start of the game. In Undertale you're told quite explicitly that you don't need to fight, but some characters seem like they give you no choice, and most characters have specific outcomes whether you kill them or not
Undertale does way more than just tell you there are other options: Torial emphasizes being kind in the combat tutorial, and then the first creatures you "fight" are these sad cute little creatures that don't seem like they actually want to hurt you, and then the first boss *is the person you'd be least willing to kill up to this point*, making sure that you the player regret every act of violence you engage in. Then, if that isn't enough, if you *do* kill Torial (which the game ensures is surprisingly easy by lying about her health bar), Flowey twists the knife about how you betrayed her. THe game has something like 7 different layers of "you don't have to kill people" baked into its beginning.
@@treyslider6954 yes, Undertale is a good game. Those aren't invisible choices though, but rather incentives to choose the other visible choice. The invisible choice is choosing not to fight toriel and finding out she doesn't have to be killed; the game explicitly tells you (through toriel) that she won't move unless you kill her, but the game is in fact lying to you. You won't know that unless you make the invisible choice however.
I agree. Reminds me of what he said about ppl thinking Dishonored was "too linear" because they didn't even know they were making choices. I feel like, if you were going to create a game with a lot of invisible choices, you should put a fairly obvious one at the beginning and have the consequences be felt immediately, just to acclimatize the player to how the system works.
@@staticradio724 I agree, except I think the choice itself doesn't need to be obvious, just the consequences (in such a way that the player realizes they could have done something different, even if they don't know what). It's a tough act to pull off for sure, but that's why game designers are as important as programmers and artists.
"WE HAVE TO CHOOSE" "PRESS SHOOT TO CHOSE" GMTK: I'm going to call this an invisible choice. It works once you explain the actual invisible choices (like shooting ropes), but the first moment gave me a chuckle.
I'm always bothered when a game introduces rules and then breaks them. Recently I played through Modern Warfare (2019) and the game really leans into the casualty of war. You're constantly put into situations where civilians are in the crossfire and you're having to make decisions about whether you should shoot somebody or not. But you also constantly fail the mission if you shoot the wrong civilian or make the wrong moral choice. Choices should have consequences, but they shouldn't result in a mission failure and a save reload if the game lays out that you live with those consequences.
Developers often confuse 'player choice' and 'morality system' with 'you either pick this option or you're a terrible person'. Morality in games doesn't come from a red or blue bar that you fill by picking arbitrary choices the developers laid out for you, but rather from watching the consequence of your actions shape up the narrative.
I mean this ddepends. Sometimes, a game is exactly where people should be encouraged to make choices they wouldn't make in real life to see the outcome. The game giving you feedback that that was a poor choice by forcing a reset isn't necessarily bad per se. Especially if the effects of the choice changes too much of the plot to make any sense. Sure that may feel "on rails" or "lazy" but you can't realistically cover for all possible outcomes of all possible choices. I for one would appreciate a game that allowed me to kill people I shouldn't and then force a reset after showing how bad a decision that was, rather than stripping the choice completely by making said character invulnerable or untargetable or something. Its like real life. You wouldn't realistically run pedestrians over, but you could, and if you did you basically get a "gameover screen" anyways and might as well restart if that was an option.
@@William_Sk Picadilly Circus. The terrorists were interspersed between fleeing civilians making taking them out more difficult. I thought this was a wonderful sequence that illustrated well just how chaotic the fog of war is. The scene where you use the wife as leverage in an interrogation. Shoot too soon, game over. 20 seconds later she's collateral.
@@thelistener1268 The Piccadilly Circus sequence is awesome, didn't remember being bothered with getting a game over when accidentally firing on civilians, since I realized that I had fucked up. The interrogation with the butcher makes sense to me, there's no need to harm his family since he will tell you anyway by just threatening them, feels weird that players would be too quick to jump the gun and play torturer.
Everyone reading this should check out the "more resources" in the description! The video downplayed them as niche resources for developers and hid them in the description, but they're all very cool videos anyone can enjoy!
This makes me appreciate Skyrim even more now. I remember in one quest where Astrid (some name like that) kidnaps you and tells you that you have kill one of the three random people who have been tied up. I was literally like, why should I even listen to this stranger? So I turned around and killed Astrid instead, even when there was no explicit instruction to do so. And as a reward, the objective changed entirely from joining the dark brotherhood to destroying them. Amazing stuff haha.
This quest is cool, but it gets a bit less so when you learn what it was *planned to be* (I assume time constraints or other gamedev factors have prevented them from going with the original vision): Those 3 random NPCs weren't supposed to be random. They were supposed to be chosen from among your companions and friends (basically NPCs you've helped - NPCs in Skyrim tend to change their status from Neutral to Friend after you've helped them with a quest or something). That'd make the quest much juicier and an actual moral dilemma if you wanted to join the brotherhood.
Alternatively, if you kill all 3, you're rewarded with unique dialogue from Astrid congratulating you on your thoroughness. Love that moment. Pity about the rest of the questline (in either direction)...
you can destroy them? oohhhh, i flee or ignore them in characters i not want to be dark as brotherhood... nice to now this, skyrim has immortal characters, soo, sometimes i forget that is just a few ones and trait any major character that is not a target as immortal by default
yet the quest you got from that choice is basically just kill everyone in the guild, report it and it’s done. you don’t even get a special quest line compared to if you join the guild. it’s all for nothing other than “roleplaying” aspect.
One thing that messes with me is how there never seem to be social consequences for general looting unless things are clearly marked as being something you can steal. There's a huge and consistent contrast between the way games reward you for looting everything you see and the way real life punishes you for such kleptomaniacal tendencies. I'm always a little afraid that some game will decide to suddenly go realistic with the consequences- especially in churches or temples populated by non-hostile NPCs. But if a game did have such consequences, I would feel kind of lied to, because games take place in a universe where the fact that you can pick things up means you're meant to have it, so by letting me pick the thing up it would have been lying about that thing being acceptable to take.
Cyberpunk 2077 has done this to me! There's a keycard right in front of a clerk in one of the side missions that I grabbed because I'd taken everything available all through the game without consequence, but this one item related to progress set off the NPCs (along with a dialogue reaction calling me a thief). It's only happened once all game and I've cleared about 3 regions of all gigs and side story jobs. I felt cheated of a stealth approach to be honest.
Pathologic let's you break into people's houses and rummage their stuff and they will fight you for it. Even better is that you may be driven to do it so you don't starve.
Starfield, or other Bethesda titles will call you out for stealing. Sadly, once you pay the fines/jailtime, companions lose their affinity towards you....that's it. Doesn't go any further than that. been great if they threw in options for NPCs to recognize you as a thief. Shop keeps watching you more carefully, guards/police keeping their eye on you, bandits appreciating your work, people fear you for your murderous tendencies, etc.
The problem with these is that because players typically expect a more clear choice, players will often go to the more obvious decisions thinking they'll be punished if they try something else, which is often what happens in many games, causing players to either have to reload or to think "Well why couldn't I just do that instead?". Invisible choices as a concept are great, but players are so used to more linear choices that it's hard to get the best out of the former.
Yeah, which is why it's up to the game designers to also make the players realize that there are more choices than meets the eye at first glance if they want their game to be based on invisible choices. Easier said than done though.
(Kinda spoilers for Spec Ops The Line) I don't know, sometimes I think it's good that the choices are really subtle. In the Spec Ops The Line scene described in the video where Walker is faced with an angry mob of civilians, the obvious choice is to gun them down. Most players will thus do that even if they thought it was a bad thing to do, thinking that they didn't have a choice. This exactly mirrors Walker's behavior throughout the entire narrative. He justifies all of the horrible things he's done by claiming he didn't have a choice. This makes a strong connection between the player and the protagonist that I feel would be lost if the idea of looking for different choices in certain situations was made clearer to the player.
@@bhx6252 Yeah, that game is a very good example of using the expected Gamer Decisions to show how uncritically many are consuming the medium. Spec Ops The Line wants you to treat it like Call of Duty so that it can say "wait, hold the phone, this is actually very bad, why are you doing this?" A similar thing happens with Undertale where you're not punished for playing it like a game as much as you're encouraged to think more about your decisions via the acknowledgement that you reloaded your save and such. But for games that aren't doing Invisible Choices As Commentary, the lack of (heh) visibility with the options does end up becoming a problem. Games teach you their verbs and having one be an option out of nowhere without telling the player is gonna lead to either nobody making that decision or people being upset that there were consequences for an action they didn't know they could opt out of.
@@bhx6252 I think the problem with spec ops the line is that even if you have hidden options in some scenarios they do force your hand when it's important. SPOILERS: Specifically I'm talking about how the game forces you to use the white phosphorus against civilians
Another challenge facing Invisible Choices is replay. If I finish a game, then discover there are other endings based upon Invisible Choices, it can be frustrating trying to get that different ending if I don't know what choices impact that ending. Short of looking up a guide.
TW3 has to be one of the absolute worst examples of this. I haven’t seen a lot of people bring this up because I think most people naturally get the good ending, but I’m honestly still mad about having to go back and replay like 4 hours of the game because Ciri didn’t like the dialogue I picked.
@@bea_3243 Yeah i realized after my second playthrough of this game, trying to have a different ending, that the choice that really matters are shown during a brief moment when Ciri remember what you have answered her very recently just before she enters the storm, and i understood that it was THAT that i should have changed to have another ending lol. But contrarely to you i had the best ending twice, despite making the completely different choice in all of the Bloddy Baron questline or with Keira Metz (that changed the fact tha tshe was here for the battle at Kaer Morhen but that's it).
This is the main problem of Beyond Two Souls. It was full of invisible choices and you never knew what could be done or not. In the end they kinda fixed it in the re-release and in Detroit by adding a flowchart of the game showcasing different branches and so choices at different moments of the game.
I agree. While Invisible Choices are a great idea to immerse yourself into a game, having too much of it often leads to missed endings. For example, I still haven't found all 26 endings of Nier Automata on my own, nor achieve Genocide from Deltarune 2 without a guide.
There is an aspect of this that I find missing in this great video: There's choices *the developers* seem to not be aware of (or at least didn't follow up on). For instance Morrowind has the big bad guy tempt You to join him through Your dreams. You then awake and find Yourself attacked by one of his minions. There is no convenient way to reply to his request other than heading right into late game territory and it is indeed not the most convincing piece of diplomacy on his part, so the player understandably isn't expected to follow up on this "offer". Well: I did and it turns out the option isn't there. Arriving at the evil lair the big bad guy instead just asked me what I'm doing there, not even having the proper weaponry to kill him yet. Had he attacked me it could perhaps be interpreted to have been a trap, but not even that was the case. In my book such design is called... an EPIC FAIL!
Your comment made me think of the Team Rocket member in Red and Blue who offers you to join them after you cross a bridge, but there's no way to accept
@@c0omlord697 I tried, but I suck at reading. I’ll read the same paragraph 5 times and not know what I read. Which is a bummer, because I’ve heard it’s really good.
@@WyattWentWacko yeah, at the start my brain was afk too but that just made it more exciting to piece stuff together and the shiplog always has a short summary of the important stuff so I just read that when I didnt get something after exploring. Plus there is almost no reading in the dlc and you can play that before the main game if you want to.
I absolutely love this concept, but to execute it properly you must at the very least hint the player that it exists in your game early on, like an optional interaction with an NPC becoming relevant later, because many games let the player perform actions that "seem" a choice, but aren't, like having the option to be merciful to enemies or killing them and then making no difference in any outcome, and this is aggravated by the also many games that explicitly tell you whenever there's a choice to make, therefore leading players to assume that if there isn't a clear indicator that in a game personal choices exist or matter, then they don't.
When hearing about the ropes in Spec Ops here, my first though was immediately "can you ever shoot ropes anywhere else? are you ever encouraged to?" Just a simple visual aid of a preciously rope-suspended object now lying on the ground anywhere in that scene would've been a nice, subtle reminder to the player here. It's always more fun to make the right choice when you've been nudged towards it rather than outright told "press x to win"
I do feel part of executing invisible choices correctly is clearly communicating with established mechanics alone rather than prompts, introducing an invisible choice with no established mechanics could be a recipe for disaster where the majority of the audience is unaware that any choice was being made
agreed, expectation setting is extremely important, especially when you expect players to have likely played other games we build our library of possible actions based on experience and signaling from the developer - I'm not gonna assume your game allows "creative" solutions by default as those are work to implement, and most games don't. it's best when there are a few easy-to-trigger hidden outcomes early on that are triggered by acting like you're in a video game - e.g. picking up every single thing, going socially inappropriate places, etc. If it's low stakes then it can be used to teach the player that the game will react to their behavior, so you can adjust how you play.
The subtlety problem reminds me of Tom O'Regan's undertale argument from his horror games video. Undertale doesn't explicitly tell you exactly which ways the story can end, but we all know about the pacifist, neutral, and no-mercy routes due to the game's internet presence. Perhaps newer games don't need to worry about consequences being too subtle because of the way we approach games being changed by the internet.
@@WanderTheNomad it absolutely does! But the point is more that if we keep getting games that go this route it will bring the idea of "invisible choices" more into the public eye and mean they can make the choices more subtle because people are now open to the possibility.
Undertale's an interesting example because it _also_ features tons of, ah, *more* invisible choices. E.g. there is special dialog if you call Papyrus immediately after receiving the phone, or if you let Monster Kid fall and Undyne has to rescue them, then she will start the upcoming battle injured and she will also reference what you did if you call her later in that spot. So it still ends up having plenty of subtle choices you can make and stuff to discover even if you know the big beats from general internet exposure.
This is one of the things that I love about the Trails series. When you play, as you do sidequests NPC's will actually remember whether or not you did their sidequests or not between games for example. It's a small thing sure, but with how in depth the worldbuilding is, talking to NPC's and doing their quests really expands the character's interaction with the world.
My favourite one in Deus ex is that if you spend too much time exploring at the beginning the swat team gets fed up of waiting for you and attacks meaning you skip the mission and it turns into a mess
Also Deus Ex where you have a mission to get an OS upgrade or something for your chip, which ends up being some kind of trap. I don't remember the exact nature, but doing or not doing that little side mission is a hidden choice in itself.
Are you talking about Human Revolution? That's not what happens. The mission stays exactly the same, only the terrorists choose to execute their hostages for some reason. After you arrive on site, no amount of waiting will cause a mission failure. This is a bullshit plot point Eidos Montreal came up at the last moment because they realized there are no consequences for ignoring your boss hurrying you. Most people fell into that trap because the level design encourages exploration, so they assumed there would be no negative consequences for indulging in it.
I thought that was really bad design, nothing tells you the game is any different from all those where you can do a mission whenever you feel like, In fact, it is the only one in the game that does that, I restarted didn't enjoy it at all, thankfully the rest of the game is great
@@aeon_zero I disagree. The dialogue is pretty clear, and you get several warnings. I felt a sense of urgency, as someone who usually explores everything before doing any main story content. I think the rest of the game could've used more instances like this, honestly, given that it's these kind of moments that make the genre so good.
@@matthewmurray8570 There are missions that urge you to run to the next step in every single open (or sort of open) world game, but they are never actually timed. You can go ahead and complete every other single mission available and the NPCs will be there waiting in a panic forever. The only way for you to know is for the game to show you first without consequences that it works that way. This obviously didn't happen in HR.
"By implementing invisible choices, players can speak using the verbs they've already been using as part of normal gameplay." This is some genuinely excellent writing, man.
Surprised you did not mention Metro Exodus with invisible choices. The outcome of the story can be influenced by how many of your crew you are able to retain throughout the playthrough. One of the most memorable and difficult ones is the The Caspian area. There are slaves that are forced to work and fight you, but if you kill all of Baron's men, the slaves will put down their weapons, which gives you a choice to either exterminate a possible threat (watching for your own back) or letting them go free. This one stuck with me throughout the entire game because it was so much more difficult to make out friend from foe. There are context clues and differences in outfits, but it really makes you stop and actually look at the enemy before you fire. I spent so much more time scouting the camps, figuring out who was an overlord and who was a slave, and then trying to save them.
Exodus handles this perfectly, just listen to characters and stay immersed, acting as a normal human would and you get the good ending. Play the game like its cod and you get the bad ending, and it all makes perfect narrative sense.
Speaking of mixing traditional dialogue systems with invisible choices, I would like to see more games where I can *tell* an NPC that I will do one thing, but then actually *do* something different. That kind of nuance can open up a lot of interesting choices I have yet to see in many games.
this happens in one quest in witcher 3 early on where one of the characters asks you to help her with something, now your main quest part with her is done, so you can be like "nah do it on your own" or "sure". if you choose to help her and then just run out the exit instead of following her, she screams at you from behind and if you choose to not help her but follow her anyway, geralt and her have a unique conversation about it where she's like "oh you decided help me after all" which was pretty cool
There's a great example of this in Skyrim's Dark Brotherhood questline. You get kidnapped by Astrid and told you need to kill one of three supposedly guilty people as payment for robbing them of a bounty and she won't let you leave until you've offed one of them, after which she offers to let you join the Dark Brotherhood. But, entirely unprompted, you can also attack and kill Astrid instead which unlocks a hidden questline to destroy the Dark Brotherhood. She also has hidden dialogue if you kill all three, calling you an 'overachiever'!
I can't remember a time Skyrim's game design was complemented. I'm used to people talking about things like the samey and poorly designed dungeons, or the world not matching the mechanics, or the countless glitches. This comment was an interesting change of pace
@@coyraig8332 Up for another example of a hidden Skyrim mechanic? Hired Thugs. If you steal an owned item, even without witnesses, there's a random chance a group of Hired Thugs will spawn in later to "teach you a lesson". One of them will have a note signed by the person you stole from.
@@coyraig8332 There are a lot of problems with Skyrim, but there's some really interesting stuff buried in there, too (even if only because of the sheer volume of stuff there is in the game.)
I think this is an instance of a poorly telegraphed "Invisible choice". Mainly becuase there are often unkillable "essential" NPCs in Skyrim, and the game often punishes you for trying to kill these NPCs by soft locking the game or closing a quest line because the NPC or surrounding NPCs become permanently hostile.
One of my favourite invisible choices was in Final Fantasy VI (snes version, BIG SPOILER HERE). When you are running away from the floating continent (and you have a limited time), a party member named Shadow is taking time and fighting against the bad guy, so that you can run away. At some point you'll reach your airship which is right below you. The dialogue box will tell you: "The airship is below. - Jump! - Wait!" If you choose to jump, Shadow will die and you won't be able to get him back in the next part of the game. If you choose to wait, you can still walk around that area, even if there is not much to do. And if you wait for the timer to reach the last few seconds while you are right in front of that point, Shadow will show up and join you before reaching the airship. Unfortunately they changed the text in the GBA localisation, where the dialogue box will tell you right away "Gotta wait for Shadow" instead of "Wait". The original version was much more powerful (and giving much more trust to player's common sense), but probably most of first-time players were just letting Shadow die because this kind of choice was so uncommon.
yeah, Like ff7 when I first played it, I never knew there woud ever be a date scene at the gold saucer, much less that I could be taking Barret to the theatre!!
"Invisible choices" is something I've been trying to go for in one of my RPG projects, explicitly _never_ giving the player a dialogue list. Instead all choices are through who you choose to talk to or actions you take during downtime, and those cause slight variations in later story-specific scenes.
@@channel45853 I use RPG Maker myself, which provides a lot of tricky stuff for you. I've been using the engines for about 18 years by this point, so I'm pretty confident with them, but they're still a good start for something simple. The project in this post I'm using RPG Maker 2000, which has no code, just a GUI-based event system, similar to the likes of Game Maker. Another project I use RMXP, which has Ruby as an extra programming tool. The latest versions use Javascript, which I'm personally not fond of, but could be more useful to others.
I would love to see a video covering meta games (games which comment on stuff outside the game) such as DDLC, Undertale or metal gear solid. The moment where flowey remarked on me killing toriel and then resetting has made Undertale my favorite game so far.
I wonder what Mark would think about The Outer World's quest in which you're asked to either help the iconoclasts or the MSI. There is a third option where you can help both factions, which requires you to basically ignore their requests to choose either one and therefore work as an intermediate until you broker a deal between the two. I personally really liked it
LOVED getting that outcome. Having a questline in a game result in an organized negotiation scene instead of a gunfight was so satisfying. Unfortunately, I did have to look up a guide or two to make sure I was on the right track to complete it correctly.
I really agree here! I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You mentioned my main point which is that invisible coices makes the game _feel_ as though anything could have a consequence. You other points were great too! I wisch more games implemented this. Same thing, in my opinion, goes for stats that can have a consequence ”RPG-wise”, like good-or-evil stats, relationship stats and such.
5:16 - Damn, that brings back memories. That was the *one* place in the game in which I heavily questioned my previous choice of playing the game on hardest difficulty... It took me a solid 5 tries to develop the proper strategy, but by hell, I did not leave Malik to die :D
This really undersells the punishing effects that bad invisible choices can have, particularly when the choice is only available in some parts of the game and not others. The most typical failure is when the same game will punish you by locking off content if you go too fast through sections, only to then have a section where content gets locked off if you go too slow and explore everything, and thus miss some invisible deadline (especially in games where some deadlines, in-story, are extremely urgent but can actually be put off for ages, but others are for some reason actually urgent). They can also be far too obscure - see the list of required choices to unlock Pathfinder WOTR's secret ascension ending, which is completely opaque to the player if they're not reading a walkthrough.
In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, if you're fighting enemies with Farah around, she can comment on your actions. For instance, if you think the fight is over and put your sword away before you beat everyone, she'll directly comment on it. Really adds to her personality.
NPCs responding to peculiar gameplay actions is definitely underutilized on average. Here's my pet hypothetical example of one such: Say it's an RPG and you're trying to visit a friendly monster village but the guard monster won't let you in. Your party leader knows some shapeshifting and thus can turn into an acceptable creature, but if you do so _in the guard's presence_ they will call you out on it and still refuse to let you in, because the only thing they trust less than heroes is shapeshifters.
FF XV has tons and tons of dialogues like this, mid combat, where they comment what they are doing. They can even say: Ignis, rescue Prompto! And the AI go there rescue. Or they protect you with a shield and make a comment about it. They talk about the creature, how disgusting it is... One of the characters always take care of the main protagonist, so mid combat he tends to stay close: if you run away, he always stop what he is doing and go after you.
Reminds me of the Milkman Conspiracy from Psychonauts in which there's G-Men restricting access from certain areas. To progress you have to find the right item which is sufficient enough as a disguise. When you get caught, there's a cutscene in which they interrogate Raz, the character you play as, about the milkman on top of stuff the player did such as burning bushes and attacking the girl scouts (I mean, they have an official name but I'm sure it'll just confuse people who haven't played the game already). Kinda disappointed you don't get anything from burning the bush you see a girl scout whispering to though.
I think one issue with invisible choices is that games have trained to not think outside the box, since creative solutions usually don’t work. When you described the Spec Ops scene I thought, “Maybe you could shoot their ropes, but that probably wouldn’t work. The game probably forced you to chose.”
Wow, I was really expecting the example of saving Zote in Hollow Knight's early game, surprised it wasn't there. Invisible choices seem to fit really nicely with metroidvanias ("save the animals", ...) in particular :)
I feel like the two endings of "Dark Souls" have the good and bad qualities of invisible choices. (Spoilers) Linking the fire requires simply lighting the bonfire which appears after defeating the final boss. It is presented the same way as previous bonfires which acted as warp points. As such, I lit the bonfire reflexively without even noticing that the button prompt was different. In a way this works for the story, because the lore implies that the gods are using you and I had been blindly trusting their instructions for a suicide mission. But I didn't appreciate that until I replayed the game and read about the story online. The second ending,. letting the fire fade, just requires walking out of the final boss room. This triggers a different cutscene and ends the game. But it's never communicated that walking out constitutes a choice, even if you've spoken to relevant characters. I can walk out of most of the other boss rooms. But try it after the final boss, and the game ends.
I finished Dark Souls Remastered for the first time a couple of weeks back. I knew there were two endings but didn't realise it was triggered by walking out. After killing the final boss, I wanted to delay my decision so walked out, and then triggered the cutscene and hidden ending. It was the ending I preferred but because I didn't mean to trigger the end, it felt a little lack lustre.
@@unluckyfives Thanks for reaching out! Kaathe is who I was referring to as "relevant characters". I just skimmed his dialogue on RUclips, and I don't think anything he says makes it reasonable to think that walking out of the final boss room amounts to deciding to never link the fire. I still appreciate both endings, I just find their execution lacking in practice.
There are such invisible choices in the recent Supermassive Games' Dark Pictures Anthology. Especially in the recent House of Ashes, they try to experiment a lot, asking you to shoot a character but you can let the timer run out and not do it. And you can even kill a character by PASSING a QTE and he can only be saved if you are thinking in that situation and choose not to do the prompt the game is giving you.
The main problem is that you rarely know if the game is meant to be a linear interactive ride, or "build your own story". Also, due to inherit limitations of video games, you understand that at some point the level of interactivity has to end. Undertale's "slay or spare" system works because it was its main selling point. Early in HL1, there's a moment where the room is flooded, and water is electrified. Most people will just run through water and take damage, not expecting that a game made in 1998 has an option to actually find a switch and toggle it. It's not like you can hit a switch in _every_ room either.
Skyrim actually has a pretty interesting example for one of these invisible choices [Spoilers for the Dark Brotherhood Questline]: In the quest for joining the Dark Brotherhood, you are brought to an abandoned shack by their leader, Astrid, and asked to kill one person. You can choose between three prisoners with sacks on their head, and you'll have to rely on their dialogue to decide which one of them has to die. This choice is relatively disappointing, though: The dialogue doesn't reveal that much about the prisoners, it has no consequences for the story or the gameplay, and even Astrid admits that she never cared about who you killed. That is, unless you pick the fourth, hidden option: Killing Astrid. Not only does this give an option for roleplaying a good-aligned character and makes you feel smart for discovering a flaw in her logic, it actually starts an exclusive quest where you destroy the Dark Brotherhood. It's a pretty neat way to expand a choice that would feel very bland and video-gamey otherwise.
She even congratulates you with her last breath after making the fourth choice, implying that she was the one with the contract in her head. With all the other choices she does not state if they were correct and simply asks a few ambiguous rhetorical questions afterward.
You can also take the Jagged Crown to the opposite war faction to switch sides. I don't think it's ever outlined but the option to betray either cause is available. Kodlak may help the Dragonborn battle Alduin if he's been sent to Sovngarde beforehand. It's possible for Kodlak to either be consumed or saved once again by the Dragonborn.
First time I played Dishonored, I played it just however - very chaotic. After I'd finished it, I decided to pursue the Ghost and Non-lethal achievements. I knew that in the first area there were many weepers in the tunnel and tried avoiding it. After I figured that was still the easiest passage to my objective, I was surprised to learn the weepers were humans. Learning how impactful my playstyle was on the game was so positively surprising that Dishonored is still my favourite game. I didn't feel cheated that I didn't know about the invisible choice - I was impressed.
The OG pick your own adventure is a Nabokov novel named Pale Fire, largely also considered the genesis of html. Read it, one of the greatest works of fiction ever
@@Ramsey276one it's from Timon of Athens, something like "the moons an errant thief, it's pale fire stolen from the sun". Used to reference the mediocre trying to borrow greater fires than their own.
I've always loved when games make choices and consequences more organic, it makes the world feel so much more real and gives the interactive nature of games so many more layers. The last time I was really impressed by something like this was at the ending of Bugsnax, where (SPOILERS) you need to run between groups of your friends and complete challenges in order to protect them from the invading Bugsnax. If you fail, they just die! And you've gotta move on to hopefully save the others from a similar fate. The game does give you an option to go back and try again once it's all over, but being on that beach and seeing that the characters I failed to save were missing was such a kick in the gut, especially after I had gotten to know all of them over the course of the game. I wish more games implemented consequences based on the player's actual perfomance into the story, the emotional reaction to story moments can be so much greater as a result
@@glowerworm I did! I definitely enjoyed that aspect of it, Cyberpunk had a lot of cool branches that were fun to explore in subsequent playthroughs. I think it caught me more off-guard in Bugsnax because that game doesn't have too many moments that are altered based on the player's skills and choices so realizing that their fates were in my hands added a lot of genuine anxiety to that final section
I love it when a game can be so subtle about choices and stuff like that. When a game allows the player to express themselves through subtle choices and decisions, it is just so much more meaningful.
Another example I like is the end of SOMA : you can choose to save the survivors from the parasitic AI, or not. If you do, you kill them and free them from their pain, if you don't, they will live forever in a decayed state, thinking they reached heaven even though it is an illusion. And whatever your choices, they don't have an impact on the end of the game, because you don't live long enough to see the consequences. So, even after finishing the game, you never know what are the good or bad choices... You can only judge based on your own morality and on what you understood of the story.
One thing that I would say is important if you're going down the "takes skill to get the good thing" route - which I'm all for - is that you don't then make it "you made the choice not to save saveable person A". That might be less an "invisible choice" and more an "invisible branch". There's different story pathways for "I chose not to try to save them", "I chose to try to save them, but failed", and "I chose to try to save them, and succeeded". But as a player of high ambition and low skill, I can tell you it does kind of rasp to get my action of "I chose to try to save them, but failed" treated as "I chose not to try to save them".
i was hoping you'd touch on Hollow Knight's invisible choices, like with the whole Zote or Cloth quest lines, but you brought up some other really good examples. nice video!
I don't think Cloth really counts, because the invisible triggers which put Cloth on one route or the other are not tied to your intent in any way. They are just two alternative ways that her story can play out, and you merely stumble upon one or the other by pure chance.
I felt like Hollow Knight's choices didn't work because they hadn't established an expectation that there would be choices. I had no idea about the grimm troupe choice, that I could not kill the nail Smith, choose to give a delicate flower to someone other than the traitor's child's grave, etc because up until those points, the game was entirely linear with no permanent changes. It just made me angry to know that I could've chosen otherwise when none of that was communicated to me in any other part of the game.
@@danielgysi5729 Well, for the Nailsmith one, why didn’t you just not kill him? I know he asked you, but if you wanted to not kill him you could. Its not like the game forced you. The Grimm Troupe one is even clearer, since Brumm literally tells you that you have a choice. Tho I agree that the delicate flower for other npcs was something that was not easy to figure out
I suppose those concluding thoughts about how some players will not even realize there's an option kind of ties in to the "Who Gets to be Awesome in Games video, but in the sense of creativity, curiosity, and maybe even game sense, rather than the more mechanical skills exemplified in that video.
An interesting case of a choice being “too invisible” for me was the final encounter in FF7R, where your approach to the previous battle influences how the rest of the party supports Cloud. In hindsight it’s a pretty neat touch, but I never would’ve noticed and appreciated it if I hadn’t discussed the fight with my girlfriend afterwards and noticed the discrepancies.
For real? I had no idea that was a thing... and by now it's been so long since I played the game I don't even remember how I played or how they acted towards me, so I can't even compare my own experiences to others.
One problem with explicit choices is for me personally, that I always want to get the "best" ending then. That means I tend to look up guides which can give away some twists and surprises.
I think games should try to avoid "best" endings, and maybe have "different" endings that maybe play more into player preference than one ending being objectively better than others.
I don't often praise Skyrim, but it has an excellent example of an invisible choice near the start of the -Thieves- **Dark** Brotherhood quest (thanks to Led Kicker for the correction). Spoilers below the fold. After being abducted by the Brotherhood, they show you three people and tell you that you must kill one of them. You can do that and progress the quest, but you can also kill the person who tells you this, ending the quest and giving you a different quest to shut down the Brotherhood instead. This is much harder because they take away your weapons and the quest giver is armed and armored, but I really appreciated that they didn't miss that trick.
It would be really cool to see a video on the surport class in games and how designers can make a class that is usually boring compared to others interesting
Apparently it's stil the cool thing to excessively hate on the game, but Cyberpunk 2077 absolutely deserves credit for having lots of hidden choices that lead to organic outcomes. There are so many different ways scenes can play out based on your actions and characters will more often than not acknowledge your way of completing certain objectives. SPOILERS with some big and small examples: -You can save Takemura. That choice is only hinted at in the level design and Johnny is actively discouraging you from doing it. -Rescuing Saul without alerting any guards will trigger unique dialogue and prevent you from being chased by a group of bad guys in the car -After Panam asks you for help with recovering the tank, you can go to Saul and tell him about her plans. This will make Panam furious at you, end her quest line prematurely and lock you out of the Nomad ending completely. You do get a unique car from Saul though. -Making your way through the Clouds club without being detected opens up an entirely new option and scene where you can interrogate Woodman and advance the quest without killing him. If you are engaging with any guards beforehand, Woodman will attack you on sight instead. There are many many more examples like this and every time they are brought up people are surprised that there was any choice to be made at all. Sadly, the dominating narrative about the game is still that it "isn't an RPG" and "there are no choices" which is completely false. The choices are just presented in a much more organic and subtle way.
A cool hidden choice is in Call of Duty World at War, a game with a truly amazing story. During the Soviet campaign you come across a lot of different German soldiers that are wounded or surrendering. You can either kill them immediately, light them on fire or spare them. Sparing them appears to do nothing since someone else will kill them..... except that it actually does something. Another soldier is keeping a journal which is quoted during the pre-mission cutscenes and the player character is mentioned varies depending on the way you treated those germans. He'll either idolise you, or call you a bloodthirsty killer who isn't different from the enemies you're fighting. Pretty cool and generally unnoticed detail
I can think of a couple examples of this that I’ve experienced. The first was in Skyrim, when that cannibalism cult tried to get me to join. I went along with the quest for a while but when I finally met the whole cult in a cave and they wanted me to go through with it, I thought, ehhh, I really don’t want my character to be a cannibal. That’s crazy. But the problem was, there were no dialogue options to refuse to join by that point, I had gone too far into the quest. So, I pulled out my mace and just killed everyone instead. Next thing I know, some priest enters the cave and thanks me handling that wretched cult. So I had made a choice that the game clearly accounted for without even realizing it because it wasn’t a dialogue option the way it normally is in Skyrim. Made me wonder what other kinds of choices that game has that I never thought to pursue. The second one is in Red Dead Redemption 2, when Rains Fall asks you to recover one of his ritual artifacts without killing anyone. This one is more clear about the choice being made here, but the actual act of making the choice is done through the game’s normal gameplay and is somewhat skill-driven. You can kill the guys guarding the artifact against Rains Fall’s wishes to make things easier on yourself, or try to do a somewhat complicated (for Red Dead) bit of stealthing to recover it without incident and get a reward for your efforts. After a couple tries, I did it without killing anyone, and it was definitely much harder than just dead-eying everybody but the reward as well as pleasing Rains Fall was totally worth it
Great video as always! A good example of making the difficulty of making choices unequal is in my first playthrough of The Witcher III, which I played in hard mode. I didn't have a reliable form of healing since the only thing that could heal me was food in this mode (and I still didn't unlock the renewable healing potions), so I had to make every meal count. It genuinely felt like every mission broke even where I had to buy loads of food after finishing only to eat almost all of it to heal up from the wounds inflicted from that very mission. So, when a murder mystery came to me in the form of a side mission where a widow wanted to confirm whether or not her husband died from wild wolves, and I found her sister to be the actual culprit only to be offered a bribe to keep quiet, I felt so bad for accepting the bribe and keeping quiet about the murder. I felt even worse when accepting the money from the widow when I was given the option to reject it. I felt so terrible, and what made it worse was that, as usual, the food I bought using that money was used up just as quickly as any other mission.
Thank you for the violence warning. I hate it when I'm watching what seems like it'll be innocuous video, when suddenly it's "HEY, REMEMBER THAT SCENE WHERE A DUDE GETS HIS JAW RIPPED OFF IN GOD OF WAR??!!" So I appreciate the warning, and the general restraint in the clip choices
Love that you mentioned the part with Faridah from Human Revolution! That was one of the most memorable scenes from the game to me. I always think about how cool that was, and it definitely helped that you felt like YOU made it happen, like it was an optional outcome the game didn't intend for (even though they obviously hoped you would at least try).
One of my favorite games with hidden choices was Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. I played it as a kid and didn't realize it was tracking my performance until I picked it up again years later, when I was better at the game. For example (spoilers), the dialogue of the Alpha Hirogen at the end of level 3 changes to complement or roast you depending on how skillfully and stealthily you played the level, or if you found all the objectives. And during the Borg-level, you're given an opportunity to save your senior officer from assimilation under a time-limit as a test of skill, or to leave them behind and avoid jeopardizing the mission, and the results of those outcomes change events later in the level. These sound like great examples of the game design principles you're talking about here.
I love it when games not only have invisible choices that you can miss, but generally content that you can miss. Even if i am the type of person to rush the main quest in rpg's (i actually went a killed alduin how the game wanted you to) but just knowing there are options out there makes the world feel alive for me. And don't get me started with dark souls and it's hidden lore, much smarter and more dedicated people dig up the amazing lore and fun bits for me sure, but just knowing these little things are buzzing around, things hiding under rocks make me nod, leave it be maybe and enjoy that there is more out there.
I'm apparently choice-blind because even giving me a bespoke line of dialogue after my invisible choice goes over my head. I pretty much never imagine my choices have an impact on the game unless the genre of the game is specifically earmarked as being one where "choices matter", and I'm given plenty of explicit choices to remind me of that e.g. Undertale
I'm doing the contrary. Just finished this video and now I'm going do Desing Doc. Didn't knew the options in Spec Ops. And yeah, I probably missed so many options in many games, only to find about them in random videos, but only because I go with me most obvious option (or the good option if there a moral system) and I'm too lazy to play a second playthrough.
One of my favorite moments of this happening to me was in fallout New Vegas, I had been massacring powder gangers the entire game and upon stumbling one who was crippled and refused to fight me he called me the powder gangre grim reaper. It made me feel like I wasn't just killing nameless baddies but a tight knit group who share tales and stories of what I've done to them. It immersed me in a way that not a lot of other games have
5:50 This can also apply to letting units die in games with permadeath, or even making tactical sacrifices. A situation I anticipate to come up a lot as I attempt to finally beat FE Conquest on classic. (Wish me luck)
When I first played The Witcher 1 I was mindblown with the fact that the Grandmaster was actually older Alvin. But the fact that his speech in the final quest mirrored all the answers I gave Alvin throughtout the game made it that much more memorable. Because of that, I remember TW1 very fondly to this day, despite its clunkyness and overall outdated engine.
Glad someone finally touched this topic. This is a big thing that I feel really puts nuance into a choice, and can often make choices feel more nuanced then they actually are (which also allows less nuanced choices to blend in with choices that have bigger consequences, forcing the player to assess every choice with a similar level of care). I’m surprised you didn’t mention Paper’s Please, it’s practically an entire gameplay system built around this concept.
One problem I have with the invisible choices is that so many games have explicit choices or few random invisible that comes out of nowhere that, when you actually get to an invisible one that matters or a game build around this type of choice, you won't think about the possibility because you're already conditioned to only do what the game explicitly say it's possible. It would be so nice to have more games with invisible choices and a good introduction showing it's a possibility for the gameplay.
Yeah. Due to how rare they usually are, I think it's really important for any game that wants those choices to feel natural, fair and to be used, that they do a very good introduction. Hopefully showing you the consequences of something you thought you had no choice
in metro exodus, there is the choice to kill or knock out a guy that ambushes you, right before you get the key for the car. i didn't kill him and later when i went to sleep in one of the many different sleeping areas. i woke up to a group of them watching me as the guy i saved thanks me and gives me a revolver attachment. at the time it took all my attention and fully immersed me as it felt like they could have found me at any time, and may not find me at all (unpredictable). later the thoughts "did they have different character positions for every sleeping area" (some were sitting on some crates) and "what if i didn't sleep, would i have missed this?" led me to believe that the idea that even after making a choice that hides a reward (as it seems like something you have done before) and that the potential reward for that choice could be missed if you didn't know about it or was unlucky, really make the situation feel like it was real, as it was precise choices that made it happen and could have very well not happened (the illusion that *every choice* makes an impact, like the real world, and that the smallest choices could have a result, if you are lucky) sorry if this is a bit messy, im just putting my mind into text
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A good example of hidden consequences is in the first Falllout.
Apparently, the entire main quest's on a timer until the vault dies out from thirst, but you can lengthen this timer by setting up a trade caravan for water.
However, doing this shortens a second timer which counts down until super mutants discover and raid the vault.
Sadly this is only true on the 1.0 disc release of the original fallout.
TLDR: players were pissed about the invisible timer and interplay butchered the game to take it out. Taking away a lot of invisible choices you had.
Edit: I spruced up the long explanation so it hopefully doesn't confuse future readers.
When you create a new game it also starts two timers. A 150 day time limit to find a water chip before the vault dies of thirst This is the first part of the main quest and you get a little tracker on your pipboy. It also starts a second timer of 500 days to kill the final boss and destroy his lab, if you don't complete the game in the 500 day limit, it's game over. This second timer is never mentioned anywhere outside of a teensy tiny hint you can easily miss.
You get the opportunity to set up a water caravan which extends the initial quests timer by 100 days, giving you more time to find a water chip. however this also cuts 100 days off the invisible 500 day timer.
Now while this all makes logical sense if you think about it (hiring the caravan attracts attention yada yada) apparently people were taking in the scenery playing fallout 1 cause a lot of people complained about the invisible time limit (in my opinion the 500 days is MORE than enough cause the game doesn't have THAT much content)
This backlash prompted interplay to have the 500 day limit extended to 13 years and when they removed the 500 day limit in patch 1.1 it also broke the mutant invasions. The mutants are supposed to be doing spoilery things and the longer you take the more towns get destroyed as the days tick down.
The game has a slideshow ending telling you what happens around the wasteland after the events of the game and half of those don't work cause the mutant invasions are broken
@@dosmastervideos6213 if that's right, unless I'm missing something the base game was absolutely nonsensical :L
If there's a 150 day timer, and you can add 100 days to it, the longest you can play the game is 250 days.
What the Dickens is the point of a 500 day timer, or even the 400 days if you set up the caravan, if you will literally never see the consequence of it?
EDIT: it just occurred to me that the main quest probably isn't the water chip :L
I apologize, and will be shutting down my account and living a life of penance up in a mountain.
@@MysterousBear Yeah, there are essentially two tasks you need to do to finish the game. The water chip isn't one of them, although I believe it opens the quests for the two main objectives. Finding the water chip is the initial main quest, however.
No need to apologise for a mistake. The previous posters didn't actually explain what the objective to finish the game is.
@@AnotherDuck You actually only need to beat The Master to end the game, which can be done without finding the water chip.
@@MysterousBear No worries I admittedly did skim over too much info and looking back it is kinda confusingly explained
Edit: I also realized I made an error saying the 1.0 had the timer but 1.0 also didn't, whoops. Don't write essays at 2 am kids
One of my favorite moments like this is in the first night of Disco Elysium, if you just held the run button all day to get around faster, your partner Kim will complain about how exhausting the day was and ask you why you’re always in such a rush.
Every time someone reminds me of a detail like this I love this game even more.
@@Vortal_Cord IIRC, he calls it the Jamrock Shuffle: a strange way of locomotion involving nearly incessant running, and towards containers first.
And he bring it up again at the end of the game, saying that it makes so much sense now.
Also, if you do the phasmid quest early, Kim will complain about it but later he will mention that because we did this,
we already know the layout of that place.
A gym teacher! Of course! No wonder you're obsessed with Contact Mike!
@@Mewseeker Actually, we're doing Disco Elysium a disservice by bringing it up in the context of a single throwaway joke. All throughout the game, dialogue options appear or not based on the character's traits and previous choices and others comment upon various things accordingly. The basic things the character notices and comments about in the environment change too.
Invisible choices are even more impactful when they are put in a game genre normally full of explicit choices, like visual novels.
I remember playing Steins;Gate and being completely caught by surprise when I reached a specific ending without making a single conscious choice - every "choice" stems from how you use you cell phone: whether you answer calls or not, and how you respond (or don't respond) to emails you receive for example.
yeah that was an example that came to mind for me as well. the problem with how steins;gate handles choices however is that its so broad that its kinda unclear why your actions lead to the consequences that follow, and its near impossible to achieve the specific outcome you want without religiously following a guide
@@rkken Personally, I like that Steins;Gate makes it almost impossible to hit the true ending without a guide.
You're most likely to get it on a second playthrough after checking, which helps you feel the same emotions as protagonist Okabe, seeking a miracle in a confusing maze of timelines.
I don't know. For example, cyberpunk had a lot of invisible choices but since there are also explicit dialog choices people got the impression that they don't have many choices and complained about it.
Its one of the best visual novels ever created for a reason
This comment just sold the game to me
Maybe for story-driven explicit choice games, Telltale’s “X will remember this” prompt would actually be useful if they used it like at the point when the consequence was happening instead of after the moment of choice. I’ve seen a couple indie visual novels do this, where when the game does a check for a previous action, they pop up a little notice reminding the player of the action they took. It makes the choices more explicit and impactful when you realized you caused this to happen, or how that choice cascaded to now.
Never thought about that, but that's way better.
Of course I expect Characters to remember what I do or say but instead being reminded of it later when the consequences unfold stops the game from "spoiling" itself.
Yeah, that's really good idea!
I remember Until Dawn doing this, a character flashing back to some action they took (as chosen by you) when the consequence rolls around. It doesn't happen very often, meaning that most of your choices don't get that kind of spotlight. It kinda also has the telltale version at the same time, with the "butterfly effect" page on the pause screen telling you that some choice you made was remembered, but it doesn't tell you what it is unless you specifically go into the menu to look it up
i think the best part of Telltale´s X will remenber this, is when they straight up kill X 5 min later, so X could not have done nothing about whatever you did to him after, but you still felt bad at the moment.
+1 Lieutenant trusts you.
+2 Kim *truly* trusts you.
A subcategory of "The developer thought of that??" - anything that helps make a game feel more dynamic and less strictly scripted helps make the game feel *alive*. And if I try something that less than 1% of people are going to try and it actually *works*, it's like I'm having this secret conversation with the developer and it's extremely satisfying.
No doubt one of the best feelings in gaming.
That and the very similar "I wonder if I can do that" and it works
Hollow Knight
@@YexprilesteR Hollow Knight has a bunch of secrets, but most of the decisions are binary, so I don’t think it fits very well to this description. Sure, there are cool things that people might not realize would happen, like Zote dying if you don’t save him, but nothing to complex
Aka the Stanley parable.
one of the reasons why I love the Metal Gear Solid series, people love the screw around and the game series rewards that.
I remember the first time I played Deus Ex, when Paul has his killswitch turned on, you are told to leave by the window and helicopter. But if you do this, Paul dies. Well, I stayed and fought! I got "killed" but it actually gets you captured and if you do it that way, or manage to beat the MIB, Paul actually lives when you meet him in prison! My mind was blown! I thought I broke the game!
damn i would never imagine to shoot the rope instead of the guys on that specops scene... mostly because i dont expect games to have this level of care/thought tbh...
I think the problem is that we expect an instant game over screen if we derive from the story.
Fail the quick time event, and you will die, if you will.
Exactly. I've played so many games where the developers /didn't/ code in an outside the box solution that I would just accept the moral dilemma as part of the game's theming. In real life I'd be looking for some other solution, but in a game I just assume it doesn't exist
@@Kyderra Just like the recent gimmick used by Supermassive in House of Ashes, where if you pass all QTEs you can literally suffocate a character to death. You have to listen to audio cues from another character and stop pressing the button to succeed. That is kinda innovative.
I thought it was the intended (and only) choice
@@Kyderra that's how Modern Warfare treated every moral "choice". If you pick the option they deem wrong it's game over.
Bonus Advantage: It keeps players on their toes about what actions are story-relevant. Surprising the player with a result from a hidden choice early on can make them double-guess whether it's reaaally of no relevance that they are stealing whatever they come across just because the game doesn't immediately declare it as theft.
Something I saw brought up is the exact counter point to that: some times it makes people feel cheated if they don't realize their actions could have consequences, since many games don't punish the player for just picking up every random thing they find.
This reminds me of a minor element in Skyrim: If you are witnessed stealing an object, it's a crime and you get a bounty for theft, right? But -- if you are NOT witnessed stealing an item, there's still the possibility an NPC will hire Thugs to track you down later, implying they discovered your theft after the fact.
@@aaronscott7467 Yes, one of my pet peeves is when a game punishes you for something that you previously never had any consequences for doing and is part of normal game design. Very much a bait-and-switch scenario where you're guilt-tripped for something you didn't even realize was a "choice."
If there are invisible choices, then I think that their consequences should be presented early on in the game, as OP suggests.
@@aaronscott7467 That may be true, but that feeling can be a core design choice, too. (Do I really need to bring up Undertale and how suddenly every basic and intuitive gameplay mechanic becomes an invisible choice with awful implications)
@@RialuCaos It´s basically a related issue to the "hidden timers". The timers (hidden or not) can be considered a choice as well. You either rush the objective (and possibly advance the story where you can´t go back), or you explore as much as you can, gathering resources/power, but risk getting a worse outcome or straight up losing for taking too long.
The flipside is the Irrelevant Choice, where you replay the scene, do something different... and get exactly the same outcome (possibly with one line of dialogue different to get the player back to the main track). A lot of games have those, including the Telltale games...
That's not very nice, Commander Shephard. Anyway, back to exposition...
My main annoyance about Fallout 4 … ugh.
I feel like every game I've played with this style of choice making does that. and god it's such a tired trope.
HOW DO YOU RESPOND
I agree
^
sarcastic < > funny
v
I disagree
YOU PICKED "I disagree"
you: "FUCK YOU MAN"
well that wasn't very nice >:( anyways.. as I was saying
Dragon Quest XI choices be like
I think the most infamous example of this is the "who do I throw the ball at choice" in BioShock infinite. The -exact- same thing happens either way.
My favorite invisible choice is in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, at the end of the second part of the Seoul mission. You're tasked to get to a crash site of a spy plane that was shot down so you can provide targeting data for an airstrike to destroy the wreckage. When you get there, Sam (the player character) remarks that the pilots could still be alive in the plane, but your mission control character tells you to designate the target anyway. If you follow mission control, Sam says "God forgive me" as he designates the target, and the mission ends. However, if you want to save the pilots, you have to sneak past a tank and several armed enemies, and then carry both pilots to safety one at a time, while your mission control character says that you're risking your life needlessly, you won't get a medal for this because your presence here is secret, etc etc. However, if you do, Sam is much happier about designating the target. There's no bonus objective to do this, and like mission control says, if you do it, you don't get bonus completion or any recognition, just knowledge that those pilots are alive because of you.
I think this is not good for the experience. If saving those men means nothing for the game (no bonus etc), what's the pint to save them? Moral? These are just a handful of pixel, why do i need to care? Instead, the game should have let know the player has made a good decision with some kind of reward or bonus (even not linked to the gameplay).
My favourite invisible choice is in Pandora Tomorrow (spoilers OMG please skip this if you want to play it). In this mission you're working with the Syrian government's secret service branch, Shin Bet, to steal a viral weapon from a terrorist laboratory. You follow a Shin Bet double agent, Dahlia Tal, who was inserted into the terrorist group, across the streets of Syria to a hidden underground facility were the weapon is stored. After you get into the elevator that leads there, and the door closes, Sam's parting with Dahlia when Lambert says "Fisher, we need Dahlia Tal dead. Kill her. Don't think, just do it".
Here's the thing. Shin Bet are attempting to betray the NSA. Once you gain the weapon they plan to kill you and steal it for themselves. How ever 3rd Echelon don't know this. They just think that Dahlia is acting suspicious. That's it.
When the order comes up nothing seems out of the ordinary. It just comes as dialogue out your earpiece, like so many other orders you've gotten during the game. You can do what ever you want, like usual. The rub is that you've been conditioned to know that whenever Lambert's advice is given it's usually the best course of action. You're now allowed to use lethal force, you won't be seen by night vision if you're in the spotlight, you can enter from the roof, reinforcements are coming, etc. He's your tactics guy and handler. So you're already used to knowing that what he says will have an impact on your gameplay, and the militaristic tone of the game overall has also engrained in you a habit to "just follow orders". On the other hand, he's never given you an order like this. He's never told you to "just do" something. He's always talked to Fisher with respect and allowed him to make his own calls. So why now? Why Dahlia? Isn't she an ally?
So there's a lot going through your mind. And when you make the choice you may not even know you just made a choice. You might just shoot because you've been following every other order Lambert gave you or. Or you might shoot her because you think it's a set part of the game and this is an order the game requires you to make. Or you might not realize you can shoot her and you just freeze. Or you might choose your actions consciously.
The best part of this is that what ever you choose the game criticizes your choice. It you *don't* shoot her, the Shin Bet go through with there plan and the NSA and SHIN BET get into firefight, and everyone will know, including the Syrian government. You may even end up killing her in the fight. At the end of the mission Lambert says you're soft spot for Dahlia has set relations back in the region decades. You're criticized for playing as a black ops agent in a game performing high risk espionage operations and not wanting to follow orders because you wanted to keep your ethics in an unethical job, for thinking you, the player, knows anything about morality in this world of covert ops.
If you *do* , Shin Bet never make there move. You're not told why you shot an ally and Sam Fisher directly compares YOUR actions to the terrorists, calling you out for acting just as evil for your country:
Sam: "Tell me what I just did Lambert".
Lambert: "The right thing. Hard work but it had to happen".
DP Brunton: "Shin Bet wasn't playing a straight game".
Fisher: "Killing unarmed women seems mighty close to terrorism".
Lambert: "Shut up Fisher. Leave the ethics to us. Brunton, sign off. We need to talk".
DP Brunton: "Get the sample as soon as possible. You're in a fifth freedom situation. All means are acceptable".
That's it. You never find out why, so you're just left to sit with what you've done and wonder what it is you're even doing, and if you even trust yourself or the people you've trusted up until this point. And at the end of the mission Fisher asks if Lambert will tell him why he killed Dahlia and Lambert will just say "No, not yet. I know your not happy about it but preventative measures are never satisfying. Meet Cohen and get to Amityville". And that's it, mission over. The game will never tell you. You killed someone, just to be safe, because you were told to. "Preventative measures".
So yeah that's my favorite choice.
Ps: on my first run I shot her and had to deal with it. It was as if I was on auto pilot. I only found out years later about the larger story. Very traumatizing.
Wow! I will play that game.
@@francesco2305 That's so unrealistic and divorced from reality. A lot of the time IRL, the moral choices you make do not reward you in any tangible way, the only thing you get out of the experience is how you feel about yourself. If your only goal in playing a game is to achieve outcomes, then none of this even matters to you, but if you want to have an *experience,* then it matters a lot.
@@keithklassen5320 i agree, but It has to be a meaningful (and i highlight meaningful) experience..
This is not a particularly invisible one but almost every one I have watched play have missed it in Plague's Tale.
You are in a tunnel and carrying a torch which means you are pushing away the crazy rats and there is an enemy guard standing near a locked door in front of you in darkness. If you simply keep moving forward you will have the rat swarm devour him despite his agony but you can shoot a fire ball near a lantern close to him which is turned off and it will save him and he will thank you and let you go.
I think what he means by invisible choice is that there are no UI elements appearing like in dialogue options or "press button to do something". Instead it's "if you keep going you'll kill him" which the characters explicitly tell you but if you spot the torch you can save him (which the characters don't tell you).
I'd call that an invisible choice. And it's a damn good example, bravo.
Oh damn I totally killed that guy :( :(
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! I wanted to save that guy so bad but I couldn't figure it out...
Yeah that was a good detail.
On the topic of "too subtle" I remember way back an old interview from the devs of Va11-hall-a who wanted something different to the whole explicit choices of many other genres and decided their solution would be for the player to instead of "choosing from a menu" you quite literally choose from a menu...of drinks.
In many ways because the game is about hearing customers requests and then you proceeding to make any drink you want. However wrong choices mean you don't get rent money, which can directly end the game after some point, plenty of players pretty much just follow the requests as given...except the part where you can add "additional karmotrine (alcohol)" so people just opt to max that out whenever they are given a chance.
Back on topic, much of the early critiques always seemed to note that despite how interesting the characters are, they only really point to Mark as noteworthy for """"subtley"""" mentioning he wants a girly drink before re-clarifying louder for a manly, macho one instead. This may as well be the most explicit choice via the given interface, but it also seems to one of the few that actually sticks.
But the punchline really is that the player could do this from the VERY FIRST ENCOUNTER, by giving the incredibly anti-social Ingram a sweet drink against his hard alcohol preferences. This in-turn opens up a whole back story about his tragic family life, yet because A) pretty much nothing actually hints that characters will accept ANY different drink combination, most especially sweets and B) most people also only do 1 playthrough of a Visual Novel; again, a lot of really deliberate work is pretty much thrown out the window because Sukeban games didn't really "signpost" what the player could or couldn't do...nor really encourage too much exploration short of perhaps the most heavy handed ones.
I ruminated a lot on their initial design philosophy for the past 5 or so years but after watching this vid I at least hope that there is some acknowledgement that lots of hard work really would go over-looked if devs actively hide a bread crumb trail in hopes of "truest player choice without ANY mechanical instigation". I guess people may just default to the path of least resistance unless they're told a less traveled path has extra goodies behind it.
He really scratched a topic Ive been having for a while I have Valhalla and still havent played it but damn I really need to give it a go
Wow, thanks for commenting. I played Va11-Hall-A two years ago and had no clue you could even do this. I think it's because at the beginning of the game, they very clearly indicate to the player that making drinks your customer DOESN'T want will result in a negative outcome (i.e. the customer will get upset or you'll earn less money that day). The average gamer is going to want to avoid a "game over" scenario and play the game the way they were told to, so I (and a lot of other people) stuck to only making drinks the way customers asked because I was afraid that if I didn't I was playing the game "wrong". I'll admit I was even reserved with how much additional karmotrine I gave customers because I wasn't sure if it was a good idea to get them drunk (the only customer I recall getting super drunk was Streaming-Chan, and that was only because she explicitly asks for a lot of alcohol during one chapter). I'm actually kind of bummed knowing that if I had thought outside of the box I could've seen dialogue and scenarios that I completely missed.
Going back to the whole "signposting" thing, I think it would've been really awesome if Sukeban had given you a character at the start of the game who was torn between which drink they should have, and then wrote the dialogue in a way that made it pretty clear you had the freedom to choose which kind of drink to make. If they'd done that, then players would have gone the rest of the game with that thought in mind, and may have occasionally deviated from the customer's requested drinks more often.
I know Sukeban is supposed to be working on Nirvana right now (the sequel to Va11-Hall-A) so hopefully they learned from their first game and have improved their system for the second!
There are also a few cases where they'll give you a very general drink selection or not give you one at all, but if you paid attention and choose a drink you know they like you'll also get more story!
Prey 2017 is the most impressive I've seen in this regard. The game is like a constant succession of trolley dilemma type situations and every choice is important. When you get to the ending it evaluates everything you've done: people you saved, if you installed neuromods or not, the story paths you choose etc. The ending is especially interesting because it has a meta layer of analysing what means to interact with narrative inside a software construct.
After all, Dishonored was too, especially in the first game
I was honestly surprised to see it not mentioned in this video. I've found that some people got to the end of Prey and were pissed off by the ending they received because they didn't realize they were making invisible choices.
@@emnii My favorite choice was trying to cheat your way into an early ending. You can take the escape shuttle leaving everyone behind but the game gives you a fake out ending followed by a game over. This seems like an odd way to punish you for working your way towards this choice until you get the further context from the ending. Realizing that you picked possibly the worst choice imaginable for what the "test" was. There's a reason it's a game over, as in you died.
@@emnii That doesn't make much sense as you are not blocked from any type of ending until the very end. The epilogue comments on your choices but none of it really changes the outcome.
@@emnii preys ending kinda made me mad because the game ended with...
(Spoilers ahead)
.. it was all just a simulation. Which kinda ruined the immersion for me. Imagine if bioshock ended with: It was all just a dream lol. Also in the last few hours after the typhon attacks the ship, alot of areas become inaccesible. And the enemy become more tankier, deal more damage and respawn a lot more. And you have backtrack through the entire ship like another 2 times before the game ends. That kinda made me dislike the ending a lot because the lack of payoff.
I do love prey and is one of my favourite, but the ending felt kinda rushed.
In Tyranny, when the third act starts, you're told to go to a specific place to be judged. But it being an RPG and there being other characters and quests I wanted to deal with, I took my sweet time visiting pretty much everywhere else in the world before going there. What do you know, the judge recognized that I ignored his summons for weeks, and an epic fight ensued. I was so pleased that an RPG finally recognized how much I was dawdling!
One game in the indie space that uses invisible choices is Forgotton Anne, an excellent puzzle platformer. I played the game demo at a Pax, and in an early interaction the game put up a message that said “this encounter could have gone differently”. It’s the only time in the game the message appears, and wanting to see what I could of done differently was a large reason I picked up the game. And the reason it was so impactful was because the choice was entirely based in gameplay.
Thank you for sharing your experience without spoiling anything. I might check this game out
I never understood why people even say could of as opposed to could've someone please explain
@@Ryan-ey3qk could’ve is could have. Not could of. But I see where the confusion comes from
@@CheeseyHR "could have" is the grammatically correct one, though. "What I could have done differently"
@@Ryan-ey3qk i think it‘s just due to the sound. But this mistake always appeared weird to me. Especially as it seems to be done by native speakers, as well.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s single piece of DLC-“The Missing Link”-used an interesting tactic: it used a visible choice to HIDE an invisible one. (Spoilers for a 10-year old game to follow.)
Near the end of “The Missing Link”, the player is confronted with a choice: a lethal poison gas is being flooded into both a prison filled with innocents (whom, before now, their jailers had been experimenting on), and the laboratory containing a whistleblower with enough evidence to see the jailers punished. Do nothing, and everyone dies. Redirect all of the poison to one of the two locations, and you save one party while killing the other more quickly.
The game presents this as buttons on a console; basically the diegetic equivalent of Bioshock’s “Save” and “Harvest” prompts. (The ending of Human Revolution’s main game also ends with a choice presented in this fashion, though that choice was 100% visible.) HOWEVER, instead of interacting with the console at all, you can follow the cabling of the console to a hidden area containing the tank that is the source of the poison. Destroy it, and you save everyone.
The video touches on the ability invisible choices have to make some options more obvious than others. It doesn’t mention that some of these choices can be what it would categorize as “visible” ones, or that visible and invisible choices can actually be used in tandem with one another.
That said, this would only work up to a point. If “The Missing Link” had presented the options from the console non-diegetically (for example, via the game’s dialogue interface), I imagine it would’ve come across as the game lying to the player, rather than as a villain lying to a hero.
Genius
I had no idea about this! Man that was a good game.
That's a good example! Very similar to the choice showed from Spec Ops.
And they kinda teach that to you in your first mission: You can shoot the poison tanks to save the hostages.
Thanks for the spoiler warning. It's still in my backlog.
I love how you used Muffet from _Undertale_ as an example of a boss with invisible choices. She's actually one of the easiest monsters to spare, but only if you make a choice so early in the game and so mundane that you might not have even known it could affect the outcome of your playthrough.
I believe you can also spare her that way afterwards? **** since there was also some muffin stall near her room, even though now it's hiked up in price.
@@sponge1234ify You can spare her in a few different ways, actually, but the easiest is to buy a Spider Donut in the Ruins and then wait until her fight with you to eat it. She'll see you eat it, then she'll receive a telegram from the Ruins spiders saying you donated to their cause.
If you can muster the 9999G for her bake sale in Hotland, you can buy her Spider Cider and skip her fight entirely. It's a steep price to pay, though. You'd be better off spending the money elsewhere.
If all else fails, you can spare her in the usual way. After enough turns, she'll get a telegram informing her that you don't hate spiders. That telegram will differ depending on if you bought anything in the Ruins, of course.
That sounds like bad design with a backdoor to fix it and call it a "choice" most of the time only knowing after reading about it.
Like Mario maker impossible levels that have a hidden block with a power up or a door, giving me the option to skip your terrible design is not good design whatsoever.
@@lasarousi I don't think that applies here; beating Muffet the "usual", non-muffin pacifistic way is still possible. It's just down to surviving a gauntlet of attacks that, to me, is still as fun and unique as the other bosses in the game.
@@lasarousi Not even close. You can just go through with sparing her the usual way, which is arguably easier than some of the other bosses prior to her. It's just a nice easter egg that has the added benefit of making the game slightly easier.
I love the inclusion of invisible choices in games, unless they’re used as a “gotcha” to the player’s detriment. It’s mentioned both in the vid and in some of the comments, but it always feels gross when the game taunts you for making the “bad” decision without any indication there was anything else you could do. I think the worst of these are missions that are secretly timed when other seemingly time-sensitive problems can be put on hold forever.
Disco Elysium did a bad one that soft locks your game on the first night, the clock stops and you don't know it's game over but there's no progression possible if you made a certain decision.
@@jayspeidell That was more a case of developer oversight (which they later fixed when it came to light), so it doesn't really fit what OP is describing. It's simply that the player could end up having made a series of choices that'd put them in a situation the developers never considered them getting into.
@@trianglemoebius I don't think they addressed any of the soft lock conditions except by saying it's a feature. I just think they should make those conditions trigger a game over screen.
then you have Spec Ops, where the game taunts you for making the bad choice of playing the game. Extremely polarizing, I know, but personally I found such meta commentary to be quite refreshing, particularly given its context.
That Chrono Trigger one you mentioned frustrated me a little. I remember them claiming that when I ran into Marle, I selfishly went to pick up her pendant instead of making sure she was okay. I was miffed at this because I wasn't trying to be selfish in picking it up. I did so with the intention of handing it to her.
One way to look at that, is it works perfectly for the game. The whole point of the trial scene is that you are being unjustly convicted. If you felt cheated out of justice because the prosecution misrepresented the intent of your actions... well that's exactly how the designers intended you to feel and all the more justification for you to make your escape
It would have been cool if you could perhaps argue that if they had tracked our choices even further- like if you pick up the necklace and then talk to Marle right away, but if you pick up the necklace and go around and talk to others or go fight Gato etc, THEN he can hit you with the thief swerve and you can't really argue that your first reaction was to take her pendant and bail on the scene.
I was more miffed that even if you're deemed innocent, you still get put in jail. But I guess that's sort of the point, as ninji stated.
@@goranisacson2502 A more modern game might have a timer or something to reflect that choice.
The Chancellor is a lie
I think one of the biggest challenges is making certain "verbs" available to the player.
Games aren't perfect physics and intelligence simulations, in the example of Spec Ops the question is whether the player may well see shooting the enemies as an option, but are they *aware* that rope shooting is a valid physics interaction, or that moving past events without interacting is a valid choice? That education (while keeping the choice invisible) is it's own design challenge.
Same for the crowd shooting towards the end. I can't remember whether civillians being scattered by gunfire was a mechanic within the game prior, though there are still more choices in that situation to stop players feeling cheated, namely the difference between shooting aggressive civillians to progress the scene and *continuing* to shoot retreating civillians. The difference between de escalation and revenge for the player.
Yeah. I love invisible choices, but plenty of games are poor at explaining you even had a choice.
For example, there was a game I played where a robot companion caught a bullet for me and died. It wasn't until after I had finished the game that I realized that I had the option to inspect the corpse and retrieve the intact memory or personality chip to take with me to revive them. I don't recall such a chip playing a large enough role in the game up to that point to remind me that it was a valid option.
I feel like this is a broader problem than just invisible choices, and comes up a *lot* in puzzle games too. For example, 99% of obviously wooden objects don't burn in the game, but this specific one will (but only if burned with exactly the right item). Obviously one of the triumphs of a game like BotW is that it had very simple rules and then just let you be creative.
@@Timberwolf581 which game is that
@@Heisenberk. Primordia. A point and click adventure game which I thoroughly enjoyed.
But its not as easy as telling the player that it is an option. These hidden choices are objectively a lot better and the dilemma wouldn't be there if there is not a challenge in thinking of that option. If the option is too telegraphed, the choice is not hard anymore. If you know you can just desturb the crowd, you are not challenged.
What is important is not that you can disrupt crowds with shots in the air, that is common sense. What needs to be established is that the game allows creativity and that what you are pushed to do is not necessarily what you HAVE to do, that there are more options. If the game is consistent in that I think it needs to allow the player to feel smart enough to think of the solutions themselves and not have them telegraphed beforehand.
Another hidden choice is in Outlast 2’s ending.
When you’re leaving the school and hear Jessica screams, if you run to her quickly, in the end, she will be normal. If you’re to slow, you will see her pale and with struggle markings.
I think this represents Blake’s guilt of not saving Jessica. If you’re fast enough, the guilt is lower since you’ve done everything you could.
*too
If I remember correctly, that difference comes from finding enough documents that explain the scientific background for the hallucinations, not from how fast you catch up to her, but maybe the article I read is the one who got this wrong 🤔
@@Nikkiflausch I wouldn't be surprised. This is the team that made the decision to hide the entire connection to the first game and the entire explanation for the events behind one document that is wildly out of the way and very easily missed.
@@Nikkiflausch well, since i didn’t knew about the docs, i did a little research 😂
I found out that the great portals like IGN tell it is all about the documents, but in user-directed pages like reddit, where some guys claimed have tested, it’s said that it is a question of the quickeness to reach Jessica.
So i really don’t know now lol
@@Daniel-bi5ci It's also possible that it's a combination of both plus other factors; that the game keeps an invisible "score" system for different elements that, if triggered/discovered, add to it, and if you pass a threshold the game considers your character to "know enough to understand the truth", ergo you see the truth in the final cutscene.
I remember when playing Skyrim for the first time, I triggered the first quest to become part of the Dark Brotherhood. For those who don't know or remember, the Dark Brotherhood abducted you and you woke up in an abandoned Shack where one of the assassin asked you to chose between three persons to kill. I remember playing the following line in my head "You are wrong. There is a fourth person I could kill." before attacking the assassin. And, of course, it triggered a new quest but I had no clue beforehand (except experimentation in the game) to know that this was possible. I found it interesting to share. Thanks for the video.
I actually did kill one of the three people, but then decided that, to be the ultimate assassin, I would assassinate the entire brotherhood.
So I did. Stole their clothes and hid the bodies in a corner. No one found out or cared but I got a cool hood. Skyrim do be like that sometimes.
[Spoilers for Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)]
There's a scene in Black Ops II where you shoot a hooded prisoner to kill them and make it look like an assassination. You're given a sniper rifle and tasked to shoot them from a distance. Most players would immediately go for a headshot, which kills the target, after which it is revealed that the mission was sabotaged and you actually killed your best friend. However, the game has a branching storyline and multiple endings. If you *don't* shoot the target in the head, but elsewhere on the body, he is shown later on to have survived.
One commenter claimed that he unwittingly got the "good" ending just because he felt like shooting the target in the balls, lol
[Spoilers for Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)]
I really need to go back and play that. Many say it's the best call of duty and I remember it being fairly ambitious compared to the rest.
And by the story the game hints you that there’s a choice here.
In the future, Menendez is alive, so even your choice don’t matter or that is not Menendez.
The latter was my thought, so, i’ve aimed to the legs.
another hidden moment in BO2 was in a mission where you had to go undercover at a resort to find a woman who was important to the plot and she gets kidnapped by the main villain's right hand man. and there's a chase sequence at the end of the mission to try and stop them from getting away. usually stuff like this is scripted and if they escape you gotta do a Spec ops Mission where you mount a rescue and try to get the kidnapped woman back, but if you are a good enough shot you can kill the kidnapper before he gets away and save the woman then and there, and now you'll skip the rescue mission in the Spec Ops.
I shot them in the nuts. Feels bad man... including the other guy in a different mission
Honestly, I think that calling them 'open choices' and 'closed choices' is more useful, because the main advantage to the former seems to actually be not in how it steers players but in how it enables developers. When developers write a closed choice, it is THE choice, whether you do Good Thing or Bad Thing or the like. A choice that explicit is difficult to expand on, especially in a team context where you effectively need to argue them out of the existing choices before you can have an extra one. But when it is an open choice, it is very easy for any developer to suggest 'why don't we let the player do X?' or 'could we do Y?'. Obviously time and resources add real limits to this, but it takes away the organisation obstacles. This is what the difference between a game like Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas is; Bethesda in dev interviews always talk about 'the choice' in a reductive way, whereas Obsidian are always excited to go 'what if' and will talk about the further options they wish they had time to include.
The distinction between "Invisible Choices" and "Explicit Choices" is descriptive and intuitive, they differ in ways of how they are presented, and has no bearing of the scope in which they deviate. The examples brought up in the video are exactly what this distinction is trying to describe.
The terms "open choices" and "closed choices" plus your definition of them while interesting, are of a different topic imo.
@@phillyq4671 I thought the same at first when i read the comment. But when you think about it, the fact that a choice is explicit/invisible almost always stems from the way the developers approached it as a choice with a set outcome or with an outcome that is organic and open. And to me actually the more you think about it, the more the invisible/explicit part becomes irrelevant, because it's not always even possible to clearly distinct between the two. If the distinction was based purely on whether the player knows he's making a choice, then I'd argue that invisibility by itself isn't good at all. If I have an arbitrary, binary choice that I additionaly don't even know that I'm making it will lead to even more unsatisfying experience. It's more about the choices and the outcomes being organic. The invisibility of the choice is only a byproduct of trying to achieve that.
@@MrRumcajs1000 Interesting. I agree, "Organic" does sound more fitting here. While the other side of the "explicit choices" doesn't necessarily has to be completely esoteric and "invisible", the clear distinction would still be not to "explicitly" present the choices in a non-immersive manner (UI or Dialogue Option).
@@phillyq4671 Yeah, generally I agree. The only problem is that since game systems have to be in some sense arbitrary, things should be explicit to the extent so that a player at least vaguely understands which of his actions are taken into account and which aren't. It's easy to fall into a design-utopia where we strive to mimic the real world as close as possible and create 100% immersive world, but this idea is so far from the reality that pursuing it can cause a lot of harm. A promise of realism can be misleading to the player as he'll quickly realise that the game in fact isn't at all realistic and he needs some clues to know how he should expect the game systems to behave.
But as for making the choices 'invisible' or 'organic' in the confines of the systems already presented to the player or at least hinted at - yeah, that's awesome.
I just called it direct or indirect choices
I think the sorrow's encounter in Snake Eater is arguably more effective than Psycho Mantis because instead of just telling you "damn you kill a lot of people" it forces you to deal with that fact head on and makes the encounter much more drawn out for each body on the pile
It can also make it feel like a very odd poorly paced corridor when you go through it the first time without killing anybody.
there is nothing there to tell me that the place is empty BECAUSE i didn't kill anybody, honestly that is the only fault i can think of in that boss, everything else is great.
@@guigondi7671 that's fair, I usually try to kill as few people as possible in stealth games but I'm not very good at them so usually the river has at least a few of the cobras wandering through it
It is the same across a lot of MGS games for certain parts. Dishonored is also very similar in the same way except across the whole game. The more people you kill the more rats, infected and guards you deal with it is fairly passive but increasingly noticeable as you get later into the game and can make certain things significantly easier and harder. There are also certain powers that you can get upgrade and use that are directly affecting by this fact and can increasingly change the way you play the game and upgrade yourself to deal with this which I found really neat how passively they integrated this increasingly impactful mechanic into the game. Funnily the least impactful part of the whole system in Dishonored imo is that it would change which ending you got if you murdered your way to redemption or killed only those necessary in the most indirect ways possible.
@@guigondi7671 Oof, yeah. Another invisible choice muck-up about that particular encounter is the solution to "beating" it. On my first playthrough, I had to trudge through the river no less than 3 times because it wasn't immediately obvious what it was I should be doing when reaching the end.
Without spoiling the details for anyone who'd still like to enjoy it themselves: the game eventually just shows you in a popup in the corner what to do if you repeat The Sorrow's river too many times.
I definitely got stuck in that part of the game for an entire day and it felt bad. Though in retrospect I still appreciate the presentation, even if the execution was a bit nebulous.
MGS 3 has some interesting invisible choices.
SPOILERS FOR MGS 3: SNAKE EATER
There are 2 extra ways to kill The End that the game doesn't tell explicitly.
1. You can just shoot and kill him the first time you see him before the fight even begins.
2. If you save the game in the middle of boss fight and wait at least 8 days, he will die of old age. This can also be achieved by changing the time on console settings.
Also, if you just wait for few days after battle but less than 8 days, The End will shoot and tranquilize Snake in his sleep. Snake wakes up at an open cell, and can travel to the fighting area again.
During fight,you can kill his parrot to make him angry. This makes him fight more aggressively.
I was baffled by a early scene in Deus Ex HR when your boss tells you to hurry to save some hostages in a factory, but as a good RPG you can wander and chill as long as you like in the Sarif building .... to then discover that yes indeed, the civilians were killed because you took too much time. And that each of the next 20 npcs will remind you that it was your fault.
Haha I left a comment about this too, that was mind-blowing to me as it was my first experience with immersive sims
I've always wanted to see a game that sets whether your camera control is inverted by just telling you to look up, and then setting it based on which direction you moved the stick without thinking.
I've heard of a game doing that but for left and right
Halo 2 and 3 did this in the opening missions
This is already common and well known trick that games use, the original Halo game is the first instance of doing this. (I mean it's the game that defined *the* standard first person control scheme that virtually all other FPSs has used since)
a lot of games do that
Ratchet: Deadlocked does this
One invisible choice that stood out to me was the ending of Nailsmith's quest in Hollow Knight. I was blindly following the instructions I was told and only later when I was watching a relative play the game I realised there even was another option. It felt really organic and as if it was judging the very way I play and approach games.
I left him alone, i knew what he wanted, i just didn't want a part in it, i assumed he would just kill himself and that left a bitter taste in my tongue when i came back, but when i discovered what hapenned... no regrets whatsoever.
I always thought Papers Please was the poster boy for excellent invisible choices and was surprised to see it go unmentioned (even if This War of Mine is a similar implementation). Papers Please also does an excellent job of reducing the complexity of consequences (sometimes having no observable consequence at all) and still making every choice feel impactful. That might be specific to the type of character the protagonist in that game is, though - someone put in a position of power over lots of people while being incentivized to not care about them. Another game that sparked that type of reaction in me was Paradise Killer, which really doesn't have any significant choices until the very end, but *damn* if they didn't make me think about the real-world power of prosecutors in what they choose to present, what to withhold, and more-or-less who to execute (while the in-game consequences are identical either way, upholding the system).
Papers Please has no invisible choices. You're clearly taught at the beginning of the game that you should decide to let people through based on your own ethics while knowing the rules of who are allowed. The choices are ALWAYS to let people through or not. That's it.
However it has some Unexpected Outputs which yes surprise you as a player when some time later a person you left through will thank you, etc.
@@narukedag I don't know that you are incentivised to just let people through based on ethics though, because you will be punished if you let too many people through who aren't allowed. It's the game's own little way of making you priorities your choices because, sure you might want to let this person through, but what if someone who you think needs to get through more desperately comes after them?
@@KiatnissNZ Yes. And this still not an invisible choice lol
@@narukedag I would argue it is because the game literally never tells you how to get any of the endings, you have to make choices, that may be intuitive, but don't tell you what they do.
@@KiatnissNZ Well you are tackling my main problem with this video. It is too incomplete by trying to summarize a complexe topic.
What you're talking about is not invisible choices, because the choices is clearly exposed to you. However it is Unexpected Output. The result of your choices is unclear. Does that really matter? How will that impact the rest of the adventure? The game never clearly tells you that which creates surprise on how your run will end.
My problem with invisible choices is that I've been taught that games often don't have other options. Like, if I try to leave the room, the door is locked, or if I try to kill someone I'm not meant to, the mission fails and restarts. Because so many games don't have any room for alternative choices, it becomes expected that the game you're playing probably won't either.
So true, that's why a lot of games feel sterile. Little to no interactions with the world or the narrative. When you can have interactions people complain it's too slow, like Red Dead 2 for example.
@@zensoredparagonbytes3985 on the other hand tho, red dead 2 while having so much interaction with its npcs, has no room for any wiggle room in the missions, for example in one mission, the game wants you to hide and then i try to hide but the game wants you to hide in a specific designated spot where the devs want you to hide which is really dumb and feels very constrained
@@kislayparashar that is also true. They probably did it for a reason, but if you dont have the freedom to resolve situations in missions with the tools you have at your dispossal, it becomes nothing more than a glorified button prompt simulator. It feels more hidden in RDR2 because the missions are multi-staged, you're constantly moving around while at the same time being restricted. Personally I didn't have issue with it because the freeroam part outside the missions/story is truly amazing. You have so much freedom to go hunting, fishing, exploring, that it makes up for it in spades. But I can see why people would be frustrated with the restrictiveness if they'd only focused on the story and didn't wanted to do the side stuff.
@@zensoredparagonbytes3985 yeh i understand why they did it but i think it kinda clashes with the open world style of it that it is so restrictive in certain missions. i know it's supposed to be more cinematic and linear but the genre of an open world itself encourages player exploration and freedom. i just think the rockstar style of game is so frustrating because on one hand, they create such vibrant worlds with meticulous detail for the player immerse themselves into but on the other, they restrict the player so much
@@kislayparashar I suspect limitations in hardware. RDR2 was originally developed for PS4/Xbox1. There's only so much you can do with so little memory and have all those system mechanics loaded and running in the memory at the same time. The size and amount of scripts needed to make everything move must've been insane. NPC AI behaviour, animal AI behaviour, water in rivers and lakes, wind, trees, objects you can pick up or react to with almost real life physics, fire, everything on specific coordinates, dialogue to trigger at specific moments, etcetera. And then there's the mission scripts, on specific locations with specific prerequisites. I think it can be all too much on the hardware I mentioned, and they did a truly remarkable job. Remember Cyberpunk 2077 on previous console gen? Didn't go too well did it? If we compare similar games in scope, like for example Skyrim or Fallout 4, those are a bit more limited and simpler compared to RDR2 overall systems.
But that's my opinion as a lay. I could be wrong though. Personally I liked with what they did with RDR2. Would I have wanted more freedom to resolve each mission? Absolutely. But I'm thankful for it anyway, because of the amount of work that went into it. And it shows because there's no other game like it out there. I can't just discard something on a few negatives while its positives are overwhelmingly much more plentyful. I've learned to accept a few flaws in exchange for satisfying what it set out to do. That is to provide an experience as a cowboy/frontierman simulator while telling a story about the human condition, Arthur facing his future demise that changed his existential perspective on life. That's as human as it gets.
I hope we at least can agree on that.
my first game ever made as a developer was a text game, you were a hired mercenary whose goal was to execute a bad guy who lives in a mansion in the city, it was a "write your own adventure" kind of game, you had a bunch of options, on how you get there, what doors you pick, where do you go, who do you shoot, and so on. it was very simple.
I had a bunch of these subtle invisible choices that they were TOO subtle. for example, at the start of the game you had to pick between a motorbike, an armored car or a van. My thinking is that if you pick a motorbike you are exposed and you will get shot as you approach very early and if you pick a slow van, that will be that slow that enemies will have so much time to prepare for you, that the high-value target just retreats to another outpost of his.
Now looking back at it, I don't know how was the player supposed to know that enemies have this information, but the important bit here and related to the video is that all the choices were supposed to take a set amount of time, which I never told to the player, I thought they'd just figure out, which almost nobody did, that the slower your actions you pick, the higher and higher it's likely that you will get a bad ending and target escapes or you get shot.
everyone who played it got back to me, called the game stupid and unfair. I learnt what had to be learnt from that experience as my first game and I moved on. If I were to remake this game, I'd put some notes at the start saying that some of the small details matter, like time spent and so on, I wouldn't wanna put exact numbers of the screen either, because I think it should still be more organic in this case than a fully-fledged strategy game
Great story!
I've seen this done on a similar game, except you have a prominent clock which ticks and advances clearly after every action you do. You may not realize *why* time advancing matters, but you'll surely notice it. You can compound this effect by having some sort of comment about how the player didn't get to the bad guys in time, and things might have gone better if they'd gotten there sooner.
you probably needed a reminder, like how in human revolution the situation at the first real mission degrades if you spend time crawling through vents in the office being a loot goblin
Information conveyance is a serious (and seriously overlooked) issue in game design, yeah. Too much conveyance and the player can feel cheated out of figuring things out themself. Too little and the player is robbed of the ability to make meaningful decisions.
I'm glad that you learned this lesson early on. Some big budget AAA releases still somehow botch conveyance miserably.
I think it's important to note that you can tell the player to keep an eye out for "invisible choices" at the start of the game. In Undertale you're told quite explicitly that you don't need to fight, but some characters seem like they give you no choice, and most characters have specific outcomes whether you kill them or not
Undertale does way more than just tell you there are other options: Torial emphasizes being kind in the combat tutorial, and then the first creatures you "fight" are these sad cute little creatures that don't seem like they actually want to hurt you, and then the first boss *is the person you'd be least willing to kill up to this point*, making sure that you the player regret every act of violence you engage in. Then, if that isn't enough, if you *do* kill Torial (which the game ensures is surprisingly easy by lying about her health bar), Flowey twists the knife about how you betrayed her.
THe game has something like 7 different layers of "you don't have to kill people" baked into its beginning.
@@treyslider6954 yes, Undertale is a good game. Those aren't invisible choices though, but rather incentives to choose the other visible choice. The invisible choice is choosing not to fight toriel and finding out she doesn't have to be killed; the game explicitly tells you (through toriel) that she won't move unless you kill her, but the game is in fact lying to you. You won't know that unless you make the invisible choice however.
@@maxkanefield3775 clicking fight but missing the hit has the same effect as clicking spare against Toriel, which I think is a genius move
I agree. Reminds me of what he said about ppl thinking Dishonored was "too linear" because they didn't even know they were making choices. I feel like, if you were going to create a game with a lot of invisible choices, you should put a fairly obvious one at the beginning and have the consequences be felt immediately, just to acclimatize the player to how the system works.
@@staticradio724 I agree, except I think the choice itself doesn't need to be obvious, just the consequences (in such a way that the player realizes they could have done something different, even if they don't know what). It's a tough act to pull off for sure, but that's why game designers are as important as programmers and artists.
"WE HAVE TO CHOOSE"
"PRESS SHOOT TO CHOSE"
GMTK: I'm going to call this an invisible choice.
It works once you explain the actual invisible choices (like shooting ropes), but the first moment gave me a chuckle.
The bit was important to have a comparison with Bioshock, but yeah, had me confused for a bit as well.
Exactly, it made sense later, but at first it was a bad example
I'm always bothered when a game introduces rules and then breaks them. Recently I played through Modern Warfare (2019) and the game really leans into the casualty of war. You're constantly put into situations where civilians are in the crossfire and you're having to make decisions about whether you should shoot somebody or not. But you also constantly fail the mission if you shoot the wrong civilian or make the wrong moral choice. Choices should have consequences, but they shouldn't result in a mission failure and a save reload if the game lays out that you live with those consequences.
I've played through that game several times, but I can't recall what parts you mean? What civilians?
Developers often confuse 'player choice' and 'morality system' with 'you either pick this option or you're a terrible person'.
Morality in games doesn't come from a red or blue bar that you fill by picking arbitrary choices the developers laid out for you, but rather from watching the consequence of your actions shape up the narrative.
I mean this ddepends. Sometimes, a game is exactly where people should be encouraged to make choices they wouldn't make in real life to see the outcome. The game giving you feedback that that was a poor choice by forcing a reset isn't necessarily bad per se. Especially if the effects of the choice changes too much of the plot to make any sense. Sure that may feel "on rails" or "lazy" but you can't realistically cover for all possible outcomes of all possible choices. I for one would appreciate a game that allowed me to kill people I shouldn't and then force a reset after showing how bad a decision that was, rather than stripping the choice completely by making said character invulnerable or untargetable or something. Its like real life. You wouldn't realistically run pedestrians over, but you could, and if you did you basically get a "gameover screen" anyways and might as well restart if that was an option.
@@William_Sk Picadilly Circus. The terrorists were interspersed between fleeing civilians making taking them out more difficult. I thought this was a wonderful sequence that illustrated well just how chaotic the fog of war is.
The scene where you use the wife as leverage in an interrogation. Shoot too soon, game over. 20 seconds later she's collateral.
@@thelistener1268 The Piccadilly Circus sequence is awesome, didn't remember being bothered with getting a game over when accidentally firing on civilians, since I realized that I had fucked up.
The interrogation with the butcher makes sense to me, there's no need to harm his family since he will tell you anyway by just threatening them, feels weird that players would be too quick to jump the gun and play torturer.
Everyone reading this should check out the "more resources" in the description! The video downplayed them as niche resources for developers and hid them in the description, but they're all very cool videos anyone can enjoy!
I think I will do that. Thank you!
This makes me appreciate Skyrim even more now. I remember in one quest where Astrid (some name like that) kidnaps you and tells you that you have kill one of the three random people who have been tied up. I was literally like, why should I even listen to this stranger? So I turned around and killed Astrid instead, even when there was no explicit instruction to do so. And as a reward, the objective changed entirely from joining the dark brotherhood to destroying them. Amazing stuff haha.
This quest is cool, but it gets a bit less so when you learn what it was *planned to be* (I assume time constraints or other gamedev factors have prevented them from going with the original vision):
Those 3 random NPCs weren't supposed to be random. They were supposed to be chosen from among your companions and friends (basically NPCs you've helped - NPCs in Skyrim tend to change their status from Neutral to Friend after you've helped them with a quest or something). That'd make the quest much juicier and an actual moral dilemma if you wanted to join the brotherhood.
I think that's like the only choice like that in skyrim though
Alternatively, if you kill all 3, you're rewarded with unique dialogue from Astrid congratulating you on your thoroughness. Love that moment. Pity about the rest of the questline (in either direction)...
you can destroy them? oohhhh, i flee or ignore them in characters i not want to be dark as brotherhood... nice to now this, skyrim has immortal characters, soo, sometimes i forget that is just a few ones and trait any major character that is not a target as immortal by default
yet the quest you got from that choice is basically just kill everyone in the guild, report it and it’s done. you don’t even get a special quest line compared to if you join the guild. it’s all for nothing other than “roleplaying” aspect.
One thing that messes with me is how there never seem to be social consequences for general looting unless things are clearly marked as being something you can steal. There's a huge and consistent contrast between the way games reward you for looting everything you see and the way real life punishes you for such kleptomaniacal tendencies. I'm always a little afraid that some game will decide to suddenly go realistic with the consequences- especially in churches or temples populated by non-hostile NPCs. But if a game did have such consequences, I would feel kind of lied to, because games take place in a universe where the fact that you can pick things up means you're meant to have it, so by letting me pick the thing up it would have been lying about that thing being acceptable to take.
That’s why I appreciated that the shopkeeper from Links Awakening would kick your ass if you stole from him.
Cyberpunk 2077 has done this to me! There's a keycard right in front of a clerk in one of the side missions that I grabbed because I'd taken everything available all through the game without consequence, but this one item related to progress set off the NPCs (along with a dialogue reaction calling me a thief). It's only happened once all game and I've cleared about 3 regions of all gigs and side story jobs. I felt cheated of a stealth approach to be honest.
Games usually allow you to "steal" from houses or cities because they want to incentivize the player to explore around.
Pathologic let's you break into people's houses and rummage their stuff and they will fight you for it. Even better is that you may be driven to do it so you don't starve.
Starfield, or other Bethesda titles will call you out for stealing. Sadly, once you pay the fines/jailtime, companions lose their affinity towards you....that's it. Doesn't go any further than that. been great if they threw in options for NPCs to recognize you as a thief. Shop keeps watching you more carefully, guards/police keeping their eye on you, bandits appreciating your work, people fear you for your murderous tendencies, etc.
The problem with these is that because players typically expect a more clear choice, players will often go to the more obvious decisions thinking they'll be punished if they try something else, which is often what happens in many games, causing players to either have to reload or to think "Well why couldn't I just do that instead?". Invisible choices as a concept are great, but players are so used to more linear choices that it's hard to get the best out of the former.
Yeah, which is why it's up to the game designers to also make the players realize that there are more choices than meets the eye at first glance if they want their game to be based on invisible choices. Easier said than done though.
(Kinda spoilers for Spec Ops The Line) I don't know, sometimes I think it's good that the choices are really subtle. In the Spec Ops The Line scene described in the video where Walker is faced with an angry mob of civilians, the obvious choice is to gun them down. Most players will thus do that even if they thought it was a bad thing to do, thinking that they didn't have a choice. This exactly mirrors Walker's behavior throughout the entire narrative. He justifies all of the horrible things he's done by claiming he didn't have a choice. This makes a strong connection between the player and the protagonist that I feel would be lost if the idea of looking for different choices in certain situations was made clearer to the player.
@@bhx6252 Yeah, that game is a very good example of using the expected Gamer Decisions to show how uncritically many are consuming the medium. Spec Ops The Line wants you to treat it like Call of Duty so that it can say "wait, hold the phone, this is actually very bad, why are you doing this?" A similar thing happens with Undertale where you're not punished for playing it like a game as much as you're encouraged to think more about your decisions via the acknowledgement that you reloaded your save and such.
But for games that aren't doing Invisible Choices As Commentary, the lack of (heh) visibility with the options does end up becoming a problem. Games teach you their verbs and having one be an option out of nowhere without telling the player is gonna lead to either nobody making that decision or people being upset that there were consequences for an action they didn't know they could opt out of.
@@daniellewasdelayed8921 Well put, I'm right there with you. Context is important and different games will have different solutions.
@@bhx6252 I think the problem with spec ops the line is that even if you have hidden options in some scenarios they do force your hand when it's important. SPOILERS:
Specifically I'm talking about how the game forces you to use the white phosphorus against civilians
Another challenge facing Invisible Choices is replay. If I finish a game, then discover there are other endings based upon Invisible Choices, it can be frustrating trying to get that different ending if I don't know what choices impact that ending. Short of looking up a guide.
TW3 has to be one of the absolute worst examples of this. I haven’t seen a lot of people bring this up because I think most people naturally get the good ending, but I’m honestly still mad about having to go back and replay like 4 hours of the game because Ciri didn’t like the dialogue I picked.
@@bea_3243 Yeah i realized after my second playthrough of this game, trying to have a different ending, that the choice that really matters are shown during a brief moment when Ciri remember what you have answered her very recently just before she enters the storm, and i understood that it was THAT that i should have changed to have another ending lol.
But contrarely to you i had the best ending twice, despite making the completely different choice in all of the Bloddy Baron questline or with Keira Metz (that changed the fact tha tshe was here for the battle at Kaer Morhen but that's it).
This is the main problem of Beyond Two Souls. It was full of invisible choices and you never knew what could be done or not. In the end they kinda fixed it in the re-release and in Detroit by adding a flowchart of the game showcasing different branches and so choices at different moments of the game.
I agree. While Invisible Choices are a great idea to immerse yourself into a game, having too much of it often leads to missed endings. For example, I still haven't found all 26 endings of Nier Automata on my own, nor achieve Genocide from Deltarune 2 without a guide.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous supposedly suffers from this.
There is an aspect of this that I find missing in this great video: There's choices *the developers* seem to not be aware of (or at least didn't follow up on). For instance Morrowind has the big bad guy tempt You to join him through Your dreams. You then awake and find Yourself attacked by one of his minions. There is no convenient way to reply to his request other than heading right into late game territory and it is indeed not the most convincing piece of diplomacy on his part, so the player understandably isn't expected to follow up on this "offer". Well: I did and it turns out the option isn't there. Arriving at the evil lair the big bad guy instead just asked me what I'm doing there, not even having the proper weaponry to kill him yet. Had he attacked me it could perhaps be interpreted to have been a trap, but not even that was the case. In my book such design is called... an EPIC FAIL!
Your comment made me think of the Team Rocket member in Red and Blue who offers you to join them after you cross a bridge, but there's no way to accept
I played fire watch recently, it left me speechless, and just thinking about what happened for a couple days. Highly suggest it
If you are interested in another game that leaves you speechless, try outer wilds. It's truly wild.
@@c0omlord697 I tried, but I suck at reading. I’ll read the same paragraph 5 times and not know what I read. Which is a bummer, because I’ve heard it’s really good.
@@WyattWentWacko yeah, at the start my brain was afk too but that just made it more exciting to piece stuff together and the shiplog always has a short summary of the important stuff so I just read that when I didnt get something after exploring. Plus there is almost no reading in the dlc and you can play that before the main game if you want to.
I absolutely love this concept, but to execute it properly you must at the very least hint the player that it exists in your game early on, like an optional interaction with an NPC becoming relevant later, because many games let the player perform actions that "seem" a choice, but aren't, like having the option to be merciful to enemies or killing them and then making no difference in any outcome, and this is aggravated by the also many games that explicitly tell you whenever there's a choice to make, therefore leading players to assume that if there isn't a clear indicator that in a game personal choices exist or matter, then they don't.
When hearing about the ropes in Spec Ops here, my first though was immediately "can you ever shoot ropes anywhere else? are you ever encouraged to?"
Just a simple visual aid of a preciously rope-suspended object now lying on the ground anywhere in that scene would've been a nice, subtle reminder to the player here. It's always more fun to make the right choice when you've been nudged towards it rather than outright told "press x to win"
I do feel part of executing invisible choices correctly is clearly communicating with established mechanics alone rather than prompts, introducing an invisible choice with no established mechanics could be a recipe for disaster where the majority of the audience is unaware that any choice was being made
agreed, expectation setting is extremely important, especially when you expect players to have likely played other games
we build our library of possible actions based on experience and signaling from the developer - I'm not gonna assume your game allows "creative" solutions by default as those are work to implement, and most games don't.
it's best when there are a few easy-to-trigger hidden outcomes early on that are triggered by acting like you're in a video game - e.g. picking up every single thing, going socially inappropriate places, etc. If it's low stakes then it can be used to teach the player that the game will react to their behavior, so you can adjust how you play.
The subtlety problem reminds me of Tom O'Regan's undertale argument from his horror games video. Undertale doesn't explicitly tell you exactly which ways the story can end, but we all know about the pacifist, neutral, and no-mercy routes due to the game's internet presence. Perhaps newer games don't need to worry about consequences being too subtle because of the way we approach games being changed by the internet.
Might depend on how popular the game is
@@WanderTheNomad it absolutely does! But the point is more that if we keep getting games that go this route it will bring the idea of "invisible choices" more into the public eye and mean they can make the choices more subtle because people are now open to the possibility.
@@KiatnissNZ ohh, good point
Undertale's an interesting example because it _also_ features tons of, ah, *more* invisible choices. E.g. there is special dialog if you call Papyrus immediately after receiving the phone, or if you let Monster Kid fall and Undyne has to rescue them, then she will start the upcoming battle injured and she will also reference what you did if you call her later in that spot. So it still ends up having plenty of subtle choices you can make and stuff to discover even if you know the big beats from general internet exposure.
@@DarkTwinge this is also very true!!!
This is one of the things that I love about the Trails series. When you play, as you do sidequests NPC's will actually remember whether or not you did their sidequests or not between games for example. It's a small thing sure, but with how in depth the worldbuilding is, talking to NPC's and doing their quests really expands the character's interaction with the world.
My favourite one in Deus ex is that if you spend too much time exploring at the beginning the swat team gets fed up of waiting for you and attacks meaning you skip the mission and it turns into a mess
Also Deus Ex where you have a mission to get an OS upgrade or something for your chip, which ends up being some kind of trap. I don't remember the exact nature, but doing or not doing that little side mission is a hidden choice in itself.
Are you talking about Human Revolution? That's not what happens. The mission stays exactly the same, only the terrorists choose to execute their hostages for some reason. After you arrive on site, no amount of waiting will cause a mission failure. This is a bullshit plot point Eidos Montreal came up at the last moment because they realized there are no consequences for ignoring your boss hurrying you. Most people fell into that trap because the level design encourages exploration, so they assumed there would be no negative consequences for indulging in it.
I thought that was really bad design, nothing tells you the game is any different from all those where you can do a mission whenever you feel like, In fact, it is the only one in the game that does that, I restarted didn't enjoy it at all, thankfully the rest of the game is great
@@aeon_zero I disagree. The dialogue is pretty clear, and you get several warnings. I felt a sense of urgency, as someone who usually explores everything before doing any main story content. I think the rest of the game could've used more instances like this, honestly, given that it's these kind of moments that make the genre so good.
@@matthewmurray8570 There are missions that urge you to run to the next step in every single open (or sort of open) world game, but they are never actually timed. You can go ahead and complete every other single mission available and the NPCs will be there waiting in a panic forever. The only way for you to know is for the game to show you first without consequences that it works that way. This obviously didn't happen in HR.
"By implementing invisible choices, players can speak using the verbs they've already been using as part of normal gameplay." This is some genuinely excellent writing, man.
Surprised you did not mention Metro Exodus with invisible choices. The outcome of the story can be influenced by how many of your crew you are able to retain throughout the playthrough.
One of the most memorable and difficult ones is the The Caspian area. There are slaves that are forced to work and fight you, but if you kill all of Baron's men, the slaves will put down their weapons, which gives you a choice to either exterminate a possible threat (watching for your own back) or letting them go free.
This one stuck with me throughout the entire game because it was so much more difficult to make out friend from foe. There are context clues and differences in outfits, but it really makes you stop and actually look at the enemy before you fire. I spent so much more time scouting the camps, figuring out who was an overlord and who was a slave, and then trying to save them.
On that part, I just didn't kill anyone due to not being able to tell and just bum-rushed until I got to the end
Exodus handles this perfectly, just listen to characters and stay immersed, acting as a normal human would and you get the good ending. Play the game like its cod and you get the bad ending, and it all makes perfect narrative sense.
Speaking of mixing traditional dialogue systems with invisible choices, I would like to see more games where I can *tell* an NPC that I will do one thing, but then actually *do* something different. That kind of nuance can open up a lot of interesting choices I have yet to see in many games.
That would be nice - an invisible version of
A: "I will do it"
B: "I will not do it"
C: "I will do it" *lie*
this happens in one quest in witcher 3 early on where one of the characters asks you to help her with something, now your main quest part with her is done, so you can be like "nah do it on your own" or "sure". if you choose to help her and then just run out the exit instead of following her, she screams at you from behind and if you choose to not help her but follow her anyway, geralt and her have a unique conversation about it where she's like "oh you decided help me after all" which was pretty cool
There's a great example of this in Skyrim's Dark Brotherhood questline.
You get kidnapped by Astrid and told you need to kill one of three supposedly guilty people as payment for robbing them of a bounty and she won't let you leave until you've offed one of them, after which she offers to let you join the Dark Brotherhood. But, entirely unprompted, you can also attack and kill Astrid instead which unlocks a hidden questline to destroy the Dark Brotherhood. She also has hidden dialogue if you kill all three, calling you an 'overachiever'!
I totally went on for killing Astrid on my first playthrough 😂😂😂 but after a save!
I can't remember a time Skyrim's game design was complemented. I'm used to people talking about things like the samey and poorly designed dungeons, or the world not matching the mechanics, or the countless glitches.
This comment was an interesting change of pace
@@coyraig8332 Up for another example of a hidden Skyrim mechanic?
Hired Thugs.
If you steal an owned item, even without witnesses, there's a random chance a group of Hired Thugs will spawn in later to "teach you a lesson". One of them will have a note signed by the person you stole from.
@@coyraig8332 There are a lot of problems with Skyrim, but there's some really interesting stuff buried in there, too (even if only because of the sheer volume of stuff there is in the game.)
I think this is an instance of a poorly telegraphed "Invisible choice". Mainly becuase there are often unkillable "essential" NPCs in Skyrim, and the game often punishes you for trying to kill these NPCs by soft locking the game or closing a quest line because the NPC or surrounding NPCs become permanently hostile.
This is one of the best videos you've ever made I think. Absolutely love that you mentioned Spec Ops: The Line. That game is an absolute masterpiece.
One of my favourite invisible choices was in Final Fantasy VI (snes version, BIG SPOILER HERE).
When you are running away from the floating continent (and you have a limited time), a party member named Shadow is taking time and fighting against the bad guy, so that you can run away. At some point you'll reach your airship which is right below you. The dialogue box will tell you:
"The airship is below.
- Jump!
- Wait!"
If you choose to jump, Shadow will die and you won't be able to get him back in the next part of the game. If you choose to wait, you can still walk around that area, even if there is not much to do. And if you wait for the timer to reach the last few seconds while you are right in front of that point, Shadow will show up and join you before reaching the airship.
Unfortunately they changed the text in the GBA localisation, where the dialogue box will tell you right away "Gotta wait for Shadow" instead of "Wait".
The original version was much more powerful (and giving much more trust to player's common sense), but probably most of first-time players were just letting Shadow die because this kind of choice was so uncommon.
yeah, Like ff7 when I first played it, I never knew there woud ever be a date scene at the gold saucer, much less that I could be taking Barret to the theatre!!
"Invisible choices" is something I've been trying to go for in one of my RPG projects, explicitly _never_ giving the player a dialogue list. Instead all choices are through who you choose to talk to or actions you take during downtime, and those cause slight variations in later story-specific scenes.
You are making an rpg? How hard is it to code? Could a simple rpg be made? And how simple would it be? I might try and make an rpg one day
@@channel45853 I use RPG Maker myself, which provides a lot of tricky stuff for you. I've been using the engines for about 18 years by this point, so I'm pretty confident with them, but they're still a good start for something simple.
The project in this post I'm using RPG Maker 2000, which has no code, just a GUI-based event system, similar to the likes of Game Maker. Another project I use RMXP, which has Ruby as an extra programming tool. The latest versions use Javascript, which I'm personally not fond of, but could be more useful to others.
I would love to see a video covering meta games (games which comment on stuff outside the game) such as DDLC, Undertale or metal gear solid. The moment where flowey remarked on me killing toriel and then resetting has made Undertale my favorite game so far.
I wonder what Mark would think about The Outer World's quest in which you're asked to either help the iconoclasts or the MSI.
There is a third option where you can help both factions, which requires you to basically ignore their requests to choose either one and therefore work as an intermediate until you broker a deal between the two.
I personally really liked it
LOVED getting that outcome. Having a questline in a game result in an organized negotiation scene instead of a gunfight was so satisfying. Unfortunately, I did have to look up a guide or two to make sure I was on the right track to complete it correctly.
I really agree here! I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You mentioned my main point which is that invisible coices makes the game _feel_ as though anything could have a consequence. You other points were great too! I wisch more games implemented this. Same thing, in my opinion, goes for stats that can have a consequence ”RPG-wise”, like good-or-evil stats, relationship stats and such.
5:16 - Damn, that brings back memories. That was the *one* place in the game in which I heavily questioned my previous choice of playing the game on hardest difficulty... It took me a solid 5 tries to develop the proper strategy, but by hell, I did not leave Malik to die :D
Yeah I was so proud when I was finally able to save her
Great video as always! That choice at 6:10 is forever seared into my brain. I still lose sleep over it.
Is that actually a big gameplay choice? I took that as a joke.
@@BagelBoi4000 No.
@@BagelBoi4000 Yes.
What game is that?
@@alexandrezani Life is Strange
This really undersells the punishing effects that bad invisible choices can have, particularly when the choice is only available in some parts of the game and not others. The most typical failure is when the same game will punish you by locking off content if you go too fast through sections, only to then have a section where content gets locked off if you go too slow and explore everything, and thus miss some invisible deadline (especially in games where some deadlines, in-story, are extremely urgent but can actually be put off for ages, but others are for some reason actually urgent). They can also be far too obscure - see the list of required choices to unlock Pathfinder WOTR's secret ascension ending, which is completely opaque to the player if they're not reading a walkthrough.
In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, if you're fighting enemies with Farah around, she can comment on your actions. For instance, if you think the fight is over and put your sword away before you beat everyone, she'll directly comment on it. Really adds to her personality.
NPCs responding to peculiar gameplay actions is definitely underutilized on average. Here's my pet hypothetical example of one such:
Say it's an RPG and you're trying to visit a friendly monster village but the guard monster won't let you in. Your party leader knows some shapeshifting and thus can turn into an acceptable creature, but if you do so _in the guard's presence_ they will call you out on it and still refuse to let you in, because the only thing they trust less than heroes is shapeshifters.
FF XV has tons and tons of dialogues like this, mid combat, where they comment what they are doing. They can even say: Ignis, rescue Prompto! And the AI go there rescue. Or they protect you with a shield and make a comment about it. They talk about the creature, how disgusting it is... One of the characters always take care of the main protagonist, so mid combat he tends to stay close: if you run away, he always stop what he is doing and go after you.
Reminds me of the Milkman Conspiracy from Psychonauts in which there's G-Men restricting access from certain areas. To progress you have to find the right item which is sufficient enough as a disguise. When you get caught, there's a cutscene in which they interrogate Raz, the character you play as, about the milkman on top of stuff the player did such as burning bushes and attacking the girl scouts (I mean, they have an official name but I'm sure it'll just confuse people who haven't played the game already). Kinda disappointed you don't get anything from burning the bush you see a girl scout whispering to though.
I think one issue with invisible choices is that games have trained to not think outside the box, since creative solutions usually don’t work. When you described the Spec Ops scene I thought, “Maybe you could shoot their ropes, but that probably wouldn’t work. The game probably forced you to chose.”
Just played through Spec Ops the other day and I was appreciating exactly this. Thanks for the deep dive Mark
Wow, I was really expecting the example of saving Zote in Hollow Knight's early game, surprised it wasn't there. Invisible choices seem to fit really nicely with metroidvanias ("save the animals", ...) in particular :)
I actually love it when I make a choice without knowing it XD. Especially through gameplay.
I feel like the two endings of "Dark Souls" have the good and bad qualities of invisible choices.
(Spoilers)
Linking the fire requires simply lighting the bonfire which appears after defeating the final boss. It is presented the same way as previous bonfires which acted as warp points. As such, I lit the bonfire reflexively without even noticing that the button prompt was different. In a way this works for the story, because the lore implies that the gods are using you and I had been blindly trusting their instructions for a suicide mission. But I didn't appreciate that until I replayed the game and read about the story online.
The second ending,. letting the fire fade, just requires walking out of the final boss room. This triggers a different cutscene and ends the game. But it's never communicated that walking out constitutes a choice, even if you've spoken to relevant characters. I can walk out of most of the other boss rooms. But try it after the final boss, and the game ends.
I finished Dark Souls Remastered for the first time a couple of weeks back. I knew there were two endings but didn't realise it was triggered by walking out. After killing the final boss, I wanted to delay my decision so walked out, and then triggered the cutscene and hidden ending. It was the ending I preferred but because I didn't mean to trigger the end, it felt a little lack lustre.
@@unluckyfives Thanks for reaching out!
Kaathe is who I was referring to as "relevant characters". I just skimmed his dialogue on RUclips, and I don't think anything he says makes it reasonable to think that walking out of the final boss room amounts to deciding to never link the fire.
I still appreciate both endings, I just find their execution lacking in practice.
There are such invisible choices in the recent Supermassive Games' Dark Pictures Anthology. Especially in the recent House of Ashes, they try to experiment a lot, asking you to shoot a character but you can let the timer run out and not do it. And you can even kill a character by PASSING a QTE and he can only be saved if you are thinking in that situation and choose not to do the prompt the game is giving you.
The main problem is that you rarely know if the game is meant to be a linear interactive ride, or "build your own story". Also, due to inherit limitations of video games, you understand that at some point the level of interactivity has to end.
Undertale's "slay or spare" system works because it was its main selling point.
Early in HL1, there's a moment where the room is flooded, and water is electrified. Most people will just run through water and take damage, not expecting that a game made in 1998 has an option to actually find a switch and toggle it. It's not like you can hit a switch in _every_ room either.
Skyrim actually has a pretty interesting example for one of these invisible choices [Spoilers for the Dark Brotherhood Questline]:
In the quest for joining the Dark Brotherhood, you are brought to an abandoned shack by their leader, Astrid, and asked to kill one person. You can choose between three prisoners with sacks on their head, and you'll have to rely on their dialogue to decide which one of them has to die.
This choice is relatively disappointing, though: The dialogue doesn't reveal that much about the prisoners, it has no consequences for the story or the gameplay, and even Astrid admits that she never cared about who you killed.
That is, unless you pick the fourth, hidden option: Killing Astrid. Not only does this give an option for roleplaying a good-aligned character and makes you feel smart for discovering a flaw in her logic, it actually starts an exclusive quest where you destroy the Dark Brotherhood. It's a pretty neat way to expand a choice that would feel very bland and video-gamey otherwise.
She even congratulates you with her last breath after making the fourth choice, implying that she was the one with the contract in her head. With all the other choices she does not state if they were correct and simply asks a few ambiguous rhetorical questions afterward.
You can also take the Jagged Crown to the opposite war faction to switch sides. I don't think it's ever outlined but the option to betray either cause is available.
Kodlak may help the Dragonborn battle Alduin if he's been sent to Sovngarde beforehand. It's possible for Kodlak to either be consumed or saved once again by the Dragonborn.
Yeah but the issue there could be that you could have the thought that Astrid is an important character and is therefore literally immortal.
First time I played Dishonored, I played it just however - very chaotic. After I'd finished it, I decided to pursue the Ghost and Non-lethal achievements. I knew that in the first area there were many weepers in the tunnel and tried avoiding it. After I figured that was still the easiest passage to my objective, I was surprised to learn the weepers were humans. Learning how impactful my playstyle was on the game was so positively surprising that Dishonored is still my favourite game. I didn't feel cheated that I didn't know about the invisible choice - I was impressed.
The OG pick your own adventure is a Nabokov novel named Pale Fire, largely also considered the genesis of html. Read it, one of the greatest works of fiction ever
Read Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
@@Rozenkratz Andres from work?!?!?! Lol I have a customer with your name. Thanks so much for your recommendation!
I like that title...
“Will you stoke the pale fire...or snuff it?”
@@Ramsey276one it's from Timon of Athens, something like "the moons an errant thief, it's pale fire stolen from the sun". Used to reference the mediocre trying to borrow greater fires than their own.
The entire time I was screaming at my phone THE TRIAL IN CHRONO TRIGGER. Glad you talked about it. Great video as always!
I've always loved when games make choices and consequences more organic, it makes the world feel so much more real and gives the interactive nature of games so many more layers. The last time I was really impressed by something like this was at the ending of Bugsnax, where (SPOILERS) you need to run between groups of your friends and complete challenges in order to protect them from the invading Bugsnax. If you fail, they just die! And you've gotta move on to hopefully save the others from a similar fate. The game does give you an option to go back and try again once it's all over, but being on that beach and seeing that the characters I failed to save were missing was such a kick in the gut, especially after I had gotten to know all of them over the course of the game. I wish more games implemented consequences based on the player's actual perfomance into the story, the emotional reaction to story moments can be so much greater as a result
Try Cyberpunk 2077, it is full of these kinds of choices/consequences.
@@glowerworm I did! I definitely enjoyed that aspect of it, Cyberpunk had a lot of cool branches that were fun to explore in subsequent playthroughs. I think it caught me more off-guard in Bugsnax because that game doesn't have too many moments that are altered based on the player's skills and choices so realizing that their fates were in my hands added a lot of genuine anxiety to that final section
I love it when a game can be so subtle about choices and stuff like that. When a game allows the player to express themselves through subtle choices and decisions, it is just so much more meaningful.
Another example I like is the end of SOMA : you can choose to save the survivors from the parasitic AI, or not. If you do, you kill them and free them from their pain, if you don't, they will live forever in a decayed state, thinking they reached heaven even though it is an illusion. And whatever your choices, they don't have an impact on the end of the game, because you don't live long enough to see the consequences. So, even after finishing the game, you never know what are the good or bad choices... You can only judge based on your own morality and on what you understood of the story.
I am so glad people still recognize Spec Ops: The Line as an amazing game. That is all, thank you.
Invisible choices do make video games amazing
One thing that I would say is important if you're going down the "takes skill to get the good thing" route - which I'm all for - is that you don't then make it "you made the choice not to save saveable person A". That might be less an "invisible choice" and more an "invisible branch". There's different story pathways for "I chose not to try to save them", "I chose to try to save them, but failed", and "I chose to try to save them, and succeeded". But as a player of high ambition and low skill, I can tell you it does kind of rasp to get my action of "I chose to try to save them, but failed" treated as "I chose not to try to save them".
i was hoping you'd touch on Hollow Knight's invisible choices, like with the whole Zote or Cloth quest lines, but you brought up some other really good examples. nice video!
I don't think Cloth really counts, because the invisible triggers which put Cloth on one route or the other are not tied to your intent in any way. They are just two alternative ways that her story can play out, and you merely stumble upon one or the other by pure chance.
Also the Nailsmith, Grimm Troupe..
agree
I felt like Hollow Knight's choices didn't work because they hadn't established an expectation that there would be choices. I had no idea about the grimm troupe choice, that I could not kill the nail Smith, choose to give a delicate flower to someone other than the traitor's child's grave, etc because up until those points, the game was entirely linear with no permanent changes. It just made me angry to know that I could've chosen otherwise when none of that was communicated to me in any other part of the game.
@@danielgysi5729 Well, for the Nailsmith one, why didn’t you just not kill him? I know he asked you, but if you wanted to not kill him you could. Its not like the game forced you. The Grimm Troupe one is even clearer, since Brumm literally tells you that you have a choice. Tho I agree that the delicate flower for other npcs was something that was not easy to figure out
I suppose those concluding thoughts about how some players will not even realize there's an option kind of ties in to the "Who Gets to be Awesome in Games video, but in the sense of creativity, curiosity, and maybe even game sense, rather than the more mechanical skills exemplified in that video.
An interesting case of a choice being “too invisible” for me was the final encounter in FF7R, where your approach to the previous battle influences how the rest of the party supports Cloud. In hindsight it’s a pretty neat touch, but I never would’ve noticed and appreciated it if I hadn’t discussed the fight with my girlfriend afterwards and noticed the discrepancies.
For real? I had no idea that was a thing... and by now it's been so long since I played the game I don't even remember how I played or how they acted towards me, so I can't even compare my own experiences to others.
One problem with explicit choices is for me personally, that I always want to get the "best" ending then. That means I tend to look up guides which can give away some twists and surprises.
GTA IV got me to do that since one of the choices was always better.
Cant you do the same once you realize there are invisible choices too?
Just don't read guides and spoilers. It's that easy
I think games should try to avoid "best" endings, and maybe have "different" endings that maybe play more into player preference than one ending being objectively better than others.
@@AhbibHaald did you only read the last half or something
I don't often praise Skyrim, but it has an excellent example of an invisible choice near the start of the -Thieves- **Dark** Brotherhood quest (thanks to Led Kicker for the correction). Spoilers below the fold.
After being abducted by the Brotherhood, they show you three people and tell you that you must kill one of them. You can do that and progress the quest, but you can also kill the person who tells you this, ending the quest and giving you a different quest to shut down the Brotherhood instead. This is much harder because they take away your weapons and the quest giver is armed and armored, but I really appreciated that they didn't miss that trick.
This is Dark Brotherhood, you slightly messed up its name with the Thieves Guild
@@ledkicker2392 Yes, that's right, thank you. It's been several years since I played Skyrim. That moment just stuck with me.
It would be really cool to see a video on the surport class in games and how designers can make a class that is usually boring compared to others interesting
Apparently it's stil the cool thing to excessively hate on the game, but Cyberpunk 2077 absolutely deserves credit for having lots of hidden choices that lead to organic outcomes.
There are so many different ways scenes can play out based on your actions and characters will more often than not acknowledge your way of completing certain objectives. SPOILERS with some big and small examples:
-You can save Takemura. That choice is only hinted at in the level design and Johnny is actively discouraging you from doing it.
-Rescuing Saul without alerting any guards will trigger unique dialogue and prevent you from being chased by a group of bad guys in the car
-After Panam asks you for help with recovering the tank, you can go to Saul and tell him about her plans. This will make Panam furious at you, end her quest line prematurely and lock you out of the Nomad ending completely. You do get a unique car from Saul though.
-Making your way through the Clouds club without being detected opens up an entirely new option and scene where you can interrogate Woodman and advance the quest without killing him. If you are engaging with any guards beforehand, Woodman will attack you on sight instead.
There are many many more examples like this and every time they are brought up people are surprised that there was any choice to be made at all. Sadly, the dominating narrative about the game is still that it "isn't an RPG" and "there are no choices" which is completely false. The choices are just presented in a much more organic and subtle way.
I completely agree. I was constantly impressed by all the little consequences I had over both the main story and small interactions.
A cool hidden choice is in Call of Duty World at War, a game with a truly amazing story. During the Soviet campaign you come across a lot of different German soldiers that are wounded or surrendering. You can either kill them immediately, light them on fire or spare them. Sparing them appears to do nothing since someone else will kill them..... except that it actually does something. Another soldier is keeping a journal which is quoted during the pre-mission cutscenes and the player character is mentioned varies depending on the way you treated those germans. He'll either idolise you, or call you a bloodthirsty killer who isn't different from the enemies you're fighting. Pretty cool and generally unnoticed detail
I can think of a couple examples of this that I’ve experienced.
The first was in Skyrim, when that cannibalism cult tried to get me to join. I went along with the quest for a while but when I finally met the whole cult in a cave and they wanted me to go through with it, I thought, ehhh, I really don’t want my character to be a cannibal. That’s crazy. But the problem was, there were no dialogue options to refuse to join by that point, I had gone too far into the quest. So, I pulled out my mace and just killed everyone instead. Next thing I know, some priest enters the cave and thanks me handling that wretched cult. So I had made a choice that the game clearly accounted for without even realizing it because it wasn’t a dialogue option the way it normally is in Skyrim. Made me wonder what other kinds of choices that game has that I never thought to pursue.
The second one is in Red Dead Redemption 2, when Rains Fall asks you to recover one of his ritual artifacts without killing anyone. This one is more clear about the choice being made here, but the actual act of making the choice is done through the game’s normal gameplay and is somewhat skill-driven. You can kill the guys guarding the artifact against Rains Fall’s wishes to make things easier on yourself, or try to do a somewhat complicated (for Red Dead) bit of stealthing to recover it without incident and get a reward for your efforts. After a couple tries, I did it without killing anyone, and it was definitely much harder than just dead-eying everybody but the reward as well as pleasing Rains Fall was totally worth it
Great video as always!
A good example of making the difficulty of making choices unequal is in my first playthrough of The Witcher III, which I played in hard mode. I didn't have a reliable form of healing since the only thing that could heal me was food in this mode (and I still didn't unlock the renewable healing potions), so I had to make every meal count. It genuinely felt like every mission broke even where I had to buy loads of food after finishing only to eat almost all of it to heal up from the wounds inflicted from that very mission.
So, when a murder mystery came to me in the form of a side mission where a widow wanted to confirm whether or not her husband died from wild wolves, and I found her sister to be the actual culprit only to be offered a bribe to keep quiet, I felt so bad for accepting the bribe and keeping quiet about the murder. I felt even worse when accepting the money from the widow when I was given the option to reject it. I felt so terrible, and what made it worse was that, as usual, the food I bought using that money was used up just as quickly as any other mission.
Thank you for the violence warning. I hate it when I'm watching what seems like it'll be innocuous video, when suddenly it's "HEY, REMEMBER THAT SCENE WHERE A DUDE GETS HIS JAW RIPPED OFF IN GOD OF WAR??!!" So I appreciate the warning, and the general restraint in the clip choices
Love that you mentioned the part with Faridah from Human Revolution! That was one of the most memorable scenes from the game to me. I always think about how cool that was, and it definitely helped that you felt like YOU made it happen, like it was an optional outcome the game didn't intend for (even though they obviously hoped you would at least try).
One of my favorite games with hidden choices was Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. I played it as a kid and didn't realize it was tracking my performance until I picked it up again years later, when I was better at the game. For example (spoilers), the dialogue of the Alpha Hirogen at the end of level 3 changes to complement or roast you depending on how skillfully and stealthily you played the level, or if you found all the objectives. And during the Borg-level, you're given an opportunity to save your senior officer from assimilation under a time-limit as a test of skill, or to leave them behind and avoid jeopardizing the mission, and the results of those outcomes change events later in the level. These sound like great examples of the game design principles you're talking about here.
I love it when games not only have invisible choices that you can miss, but generally content that you can miss. Even if i am the type of person to rush the main quest in rpg's (i actually went a killed alduin how the game wanted you to) but just knowing there are options out there makes the world feel alive for me. And don't get me started with dark souls and it's hidden lore, much smarter and more dedicated people dig up the amazing lore and fun bits for me sure, but just knowing these little things are buzzing around, things hiding under rocks make me nod, leave it be maybe and enjoy that there is more out there.
Prey (2017) is a good example of invisible choices.
Yeah it is. Surprised he didn't mention it.
I'm apparently choice-blind because even giving me a bespoke line of dialogue after my invisible choice goes over my head. I pretty much never imagine my choices have an impact on the game unless the genre of the game is specifically earmarked as being one where "choices matter", and I'm given plenty of explicit choices to remind me of that e.g. Undertale
Just finished Design Doc's last video and then this one pops out. Tis' a great day for sure
I'm doing the contrary. Just finished this video and now I'm going do Desing Doc.
Didn't knew the options in Spec Ops. And yeah, I probably missed so many options in many games, only to find about them in random videos, but only because I go with me most obvious option (or the good option if there a moral system) and I'm too lazy to play a second playthrough.
One of my favorite moments of this happening to me was in fallout New Vegas, I had been massacring powder gangers the entire game and upon stumbling one who was crippled and refused to fight me he called me the powder gangre grim reaper. It made me feel like I wasn't just killing nameless baddies but a tight knit group who share tales and stories of what I've done to them. It immersed me in a way that not a lot of other games have
Did you then kill them?
5:50 This can also apply to letting units die in games with permadeath, or even making tactical sacrifices.
A situation I anticipate to come up a lot as I attempt to finally beat FE Conquest on classic. (Wish me luck)
When I first played The Witcher 1 I was mindblown with the fact that the Grandmaster was actually older Alvin. But the fact that his speech in the final quest mirrored all the answers I gave Alvin throughtout the game made it that much more memorable. Because of that, I remember TW1 very fondly to this day, despite its clunkyness and overall outdated engine.
Glad someone finally touched this topic. This is a big thing that I feel really puts nuance into a choice, and can often make choices feel more nuanced then they actually are (which also allows less nuanced choices to blend in with choices that have bigger consequences, forcing the player to assess every choice with a similar level of care).
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Paper’s Please, it’s practically an entire gameplay system built around this concept.
The way you cut your edits to the narration is absolutely phenomenal. You’re the best Mark, thanks for creating.
One problem I have with the invisible choices is that so many games have explicit choices or few random invisible that comes out of nowhere that, when you actually get to an invisible one that matters or a game build around this type of choice, you won't think about the possibility because you're already conditioned to only do what the game explicitly say it's possible. It would be so nice to have more games with invisible choices and a good introduction showing it's a possibility for the gameplay.
Yeah. Due to how rare they usually are, I think it's really important for any game that wants those choices to feel natural, fair and to be used, that they do a very good introduction. Hopefully showing you the consequences of something you thought you had no choice
in metro exodus, there is the choice to kill or knock out a guy that ambushes you, right before you get the key for the car.
i didn't kill him and later when i went to sleep in one of the many different sleeping areas. i woke up to a group of them watching me as the guy i saved thanks me and gives me a revolver attachment.
at the time it took all my attention and fully immersed me as it felt like they could have found me at any time, and may not find me at all (unpredictable).
later the thoughts "did they have different character positions for every sleeping area" (some were sitting on some crates) and "what if i didn't sleep, would i have missed this?"
led me to believe that the idea that even after making a choice that hides a reward (as it seems like something you have done before) and that the potential reward for that choice could be missed if you didn't know about it or was unlucky, really make the situation feel like it was real, as it was precise choices that made it happen and could have very well not happened (the illusion that *every choice* makes an impact, like the real world, and that the smallest choices could have a result, if you are lucky)
sorry if this is a bit messy, im just putting my mind into text