"Your relationship with Kim never ultimately changes throughout the course of the game". Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a hidden stat of "Kim's trust" that impacts what happens at the tribunal?
Yes, that is very incorrect. I mean, I don't want to sound harsh but it is actually so incredibly incorrect that it makes me question whether the makers of the video has even actually played the game? It's almost like saying Star Wars is about the story of the Ewoks or Harry Potter is mainly about quidditch. Like I don't know how someone that watched the movies could reasonably come with such a strange understanding of them? Kim is incredibly important in Disco Elysium and his relationship with the player character is one of, if not *the* most impactful in the entire game. I... just don't understand?
@@Willehable I mean I reckon it's more likely JM8 just never had a run where he wound up with a bad relationship with Kim, you have to play pretty incompetently or acting very purposefully unprofessional towards Kim and everyone else to get Kim's trust score so low. I don't think too many players know just how differently the tribunal can go.
I think what the video tries to communicate is that Kim doesn’t have major branching paths (you made a choice and now you will see a completely different set of lengthy content). Reactivity of Kim (and most of Disco Elysium) is very focused - you do get reactivity, but it doesn’t by itself change a lot of your playthrough. There is this idea that “real choice” is defined by amount of content that is locked behind it. I don’t agree with it. Choice is there for player to express themselves, and game reactivity is there to acknowledge this choice. If they can do it, while being economical with extra content - that’s not “fake choice”, that’s smart design. And yeah, there is Kim reputation system which is based on multitude of little interactions you have with him, which has narrative repercussions later on. The video seems to believe that the only kind of reactivity there is are branching paths. Reputation systems have been used for a long time, to provide more global reactivity to multitude of small choices player makes in the game. I recommend Josh Sawyer’s “Reputation Overload” on strengths and pitfalls of systemic reactivity (reputation system).
I feel like maybe we have different definitions of the word "choice." If you and I are both going out to the bar, but I choose to walk and you choose to take the bus, we both end up at the same place, but we still made meaningful choices along the way that affect our experiences.
It depends on whether you want to choose a different outcome or a different experience. If you want the choice of which restaurant to go then the choice of transportation is irrelevant.
I feel like a lot of "illusion of choice" criticisms come down to this and people fundamentally misunderstanding what the "story" is as something over and above an account of the events that took place. Like in Lord of the Rings the final scene with Frodo, Gollum and Sam ends with Gollum dead, the ring destroyed and Frodo and Sam alive. But if it played out with Frodo stabbing Gollum and triumphantly hurling the ring into Mount Doom saying "take that Sauron!" and then Sam claps it would be an incredibly different story despite technically having the same outcomes.
I feel the same way when people talk about most Telltale games having the same broad-strokes ending, or at least the same ending choice. It's like... yeah, and?
He opens one hand and looks at it. A moment passes. “Do you subscribe to the school of Mambo…” He opens the other hand:”… or Jambo?” “Wait, which one is the one where you hear your tie talk to you?” “Mental illness.”
I take issue with the characterization that aesthetic divergences aren't divergences with consequences. This is, ultimately, an art form, and aesthetics are the core of it. No consequence is more important than the aesthetic ones. I mean, the ending of the game is dialog, and that dialog is affected by things you've done. Sure, no points go up anywhere but it matters to me when I get to the end if I treated Kim well. That Kim might not even be there technically only affects the aesthetics of the ending, but it still matters to me if he's there.
I agree. I think aesthetic divergences are worthwhile IF the aesthetic differences are cool/interesting/provocative enough to change the player's experience. Or, as happens a lot in Disco Elysium, the aesthetic differences are substantial enough to change the tone of what's happening. There are several times where the different voices will say essentially the same line with vastly different implications.
Hell, the primary and ultimate choice in Life Is Strange is ultimately an aesthetic choice. "Which type of story do I vibe with the most here?" Sure, it has plenty of real world consequences, but those consequences are not the reason for it even if many people engage with it on that level - the game is clearly "aesthetics first".
Yeah, it really bugs me when people say things like "I chose to do X, but Y happened anyway, therefore my choice didn't matter". Role-play matters. A choice reflects the personality of the character. A character who chose X over Y is a different person from one that chose Y. You can wear a red shirt instead of a blue shirt, and nothing will really change in your life, but that choice is still an expression of your will. Your choice to wear a red shirt still matters, even if there are no apparent direct consequences from it other than you wearing a red shirt.
I really don't feel like it's a trick. I don' feel lied to, and I'm very aware the game doesn't have the budget to go in entirely different directions. But it's putting in the effort to do little recalls to your - arguably mostly flavor, but sometimes more impactful choices. And that's actually very rare. This is also why Fallout New Vegas is loved. Josh Sawyer gave an entire talk about choice architecture describing how to make games feel deep and reactive without breaking the budget.
I don't think its fair to say Aesthetic Divergences "don't matter". They don't change mechanics but one of the main points of Disco, I'd say, is to make you feel. Kim liking me or not makes me feel, so Aesthetic Divergences matter immensely in Disco. They may not in other games where thr characters or story aren't as important.
The experience that solidified Disco Elysium as one of my favourite games ever was the story of the "Working Class Woman". A character not even significant enough to be given a name within the game. I started the game deliberately making choices that seemed funny at the time and ended up kinda bullying her about her husband being missing because it was funny to see her trying to remain respectful at this mad police officer completely misunderstanding her. Later I found her husband dead and realised that I'd have to break the news to her. I felt so bad about how I'd acted before that I spent all the skill points I'd been hoarding on Empathy and reworked how I played the game purely to make sure I didn't upset her more than I already had done. This character does not make a material difference to any outcome of the game but she my choices of how to treat her absolutely DID matter to me even if it only affected a few lines of dialogue
Alpha protocol, game has the most meaningful choices that actually effect the story in interesting ways. Yet the branching story paths all feel so natural you will think it is an illusion of choice that doesnt effect much if you only play once, but make different choices on subsequent playthrough and see a wildly different narrative playout.
Absolutely, the amount of work they put into that game is frankly insanity manifest. A few years back, I saw a picture of a large black board where they had laid out a part of the story and the amount of massively diverging branches was awe inspiring. Can't find it now though...
Wish I'd been able to get the hacking minigame to work. The difficulty on that's just absurd unless you have the precise neurotype for it as well as the right control system. Everything I read about it felt like Deus Ex.
That game certainly falls into a somewhat unique niche. The fact that it focused a lot on the conversation tree was a surprise right out of the gate. Couple that with taking on the mission hubs, even the specific missions to an extent, in any order further highlighted this uniqueness. Of course, the implementation of it was not always the best or even complete (IIRC, there were a few that ended up being missed or not finished for whatever reason), and part of me lays that at Sega's feet, but even so, I found myself replaying it over and over and over, even after I had already settled into my preferred pattern. And perhaps naturally, even before I saw his review of it, my very first playthrough of it ended up resembling Yahtzee's by a lot, though with three notable differences: 1) I was not being a complete ponce (that was my second playthrough), 2) I was a stealth/pistol specialist, and 3) my first playthrough was on the Recruit background, which is the game's hard difficulty, and I did that in order to unlock the Veteran background, which is the game's easy difficulty (I do not mind hard games, but I prefer easier difficulties because I generally play for relaxation rather than challenge). I have to say, it was kinda cool seeing how even the starting background plays a part in the conversation choices - kind of felt like a properly scaled-down D&D session. Side note: when Yahtzee described his experience with that one boss, the one with the knives (yeah, I know who exactly it was, but I'm sparing any spoilers in case anyone curious sees this), I groaned because my first playthrough's segment with that boss went _exactly_ like his, complete with the Benny Hill chasing. Alpha Protocol is ultimately in a weird place. On the one hand, you want to see what could have been done if it was properly finished, maybe even given a proper sequel/follow-up, because the game concept was more fun than expected. On the other hand, it is not likely to make any big splash, and even if it was properly finished in the first place, it probably would still be getting little more than mentions like those in this thread. Even so, it deserves attention, and so here I am joining in it.
I feel like you missed a couple things - namely the main way your "choices" interact with the gameplay in Disco Elysium in that things you do or say often end up getting reflected in modifiers on subsequent skill checks. For example making an ass of yourself in front of Klaasje at the beginning will make things harder for you when its time to interrogate her later on. This in turn can affect what routes of exploration are available to you. This also plays out with Kim and how much he trusts you - during the Tribunal where you have to warn him that one of the mercs is about to shoot him. If Kim trusts you get a bonus on the check to warn, if he *really* trusts you, you get an even bigger bonus. You can, in fact, fail that roll and if you do he will be shot and you get stuck with Cuno for the rest of the game. Not to mention the emotional impact of checking the modifiers on that check and seeing the "Kim *truly* trusts you" modifier listed, marking possibly the only time in gaming history where reading a list of skill check modifiers got me in the feels.
I failed on a 97% success and had Kim in the hospital for the end. Im stupid upset over it but I'm glad I made the choice. It made it feel like I really was on my own. It helped in roleplaying harry. Idk I want to play it again and make sure Kim tags along the whole time
_Disco Elysium_ tricks the player by presenting the murder mystery and all the political wranglings around it as the core story, when it's actually not. The story always hits the same main beats no matter how you choose to play it. The true game is around the main character's identity: what type of person you choose to make him. Kim is best sidekick precisely because he rolls with all of your bullshit, but you _can_ affect how he sees you. It's heartwarming to hear him stick up for you and remember the good (or bad) things you did. During my first playthrough, I wanted more than anything else not to disappoint him.
This. The crux of the choices of Disco Elysium aren't how they affect Martinaise or the Strike or the Murder, those things are all mostly out with the control of a single RCM officer like Harry. The true point of our decisions is in how we define Harry as he rediscovers himself and decides who he is and whether he cares to change from the person he was pre-blackout, and how the people he meets as he goes about his job react to him.
I feel like this has to be what the video creator missed. The game's ending isn't the conclusion of the mystery - it's the scene after where you get 'reviewed' for the kind of person you were. Choices throughout the whole game change the dialogue of this nearly hour long scene and the ending you receive. The TWD example he used is a good example of divergences over choices, but I don't understand why he's saying TWD just did divergences poorly. It was done poorly BECAUSE they were divergences instead of choices. The Disco Elysium examples he provides work far differently. It doesn't make sense that he's calling this game's mechanics or others for that matter divergences at all. TWD was a divergence because it ultimately changed nothing. In this game and others, your choices change quite a bit.
I went into the game wanting to be an agent of chaos and Kim managed to make me play as a good person purely with the power of his approval and disapproval. My choices mattered because HE thought they did
The "illusion of choice" framing honestly *feels like* (again: FEELS LIKE FEELS LIKE) an insult to the game designs it is used to talk about. I wish there was another way of saying the exact same points sometimes. Like, why can't these low-impact decisions still be MEANINGFUL DESPITE low impact? Why do we have to frame it as "deciet" and not "acknowledging there are Degress To Decision And Autonomy"?
Firstly, I agree. Low impact choices can be meaningful to a player. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was playing as a Jedi Guardian, but found a cowboy-style hat in some loot that was intended for the smuggler class. That hat never left my character's head from that moment forward. It's still my favorite character to play because of it. Low gameplay impact, but super meaningful to me. But I think the "illusion of choice" being used in chiding and derogatory ways could come from times that gamers were promised big, impactful choices but didn't get them. Mass Effect 3 comes to mind. There were great and impactful choices along the way, and we were told all our decisions mattered, but when we got there, it was choose the Red, Blue, or Green colored ending. I remember it stung, and Bioware received a lot of backlash for it. So, in my opinion, it probably comes from past broken promises that make gamers and game reviewers more sensitive to choices and their impact on the game.
@@youtubeuniversity3638"acknowledgement of choice is more meaningful then the scope of it" most players only play a game once. Especially if it's a relatively long one. the most meaningful part of the game is the moment to moment writing not the spreadsheet at the end shows how much you missed so you can go: "wow, so many choices!" The game ALWAYS makes sure your character fails a lot, always makes sure to bring up the "ex-something", your choices always reflect your character's flaws and the game always try to make your character have moments of deployment. The game is trying to lead you towards a good story no matter what, all you do is choose your flavor of roleplay.
@@youtubeuniversity3638seems like the proper way is to break it down to its various parts High or low choice reactivity in systemic game design. Linear vs non-linear vs emergent narrative branching in quest, narrative, and world design. Player and character expression...
Always love to see people talk about this game and great to hear your thoughts on it. For me, the true aspect of choice in Disco Elysium is about Harrys direction in life, will you give in to his impulses and addictions or try to help him change? This is whats most reflected in the few differing endings there are. Additionally theres an achievement for completing the game without even inspecting the body, showing how much control you do have over what leads to follow and how to solve the case. Final note (spoilers!) : Also your choices can have a great effect on Kim, you can lose him as your partner if he doesn't trust you enough at a certain high stress point of the game, you end up with a different NPC as your sidekick after!
Yeah, you have large control over what kind of person Harry turns out to be in the end. The Thought Cabinet is vast and there are so many different ways to alter Harry's persona, both big and small.
I like to argue that DE is the only true *role playing* game out there. In other RPGs you're gaining skills, adding items, acting in various good/evil ways, etc. In DE you're creating a character from a tabula rasa detective, defining who he actually is, and a huge chunk of the game is talking to the inner voices trying to convince you to become what they want. The story itself is meaningless and the solution to the crime a total anticlimax (as foreshadowed by reading some of the pulp detective novels)- it's who you end up as that's important.
@@kaptenteo I played it some time ago, but I think to remember that one of the points of the end of the game is that Harry has not really changed. I went with a "redemption" arc, trying to become a good, professional cop, and the other cops that turn up at the end commented that Harry had made similar attempts in the past, only to eventually fail.
I've always felt like any form of divergence makes my choice feel meaningful. Kim saying, or not saying, something in response to my words? That's meaningful in and of itself to me. My Shepard says something mean to someone? Well that's a difference, even if it doesn't extend beyond the scene, someone else's Shepard might not have! A moment of difference is a meaningful difference to me, even if it's a throwaway line. I'm role-playing here.
1:16 I completely disagree. Sometimes the complete information still leaves a choice, because no option is obviously and inherently better. Like with the weapon example, some weapons can do more damage but are harder to use as a player, compared to a slightly weaker but simpler weapon, which i will choose even knowing its damage is lower, because of who i am as a person. You can say it's not a "dilemma", but it's still "choice". 10:40 Isn't that just "parallel divergence, but very very small"? 12:10 It could also mean the opposite thing: you realize suddenly that something you didn't think about DOES make much more sense than you thought at first. It's called "Fridge Revelation".
Just to see if I'm getting your example correctly here: You're given the choice between 1) a weaker easy to control weapon and 2) a stronger hard to control weapon. In that case: Yes you basically still have the choice between the two, but if you can't control the stronger weapon at all, then your choice is basically reduced to "1) Deal small amounts of damage" and "2) Deal no or next to no damage at all since you can't control and thus not hit a single shot with this". On the other hand for someone who's got no issues controlling a weapon that's more difficult to handle, there also isn't really a choice here, since choosing the weaker weapon in this scenario just handicaps you and outside of a challenge run or wanting to challenge yourself as a player it's just not a choice a player would make.
@@ExSuPiO1 There are still so many factors that they aren't considering in this video. Personal preference? Past experience? Actual trauma.. a choice is always a choice. If you had all the information for each choice, where one choice is still vastly inferior, some players will still choose the poorer one. Sometimes just to see what would happen.
@@ExSuPiO1 I agree with the person but I'm thinking more about incomparable things. For example the ability to turn invisible versus the ability to blink back to your previous position. You can have complete information about both of them and still be left with a satisfying and meaningful choice.
With weapons, you can have for example: Fire rate, accuracy, recoil, ammo capacity, reload speed, ammo type, weight, size, damage, damage type, armor penetration, range, sound, attachments. Probably some additional things. Easily can have variety and player choice what to use.
I will die on this hill, the idea that your choice didn't matter because it didn't actually matter is ridiculous. Fiction is fiction, the emotions you feel are real and were real. Having the stage play end only to notice the curtain doesn't mean it was a bad play. The illusion of choice is all most people have, and video games allow us to feel like we make meaningful choices: I think the only really bad examples are the ones where it's made *immediately* clear it didn't matter, or if the game claims it will and then never pays it off. Mass Effect is the gold standard here because it had THREE games to insist your choices were important and leading up to something only to throw the switch on a quite literal end-o-tron 3000. It's not that every choice didn't move the universe, it's that the game never respected them. Killed the Rachni Queen? Oh, she's reanimated for the finale. Fondue. Right. The. Freeze. Off. It turned out the only real decision that mattered was whether or not you saved Ashley or Kaiden: not that they didn't find a way to fuck that one up but at least they were there with you at the end of the trilogy.
Disco Elysium is all about criticizing the concept, the notion of full agency, full control, and full choice. We are bound by History and our own history (and others). Its hugely meta. P.s.: you could very well say the game is playing you. And quite blatantly.
Freedom can only exist in contrast to captivity. What is full agency or full control? Without any history or boundaries to define your control or lack of thereof control doesn't even exist because there is no one there to be free and make choices. Or to put it differently, an infinite amount of foodchoices is irrelevant if you aren't hungry.
3:53 Why's that an "illusion"? Why is a choice that only matters for a temporary time any less LEGITIMATE of a choice? Heck, think of it like this: Even in a game full of "real" choices, it always leads back to eventually save quitting and doing something other than playing the game. So is there no such thing as choice, then?
And, if you extend the logic (to an admittedly extreme degree), you end up with some truly wacky positions in regards to all the things we do here in real life in light of mortality.
@@youtubeuniversity3638 Just in case it wasn't obvious, the final logical step is "life is meaningless because we all die in the end". This suggests that the logic might be flawed.
In other words, the meaningful choice is HOW you go about solving the crime because every road leads to Rome, you just get to choose WHICH of those road to follow. You choose what aspects of the story you want to explore and you can still beat the game regardless. Pretty damn good design
10:25 This feels akin to an insult to aesthetic. As lootboxes with cosmetics have proven, as fashion souls proves too for something I'm more sure you'd know much on, aesthetics matter. Reduce Disco Elysium to textureless grey boxes and dialouge to "insert flag here triggered" and choices to just a list of letters with associated percent chances and see how fun that is.
@@SageWon-1aussie Thems was Built As textbased. Disco Elysium actually Uses aesthetic, meaningfully so, and ergo removal of it WOULD NOT RESULT IN THE SAME THING AS a game built as text based only to start with.
You mentioned our relationship with not ultimately changing despite our choices but I think it's important to bring up that there's actually two moments (that I know of) in the game where it does change in a meaningful way and the change is the factor that makes those two moments hit the player extra hard. Spoilers for Disco Elysium ahead: 1) At the very end of the game, during our very own tribunal scene, Kim's final judgement of us will depend on the combined effect of all our choices, even to the point that he'll sometimes express bafflement at how much our personality can swing wildly between extremes. 2) When you're trying to convince Kim to dance, if you fail the check and say the wrong things to him, he will be extremely pissed at you and will leave for the rest of the day. Being forced to spend the remaining time on your own not only makes you feel the weight of your mistakes through his absence, it also locks you out of several conversations pertaining to the case that can't be done without your partner. Kim will still come back the next day after recomposing himself, but that period without him always leaves a mark with the player.
I'm sorry but this is quite a superficial and even incorrect take. In fact, there are several incorrect take or assumptions. The weapon stats being just like solving a puzzle, aesthetic divergence and most important and baffling, Kim's relationship with the player character being some. If weapon stats (around 1:08 ) were a puzzle there would be one obvious and objective right and wrong choice and anyone who's played an FPS, available weapon stats or not, can say that is clearly not the case. The divergences from your choices in Disco Elysium aren't merely aesthetic and I have no idea where this take is coming from. They don't "change the gameplay" ( 10:10 ) in the sense that it becomes a different kind of game but that's never the case and also no the point the video itself is trying to make. They change what happens in the game in a really fundamental and incredibly important way. The idea that Kim's relationship with the player character doesn't change (9:55 - 10:10) is such a baffling take that I had to listen to it again to make sure that's what they were saying. I don't want to get into story details and spoilers but this relationship is so instrumental and it changes sooo much because of your choices during the game which in turns affects how parts of the game plays and even ends! In summary, these misunderstandings are so basic yet so incorrect that they severely reduces the credibility of the makers of the video. It's unfortunate and I don't want to come down on the creators too much. Other than the points raised the video is well made and entertaining, I just think some more research, script editing and further understanding of the topic they're discussing would be very constructive and helpful.
I love DE mainly because often times the best outcome isn't when you make the roll, it's the one you fail. So, there really isn't any pressure or anger when you fail a roll. One of the few games where I realized it's best not to save scum because unlike say BG3, where failing a roll almost always leads to a bad outcome, in DE it's just fun because Harry has some funny dialogue or does something funny and often times failure succeeds anyway just in a more comical or pathetic way.
This is really one of the best aspects of DE and something I've come to consider in any roleplaying context moving forward. It's harder to do but way more satisfying. If your players fail a check to open a door, it's easy to leave it at that and shut down engagement. It's better to divert their attention to the awkward window where they will have to shimmy around, or perhaps even just make someone from the other side knock.
I kind of take issue with the idea that choices in games where the ending is the same are an illusion of choice, when in many of those games you get to see or experience a part of the game you wouldn't otherwise. Sure the end result may be the same, but you still get to see a different scene, or area, or unlock a different ability and way to play the game. That isn't really an illusion of choice, that is just an actual choice. Sure in an open world game you still have to fight the same end boss, and you still get the same couple endings, but you can get there by skipping areas or using different abilities. many narrative focused games have entire chunks of dialogue and scenes you wouldn't see without making different choices. So why do we call it an illusion if the choices actually do affect what you see and do in the game?
One of my favorite random niche "choice based games" was some random Phone Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game called "Choices That Matter" or something akin to that, it was really just an interactive novel more than a game but I got super hooked on one of the stories, and I even got my wife into it. One thing that's stuck with me for years is how much I loved the experience *despite* how many useless choices there were. The game had a great mix of useless small dialogue options that were only there to make you think about choices all the time, but there were also MAJOR story choices that were intertwined alongside the fluff. I got the worst ending possible by the end and my wife ended up basically saving the world. Since then, I've held the belief that having choices that "don't matter" isn't automatically a bad thing, as I still enjoyed and put a lot of thought into the smallest choices that I would make *because I was so engaged with the story anyways*. Do engaging choices become nullified only after you replay a game and subsequently realize how ineffectual they were?
I think one of the smartest things Disco Elysium does is to make failure fun. On a second playthrough, I tried the "run out flipping off the bartender" choice, failed due to bad physical stats, and fell over, destroying a pinball machine... at which point the bartender found me so pathetic that he reduced my bill. Because this happened on a mid-percentage roll, my guess is that a lot of people will not try it but a fair few people who *do* try it will have failed and got to see this outcome. And that drives you as a player towards being more experimental and carefree. It discourages save-scumming, or risk-averse play, but showing that there's likely to be new and interesting content whether you win or lose. I think that works well with DE because it's so text-orientated, but I'd love to see other games try this out - like, if you lose a battle or fall down a pit that *looks* like it should just be a standard game-over, you instead find a whole other part of the game you didn't expect. Bloodborne did it - a certain enemy killing you in a certain place results in you waking up somewhere completely different, way before you'd normally get there - and it's such a complete shock when it happens (especially because that's a game where you'll have died a shitload before then).
The more I think about it the more I hate the framing around these concepts. Don't get me wrong they seem like very useful concepts for planning out the choices in your game but... The player IS still making the choice of which rails to follow. Just because they end up at the same place in the end doesn't negate everything that does change getting there. Like by this logic if I go to buy a car... it doesn't matter if I get a truck or a motorcycle because I'm just going to end up driving it to work and back home over and over until I die slipping in the shower one day. Oh the truck will make it easier when I have to move sure, but that's just a "skip divergence" avoiding the U-Haul side quest. Also what about games that have different endings? Framing it as an "illusion of choice" seems hinged on the fact that it always ends up in the same place; so if a game even has 2 different endings (or maybe 3 different coloured ones like ME3) then it ceases to be an illusion and this whole things just becomes a system to help developers plan that choice.
@@SageWon-1aussie I was using a real world example to show how even choices we make in life, fairly big ones, could be seen as an "illusion of choice" by framing it in the way this video does. I used real life in hopes it would make it more personal but if you prefer I can use a game example instead: Cyberpunk, you spend like half the game travelling around Night City and your choice of transportation would be an illusion of choice, but could have a radical effect on how much you enjoy the game. My point is that it's a real choice the player is making (car, train, fast travel, etc) and it effects how much they enjoy the game (enjoying the exploration, feel like it's a slog to get around, etc) so calling it an illusion just because it doesn't effect other choices is needlessly reductive. That said, I understand the whole point of this model of thinking is to help plan out the choices and how they fit together, not to worry about how it effects the player necessarily; that's why I said up-front that it seems useful. My problem is solely with the word "illusion" - because contrary to what you just wrote you can use this model to plan out choices that do effect each other. Games do it all the time. Mass Effect 2's Suicide Mission is effected by choices you made throughout the game and in turn the ending is directly effected by how that mission goes.
I feel like starting with the complete information choice/puzzle distinction was a bad choice (lol) for the video. It connects to nothing discussed later and was not given enough time to stand on its own. I straight up disagree. Even knowing all the stats for a weapon still allows me to choose my preferred playstyle if both weapons are suitable to the situation. And conversely, even if there is hidden information, the "puzzle" of picking a rocket launcher when fighting a helicopter is available to the designer.
For anyone who has seen a lot of the optional content already, I can strongly recommend going for one run as a boring, straight-edge and straight-laced cop. Stick to the case and do it as competently as you can, apologize for your previous behavior when it's truly appropriate but don't overindulge in that either. Don't read the book on Dolores Dei and don't even try to enter the church. Express moralist politics when you have to pick one, but don't go out of your way to turn conversations into debates and don't pursue a vision quest (but definitely do another run for the moralist one at some point if you haven't seen that one either, it's truly unique). I committed to that gimmick once for shits and giggles, and it turned out to be a whole worthwhile experience in itself. You'll miss out on like 80% of the most memorable content and it'll be a really quick run, but as a character arc for Harry, it's genuinely touching. Here's this lumbering disaster waking up from his worst death spiral yet, and he's just lost most of his demons along with his memories. He recalls so little of his hang-up on Dora that he's able to get a good, refreshing nap right before the big arrest, and blows everyone's expectations on him out of the water in a way no other version of him can.
I'll tell you straight up that the entire premise of this essay is very fishy indeed. To say that there is such a thing as illusory choice implies the existence of authentic or real choice that is made. No such thing has ever been proven to exist anywhere!
But the ironic or cartoonish nature of choices in games does provide people with more radical choices than in life because there is less difficulty attached to the expression. Such as choosing a different gendered avatar in a game is a much easier thing to do than becoming a different gender out on the street. So is a real choice one which we feel is forced upon us by society, law or convention?
@@SageWon-1aussieYou say you had a choice or are making choices about games, but really you are just stating this as a fact without any proof. Maybe this other world where you could simply have ignored my comment is a convenient "illusion" to make you feel better.
@@SageWon-1aussie You responding doesn’t seem like much of a choice, given you’ve responded to many of the comments criticizing the video. In the case of a narrative game like DE, every choice matters because it changes the experience of the player. Sure, there are story beats that will always be hit, but the prose in DE is so effective that a player’s view of characters or the world can radically change depending on the choices they’ve previously made. The first time I played the game I found Cuno annoying in a funny way and so that’s what the narrative was. But in another play through I spent more time talking to him, figuring out his past and his connection to Cunoesse. Suddenly the narrative had meaningfully changed and many of his actions were recontextualized. It also changed the way I interacted with him. This was a meaningful consequence of a choice I made.
That fact that corpo asshats stole Disco Elysium from the dev team is the greatest tragedy. I hope we will see the former ZA/UM head return to making great games, yet I don't have high hopes after such a traumatic chain of events for them.
Disco Elysium is a story about a guy who's lost control of his life. So the narrative games "all roads leave to the plot that's written" approach works well there. There are a lot of great stories about how people react to or contextualize choices that are largely constrained by circumstances beyond their control, it's a relatable experience.
Well put. Games like Disco Elysium do a neat trick where they make you think you’re controlling the story, when in reality you’re controlling how your character reacts to it. Saying they “lied” to us feels like a stretch to me. It’s easy to mess up the events and have characters die, or botch up entire missions. It’s different *enough* where it feels like my choices do in fact matter. I played through Disco as a dumb drugged out detective who was having conversations with his tie and then I played through it again as a highly intelligent sleuth and yes… I will yield that the core events of the plot were the same… but it was an entirely different experience! That’s what made Disco Elysium such a good game. You can be MacGyver solving everything or you can be MacGruber who decides we need to attack the mail delivery box.
In sandbox, simulationist games like Crusader Kings 3 or Dwarf Fortress, one's choices matter in a way they couldn't matter in a conventional CRPG. There are some narrative branches baked in -- activity and event branches in the former, Hidden Fun Stuff and fortress growth in the latter -- but by and large it's "welcome to the world, good luck, don't die". And there's a cost to this. Two, I'd say. First, the procedural content that results lacks the "oomph" of hand-crafted narratives. You just can't don't get your incredibly memorable allies like Kim Kitsuragi or Karlach, or your despicable enemies like Caesar or Orin. Sometimes particular characters will prove memorable by chance and happenstance, but it's never as heavy. Second, it's harder to discuss with friends and compare-and-contrast afterwards. I could tell you stories about that backstabbing, scheming S.O.B. Prince Ishmael, his efforts to steal my throne, and our final reconciliation, but in literally every other game of Crusader Kings 3, he did not exist at all, so nobody can say, "huh, I actually ended up befriending him" or whatever and you don't get those moments of discussing branches.
Hmm, I disagree with a few things. I wouldn't define a weapon choice as a puzzle just because I know stats. I have often picked less efficient weapons because I prefer the feel over a stat gain, or even just the aesthetic. I also question how we are defining meaningful choice and consequence. I'd argue for a not insignificant number, a purely visual change or character tone shift could easily still be seen as a consequence and meaning for a player could still be gotten from a choice that still leads to the same end conclusion due to emotional impact of choice before the reconverge.
@SageWon-1aussie so, as a narrative I must pose the question, what is more important, the tale itself or what the reader takes away from it? If it's what the reader takes away, I'd argue even a non major, or even temporary change, can be meaningful. If we only care if a choice has a meaningful impact on the narrative, that renders any non main narrative meaningless, which I'd say most would disagree with. Even if the various paths before getting the body down don't change the overall narrative, it still flavors the tale for those who do go down that road, which I would argue is still very meaningful
This feels like a pretty reductive take honestly, one that boils down very meaningful changes to just 'divergences'. Also pretty sure Kim can straight up leave your party if you make him upset enough.
“But what do you think?” *Thinks over video, checks title again I think… my input in this matter is an illusion presented in the format of an aesthetic divergence where all options fundamentally lead down the same path of eating dinner and sleeping later regardless of the different interactions that can play out in this moment? Did I pass the test?
@@SageWon-1aussie Nah. It’s still true that all routes lead to the same outcome so I’ll take the L and appreciate that my experience will be different from those who passed test.
I disagree with your assessment that a sufficiently-honest weapon system is a puzzle and not a choice. A puzzle doesn't assess how something feels to play or what playstyle most appeals to you; a well-balanced weapon system will leave you with the choice of how to approach a problem. Do you want to stand back and play a point-and-click adventure with the sniper rifle- only to panic once they close the gap? Do you want to LARP as the Doom Guy and go in for a little kiss before you shotgun your enemies to death- and be continuously low-health from all the face-checking you're doing? Depends on what appeals to you; both styles have drawbacks and no clear answer. Now, in a POORLY balanced weapons system, it does become a puzzle of "how do I best exploit these numbers." That I will absolutely give you.
I think this is an oversimplification of the topic. I think most gamers know games have a boundary that limits what is possible. In the game The Witness you can complete the game in minutes. Or Persona 4 Golden/Persona 5 Royal where you don't even get to fight the last bosses if you don't take the right choices. You won't even know they exist. These choices do not matter? It has no impact on you as a player?
@@SageWon-1aussie It is simplified in a kind of tabloid way. "Disco Elysium is lying to you". Because of limitation in computing these limits would exist no matter how long and wide you make these choices. Not saying this is a good thing, but in the future an AI could generate responses on the spot, and maybe even animations and decisions and hence lift this limitation.
I feel like this episode needed more examples on HOW disco Elysium is lying. As someone who played the game like a year ago, this was pretty hard to follow.
@@SageWon-1aussie There's always one hyper-aggressive sycophant. J's video defines what is a "choice" in a video game and which -choices- "divergences" "matter." He describes "simple" choices and "dramatic" ones, which "change the narrative." To "change the narrative" is, as shown by tracks heading in all different directions, to change the destination of the story. The "illusion of choice" relates to "divergences" which don't "change the narrative," and it is spelled out that a successful "divergence" is one which results in a different ending, or, one which "tricks" the player into believing that it will. (the "illusion") 11:01 "... any and all decisions you make in Disco Elysium (and any game for that matter) are just variations on these [4 categories of divergence], and like I said before: these can be applied to any decision you make in any game. Consequences, where to go, what to do, you name it." 8:01 "We've just spent a lot of time discussing the illusion of choice and things that don't really matter..." You've been waging war on commenters (gamers) for describing their experience with games. They enjoy the journey, and aren't concerned with every choice "changing the narrative." They don't feel it necessary to believe that it will. Many of us are perfectly happy with low-stakes consequences, going places without it changing the end of the story, doing things that don't "change the narrative." It's poor advice to game developers precisely because it ignores this feedback. Dark Souls is a great example of some of these "divergences" which make no attempt at convincing players that the story will change based on the clothes that they wear or the direction they choose at a "cross divergence." It's greatly enjoyed by its players and is a huge success. Yet by the standards set by this video its "divergences" are "poorly done" because the person who picked the Thief class and fought Quelaag as their first boss, ringing the second Bell of Awakening _first_ , wasn't "tricked" into believing that this would "change the narrative." Or even worse, it is "poorly done" because it _doesn't_ change the ending one bit. At the end of Dark Souls, you either become kindling for the First Flame or you become the Dark Lord. Nothing you do affects the ending, but it nonetheless changes how players experience and enjoy the game. Hence, it "matters." As a game developer, being convinced that these things "don't matter" is a good way to be discouraged from including them. Again, players enjoy these things anyway. It "matters" to their enjoyment. "Consequences, where to go, what to do, you name it." Many games are enjoyed by many people without adhering to J's "sage advice." It's simply not necessary for a game to "trick" players into thinking each and every decision will profoundly change the ending of the game. Gamers will enjoy the journey... for the journey. You say "the choice isn't meaningful in terms of the game's design." How, exactly? Each area has different items and materials to pick up. They have souls to acquire. The enemy design and placement are all engaged with, and enjoyed. That is unequivocally "the game's design." It's part of the experience and the enjoyment. The manner in which the player advances through Dark Souls will be changed very much by which weapons, spells, miracles, armor, and items they obtain. They will experience NPC quest trees. Many of us have our favorites, and our enjoyment of the game was colored in some part by those interactions. Even though they don't change the ending. Many, many people are not choosing their armor and equipment because it is the "objective[ly] [optimal] choice." They aren't choosing it because it "changes the narrative." They aren't choosing it because it tricks them into believing that it does either. Remember, J said that this applies to gear selection as well. 2:38 "... all of these techniques can be applied to any form of choice in games: dialogue, traversal, weapon upgrades, take your pick." The video is poorly argued. The script could have used a second pass. It's full of semantic mistakes (misdefining autonomy), false dichotomies (decision vs puzzle), factual errors about the game he's discussing (in particular, Kim's relationship with the protagonist) and just generally flimsy advice for how to develop a game. I do not believe that taking what is presented in this video to heart will make anybody a better game designer.
Disco was such an amaizing game, it always felt like such a personal experience because of how it portrayed the effects of my choices and stats, wonderful!
I think choice DOES matter (even if core paths are a railroad), in fact with Disco Elysium you get to see consequences such as Kim leaving you forever, versus an ending I had where he backs up Drunk Cop's redemption and helps you get back with the force, with extra flavour dialogue about how he never abused drink or drugs the whole playthrough. The effort may be low with scraps of dialogue and status text being affected, but it's still a meaningful consequence. What undid Telltale is that everything got suggested as 'remembered' but would be utterly undone and thrown away, like the two characters you mentioned. They could have been kept until the end of the game with small alterations to character reactions and some tiny moments with each person, but instead the game showed its hand and ripped both from your hands. In fact, in their Batman game it was at its absolute worst, where characters actively ignored your choices to the point where Harvey Dent had a reaction that was laughably nonsensical towards the end. The choices were ignored and fully undone when with some small effort the same core endings could happen but with some aesthetic differences. *Choices don't have to rewrite the entire game.*
A choice is always a choice. Even with all the information available it doesn't mean people are always going to pick the superior one. I had a friend that got locked in a freezer one time and had personal trauma over it. Because of that they would never pick any weapon with ice elements, even if it did twice as much damage. Then you have something far more obvious of people taking the wrong choice just to see what happens.
While perhaps a little tangental, I think it’s important to note the lack of general story “branches” due to choices is also very thematic. Harry can only change himself and help other people, or as much as a train wreck of a man can do in 5-10 days. But the forces of the world operate on their one scale, and he has no hope of changing things. He can only do what he thinks is best in those situations.
My first question would be, how do we define whether a choice matters or not? From a certain perspective, the limited choices i have in regards to Shepard's squad in Mass Effect don't matter. I will not irrevocably lose out on war assets if i didn't recruit Garrus in the first game. If i let Shepard's love interest die, she will not succumb to despair and cease to function. The game will not change to a stealth action survival game where Shepard has to evade a hitman sent by Ashley's family if i let her die on Virmire. But it does matter to the story i'm telling about my Shepard -- her values, her relationships, the sacrifices she will and will not make to save the galaxy. It matters in the conversations she will have and the quests she won't go on. There will never be a game where you can *literally* do anything, go anywhere, make any decision you can think of -- it would be a waste of time and resources to try even if you could. But i think there's a meaningful difference between a choice with a limited impact and a choice that doesn't matter at all. I'm not a game designer, but i suspect that both can work, you just have to be more careful with the latter.
Interesting video! I'm struck when thinking about choice of this great part of a video about bg3 demonstrating why it's so good by canvassing how people handled the goblin camp in act 1 - the sheer mountain of options feels true to it being tied to tabletop - but ultimately however it ends, the story progresses along parallel-ish tracks: a good example of localised divergence. It's also interesting seeing how the conversation is had across genres in resisting the ease to fall into minmaxing
Ah, I'm more familiar with the term "Fridge logic" for what you described. As for the illusion of choice, there's an element of suspension of disbelief when it comes to playing games similar to reading books. In the end, what's written (in prose or in code) is static; a set arrangement of immutable facts that cannot alter itself. If you're determined enough, you can see every single permutation a game has to offer, and it can only respond to your choices in so many different ways. For Disco Elysium, for example, it's like reading a "choose your own adventure book", in the end, your choices will be limited by what is presented, and no matter your will, unless you simply choose to stop reading, it will reach one of a predetermined amount of endings. The choices can still mean something though, because if presented right, it can feel like no one else made their way through the game quite the same way you did, and that if you replayed the game and made different choices (or had die rolls go a different way) that the story could play out a little differently. Sure, the end result might be largely the same and major plot beats will remain unchanged, but the moments in between can have enough variance through choice to feel genuinely different.
Precisely this, great way to put it. Disco Elysium of all games is definitely as much if not more about the moments in between, as you say, as it is about the larger and more "consequential" story beats.
The thumbnail artist got a lot of nice small touches! I like how color is slightly bleeding like on the original game poster, it's nicely conveyed through a pure vector thumbnail. And the monument in the back. Kudos to you, thumbnail artist! (Also the video is of course good. We used even "faker" choices in Pathologic 1, where you'd sometimes (!) have three reply options, but no matter which one you choose you get the same reply back, cleverly formed to fit any of your dialogue. Nobody even noticed on their 1-st or even 3-rd playthroughs, and it was basically "almost free development cost wise player agency". Key difference here being, that our version affect nothing but the player perception of their adventures
Any narrative driven RPG-like game is bound to have these limitations, I don't see what the fuss about this is. It is essentially a choose your own adventure book in a computer dictated format, where your actions are always pre determined by the developer and accounted for. The more meticulous and cleverly the story is written the better the overall experience tends to be. This can apply to Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect and yes the Tell tale games. Also again games usually have a main quest and multiple side quests. Games that make the side quests interact with the main quest and/or make the side quests a meaningful part of the game world, such as the Witcher 3, tend to be overall better narrative experiences as well. On the compete opposite side of the spectrum you have the Systems Driven games where the story and the outcomes of the game are decided by the player themselves using the flexible ingame systems that the developers leave out for them. Examples for that would be Minecraft, Kenshi, Project Zomboid or hell even Garry's Mod to an extent.
I think "investment" matters. An Ending-tron-3000 never feels good, because it's low investment - you can go right back and change on a dime. If a decision comes back to haunt you after 5 or 10 hours of playtime, it feels more real and important, because even though you might not like the result, you are invested now in your timeline, and you won't reload and replay all that.
I mean we're talking about video games here... the illusion of anything mattering at all is the point isn't it? At least Disco helps the player try to understand themselves and see the world from a different perspective, which carries outside the game and that's more meaningful than straight up time sinks.
Kim can leave if you disappoint him enough, and Kuno can be deputized, AND you can be committed at the end by your old partner. I don't think JM8 is as familiar with the game as they think they are. Yes it all leads to the Deserter at the end, but the circumstances around that can be wildly different.
@@SageWon-1aussie While the developers did indeed do that, unfortunately the example he used to prove it was objectively wrong, which undermines the point and makes his argument weaker. IF JM8 had acknowledged that Disco Elysium does have divergent paths, events, and Outcomes to decisions you make, including Kim potentially leaving you, he could have argued that the game will still end with going to the island, meeting the Defector, then getting questioned by you old partner. Then I'd argue that that'd make for a better argument for what we all coin "the illusion of choice" in games, rather than focusing on Kim and getting his info wrong. And while it doesn't mean the concept isn't valid and a technique used by developers, the example he based his entire argument on to prove the point is, well, factually false. In the scope of an argument or opinion piece, that undercuts what you're saying and makes you look ill-informed and sadly not really knowing what you're talking about.
Before I even started playing the walking dead I turned off the "whoever will remember this" messages without really knowing what I was doing. I did miss the point of a lot of memes but I think the game was infinitely better for it.
Honestly, I tend to disagree with the basic premise, simply because people evaluate choices in very different ways. One person looks at a gun and only sees it's raw DPS, another cares more about it's look and feel than precisely how much damage it does. One person sees two branches that go to the same place as being identical and pick at random, others will pick the same branch every single time. One person wears whatever gear gives the best stats, another will wear whatever they think looks the best or the silliest or whatever. A lot of conversations about choices in games make it sound like folks have never gone to a restaurant. You go to a restaurant, and the only options you've got for food are what's on the menu. Picking what to order in a restaurant isn't typically a life-changing event (at least for those of us without allergies) but a lot of us do have pretty strong preferences about what we eat. And on top of that, I don't walk into a chinese restaurant and get miffed that beef stroganoff isn't on the menu. But also, who hasn't encountered games where some random minor side-content isn't the thing we remember and think and talk about days or weeks later because we're far more invested in random npc #426 and their situation than whatever the big branching choice was about. Give me a choice of two companions, one is a dog, the other a robot, and they're precisely identical in every way in mechanics and story impact... I'm taking that robot every single time. Make the dog better than the robot, and I'm still probably taking the robot. The best choices are the ones we /care/ about the most, for whatever reasons, and that caring may not have /anything/ to do with objective superiority or whether the story flies off into left field. Mechanical differences and branching narratives are tools that can be used to make people care about a choice, but they are the sole defining items in terms of the real impact a choice has on a player.
The "skip" discussed in this video about shooting the body down actually reminds me of something that broke me out of the illusion my first time through the game. Without going into too much detail, it is quite possible to pretty early on find the back room and pass a check to identify 3 possible points to fire from, including realizing the probability that the shot came from the island. I actually ended up getting frustrated running around in circles for a few IRL hours trying to figure out how to to there and it was a huge letdown to learn by playing and talking with friends that you just aren't allowed to go there no matter what until the scripted time, and you'll automatically learn you need to. I feel like that's a skip they should have accounted for and let people who found the clues you need to have found and pass multiple checks to deduce the bullet trajectory to actually follow up on the lead the game let them discover.
and this is why the manufacturer of Endingtron 3000s gets so much business - there's another kind of divergence: the "there won't be any choices later so we can fully realize all the options without breaking the budget" divergence
6:30 also failing too shoot the body down (kim misses) also leads up too a later moment where Kim needs too shoot and REALLY needs too hit. the player in that moment will remember: kim missed. will he miss again?
I never understood this entire line of argument for the existence of a genre. Of course your choices matter. Without your intervention, nothing would happen in any video game. Mario would either be stuck in the intro demo, or standing at the left edge of the Mushroom Kingdom, depending on what you consider the start of the game, for example. Ryu would get his ass handed to him by literally everyone in the fighting tournament. The track and field stars from Track and Field on the NES would stand at the starting line, wasting everyone's time. If your choices didn't matter, you'd be watching a video, not playing a video game. A better title would probably be "branching paths", though it wouldn't capture people's interest as well, but "choices matter" just sounds... patronizing. "Your choices actually matter here!" As if they don't anywhere else. Fuck you and everyone who rode in with you. Perhaps my choice of whether to punch you in the face or kick you in the nuts might matter - the nuts will knock you unconscious faster, meaning I get more time to break my foot curb stomping your teeth out of your skull, but the face will give you an honorable man's death by letting you fight back. It's screaming, begging you to care about its story, lying all the while by telling you that you can do whatever you want, then giving you pre-written choices at each junction. Tabletop role playing this is not.
This series is great. I love the way it unlocks a new term or sequence if thought. I had a pre-existing concept of illusion of choice, bur had never had it so wonderfully described as a divergence. Thank you for your work!
To add onto the refrigerator test segue at the end, there's also the "fridge brilliance" and the "fridge horror" tests, where you accept everything at face value when you consume it, but during the aforementioned trip to the fridge for a midnight snack you realise how intelligent/messed up something is respectively
Well, I suppose we can discuss the concept of choice in the game, including its aspects and other details, and it is indeed an interesting subject. But at the end of the day it is all about whether or not you had fun or not playing the game. I know I had. Which means it was well-designed.
Love this series, glad to have a new video! (Post-watch) I feel like this tapped into a lot of problems I've been having with my DnD game lately. Super interesting breakdown, thanks!
I loved Disco Elysium but I found the getting the body down part was the only bit I really hated. I kept missing various rolls (perhaps I picked very bad stats). It meant I felt like I was "grinding" to get stats to enable it. I felt I had done all the "good" content and was scraping around the corners to get enough stats to pass that block. Everything else in the game was stellar and immersive but the feeling of being road blocked from progression by failing random checks again and again was infuriating.
7:30 opportunity cost this is what prevents me from playing most RPG games, sadly. everything i do, i feel like I've missed out many other things. playing the game means I'm missing vast parts of the game. I'm so concerned of what I've missed, i can't appreciate what I've done. but if i find out my choice never mattered... well damn... makes it very difficult to care what anyone says during in game conversations
This is one of your better videos, I think. Insightful commentary with a lot of information crammed into a relatively small amount of time, and some good visual explanations to boot. I hope you keep this standard of quality going forward. Reminds me of Extra Credits back when it wasn't a steaming pile of garbage.
Ha, yeah, this makes me think of myself a few years ago...deciding that I wanted to do a narrative game where the choices *really* matter and you have many different paths, and then doing the math and realizing just how many branches that could easily end up being. Thus, the game has to get simplified a bit (or a lot), to give choice without having to incorporate a bunch of wildly different plots, because then the story just has no sense of cohesion. So yeah, definitely a topic of interest to me. I love the breakdown of the different types of approaches!
Is this really illusion of choice? Sounds more like an illusion of the breadth and diversity of the possibility space. Which is still considerably large on Disco Elysium. And I'd argue there's not much of an illusion there either: on my first play-through I actually thought there was way less stuff which could have gone different then there in fact was. Also, I get that it was just the main example, but Disco Elysium is as much as anything an interactive story / role playing. "Aesthetic choices" are choices, they change the story you get and how you relate to the characters and the world, which is the meat of this game. You do make the choices and it does impact the story, even when they don't have larger impacts on the "plot". I think really what's being discussed with the four categories is not really about illusions of choice, of consequence or even of scope. To me they rather sound like techniques to contain scope while implementing choices and consequences, which may or may not end up being meaningful. So instead of tools to create an illusion of choice, these can be seen as tools to enable choice.
So it kinda does matter. If we're thinking about the endgame, yeah, sure, in the end we'll all see the credits, we'll all see the conclusion. But what about the journey? What about HOW we get there? Isn't it more important than WHAT is at the end? Isn't it more important to play as a bard rather than a fighter than it is to actually see the demon god die? To choose broadswords rather than bows? I mean, yeah, the ending is still the same, so our choices don't factor in on that, but... It's so much more. I'm not criticizing your analysis, it's on point, I'm just placing my perspective as a player. Still, awesome as always.
@@SageWon-1aussie Oh, for sure. My point is not against his argument, is just another point of view on choices. I'm not saying that designers should change the way choices are made in games, I'm just saying that there's more to choices than the last seconds of each act. Taking Disco Elysium as an example, the choices DO matter, but not for the outcome, but for HOW we get there, as I've said. That's the cool part.
@@SageWon-1aussie You do realize you're being a stubborn ahole, right? I'm not going against his point, I'm just shining some light on the other side of the discussion. I'm not saying he's wrong, I'm saying there's more to choices than the ending. Geez, some people...
Choices can definitely add entertainment value in the moments even if they have no real bearing on the story itself, Commander Shepard punching the news reporter being a prime example.
For me, I am now solo playing tabletop games. That is all about decision making. It is not about telling a story, but experience an environment and trying to reach a more ideal state. Even if my opponent is a random number generator, that is the point. Not all game have stories. Some are a toolbox for generating stories. On that note, the world of solo tabletop games is worth investigating.
Steam says my rarest achievement is the one you get for winning the eyebrow raising contest with Kim, which I still laugh about. I found the weird guy in the container, which didn't "matter" but was memorable. the story path leading to "The Figurines Won't Win Her Back" completely broke my heart. even if my choices didn't change the course of the main game story sequence much, they gave me a unique experience. probably won't play again because the original playthrough feels like my personal canon.
If there is one game that did this parallel divergences better than I feel anyone else and that you should cover someday, it's Alpha Protocol, one of the most underrated games I know, simply for the shere amount of work they had to put into it.
It's a shame how ZA/UM has imploded due to corporate fuckery. Currently, they've canceled 3/4 of the projects they were working on, laid of most of their staff, including everyone who actually worked on Disco Elysium. Robert Kurvitz spent twenty years designing and creating this universe, and now the system that he used this game to critic has taken his creation from him. Thankfully, Kurvitz and co have created a new studio based in Brighton and are working on a new game with backing from Net Ease.
For me, the text on-screen matters as much as it does in a book; or spoken dialogue in a film. Having *gameplay* consequences is a huge plus because this medium allows it, but is not mandatory to qualify as "it matters". It matters to me what my character says and how the world responds to me/the character. Not everything needs consequence; maybe I'm wearing this white shirt just because I like it better and not because of its stats or it (fundamentally) changes the game and responses to my character.
The original Deus Ex really nailed what makes a choice feel meaningful, having people REACT to it afterwards. News bulletins will call out your actions, your three mentors will complain or compliment you depending on if you handled the mission like they would've, and the game even lets you do some outside-the-box things like putting a trap down in advance to kill an NPC in a cutscene, preventing the scripted death of another character in said cutscene and getting additional intel the first person was trying to stop you from obtaining. Very few modern games even comes close to the reactivity of DE1.
This needs a second pass. Its best to think of Disco Elysium like this; you are not playing as Harry Du Bois, you are playing as the intermediate will that is shaping the person Harry Du Bois is going to be after his brain forms back together. Theres no more agency than that.
I think one of the things that's most important in "Illusion of choice" is that even if every choice doesn't result in a completely new story branch. Every choice should at least result in a different feeling to the game. As a bad example lets pick apart the Walking dead example given. The fact both characters perform the exact same actions and later die in the exact same way makes the illusion of choice especially obvious and the choice feel especailly hollow. The only slight difference is some extremely minor dialogue various including a lightly implied romance between the female survivior and the main character. But since she's killed off soon after this is oviously fake and means nothing. So what should have been done different without increasing the workload too much? 1.Create two similar but distinct events triggered by the surviving character. Even if you ultimately end up at the motel later on having a section of the game play out differently depending on the survivior gives the choice substance. 2. If keeping the survivior alive the entire game isn't an option have them die at different points. Rather than having them die at the same point for the same reasons have a point where one dies but the other lives at least a while longer. To reduce the load on developers have the survivor that lives longer simply inherit tasks other characters would do if they were not there. This way the story stays on track but the fact the survivior isn't just two alternate skins of the same character makes the choices more fun to make even if all paths are ultimately scripted. 3. Have SOME athetic change carry over to the end of the game. Maybe the survivior leaves something behind for the player and each survivior has a different one. Giving it some minor practical use will also help give this item value. Like ... maybe one gives you a clip of bullets which lets you shoot some zombies allowing you to skip the QTE event but it stil plays out the same as if you just won all the QTE's. In this case if someone is bad at QTE maybe they'll be really happy to have those bullets. Then maybe have the other character leave behind cigarettes which can be used to bribe certain characters thus allowing you to get past some choices challanges more easily but ultiamtely be the same as if you just chose the right dialogue options to win them over the hard way. These three things don't change the overall path but add way more substance to chosing who survives and given it's one of the first "real" choices the game has you make they REALLY should have made that choice have extra value. Instead it simply teaches you early on how empty your choices are.
Even if I end up experiencing the same content, even if in the end I end up making the same decisions, my involvement and attachment is validated if the game acknowledges in any way what I did. With acknowledge I don't meant just in the moment the thing happening: if it has no long term consequences or a throwaway voiceline change I quickly realise it's just a vignette but I'm still on the same tracks as everyone else. I mean exclusive gear(even if end up not using at all), traits that give me inconsequential amounts of xp for doubling down on my character's stance, or even a +1 to a later crucial roll. It'll still be a minor impact on dev time and the game as a whole, but it's stuff I carry with me during the entire game, either literally or by showing up again at the most salient parts of the story, even if in minor ways.
I remember playing The Walking Dead as a teenager when it first came out and it really moved me. I had nightmares about the zombies, i was so sad about the end of the game i sat and wrote a little fanfic just for myself changing it. After the emotional rollercoaster of my first play through it took a while for me to pick it up again and see "what i missed" by making the choices i did. I felt extremely disappointed by the second play through when i realised nothing changed anything. As an adult i kinda see some value in making a story that way - emphasising the doomed nature of the cast trying to survive but subsequent play throughs of telltale games have not had any replay value to me since; because I know any divergence i may have done was trivial.
I use a lot of this in my DMing in DND and other games. My players love the feeling that the world keeps spinning without them and their choices affect what little bubble they occupy at one time. Understanding that the bad guys will and can attack them at any time. No sneering villains, just mono-myth and their choices going global if they decide. If not, it is just fine to sit in town, drinking your days away. :> its the best. I have yet to play Disco but when I do it'll be a great study for sure.
Funny to see Factorio being used for illustration here, because factory and logistics games manage to give choice without resorting to lies and manipulation, by building the game around travelling salesman problem, they are puzzles without the right answer.
I’ve always thought that the greatest gift in life is the gift of choice, true you can give somebody a fuck ton of money, which begs the question, which is more… a shed load or a fuck ton? I regard the later as greater but the gift of choice in a game or in life itself is a force all by itself. Keep up the gr8 work JM8, love what you’re doing.
I'd rather not have choices than have them be meaningless, to be honest... I've played through plenty of "on rails" narratives and enjoyed them fine, but it feels aggravating to have the illusion of choice that isn't actually a choice at all. Baldur's Gate 3 is the ultimate "choices matter" game, and I've replayed it so many times trying to make different choices and view different outcomes.
The game gives you the same amount of choice as real life. You don't control everything, not everything is about you. You are simply wrong. Way to rage bait engagement with a title, does that tend to work well in game design?
This is super nitpicky, but I gotta go to bat for The Walking Dead here. On one level, the Carley/Doug doesn't make any massive divergence mechanically: both will have small dialogue at the motel and contribute slightly to the group, save you near the end of episode 2, and die in the same location in episode 3. But on a wider level, you do feel a different vibe from the group with each of them. Carley proves to be the most valuable member of the group in a firefight, provides a small romantic interest for the player, keeps Lee's murder charge in the frame much more as a narrative device, and her cold blooded murder feels like you've just lost an irreplaceable member of the group. The Doug-timeline motel group meanwhile feels less offensive but more resourceful with his traps and engineering skills, and while Doug himself may not make as much of an impression, it shifts far more of the suspicion of the stolen supplies onto Ben, and his accidental death trying to save Ben keeps Ben in the spotlight, while also feeling like the heart of the group has been lost. There are definitely quite a few of these "choose one" choices in the rest of TWD that definitely do feel pointless, but I really do find myself impressed by how such small changes done in the first season provide different perspectives on the same scenes, and its probably the second best choice in the games for differing character motives, though comfortably behind Violet and Louise in the final season.
"Your relationship with Kim never really changes"
There's apparently a route where he becomes so disgusted with you that he straightup leaves.
There's a route where he's replaced by Cuno too
I have a feeling the devs dont like "Traditionalism," I can only wonder why💀
Way to derail the whole premise of the video lol
@@noragrettispaghetti The video has no premise it's a non-sequitur in search of a problem.
@@aturchomicz821Are you a traditionalist?
"Your relationship with Kim never ultimately changes throughout the course of the game". Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a hidden stat of "Kim's trust" that impacts what happens at the tribunal?
+2 Kim *Truly* trusts you.
Yes, that is very incorrect. I mean, I don't want to sound harsh but it is actually so incredibly incorrect that it makes me question whether the makers of the video has even actually played the game? It's almost like saying Star Wars is about the story of the Ewoks or Harry Potter is mainly about quidditch. Like I don't know how someone that watched the movies could reasonably come with such a strange understanding of them? Kim is incredibly important in Disco Elysium and his relationship with the player character is one of, if not *the* most impactful in the entire game. I... just don't understand?
@@Willehable I agree with the feeling.
@@Willehable I mean I reckon it's more likely JM8 just never had a run where he wound up with a bad relationship with Kim, you have to play pretty incompetently or acting very purposefully unprofessional towards Kim and everyone else to get Kim's trust score so low.
I don't think too many players know just how differently the tribunal can go.
I think what the video tries to communicate is that Kim doesn’t have major branching paths (you made a choice and now you will see a completely different set of lengthy content). Reactivity of Kim (and most of Disco Elysium) is very focused - you do get reactivity, but it doesn’t by itself change a lot of your playthrough.
There is this idea that “real choice” is defined by amount of content that is locked behind it. I don’t agree with it. Choice is there for player to express themselves, and game reactivity is there to acknowledge this choice. If they can do it, while being economical with extra content - that’s not “fake choice”, that’s smart design. And yeah, there is Kim reputation system which is based on multitude of little interactions you have with him, which has narrative repercussions later on.
The video seems to believe that the only kind of reactivity there is are branching paths. Reputation systems have been used for a long time, to provide more global reactivity to multitude of small choices player makes in the game. I recommend Josh Sawyer’s “Reputation Overload” on strengths and pitfalls of systemic reactivity (reputation system).
I feel like maybe we have different definitions of the word "choice."
If you and I are both going out to the bar, but I choose to walk and you choose to take the bus, we both end up at the same place, but we still made meaningful choices along the way that affect our experiences.
yea. It's like saying there is no difference in picking an ice cream flavour if you just eat it and it's gones anyway. The flavour is the difference.
It depends on whether you want to choose a different outcome or a different experience.
If you want the choice of which restaurant to go then the choice of transportation is irrelevant.
I feel like a lot of "illusion of choice" criticisms come down to this and people fundamentally misunderstanding what the "story" is as something over and above an account of the events that took place.
Like in Lord of the Rings the final scene with Frodo, Gollum and Sam ends with Gollum dead, the ring destroyed and Frodo and Sam alive. But if it played out with Frodo stabbing Gollum and triumphantly hurling the ring into Mount Doom saying "take that Sauron!" and then Sam claps it would be an incredibly different story despite technically having the same outcomes.
I feel the same way when people talk about most Telltale games having the same broad-strokes ending, or at least the same ending choice.
It's like... yeah, and?
He opens one hand and looks at it. A moment passes.
“Do you subscribe to the school of Mambo…” He opens the other hand:”… or Jambo?”
“Wait, which one is the one where you hear your tie talk to you?”
“Mental illness.”
I take issue with the characterization that aesthetic divergences aren't divergences with consequences. This is, ultimately, an art form, and aesthetics are the core of it. No consequence is more important than the aesthetic ones.
I mean, the ending of the game is dialog, and that dialog is affected by things you've done. Sure, no points go up anywhere but it matters to me when I get to the end if I treated Kim well. That Kim might not even be there technically only affects the aesthetics of the ending, but it still matters to me if he's there.
I agree. I think aesthetic divergences are worthwhile IF the aesthetic differences are cool/interesting/provocative enough to change the player's experience. Or, as happens a lot in Disco Elysium, the aesthetic differences are substantial enough to change the tone of what's happening. There are several times where the different voices will say essentially the same line with vastly different implications.
THIS! A hundred times this!
Hell, the primary and ultimate choice in Life Is Strange is ultimately an aesthetic choice. "Which type of story do I vibe with the most here?" Sure, it has plenty of real world consequences, but those consequences are not the reason for it even if many people engage with it on that level - the game is clearly "aesthetics first".
Yeah, it really bugs me when people say things like "I chose to do X, but Y happened anyway, therefore my choice didn't matter". Role-play matters. A choice reflects the personality of the character. A character who chose X over Y is a different person from one that chose Y. You can wear a red shirt instead of a blue shirt, and nothing will really change in your life, but that choice is still an expression of your will. Your choice to wear a red shirt still matters, even if there are no apparent direct consequences from it other than you wearing a red shirt.
Yeah this video kinda was a bad take.
I really don't feel like it's a trick. I don' feel lied to, and I'm very aware the game doesn't have the budget to go in entirely different directions. But it's putting in the effort to do little recalls to your - arguably mostly flavor, but sometimes more impactful choices. And that's actually very rare. This is also why Fallout New Vegas is loved. Josh Sawyer gave an entire talk about choice architecture describing how to make games feel deep and reactive without breaking the budget.
That's the point! Not feeling like it's a trick means it's succeeded in tricking you, thoroughly like. It's a sign of good narrative design.
I've always said it doesn't matter what the game is, how big it is, or whatever. All that matters is that you had fun and gained value from that game.
Thanks for alerting me to the existence of that talk, I've gone through a LOT of old GDC talks but somehow missed that one.
I don't think its fair to say Aesthetic Divergences "don't matter". They don't change mechanics but one of the main points of Disco, I'd say, is to make you feel. Kim liking me or not makes me feel, so Aesthetic Divergences matter immensely in Disco. They may not in other games where thr characters or story aren't as important.
The experience that solidified Disco Elysium as one of my favourite games ever was the story of the "Working Class Woman". A character not even significant enough to be given a name within the game. I started the game deliberately making choices that seemed funny at the time and ended up kinda bullying her about her husband being missing because it was funny to see her trying to remain respectful at this mad police officer completely misunderstanding her.
Later I found her husband dead and realised that I'd have to break the news to her. I felt so bad about how I'd acted before that I spent all the skill points I'd been hoarding on Empathy and reworked how I played the game purely to make sure I didn't upset her more than I already had done. This character does not make a material difference to any outcome of the game but she my choices of how to treat her absolutely DID matter to me even if it only affected a few lines of dialogue
Alpha protocol, game has the most meaningful choices that actually effect the story in interesting ways. Yet the branching story paths all feel so natural you will think it is an illusion of choice that doesnt effect much if you only play once, but make different choices on subsequent playthrough and see a wildly different narrative playout.
Absolutely, the amount of work they put into that game is frankly insanity manifest. A few years back, I saw a picture of a large black board where they had laid out a part of the story and the amount of massively diverging branches was awe inspiring. Can't find it now though...
@@exp2745 last I checked(years ago) there still wasn't a consensus on how many different ending states the game has.
Wish I'd been able to get the hacking minigame to work. The difficulty on that's just absurd unless you have the precise neurotype for it as well as the right control system. Everything I read about it felt like Deus Ex.
That game certainly falls into a somewhat unique niche. The fact that it focused a lot on the conversation tree was a surprise right out of the gate. Couple that with taking on the mission hubs, even the specific missions to an extent, in any order further highlighted this uniqueness. Of course, the implementation of it was not always the best or even complete (IIRC, there were a few that ended up being missed or not finished for whatever reason), and part of me lays that at Sega's feet, but even so, I found myself replaying it over and over and over, even after I had already settled into my preferred pattern.
And perhaps naturally, even before I saw his review of it, my very first playthrough of it ended up resembling Yahtzee's by a lot, though with three notable differences: 1) I was not being a complete ponce (that was my second playthrough), 2) I was a stealth/pistol specialist, and 3) my first playthrough was on the Recruit background, which is the game's hard difficulty, and I did that in order to unlock the Veteran background, which is the game's easy difficulty (I do not mind hard games, but I prefer easier difficulties because I generally play for relaxation rather than challenge). I have to say, it was kinda cool seeing how even the starting background plays a part in the conversation choices - kind of felt like a properly scaled-down D&D session.
Side note: when Yahtzee described his experience with that one boss, the one with the knives (yeah, I know who exactly it was, but I'm sparing any spoilers in case anyone curious sees this), I groaned because my first playthrough's segment with that boss went _exactly_ like his, complete with the Benny Hill chasing.
Alpha Protocol is ultimately in a weird place. On the one hand, you want to see what could have been done if it was properly finished, maybe even given a proper sequel/follow-up, because the game concept was more fun than expected. On the other hand, it is not likely to make any big splash, and even if it was properly finished in the first place, it probably would still be getting little more than mentions like those in this thread. Even so, it deserves attention, and so here I am joining in it.
The only other RPG that I noticed a similar level of replayability was Tyranny, from Obsidian. Another niche game.
I feel like you missed a couple things - namely the main way your "choices" interact with the gameplay in Disco Elysium in that things you do or say often end up getting reflected in modifiers on subsequent skill checks. For example making an ass of yourself in front of Klaasje at the beginning will make things harder for you when its time to interrogate her later on. This in turn can affect what routes of exploration are available to you.
This also plays out with Kim and how much he trusts you - during the Tribunal where you have to warn him that one of the mercs is about to shoot him. If Kim trusts you get a bonus on the check to warn, if he *really* trusts you, you get an even bigger bonus. You can, in fact, fail that roll and if you do he will be shot and you get stuck with Cuno for the rest of the game. Not to mention the emotional impact of checking the modifiers on that check and seeing the "Kim *truly* trusts you" modifier listed, marking possibly the only time in gaming history where reading a list of skill check modifiers got me in the feels.
+1 to this. Seeing that Kim really trusted me was an emotional high greater than the games conclusion
@@fergie0044Yup that was one of the best moments of the game.
I ended up being the injured one in that gunfight too.
I failed on a 97% success and had Kim in the hospital for the end. Im stupid upset over it but I'm glad I made the choice. It made it feel like I really was on my own. It helped in roleplaying harry. Idk I want to play it again and make sure Kim tags along the whole time
_Disco Elysium_ tricks the player by presenting the murder mystery and all the political wranglings around it as the core story, when it's actually not. The story always hits the same main beats no matter how you choose to play it. The true game is around the main character's identity: what type of person you choose to make him.
Kim is best sidekick precisely because he rolls with all of your bullshit, but you _can_ affect how he sees you. It's heartwarming to hear him stick up for you and remember the good (or bad) things you did. During my first playthrough, I wanted more than anything else not to disappoint him.
This.
The crux of the choices of Disco Elysium aren't how they affect Martinaise or the Strike or the Murder, those things are all mostly out with the control of a single RCM officer like Harry. The true point of our decisions is in how we define Harry as he rediscovers himself and decides who he is and whether he cares to change from the person he was pre-blackout, and how the people he meets as he goes about his job react to him.
I feel like this has to be what the video creator missed. The game's ending isn't the conclusion of the mystery - it's the scene after where you get 'reviewed' for the kind of person you were. Choices throughout the whole game change the dialogue of this nearly hour long scene and the ending you receive. The TWD example he used is a good example of divergences over choices, but I don't understand why he's saying TWD just did divergences poorly. It was done poorly BECAUSE they were divergences instead of choices. The Disco Elysium examples he provides work far differently. It doesn't make sense that he's calling this game's mechanics or others for that matter divergences at all. TWD was a divergence because it ultimately changed nothing. In this game and others, your choices change quite a bit.
Do you mean Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau?@@ashleywilliams4896
I went into the game wanting to be an agent of chaos and Kim managed to make me play as a good person purely with the power of his approval and disapproval. My choices mattered because HE thought they did
The "illusion of choice" framing honestly *feels like* (again: FEELS LIKE FEELS LIKE) an insult to the game designs it is used to talk about.
I wish there was another way of saying the exact same points sometimes.
Like, why can't these low-impact decisions still be MEANINGFUL DESPITE low impact?
Why do we have to frame it as "deciet" and not "acknowledging there are Degress To Decision And Autonomy"?
Firstly, I agree. Low impact choices can be meaningful to a player. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was playing as a Jedi Guardian, but found a cowboy-style hat in some loot that was intended for the smuggler class. That hat never left my character's head from that moment forward. It's still my favorite character to play because of it. Low gameplay impact, but super meaningful to me.
But I think the "illusion of choice" being used in chiding and derogatory ways could come from times that gamers were promised big, impactful choices but didn't get them. Mass Effect 3 comes to mind. There were great and impactful choices along the way, and we were told all our decisions mattered, but when we got there, it was choose the Red, Blue, or Green colored ending. I remember it stung, and Bioware received a lot of backlash for it.
So, in my opinion, it probably comes from past broken promises that make gamers and game reviewers more sensitive to choices and their impact on the game.
@@peterthe_geek Any ideas on what could be another framing that we could use, one that shows these smaller choices better respect?
@@youtubeuniversity3638"acknowledgement of choice is more meaningful then the scope of it"
most players only play a game once. Especially if it's a relatively long one. the most meaningful part of the game is the moment to moment writing not the spreadsheet at the end shows how much you missed so you can go: "wow, so many choices!"
The game ALWAYS makes sure your character fails a lot, always makes sure to bring up the "ex-something", your choices always reflect your character's flaws and the game always try to make your character have moments of deployment. The game is trying to lead you towards a good story no matter what, all you do is choose your flavor of roleplay.
@@Diszzzon75 I think I like your framing more.
@@youtubeuniversity3638seems like the proper way is to break it down to its various parts
High or low choice reactivity in systemic game design. Linear vs non-linear vs emergent narrative branching in quest, narrative, and world design. Player and character expression...
Always love to see people talk about this game and great to hear your thoughts on it.
For me, the true aspect of choice in Disco Elysium is about Harrys direction in life, will you give in to his impulses and addictions or try to help him change? This is whats most reflected in the few differing endings there are.
Additionally theres an achievement for completing the game without even inspecting the body, showing how much control you do have over what leads to follow and how to solve the case.
Final note (spoilers!) :
Also your choices can have a great effect on Kim, you can lose him as your partner if he doesn't trust you enough at a certain high stress point of the game, you end up with a different NPC as your sidekick after!
Yeah, you have large control over what kind of person Harry turns out to be in the end. The Thought Cabinet is vast and there are so many different ways to alter Harry's persona, both big and small.
I like to argue that DE is the only true *role playing* game out there. In other RPGs you're gaining skills, adding items, acting in various good/evil ways, etc. In DE you're creating a character from a tabula rasa detective, defining who he actually is, and a huge chunk of the game is talking to the inner voices trying to convince you to become what they want.
The story itself is meaningless and the solution to the crime a total anticlimax (as foreshadowed by reading some of the pulp detective novels)- it's who you end up as that's important.
@@kaptenteo I played it some time ago, but I think to remember that one of the points of the end of the game is that Harry has not really changed. I went with a "redemption" arc, trying to become a good, professional cop, and the other cops that turn up at the end commented that Harry had made similar attempts in the past, only to eventually fail.
@@meej33 yeah, but never to the point that he lost all his memory, also you can drop drinking, which is noticed by your partners as an upgrade
I've always felt like any form of divergence makes my choice feel meaningful. Kim saying, or not saying, something in response to my words? That's meaningful in and of itself to me. My Shepard says something mean to someone? Well that's a difference, even if it doesn't extend beyond the scene, someone else's Shepard might not have!
A moment of difference is a meaningful difference to me, even if it's a throwaway line. I'm role-playing here.
1:16 I completely disagree. Sometimes the complete information still leaves a choice, because no option is obviously and inherently better. Like with the weapon example, some weapons can do more damage but are harder to use as a player, compared to a slightly weaker but simpler weapon, which i will choose even knowing its damage is lower, because of who i am as a person. You can say it's not a "dilemma", but it's still "choice".
10:40 Isn't that just "parallel divergence, but very very small"?
12:10 It could also mean the opposite thing: you realize suddenly that something you didn't think about DOES make much more sense than you thought at first. It's called "Fridge Revelation".
Just to see if I'm getting your example correctly here:
You're given the choice between 1) a weaker easy to control weapon and 2) a stronger hard to control weapon.
In that case: Yes you basically still have the choice between the two, but if you can't control the stronger weapon at all, then your choice is basically reduced to "1) Deal small amounts of damage" and "2) Deal no or next to no damage at all since you can't control and thus not hit a single shot with this".
On the other hand for someone who's got no issues controlling a weapon that's more difficult to handle, there also isn't really a choice here, since choosing the weaker weapon in this scenario just handicaps you and outside of a challenge run or wanting to challenge yourself as a player it's just not a choice a player would make.
@@ExSuPiO1 There are still so many factors that they aren't considering in this video. Personal preference? Past experience? Actual trauma.. a choice is always a choice. If you had all the information for each choice, where one choice is still vastly inferior, some players will still choose the poorer one. Sometimes just to see what would happen.
@@Carewolf doesn't he know that in the service you must choose the lesser of two weevils?
@@ExSuPiO1 I agree with the person but I'm thinking more about incomparable things. For example the ability to turn invisible versus the ability to blink back to your previous position. You can have complete information about both of them and still be left with a satisfying and meaningful choice.
With weapons, you can have for example:
Fire rate, accuracy, recoil, ammo capacity, reload speed, ammo type, weight, size, damage, damage type, armor penetration, range, sound, attachments. Probably some additional things.
Easily can have variety and player choice what to use.
I will die on this hill, the idea that your choice didn't matter because it didn't actually matter is ridiculous. Fiction is fiction, the emotions you feel are real and were real. Having the stage play end only to notice the curtain doesn't mean it was a bad play. The illusion of choice is all most people have, and video games allow us to feel like we make meaningful choices: I think the only really bad examples are the ones where it's made *immediately* clear it didn't matter, or if the game claims it will and then never pays it off. Mass Effect is the gold standard here because it had THREE games to insist your choices were important and leading up to something only to throw the switch on a quite literal end-o-tron 3000. It's not that every choice didn't move the universe, it's that the game never respected them. Killed the Rachni Queen? Oh, she's reanimated for the finale. Fondue. Right. The. Freeze. Off.
It turned out the only real decision that mattered was whether or not you saved Ashley or Kaiden: not that they didn't find a way to fuck that one up but at least they were there with you at the end of the trilogy.
Disco Elysium is all about criticizing the concept, the notion of full agency, full control, and full choice. We are bound by History and our own history (and others). Its hugely meta.
P.s.: you could very well say the game is playing you. And quite blatantly.
Freedom can only exist in contrast to captivity. What is full agency or full control? Without any history or boundaries to define your control or lack of thereof control doesn't even exist because there is no one there to be free and make choices.
Or to put it differently, an infinite amount of foodchoices is irrelevant if you aren't hungry.
3:53 Why's that an "illusion"?
Why is a choice that only matters for a temporary time any less LEGITIMATE of a choice?
Heck, think of it like this:
Even in a game full of "real" choices, it always leads back to eventually save quitting and doing something other than playing the game. So is there no such thing as choice, then?
And, if you extend the logic (to an admittedly extreme degree), you end up with some truly wacky positions in regards to all the things we do here in real life in light of mortality.
@@Daemonworks Well now you have ne curious!
@@youtubeuniversity3638 Just in case it wasn't obvious, the final logical step is "life is meaningless because we all die in the end".
This suggests that the logic might be flawed.
@@Himomo3 Ah, I had been hoping for wackier than that.
In other words, the meaningful choice is HOW you go about solving the crime because every road leads to Rome, you just get to choose WHICH of those road to follow.
You choose what aspects of the story you want to explore and you can still beat the game regardless.
Pretty damn good design
Games don't need 1000 endings but if I can experience a meaningful journey, even if illusionary, I call it a win.
Disco Elysium is a true masterpiece!
10:25 This feels akin to an insult to aesthetic.
As lootboxes with cosmetics have proven, as fashion souls proves too for something I'm more sure you'd know much on, aesthetics matter.
Reduce Disco Elysium to textureless grey boxes and dialouge to "insert flag here triggered" and choices to just a list of letters with associated percent chances and see how fun that is.
@@SageWon-1aussie Thems was Built As textbased.
Disco Elysium actually Uses aesthetic, meaningfully so, and ergo removal of it WOULD NOT RESULT IN THE SAME THING AS a game built as text based only to start with.
@@SageWon-1aussie ...you realize that ART ASSETS exist, yes?
Reread my original comment quick.
Find. The third. Thing.
You mentioned our relationship with not ultimately changing despite our choices but I think it's important to bring up that there's actually two moments (that I know of) in the game where it does change in a meaningful way and the change is the factor that makes those two moments hit the player extra hard.
Spoilers for Disco Elysium ahead:
1) At the very end of the game, during our very own tribunal scene, Kim's final judgement of us will depend on the combined effect of all our choices, even to the point that he'll sometimes express bafflement at how much our personality can swing wildly between extremes.
2) When you're trying to convince Kim to dance, if you fail the check and say the wrong things to him, he will be extremely pissed at you and will leave for the rest of the day. Being forced to spend the remaining time on your own not only makes you feel the weight of your mistakes through his absence, it also locks you out of several conversations pertaining to the case that can't be done without your partner. Kim will still come back the next day after recomposing himself, but that period without him always leaves a mark with the player.
I'm sorry but this is quite a superficial and even incorrect take. In fact, there are several incorrect take or assumptions. The weapon stats being just like solving a puzzle, aesthetic divergence and most important and baffling, Kim's relationship with the player character being some.
If weapon stats (around 1:08 ) were a puzzle there would be one obvious and objective right and wrong choice and anyone who's played an FPS, available weapon stats or not, can say that is clearly not the case. The divergences from your choices in Disco Elysium aren't merely aesthetic and I have no idea where this take is coming from. They don't "change the gameplay" ( 10:10 ) in the sense that it becomes a different kind of game but that's never the case and also no the point the video itself is trying to make. They change what happens in the game in a really fundamental and incredibly important way. The idea that Kim's relationship with the player character doesn't change (9:55 - 10:10) is such a baffling take that I had to listen to it again to make sure that's what they were saying. I don't want to get into story details and spoilers but this relationship is so instrumental and it changes sooo much because of your choices during the game which in turns affects how parts of the game plays and even ends!
In summary, these misunderstandings are so basic yet so incorrect that they severely reduces the credibility of the makers of the video. It's unfortunate and I don't want to come down on the creators too much. Other than the points raised the video is well made and entertaining, I just think some more research, script editing and further understanding of the topic they're discussing would be very constructive and helpful.
agreed
Often the journey is probably more important than the destination.
I love DE mainly because often times the best outcome isn't when you make the roll, it's the one you fail. So, there really isn't any pressure or anger when you fail a roll. One of the few games where I realized it's best not to save scum because unlike say BG3, where failing a roll almost always leads to a bad outcome, in DE it's just fun because Harry has some funny dialogue or does something funny and often times failure succeeds anyway just in a more comical or pathetic way.
This is really one of the best aspects of DE and something I've come to consider in any roleplaying context moving forward. It's harder to do but way more satisfying. If your players fail a check to open a door, it's easy to leave it at that and shut down engagement. It's better to divert their attention to the awkward window where they will have to shimmy around, or perhaps even just make someone from the other side knock.
I kind of take issue with the idea that choices in games where the ending is the same are an illusion of choice, when in many of those games you get to see or experience a part of the game you wouldn't otherwise. Sure the end result may be the same, but you still get to see a different scene, or area, or unlock a different ability and way to play the game. That isn't really an illusion of choice, that is just an actual choice. Sure in an open world game you still have to fight the same end boss, and you still get the same couple endings, but you can get there by skipping areas or using different abilities. many narrative focused games have entire chunks of dialogue and scenes you wouldn't see without making different choices. So why do we call it an illusion if the choices actually do affect what you see and do in the game?
One of my favorite random niche "choice based games" was some random Phone Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game called "Choices That Matter" or something akin to that, it was really just an interactive novel more than a game but I got super hooked on one of the stories, and I even got my wife into it. One thing that's stuck with me for years is how much I loved the experience *despite* how many useless choices there were. The game had a great mix of useless small dialogue options that were only there to make you think about choices all the time, but there were also MAJOR story choices that were intertwined alongside the fluff. I got the worst ending possible by the end and my wife ended up basically saving the world. Since then, I've held the belief that having choices that "don't matter" isn't automatically a bad thing, as I still enjoyed and put a lot of thought into the smallest choices that I would make *because I was so engaged with the story anyways*. Do engaging choices become nullified only after you replay a game and subsequently realize how ineffectual they were?
I think one of the smartest things Disco Elysium does is to make failure fun. On a second playthrough, I tried the "run out flipping off the bartender" choice, failed due to bad physical stats, and fell over, destroying a pinball machine... at which point the bartender found me so pathetic that he reduced my bill.
Because this happened on a mid-percentage roll, my guess is that a lot of people will not try it but a fair few people who *do* try it will have failed and got to see this outcome. And that drives you as a player towards being more experimental and carefree. It discourages save-scumming, or risk-averse play, but showing that there's likely to be new and interesting content whether you win or lose.
I think that works well with DE because it's so text-orientated, but I'd love to see other games try this out - like, if you lose a battle or fall down a pit that *looks* like it should just be a standard game-over, you instead find a whole other part of the game you didn't expect. Bloodborne did it - a certain enemy killing you in a certain place results in you waking up somewhere completely different, way before you'd normally get there - and it's such a complete shock when it happens (especially because that's a game where you'll have died a shitload before then).
The more I think about it the more I hate the framing around these concepts. Don't get me wrong they seem like very useful concepts for planning out the choices in your game but...
The player IS still making the choice of which rails to follow. Just because they end up at the same place in the end doesn't negate everything that does change getting there.
Like by this logic if I go to buy a car... it doesn't matter if I get a truck or a motorcycle because I'm just going to end up driving it to work and back home over and over until I die slipping in the shower one day. Oh the truck will make it easier when I have to move sure, but that's just a "skip divergence" avoiding the U-Haul side quest.
Also what about games that have different endings? Framing it as an "illusion of choice" seems hinged on the fact that it always ends up in the same place; so if a game even has 2 different endings (or maybe 3 different coloured ones like ME3) then it ceases to be an illusion and this whole things just becomes a system to help developers plan that choice.
@@SageWon-1aussie I was using a real world example to show how even choices we make in life, fairly big ones, could be seen as an "illusion of choice" by framing it in the way this video does. I used real life in hopes it would make it more personal but if you prefer I can use a game example instead: Cyberpunk, you spend like half the game travelling around Night City and your choice of transportation would be an illusion of choice, but could have a radical effect on how much you enjoy the game. My point is that it's a real choice the player is making (car, train, fast travel, etc) and it effects how much they enjoy the game (enjoying the exploration, feel like it's a slog to get around, etc) so calling it an illusion just because it doesn't effect other choices is needlessly reductive.
That said, I understand the whole point of this model of thinking is to help plan out the choices and how they fit together, not to worry about how it effects the player necessarily; that's why I said up-front that it seems useful. My problem is solely with the word "illusion" - because contrary to what you just wrote you can use this model to plan out choices that do effect each other. Games do it all the time. Mass Effect 2's Suicide Mission is effected by choices you made throughout the game and in turn the ending is directly effected by how that mission goes.
I feel like starting with the complete information choice/puzzle distinction was a bad choice (lol) for the video. It connects to nothing discussed later and was not given enough time to stand on its own. I straight up disagree. Even knowing all the stats for a weapon still allows me to choose my preferred playstyle if both weapons are suitable to the situation. And conversely, even if there is hidden information, the "puzzle" of picking a rocket launcher when fighting a helicopter is available to the designer.
For anyone who has seen a lot of the optional content already, I can strongly recommend going for one run as a boring, straight-edge and straight-laced cop. Stick to the case and do it as competently as you can, apologize for your previous behavior when it's truly appropriate but don't overindulge in that either. Don't read the book on Dolores Dei and don't even try to enter the church. Express moralist politics when you have to pick one, but don't go out of your way to turn conversations into debates and don't pursue a vision quest (but definitely do another run for the moralist one at some point if you haven't seen that one either, it's truly unique).
I committed to that gimmick once for shits and giggles, and it turned out to be a whole worthwhile experience in itself. You'll miss out on like 80% of the most memorable content and it'll be a really quick run, but as a character arc for Harry, it's genuinely touching. Here's this lumbering disaster waking up from his worst death spiral yet, and he's just lost most of his demons along with his memories. He recalls so little of his hang-up on Dora that he's able to get a good, refreshing nap right before the big arrest, and blows everyone's expectations on him out of the water in a way no other version of him can.
9:22 - the horns of Revachol get me every time. And we all should write love letters to Kim, he is the best.
I've only ever played through day one of DE and I still felt my heart leap when that track started playing.
I'll tell you straight up that the entire premise of this essay is very fishy indeed. To say that there is such a thing as illusory choice implies the existence of authentic or real choice that is made. No such thing has ever been proven to exist anywhere!
But the ironic or cartoonish nature of choices in games does provide people with more radical choices than in life because there is less difficulty attached to the expression. Such as choosing a different gendered avatar in a game is a much easier thing to do than becoming a different gender out on the street. So is a real choice one which we feel is forced upon us by society, law or convention?
@@SageWon-1aussieYou say you had a choice or are making choices about games, but really you are just stating this as a fact without any proof. Maybe this other world where you could simply have ignored my comment is a convenient "illusion" to make you feel better.
@@SageWon-1aussie You responding doesn’t seem like much of a choice, given you’ve responded to many of the comments criticizing the video.
In the case of a narrative game like DE, every choice matters because it changes the experience of the player. Sure, there are story beats that will always be hit, but the prose in DE is so effective that a player’s view of characters or the world can radically change depending on the choices they’ve previously made.
The first time I played the game I found Cuno annoying in a funny way and so that’s what the narrative was.
But in another play through I spent more time talking to him, figuring out his past and his connection to Cunoesse. Suddenly the narrative had meaningfully changed and many of his actions were recontextualized. It also changed the way I interacted with him. This was a meaningful consequence of a choice I made.
That fact that corpo asshats stole Disco Elysium from the dev team is the greatest tragedy. I hope we will see the former ZA/UM head return to making great games, yet I don't have high hopes after such a traumatic chain of events for them.
Disco Elysium is a story about a guy who's lost control of his life. So the narrative games "all roads leave to the plot that's written" approach works well there. There are a lot of great stories about how people react to or contextualize choices that are largely constrained by circumstances beyond their control, it's a relatable experience.
"Your relationship with kim never fundamentally changes" FALSE. Kim's approval is a tracked stat that impacts the potential endings to the game
Well put. Games like Disco Elysium do a neat trick where they make you think you’re controlling the story, when in reality you’re controlling how your character reacts to it. Saying they “lied” to us feels like a stretch to me. It’s easy to mess up the events and have characters die, or botch up entire missions. It’s different *enough* where it feels like my choices do in fact matter. I played through Disco as a dumb drugged out detective who was having conversations with his tie and then I played through it again as a highly intelligent sleuth and yes… I will yield that the core events of the plot were the same… but it was an entirely different experience! That’s what made Disco Elysium such a good game. You can be MacGyver solving everything or you can be MacGruber who decides we need to attack the mail delivery box.
In sandbox, simulationist games like Crusader Kings 3 or Dwarf Fortress, one's choices matter in a way they couldn't matter in a conventional CRPG. There are some narrative branches baked in -- activity and event branches in the former, Hidden Fun Stuff and fortress growth in the latter -- but by and large it's "welcome to the world, good luck, don't die".
And there's a cost to this. Two, I'd say.
First, the procedural content that results lacks the "oomph" of hand-crafted narratives. You just can't don't get your incredibly memorable allies like Kim Kitsuragi or Karlach, or your despicable enemies like Caesar or Orin. Sometimes particular characters will prove memorable by chance and happenstance, but it's never as heavy.
Second, it's harder to discuss with friends and compare-and-contrast afterwards. I could tell you stories about that backstabbing, scheming S.O.B. Prince Ishmael, his efforts to steal my throne, and our final reconciliation, but in literally every other game of Crusader Kings 3, he did not exist at all, so nobody can say, "huh, I actually ended up befriending him" or whatever and you don't get those moments of discussing branches.
Hmm, I disagree with a few things. I wouldn't define a weapon choice as a puzzle just because I know stats.
I have often picked less efficient weapons because I prefer the feel over a stat gain, or even just the aesthetic.
I also question how we are defining meaningful choice and consequence. I'd argue for a not insignificant number, a purely visual change or character tone shift could easily still be seen as a consequence and meaning for a player could still be gotten from a choice that still leads to the same end conclusion due to emotional impact of choice before the reconverge.
@SageWon-1aussie so, as a narrative I must pose the question, what is more important, the tale itself or what the reader takes away from it?
If it's what the reader takes away, I'd argue even a non major, or even temporary change, can be meaningful.
If we only care if a choice has a meaningful impact on the narrative, that renders any non main narrative meaningless, which I'd say most would disagree with.
Even if the various paths before getting the body down don't change the overall narrative, it still flavors the tale for those who do go down that road, which I would argue is still very meaningful
This feels like a pretty reductive take honestly, one that boils down very meaningful changes to just 'divergences'. Also pretty sure Kim can straight up leave your party if you make him upset enough.
“But what do you think?”
*Thinks over video, checks title again
I think… my input in this matter is an illusion presented in the format of an aesthetic divergence where all options fundamentally lead down the same path of eating dinner and sleeping later regardless of the different interactions that can play out in this moment?
Did I pass the test?
@@SageWon-1aussie Nah. It’s still true that all routes lead to the same outcome so I’ll take the L and appreciate that my experience will be different from those who passed test.
I disagree with your assessment that a sufficiently-honest weapon system is a puzzle and not a choice. A puzzle doesn't assess how something feels to play or what playstyle most appeals to you; a well-balanced weapon system will leave you with the choice of how to approach a problem. Do you want to stand back and play a point-and-click adventure with the sniper rifle- only to panic once they close the gap? Do you want to LARP as the Doom Guy and go in for a little kiss before you shotgun your enemies to death- and be continuously low-health from all the face-checking you're doing? Depends on what appeals to you; both styles have drawbacks and no clear answer.
Now, in a POORLY balanced weapons system, it does become a puzzle of "how do I best exploit these numbers." That I will absolutely give you.
I think this is an oversimplification of the topic. I think most gamers know games have a boundary that limits what is possible. In the game The Witness you can complete the game in minutes. Or Persona 4 Golden/Persona 5 Royal where you don't even get to fight the last bosses if you don't take the right choices. You won't even know they exist. These choices do not matter? It has no impact on you as a player?
@@SageWon-1aussie It is simplified in a kind of tabloid way. "Disco Elysium is lying to you". Because of limitation in computing these limits would exist no matter how long and wide you make these choices. Not saying this is a good thing, but in the future an AI could generate responses on the spot, and maybe even animations and decisions and hence lift this limitation.
I feel like this episode needed more examples on HOW disco Elysium is lying. As someone who played the game like a year ago, this was pretty hard to follow.
The ability to chose my build in a soulslike *IS* the experience of playing a soulslike, if you ask me. Those choices matter.
@@SageWon-1aussie completely arbitrary definition. Meaning is ascribed by the audience and is not an inherent quality of any form or method of design.
@@SageWon-1aussie also go outside and breathe some fresh air, you're arguing with every single comment that disagrees with the video
@@SageWon-1aussie There's always one hyper-aggressive sycophant.
J's video defines what is a "choice" in a video game and which -choices- "divergences" "matter." He describes "simple" choices and "dramatic" ones, which "change the narrative."
To "change the narrative" is, as shown by tracks heading in all different directions, to change the destination of the story. The "illusion of choice" relates to "divergences" which don't "change the narrative," and it is spelled out that a successful "divergence" is one which results in a different ending, or, one which "tricks" the player into believing that it will. (the "illusion")
11:01 "... any and all decisions you make in Disco Elysium (and any game for that matter) are just variations on these [4 categories of divergence], and like I said before: these can be applied to any decision you make in any game. Consequences, where to go, what to do, you name it."
8:01 "We've just spent a lot of time discussing the illusion of choice and things that don't really matter..."
You've been waging war on commenters (gamers) for describing their experience with games. They enjoy the journey, and aren't concerned with every choice "changing the narrative." They don't feel it necessary to believe that it will. Many of us are perfectly happy with low-stakes consequences, going places without it changing the end of the story, doing things that don't "change the narrative."
It's poor advice to game developers precisely because it ignores this feedback. Dark Souls is a great example of some of these "divergences" which make no attempt at convincing players that the story will change based on the clothes that they wear or the direction they choose at a "cross divergence."
It's greatly enjoyed by its players and is a huge success. Yet by the standards set by this video its "divergences" are "poorly done" because the person who picked the Thief class and fought Quelaag as their first boss, ringing the second Bell of Awakening _first_ , wasn't "tricked" into believing that this would "change the narrative." Or even worse, it is "poorly done" because it _doesn't_ change the ending one bit.
At the end of Dark Souls, you either become kindling for the First Flame or you become the Dark Lord. Nothing you do affects the ending, but it nonetheless changes how players experience and enjoy the game. Hence, it "matters." As a game developer, being convinced that these things "don't matter" is a good way to be discouraged from including them. Again, players enjoy these things anyway. It "matters" to their enjoyment.
"Consequences, where to go, what to do, you name it." Many games are enjoyed by many people without adhering to J's "sage advice." It's simply not necessary for a game to "trick" players into thinking each and every decision will profoundly change the ending of the game. Gamers will enjoy the journey... for the journey.
You say "the choice isn't meaningful in terms of the game's design." How, exactly? Each area has different items and materials to pick up. They have souls to acquire. The enemy design and placement are all engaged with, and enjoyed. That is unequivocally "the game's design." It's part of the experience and the enjoyment. The manner in which the player advances through Dark Souls will be changed very much by which weapons, spells, miracles, armor, and items they obtain. They will experience NPC quest trees. Many of us have our favorites, and our enjoyment of the game was colored in some part by those interactions. Even though they don't change the ending.
Many, many people are not choosing their armor and equipment because it is the "objective[ly] [optimal] choice." They aren't choosing it because it "changes the narrative." They aren't choosing it because it tricks them into believing that it does either. Remember, J said that this applies to gear selection as well.
2:38 "... all of these techniques can be applied to any form of choice in games: dialogue, traversal, weapon upgrades, take your pick."
The video is poorly argued. The script could have used a second pass. It's full of semantic mistakes (misdefining autonomy), false dichotomies (decision vs puzzle), factual errors about the game he's discussing (in particular, Kim's relationship with the protagonist) and just generally flimsy advice for how to develop a game.
I do not believe that taking what is presented in this video to heart will make anybody a better game designer.
Disco was such an amaizing game, it always felt like such a personal experience because of how it portrayed the effects of my choices and stats, wonderful!
I think choice DOES matter (even if core paths are a railroad), in fact with Disco Elysium you get to see consequences such as Kim leaving you forever, versus an ending I had where he backs up Drunk Cop's redemption and helps you get back with the force, with extra flavour dialogue about how he never abused drink or drugs the whole playthrough. The effort may be low with scraps of dialogue and status text being affected, but it's still a meaningful consequence.
What undid Telltale is that everything got suggested as 'remembered' but would be utterly undone and thrown away, like the two characters you mentioned. They could have been kept until the end of the game with small alterations to character reactions and some tiny moments with each person, but instead the game showed its hand and ripped both from your hands.
In fact, in their Batman game it was at its absolute worst, where characters actively ignored your choices to the point where Harvey Dent had a reaction that was laughably nonsensical towards the end. The choices were ignored and fully undone when with some small effort the same core endings could happen but with some aesthetic differences.
*Choices don't have to rewrite the entire game.*
A choice is always a choice. Even with all the information available it doesn't mean people are always going to pick the superior one. I had a friend that got locked in a freezer one time and had personal trauma over it. Because of that they would never pick any weapon with ice elements, even if it did twice as much damage. Then you have something far more obvious of people taking the wrong choice just to see what happens.
While perhaps a little tangental, I think it’s important to note the lack of general story “branches” due to choices is also very thematic. Harry can only change himself and help other people, or as much as a train wreck of a man can do in 5-10 days. But the forces of the world operate on their one scale, and he has no hope of changing things. He can only do what he thinks is best in those situations.
My first question would be, how do we define whether a choice matters or not? From a certain perspective, the limited choices i have in regards to Shepard's squad in Mass Effect don't matter. I will not irrevocably lose out on war assets if i didn't recruit Garrus in the first game. If i let Shepard's love interest die, she will not succumb to despair and cease to function. The game will not change to a stealth action survival game where Shepard has to evade a hitman sent by Ashley's family if i let her die on Virmire. But it does matter to the story i'm telling about my Shepard -- her values, her relationships, the sacrifices she will and will not make to save the galaxy. It matters in the conversations she will have and the quests she won't go on.
There will never be a game where you can *literally* do anything, go anywhere, make any decision you can think of -- it would be a waste of time and resources to try even if you could. But i think there's a meaningful difference between a choice with a limited impact and a choice that doesn't matter at all. I'm not a game designer, but i suspect that both can work, you just have to be more careful with the latter.
Interesting video! I'm struck when thinking about choice of this great part of a video about bg3 demonstrating why it's so good by canvassing how people handled the goblin camp in act 1 - the sheer mountain of options feels true to it being tied to tabletop - but ultimately however it ends, the story progresses along parallel-ish tracks: a good example of localised divergence.
It's also interesting seeing how the conversation is had across genres in resisting the ease to fall into minmaxing
Ah, I'm more familiar with the term "Fridge logic" for what you described. As for the illusion of choice, there's an element of suspension of disbelief when it comes to playing games similar to reading books. In the end, what's written (in prose or in code) is static; a set arrangement of immutable facts that cannot alter itself. If you're determined enough, you can see every single permutation a game has to offer, and it can only respond to your choices in so many different ways. For Disco Elysium, for example, it's like reading a "choose your own adventure book", in the end, your choices will be limited by what is presented, and no matter your will, unless you simply choose to stop reading, it will reach one of a predetermined amount of endings. The choices can still mean something though, because if presented right, it can feel like no one else made their way through the game quite the same way you did, and that if you replayed the game and made different choices (or had die rolls go a different way) that the story could play out a little differently. Sure, the end result might be largely the same and major plot beats will remain unchanged, but the moments in between can have enough variance through choice to feel genuinely different.
Precisely this, great way to put it. Disco Elysium of all games is definitely as much if not more about the moments in between, as you say, as it is about the larger and more "consequential" story beats.
The thumbnail artist got a lot of nice small touches! I like how color is slightly bleeding like on the original game poster, it's nicely conveyed through a pure vector thumbnail. And the monument in the back. Kudos to you, thumbnail artist! (Also the video is of course good. We used even "faker" choices in Pathologic 1, where you'd sometimes (!) have three reply options, but no matter which one you choose you get the same reply back, cleverly formed to fit any of your dialogue. Nobody even noticed on their 1-st or even 3-rd playthroughs, and it was basically "almost free development cost wise player agency". Key difference here being, that our version affect nothing but the player perception of their adventures
Any narrative driven RPG-like game is bound to have these limitations, I don't see what the fuss about this is. It is essentially a choose your own adventure book in a computer dictated format, where your actions are always pre determined by the developer and accounted for. The more meticulous and cleverly the story is written the better the overall experience tends to be. This can apply to Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect and yes the Tell tale games.
Also again games usually have a main quest and multiple side quests. Games that make the side quests interact with the main quest and/or make the side quests a meaningful part of the game world, such as the Witcher 3, tend to be overall better narrative experiences as well.
On the compete opposite side of the spectrum you have the Systems Driven games where the story and the outcomes of the game are decided by the player themselves using the flexible ingame systems that the developers leave out for them. Examples for that would be Minecraft, Kenshi, Project Zomboid or hell even Garry's Mod to an extent.
I think "investment" matters. An Ending-tron-3000 never feels good, because it's low investment - you can go right back and change on a dime. If a decision comes back to haunt you after 5 or 10 hours of playtime, it feels more real and important, because even though you might not like the result, you are invested now in your timeline, and you won't reload and replay all that.
I mean we're talking about video games here... the illusion of anything mattering at all is the point isn't it? At least Disco helps the player try to understand themselves and see the world from a different perspective, which carries outside the game and that's more meaningful than straight up time sinks.
"Actually, the only difference from performing actions is that there's different text on screen." Joke's on you, the whole game is text on a screen.
Always a good day when James releases a video
Kim can leave if you disappoint him enough, and Kuno can be deputized, AND you can be committed at the end by your old partner. I don't think JM8 is as familiar with the game as they think they are. Yes it all leads to the Deserter at the end, but the circumstances around that can be wildly different.
@@SageWon-1aussie While the developers did indeed do that, unfortunately the example he used to prove it was objectively wrong, which undermines the point and makes his argument weaker. IF JM8 had acknowledged that Disco Elysium does have divergent paths, events, and Outcomes to decisions you make, including Kim potentially leaving you, he could have argued that the game will still end with going to the island, meeting the Defector, then getting questioned by you old partner. Then I'd argue that that'd make for a better argument for what we all coin "the illusion of choice" in games, rather than focusing on Kim and getting his info wrong. And while it doesn't mean the concept isn't valid and a technique used by developers, the example he based his entire argument on to prove the point is, well, factually false. In the scope of an argument or opinion piece, that undercuts what you're saying and makes you look ill-informed and sadly not really knowing what you're talking about.
@@SageWon-1aussie tosser
Before I even started playing the walking dead I turned off the "whoever will remember this" messages without really knowing what I was doing. I did miss the point of a lot of memes but I think the game was infinitely better for it.
Honestly, I tend to disagree with the basic premise, simply because people evaluate choices in very different ways. One person looks at a gun and only sees it's raw DPS, another cares more about it's look and feel than precisely how much damage it does. One person sees two branches that go to the same place as being identical and pick at random, others will pick the same branch every single time. One person wears whatever gear gives the best stats, another will wear whatever they think looks the best or the silliest or whatever.
A lot of conversations about choices in games make it sound like folks have never gone to a restaurant. You go to a restaurant, and the only options you've got for food are what's on the menu. Picking what to order in a restaurant isn't typically a life-changing event (at least for those of us without allergies) but a lot of us do have pretty strong preferences about what we eat. And on top of that, I don't walk into a chinese restaurant and get miffed that beef stroganoff isn't on the menu.
But also, who hasn't encountered games where some random minor side-content isn't the thing we remember and think and talk about days or weeks later because we're far more invested in random npc #426 and their situation than whatever the big branching choice was about.
Give me a choice of two companions, one is a dog, the other a robot, and they're precisely identical in every way in mechanics and story impact... I'm taking that robot every single time. Make the dog better than the robot, and I'm still probably taking the robot.
The best choices are the ones we /care/ about the most, for whatever reasons, and that caring may not have /anything/ to do with objective superiority or whether the story flies off into left field. Mechanical differences and branching narratives are tools that can be used to make people care about a choice, but they are the sole defining items in terms of the real impact a choice has on a player.
For the more trope-inclined, the "refrigerator test" is also commonly known as Fridge Logic.
The "skip" discussed in this video about shooting the body down actually reminds me of something that broke me out of the illusion my first time through the game. Without going into too much detail, it is quite possible to pretty early on find the back room and pass a check to identify 3 possible points to fire from, including realizing the probability that the shot came from the island. I actually ended up getting frustrated running around in circles for a few IRL hours trying to figure out how to to there and it was a huge letdown to learn by playing and talking with friends that you just aren't allowed to go there no matter what until the scripted time, and you'll automatically learn you need to. I feel like that's a skip they should have accounted for and let people who found the clues you need to have found and pass multiple checks to deduce the bullet trajectory to actually follow up on the lead the game let them discover.
and this is why the manufacturer of Endingtron 3000s gets so much business - there's another kind of divergence: the "there won't be any choices later so we can fully realize all the options without breaking the budget" divergence
What is choice?
Clips from Stanley Parable start playing. love it.
3:37 As I keep saying, the only way people will care about their choices IS THE JOURNEY not, "oh keep track of everything I ever did game!"
6:30 also failing too shoot the body down (kim misses) also leads up too a later moment where Kim needs too shoot and REALLY needs too hit.
the player in that moment will remember: kim missed. will he miss again?
I never understood this entire line of argument for the existence of a genre. Of course your choices matter. Without your intervention, nothing would happen in any video game. Mario would either be stuck in the intro demo, or standing at the left edge of the Mushroom Kingdom, depending on what you consider the start of the game, for example. Ryu would get his ass handed to him by literally everyone in the fighting tournament. The track and field stars from Track and Field on the NES would stand at the starting line, wasting everyone's time. If your choices didn't matter, you'd be watching a video, not playing a video game.
A better title would probably be "branching paths", though it wouldn't capture people's interest as well, but "choices matter" just sounds... patronizing. "Your choices actually matter here!" As if they don't anywhere else. Fuck you and everyone who rode in with you. Perhaps my choice of whether to punch you in the face or kick you in the nuts might matter - the nuts will knock you unconscious faster, meaning I get more time to break my foot curb stomping your teeth out of your skull, but the face will give you an honorable man's death by letting you fight back.
It's screaming, begging you to care about its story, lying all the while by telling you that you can do whatever you want, then giving you pre-written choices at each junction. Tabletop role playing this is not.
This series is great. I love the way it unlocks a new term or sequence if thought. I had a pre-existing concept of illusion of choice, bur had never had it so wonderfully described as a divergence.
Thank you for your work!
To add onto the refrigerator test segue at the end, there's also the "fridge brilliance" and the "fridge horror" tests, where you accept everything at face value when you consume it, but during the aforementioned trip to the fridge for a midnight snack you realise how intelligent/messed up something is respectively
Well, I suppose we can discuss the concept of choice in the game, including its aspects and other details, and it is indeed an interesting subject. But at the end of the day it is all about whether or not you had fun or not playing the game. I know I had. Which means it was well-designed.
Love this series, glad to have a new video! (Post-watch) I feel like this tapped into a lot of problems I've been having with my DnD game lately. Super interesting breakdown, thanks!
I loved Disco Elysium but I found the getting the body down part was the only bit I really hated. I kept missing various rolls (perhaps I picked very bad stats). It meant I felt like I was "grinding" to get stats to enable it. I felt I had done all the "good" content and was scraping around the corners to get enough stats to pass that block. Everything else in the game was stellar and immersive but the feeling of being road blocked from progression by failing random checks again and again was infuriating.
7:30 opportunity cost
this is what prevents me from playing most RPG games, sadly.
everything i do, i feel like I've missed out many other things.
playing the game means I'm missing vast parts of the game.
I'm so concerned of what I've missed, i can't appreciate what I've done.
but if i find out my choice never mattered... well damn... makes it very difficult to care what anyone says during in game conversations
This is one of your better videos, I think. Insightful commentary with a lot of information crammed into a relatively small amount of time, and some good visual explanations to boot. I hope you keep this standard of quality going forward.
Reminds me of Extra Credits back when it wasn't a steaming pile of garbage.
Ha, yeah, this makes me think of myself a few years ago...deciding that I wanted to do a narrative game where the choices *really* matter and you have many different paths, and then doing the math and realizing just how many branches that could easily end up being. Thus, the game has to get simplified a bit (or a lot), to give choice without having to incorporate a bunch of wildly different plots, because then the story just has no sense of cohesion. So yeah, definitely a topic of interest to me. I love the breakdown of the different types of approaches!
Is this really illusion of choice? Sounds more like an illusion of the breadth and diversity of the possibility space. Which is still considerably large on Disco Elysium. And I'd argue there's not much of an illusion there either: on my first play-through I actually thought there was way less stuff which could have gone different then there in fact was.
Also, I get that it was just the main example, but Disco Elysium is as much as anything an interactive story / role playing. "Aesthetic choices" are choices, they change the story you get and how you relate to the characters and the world, which is the meat of this game. You do make the choices and it does impact the story, even when they don't have larger impacts on the "plot".
I think really what's being discussed with the four categories is not really about illusions of choice, of consequence or even of scope. To me they rather sound like techniques to contain scope while implementing choices and consequences, which may or may not end up being meaningful. So instead of tools to create an illusion of choice, these can be seen as tools to enable choice.
So it kinda does matter. If we're thinking about the endgame, yeah, sure, in the end we'll all see the credits, we'll all see the conclusion. But what about the journey? What about HOW we get there? Isn't it more important than WHAT is at the end? Isn't it more important to play as a bard rather than a fighter than it is to actually see the demon god die? To choose broadswords rather than bows? I mean, yeah, the ending is still the same, so our choices don't factor in on that, but... It's so much more. I'm not criticizing your analysis, it's on point, I'm just placing my perspective as a player.
Still, awesome as always.
@@SageWon-1aussie Oh, for sure. My point is not against his argument, is just another point of view on choices. I'm not saying that designers should change the way choices are made in games, I'm just saying that there's more to choices than the last seconds of each act.
Taking Disco Elysium as an example, the choices DO matter, but not for the outcome, but for HOW we get there, as I've said. That's the cool part.
@@SageWon-1aussie You do realize you're being a stubborn ahole, right? I'm not going against his point, I'm just shining some light on the other side of the discussion. I'm not saying he's wrong, I'm saying there's more to choices than the ending. Geez, some people...
Choices can definitely add entertainment value in the moments even if they have no real bearing on the story itself, Commander Shepard punching the news reporter being a prime example.
For me, I am now solo playing tabletop games. That is all about decision making. It is not about telling a story, but experience an environment and trying to reach a more ideal state. Even if my opponent is a random number generator, that is the point.
Not all game have stories. Some are a toolbox for generating stories.
On that note, the world of solo tabletop games is worth investigating.
Steam says my rarest achievement is the one you get for winning the eyebrow raising contest with Kim, which I still laugh about. I found the weird guy in the container, which didn't "matter" but was memorable. the story path leading to "The Figurines Won't Win Her Back" completely broke my heart. even if my choices didn't change the course of the main game story sequence much, they gave me a unique experience. probably won't play again because the original playthrough feels like my personal canon.
If there is one game that did this parallel divergences better than I feel anyone else and that you should cover someday, it's Alpha Protocol, one of the most underrated games I know, simply for the shere amount of work they had to put into it.
I have had that sitting in my steam library for several years now. Looks like I'll be giving it a try now.
It's a shame how ZA/UM has imploded due to corporate fuckery. Currently, they've canceled 3/4 of the projects they were working on, laid of most of their staff, including everyone who actually worked on Disco Elysium. Robert Kurvitz spent twenty years designing and creating this universe, and now the system that he used this game to critic has taken his creation from him. Thankfully, Kurvitz and co have created a new studio based in Brighton and are working on a new game with backing from Net Ease.
For me, the text on-screen matters as much as it does in a book; or spoken dialogue in a film. Having *gameplay* consequences is a huge plus because this medium allows it, but is not mandatory to qualify as "it matters". It matters to me what my character says and how the world responds to me/the character. Not everything needs consequence; maybe I'm wearing this white shirt just because I like it better and not because of its stats or it (fundamentally) changes the game and responses to my character.
Thanks Ludo for all your work on this video
The original Deus Ex really nailed what makes a choice feel meaningful, having people REACT to it afterwards. News bulletins will call out your actions, your three mentors will complain or compliment you depending on if you handled the mission like they would've, and the game even lets you do some outside-the-box things like putting a trap down in advance to kill an NPC in a cutscene, preventing the scripted death of another character in said cutscene and getting additional intel the first person was trying to stop you from obtaining. Very few modern games even comes close to the reactivity of DE1.
This needs a second pass. Its best to think of Disco Elysium like this; you are not playing as Harry Du Bois, you are playing as the intermediate will that is shaping the person Harry Du Bois is going to be after his brain forms back together. Theres no more agency than that.
I think one of the things that's most important in "Illusion of choice" is that even if every choice doesn't result in a completely new story branch. Every choice should at least result in a different feeling to the game.
As a bad example lets pick apart the Walking dead example given.
The fact both characters perform the exact same actions and later die in the exact same way makes the illusion of choice especially obvious and the choice feel especailly hollow. The only slight difference is some extremely minor dialogue various including a lightly implied romance between the female survivior and the main character. But since she's killed off soon after this is oviously fake and means nothing.
So what should have been done different without increasing the workload too much?
1.Create two similar but distinct events triggered by the surviving character. Even if you ultimately end up at the motel later on having a section of the game play out differently depending on the survivior gives the choice substance.
2. If keeping the survivior alive the entire game isn't an option have them die at different points. Rather than having them die at the same point for the same reasons have a point where one dies but the other lives at least a while longer. To reduce the load on developers have the survivor that lives longer simply inherit tasks other characters would do if they were not there. This way the story stays on track but the fact the survivior isn't just two alternate skins of the same character makes the choices more fun to make even if all paths are ultimately scripted.
3. Have SOME athetic change carry over to the end of the game. Maybe the survivior leaves something behind for the player and each survivior has a different one. Giving it some minor practical use will also help give this item value. Like ... maybe one gives you a clip of bullets which lets you shoot some zombies allowing you to skip the QTE event but it stil plays out the same as if you just won all the QTE's. In this case if someone is bad at QTE maybe they'll be really happy to have those bullets. Then maybe have the other character leave behind cigarettes which can be used to bribe certain characters thus allowing you to get past some choices challanges more easily but ultiamtely be the same as if you just chose the right dialogue options to win them over the hard way.
These three things don't change the overall path but add way more substance to chosing who survives and given it's one of the first "real" choices the game has you make they REALLY should have made that choice have extra value. Instead it simply teaches you early on how empty your choices are.
As an amateur trying to make a game in Twine, this was valuable. Thanks. I took notes.
Even if I end up experiencing the same content, even if in the end I end up making the same decisions, my involvement and attachment is validated if the game acknowledges in any way what I did. With acknowledge I don't meant just in the moment the thing happening: if it has no long term consequences or a throwaway voiceline change I quickly realise it's just a vignette but I'm still on the same tracks as everyone else. I mean exclusive gear(even if end up not using at all), traits that give me inconsequential amounts of xp for doubling down on my character's stance, or even a +1 to a later crucial roll. It'll still be a minor impact on dev time and the game as a whole, but it's stuff I carry with me during the entire game, either literally or by showing up again at the most salient parts of the story, even if in minor ways.
I remember playing The Walking Dead as a teenager when it first came out and it really moved me. I had nightmares about the zombies, i was so sad about the end of the game i sat and wrote a little fanfic just for myself changing it. After the emotional rollercoaster of my first play through it took a while for me to pick it up again and see "what i missed" by making the choices i did. I felt extremely disappointed by the second play through when i realised nothing changed anything. As an adult i kinda see some value in making a story that way - emphasising the doomed nature of the cast trying to survive but subsequent play throughs of telltale games have not had any replay value to me since; because I know any divergence i may have done was trivial.
I use a lot of this in my DMing in DND and other games. My players love the feeling that the world keeps spinning without them and their choices affect what little bubble they occupy at one time. Understanding that the bad guys will and can attack them at any time. No sneering villains, just mono-myth and their choices going global if they decide. If not, it is just fine to sit in town, drinking your days away. :> its the best. I have yet to play Disco but when I do it'll be a great study for sure.
Was not expecting to hear one of my all-time favorite tracks ever -The Abyss - off the Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack. Immaculate vibe ✨️
Funny to see Factorio being used for illustration here, because factory and logistics games manage to give choice without resorting to lies and manipulation, by building the game around travelling salesman problem, they are puzzles without the right answer.
I’ve always thought that the greatest gift in life is the gift of choice, true you can give somebody a fuck ton of money, which begs the question, which is more… a shed load or a fuck ton? I regard the later as greater but the gift of choice in a game or in life itself is a force all by itself. Keep up the gr8 work JM8, love what you’re doing.
I'd rather not have choices than have them be meaningless, to be honest... I've played through plenty of "on rails" narratives and enjoyed them fine, but it feels aggravating to have the illusion of choice that isn't actually a choice at all. Baldur's Gate 3 is the ultimate "choices matter" game, and I've replayed it so many times trying to make different choices and view different outcomes.
You're trying way too hard to be profound too often, seeing as a big basis for this video is just entirely incorrect as a lot of comments state.
excellent design delve as always! id love to see a video done on citizen sleeper if possiblen :)
The game gives you the same amount of choice as real life. You don't control everything, not everything is about you. You are simply wrong. Way to rage bait engagement with a title, does that tend to work well in game design?
This is super nitpicky, but I gotta go to bat for The Walking Dead here. On one level, the Carley/Doug doesn't make any massive divergence mechanically: both will have small dialogue at the motel and contribute slightly to the group, save you near the end of episode 2, and die in the same location in episode 3. But on a wider level, you do feel a different vibe from the group with each of them.
Carley proves to be the most valuable member of the group in a firefight, provides a small romantic interest for the player, keeps Lee's murder charge in the frame much more as a narrative device, and her cold blooded murder feels like you've just lost an irreplaceable member of the group. The Doug-timeline motel group meanwhile feels less offensive but more resourceful with his traps and engineering skills, and while Doug himself may not make as much of an impression, it shifts far more of the suspicion of the stolen supplies onto Ben, and his accidental death trying to save Ben keeps Ben in the spotlight, while also feeling like the heart of the group has been lost.
There are definitely quite a few of these "choose one" choices in the rest of TWD that definitely do feel pointless, but I really do find myself impressed by how such small changes done in the first season provide different perspectives on the same scenes, and its probably the second best choice in the games for differing character motives, though comfortably behind Violet and Louise in the final season.
Calling your weapon loadout a "puzzle" is wild af.