So what are examples of good Choices and Consequences system?

[ilitarist]

...You do know that in the end your spouse doesn't suffer and your house is safe? This particular quest's problem is it's not made clear beforehand.

 

[Falksi]

...You do know that in the end your spouse doesn't suffer and your house is safe? This particular quest's problem is it's not made clear beforehand.

That's my point. It all feels so fake whichever way you look at it from. My instant reaction was "what about my house & family", but that didn't even seem to factor into any of the equation. More-so, the alternate action of "we'll just hang on" made it seem awful too.

Seriously, it's one example of a quest & supposed C&C just done terrible.

 

[Black Angel]

But there's nothing rivaling Bethesda games in terms of choices.

illitarist for

2017™

 

[Lilura]

Alpha Protocol nailed c&c

It nailed being a steaming dog turd, too.

 

[ilitarist]

illitarist for

2017™

The prophecy is clear: if 3 people in the same thread talk without disdain about mainstream critically acclaimed RPG - the Codex will fall and you will never see any turn-based tactical RPG anymore.

It nailed being a steaming dog turd, too.

Ah, you are one of those people who cares about gameplay, consistency, polish and quality instead of appreciating the dream, the promise of perfection that is gifted to you by true masterpieces.

 

[Darth Roxor]

 

[fantadomat]

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Ogre Battle 64 - How you manage your campaign and capture cities determines whether you're a conqueror or liberator. No weaseling out of that at the end either.

Valkyrie Profile - You have to choose who to send up each chapter; some characters are so good sacrificing them makes the future battles tougher; you also have to misbehave to some degree in order to discover the truth and reach a completely different endgame.

 

[PosledniKovboj]

Tyranny had some pretty good c&c. But it didn't have non-binary trans romance, so I guess that doesn't count.

 

[Luckmann]

So what are examples of good Choices and Consequences system?

None. As soon as you turn it into "a system", you've already failed.

Tyranny had some pretty good c&c.

Haha, what the fuck, I don't even know what to say. Tyranny was insanely railroaded, with forced choices and mutually exclusive tracks all over the place, where you had to act in completely nonsense ways to change tracks, and the shifts felt about as organic as a 9mm lead bullet to the sternum.

The only cool thing Tyranny did in the department of C&C was the conquest of the tiers before the game started. That was a pretty cool thing, but that is really not more of a real "choice" with real "consequences" than the choice of character. Once it's set, it's set, it's a number of flags on a switchboard outside of the game proper.

Don't get me wrong, it was cool, but does it mean that Tyranny had good C&C? Haha, no.

 

[forumvisitor#451]

You did not explain what is an RPG, so Pathologic.

 

[Dorateen]

Every old school dungeon crawler with party customization and trapped treasure chests.

 

[mogwaimon]

I've played Alpha Protocol exactly once. I knew there are lot of choices made along the way, but to me it didn't feel at all that my actions decide anything.

If they did, it was something very subtle and behind the scene. I can only specifically remember Albatross guys - I had a possibility of pissing them off and I didn't and later they were visible not pissed off.

I've also noticed that many of my dialogue choices and mission completion gives me specific bonuses. That felt very appropriate, too bad we don't see it even in games that rely on character self-expression - would've looked great in modern BioWare games. They had a thing like that in Jade Empire, where your decisions gave you training with very small bonuses. There's also a little of this in Pillars of Eternity. And Tyranny too, that was a good fusion of C&C and gameplay.

So what did I miss in Alpha Protocol?

As an example you can obtain the services of the Arab terrorist you're supposed to kill in mission 1 as a spy for future missions if you don't kill him. I've only done one play of Alpha Protocol but I was surprised it actually let me do something like that.

Alpha Protocol isn't shit BTW. It's not great but it's nowhere near the level some people make it out to be

I thing RPG's feel more genuine when people react as such. And simply sitting round on your hands idle mid-revolution isn't a realistic reaction. You've essentially been given 2 options 1) to progress the revolution; 2) to stop it dead by telling everyone involved to wait round for a bit. The second option is just a joke really.

You can disrupt it work against it thus status quo is maintained. The only problem here is the game won't acknowledge your actions by letting you completely screw up things.

Just wondering: would you consider this a real RPG if you could at any moment go and kill leaders of Legion/Skyrim forces and the game just said that now quest lines are screwed up and the civil war is a chaotic affair now? So you can not just stop progressing the war but just randomly decide that this questline should be botched.

And again - do you see you acknowledge you just need a binary choice to feel you're in RPG? That's the very same feeling BioWare addresses with dialogue wheel: they know people really want an illusion of choice, so they could always react to anything in 2 or 3 ways with all of those options not changing anything.

Yes, Skyrim WOULD be a better RPG if you could do that because it would mean your actions actually have a consequence for the people around you rather than "Oh look you're the Dovahkin woop de doo." Say what you will about Bethesda but at least back in Morrowind you could kill anyone in the game (Except Vivec, IIRC, because he was an actual avatar of a god or something) and you could at least lock yourself out of quests, get people mad at you, etc.

I don't know where you get that a choice has to be binary, either. Purely binary choices are often a poor implementation of C&C, there should be more than two ways to resolve many situations.

 

[Vorark]

^ You can kill Vivec.

Better yet, soul trap him.

 

[mogwaimon]

^ You can kill Vivec.

Better yet, soul trap him.

Oooh, right, I sorta remember now sorry. Last time I played Morrowind was before I graduated high school so it's been like 12 years. Your mentioning the soul trap reminded me because I remember that killing him was supposed to be a good way to get an early Greater Soul Gem or something special like that if you didn't care about doing the main quest?

 

[YES!]

I think good examples would be a good party based game that doesn't let you cover every base of functionality, or makes you stretch too thin and lower your effectiveness to minimally cover all bases.

I prefer opportunity cost over choice and consequence, as it is more accurate and describes a theme instead of certain specific plot points. Some games have a lot of opportunity costs, and those tend to be the better rpgs in my opinion. RPGs are about creating a story, not having a story dictated to you. If a game is chock full o' opportunity costs I think that is the best way to simulate creating your own story. Opportunity cost is used in finance to help quantify the value of doing a over b through z. Or, let me explain it this way - if you have 100 shekels and you decide to spend it on pokeman games you lose out on the interest you could have accrued if you invested that 100 shekels, or a nice meal or 10, or new fancy sneakers, or penis enlargement surgery, etc. Opportunity cost can mean any action you take, if that action involves a finite resource. Time, money, anything. Console games like to remove opportunity costs to broaden their market, but all the great rpgs have it in spades throughout the game.

What I would like to see is more opportunities related to character and beliefs. Helping people costs you money were as hurting them gets you money. Games try and balance it out and give you an equal reward for helping or hurting. There is no opportunity cost to helping so why not? It is easy to play a good guy and hero in that situation. Your motives for doing anything can always be the same. A mod for Skyrim made it so if you worship any of the good gods you can only steal, murder, or assault people very few times before you lose their blessing. And if you wanted a gods blessing at that point it was the evil god or nothing. I thought that was pretty awesome.

 

[Luckmann]

^ You can kill Vivec.

Better yet, soul trap him.

Oooh, right, I sorta remember now sorry. Last time I played Morrowind was before I graduated high school so it's been like 12 years. Your mentioning the soul trap reminded me because I remember that killing him was supposed to be a good way to get an early Greater Soul Gem or something special like that if you didn't care about doing the main quest?

IIRC, in Morrowind, you could kill anyone. It's just that if you killed certain people at certain times (some of the at any point) the game told you that you felt that the strands of fate had been broken - meaning that the main quest had likely been irrevocably compromised.

 

[ilitarist]

You did not explain what is an RPG, so Pathologic.

It was good at explaining why none of your choices mattered and why all of them were wrong and how the choice itself is an illusion and how you're just a puppet thinking it's a puppeteer.

 

[ilitarist]

I don't know where you get that a choice has to be binary, either. Purely binary choices are often a poor implementation of C&C, there should be more than two ways to resolve many situations.

The common implementation is making a series of binary choices. The idea is players want choice, but not too much choice. And they usually want it to be either clear (Eat baby/spare baby; nuke the city/defuse the bomb; stealth through enemy lines/kill everyone) or hard and ambigous (Kaidan/Ashley dies). Thus your choice feels very railroaded. You chose between two clearly explained roads. Thus to me it feels no better than a linear RPG, it's not my story, it's a story of my friend who sometimes calls me and asks which of two alternatives would I chose in a specific situation. Morrowind or even Skyrim don't have that problem as you're really defined by your action. Most of it happens in your head as the game doesn't react much. But you don't have a choice between Fighters Guild and Mages Guild; you choose how much you're involved in those guilds and when it happens. Are you a rookie trained by the guild and uplifted by it? Or are you a powerful archmage who decided he can also try to train his body? Or are you a cynical guy who is in it just for the money? The game doesn't tell you and rarely locks you out of decisions, and as you very rarely have to chose one of several opportunities your story feels more significant. Yes, the game doesn't notice your actions, but when you clearly chose not to deal with Fighters Guild it's because you don't want to, not because you just walk the Mages Guild road the game gave you.

 

[Commissar Draco]

THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM

Will never forget when my quest line lead me to the "choice" of invading & wiping out Whiterun. Whiterun where I'd set up home with a wife.

Choices offered? Either "Yes. Kill my wife, ransack my house & wipe out my neighbours" or "Yes. Kill my wife, ransack my house & wipe out my neighbours" lol.

What a laughable excuse for an rpg that game is. Anyone who scored it 10/10 should be banned from ever reviewing any game ever again.

You had choice to defend your home, waifu and your Dude Bro Jarl you swore an oath as Thane if you stayed loyal to Empire Citizen; for me the fact that Nord rebellion is more rotten the more you delve into game is nice way to punish dumbfucks who got seduced by not agent of Thalmor Cause cause of neither muh FREEDOOM! or being closet nazis.

 

[V_K]

What I hate in this kind of games is "forced" replayability - when you're locked out of content not because of your build, but because of a dialog choice. Particularly because it makes the devs think: "We have a branching story, that checks the replayability box. Now we don't have to think of different ways to tackle problems and can make all the builds play the same. Brilliant!" So on the one hand, it becomes necessary to give the game more than one playthrough to experience all of the content, and on the other hand the subsequent replays won't be different enough to be enjoyable.
So I'd take a completely linear game where builds matter gameplay-wise over something like Witcher any day.

 

[hogcranker]

I don't know where you get that a choice has to be binary, either. Purely binary choices are often a poor implementation of C&C, there should be more than two ways to resolve many situations.

The common implementation is making a series of binary choices. The idea is players want choice, but not too much choice. And they usually want it to be either clear (Eat baby/spare baby; nuke the city/defuse the bomb; stealth through enemy lines/kill everyone) or hard and ambigous (Kaidan/Ashley dies). Thus your choice feels very railroaded. You chose between two clearly explained roads. Thus to me it feels no better than a linear RPG, it's not my story, it's a story of my friend who sometimes calls me and asks which of two alternatives would I chose in a specific situation. Morrowind or even Skyrim don't have that problem as you're really defined by your action. Most of it happens in your head as the game doesn't react much. But you don't have a choice between Fighters Guild and Mages Guild; you choose how much you're involved in those guilds and when it happens. Are you a rookie trained by the guild and uplifted by it? Or are you a powerful archmage who decided he can also try to train his body? Or are you a cynical guy who is in it just for the money? The game doesn't tell you and rarely locks you out of decisions, and as you very rarely have to chose one of several opportunities your story feels more significant. Yes, the game doesn't notice your actions, but when you clearly chose not to deal with Fighters Guild it's because you don't want to, not because you just walk the Mages Guild road the game gave you.

The 3,683,767,879th post on the world wide web that can be TL;DR'd as "Bethesda games having no reactivity... is good, actually."

 

[fantadomat]

What I hate in this kind of games is "forced" replayability - when you're locked out of content not because of your build, but because of a dialog choice. Particularly because it makes the devs think: "We have a branching story, that checks the replayability box. Now we don't have to think of different ways to tackle problems and can make all the builds play the same. Brilliant!" So on the one hand, it becomes necessary to give the game more than one playthrough to experience all of the content, and on the other hand the subsequent replays won't be different enough to be enjoyable.
So I'd take a completely linear game where builds matter gameplay-wise over something like Witcher any day.

I whole heartedly agree with you mate.Good example for that is Tranny by obsidian and AoD.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM

Will never forget when my quest line lead me to the "choice" of invading & wiping out Whiterun. Whiterun where I'd set up home with a wife.

Choices offered? Either "Yes. Kill my wife, ransack my house & wipe out my neighbours" or "Yes. Kill my wife, ransack my house & wipe out my neighbours" lol.

What a laughable excuse for an rpg that game is. Anyone who scored it 10/10 should be banned from ever reviewing any game ever again.

You had choice to defend your home, waifu and your Dude Bro Jarl you swore an oath as Thane if you stayed loyal to Empire Citizen; for me the fact that Nord rebellion is more rotten the more you delve into game is nice way to punish dumbfucks who got seduced by not agent of Thalmor Cause cause of neither muh FREEDOOM! or being closet nazis.

What is this? Is just chose empire so i could loot Ulfric's clothes later.
And in Requiem, Galmar's outfit.

 

[fantadomat]

THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM

Will never forget when my quest line lead me to the "choice" of invading & wiping out Whiterun. Whiterun where I'd set up home with a wife.

Choices offered? Either "Yes. Kill my wife, ransack my house & wipe out my neighbours" or "Yes. Kill my wife, ransack my house & wipe out my neighbours" lol.

What a laughable excuse for an rpg that game is. Anyone who scored it 10/10 should be banned from ever reviewing any game ever again.

You had choice to defend your home, waifu and your Dude Bro Jarl you swore an oath as Thane if you stayed loyal to Empire Citizen; for me the fact that Nord rebellion is more rotten the more you delve into game is nice way to punish dumbfucks who got seduced by not agent of Thalmor Cause cause of neither muh FREEDOOM! or being closet nazis.

What is this? Is just chose empire so i could loot Ulfric's clothes later.
And in Requiem, Galmar's outfit.

Or just use the console to add them.