So what are examples of good Choices and Consequences system?

[ERYFKRAD]

Or just use the console to add them.

Nah, too much work.

 

[fantadomat]

Or just use the console to add them.

Nah, too much work.

But,but that is half the game.....

 

[ERYFKRAD]

But,but that is half the game.....

Work, or the console?

 

[daveyd]

I see many people cite Age of Decadence but to me it looked like a game with little choice. At least in the beginning you are slave to your stats, there's a very narrow path of right choices that are allowed by your social skills. Maybe it opens up later but I couldn't play it for long as the writing was atrocious and the game very much relied on said writing - the part where you pretend to be helping with ancient underground machine and kill lots of people by exploding it was a wall of text with no interaction and it's even worse than Numenera's verbose chosse-your-own-adventure segments.

Part of the problem here is that you're viewing failing a skill / stat check at a failure of the game. The basic premise of AoD is that you are just an ordinary human, not a good so you cannot be good at everything. You can superior in a couple of areas or slightly above average in a few but you can't just do everything in one playthrough.

There are only a handful of scenarios where failing a stat checks equals instadeath, and that is usually you're doing exceptionally risky things, like breaking into the castle / sneaking past a shitload of guards or a rogue trying to steal things with low perception / no traps skill. For the most part, failing a skill check is not game over. You might not be able to avoid a combat encounter or trick someone into giving you money, but the game goes on. So rather than getting irritated when your character can't do backflips with 5 dexterity or trick someone with a streetwise skill of 2/10, you should see the failures as an opportunity for replay (next time I'll build a character who specializes in this & that).

Now you may see it as being a "slave to stats" but I see it as being an actual roleplaying game. If you could simply do whatever you wanted then it would be a COYA / visual novel. This is not to say that AoD did C&C perfectly and I would have liked to have even more options in some cases... But i wish there were more RPGs like it where your stats actually matter, how you build your character matters and the choices you make do something more significant than increase your gold a bit.

 

[Ranarama]

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

Ehh... I think the best chance of getting decent C&C is by going the simulationist route, which likely means some sort of codified system of actions or interaction.

In order to allow anything beyond prescripted trees of decisions, you need to have something like 'X happens if Y or Z' which means you need a system that understands X, Y and Z and the best way for that to happen is to codify relationships, actions and so on. Which means you're system building.

C&C in an "RPG"? Try CK2.

And you know what, I know that's unsatisfying, but until someone comes along and mixes scripted stories with systems in a way that makes it more biased towards a coherent story thread with a single player character, I think that's the best there is.

 

[ilitarist]

There are only a handful of scenarios where failing a stat checks equals instadeath, and that is usually you're doing exceptionally risky things, like breaking into the castle / sneaking past a shitload of guards or a rogue trying to steal things with low perception / no traps skill. For the most part, failing a skill check is not game over. You might not be able to avoid a combat encounter or trick someone into giving you money, but the game goes on. So rather than getting irritated when your character can't do backflips with 5 dexterity or trick someone with a streetwise skill of 2/10, you should see the failures as an opportunity for replay (next time I'll build a character who specializes in this & that).

Now you may see it as being a "slave to stats" but I see it as being an actual roleplaying game. If you could simply do whatever you wanted then it would be a COYA / visual novel. This is not to say that AoD did C&C perfectly and I would have liked to have even more options in some cases... But i wish there were more RPGs like it where your stats actually matter, how you build your character matters and the choices you make do something more significant than increase your gold a bit.

I was irritated by walls of text I got when my skills were good enough. And it's not about not liking failure, it's about limited choice. I remember playing as appraiser's apprentice, eventually I got into the quest where I think trade guild or something wanted me to make some guy in a tavern lose a lot of money or something. I didn't have enough skill to do that. Fine. But the only solution to the problem there was to become indebted to some shady criminal so that he robs my target. All the choice I had was to finish the quest or not to finish quest. Or maybe load the game, walk around getting XP and improving skills so I don't need the help of criminals.

This felt to me like chosing a character in the beginning and it decided most of my choices for me, all that was left for me was being more or less effective in combat or pixel hunting.

 

[buru5]

I've been playing this game recently, very impressed with it. It's actually a very deep and fulfilling gameplay experience with billions on individual NPCs, each with unique interactions with consequences for almost all your choices with them, millions of different unique settlements with working economies that interact with each other. Has a very complex job system with many different customization options as well. All these systems relate to the almost PERFECT choices and consequences system this game has, things you did in-game months ago can crop back up and surprise you. For example say you need some items from a local store, if you treated someone poorly you may find they are an employee at that store and that employee treats you badly as a result, little things like this really make the game shine. It's a technical marvel and a gaming masterpiece to be sure. I'd recommend it to anyone over most of the trash that has been posted in this thread. The game is called GOING OUTSIDE.

 

[Uncle Skull]

buru5 You conveniently forgot to mention that you are stuck at level 1 perpetually and cannot even engage in combat with random mobs and animals without all the NPCs scolding you for it.

 

[buru5]

buru5 You conveniently forgot to mention that you are stuck at level 1 perpetually and cannot even engage in combat with random mobs and animals without all the NPCs scolding you for it.

There's no leveling system, it uses a system of itemization and currency to determine your standing and influence on the world.
And you can kill with relative impunity if you take the Mafia boss job, but you usually have to be born into this position. Law officer, solider, and a few other jobs allow you to kill as well.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

buru5 You conveniently forgot to mention that you are stuck at level 1 perpetually and cannot even engage in combat with random mobs and animals without all the NPCs scolding you for it.

There's no leveling system, it uses a system of itemization and currency to determine your standing and influence on the world.
And you can kill with relative impunity if you take the Mafia boss job, but you usually have to be born into this position. Law officer, solider, and a few other jobs allow you to kill as well.

The community is of extremely dodgy quality though. And it's pay2win of the worst kind.

 

[buru5]

The community is of extremely dodgy quality though. And it's pay2win of the worst kind.

There's no winning, it's all relative, even at the highest levels of wealth you still need some sort of medical help to avoid crippling depression and death. Its difficulty is legendary.

 

[mogwaimon]

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.

I mean if we define choices and consequences by what we choose to do with our character in a meta sense, I guess Final Fantasy 7 has a pretty sick choice and consequence system because I often choose not to do the Golden Saucer minigames because Cloud Strife is emo and wouldn't be caught dead playing a snowboarding arcade game because it would mess up his hair.

 

[Uncle Skull]

There's no winning, it's all relative, even at the highest levels of wealth you still need some sort of medical help to avoid crippling depression and death. Its difficulty is legendary.

If you have high wealth and suffer from the depression status effect, you aren't playing it right. Death is annoying since it wipes all of your progress and nobody has developed a way to stop aging, but the way you deal with it is by beating the game before it becomes an issue.
This game's difficulty is also rather misunderstood. Since the game is so open-ended, the ways to win it before the time limit runs out are virtually endless. Here's an easy guide how to do it as early as 15 or 16 years.

 

[Mark Richard]

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?

Certain enemies show up if you don't kill them in previous missions. Some characters are encountered on multiple occasions which allows you to form evolving long term relationships that can be chummy or antagonistic. Your choice of allies affects the resources available to you, letting you access places unnoticed or call in fire support for example. Alpha Protocol does a really good job of putting you in the role of a rogue agent who has to build their own network.

 

[VIDOMINA]

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.

Shit

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

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.

The NPCs who were integral to the main quest were marked with an "essential" flag in the game's data, which meant that killing any of them would result in the appearance of a message "With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed", even if you had already completed the relevant portion of the main quest concerning that character and therefore could, in fact, continue the main quest despite their death.

 

[ilitarist]

Certain enemies show up if you don't kill them in previous missions. Some characters are encountered on multiple occasions which allows you to form evolving long term relationships that can be chummy or antagonistic. Your choice of allies affects the resources available to you, letting you access places unnoticed or call in fire support for example. Alpha Protocol does a really good job of putting you in the role of a rogue agent who has to build their own network.

But do I understand correctly it all ends in the same way - you fight the organization that hired you in the first place and become a lizard king yourself?

 

[buffalo bill]

Fallout 3
Choice: install, play game intro
Consequence: crushed hopes for franchise
Choice: uninstall
Consequence: relief

so many potentially dangerous alternate possibilities with this game (imagine actually playing though!), great system

 

[Konjad]

Bioware has the best C&C so far. It teaches you that no matter what your choices are, you will always be a faggot.

 

[Mark Richard]

Certain enemies show up if you don't kill them in previous missions. Some characters are encountered on multiple occasions which allows you to form evolving long term relationships that can be chummy or antagonistic. Your choice of allies affects the resources available to you, letting you access places unnoticed or call in fire support for example. Alpha Protocol does a really good job of putting you in the role of a rogue agent who has to build their own network.

But do I understand correctly it all ends in the same way - you fight the organization that hired you in the first place and become a lizard king yourself?

Basically, yes. The character's motivations and choice of allies may be different, but you're still going to have to go through an abysmal hour long combat sequence and fight a Metal Gear Solid boss before riding off into the sunset. Even if you cut a deal with the bad guys.

 

[ilitarist]

Not that I want every game to have FNV endings, but it felt to me like Alpha Protocol had that cheap reactive C&C with very short distance consequences.

It's sort of the opposite of Skyrim in that regards. You can do whatever you want in Skyrim but the game rarely acknowledges it and most of it is done through guard lines, no other NPC acknowledges you are the great hero armed with weapons of gods. In AP there's very little you can do, but every choice is acknowledged, often very unsubtly. Like in the beginning when you try to be friendly to some guys they react with OH I SEE YOU ARE TRYING TO BE FRIENDLY, and they don't shut up about every choice you make even though it affects nothing more. You can later see the same in Telltale games. I can see how this approach works well sometimes; I remember it in Planescape when it turned out the game remembered what I answered to an important question a long time ago, but for most of the time it's like a quick signal that game actually had different replies for whatever you said. It's basically the same with BioWare, only most of your choices do not matter but some cause different reactions and it worked quite well in Dragon Age Inquisition where you could affect certain NPCs during the day to make them next Fantasy Pope and affect how they rule. And like AP it has many problems, kinda like one of the first AP choices has "Improvise" option which means smashing the glass wall and raising the alarm.

I remember sometimes AP did that thing subtly. Like when you went for a peaceful meeting in a public place and your contact was irritated by the fact you brought military gear. That's great, that's the kind of things that make you expect game to evaluate everything you do even if the game is not open about it. Much better than the game teaching you that any consequence is immediate and obvious. "Mike, thank you for not killing my girlfriend when you had a dialogue wheel asking if you want to kill her. I really appreciate it" [Albatross will remember this]. Playing some older RPGs like Planescape made you feel that game is watching you and the world reacts to your actions *sometimes* even if in reality you rarely affected anything.

 

[Luckmann]

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.

The NPCs who were integral to the main quest were marked with an "essential" flag in the game's data, which meant that killing any of them would result in the appearance of a message "With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed", even if you had already completed the relevant portion of the main quest concerning that character and therefore could, in fact, continue the main quest despite their death.

I might've been running a mod/fan patch that removed the flags under certain circumstances, then - I haven't played Morrowind in a very long time.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Alpha Protocol nailed c&c

I came here to say Alpha Protocol.

The Age of Decadence is another good example.

 

[vota DC]

-The adventures of Robin Hood (Millenium game): you can beat the sheriff of Nottingham but people will lynch you if you didn't help the poor. Also you can ignore or kill lady Marian lol.
-Conquest of the longbow....again Robin Hood, many endings you can beat the game and still end very bad.
-Deus Ex Nameless Mod. Have more C&C than the original.

-Heroes of Might and Magic 2: one big C&C....well it is just a trick to switch faction.
-Age of Wonders. Funny when you choose Cult-Highmen path.

 

[Sceptic]

The NPCs who were integral to the main quest were marked with an "essential" flag in the game's data, which meant that killing any of them would result in the appearance of a message "With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed", even if you had already completed the relevant portion of the main quest concerning that character and therefore could, in fact, continue the main quest despite their death.

You could still continue the MQ even if you had not completed the relevant portion. The backpath requires exactly one NPC to be alive (and it's not Vivec). Even if you kill this NPC before completing the backpath, the way Morrowind mechanics work ensures you can still complete the MQ if you have metaknowledge of what you need to do, or if you can figure it out from the (many) sources available in-game.