Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Many games in this category also provide the player plenty of choices
when it comes to his player character(s). In addition to visual customiza-
tion, the player can determine his avatar's areas of skill and expertise,
either via menu choices or even by performing certain actions repeatedly
in the game space and watching his player character “get better” at it. This
unlocks certain player character verbs while ruling out others, providing
for unique player story experiences.
Perhaps the most significant and challenging feature games of this ilk
sometimes attempt is to incorporate player choices that
do
affect the
overarching, pre-crafted narrative in some way. These branched structures
are tricky since, with multiple levels of branching, they have the potential
to set up a combinatorial explosion of possibilities, each of which may re-
quire custom content—most of which will never be experienced by a giv-
en player during a playthrough. This can mean creating a large amount of
content that most players will not see, robbing precious development time
and effort from the content that the player
does
end up experiencing.
One solution to this dilemma is to restrict the ramifications of player
choices to settings that are quietly tracked by the game itself. Invisible to
the player, these “flags” don't usually change the big-ticket aspects of the
narrative—where you go, what you must do—but instead alter more minor
aspects of the experience along the way. For example, if you are rude to
an NPC in Mission 1, the game may silently set a flag that is referenced and
reflected when you run into that character again in Mission 3. (Perhaps
he's much less friendly.) This approach may still require the creation of al-
ternate versions of assets, situations, or entire missions, but improves effi-
ciency somewhat by allowing for significant sharing of most assets.
BioShock
silently tracks some of the moral decisions you make during
gameplay and uses that data to present one of two different closing
cutscenes. And
The Walking Dead: Season One
provides many small-scale
choices in dialogue and action that can have noticeable effects on later
events and situations. However, in order to control scope, the game's de-
velopers made sure that none of these flag-based variations change where
you go, what you're tasked with doing, or how the story ends.
Another solution to the threat of a combinatorial explosion of branched
content is to keep the choice binary and then “pinch back” into a single,
unified story thread.
This was the approach we took in
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2
. Once the
player chose a side in the super hero Civil War, he experienced a unique
