I just finished another game with a wonderful denouement, Dungeon Siege III, which gave me a couple surprises. One, is that Obsidian Entertainment (mostly made up of people from Black Isle Studios) are consistently good about putting in denouements in their game, even when it's a clearly rushed form (Knights of the Old Republic 2). You always know what happened to the characters you interacted with and how everyone is recovering from whatever disaster you saved them from. The other surprise this time was that not all of my choices ended up with a super mega happy ending even though I played how I normally play RPGs with choices and saved everyone. This game was chock full of grey choices that don't have a good/bad or right/wrong choice and I think that makes the choices even more meaningful.
In most Bioware games, I am playing to be the good guy, paragon, light side, etc. and it's usually pretty obvious which choice I should make to further that character. The results of said choices are usually just as predictable. I think this method completely eliminates the choice for me. Predictability is important, but I think every once in awhile, there should be a choice that will have a consequence no matter what. For clarity's sake, I'll explain the example from Dungeon Siege III. A town is being harassed by a mysterious person known as The Dapper Old Gent. Eventually you catch him - after he made half the town's automatons attack them - and realize that he used to be part of your group and was taking revenge on the town for killing all your members that lived there. So the choice is do you turn him over to the town for justice (he will almost definitely be killed) or let him join your ranks saying you will take responsibility for him? I chose to save him because my group needed a Dapper Old Gent and up until that last event, he hadn't done that much real harm to the town. That seemed simple enough until the ending showed me that the town did not like that decision and exiled the guy that had been standing up for our group when the whole town was against us. This made me realize my decision had longer lasting repercussions than I had realized.
It's rare that I feel like my choices matter in the long term in games and I think that's a lot of wasted potential for good story telling and world building. Games are the only medium where the users get to make choices and interact with the world, so I think at least some of those interactions and choices need to be super important and truly affect the world. The most minor case that always makes me smile is when some news report or random conversation I overhear later in the game references something I did previously. But some choices should have the possibility of having good and bad consequences either directly or indirectly. The more the choices affect the world, the more the player is going to feel like they matter and are a part of this world. So maybe your saving one town will upset the economic balance in the area and cause another town to become super poor. Or maybe the opposite can happen and saving one town can build a trade route that causes that whole area to become wealthy and other towns start to appear.
Having these impacts later on mean that it's much harder for players to go back and undo them, which means they will have to live with their consequences. When originally thinking about this topic, I was against that, but that's because then I feel bad and I don't like to feel bad, but maybe games should make bad emotions arise as well as good ones if they ever really want to be meaningful to society as a whole - that is, if we want our Citizen Kane of games. I still remember how a small dialogue choice I made in Mass Effect 3 cost the life of someone that was important to me. No one else (in real life) I've talked to even really remembered her, but she had a big impact when my action cost her her life and it was such a delayed consequence that there was no way I could go back and change it. This more than anything else made the impact of that war affect me and I think that is really important. No matter how awesome Commander Tamara Shepard was, she couldn't save everyone in the entire galaxy. Her choices had a greater impact than I could have possibly expected, even the little ones sometimes.
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