I stumbled across this somewhat interesting interview with the Creative Director of Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Maxime Béland. I assume most of you have read it a long time ago, but I just read it, and found the data and ideas within very interesting - most of all in hindsight to future Mass Effect games.
For some context as to what brought him on his trail of thoughts:
Everyone who played Splinter Cell: Conviction probably remembers the so-called "Interactive Torture" - which, for people unfamiliar with it, was basically just pressing a single button to rubber-stamp your protagonist smashing his opponent into nearby objects. After reapeating this three times, the cutscene would advance to the point where the guy tells you want you want to know. In the new game, they scrapped this dubious feature, and gave the player the option to either kill or spare the bad guy instead - Sam would usually kill the bad guy after each interrogation before.
Béland first explains the obvious of those interactive cutscenes not truly having been interactive at all, and then goes on to make some really interesting (and of course not entirely new) points on video game choices:
Maxime Béland:
I kind of analyzed the types of choices that you can do in a game. There's the blind choice, which is, you know, do A or do B. And you're not going to know the repercussions until they're done. Where like, a door opens and a guy's like "follow me!" and you follow, but you don't know what's gonna happen. Then you've got what I call the "win-win" choice, which is: Regardless of what you do, you know the outcome's gonna be the same. So it's an invalid choice.
I identified all these choices. For example, in Rainbow [Six], 'Your teammate's gonna die, but there's this school bus full of children, what are you gonna do?' That's interesting in a movie, because if you're Spider-Man you save both, if you're Jack Bauer, you do the greater good and someone dies, but in a game, if you don't know what's gonna happen, it has no value.
So I tried to identify that. And the only choice that I thought had value, and that was more interesting for players, was a choice where the repercussions were clear, and they were both positive. You could have two repercussions, one good one bad, and it's obvious.
This is one thing that I noiced about Mass Effect.
The only decisions that truly affect you in either an uplifting or devastating way, are actually the ones you know the outcomes of. Because they play by the invisible, unwritten ruleset you make up for it as a game in your head - almost like gambling. If you loose at a game of Roulette, you don't really feel you were defeated or achieved something respectively, because the game as it is, is unpredictable. For all intends and purposes, the very game is not fair. It wasn't your judgement and experience that led to the outcome, it was chance. Being bested by chance is, quite literally, merely unfortunate.
This may not seem like news to anyone, but I believe that BioWare -or the players?- often confused choice with gambling. Take his words for clearance, where he will go into detail about the flaws of Mass Effects morality system:
Maxime Béland:
Our conclusion was that, to have a true moral choice in a game, we haven't found a way to link it to gameplay. As soon as you link it to gameplay, the player sees the matrix and then he plays the system a lot more than he plays the true morality.
So if you take a game like Mass Effect, at one point, you kind of decide if you want to be good or bad. And then you're not really role-playing the situation, you're saying, 'I want to be good, so what's the good answer here?' So you're playing the system more than the true morality.
You're not going to get a thousand dollars if you don't kill the guy and only five hundred if you do; let's remove all the gameplay part of it. Let's put the player into those situations, put them in control—because that's where games shine—and then, hopefully, we're treating it in a way that's mature, that's respectful, that will get people talking about it. 'Of course I killed the dude, it was 61%' You know, get people talking about that.
That is actually the heart of the problem. Especially in ME2, the morality was heavily linked to the gameplay, up to the point were I thought "I want to Renegade that guy so bad, just say something mean once. But if I do, I might screw up my ratio and not be able to wizard me out of the next situation!" While I consider the third game more of a mix between the first two - the neutral "reputation points" being a vast improvement- especially in ME1, I think it was too much of a gamble most of the times. You were left at the end of a meaningful dialogue with only an upper and a lower option, closeup to Shepard's face, and you could almost envision the writers winking at you.
I'm not saying that they should provide you with a crystal bowl for every subsequent installement, or even that it's "unrealistic" that you don't know what they actual outcomes would be most of the times. But speaking of realism of all things, while playing those games, it is often forgotten how one would truly react to many situations we're provided with moral dillemas in the game.
Despite all those points made above, he ends the interview with one -to me, very sad- anecdote:
Maxime Béland
When I called him, I said, 'Hey Richard, we're making Splinter Cell six, do you want to write it for us? And his first question was, 'Do I need to come up with a story that's gonna require Sam to take out 800 guys?' And I paused for a second and I said… 'This is sad, Richard, but I think so. We can talk about it, but I think at the end of the day… at the end of the day, it's just Sam Fisher and bad guys and maps, right?'
At the end of the day Mass Effect, too, gameplaywise is a shooter, in which the victory is still felt the most by the majority of players after the last enemy dropped. Dead, that is.
There isn't much greyscale morality in exterminating the population of a small city in random mercenaries, so of course there is always that as a thought-terminating argument. But there are so many disputes just on this very board about whether certain decisions are felt as "meaningful" or "morally diverse", and I kind of lack the argument whether a choice is actually perceived as a "choice" at all, sometimes.
Just thought I'd share, for what it's worth.
P.S.: I of course edited the quotes, in the form of removing irrelevant info/advertising on the Splinter Cell game, as well as tiresome expressions of it being recorded in spoken form for better legibility.
Modifié par Baelrahn, 24 juillet 2013 - 10:12 .
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