@WCG, I understand the frustration with things like auto-saves and 2 hour blocks of time without saves. I also am a retro-gamer and enjoy saving state so I can go back and explore all the possibilities. However the truth is that no matter what one’s preferences are, being able to save and go back and have deep emotional consequences are mutually exclusive. You can do one or the other, but to do both is impossible. This would even be true in real life. If you could go back in time, you wouldn’t get upset about tragedy in real life either.

@t_m, sorry to hear you lost your three characters. :-) Balancing difficulty with emotional attachment is a delicate design process.

@Andrey, yes, making a game where the consequences of choices are obvious, such as a better ending or no ending, are less compelling. The best choices are the ones that test the player’s character.

Thanks for the comments (so long ago) everyone!

This gave a consequence that was redeemable, and a measurable reward for keeping it from happening (a low “has died” count, and less loss of gold). The problem with this permanent death concept you describe is that everyone wants to experience the “best play through possible” and this can’t possibly be the play through that’s littered with irreversible mistakes. Mass Effect2 also had a mechanic towards the end for loosing characters. It didn’t work for me because it was optional (and avoidable). I think if you want to have a consiquence mechanic have a deep and irriversable impact it works best is if the alternative isn’t the lack of a consiquence, but instead an alternative consiquence – then the drama of loss could be retained within the storytelling without compromising a players feeling of experiencing the “best play through possible” – since they know through an unspoken trust with the game designers that whatever they are experiencing was one of the intended paths.

i too played fire emblem (gameboy ver.)

i did feel the pressure of not letting people die, and thus dearly regret any death

sometimes i would fight the entire 1+ hour battle again to save em

however the best save systems are those that dont let you go back, but let you redeem your errors later on (like an mmo).

sometimes i dont play a game entirely based on the save mechanism, like @WCG said we got our time/lives and too many games out there (hehe “choice”), so we arent gona play repetitive or grindy games (too much repetition = boring, total waste of time)

That was the big problem with Indigo Prophecy’s design… sometimes failure led to a different outcome, sometimes it led to instant game over. Which possibly meant that I didn’t want to risk not saving the kid because it would probably be a game over.
On the other hand maybe I saved him because at that point i was pretty involved in the game, and while I didn’t know the kid, I cared about the main character and wanted him to do something good.
FYI, if you do save the kid then it does come up later, in a small way. The cop has a guilty concience about not catching you and tells the detectives. I don’t know if it has an effect on the game, but it gets at least mentioned in the story (and slightly helps rationalise the detective’s choice not to turn you in later).

I played one of the Fire Emblem games on the GBA last year, and I quit half way through. After playing a battle that took about 2 hours (or 4-5 days in real-time on-train play) I suddenly lost about 3 main characters in one turn. Maybe i should have continued, but it seemed the game would be pretty impossible from that point without them (or at least games have trained me to think that). I couldn’t be bothered to replay the whole battle again. So I just stopped playing.

Indigo prophecy was interesting in that it tried to get away from the standards of game design, and seemed to try to make the consequences of your actions unclear. But because it still stuck with game-tropes like “game over” it totally didn’t work.
(it also of course suffered from losing the last 2 parts of the trilogy and having all that crammed into one sudden, nonsensical ending).

It’d be really interesting to go back and remake Indigo Prophecy with a little hindsight and experience.

I’ll always want to save a game before a choice. Part of that is because I frequently want to make a foolish choice – deliberately – just to see what the game developer will do to my character. Then I reload and continue. Hey, it’s a GAME, right? The point is to have fun.

Furthermore, I wonder about leaving a player regretting his choices. Do you really want the player regretting the bad choices he’s made in a game? How is that fun? Frankly, it’s too much like RL for me! I’ve made enough bad choices in my life; I certainly wouldn’t enjoy doing the same in a computer game!

The rest of your article is great. To my mind, The Witcher did choices very badly (though I still enjoyed the game). Your choices were meaningless, because they all turned out similarly (badly). And you had no reason to choose one over another, no way of finding the “best” solution, because there wasn’t one. There was nothing you could do to compromise or choose a third way. So, basically, you just flipped a coin and watched the inevitable disaster play out. That was supposed to be “gritty,” I guess, but it meant that our choices were arbitrary and meaningless.

And although I always want to be able to save a game, at any time, it certainly shouldn’t encourage constant reloads. I think of games with random loot in treasure chests, which encourage reloading over and over again to get the best items. That tends to ruin a game.

So what’s best? Make a game where both choices are viable and both choices are fun, but there are still real consequences. Make it an intelligent choice, not just flipping a coin randomly. Make it memorable in the ways you suggest. If a child dies, make it regrettable, but still not necessarily the “wrong” choice. A player can regret the consequences of a choice, but still feel that it was the right decision. (That way, you can get the emotional impact of making the choice, without making the player feel like an idiot or a loser.)

And often, a player will want to play an evil or amoral character. If the game permits such an approach, it should still be fun, but there must be realistic consequences, and the player should definitely not feel heroic for his dastardly deeds. The player must still enjoy the game, but his amoral character doesn’t have to prosper from such things. (And most players are NOT amoral, and so can be made to feel the weight of any evil decisions. They might even feel satisfied that their evil character did not personally profit from his actions.)

All in all, I loved your discussion of this topic. There needs to be a lot more thought given to the whole matter of choices in computer games. I think that game developers have barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. How do books and movies make us care about even minor characters? How do they tug at our heartstrings? Games can do this, too.