Today’s entry is inspired by a Stolen Pixels cartoon from The Escapist. Ever heard the old Heaven/Hell joke involving European nationalities?
Heaven is where the police are British,
the chefs Italian,
the mechanics German,
the lovers French,
and it’s all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the police are German,
the chefs are British,
the mechanics French,
the lovers Swiss,
and it is all organized by the Italians.
Stolen Pixels decided to make their own version of that involving video game companies.
If you’re not amused, it’s okay, you might just not be a VG nerd. Even so, you might notice one oddity amongst the subjects, which is that Bioware ended up in charge of both the Heaven and Hell of video game dialog.
That also happened to be the part of the cartoon that nearly made me spit-take soda all over my monitor, because it is so paradoxically, agonizingly true. And that’s because the modern CRPG is still, to this day, really nothing more than a matter of how well you can fool a player into thinking they’re not being railroaded.
Anyone who has played pen-and-paper RPGs has probably run across the dread concept of railroading. It’s a controversial term and there’s a lot of debate about just how much or how little should be present, since at the one end you have complete chaos, and at the other a Gamemaster mandated narrative so strict and inflexible that the players end up feeling like they might as well not be present. The term of course comes from the idea of being confined, like a train, to a particular set of tracks that you can’t escape from no matter how much you would like to.
CRPGS have made great advances since their first days, but at heart the game engine still consists of a bunch of 1s and 0s unable to think beyond what the designers programmed it with. Until and unless true AI is a reality, no computer RPG will ever come close to the flexibility of even the most rigid human GM (although once true AI is a reality you may have to deal with the AI favoring its girlfriend). To be fair, there are other technological limitations at play as well, such as the memory space available on a DVD, but still…
Say in a pen-and-paper game, you wanted to climb over a fence and check out the farmer’s field next door, and this conversation happened:
Player: “I climb the fence.”
GM: “You can’t.”
Player: “What do you mean, I can’t? How tall is it?”
GM: “Well, about four feet.”
Player: “You’re telling me I can’t climb over a four foot fence? Am I crippled? Do I have some sort of fenceophobia?”
GM: “No, just, that area isn’t important so you can’t go there.”
Player: “But there are cows! I can see them. I want to pet the cows.”
GM: “No.”
Player: “Oh really? Fine, I shoot one with my gun.”
GM: “You can’t.”
Player: “What? Now my gun doesn’t work? Did I miss?”
GM: “No, it fires, check off a bullet from your ammo. Just nothing happens.”
We’ll leave this imaginary session before it degenerates into exchanges of insults and a possible murder/suicide, especially later on when the GM informs the player that despite the mining camp’s worth of explosives he’s toting, he cannot blow open that locked wooden door. This is exactly the same sort of thing we accept when playing a CRPG. A pen-and-paper game is limited only by imagination (and perhaps, preparation). We give a pass to computer games because all the imagination involved is pre-loaded, and while we might see wonderful sights and sounds and experience a fantastic, emotionally fulfilling story, there will always be fences you cannot climb.
There is an accompanying adage to the idea of railroading, which is that if the scenery along the way is interesting enough and the destination good enough, you don’t really mind the lack of freedom. To continue the analogy, some games also give you a lot of different tracks to choose from, even if all of them eventually end up in the same spots. The pinnacles of this are the “sandbox” games that allow you to explore, do side quests, and generally muck about to your heart’s content rather than getting on with the main story. Eventually though, you’ll have to get back on the train in order to earn completion.
The so-called “dialog trees” that make up character interactions in these games are micro-railroads of their own, and it’s not really fair to single out Bioware for them. It’s just the nature of the beast. But besides the impassable fences, dialog sequences are the most glaring weakness of CRPGS, the ones where the wires show and you can get dragged right out of the experience and reminded you’re dealing with a very limited format. As the cartoon so artfully expresses, you will run into multiple occasions where your only choice is to get punched in the dick, and it’s just a cosmetic matter of how enthusiastic you are about it.
Better yet, I can use a recent example from my current play of Fallout: New Vegas. Now, this game allows you to break down ammunition and recreate it, combining base powder, lead, and casings into new calibers and/or types of bullets. These components actually have no weight to them, so by the time I was done with my frenzy of recycling I was toting around thousands of casings and raw pellets of lead.
Now, this might be a flipside of the argument since a human GM would probably call bullshit on you lugging that much crap around the wasteland, but still, I quite literally was told by one questgiver that he’d agree to an arms exchange only if I could gather enough raw materials for him to make the necessary ammunition. Guns he had plenty of, but he needed to make ammo. Go find me some metal to melt down.
Offering him all the ammunition parts I was already carrying? Not even a dialog option. And in fact, although a bent tin can or a pile of ‘scrap metal’ was perfectly acceptable for his purposes, a metal spoon or fork was not. At this point you’d be repeatedly stabbing your human GM in the neck with said fork, asking him how metal he thinks it is now, but the computer really doesn’t give a fuck: it was programmed to accept X and Z, and if you have the bright idea that Y should work, also? Too bad.
Good modern CRPGs try to minimize these incidents, and the best of them also try to accomodate for different ‘characters’ or at least moral approaches to a problem. Sometimes this is as simple as having a ‘good’ track and an ‘evil’ track, but if you’re true masochistic Roleplaying nerds like my wife and myself, you will still continually think up a particular character to occupy the protagonist slot and try to make your choices based on what that character would do, despite your only audience being a cluster of 1′s and 0′s that doesn’t actually care how hard you tell it you want to be punched in the dick, and sometimes isn’t even programmed for the option of avoiding the dick punch entirely. The beginning of Fable III is an excellent example of this sort of disappointment: even though it gives you a couple of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ moral choices in the intro, your character still ends up bursting in on a private meeting in exactly the same way in order to insist that someone powerful not hurt innocent people, and no amount of “Hey wait, I wouldn’t have done that” stops the cutscene and the serious amount of bad things that happen to you as a consequence.
Bioware probably stands out the most because it’s the big dog as far as trying to push the envelope on NPC and world interactions, always trying to hide those tracks away and immerse you, and give you choices and consequences for those choices. With Mass Effect 2 they actually began carrying over all your major decisions from Mass Effect 1, and that kind of continuity and cascade really does go a long way towards a personalization of experience that hasn’t been there before. Early on they also started experimenting with romance options, and somehow managed to succeed in making it not a complete joke… but wow does it still need a lot of work to seem anywhere near natural. For instance, with every game they release there are usually several companions you can recruit, but only a certain portion of those companions are (quite literally) programmed for romance.
Fair criticism? No, but again, one of those aspects that has a long way to go before it approaches the flexibility of pen-and-paper and a human GM. Even if they’re not comfy with all that lovey dovey crap, you could at least bring it up as an option. In Dragon Age there’s no dialog choice for proposing to Sten, pointless (but amusing) as that might be. Mass Effect 2 at least finally acknowledged that people can get pretty, ahem, curious with this sort of thing and allowed romance options with full-on aliens such as Garrus and Tali, even if it still stuck hard-working Tali romancers with total “What’s under that faceplate?!” blueballs.
So don’t get me wrong, I love Bioware and I love the Fallout series, they tell great stories, and in a way the railroading ensures that everyone who plays has a certain set of shared experiences to cherish, and a coherent narrative to follow. But on the other hand, I wonder if it’s precisely because we can’t get the bullet-making dude to accept the entire backpack of lead, or can’t ask the cute Bio-Implants clerk for her holophone number, that those of us who still do the pen-and-paper gaming get so insane with our comparative freedom there. We adopt random monsters (as pets or, uh, “trap finders”), we seduce the Admiral’s daughter and then start writing her letters, we decide to carry dead animals on sticks and worship them as gods, we roll a bunch of big rocks down into the goblin cave rather than going in and fighting them…
Come to think of it, I remember doing shit like that long before CRPG’s became sophisticated enough to even pretend like they weren’t set on the rails, but I do believe that when players are given the opportunity to think outside the (X-)box, you better believe it’s gonna happen. So be ready for them to jump that four-foot fence, and have a great time with the consequences.
“we roll a bunch of big rocks down into the goblin cave rather than going in and fighting them…”
Heheh, good times. Those kobolds (and the GM) never saw that one coming…
On the topic of dialog trees, something that’s been brought back to the fore of my memory with all your coverage of classic adventure games was my first reaction to their introduction. As I remember it, they came as part of the final move towards pure mouse-pointer based interfaces, and I was livid at the loss of the keyboard command entry option. My feeling was that the command line offered what felt like greater freedom of interaction with the game world; rewarding creativity (as I saw it) rather than laying all your options out for you to see. In hindsight, this was sort of ridiculous. After all, being a computer game, your options are just as finite and limited whether you’re guessing at what you can try to type in as opposed to seeing all your options. But I think it was that obfuscation of your discrete dialog options that helped to hide the rails from my adolescent mind.
On the other hand, it was these very dialog trees which added a much richer dimension to the portrayed scenes. Not only did it give a much more cinematic (or maybe just choose-your-own-adventure-esque) feeling to the language your character was using, but it also likely suggested more stylish or witty lines for your character to “say” than you might ever have come up with on your own.
I think I had much the same knee-jerk reactions you did when dialog trees and action wheels started becoming popular, and you spell out exactly the reason why that rage made no sense. Even though Infocom and Sierra games would let you type in whatever you wanted, only the tiniest range of options would get any sort of response… it was just us getting mad at seeing behind the curtain and realizing just how few of the wonders around our protagonist we were capable of interacting with.
But you’re also dead on about the cinematic feel of pre-scripted responses. In fact just a few days ago I had a moment like that with Fallout: NV where due to my skill level in Speech, a response was available that I probably wouldn’t have thought of on my own and was a really clever way of getting what I wanted out of a given character (basically telling a drug dealer that unless he stopped selling to certain people, I’d tell everyone in his community that he was working for a certain faction to keep them down… a rumor that would have gotten him ostracized at best).
So sometimes the limited, pre-programmed options aren’t so bad. And sometimes they are. For now, they’re just the nature of the beast.
My favorite CRPG moment was playing Ice Wind Dale II, undertaking a quest to help fortify an outpost against an incoming goblin attack. In order to do this, my character had to acquire a hammer to help reinforce some barricades.
Now, I knew that since this was a CRPG, there would be absolutely no time constraint on finding said hammer and, presumably, pounding nails, a fact which I was grateful for, because something told me I was going to have to search every hovel, tent and outhouse in the damn outpost to find the One True Hammer of Fortification (ie the game-widget that would facilitate completing the quest and advancing the story).
So I looked. And I looked. I talked to every goddamn peasant and soldier in that stupid outpost. I clicked on every terrain feature I could think of, squinting at the monitor, trying to detect out-of-place pixels that would signal something with which I could interact.
Finally, I gave up looking and went to the weapons shop. I bought a warhammer, equipped it, and returned to the quest-giver, wishing I could attack him. “Here’s your goddamn hammer, you fuck! What? Not good enough for you?!?”
Well shockingly enough, it turns out that a warhammer is perfectly passable a tool to pound nails. The quest-giver even commented that it wasn’t ideal, but it would certainly work, and good improvising on my part woohoo.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was so… simple… and obvious… and yet, because I knew I was playing a CRPG with (what I thought were) certain inviolable conventions, it never even occurred to me that a practical solution to the problem at hand would be considered correct.
I don’t remember anything else about the events Ice Wind Dale II, let alone the story or plot, but that damn hammer quest will haunt me forever.
Buying the island containing the asylum. Burning down a major city. Like Bryn said…good times.
Team Tali.