Making the Player Matter

[Pfheonix]

Okay, so we've all played games such as Call of Duty in which you are one faceless supergod who can take thirty thousand bullets and only need to hide behind cover and wipe the jam from your face. However, the plots of these games don't make you feel like you've made a difference. You are just one of the thousands of supercommandoes, who really are all interchangeable. Literally.

So, taken to its logical conclusion, how does one make the player feel like they have changed things, outside of cinematic cutscenes? Without making the player a superman, I mean. Because the only thing I can think of that does it is a world which is persistent and changing. For example, would you have used a different tactic, or chosen a different mission objective, that city might not have been reduced to rubble. Now it's all your fault that three million citizens died.

There is no real impact to these short as hell games. You go in, shoot everything, come out, and look! It didn't matter. How does one get the feeling that their character, theirs out all the weapon toting maniacs in that skirmish, made the impact?

 

[Kahunaburger]

Choices and consequences are definitely important. Most good WRPGs (and many good games in other genres) have this as a core design focus.

The other way to do it is to model the game world with the mechanics, a la Alpha Centauri.

 

[tippy2k2]

Most games don't require that. Most games are not Mass Effect (or _____ the RPG), where it's your story.

These games with their own stories are the developers stories that they are trying to tell. By attempting to force choice in, most of these games are going to suffer and the feature will just feel tacked on.

Spoiler: Modern Warfare Series spoiler

EDIT: With that, I feel that you did make a big difference in the Call of Duty Modern Warfare series. I killed a one-armed terrorist, took out a corrupt General, and finally killed Makarov.

Maybe linear games just are not your cup of tea?

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

Now it's all your fault that three million citizens died.

Except that it's not. It's your commanding officer's fault for choosing the tactics that failed. I'm assuming you're referring to the city that gets nuked halfway into Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, right? The soldier you're playing as in that section, if I'm not mistaken, was a Sergeant. In other words, you aren't an officer, and you aren't the one responsible for planning operations. It would have been unrealistic (I know, I know... CoD =/= Realism) for you to be making those decisions.

How does one get the feeling that their character, theirs out all the weapon toting maniacs in that skirmish, made the impact?

There's a reason why so many people found the change from "Be All You Can Be" to "An Army Of One" to be ridiculous. The Army doesn't promote an 'army of one' mentality... in fact, it actively tries to suppress/remove that mentality from its recruits. Instead it promotes working as a unit. You aren't one... you're one of many. You're not supposed to feel like a special snowflake.

Granted, this is all working under the assumption that CoD takes the military seriously - which it clearly does not.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Most games don't require that. Most games are not Mass Effect, where it's your story.

These games are the developers stories that they are trying to tell. By attempting to force choice in, most of these games are going to suffer and the feature will just feel tacked on.

Well, I'm not sure the mass effect games are the best example of allowing the player to shape the story, but on topic, adding significant choice mechanics is a step that could certainly be taken towards turning the Scripted Brown Modern FPS sub-genre into real games haha. Six Days In Fallujah looked like it was going to be this until it got scrapped for addressing issues that make people uncomfortable.

 

[tippy2k2]

Most games don't require that. Most games are not Mass Effect, where it's your story.

These games are the developers stories that they are trying to tell. By attempting to force choice in, most of these games are going to suffer and the feature will just feel tacked on.

Well, I'm not sure the mass effect games are the best example of allowing the player to shape the story, but on topic, adding significant choice mechanics is a step that could certainly be taken towards turning the Scripted Brown Modern FPS sub-genre into real games haha. Six Days In Fallujah looked like it was going to be this until it got scrapped for addressing issues that make people uncomfortable.

Yeah, I edited it a bit to demonstrate my point clearer. Mass Effect was just the "go-to" in my mind when it came to choices (until the ending, the choices in ME were the biggest factors in that game).

 

[Pfheonix]

Now it's all your fault that three million citizens died.

Except that it's not. It's your commanding officer's fault for choosing the tactics that failed. I'm assuming you're referring to the city that gets nuked halfway into Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, right? The soldier you're playing as in that section, if I'm not mistaken, was a Sergeant. In other words, you aren't an officer, and you aren't the one responsible for planning operations. It would have been unrealistic (I know, I know... CoD =/= Realism) for you to be making those decisions.

Spoiler

How does one get the feeling that their character, theirs out all the weapon toting maniacs in that skirmish, made the impact?

There's a reason why so many people found the change from "Be All You Can Be" to "An Army Of One" to be ridiculous. The Army doesn't promote an 'army of one' mentality... in fact, it actively tries to suppress/remove that mentality from its recruits. Instead it promotes working as a unit. You aren't one... you're one of many. You're not supposed to feel like a special snowflake.

Granted, this is all working under the assumption that CoD takes the military seriously - which it clearly does not.

The idea I was saying is that you are the person who decides the mission objective to go after. I'm not saying that Call of Duty is necessarily a bad model for the common gamer, but for other people, story matters, and having someone who could easily and is easily replaced by someone else is jarring. You want the character you play as to have facilitated the plot, rather than being a faceless goon.

And I was not pointing to the nuking in Modern Warfare 1. That is a completely different thing altogether, which did impact me, but in a decidedly different manner. What I'm referring to is a hypothetical future game which allows the player the ability to decide which operation or mission he involves himself and his underlings in, in order to move the plot forward. In doing so, the world is changed by your decision, not an arbitrary decision by the developers. It gives the appearance that you have done something, as opposed to merely being the tool through which things were done.

I understand I may not be expressing my opinions very well in this. I actually started thinking about this after watching Yahtzee's ZP on Syndicate, in which he refers to the protagonist not really being all that important to the story. As humans, we want to be the hero, or at least the one who saved the day, if we aren't recognized for it. And we want it to be our decisions and actions, not other's, which resulted in that. It would also give replayability and a fair bit of character involvement.

Though I'll admit, RPGs do this a helluva lot better than FPSs.

 

[Jitters Caffeine]

I'd say it's just just CoD that has this diminished sense of player importance.

This is actually the biggest issue I had with Skyrim. Nothing you did ever changed the world and the population never really reacted to your actions beyond shouting a new line of ambient dialogue that you'd hear when you returned from you latest looting raid. No matter what you did, the population seemed to ignore you entirely, despite the fact you were apparently supposed to stop the apocalypse. No one cared what you did or who you were as long as you didn't unlock someone's door in front of a guard or go on a killing spree. The whole world felt sterile and lifeless, like the game had a permanent "Do not disturb" sign hung up over the game world.

Personally, I never felt welcome into the game. I always felt like the game would rather I go walk around and LOOK at everything and not ruin the pristine condition it's suspended the world in, and barring that, I'd just leave it alone altogether. Which I've ended up doing. Touche Skyrim. You got what you wanted.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

snip

I think I get what you're saying, but unfortunately, it's not something you're going to get from a military FPS that's trying to take itself seriously. Generally the men and women who are going to be making those decisions sit at desks, far away from where the shooting is.

If you're looking for shooters in which decisions are made by you as the person on the ground, the modern military FPS scene probably isn't the right place to be looking since your character in them is, by definition, meant to be interchangeable and unquestioning of his/her objectives.

The hypothetical future shooter would have to either throw all semblance of realism completely out the window with regard to chain of command, or it would have to be of a different sub-genre of the shooter scene (kinda like the original Deus Ex, which was an FPS/RPG hybrid).

 

[Erana]

Considering development constraints and general technical limitations, having a real impact on the world is kind of hard. Some genres are just not going to do so as effectively, either.

Having real repercussions on the world at hand is an aspect of gaming that is on the table, but will take some time to really be able to be integrated successfully into a large number of titles. While conscious effort is nice to see, I feel that this is ultimately a feature we're going to have to wait a while for.