Choice: The Importance of Illusion

It goes without saying that choice is an integral part of a role playing game. From the tabletop adventures seen in Dungeons and Dragons or Cyberpunk, to the digital adventures in video games like Mass Effect or Cyberpunk. However, to imply that choice is exclusive to RPGs would be doing a disservice to gaming as a whole, because all games, not even just video games, involve choice. Monopoly, Halo, Chess, Mafia, Dark Souls, Poker, Fortnite, each of these games are different in genre, medium, theme, and rules, but something they all have in common is how important choice is, even if it is handled in very different ways.

In Monopoly, like most board games involving dice, luck of the roll is very important, but what is just as important is how you act on those rolls. If you land on Pacific Avenue, but only have 350 dollars, do you buy it? Do you risk being that close to bankruptcy in the hope that someone will land on it enough times to make up for how much you paid for it? Do you ignore it, and put it up to auction and risk another player with more properties gaining even more of an advantage over you?

Kenny Rogers wrote a very extensive essay on the element of choice in poker. To quote him directly, “You got to know when to fold ‘em, know when to hold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” When you’re playing seven card draw, and someone bets five blues, then only trades in one card, it doesn’t matter how cool your full house aces over kings is, you probably should just go ahead and fold. Do you really wanna risk that much on a hand like that?

Let’s say that you’re playing Mafia, and you have been randomly assigned the role of doctor. You know that you can protect one person from death each night. Who will it be? Do you protect Jonesie, who spent the entire round accusing Harry of being in the mafia, and hope that she is the target of the mafia for speaking up so much? Do you give in to your self protective nature and protect yourself, in order to keep yourself in the game so that you don’t feel left out?

Dungeons and Dragons is, without a doubt, the best role playing game of all time. This is for many more reasons than I can count, such as the amazing, fantastical feeling of the game, or the incredible worldbuilding, or the flexibility created with the wide variety of different rulesets and handbooks that can be chosen for different campaigns. However, the most important reason for its success as an RPG, the reason that so many tabletop RPGs are still popular today despite how much video game RPGs have evolved, is the lack of standardization.

Now, I know that even though Dungeons and Dragons is a lot more popular nowadays than it used to be, there are still a lot of people who have never played it because, well to be frank it’s nerd shit. There is little nerd shit on earth nerdier than Dungeons and Dragons, so here’s a little summary of what D&D is. This summary can, for the most part, also apply to other tabletop RPGs, but some of the specifics may vary. Whenever I’m referring to tabletop RPGs, I’m drawing my knowledge of them mostly from D&D since it is both the most popular tabletop RPG and also the one I have the most experience with.

D&D is a tabletop RPG where a group of players create characters and play as those characters as they go through a campaign that they are being guided through by a DM, or Dungeon Master. So, what do you do in D&D? What are the rules? What’s the story? Well, to answer all these questions simply, whatever the hell you want. Typically D&D takes place in a medieval fantasy where you slay monsters and be heroes and fight evil supervillains, but this is not always true. D&D has a set of standardized rules, but you are not required to follow them. In the tabletop RPG community, one of the most important concepts to understand is “Rule Zero.” Rule Zero in most tabletop RPGs is the idea that the Game Master, the Dungeon Master, who is in charge of the game, has final say above everything, even the word of the developers. Page four of the Dungeon Master’s Guide states,

“The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules are not in charge. You’re the DM, and you are in charge of the game.”

The rules of D&D are not, like in most other games, set in stone. If the DM decides that some rule in the handbook doesn’t fit into their game for one reason or another, maybe for lore reasons, maybe for gameplay purposes, then they can decide that the rule does not apply. Many board games are well known for various house rules, like Monopoly’s free parking rule or Cards Against Humanity’s Rando Cardrissian. Imagine though, that you were not just allowed to make house rules, but the game’s rulebook explicitly encouraged you to come up with your own rules. A very well known example is “Rule of Cool,” which refers to DMs often disregarding their own rules on purpose in order to allow themself or a player to do something cool, because the rules are not more important than the enjoyment of the players.

For an example of disregarding rules as written, let’s discuss a rule that I personally, as a DM, do not like: flanking. In the official rules of D&D Fifth Edition, if the players are in a battle, and one of the players gets behind an enemy they are fighting, they are considered to be flanking, and they are given advantage on their attack roll, which lets them make a second attack roll and take the higher result, greatly improving their odds of landing an attack. 

While this rule may sound good, I myself am not a fan of it. Giving such a huge benefit to something as simple as walking around the enemy just seems way too overpowered. When my players are in combat, I want them to think outside the box, to use the environment to their advantage, but why would a player bother coming up with unique plans depending upon the situation when they can get the same or even better rewards from something as simple as walking around. Because of that, in my games, I make it so that flanking gives you a +2 bonus to your attack rather than advantage, as to encourage my players to come up with more unique tactics.

However, the best thing about Rule Zero is the fact that it doesn’t just apply to simple rules. It applies to the world itself. You see, D&D has a fully fleshed out world. This is fantastic, as there are many DMs who want to host a game of D&D, but maybe they aren’t very good at worldbuilding. It’s a very difficult thing to do. Creating an entire fantasy world just requires so much effort. Way more effort than an average player could realistically be expected to put in. All of the enemies and lore written in D&D is presumed to be taking place in the world created by the developers.

There are many DMs though, like myself, who do have good writing ability, and have the spare time to create a world. Furthermore, there are some players who want to play D&D, but just really aren’t that interested in medieval fantasy worlds, or may enjoy these worlds, but want to try something different. This is where the concept of homebrew comes into play.

Many things can be considered homebrew. A set of rules made up by players, a character class that isn’t created by Wizards of the Coast, a race of people that is unique to your game, or even the genre of your campaign. In my senior year of high school, my best friend wanted to DM a campaign that was different from what we usually did. He was debating between a western setting and a more cyberpunk one. Neither of these settings are accounted for in the ruleset of D&D, but that does not make them incompatible. The brilliance of D&D is best displayed by the fact that me and my friends played two sessions of D&D in a cyberpunk world, and not once did we feel like we were playing the game wrong. Because the rules are made to be bent depending on how you want to play, the rules never feel like they are holding you back. 

Now, this does not mean there are no rules that are meant to check the DMs power. The Dungeon Master’s Guide explains right after it says that the DM has final say on rules that “your goal isn’t to slaughter the adventurers but to create a campaign world that revolves around their actions and decisions, and to keep your players coming back for more!”

Put simply, the DM does not “win” D&D. Strictly speaking, there is no “winning” D&D. It’s an open ended game, whose world evolves as the players travel through it, and ends when the players feel the campaign no longer needs to be explored. Or, more realistically, when all the players get busy because of a lot of different situations and spend so long without meeting up to play that nobody remembers the campaign that well or where they left off, so they feel like they need to start something new, but it’s hard to arrange times to meet so it devolves into a bunch of one shots, and… oh god, editor’s note, please cut this part.

Up to this point, I’ve been building up the importance of the DM and how they decide to do things, but the DM is only one part of the important factors that make a good campaign. A DM is worthless without their players.

D&D, or any tabletop RPG for that matter, is the best subject in all of gaming for an analysis of player agency. While the DM may create the world, or the basis of the campaign, or how it starts out, the engine that pushes the story forward from that point on is the players. 

Speaking as a DM myself, I can say that being a DM is difficult. To be honest, that’s putting it very kindly. There are a lot of things to consider when being a DM, and one of the most important things to consider is the unpredictable nature of your players. 

In Chess, it’s considered bad form to assume that you know what your opponent is going to do. There are so many possibilities in Chess, so many strategies available, that even a baseline skill Chess player understands that you need to build your strategy off of what your opponent does, not what you assume they will do. Being a DM is like playing collaborative Chess, where you build the board the players are on as they go. Any DM worth their weight in platinum coins will know that it’s foolish to assume your players will go where you hope they go. A good DM will always anticipate the possibility that their players may subvert your expectations of them. A great DM is prepared for those kinds of situations.

For a minute, let me return to my buddy Joe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while school was canceled and we had almost nothing to do in our free time, we would meet up to play D&D. During this campaign, Joe came up with a massive Orc bandit by the name of Gron. Gron was intended to be the party’s first big bad guy, someone who would reappear at different times, who we would have to pursue and fight on multiple occasions until we were eventually successful. Joe was incredibly confident that we would not kill him. 

Here’s the premise: My party was hired by the nearby town guard to go to the Orc camp that Gron led. We arrive, and after a short skirmish with Gron’s warriors, he stops the battle to ask the party questions. He goes on a speech, and after learning our characters’ most valued abilities, resumes battling us. However, Joe was not prepared for how much damage we would deal to him. As a backup plan, he had a cleric appear to heal Gron as we fought him. Regardless, we kept dealing more and more damage to him. One by one, the members of my party fell, bested by the orcs. Eventually, my character was the only one left standing. Dravenia Strider, a rogue undergoing an amnesia fueled identity crisis, successfully hid from Gron just long enough for her to sneak up behind him and pounce upon his back to drive her rapier into his throat. My party, by good tactics and sheer luck, had managed to execute our first big bad guy, against all odds, on our first encounter with him.

Joe had not prepared for this, but because he is a good DM he did not stop us from killing Gron just because it would inconvenience him. Instead, he improvised an alternate scenario on the spot to allow us to defeat Gron. This is, almost certainly, the best moment I have ever experienced in any game of D&D I have ever played.

The moral of this story is that players are unpredictable. In a world purely at the whim of the players, nothing can be presumed. With a good DM, D&D is player agency.

Dungeons and Dragons is a collaborative adventure RPG, where the Dungeon Master creates the basis of the world, and they and the players work together to create their own, unique storyline. No two campaigns, even ones that use the same adventure sets like The Curse of Strahd, will ever be the same.

So, why is this important? When thinking about choice, D&D is the perfect example of what happens when players are given total agency over their actions, over the story they are participating in. In D&D, if the DM presents a questline they spent hours writing, but the players say “nah that sounds boring, let’s go fuck around and get drunk in a tavern and do medieval crack and fuck dwarf hookers and solve racism and stage a proletariat coup against the king and allow the workers to seize the means of production,” then a good DM just has to say “aight, you can certainly try,” and roll with it. Rule number one for pretty much any DM is don’t say no. Obviously there are some extreme circumstances where the DM has to say no, but when the party tells you that they want to do something that they are fully capable of doing, you can’t just say no, you have to at least let them try.

D&D is all about choice. Even from session zero, the players have to make a lot of choices that will influence the entire campaign. “I wanna play a bard, but the party already has plenty of magic users. Should I play as a barbarian to add some balance to the party, or should I play the character I want to play at the cost of party synergy.” “How seriously do I want to take my character’s story?” “What does my character want in the long run?” “Do I wanna focus on roleplay, or do I want to focus on combat abilities?”

This kind of freedom with choice is only possible with the medium of tabletop RPGs. Because the game is being created as the players play, there is a theoretically endless amount of possibilities for how the campaign can go. The only limitations are the imagination of the players, and the rules set in place by the DM. This boon, however, obviously cannot be granted to video games. Video games have to be coded by a team of programmers, or sometimes by one person alone, and coding takes a long time even for simple changes, especially on large projects. A larger ship is a hell of a lot harder to steer. On top of that, video games can often have a player base of millions, while the average D&D campaign will be lucky to have more than five players. There are no bounds to the size of a D&D campaign, but a video game has to worry about file sizes. If I’m playing the hit video game Lord of the Rings: Gollum™ and I say “I want to make Gollum go to the Shire and make out with hot Hobbit babes…” well first of all there’s probably something deeply wrong with me, but the point is if I wanted that, too bad, the game isn’t programmed to let that happen, because of course it isn’t. 

Video games have limits. They have to institute a very strict set of rules. Because of this, video games must manage choice in a more rigid way.

Halo is a very special game to a lot of people, myself included. It stands to many as an incredible evolution of previous first person shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein. If you ask a game critic why Halo is so special, why it’s such an amazing example of good game design, they would most likely mention the variety of tactics available to the player, the fact that there’s no one “correct way” to play. One player might be cautious, using long range weapons and cover to stay safe, slowly and methodically clearing the path ahead. Another player might be brash, choosing close range weapons and rushing ahead to get a riskier, but more exhilarating play style.

Dark Souls is considered by many to be a flawed masterpiece. It has the best first half of any game I have ever played, and it ranks highly as one of my favorite games ever, despite its marred final sections. *cough cough* Bed of Chaos *cough cough*. Its combination of fantastic worldbuilding with good combat and fantastic build diversity makes it so almost any build is viable if you know how to use it. Not only that, but the ending prompts you with an intriguing ethical question that isn’t asked by any other mainstream video games I know of: Do you let the world you live in continue, knowing that the world is horrible, or do you end this world to make way for a new world to come in that you know nothing about? 

There are few games I can gush about more than Mass Effect. The Mass Effect trilogy has one of the greatest Sci-Fi universes I’ve ever experienced. The characters are incredible, the story is enthralling, the lore is intriguing, and almost every choice you make feels impactful. Going through the series, you see time and time again that your previous decisions can come back to help or haunt you, even if they seem inconsequential at the time. What’s more, all of these outcomes that your choices influence feel natural, as if you truly are changing the world around you.

These three games, and their franchises, at first glance may appear to have next to nothing in common. They do, however, have one major commonality among them: choice. Whether it’s pure flavor, like how you deal with a certain encounter, or more substantial decisions, like how you want the ending to go, choice is everywhere in these games. Choice is essential to the identities of these games, but it doesn’t take a PHD to recognize that they all use different kinds of choice.

Throughout gaming, I have noticed that there are three different kinds of choices that define a game: action, avatar, and narrative. Different games can have different amounts of these choices, and they can focus more or less on a specific kind of choice. These different kinds of choice can also heavily influence each other in the context of the game they are in.

The definitions of these choices are pretty easy to understand. Action choice is the most basic level of choice, and it applies to pretty much every game ever made, though some games focus on it less than others. Action choice is when the game in question has infrastructure set up for the gameplay to differ depending on the actions of not only the player or players, but also the mechanics of the game itself. Halo is a good example of this. The weapons sandbox is an action choice. The way you play through an encounter will vary greatly between someone with a sniper rifle and active camo, and someone with a shotgun and overshield. It isn’t just weapons, though. Enemies play into this as well. The different enemy troops have different strengths and weaknesses that influence how you may decide to play through a scenario. Do you kill the Grunts first so that the Elite has less fire support, or do you kill the Elite first so that the Grunts will flee in terror and be easier to kill? As I said before, pretty much every game has this to some degree, but not all games have the same amount of flexibility. Call of Duty has less action choice than Halo by virtue of its more linear design and smaller enemy variety, but Halo has less action choice than Dark Souls, due to its open world and wider enemy and weapon variety.

Speaking of Dark Souls, let’s talk about avatar choice. Avatar choice is when your decisions can alter the character you play in a way that fundamentally alters how the game may progress. I am putting emphasis on the “alters how the game progresses” part because there are many games that will let you customize your appearance, but that is not changing how the game plays. Making your Spartan a boy with pink armor in Halo Reach does not alter the gameplay, it just makes you look sexy, the same way that having a Master Chief skin in Fortnite does not make you as strong as Master Chief. For true avatar choice, we’ll take a gander at Dark Souls. In Dark Souls, you have an array of skills that you can improve as you level up, and your build in Dark Souls is defined by the skills you choose to level up. Those levels fundamentally alter how you play the game. 

No matter what you’re doing in Halo, you will always be able to swap out your rocket launcher for an energy sword. In Dark Souls, though, if you chose to focus on dexterity and strength because you really wanna use that big ole club you found, you’re typically doing that at the cost of being able to use spells. Wanna try and evenly distribute all your levels to be a jack of all trades? Well sure, now you’re alright at a lot of things, but you lack the specialization required to do one single thing super well. Bruce Lee quote. Notice how the action choice and the avatar choice are tied together, how they influence each other. Dark Souls has both action and avatar choice, and those two choices are tied together. The choices you make for your build influence what parts of the sandbox you are capable of wielding and the techniques you can do, and the items in the sandbox and the techniques you want to do may alter what you decide to focus on leveling up.

Moving on to narrative choice, you have likely guessed that this applies to most RPGs where you can influence the story. Narrative choice is whenever a decision you make, whether it’s through dialog or gameplay, affects some part of the story. Mass Effect is a perfect example of these choices. Wrex and Garrus are a pair of companions you can have, and they are pretty universally regarded as some of the best companions. While most players will end up with both, it is not required. You can choose to leave one of them behind on the Citadel. With Garrus, the most noteworthy change this has is that you are now missing the sexiest crew member, and that you have less tech flexibility in your party. In terms of story, though, this doesn’t change much, even in the sequels. Leaving behind Wrex though does have some pretty noticeable consequences, and not just in the sequels. Typically the player will get to Virmire, a mid to late game mission, with Wrex. Wrex, upon learning about the presence of a cure to a disease forced by all the other species onto his, is enraged and questions why he should follow you if you would have him destroy the cure. This is one of the most memorable moments in the game. You and one of your strongest companions have a standoff. You have to try and talk him down. If you can’t, you have to kill him. 

Obviously if you don’t recruit him, this just doesn’t happen, and you miss out on one of the greatest story moments in the game. Not all narrative choices have to be so eventful, though. A lot of narrative choices are almost purely flavorful, like unimportant dialogue that changes how a character responds, or a decision that only affects one scene in the last game, like getting all of the Asari Writings. Dark Souls has a lot of narrative choices that may be cool, but probably aren’t important to the average player. One that comes to mind involves fan favorite recurring character Patches. In an example of avatar choice melding with narrative choice, if you chose cleric as your starter class, then Patches will hate you. Normally, he will have a couple opportunities to kill you, but after these attempts on your life you can forgive him to make him a merchant with a very good stock. As a cleric, though, you can’t do this. When he realizes he hasn’t killed you, instead of begging forgiveness, he simply tries to kill you again. Why? Well, he hates clerics. Simple as. Another bit of narrative choice that isn’t really important is the ending, specifically which one you choose. Well, about that… we’ll come back to this.

Back to Mass Effect. As I said, many decisions are wholly unimportant. In fact, a majority of decisions are unimportant. Not every word you speak in dialogue will have some sweeping effect ten missions down the line. Some decisions, though, are masterfully disguised as minor choices, then turn out to be major decisions, such as the decision to send either Ashley or Kaidan with Kirrahe’s squad on Virmire. When you first make this choice, it seems fairly unimportant, just choosing the name said in dialogues, which voice speaks over the comms. However, then you get hit with the bombshell choice: Ashley or Kaidan. You can only save one, the other dies. Now the decision of who you sent with Kirrahe matters, because it influences your decision. Did you send Ashley with Kirrahe because you really like Kaidan’s biotics? Well ain’t that a bitch, because now if you want to save Kaidan again for his biotics, you have to let Kirrahe and his squad die. 

I don’t only bring up Mass Effect because it displays narrative choice. I also mention it because it is a good example of all three types of choice. You can change your and your squadmates’ weapons, choose ones that focus more on one stat over the other, and add mods to them that synergize with the rest of your build. You have your team’s powers that you can use at different points of combat. Mix that with positioning, commanding your squad to move to specific places or attack specific enemies, and you get a strong amount of action choice.

It goes without saying that you have avatar choice. Not only can you alter how your character looks, but you can choose your gender which will alter the gameplay in some minor, but noticeable, ways. Your possible romance options depend on your gender, and the game even has some low down characters make misogynistic comments toward you if you play as Fem Shep, which is the correct way to play, I will fight you if you disagree. You choose your class, and which class you choose affects your skills and proficient weapons. You also choose your backstory, which affects certain dialogues and even gives you access to sidequests unique to your backstory. In the sequels, if you focus on the mean renegade dialogue, you get these badass looking red scars all over your face.

Speaking of sequels, when you make a continuation to a game you have to consider a great many things, and the three different choices are some of the biggest things to consider. Choice is a fickle thing, however, so you have to be very careful with it. When you make a sequel to a game, there is a set of expectations that the sequel should be as good if not better than the original, and most people will by default assume that the sequel should be better. Because of this, you have to mix up the choices. You can’t stay idle, if you do then your game gets stagnant and you risk becoming just another case of Sequelitis, among the ranks of franchises like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed. However, there eventually comes a breaking point where too much choice can hurt you. Freddie Mercury quote.

Each of the three kinds of choices in sequels have to be expanded upon in order for a sequel to be considered a worthwhile change. Each field of choice is changed in different ways, so let’s talk about that.

Action choice, since it is already a simple kind of choice, is once again very easy to understand in this respect. Again, Halo is a great example. Halo Combat Evolved had an extensive sandbox, not just in weapons, but also in enemies and vehicles. Halo CE made roughly fifty nine quadspillion dollars on launch day though, so all of a sudden Bungie has a certain level of expectation from everyone involved. Not only do the fans want a bigger game than ever before, but Microsoft does too. They’re throwing a lot of money at Halo 2, so it better be good. The developers need to make the game bigger, need to add more things, and that’s what they did. New weapons like the beam rifle, battle rifle, and sentinel beam, new enemies like drones and brutes, and even dual wielding, a pretty big change to how you can go through combat. 

You’ll notice this pattern continues with almost every series of games, the sequels always need to add something new, change something up. Continuing with the example of Halo, Halo 3 once again added new weapons like the mauler and spiker, new vehicles like the hornet and prowler, and though it didn’t add new enemies, it still shook up the enemy sandbox by making the brutes the main enemy and making the elites your allies. The spinoffs had to change too, with ODST making you weaker, slower, more human, and Reach adding Skirmishers and some new weapons and vehicles. Both of these games removed some aspects of the sandbox in order to mix things up, both had no dual wielding, ODST had no elites (living ones at least), and Reach actually removed a good handful of weapons and vehicles.

Sandbox changes, however, are not always for the better. Here we reach the double edged sword of sequel development. You need to change the game, but if you change the wrong thing then you just make the game worse. If you add too much unsubstantial content, you make the game bloated. Bungie understood well that after Reach, they had exhausted Halo. They did everything they could with the series, and had decided they were done with it. 

Microsoft still wanted money, though, so after Halo Reach, Halo was put into the hands of 343 Industries, a company that had a lot of great ideas, but lacked enough knowledge on how to execute them well. You see, Halo 4 came with a massive change to its sandbox, which in theory is a very welcome change. Where problems start to form is when the new enemies are sometimes total bullshit to deal with, and the weapons are genuinely some of the worst in the series. The suppressor rifle is a pea shooter, the boltshot is just a less useful plasma pistol, the lightrifle is just the battle rifle and the DMR in one, and as cool as the scattershot is aesthetically, that doesn’t really change the fact that it’s just a shotgun with less mag capacity. Suddenly, the sandbox was bloated, and everything in it had decreased in value as a result. 

Though the story was incredibly well written, the gameplay couldn’t hold up. Halo 4 is a perfect example of the delicate balance developers must tread when changing the action choice in their sequels. Halo, in an attempt to prolong its lifespan and prevent sequelitis, had accidentally changed too much, and contracted a far worse video game illness: disaster artistry.

Avatar choice is just as important to not mess up. Let’s talk about Dark Souls 2. Similar to Halo 4, it’s a game that had a lot of good ideas, but didn’t know how to execute them. That’s all you're getting out of me Dark Souls 2 fans, you’re not gonna hear anything more positive about your shitty game than that from me. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I just, really, really, REALLY hate Dark Souls 2. And I also really, really hate you personally if you think it’s a good game. Back on track, Dark Souls 2 had some alright ideas. It got rid of resistance, which was the dumbest stat in Dark Souls. Power stancing is a cool addition to the franchise, and I’m glad it eventually got to return in Elden Ring, and there’s a decently long list of other cool ideas from DS2 that I think could, and maybe should make a return, like Bonfire Ascetics and the lighting system.

So, where did it go wrong? Well, this is an essay about choice, not about why DS2 is one of the worst video games ever made, so I’ll focus on one change I think is emblematic of the risk associated with changing avatar choice: Adaptability. In Dark Souls, dodge rolling was pretty essential to playing the game. Even if you didn’t want to master it, you needed to at least understand the basics of dodge rolling if you wanted to get anywhere in the game. Regardless of your build, you’re gonna end up doing some rolling. DS2 comes around and looks at rolling, something that pretty much everyone needs to do, and locks it behind a stat wall. Then they decided that explaining this new change in a way that a new player would understand was for pussies. 

The first time I played DS2, I saw adaptability and assumed it was just the new resistance, a stat that wasn’t very important and could be skipped, because the idea of better rolling being put behind a stat wall was so ludicrous to me that it never even crossed my mind, so I put all my focus on health, stamina, and strength like I usually do. It took until I was almost level 100 and near the end of the game for me to realize that the reason my dodges were so damn pathetic was because I had to level up the dodge roll, something that is essential to the gameplay. Realizing that I had to level up my roll genuinely made me more angry than when I thought the roll was just bad in general. 

Dark Souls 2, just like Halo 4, had devalued choice by giving you too much, though they managed to do this in different ways. Even if you’re a spellcaster or a bow user who fights from range, you still need a good dodge to deal with ranged attacks coming toward you or bosses you can’t just run away from. It doesn’t matter what build you use, you need to have a good roll, which means you absolutely must level adaptability. The game has essentially given you a “choice” in very strong quotation marks, because literally the only reason you don’t take it is if you don’t know you need it or if you are deliberately avoiding it for a challenge run. It is a meaningless choice that only makes levelling up less valuable because now you can’t focus on your build, you have to focus on making the game fucking playable.

Dark Souls didn’t really need a sequel. Hidetaka Miyazaki didn’t even want to make one, choosing to not be super involved with Dark Souls 2 because he wanted to make Bloodborne instead. I can empathize with the developers of Dark Souls 2, because I can only imagine how stressful it was to try and come up with a sequel to a game that really doesn’t need one. The thought process behind a lot of the changes was likely similar to the developers of Zelda 2. They didn’t want to just make the same game again, so they tried to change things. They were scared of sequelitis, and mixed things up to inoculate themselves from it. In the process, though, they ended up changing too many things, and created a black sheep of the franchise that most people just don’t care that much about.

Dark Souls 3 did a much better job managing changes to choice, even if it isn’t perfect. Dark Souls 3 kept the decision to have no resistance, and also chose to remove adaptability. DS2 changed the world design by giving you access to four pathways through the game at the same time. This ended up hurting the game because the world design felt disjointed, and this organization caused the game to get way too much easier as you progressed because all four of the paths are roughly the same difficulty. Your choice in direction doesn’t matter that much because you aren’t choosing to risk going down a more difficult path, like in Dark Souls. No, you’re just picking which path you want to be normal, and which paths you want to be insanely easy. DS3 changed the world design to be a bit more linear, which severely hurt the open world feeling from the first game, even with the offshoots from the path you could take, but came with the massive benefit of implementing a more strict leveling curve through the game.

That thoroughly covers action and avatar choice. Narrative choice, though, that’s a very different beast, a beast that’s a whole lot uglier to deal with. You’re dealing with something much more volatile: the whims of the player. The writers of any RPG are given a pretty tall order. They have to write out questlines that can change and vary based on decisions the player made fifteen missions ago. If you’re writing a series of RPGs like Mass Effect, you may have to alter the questline you’re writing so that you can account for a decision the player made two games ago. Managing narrative choice can be very difficult. In games that don’t focus on narrative choice, like Dark Souls, it can be pretty easy. Story based RPGs however focus most importantly on that narrative choice. When you give a player an important set of choices, then you make a sequel that takes place after that choice, you have to build your game around every possibility, in one way or another. So, how do you do that? 

Keep in mind, you can’t really expect developers to make two completely separate games in order to account for a major decision. That is just way too much to expect from people who are already working in one of the most stressful fields in media production. You can only make one game, but that one game needs to somehow account for every option. 

All of a sudden, sequelitis isn’t what you’re worried about. Now you’re just concerned with keeping a consistent canon and not pissing off your invested fanbase.

So how about that Dark Souls ending, huh? Told you I’d get back to it. At the end of Dark Souls, after defeating Gwyn, the Lord of Cinder, you can choose to leave the world in darkness or to continue the age of fire. As anyone who has played Dark Souls 2 and 3 knows, this choice does not matter, because regardless of what you decide, the fire gets linked regardless. This is the first approach to major choices in video games: to simply retcon them. Retconning is often looked down on in every type of media, especially video games, with very good reason. It’s genuinely pretty shitty of a game writer to say “I don’t want to account for this decision the player might have made, so fuck you, your choice doesn’t matter.” 

However, Dark Souls isn’t simply retconning the choice between light and dark. The decision to make the sequels continue the age of fire actually makes a lot of thematic sense. Dark Souls puts a lot of focus on how weird timelines are, with players being able to jump between timelines of the same world through online multiplayer. Each Dark Souls player is in the same world, just different versions of it, and those worlds are tied together, linked as if they are one. All it takes is one person to link the flame. Even if you don’t link the flame, someone does, especially since most first time players wouldn’t even know that letting the flame burn out is an option. Dark Souls 2 continues with the age of fire, and you get the same dilemma of light versus dark there as well, and just like the first game, it doesn’t matter. Dark Souls 3, once again, takes place in the age of fire. This decision is absolutely genius. It isn’t just some convenient way they can write off a retcon to make future writing easier, this trend contributes to the series thematically. 

The third game approaches this illusion of choice in a different way. There is no sequel to Dark Souls 3 that shows the age of fire again. Instead, in DS3, it doesn’t matter what you choose, the age of dark comes anyway. Boom, complete reversal of the inevitable. All of a sudden, it isn’t fire that’s bound to be linked, it’s darkness that cannot be stopped, and eventually will overpower your efforts. DS3, and Dark Souls as a series, is about entropy. The age of fire has been going on for so long that it is dying, collapsing in on itself. It literally cannot continue anymore. You witness in the game the end result of continuing the Age of Fire, just an endless ashen wasteland, dotted with barely recognizable ruins. In the end, if you choose to continue the age of fire, then the first flame is lit, then sputters, and the game ends with a panning out of the camera, and the darkness setting in. 

With a sequel following a major decision, a developer’s first option is to simply pick the ending they like. Most of the time this is lazy and an insult to the consumer, but as Dark Souls shows, it isn’t always. Your second option is to make the games in your series have so much separation between them that you don’t need to account for the players’ decisions. This is the Elder Scrolls approach. Every Elder Scrolls game takes place hundreds of years and hundreds of miles apart, which means that enough history and/or distance has passed that realistically nobody would care that much about the minor differences in the plot, historians would only pay attention to the larger general details. This decision is smart, and is a perfect decision for a series like the Elder Scrolls or Fallout, but it’s not exactly creative. There is absolutely wrong with this approach, but this kind of continuation is not conducive for a series of RPGs with an intertwined plot.

Your third option is the Mass Effect approach, the approach that most serial RPGs like The Witcher and Dragon Age take. You write a story where you try your best to account for such major decisions in a way that doesn’t cause the possible paths to diverge too much. This is the much more common approach, and it is very… hit or miss, to put it kindly. When done well with decisions that aren’t way too drastic it can be done without issue. Even if the consequences of a decision are drastic, it can still be done very well as long as the backup plan is adequately well written. In Mass Effect, after deciding whether you want Ashley or Kaidan to live, the developers were left with a pretty convenient situation. You see, Kaidan and Ashley are pretty damn similar. They’re both humans who fight for the Alliance and are loyal to Shepard. With a situation like that, there isn’t too much work needed to be done to account for which one lives or dies. Regardless of who dies, the survivor can just take the place of the other. In Mass Effect 2 and 3, the storylines of Ashley and Kaidan are identical, with the only differences being their behavior and specific dialogue. The specifics vary to account for their personalities, but the general stuff is identical.

With a more complicated example, we can look at Wrex, and his fate in Mass Effect. In Mass Effect, if you kill Wrex or never recruit him at all, you progress through the rest of the series without him. His character is replaced with his brother, Wreav, but it isn’t the same as how Kaidan and Ashley are interchangeable. Both Kaidan and Ashley trust you, and are loyal to you, so they can justifiably act the same around you regardless of which one you chose. Wreav doesn’t know you, though. He treats you like an outsider because all he knows about you is that you killed some Geth a couple years ago, and you may have killed his brother. He helps you because he is trying to be diplomatic, and because he has no reason to deny you answers, but he isn’t gonna jump out of his throne to give you a hug or have any sort of personal conversation with you. He gives you the bare minimum because that’s all he would expect from you. You aren’t his friend, you’re just some soldier. Sure, you’re famous, but there are lots of famous soldiers. 

The differences between Wrex and Wreav and the consequences of those differences is even more pronounced in Mass Effect 3, because this time the Krogan are a pretty big part of the plot. In the past, the Krogan have been interesting side stories, but they aren’t super important to the main story. This time, the genophage is a big fucking deal. Want the strongest species in the galaxy to help fight the Reapers? Well you gotta help them first. If Wrex survived the first game, then dealings are pretty amiable. As stern as Wrex is, he’s sensible. He listens to people, you especially, and most importantly he genuinely cares about the Krogan as a people. He is a leader who cares about them, and knows what kind of work must be done to solidify the Krogans’ place in galactic society. 

Wreav, though? He’s a mercenary who killed enough people to get himself on top. He doesn’t really care about the Krogan so much as he cares about his own gains. He’s dumb, unobservant, and doesn’t understand the kind of effort needed to solidify a place for Krogans. Wreav is such a poor leader, that if you fail to keep Eve alive, then Mordin has such low faith in the possibility of a Krogan renaissance that you can convince him to not even try to cure the genophage so that you can get the support of the Salarian dalatrass, who wants the genophage to stay. Speaking of, if you choose to lie to the Krogan about curing the genophage, Wreav will never find out. Wrex, however, is actually a competent leader and has an information network. Lie to him, he finds out, and tries to kill you for your betrayal.

As we can see, even major decisions can be accounted for in ways that are not too dissimilar from each other, and genuinely well done. What about the opposite? Well, that is best displayed in the council. At the end of Mass Effect, you can choose to let the council die to focus all forces on destroying Sovereign, or you can save the council at the cost of more dead soldiers. This is a pretty major decision, and on the face of it is pretty interesting, if not a bit black and white. Obviously it’s really bad to let the leaders of galactic politics all get killed. The citadel is absolutely wrecked, millions are dead, and reconstruction of the seat of galactic politics and of the military is urgently needed. Having a power vacuum is a REALLY FUCKING BAD scenario to have on top of all that chaos. One might argue that, on the other hand, those councilors can be replaced. Even if now is a really bad time to have a lack of power, that power can be replaced. It’s only three councilors. From a more renegade pragmatic view, the lives of those three councilors are just not worth the thousands of soldiers that would die trying to save them. This is a very big decision that takes a lot of politics into account, and can have serious consequences. Think of the political blowback that can befall Shepard and the Alliance as a whole if they deliberately let the council die. Think of how massive a power vacuum is created if they die. The point is, deciding whether the council lives or dies should have massive consequences in Mass Effect 2. So, does it?

Nope.

In Mass Effect 2, they made what was probably the smartest decision regarding the whole council deal, which was finding a reason to avoid it. In Mass Effect 2, you don’t work for the council, you work for a terrorist group (long story, unimportant). The council doesn’t really want anything to do with you regardless of if you saved them, there are lots of political issues there they don’t want to be troubled with. If you chose to save the council, then they throw you a bone in thanks by reinstating your Spectre status, but everyone involved knows it is purely performative and doesn’t affect much of anything. For ME2, this makes sense. It’s a bit sad we don’t get to see the repercussions of that decision in the game, but hey, maybe they’ll come up in the third game!

Nope.

You’d think Mass Effect 3 would put a lot of focus on if you saved the council or not considering that by this point you’re back in the employ of the Alliance and are subject to the Council’s whims, and you spend much of the game trying to appeal to the council to get their support in your war against the Reapers, but even still they just brush over it. They mention your decision once or twice, but it never really affects any scenes in the game. The only serious thing it changes is the standoff with the Virmire Survivor. If you saved the council in ME1, it’s easier to make them stand down. The thing is, it isn’t actually that hard to make them stand down. All you have to do is talk to them throughout the game and not be an asshole and they stand down. At this point, we’ve finally butt our heads against the limitations that come with choice in video games.

When it comes to dealing with narrative choice across sequels, developers have to make sure they stay on that thin line that marks out what is possible for them to pull off. Writing out what happens if the Council dies in Mass Effect is something that the writers couldn’t really pull off, at least not well. They made it work, sure, but they only made it work by turning what seemed to be a massive decision into a completely inconsequential one. Writers of massive RPGs like that need to consider what is actually possible for them to do well, because realistically the death of the council should have absolutely huge consequences that the writers just couldn’t account for, so the only way for them to deal with it in a way that doesn’t seem completely idiotic is to skip over it and try to pretend it didn’t happen, only bringing it up occasionally so it doesn’t look like they forgot about it.

I know I sound harsh, and I want to reiterate how much I love Mass Effect. I feel it is one of the greatest video game franchises ever written, with some exceptions, Andromeda. So, enough criticism of Mass Effect, let’s get back to praising it, because it is designed incredibly. I want to point out how, throughout the game, the action choice is tied into the avatar choice, and the avatar choice is tied into the narrative choice. Mass Effect, being the masterfully crafted RPG that it is, blends these three aspects of freedom together. They aren’t just things you can do in the game because the developers thought it would look cool in a trailer, they are deliberate additions that affect every aspect of the game for the better. They are tightly woven together, and weakening one of the three would fundamentally alter the other two.

A very important aspect of game design is synergy. Any game designer, before they add a feature to their game, needs to ask themself, “What does this feature contribute to the main purpose of the game?” Every feature in a game needs to work together to contribute to the overall picture. The focus of Mass Effect is the storyline and how it can be shaped and molded by the player, meaning that the narrative choice is paramount. As a game about how the player shapes the story, not how the character shapes it, it’s important that the player be able to shape their own backstory. This can be contrasted to games like The Witcher, which are about a fully written character who already has a backstory. In a game like that, your avatar choice is a bit limited because you are taking control of a fully fleshed out character, not creating your own character.

When you’re shaping a player’s custom character, it’s important to shape their backstory, but you don’t just want the player to read about the differences in their character, it’s a video game, you want them to feel the difference as well, so you give them a select variety of classes to choose from. Now you have a group of possible classes, you need to create weapons and abilities for those classes to make each one feel unique, so you create the skill trees and the abilities, the weapons, weapon mods, armor, money to buy these things, the whole nine yards. Boom, you have elaborated on the narrative choice in a way that expands on the avatar and the action choice.

Mass Effect pulled this off in 2007. It was nowhere near the first game to do things like this, because pretty much every great game before Mass Effect did the same thing. Deus Ex, Doom, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Fortnite, they all ensured that every aspect of gameplay tied into each other and strengthened each other to create a perfectly airtight experience. It’s been over a decade since then, so surely video games have gotten even better at this! Surely they have mastered this concept!

Surely…

Failure to keep this kind of synergy is unfortunately all over the video games landscape nowadays, and what concerns me is that people just eat it up uncritically and wonder why all that ever gets made by AAA devs nowadays are copies of the exact same game over and over again with a different coat of paint. What’s even more concerning to me is that the world saw the eventual conclusion of maintaining a system like this, and yet we did nothing about it. What I am talking about is none other than Cyberpunk 2077, a game that might go down in history as one of the most controversial video game launches of all time, alongside legends like No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76.

It seems that a majority of people have severely misinterpreted the lesson that should have been learned from Cyberpunk’s launch. What most people took from the situation was “we shouldn’t rush game developers, they will finish their game when they’re ready,” and you know what? Sure, that’s not wrong. We shouldn’t rush developers, but that’s not what happened there. Cyberpunk started development in 2016, right after the release of The Witcher 3. This means the game was in development for around four years. For comparison, Witcher 3 was in development for around five years, and so was Elden Ring. The time difference isn’t very drastic, but CD Projekt Red has gone on to prove that even after two years of time to be able to develop it further and patch it more, they haven’t really fixed the real issue with the game. Glitches and bugs aren’t the problem with Cyberpunk, at least, not the underlying problem. Cyberpunk today is about as stable as you would expect a Bethesda game to be two years after launch, still noticeably more buggy than the average AAA game, especially compared to The Witcher 3, but not as buggy or broken as it was at launch. 

The thing is, I still wouldn’t call it that good of a game. I played it only a week or so after it was released, and I can say that as annoying as the bugs were, they didn’t get to me. I’ve played many a Bethesda game in my life, so bugs don’t bother me that much. No, I was displeased with some of the deeper aspects of the game. The truth of the matter is that they shouldn’t have needed that extra year. If a developer says they want more time, they should get it, but that doesn’t change the fact that Cyberpunk straight up shouldn’t have needed another year. My evidence for this? 

Um, play the fucking game. Before writing this essay, I played through the entire game. I mean, the entire game, including every single side quest and gig available. I have experience playing the game in its current state as well as its state on launch and I can say that I have hated this game both times.

You’ll notice almost immediately how massive the map is, and how it is absolutely drowning in objectives and mission markers. I mean, just look at the map screen. Almost every block has a quest marker. This sounds amazing, but if you’ve played any of those quests you know that a majority of the side quests on the map boil down to “go here, kill people, get money.” There are some good side quests, like Skippy the gun, or the talking vending machine, or flaming crotch guy, but good fucking luck finding them. The map is riddled with hundreds of markers, 99.99% of which amount to uninteresting gigs. Go here, punch a dude, get money. Go here, shoot people, get money. Go here, kill a generic mini boss, get money. There’s no story, no intriguing characters to follow, no decisions to be made, nothing.

There is nothing wrong with side quests, but if you want side quests, then you need a majority of them to be substantial. Mass Effect has a lot of side quests, every RPG has a lot of side quests, but you know what those RPGs have that sets them apart from Cyberpunk? You can actually find the good side quests because most of them are good. The boring Mass Effect side quests were the collection quests, things like the Matriarch writings, or the metal collection. There are only like four of them, compared to the dozens and dozens of side quests with actual interesting characters. Going through the world of Cyberpunk though there are fifteen boring radiant quests for every side quest that’s actually worth your time. Even Skyrim, a game with writing so boring it’s tantamount to a war crime, manages to keep its radiant quests relegated to the tiny corners and at least tries to make the random side quests interesting.

It isn’t just the quests, though. The gameplay has a lot of problems too. There’s crafting mechanics, because of course there’s crafting mechanics. Nowadays every goddamn game under the sun needs crafting, so we gotta have that! Better dedicate half of our loot drops to crafting now! There’s vehicle purchasing, and if you wanna buy every vehicle you need to spend over a million fucking dollars. Oh, and the driving sucks ass too, by the way. You’re not spending a million dollars on cars like in Grand Theft Auto, these cars are genuinely the worst driving I have experienced in a game. There’s life paths, which do absolutely nothing but change the first half hour of the game and all end in the exact same way, things that could have been summarized in one or two paragraphs of text.

There is an amazing game buried underneath the muck in Cyberpunk. Anyone who has played it will recognize how amazing the writing is, but the gameplay is just not that good, and no amount of development time will fix that because half of the mechanics just don’t work together. 

After replaying Cyberpunk 2077, I can very confidently say that even if you fixed every bug in the game, it still just isn’t fun. This is incredibly sad to me because I know for a fact that there is a good game inside Cyberpunk. I know this because the developers literally made that good game, but you only get glimpses of it. Around the end of Act 1, there's a segment where you play as Johnny Silverhand, and suddenly all of the RPG elements are gone. Johnny Silverhand doesn’t have an experience bar, perks, life paths, none of that. Instead, when you play as Silverhand, you’re playing a high octane balls to the wall corridor shooter, and it is amazing. Then, you jump back into playing as V, and suddenly all the enemies are bullet sponges, are poorly programmed, and don’t respond well to the environment.

The parts of Cyberpunk that are written out are so amazing. The first act, leading up to the big heist, working alongside Jackie is incredible. I knew going into the game that Jackie died because of the marketing, yet I still felt emotional when he died. I cannot understate how massive the balls on CD Projekt Red were to spoil a character's death in the marketing, only to then immediately make him such an amazing character. Sitting at Johnny Silverhand’s grave and speaking to him is such a well written moment that whenever I think of Cyberpunk 2077’s story, I think of that. All of the side characters, Judy, Panam, River, flaming crotch guy, they all have fully thought out and interesting side quests that are amazing to experience. It’s such a shame that the gameplay surrounding them is so awful, and that so many of the game’s side quests are so bad that it discourages people from digging deep into the better side quests.

There are so many features in Cyberpunk that clearly did nothing in development but distract developers from working on the actual important stuff. I wish I could take a hacksaw to Cyberpunk, because there’s just too much stuff in it. There are a lot of mechanics that just don’t add anything to the game. Instead of a handful of mechanics that fit together like pieces of a puzzle, the developers seemingly made fifty thousand game mechanics, tossed them into a pile, and put them all together haphazardly with no consideration for how they should work with one another. 

What do crafting mechanics do to enhance the story? What does a sprawling map with a gorgeous amount of detail but nothing interesting to find do to discuss the interesting trans-humanist setting? A major problem with modern AAA games is that they are bloated, filled to the brim with bullshit content that adds nothing to the experience. You know why survival games have crafting? Because they’re survival games! Cyberpunk and Fallout and Assassins Creed and Far Cry and yes, even Elden Ring, do not fucking need crafting. It’s just extra bloat that at best is a waste of time for both the devs and the players, and at worst only serves to make the game worse by pulling peoples’ focus away from what matters. 

Not every game needs to have an open world. Not every game needs to have level ups, and perks, and skill trees, and crafting, and stealth, and non-lethal takedowns, and radiant quests, and every other mechanic you can possibly add to a game. A game can have some of these, or even a lot of them, but they better be tightly woven into the game. Don’t just tack it on so you can advertise it.

No amount of dev time would make Cyberpunk a good game, because the game as it is was doomed from the start. The extra year of development they needed made Cyberpunk a more stable game, but that doesn’t make it good. Fallout New Vegas is one of the most unstable games I have ever played, and it’s also one of the best games ever made. If the developers wanted to salvage Cyberpunk, it was too late to do that the moment they released it. The game is out, and you can’t cut things from a fully released product. 

After the release of Cyberpunk, lots of capital G trademark Gamers™ were mad at CD Projekt Red because the game was lacking a lot of features they promised, and one of the most liked posts on the Cyberpunk subreddit was a thread of all the features that were missing from Cyberpunk. All I could think reading that post was how much I wanted people to shut the fuck up about how many features they wanted. Something I have learned the more time I have spent interacting with media consumption is that the average consumer is a braindead troglodyte, because Cyberpunk doesn’t need more features, it needs less. Cyberpunk needs to be cut in half. Yes, CD Projekt Red shouldn’t have promised all of those features, it’s bad to lie to consumers, but they shouldn’t have even thought about adding all those features because the game has too much in it.

The only way to save Cyberpunk would be to go back in time and tell the developers to have a vision, a strict vision, a vision where the mechanics were tied together and not just a loose mishmash of RPG elements. Maybe shrink the map in half, cut out a majority of the badlands where it’s just open desert and fuck all to do or see, get rid of the literal hundreds of gigs and police scanner missions that do not contribute jack shit to the game as a whole, as well as a mountain of other things, like perks and skills and especially crafting.

When games are full of nonsense content that adds nothing to the focus, all they end up doing is giving the player an even worse version of choice paralysis. We all know what choice paralysis is like, it's when you go to a store to get mayonnaise and for some reason there are fifty thousand brands of the exact same product for absolutely no reason. When I play a game like Mass Effect, The Witcher 3, Fallout New Vegas, any good RPG, and look at the quest list filled with dozens of quests, I don’t feel paralyzed choosing which one I want to pursue, because most of the time each quest is unique and different in one way or another, with some exceptions like the dreaded Witcher gear treasure hunts. Looking at the Mass Effect grocery list of side quests, there’s ketchup, hamburger buns, ground beef, Doritos, sliced ham, cheddar cheese, hot dogs, everything you could ever need to have a good poolside cookout. When I open up the map of Cyberpunk and see five thousand map markers for quests, and I know that 99% of them are identical radiant quests, it’s like opening up your grocery list and seeing mayonnaise written seventy times and then the words “everything else.” I’m just not gonna bother going to the store. My evil bitch wife CD Projekt Red wants me to go out and buy groceries, but if they really want me to go shopping then I need a list with more stuff on it than just mayonnaise! I’ll just stick to the main quests because I know they are guaranteed to have effort put into them. Players end up missing the cool minor side quests because of how awful and common the boring ones are.

Tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons are able to pull off limitless choices for players because the game is boundless. Tabletop RPGs are made procedurally by the strongest computer on Earth, the human brain, a computer that does not need to spend a month being programmed and altered to play a side quest in D&D. There are no limits other than the raw creativity and imagination of the players, which means that anything is possible. If the players choose to let the council die instead of saving them, the DM can change the story accordingly because it is being written as they play, and the DM doesn’t need to worry about “oh no what would happen if we play that moment again but they save the council” because the moment is over, and you are continuing a campaign, not making a video game that millions of people will buy and play and review.

Video games are simply not capable of doing this, and never will be. When video games try to be infinite and limitless, most of the time they just end up being ignored because they’re boring. Nobody ever plays radiant quests in video games, at least not for long, and certainly nobody enjoys them. The only radiant quests I have ever put dedication into completing are the ones with the Skyrim thieves’ guild because that’s the only way to beat that questline. Radiant quests are, by definition, boring and repetitive. Nobody enjoys them, so stop making them.

Many modern video games feel as though they are fundamentally misunderstanding what freedom of choice should be. When you make a choice in a game, whether it’s a board game like Chess or Monopoly, or a video game like Mass Effect or Dark Souls, you should feel like that choice was significant somehow. In Halo, choosing which weapon you want to use will shape how your battles go. In Dark Souls, the skills you level up will shape your playstyle fundamentally. In Mass Effect, when you make a decision about the story, you want that decision to be brought back somehow in the future. 

Choice has to feel like it matters, even if it doesn’t. In Halo, it doesn’t matter what type of playstyle you play with, or the difficulty you play on, the game ends regardless, but that isn’t what the player cares about. The player cares about the feeling, and they feel like their decision matters when they choose to fight with the weapon they really like and absolutely tear up those filthy splitlips. Yeah, I said it. This is a Sangheili hostile space. Silence elite preferred species.  

In Dark Souls, it doesn’t matter to the game what weapon you use or what build you follow or what ending you choose, the bosses are gonna die by your hand, and what you use to kill them doesn’t change that. This doesn’t change how important the decision of build feels though when a player masters a playstyle they enjoy.

At the end of Mass Effect 3, you save the galaxy in one of three pretty colors, or you let the Reapers destroy it because you’re doing a psychopath playthrough and the writers at BioWare had a seizure and forgot how to write a good ending. Your decisions throughout the series sort of affect that decision, but like, not really. Your ending isn’t determined by your choices, the options you can choose from are, and even then it’s decided by a really dumb numerical system, whatever, that’s not relevant. The ending you choose may not be influenced by your decisions, but that doesn’t make your choices feel insignificant. As much as I hate the ending of Mass Effect 3, that doesn’t diminish, to me, the value I get from the choices I made as I was making them. Even though the decisions aren’t impactful to the ending, at least in a significant way, that doesn’t change how important those decisions feel to the player.

Any video game, by default, is going to end up having the illusion of choice. No matter how well written or programmed a game is, there will always be limitations, always be rules in place, options that you straight up aren’t allowed to have. This isn’t a bad thing, as negative as it may sound. People don’t complain about Mass Effect not having enough choice, or Halo not having enough weapons, or Dark Souls not having enough build variety.

When making a video game, there are inherently limitations, and any good developer will embrace those limitations. A good developer has to understand what kind of game they are making, and set boundaries. You can’t let your game be bloated. Adding mechanics like skill trees and crafting and radiant quests and stunt tracks and wildlife hunting do not make your game cooler by default, most of these mechanics end up just making the game bland and samey, identical to every run of the mill garbage video game being made nowadays. Almost every AAA title nowadays has a bunch of RPG elements, and you know why? Because Skyrim made eighty gazillion dollars and is still printing money with every rerelease it gets. Every game company looked at Skyrim and said “hey that game made a lot of money and it has skill trees, and crafting, and stuff like that, we can find ways to unnaturally force that into our games so we can call them RPGs even though they aren’t.” A decade has passed since the cardinal sin that was Skyrim was released and God has still yet to forgive us. 

Adding a dozen RPG elements to your game that isn’t an RPG makes it bland and only weakens the structure of the game by bloating it. Video games, just like movies, paintings, tv shows, all kinds of art, take a good amount of money, talent, knowledge, and dedication to make, and if you’re going to put in all that effort, you should make the end result worthwhile. It doesn’t need to be high art, I enjoy Call of Duty, even if I would never buy it on release day, or ever honestly. Even though I’m not a fan of Call of Duty though, and even though I have critiques of the series and the sequelitis it is dealing with, I would never call it a bad game. Call of Duty knows what it wants to be, and it does it. Call of Duty wants to be a military first person shooter with rather simplistic and linear campaigns and competitive multiplayer that serves as the main draw to the series, and by god that’s what it does, and it does it well. It’s fine for a game to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but you can do that while maintaining a polished and tightly woven experience. Call of Duty isn’t out here making open world campaigns with leveling systems and crafting and investigation mode. Not yet, at least. Inshallah the sun will explode if that happens.

Fortnite might be an affront to god and single handedly disproves Fukuyama’s end of history by being an ontological evil that is slowly dismantling western liberal democracy, but I can’t deny that it knows what it wants to be. It wants to be a battle royale with mediocre gameplay that puts more focus on getting money from idiots than being a good game, and it does that very well. As awful as Fortnite might be morally, I certainly couldn’t call it a bad game from a mechanical standpoint.

The modern games industry is somehow even more of a nightmare than it was a decade ago, because mistreatment of employees has seemingly gotten worse and worse, and the artistic expression of programmers, writers, graphic designers, and everyone involved is being more and more limited and forced into a box so the people up top who have never written a line of code in their lives can make more money. They don’t understand the artistic process, they just understand money, so they make the art worse because they know the consumer is too stupid to realize, and they make more money while the people they hire make less. 

So many modern AAA games have all these random RPG elements and open world nonsense thrown in so they can talk about it in the marketing because the average consumer is a fucking moron who thinks that more features equals more good. In the wise words of Sonic the Hedgehog, “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.”

Just like any other artform, every aspect of a video game is like a piece to a puzzle, and the pieces need to contribute to the larger picture. Red Dead Redemption 2 has a very large picture, and it has a lot of extra mechanics to it. RDR2 has crafting, hunting, stealth, oh my! But it all contributes to the whole because the game at its core is trying to be a gritty, somewhat realistic, western story, just like the first game. Hunting an antelope with a bow and arrow and slowly skinning it, as repetitive as it is, adds to the grander picture. There is a lot to be critiqued about RDR2, and I do mean a LOT, but the synergy of the mechanics and the vibe is not one of them. Even if I despise how long it takes to search a house, I can’t deny that it adds to the vibe the developers were going for. 

Tabletop games and video games are different. Shocker, I know. They share a history, and have a lot in common, but they are of different mediums, and therefore have different standards, different possibilities for what can be done with them. Cyberpunk the tabletop RPG is a game of imagination, and therefore has no limits. Just like any other tabletop RPG, it embraces that freedom to be anything. 

Cyberpunk the video game feels as though it tried to do the same thing. It rejected the inherent limitations of the medium and tried to add in a bunch of stuff to fill up its mostly empty, way too large map and make the player feel like there’s no end to the fun. They misunderstood the fact that a video game must eventually run into that brick wall. Video games are completed products, and are limited to the coding they are sold with. A good developer must understand those limitations, and learn how to make a great game using those limitations, not in spite of them. 

Cyberpunk is not an exception, it’s the rule. The average Gamer™ is too stupid to understand that. The Ubisoftification of the games industry is slowly taking hold, and the only way we can stop it is by holding our games to a higher standard. No game can be an everything game, and the pursuit of that end is a foolish endeavor. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Choice is essential in all games. Games are defined by the ability to choose your strategy, even if your options are limited. However, having more choices does not a better game make. Most of the time, to make your game better, you need to limit a player’s choice. Sometimes, the illusion of choice is more important than having choice.