Revisiting hbomb's Fallout 3 video because why not
Once again being reminded of how much I fucking hate the idea of "Player Choice" being a core gameplay mechanic or back of the box bullet-point outside of, like, hyper-traditional cRPGs
Bethesda, TellTale, and ESPECIALLY Quantic Dream (list not exhaustive) don't make games with real choices, they make games that pretend to give you choices and then lead you where they want you to go anyway
Actually, you know where interesting and cool ideas of Player Choice can be seen?
FromSoft games
The games are completely open and honest about how the plot really doesn't matter and how the various endings are basically just window-dressing so you can pretend there's narrative and thematic cohesion, BUT they also let you play them however the fuck you want
"Oh, you want to dual-wield tower shields? Go off, I guess."
Also the re-emergence of immersive sims is another obvious place to examine what Player Choice can, should, and doesn't mean in video games
The Dishonored games have a really messy and simple "morality" system but I can do any mission I want from like a hundred different angles, some of which I'm sure the devs never fully anticipated, because the choice comes from the mechanical interaction and extremely good level design
This is neither the first nor the last time I'll have this rant
The sister to this one is that meaningful narrative choice would work better in games if video games had good writing, but aside from, again, hyper-traditionalist cRPGs no video game is even TRYING to have good writing
But they are trying to make you BELIEVE they have good writing
@coriander i mean there are walking simulators and adventure games with good writing but please don’t put player choice in those games i don’t want to have to walk through the same area five times to get all of the content
