I think a game worth mentioning in this discussion is Kenshi. Like Rimworld, you command an odd assortment of characters (if you could call them that from the start) that have goals set BY you at all times. There is a narrative, but it only progresses if YOU progress it, and more often than not the narrative are the justifications for your actions that you invent. The game does not force you to do anything, posit any arbitrary "this-or-that" decisions; it's all YOU. Your actions have a tangible effect on the game-world. Great video by the way!
I think when people talk about the illusion of choice in video games they tend to over simplify things. There's too much focus on what happens, not how it happens. Take Baldur's Gate. At the end of the game you defeat the bad guy. That's the basic ending of most stories ever written, but along the way you get to decide how characters develop. Does Shadowheart remain a Sharran? Does Astarion Ascend? These things matter to players, because we become invested in the characters. A lot of people won't care if the BBEG is defeated if all the characters die at the end.
I see what your saying, but I felt that I didn't really have any say in anything, only the dice did. Perhaps I just had bad rolls, but by the time Shadowheart tried to kill Lae'zel, I let her do it because it felt like the first time in the game I had any effect on anything.
I did not went out of the collectors base with zero losses. I had to replay a couple of times from the save point all to find out that mordin died out of camera.
Agency is freedom to choose, so you need freedom, and separately you need choices that will yield to your freedom. If the choices presented dont require your freedom to calculate thats as unfulfilling as having freedom but no choice.
3:25 that bait and switch lol. Your video though helped me understand why I couldn't feel CP2077 was an RPG; you're not in control, it's V and Johnny through V. I've personally been enjoying Starfield, and a common criticism that pops up is that it's boring or the main quest is written badly, leading me to think it's related to what your video goes over. Players want the illusion of choice, not actual choice.
Now that I have seen this video, your subscriber-count surprised me quite a bit. It just has all the vibes of a video that will soon receive the mighty algorithm's attention :D
Dead Money's probably my favorite example of a game taking away your agency right. The game warns you upfront there's no coming back from the Sierra Madre till you're done. And Elijah is not playing around with you, disobey and boom. You're on strict rails for 90% of the dlc and its great because it just adds to the miserable hostile slog through the casino.
Another example, Planescape Torment, you've made every choice before, you deal with the consequences of those choices, you can;'t choose your past or your ultimate destination but you're the one who controls whether you accept yourself, warts and all, or keep running.
A good example of player agency is BioShock Infinite. Not because you have any choices or agency but because it straight up tells you you don't. Then through the game you're constantly presented with choices from small ones like which necklace Elizabeth wears to which branching path you take while walking down a street. The best part is that every branching street converges back to the same point before the end so which path you choose before had minor changes that has no overall effect on the game and at the very end of the game, after giving you tons of small choices, it reminds you once again that you had no real choice in any of it. It's one of the few examples where the game messes with you a little by stating it's not giving you a choice, then waving the illusion of choice in your face through the entire game, then finished the story by reminding you that it was always going to end the one way. I didn't care much for the plot of the game but i did appreciate the fact it toyed with the illusion of choice in a way most other games aren't brave enough to.
There is some agency in bg3, though it is relatively minor. Like if you kill gortash before attacking the steel watch facility the brain takes over the stell watch. And, of course, the people you ally with helping in the final fight
I would have liked those final allies to have had a more pronounced effect. They were kinda fodder. Ya, it's not a zero-agency title, but then again, neither was Mass Effect 3. In both cases, though, the agency was skin-deep, and really didn't play a huge part in the outcome of the story.
@@speedingoffence I know recently they added more endgame cutscenes involving the characters you sided with. I haven't personally been able to finish another playthrough yet but maybe it helps a bit more with that.
I did feel like with BG3 player choices are a bit of an illusion on one point, in your racial dialogue options. Excepting very few scenarios, the seemingly unique choices you had as a tiefling or a drow etc were things you could have still picked regardless of race just written under another option. And I get it; so say your racial option lets you pass through an area without fighting, it skipped a dialogue check that would do the same. Some small ways it worked was you would get a different dialogue response, though not impacting the following events much or differently compared to other choices you would make. I will give it this, BG3 does present you with a lot of options in dialogues so the varied choices are there, I just felt slightly fooled to play as one race and redo an encounter as another to find I had all the same choices when simplified. One thing I'll mention, it is actually technically possible to dominate the elder brain without being an illithid yourself, but it requires you to go along with the emperor until the very end then betray him and dominate the brain. It is kind of funny since all he really did was open a portal and you can do all the work inside, which I did on a solo SH challenge playthrough. He claimed only a mindflayer could defeat the elder brain but it's more of a only the mindflayer could open that portal before eliminating the brain. I guess in a way he's right because you can't get to the brain if a mindflayer doesn't open the portal, but still amused me. These mindflayers and elder brain are supposed to be able to calculate so much better than humans, yet didn't calculate you stabbing emperor in the head then dominating the brain yourself
Ya, the way he seems to think you'll somehow appreciate him, it's pretty narrow minded. I think a LOT of people think of a change like becoming a Mindflayer effectively the same as death anyway, and we're only accepting his 'help' because, as he says, you have literally no other options. Until you do.
@@speedingoffence Narrow minded indeed, and also suggests he holds a sense of superiority and quite the ego about the intellect of his species, which could be the case for illithids themselves though I cannot say, since you only really get to the core of the emperor in this game, a little on omeluum who does seem to be more chill overall (though I never really pissed him off in dialogue, just in combat made him teleport somewhere unknown). It's clear illithids are intelligent beings from their stats alone and the way that they work in combat appears to be a little more intelligently put together (deliberately flying over harmful terrain, generally avoiding nautiloid strikes), yet they're still prone to hubris and error like humans nonetheless
Story playstyle :D. World dynamics esthetic. Communication is partnership. If game become a sport I belive playstyle an agency will go directly in xp or world(dynamic esthetic). XP expirance capture emotion and asset distinguish player record different then playstyle. Agency is designated world space. Like a market or farm plot. Needed the hight of ruler or king of xp or ladder/rank 🪜. 😊 masseffect and Phoenix point are great story liner narrative. Missplays and choices are essential to esthetic.
Rimworld though. What a piece of art. I only have a console to play it on and it still rocks. I’ll get a pc eventually and it’s just gonna be a rim-machine. I’ve forgotten all my criticisms of Mass Effect because even at its worst it is on average better than most of the modern games I play. Edit: except Andromeda, that game can live in a bargain bin afaik.
Ya, I wasn't trying to imply Mass Effect wasn't good. It just wasn't good for the reasons people keep saying. It was a great cinematic action game, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Iirc ME3 does have a point system where certain endings apart from war assets though that may have only been included with Legendary Edition. Or it was a mod I downloaded, that's a possibility.
Sounds like a mod. When you load an me2 save game into me3, it tells you all the stuff that's being carried over, and it's not a long list. You can use save managers to create save games from scratch, too. Apart from the ending, they're still amazing games. They're just more 'final fantasy' than 'fallout'.
I want the Player Agency from TES III Morrowind back. You can basically say "Go fuck yourself." to everyone but the NPCs from the very very start where you leave the ship (only because you need to actually start the game somehow and I consider this the min needed gameplay), but after that you are free to do whatever you want. You could finish the game without anyone. You could finish the game with everyone important dead before you. You can, gameplay wise, become whatever you want. Sure you will have it tough and if you don't know what anything does, it would be like the monkey, the typewriter and the endless time. Well, even there TES has a solution by being rather wonky with their Elder Scrolls. Something only becomes ever concrete set in stone, if it was done by someone. Otherwise there are endless amounts of prophecies which are as true as the other one. Theoretically, you, as the player, could have defeated the endboss with a poisend apple, if the game mechanics allowed for it. Lorewise you would have been the slyest person to ever walk on Nirn. Or the apple could have been a metaphor... ect.
People whine that it's bad, but it's still a good mod despite its age. It's a staple in my mod orders. If you know what you're doing, it is easy to avoid issues with it.
PNV is still a good mod as long as you don't add 500 other mods on top of it. It's meant to be a AIO mod and not just another small mod you add in the middle of a load order and forget about. Most people aren't willing to put in the work to read a mods description page and do the necessary step to install it properly then go on to blame the mod.
9:08 I don’t have time to write this right now but I feel like you’re kinda putting the cart before the horse here. The idea that you can answer a question the way you want to, and have a bad outcome as the result of that, is the entire point of the dialogue wheel. Imo it kinda fails because it’s openly choreographed to the player, “HERE IS [GOOD ACTION] AND HERE IS [BAD ACTION], ALL OTHER ACTIONS ARE OBJECTIVELY INFERIOR.” I cannot understate how disappointing Andromeda was, but I thought the switch from “paragon/renegade” to “inquisitive, brash, friendly,” whatever that dialogue system was, was (on paper) a really good change. In the trilogy, players will choose a color and then mindlessly pick it for every single dialogue option because that’s what the game teaches them to do. There’s no penalty to being a high Paragon character and choosing a Renegade option/interrupt when it seems appropriate- sabotaging the gunship in Garrus’ recruitment mission is a great example of this. The problem is that they conditioned the player to think “red or blue” only, and not to think “how would I respond to this?” It objectively DOES give the player a significant amount of agency in the outcomes of the squad’s stories, especially considering that their loyalty missions are skippable. I promise you, contrary to your blanket statement that “everyone” got the best possible ending first try, there were plenty of people who didn’t trust Legion and sold him to Cerberus, there were plenty of people who didn’t give a fuck about Jacob’s story, there were plenty of people who didn’t upgrade the Normandy fully, there were plenty of people who didn’t have enough reputation to be able to defuse the Tali/Legion or Miranda/Jack conflicts. There are dozens more things I could list off, which include both dialogue choices, actions the player chooses to/not to take, characters the player does/doesn’t interact with, etc. I went on a bit of a tangent there, but the idea with the dialogue wheel is that the player can choose the Paragon or Renegade options in any situation, and this can in fact impact the outcome of their story. If you’re a Renegade character, and you occasionally chose the Paragon dialogue options because it seemed more appropriate to you at the time, and maybe you don’t put enough points into the stat which boosts your reputation, you might not have enough rep to be able to choose a red/blue option instead of an inferior white one. That agency DOES exist, it is NOT an illusion; the problem is that the player will typically just go with “up option” or “down option” every time without really considering the RP element of this RPG, and that’s the fault of Bioware for designing the system to be so visually obvious. Saying that you should use a mod to max out your rep scores so you don’t “Have to worry about whether or not you can choose the dialogue options you want to” defeats the entire purpose of the dialogue wheel. If you choose the option you want, and that can vary between Paragon and Renegade (as, I would argue, it should), then you won’t always be able to get the best possible outcomes- you’ll have to live with the consequences of your choices, if you will.
My issue with it is that it's less 'right and wrong' and more 'game theory'. I think you hit on something good there, though- if they removed the blue and red, and maybe mixed the answer locations up a bit... Of course, the answers would have to be more clear than they are, but that would have gone a fair ways to change it from just a game mechanic to something you can own.
Dude thanks! That was a 15-year old Yeti lol. I was using it because my headset microphone picked up too much backgound computer noise, but I just tried it with a bunch of couch cushions stacked around the computer... It's a lot better, and I'm hoping it'll be a workable option going forward.
Saying the first choice in TOW is difficult is patently false. There is a very clear best option for everyone involved EXCEPT the company rep. And I'd argue superficial differentiation like in F4 IS less player agency. If two games have equal choices but the games' reactions to them are differentiated more or less from the results of other choices DOES mean it has more player agency. Just because F4 reacts to more things than FNV does not mean it has more agency, because those reactions are lesser in difference (and quality).
The Reapers came to their conclusion that organic and synthetic lifeforms can't co-exist base on a sample group of one, their own. When they came to that conclusion, the sample group was actually zero, because they hadn't actually wiped out their creators at that point. If they had decided to NOT wipe out their creators, a similar sample group of one would have yielded the opposite answer. Their entire theory is flawed. Canonically, it's deliberately demonstrated as false when the Geth and Quarians ally in ME3. Then they put forward three solutions to their presupposed problem. They have determined that those solutions are the ONLY solutions that can work, but provide no evidence to back it up. They will allow the cycle to end, but only on THEIR terms. No, the correct answer is sacrifice, another cycle forfeited, so the next cycle, armed with the information from the previous, can defeat the Reapers on their own terms.
@@speedingoffence "The Reapers came to their conclusion that organic and synthetic lifeforms can't co-exist base on a sample group of one, their own." This is actually not true, although it's not made clear until the Leviathan DLC. The Leviathan tells you that they created the Reapers after seeing their vassal races invent AI and then inevitably end up embroiled in existential warfare that the Leviathans had to break up. That's what made the Leviathans worry that the same thing would happen to them and task the Crucible AI with solving the issue. The Crucible AI also rejects the Geth-Quarian truce because it has seen similar truces in the past that inevitably failed in the long term, and it tells you so. I still think it's incredibly stupid that the writers of ME decided to treat "synthetics and organics will annihilate each other" as axiomatic, but the Crucible AI and its Leviathan creators *did* possess enough evidence to rationally conclude that this axiom is true in-universe.
Lol your no is wrong. You absolutely CAN choose to not do something, the fact that almost no one does only means that the choices weren't meaningful. Like there was no incentive to choose A over B so everyone choose B.... but they didn't HAVE to. It does not mean that the choices didn't exist or there was no player agency in making, just that it was a dumb/bad choice. Better case in point than anything you mentioned. Morrowind. It had so much agency you could lock yourself out of winning the game, but did anyone actually choose to just keep playing once they knew they could never win? Of course not. Because you want to beat the game. As for BG3? Yeah it is a crap story with a crap rail roaded plot and your choices matter little to none. That was telegraphed from basically the first few hours. There is no video game that meets your criteria for player agency and there never will be, because you can't account for all player choices, and by having a plot you can only create so many endings/plot hooks. Is BG3 basically the lowest bar? Yes, but most players are only in it for entertainment or in BG3 case FOMO so it gets it done 90+% of the time. Games like Fallout New Vegas are simply over hyped by people with rose tinted glasses like you said. Cyberpunk I have to wonder if you even played it though. Johnny was no more in control than you were, and the reason things shake out like crap kind of no matter what is because.... it's cyberpunk. That's literally a core part of the entire settings theme, no one wins, you either stop playing and accept your place, or you keep going until you lose. V was a dead man walking the whole game and it had jack all to do with Johnny. I would argue it still had better agency than most games as it had choices I at least needed to think about, like how to resolve Judy's plotline, and at least that characters life could be dramatically different based on your choices.
Mass Effect has player agency in the way that you could choose to sandbag a run of Super Mario World if you wanted to. Those games are spectacularly good, but they're good in the way the great Final Fantasy games were good.
Cyberpunk was an attempt at a Shakespearean tragedy by someone who clearly never read any Shakespeare. For a 'down' to matter, there has to be an 'up', and the only 'up' in Cyberpunk was in a 5-minute montage at the beginning of the game that you don't play.
@@speedingoffence I would argue it is not Shakespearean at all and was just made by a fan of the original real cyperpunk setting as created my mike pondsmith. The setting was always a heavy dystopia where it was clear you never won, you just quit while you were ahead or died. There are no drinks in the afterlife named after people who didn't die fighting. There is some player agency, but it is very low key, and only impacts the small things. Like Takamura actually not being dead at the end.
@@speedingoffence oh for sure. I must have misunderstood, my bad. I was overall let down with Baldurs Gate 3 myself. I like it for what it is, but I can't see myself playing another 100 hours to replay it!
@@LinguiniP Ya, I think the big issue for me was that I thought I'd be in more control than I was. I think if I had different assumptions from the beginning, I could have enjoyed it more. I think the biggest problem was that it was D&D. It never felt like I was in control, it was the dice. When Shadowheart went to kill Lae'zel, I just let her, because it felt like the first time I actually got to make any real choice at all.
@@speedingoffence To be fair it is a Larian game, they have never been big on any real player choice or agency. Also the game constantly spammed about how you should use your mind flayer powers, how cool they were, and how much stronger you would be, and how you would not be a mindless one but still in control, blah blah blah.
@@DKarkarov To me, saving myself from becoming a Mindflayer with the primary plot, the invasion of Baldur's Gate was just background. The Guardian was the antagonist, and I killed him the first chance I got. And it was a game over. I actually put the game down for several days, considering that to be my ending. I still consider it my 'canon' ending. I only went back to see what content I'd missed, and it soured the entire third act.
Illusion of choice is a fundamental taught in game design.
That makes sense. I was surprised to see it so strong in BG3, though. Perhaps D&D is more story driven than I thought.
“I don’t think Obsidian themselves tried to make the claim.” Meanwhile, “Outer Worlds, from the creators of Fallout New Vegas.” Yeah they did.
Yeah, kinda hard to argue with that.
I think a game worth mentioning in this discussion is Kenshi. Like Rimworld, you command an odd assortment of characters (if you could call them that from the start) that have goals set BY you at all times. There is a narrative, but it only progresses if YOU progress it, and more often than not the narrative are the justifications for your actions that you invent. The game does not force you to do anything, posit any arbitrary "this-or-that" decisions; it's all YOU. Your actions have a tangible effect on the game-world.
Great video by the way!
Haven't played that one, it sounds like it belongs on the list.
I think when people talk about the illusion of choice in video games they tend to over simplify things. There's too much focus on what happens, not how it happens. Take Baldur's Gate. At the end of the game you defeat the bad guy. That's the basic ending of most stories ever written, but along the way you get to decide how characters develop. Does Shadowheart remain a Sharran? Does Astarion Ascend? These things matter to players, because we become invested in the characters. A lot of people won't care if the BBEG is defeated if all the characters die at the end.
I see what your saying, but I felt that I didn't really have any say in anything, only the dice did. Perhaps I just had bad rolls, but by the time Shadowheart tried to kill Lae'zel, I let her do it because it felt like the first time in the game I had any effect on anything.
I did not went out of the collectors base with zero losses. I had to replay a couple of times from the save point all to find out that mordin died out of camera.
Agency is freedom to choose, so you need freedom, and separately you need choices that will yield to your freedom. If the choices presented dont require your freedom to calculate thats as unfulfilling as having freedom but no choice.
3:25 that bait and switch lol.
Your video though helped me understand why I couldn't feel CP2077 was an RPG; you're not in control, it's V and Johnny through V.
I've personally been enjoying Starfield, and a common criticism that pops up is that it's boring or the main quest is written badly, leading me to think it's related to what your video goes over. Players want the illusion of choice, not actual choice.
Haven't played Starfield yet. Prolly give that a go after Elden Ring.
Now that I have seen this video, your subscriber-count surprised me quite a bit. It just has all the vibes of a video that will soon receive the mighty algorithm's attention :D
That's nice of you to say!
If BG3 had 100% less bear f****** it actually looks like it would be a good game [an unfinished game, but a good game nonetheless]
Dead Money's probably my favorite example of a game taking away your agency right. The game warns you upfront there's no coming back from the Sierra Madre till you're done. And Elijah is not playing around with you, disobey and boom. You're on strict rails for 90% of the dlc and its great because it just adds to the miserable hostile slog through the casino.
The best game that tackles the idea of player choice from a philosophical parody point of view is The Stanley Parable. Must play it!
Another example, Planescape Torment, you've made every choice before, you deal with the consequences of those choices, you can;'t choose your past or your ultimate destination but you're the one who controls whether you accept yourself, warts and all, or keep running.
A good example of player agency is BioShock Infinite. Not because you have any choices or agency but because it straight up tells you you don't. Then through the game you're constantly presented with choices from small ones like which necklace Elizabeth wears to which branching path you take while walking down a street.
The best part is that every branching street converges back to the same point before the end so which path you choose before had minor changes that has no overall effect on the game and at the very end of the game, after giving you tons of small choices, it reminds you once again that you had no real choice in any of it.
It's one of the few examples where the game messes with you a little by stating it's not giving you a choice, then waving the illusion of choice in your face through the entire game, then finished the story by reminding you that it was always going to end the one way.
I didn't care much for the plot of the game but i did appreciate the fact it toyed with the illusion of choice in a way most other games aren't brave enough to.
There is some agency in bg3, though it is relatively minor. Like if you kill gortash before attacking the steel watch facility the brain takes over the stell watch. And, of course, the people you ally with helping in the final fight
I would have liked those final allies to have had a more pronounced effect. They were kinda fodder.
Ya, it's not a zero-agency title, but then again, neither was Mass Effect 3. In both cases, though, the agency was skin-deep, and really didn't play a huge part in the outcome of the story.
@@speedingoffence I know recently they added more endgame cutscenes involving the characters you sided with. I haven't personally been able to finish another playthrough yet but maybe it helps a bit more with that.
Your channel is underrated, I wish you luck in your UA-cam endeavors.
I did feel like with BG3 player choices are a bit of an illusion on one point, in your racial dialogue options. Excepting very few scenarios, the seemingly unique choices you had as a tiefling or a drow etc were things you could have still picked regardless of race just written under another option. And I get it; so say your racial option lets you pass through an area without fighting, it skipped a dialogue check that would do the same. Some small ways it worked was you would get a different dialogue response, though not impacting the following events much or differently compared to other choices you would make. I will give it this, BG3 does present you with a lot of options in dialogues so the varied choices are there, I just felt slightly fooled to play as one race and redo an encounter as another to find I had all the same choices when simplified.
One thing I'll mention, it is actually technically possible to dominate the elder brain without being an illithid yourself, but it requires you to go along with the emperor until the very end then betray him and dominate the brain. It is kind of funny since all he really did was open a portal and you can do all the work inside, which I did on a solo SH challenge playthrough. He claimed only a mindflayer could defeat the elder brain but it's more of a only the mindflayer could open that portal before eliminating the brain. I guess in a way he's right because you can't get to the brain if a mindflayer doesn't open the portal, but still amused me. These mindflayers and elder brain are supposed to be able to calculate so much better than humans, yet didn't calculate you stabbing emperor in the head then dominating the brain yourself
Ya, the way he seems to think you'll somehow appreciate him, it's pretty narrow minded. I think a LOT of people think of a change like becoming a Mindflayer effectively the same as death anyway, and we're only accepting his 'help' because, as he says, you have literally no other options.
Until you do.
@@speedingoffence Narrow minded indeed, and also suggests he holds a sense of superiority and quite the ego about the intellect of his species, which could be the case for illithids themselves though I cannot say, since you only really get to the core of the emperor in this game, a little on omeluum who does seem to be more chill overall (though I never really pissed him off in dialogue, just in combat made him teleport somewhere unknown). It's clear illithids are intelligent beings from their stats alone and the way that they work in combat appears to be a little more intelligently put together (deliberately flying over harmful terrain, generally avoiding nautiloid strikes), yet they're still prone to hubris and error like humans nonetheless
Holy crap, I feel seen! Yeah, that whole Johnny Silverhand thing so ticks me off so much.😊
Nice mix of thoughtful content and amusing editing gags, I enjoyed
Story playstyle :D.
World dynamics esthetic.
Communication is partnership. If game become a sport I belive playstyle an agency will go directly in xp or world(dynamic esthetic).
XP expirance capture emotion and asset distinguish player record different then playstyle. Agency is designated world space. Like a market or farm plot. Needed the hight of ruler or king of xp or ladder/rank 🪜. 😊 masseffect and Phoenix point are great story liner narrative. Missplays and choices are essential to esthetic.
Would you like some dressing with that?
Rimworld though. What a piece of art. I only have a console to play it on and it still rocks. I’ll get a pc eventually and it’s just gonna be a rim-machine. I’ve forgotten all my criticisms of Mass Effect because even at its worst it is on average better than most of the modern games I play. Edit: except Andromeda, that game can live in a bargain bin afaik.
Ya, I wasn't trying to imply Mass Effect wasn't good. It just wasn't good for the reasons people keep saying.
It was a great cinematic action game, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Iirc ME3 does have a point system where certain endings apart from war assets though that may have only been included with Legendary Edition. Or it was a mod I downloaded, that's a possibility.
Probably a mod. The only difference the "War Assets" made was small bits of the cutscene before the final battle.
Sounds like a mod. When you load an me2 save game into me3, it tells you all the stuff that's being carried over, and it's not a long list. You can use save managers to create save games from scratch, too.
Apart from the ending, they're still amazing games. They're just more 'final fantasy' than 'fallout'.
OH you might be thinking of the Quarian Act. You need five 'points' to 'win' that one.
Glad I took a chance of a small channel, good stuff
Appreciated!
I want the Player Agency from TES III Morrowind back. You can basically say "Go fuck yourself." to everyone but the NPCs from the very very start where you leave the ship (only because you need to actually start the game somehow and I consider this the min needed gameplay), but after that you are free to do whatever you want. You could finish the game without anyone. You could finish the game with everyone important dead before you. You can, gameplay wise, become whatever you want.
Sure you will have it tough and if you don't know what anything does, it would be like the monkey, the typewriter and the endless time. Well, even there TES has a solution by being rather wonky with their Elder Scrolls. Something only becomes ever concrete set in stone, if it was done by someone. Otherwise there are endless amounts of prophecies which are as true as the other one. Theoretically, you, as the player, could have defeated the endboss with a poisend apple, if the game mechanics allowed for it. Lorewise you would have been the slyest person to ever walk on Nirn. Or the apple could have been a metaphor... ect.
Great work, brother-man 👽🤙
Appreciate it! It's nice to see a video get some traction.
Seeing Project Nevada in 2023 is crazy
People whine that it's bad, but it's still a good mod despite its age. It's a staple in my mod orders. If you know what you're doing, it is easy to avoid issues with it.
PNV is still a good mod as long as you don't add 500 other mods on top of it. It's meant to be a AIO mod and not just another small mod you add in the middle of a load order and forget about.
Most people aren't willing to put in the work to read a mods description page and do the necessary step to install it properly then go on to blame the mod.
9:08 I don’t have time to write this right now but I feel like you’re kinda putting the cart before the horse here. The idea that you can answer a question the way you want to, and have a bad outcome as the result of that, is the entire point of the dialogue wheel. Imo it kinda fails because it’s openly choreographed to the player, “HERE IS [GOOD ACTION] AND HERE IS [BAD ACTION], ALL OTHER ACTIONS ARE OBJECTIVELY INFERIOR.” I cannot understate how disappointing Andromeda was, but I thought the switch from “paragon/renegade” to “inquisitive, brash, friendly,” whatever that dialogue system was, was (on paper) a really good change.
In the trilogy, players will choose a color and then mindlessly pick it for every single dialogue option because that’s what the game teaches them to do. There’s no penalty to being a high Paragon character and choosing a Renegade option/interrupt when it seems appropriate- sabotaging the gunship in Garrus’ recruitment mission is a great example of this. The problem is that they conditioned the player to think “red or blue” only, and not to think “how would I respond to this?” It objectively DOES give the player a significant amount of agency in the outcomes of the squad’s stories, especially considering that their loyalty missions are skippable.
I promise you, contrary to your blanket statement that “everyone” got the best possible ending first try, there were plenty of people who didn’t trust Legion and sold him to Cerberus, there were plenty of people who didn’t give a fuck about Jacob’s story, there were plenty of people who didn’t upgrade the Normandy fully, there were plenty of people who didn’t have enough reputation to be able to defuse the Tali/Legion or Miranda/Jack conflicts. There are dozens more things I could list off, which include both dialogue choices, actions the player chooses to/not to take, characters the player does/doesn’t interact with, etc.
I went on a bit of a tangent there, but the idea with the dialogue wheel is that the player can choose the Paragon or Renegade options in any situation, and this can in fact impact the outcome of their story. If you’re a Renegade character, and you occasionally chose the Paragon dialogue options because it seemed more appropriate to you at the time, and maybe you don’t put enough points into the stat which boosts your reputation, you might not have enough rep to be able to choose a red/blue option instead of an inferior white one. That agency DOES exist, it is NOT an illusion; the problem is that the player will typically just go with “up option” or “down option” every time without really considering the RP element of this RPG, and that’s the fault of Bioware for designing the system to be so visually obvious.
Saying that you should use a mod to max out your rep scores so you don’t “Have to worry about whether or not you can choose the dialogue options you want to” defeats the entire purpose of the dialogue wheel. If you choose the option you want, and that can vary between Paragon and Renegade (as, I would argue, it should), then you won’t always be able to get the best possible outcomes- you’ll have to live with the consequences of your choices, if you will.
My issue with it is that it's less 'right and wrong' and more 'game theory'. I think you hit on something good there, though- if they removed the blue and red, and maybe mixed the answer locations up a bit... Of course, the answers would have to be more clear than they are, but that would have gone a fair ways to change it from just a game mechanic to something you can own.
thanks, does say great game are great when they respect players freedom, since games are all along a form of escapism.
Don't forget about planescape torment great game with that
great content i enjoyed this ..... Get a better microphone YOU'RE WORTH IT
Dude thanks! That was a 15-year old Yeti lol.
I was using it because my headset microphone picked up too much backgound computer noise, but I just tried it with a bunch of couch cushions stacked around the computer... It's a lot better, and I'm hoping it'll be a workable option going forward.
wow i never realized the emporer was such an asshole he seemed pretty chill in my playthough
Saying the first choice in TOW is difficult is patently false. There is a very clear best option for everyone involved EXCEPT the company rep.
And I'd argue superficial differentiation like in F4 IS less player agency. If two games have equal choices but the games' reactions to them are differentiated more or less from the results of other choices DOES mean it has more player agency. Just because F4 reacts to more things than FNV does not mean it has more agency, because those reactions are lesser in difference (and quality).
Why do you think refusal is the good ending ?
The Reapers came to their conclusion that organic and synthetic lifeforms can't co-exist base on a sample group of one, their own. When they came to that conclusion, the sample group was actually zero, because they hadn't actually wiped out their creators at that point. If they had decided to NOT wipe out their creators, a similar sample group of one would have yielded the opposite answer. Their entire theory is flawed. Canonically, it's deliberately demonstrated as false when the Geth and Quarians ally in ME3.
Then they put forward three solutions to their presupposed problem. They have determined that those solutions are the ONLY solutions that can work, but provide no evidence to back it up. They will allow the cycle to end, but only on THEIR terms.
No, the correct answer is sacrifice, another cycle forfeited, so the next cycle, armed with the information from the previous, can defeat the Reapers on their own terms.
@@speedingoffence "The Reapers came to their conclusion that organic and synthetic lifeforms can't co-exist base on a sample group of one, their own."
This is actually not true, although it's not made clear until the Leviathan DLC. The Leviathan tells you that they created the Reapers after seeing their vassal races invent AI and then inevitably end up embroiled in existential warfare that the Leviathans had to break up. That's what made the Leviathans worry that the same thing would happen to them and task the Crucible AI with solving the issue.
The Crucible AI also rejects the Geth-Quarian truce because it has seen similar truces in the past that inevitably failed in the long term, and it tells you so.
I still think it's incredibly stupid that the writers of ME decided to treat "synthetics and organics will annihilate each other" as axiomatic, but the Crucible AI and its Leviathan creators *did* possess enough evidence to rationally conclude that this axiom is true in-universe.
FR
Lol your no is wrong. You absolutely CAN choose to not do something, the fact that almost no one does only means that the choices weren't meaningful. Like there was no incentive to choose A over B so everyone choose B.... but they didn't HAVE to. It does not mean that the choices didn't exist or there was no player agency in making, just that it was a dumb/bad choice. Better case in point than anything you mentioned. Morrowind. It had so much agency you could lock yourself out of winning the game, but did anyone actually choose to just keep playing once they knew they could never win? Of course not. Because you want to beat the game.
As for BG3? Yeah it is a crap story with a crap rail roaded plot and your choices matter little to none. That was telegraphed from basically the first few hours. There is no video game that meets your criteria for player agency and there never will be, because you can't account for all player choices, and by having a plot you can only create so many endings/plot hooks. Is BG3 basically the lowest bar? Yes, but most players are only in it for entertainment or in BG3 case FOMO so it gets it done 90+% of the time. Games like Fallout New Vegas are simply over hyped by people with rose tinted glasses like you said.
Cyberpunk I have to wonder if you even played it though. Johnny was no more in control than you were, and the reason things shake out like crap kind of no matter what is because.... it's cyberpunk. That's literally a core part of the entire settings theme, no one wins, you either stop playing and accept your place, or you keep going until you lose. V was a dead man walking the whole game and it had jack all to do with Johnny. I would argue it still had better agency than most games as it had choices I at least needed to think about, like how to resolve Judy's plotline, and at least that characters life could be dramatically different based on your choices.
Mass Effect has player agency in the way that you could choose to sandbag a run of Super Mario World if you wanted to. Those games are spectacularly good, but they're good in the way the great Final Fantasy games were good.
I mention numerous games with player agency by my definition.
Cyberpunk was an attempt at a Shakespearean tragedy by someone who clearly never read any Shakespeare. For a 'down' to matter, there has to be an 'up', and the only 'up' in Cyberpunk was in a 5-minute montage at the beginning of the game that you don't play.
@@speedingoffence I would argue it is not Shakespearean at all and was just made by a fan of the original real cyperpunk setting as created my mike pondsmith. The setting was always a heavy dystopia where it was clear you never won, you just quit while you were ahead or died.
There are no drinks in the afterlife named after people who didn't die fighting. There is some player agency, but it is very low key, and only impacts the small things. Like Takamura actually not being dead at the end.
You're wrong tho, man. You DO get the choice to free Orpheus. So you don't really have to become a mindflayer...
You can also let Johnny Silverhands do it. I was saying that someone has to be a Mindflayer. Only a Mindflayer can defeat the final boss.
@@speedingoffence oh for sure. I must have misunderstood, my bad. I was overall let down with Baldurs Gate 3 myself. I like it for what it is, but I can't see myself playing another 100 hours to replay it!
@@LinguiniP Ya, I think the big issue for me was that I thought I'd be in more control than I was. I think if I had different assumptions from the beginning, I could have enjoyed it more.
I think the biggest problem was that it was D&D. It never felt like I was in control, it was the dice.
When Shadowheart went to kill Lae'zel, I just let her, because it felt like the first time I actually got to make any real choice at all.
@@speedingoffence To be fair it is a Larian game, they have never been big on any real player choice or agency. Also the game constantly spammed about how you should use your mind flayer powers, how cool they were, and how much stronger you would be, and how you would not be a mindless one but still in control, blah blah blah.
@@DKarkarov To me, saving myself from becoming a Mindflayer with the primary plot, the invasion of Baldur's Gate was just background.
The Guardian was the antagonist, and I killed him the first chance I got. And it was a game over. I actually put the game down for several days, considering that to be my ending. I still consider it my 'canon' ending. I only went back to see what content I'd missed, and it soured the entire third act.
What is Balders gate? Spellcheck maybe?
'Baldur' doesn't show up in spellcheck. Interestingly, Balder does.
@@speedingoffence Probably for comparing bald people.
balderdash?