Low/Zero Impact Choices

[Hidden Dreams]

Do you find choices that have little to no impact on the events of the story beneficial to the play experience? For example, would a game with a few impactful choices and many choices that may only result in maybe one different line of dialogue feel more immersive/engaging than the same game with only the impactful choices?

My intuition tells me these extra choices improve the game, but I'm wondering if people find them tedious or disappointing when they realize the choice was irrelevant.

 

[Meaning Less]

As innocent as they might sound they do have a big impact on replayability and perceived quality of your game.

I'd say that if your goal is to make a kinetic novel then you should do just that and avoid misleading players with fake choices, because once they rollback/load/replay they will instantly realize that choice was meaningless.

And if you do have some meaningfull choices but also added fake ones on top be aware that you will just dilute the overall quality of the game for no reason, increasing the odds of players to just ignore or not notice the few meaningful choices because of that.

Think of visual novel players as choice explorers, whenever you put a choice in the game players will make it, and if they notice too many choices leading nowhere they will just stop making choices.

 

[♍VoidTraveler]

I'll just say that i'd rather have a few meaningful choices than a thousand of meaningless choices.

 

[Adabelitoo]

If every choice is meaningful, the game can become stressing.

Let MC pick between a pizza and a burger, beer or soda, action movie or horror movie. What's the harm in that? What's the problem if I can't tell what choices are meaningful? The main reason why I wouldn't be able to tell that is because the writting was poorly done, not because of a pizza and a burger. A lot of people want realistic games (a lot of times that same people will want to fuck the MC's whole family...), IRL you can have an idea but you trully never know what choices will be meaningful for your life.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Do you find choices that have little to no impact on the events of the story beneficial to the play experience?

They are narrative choices, and yes they tend to accentuate the self insertion. With them, the player control not only MC's actions, but also, to some extend, its thoughts.

 

[Kellermann]

If every choice is meaningful, the game can become stressing.

Let MC pick between a pizza and a burger, or a beer and a soda, or a action movie and a horror movie. What's the harm in that? What's the problem if I can't tell what choices are meaningful? The main reason why I wouldn't be able to tell that is because the writting was poorly done, not because of a pizza and a burger. A lot of people want realistic games (a lot of times that same people will want to fuck the MC's whole family...), IRL you can have an idea but you trully never know what choices will be meaningful for your life.

Yes although I tend to refer to them as branching choices and non-branching choices. They can all be meaningful if written in the proper way. I don't think it is bad to have a few non-branching choices (burger or pizza etc as you said) mixed in here and there with the majority branching choices. I go for the 80/20 mix or thereabouts.

 

[HarveyD]

I'd argue a dev should be able to write good meaningful choices before worrying about anything else.

But assuming that's accounted for, I'm fine with them. Though I think I'd prefer to know which choices are the more important ones, something easily done with good writing, or with some kind of visual distinction.

 

[russianbot]

I've always liked the middle of the road option: the morality system. Some people don't like it because it's reductive and it has been abused in the past, but I would argue that the gamification of choice is what you should be striving for when making a game.

 

[SatinAndIvory]

I've always liked the middle of the road option: the morality system. Some people don't like it because it's reductive and it has been abused in the past, but I would argue that the gamification of choice is what you should be striving for when making a game.

It incentivizes picking a choice that you otherwise wouldn't have just because it aligns with your end goal. For example, a character does something really, really stupid and you have the choice to chastise them or be nice. You're going for a nice guy playthrough so you're highly incentivized to pick the nice option even though you'd love to rip into the character just this once. Ripping into them this one time might be the difference between you getting a good ending or not, so you forgo what you wanted to do in favor of what gets you the ending you wanted. Simulate that kind of decision making to the end and you end up with a binary system in which you're either playing a good guy or the polar opposite. Ideally, the story you are telling is so tight that you (the dev) can keep track of each and every major decision the player has made and create an appropriate reaction to them. This, instead of awarding/deducting morality points, so the player feels like the world is truly alive instead of being taken out of the story and reminded that they need to metagame the choices.

Low impact choices don't have to be completely useless. You can use them to show the different sides of a character's personality from their reaction to the player's choices, or that choice could lead to some plot irrelevant world building, etc. I think there should be more of a payoff for low impact choices than simply one or two meaningless lines of dialogue ("Oh, you like hamburgers, wow!" "The steak here is nasty!"). It adds nothing to the experience and the more you insert these meaningless choices into the game, the less tolerant of said choices the player will become in the long run.

 

[russianbot]

It incentivizes picking a choice that you otherwise wouldn't have just because it aligns with your end goal. For example, a character does something really, really stupid and you have the choice to chastise them or be nice. You're going for a nice guy playthrough so you're highly incentivized to pick the nice option even though you'd love to rip into the character just this once. Ripping into them this one time might be the difference between you getting a good ending or not, so you forgo what you wanted to do in favor of what gets you the ending you wanted. Simulate that kind of decision making to the end and you end up with a binary system in which you're either playing a good guy or the polar opposite. Ideally, the story you are telling is so tight that you (the dev) can keep track of each and every major decision the player has made and create an appropriate reaction to them. This, instead of awarding/deducting morality points, so the player feels like the world is truly alive instead of being taken out of the story and reminded that they need to metagame the choices.

You're describing a problem that the morality system alleviates. If getting the good ending is just a matter of getting enough "good points," then you have complete freedom to occasionally take bad actions for whatever reason you feel like and still get the good ending. On the other hand, if you have every major decision matter in the ending, then you would want to metagame because ripping into a character "just this once" could have major consequences.

 

[khumak]

To me choices that either lead to exactly the same outcome, or only differ by having slightly different dialog are pointless and may as well not be there at all. Not every choice needs to cause a major branch in the story but it should have some kind of noticeable difference or there's no point. When I play games that do that I typically just skip all the dialog and skip straight to the sex scenes because since the choices don't matter, the story probably doesn't either. Every choice has the same outcome so it doesn't matter what I say or do, the outcome is predetermined.

It's almost as bad if the choices mostly only differ by making slightly different ajustments to various variables. If I compliment her she gains 1 relationship. If I instead make fun of her she gains 2 relationship. I have no clues that let me know that beforehand though so I'm basically just picking at random or following a walk through. The worst option is if those values are hidden so I don't know I made a bad choice until I end up at the game over bad ending with no idea why I ended up there instead of the good ending.

I'll make an exception for choices that are an obvious joke. Like a girl is fucking you and asks you if you want her to stop. Your choices are something like:

1. Oh god
2. Oh fuck
3. Urghh...
4. Ahhh...

Obviously the answer doesn't matter and is always some version of HELL NO! That's fine.

 

[nulnil]

I think narrative choices in general aren't good in a videogame. You might be immersed in the decisions you make for your first run, maybe even second, but what about the times after that? The choices become more about what content you haven't seen yet, rather than choices that represent you.