Decoupling player appearance from progression

by Leisandir , Virginia, USA, Sunday, March 31, 2013, 15:50 (4254 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Without restrictions, all we do is sit there. At the most basic level, a game developer has to set boundaries and give us goals in order for us to actually play a game. You'll notice a distinct lack of true sandbox games; even something like Minecraft, which gives you no direct goal or objective, gives you incentives to play in a particular way.

We can debate how severe these restrictions need to be, but they have to be there in order for there to be a game. "Player investment" need mean no more than a Reward for an Action. If that action is something the player would have done anyway, it reinforces whatever the developer is aiming for, whether that be the narrative or some other element of the game. If it isn't, then it's an incentive for the player to explore beyond the boundaries of the core game, whatever that means. Some players don't need incentive to do that; early PC gaming history is a clear indicator of that. Other players, though, might need that prod to realize that there is more to a game than the core experience, and achievements or other rewards such as items or XP can be used to draw them there.

I'll give you good and bad examples of this. Mass Effect is a game which does not require that you be at or even near max level to succeed, because it is a shooter in the clothes of an RPG. There is a point about halfway through the game where you look at your masses of assault rifles and Titan VI armors and Bluewire IXs and realize that you haven't had much trouble killing anything in a while, and will probably be okay if you don't go off on the sidequests. My first time through, the urgency of the game's primary narrative dissuaded me from most of the sidequests anyway; I'm Commander Fucking Shepard and I've got a galaxy to save, no thanks I don't have time to find your brother. I saw that there was other work to be done and I ignored it in favor of completing the main quest, and although I knew I had missed out on some content, I felt justified, and the game did not punish me for doing so. On subsequent playthroughs, I did the additional content and found the missions rewarding and interesting, not only full of valuable information about Shepard, but the galaxy as a whole.

Continuing the Bioware catalogue, Dragon Age starts a main quest with a very similar tone of urgency in which it's pretty apparent that the fate of the kingdom depends on just a few days of action, and as soon as you're dropped out of the excellent prologue, you and your party are asked to take a short break to rescue lost orphans and help old women get their cats out of trees. Now, if this were Mass Effect, I'd say "Nope, sorry, got to save the galaxy and good luck," because I know I'm able to fight my way through higher-level encounters by being clever and a good shot, but since this is Dragon Age, I know that if I ignore them, I'll be several levels down for future encounters and have a much harder time completing the game. Now I haven't beaten Dragon Age (incidentally, because I was bothered so much by that break in narrative), so I don't know if the side quests contain the same interesting nuggets of information as the Mass Effect missions, but I do know that the game presented me the option of ignoring them with the threat of increased difficulty later on, and that was not a fair tradeoff.