Mass Effect 2 and the Articulation of Choice

Despite all the excitement surrounding the option to load a save game from Mass Effect for continuation in Mass Effect 2, I made a new character (referred to as a new "Shepard," for the character's universal surname). I did this for several reasons: a) my first playthrough of games like this generally sucks, and I didn't want to "waste" a character I had already put effort into on a sub-par playthrough; b) I wasn't too thrilled with any of my Shepards as a jumping-off point; and c) I wanted to know what the designers put in as the default choice history--to have a dry run so that I'd know when I was seeing different content on subsequent playthroughs.

This has put me in an interesting position, as a player. In a sort of player amnesia situation, my Shepard remembers what she did during the events of the first game, but I don't. And I like it that way--the fact that there are things about this character that I don't know yet, that I need to find out, makes her feel more alive. I'm much more heavily invested in my Shepard2 than I was in my original Shepards. Heck, I'm more invested in my default-Shepard than I was in any character built up from scratch in any single-player RPG I've ever played, save my Jedi Exile in Knights of the Old Republic II.* And I'm dead certain that the reason those two characters stick out in my mind is tied that same player amnesia, particularly the fact that both made questionable or destructive choices of which the player must take them through the consequences.

Unlike the original Knights of the Old Republic, where a big point of the game is that the player character has had his memories overwritten with a new personality (he's not amnesic at the start of the game, but his false history is never referenced or explored in any meaningful way, so he might as well be), KotORII starts with the Jedi Exile, who clearly has a tumultuous history to which the player is initially not privy. Over the course of the game, the Jedi Exile's significant role in the recent war that left the galaxy devastated (quick summary: the Jedi Exile developed and executed a plan to destroy an entire planet in order to end a destructive war, slaughtering both the enemy army and her own, and leading to the loss of her connection to the Force and exile as a war criminal) becomes clearer and clearer. Though the player can add nuance to the decision, the fact that the character was the one who pushed the doomsday button and must deal with the consequences remains as the game circles that choice in a slowly tightening spiral. Likewise with Shepard2--she's faced with the consequences of having left the Council to die,*** though the decision isn't the major thematic focus that it is in KotORII.

This is especially interesting to me because, if I had the option to play through those decisions, I would have made them differently because of the way I tend to shape character. Case in point: when ME presents the decision to save or abandon the council, the options are "We should save the Council because it's the right thing to do" and "Screw 'em! What have they ever done for us?" in classic RPG Saintly/Psychotic morality dichotomy. I chose the appropriate option for my Shepards' alignments, because I take pride in playing consistent characters. But in ME2, I have the opportunity to add a great deal of nuance to that decision--I decided through dialogue that Shepard2 abandoned the Council because the cost of saving them would have been too high for a cause that appeared lost. I also decided that she regrets it and wonders if she made the right choice when she sees where the new Council has taken the Citadel and the galaxy, an interpretation that I think is valid. That's all nuance that I would never have encountered with my ME Shepards, since my Paragon Shepards saved the Council and my Renegade Shepard would have no regrets at the rise of humanity over aliens. And it's that nuance, the ability to not only make choices but articulate the reasons and feeling behind them, that really takes a character into three-dimensionality.

So how can we implement nuanced choices in games? Well, option one is to have a lot more dialogue options when a choice is presented. In a game like ME2 where PC dialogue is lovingly voiced and animated, that option runs up against the content generation cost-efficiency problem (not to mention the interface design problem of the ME dialogue wheel only having space for six options, two of which are inevitably taken up with "Investigate" and "Goodbye"). Another option would be to integrate consequences of all of the decision-making points into the game's main plotline,**** creating opportunities for conversations reflecting on the choices made. The problem, again, is that creating the kind of action-consequence chains that dog us in real life requires exponential increases in game content. A third option is to make more games like KotORII and ME2, where the PC starts as a fully-fleshed person who has made important choices in the past, for good or ill, and let the player flesh the character out from there. The problem here is not the quantity of content, but whether or not people are willing to play a game where they aren't starting with a completely blank slate, and the potential reduction of the game's audience (personally, I don't think it would be a problem, but I'm an artist and not a marketing statistician). And I think I'll stop before I launch into an analysis of JRPGs vs. Western RPGs.


*When I compare ME2 to KotORII, it's meant as high praise. KotORII is, if not my favorite game of all time, then at least in my top three.**

**Note that this is my top three favorite games, not the top three best games. There's some overlap, but there are also many games that I love dearly but acknowledge are absolutely terrible games. Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, for example, is in my top 10. I would never, ever, recommend it to anyone because it's a terrible game, but that doesn't stop me from pulling it out every six months or so to start a new playthrough. There's no better way to mow down hundreds of stormtroopers with a lightsaber.

*** I was pretty excited when I discovered that Shepard2 had left the Council to die in the final battle of ME (on the other hand, I was pretty pissed off when I discovered that she had killed Wrex, mostly because I had totally forgotten that was an option). Games that feature moral choices but must also define some kind of canon all too frequently assume the "good" option at every juncture (they also almost invariably assume male as canon when there are gender options for the player character, but that's an issue for another time). At the very least, it's reassuring to know that there's a reason to load up one of my Paragon Shepards for a ME2 run.

**** RPGs are trending toward some choices inducing consequences, but "consequence" seems to all-too-frequently mean either "wildly unpredictable reaction" or "sudden and inevitable betrayal," both with a nice side helping of either Guide Dang It or Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. They also rarely include opportunities to reflect on or articulate the choices attached to those consequences. I could gripe for hours about the problems with Dragon Age: Origins in this area.