06.07.08

Life and Death

Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 22:48 by Jonas

I was browsing Shamus’ blog Twenty Sided the other day, idly making plans to kill him and take over his readership, when I came across a post wherein he lambasted Invisible War for largely limiting your choices to “Kill” or “Let Live”. Not only that, but compared eg. to the similarly Life/Death-based choice of what to do with Juan Lebedev in Deus Ex 1, most of these choices seem a bit tame because you usually don’t have any reason to kill the character in question.

On Lebedev’s jet, you have your orders not to kill the prisoner conflicting with Anna’s urgent demands that you execute him and threats to do it herself if you hesitate too long. It becomes a reasonably well balanced choice between killing your ruthless partner or killing the unarmed guy who claims to know important things about your past.

As with any game design observation, and particularly those that involve Deus Ex, I immediately turned it around and looked at The Nameless Mod through its perspective, and I noticed that by far most of the choices we have in the mod are similar choices for whether or not to kill different characters. On some occasions, you have reasons for and against, but I admit they’re never quite as terrific as the Lebedev dilemma, and by far most of them simply concern ancillary characters whose deaths have little consequence and offer you no significant benefits.

And yet I love them. There’s something about the power of life and death - watching an important NPC through your sniper scope and knowing that his or her continued existence is in your hands. It’s the only kind of real plot-relevant choice Grand Theft Auto 4 offers you, and even though there appears to be very few consequences either way, it never gets old. The choice would be monumental in real life, and I don’t wish to ever have to make it, but in a game the consequences are limited in scope and can often be reversed by a quickload.

One of our basic paradigms in the development of TNM is that no characters may be invulnerable unless explained by the story - since TNM takes place in an extremely fictional virtual setting, that of course affords us tremendous latitude in making anybody we want invincible, but that would defeat the spirit of that paradigm: To let the player kill as many people as he or she likes. Thus, only 3 characters in TNM are invulnerable (though killing certain other characters may end the game quite abruptly - though entertainingly!).

Of course this has created an incredible amount of extra work for very little benefit. Perhaps if the game had been designed with the feature in mind from the outset, it wouldn’t have been so complicated, but problematically it was introduced a few years into development. The problem is that the player won’t have any reason to kill most characters except pure sadistic spite. This, combined with the very real risk of missing side missions or plot tidbits, means that most players by far won’t ever kill a non-hostile character, meaning we’re putting all this work into the game for a very small group of players.

Of course we mostly do it to prove we can, so I regret nothing.

The point is, even if you don’t kill an important NPC, you’ll know you have the power to do so. Even if you don’t kill the guy with the side-mission, you’ll know you’re choosing not to kill him, you’re not just sparing him because the game makes you. If we were operating under a tight budget, such a limited benefit wouldn’t be worth the time we’ve spent on it, but under the current circumstances, in my opinion, it is. Because few choices are as powerful as the choice between life and death, even if it’s entirely fictional.

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