"Beyond: Two Souls' most unique feature is ahead of it's time (in the worst way possible)"

Gazza_N

I've not played Beyond: Two Souls, but there's been a lot of noise about it lately (mostly regarding its rubbish writing). However, this article goes into an aspect of the game that many apparently missed: there's an invisible choice/consequence system at work that makes seamless changes to the plot based on player actions.

When I replayed Beyond: Two Souls, I was astounded to find so many little and big things I missed on my first playthrough. Little things like vision objects, and big things like scenarios that were actually dependent on a choice I made earlier. I found out about so many little decisions I made that caused subtle changes throughout the game. Changes that never seemed like variables, but rather scripted scenarios. I found out that I played through scenes that some players never saw, and missed more exploration-based interactions than I ever would have guessed.

http://playersdelight.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/beyond-two-souls-most-unique-feature-is.html

So, is this a catastrophic failure to provide proper user feedback, or is it, as the author posits, the result of overly-signposted games that have taught players that they can only react to explicit prompts? I, for one, recall many such scenarios in old RPGs, or games like Deus Ex, but must choices be signposted to ensure the players feel they have agency, or is the "holy crap, I didn't get that!" factor when discussing the game with friends enough?

DISCUSS, if you will!

Tuism

Wow I loved that article, and made me wanna take a look at Beyond.

Indigo Prophecy was one of my favourite games a while back, and I did kinda enjoy Heavy Rain despite feeling quite let down by some of its narrative and immersion-breaking repetition ("JAY-SUNN!!").

I really like the concept of invisible choice - it makes the experience an experience, instead of a series of left/rights. Though it can be clearly seen that such a system makes the player lose their sense of agency. And agency is the thing that separates a game from an interactive fiction from a movie/book, right?

So the question is - is it intrinsically better to play a game or to experience a story? As that sense of linearity seems to be the gripe about this invisible choice system.

Or is it an expectation problem - people playing a game expect a game, people watching a movie expects a movie. A game that comes across as a story or a movie that comes across a game (imagine, say, when you're watching a movie in a cinema, prompts continually come up to ask what you want to happen on the screen, or a movie that changes its story without you knowing you're changing it by reading your brain waves) may have expectation issues where the audience experiences dissonance.

Then, is that dissonance not just a result of ignorance? If people are more familiar with the format, would they not be more able to enjoy its nuances?

Something that's kinda been back of my mind as I read the "symptoms" of the invisible choice thing was how games have become increasingly more and more a chain of deliveries instead of worlds to explore - it's what happened to Final Fantasy, it's what happened to FPSs (the Doom levels VS COD set-piece tunnel level design image comes to mind), and just in general. People expect options, but they expect them in their face and not "to be found".

Is that a bad thing, intrinsically? I'm not sure. I get that we all live "fast lives" and that we don't have a million hours to grind looking for a pixel in a room, and as much as I enjoyed old-school games I also got tired of the pace. But taken to the extreme, we have games which are essentially movies offering pseudo-choice to feed an addiction to being in control as opposed to real meaningful choice.

I would propose that the way to a "good" invisible choice system lies in an early education of the player that choices are happening all the time by offering maybe a little condensed piece of narrative that "explains" the way that things you do affect the narrative (not verbose, mind you), perhaps offering some kind of mechanic up to show that, in a micro scale (some kind of re-do time travel thing or flashbacks or whatever), then let the player loose into the macro game with that knowledge. It was a tutorial problem.

Then also, maybe making each of the outcomes from the invisible choices more satisfying may be a way about making it better - most of the problems cited with the lack of agency comes from unsatisfied, unresolved outcomes, but there can certainly be variable outcomes without sacrificing storytelling integrity of each outcome? Perhaps this is VERY hard to construct, but would go a ways towards having a happy audience.

Then - if the game has multiple outcomes, then they should have built social interactions into the game - some way for people to know that other people had a different experience from yours. Yes the reviewers and panellist eventually understood, but I bet many didn't. Off the top of my head, a couple of Indie games did it - Gunpoint had an ending where you write a blog about your adventure at the end of the game, and you were guided to see what other people wrote. In Home there was something similar in that people tweeted about what they were doing. Of course, this raises spoiler issues, but it could be done subtly.

It was an interesting thought experiment :)

Gibbo

I would certainly much prefer for 'choice' games to take this approach where you aren't explicitly told "oh hey you are now making an important decision that will affect things", because I find that you're otherwise encouraged to reload from a previous savepoint if you don't like the results of the choice you just made.

Walking Dead is a good example of this, where big bold letters tell you that you just made an important choice, and if you don't like it then reload. If choices in a game are being made (or the option is available) without being pointed out, it should result in a more natural and rewarding experience without you trying to rig the system to get the best possible outcome.

On the flip-side, the point is valid that most players (who are used to games taking a hand-holding approach) aren't ready for that level of self-discovery, but maybe there are ways around it? In a game like Skyrim you would miss the vast majority of content and story if you chose to only play through the main missions, but from the start you are encouraged to explore the lands for yourself and by doing so you will stumble upon the extra content (secret tombs, treasures, interesting characters, side-missions etc.)

So could Beyond have told the player in some way at the beginning that they will have choices throughout the game and are encouraged to explore their environments, then leave them to it from there?

Gazza_N

Tuism said:

I would propose that the way to a "good" invisible choice system lies in an early education of the player that choices are happening all the time by offering maybe a little condensed piece of narrative that "explains" the way that things you do affect the narrative (not verbose, mind you), perhaps offering some kind of mechanic up to show that, in a micro scale (some kind of re-do time travel thing or flashbacks or whatever), then let the player loose into the macro game with that knowledge. It was a tutorial problem.

Gibbo said:

So could Beyond have told the player in some way at the beginning that they will have choices throughout the game and are encouraged to explore their environments, then leave them to it from there?

The funniest thing is that this isn't a new system, and I agree that it may well be a matter of how it's introduced to the player. The original Deus Ex, for instance, had all manner of seamless reactivity. They introduced this after your first mission, where characters would make comments reflecting your play style (stealth or killemall) and which side-missions you had accomplished (like whether you rescued a fellow agent). The real stroke of genius, though, was if you entered the ladies' bathroom while exploring your headquarters. Your boss would chastise you for having done so if you spoke to him later. All those little touches were enough to impart the reactivity of the world to you, so that when events did occur, you were generally of the opinion that they were implicitly caused or influenced by your actions. No popups, no "PRESS X TO CHOOSE Y" prompts, just your in-game actions and their consequences.

Squidcor

I would count this as a failure provide feedback. To pull a quote from Rules of Play:

"Meaningful play is what occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernible and integrated into the larger context of the game"

Discernible is the key word there. You need to make the players feel like they are making meaningful choices, regardless of whether they are or not.

This doesn't mean you need to explicitly tell players the outcomes and repercussions of their choices, or ram "THIS IS AN IMPORTANT CHOICE" in their faces. It does however mean that you need to somehow convey that their choices make a difference. You want players to go "Ooooooh... this is totally happening because I did (or chose) X, I wander what would happen if I had done something else?".

The real design problem here is how to convey that choices are meaningful when using an invisible choice system.

Perhaps a solution is to be explicit in the beginning of the game, and let the player know how important their choices will be throughout the rest of the game?