Carth had a lot more going on than he gets credit for. He was pretty easily overshadowed by the other party members in KOTOR, mostly because he was the stern, stoic, pokerfaced husk of the group, but there was more to him than that. Quite a few people complain that he’s a very whiney addition to the group, moaning about what you’re doing, and generally being a pouty little nancy no fun.
That mindset never made much sense to me. Yes, he’s quick to disagree with what you’re doing, but shouldn’t that be fantastic, not awful? Take one small scene near the start of the game. Generic alien tentacle face is getting rocks thrown at him by kids, and you’re given a dull and clichéd moral choice to help him or ignore him. Where it gets interesting is when you say you don’t care. At first, Carth mildly admonishes you, saying that you should probably step in and do something, but if you persist, then he actually steps in himself.
Yes, he acts like a human being, quelle surprise. He actually takes a course of action not only independent of the player, but distinctly opposed to your wishes. Isn’t that brilliant? The actual example of “oh no that alien is being bullied” is a bit trite, but the result is a very interesting one. One of your party members legitimately goes against the player.
Take a recent example from Dragon Age, in the mage’s tower. You come across Wynne, a pleasant old wizard lass, and if you have Morrigan in your party, she wants you to kill Wynne because she’s fundamentally opposed to people being pleasant. If you say no, Morrigan just pouts, sits back, and loses a boatload of magical friendship points – 19, from memory.
Nineteen, when the scale only goes between plus and minus twenty! That’s almost somebody going from the love of your life to a complete stranger. You’d think that a fully developed person would do something in such a situation where they disagree to such a strong, passionate extent like that. I’m not saying that it’s silly for her to care about something like that so much. Quite the opposite, it’s always intriguing to see a character show some raw energy about an issue they really feel personally affronted by. I’d just like to see a reaction that’s actually bordering on emotionally appropriate.
Most of the games with ethical choice systems fall prey to this. The easy excuse that the developers put in is that if you hit a low enough score on the friendship meter, then party member x decides to bail out. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good mechanic, but it’s a passive one. They’re not really reacting to a specific event, and even then, they won’t directly challenge the player, and intervene of their own accord. It just feels hollow, and it strips away meaning from an action that could actually end up being a very dramatic, memorable stand for their personal beliefs.
I liked the tone in this one, it had a bit more humour going for it - which seems to be a mainstay of the rps diet - but it felt a little less focused than the piece I went with. Still good, and it was a close call, but, the other piece just felt like it was stronger.
Classes in role playing games are one of the most important decisions, if not the defining choice of your character, and games should try to reflect that choice. If you go ahead and pick a wizard, then you should feel like you’re playing a wizard – seems pretty straightforward, yes? It doesn’t need to be a gigantic change, making the entire game completely different; small attempts can work just as well.
In Deus Ex, there is nearly always about a half a dozen different ways to approach each obstacle. If you’re playing a shifty hacker, you can sneak past that guard, disable the security cameras, and reprogram all of the turrets to shoot at everything. Or maybe you feel like crawling through some air vents. Maybe you want to be a silent ninja assassin, and pick off every guard one at a time, dragging their bodies into the shadows. Maybe you just want to blow everything up with a big rocket launcher.
The point is that the game reinforced your choices. They felt validated. Not only that, but they were distinct. Each way to approach a problem had its own sense of identity about it. Unfortunately, this seems to be weeding its way out of rpgs of late, and in lieu of these choices, we have delegated player roles.
By that I mean the current set up of healer, dps, tank – the guy that heals damage, the guy that deals damage, and the guy that takes damage. When you spell it out like that, it already looks pretty flat and dull, doesn’t it? Think about World of Warcraft. The game rarely, if ever, reinforces your choice of class, just your designated role.
Take the rogue class. Pick a roguish character from something. Han Solo, maybe. He’s a pretty well defined character. He’s a sneaky smuggler guy who shoots firsts and doesn’t bother with questions afterwards. He’s smarmy, kind of arrogant, dabbles in pretty much any illegal activity that comes his way; whatever it takes to make a quick buck, really.
Has anybody ever felt anything even approaching that while playing a rogue in World of Warcraft? The game world doesn’t react to your choice at all. You’re not a rogue, you’re just a dps. More or less interchangeable for any other dps class. Some of your attacks might have slightly different effects, and your abilities are somewhat different, but that’s a very shallow sort of sense of identity there.
If people could get out of this mindset of this three role system, then some really interesting mechanics might emerge. Take Gandalf. Was he just a ranged dps guy with a cool stick? Did he spend most of his time dealing damage, or reading books, talking to people, protecting his friends, trying to actually figure out what was going on? Something as prolific as a wizard shouldn’t be hard to express within a game at all, but instead we’re stuck with these player roles that restrict a lot of freedon. I’d be very intrigued to see what somebody might come up with if we got rid of them.
Now this was just... a huge mess. Again, I picked a topic that was too big for five hundred words. I did that a few times here, and I just ended up trying to fit too much into too little space. I'll probably come back to this at some point without constraints in mind and just let it go for as long as it feels like it ought to be, but for the purposes of this exercise, it was a pretty poor piece.
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