Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
One of the things that I think keeps tripping up choice and consequence in games is the idea that your choices matter means they drastically impact the plot. I much prefer to see choices as revealing character, which can be done with much less plot impact, arguably almost none at all. You can have the protagonist saves the world plot and all the same setpieces, but if the protagonist is a bitter jerk it'll feel very different than if they're a nice person, and all you need to alter is dialog.
One of the things that I realized looking back at Bioware's (de)volution is how much "choices matter" in an RPG is smoke and mirrors. And that's fine. It's an entertainment product. If the smoke and mirrors make you feel like you've made an important choice, you've made an important choice. Actual branching content is expensive, and you can't really branch beyond a few paths before it explodes exponentially. KotOR had almost no truly branching content beyond the dialog-tree scale. 99% of the choices in that game were addressed with a few lines of dialog. You'd decide the fate of something important on a planet, they'd tell you what the result was, then you'd leave the planet forever and the game never addressed it again. The ending was the exact same, just with a different cutscene.

And it worked. Even if my dark side choices only affected the game one minute into the future, the game did a good enough job of convincing me that I was participating in a story that the choices felt real. Dialog choices felt like they mattered, even if they didn't change the overall plotline. The game, well, it let you roleplay.

But then Bioware tried to "make your choices matter". It became a big thing. Instead of putting your choices in strategic places where they wouldn't require branching they were put front and center in the main plot. Instead of micro-scale choices that the game could give a convincing micro-scale response to they tried to give you BIG CHOICES. In the process of making choices more nominally consequential, the smoke blew away, the mirrors broke, and the artifice wound up being laid bare.

ME2 makes the problem really obvious right away: They can't deal with the choice they gave you at the end of ME1 without basically making two different games, so instead they just lock you out of the council. But the problem also creeps in more subtly. The dialog becomes too obviously railroaded. Instead of responses that acknowledge what you say, you get dialog options that don't say anything so that the character you're talking to can respond to all of them with the same thing.

WotR and Rogue Trader both do choice way, way better than ME even though the main plot stays more or less on the rails because they focus on giving you locally important choices that they can actually commit to.