Wings of Liberty: Execution of Choice

Choice in video games; this usually brings to mind static menus and conversation trees. This isn’t our only option though. Choice has been very popular for morality systems. Whether the Paragon - Renegade of Mass Effect or Demon’s Soul’s world status it’s the same choice. Be a good guy and save the world, or do the dastardly deeds. I think we, as developers and gamers, need to remember that choice isn’t just moral. I choose pie over cake, and not because the cake’s a lie, but simply for taste.

In the Starcraft Brood War expansion the players were given choice. The mission I recall was the preparation for the siege of Korhal. To undermine the Dominion’s force you had to choose, by action, whether to destroy the nuclear silos or physics labs of the enemy. Eliminating one group would end the mission and affect which mission you would play next. You got to choose your next mission based on which base you attacked. The back story is that taking out the silos eliminated the threat of nukes while taking out the physics labs disabled the Dominion’s fleet of Battlecruisers.

This was a brilliant move. Let the player choose their enemy and affect the narrative in a non-consequential way. No matter your choice Korhal was to fall, it was how you the player wanted to go about it. Minor changes to the narrative about whether it was nuclear bombardment or a hail of capital ship fire can go unmentioned. This kind of choice carries over into Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. I won’t go into spoiler details but I will summarize what leads up to the choices.

Before certain missions there are cut scenes of Jim Raynor discussing the impending mission. Some extenuating circumstance is brought up and two support characters will give Jim an alternative mission. You pick the mission and it only affects that one mission. One affects the type of units you can build but also the fate of a character. Continuity of story is sacrificed to give the player a static choice. While this is the more popular method today we have to ask if it’s the best.

The original formula worked so well because at any moment you could switch which base you were attacking. The player made the choice through actions in game. If one base was proving too hard then they could regroup and try for another. This style of choice is interesting to me. I’ll go into further detail in my next post. Cause this is getting a little long.

How about you, readers? Leave a comment or send me an e-mail about interesting choices in video games you’ve played or heard of or anything you’d like to talk about. Bonus points for youtube videos.


EDIT
I changed up the font so that it would be uniformed. Did it for all my posts. Let me know if you like it. I'm open to suggestions on fonts. Still trying to find the right one. 

Hello World

Hi there, I'm Mad and my thing is story. I'm a young writer, avid gamer and student of video game design  at the University of Texas at Dallas. Between reading and gaming all my life I understand storytelling in different mediums. That's what I'm here to talk about. Stories across mediums whether in movies, literature, video games or new media endeavors.
I'm here to talk about the good or bad ways developers and writers implement their stories in their given mediums. Movies don't work the same way a video game does just as you would expect a movie to differ from a novel. Then there are new media stories; an odd area I've studied where a story is told through new and unexpected modes. These are hard to define or explain but are remarkable for the level of interactivity in the stories. I'll get into that in a future post though.
For now just remember my name is Mad and I'm here to see what I can get into. Maybe y'all will like it too.