Darth Hater

When BioWare first announced Star Wars: The Old Republic, they released a video explaining the collaboration between LucasArts and BioWare as well as some of the key features of the game. One of these features was the lack of a save button. Traditionally in BioWare games, players could see the result of their choices in-game and then load up a prior save to see what happens when they make a different choice. However, in Star Wars: The Old Republic, there is no save button; the decisions you make are the decisions you live with. As more information about the game comes to the surface, the key feature of making decisions that last seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Something psychological happens when we make a choice. In order to make a choice, we have to give something up to gain something else. The same occurs when making choices in a game, but with a choice that can later be changed, you never fully forget the thing you gave up, leaving it lingering in the back of your mind. Players who make permanent decisions are more satisfied with their choices than players who can change their choice later. Players feel like they need to make the right choice to become viable. Due to this, if the option to change their choice is available, on average, they will second-guess themselves. They will stress over minor aspects of their characters, determined to find the most optimized configuration and setup. Some games are event built on this notion of second-guessing, such as deck-building card games like Magic: The Gathering and Dominion.

A recent real example of this permanent decision-making in games is Risk: Legacy. This version of Risk plays just like the original, with the noted exception that players mark the board each round, permanently altering the gamespace for each game thereafter. Rob Daviau, the game’s designer, talked about some of the reasons he made the change on BoardGameGeek, saying, “The design started with an attempt to make a game decision matter, to up the ante, to maybe make you sweat a bit before you do something. We all make plenty of decisions every day. Many are meaningless. Some stay with us forever. We all have the girl (or boy) who got away, the job we should or shouldn’t have taken, the night out that ended badly, the girl (or boy) we should’ve let get away. We can move on from these or try to atone or learn from them or even enjoy who we are because of them, but there’s one thing we can’t do: we can’t take them back. There are no do overs in life. Some decisions just make you who you are.”

If choices and decisions are permanent, our brains have a way of rationalizing any flaws or defects that result from such decisions. We might say things like, "I like having a unique character, it adds challenge to gameplay" or "my combat skills reflect my character’s personality." It’s interesting to observe because despite our choice that made us unique, we’ll still seek out others who made similar decisions to associate with. We’ll create subcultures within the game world to socialize with and find friends in. These subcultures are often more specific than just class or specialization, such as Petopia, a site for World of Warcraft Hunters who love taming and collecting pets.

There is a difference, however, between good and bad implementation of permanent decisions. Most MMOs allow the player to create their character, choosing the sex, appearance, and name. These are good implementations of permanent decisions because they have no weight on gameplay and combat. Regardless if the player chooses a female elf archer or a male cybernetic sniper, the game still plays effectively the same. Bad implementation of permanent decisions begins once racial abilities are introduced. A new player can’t possibly know how powerful each racial ability is with each class, especially at end-game two years later. Being an orc in World of Warcraft meant having Blood Fury as an extra button to increase damage or healing, which pales in comparison to a tauren of the same class in a raid encounter. How many players created a new character of a class they already had just because of the bad implementation of permanent choice?

Not to say gameplay-changing permanence can’t exist. The key to creating natural and fun permanence is for players to sacrifice versatility for specialization. By giving up the ability to do all things, they gain power in doing one thing well. Using the same character creation example, choosing a class would fall into this category. By choosing a class, you’re given the tools, skills, and abilities you need to fulfill your role and playstyle. Past games, and even upcoming games like Funcom’s The Secret World, have you distributing skills points into different skills at character creation. With no knowledge of how each skill and ability works, it’s easy to create a character that doesn’t function the way you want it to. If you’re someone like me who has never played Dungeons & Dragons before, try creating a custom character for Dungeons & Dragons Online. It’s a hopeless mess leaving the player overwhelmed before even entering the game world.

The unfortunate part of all this is, like other games, Star Wars: The Old Republic has the trappings of withdrawing its promise of a world where decisions matter. It doesn’t matter how your decisions and reactions affect your companions, because you can just give them gifts to increase their affection. Flashpoints are a highly customized form of instances that integrate narrative into gameplay, but it’s hard to care about the choices made in a Flashpoint when they don’t effect anything outside of it. The ability to change your advanced class after your initial choice exemplifies the slippery slope notion that choices and decisions made at early levels may not follow through to later levels.

I realize many of these features are simply quality of life conveniences, made so the player spends less time bogged down by game systems and more time having fun. But the phenomenon of players asking for control over choices they shouldn’t have control over defeats the impact those choices have. If asked, the majority would choose to be able to back out or change every decision they make in the game. However, having the ability does not make the game more fun, and subconsciously, players are happier without it.

Daniel Gilbert, psychology professor at Harvard University and author of “Stumbling on Happiness,” demonstrates this notion with an experiment involving Monet paintings. He shows a series of Monet paintings to a person and asks them to rank them from one to five; one being the most liked, five being the least liked. The person is given the painting they ranked as three to keep. Some time later, the same experiment is conducted with the same person, but this time they rank the painting they have, the one they ranked as three the previous time, as one, the most liked. This same notion can be applied to games. We’re more likely to enjoy what we already have than what we believe we might enjoy more.

The whole idea is if you’re going to design a game where your decisions have impact, those decisions need to have consequence down the line as well, whether it’s three hours later, three months later, or three years later. The most effective way to achieve that goal is with permanent choices. Not everything needs to have permanency to it, but important story beats, interactions with significant characters, and monumental moments should lay the foundation for how a player’s story unfolds. Players want to be able to compare figurative notes on how their stories turned out. It’s only through our unique and lasting choices, whether they’re good or bad, light or dark, we can stand out.