When I was a kid, I really hated reading the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine. I hated flipping through the pages only to discover a story dead-end. The whole book feels like a labyrinth of bad endings and a massive ploy by the author to scare me at every turn.  I hated it. Now it feels like RPGs are going that route: choose your own adventure, decide your protagonist’s personality – cheerful and kind or evil and mean? For someone who loves the traditional mode of storytelling, I feel ambivalent towards this trend.

For me, the freedom to choose disrupts the flow of the plot. I can’t get into the story as deeply as I can with a linear story. For example, I cried during the train scene in Shadow Hearts Covenant. It was so sad. But in Persona 4, other than the usual ‘aww, that’s sweet,’ I don’t feel anything deeper than that. I guess all the choices in the game cannot hide the fact that in the end, you won’t emphasize with the protagonist as well as you does in a traditional linear story line. He/she ends up as a puppet for our manipulation.

Plus, when I get to call the shots, I feel like there’s too much of me to enjoy other possible point of views. If I’m the one choosing the adventure, it does go the way I want it to go, but it also feels…boring and common. I’ve been hanging out with MYSELF for so many years, I just want to get away from ME when I read or play games. I don’t want to be ME slipping into the skin of someone else and bringing along my own essence. I want to be somebody else! It’s like, for lack of better example, if you get to play as Professor Snape, invariably, you will inject your own personality into his character no matter how hard you try to emulate him.

Some gamers like having choices because they can do the extreme thing and play as the meanest, baddest protagonist, someone they are not in real life. But for some odd reason, even when I do that, it feels forced and unnatural. For example, my husband is currently playing The Witcher and choosing to be mean and unpleasant in general. I don’t see the White Wolf as such a character! It just doesn’t fit. It’s like asking Alucard to be churlish and punk-like. Come on, the White Wolf is supposed to be aloof, reticent, but inherently noble! Doesn’t anyone else feel that way?

The Witcher screens on GamePro.com

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Arturis

You make some excellent points. Nowadays, with "sandbox" gaming becoming more and more popular, its becoming increasing difficult for developers to tell a cohesive, universal story. The Elder Scrolls games, most notably Daggerfall and Oblivion, do an amazing job of setting you inside a world with few limitations, but due to this I usually stop following the main plot a few hours in, and instead spend my time exploring, slaughtering monsters, and breaking many, many laws.

Though I will point out that there is something to be said for the "chose your own adventure" of game play, especially when it comes to multiplayer/co-op/MMO gaming - you want your character to be yours, and not just Rogue23951 amongst the sea of other players defined by their respective classes and abilities. I believe in that forum, character customization and decision making is still falling way short of what it needs to be.

Coming up with a way of making your character's decisions effect how he/she plays (more than just the superficial scarring and reactionary consequences of Fable/Fable 2) is one of the great challenges that people have yet to find a solution for. As it stands, every character is the hero, they all fill the same rolls. The person ahead of you on your favorite MMO turns in the quest and gets heralded as the hero of the land in the exact same way that the person after you will, and this, in my opinion, completely breaks the immersion of having a living breathing world.

DrZeiss

I think sometimes the sad thing is that many people think they are getting a better value in their games if it has a sandbox mode. They might think they are getting much more replayability but sometimes it just doesn't work that way.
I agree that some games(be it RPG or FPS etc) just have to be more linear than others.
About having choices, I have played Fallout 3 as both a good and evil character and although, most of the time, it's true that it feels weird making evil choices, it's just for fun and I get a kick out of seeing the conversations/reactions which one will never see in real life... unless you get yourself beaten up or arrested afterwards ;)

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