Illusions

Armthony Chairtano here, the internet's most pretentious game designer, and it's time for the latest pondering session from a Youtuber.

All RPGs are an illusion of choice to some degree. Mass Effect most famously culminated all of its choices into picking three colors. Dragon Age's epilogue alters a slideshow. Outer Worlds makes you choose between sides in a war rather than stopping or starting said war.

Even the most celebrated games for reactivity and choice like Alpha Protocol have tons of dead-ends, streamlining, cover ups, etc, and that's not their fault. Until there's AI algorithms capable of generating Dostoyevsky narratives on the fly, all storytelling in games is going to have to be achieved by hand.

So when people ask for more decisions, more reactivity, more ramifications, what they're really asking for is more content, and that's not going to happen until game development itself is radically more optimized.

So then, the way to innovate the genre isn't through additional content, it's through changing the illusion.

Here comes the arm chair design part, as with almost all things in game design, ideas which sound great on paper can totally fail in practice. I'm not trying to virtue this idea from a tower megaphone, but ground level with everybody else.

Imagine an RPG with the same amount of decisions as your usual Mass Effect or Dragon Age, perhaps even less, but the start of it changes depending on when you initiate it. The goal is to portray the world's events like they're happening, even when you're not around. In Witcher 3, certain side-quests couldn't be completed if you didn't do them by a certain time, this would be an iteration of that.

Lets say in the next Mass Effect, there are three planets to visit, but each of them have an event going on that varies depending on the order you visit them. 

On Planet A, there's a civil war brewing between the leading factions.

On Planet B, a plague that's threatening to consume the population.

On Planet C, a gang war over vital resources to your cause.

Normally in games, there's a plotline for each planet, and it begins no matter when you visit. With this system however, you'd have each of the three stories occurring simultaneously. Resolve the Civil War & Plague, and the Gang War's already been wrapped up, and there's a domineering clan you must face that could've been avoided entirely before.

Changing the start of your story, will change the end of your story.

You could even experiment with this idea in an Open World game. Imagine a GTA style game where the narrative's 7 hours rather than 30, but no stories are put on hold. If one of the heroes friends is taken hostage and says "come help me" you actually have to go and help him if you want him to live.

Now, I already see multiple challenges with this. For one thing, you're going to have to create a lot of content that statistically, won't be seen by even half of players, at least if their usual habits continue. There's also a lot of people who enjoy the safety net in Open World games that is free-roam, and don't want a boot constantly putting pressure on their neck.

This isn't about telling designers what to do, it's merely about demonstrating how much of game design is about constructing a convincing illusion, so innovation then doesn't come from adding more but presenting what already exists differently.