Narrative Choices in Video Games (Telltale Games vs Quantic Dream)

Often, games claim to have their choices affect the outcome of the story. But do they though? Is the infamous illusion of choice enough for developers and players to keep going with this façade? Or will there be a contender that will challenge the game forever?

Choice in a game is a weapon for the player

Stories aren't limited to any medium. And video games, is objectively, the best one for telling of narratives. You can tell a story just by the gameplay itself. Choice allows the player to control and manipulate the game's attributes, whether it be related to the game's plot, mechanics, appearance, etc.

Now, what if the writer gives the player the power of choice in the narrative?

The company that advertises itself the most of having "choice-based games" at the moment is Telltale Games. While there are instances of multiple endings, the power of their choices doesn't go at their highest potential. They are often used to frustrate, limit the capability and confuse the player's expectation. Sadly, they were the front face of choice-based games for many for so long.

And then Detroit: Become Human came along.

Every choice serves the story in terms of character development, the development of the player's expectation and motivation for the story and narrative pathways. Unlike Telltale Games, their way of implementing choices encourages players to choose what they want and choose the others after finishing the game to learn about the story which ultimately gives Detroit Become Human its replayability. The fact that the game has so many different outcomes, rewards the players for their need for exploration. If the player hates androids and wants them to fail at their task to 'become human' they are rewarded with their ending.



Flowcharts are lovely.



Another thing that Telltale does poorly is that they give themselves excuses to have the player be limited in their outcomes. "The world is rough and sometimes doing the right thing won't result towards the best thing" mentality. With Detroit Become Human, having so many outcomes and having so many fair instances of the players being able to fail, rewards success rather than give frustration. If the player manages to save a character, they are rewarded to have that character be an important element of the story and the ending. Meanwhile in Telltale's games, most of the time, you don't even have the option of doing the best thing, or even the right thing, just for the sake of making the player frustrated or emotionally impacted by the game's story, but in truth, they are frustrated with the game's infamous illusion of choice.

Will he remember that though? Will he?

This leads us to Telltale's most notable problem. They make choice-based games to tell a linear story, rather than make a choice-based game to give players a story-branching game expanding the player's knowledge of the world and story through multiple pathways of the narrative that results in multiple outcomes for the player to find, which Detroit and Undertale do with flying colors.



This type of choice-based game makes the story more dense with content and the characters more complex and deep, which Telltale attempts to have.

I loved Tales from the Borderlands though.