You're the creative director for the next up-and-coming RPG. You step on stage in front of an audience of eager fans (pretend we still do these things live), and after the reveal trailer rolls you steeple your fingers and the grand promise you make to players is:
- "That mountain? You can go there!"
- "A living, breathing world"
- "A story with choices that matter"
You say "choices that matter" and the crowd cheers, though they're quietly harboring skepticism. Would they have believed you outright if you went for the mountain? Maybe. They're all buzzword-laden lines, so perhaps it won't make any difference in the end. But whether or not the choice perceptibly changes your trajectory, it sure felt like a big deal in the moment, and that's what makes a choice matter.
Giving me choices that matter, not just to its own systems and evolving story, but to me as a player, is something Obsidian's latest RPG Avowed just nails. It's constantly giving me dialogue options that let me roleplay my Envoy in interesting ways, and choices that I can feel are going to have repercussions later on, but also choices that just feel fun and interesting to make even if I don't know whether they'll turn back up in the epilogue.
It hurts my heart a little to find yet another way to praise Avowed as a direct response to something that I felt let down by in Dragon Age: The Veilguard last year, but I haven't been able to ditch the feeling in my 80 hours and counting.
One of my major complaints in my Veilguard review was that it became obsessed with proving to me that my choices mattered. Reminders would pop up in the middle of a cutscene making sure I understood that events playing out were a result of my decisions.
But "choices that matter" isn't just about how many ways a game can demonstrate cause and effect to me. A few slightly different dialogue lines or choosing which of my party members will have a bruised up face for 10 hours of my playthrough just didn't matter to me if the choice that made it happen was uninteresting. Tangible effects are an important part of making choices matter, but without a choice that's difficult or surprising or scary I'd rather just not get to choose anything at all.
Avowed has heaped my plate full of steaming hot choices. One of the first things I did with my "Court Augur" background was decide that yes I did actually have a romantic history with this Inquisitor Lödwyn person everyone's talking about. I had no idea if it was going to come up much (it has, fun enough) or if it was just a little moment of backstory flair, but it sure felt juicy to make that choice.
Later on in Avowed's second area, the Memory of the Deep side quest asks me to find a hidden meteorite and choose whether to give it back to the person who originally gave me the quest, or someone else. I actually sat there and thought about it for a solid five minutes. Giving the meteorite back to the farmer who asked for it could have serious consequences but giving it to the very suspect "Giftbearer" didn't seem right either. I was pretty sure this choice wasn't actually going to result in any change to the game—a sequence involving an incursion of new dream thralls seemed unlikely—I just cared about the choice itself. Should I let this guy have back the thing that could put him in danger?
There are so many other choices in Avowed that have stopped me and made me think. Should I lie to a dreamscourged ranger about the fate of her patrol partner? Should I execute a traitor who's trying to avoid further bloodshed? Should I help a dreamscourged man euthanize himself even if his sole surviving family member begs me not to let him? Many of these choices didn't have any effect on other parts of the game—just a quick exchange of dialogue and a strikethrough in my quest log. But those choices mattered to me just because they were interesting problems for my emotional little human brain.
Avowed has launched a bare three and a half months after The Veilguard, meaning that nothing in it could possibly be a reaction to critiques of BioWare's storytelling, and yet I just kept finding ways to directly compare them.
I found myself uninterested in choosing to save Minrathous or Treviso in The Veilguard because choosing between two mostly identical dragon attacks meant nothing to me. But a similar situation about the fate of an entire city in Avowed really made me stop to think about what it would mean for the future of its citizens.
I was annoyed when all of my companions in The Veilguard ended their personal quests by putting major decisions about their lives in my hands. Choices that, again, seemed sort of morally equivalent and uninteresting to consider, but more maddening for the fact that they kept letting me be the one to choose.
Meanwhile, much later in Avowed, I see one of my companions making a similar choice about her future and what to pursue. My Envoy has a dialogue option saying: "wait, you want me to choose?" and my companion responds—all but looking directly into the camera—that no of course she's going to make her own choice but she'd like my opinion as a friend. Obsidian couldn't have predicted this very specific thing bugging me in The Veilguard, and yet.
"Choices that matter" is one of those marketing lines that gets tossed around as often as any other lofty promise about "immersion" in games. It was a real bummer to see a series I've loved miss what matters most about making choices matter—that the choices themselves, not just their outcomes, have to be interesting—but Avowed has lifted my spirits a little bit by just getting it.
Avowed has plenty of cause and effect type choices that change the course of the story and affect major parts of my surroundings. It has missable quests with pretty big implications. It has one of those RPG epilogue reels where you find out the fate of everyone you influenced with your decisions. It has a whole lot of choices that have observable effects, but more importantly it has choices that matter.
