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Comment by Leszek | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention, the recently gone bankrupt Telltale, which suffered from decisions that claimed to make a difference to the story, but which really did nothing to the overarching plot (e.g. you choose to save character A instead of B, A is soon killed anyway).

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I've been playing their game The Walking Dead Season 1 and yes, it's mostly the illusion of choice, not real choice. But it's also surprisingly convincing during your first play (characters remember choices you made; they are either friendly or hostile depending on how you treated them; some show up later and some don't; etc). It's only after you replay the game that you see underneath and realize it's all mostly cosmetic, and that you cannot make really meaningful choices.

Illusion of choice can definitely work -- some of my most memorable choices in games are where I _know_ it's the choice between a bad end or continuing-it works because _I_ had to actively make that choice -- but my problem with Telltale is that it dresses it in a way that makes it _seem_ like they are going to be far more impactful, and they rarely are, and there's often a second event to "correct" the choice (e.g. you saved Person A, here's where they die anyway). It breaks the illusion of choice.

You don't need big branching paths for choice to matter, it mattering in the moment is enough, but Telltale's way of making a big deal of choices makes you realise that _nothing_ ever _actually_ matters. It undermines that in the moment nature; they'd be better off just not making you expect it to come up again.

I think we agree :)

Regardless, I remember two instances from Season 1 -- currently replaying episode 2, I think I finished it last time and I know the "plot twist" of the dairy farm -- where you choose to save one character and the other dies, and your choices seem to stick (so far, the other character is alive and even remembers you chose her/him over the other option). The problem for me is that it doesn't really matter who you chose, because these are cardboard characters and whoever survives is going to fill the same role. And of course, the same situations play out with minor differences no matter what. I suppose it'd be too expensive to actually have the game vary wildly depending on who you save or where you go.

If you mean the person you saved eventually dies anyway, isn't this also a flaw of the source material. I stopped watching TV show because of this: it ends up becoming a monotonous series of main character deaths.

Indeed, and this is in a video game, where swapping in a different character model and audio into an identical scenario is reasonably cheap, and thus can be done for many decision. Trying to do the same thing with real actors and re-filming scenes based on choices feels... harder.

On the other hand, I loved the decision making in Skyrim.

Major plot points turn out completely differently on every playthrough. I played as a nord - storm cloak (nationalists) in my first run based on the tradtitional mold of the warrior hero freeing their country from the Invaders.

Mid way through the game their facist side became more apparent, and I helped a genuine asshole of a person become king.

This made my 2nd playthrough as the empire (colonists/settlers) just that much more fun, as I tried to seek revenge on the asshole that I didn't like from a previous life.

It has been 8 years since it came out, and no game captured me quite like it. (Borderlands and Witcher came close)

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