How Videogames Make The Ultimate Sacrifice

fallout 3 was an okay video game it's got a fun open world there's a lot to do and the story while riddled with plot holes is decently entertaining with one major exception right at the very end of the main quests you're tasked with reactivating this big water purifier that will deliver clean water to the entire capital wasteland but to get to the console someone's going to have to take a massive dose of radiation someone is going to have to sacrifice themselves this final quest should be a huge climactic choice that brings together everything you've seen over the course of your adventure but it just doesn't really work what's supposed to be the climax of the story doesn't feel like it has much of any dramatic weight whatsoever fallout as a series is built around giving players lots of choices and ways to solve problems in a way that reflects the kind of character they want the players so funneling the player into something they may not want to do and giving them no opportunity to use their skills to get around the problem robs the sacrifice of its meaning even after the broken steel dlc fixed this issue a little bit the game still heavily implies you are coward for not trying to sacrifice yourself instead of delegating to you know maybe one of your three radiation immune companions for example when i first played fallout 3 about 10 years ago myself and the rest of the internet were justifiably a bit upset but in looking back on fallout 3's ending it's clear that its problems are just a part of a much broader pattern of video games being rubbish are using sacrifice as a mechanical and narrative theme in left for dead for example the aptly named campaign the sacrifice is all about forcing one player to willingly sacrifice themselves to let the others live but the dead player still wins along with everyone else and said sacrifice is a 10 second run to press the button at which point the game immediately ends not very interesting in some strategy games like the og x-com using soldiers and suicide bombers should be a dramatic last resort but it's actually so cheap and reliable that it unbalances the whole thing and a variety of gaming stories are ruined by pointless feeling sacrifices that unduly take away agency from the player even when you were just kicking this guy's ass i mean seriously long story short sacrifices are a huge part of not just storytelling but of human culture as a whole and they can be a fantastic way to inject drama and excitement into all sorts of stories think about how the iron giant sacrifices himself to stop that big missile how tragic it is when romeo and juliet mutually sacrifice their lives at the end and the triumph of darth vader symbolically redeeming himself by killing the emperor at the expense of his own life although i guess palpatine was just sort of fine actually but the point stands why do video games specifically struggle when it comes to portraying such a universal dramatic trope well i think the problem lies in the nature of video games as an interactive medium you aren't just watching someone make a sacrifice you have to live with the consequences and often make the decision yourself this presents a problem because it means players are going to be able to go out of their way to avoid having to get into that situation in the first place and might end up regretting any decisions they make take the ending of fable 2 for example a spoiler warning for a game released in the late neolithic era skip to this time stamp to avoid it you can't complain now at the very end of the game you're asked to make a wish you can choose to resurrect a bunch of people resurrect your sister and more importantly your companion dog who accompanied you through the whole game but takes a bullet during the final quest or gain a million gold which is enough to buy yourself a whole castle it's impossible to get everything you want and this makes the end of the game a properly bittersweet moment you either sacrifice a bunch of lives for money your own self-interest to do objectively the right thing or any semblance of a reward just to get your dog and sister back it's a great sacrifice decision to the point that it worked a bit too well because players didn't like having to choose between being a good person and getting their pup back they sent a bunch of death threats the lionhead the developers who eventually caved and let people get their dog back in a dlc area cleverly named cheaters crypt allowing players to get their real happy ending and destroying the integrity of this sacrifice in the process even taking morality and sentiment out of the equation sacrifices can still be difficult to execute sacrifices as a mechanic are incredibly hard to balance because they're inherently undesirable a strategy that loses nothing will always win out of the one that requires the loss of a crucial resource even if a pyrrhic victory would be more fun take fire emblem for example a tactic series that prides itself on having a rich cast of likable well-rounded characters and permadeath opening up the possibility for suicidal last stands to hold off an enemy characters diving in the path of foes to save their pals and a genuine story of wars cast on individuals however basically nobody plays fire emblem like that because if a character dies not only are you then at a massive disadvantage going forwards but you'll also miss out on whatever story stuff that character was involved in what this means is that most fire emblem play is incredibly cautious to minimize any possible casualties and is very liberal with reloads in the event you make a mistake bypassing the very idea of making interesting sacrifices in the first place this leads me to the ultimate player psychology problem faced by any game that includes sacrificing things as a mechanic or a story element they need to strike a delicate balance between encouraging or forcing players to engage with the sacrifices in the first place whilst also mitigating the potentially low energy outcome if players are able to get out of making a sacrifice they will but if they're forced to wallow in one that's too upsetting they'll lose their investment and bail on the whole thing it's a real conundrum you might think that getting around this issue would be as simple as making sacrifices desirable and empowering to pull off but that's easier said than done these sorts of positive feedback loops can also have their dangers if players are allowed to get too powerful or too good at a game allowing them to oblivate having to sacrifice anything at all then the integrity of these decisions falls apart in darkest dungeon players will be hesitant to risk their good heroes who they spend many hours building up and so will gradually figure out that they can send a never-ending parade of free low-level chumps into the dungeon and essentially sacrifice their bodies and sanity for some easy cash this is a fun realization that feeds into the themes of the game but it also removes the stress and danger that makes darkest dungeon's most gut-wrenching mid-fight sacrifices work so well because you've become so efficient that nothing you really care about is on the line anymore the best way to keep sacrifices from derailing a game in one direction or another is to contain their effects and stop them getting too out of hand or dragging a game down keeping things in a nice equilibrium this brings me on to a little game called inscription which has sacrificed as a theme baked into basically every aspect of the game oh and before i go any further this is a dan mullens game so inscription's got loads and loads of secrets and fourth wall breaking stuff but don't worry i'm not gonna spoil any of it i'll only be talking about mechanical stuff that you'll see in maybe the first hour or two of the game nothing else so inscription is a card game where all of your creatures are literal forest animals like stoats wolves ravens cockroaches etc and rather than paying for them with a manner or money you pay for them with blood which you get from sacrificing and bones that you collect whenever one of your creatures dies one of the only cards in the game that's completely free to play are these useless defenseless squirrels meaning that first you've got to get squirrels on the board then sacrifice them in order to summon more powerful cards like this stoat but the sacrifice mechanic goes a bit deeper than that you won't get very far relying on a measly one squirrel a turn so you'll have to start killing potentially useful pals if you want to get ahead is it worth killing this wolf to inefficiently rush out the bigger creature in a better position should you play the long game by investing some blood in a warren that generates sacrifice fodder or is it even worth letting creatures die so you can pick up some bones and play a rattlesnake you only have a limited number of creatures in your deck and once sacrificed they're gone meaning that each decision to kill a creature has a measurable consequence right off the bat and it's impossible to avoid the system entirely this theme continues into the wider game to upgrade cards you have to sacrifice another to transfer its effects or sacrifice a pair to merge them together into a single stronger but less versatile card that's not to mention the most powerful usable items which require a little bit more of a physical sacrifice like this knife which lets you put one of your eyes on the damage scale blinding half your screen however in spite of the amount of sacrificing you do none of these effects are permanent dead creatures return to your deck after each battle the damage scale is reset and you'll even get a new eye to replace one that you've lost inscriptions sacrifices are meaningful and you're encouraged to engage with the system as much as possible but their effects are usually contained to a single battle and even if you do completely mess up the game's roguelike structure ensures that even death can be just another useful sacrifice of course inscription isn't alone here by limiting the scope of sacrifices you make games can still have them be meaningful without making them completely demoralizing in outer wilds sacrificing your life in pursuit of science is part of the course with you routinely doing downright dangerous things like leaping into mysterious portals or braving a crumbling world in search of knowledge but in spite of the fact that you'll just be sent back to the start of the day if you die these dangerous journeys retain their attention because dying will mean having to travel all the way back to the planet you were on and potentially missing out on more discoveries so if you're going to do something as dumb as this it better be worth it however while the approach of these games to sacrifice is great they're not completely doing justice to the concept by letting you quickly get out of the consequences what about games that force you to actually live with the effects of your sacrifices long term well games that choose to do this are more often than not complete bummers so the best ones need to make their sacrifices and their consequences interesting enough to keep you playing instead of giving players an excuse to run away and play something less stressful two games that immediately come to mind here are pathologic and lisa the painful two games that go all in on being relentlessly depressing and in doing so create some fantastically tough and engaging sacrifice decisions in pathologic 2 the unnamed town the game is set in is rapidly falling to a plague and it's your job to keep everyone alive something that's basically impossible to do particularly if you want to stay alive yourself luckily the game is incredibly freeform allowing and encouraging you to serve the greater good in unscrupulous ways you can hack up bodies to research a cure at the expense of your reputation loot abandoned homes and risk getting beaten up by muggers and use your medical privilege to choose who lives and who dies ultimately shaping the future of the town as well as the grand theater player of destiny that is the game's story similarly in lisa the painful the depravity of the world of olathe is constantly shoved in your face with brad the player character having to make several difficult choices over the course of the game for example in act 1 you need to choose between sacrificing a party member who is instantly and permanently executed and one of your arms which massively reduces your stats and disables certain moves and a bit later on you could even wager the lives of your party members in russian roulette this sort of stuff happens over and over again all with the aim of breaking down your resolve you might go into lisa thinking that you're going to be a good selfless person but when you're faced with the prospect of having no limbs to fight with suddenly a little bit of human sacrifice doesn't look so bad but i think the best game at having real honest-to-god sacrifices is a little game called unsighted which initially appears to be a fairly standard metroidvania but hides a lot of hidden moral complexity underneath the surface see as a result of plot shenanigans you and your robot pounds need a substance called anima to live which is found inside a meteor and there's none of it around anymore which means that when robots run out they go unsighted which is a term that's not very well explained but basically means they turn into mindless killing machines not good so while the game starts with the vague suggestion of the time limit gradually it becomes clear that most of the npcs in the game won't survive until the credits roll without your help this means that you've got to explore around to find meteor dust each of which can give a friendly robot an extra 24 hours to live rather than keeping on the pressure right away unsighted eases you into this gradually and you'll have more than enough time to complete the first dungeon before you've even got to worry about the weakest robot in the village this old lady going unsighted however because each robot's starting time limit is staggered soon enough you'll be watching out for multiple robots in the danger zone with more and more yourself included continually ticking down to the point that by the second half of the game you'll realize it's impossible to keep them all alive because there's only a finite amount of meteor dust to go around this is where unsighted's excellent handling of sacrifice comes in ultimately the only robot that needs to survive is you and every other character is expendable meaning that you've got to make difficult choices about how to use your limited meteor dust the old ladybot i mentioned earlier only sells rubbish consumables which are very easy to make yourself so keeping her alive is mostly a drain on precious resources forcing you to either play faster and more recklessly to make better use of your dwindling time or to abandon her even your fairy helper bot outlives her usefulness eventually and you've got to choose between watching her die or sacrificing precious time completing her personal quest out of nothing more than a sense of sentimentality not only that if the going gets really tough you can even literally sacrifice the remaining time of other machines to boost your own which is very powerful but you know also pretty evil the sacrifice decisions these games create are so compelling because the player's natural instinct to mitigate the number of sacrifices they have to make and to strive for a desirable resolution drives them to play the game in a more interesting way and to master the mechanics rather than playing it safe this was the ultimate problem with fallout 3's big end game sacrifice because the game boils everything down to selfless good guy sacrifice or unfeeling coward you're punished for trying to role play and get invested in the story being anything other than a boring goody two shoes with a daddy complex means an already contrived and low agency sacrifice completely dissolves leaving you with an ending that doesn't mean anything because nothing was ever at stake and a game that hates you for trying to think outside the box mass effect 2's suicide mission falls into the same trap it appears to be a fantastic do-or-die mission where you have to make tough choices about who to send where and which characters are going to risk their lives but if you just make friends with everyone you can get through the whole thing with minimal casualties meaning that better more invested players are quote unquote rewarded with less interesting choices to make the same sort of end game choice in mass phase one between whether to save kaden or ashley works much better because there's no way around it even the best players will have to say goodbye to one and the choice feels more meaningful because of it it goes without saying that it would be even better if you weren't forced to choose between the two worst characters in that game space racist and human-shaped piece of wet bread but what are you gonna do ultimately i think more so than any other kind of decision in games sacrifices are deeply reliant not just on the player's participation but the player's active commitment and investment in their role the moment you as a player start to lose faith in the game being a good time or stop caring about what's going on the point of making a sacrifice at all collapses and often takes the whole game with it this is why it's so important even for games that don't give the player any real decisions to make regarding the plot to ensure that you're on board and willing to go along with the game's emotional arc in halo reach basically the entire game is a setup for the final level priming you to buy into the fact that you're not going to win and have to throw your life away taking as many covenant down with you as you can it's a fantastic anti-climax that only works because you're invested enough in what's going on that it outweighs the fact that the gameplay of the level is objectively speaking unfair and pointless but more than that i think we do have to sort of make peace with the idea that not all games are going to be empowering and endlessly entertaining experiences sometimes the price we pay dare i say sacrifice for much deeper gameplay and a richer more nuanced decision making is occasionally having to live with our mistakes and to accept the fact that we can't get everything we want games about sacrifice teach us that compromise and disempowerment can actually focus us on what really matters and drive us much further than the ones that offer no resistance at all so when you next face a tough decision and it seems like you might have to choose between things you love resist that inclination to run away or try to think your way around the problem sometimes making the harder decision and sticking with it can be much more rewarding in the long run or alternatively the game will just spawn eight bears to kill you because it turns out the real sacrifice was me trusting dan mullins to play it fair inscription more like inscription oh wait that doesn't really work if you say out loud balls hello and welcome to another after the video segment that part of every video where we have a little chat about some stuff and where all the people not watching this in the background have already clicked off by now apologies for this video being a little bit later than usual i took a few days off for my health and i definitely didn't spend it all playing video games or anything like that definitely not no way anyway one of the most important things i'd like to discuss in these segments is a cool internet person that you should be paying attention to and this time it's giant grant games a youtuber and streamer whose specialty is cheating the hell out of blizzard rts games did you think it was impossible to complete the entire starcraft 2 campaign on the hardest difficulty without building any units because i certainly did but as it turns out if you're very good at the game and know how to exploit some incredibly obscure bugs it's actually possible and the thought process for figuring this stuff out is incredibly entertaining please do give giant grand games a look but even more important than my recommendation is a shout out to my lovely patrons who make everything i do on this channel possible and will be exempt from the human sacrifices that must be performed to bring my true self into material reality supporting the channel on patreon is orders of magnitude more efficient than watching ads it's something like one month of patreon support equaling tens of thousands of ad views so if you do choose to give me some money on patreon feel free to block the ads on my stuff as far as i'm concerned you've paid your dues and if my absolution weren't enough patrons also get earlier access to videos behind the scenes stuff and even some special shout outs at the end of each video like these lovely people who are alex fiera andrew lebruno algae or alg asaran bjorn karla brennan spalling brian natariani constance in a punk corey gerard cosmetics 360 daniel mences david senser deceptive rant dirk jan karen beld dalto diglettier ekton edward franklin woods eugene bulkin gaskell greta hamilton honor jacob dillon riddle james andrew adams janos ferchette joey bruno jordan gear george aria navarro lee berman lucas slack mace window 54 max philippov nwd nate graf patrick romberg pet pumpkin philby the bilby phoenix thoracas reddit x regal regex rey's dad sheldon hearn simon jacobson steve reilly strategy and ultima the forbidden shrimp tyler duncan whimsical wisp wolf 414 zac grendel and ciao thank you ever so much for watching and i will see you next time bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 271,563

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, guide, Level design, Mass Effect, choices matter, Outer Wilds, Moral Choices, Skyrim, Elder Scrolls, Sacrifice, hardest choices, story games, Inscryption, Unsighted, New Games, Fable, Pokemon, Fallout, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Hbomberguy, Far Cry, Sacrifice choices, Card Games, CCG, Fire Emblem

Id: 0kmBKuTD-2k

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021