How much freedom is too much freedom?

In the ever-growing realm of video games, the worlds we as gamers are presented with are reaching new heights in both the capacity to tell enormous, and thrilling, stories and to give players new ways to interact with the medium. There’s a fine line, however, between telling a story within a world and telling a character’s story within a world. In many open world games, the gamer is given the chance to explore to their heart’s content and experience many tales and unique experiences, but often to the detriment of character arc.

Why should character arcs be important?

In games such as the Mass Effect trilogy, each player gets to build their own version of Shepard, all the way from looks to choice of sex, and the options that create Shepard’s personality are all devised from the player’s desire to see their own Shepard respond in the way they see fit, a choice that frequently has repercussions and backlash down the road. Throughout the series, the bond between player and Shepard grows into a fully blossomed relationship, and by the end of the series the character that you took control of for the first time aboard the Normandy has grown into a fully fleshed out character with his own interests, relationships, and personality quirks.

While this is great for people who are looking to be drawn into a journey with what can largely be quantified as a singular character, there are many games where the player creates their character entirely from scratch, goes out into the world and makes their own journey. The most poignant of these is the Elder Scrolls series and Fallout. In both series’, the player takes on the role of a handcrafted avatar and while there is a major story arc, there’s only one way through the narrative. Any player who takes it upon themselves to stop Alduin from systematically torching the land of Skyrim can only get to that final confrontation by proceeding through a linear series of objectives - with or without any companion help - at any point they choose; if you’re insane like I am, you would only do so after you’ve invested 150+ hours into the game, making that last leg all the more challenging.

Yay! You’ve saved Skyrim. Now go out and do whatever else it is that you want to do within the land. Or stop playing altogether. The choice is in the player’s hands, as the game has no end whatsoever. Which is awesome! Yet, the big problem with telling stories in this manner is that there is no bonding between the player and their character. Any actions that you take within the game have no consequences, other than minute things like having this clan attack you on sight or this guy won’t talk to you now. There’s no form of attachment to be had. Never once did I feel like my character was doing anything more than tying up loose ends for characters who I would barely remember the next day. In Fallout 3, I never truly felt that I had incentive to do anybody’s quest for them besides getting that next piece of gear to make me into more of a badass. There was never any consequence for killing an NPC except for the small chance that you would miss out on a potential quest.

This is where character arc comes into play. At any point in time, in either Skyrim or Fallout, I could have been introduced to consequences. Not just basic consequences, but character altering consequences. Events that make me struggle to be encapsulated by what it is exactly that made me play the game in the way that I was playing. While Fallout has a morality system, there’s never a point where the player is expected to make a morally compromising decision. Even though the protagonist is silent, the bond between player and character would have grown to the nth degree had I felt the need to make heartfelt decisions that affected the game in other ways than “I want the game world to turn out this way because I’m a good guy.” In Mass Effect, there were countless instances of me sitting still and staring at the screen, debating what choice I should make and what the end result could be. I cared about my decisions and how they would affect the game down the road. That was rarely, if ever, the case in either of Bethesda’s open world titles.

In a nutshell, what I’m saying is that character arc is important to drawing the player into the world. Give me a serious reason to want to help your NPC.’s existential crisis. And give them better character animation for god’s sake.

This is the real bugaboo of a question. Would Fallout or Skyrim have played out the same way if the interactions with NPCs had been more meaningful? What if you had a series of followers who interacted with you in regards to their own beliefs, as in Star Wars: The Old Republic? It was thrilling to me when I discovered that I couldn’t appease every member of my party with every decision I made in SWTOR. There’s just no way to do it. Each character has their own ideologies and set of rules, more often than not they are ones that are in direct conflict with the player’s choices. However, the blend between building up your relationships with these characters doesn’t undermine allowing the player to experience the game in the way that they desire. If your main desire is to explore the galaxy and battle other players, you’re completely liberated to doing so. But the narrative options are still there. The weight behind the decision-making process remains. Conflict; consequence.

My followers in Skyrim had absolutely no narrative value. Yet, I was unencumbered by them. I felt no obligation towards keeping any one specific party member, which felt like the groundwork of exploring more options without being hindered by emotional input. I never finished the quest by returning Barbas to his master just for the fact that he was an invincible party member. He never needed revived, but god was he annoying. In the case of Barbas, non-narrative arc got in the way of player experience. I barely ever had to physically battle any of the dragons I came across; they just attacked Barbas and my other party member. Is there anything wrong with this play style? Not necessarily, the game allows the player to cater to whatever play style they want, for however long they want.

In games such as Skyrim and Fallout, there’s a good chance that an overarching character narrative could directly intervene with the exploration element of each game, and the chance for discovering each story as a standalone tale would be greatly reduced. An entirely new system would have to be implemented to accommodate the change. This is where games like Mass Effect and the Witcher shine. Even Grand Theft Auto V incorporates a seamless blend of characterization and player freedom.

It could be said that narrative arc gets in the way of player experience when the fundamental elements of the game are at risk of being changed. There is no perfect game, and therefore no perfect form of interactive narrative exists. The exact question could be flipped on its head as well: When does the player experience get in the way of narrative arc?

There’s never been a perfect form of storytelling, and there likely never will be. That doesn’t mean that story should be put on the backburner where video games are involved. As games evolve and grow, so should their capacity for telling interesting and compelling stories. Players who go into a game expecting a great interactive story should come out satisfied that their purchase was justified. No game should be exactly the same as another, nor should the storytelling elements be identical, but this doesn’t mean that immersion should be sacrificed for a larger open world experience, and vice versa.

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Jake Haas

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Jake is a Staff Writer for Continue Play. When he isn't wailing in despair at his college loans, he can be found roaming around Ooo with Finn or mathematically playing his drums.