Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Deus Ex and the illusion of choice

Deus Ex: Human Revolutions is a great game.

Stealth and straight-forward violence are both viable options throughout the vast majority of the game, with good tradeoffs for both strategies; the levels are well-designed, at times intuitive and occasionally very difficult. Patience and planning are rewarded, the inventory and skill systems work well, with none of the skills feeling overpowered or—except perhaps for hacking—totally necessary. The atmosphere is good, the characters both realistic and consistent, and the environments can be quite beautiful. The only thing anyone seems to have a problem with are the boss fights.


The subject has created quite a bit of a stir on the internet, with most reviewers saying the boss fights suck and many coming to the defense of them from a narrative standpoint or just because they like boss fights. Personally, I fall into the former camp, not because I’m against the idea of a situation you can’t stealth your way out or where you have to kill the enemy, but because I think they’re simply poorly implemented. Generally the only way to deal with them is to fill them with bullets or empty your inventory of grenades. They’d be totally fine if Deus Ex allowed you the same freedom as you have elsewhere: if the combat areas were more diverse (i.e., if they had the catwalks and doors and vents found EVERYWHERE else in the game), if you could play cat and mouse more legitimately, if you could melee them while sneaking or knock pillars on their heads.

The bosses in Deus Ex (or at least the second and third one) are, in my opinion, examples of the worst type of boss—the “strafe-boss.” There are a couple different prototypes for bosses, from Smaug bosses (one weak area, one critical set of movements, one special weapon—i.e., every Zelda boss ever) to environmental bosses (run around, avoid the lasers / minions, destroy the controls / shield / water valves, rinse and repeat) to super-minions and anti-heroes (like regular opponents, but with more health / damage etc). The problem with the bosses in Deus Ex is that the best strategy for moderately skilled players is to simply run away from them until you get the chance to get one or two shots off, a strategy that belies both your superhuman powers (why can’t I use my armblades?!) and any sort of ability to end the battle in your chosen manner.

I didn’t find this to be a huge problem until I got to the end. (No spoilers.) I found that all the decisions I had made seemed to get steamrolled into one final decision that everything would depend on. It didn’t matter whether I had put everyone to sleep and slipped quietly through installation after installation without anyone ever seeing my face or if I had slaughtered thousands of regular humans in order to get revenge. Everything up to that point didn’t matter (also, the final cinematic before the credits may have been the worst thing ever).

It reminded me, in some ways, of the end of Bioshock—another great game, although with a terrible final boss fight—in that, in both, my final actions seemed to have little to do with the character that I had spent hours perfecting until he was the perfect sniper or wrench-wielding freeze artist. It was as though, throughout the game, I had been merely given the illusion of choice: I could do whatever I wanted up to that point, but when it came time for the chips to be down on the table, I was going to be in room x killing opponent y with weapon z.

In the end, I think the boss fights are where Deus Ex struggles with what sets video games apart, as a form of storytelling, from books or movies. The player has much more agency in the modern action-adventure-rpg game than is possible in other mediums. Even those “chose your own adventure books” are, at best, a set of limited options, typically binaries that lead you to one place or another that are already “coded” in.

The video game, in contrast, can give you infinite options, as best expressed in a game like Morrowind. After getting off the boat, you can literally wander everywhere, kill (almost) anyone. If you want to save the world, well, you will have to go to room x and kill opponent y with weapons z1 and z2, but you don’t actually have to do that. You could just decide to become head of a house and literally wage war upon your opponents. Completing the game is one of the many narratives that you can act out, and you have nearly absolute freedom to pick them and delve into the mysteries of each.[1] The consequence is that you sacrifice the flesh of the narrative: except for the final battle, which changes the color of the sky, your actions have very little effect on the world, with no cutscenes or developments that follow your ascension. To do so would be impossible because there are too many variables to be taken into account even in just the people who would witness such an ascension: maybe I wiped out that cheering village already, maybe I killed that duke, maybe I disposed that guild leader. The narrative is left up to the player to construct within the confines of the game.

The contrast would be the original Assassin’s Creed, in which there were, to be sure, sidequests, and maybe even different ways that you could go about killing an opponent. But you were going to act out the story, and you were going to do so by killing these people, and your agency really didn’t matter much. This didn’t detract from the game (that was the repetitive nature of the gameplay) because, at least in my opinion, the story was interesting enough that I was willing to follow along, just like a good movie, except with me following the script of the main character.

Games like Dragon Age: Origins, the Witcher 2, and Deus Ex attempt to straddle this divide by guiding the players along but giving them a couple of key choices throughout the game (your origin in DA:O, whose side you take at various moments in W2, how you approach objectives in DE). I haven’t replayed through DE yet, and it is possible that the choices throughout will have a substantial effect on what I experience down the line. This was true to a remarkable extent with W2, but it was also true that it seemed that, despite my choices, the world wasn’t going to react much—the narrative had to stay stable to an extent, and there wasn’t much I could do to stop the final battle from happening. My choices, in other words, had little consequence. DA:O was a different beast, but had the same problem: the existence of the origins, and how little they mattered after Ostagar, was upsetting, and made me, at least, think that I would have preferred the Neverwinter Nights 2 backstory method (“Guess what! You’re adopted! I bet you never guessed that I, an Elf, was not really related to you, Dwarf-boy!”).[2]

The same tension between player agency and narrative was most noticeable in Deus Ex in the boss battles (and in the end) mostly because, I would argue, the boss battles were such a break from both. I mean, Nintendo temple bosses have more backstory than these guys: you don’t know who they are or were before they met you, you don’t know why they want to kill you, etc. Nor can you approach them in many different ways, meaning that they lack the two notable things about Deus Ex: the richness and complexity that defines the world and the vastness of the ways you have to make your way through it. The motives of various players—from Zhao to Sarif—may not be fully explained, but they are characters with motives and personality traits. The almost nameless mercenary squad that you devote most of the game to chasing? You never discover why they care, what they stand to gain, or how they got to where they are. It’s not a big problem, not nearly as big as the failure of the ending (I really didn’t like the final cutscene / narration, ok?), But, for a game that is so rich otherwise in both aspects, each boss fight is a little bit of a letdown.

I think that the tension will slowly decrease as developers and writers get more adept at working with it and as the technology improves (eventually, I expect to see 100 gigabyte games in which hundreds of different choices are accounted for and that run easily on then-modern cpus). But there are some games already that—I would say—successfully have a foot in both puddles, as it were. The second Mass Effect managed to give some freedom—to explore, to make personnel decisions, to do side quests—while driving the story towards an end where it seemed like every move you made in preparation might matter.[3] We can’t expect everyone to be BioWare, of course (even BioWare—Dragon Age 2 was not nearly as effective, as Mass Effect-y as it might have been), but I think their success points in the right direction: it isn’t about choice, but about consequence (and a really good story). One or two major choices to make that will decide who they fight later in the game, or who helps them. Otherwise, we would never have advanced, freedom-wise, past Oni.[4] They have to instead feel like their interactions and choices both build toward and ending (i.e., they are consequential) and that doing things another way would matter (i.e., that they are powerful). Without those two components, choices as a whole don’t really matter.

Finally, and here are there are massive spoilers for Deus Ex, the most interesting part of the ending was how it forced the player to choose between two lies, the truth, and nothing. Not only was nothing an option, but they grouped it separately from the truth and the two lies, informing you that the truth was just another opinion, and that the only way to ensure that you were not like the man who had just unleashed terror upon the world was to assume that you didn’t know any better than the rest of humanity and destroy yourself and everyone else who could possibly explain what had happened. Had it been implemented well, instead of those awful 50s montages with bad narration, the ending could have been a beautifully articulated expression of the end of man is to know. But it wasn’t.


[1] And, if you really want to, you can cheat and edit dialogue codes in the built-in editor so that you can actually become lord of all the houses. Incidentally, I consider Morrowind the greatest game I have ever played.
[2] When I say problem, don’t think that I disliked these games. I quite liked all of them. But that doesn’t mean they were flawless. Additionally, the news that the new Neverwinter will be a MMO with only five classes was like an announcement from Blizzard that the next Starcraft would only feature Terran and Zerg, the Protoss having been eliminated.
[3] It was clearly all Martin Sheen.
[4] Hardest game I have ever beaten. By a mile. I can’t imagine what skills I must have had when I was fourteen or so. It destroyed me last year.

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