One of the things that a fair amount of interesting games do is provide you with a meaningful choice you can't go back on that will affect the entirety of the rest of the game.
I'd like to talk a little bit about the concequences of this type of design, and what it entails.
The choice is often placed either at the beginning or at the end, and only rarely in the middle. It makes "sense" to place it in the end because a 2branched choice placed 3 hours before the end only necessitates about 6 hours of gameplay, of which 3 are the price of the choice.
A choice placed at the begining, on the other hand, is arguably either very expensive to design, or it doesn't diversify the experience afterwards as much from the other options - only few games will place a choice before the player 40 hours before the game ends, and effectively pay 40 additional hours of gameplay time as the price.
Various strategies are can be used to lessen the price. Some go so far as to rely on the player forgiving the lack of concequences of most choices because it would be too time consuming to implement. It's a completely viable strategy, since players expectations are measured by their perception of viability and quality. If they find that implementing proper concequences would have been detrimental, they may be willing to accept the compromise because they cannot think of a better one.
Applying the decision pattern, then, is a question of weighing returns. A lot of older games provide much more detailed responsiveness to choices than many state of the art modern ones. The newer games gamble that gamers are very forgiving; since the demographic of gamers has changed over the past decades, it may well be a sound gamble. All the same, I do not feel that blindly submitting to it is the optimum choice.
A good example of the application of the decision pattern is the choice of wether or not you save Paul Denton in Deus Ex. A bad example is wether or not to be bad or good at the end of Deus Ex, if not for the fact that the choice was placed right at the very end.
I'll go into the intricasies of the decision pattern in a later post, and narrow down how to apply it correctly.
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There is no good or bad in Deus Ex's ending, there is only conflicting philosophies ; )
Notice that Paul's death actually has very few consequences - the choice is placed in the beginning of the game, but if you save him, all that happens is that he appears 2 consequtive times. If you don't save him... he doesn't.
A quite terrible example is Fable 1, where the player must choose whether or not to kill his old childhood friend about half-way through the game. Unfortunately, even if the player doesn't kill her, she goes off to another continent, effectively vanishing from the game just as if the player had killed her. You have to be VERY forgiving to accept that one. The result is that to me and others I've talked to about it, the choice feels very hollow and pointless.
There are ways to recycle content such that the price of having an early decision with profound consequences can be reduced - since you've played The Nameless Mod, you're doubtlessly aware of such techniques ; )
Thanks for the comment, and yes, I agree with everything you say.
I think the subject is fairly complex, so that's why I decided to split up my writings on it.
And ya, Deus Ex' ending is actually a really special beast, I think. It deserves further study, certainly.
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