Character Choice in WoW

It's hard to put the RP in video game RPGs.

As I've detailed on this blog, I've spent the last few years immersing myself in the great joys of Dungeons and Dragons, which really launched the RPG genre before video games were really a thing (other than maybe Pong and Asteroids.) Because the Dungeon Master who is running the game can respond in real time to every decision the player characters make, it's more or less endlessly flexible.

Video games can't really do that. Even if you did have a programmer and designer sitting and watching you play, there's no way that they could implement every scenario in real-time. Instead, video game RPGs have to anticipate every choice you could make and program in the consequences of those choices.

That means that decisions have to have very short-term and impermanent consequences - like combat - or they the consequences all lead back to the same point - such as when you have a quest chain that branches out into two or three sub-chains, but you have to finish all of them to complete the story - or the decisions have to result in a discrete and small number of ending scenarios that the developers have time to plot out, and that don't mess too much with the plot or the prepared content.

Mass Effect 3 got a lot of criticism for ultimately leading down a similar path regardless of the major choices you made over the course of the three-game series, and while yes, the ending got a lot better when they extended it with free DLC (and also gave you access to the third ending without forcing you to play the crappy mobile game attached to it,) it still ultimately went down the same few beats and gave you three endings that all railroaded you into some kind of self-sacrificing ending regardless of your choice. And the final combat segment was all identical regardless of your choices.

WoW is in an even tougher position, because it's a fundamentally multiplayer game. Not only do they need to anticipate your choices, but they also need to come to a consistent final scenario at the end of each expansion.

And that's what makes the 8.1 stuff kind of interesting:

SPOILERS AHOY


In Mists of Pandaria's 5.1 story, Horde players began forced to play the part of Garrosh loyalists eagerly attacking the Alliance. But after Garrosh tried to have Vol'jin assassinated, the player became a resistance fighter immediately. I didn't mind it, given that I thought Garrosh was a fascist with a serious case of testosterone poisoning, but it was a bit jarring.

In 8.1, we're getting a remarkably similar scenario (really a quest chain) in which Sylvanas tells us that spies report Saurfang has broken out of prison, and we are sent to retrieve him. When the Dark Ranger we're with tells us to go make a report while they follow up on the leads you've discovered, Zekhan (aka Zappyboi) shows up and tells us that the Dark Rangers are there to kill Saurfang, and that we have to rescue him.

Recently on the PTR, they've added an option here to say no: you can say "I won't betray the Warchief." This does mean that the quest chain abruptly ends there (and you don't get a Toy) but you are able to finish the story with your loyalty to Sylvanas intact.

Hilariously, you don't even have to make a report to Sylvanas, as there's an additional option to simply decide to take a vacation on the beach while all of this subterfuge sorts itself out.

Personally, between my Undead Rogue, Tauren Shaman, and Blood Elf Priest (the latter of which is still sitting at 110 in Dalaran) I can really only see the Priest siding with Sylvanas. The Rogue is really unhappy with how Sylvanas is becoming more and more like the Lich King, and while he holds out hope she might be persuaded to see reason, he'll be more than happy to stick a dagger in her back if it comes to it, while the Shaman naturally respects Saurfang a whole hell of a lot more than someone who would burn a bunch of Night Elf civilians to death.

But it does make me wonder a bit about allowing future choices in game.

One thing I've felt since Mists is that the Alliance doesn't have enough inner conflict. Tyrande's assumption of the Night Warrior transformation would be a good place for us to see the Alliance go dark - frankly I think it's time we see the more zealous members of the Alliance, like the Lightforged Draenei and maybe some "Crimson Priests" who are former Scarlet Crusade members going around and burning Forsaken at the stake. The Horde needs an actual reason to fear, hate, and resent the Alliance, rather than just willfully ignoring every time the Alliance has offered peace and toleration.

Unfortunately, I think that the time to build up that side of the Alliance has kind of passed, now that the war is in full effect. Still, I'd like to see some moral choices of this sort in the Alliance story, and give us a scenario in which it really does seem like we're taking things to far. The problem is that after events like Teldrassil, it's really hard to imagine a limit on what the Alliance would be justified in doing in order to end the war. Intentional targeting of civilians is never acceptable, but at this point, the Horde could not condemn it without looking like hypocrites.