It's interesting to me that the two games from 2023 that impressed me the most were so profoundly different when it came to their attitude toward player choice.
Baldur's Gate 3 lovingly recreates the experience of Dungeons & Dragons on the computer, not only incorporating the rules of 5th Edition D&D (with a few tweaks here and there) but has a massive amount of flexibility as to where the story can go - you've got characters who can be early miniboss fights or full-fledged party members, and the fates of your party members can vary drastically depending on the choices that you make with them. Tons of different scenarios can play out in different ways depending on how the player chooses to approach certain things, and whether the right die rolls favor you.
Alan Wake II is a singular narrative that is going to play out the same one way or another - an extremely complex, intricate narrative that investigates the very nature of storytelling, the function of the hero's journey, the morality of fiction, and the challenge of truly facing the darkness within us.
In general, I think the prevailing ethos in gaming is, and has been for over a decade, the notion that freedom and openness is the ideal goal. We've seen many more games go for an "open world" concept, and the games that people seem the most excited about are the ones in which players really get to choose one of many paths through the game's world.
As readers of this blog will have noticed, I've been lukewarm to hostile regarding the direction the Zelda series has gone since Breath of the Wild (I wasn't crazy about Skyward Sword either, but for very different reasons). I'll concede that, at least for now, I feel like I'm vibing more with Tears of the Kingdom, but I do still miss the clear structure that the Zelda games that I grew up with, like Ocarina of Time (I guess I didn't play Wind Waker or Twilight Princess until I got to college).
And Baldur's Gate 3 was incredible and fun, but for some reason I hit a wall when I got to the eponymous city - I began to feel paralyzed by the scope of choices presented to me, and the more invested I became in the characters, the more important it was for me to not "screw it up" and give any of them tragic ends. The freedom of choice began to feel like a trap, where I felt compelled to look up guides and ensure that I was doing everything "right."
The single story path of Alan Wake II, as a result, felt oddly liberating. I knew that I was going to get through the story that Remedy wanted to tell, and even if I might play with the way that story was presented, choosing when to swap between Saga's and Alan's sides of the game (the first time I played through it I alternated every mission, whereas when I did the Final Draft, once I was able to choose, I played through all of Saga's stuff before finishing Alan's half.
Alan Wake II is still something of an "open world" in the sense that, in contrast with the original game, it's not broken up into distinct levels. Until the game's ending, you can generally re-visit areas of the game you've been to before, and there are side objectives that you can pursue that require you to criss-cross the game's world (particularly on Saga's side, where there's a light Metroidvania-style unlocking of things that require you to hit certain parts of the story to get tools that let you past various locked doors).
But the story has two endings only in the sense that you need to beat it a second time on the Final Draft mode to see how things ultimately end up (as a note, Stephen King has been a big influence on Alan Wake and Control, and I feel silly that I didn't see the looping ending as a connection to the Dark Tower's infamous and controversial ending - which I confess I hated when I originally read the last book when it came out in my freshman year of college. I guess it's just that, unlike with Roland Deschain, we actually got the opportunity to see Alan's final loop).
Baldur's Gate 3's goal is to do its best to simulate what happens at a table of people playing D&D - where normally you have a human dungeon master who can improvise a response to the crazy ideas that the players have. In a digital game, that's incredibly impressive given that every possibility has to be programmed in ahead of time - essentially Larian studios had to predict every crazy idea that people have now pulled off in the game and made it work.
On the other hand, the whole plot of Alan Wake II is the culmination of a writer refining his story over the course of countless drafts, allowing only the perfect version that walks the narrow line that will achieve his goals to come out in the end.
Indeed, the difference between the main game and the Final Draft are subtle, which means there's really not much of a margin for error - so it makes sense, in a way, that the player couldn't make any real plot-impacting decisions - that victory requires going through the story successfully.
I think it would be tempting to create a hierarchy here - in my case, to be the contrarian to most modern gaming trends and extol the virtues of this "linear" (if Alan Wake II's mindfuck of a plot could be considered linear) type of storytelling over player choice and decision-driven stories. Of course, the truth, as usual, depends on the situation. These are extremely different games shooting for extremely different goals. They do, as well, both do an amazing job of making me care about them and their characters.
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