This week’s work has me fleshing out the system mechanics and working up various lists. Lists of talents and abilities, lists of spells, and a list of skills.
Skills have always been a sticking point when designing. Do I want to have a skill for all conceivable player actions? This leaves me with a long list, the majority of which will never see any apprecable play, let alone do more than give some characters a smattering of flavoring. It doesn’t advance the playability of the game or the character. On the other hand, I could aim for haivng a majority and let the GM and Players do some clean up if they find something I’ve missed? That gets rid of a certail level of customazation I know that some GMs and Players really enjoy having.

It also leaves them with an additional task when creating a character.

With either choice, I’m often stuck on this part of the game for weeks going back and forth.

So I’m trying to do it different with this game.

Last night, I had the idea that the careers have inherent, but litmited, skills and/or abilities (whatever you want to call them) which are directly related to what the career is named. That is if your character starts life as a Baker, then obviously, they’ve had some training and expreience baking goods. In making this a rule, both the player and the GM can safely make the assumption that if anything baking related suddenly becomes important to the story, then this character has the capacity to deal with it. How well they can deal is where dice come into play.

This cuts me free from having to stick in a dozen or more of the more function style of skills. At the same time, it also keeps the sorts of custmozation and character flavor options in there, should the Player or the GM want to go that route.

Which is good. I like that I can keep the skill list short-ish. It means that players are going to have a better chance at doing things, more often because their characters will have the skills to do so.

But then there are the meta-skills.

Perception, awareness, search, and their brethern. Where do they fit in?

Anymore, it’s something of a rite for players to expect, once a session to miss some detail or clue because of a botched test of one of those listed above. It is disheartening and frustrating when it becomes apparent that this was curcial in order to get through the rest of the session.

That player part of me wants to eliminate those failure points. Move to something like the Gumshoe system which gives the characters all of the clues and then uses their skills to put the links between them together. It’s a nice solution which keeps the players invovled in the story and less involved in statistics and dice.

“But,” the GM in me interrupts, “what if the situation calls for the players to be distracted at a crucial clue gathering moment? Or if the GM feels they need to work for a clue to the plot? What then?”

In those situations a skill check certainly feels more appropriate but this doesn’t get us past the underlying dilemma — the use of randomness to advance the plot, rather than using character action to do the same. I’m not saying that randomness isn’t a part of RPG patterns, but I have become suspcious when it’s used for plot.

More thinking is needed before I come to a decision.

The idea of a stack is bit of a cross breeding of L5R’s ranks and of WFRP’s careers. Stacks have three or four careers in them. Each career emphasizes a different set of abilities and skills that are unique to that particular career as well as a set of stat increases that are unique to the stack. Each career gives you a number of options to move on. You can stay inside the stack or move to a different stack. In staying inside the stack, you get the next set of stat bonuses (after buying your way through the new career). Go to a new stack, get a different set of skills and stat bonuses based on the theme of that stack.

Stacks are themed. Thief, Knight, Apprentice (wizard or priest), Scholar, Noble, Peasant, Streets, etc. Careers inside the stack are all tied to the theme and share many of the skills and abilities across the careers present. For instance, the Thief stack could have careers like Cutpurse, House Breaker, Smuggler, and Rogue. It’s easy to see where the skills all apply to the different careers. Now for a different view, you have the Peasant stack.  In that one, I could put careers like Servant, Valet, and Messenger. Here the ties between the careers are not as obvious, but if you think about how one gains trust inside a household, then it should become more obvious.

Career exits would also have some thematic tie to the career. I could see House Breaker and Smuggler getting an exit of Fence (from say, the Underworld stack) while Cutpurse and Rogue could have Vagabond (from the Streets stack).

I can imagine if such a character system was implemented, I would want to employee an buy system with some minor tweaks. As already mentioned, the stat bonuses would only come from the stack and would apply _after_ having bought through the career’s skills and abilities. Off the top of my head, I think skills would cost 50xp and could be purchased indefinitely, but have an increased cost each time. So the first repurchase would cost 100xp, the next 150 xp, the third repurchase would then cost 200 xp, etc. which makes it self-limiting. Each additional purchase would provide a 5% increase bonus to the roll.

If a character has a given skill from a previous career, they don’t have to purchase it again to pass the career, but they can if the player wants to.

Abilities are one time buys costing 100 xp each. I imagine abilities coupled very tightly to the career and stack themes and are along the lines of feats and class abilities from 3.x ed d&d or paizo’s pathfinder.

I can also see where changing stacks would cost experience. Maybe 100xp since the character is changing its emphasis. Staying inside the same stack is free. There might be a provision to jump to an unrelated career for 200 xp considering that a character’s story might change completely during the course of play.

Stack bonuses — it all depends on the system underlying this character system, but this is where characters would receive their stat increases. Each time a career is completed, the character gets the stat increase (and possibly a new ability or power — thinking of wizards, druids and priests here). The point being staying inside a given stack would give a more focused stat increase the longer the character stays inside it. The converse is that jumping from stack to stack, while not getting the same size of stat increases gives them a more rounded/diverse set of increases to the character.

Sticking with the Thief example from before. First stat increases would be to dex/agility, intelligence, fellowship/charisma, and combat — the next would be another increase to dex/agility, combat, and an initial health increase. Here they might also get a bonus to hiding or a backstabbing ability. The third again increases dex/agility, fell/char, some dodge ability or bonus thereto (again depends on the underlying combat resolution system), some bonus to lying/quick talking.

Ran out of idea for the fourth career, but I think you get the idea.

Also to make sure I’ve said it, jumping from stack to stack, you only get the first bonus from the new stack.

But this is just the “Basic” stacks — There is more than enough room to also do “Advanced” stacks which give a greater set of stats and abilities while putting less emphasis on skills (which was the point of the Basic stacks).

The one big thing which hasn’t changed is the stat stack. The big six are known for the comprehensive and familiar description. Likewise, the range of those numbers and the fact that 1  or 0 is the bad end of the spectrum and 18 and over is the good end. Classic base character archetypes — Fighter, Thief, Priest, and Wizard. Levels, experience points, hit points, Vancian magic, and saving throws.

So what if WotC were to mess with that list? What if the big six were replaced with something else? Or if you suddenly had stats measuring from 1 to 10 on each of those? Would it still be D&D?

Don’t misunderstand. D&D is as much a brand as it is a system but which built which?

I am almost willing to argue that the system made the brand what it is. When one says D&D you get a certain image in your mind that encompasses a specific experience which includes some of those things I mentioned before. They may vary slightly — anyone else remember the saving throws of “Bend Bars / Lift Gates” or that strength could have a percentage rider if you rolled up a 18 at character creation?

It certainly wasn’t the same D&D from before, but it was still D&D. The big six were still present, hit points and movement still mattered.

But the twist is this. Even without the big six or hit points or Vancian magic, you could make a decent dungeon crawl based game. With the D&D brand, it suddenly becomes a D&D game. WotC has already done this to a certain extent with both some of their D&D board games, but also with Gamma World.

The brand in those cases is more important than the actual system that it’s been applied to. It’s not that something new has been made with the old, but that the old system was dumped all together.

So I think that nothing is going to be off limits for the designers. Everything, including the old sacred cows mentioned above, is up for the metaphorical slaughter. With this Legend & Lore column by Monte, I think it indicates with the “you play what you want to play” line there are a number of changes in stock for us old timers. We are going to be surprised, very surprised, to see what has been done with D&D when 5th edition gets published.

First, the things that WotC did wrong

The PDF debacle

The digital world is here and now. Pretending otherwise isn’t helping anyone. Taking away the ebooks and pdfs did absolutely nothing to deter or prevent people from having a digital copy. All it did was take away legit sales. All it did was alienate people. All it did was create a PR nightmare that continues to this day.

Bad communication and inconsistent messages

What was the plan with 4th and why did it get changed so frequently? What was supposed to be the core books and which were optional? What was the difference between Essentials and the Red Box? And how were those different from the core? And what was the bloody point to it all?

If something changes this needs to communicated. If something advertised is impacted, this needs to be communicated. If something gets cancelled, this needs to be communicated. And the reason needed to be communicated, too. Hiding behind press releases and allowing rumors to get started never helps maintain a brand, let alone the goodwill of the gaming community.

Lack of support

It’s great that they went back and converted many of their settings but what else was done with them? Nothing! Where was Dungeon with the latest installment of an ongoing campaign? Where was the weekly “encounter” example? Where was free intro adventure to said setting? Where was Dragon with the interesting twist on play or class?

And in conjunction with my previous point of communication, it seems to me like there should have been a greater effort to make players aware of some of these things (if they existed, which I’m not sure that they did).

Subpar products

How much errata did they release? How many times did they forget to include necessary mechanics in their books? Nothing is as frustrating as finding that the part you’ve just spent three days searching for never made it into the final product.

Cards, minis, tokens, decks. AKA: Extras

These are distractions even when they’re the central mechanic of play. Remember that all of this started with pencil and notebook paper. Add some standard dice and that is all you should ever need to play. Anything less and you have broken RPGs. Substitutions do not apply. Additions, maybe, but they have to be optional and cheap enough to buy for everybody.

Even Fantasy Flight had to relent and give players straight up books with the card info in them in order to keep selling their version of WFRP. The point being we of the RPG world don’t like being forced into buying extras to keep playing. If we wanted to do that, we’d be playing Magic (and some of us still are). Keep with making the books the sole point of information to play.

What they need to do

Convince me there’s a vision

A D&D that’s all things to all players already exists. It’s called GURPS. If I want to play that, I know how to find it. And while I am fan of Monte Cook’s work, I already have the most recent revision of his best. There needs to be something new, something different, something cool about this next version of D&D.

The thing is, no company gets customers automatically. The execs of many may think they do, going so far as to see these people as an inevitability. But that’s not how it works. You have to earn your customers and their loyalty. Nothing stands out more in this line of thought than Gabe Newel’s recent comments about Steam and his business.

He is spot on about how the media companies are killing themselves by worrying over control instead of delivering the goods to people for a price they want to pay.

The same has to happen to the culture of Hasbro and WotC. They have to let go of the control ideology and embrace an more open paradigm.

Which translates into support, support, support

They need to step up the support of digital world. That means pdfs, ebooks, and the web. Yes, people will send these to their friends. Yes, they will be on torrents. And guess what? This will happen anyways. If Hasbro/WotC wants any chance to stay relevant, they must ignore the inevitable and provide a product that people will pay for.

Also, web tools. The character generator should be out front and ready to be used by any passing browser. Don’t make the gateway to your system sit behind a paywall or a log-in. Let players make thousands of characters for the hell of it. One or two might get turned into a sale. And that’s what the goal should be.

Anything else (GM tools, maps, etc) can sit behind a log-in. Freemium at the very least with a dollar or two for 48/72 hours of unlock of extra tools. Make the tools good enough, you can start selling week/month/year subscriptions as the word spreads. These need to be available at launch. No later unless you want to hear how this is just like the 4th Ed tools that never existed.

Support also means more than settings. It means having campaigns in those settings. Sourcebooks and gazetteers are nice, but nothing beats being able to point a player to a single source of everything needed for their game night. Getting set up is a chore and one that 4th attempted to solve. But that was solving for the wrong variable. The right one is having the story ready to go.

Even better would be to match what Paizo has done with Pathfinder and have a continuing, living, open campaign to draw the players. Pick one of your many properties. Start writing and have fun with it.

Acknowledging the past

I have no idea about the actual costs, but with the rise of the retroclones, it is obvious that there are players craving something of the old-school. And since there’s this gigantic back catalog there is absolutely no sense in not tapping it. In keeping with my first point, this also means digitizing it. Make it available and make it cheap. Suck it up, figure out the maze of royalties, and give your customers what they so obviously want.

The question of the moment is will they actually listen to feedback on the playtest? And if they do, what will become of it?

I am doubtful that this will turn out the way most people expect it to. Not because the people behind the next edition are in any way closed minded about receiving feedback from the Internet. But because at the very least, the channel of information from the players in the wider Internet is going to be controlled to a degree befitting a corporation of Hasbro’s size and scope.

Because, and let us be honest here, the elephant in the room is Paizo. It is very hard to argue against the idea that we would not be looking at this announcement if it weren’t for the plucky upstart’s enormous and well earned success of the past couple of years. That WotC has announced that they are going to be following in their footsteps should have come as no surprise to anyone. It is smart of WotC to attempt to regain both the market and the hearts of players by doing exactly what Paizo did to gain them.

The fact that I think is being overlooked by this plan is that Paizo’s success came from two things which WotC does not have going for them. The first is the time at which Pathfinder was introduced. With the dissent of 4th edition in full swing and few retroclones to compete against, Paizo was incredibly well positioned to pull off a major coup. Which, as we can now see, it did. The second is Paizo’s size. Being as small as it is, Paizo is able to be dynamic and responsive to both the market and to the players.

The time for WotC to have struck is long since past. Market fragmentation, driven in part by a baffling series of confusing messages from the company in the last few years and in part by the removal of all previous versions of D&D from sales channels, is set. WotC is now in the unenviable position of being a owner of a brand which has inspired such loyalty as to actively drive more causal gamers away. Short of going back in time to prevent Paizo and the OGL from ever existing, they are now stuck with their subset of hardcore supporters and a harder sell to everyone else.

As for the dynamic and responsive presence, I don’t know. I feel like they don’t have it in themselves to win that fight. They can do whatever Hasbro let’s them get away with, but ultimately WotC and the designers don’t have the editorial or financial independence Paizo does. And they certainly don’t have the same trust of the gaming community they once held.

In some respects this pledge of openness reminds me of Blizzard and World of Warcraft. If you have ever spent time delving into their forums, specifically the beta forums, you will find any number of issues with the game brought up. Some big and many small. They have also gone out of their way to ask their community for feedback on classes several times now. And yet with all of this feedback, very little has ever made it through to the actual coders and designers to fix.

As explained more than a few times now by their community managers and CSRs who tend the forum, there isn’t a direct line to the devs. Nor was there ever intended to be one. At best the CSRs will gather up the biggest issues and most interesting posts to pass along to their superiors who, we guess, send them along to the appropriate triage teams and eventually to the devs.

That is a textbook case of how you manage a number of players the size of which WotC is aiming to have. Why anyone would think that Hasbro and WotC would do their forums and feedback any different is…perhaps naive or possibly fooling themselves.

Do not misunderstand me. I think it would be wonderful to have Monte Cook hip deep in their forums and responding, personally, to every well thought out and worded post. Or to see a change or three initiated by some player’s insightful suggestion. I think that this and the other announcements we got yesterday are part of their overall marketing strategy.

Spent part of today rethinking my rules for Sands of Mars. There were some parts I liked and some that felt clunky. On the clunky side, there wasn’t the meshing I wanted when it came to playing become action. There was plenty of action, but I felt that it wasn’t as complete as it could be. Something about what we were doing and what our goals were didn’t quite get there. This, I felt, affected how much fun we had. Therefore, I went and looked at what streamlining could be done as I reviewed my notes from the playtests.

I felt that it’s been long enough since I first put things together that going back to the beginning and reviewing my thought process was the place to start.

So, for successful habitation of Mars, humans need oxygen, food, water, and shelter

Make the Nuke plant optional and there we go. Materials have been reduced to a single resource, getting rid of something I felt was too complicated. Locations continue also be a resource, but this time, they’re generalized giving the players some freedom in planning but also giving me the ability to mess around with the game tiles and the distribution of usable sites across them. Some playtesting is needed now to see how well these ideas work and so I can get a feel for the number of items needed for a “win”.

The thought was this: The RPG market has two separate sets of investors. The first group are those who spend money to get get games printed. Let’s call this group the Publishers. In most cases, this group does the work of publishing in the hopes of getting some return for their money. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot, and smartly, this group will see potential in lots of games and will spread the risk of their investment throughout all of them and hope that a good return on any one of them will cover the losses on all the others.

The second group invest their time to take the RPG and make it fun for others. Let’s call them the Makers. We can’t use the common economic framework of risk and reward to understand this group. Their investment is to create adventures, to host events, and to promote it among their friends and family. This makes many of the Makers fickle and loyal. They can see any one aspect of an RPG as the thing which draws them to it. Remove this one thing and you will risk losing their investment in your system.

Without the Makers’ investment, your system sits on store shelves, languishing.

Without the Publishers’ investment, your system may never see print.

What are these investors goals?

Obviously, Publishers want to have a monetary return. Although they may have secondary goals that led them into that business, their primary is to make money. To do this, your RPG has to sell.

Which leads us to the Maker’s goals. To have fun. To make something interesting to play. To tell stories. To entertain and engage with friends or strangers through drama and dice. To do this, your RPG must have a certain level of accessibility.

Boiling it down we end up in a situation where access has to be balanced against profit. Is there a good way to maintain this in the digital landscape? Does one trump the other?

Let’s start with what went right. For what we are given, it was given with an extreme amount of polish. The game play is buttery smooth. Controls are tight and responsive, just as you would always want them to be. There is little question as how easily your intent is translated into the gameworld. You don’t have to hit the same button twice to get that twitch action neuron saturated with all of the dopamine it can handle. The gore is wholly visceral and the crunchy undertones bring an unrelenting satisfaction with ever trigger pulled.

What cuts deepest is the solution to every problem facing the characters in the game. Whereas in the first and second games there were moments when brain mattered over calibre, Gears 3 presents one and only one solution to every quandary besetting your avatar. Shoot it, stomp it, or just beat it with your weapon. As true to the nature of this game it might be, that nonetheless gives me with little else to dwell upon. Am I to be challenged only managing my ammo stockpiles?

Speaking of which, we do get new weapons to play with but so what? There isn’t any new tactics to use them with. And, no, flinging exploding boulders from giant beasts of burden does not a new tactic make. I am disappointed in the big new weapon being the “retro” Lancer. How is that remotely interesting? An older version of the main gun used throughout the game which doesn’t share a ammo pile with anything else. Gotcha. Cool story, bro. I’m gonna be over here using a chainsaw bayonet to cut someone in half. You can stab the wall.

The point being that it’s a DOWNgrade to an already all-around good weapon. Why do that? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But that’s not the only thing that got a downgrade. You remember those monstrous beasts that you had to keep running away from in the first two games because they were so much bigger and required, you know, cannons or space lasers to get rid of? Yeah, those! Those were awesome because you had to figure out a way around them. It was cool to have to think through those sections of the game. You couldn’t just shoot your way through them like everything else.

Yeah, those days are gone. Apparently no one told Marcus that you could use regular weapons on them. He knows now of course, and so you get to use your Lancer on those pesky Brumaks and Corpsers that were the bane of the first two games.

Having bigger, badder enemies to kill is part of the Tao of sequels. Having gone through two games where certain enemies needed special, and I might add, fun weapons in order to bring them down I was expecting something new and exciting for the final installment. Instead we get an underwater section that was obviously phoned in. Shooting space squid hanging in a omnidirectional sphere off a submarine (how is this thing attached again?) is wasn’t exciting but regrettably pointless. Gears, as a series, was known for the visceral depiction of what the weapons do. Since most of the time you’re regulated to shooting torpedoes heading for your sub, you don’t get any feel for the weapon, let alone tear through countless hordes of foot soldiers the way you can with the Vulcan or other mounted weapons.

Enough of the weapons, what about the other half of the reason you play the game? What of the plot?

So stereotypical it hurts. I started to cringe more and more as the game went on. Faced with a dilemma of resolving the outstanding questions brought forth in the first two games, I feel the writers were tasked with coming up with new plot elements instead. It is otherwise hard to understand the option to jump fifteen years into the future, given that Gears 1 and 2 were set mere months apart.

It’s also hard to call this a resolution to the story we stared out with two games ago. What was going on in Gears 2 with all the experiments on humans that the Locus were doing? Did the sacrifice of Jacinto make any difference with the Locus or not? These are the very base of things which should have been addressed in the plot, but are missing and replaced with a brand new assortment of mysteries.

Like the Lambent. Seeds of that story are admittedly planted in Gears 2 but again that jump of years imposes a great burden for the plot which is not met. Going from moving, glowing blobs to fully formed burrowing stalks of exploding death is something else. How about explaining how that happened or why? There’s a great voice over to start the game, something to bring the player up to speed that events X, Y, and Z happened, but lacks an explanation of why the game is starting then and not at some of those pivotal moments that were glossed over a few seconds before?

Because of this, I find it hard to ascribe any importance to the events of the game. They have no context, no way to draw the player into caring about what happens. I am not suggesting that the game isn’t exciting, it is. You are thrust into battle, sent through lands exotic and strange. The familiar is made weird by change. And yet this is all window dressing, a hollow storefront that a play is staged in front of. Nothing more.

Also, suggesting that I needed to read the supplementary novels or comics is a non-starter. The game is the medium in which the story started. It should be where everything crucial to the story happens. In taking vital, necessary portions of the story out of the game, you have diminished the power the game has to tell stories. If games are to be held up and take their place with film and literature, then this short cut needs to be eliminated.

To summarize, if you liked the previous Gears you should give this one a chance. Rent it first and see if it can’t justify the purchase.

Desolation is the only way I ever got a sense of a scale of the world. Specifically, the desolation of the Kansas Flint Hills.

For those too lazy to hit Wikipedia, the Flint Hills is a stretch of prairie in eastern Kansas, about two hours west of Kansas City. Known for a bit of oil and cattle ranching, it is about as untouched as you can get. It is also empty. There have been a few attempts at settling it, but those were abandoned when it become unfeasible to keep trucking in the food needed to sustain living. The culprit here is the rocky soil. Ideal for the scrub and grasses native to the region but unworkable in any real sense for food crops.

My old scout troop would go camping out there once every couple of years. It was my first camp-out with the troop, actually. And it was hard, very hard, to not fall in love with the place. That emptiness, that Desolation (capital “D” well deserved here) gnaws at your mind until you finally comprehend your size compared with everything else. Out there you have the scale of the world pressed upon your mind. You see that you are as a flea to the grandness of the Earth. Your import, your ability to affect and shape is only in proportion to your size. And is just during the day. At night you are exposed to the cosmic scale. There are no lights save for those you bring. You see stars that you never otherwise see. You can watch satellites pass with without any telescope or binoculars. The galactic disk is obvious and bright. You see that we are nothing but a mote of dust, clinging to a mote of dust, swirling across the infinite void.

That is how empty it is. And that emptiness weighs on you. The nothingness is heavy enough to crush and sets in immediately as we turned off the highway, starting down those chert crusted roads and into the rolling brown expanses.

We went late in the year, late enough to not bother any cattle or to cause problems with the small derricks dotting the surface. Not that some of us didn’t try to cause a little trouble. People who shall continue to be unnamed decided that the best way to clear some of the debris from around their tent was with fire. In the constant 15-MPH wind, the dry November grass did more than clear out from the camping area. It cleared out several acres, leaving a straight black line across the otherwise dun hills.

But that momentary scratch on the surface of the hills was impermanent. As is all technology in that place. It endures in a way which belittles humankind’s efforts to tame it and to bring it under our control.  It is a hard place, it can be an unforgiving place, but those things give it part of its beauty.

Simply put, Half-Life 2 tries hard to be an excellent game. It looks good, the controls are easy to use, and there is a lot of world-building to see. But that’s the problem. All I ever got to do was look at the world, I never got to explore it. The limitations artificially foisted are numerous and varied.

For one, there is the story. All by itself, it might have sufficed to be a short novel perhaps. But as part of an interactive medium, the story suffers in its inability to let the player be the hero. In giving no quarter, no choice to the player, the story of Half-Life 2 becomes a bland background. This is incredibly jarring since NPCs constantly say that the player will think of something and lead them to victory. But no thinking is required on behalf of the player. Just follow the primrose path laid before them. How then is the player motivated? There is absolutely no reason to save the world because there is nothing at stake. There are no worthwhile failure conditions. And it doesn’t matter what the player may want or do, the world will be saved because that is what the story says will happen. For as much choice Half-Life 2 gives the player, you might as well be playing a high-res version of pong.

Second, there is the actual game itself. Only at its very end, did Half-Life 2 resemble anything like an actual game. And that was more an homage to the old arcade Tron game.

Otherwise, Half-Life 2 is best described as a series of in-game cut scenes punctuated by an occasional puzzle or fight. This really makes it no different than any other FPS released in the last decade. Most of the puzzles and fights are very easy. But there are a rare few which jumps so far up the difficulty curve as to be completely separate from the rest of the game. And while this is a fantasy game dressed in the guise of science fiction, there are more than one puzzle or fight which defies the rules of their world. Almost every enemy could see through walls, there were enemies which never faltered in their aim, and enemies immune to all attacks.

I think that the designers of the game were not so interested in what the player can achieve but were far more engaged in celebrating their own creation. Like some four year old holding up their crayon art for praise, Half-Life 2 wants you to be impressed with itself and not the experience that it brings to you.

This attitude is endemic in the video game world. We hear that the game creators want to engage Players through story and consequences, but Half-Life 2 gives no control over either to the player. Where this discontinuity originates, I have no idea. All I can see is that there is no trust in the player to be the hero, there is no trust in the player to choose the righteous path. I am not asking for an AI game master to  improvise at the player’s whim, but something far simpler. To start, failure should be an option and it should not end the game. Right or left should be meaningful options. At the very least I should be able to chart out the plot as per Robin’s Law of good gamemastering and have it be a straight line.

Games like Half-Life 2 that attempt to dazzle to distract from their flatness do a disservice to all games.