There's only so much choice a video game can give you. Open world games have borders because you can't actually explore forever, only so far as the game is designed for. Likewise, while games like to claim they present endless choices, they only offer specific ones they have planned for. In most games, you can't pull a gun on an annoying NPC withholding information even though you have the arsenal of a small army in your pockets. But where games present you with options, are you shaped by the choices you make, or do the choices you make shape you? It's within this paradox that Broken Roads’ choice system, one of the most intelligent I've ever seen, comes alive.
In most games with choices, you'll be presented with two binary options - in one, you will do the right thing but earn little to no rewards, and in the other, you will act selfishly but enrich yourself. Be good or be evil. Sometimes these are stylised as being lawful or rebellious, still a good person at heart but with drastically different methods. There are more complex versions out there, however. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disco Elysium used political theory and knowledge accrued by your character in the game to inform their options, while 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 offers unique responses to most situations based on your class and species. Bro🎀ken Ro🔯ads offers something of a combination of these two approaches.
When you choose your character’s origin story and assign their character stats (it's a point buy system), you'll face a questionnaire with moral quandaries. Right now, these are hypothetical scenarios, but they shape your world view. For example, one question described a family in your commune who had to quarantine due to serious illness, but their son snuck out to play with the other children. You might choose to make an example of this family, or exploit them. You might want to uphold law and order while maintaining peace, or you might think not of punishment, but of containment of the disease itself. The options you're given each time each correspond to a personality type: Utilitarian, Nihilist, Machiavellian, and Humanist. Once this questionnaire is complete, it tells you where on the political spectrum you fall - it's a little like when Buzzfeed tells you what 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disney Princess you are based on what you'd have for breakfast.
From this point on, your answers become restrictive, only offering you choices that fall inside your typical political outlook. In traditional choice games, you can choose the 'good' option in one quest to save the town, and then the 'bad' option the next town over because the rewards are better. It's not really roleplaying, it's metagaming. However, you're not locked in for keeps in Broken Roads - if you make choices on the edges of your philosophy, the needle moves, and so your outlook changes. You might start as a kind-hearted, open and loving optimist, but over the course of the game can harden into a scheming, selfish Machiavellian scoundrel.
It's a system that means you get to move with your character, making choices that suit them and the story you are writing together, not just the choices that offer the easiest game or suit your specific needs based on outcomes you shouldn't know but have already searched online for. It's a simple change to the formula, but it's perfect for a roleplaying game that wants to emphasise that you are playing a role and while improv is encouraged, there are still lines and beats to hit for the story to make sense.
I hope the gameplay itself can measure up to the in-depth thinking going on elsewhere. I played the opening of the Farmer origin recently, but as you might expect for that story it began slowly, with toiling in the barn. There was then a gap over an unfinished section (pretty typical in a preview) and some combat that I didn't feel prepared for. The pacing was all wrong and it's difficult to judge the gameplay alone in a short burst like that. It wasn't bad, necessarily, but it wasn't anything special either. The character profile process was. If the rest of Broken Roads can get on its level, we will have one of the smartest games in years on our hands.