Originally Posted by
Kisho
Single player RPGs, absolutely. Let's have some serious, meaningful decisions. Let's kill off characters, let's make mistakes. Mass Effect, you're the golden standard here. Let's make some serious drama.
MMOs... Well, unfortunately you can't really. Every player needs to have the same potential to reach the maximum power possible. If they get cut off from some power gain because of a choice they made when they were potentially uninformed, well that's bad design. That makes players feel as though they can never 'catch up', even if the power gain in question is just +1 to strength or whatever.
There's also the issue with MMOs where, let's say for example you implement a story decision where you choose who lives and who dies. What happens when you want to reintroduce the person who lives into the story? 50% of your players would have chosen the 'wrong' answer, which feels bad, or you constantly have to use some sort of phasing technology to make the two characters interchangeable depending on who you chose to keep alive. A bit like how Mass Effect uses Kaidan and Ashley, but much more problematic because it's not a single player game.