Irreversible decisions (Pathfinder:Kingmaker and XCOM)

I think that irreversible decisions can be one of the most powerful tools you can use in your game design. But as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility.

When there are decisions player has to make, that will have significant impact on the rest of the game –> it makes it very important and emotional.

That can be the greatest strength or a complete turn off.

Let’s have a look at our two examples: New XCOM games and Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

XCOM is a series of tactical turn based strategy games where you take group of soldiers on missions, maintain your base and upgrade those soldiers in-between missions. Success of your missions solely depends on your strategy and a capability of your soldiers.

As the soldiers progress, you can level them, choose they equipment, pick their hair color, clothes and even change their name. Then on any given mission, something goes wrong and your soldier dies. Maybe even whole squad.

And that’s it, they are dead and you will never see them again.

As you can imagine seeing your soldier die hurts quite a bit, you have likely grown quite attached to them. This real death makes XCOM feel a lot more impactful.
You are their commander and you lead them to die. It may have not been your fault, but they are dead.

You can train new soldiers of course, but if any of your high level soldiers died, it will be quite a hit to your fighting abilities and not just the emotional damage.

That’s irreversible decision made right. Your actions had real consequences.

---

Now for a Pathfinder: Kingmaker, it’s a cRPG, based on DnD ruleset. There is a lot of irreversible decisions in the game and most of them are done very well. What I would like to talk about is one not done well and that’s a character creation.

You start the game with a very complicated and overwhelming character creation system. The problem is, that if you are not already very familiar with Pathfinder game systems (I wasn’t), you will have no clue what you are doing.

If I did it again, I would have chosen pre-built character from devs, but that’s not at all my natural inclination. I love to make my own character.

Sadly enough, that meant my Sword Saint was completely useless for about first 10 hours of the game. That is very frustrating as you can imagine.

Luckily other characters join your party right from the start and you are not left completely out to die. Still I would like to not have my main character dead most of the fights.

---

So, what makes these two examples different?

I am not entirely sure. I think information transparency plays a huge role here.

In Pathfinder I didn’t understand how combat system even works until 5 hours in and few online guides.

But in XCOM, I know that every single time I send a soldier out to a mission, there is a real possibility he/she won’t return.

I can make a real choice because I understand the consequences.

With Pathfinder I can make educated guess, but that ended up being very wrong and once I am already multiple hours in the story and realized the character I picked doesn’t work like I thought, I don’t want to start from start coz I would have to go through that whole first part of the story again.

To be fair, if I knew DnD and Pathfinder rules properly, I would have probably been able to make much better decisions and not end up with useless character… so we are back at the information transparency.

I think a good lesson from here is:

If there is a strategic decision that has real consequences, it's important player understands what those real consequences will be on the rest of the game.

PS: If you wanna read more about irreversible decisions in connection to narrative design:

Decision consequences vs Narrative (Xcom chimera squad)