Does your chosen game make user
input feel meaningful in terms of story direction and progression?
Why or why not?
The conflict and central story of
Facade is staged very clearly – The PC's friends,Trip and Grace are
in an unhappy marriage as they fight before the PC arrives, they make
passive aggressive remarks to one another while they're trying to be
hospitable, and eventually break out into a full scale confrontation
that the PC must mediate in an attempt to meet a peaceful outcome...
or so I would assume.
My playthrough ended with Grace leaving
before Trip could confess that he was having an affair, and though I
answered as personably and as honestly as the real me would have in
the situation, I didn't feel like my input had any strong or lasting
effect on either character and that this ending was inevitable. They seemed so argumentative over
seemingly insignificant things and gave off the impression that they
hated each other so much that it honestly left me feeling helpless to
even try to solve anything between the two of them. Half the time
what I typed went completely ignored or Trip and Grace just side-eyed
each other awkwardly like they weren't sure what I meant. Other
times I would try to help one or the other, only to accidentally
interrupt them or answer a question that I hadn't heard and didn't
mean to answer. Grace asked for a lot of yes/no answers, and simply
interpreted my words as yes or no depending on if I had a negative or
positvely associated word in it – I kept typing 'you shouldn't be
fighting' and the AI interpreted it as me telling her she shouldn't
feel like she was important or she shouldn't want to be an artist.
It felt like my answers only mattered when I insinuated 'yes' or 'no'
and everything else I said was inconsequential.
From what I gathered of the story,
Grace was mad that Trip wanted to go on vacation all the time? Trip
was mad that Grace was always angry and frigid? It felt like the
pettiest conflict but over the course of my playthrough, I couldn't
figure out whether there was any deeper meaning to it, though I felt
like there had to be. I feel like this game is a case of too much
player freedom and not enough actual player interaction. Realistic
as standing around in a modern setting and talking is, its neither
immersive nor stimulating to feel like the player's words don't mean
anything and that the AI is only acting on key phrases.
No comments:
Post a Comment