When I was young, I divided the games I played into two categories: the ones where I could kill everyone (including my friends) like Halo: Combat Evolved and Fallout; and the ones where I could only kill the people I was allowed to kill (including my enemies), like Knights of the Old Republic and Metal Gear Solid. My preference was for the former. To test the boundaries of these categories, I always tried to murder everyone I met in any game that I played. This tradition continues to this day.
Today, I view these two categories as the primary types of narrative philosophies in game design. I call them Constrained and Unconstrained narrative systems. In a game with a Constrained narrative, there is only one path to the conclusion. In an Unconstrained narrative, player agency determines outcomes.
Constraint comes on a spectrum. Halo is obviously not an Unconstrained game overall, and every game is Constrained by the limitations of the designers. Still, I use this distinction to better understand the design intent of a given title, especially a roleplaying game, and to determine if it is or is not doing what it set out to do.
I’ll be comparing roleplaying games going forward. Fundamentally, especially when I was younger, I understood this distinction in games with branching narratives as the separation between BioWare’s games and Obsidian’s. Let us go to them for our first examples.
A Case Study
Every campaign of Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas ends with the Battle of Hoover Dam. Likewise, every campaign of BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins ends with the slaying of the Archdemon. The end point is fixed. These games are both cRPGs and generally considered to be of the same genre. They are both highly regarded, and they both respect player agency.
But they take incredibly different approaches to how the player should be allowed to reach the climax, and both present the climax in very different ways.
BioWare
No matter what decisions the player makes throughout the course of Origins, the overall journey will remain the same. After the prologue is concluded, every playthrough will follow the player to Redcliffe, Orzammar, the Circle of Magi, and the Dalish. The order can vary, and the actual content of the beats will change based on player decisions, but each event must occur. This is the Constrained philosophy of narrative design.
The Constrained philosophy is plot-driven and character-focused. It is about telling a specific story about specific people, rather than allowing the player to tell his own story.
Origins is not Constrained in the sense that the player’s choices don’t matter, or that agency is not respected. What makes it Constrained is that the end can only be reached by following the plot the designers intended. There is no way through Origins that does not follow the main storyline. Every faction must be recruited first.
Obsidian
In New Vegas, the player’s initial goal is to find Benny and recover the Platinum Chip. The developers do not care how he does this. He can follow the plot as it appears in his quest log. He can use other clues to work it out for himself. He can march to New Vegas immediately in a straight line and take vengeance before doing anything else at all. When the story’s focus shifts and the decision must be made of what to do with the Platinum Chip, the philosophy does not change. The player’s goal becomes larger than revenge. He is presented with factions to side with or against, and how he goes about bringing forth the climax is up to him.
The player can make alliances with factions, or he can skip them. He can kill everyone in the world, or he can kill no one at all. He can do what Caesar or Mr. House want, or he can do it for himself.
No matter which option he chooses, the game still ends at the Hoover Dam. That is still some kind of Constraint. But nearly everything in the game is optional. New Vegas can be finished extremely quickly if the player knows exactly what to do and where to go. The game does not care. It is a sandbox. What he does with the sand is up to him.
The Unconstrained philosophy is player-driven and setting-focused. It does not care about plot or pacing, and it is less interested in characters than games that are Constrained. Fallout epitomizes the Unconstrained philosophy: the individual quests are Constrained, but players are given huge varieties of options for solving problems, from pacifism to genocide.
As a child, I was right to divide games along the line of mass murder. Dragon Age: Origins does not bother explaining why the player isn’t allowed to kill all of the dwarves in Orzammar. Any killing spree in that game is performed with the express permission of the writers. The implicit reason is because rolling up and butchering Lord Harrowmont and all of his friends would not be a valid solution to the succession crisis, and it is not something that your character, the last Gray Warden, would do.
The writers of New Vegas have no interest in telling the player what his character would or would not do. The systems only tell us what the character can do. The rest is up to him.
Both philosophies have their places. Neither is inherently superior to the other. What is vital is that developers understand the kind of games that they are making. If they don’t, disaster will strike. A Constrained game that permits too little behavior can start to seem frustratingly arbitrary. An Unconstrained game that allows too much without reckoning with the consequences will seem broken and bizarre. Before designing systems, stop to ask: what kind of a game is this? Is it sandbox or story-driven? Can the player kill anyone he sees, or will some be untouchable? Can the player rush to the end of the story straight away, or does he have to follow a plot?
The answers to each question do not matter. All that matters is the intent behind the design at large. Constrained and Unconstrained RPGs can both be excellent for different reasons. Only a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be will end up bad.
Edit: For an example of a game that has no idea whether it is Constrained or Unconstrained, look no further than Starfield.