Illusion of Choice

One of the biggest issues I run into with far too many games is what I call the Illusion of Choice. When a game offers you the choice between two options that are terribly unequal, the choice might as well not exist. If I offer you the choice between 100 dollars and 100 yen, I haven't really given you a choice at all.

Lately, I've been making my way through Dragon Age: Origins, and I've been meeting this problem in spades. Your party in DA consists of four characters, each of which is one of three classes. Theoretically, you can choose any of the eight (nine, if you include the DLC) main characters to make up this party. In reality, you're going to need a Warrior who can take hits, and Alistair tends to be better than the other two; a Mage to do magic damage, and only Morrigan fits that bill; a Mage to heal and buff, and only Wynne can do that; and someone to do physical damage, which means the rest of the cast. The player character can be built to fill any of those slots, but it only frees you to take one other person. The game gives you the choice of eight, but at least two of those are all but required.

Bioshock suffers from a similar problem. While you have the choice of filling your slots with any plasmids you wish, one of them had better be Electro Bolt. It stuns enemies, it electrocutes anyone standing in water (and in Rapture, there are a lot of puddles), it opens doors, and it drops security drones better than anything else. On the other hand, slotting Cyclone Trap is a waste of a slot. It doesn't do enough damage or provide enough control to warrant filling one of your few plasmid slots with it. If you need to lay traps, you can draw enemies into puddles for Electro Bolt, or draw them into an oil slick and use Incinerate, or fire trap bolts from the crossbow.

Generally, Illusion of Choice tends to appear because the developers misjudged the usefulness of certain tactics or abilities. In Dragon Age, because mages can provide damage, control, and healing in ways that no other class can replicate, they become the best choice for party members. In Bioshock, Cyclone Trap doesn't provide anything that other plasmids or weapons can't do better.

The answer to avoiding the Illusion of Choice is to ensure that all options are equally useful. This tends to require a lot of analysis, as the more choices you have, the greater the chance that one will be more valuable than the others.

The alternative is to not allow choices at all. Please don't do that.