Dungeon Master
Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer’s regular RPG column, where Online Editor Fraser Brown delves into PC gaming’s most beloved and enduring genre. Grab a seat in our badly-lit tavern and please ignore the goblin puke.
We love a big RPG dilemma, don’t we? Right up until the point where we actually have to make the choice and we stare at our screens for an uncomfortably long time, hoping we’ll figure out a way to make a call and not feel absolutely terrible about it later.
For my money, the best—agonising, guilt-inducing—choices are the really personal ones. I love that Mass Effect lets me determine the fate of the galaxy in all these different ways, but it never gives me a reason to care about the rachni, for instance, or the council, so when I have to decide to save them or let them die, it becomes more of an abstract moral choice.
Disco Elysium, then, left me in tatters. It’s more personal and intimate than a productive therapy session. There’s a card you can read pretty early on, stuck inside a ledger, that opens the wound that Harry worked very hard—by abusing alcohol and drugs—to forget. If you toss it, you never get it back. That was a hard one. Is ignoring it a kind of liberation? Or are you just helping Harry hide from his trauma?
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It’s effective because it’s powerfully relatable. You don’t even need to have experienced a cataclysmic breakup to understand Harry in that moment. We’ve all got shit we’d really love to forget. Self-destructive choices that we made in a heated moment, leaving regret to constantly claw at us.
Relationship drama should be excellent fodder for RPG choices, but that rarely ends up being true. Usually they end up being friction free, but sometimes you’ll be walloped with the classic trope of being forced to decide if they live or die—a cheap trick to force us to care about someone, even if they actually suck. Yeah, I’m talking about you, Ash.
That’s why Geralt’s romantic misadventures are so effective at spitting out challenging conundrums. The best thing about The Witcher 3‘s approach is that you can choose not to make a decision. It’s so rare for games to recognise that indecision is another choice.
I desperately wanted Geralt to be happy. He deserved it. But I could not figure out the best way to go about giving him his happily ever after. The depths of his feelings for Yennefer nudge you towards making sure they have a life together, but god she’s toxic. She regularly makes him feel like shit. Triss actually seems to make him happy, but is that just the safe pick?
So I never made the choice. I told both of them I loved them, and they left me tied to a bed while they went off to get drunk. My inability to make a choice was the worst choice. But it also ended up feeling poignant—Geralt so often gets in the way of his own happiness.
OK, what about you lot? What’s the toughest choice I’ve had to make in an RPG? Let me know in the comments.