5 Tiny Decisions That Nearly Ruined Your Favorite Games

A chance encounter on a snowy road, according to director Hidetaka Miyazaki. See, he meant the whole thing to be a more positive experience. Once upon a time, a car in front of his got stuck on a hill, stalling traffic. So he and the other drivers all worked together to push each other out, and he made it home safe without the chance to say thanks. He had an existential awakening regarding the kindness of strangers, and thought he could put something in his game that would remind him of that feeling. Then gamers, being gamers, used it to torture and murder each other instead. Miyazaki forgot who he was dealing with.

So why did the developers implement such a frustrating and tedious obstacle for the grand finale of a flagship game? Were they making a statement about the futility of killing a god? The impotence of rage? Just having a go at Sisyphus?

None of the above! They flat-out didn't bother testing it. Nowadays, God Of War is one of Sony's premier franchises, but right up until the day it came out, the developers thought it would flop, so they got lazy with testing. According to one of the level designers, players were only supposed get "knocked down the spikes a little bit," not thrown to the ground. But as series director David Jaffe explained:

"We had focus-tested the shit out of that game, and it's a linear process, so by the time we got to focus-testing we were just like 'Nah, we got it, we're good.' It was literally the last level of the game so we didn't focus test that one, and that was the one that bit us in the ass."

So why was Disney ruining tiny thumbs with such difficult levels in games designed for little kids? In one word: Blockbuster. A former Lion King developer went on record explaining how Disney had a rule that their games needed to be frustratingly difficult, because they wanted people to buy them, rather than rent them. Plenty of gamers would only buy a title if it was far too grueling to finish quickly, because this was a dark and backwards era, and your nostalgia is lying to you.

Publisher 2K Games considered this stance, nodded thoughtfully, then outsourced the multiplayer component to another studio. It's like if the studio feared audiences would find Apocalypse Now boring, so they added a few scenes in which Martin Sheen kills waves of attack gorillas with a rocket launcher.

Spec Ops was well-reviewed and won tons of awards, but critics trashed the multiplayer for detracting from the game's themes. The multiplayer also did nothing to help the poor sales numbers, because in addition to the tonal dissonance, it also just plain sucked. Lead designer Cory Davis lambasted 2K in an interview, saying that the "multiplayer shouldn't exist," and that it "tossed out the creative pillars of the product." Fair enough. Then he went on to say the publisher "raped" the game and compared the multiplayer to cancer, which seems like a bit much. But then, this is the game where you're forced to bomb citizens with white phosphorous to prove war is bad, so maybe subtlety isn't their strong suit.

Luckily, saving the Little Sisters is objectively the best way to go. You're periodically rewarded for rescuing them, so by the end of the game, you end up with roughly the same amount of ADAM, plus all sorts of bonus goodies.

What was supposed to be a challenging moral decision was instead a superfluous "kill the little girl for no reason" minigame. BioShock's creator, Ken Levine, originally wanted this choice to be much tougher. Doing the right thing would have truly handicapped the player and given them a serious challenge, but the publisher was worried that players would simply follow the logic and figure that it would be best to commit mass child murder. So the developers overcompensated, and the opposite became true -- killing the Little Sisters, and the ending you see from doing so, is all so depressing and grotesque that the whole point of the exercise was defeated. A heady, grey moment of self-reflection turned into a basic black-and-white foregone conclusion, and all to, what? Prevent some child murder? Was it really worth it?

Download Chris's new party game Cheer Up! here for free. Preorder it here now! Jordan Breeding also writes for Paste Magazine, the Twitter, and himself.

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For more check out 5 Video Games That Pose (And Reward) Awful Moral Choices and 5 WTF Video Game Design Choices That (Somehow) Nobody Caught.

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