This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Editor's note: Evan looks at the disconnect that sometimes arises between a player's interpretation and a developer's will in open-world games. By the way, I failed "Eva in Peril" for the exact same reason. -Brett
Note: This article contains spoilers for the "Eva in Peril" side mission in Red Dead Redemption.
During one of the Stranger missions in Red Dead Redemption, I encountered Mario, a Mexican pimp, in the process of slapping around Eva, one of his "employees." My character told him to stop, and I received a prompt: I could either pay Mario $200 for Eva's freedom, or… actually, that was it.
I thought about this for a minute. Two hundred dollars (about $4,500 in 2010 money, according to usinflationcalculator.com) would not only allow Mario to keep up his activities, but it would also be like paying the admission for the next young woman unfortunate enough to end up on the wrong side of his smackin' hand.
With this in mind, I pulled out my gun and sent that asshole to Pimp Heaven.
Before the body had even hit the ground, the game informed me that I had frightened Eva, and now she wanted nothing to do with me. I had failed the mission.
This annoyed me for a couple reasons. Not only had killing Mario felt like the only decent thing to do, but I also wasn't sure why it was necessary for me to stay on Eva's good side. She had no reason to go anywhere with me; her problem was the guy hitting her in the face. I had removed that problem, so I should have completed the mission, right?
Unfortunately, no. What I was supposed to do was pay Mario off so that Eva could run away to a convent, and then come back in a few days to learn that she had left with some guy, and then go to the graveyard up the hill to find that Mario had killed her. Only then did developer Rockstar deem it acceptable to kill him, thus recovering my $200 and gaining honor and fame.
This is the only series of events that completes the mission. I felt cheated: My way was quicker and had a better result for all involved — except for Mario, of course. But at least he didn't have all that grief to deal with before I Dead-Eyed three bullets into each of his nuts.
Granted, Red Dead Redemption is not a role-playing game, and as such it is less beholden to a player's individual decisions. But "Eva in Peril" is somewhat at odds with the game's occasional morality prompts. The mission "Water and Honesty," for example, you can complete whether you kill or spare those involved. But the fact remains that as an open-world game, Red Dead's only obligation to player self-determination is to allow us to play through the missions at our own pace.
However, it is still strange that the game allows us to make these choices in some cases and not others. I had a similar experience in Saints Row when what I thought was an ingenious shortcut led to mission failure because I'd failed to drive the exact route as the car I was chasing.
When you're dressed like this, no shortcut is too short.
Additionally, during my brief time with Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind — admittedly an RPG — I panic-murdered a character after she caught me breaking into her house, only to discover later (from a FAQ, no less) that this would keep me from completing a side quest I'd been working on for several hours. This example is an interesting outlier, because the game let me discover in my own time that I had failed, rather than just telling me outright. Still, it was no less frustrating — although it did provide a valuable lesson on the tragic consequences of breaking and entering.
A game that truly fulfilled the often-used bullet point of "go anywhere, do anything" wouldn't work for everyone, and I'm not entirely sure how developers would make it. If you can go anywhere, where do you start, and where do you go from there? If you can do anything, what is your goal, and how do you know if you win?
Games don't work unless there is some kind of structure in place, so I can't fault Rockstar for providing guided experiences in side missions like "Eva in Peril." However, in the game industry's recent rush to provide players with morality prompts and more open experiences, this mission in particular feels contrary to the spirit of these trends, as well as many players' desires to interpret for themselves what characters like protagonist John Marston would do in a particular situation.
There's a conflict, then, between the developer's story of a mission and the player's. With "Eva in Peril," Rockstar wanted to tell a tragic story about how misfortune perpetuates itself unto death. I wanted to tell a story about how John Marston efficiently rid the West of a drunken, pimping fuckstick. The developer's intentions won, as always, even if that meant arbitrarily removing options from the equation. In many cases, then, the most audacious part is letting players think they have any choice at all.