Spoiled for Choice: Can Live-Action Games Become More than Drama with Buttons?

In fact, Liu has already died four times in the 10 minutes since the game has been running. She is playing Road to Empress, an interactive live-action game that turns the early reign of Wu Zetian (武则天), China’s only female emperor, into a first-person struggle for survival. Players step into the role of a newcomer to the Tang court, grappling with all its inherent power struggles, political rivalries, and hidden ambitions. Every choice can lead to an alliance, revenge, or death.

Built around 4K live action and a setting reminiscent of popular palace dramas, the Road to Empress series has become a major hit in China’s growing market for full-motion video (FMV) games. Released globally in June, the second installment follows Wu Zetian’s path from low-ranking consort to the throne and sold more than 1 million copies within five days, while receiving more than 85 percent positive reviews on the game distribution platform Steam.

The success of Road to Empress has put China’s live-action games in the spotlight. Unlike traditional games built around combat, upgrade systems, or virtual currencies, FMV titles use real actors, filmed performances, and branching narratives to put players in the story, where their choices guide the narrative.

“It felt as if the characters were right there in front of me. I was watching the story unfold with them,” Liu, a 26-year-old from Shandong who in real life works as a foreign trade specialist, tells TWOC.

Once dominated by romance fantasies, the FMV genre is now expanding into crime, folklore, and social realism. Yet many titles still leave players searching for what feels like the right answer among a set of predetermined options, rather than truly influencing the trajectory of the story. As the industry grows, developers are looking to make changes that counter the perception that these games are simply dramas with buttons.

Opening moves

The fusion of games and films has its origins in early 1960s experiments that allowed cinema audiences to decide the fate of the protagonist on screen. The same core concept reached a mass television audience in the late 2010s, with Netflix’s choose-your-own-adventure film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Around the same time, the genre took off in China with The Invisible Guardian, an espionage game that casts players as a wartime spy and has drawn millions of players with its combination of live-action photography and filmed scenes since its release in 2019.

As live-action games grew more popular, romance quickly became the format’s preeminent theme. Released in 2023, Love is All Around, which follows a debt-ridden man’s attempts to navigate relationships with six different women, sold more than 1.9 million copies across all platforms in three months and sparked a wave of dating simulator FMVs primarily targeted at male players. The breakout hit, however, drew criticism for its sexualized portrayal of women and storylines that catered to male fantasies.

More recent titles have begun to focus on stories beyond romance. Revenge on Gold Diggers (2025) explores the murky world of relationship scams, though its portrayal of female characters has also been criticized for misogyny. This June’s Northeast Past delves further into the world of crime, immersing players in the violent struggle of northeastern China’s gang conflicts in the 1980s and 90s. The genre’s latest hit in August, Shao Song, taps dependable historical themes, following a student who travels back in time to the Southern Song dynasty (1127 – 1279) and attempts to change the fate of an emperor. The game goes beyond simple dialogue choices, adding turn-based battles and allowing players to command troops, albeit with some criticism for the jarring switches between its live-action scenes and cartoon-style battlefields.

For player Liu, the appeal of these games lies in better understanding the motivations and compromises of real historical figures. “The real actors really put me in the protagonist’s shoes, and I also get to watch it like a TV drama,” she says. The elaborate costumes, sets, and performances of Road to Empress drew her into Wu Zetian’s world, and the story enriched her understanding of the empress’s life. “I had read about her before, but this gave me a new perspective,” she says.

The illusion of choice

Yet the game’s much-advertised variety of branches and endings didn’t deliver the freedom Liu expected. Instead, progression became a cycle of trial and error. “There aren’t that many choices,” she says, “say there are five options, only one actually moves the story forward.” Liu spent more than 40 hours trying every possible route in Road to Empress, worried that she might miss part of the story. She found that many paths eventually arrived at the same scenes, making the impact of her choices feel less significant. “There’s no way to fast-forward. I ended up watching some scenes four or five times,” she says.

“You’re really just playing Minesweeper,” explains Ye Yi, a 33-year-old screenwriter-turned-game designer from Jiangsu who goes by a pseudonym. “There’s only one gameplay mechanic; from beginning to end, the whole story is pre-scripted.”

Ye believes many Chinese FMVs are built more like dramas than actual games. “In film and television, you take a script and visualize it,” he says, “but games are more complicated. You first need to design the gameplay mechanics, then turn those concepts into a working experience.”

For Ye, gameplay decisions must be part of the story, not just a way to unlock a scene that developers have already filmed. He cites popular narrative-driven games such as Detroit: Become Human (2018), where player choices—to protect, fight, or even kill other characters—genuinely reshape the game’s relationships, events, and endings. “A good interactive game shouldn’t stop the drama every few minutes and ask players to choose between options with only one correct answer,” he says. “A player’s decisions should have consequences and give them a reason to act, not just watch.”

The gap between watching and playing has become one of the industry’s biggest challenges as more creators from film, television, and the booming micro-drama sector enter the field. Ye has seen firsthand how developers repeatedly approach games with the mindset of making films, leaving the industry still searching for its own identity. “Some think they can make a good video and just add clickable options,” he says, “or throw in a few gameplay mechanics and call it a day.”

Game changer

Beyond questions of game design, FMV titles also face operational challenges to success. Live-action games must budget for actors, sets, costumes, and post-production for each story branch, and Ye estimates that even a small project can cost 2 to 3 million yuan to produce. This makes failure expensive: business and technology outlet Tech618 reports that around 90 percent of FMV games were losing money, with critics blaming predictable plots and weak storytelling for failing to hold interest.

Liu can testify to this experience. She quit playing another historical live-action title, Mandate of Heaven (2025), after about 40 minutes, finding the pacing too slow. “I knew that the interesting part might come later, but I wasn’t interested enough to continue,” she says.

New technology, however, might be changing the equation. A June report by market analyst East-West Entertainment found that artificial intelligence could lower the cost of live-action projects by millions of yuan, while cutting production timelines in half. AI’s impact is said to be especially pronounced for post-production tasks like set design and visual effects.

These advances are also expanding the possibilities for genres—from post-apocalyptic sci-fi to adventure tomb-raiding—that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to create with traditional visual special effects. A demo for the upcoming supernatural horror title Strange Tales of Republican China has attracted tens of thousands of sign-ups on Steam for its unique world-building and gameplay, combining spooky AI-generated visuals with branching choices and adventure-style puzzles that require players to uncover clues and escape danger. The game was made by a team of only four people, without any live actors.

Game designer Ye, however, remains skeptical that easier production will necessarily lead to better games. “You still need good ideas,” he says, “having the tools alone isn’t enough.” He is now exploring projects that combine new themes with ways to play that are not yet on the market, hoping to push the industry in a new direction. “Live-action video is only one way to present a game,” he says, “the core will always be gameplay where you guide players to take control.”

Player Liu also hopes future interactive games can offer more than just a cycle of failure and restart. She’d also like to see a continuation of Wu Zetian’s story that goes beyond her ascent to the throne. For her, the allure was never about reaching the game’s ending, but experiencing the story of the ruler’s life. “She didn’t get as many opportunities as I did to get things right,” says Liu. “She only had one chance.”