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by seanhunter
522 days ago
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There a lot of great games with branching narratives, for example The Outer Wilds, Baldur's Gate 3, The Witcher 3, all the FromSoft games have extremely powerful narratives with multiple branches and multiple possible endings based on player choice. Done well there's a lot of replayability that arises from the desire to experience different paths within the overall general experience, as well as the immersion that comes from the player truly feeling they have agency in the world in the way that an on-rails experience just cannot do. For example there was one quest in the Witcher 3[1] where I remember being haunted by the consequences of an extremely difficult choice I had to make and wondering for days whether or not I had done the right thing. I eventually replayed the game and when I got to that point .... decided to make the same choice. sigh. So I still don't know whether I did the right thing. I just couldn't bring myself to try the other branch - it just wasn't right for me. One of the most powerful things a game has ever done to me, and very true to the complex and ambivalent moral tone of the books in my opinion. Done poorly, you end up with something like Fallout 4. Theoretically there are choices but they don't matter that much and many of the branches get little to no QA love so have bugs and problems (eg when I did my playthrough of fallout 4 I unwittingly managed to avoid the main choice you're supposed to be forced into doing which is to choose which faction to align yourself with) which had numerous buggy consequences because the devs clearly had never expected anyone to play in this particular way (I basically did a breadth-first traversal of all the different quests but put off a couple of key decisions because I couldn't make up my mind. In the end this pushed me past the point where I was supposed to make the choice and I ended up friends with just about everyone. Except the institute. Screw those guys). Yet another reason that game was so disappointing. [1] The whispering hillock. If you know, you know. |
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At the end, you have just two options: You can join the institute, or make war with them. I actually really didn't care about this faction and wanted to get out of that storyline, but that's what the game offers you.
Of course many games lead you to a specific denouement, which is typically one where you've defeated all the bad guys and win. But those games don't make any pretenses about making choices, whereas Fallout does.
I was really impressed with how many choices you had in Baldur's Gate 3. They definitely recorded an insane amount of dialogue just to cover all the possibilities. But I did find myself annoyed with the ending here, too, which only allows two choices at the end.
If there are two choices to make, it's basically the same as one, because the story just stops there. I'd rather games stop pretending. Don't pretend that there are so many gray areas. Just let the good guys win over the bad guys.
An alternative approach for such a game would be to have the decision tree be oriented around a kind of moral compass throughout, and your deeds decide what you can do. So if you keep killing or betraying people, you become more evil, maybe physically deteriorating into a kind of ghoul, while normal people start to fear you and refuse to barter or make allegiances. But as you get more evil, you gain access to eldritch abilities, make friends with monsters, and so on. There may be a point where you can make amends and return from evil, or vice versa, but at some point there's a point of no return where the final trajectory has been decided.
There are some games that have some something like this, where you have a "reputation" among the good guys that you can lose by doing misdeeds. Not sure if exactly what I describe has been done, however.