If there is one outcome, remove the guise of control. Have my character speak for me. I don’t fucking care. I’d rather feel like my character is doing or saying something I wouldn’t personally do than for me to be given a fucking pop-up that means nothing and is just there to reinforce a self-insert facade. At least make a bit out of it if you’re gonna do it. It’s genuinely one of the worst pieces of game design outside of legitimately predatory behavior.
"do you want a pokemon?"
"no"
"whaaaaat???? i don't think i heard you right! do you want a pokemon?"WHY THE FUCK DID YOU GIVE ME THE OPTION TO SAY NO
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaat least just do the decency of kicking us back to the start screen for the bit
Or just let us go into the bushes and get attacked by a pidgey, then wake up in the professor's lab where he's like
The Skyrim opening screen displays, and suddenly the game turns into Skyrim instead of Pokémon.
Voiced dialogue had a lot to do with this. Text requires a writer and an editor. Voice requires writers, editors, voice actors, recording people, space on disc, it's expensive. So you need to streamline. Can't have 500,000 word novel games anymore.
I am 100% with you.
Developers need to have the courage to build bad endings in storytelling/RPG games. Make a decision in Act 1 that potentially ruins your day by Act 2. Make a decision in Act 3 that ends in "You Lose" even if you've kicky-punchy'd every boss to death.
These don't have to be Earth Shattering decisions. Maybe you challenge the fencing master to a dual with naked blades and get an eye pocked out. Now you play the rest of the game with an eyepatch. Consequences! Maybe you refuse to take good advice (or follow a bad lead) and one of your party members gets Aerith'd as a result. Maybe you don't solve the murder, and you never get the promotion that gives you access the best car in the game. Maybe you don't solve the murder and you get fired and there's a big "You're Fired" on the screen before the game would normally end.
These kinds of make-or-break decision moments are what gave games like Wing Commander and Mass Effect and Deja Vu and Elden Ring real replay value. Losing is part of what makes games fun. It doesn't have to just be mashing the A button to get to the next cinematic.
dragon age origins did it well
do something that will obviously immensely piss off one of your companions and they will just fucking leave lolThe bad guy ending for Knights of the Old Republic rules, too.
Dark Side ending spoilers
Massacring half of your party, and forcing Zaalbar to choke out Mission was some pretty diabolical shit. And if you didn't take the dark side path for him on Kashyyyk, he tries to kill you on the Star Forge later.
Planescape torment has a choice in the middle of the game where it straight up ends if you take it and I wish more games did that.
'Choosing' to be homeless (not having enough cash for rent) is a game over in Disco Elysium.
Or maybe some kid calls you gay so hard your brain breaks and you go live under a bridge.
That's pretty much the thing that made The Witcher 3 stand out, that there were just constantly little choices to make with no indication what would just be irrelevant because you'd just leave and never see anyone involved again and what would matter to the story later.
Other way around. Being overbearing and controlling towards Ciri leads to a bad end, while compassion in general leads to narratively better results like when you're literally put on trial for being a monster hunter only to have all the magical creatures you helped show up to speak to your defense.
Like it consistently strongly favors non-violent resolution whenever possible except in one particular case, even when violence is the appropriate reaction (IIRC you lock one storyline into a bad end if you break the sleazy spymaster's leg), and generally casts Geralts natural detachment and alienation as bad things.
I have a hard time even calling it particularly lib-brained because pretty much any other game comparable to it does it worse. It was made by a bunch of polish libs who have plenty of bad takes, but seemingly fewer brainworms than their American techbro counterparts.
seemingly fewer brainworms than their American techbro counterparts
Helps that they weren't living in the most propangandized country on Earth.
about how cool it was that helping some needy people actually resulted in them being murderous criminals with the narration tsk tsking you for caring too much, because it's "cliche" and "political" for helping people to result in helped people.
I think that's from the first game? Where there are some elven guerilla fighters smuggling supplies into the city, and if you help them they later assassinate someone else you're on good terms with (because they're fighting a protracted people's war against the human authorities)? I'm fuzzy on the details because I didn't get that far in that one. But there were a lot of problems with that game.
I can't think of any case like that from the third game. I know there are some "somebody in this situation is getting screwed over no matter what" choices but in general it's narratively better to be merciful and generous than vengeful and self-serving.
you're telling me
X) Yes
Y) Maybe Later (aka yes)
B) No (but still yes)
A) Sarcastic (also yes)
isn't the best gaming dialogue of all time?
I'll push back a little and say that multiple dialogue choices with the same outcome can be good if you accept them as minor expressions of character in that moment, rather than expecting them to have sweeping downstream effects. It can feel nice to say "Okay, I'll do that" in a way that feels more fitting for your character even if there's no "functional" distinction
I've been crawling through FF14, and since it's an MMO, there really can't be any choice. But they still constantly give me dialogue options. Anytime you choose the wrong one the person you're talking to just corrects you and carries on. It's...completely meaningless. I don't understand why they bothered, if anything I'd rather go back to being a silent protagonist rather than having it waste my time pausing a cutscene so I can make some stupid quip that immediately gets corrected before we get back to the story.
I don't understand why they bothered, if anything
To be fair there are some legitimately funny cutscenes/NPC reactions for some of FFXIV's dialogue options though. Anytime Y'shtola asks the WoL a question - there's guaranteed to be at least one response where the WoL either makes fun of Y'shtola or simps for her and she is always annoyed by it.
Anytime a MSQ gives you the option to make the WoL reply in a dumbass/snide/etc manner? There's at least usually some sort of remark that makes it worthwhile.
All the Scions (and half of the various other NPCs) are always so annoyed/off-put whenever the WoL decides to quip or says something dumb they're always the choices I gravitate towards if given one.
That's just kinda how it is in a lot of RPGs these days. So many games are labeled as role-playing games when they're actually an action game where you get to pick your abilities. Like there's no role-playing element to Borderlands or Vermintide, other than the role you play in the party (i.e. tank/sniper/dps). You don't have to think like your character and what choices you're allowed to make rarely matter in the long run.
Clearly you're not a real gamer. Everyone knows that RPG=numbers, and numbers must go up.
I mean, idk, as a JRPG fan the whole "True RPG" discourse annoys the hell out of me. Yeah sure JRPGs are linear narratives usually but it still has its historical origins routed in the first RPGs the genre just developed differently because of Japanese culture.
Tho idk this is a particular bugaboo of mine because of a close friend of mine who Ive argued with about this subject a lot. She has what to me is an incredibly narrow view of what an "RPG" is.
I guess I should have specified the branch of the RPG genre. As much as I rag on western RPGs for the lack of choices, I'm still a huge sucker for Dragon Quest and early Final Fantasy.
No worries I just needed to be autistic and go off about my personal bugaboo lol. Love those games too.
"Illusion of Choice" is one of, if not the, core of any pc game. If it's done well then the players think they were making important decisions all along, even though on the back end it's just as "but thou must" as any other game. If it's done poorly you get what op is talking about.
Basically - if the player misses, or refuses, or is locked out of a quest chain then all the time spent developing that quest is a waste. Most players never complete on playthrough, so having multiple branching endings uses up resources with limited payoff.
Any choice that seriously alters the course of the game can double the resource cost from that point on - now you need two complete story options, complete with art, locations, voice work, mocap, and god knows what else.
And all of this eats in to your profits, which is why we must abolish the value form so we can have gigantic messy crowd sourced labor of love games that are in continual community development for decades with dozens of incompatible forks.
gigantic messy crowd sourced labor of love games that are in continual community development
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead has entered the chat
There was that Game of Thrones game that Telltales Games developed that felt a lot like this. Not sure if the rest of their games are like that since it was the only one I played, but it felt like a waste of time to make choices that had no consequence in what happened in the story.
They mostly are. Generallly only minor changes regardless of your decision.
Back in the fallout days the companions were pretty one note but they would straight up shoot you if you did something horrible or seriously against their values. And if you gave Ian an smg there's a pretty good chance he'd turn you in to chunky salsa on the first round.
Baldur's Gate, especially 2, did really good with this - there were a ton of complex character plots and sub plots and if you didn't do the right things with the right kind of character you'd miss them. Convincing the evil drow lady to stop being stupid evil and just be regular evil was fun; she's a total jerk the entire time but if she "reforms" she becomes a total jerk who is also your evil buddy and maybe lover.
I don't remember that one. Myron was a creep so I usually left him behind somewhere.
iirc canon says he died like a rabid dog, it's fine if the "by whom" part is a little muddied
They are mostly like that I believe, I think the their games in general fell off once everyone figured out nothing really changed based on your choices.
I still feel like season 1 of the Walking Dead is a really, really good game because of the emotional impact but yeah the choices not really mattering that much (some did) kinda sucked and eventually the formula soured.
I had great fun with that game because all your dialogue choices were on a timer, so you always had the option to just not say anything. I always picked that option, every character I controlled would spend every single conversation staring blankly ahead, dumbfounded and unable to find any words to answer even the most basic question, while the other party would spend the conversation talking themselves into helping me. Turned the entire game into a comedy.
that actually sounds hilarious. this is why i think all games with dialogue options should always have a "say nothing" option at all times. i cant recall where ive seen it before, but other games have played around with the comedy of that
You should look into Age of Decadence and Colony Ship. They care very deeply about choice and consequence and it's reflected in the writing and quest design.
