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I think this gets to a truth far beyond alternate endings or even video games: _A good ending is one that resolves character development, not just the main plot._ In all the cases you mention the "true ending" is the one that does precisely that, and the games whose alternate endings provide different conclusions to the plot but are irrelevant to the individual characters are unsatisfying. ME3 shows this so clearly. So does the ending to HIMYM. Because this is universal and goes beyond games with alternate endings, it shows that the whole discussion about choice is a bit of a red herring. I don't want choice in the ending, I want the ending to be _consistent_ with what the characters have experienced. This implies that if I have choice in the characters actions through out the game, then there better be different endings that reflect that. Otherwise the game is writing cheques that it can't back. But even then, the variety of endings is a necessity mandated by the possible different choices made earlier, not a choice of itself.
Generally in games with many endings, I find the side-endings develop the characters and the "true ending" develops the plot. But this is mostly in VNs
Everyone forgets about the most popular ending in Souls games: the one where you give up (e.g. basketball timeline from BDG's LoZ vid). While that is a funny joke, it's also kind of not a joke, even being codified in Dark Souls by the concept of going hollow.
my favorite part of a fire emblem game is not the ending, but the slides afterwards that detail how everybody choose to live their lives and with who. They feel so unique and personal to my playthrough, its all the alternate ending I need and a solution I'd always encourage
Optimizing the last third of Three Houses with side map grinds not for the combat xp, but for affinity xp so i could matchmaker everyone into the perfect little couples
What we want is not necessarily different endings. We want customized player-specific epilogues. In Mass Effect, I shouldn't need to make one big final choice. I spent the entire game making choices. The finale should show me *the culmination of those choices*.
To be fair, they can't exactly do that. There are thousands of players all making different choices. Even with maximum customization, developers would only be able to have broad categories of endings with minor edits depending on minor choices.
@@ButterflyScarlet Bioware were doing almost exactly that in Dragon Age: Origins, though. The ending slides outlined all the impact you left on this world and its characters, and it felt great.
@@ButterflyScarlet And that's fine. No ones expecting an epilogue where Garrus opens up his own club beacuse you did the Shepard shuffle 10,000 times. In Mass Effect the only ending should of been destroy (without killing other AIs). Perhaps with a true ending where Shepard doesn't have to sacrifice themselves. And the epilogue details how and who is doing what to rebuild the galaxy afterwards.
Spicy Hot Take: Mass Effect gutted its ability to have a satisfying ending the instant they decided the Trilogy was about the end of the world. World Ending sucks ass, we need to stop writers from doing it, it's always bad. Choices are valued because of their Consequences, and Consequences react to stakes as high as the End of the World in the same way a sandcastle reacts to a tidal wave.
The true endings are actually hard to avoid even if they are not created explicitly. We humans tend to value stuff according to the effort it takes to achieve. So some endings that are difficult to achieve are valued more. But we also expect as humans that the rewards we get are according to the effort. If an ending is very difficult to achieve, but it's "meh", it feels disappointing. So for game designers is very easy to fall in the pitfall of matching the value of the ending with its difficulty. If the ending matches the expectations a hierarchy of endings emerge. So you end up creating "true" endings even if it's not the original intention. On top of that, players usually expect that the hardest and coolest ending to be the canon ending, so...
And as soon as you add a sequel you have to pick 1 ending to be the cannon ending or you have to make 1 completely unique game for each ending (i guess you could nuke the world so non of the endings mattered but thats lame) and then detect the save file of the previous game to know what ending to play. Tldr: sequels mandate an ending get declared the cannon ending to use as the starting point of the sequel. Also prequels have to end at the starting point if the original game so they can't even do alternate endings.
@@jasonreed7522 Or you could be SMT and have every game (past 2) be in a basically altenate worldline in the first place, sidestepping the problem entirely.
@@sponge1234ify Or you can do it how Fallout handled previous endings: say that nobody knows exactly how things went in the end for some reason. News travels very slow in the wasteland, I guess.
@@killerbee.13 Ah yes, the "make it vague" route. To be fair, if you're in the wasteland, would you care what happened in bumfuck nowhere in the other end of North America, when you're already dealing with your own clusterfuck of humanity, radmonsters, and package delivery?
I think something that pushes Undertale over the edge is that, while most of its endings follow a pretty standard structure of getting something that more closely approximates the best ending with proportion to how much effort the player puts into the game, the ending that requires the MOST effort, i.e. the genocide ending, is explicitly a bad ending that exists not to be a satisfying conclusion to the story, but instead as a means of further fleshing out the rest of the game by giving story and lore details that can't be found anywhere else. I think the potential to use alternate routes as means of fleshing out the story of a game in ways that enhance the player's appreciation for more "correct" paths is pretty underutilized. I want to see more games with some absolutely _wacky_ endings that aren't satisfying on their own, but elevate the experience as a whole.
Yoko Taro is also a master with that sort of storytelling as well. Drakengard 1's alternate endings are all bad endings but they really flesh out the characters and the final one ends up being the prologue for the Nier series.
The Dog and UFO endings in the Silent Hill series are difficult endings that are not "correct". They don't really flesh out the story, but they provide a new perspective. IIRC, one of the developers said he was concerned that players going through the story multiple times could become depressed, so he added a joke ending in an attempt to bump those players out of their rut.
Some VNs use alternate routes to good effect, although some also try to create an illusion of player agency but many are more like books with alternate endings. For example, Fate/Stay Night is about a battle royale with >14 different characters, each of whom gets elaborated in at least one of the three routes even if they die early in another one. While in the prequel Fate/Zero no master or servant dies for the whole first half since it's a regular book and the author has to characterize everyone before killing them off.
@@w4t894thwl3r The Genocide route is specifically aimed at the sort of people who will walk in circles killing the same random encounter over and over to get their level up in other games, and it's only a few hours total as I recall which is a lot less than grinding in most games.
It’s more of the genocide route that is the interesting thing, as the ending is a bit vague, with the fallen child aka Chara spouts a bunch of oddly-worded lines, and destroys the entire world, somehow. The ending is intentionally underwhelming, albeit creepy, but the journey gives us a lot more insight into the characters.
Interesting to note that the gameplay derived endings you mentioned working early on - with the example of Pikmin - fit neatly into the true ending category for all the same reasons. They're a culmination of the journey you undertook to get to them, and reflect what happened. The difference is that the changes aren't based on moral decisions, but rather player skill - the better player gets the better reward.
Also Pikmin has Cannon endings (the best 1) because it has sequels that imply the ending of the previous game. The entire pikmin franchise feels very underrated despite doing so much right, including respecting player's time and being a perfect openworld for its console limitations. (It has levels but you can solve the levels puzzles in any order if you have the right pikmin to actually solve the puzzle or the glitch knowledge to bypass it)
Fallout New Vegas is the gold standard for multiple endings in my opinion. It does lock you into a specific ending once you go far enough down one, but you can still go do the independent ending if you want to.
Yeah, I think New Vegas benefits from two main things. One is that the player can't change the big structure. There's going to be a fight over Hoover Dam, nobody can stop that, no matter what you do or who you kill along the way. The player gets to influence who shows up and on what side. So the game gets to use basically all of the content on every path *and* just has to include or not include certain factions in the big finale. So the stuff the player did along the way to get to the ending always matters in ways they can palpably detect during the big battle (didn't meet the Khans, they fight for Caesar, did meet the Boomers, they do a bombing run to support you, etc). The other is that the path lock-in is pretty early on in the main story all things considered. You get the platinum chip quite early on in the critical path and lock in your side by delivering it. So you get to do someone's perspective on the rest of the content and your ending will proceed from that.
I remember the first time I played being stunned by the fact the game cared enough to detail every little "where are they now", right down to people like the khans who I just wiped out because I couldn't stand them, or helping out little ol jacobstown. Made further playthroughs all the better knowing that playing a different character with different alliances is actually going to affect something, unlike a lot of games where pushing your character into a specific archetype is totally ignored.
Regarding true endings, I remember in a conference Yoko Taro explaining that the feeling of freedom in game isn't when you have a lot of options from the start and can do whatever you want, but when your options were limited and suddenly expand. I feel that the same thing applies to true endings. You thought the story had to end in a few restrictive ways, but then you find out that by doing certain things, you can unlock more options. That's what makes it feel like you're in control when you're just playing an extra part of the game.
So people want the subplots to have a good ending, like relationships with people or organizations. Just like in Lord of the Rings the film doesn't end when the ring is destroyed but when sam gets home to his wife, it ties up the subplots. Okay not exactly what the whole video was about, but a part of it
deborah hendersons research seems to support you. at the games narrative summit her takeaways were basically: 1. write good/memorable characters and provide meaningful options for interaction with them 2. very few players care to closely follow plot 3. what interests players is which characters they're interacting with and/or what story beats were caused by their interacting with the games characters and systems
You make a good point I think. The ending of A Short Hike is the same regardless of how you managed to collect the feathers needed to get to the top, or even how many you got, however, your character will mention all the optional things you did throughout the game, the different characters you've met, etc. And that was enough to make me feel like it was my own ending which was very cool.
I think Dragon Age: Origins had a good ending system. Each zone/area was affected by your decisions there and the final ending is also dependent on your choices.
I agree to a certain extent. But there really isn't much of a choice as to how to deal with the Fifth Blight. You can't run away and let Ferelden burn. Yeah you can choose how your allies feel and react but the main conflict is just like ME3 in the end. You can choose your way through the game but the final conflict remains the same. You must fight the Arch Demon no matter how valiant or evil your character is. The only major change when it comes to that final battle is who does or does not die: the Warden, Loghain and/or Alistair. The only major effect your player choice has on that ending is whether or not your character's gender is capable of conceiving a child with Morrigan, which locks you into a set amount of options to save yourself and your companion of choice. You can't avoid becoming a Warden, you can't run away from the Blight and Alistair is pretty good at keeping us as players on the "deal with the Blight" path since he is like "we're stuck together now. love it or hate it." He won't be happy if we are being evil but he sticks around until the Landsmeet and after for most players. Like let me get my ass handed to me by Duncan or Alistair if I try to run! we can spare Loghain but we can't choose anything other than deal with the Blight? Let me be a coward in more than just words.
@@kraziiXIII But you know, ME3 ending would already be immediately better if you didn't have the final choice, and whatever you did leading up to that point had your character choose the ending for you. Since it was the journey that mattered most.
@@kraziiXIII but it isn't about the ending. its about the people. if you take a look at dragon age keep, 99% of the potential choices involve people and what happens to them. this game is the FIRST and a LOT of the choices you make are present and effect the story in later games to at least a minor degree. For example, entire missions in DAI can cease to exist depending on your choices. the fact that that the arch demon is defeated has to happen because it not happening would destroy the potential for games later in the storyline, because an entire somewhat major area is now entirely destroyed and overrun. I feel that it was designed with later games in mind, because of just that. if they didn't plan to have later games, and have your earlier choices effect them, there would definitely be at least one ending that went like that. and, like i said,its not about the final ending anyways, its about what happens to the people within it, even if it only amounts to a line of dialogue.
Fallout new vegas does the alternate endings very well, with dozens of potential endings, based on faction rep, who you have as companions, who you let live or killed and many other factors
That's why I like "slide endings". They are easy enough to produce that the devs can really account for most of the decisions you made during the game. You don't really need to spin out a massive story about how you changed the entire world. Often, it is just enough to have the game give you a nod acknowledging a choice you made by a simple slide.
@@George_M_ that was the problem, New Vegas is best played like DnD or Pathfinder, not most modern video games, you cant really optimise the ending, all are valid, due to your actions in the game, trying to optimise that much of New Vegas removes what makes it New Vegas
Agreed, it’s a perfect solution. It requires the least resources to acknowledge the most choices, and creates the impression of a world with its own life you helped to shape.
The Zero Escape trilogy's endings are interesting to me, since with the time travel plot point/mechanic, all of the "alternate" endings lead directly into the "true" ending. It doesn't have the issue of any of the endings being underdeveloped, because they were all planned to be part of the main linear storyline anyway, it's just a matter of which order you see them in before the true ending.
yeah, that series was sweet. the bad endings leading to the true ending make the bad endings matter to the overall plot. you gotta take that axe to the face to find out which route leads to the real ending. plus it has some awesome true endings. i really liked the first game's ending. so awesome.
also basically in the last one the bad guy says "oh yeah, all of those bad endings happened, you're just the versions of yourselves that lucked into the timeline where you don't die horribly, enjoy the existential horror of that :)"
Yeah, Zero Escape handles this very well - VLR handles multiple endings _perfectly_, IMO. I think you _have_ to see all of the non-Game Overs to get the true ending. But all of them really develop a character and/or the overarching plot, which makes them all seem meaningful.
The main thing about me3 that bothered me was that I had literally brokered peace between organics and synthetics and now this kid tells me that war between them is inevitable.
The fact that you literally defy the reaper's core reason for existing before you even learn what they want is probably the biggest mistep in the whole game - it's the one thing that is just straightup bad rather than an inevitable consequence of over-promising, it doesn't even get mentioned I don't think!
@@ArchitectofGames I've seen this complaint several times, and I don't really agree. The problem the Reapers' creators identified is that if any group of synthetics ever builds up its strength and takes over the galaxy, they can destroy organic life everywhere forever if they feel like it. Just because it's possible for some organics and synthetics to cooperate sometimes doesn't make this problem go away. Their solution was just terrible from both ethical and reliability standpoints. But since the game creators had established what the Reapers do, and then had to explain why and where they came from, it's as good an explanation as any I can come up with. I'm actually more bothered by some earlier plot points: It seems like they had the Reapers take over the Citadel off screen (presumably killing most of the characters in the series) and move it to Earth just so they could sell the game as being about defending Earth, when the Citadel is obviously more interesting and important in the Mass Effect universe. And it seems like they had Udina decide to help Cerberus, even though at that point everyone in the galaxy knew Cerberus was controlled by the Reapers, and he wasn't indoctrinated, just because they thought it would be satisfying to kill him, since he's kind of a jerk. But I, for one, was actually starting to respect him after he finally realized Shepard wasn't just a crazy person who kept making his job harder, and it turned out he was actually pretty good at that job.
The Catalyst is working with a very basic idea. It's creators programmed it for solving one problem, but they didn't give it enough constraints, the Oshantans from The Last Angel come to mind here. The Leviathans built this AI with a simple command, one it is still following, but left it's actual thinking systems and algorithms very simple and honestly cyclical. They built it to find out why "synthetics and organics always fight", and so it assumes that that will always be the case, thus locking it into a logical loop that will always double back on itself to "synthetics and organics will always fight". So no matter what you do it is, at the end of the day, a very simple AI working on a feedback loop of logic that no new information can break it out of. The only thing wrong with the ending of ME3 is the fans reaction (much like the Star Wars Prequels). I am so glad I got into Mass Effect long after it finished, and without reading up on it, so I had everything first thing out and had no outside influenced biases. In my mind the Citadel DLC ties up all the party member side plots, and all the missions before tied up all the story side beats, and the ending ties up the main story. And Adam mentioned that each ending allowed you to influence other things, but everything you can influence has already been done, you have made every push and nudge you can, Shepard's story as a human on the galactic influence stage ends with that choice. He or she is either going to survive and retire (High EMS destroy), die (low EMS destroy), become the basis for new life (Synthesis), or become the AI (and one that isn't locked in the faulty logic loop) in charge of the Reapers (Control). We may see the results of these changes in the new Mass Effect game, and I hope we do, but with a save import system, so that each person can bring in their favorite playthrough.
"War between organics and synthetics is inevitable" would be a much stronger arguement if the peace between the Quarians and Geth was doubtful and uneasy. Shepard can have faith in both species to do better in the future, but the we wouldn't get "the Quarians get their homeworld back ASAP."
I would argue that ME3 endings were GOOD in principle, because they were broad enough to cover all major possibilities. But they were BAD executed. The game already had actions/dialogue options that could predetermined the ending. Like: - aligning with the Illusive Man sets the synthesis - being skeptical of cerberus sets the reapper annihilation. - having many lost teammates pushes Shepard to wanting to be a God or wathever. Those could set an unique ending fitted to the player tastes. Without the "big three buttons". And then more unique cutscenes (like having to battle the illusive man or being defeated by him) just to make then more memorable.
I disagree completely. I think they were extremely weak in and of themselves, as was almost everything else related to the Catalyst. It's a very cheap deus ex machina that breaks the entire universe's internal logic, relies on last minute exposition, greatly diminishes the threat of the Reapers and also robs the player of their agency. Save for a complete rewriting of Mass Effect 3, I don't see how the endings could have been made good. Then again, I'm in the minority on this. Perhaps most people would have liked the endings just fine with minor alterations.
@@samg.5165 IMO the crucible is just badly executed. A big weapon developped since several cycles, with each cycle finding its plans and adding to them and finding a way to make the information pass through to the next cycle is logical when confronted to a threat like the reapers. Liara does it herself during ME3 in case they lose the war. And it being in human archives is logical, since in ME1 there is a side quest in wich you get important informations (about cerberus iirc) and the shadow broker contacts you to buy them since "the alliance will just archive them and do nothing with them, like they do with everything else." The alliance doesn't care about anything not usefull imediatly to them and just archive it without a second thought, so them not fiding about the crucible is not that farfetched. But here are the only "realistics" things about the crucible. The fact it can give you 3 options comes out of nowhere. The catalyst too (the crucible missing a part is ok, this part being an IA in a reaper construction is weird). The way the crucible is discovered is bad, and they just had to have Liara say "my shadow broker network gave me access to Mars archives, wtf humans, why didn't you study it more?" to make it passable. Not "insight and desperation". And the 3 choices... either you chose destroy and everything you did to make peace between organics and synthetics is meaningless, or you say "yeah, the previous bad guys were right, good thing I'm not endoctrinated myself thought". And refusal... well at least the stargazer bit of this ending shows that Liara's plan in case of failure worked perfectly, and the reapers are defeated in the next cycle. All of this to say, IMO the ending could have been way better even by keeping the crucible, the problem really being the last 15 minutes of the game, and some tweakings here and there.
I'd go for a slightly different perspective. I'd have the your actions previously in the game eliminate some of the choices you are allowed to pick at the end. So if you sided with the meatbags too often, you couldn't pick the toaster side and vice versa. Only if you didn't show any particular pattern in your moral choices would you get all 3 or 4 choices at the end.
What if that choice was done at the middle of the game but it's more of a process than a switch toggle, so throughout the rest of the campaign, you have to deal with the allies and factions that go against that decision?
One of your earlier examples, choose your own adventure books, are a actually a really good example of your point. Nominally have many endings, but really have only two; the "good" ending, and many endings that mostly boil down to, "you done screwed up and died".
Not necessarily; I remember several books that offered multiple "good" endings, or had an additional "true ending" if you found all the clues throughout your adventure. That being said, books probably have a way easier time with this than video games, as they are much less interactive, so the choices you get can be more strongly directed.
Have you read Meanwhile by Jason Shiga? It's a fantastic choose-your-own adventure book with lots of very different endings and a very unique journey to get through all of them. I highly recommend it if you like that kind of story.
Fallout 2 does this perfectly. When I first played the game of was amazing to me. There is a "big" ending which describes how you resolve the main quest but this is followed by a half dozen subsidiary endings. So there are independent dialogues like "meanwhile in Klamath..." describing your personal resolution to that sub plot. As a player I hit the main ending and felt good but then it was followed by "meanwhile in" covering the most obvious side quests making me realise I did not get great resolutions to other choices. This goes to combinatorics. By treating the different subquests as independent you get an ending nuanced by every sub part and you feel all of the main choices are reflected reasonably in the ending. In my first playthrough it turned me from feeling "oh I triumphed" to "I am so awful look at the good people I forgot to help". Weirdly felt good because I mattered. For me it is the single most memorable video game ending - really bittersweet showing your good and bad choices together.
_Because_ endings are actually about good _synthesis,_ I think the more satisfying question is about 'routes.' Fire Emblem: Three Houses works so well because hard-locking the player into distinct routes has carried Japanese visual novels for decades. Sometimes it's an explicit choice point, like which team to ally with; sometimes it's obfuscated behind affection meters you did or did not max out, turning left on a road instead of right, etc. It still sidesteps 'this story can't put its foot down and _say anything,' by committing early and seeing how the aftermath plays out for 90% of the runtime._ Instead of writing every mission as though Tali is simultaneously _dead and alive,_ or Agent Lucy Kuo is simultaneously _friend and foe,_ it's able to explore the full implications of these state-changes. A love interest throughout one route, may be a terrifying Nemesis pursuing you through another, letting you reflect on your ability to love or _hate_ this person equally depending on how your relationship develops. In terms of routes, Disco Elysium's mostly-linear ending is dotted with sidequests another player _might never see._ The route is predetermined, but the path to get there _is the playground._ The DE fandom _exists_ to compare experiences. I think a synthesis between these two styles has a lot of potential.
Actually, Three Houses is an anti-example and smashes this thesis despite said thesis being very intuitive. The endings are a lot better than the actual routes. Silver Snow was written before the writers got good, Crimson Flower is severely undercooked and honestly unfinished, Verdant Wind is a weird copypaste of Silver Snow, just with some seperate pros and cons and...well, the DLC route feels like they just randomly made it up on the fly to sell more content. Only Azure Moon gets away from examination largely untouched.
Sometimes, the condition to reach the true ending is so specific to the point of feeling like a checklist. Like finding this hidden item and give it to an NPC who will only appear in an area you already passed by, no sooner or later or else you fucked up. Or you can't receive this item from this NPC or being nice to other NPC, or else they will die or kill someone else and you will never get any kind of hint about that.
That just reminds me of the Cave Story-true ending that is one of the most garbage true endings compared to the respective normal ending I can remember.
i feel like the CRPG trope of the ending montage that describes the aftereffects of all your choices, like what FNV does, was basically the perfect ending technology and it kills me that it never became more popular
There's probably a reason that many of the very best use cases of alternate endings in games are explicit commentary on the nature of player agency in games, from Undertale to NieR to The Stanley Parable to a few others I don't want to mention because finding out their actual point was a pleasant surprise. I'm not sure *what* that reason is, metacommentary isn't inherently better than traditional narratives, and many of these games only have effective endings because of the strength of their stories on top of the meta elements, but it a very interesting trend to see.
I haven't played the mass effect series, but hearing you talk about this made me thing if a possible way to make that ending better: Don't put you up there alone. Adjust the choices a bit, and sort the characters you can interact with into categories based on which one they'd have strong opinions on. Then have whichever member of each section the player interacted with the most make it there with them. That way they could shrink the scope back down. You aren't wiping out machine life, you're looking Legion in the eye and telling him his very existence jeopardizes the galaxy. And if you elect to control synthetic life, you're doing it side by side with your friend who is very quickly going a bit mad with the power. Maybe if you got everyone in one section killed there's a moment where shepard looks at that button and gets flashbacks to one of them, before muttering about what they probably would have wanted. Maybe some characters will try to stop you and you literally have to put down one of your friends in order to keep your agency. And when you make your choice, the game shoves it in your face. It takes a nice, slow moment to show how the characters react to this decision. From pained betrayal, to smug arrogance, to just silently nodding along and saying "Whatever you say commander." If a game's about social interactions, they can't just leave you alone at the end. That's a stupid idea. No, you've got to bring them with you all the way to the credits. Unless the point of an ending is to make you feel overwhelmingly alone, that is.
I honestly don't get why they didn't do something similar to the mass effect 2 ending. In it you have the (somewhat arbitrary) choice of controlling the reaper you find there or destroy it. But the ending isn't really about that. The ending is about Shepard going on a suicide mission to save a galaxy that has forgotten them. You start the game alone and as you go one meet new crewmates or meet up with old ones. You can decide to go do the suicide mission pretty early or collect all possible space friends. Depending on which of them you assign to which task (which takes getting to know them), how your relationship is with them (can you trust them?) and the resources you've collected to upgrade your ship, they can all survive or all die. Most of them can also be ignored entirely if you want to. The ending isn't about what you decide at the last moment but it's about who gets to make it back from the suicide mission. In all my time gaming I've never had a more fulfilling experience than the 40 ish hours I spent playing ME2 to 100% and getting the best ending.
@@MastahMilan When the stakes get high enough in a story they stop having impact. Of course you're going to save the universe. At that point, the question needs to change: What is it going to cost them to do it. Making it a suicide mission you can survive is a great way to put those stakes in a game.
The Witcher 3 does an interesting job with endings- a good number of Quests have endings of their own that don't have a massive effect on Geralt in the long run. Some quests do the true ending treatment where there is an obvious best outcome that takes extra work, but others are moral questions like if these kids have more value than this small village of cannibals. The result is that I'm generally most engaged by the game in... dialog. It's great.
I recently reset my 150+ hour file of Elden Ring, and the reason why actually illustrates the point made here. Without spoiling too much, I followed the advice of messages left by other players, and accidentally destroyed my relationship with my favorite character and locked myself into the "bad" ending. This made my progress up to that point feel so pointless that I immediately reset my game, even though I had put in 154 hours into it. I have no regrets about doing it, and honestly I'm not even that salty about it because I'm enjoying my second playthrough. But yeah, just knowing that I was slowly marching toward an ending I didn't want made everything I had done up to that point feel worthless.
You aren't actually locked into that ending, Millicent's questline can be played start to finish as long as you haven't killed Melania yet, and then you can cure the madness. I will say, I do think you're arguing for the opposite point of this video. You're asking for control, not for linear consequences. You decided to go into the sewers despite Melina screaming at you not to, and when the game said "welp you get this ending now" you rebelled and asked for three buttons at the end instead.
Oh no, I'm not arguing for the opposite at all! I LOVE the fact that the decisions I was making had permanent consequences, and I ended up beating the game on my second playthrough after I left my last comment, haha. I regret nothing, except maybe the extraordinary bad luck I had. Like dude, I literally missed all of the "talk to Melina" messages, had killed Shabriri (so he wasn't there to tell me what was going on), I had player messages on telling me to take my armor off, but I was purposefully staying away from guides/online stuff, so I managed to get all the way to the three fingers without knowing that they even existed haha. And yeah, like I said, I didn't know about Millicent's questline (or even Melania), since I wasn't using guides or anything. It seemed like my best option was to start over, so I did, and I regret nothing.
I remember a small game I played many years ago called Cute Knight that had multipule ending. It was the first game that truly felt like it tried and succeded at that. It was one of the first to have a set of cards representing all the different endings (36 I think) that you flipped and the game saved them so you could try to find them all. I remember I loved that you could be a fighter, a knight or diplomat just as easily as you could become a librarian or a beggar. You could discover you were the real missing princess, pretend you were the missing princess, rescue the princess or just convince the prince to marry you. Or you could brow up the world helping the university professor with his weird experiments.
This has reminded me of how good the endings in Cyberpunk 2077 are, which I'm kind of surprised you didn't touch on. They do everything right. You get a lot of unique content for each ending (2-3 hours worth), and you can unlock more options for endings by playing more of the game, and then there will be small detail differences depending on a bunch of things you did throughout the game, plus you get narrative updates on where most of the characters you fostered a relationship with and how they're doing, or what they thought of your final choice.
Alternate Endings along the lines of Tales of Symphonia are a nice option that I feel didnt really get accounted for here, and are really my preferred option. All paths are pretty much the same, but based on your choices through the game, 1 party member gets flagged as the most important/liked one at a certain point about 3/4 through, and the final act gives special dialogue / importance to that character, and the epilogue gives them a little extra with the main character. There's 1 party member that changes the end a little more than the other 7 options, but it's stil no more the 'true' ending because of it, it just kinda has to play out differently due to plot reasons. Definitely could've had that approach work in Mass Effect. It doesn't work for every plot, but I think its a pretty effective style.
I love the way radiant historia does alternate endings. It's a jrpg about time traveling to save the desertification of the planet, but there really is only 1 ending. All other endings happen right after making a "wrong" choice in history and send you back in time after a little epilogue. It's great to see all the possible outcomes and what characters might do if the planet wasn't destroyed and makes the actual ending even more satisfying.
Control versus meaning. That was a great conclusion. I think that might be related to to a lot of problems not only in game dev but the movie industry.
I'd say there are is another medium with open-ended/alternate endings, or, if you will, freeform endings created by the players themselves: table-top role-playing games. So, D&D, Savage Worlds, etc, are unique in that the story is driven by the players, and the conclusion depends entirely on their actions.
I'd say many mediums work towards this: some movies, some shows, just as not all video games have this. Interactivity is a must for games, which makes me wonder if Clue, Bandersnatch, and the Chose your own adventure models can be categorized as games. D&D though is a game, a tabletop game, just not having the video. I believe the question begets us is how much agency creates play that defines a game.
Having another human as the game master is a bit of of a cheat though. A good GM will interview their players and build the story around want the players of that campaign want. It's easier to write a story and ending to suit 4-8 people that you must convey to them in person than a completed story that must appeal to thousands.
@@LaconicKibitz Yes and no. The basic psychological aspects of story allow you to appease to millions of people as long as it's done right. However, you are right it's easier to make it even more meaningful with that scale.
Best game i've seen handle this in a long time is Triangle Strategy. The main game does a good job of showing you why you should/shouldn't make certain choices, the 3 main endings leave you satisfied but are also just flawed enough that you're also wondering "what if" so you'll check out the other paths and the "true" ending does an amazing job of addressing all of the problems you might have had with any other ending.
It seems really stupid how morality systems are often balanced to force you to go all in on one of the directions rather than deciding on a case by case basis. Essentially, they take choices away from you, rather than giving you more, that way. The worst offender for this is probably Mass Effect 2 (and, to a lesser degree, ME1 and 3), where you are essentially forced to mindlessly click the top or bottom dialogue option all the time so you can unlock the special red or blue dialogue options allowing you to get the best resolutions to many problems. Also, good and evil are often pretty indistinguishable, as both special blue and the red dialogue options tend to have the exact same outcome, only that the red one involves more yelling - strangely, that is not (always) true for the normal dialogue options.
Divinity Original Sin 2 is probably the best way I've ever seen endings handled in an RPG. It gives you multiple choices at the end, some of which are only available by making certain choices beforehand and goes on to narrate all the smaller choices you've made in a fully voiced and elaborate slideshow epilogue. And THEN you're free to walk around a ship with all of the allies you've made along the way and can chat with them and they will acklowledge what you have (or haven't) done for them. After 4 playthroughs I still had meaningful differences at the end and since it can be played with several people locally, so did my girlfriend. Criminally underrated game.
Agreed so so so much. It can be a bit jank of an ending sequence, first time I did it I accidentally got a bad one whilst being overwhelmed, but it is so so good. I think it helps that the entire game built up to that final moment, not just in terms of the characters, but with you aswell. It poses a nightmarishly difficult choice to make, and merges the effects on your character and the wider world seemlessly.
I think the game with my favorite alternate endings would be OneShot. The game's very story-focused and it's difficult to talk about its endings in a way that doesn't completely spoil them, so I'll leave everything under the cut. The entire game has you form a connection between both Niko and The World; In OneShot, you don't control Niko in the typical game sense, at least, not in-universe--you instead you can communicate with her and advise her on what to do, which makes your relationship with her feel more real than if you just controlled her like a typical game. The rest of The World has characters that are all important to the story and have distinct personalities, making them all stick in your mind, and ends up creating an attachment between you and The World as a whole. All of the game has these relationships built up, and the ending is spoken about in the way that it's a good ending where the world is saved from dying, but that's really just wishful thinking on the people's part. In reality, when you get to the end, you are offered a choice between which of the two you want to save; Niko, or The World. Something else is brought up just before that, though, which makes it far more difficult to decide, and thus makes the final decision far more impactful; The World is actually a simulation, and Niko *isn't*. One more thing is that there is a Solstice ending that's really this game's True ending, but unlike other games where the story just goes to the True ending from the beginning, the Player's previous playthroughs are canon in-universe in a way; a conversation very late into this route-- the route being something which you get locked into right from its start, even if both routes feel very similar at the beginning--described The World as having been created time and time again by the Player so that they can save both Niko and The World, but it wasn't possible until the Solstice route was activated. This, I feel, makes the True ending more than if it was just its own route, as being built on top of the other playthroughs makes it carry more weight than it ever would have otherwise.
Yeah. Undertale also requires a second play through go get to the true ending, because its canon that you keep all knowledge every time you start a new save file.
Part of what makes OneShot's endings so powerful is the gimmick of the game. When you can only play a game once (outside of shenanigans), the ending you get is far more meaningful than the endings in a lot of games. In something like Hollow Knight or Undertale, each ending is good, but they can feel a bit like a checklist. Collect all the endings for the True Experience! OneShot says "This is how it happened" - your choices, the optional quests you did, the interactions you had with all the different characters; they all have a finality to them that simply doesn't exist in other games. Caveat: the Undertale genocide route does pull this same trick to some extent, though it's not nearly as dedicated as OneShot.
Seriously, the biggest failing of ME3 was even including any final choice at all. Rather, the ending we got should have been entirely dependent on all the other choices we made along the way. Say what you will about most of Crono Tigger's endings being shallow or jokes, but how you achieve them is still done correctly. No matter what path you take through the game it always leads to the same final battle with Lavos, with no more choices to make after that. The ending you are going to get is locked in the moment you start the final battle, and is entirely a consequence of what actions you have or have not taken elsewhere in the game. The ironic failing of any game that tries to tie multiple endings to one final choice is that in doing so it basically invalidates every other choice made along the way. When it comes to acknowledging and rewarding player agency, the ending of a game shouldn't be about the DESTINATION, but rather a summation of everything you did on the JOURNEY to get there.
This is a serious necro, but I want to add. There is one game I've played, where though the ending sequence can be a bit jank, it's final ending choice feels brilliant. It's divinity original sin two, and I think it works so so well because the entire game is leading up to that ending, everything is about that one choice, so it feels significant.
Games with sandbox elements, like civilization sims or strategy games, inherently accomplish multiple endings. I'd say that a sandbox is the perfect solution to the multiple-ending problem. For games focused on smaller casts instead of towns, nations, or civilizations, the genre labelled "immersive sim" attempts this approach. It just takes a *really good* sandbox mechanic to produce the depth that ad hoc writing can. For now.
I think I agree. Part of whether I find a game’s ending satisfying or not is linked to if it made me feel like I wasted my time. That can be due to the writing but more often that not it’s downplaying the journey to get there. Good video. 😃
1 caveat for Pikmin's ending is that there are a specific 5 ship parts that are optional, and you only get the "average" ending if you failed to get those parts. If you are missing a part not on that list of 5 then you get the bad ending. I would also call the get all parts the "canon ending" because the sequels exist. Either way still happy to see a childhood classic included.
I've honestly grown cold toward games that try to focus on moral choice and multiple endings, etc. Theres been some good examples of these things done right but there are so many examples where things end up feeling forced or contrived. Or they take the Dishonored route and make one route more or less fun than the other.
Saying one route is more fun than the other strikes me as odd. The blood-soaked path is fun, yes, but you end up ignoring a ton of what the game has to offer in order to just carve your way through levels. It's instant gratification. Non-lethal, stealth, or both - those are painstaking, often involving a lot of saving, memorizing patrol routes and experimenting with various strategies, but it's crazy to say that's not fun. It's just delayed gratification, but the work you put in is really satisfying when it pays off and your plan finally works like clockwork.
@@dvillines26 I agree that the stealthy non-lethal option is fun too; in fact, I think it's more fun. But I think the problem is that the two paths appeal to different breeds of players. For most people, the sheer difference in the gameplay of those two routes make one inherently more fun than the other, reducing the choice involved. A player that prefers stealth games will prefer avoiding killing a lot of people, even if they kill their main targets. This naturally pulls them towards the Low Chaos ending. A player that prefers action games will have more fun carving their way through the guards even if they utilise some stealth mechanics, naturally pulling them towards the High Chaos ending(s).
A lot of writing in the last half decade has lost nuance, ESPECIALLY in film and TV but in games as well. The “moral” endings are being written by people who either have none or don’t understand that whilst some things are black and white, others aren’t. Or they “subvert your expectations” with something like “ooh, you flipped the switch so the trolley goes down the empty track instead of hitting the inexplicably placed baby? Too bad, that was actually baby Hitler all along, lmao”
SMT games tend to make the different routes interesting as they all represent different ideologies that can be both argued for and against, the game even providing loads of different perspectives on these from numerous sides. But you can also often tell when a title has bias towards one of them, as there's usually one route that gets the most amount of content. Yet surprisingly these routes are rarely depicted as the one and true choice as all of the options are ideologically more or less grey. None of the scenarios are simple, none of them have a clear right choice, or that clear right choice simply doesn't exist. You have to pick your poison from the options you can find.
What really gets me about the ending of Mass Effect 3, is that they already had the galactic readiness score. They were halfway to executing on an ending that came about as a result of all your player choices to that point. The ending 100% should have just been the result of whatever your readiness score was, rather than having it just unlock the Synthesis ending.
Imagine getting to the end of Mass Effect 3 and not making a choice at all, but having Shepard be influenced by the people you have made friends with and the absence of those you have pushed away or eliminated... Followed by an ending that is relevant to who your Shepard has become through all of those decisions
He didn't mention the Witcher 3 alternate endings! I know it is a wee bit clunky when you know the mechanics behind it, but that first play through were I got the bad ending and had the showdown with the remaining Crone really hit home in a way no other games ending has for me.
I've always loved the endings in the Witcher III because they are character focused, and are decided based off your actions. And while the Worse-Ending is clearly....well the worse the path to it CAN seem justifiable to some and so can be shocking when it occurs, and the other two endings are such a philosophical debate that both are "good". As for content, they are all so satisfying. The Worse-Ending is tragic and channels the players anger, picking up from a previous plot point. The Witcher-Ending is cathartic and wholesome as you see Ciri truly happy and giving her the sword feels so rewarding. The Empress ending is bittersweet as you see Ciri give up a similar happiness she had in the Witcher-Ending for the greater good, and while you feel loss at her leaving, you cannot help feel proud at her for making the harder choice. My biggest complaint is how obvious some of the decisions are after your first playthrough. Out-of-place timed-choices feel so obviously important that it takes away the player choice in other moments. However, the greatest strength of the Witcher III is how it manages to make every choice seem important even when it is not, so it's mostly gets a pass.
@@andrewgreenwood9068 its decided through organic decisions involving what kind of father figure you are to Ciri, esentially. Its generally obvious because Ciri is either directly present, or heavily involved in the choice.
@@freewyvern707 "how it manages to make every choice seem important even when it is not, so it's mostly gets a pass." This is the only thing I hated about the Witcher 3. Worrying so much about tough decisions that don't really influence anything. For example, I really wanted to save the Bloody Baron on my second playthrough ... turns out, that the leaves and that asshole commander becomes lord of the castle anyway.
i think the problem isnt that games have alternate endings, but how they're delivered. you work so hard to get an ending that fits a style of play that its almost just a self fulfilling prophecy - and they lived happily ever after... like you wanted. i think a better delivery method for most games with multiple endings is to have them function the same way as secret endings, letting you see an ending the developer intended as well as options to reward a committed play
Would have loved a section or mention of Shin Megami Tensei and the way the alignment system affects endings, giving player choices meaning even if the character is too weak in the narrative to do anything at the time. SMT Nocturne does this well by giving you alternate bosses or skipping some entirely based on if the alignment rep you're around is friendly to you or not, and makes many playthroughs unique
You know, until watching this video I don't think I ever thought of GTA5 as having a bad ending, or falling victim to the ME3 syndrome... It always felt to me like they had been building to that ending all along, that there was simply no way all these larger than life personalities could continue living.
this reminds me of my first Dishonored playthrough where i killed Slackjaw. Daud's diary was a bit different when it came to Slackjaw, that bottle street gang member in the sewers dialouge is changed saying "but without Slackjaw we were powerless, and Granny rags's line was also changed. Just because i played the game like i was playing Skyrim
I like those ending cards that tell me what happened because I was doing optional stuff even if it did not effect the ending, like in Dragon Age or Mass Effect (happens in the next game thou, weird lag), but I like them only if it does not feel like they tried to pat my head by giving me "something" to read, I mean, those can be the best endings of the game, because they are way more personal and optional than the main campaign, but I did have to notice them (or overlook them by accident ... my bad) while playing to care they happened.
Disco Elysium has an incredibly linear ending and yet its the game where i've felt most connected to and satisfied with my decisions impacting the ending. It encapsulates the game and ties up the threads you've been interacting with in your own way, and I still felt like I did what I wanted through the game
I feel like a lot of the time alternate endings are a bit of a cop out from making (possibly unpopular) decisions on a story, and it usually shows, because the story will feel half baked overall. I prefer a decided story over a branching story in all directions, if it's a story someone truly wants to tell, and they get the opportunity to craft it exactly like that. The kinds of game you make for a branching or for a linear story are very different by their very nature, and I believe that's often overlooked in both directions. On the other hand, there's another kind of alternate endings, which is emergent stories. If you're playing a total sandbox game, you can suddenly have really intense stories that nobody ever intended to tell. Like the time your City in an RTS game almost got run over but a few brave soldiers held it long enough to push them back. That's something you can't really plan for, because this kind of gamemode is free from story by its very nature. And yet that very thing is what turns it into the fertile soil of many interesting stories to emerge.
I never had a problem with ME3's ending, but I think it was because I treated the entire last half of the game as the ending. The choices you made in the game up to that point came to a culmination, determining whether, for instance, the quarians or the geth survive. It was a subtle culmination, not broadcasting the formula for determining how your choices interweave, but it still is there in the background. Of course, you learn that your choices are pretty much just set dressing by ME2, when who you saved in the previous game only leads to a different character saying the exact same things to you in certain scenes like Horizon.
Pathologic let's you choose. Moral choices in AAA games: do you choose the obvious good or the obvious bad Moral choices in pathologic: do you screw over the people you trust so you can save the village or do you tell the truth dooming the village This is one of dozen impossible choices that you choose in the game
I think it is similar to how we enjoy noninteractive media, the ending is satisfying because it is connected to the choices the characters made, not because they controlled the direction of the narrative.
I feel like your insight into the subjects you explore is far beyond almost everyone trying to cover game design. You not only explore more crucial concepts in modern games, but drill into why individual examples are effective or ineffective in a way that most seem to just fail to address. Thank you for doing what you do!
My favourite ending might be Pyre's, you might lose sometimes, but it will never be a game over, and everything continues. It just shapes the story to everything you do and I love it
The Ar Tonelico games did the thing where the story splits into two significantly different routes midway through, plus a third route once you've seen both, way back on the PS2.
I've always read Undertale's genocide route as the true ending (considering subsequent pacifist route clears as an extension of the genocide route) since, when playing the game naturally, it's unlikely to get the genocide route unless you get the pacifist ending and then think "I wonder what would happen if I did the opposite of this". As such, doing a true reset (much to flowey's dismay) is the first step toward the route since it shows the player in question (assuming this is the same player who beat the game and not a new one) doesn't care about the characters and their happiness, but the game and its content.
thank you for bringin the grow video to my attention. For years I've been mentioning this game series and it is nice to see other people talk about it too.
20:39 Liked commented and subscribed for the most objectively correct statement in the whole video. I think to put your point more succinctly, gamers want endings to be about consequences. The same way choices don't matter if they don't impact the game world or characters in any way, a choice of endings doesn't matter if we don't get to see what effect that choice has. I think this is the real reason the original ME3 ending caused such a stink, because there was no ending that gave proper closure to the stories the player had been part of.
personally i really enjoyed the ending of pillars of eternity. the main ending choice is not particularly impactful but you get to see how all the little decisions you made affected the world and your companions.
I liked how Atelier games during Arland did endings. They had one set of ending for how much of the game you progressed. And then you also got to choose at the end between like 3-ish choices that you got based on some of the special achievements you made in that run. It gave a lot of replay value to the game and made your choices you made with social links and other weird other things feel like it matters. Similarly games like Princess Maker and such has various ending for what you chose to focus on in your run of the game.
Those games trully are unique, but they are only possible because of their very limited scope and lenght. They are not very appealing to Companies because their require to spread a lot of content in a very short play through, and people usually complain if a game is short, despite being able to play it 8 times and never once get involved in the same plot and ending.
I think the biggest pitfall games have when making endings is that they believe that the player wants all their choices to affect the MAIN ending, how the plot is resolved in the climax. This really isn't the case; the players often just want an acknowledgement of their choices along the way. Despite everyone and their dog talking about Undertale, they always talk about the True Pacifist and Genocide endings. Soulless Pacifist, too, if they want to get fancy. Nobody seems to acknowledge the Neutral endings, which I believe are a perfect representation of how a branching narrative game should handle it's ending. The choice you've made along the way don't change how the plot is resolved; You fight Omega Flowey, and then you exit the Underground. However, after that, the game gives you a phone call, where you're told of how the Underground has been since your exit. This is where all those choices you made across the game matter. Not in how the game ends, but in the game telling you what kind of world you've left behind. This is what Fallout New Vegas also does right (The plot always resolves in a battle for Hoover Dam), and I believe more games should take these two as an example of how to resolve branching narratives.
Yes, neutral endings really need more love, having the game acknowledge the snowman piece I always kept in my pocket and refused to eat no matter how many times I got wrecked by the bosses is so satisfying
I feel like the best endings are for RPGs that built multiple "reads" into their script. Whether through questlines that lead into their own ending OR just having a more complex intellectual soup that has multiple things you want to see paid off. And it's BETTER if the game isn't requiring you do everything. To be able to slice your cut out of the game that you want is a great option and having endings that reward you for that slice are great. Games like RDR2 FAILED to do this miserably. The "good" ending...the honorable ending, is the only one that made any fuckin sense for why we watched him go through the struggle and what decisions he made throughout the story. To get the "bad" endings all felt like you got robbed of basic closure on the character you got to know. What's the point of the plot in the bad ending? Bad man gets what he deserved? lol ok Rockstar....if Arthur isn't honorable, the plot has no tension, it has no redemption, and the characters in it make no sense when opposed to each other. I thought Cyberpunk 2077's endings were some of the best "alternates" I've experience in an RPG. Not only did they build the script with 3 unique casts with 3 unique endings you WANTED to see the ending on, there were so many plot elements within that...while not paid off, the ending you got felt like a fantastic set of thoughtful endings to character arcs and decisions that you made from intuition and to see if you were right or if there even is a 'right' answer. You had "converted by Johnny"....to "Converted INTO Johnny" to "stuck to their idealism" and "sold their soul" OR "they left the system" and even "end it all" and each one feels like a thoughtfull conceptual framework to analyze the story that you witnessed and each pay off different arcs and sometimes accidently are meaningful due to the levels at play in the subtext of the game. Each endng is a response against capitalism and each ending gives you a different set of pros and cons to those responses. Join the system? Who are you at the end of it? Leave the system? Are you you anymore or are you a member of a group and almost nothing else? What if you change who you are? What does that mean? Does their agenda give you more meaning in capitalism? What about succeeding on your own terms? Is that even possible or do you just end up alone and working to work? The problem with Mass Effect was that they kept slapping more mystery boxes and more problems until they shoveled the ending onto some poor sap who got the fall for the whole line of terrible decisions leading up to it. It's not that Mass Effect 3s ending was bad, it's that Mass Effect as a series was not built for 3 games and it CERTAINLY structured itself so that whoever got the ending and had to write that script was fucked. Nobody down the line thought about how their choices meshed NOR did they account for the different versions of Shephard because they never wrote shepherd in any consistent way. Choices for the sake of choices without any regard for the MEANING of those choices and how they relate to the greater plot. Which is why the current genre of RPGs is plagued with Mass Effect fanboys who think there is some alternate reality where a good writer can write a story like that and it work...and frankly, no, that's impossible to give someone both MEANINGFUL CHOICES...A LOT OF THEM...and still have a coherent story with characters that develop and big payoffs...if every can die nobody matters and so therefor the plot doesn't have real characters, their archetypes built to eventually die.
Hmm I never knew saving the lil sisters was the optimal gameplay choice. I simply did it for the good ening, despite it being harder at the beginning. I never even considered those gifts giving more than the bad choice.
I can't believe you made a video about alternate endings and talked about Fallout New Vegas for 9 seconds. The game has at least 4 different outcomes for a guy who is extremely easy to miss and has a great backstory.
Fallout NV had a really cool way of making choices feel rewarding every faction you interacted with could play a part in the final battle and each had there own endings despite not being "main" factions
I had this stance back when it came out and maintain it to this day: Mass Effect 3 should've had essentially two Endings: You beat the Reapers ass or you don't. Simple as that. The "Ending of Mass Effect" is the decisions you make throughout the game. The Ending should've been a last hurrah. A desperate last ditch effort that fails or a bittersweet final battle filled with scenes of tragic heroism that results in victory. The Reapers didn't need an explanation for their purpose or their motivation. They're ancient Lovecraftian Doomsday machines. That one conversation with Sovereign in Mass Effect is really all we needed as a setup for them and it's one of my favorite dialogues in the entire series. The last thing that is awful about the ME3 Endings is how thoroughly they wrote themselves into a hole. Krogans, Quarians and Geth possibly existing or being gone would've already been a huge challenge to continue writing on from, but even though the Endings all feel emotionally pretty similar their implied impact on the Galaxy as a whole is absolutely staggering and I'm interested how they go about this with the upcoming Mass Effect game.
I do have to point out for Fallout 4 their were 4 different ending: save all factions but institute, railroad/minuteman ending with downfall of BoS, Institute ending destroying all factions and asserting dominance, and BoS ending destroy all factions then purge all non human life from the planet. There's only 1 ending where at least 2 of the factions aren't destroyed
As a game developer (Anglerfish & The ER: Patient Typhon) and as a person who works with theater, I can say that games are far from the only medium that works with multi endings. There is a theater genre called Forum theatre where the audience keeps changing the performance after seeing its end, to reach an end they think is a good end to the story. I can tell from experience that what one audience thinks are a good ending to a performance, another audience thinks is a bad ending and makes a completely different ending to the same story. So you can experience over 100 endings to the same story, which we rarely see in games. And it’s not the only form of theater with multi endings. Choose your own adventure books I also remember reading as a child where there were several endings. They often do not work very well, I thought at the time, but they do exist. ;) But I still found your video intriguing with some good observations like all your other videos.
I'm curious if you've played Triangle Strategy yet, and if so your take on its ending options. It has a "true ending" for sure, but how you get there is kind of neat.
I like that Triangle Strategy is very explicit about where all the branching points are, and a what points the story connects back together. You still have to figure out the "True Ending" yourself, but if you want just want to see new things on subsequent playthroughs it's really helpful. Also, using the "Recommended" units to let you know which characters can have unique dialogue triggered on a map is also pretty neat.
I love your videos, it feels like I'm getting as much information as a video essay without having to watch 3 hours on why Portal is actually an allegory to Kazakhstan or something like that.
Not ending related but I feel that optimization problem in Kingdom Hearts a lot. The narrative makes a big deal about "Darkness=Bad" but when you actually get to use Dark powers in gameplay, its the most fun I have, I relished using Shadow-Sora in 2, Terra in Birth by Sleep, and Riku in Dream Drop Distance are my favorite characters to play as purely because their dark moves tend to have the most fun elements to em. (Three tired to mitigate Shadow Sora's moves into the Frozen world's Keyblade, and the Ice claws were cool but a sad imitation)
I think there's a better alternative to guilting players for being evil while doing so is still fun. You make an evil playstyle fun at first but get dull and/or lock you out of content or upgrades as you proceed.
Interesting that you felt that way, considering Anti-Form was explicitly meant to be a hindrance, a way to keep reliance on Drive Forms down. It locked you into a form with no defense, no way to recover HP, took away ALL of your gage when you reverted, and since none of its attacks were finishers, you were left with no way to end boss fights.
@@LastGreatDen I didnt know it couldnt end boss fights, I just liked the way it attacked. I think I just got lucky with it, usually only seeing it when leveling up the drive forms. I do know using Final Form lowers the secret counter for how often it can appear. That probably contributed to not fighting bosses with it
I recently finished playing ReB, and I picked Zoe, I feel like I missed something.. but this is the ending I get, oh well. though it geniunly seems like it could be a good choice.. right???
The very first time I ever played KOTOR, I switched and joined Bastilla after she gave me the dramatic “JOIN ME IN THE DARK SIDE” speech, and I wound up have to restart the entire game because suddenly the cost of all of my Force powers was so high because they didn’t match my alignment that I couldn’t beat the game.
The other great thing about three houses is, you get little stories depending on which charecters had strong relationships, and you can also choose to have a special ending with someone byleth had a strong relationship with. It's fun and simple, but it makes things feel unique. I'm simple, I don't care about having 50 choices that all branch and weave and change things throughout the story, plus that would be an insane amount of work. But If you are gonna give me all these "important" decisions to make, I would like the decision I make to have SOME impact beyond hidden values that just decide just the ending. Thats lame and basically what most "morality" systems tend to do. Even if it's just a 2 paragraph update after or during the credits.
Just a quick correction, unless you are including the tonics that you are give by the little sisters Harvesting them objectively gives you more ADAM throughout your time in Bioshock's Rapture. Additional its an immediate benefit to the player to harvest but over the long term you will receive the gifts from the little sisters that bump you back up. For saving them, you get 21x80 +7x200 = 3080 ADAM; for harvesting them, you get 21x160 = 3360 ADAM.
Just searched for this comment after watching. It's puzzling how this falsehood is so pervasive: I've never seen a single time when harvesting mechanic mentioned in a video in a factually correct way.
I really like the approach The Stanley Parable (original and Ultra Deluxe) takes with having several endings and no endings at the same time. There is technically a "real" end, but the credits roll at a completely different time and there's even an epilogue that just keeps it all looping backwards and forwards again and again. In the end, the player can choose where the game ends for them. I'd argue the game has already ended before you even start playing it, yet the end is never the end is never the end is never. I understand this is a matter of preference and not everyone likes it, and it would not work with most games. But it's also a narrative that can only work in a game, showcasing the possibilities of the medium. And it's a fascinating example of metamodern storytelling as well.
There's one extra bit to comsider... a lot of players are going to walk away after they get an ending. They take whatever cutscene/epilogue/whatever they get, call it a day and move on to a new story.
Tangentially, a super minor quibble, but for a lot of us going ghost was the entire point of playing Dishonored, with the 'go loud' toys existing solely to cover our failures. The low-finesse route is an experience we can get from a billion other games.
This is why RPGs, REAL choice driven RPGs are so underrated (and sadly they're rare), real western RPG can allow you to have yo cake and eat it too, like evil endings? Great, you can actually build everything up to that point without feeling disjointed. Infact if the RPG is good(New Vegas) and not bad(Fallout 3) you can make evil endings feel like "correct/good" endings and vise versa potentially making more diverse grey area endings which can be considered good or evil for different types of people.
It's basically impossible to create a game that gives you autonomy but also somehow accounts all player agency into a satisfying ending. It's a catch 22, the more you restrict player involvement the easier it is to do but the less meaningful it feels. Something like The Stanley Parable, like you mention, has so many excellent alternate endings bc really they're not alternate endings. The game is extremely limited in what you can actually do, you're just accessing a different ending walking down a different path (which is basically the whole game). The sheer amount of scripting, development, production, cost, and forward and fringe thinking it would require to create an open and cinematic game truly adapting to most player actions and having profound effects on the world, gameplay, and narrative while still creating the experience and story they want the game to be doesn't seem humanly possible.
Maybe if we can train Ai to the point where it can rebuild and rewrite the entire game depending on your choices... But than can lead to a ton of others unpredictable problems...
Mass Effect 3's ending is even worse because the Organic vs AI objective wasn't why the Reapers were initially created, when the plot was leaked BioWare's higher ups changed it. The original ending was more of a techno-cosmic horror analogy for environmentalism where widespread use of eezo accelerates entropy via dark energy byproduct, and the Reapers were created to find a solution for the acceleration of the death of reality. They decided continual genocide before organic life to prevent eezo usage was the best bet, in the same logic of 'if all of humanity was genocided, carbon emissions would even out', and popped off with the Cycle. This was touched on in Mass Effect 2 in the mission where you pick up Tali and you find out the solar system's star is dying way earlier than it was projected to, which shouldn't be possible (because they didn't know about dark energy's negative effects on entropy). Mass Effect 3 isn't simply a cautionary tale on poorly delivered multiple endings, it's why you shouldn't change your plot last minute because the story got leaked online. Better a story that was spoiled than a story that was butchered.
Okay you've got to trust me here, you need to be a patreon donator and have the twelve magic crystals in your inventory by the time you fight Ultimate Omega Forme Architect or you get locked into the bad ending! www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames
Twitter: the bad ending of social media, follow me there now!: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
I can't help but appreciate your out and proud robosexuality.
@@FelisImpurrator it's pride month!
@@ArchitectofGames Exactly! Can't hide that true furry nature though...
You should edit the video and add an alternate ending after the credits/post video part
i never expected to hear a waiting for godot reference in a video about video game endings
I think this gets to a truth far beyond alternate endings or even video games: _A good ending is one that resolves character development, not just the main plot._ In all the cases you mention the "true ending" is the one that does precisely that, and the games whose alternate endings provide different conclusions to the plot but are irrelevant to the individual characters are unsatisfying. ME3 shows this so clearly. So does the ending to HIMYM.
Because this is universal and goes beyond games with alternate endings, it shows that the whole discussion about choice is a bit of a red herring. I don't want choice in the ending, I want the ending to be _consistent_ with what the characters have experienced. This implies that if I have choice in the characters actions through out the game, then there better be different endings that reflect that. Otherwise the game is writing cheques that it can't back. But even then, the variety of endings is a necessity mandated by the possible different choices made earlier, not a choice of itself.
you a real 5head. saving this comment for future reference
@@gordo6908 I... have no idea what that means, but I'll take it as a compliment?
Generally in games with many endings, I find the side-endings develop the characters and the "true ending" develops the plot. But this is mostly in VNs
@@QuantumHistorian They’re saying that you’re a genius
@@sorakh4119 Cheers. I feel like Homer when he said "I used to be with it, then they changed what 'it' was and now I'm lost"
Everyone forgets about the most popular ending in Souls games: the one where you give up (e.g. basketball timeline from BDG's LoZ vid). While that is a funny joke, it's also kind of not a joke, even being codified in Dark Souls by the concept of going hollow.
Im curious, who is this BDG and where can I watch their zelda video
@@why3994 Brian David Gilbert. Poliigon channel!
Yeah, I liked to imagine my characters go hollow if I quit. Motivates me to keep trying
@@why3994 Brian David Gilbert's video "Solving the Zelda Timeline in 15 minutes", it's on Polygon's youtube channel
God, Unraveled was a gem of a show
my favorite part of a fire emblem game is not the ending, but the slides afterwards that detail how everybody choose to live their lives and with who. They feel so unique and personal to my playthrough, its all the alternate ending I need and a solution I'd always encourage
Optimizing the last third of Three Houses with side map grinds not for the combat xp, but for affinity xp so i could matchmaker everyone into the perfect little couples
"Died in chapter 14"
@@dontstealmydiamondsv3156 haha savescum go brrrr
@@ParkaPal DLC allows to get affection with zero effeort. Great for replaying the game
@@robertnomok9750 how so? I never played the DLC since I was mostly content with the main game.
What we want is not necessarily different endings.
We want customized player-specific epilogues.
In Mass Effect, I shouldn't need to make one big final choice.
I spent the entire game making choices. The finale should show me *the culmination of those choices*.
To be fair, they can't exactly do that. There are thousands of players all making different choices. Even with maximum customization, developers would only be able to have broad categories of endings with minor edits depending on minor choices.
@@ButterflyScarlet That's what new vegas does, and I'd say new vegas is one of the games that does alternate endings pretty well.
@@ButterflyScarlet Bioware were doing almost exactly that in Dragon Age: Origins, though. The ending slides outlined all the impact you left on this world and its characters, and it felt great.
@@ButterflyScarlet And that's fine. No ones expecting an epilogue where Garrus opens up his own club beacuse you did the Shepard shuffle 10,000 times. In Mass Effect the only ending should of been destroy (without killing other AIs). Perhaps with a true ending where Shepard doesn't have to sacrifice themselves. And the epilogue details how and who is doing what to rebuild the galaxy afterwards.
Spicy Hot Take: Mass Effect gutted its ability to have a satisfying ending the instant they decided the Trilogy was about the end of the world. World Ending sucks ass, we need to stop writers from doing it, it's always bad. Choices are valued because of their Consequences, and Consequences react to stakes as high as the End of the World in the same way a sandcastle reacts to a tidal wave.
The true endings are actually hard to avoid even if they are not created explicitly. We humans tend to value stuff according to the effort it takes to achieve. So some endings that are difficult to achieve are valued more. But we also expect as humans that the rewards we get are according to the effort. If an ending is very difficult to achieve, but it's "meh", it feels disappointing. So for game designers is very easy to fall in the pitfall of matching the value of the ending with its difficulty. If the ending matches the expectations a hierarchy of endings emerge. So you end up creating "true" endings even if it's not the original intention. On top of that, players usually expect that the hardest and coolest ending to be the canon ending, so...
And as soon as you add a sequel you have to pick 1 ending to be the cannon ending or you have to make 1 completely unique game for each ending (i guess you could nuke the world so non of the endings mattered but thats lame) and then detect the save file of the previous game to know what ending to play.
Tldr: sequels mandate an ending get declared the cannon ending to use as the starting point of the sequel.
Also prequels have to end at the starting point if the original game so they can't even do alternate endings.
@@jasonreed7522 Or you could be SMT and have every game (past 2) be in a basically altenate worldline in the first place, sidestepping the problem entirely.
@@sponge1234ify Or you can do it how Fallout handled previous endings: say that nobody knows exactly how things went in the end for some reason. News travels very slow in the wasteland, I guess.
@@killerbee.13 Ah yes, the "make it vague" route.
To be fair, if you're in the wasteland, would you care what happened in bumfuck nowhere in the other end of North America, when you're already dealing with your own clusterfuck of humanity, radmonsters, and package delivery?
Prime example of this is the True Demon Ending from Shin Megami Tensei 3.
how is "Waiting for Godot" false advertising? The whole play is about waiting for Godot. It's not called "Godot Arrives".
shit I think you've got me there
@@ArchitectofGamesi ¹¹😊😊😊
Hahahahahaha brilliant. Just brilliant 😂
I think something that pushes Undertale over the edge is that, while most of its endings follow a pretty standard structure of getting something that more closely approximates the best ending with proportion to how much effort the player puts into the game, the ending that requires the MOST effort, i.e. the genocide ending, is explicitly a bad ending that exists not to be a satisfying conclusion to the story, but instead as a means of further fleshing out the rest of the game by giving story and lore details that can't be found anywhere else. I think the potential to use alternate routes as means of fleshing out the story of a game in ways that enhance the player's appreciation for more "correct" paths is pretty underutilized. I want to see more games with some absolutely _wacky_ endings that aren't satisfying on their own, but elevate the experience as a whole.
Yoko Taro is also a master with that sort of storytelling as well. Drakengard 1's alternate endings are all bad endings but they really flesh out the characters and the final one ends up being the prologue for the Nier series.
The Dog and UFO endings in the Silent Hill series are difficult endings that are not "correct". They don't really flesh out the story, but they provide a new perspective. IIRC, one of the developers said he was concerned that players going through the story multiple times could become depressed, so he added a joke ending in an attempt to bump those players out of their rut.
Some VNs use alternate routes to good effect, although some also try to create an illusion of player agency but many are more like books with alternate endings.
For example, Fate/Stay Night is about a battle royale with >14 different characters, each of whom gets elaborated in at least one of the three routes even if they die early in another one. While in the prequel Fate/Zero no master or servant dies for the whole first half since it's a regular book and the author has to characterize everyone before killing them off.
@@w4t894thwl3r The Genocide route is specifically aimed at the sort of people who will walk in circles killing the same random encounter over and over to get their level up in other games, and it's only a few hours total as I recall which is a lot less than grinding in most games.
It’s more of the genocide route that is the interesting thing, as the ending is a bit vague, with the fallen child aka Chara spouts a bunch of oddly-worded lines, and destroys the entire world, somehow. The ending is intentionally underwhelming, albeit creepy, but the journey gives us a lot more insight into the characters.
Interesting to note that the gameplay derived endings you mentioned working early on - with the example of Pikmin - fit neatly into the true ending category for all the same reasons. They're a culmination of the journey you undertook to get to them, and reflect what happened. The difference is that the changes aren't based on moral decisions, but rather player skill - the better player gets the better reward.
Also Pikmin has Cannon endings (the best 1) because it has sequels that imply the ending of the previous game.
The entire pikmin franchise feels very underrated despite doing so much right, including respecting player's time and being a perfect openworld for its console limitations. (It has levels but you can solve the levels puzzles in any order if you have the right pikmin to actually solve the puzzle or the glitch knowledge to bypass it)
Fallout New Vegas is the gold standard for multiple endings in my opinion. It does lock you into a specific ending once you go far enough down one, but you can still go do the independent ending if you want to.
Yeah, I think New Vegas benefits from two main things. One is that the player can't change the big structure. There's going to be a fight over Hoover Dam, nobody can stop that, no matter what you do or who you kill along the way. The player gets to influence who shows up and on what side. So the game gets to use basically all of the content on every path *and* just has to include or not include certain factions in the big finale. So the stuff the player did along the way to get to the ending always matters in ways they can palpably detect during the big battle (didn't meet the Khans, they fight for Caesar, did meet the Boomers, they do a bombing run to support you, etc).
The other is that the path lock-in is pretty early on in the main story all things considered. You get the platinum chip quite early on in the critical path and lock in your side by delivering it. So you get to do someone's perspective on the rest of the content and your ending will proceed from that.
I remember the first time I played being stunned by the fact the game cared enough to detail every little "where are they now", right down to people like the khans who I just wiped out because I couldn't stand them, or helping out little ol jacobstown. Made further playthroughs all the better knowing that playing a different character with different alliances is actually going to affect something, unlike a lot of games where pushing your character into a specific archetype is totally ignored.
Regarding true endings, I remember in a conference Yoko Taro explaining that the feeling of freedom in game isn't when you have a lot of options from the start and can do whatever you want, but when your options were limited and suddenly expand.
I feel that the same thing applies to true endings. You thought the story had to end in a few restrictive ways, but then you find out that by doing certain things, you can unlock more options. That's what makes it feel like you're in control when you're just playing an extra part of the game.
So people want the subplots to have a good ending, like relationships with people or organizations. Just like in Lord of the Rings the film doesn't end when the ring is destroyed but when sam gets home to his wife, it ties up the subplots.
Okay not exactly what the whole video was about, but a part of it
deborah hendersons research seems to support you. at the games narrative summit her takeaways were basically:
1. write good/memorable characters and provide meaningful options for interaction with them
2. very few players care to closely follow plot
3. what interests players is which characters they're interacting with and/or what story beats were caused by their interacting with the games characters and systems
You make a good point I think. The ending of A Short Hike is the same regardless of how you managed to collect the feathers needed to get to the top, or even how many you got, however, your character will mention all the optional things you did throughout the game, the different characters you've met, etc. And that was enough to make me feel like it was my own ending which was very cool.
I think Dragon Age: Origins had a good ending system. Each zone/area was affected by your decisions there and the final ending is also dependent on your choices.
If the ending isnt majority weighted on your game choices they have gone cheap.
Basically how a lot of traditional CRPGs have done it for years. Fallout in 1997 had this already and the sequel even expanded on it.
I agree to a certain extent. But there really isn't much of a choice as to how to deal with the Fifth Blight. You can't run away and let Ferelden burn. Yeah you can choose how your allies feel and react but the main conflict is just like ME3 in the end.
You can choose your way through the game but the final conflict remains the same.
You must fight the Arch Demon no matter how valiant or evil your character is. The only major change when it comes to that final battle is who does or does not die: the Warden, Loghain and/or Alistair. The only major effect your player choice has on that ending is whether or not your character's gender is capable of conceiving a child with Morrigan, which locks you into a set amount of options to save yourself and your companion of choice.
You can't avoid becoming a Warden, you can't run away from the Blight and Alistair is pretty good at keeping us as players on the "deal with the Blight" path since he is like "we're stuck together now. love it or hate it." He won't be happy if we are being evil but he sticks around until the Landsmeet and after for most players.
Like let me get my ass handed to me by Duncan or Alistair if I try to run! we can spare Loghain but we can't choose anything other than deal with the Blight? Let me be a coward in more than just words.
@@kraziiXIII But you know, ME3 ending would already be immediately better if you didn't have the final choice, and whatever you did leading up to that point had your character choose the ending for you. Since it was the journey that mattered most.
@@kraziiXIII but it isn't about the ending. its about the people. if you take a look at dragon age keep, 99% of the potential choices involve people and what happens to them. this game is the FIRST and a LOT of the choices you make are present and effect the story in later games to at least a minor degree. For example, entire missions in DAI can cease to exist depending on your choices. the fact that that the arch demon is defeated has to happen because it not happening would destroy the potential for games later in the storyline, because an entire somewhat major area is now entirely destroyed and overrun. I feel that it was designed with later games in mind, because of just that. if they didn't plan to have later games, and have your earlier choices effect them, there would definitely be at least one ending that went like that. and, like i said,its not about the final ending anyways, its about what happens to the people within it, even if it only amounts to a line of dialogue.
Fallout new vegas does the alternate endings very well, with dozens of potential endings, based on faction rep, who you have as companions, who you let live or killed and many other factors
That's why I like "slide endings". They are easy enough to produce that the devs can really account for most of the decisions you made during the game.
You don't really need to spin out a massive story about how you changed the entire world. Often, it is just enough to have the game give you a nod acknowledging a choice you made by a simple slide.
New Vegas having that many endings made me quit, actually. The huge spreadsheet you have to follow to get the desired one.
@@George_M_ that was the problem, New Vegas is best played like DnD or Pathfinder, not most modern video games, you cant really optimise the ending, all are valid, due to your actions in the game, trying to optimise that much of New Vegas removes what makes it New Vegas
Watching the slides go by and seeing the effect my choices made while listening to that music was an experience I’ll never forget
Agreed, it’s a perfect solution. It requires the least resources to acknowledge the most choices, and creates the impression of a world with its own life you helped to shape.
The Zero Escape trilogy's endings are interesting to me, since with the time travel plot point/mechanic, all of the "alternate" endings lead directly into the "true" ending. It doesn't have the issue of any of the endings being underdeveloped, because they were all planned to be part of the main linear storyline anyway, it's just a matter of which order you see them in before the true ending.
I really like this concept in games, Nier does this to good affect.
yeah, that series was sweet. the bad endings leading to the true ending make the bad endings matter to the overall plot. you gotta take that axe to the face to find out which route leads to the real ending. plus it has some awesome true endings. i really liked the first game's ending. so awesome.
also basically in the last one the bad guy says "oh yeah, all of those bad endings happened, you're just the versions of yourselves that lucked into the timeline where you don't die horribly, enjoy the existential horror of that :)"
VNs are great at alternative routes and endings, one thing I enjoy about them over books
Yeah, Zero Escape handles this very well - VLR handles multiple endings _perfectly_, IMO. I think you _have_ to see all of the non-Game Overs to get the true ending.
But all of them really develop a character and/or the overarching plot, which makes them all seem meaningful.
The main thing about me3 that bothered me was that I had literally brokered peace between organics and synthetics and now this kid tells me that war between them is inevitable.
The fact that you literally defy the reaper's core reason for existing before you even learn what they want is probably the biggest mistep in the whole game - it's the one thing that is just straightup bad rather than an inevitable consequence of over-promising, it doesn't even get mentioned I don't think!
@@ArchitectofGames I've seen this complaint several times, and I don't really agree. The problem the Reapers' creators identified is that if any group of synthetics ever builds up its strength and takes over the galaxy, they can destroy organic life everywhere forever if they feel like it. Just because it's possible for some organics and synthetics to cooperate sometimes doesn't make this problem go away. Their solution was just terrible from both ethical and reliability standpoints. But since the game creators had established what the Reapers do, and then had to explain why and where they came from, it's as good an explanation as any I can come up with.
I'm actually more bothered by some earlier plot points: It seems like they had the Reapers take over the Citadel off screen (presumably killing most of the characters in the series) and move it to Earth just so they could sell the game as being about defending Earth, when the Citadel is obviously more interesting and important in the Mass Effect universe. And it seems like they had Udina decide to help Cerberus, even though at that point everyone in the galaxy knew Cerberus was controlled by the Reapers, and he wasn't indoctrinated, just because they thought it would be satisfying to kill him, since he's kind of a jerk. But I, for one, was actually starting to respect him after he finally realized Shepard wasn't just a crazy person who kept making his job harder, and it turned out he was actually pretty good at that job.
@@NMS127 There is actually information that says he may have been indoctrinated, it is never confirmed, but several people voice the possibility.
The Catalyst is working with a very basic idea. It's creators programmed it for solving one problem, but they didn't give it enough constraints, the Oshantans from The Last Angel come to mind here. The Leviathans built this AI with a simple command, one it is still following, but left it's actual thinking systems and algorithms very simple and honestly cyclical. They built it to find out why "synthetics and organics always fight", and so it assumes that that will always be the case, thus locking it into a logical loop that will always double back on itself to "synthetics and organics will always fight". So no matter what you do it is, at the end of the day, a very simple AI working on a feedback loop of logic that no new information can break it out of. The only thing wrong with the ending of ME3 is the fans reaction (much like the Star Wars Prequels). I am so glad I got into Mass Effect long after it finished, and without reading up on it, so I had everything first thing out and had no outside influenced biases. In my mind the Citadel DLC ties up all the party member side plots, and all the missions before tied up all the story side beats, and the ending ties up the main story. And Adam mentioned that each ending allowed you to influence other things, but everything you can influence has already been done, you have made every push and nudge you can, Shepard's story as a human on the galactic influence stage ends with that choice. He or she is either going to survive and retire (High EMS destroy), die (low EMS destroy), become the basis for new life (Synthesis), or become the AI (and one that isn't locked in the faulty logic loop) in charge of the Reapers (Control). We may see the results of these changes in the new Mass Effect game, and I hope we do, but with a save import system, so that each person can bring in their favorite playthrough.
"War between organics and synthetics is inevitable" would be a much stronger arguement if the peace between the Quarians and Geth was doubtful and uneasy. Shepard can have faith in both species to do better in the future, but the we wouldn't get "the Quarians get their homeworld back ASAP."
I would argue that ME3 endings were GOOD in principle, because they were broad enough to cover all major possibilities.
But they were BAD executed.
The game already had actions/dialogue options that could predetermined the ending.
Like:
- aligning with the Illusive Man sets the synthesis
- being skeptical of cerberus sets the reapper annihilation.
- having many lost teammates pushes Shepard to wanting to be a God or wathever.
Those could set an unique ending fitted to the player tastes. Without the "big three buttons". And then more unique cutscenes (like having to battle the illusive man or being defeated by him) just to make then more memorable.
Agreed. The endings could've worked well if they were actually implemented more into the gameplay as opposed to a single choice at the very end.
I disagree completely. I think they were extremely weak in and of themselves, as was almost everything else related to the Catalyst. It's a very cheap deus ex machina that breaks the entire universe's internal logic, relies on last minute exposition, greatly diminishes the threat of the Reapers and also robs the player of their agency. Save for a complete rewriting of Mass Effect 3, I don't see how the endings could have been made good.
Then again, I'm in the minority on this. Perhaps most people would have liked the endings just fine with minor alterations.
@@samg.5165 IMO the crucible is just badly executed. A big weapon developped since several cycles, with each cycle finding its plans and adding to them and finding a way to make the information pass through to the next cycle is logical when confronted to a threat like the reapers. Liara does it herself during ME3 in case they lose the war. And it being in human archives is logical, since in ME1 there is a side quest in wich you get important informations (about cerberus iirc) and the shadow broker contacts you to buy them since "the alliance will just archive them and do nothing with them, like they do with everything else." The alliance doesn't care about anything not usefull imediatly to them and just archive it without a second thought, so them not fiding about the crucible is not that farfetched.
But here are the only "realistics" things about the crucible. The fact it can give you 3 options comes out of nowhere. The catalyst too (the crucible missing a part is ok, this part being an IA in a reaper construction is weird). The way the crucible is discovered is bad, and they just had to have Liara say "my shadow broker network gave me access to Mars archives, wtf humans, why didn't you study it more?" to make it passable. Not "insight and desperation". And the 3 choices... either you chose destroy and everything you did to make peace between organics and synthetics is meaningless, or you say "yeah, the previous bad guys were right, good thing I'm not endoctrinated myself thought". And refusal... well at least the stargazer bit of this ending shows that Liara's plan in case of failure worked perfectly, and the reapers are defeated in the next cycle.
All of this to say, IMO the ending could have been way better even by keeping the crucible, the problem really being the last 15 minutes of the game, and some tweakings here and there.
I'd go for a slightly different perspective. I'd have the your actions previously in the game eliminate some of the choices you are allowed to pick at the end. So if you sided with the meatbags too often, you couldn't pick the toaster side and vice versa. Only if you didn't show any particular pattern in your moral choices would you get all 3 or 4 choices at the end.
What if that choice was done at the middle of the game but it's more of a process than a switch toggle, so throughout the rest of the campaign, you have to deal with the allies and factions that go against that decision?
One of your earlier examples, choose your own adventure books, are a actually a really good example of your point. Nominally have many endings, but really have only two; the "good" ending, and many endings that mostly boil down to, "you done screwed up and died".
Not necessarily; I remember several books that offered multiple "good" endings, or had an additional "true ending" if you found all the clues throughout your adventure.
That being said, books probably have a way easier time with this than video games, as they are much less interactive, so the choices you get can be more strongly directed.
Have you read Meanwhile by Jason Shiga? It's a fantastic choose-your-own adventure book with lots of very different endings and a very unique journey to get through all of them. I highly recommend it if you like that kind of story.
Fallout 2 does this perfectly. When I first played the game of was amazing to me. There is a "big" ending which describes how you resolve the main quest but this is followed by a half dozen subsidiary endings. So there are independent dialogues like "meanwhile in Klamath..." describing your personal resolution to that sub plot. As a player I hit the main ending and felt good but then it was followed by "meanwhile in" covering the most obvious side quests making me realise I did not get great resolutions to other choices. This goes to combinatorics. By treating the different subquests as independent you get an ending nuanced by every sub part and you feel all of the main choices are reflected reasonably in the ending. In my first playthrough it turned me from feeling "oh I triumphed" to "I am so awful look at the good people I forgot to help". Weirdly felt good because I mattered. For me it is the single most memorable video game ending - really bittersweet showing your good and bad choices together.
_Because_ endings are actually about good _synthesis,_ I think the more satisfying question is about 'routes.'
Fire Emblem: Three Houses works so well because hard-locking the player into distinct routes has carried Japanese visual novels for decades. Sometimes it's an explicit choice point, like which team to ally with; sometimes it's obfuscated behind affection meters you did or did not max out, turning left on a road instead of right, etc.
It still sidesteps 'this story can't put its foot down and _say anything,' by committing early and seeing how the aftermath plays out for 90% of the runtime._ Instead of writing every mission as though Tali is simultaneously _dead and alive,_ or Agent Lucy Kuo is simultaneously _friend and foe,_ it's able to explore the full implications of these state-changes. A love interest throughout one route, may be a terrifying Nemesis pursuing you through another, letting you reflect on your ability to love or _hate_ this person equally depending on how your relationship develops.
In terms of routes, Disco Elysium's mostly-linear ending is dotted with sidequests another player _might never see._ The route is predetermined, but the path to get there _is the playground._ The DE fandom _exists_ to compare experiences.
I think a synthesis between these two styles has a lot of potential.
Actually, Three Houses is an anti-example and smashes this thesis despite said thesis being very intuitive. The endings are a lot better than the actual routes. Silver Snow was written before the writers got good, Crimson Flower is severely undercooked and honestly unfinished, Verdant Wind is a weird copypaste of Silver Snow, just with some seperate pros and cons and...well, the DLC route feels like they just randomly made it up on the fly to sell more content. Only Azure Moon gets away from examination largely untouched.
Sometimes, the condition to reach the true ending is so specific to the point of feeling like a checklist. Like finding this hidden item and give it to an NPC who will only appear in an area you already passed by, no sooner or later or else you fucked up. Or you can't receive this item from this NPC or being nice to other NPC, or else they will die or kill someone else and you will never get any kind of hint about that.
That just reminds me of the Cave Story-true ending that is one of the most garbage true endings compared to the respective normal ending I can remember.
That's just achievement hunting.
"A fun house is a linear sequence of scares, the only choice is take it or leave it"
"Makes you think about free will"
What time is it, CV-11?
Ah yes Max Payne new York's finest with the highest mobster body count ever. Dearest of all my friends
i feel like the CRPG trope of the ending montage that describes the aftereffects of all your choices, like what FNV does, was basically the perfect ending technology and it kills me that it never became more popular
There's probably a reason that many of the very best use cases of alternate endings in games are explicit commentary on the nature of player agency in games, from Undertale to NieR to The Stanley Parable to a few others I don't want to mention because finding out their actual point was a pleasant surprise. I'm not sure *what* that reason is, metacommentary isn't inherently better than traditional narratives, and many of these games only have effective endings because of the strength of their stories on top of the meta elements, but it a very interesting trend to see.
I haven't played the mass effect series, but hearing you talk about this made me thing if a possible way to make that ending better: Don't put you up there alone. Adjust the choices a bit, and sort the characters you can interact with into categories based on which one they'd have strong opinions on. Then have whichever member of each section the player interacted with the most make it there with them.
That way they could shrink the scope back down. You aren't wiping out machine life, you're looking Legion in the eye and telling him his very existence jeopardizes the galaxy. And if you elect to control synthetic life, you're doing it side by side with your friend who is very quickly going a bit mad with the power. Maybe if you got everyone in one section killed there's a moment where shepard looks at that button and gets flashbacks to one of them, before muttering about what they probably would have wanted. Maybe some characters will try to stop you and you literally have to put down one of your friends in order to keep your agency.
And when you make your choice, the game shoves it in your face. It takes a nice, slow moment to show how the characters react to this decision. From pained betrayal, to smug arrogance, to just silently nodding along and saying "Whatever you say commander."
If a game's about social interactions, they can't just leave you alone at the end. That's a stupid idea. No, you've got to bring them with you all the way to the credits. Unless the point of an ending is to make you feel overwhelmingly alone, that is.
I honestly don't get why they didn't do something similar to the mass effect 2 ending. In it you have the (somewhat arbitrary) choice of controlling the reaper you find there or destroy it. But the ending isn't really about that.
The ending is about Shepard going on a suicide mission to save a galaxy that has forgotten them. You start the game alone and as you go one meet new crewmates or meet up with old ones. You can decide to go do the suicide mission pretty early or collect all possible space friends. Depending on which of them you assign to which task (which takes getting to know them), how your relationship is with them (can you trust them?) and the resources you've collected to upgrade your ship, they can all survive or all die. Most of them can also be ignored entirely if you want to.
The ending isn't about what you decide at the last moment but it's about who gets to make it back from the suicide mission.
In all my time gaming I've never had a more fulfilling experience than the 40 ish hours I spent playing ME2 to 100% and getting the best ending.
@@MastahMilan When the stakes get high enough in a story they stop having impact. Of course you're going to save the universe. At that point, the question needs to change: What is it going to cost them to do it. Making it a suicide mission you can survive is a great way to put those stakes in a game.
The Witcher 3 does an interesting job with endings- a good number of Quests have endings of their own that don't have a massive effect on Geralt in the long run. Some quests do the true ending treatment where there is an obvious best outcome that takes extra work, but others are moral questions like if these kids have more value than this small village of cannibals. The result is that I'm generally most engaged by the game in... dialog. It's great.
I recently reset my 150+ hour file of Elden Ring, and the reason why actually illustrates the point made here. Without spoiling too much, I followed the advice of messages left by other players, and accidentally destroyed my relationship with my favorite character and locked myself into the "bad" ending. This made my progress up to that point feel so pointless that I immediately reset my game, even though I had put in 154 hours into it. I have no regrets about doing it, and honestly I'm not even that salty about it because I'm enjoying my second playthrough. But yeah, just knowing that I was slowly marching toward an ending I didn't want made everything I had done up to that point feel worthless.
You aren't actually locked into that ending, Millicent's questline can be played start to finish as long as you haven't killed Melania yet, and then you can cure the madness.
I will say, I do think you're arguing for the opposite point of this video. You're asking for control, not for linear consequences. You decided to go into the sewers despite Melina screaming at you not to, and when the game said "welp you get this ending now" you rebelled and asked for three buttons at the end instead.
Oh no, I'm not arguing for the opposite at all! I LOVE the fact that the decisions I was making had permanent consequences, and I ended up beating the game on my second playthrough after I left my last comment, haha. I regret nothing, except maybe the extraordinary bad luck I had.
Like dude, I literally missed all of the "talk to Melina" messages, had killed Shabriri (so he wasn't there to tell me what was going on), I had player messages on telling me to take my armor off, but I was purposefully staying away from guides/online stuff, so I managed to get all the way to the three fingers without knowing that they even existed haha. And yeah, like I said, I didn't know about Millicent's questline (or even Melania), since I wasn't using guides or anything. It seemed like my best option was to start over, so I did, and I regret nothing.
I remember a small game I played many years ago called Cute Knight that had multipule ending. It was the first game that truly felt like it tried and succeded at that. It was one of the first to have a set of cards representing all the different endings (36 I think) that you flipped and the game saved them so you could try to find them all. I remember I loved that you could be a fighter, a knight or diplomat just as easily as you could become a librarian or a beggar. You could discover you were the real missing princess, pretend you were the missing princess, rescue the princess or just convince the prince to marry you. Or you could brow up the world helping the university professor with his weird experiments.
Adam: it's kinda lame how sometimes games have a bias for certain endings
also Adam: true endings are great!
I just wish more games did a New Vegas (and other early fallouts), and just showed how the characters and locations ended up.
This has reminded me of how good the endings in Cyberpunk 2077 are, which I'm kind of surprised you didn't touch on. They do everything right. You get a lot of unique content for each ending (2-3 hours worth), and you can unlock more options for endings by playing more of the game, and then there will be small detail differences depending on a bunch of things you did throughout the game, plus you get narrative updates on where most of the characters you fostered a relationship with and how they're doing, or what they thought of your final choice.
Alternate Endings along the lines of Tales of Symphonia are a nice option that I feel didnt really get accounted for here, and are really my preferred option. All paths are pretty much the same, but based on your choices through the game, 1 party member gets flagged as the most important/liked one at a certain point about 3/4 through, and the final act gives special dialogue / importance to that character, and the epilogue gives them a little extra with the main character. There's 1 party member that changes the end a little more than the other 7 options, but it's stil no more the 'true' ending because of it, it just kinda has to play out differently due to plot reasons.
Definitely could've had that approach work in Mass Effect. It doesn't work for every plot, but I think its a pretty effective style.
I love the way radiant historia does alternate endings.
It's a jrpg about time traveling to save the desertification of the planet, but there really is only 1 ending. All other endings happen right after making a "wrong" choice in history and send you back in time after a little epilogue.
It's great to see all the possible outcomes and what characters might do if the planet wasn't destroyed and makes the actual ending even more satisfying.
So like those chose your own adventure books.
Control versus meaning. That was a great conclusion. I think that might be related to to a lot of problems not only in game dev but the movie industry.
I'd say there are is another medium with open-ended/alternate endings, or, if you will, freeform endings created by the players themselves: table-top role-playing games. So, D&D, Savage Worlds, etc, are unique in that the story is driven by the players, and the conclusion depends entirely on their actions.
That's not a predefined medium is the thing, it's imagination based
I'd say many mediums work towards this: some movies, some shows, just as not all video games have this. Interactivity is a must for games, which makes me wonder if Clue, Bandersnatch, and the Chose your own adventure models can be categorized as games. D&D though is a game, a tabletop game, just not having the video. I believe the question begets us is how much agency creates play that defines a game.
Having another human as the game master is a bit of of a cheat though. A good GM will interview their players and build the story around want the players of that campaign want. It's easier to write a story and ending to suit 4-8 people that you must convey to them in person than a completed story that must appeal to thousands.
I mean, choose your own adventure books exist
@@LaconicKibitz Yes and no. The basic psychological aspects of story allow you to appease to millions of people as long as it's done right. However, you are right it's easier to make it even more meaningful with that scale.
Best game i've seen handle this in a long time is Triangle Strategy. The main game does a good job of showing you why you should/shouldn't make certain choices, the 3 main endings leave you satisfied but are also just flawed enough that you're also wondering "what if" so you'll check out the other paths and the "true" ending does an amazing job of addressing all of the problems you might have had with any other ending.
It seems really stupid how morality systems are often balanced to force you to go all in on one of the directions rather than deciding on a case by case basis. Essentially, they take choices away from you, rather than giving you more, that way.
The worst offender for this is probably Mass Effect 2 (and, to a lesser degree, ME1 and 3), where you are essentially forced to mindlessly click the top or bottom dialogue option all the time so you can unlock the special red or blue dialogue options allowing you to get the best resolutions to many problems. Also, good and evil are often pretty indistinguishable, as both special blue and the red dialogue options tend to have the exact same outcome, only that the red one involves more yelling - strangely, that is not (always) true for the normal dialogue options.
Divinity Original Sin 2 is probably the best way I've ever seen endings handled in an RPG. It gives you multiple choices at the end, some of which are only available by making certain choices beforehand and goes on to narrate all the smaller choices you've made in a fully voiced and elaborate slideshow epilogue. And THEN you're free to walk around a ship with all of the allies you've made along the way and can chat with them and they will acklowledge what you have (or haven't) done for them. After 4 playthroughs I still had meaningful differences at the end and since it can be played with several people locally, so did my girlfriend. Criminally underrated game.
Agreed so so so much. It can be a bit jank of an ending sequence, first time I did it I accidentally got a bad one whilst being overwhelmed, but it is so so good. I think it helps that the entire game built up to that final moment, not just in terms of the characters, but with you aswell. It poses a nightmarishly difficult choice to make, and merges the effects on your character and the wider world seemlessly.
I think the game with my favorite alternate endings would be OneShot.
The game's very story-focused and it's difficult to talk about its endings in a way that doesn't completely spoil them, so I'll leave everything under the cut.
The entire game has you form a connection between both Niko and The World;
In OneShot, you don't control Niko in the typical game sense, at least, not in-universe--you instead you can communicate with her and advise her on what to do, which makes your relationship with her feel more real than if you just controlled her like a typical game. The rest of The World has characters that are all important to the story and have distinct personalities, making them all stick in your mind, and ends up creating an attachment between you and The World as a whole.
All of the game has these relationships built up, and the ending is spoken about in the way that it's a good ending where the world is saved from dying, but that's really just wishful thinking on the people's part. In reality, when you get to the end, you are offered a choice between which of the two you want to save; Niko, or The World. Something else is brought up just before that, though, which makes it far more difficult to decide, and thus makes the final decision far more impactful; The World is actually a simulation, and Niko *isn't*.
One more thing is that there is a Solstice ending that's really this game's True ending, but unlike other games where the story just goes to the True ending from the beginning, the Player's previous playthroughs are canon in-universe in a way; a conversation very late into this route-- the route being something which you get locked into right from its start, even if both routes feel very similar at the beginning--described The World as having been created time and time again by the Player so that they can save both Niko and The World, but it wasn't possible until the Solstice route was activated.
This, I feel, makes the True ending more than if it was just its own route, as being built on top of the other playthroughs makes it carry more weight than it ever would have otherwise.
Yeah. Undertale also requires a second play through go get to the true ending, because its canon that you keep all knowledge every time you start a new save file.
Part of what makes OneShot's endings so powerful is the gimmick of the game. When you can only play a game once (outside of shenanigans), the ending you get is far more meaningful than the endings in a lot of games. In something like Hollow Knight or Undertale, each ending is good, but they can feel a bit like a checklist. Collect all the endings for the True Experience! OneShot says "This is how it happened" - your choices, the optional quests you did, the interactions you had with all the different characters; they all have a finality to them that simply doesn't exist in other games.
Caveat: the Undertale genocide route does pull this same trick to some extent, though it's not nearly as dedicated as OneShot.
And then the game threw it all away.
Seriously, the biggest failing of ME3 was even including any final choice at all. Rather, the ending we got should have been entirely dependent on all the other choices we made along the way.
Say what you will about most of Crono Tigger's endings being shallow or jokes, but how you achieve them is still done correctly. No matter what path you take through the game it always leads to the same final battle with Lavos, with no more choices to make after that. The ending you are going to get is locked in the moment you start the final battle, and is entirely a consequence of what actions you have or have not taken elsewhere in the game.
The ironic failing of any game that tries to tie multiple endings to one final choice is that in doing so it basically invalidates every other choice made along the way. When it comes to acknowledging and rewarding player agency, the ending of a game shouldn't be about the DESTINATION, but rather a summation of everything you did on the JOURNEY to get there.
So the true ending was the choices we made along the way.
This is a serious necro, but I want to add. There is one game I've played, where though the ending sequence can be a bit jank, it's final ending choice feels brilliant. It's divinity original sin two, and I think it works so so well because the entire game is leading up to that ending, everything is about that one choice, so it feels significant.
Games with sandbox elements, like civilization sims or strategy games, inherently accomplish multiple endings.
I'd say that a sandbox is the perfect solution to the multiple-ending problem.
For games focused on smaller casts instead of towns, nations, or civilizations, the genre labelled "immersive sim" attempts this approach.
It just takes a *really good* sandbox mechanic to produce the depth that ad hoc writing can. For now.
I think I agree. Part of whether I find a game’s ending satisfying or not is linked to if it made me feel like I wasted my time. That can be due to the writing but more often that not it’s downplaying the journey to get there. Good video. 😃
1 caveat for Pikmin's ending is that there are a specific 5 ship parts that are optional, and you only get the "average" ending if you failed to get those parts. If you are missing a part not on that list of 5 then you get the bad ending.
I would also call the get all parts the "canon ending" because the sequels exist.
Either way still happy to see a childhood classic included.
I've honestly grown cold toward games that try to focus on moral choice and multiple endings, etc. Theres been some good examples of these things done right but there are so many examples where things end up feeling forced or contrived. Or they take the Dishonored route and make one route more or less fun than the other.
Saying one route is more fun than the other strikes me as odd. The blood-soaked path is fun, yes, but you end up ignoring a ton of what the game has to offer in order to just carve your way through levels. It's instant gratification. Non-lethal, stealth, or both - those are painstaking, often involving a lot of saving, memorizing patrol routes and experimenting with various strategies, but it's crazy to say that's not fun. It's just delayed gratification, but the work you put in is really satisfying when it pays off and your plan finally works like clockwork.
@@dvillines26 I agree that the stealthy non-lethal option is fun too; in fact, I think it's more fun. But I think the problem is that the two paths appeal to different breeds of players. For most people, the sheer difference in the gameplay of those two routes make one inherently more fun than the other, reducing the choice involved.
A player that prefers stealth games will prefer avoiding killing a lot of people, even if they kill their main targets. This naturally pulls them towards the Low Chaos ending. A player that prefers action games will have more fun carving their way through the guards even if they utilise some stealth mechanics, naturally pulling them towards the High Chaos ending(s).
A lot of writing in the last half decade has lost nuance, ESPECIALLY in film and TV but in games as well. The “moral” endings are being written by people who either have none or don’t understand that whilst some things are black and white, others aren’t. Or they “subvert your expectations” with something like “ooh, you flipped the switch so the trolley goes down the empty track instead of hitting the inexplicably placed baby? Too bad, that was actually baby Hitler all along, lmao”
SMT games tend to make the different routes interesting as they all represent different ideologies that can be both argued for and against, the game even providing loads of different perspectives on these from numerous sides. But you can also often tell when a title has bias towards one of them, as there's usually one route that gets the most amount of content. Yet surprisingly these routes are rarely depicted as the one and true choice as all of the options are ideologically more or less grey. None of the scenarios are simple, none of them have a clear right choice, or that clear right choice simply doesn't exist. You have to pick your poison from the options you can find.
This. It speaks volumes when even the fandom is somewhat evenly divided into which ideology is the best one.
What really gets me about the ending of Mass Effect 3, is that they already had the galactic readiness score. They were halfway to executing on an ending that came about as a result of all your player choices to that point.
The ending 100% should have just been the result of whatever your readiness score was, rather than having it just unlock the Synthesis ending.
Straight up, ME3 could've just given Fallout New Vegas exposition dumps detailing the domino effect of our choices
*should've
Imagine getting to the end of Mass Effect 3 and not making a choice at all, but having Shepard be influenced by the people you have made friends with and the absence of those you have pushed away or eliminated... Followed by an ending that is relevant to who your Shepard has become through all of those decisions
He didn't mention the Witcher 3 alternate endings! I know it is a wee bit clunky when you know the mechanics behind it, but that first play through were I got the bad ending and had the showdown with the remaining Crone really hit home in a way no other games ending has for me.
I've always loved the endings in the Witcher III because they are character focused, and are decided based off your actions. And while the Worse-Ending is clearly....well the worse the path to it CAN seem justifiable to some and so can be shocking when it occurs, and the other two endings are such a philosophical debate that both are "good".
As for content, they are all so satisfying. The Worse-Ending is tragic and channels the players anger, picking up from a previous plot point. The Witcher-Ending is cathartic and wholesome as you see Ciri truly happy and giving her the sword feels so rewarding. The Empress ending is bittersweet as you see Ciri give up a similar happiness she had in the Witcher-Ending for the greater good, and while you feel loss at her leaving, you cannot help feel proud at her for making the harder choice.
My biggest complaint is how obvious some of the decisions are after your first playthrough. Out-of-place timed-choices feel so obviously important that it takes away the player choice in other moments. However, the greatest strength of the Witcher III is how it manages to make every choice seem important even when it is not, so it's mostly gets a pass.
This is the first I am hearing of that game having multiple endings. I guess that is my gaming for the next few weeks planned out.
@@andrewgreenwood9068 its decided through organic decisions involving what kind of father figure you are to Ciri, esentially. Its generally obvious because Ciri is either directly present, or heavily involved in the choice.
@@freewyvern707 "how it manages to make every choice seem important even when it is not, so it's mostly gets a pass."
This is the only thing I hated about the Witcher 3. Worrying so much about tough decisions that don't really influence anything. For example, I really wanted to save the Bloody Baron on my second playthrough ... turns out, that the leaves and that asshole commander becomes lord of the castle anyway.
i think the problem isnt that games have alternate endings, but how they're delivered. you work so hard to get an ending that fits a style of play that its almost just a self fulfilling prophecy - and they lived happily ever after... like you wanted. i think a better delivery method for most games with multiple endings is to have them function the same way as secret endings, letting you see an ending the developer intended as well as options to reward a committed play
Would have loved a section or mention of Shin Megami Tensei and the way the alignment system affects endings, giving player choices meaning even if the character is too weak in the narrative to do anything at the time. SMT Nocturne does this well by giving you alternate bosses or skipping some entirely based on if the alignment rep you're around is friendly to you or not, and makes many playthroughs unique
You know, until watching this video I don't think I ever thought of GTA5 as having a bad ending, or falling victim to the ME3 syndrome... It always felt to me like they had been building to that ending all along, that there was simply no way all these larger than life personalities could continue living.
this reminds me of my first Dishonored playthrough where i killed Slackjaw. Daud's diary was a bit different when it came to Slackjaw, that bottle street gang member in the sewers dialouge is changed saying "but without Slackjaw we were powerless, and Granny rags's line was also changed. Just because i played the game like i was playing Skyrim
I like those ending cards that tell me what happened because I was doing optional stuff even if it did not effect the ending, like in Dragon Age or Mass Effect (happens in the next game thou, weird lag), but I like them only if it does not feel like they tried to pat my head by giving me "something" to read, I mean, those can be the best endings of the game, because they are way more personal and optional than the main campaign, but I did have to notice them (or overlook them by accident ... my bad) while playing to care they happened.
Disco Elysium has an incredibly linear ending and yet its the game where i've felt most connected to and satisfied with my decisions impacting the ending. It encapsulates the game and ties up the threads you've been interacting with in your own way, and I still felt like I did what I wanted through the game
A lot of novellas utilize "open endings" that let the reader interpret their own conclusions to the story based on the content
I feel like a lot of the time alternate endings are a bit of a cop out from making (possibly unpopular) decisions on a story, and it usually shows, because the story will feel half baked overall. I prefer a decided story over a branching story in all directions, if it's a story someone truly wants to tell, and they get the opportunity to craft it exactly like that. The kinds of game you make for a branching or for a linear story are very different by their very nature, and I believe that's often overlooked in both directions.
On the other hand, there's another kind of alternate endings, which is emergent stories. If you're playing a total sandbox game, you can suddenly have really intense stories that nobody ever intended to tell. Like the time your City in an RTS game almost got run over but a few brave soldiers held it long enough to push them back. That's something you can't really plan for, because this kind of gamemode is free from story by its very nature. And yet that very thing is what turns it into the fertile soil of many interesting stories to emerge.
I never had a problem with ME3's ending, but I think it was because I treated the entire last half of the game as the ending. The choices you made in the game up to that point came to a culmination, determining whether, for instance, the quarians or the geth survive. It was a subtle culmination, not broadcasting the formula for determining how your choices interweave, but it still is there in the background. Of course, you learn that your choices are pretty much just set dressing by ME2, when who you saved in the previous game only leads to a different character saying the exact same things to you in certain scenes like Horizon.
Pathologic let's you choose.
Moral choices in AAA games: do you choose the obvious good or the obvious bad
Moral choices in pathologic: do you screw over the people you trust so you can save the village or do you tell the truth dooming the village
This is one of dozen impossible choices that you choose in the game
I think it is similar to how we enjoy noninteractive media, the ending is satisfying because it is connected to the choices the characters made, not because they controlled the direction of the narrative.
I feel like your insight into the subjects you explore is far beyond almost everyone trying to cover game design. You not only explore more crucial concepts in modern games, but drill into why individual examples are effective or ineffective in a way that most seem to just fail to address. Thank you for doing what you do!
My favourite ending might be Pyre's, you might lose sometimes, but it will never be a game over, and everything continues. It just shapes the story to everything you do and I love it
just finished my FIRST ending playthrough for Citizen Sleeper. excited to hear you mention it.
I love how Shadow the Hedgehog has become the go-to example of how not to make a game with branching paths.
The Ar Tonelico games did the thing where the story splits into two significantly different routes midway through, plus a third route once you've seen both, way back on the PS2.
The first two games are my favourite. The third one though, not so much.
I've always read Undertale's genocide route as the true ending (considering subsequent pacifist route clears as an extension of the genocide route) since, when playing the game naturally, it's unlikely to get the genocide route unless you get the pacifist ending and then think "I wonder what would happen if I did the opposite of this". As such, doing a true reset (much to flowey's dismay) is the first step toward the route since it shows the player in question (assuming this is the same player who beat the game and not a new one) doesn't care about the characters and their happiness, but the game and its content.
thank you for bringin the grow video to my attention. For years I've been mentioning this game series and it is nice to see other people talk about it too.
20:39 Liked commented and subscribed for the most objectively correct statement in the whole video.
I think to put your point more succinctly, gamers want endings to be about consequences. The same way choices don't matter if they don't impact the game world or characters in any way, a choice of endings doesn't matter if we don't get to see what effect that choice has. I think this is the real reason the original ME3 ending caused such a stink, because there was no ending that gave proper closure to the stories the player had been part of.
Incredible video as ever! A refreshing and educated take on endings is something I didn't even know I wanted till I watched this :D
personally i really enjoyed the ending of pillars of eternity. the main ending choice is not particularly impactful but you get to see how all the little decisions you made affected the world and your companions.
I liked how Atelier games during Arland did endings. They had one set of ending for how much of the game you progressed. And then you also got to choose at the end between like 3-ish choices that you got based on some of the special achievements you made in that run. It gave a lot of replay value to the game and made your choices you made with social links and other weird other things feel like it matters.
Similarly games like Princess Maker and such has various ending for what you chose to focus on in your run of the game.
"way of the samurai" on PS2 was my first truly branching story line game... it was great
Those games trully are unique, but they are only possible because of their very limited scope and lenght. They are not very appealing to Companies because their require to spread a lot of content in a very short play through, and people usually complain if a game is short, despite being able to play it 8 times and never once get involved in the same plot and ending.
I think the biggest pitfall games have when making endings is that they believe that the player wants all their choices to affect the MAIN ending, how the plot is resolved in the climax. This really isn't the case; the players often just want an acknowledgement of their choices along the way.
Despite everyone and their dog talking about Undertale, they always talk about the True Pacifist and Genocide endings. Soulless Pacifist, too, if they want to get fancy. Nobody seems to acknowledge the Neutral endings, which I believe are a perfect representation of how a branching narrative game should handle it's ending.
The choice you've made along the way don't change how the plot is resolved; You fight Omega Flowey, and then you exit the Underground. However, after that, the game gives you a phone call, where you're told of how the Underground has been since your exit. This is where all those choices you made across the game matter. Not in how the game ends, but in the game telling you what kind of world you've left behind.
This is what Fallout New Vegas also does right (The plot always resolves in a battle for Hoover Dam), and I believe more games should take these two as an example of how to resolve branching narratives.
Yes, neutral endings really need more love, having the game acknowledge the snowman piece I always kept in my pocket and refused to eat no matter how many times I got wrecked by the bosses is so satisfying
I feel like the best endings are for RPGs that built multiple "reads" into their script. Whether through questlines that lead into their own ending OR just having a more complex intellectual soup that has multiple things you want to see paid off.
And it's BETTER if the game isn't requiring you do everything. To be able to slice your cut out of the game that you want is a great option and having endings that reward you for that slice are great.
Games like RDR2 FAILED to do this miserably. The "good" ending...the honorable ending, is the only one that made any fuckin sense for why we watched him go through the struggle and what decisions he made throughout the story. To get the "bad" endings all felt like you got robbed of basic closure on the character you got to know. What's the point of the plot in the bad ending? Bad man gets what he deserved? lol ok Rockstar....if Arthur isn't honorable, the plot has no tension, it has no redemption, and the characters in it make no sense when opposed to each other.
I thought Cyberpunk 2077's endings were some of the best "alternates" I've experience in an RPG. Not only did they build the script with 3 unique casts with 3 unique endings you WANTED to see the ending on, there were so many plot elements within that...while not paid off, the ending you got felt like a fantastic set of thoughtful endings to character arcs and decisions that you made from intuition and to see if you were right or if there even is a 'right' answer.
You had "converted by Johnny"....to "Converted INTO Johnny" to "stuck to their idealism" and "sold their soul" OR "they left the system" and even "end it all" and each one feels like a thoughtfull conceptual framework to analyze the story that you witnessed and each pay off different arcs and sometimes accidently are meaningful due to the levels at play in the subtext of the game. Each endng is a response against capitalism and each ending gives you a different set of pros and cons to those responses. Join the system? Who are you at the end of it? Leave the system? Are you you anymore or are you a member of a group and almost nothing else? What if you change who you are? What does that mean? Does their agenda give you more meaning in capitalism? What about succeeding on your own terms? Is that even possible or do you just end up alone and working to work?
The problem with Mass Effect was that they kept slapping more mystery boxes and more problems until they shoveled the ending onto some poor sap who got the fall for the whole line of terrible decisions leading up to it.
It's not that Mass Effect 3s ending was bad, it's that Mass Effect as a series was not built for 3 games and it CERTAINLY structured itself so that whoever got the ending and had to write that script was fucked. Nobody down the line thought about how their choices meshed NOR did they account for the different versions of Shephard because they never wrote shepherd in any consistent way.
Choices for the sake of choices without any regard for the MEANING of those choices and how they relate to the greater plot. Which is why the current genre of RPGs is plagued with Mass Effect fanboys who think there is some alternate reality where a good writer can write a story like that and it work...and frankly, no, that's impossible to give someone both MEANINGFUL CHOICES...A LOT OF THEM...and still have a coherent story with characters that develop and big payoffs...if every can die nobody matters and so therefor the plot doesn't have real characters, their archetypes built to eventually die.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Specops: The Line for having multiple endings and choices without telling you what they are.
Great video! And especially about Legion... he truly is the sexiest out of all the synthetics!
Hmm I never knew saving the lil sisters was the optimal gameplay choice. I simply did it for the good ening, despite it being harder at the beginning. I never even considered those gifts giving more than the bad choice.
I can't believe you made a video about alternate endings and talked about Fallout New Vegas for 9 seconds. The game has at least 4 different outcomes for a guy who is extremely easy to miss and has a great backstory.
I realised I was not very clear the guy I was talking about here was arcade Gannon
Your shoutouts to other creators is really fantastic. Also love your vids.
video is only in 360p for me, just so you know
youtube processing is being real freakin slow today :(
Fallout NV had a really cool way of making choices feel rewarding every faction you interacted with could play a part in the final battle and each had there own endings despite not being "main" factions
I had this stance back when it came out and maintain it to this day:
Mass Effect 3 should've had essentially two Endings: You beat the Reapers ass or you don't. Simple as that. The "Ending of Mass Effect" is the decisions you make throughout the game. The Ending should've been a last hurrah. A desperate last ditch effort that fails or a bittersweet final battle filled with scenes of tragic heroism that results in victory.
The Reapers didn't need an explanation for their purpose or their motivation. They're ancient Lovecraftian Doomsday machines. That one conversation with Sovereign in Mass Effect is really all we needed as a setup for them and it's one of my favorite dialogues in the entire series.
The last thing that is awful about the ME3 Endings is how thoroughly they wrote themselves into a hole. Krogans, Quarians and Geth possibly existing or being gone would've already been a huge challenge to continue writing on from, but even though the Endings all feel emotionally pretty similar their implied impact on the Galaxy as a whole is absolutely staggering and I'm interested how they go about this with the upcoming Mass Effect game.
I do have to point out for Fallout 4 their were 4 different ending: save all factions but institute, railroad/minuteman ending with downfall of BoS, Institute ending destroying all factions and asserting dominance, and BoS ending destroy all factions then purge all non human life from the planet. There's only 1 ending where at least 2 of the factions aren't destroyed
So when are you uploading the other 2 scripts so that we can decide which one we want to accept as the true video?
As a game developer (Anglerfish & The ER: Patient Typhon) and as a person who works with theater, I can say that games are far from the only medium that works with multi endings. There is a theater genre called Forum theatre where the audience keeps changing the performance after seeing its end, to reach an end they think is a good end to the story. I can tell from experience that what one audience thinks are a good ending to a performance, another audience thinks is a bad ending and makes a completely different ending to the same story. So you can experience over 100 endings to the same story, which we rarely see in games. And it’s not the only form of theater with multi endings. Choose your own adventure books I also remember reading as a child where there were several endings. They often do not work very well, I thought at the time, but they do exist. ;) But I still found your video intriguing with some good observations like all your other videos.
I'm curious if you've played Triangle Strategy yet, and if so your take on its ending options. It has a "true ending" for sure, but how you get there is kind of neat.
I like that Triangle Strategy is very explicit about where all the branching points are, and a what points the story connects back together. You still have to figure out the "True Ending" yourself, but if you want just want to see new things on subsequent playthroughs it's really helpful. Also, using the "Recommended" units to let you know which characters can have unique dialogue triggered on a map is also pretty neat.
I love your videos, it feels like I'm getting as much information as a video essay without having to watch 3 hours on why Portal is actually an allegory to Kazakhstan or something like that.
Not ending related but I feel that optimization problem in Kingdom Hearts a lot. The narrative makes a big deal about "Darkness=Bad" but when you actually get to use Dark powers in gameplay, its the most fun I have, I relished using Shadow-Sora in 2, Terra in Birth by Sleep, and Riku in Dream Drop Distance are my favorite characters to play as purely because their dark moves tend to have the most fun elements to em. (Three tired to mitigate Shadow Sora's moves into the Frozen world's Keyblade, and the Ice claws were cool but a sad imitation)
I think there's a better alternative to guilting players for being evil while doing so is still fun. You make an evil playstyle fun at first but get dull and/or lock you out of content or upgrades as you proceed.
Interesting that you felt that way, considering Anti-Form was explicitly meant to be a hindrance, a way to keep reliance on Drive Forms down.
It locked you into a form with no defense, no way to recover HP, took away ALL of your gage when you reverted, and since none of its attacks were finishers, you were left with no way to end boss fights.
@@LastGreatDen I didnt know it couldnt end boss fights, I just liked the way it attacked. I think I just got lucky with it, usually only seeing it when leveling up the drive forms.
I do know using Final Form lowers the secret counter for how often it can appear. That probably contributed to not fighting bosses with it
@@LastGreatDen No, Anti-form very much has finishers. The combos are just so long that it can be hard to actually land them against bosses.
@@lpfan4491 You're right, dunno what 6-months-ago me was thinking.
20:11 Wow.... that's... It's really opened my eyes about stories and gaming as a whole, thank you. Really.
I recently finished playing ReB, and I picked Zoe, I feel like I missed something.. but this is the ending I get, oh well.
though it geniunly seems like it could be a good choice.. right???
Uh... What even game is that?
@@FelisImpurrator Resident Evil 7. Although it's subtitled as Resident Evil Biohazard so that's probably what they were going off of.
@@Riggs_The_Roadie Ah. I was wondering because it was listed as 7 in the description.
@@FelisImpurrator yeah, Resident evil biohazzard
The very first time I ever played KOTOR, I switched and joined Bastilla after she gave me the dramatic “JOIN ME IN THE DARK SIDE” speech, and I wound up have to restart the entire game because suddenly the cost of all of my Force powers was so high because they didn’t match my alignment that I couldn’t beat the game.
No no, he has a point there, Sega should have given us that
The other great thing about three houses is, you get little stories depending on which charecters had strong relationships, and you can also choose to have a special ending with someone byleth had a strong relationship with. It's fun and simple, but it makes things feel unique.
I'm simple, I don't care about having 50 choices that all branch and weave and change things throughout the story, plus that would be an insane amount of work. But If you are gonna give me all these "important" decisions to make, I would like the decision I make to have SOME impact beyond hidden values that just decide just the ending. Thats lame and basically what most "morality" systems tend to do. Even if it's just a 2 paragraph update after or during the credits.
Just a quick correction, unless you are including the tonics that you are give by the little sisters
Harvesting them objectively gives you more ADAM throughout your time in Bioshock's Rapture. Additional its an immediate benefit to the player to harvest but over the long term you will receive the gifts from the little sisters that bump you back up.
For saving them, you get 21x80 +7x200 = 3080 ADAM; for harvesting them, you get 21x160 = 3360 ADAM.
The tonics you get are often better, though, than what you would have bought for the ADAM, anyway.
Just searched for this comment after watching. It's puzzling how this falsehood is so pervasive: I've never seen a single time when harvesting mechanic mentioned in a video in a factually correct way.
I really like the approach The Stanley Parable (original and Ultra Deluxe) takes with having several endings and no endings at the same time. There is technically a "real" end, but the credits roll at a completely different time and there's even an epilogue that just keeps it all looping backwards and forwards again and again. In the end, the player can choose where the game ends for them. I'd argue the game has already ended before you even start playing it, yet the end is never the end is never the end is never. I understand this is a matter of preference and not everyone likes it, and it would not work with most games. But it's also a narrative that can only work in a game, showcasing the possibilities of the medium. And it's a fascinating example of metamodern storytelling as well.
There's one extra bit to comsider... a lot of players are going to walk away after they get an ending. They take whatever cutscene/epilogue/whatever they get, call it a day and move on to a new story.
Tangentially, a super minor quibble, but for a lot of us going ghost was the entire point of playing Dishonored, with the 'go loud' toys existing solely to cover our failures.
The low-finesse route is an experience we can get from a billion other games.
This is why RPGs, REAL choice driven RPGs are so underrated (and sadly they're rare), real western RPG can allow you to have yo cake and eat it too, like evil endings? Great, you can actually build everything up to that point without feeling disjointed. Infact if the RPG is good(New Vegas) and not bad(Fallout 3) you can make evil endings feel like "correct/good" endings and vise versa potentially making more diverse grey area endings which can be considered good or evil for different types of people.
It's basically impossible to create a game that gives you autonomy but also somehow accounts all player agency into a satisfying ending. It's a catch 22, the more you restrict player involvement the easier it is to do but the less meaningful it feels.
Something like The Stanley Parable, like you mention, has so many excellent alternate endings bc really they're not alternate endings. The game is extremely limited in what you can actually do, you're just accessing a different ending walking down a different path (which is basically the whole game).
The sheer amount of scripting, development, production, cost, and forward and fringe thinking it would require to create an open and cinematic game truly adapting to most player actions and having profound effects on the world, gameplay, and narrative while still creating the experience and story they want the game to be doesn't seem humanly possible.
Maybe if we can train Ai to the point where it can rebuild and rewrite the entire game depending on your choices... But than can lead to a ton of others unpredictable problems...
@@ЗолотойЗомби-г2о Probably be hilarious but nonsensical
Mass Effect 3's ending is even worse because the Organic vs AI objective wasn't why the Reapers were initially created, when the plot was leaked BioWare's higher ups changed it.
The original ending was more of a techno-cosmic horror analogy for environmentalism where widespread use of eezo accelerates entropy via dark energy byproduct, and the Reapers were created to find a solution for the acceleration of the death of reality. They decided continual genocide before organic life to prevent eezo usage was the best bet, in the same logic of 'if all of humanity was genocided, carbon emissions would even out', and popped off with the Cycle.
This was touched on in Mass Effect 2 in the mission where you pick up Tali and you find out the solar system's star is dying way earlier than it was projected to, which shouldn't be possible (because they didn't know about dark energy's negative effects on entropy).
Mass Effect 3 isn't simply a cautionary tale on poorly delivered multiple endings, it's why you shouldn't change your plot last minute because the story got leaked online.
Better a story that was spoiled than a story that was butchered.