What doesn't kill you will eventually.
I have a bone to pick with the "multiple ending" scenario of certain video games.
Take for instance, Fable. The concept is pretty simple: your actions in-game will either give you good karma, or bad karma, and whichever way you sway determines the outcome at the end of the game, and how your character is perceived by the in-game world. If you are too evil, certain quests won't be available to you. If you are purely good, everyone in every town will know your name, and ask you for help. Where the concept is pretty standard in terms of video games, it pisses me off to no end.
Why? For one, the execution is extremely poor. I had to reset my first playthrough of the game. Completely make a new save file, after 15 minutes of play.
The very first objective of the game is simple. Get some money, buy your big sister a birthday present. Starting off as a young boy, you can go up to a couple of the townspeople and do different deeds, and find items, or watch people, or tell the guards about suspicious acts, or whatever. Once you have X number of gold pieces, earning one for every deed you do, good or bad, the game progresses. But here's the rub: each deed you perform will have two paths to get to the endpoint. One is evil, one is good. However, there is never ANY indicator as to which is which. What you may feel is the correct choice to make is in fact the exact opposite of what you were trying to achieve.
This first quest in the game give you a chance to explore a small town of no more than around 35 people. At the top of a small knoll, you find a young boy crying, and another boy talking to him. You talk to the little boy, and he says the older one took his toy doll. He asks you to beat him up for him and get his toy back. So I go over to talk to the older boy. He states that he simply brought the toy to his mother, because it had broken, and she was fixing it for him. Now this little kid is screaming bloody murder at him, and he doesn't know how to handle it, and asks for your help.
The way the game sets this up, is you talk to one, and click a button to side with whichever you want to. I decided that this older boy was trying to help this little kid out, and I wanted to help this older kid out, and explain it to the young kid that his dolly wasn't stolen, and that he would get it back soon. Cheer up the little kid, give this older kid a pat on the back, and be on my way. Right? Wrong.
Siding with the older boy is considered "evil" because he is lying to you. The correct choice is to beat the snot out of him. I was going for a purely "good" character run on my first playthrough. Immediately, I got duped into being evil. The older kid gives me a gold coin, and proceeds to beat the little boy up for being a whiny little baby. So I rush in to break up the fight, and punch the bully to get him off the kid. He runs off and grabs a guard, who scolds me, and makes me pay a fine, and my karma goes further south.
So the snotty little bitch who wants me to kick the shit out of some kid who's claiming he did nothing wrong is actually the one who would give me the "good" karma. So beating someone up for money (he offered a gold piece if I beat the kid up) is considered a "good" deed, but trusting your fellow man at his word, and trying to fix a situation gone awry is apparently fool-hearty, and evil. Like, what the fuck? I had to restart the game and go through all the motions again cause of this shit!
Other situations aren't so gray, such as finding a man attempting to cheat on his wife, and he offers you two gold pieces in exchange for silence. If you don't take it and tell his wife, you get a good deed tacked on to your karma-meter. But for fuck's sake, some of this shit is just too imprecise.
On the other side of the scale is the style of the Final Fantasy series. Yes, you have many instances where you must make an A or B choice. None of it is ever game-breaking though. You will simply see a scenario presented to you differently. The problem is, you have no idea when any of these choices are going to affect anything, or what they are affecting!
Take, for instance, FFX. Depending on what you tell this one guy when he asks you about bird training (either "Yeah, go for it", or "No, I think you are better suited as a soldier")... It decides whether he or his commander DIE. Fucking DIE. Cause you tell some asshole he should be a bird trainer, his commanding officer gets killed!? Where the fuck is the correlation here?
FFVII has plenty of this stupid shit going on. Some of it, however, is downright lunacy. Throughout the game, the main character Cloud gets asked to react to different stories being told by the rest of his friends and comrades. Depending on your reaction, it adds, subtracts, and multiplies unseen "points" that are attributed to each character, and how much they like you. This all culminates to a scene somewhere towards the beginning-of-the-end of the game. You go on a date with, and take a romantic trolley ride with one of 5 people. The points are heavily favored to the two main love-interests (one of them dies at one point, so if you go to the location where this occurs after she is dead, it defaults to the next chick). And not only are they heavily favored, it's damn near impossible the get any other character to go with you unless you know the sequence. So if I want Barret, or Yuffie to be the one to go with me, I have to go look at some guide on gamefaqs.com, and make these ridiculous decisions throughout the game. This isn't fun. This is fucking gay.
Lastly, is the truly game-changing Mega Man X5 style of multiple endings. The ones that you have NO FUCKING CONTROL OVER. Who's the fucking genius that thought this shit up!?
In X5, you have a space colony filled with a crazy ass computer virus that is crashing into Earth. You, Maverick Hunter X, (or Marverick Hunter Zero, since you can pick who to play as) have to find a bunch of pieces to some ancient cannon to shoot it out of the sky. This weapon (Codename: The Enigma), has 4 pieces. So you go to four of the robot-master's stages, and whip some fucking ass, and get the 4 pieces. Next, you fire the fucker off. And... and... and...
"Negative, damage is only 56%. Time to use Plan-B!"
Now you gotta go kick the shit out of 4 more bosses to get 4 parts to enhance a SPACE SHUTTLE to CRASH IT INTO THE COLONY. Brilliant I know.
And then, X's buddy Zero is the one who has to fly it into the colony, and eject at the last second, because the auto-pilot is infected and won't work. So you watch the scene, and... and... and!?!?!?
"Negative, damage is only 89%... But... Zero survived... He's just some crazy fuck-tard now who wants to kill you so go fight him!"
Seems simple enough... Except the success rates of BOTH the Enigma, and the shuttle are, get this, 100% random. Meaning that withOUT a single piece of the Enigma, you can fire it over and over again, resetting every time it doesn't work, until it fucking works. Same for the shuttle.
The ONLY way to get the "good" game ending for X is for the colony to get destroyed, and for Zero to return safely. Conversely, the ONLY way to get the "good" ending for Zero, is for the colony to get destroyed, and for Zero to return safely. After all, if he goes crazy cause of the virus, he becomes unplayable! Pretty simple concept. If you don't have a character, you can't beat the game with him haha.
Basically, there are 4 endings to this game, and only one of which is canon in the scheme of the grand story. X's "good" ending. But what about the bad one? I get to reset my game a hundred times, til the shuttle fails, then replay the last few levels, and watch the ending! or i could just youtube it... But really, what's the point in owning interactive media if I don't interact with it?
*sigh*
It comes down to this: Games that have multiple endings, or decisions that alter your path, but not your end-game, or lock you out of certain quests, or whatever... They are hurting gaming.
I don't want to play a game with my face phase-locked to a piece of paper that tells me what to input for the right reactions, just so I can see an alternate scene that has my character flirt with some chick while they ride on snow-mobiles to the ice-temple, or just to get a pheonix pinion instead of a pheonix down from some asshole I have to talk to. Maybe if you spent more money on your localization instead of the mathematical constructs you attribute in the background of EVERY button press, I'd have a game I could enjoy!
The only time a multiple ending seems worth it, is when you make one of 3 choices at the very, very, very end of the game. Usually directly before the last boss or level.
I believe one of the more recent Silent Hill games has a functionality similar to this. You talk to a guy in the last level, and depending on your answer, you either get the good, evil, or neutral ending.
But, when its as simple as saving your game with 10 minutes left to go, and replaying that one part a couple times... That seems cheap, and tacked on.
So where exactly does one find that happy medium? BY NOT FUCKING HAVING IT.
Every game out there doesn't need a multiple ending, multiple scenario fuck-fest. In fact, it takes me out of the game when I am forced to make some ridiculous decision about something I not only don't care about, but know nothing about, only to have it bite me in the ass in about 15 minutes. Great. I get to become bored with this game, because my last save was 35 minutes ago, and I need to reset it to redo the scenario that gave me the shitty outcome. Thanks game-designers! You blow.
The Kingdom Hearts series doesn't have multiple endings! Sure, it has a *secret* ending that you can obtain by finishing all the side-quests. But the story is cut and dry, and everyone who plays it gets the EXACT same playing experience. Yet, I have replayed Kingdom Hearts I and II more than any other RPG that I can think of! Why? Because I can sit back and enjoy the fucking game. I don't need to worry about any of the bullshit that gets thrown in for no fucking reason.
You want multiple endings? Go write a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. And put zombies in it. I've always wanted a choose your own adventure zombie apocalypse book.
But really now. Alt endings, alt scenarios, leave me the fuck alone. You have no business in my life. I want to enjoy the shit I play, and you're fucking it up for everyone. There's either so fucking ridiculous choices to make that no one can figure out what to do without a game guide, or so few that it seems moot, and doesn't even need to be there! My solution feels sound. Get rid of them!
Or, better yet, take a look at FFVIII, my 2nd favorite RPG of all time. You get put into a situation where your main character has to decide how to defend against an oncoming attack. This attack is coming from a trained militia. Not only that, but the attack is aimed at a school for training a rival militia. You just got voted as the leader of the school, and thrust into a role where you had to make some quick decisions, when it was the last thing on your mind. You were given a choice of 8 things to tell your fellow classmates over the loudspeaker. However, you only have time to tell them 4. Telling them the incorrect things to do, such as instead of telling the upper class-men to protect the young children, and instead telling them to go and make sure all the hot-dogs in the cafeteria were protected... well, it doesn't exactly effect your game. You'll get a quick line about how that seemed excessive, you may run into more random battles for the next few moments, and the amount of time you get in one of the timed segments may be higher or lower, depending on your decisions. You get a very subtle change in dialogue, and the actual mechanics of which you play in get temporarily altered. Nothing becomes impossibly hard. Nothing becomes lost forever. Nothing gets broken. Nothing "real" changes. You get a one sentence blurb of a character's inner monologue, and that's it. Every other part of the game remains intact. It's just whether or not you have the extra couple of seconds to do your thing while the shit hits the fan.
So basically, get the unneeded, unwanted, trivial bullshit out of my video games. Now. Cause I fucking hate it. And after my little rant, I hope you hate it too. And that you appreciate how ridiculous it is to restart a fucking MegaMan game just to see Zero's "bad" ending. Or how fucked it is to have 52 Final Fantasy X saves on your PS2 card, cause you think that something you did might fuck your game up, so you make two different saves, so you can go back to the other just in case. But there's so many of these encounters, you wind up having 52 branching paths...
Jesus Christ, just give us a single, super-enjoyable game. Throw in a ton of legit extras, like SECRET endings when you ace the game, or beat a super high difficulty. Like alt outfits that aren't just palette swaps. Like unlockable cheats that ENHANCE gameplay, and aren't glitchy as fuck.
And give us a real reason to replay the game. Make it the best thing you can. We will come back to it simply for the narrative. We will come back to it simply for the great gameplay mechanics. Not because you made something so retardedly complicated that nothing but a FAQ guide can net our desired outcome. It's fucking gay, and I'm taking a stand.
No more shitty game mechanics!
Take for instance, Fable. The concept is pretty simple: your actions in-game will either give you good karma, or bad karma, and whichever way you sway determines the outcome at the end of the game, and how your character is perceived by the in-game world. If you are too evil, certain quests won't be available to you. If you are purely good, everyone in every town will know your name, and ask you for help. Where the concept is pretty standard in terms of video games, it pisses me off to no end.
Why? For one, the execution is extremely poor. I had to reset my first playthrough of the game. Completely make a new save file, after 15 minutes of play.
The very first objective of the game is simple. Get some money, buy your big sister a birthday present. Starting off as a young boy, you can go up to a couple of the townspeople and do different deeds, and find items, or watch people, or tell the guards about suspicious acts, or whatever. Once you have X number of gold pieces, earning one for every deed you do, good or bad, the game progresses. But here's the rub: each deed you perform will have two paths to get to the endpoint. One is evil, one is good. However, there is never ANY indicator as to which is which. What you may feel is the correct choice to make is in fact the exact opposite of what you were trying to achieve.
This first quest in the game give you a chance to explore a small town of no more than around 35 people. At the top of a small knoll, you find a young boy crying, and another boy talking to him. You talk to the little boy, and he says the older one took his toy doll. He asks you to beat him up for him and get his toy back. So I go over to talk to the older boy. He states that he simply brought the toy to his mother, because it had broken, and she was fixing it for him. Now this little kid is screaming bloody murder at him, and he doesn't know how to handle it, and asks for your help.
The way the game sets this up, is you talk to one, and click a button to side with whichever you want to. I decided that this older boy was trying to help this little kid out, and I wanted to help this older kid out, and explain it to the young kid that his dolly wasn't stolen, and that he would get it back soon. Cheer up the little kid, give this older kid a pat on the back, and be on my way. Right? Wrong.
Siding with the older boy is considered "evil" because he is lying to you. The correct choice is to beat the snot out of him. I was going for a purely "good" character run on my first playthrough. Immediately, I got duped into being evil. The older kid gives me a gold coin, and proceeds to beat the little boy up for being a whiny little baby. So I rush in to break up the fight, and punch the bully to get him off the kid. He runs off and grabs a guard, who scolds me, and makes me pay a fine, and my karma goes further south.
So the snotty little bitch who wants me to kick the shit out of some kid who's claiming he did nothing wrong is actually the one who would give me the "good" karma. So beating someone up for money (he offered a gold piece if I beat the kid up) is considered a "good" deed, but trusting your fellow man at his word, and trying to fix a situation gone awry is apparently fool-hearty, and evil. Like, what the fuck? I had to restart the game and go through all the motions again cause of this shit!
Other situations aren't so gray, such as finding a man attempting to cheat on his wife, and he offers you two gold pieces in exchange for silence. If you don't take it and tell his wife, you get a good deed tacked on to your karma-meter. But for fuck's sake, some of this shit is just too imprecise.
On the other side of the scale is the style of the Final Fantasy series. Yes, you have many instances where you must make an A or B choice. None of it is ever game-breaking though. You will simply see a scenario presented to you differently. The problem is, you have no idea when any of these choices are going to affect anything, or what they are affecting!
Take, for instance, FFX. Depending on what you tell this one guy when he asks you about bird training (either "Yeah, go for it", or "No, I think you are better suited as a soldier")... It decides whether he or his commander DIE. Fucking DIE. Cause you tell some asshole he should be a bird trainer, his commanding officer gets killed!? Where the fuck is the correlation here?
FFVII has plenty of this stupid shit going on. Some of it, however, is downright lunacy. Throughout the game, the main character Cloud gets asked to react to different stories being told by the rest of his friends and comrades. Depending on your reaction, it adds, subtracts, and multiplies unseen "points" that are attributed to each character, and how much they like you. This all culminates to a scene somewhere towards the beginning-of-the-end of the game. You go on a date with, and take a romantic trolley ride with one of 5 people. The points are heavily favored to the two main love-interests (one of them dies at one point, so if you go to the location where this occurs after she is dead, it defaults to the next chick). And not only are they heavily favored, it's damn near impossible the get any other character to go with you unless you know the sequence. So if I want Barret, or Yuffie to be the one to go with me, I have to go look at some guide on gamefaqs.com, and make these ridiculous decisions throughout the game. This isn't fun. This is fucking gay.
Lastly, is the truly game-changing Mega Man X5 style of multiple endings. The ones that you have NO FUCKING CONTROL OVER. Who's the fucking genius that thought this shit up!?
In X5, you have a space colony filled with a crazy ass computer virus that is crashing into Earth. You, Maverick Hunter X, (or Marverick Hunter Zero, since you can pick who to play as) have to find a bunch of pieces to some ancient cannon to shoot it out of the sky. This weapon (Codename: The Enigma), has 4 pieces. So you go to four of the robot-master's stages, and whip some fucking ass, and get the 4 pieces. Next, you fire the fucker off. And... and... and...
"Negative, damage is only 56%. Time to use Plan-B!"
Now you gotta go kick the shit out of 4 more bosses to get 4 parts to enhance a SPACE SHUTTLE to CRASH IT INTO THE COLONY. Brilliant I know.
And then, X's buddy Zero is the one who has to fly it into the colony, and eject at the last second, because the auto-pilot is infected and won't work. So you watch the scene, and... and... and!?!?!?
"Negative, damage is only 89%... But... Zero survived... He's just some crazy fuck-tard now who wants to kill you so go fight him!"
Seems simple enough... Except the success rates of BOTH the Enigma, and the shuttle are, get this, 100% random. Meaning that withOUT a single piece of the Enigma, you can fire it over and over again, resetting every time it doesn't work, until it fucking works. Same for the shuttle.
The ONLY way to get the "good" game ending for X is for the colony to get destroyed, and for Zero to return safely. Conversely, the ONLY way to get the "good" ending for Zero, is for the colony to get destroyed, and for Zero to return safely. After all, if he goes crazy cause of the virus, he becomes unplayable! Pretty simple concept. If you don't have a character, you can't beat the game with him haha.
Basically, there are 4 endings to this game, and only one of which is canon in the scheme of the grand story. X's "good" ending. But what about the bad one? I get to reset my game a hundred times, til the shuttle fails, then replay the last few levels, and watch the ending! or i could just youtube it... But really, what's the point in owning interactive media if I don't interact with it?
*sigh*
It comes down to this: Games that have multiple endings, or decisions that alter your path, but not your end-game, or lock you out of certain quests, or whatever... They are hurting gaming.
I don't want to play a game with my face phase-locked to a piece of paper that tells me what to input for the right reactions, just so I can see an alternate scene that has my character flirt with some chick while they ride on snow-mobiles to the ice-temple, or just to get a pheonix pinion instead of a pheonix down from some asshole I have to talk to. Maybe if you spent more money on your localization instead of the mathematical constructs you attribute in the background of EVERY button press, I'd have a game I could enjoy!
The only time a multiple ending seems worth it, is when you make one of 3 choices at the very, very, very end of the game. Usually directly before the last boss or level.
I believe one of the more recent Silent Hill games has a functionality similar to this. You talk to a guy in the last level, and depending on your answer, you either get the good, evil, or neutral ending.
But, when its as simple as saving your game with 10 minutes left to go, and replaying that one part a couple times... That seems cheap, and tacked on.
So where exactly does one find that happy medium? BY NOT FUCKING HAVING IT.
Every game out there doesn't need a multiple ending, multiple scenario fuck-fest. In fact, it takes me out of the game when I am forced to make some ridiculous decision about something I not only don't care about, but know nothing about, only to have it bite me in the ass in about 15 minutes. Great. I get to become bored with this game, because my last save was 35 minutes ago, and I need to reset it to redo the scenario that gave me the shitty outcome. Thanks game-designers! You blow.
The Kingdom Hearts series doesn't have multiple endings! Sure, it has a *secret* ending that you can obtain by finishing all the side-quests. But the story is cut and dry, and everyone who plays it gets the EXACT same playing experience. Yet, I have replayed Kingdom Hearts I and II more than any other RPG that I can think of! Why? Because I can sit back and enjoy the fucking game. I don't need to worry about any of the bullshit that gets thrown in for no fucking reason.
You want multiple endings? Go write a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. And put zombies in it. I've always wanted a choose your own adventure zombie apocalypse book.
But really now. Alt endings, alt scenarios, leave me the fuck alone. You have no business in my life. I want to enjoy the shit I play, and you're fucking it up for everyone. There's either so fucking ridiculous choices to make that no one can figure out what to do without a game guide, or so few that it seems moot, and doesn't even need to be there! My solution feels sound. Get rid of them!
Or, better yet, take a look at FFVIII, my 2nd favorite RPG of all time. You get put into a situation where your main character has to decide how to defend against an oncoming attack. This attack is coming from a trained militia. Not only that, but the attack is aimed at a school for training a rival militia. You just got voted as the leader of the school, and thrust into a role where you had to make some quick decisions, when it was the last thing on your mind. You were given a choice of 8 things to tell your fellow classmates over the loudspeaker. However, you only have time to tell them 4. Telling them the incorrect things to do, such as instead of telling the upper class-men to protect the young children, and instead telling them to go and make sure all the hot-dogs in the cafeteria were protected... well, it doesn't exactly effect your game. You'll get a quick line about how that seemed excessive, you may run into more random battles for the next few moments, and the amount of time you get in one of the timed segments may be higher or lower, depending on your decisions. You get a very subtle change in dialogue, and the actual mechanics of which you play in get temporarily altered. Nothing becomes impossibly hard. Nothing becomes lost forever. Nothing gets broken. Nothing "real" changes. You get a one sentence blurb of a character's inner monologue, and that's it. Every other part of the game remains intact. It's just whether or not you have the extra couple of seconds to do your thing while the shit hits the fan.
So basically, get the unneeded, unwanted, trivial bullshit out of my video games. Now. Cause I fucking hate it. And after my little rant, I hope you hate it too. And that you appreciate how ridiculous it is to restart a fucking MegaMan game just to see Zero's "bad" ending. Or how fucked it is to have 52 Final Fantasy X saves on your PS2 card, cause you think that something you did might fuck your game up, so you make two different saves, so you can go back to the other just in case. But there's so many of these encounters, you wind up having 52 branching paths...
Jesus Christ, just give us a single, super-enjoyable game. Throw in a ton of legit extras, like SECRET endings when you ace the game, or beat a super high difficulty. Like alt outfits that aren't just palette swaps. Like unlockable cheats that ENHANCE gameplay, and aren't glitchy as fuck.
And give us a real reason to replay the game. Make it the best thing you can. We will come back to it simply for the narrative. We will come back to it simply for the great gameplay mechanics. Not because you made something so retardedly complicated that nothing but a FAQ guide can net our desired outcome. It's fucking gay, and I'm taking a stand.
No more shitty game mechanics!