The Good, The Bad, And The Sexually Frustrated
(Ok, so the sexually frustrated part has nothing to do with anything, but it makes a good subject line. :P)
I was piddling around a bit ago and out of morbid curiosity I looked up a game I was involved in making for a while (until it got so damn annoying that I stopped). This also has very little to do with anything, but it got me to thinking about game design philosophy again.
With the games that have multiple endings, WHY does there have to be a good ending and a bad ending (among others)? WHY do they design them so that there's a BEST ending? Because once you find the best ending, why would you wanna bother playing to see what the other endings are like?
In my philosophy, there ought to be good stuff and bad stuff in all the endings (and at points in between). There's just realistically no way everyone important can live happily ever after, especially when there's been twisted love triangle shit going on through the whole game. So maybe things are perfect for Frank, but Joe ends up in a boring desk job and Mary killed herself because she was in love with the villain that just got defeated. If there was a game like that, THEN you wouldn't get sick of playing after you found the "best" ending, because you could go back and see what happened if Mary's life turned out better (and existing to begin with). Of course, in that plotline, maybe Joe got his arm blown off and now has a robotic hand (which is what Mary enjoys about him *winkwink*) and Frank is a beer-guzzling couch potato with 6 sleazy girlfriends at any given time. (And why don't some of these heroes end up with post traumatic stress from all the fighting they did in the game? :P)
Anyway, the point isn't to make some weird soap opera thing where the only point of the gameplay is to determine who ends up boinking who. The point is to have more variety than every damn NPC in the game going "Thank you for saving me! Here have a bunch of gold and jewels and the hand of my daughter in marriage!" Just ONCE I wanna rescue the princess, only to watch her successfully plot the death of her father the king and start up her own Big Bad Evil Empire (tm). Or what if the guy you just saved thanks you profusely and then, after much drunken celebration, steals your clothes when you pass out, and runs around impersonating you and doing bad stuff? (I'm sure the princess would be impressed. :P)
Things are just too damn predictable when everything's either all good or all evil. And predictable=bad.
I was piddling around a bit ago and out of morbid curiosity I looked up a game I was involved in making for a while (until it got so damn annoying that I stopped). This also has very little to do with anything, but it got me to thinking about game design philosophy again.
With the games that have multiple endings, WHY does there have to be a good ending and a bad ending (among others)? WHY do they design them so that there's a BEST ending? Because once you find the best ending, why would you wanna bother playing to see what the other endings are like?
In my philosophy, there ought to be good stuff and bad stuff in all the endings (and at points in between). There's just realistically no way everyone important can live happily ever after, especially when there's been twisted love triangle shit going on through the whole game. So maybe things are perfect for Frank, but Joe ends up in a boring desk job and Mary killed herself because she was in love with the villain that just got defeated. If there was a game like that, THEN you wouldn't get sick of playing after you found the "best" ending, because you could go back and see what happened if Mary's life turned out better (and existing to begin with). Of course, in that plotline, maybe Joe got his arm blown off and now has a robotic hand (which is what Mary enjoys about him *winkwink*) and Frank is a beer-guzzling couch potato with 6 sleazy girlfriends at any given time. (And why don't some of these heroes end up with post traumatic stress from all the fighting they did in the game? :P)
Anyway, the point isn't to make some weird soap opera thing where the only point of the gameplay is to determine who ends up boinking who. The point is to have more variety than every damn NPC in the game going "Thank you for saving me! Here have a bunch of gold and jewels and the hand of my daughter in marriage!" Just ONCE I wanna rescue the princess, only to watch her successfully plot the death of her father the king and start up her own Big Bad Evil Empire (tm). Or what if the guy you just saved thanks you profusely and then, after much drunken celebration, steals your clothes when you pass out, and runs around impersonating you and doing bad stuff? (I'm sure the princess would be impressed. :P)
Things are just too damn predictable when everything's either all good or all evil. And predictable=bad.