Today I decided not to bother finishing Overlord II. This adds to a long list of recent games where I quite literally get to the final boss and say, "ehh, whatever. I'm done."
I'm trying to figure out why this is.
At first I thought it might be a singularly uncompelling narrative. There haven't been many modern games where I've actually said, "I wonder what happens next?" It's all too predictable, too pat. But that can't be it, because there are lots of older games where the narrative was even worse and I happily completed them. Like every JRPG since FFVI.
I think it's because I've been wounded to my very soul by cheap-ass cop-out endings that have nothing to do with the rest of the game.
It's this "good vs evil" crap, where you can be "good" or "evil". (Really, you can be "insufferable pansy" or "idiotic twelve-year-old pyromaniac".) These "choices" over the course of the game end up literally never mattering: at the end of the game you are ALWAYS allowed to choose ANY of the endings you prefer. I understand why the decision to do that was made, but it's a bad decision. It robs the ending of any meaning, any connection to what I've actually done over the course of the game. It gives me agency, and then spits in my face and tells me my choices don't matter, they never mattered.
I think that this has destroyed my respect for video game endings. I spent so long getting spat on by them that now I can't muster up any excitement over the idea of getting spat on again. Even if I know the game won't pull that cheap-ass idiocy, I'm still trained to hate.
Narrative can still be used to guide me through the end of the game, as Portal did. But it can't be a beacon at the end of the tunnel: it has to be a series of runner-lights that are with me the whole way. Because when I see the light at the end of the tunnel, I presume it's a giant bucket of spit.
...
The other factor here is one of gameplay. Modern games are much too long for the amount of gameplay they actually offer, with very few exceptions. Any way you cut it, when you're in the final level, there are no new avenues of play left to explore. So all the designers can do either is make things unreasonable, be boring, or both.
But I can't blame everything on final gameplay, because I frequently give up before I even see it.
...
Edit: Actually, I think the narrative thing really IS it. I think I've become trained to see when someone's pulling a "string of pearls" narrative design and instinctively distrust it. That gap between the pearls is very easy to see... so easy, you might not actually notice that you're noticing it.
13 comments:
It occurs to me that this wasn't actually the case in the earliest game I can think of to have clear "good" and "evil" paths - Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight. About halfway through the game, you had a deciding point, where you either became a jedi or a sith, depending on what you'd done before. It had its own issues (like there was no way to tell how far to one side you were at any given time), and it wasn't really an RPG, but it definitely had cumulative alignment that you couldn't change at the last minute.
It seems that most recent games, however, are rather following the Knights of the Old Republic model, instead. When one game becomes very influential, both its good and bad elements will be imitated. Until someone comes along and makes a brilliant alternative, most developers will feel no incentive to change the model.
And the gameplay part seems to just be a consequence of the fact that developers feel compelled to make games that are longer than they need to be.
I think it's probably the string-of-pearls approach in general that's causing the issue. The last-second-choice is just the nastiest example of string-of-pearls design.
String-of-pearls design works okay if the player is aware that he doesn't have much agency on that level. It only backfires when you pretend to give the player lots of agency.
i guess you removed your other post... but why is it bad to be dumb? and is it even really dumb to like flowers and children?
It's not bad to be dumb, or to like children and flowers. It's just bad to push your agenda on other people, especially if your agenda is not, in fact, thought through at all.
Agreed, but people are what they are, and even the ones who ought to be thoughtful often aren't.
"Thoughtful" is a wonderfully mushy word to throw around.
For some reason, that wording makes me think of a food fight involving mashed potatoes.
"Chew on THIS!"
contemplative, thinking before acting
Or to use the phrase that I was responding to with that word "thinks things through," past tense: "thought through."
You think mere thoughts can go through my mashed potato armor?!
You obviously never played Deus Ex :). After the whole game of possibilities and different actions that affect all later story in the end you're just given the list of options and told to choose whatever you want. I didn't play the Overolrd II, but I felt exactly what you described.
Uh, yeah, I played Deus Ex when it first came out, and what you're saying is true. When did I say it wasn't?
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