CamHostage
Member
Tell that to my Mass Effect playthoughs.. I loved saving before a big choice and seeing the different outcomes
Yes but what does it take away from the player?
Consequence. Stakes. Intensity. Finality.
We all did it, for sure. And playing a gigantic time-vortex like Mass Effect multiple times over to see different paths is just punishment on your schedule.
But I do think it robs you of the value of playing a game for the immersion of playing it. If you think of a decision as a consequence, then what you decide matters and what you know before you make that decision makes all the difference. The rewards are yours if you get it right; if not, it was your choice.
...If you think of a decision in a game as a branching path of story trees in game code, however, then you're done playing the game as a hero trying to save the world; now the storytelling is over and you have become a text/attrib investigator looking to see what different forks the developers thought to include in their product. Which sounds like more fun, being a hero or a debugger?
I think of it like the old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels. The first read for a kid, wow, that's cool, this story can be different every time I read it and I am in control! But then you get a day older and you pull the book apart and you get that, of course, it's a regular book just with different versions of outcomes or story paths depending on what page you're told to flip to. You collect two or three, you flip to some of the wilder outcomes, you find out all the clever ways to die, and eventually you stop buying Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books because, it turns out, one good story is worth many, many more arbitrarily-arranged ones.

Games are different, because they're meant to be played (hopefully people aren't suffering through all the branching paths of games they hate playing just to see what crappy story threads are in there....) but still, if a game's story is good and if the consequences of choices really are consequential, that's way more valuable than some 80-ending RPG that has no one good way to enjoy it beginning to end.
We'll see if AI will be able to change that. AI could conceivably remix and tell new stories on the fly as players play, and they may possibly get good enough to actually offer the true breadth of consequence that games like the Mass Effect trilogy tried to promise but struggled to deliver. (They tried to have it both ways, with a bunch of tiny story threads paid off in 3 that players accumulated in 1/2 but then one global ending that all players would bond together over experiencing... it didn't quite work that way.) I worry though that AI won't work out that way, that it'll instead either just get better at disguising story branches through smarter personalization, or worse, it will come up with infinitely more inconsequential story branches for players to hammer F5/F9 all the way through to see more and tiny variants of an ending. We'll keep narrowing down how many trees we can take a look at and never have a sense of the forest.
...But, I don't know, that might be fun to play that way too.
Last edited: