Bad Ending

[Wavelength]

"You have to make the player feel like they're in control of the factors behind this bad ending"

I don't understand the meaning of this phrase, could you explain?

I read that thread and got some nice info, thank.

Anyway I wanted to explain that in the end the character doesn't go to the enemy's side by her free will. She get "indoctrinated", so she was forcefully taken to their side

The meaning of that phrase is that in order to have an immersive plot in a video game, I believe that your player needs to be able to view a character's decisions and actions as if they (the decisions and actions) were the player's own.

If the character is doing smart, good, heroic things, and the writing is reasonably good, then the player will naturally feel like they were the agent of those actions.  Your job becomes easy.

But when the character does dumb, malicious, or cowardly things that the player wouldn't want to do, they begin to feel a disconnect from their character, and you lose immersion.  Your job becomes much tougher.  One way you can add back that immersion is to give the player choices and then connect the dots to show the player how their choices cause the events that happen.  For example, your character might find themselves in a "re-education facility" where they are starting to be brainwashed.  A starving NPC steals some food from the facility, and you can choose to rat them out (to gain favor with the facility's guards, who you need information from) or to play dumb (saving the NPC from a horrible fate but losing you the trust of the guards).  This decision might only have a very small immediate impact on gameplay, but if later on you work that earlier decision into something the character does when they become fully indoctrinated, the player will feel like they were the reason the character turned to evil.  In won't be a good feeling for the player, but it will be a believable and immersive one.  Your player will feel the full brunt and emotion of the story, instead of disconnecting himself from it.

Personally, the single thing that ruins a game's narrative for me the most is watching my character do something wrong that I know I wouldn't ever do.  The most egregious example I can think of is Edge's actions on "Old Earth" in Star Ocean: the Last Hope.  He made a storyline-related decision that I had no control over, and at the time I thought it was incredibly stupid.  A few hours later, we see the consequences of those decisions - consequences that severely affect not only the characters and the world, but the course of the gameplay as well.  It was at that moment that I stopped looking at the game as an incredible adventure that I was taking and controlling, and started looking at it purely as a game to be played that happened to have a story tacked on.  It wasn't the tragic plot event that broke my immersion - it was the fact that the character was in control of his own actions, and yet I as the player was so completely out of control.  If the character is in control of what transpires, you need to grant the player that same control, or at least trick them into thinking they had that same control all along.

Hopefully you find this helpful!

 

[Shuji]

Yeah, I found this very helpful.

Probably my very first mistake is that I consider writing the story for a game as I would for a book, without thinking about the player.

Thanks everyone for your help^^

 

[whitesphere]

Generally, my games have happy endings, but the ending is rarely "Shiny, happy, everything's Great." It's more like "We won a great victory at a terrible price."

One game had the end be "Well, we defeated the Big Bad and saved the world. But, along the way, the characters were exiled from their homes, because they slaughtered the rulers of their respective areas.  They were merely exiled because the rulers WERE under control of the Big Bad or on the Big Bad's side.  But the people were still a bit nervous having regicides running around.  So even heroic in-the-right actions have negative consequences."

I think it's a very fine line to walk --- when, as designers, we force the player to do things, as Wavelength said, we risk breaking immersion.   I think that's why game plots have mostly obvious tasks at each point.  Each individual action needs to be reasonable.  And it's important to be very careful with nasty turns that come out of nowhere.

In Final Fantasy IV, for example, Kain disappears.  When you next encounter him, he's been brainwashed by Golbez into being Golbez's minion.  You get him back in your party for a chunk of the game, but he then betrays you to take the Dark Crystal.  This is a nasty turn --- but well justified in-universe since Golbez specifically says "I had but slackened his leash and waited until the proper moment to pull it taut."  So it works in that game.  And it does not invalidate the player's choices.

Personally, a "forced indoctrination" near the end of the game would really upset me, because it reeks of Diabolus Ex Machina --- a really nasty thing pulled out of nowhere.  Granted, Deus Ex Machina is just as bad --- very lazy writing, really.  The only time either would be OK with me, as a player, is if the game were a rendition of, say, a religious or mythic tale where the Gods and Goddesses DO play huge roles, and that's the nature of the game from the start.

 

[Shuji]

The character doesn't get indocrtinated out of the blue.

I have to explain a bit the world of my game.

It's hard only in few words, but I'll try:

The country is ruled by the Patriarch. Society is divided in 3 categories: 

At the top is the Patriarch and everyone related to the "Church"

The middle class is formed by people indoctrinated who live believing the Patriarch is God or something like that.

At the lowest class we find farmers, miners and all poor and ignorant people who didn't get any education.

The protagonist is from the middle class, so before the events in the game he was indoctrinated. He somehow free himself from this during the game but in the end he gets indoctrinated again. 

 

[Scott_C]

I think a “bad ending” can still feel like wining if the player knows ahead of time that's the goal of the game.

Imagine a game that opens with the line “This is the story of how I failed everyone I ever loved”.

The player immediately knows that he's not going to win. But at the same time he becomes interested in learning exactly how the main character is going to fail. Why didn't the hero win? What went wrong?

And then when he gets to the end of the game and fails he still feels like a “winner” because he managed to get to the bad ending that he was told was waiting for him. He completed the goal he had been given at the beginning of the game.

 

[whitesphere]

I think a “bad ending” can still feel like wining if the player knows ahead of time that's the goal of the game.

Imagine a game that opens with the line “This is the story of how I failed everyone I ever loved”.

You just reminded me of the movie "American Beauty."  The movie beings with the narrator (Lester) saying explicitly something like "This is the year before I died."  I loved the movie, despite the 'bad' ending.

And, the excellent movie "Skeleton Key" which had a bad ending that made perfect sense (the villains win) even though it wasn't told to the viewer at the start.

That proves your point, that a really good story can make a bad ending work.

 

[Shuji]

Thanks Scott_C, that's a good suggestion^^

I'll also try seeing those movies

Thanks very much for your help ^^

 

[Tarsus]

I'm making a game right now that could be considered to have a "bad" ending.

It's a sci fi game set on a large space ship that is effectively on a suicide mission to stop a war from breaking out. I make it clear from the start that the ship will probably get destroyed but it's the mission that counts and as long as you complete it the fate of the crew is secondary.

Sometimes having a bad ending can be good, it allows you set up for a sequel if your main char becomes a bad guy for instance.

On another note, there are lots of triple A titles that have the main or secondary characters die at the end despite it not being necessarily a bad ending.

Spoiler

Mass effect

DA.O , 2 out 3 endings result in a main char dying

In fable your dog dies!

 

[RocketKnight]

Working with multiple end can order much of the game and should be implemented in different choices and

paths for systems that form the structure of each end, a positive point of this would be magnification of

gameplay and playing time however the biggest negative point would be to work / draw the choices or paths to each end.

 

[TheRiotInside]

If you guys remember A Blurred Line way back on RPG Maker 2000, it was a great example of a "bad ending" hinted at the start of the game. It starts off with a few official types trying to stop a man from destroying...what was it called, the Catch Colony? I think it was basically a gigantic structure used to harvest solar energy for the planet. Objectively, this seems like a bad man trying to do a bad thing.

After the intro, you go back a year and are now playing as that man. You know that the game's events will eventually lead up to your character doing a dastardly deed, so it becomes more of an adventure to see how his life will turn in that direction, instead of it being a bad surprise for the player at the end.