Disconnection from a Game's Narrative.

[MrDumpkins]

SNIP

Yeah I was pretty excited when they kept referring to the reboot as a coming of age and development story. But it just didn't work out with the gameplay they had in mind. I remember one of the coolest scenes was towards the end with the stormguard, you finally get to meet them after running through the game scared of them. So when you start sneaking through their ritual party, I was pretty immersed again and was really hoping they wouldn't see me. Then after that scene you run outside and it goes to a cutscene where like 10000 of them line up and laura just yells "COME AND GET ME" and you fight them all. Why was I sneaking past them at the start then if I could just plow through them with no problem...

I had lost interest in laura's story a long time before them, but the mystical nature of the stormguard had me intrigued until you actually had to fight them. That game disappointed me in so many ways.

 

[Ubiquitous Duck]

SNIP

Yeah I was pretty excited when they kept referring to the reboot as a coming of age and development story. But it just didn't work out with the gameplay they had in mind. I remember one of the coolest scenes was towards the end with the stormguard, you finally get to meet them after running through the game scared of them. So when you start sneaking through their ritual party, I was pretty immersed again and was really hoping they wouldn't see me. Then after that scene you run outside and it goes to a cutscene where like 10000 of them line up and laura just yells "COME AND GET ME" and you fight them all. Why was I sneaking past them at the start then if I could just plow through them with no problem...

I had lost interest in laura's story a long time before them, but the mystical nature of the stormguard had me intrigued until you actually had to fight them. That game disappointed me in so many ways.

The 'reveal' or whatever you'd like to call it of the stormguard in the story, I thought was genius.

I was like: Yes! this game is not what I thought at all and has taken a completely dark route now, but it just didn't continue on the vein that I wanted.

It was definitely the best aspect, but the execution of it, by you then taking them all on, I agree, was a bit mental and left me annoyed.

 

[porous_shield]

The Walking Dead game for me completely disconnected me from the story the moment I realized it was just like a choose-your-own-adventure book. I'd get invested in the what was happening and then I'd make a choice and the mechanics of the game came front and center and it ruined it a bit for me that my choices didn't carry any weight.

What I mean by that is in a choose your own adventure book the choices you make are only ever very shallow for the simple fact that if you had a choice with two major decisions that would affect the story in significant ways, choosing either would force the writer to write two very different stories from then on. Further choices create a ever more branching tree and even more work. The writer needs to merge the story to cut down on work for themself or they need to end the path altogether, so any choices need to be shallow or cosmetic enough so that the two paths can merge.

With The Walking Dead:

Spoiler

When that guy gets caught in the bear trap and you have a choice to either help him or let him stay there forces a very brutal choice on you but I feel it was undermined by the realization that if you save him or let him die, this man will be a very minor character and probably be killed off or otherwise leave right away. The saving him path would mean adding scenes and lines for him to the rest of the game, and that's a lot of work that presumably half your audience won't see, so the designers had to make both paths merge again and they did this by having him die right away.

Another example:

Spoiler

Choosing food for the group was one of the hardest decisions I had to make in a game but again it was undermined by knowing that it would be a very shallow choice. There was no way the designers were going to include outcomes for all the different possibilities for who you could have given food to. All you get is a couple of lines and that's it about your decisions and that killed it for me.

I enjoyed the game overall, but knowing the inner workings of the choices tore me out of the story every time.