now this is a bit of a rage, but i think its warranted. I want to say right here and now that good vs bad decisions suck ass!!! game devs put them in because they make a good bullet point and people think that they need a bit of tweeking and they will work. well im here to say, they dont, they will never work, and they only hurt your game.
Good vs bad, and any other multiple storyline type dealies, hurt the game because they force the player to miss content in your game. if i have to chose between two different jedi power sets, then i miss out on the fun of using the other set of powers. this is detrimental to your game, and means that i may not enjoy it as much. it might encourage multiple playthroughs, but why should i have to play your game 3 or 4 times just to get different content? its stupid to make the player sacrifice parts of the game, arbitrarily.
secondly, it dilutes the storyline. because you have to make two storys, each one is only half as good, because it has half the effort put in. the end result is that i play a game that is only half as good as it could be, while the other storyline languishes on the disk, doing nothing but making it take longer to read. each storyline has to mesh with other key facts, so it wont be as potent, and it often ends up being bland. untill the end where they finally diverge in the final cutscene and become radically different, trying to cram all that story into one scene. this is often jolting and poorly story structure. simply put, 2 times the storylines equals 2 stories that are half as good.
the counter argument is that good vs evil/ choose your path gameplay makes it more like real life, supposedly it means games are evolving. THIS IS STUPID! are you gonna help cure world hunger? or are you going to murder the entire population of Western Europe. hummmm i dont know. im pointing out the black and whiteness of the choices that are in these games. binary choices dont simulate life, and you certainly cant try out choices in real life and reload the game to choose the other one when the current choice sucks dick. computers cant simulate choices well anyway. thats why it has always been and will always be a or b. computers are binary they dont like variability. so simple organic choices that we make ever day in our lives can never exist in games. besides, do we want real life? do you want a game where your choices are real, final and everlasting? Escapism; why most of us game. we dont want real life, people dont take one bullet and go down because thats not fun, learning to fly a ship takes years, but we do it in games in seconds because we want to escape.
finally, good vs evil/alternate storylines will never work. give it up game devs, no one likes em. they force me to lose out on your handcrafted content, they dont work like they should, they will never work like they should, and no one wants them to work like they should.
Good vs bad, and any other multiple storyline type dealies, hurt the game because they force the player to miss content in your game. if i have to chose between two different jedi power sets, then i miss out on the fun of using the other set of powers. this is detrimental to your game, and means that i may not enjoy it as much. it might encourage multiple playthroughs, but why should i have to play your game 3 or 4 times just to get different content? its stupid to make the player sacrifice parts of the game, arbitrarily.
secondly, it dilutes the storyline. because you have to make two storys, each one is only half as good, because it has half the effort put in. the end result is that i play a game that is only half as good as it could be, while the other storyline languishes on the disk, doing nothing but making it take longer to read. each storyline has to mesh with other key facts, so it wont be as potent, and it often ends up being bland. untill the end where they finally diverge in the final cutscene and become radically different, trying to cram all that story into one scene. this is often jolting and poorly story structure. simply put, 2 times the storylines equals 2 stories that are half as good.
the counter argument is that good vs evil/ choose your path gameplay makes it more like real life, supposedly it means games are evolving. THIS IS STUPID! are you gonna help cure world hunger? or are you going to murder the entire population of Western Europe. hummmm i dont know. im pointing out the black and whiteness of the choices that are in these games. binary choices dont simulate life, and you certainly cant try out choices in real life and reload the game to choose the other one when the current choice sucks dick. computers cant simulate choices well anyway. thats why it has always been and will always be a or b. computers are binary they dont like variability. so simple organic choices that we make ever day in our lives can never exist in games. besides, do we want real life? do you want a game where your choices are real, final and everlasting? Escapism; why most of us game. we dont want real life, people dont take one bullet and go down because thats not fun, learning to fly a ship takes years, but we do it in games in seconds because we want to escape.
finally, good vs evil/alternate storylines will never work. give it up game devs, no one likes em. they force me to lose out on your handcrafted content, they dont work like they should, they will never work like they should, and no one wants them to work like they should.
