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Patron Input - Bad Decisions - a Good Idea?
🕑 Added 2021-09-09 08:20:00 +0000 UTCTo all of the new Patrons, since my last post, very welcome! <3
From time to time, we have polls where you get to shape the game's direction as we advance. I'm happy to announce that this is one of those times.
Before we start, I'd like to apologize in advance for the ramblings you are about to read.
From the beginning, Infinite Stars never had "bad end" or "dead-end" choices. After some campfire discussions, I decided to ask the opinions of those who matter the most - all of you.
By not adding dead-end choices to the game, players experience an ongoing "career" - the choices they make become their personal canon, and it disincentives them to reload previous decisions. This is how it has been until now. Choices have a flavor effect on the story (e.g., who adopts Cleo, who is injured during the "incident," etc.) that adds distinct differences to each story without having to split off entirely. I'm worried that once players realize this, the tension in the story falls flat since no matter what they choose, the story will always continue.
Adding dead-end or wrong choices ups the stakes for players by increasing the tension of the decisions. I'm not entirely sure how I would implement these yet, but it won't be as cheap as choosing between going left or right, where the wrong choice leads to a game-over screen. Although there should be some ambiguity with players not knowing what the wrong choice is (or else it defeats the purpose of adding tension,) they would likely manifest in the form of two impossible decisions, like going left into the radioactive chamber, or going right into the pool of acid.
I am worried that it won't have the desired effect of adding tension, as players will (and should) reload at a game-over screen. The first time it happens might have the desired emotional effect, but it will change into just another reflex reload with time. I can somewhat combat this by adding a "sunken cost," where a choice you make now might only have dire consequences and a game-over screen in the future. (ranging from a few paragraphs to a few episodes down the line.) - the concern with this method is that players might hit a game-over screen and realize they have to reload a much earlier, possibly overwritten save, to avoid the ending. At best, this would lead to rereading/skipping a bunch of content until they reach the fork where they don't get a game-over screen. At worst, this will lead to a rage-quit.
Taking the above concerns into account, what are your thoughts? I wanted to make this a poll, but I feel a discussion might be better suited due to the importance of the subject matter. Give your opinion below (or on Discord) - there are no wrong answers (yet?)
Comments
Linz
Hello! I only recently found this title, but I have been wonderfully entertained! From Veera using Katya as a distraction to Lahnkush's fulmination against "yuman" recklessness, I have been smiling virtually non-stop while reading... To answer your question, though: I think dead-ends are just one available tool at your disposal. Some games implement them well; however, often they are used more for quantity than quality (padding the word-count and/or being billed as possible endings), or they are used to foster a feeling of freedom and choice where there isn't any. I love what you have done so far, and I agree with @Toastywafflz that the tension stems from the writing itself. Also, personally, I rather enjoy the freedom that comes with "flavor only" options. I have, more than once in some games, had to backpedal a choice my character WOULD make because that choice leads to a bad end or some other undesirable event. The frustration scales with my role in that character's personality-- games with strongly-written, well-defined characters with preset personalities can get away with a lot more "bad" choices, I think.
Toastywafflz
This is a good question with no easy answer I think. By and large, when it comes to keeping tension, I don't think dead ends necessarily help; I can recall a few times in visual novels and other games or interactive fiction where I get frustrated by dead ends, particularly when they seem contrived or result from my character doubling down on something stupid when I didn't necessarily intend for them to or think the choice I made reflected what they ultimately did. One of my favorite visual novels, however, is absolutely full of dead ends. Fate/stay night has like 40 or 50+ bad endings; the original game had this ridiculous branching tree for which choices and character points got you on which route, but the Realta Nua version, iirc, split the routes up, with the result being that your choices only really affected whether you got these bad endings. Some of them were immediate, and Shirou is a maniac so being self-sacrificial psycho is generally the way to go, which means some of them kind of annoy me and aren't really choices you can base on anything meaningful as a reader, which is especially frustrating earlier on when you don't have the insight into Shirou's character to understand why one choice is better than the other. Others were less immediate, but it's kind of more obvious than the immediate ones; like, hey, you treated this character like garbage the entire route so now they stab you in the back, what a shocker. Those are kind of cool to me in reflecting the logical extreme of being a terrible person or doubling down too hard on screwing a character over, and some of the more immediate ones provide insight into certain aspects of character or paint a bit of a light on the setting. That's just one example. I remember another visual novel I really enjoyed, Sound of Drop, would have markers for the player when they were about to make a "dangerous" choice. Some choices would affect characters or route, and others could lead to bad ends; the choice options for branches that could lead to bad ends had a different color to let you know that if you chose poorly you would die horribly or turn into a fish or something, so that might be something to consider. I think above all though you are best served by consulting your writing and what you can reasonably implement in terms of branching and changing context. Good writing is really important for a visual novel's retention, in my opinion, as no matter how amazing one's soundtrack or visuals are, I will walk away if the story punches me in the nuts or bores me. So basically, as long as the choices you decide to go with do not betray the player's expectations in an unfair way, like "pick a shoelace color" leading to "you were thrown in the airlock by the fashion police", you can rely on the writing to maintain tension. I think what you said about choices flavoring context is reflective of that in a way, and something I really enjoy. When you have interactivity a big part of a story becomes how it reflects your actions as the reader. So when I make a bunch of minor choices and they inform context and other characters' reactions and motivations, I get that giddy happy feel good fun time in my tummy and my brain and I keep reading. With that in mind, I think sunken cost choices are fine as long as they: Make sense. Do not lead into a straight up gameover. I think it's great if our choices can lead to further drama down the line, or if they can make it harder to achieve a desired outcome. I like the idea that things can go down differently, or when choices we made awhile ago come back to haunt us in meaningful ways without necessarily leading to a straight up game over or being locked out of an ending. I think with this in mind, dead end choices aren't exactly the greatest unless you flesh them out as a genuine ending; if we can earn a bad ending and it doesn't come out of nowhere, that can be kind of interesting, although then you run the risk of punishing the player for playing their character a particular way, and I think the system you have in place so far for letting the player roleplay is excellent for allowing us to tailor the story experience to our characters without creating an impossible amount of work for yourselves. TL;DR and recap: the tension I feel comes from our attachment to the characters and our investment in the plot; therefore, doubling down on your current focus on contextual changes and maybe having choices inform the nature/availability of other choices, or altering character behavior when appropriate and so on, would be much preferable to straight up dead-ends. It's like you said, this is our character's career. You open this post positing the concern that "the tension in the story [might fall] flat since no matter what they choose, the story will always continue." For me, the tension comes from how the story unfolds. You can punish our characters and have consequences for our actions that don't bring the story to the halt or kill our character, and I think what you said about impossible choices is a good idea, or just having choices where there's no one right answer and it's kind of up to what you want your character to do and what they think is best, that leads to narrative nuance and diversity and gives us a chance to have some great drama between characters and what not. This got way longer than I thought lmao let me know if something I said makes no sense or something, this is a very interesting question and I'm a writer myself who would like to create interactive fiction so it's fun for me to think about and something I'll need to consider in the future as well.
