Allan Schumacher wrote...
Oh and I get the joke in there about vagueness and deus ex.
Oh? I didn't mean for there to be one. What was it? LOL.
The original Deus Ex is one of my all time favourite games. By not showing you the explicit aftermath of your choices, it puts more focus on the choices themselves and your/Denton's motivation for choosing them, instead of on the consequences of said choices. Someone could have all the noble intentions in the world of making a particular choice, but if the game dev goes "This bad thing happens" it can backfire.
Sometimes it works though (siding with the Kuei-Jin in Bloodlines).
See, I I feel a game should do the exact opposite - tell us the consequences of our choices, so I can feel like I had an impact on the world. This lets actions done during the game, both big and small, grow into a true feel of affecting the world.
What I did not like about DE1 or ME3 was that it gave huge choices at the very end, choices which were not in the least bit affected by anything done prior. If you hadn't played ME3 or DE up until the last thirty minutes, the endings would not be widely different (even with ME3's EC, which gave only the most superificial acknowledgements of what the character DID - something we already knew - and not what these actions resulted in) aside from the choice made in the game.
If there was a way for the game to make random decisions about prior choices and then only let a player touch on the last half hour of your game and that player could see almost no differences in the endings apart from the choice(s) they made in the last thirty minutes, then there is something VERY wrong there. This complaint can be easily applied to DE:HR as well.
I get the first-person, role-playing worth of not telling the endings for an ending like Synthesis or Destroy (where Shpeherd presumably wouldn't be around, let's say) but Control should, at the least, give you very detailed descriptions of how things played out. Its very unsatisfying to see it in a game like DE or DE:HR, but emotionally damaging to invest the amount of time in the ME series, to put the deep thought into so many choices, and to have all of those choices reduced to a number that scantly affects the ending (a number which is just as easily boosted by multiplayer Slayer matches), but rather the ending is dominated by a choice made at the end of the game, completely removed from everything else.
DA:O gave you the ending choices of whether to do the DR, or to sacrifice yourself or the other Warden (Loghain or Allistair). But the ending still went on to explain how the action you performed, both in major and minor quests, changed the world for good or bad.
If a developer is worried about players picking one choice over another for meta-gaming, then make each choice with a mixed bag of good things. You freed the werewolves from a centuries long curse, great... but the elves are infuriated about it and take their rage out on nearby settlements. Or you spared the lives of the mages, not invoking the Right of Annulment after the Tower... but over time, more and more students do not pass their Harrowing and it is suspected it is because of a missed prescence hidden deep within the Tower. You saved the Urn of Sacred Ashes and told the world about it, bringng many to be healed by its powers... but now warring neighbors fight over the town of Haven for control of the area, leading to countless deaths.
No choice ever results in all good or all bad, so endings that reflect that are okay. But to make a decision made in the final seconds, one that is not colored by past actions in the least nor is in line with many of the views our character has espouted the entire series, is not a good ending, in my opinion.
Didn't mean to go into a tirade, but just wanted to throw my two cents in and put my vote on the record for more description in endings of results, not just "the world is completely changed by this last minute decision I made, because I am the Chosen One..." That's silly. Again, in my opinion.
Retour en haut
), but at Bioware.
