Is it a bad idea to have multiple bad endings and only one good ending?

The game "Marvel: Ultimate Alliance" had a system where each side quest's outcome (and some choices that were tied to the main plot and couldn't be avoided) were recorded. At the end of a full play through, the marvel character Uatu tells you how each of these choices (including never acting on the choice) will alter the course of history. Most of these choices have a good and bad outcome that ties the good outcome to completion of the side quest and the bad outcome to non-completion. In the case of the unavoidable mission, there is no correct answer and both choices receive a negative outcome where the X-Men are disbanded... though one is with a far lower body count.

posted over 5 years ago

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hszmv‭

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Due to the nature of your game, I'd say it is a good idea, and many games already do do this. The first one that comes to mind is 999 (9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors) in which you have to do exactly as you are stating- gain knowledge from past play throughs to get the "true" ending.

Giving one true ending is also especially common in visual novel sort of games. Usually with these sorts of games, especially considering that you're encouraging players to get all the endings, the game is only really completed once completing all the "bad" endings to successfully run the "true" ending. The only catch really is to not make the bad ending too unrewarding, but it sounds as though you are aware of that.

Overall I don't think it's bad game design. A player who is really experienced in these sorts of games could always look up the decision tree and just jump to the true ending. I'd suggest maybe a warning at the beginning of the game that your actions will affect the game outcome, as well as a "skip" feature for text/content the player has already seen. Best of luck!

posted over 6 years ago

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Lyco‭

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I think it is a bad idea and might be frustrating to play if it seems like you always lose and cannot ever find the combination that wins.

However, you might be able to make some of those bad choices that lead to certain failure just make it more difficult to get to the good ending. Basically give them another choice to make on those paths, one that seems costly, so it is unlikely they will take it, but IF THEY DO then they are back on their way to the good path (whether they know that or not).

Then you have an "easy" way to win, and a few "difficult" ways to win.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

The first thing that came to my mind when I read your question was the Black Mirror Netflix series. It has very high ratings despite the dark tone and the fact that few episodes actually have a happy ending. Even the happy endings are seldom purely happy, often they just mean that it wasn't the worst possible outcome for everyone. It's really hard to describe the series without spoiling it, so I recommend you just watch it, reflect it, and learn from it. The point is, you can absolutely tell a compelling story without a happy ending, but the reader should probably somehow be made aware in advance that that's the name of the game.

Next I thought of some games that would match the situation. The first one I thought of was 80 Days, a work of interactive fiction where you are supposed to circumnavigate the world in 80 days or less. If you don't make it you've lost the game, but you don't feel too bad about it because the characters just go like "Oh well, it was an interesting adventure anyway, and we've got a lot more to come!" or something like that.

But more importantly, when you play the game, you learn about the world, and that knowledge carries with you to the next playthrough. So if during your first game you learn that there's a way to travel from, say, Budapest to Kiev, then in the next game you know there will be such a connection right when you start the game, and this time you don't need to buy a train map or listen to some gossip or anything like that to find that out. And even if you know about a connection, it might not be as useful a piece of information as it was in the previous game, due to random events or other kind of change of plans.

Finally, I thought about Nethack. It's a roguelike where the default expectation is that you will die, and there are dozens of ways to die. People are known to have played it for decades already without ever completing it. But even when your character dies in the dungeon, you will have learned something that you can use in your next game. What's more, dead characters may actually appear in the future games as ghosts of themselves! Then you might be forced to fight a previous version of yourself, or, in case of online servers, the ghost of some other poor player. And should you defeat your ghost, you'll get (at least some of) the items you were carrying when your game ended. So this way your previous losses may again help you in your current game.

Anyway, how long are you planning for one playthrough to last? Because I can tell you I feel a lot worse if I spend 30 hours on a game just to be told "Everybody died, game over, you lost", versus spending, say, just three hours and encountering this ending. I love the Civilization series, but when I lose after a loooong playthrough, I don't feel like starting a new game any time soon. So definitely plan and balance the play time carefully. Don't go for anything too long with the format that you've chosen.

And if you can add any upside to the bad endings at all, I think that would be good. (The Old One didn't enslave the entire world, only the Americas! The whole family didn't die, one of the children only lost their legs! Etc...)

posted over 6 years ago

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ZeroOne‭

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It depends on your genre - in horror games this can be a very good decision

If you are going for a darker themed game, and your description suggests that you are doing this, then having multiple bad endings is fine. I've played quite a few horror games that were created with the RPG Maker (I am not affiliated with the company) for example where there are lots of bad endings - and I enjoyed all of them. Because you spend most of your time in the game itself: The journey is the destination.

Having only bad endings would probably be a bad idea. This would make the player feel like all of their effort was indeed wasted. But if your game makes it obvious that there are multiple endings and each ending gives information about a possible other ending, one of them being good, then everything is fine. If only you had taken the knife with you that the Antagonist just used to stab you, things might have gone a different route...

The players who enjoy playing a game multiple times will try to follow the advice they got. Others might simply look up a walkthrough that shows them the other endings. I've been on both sides, depending on how much time I would need to spend with the same stuff I've already done in previous runs. The more decisions one can do the better. Spending 10 hours only to click Left instead of Right before the Boss' lair is boring. But deciding whether you take the lamp or the book with you after a few minutes is a completely different matter. As long as these decisions matter that is. Having regular checkpoints, especially before important decisions can help, too. If that is your style, of course. Some games prefer to go a rogue-like style and let the players decisions be final when they are deciding which part of the story they want to play.

Having only one good, hard to achieve, ending is especially good for perfectionist gamers that want to get everything. They will try to get every ending and see which hints they contain that will help them get to 100 %.

Furthermore having only one good ending makes this one feel special to the players who manage to achieve it. It's clearly better than any other ending they managed to get and therefore more valuable in their eyes.

Having bad things happen to your character is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you give it a positive spin. See my answer to the question Still struggling with character desire, positive vs. negative, hooking readers for a more detailed discussion about why negative feelings resonate more strongly in us humans and how this can be used to give a character a motivation that the reader/player can relate to as they are trying to bring happiness to the character that is suffering. Multiple bad endings mean that there are more reasons to help the character finally achieve his well-deserved piece of peace and happiness.

What you also sometimes see is that a game has maybe two or three bad endings (plus a Game Over that can for example occur if the player dies) and one good ending. And then one special, true ending that you can only get if you for example collect all of the very rare items. This is another possibility. Make it a little bit easier to have a nice ending to please your more casual gamers and make the true ending extra hard to get and thereby extra rewarding. The true ending doesn't have to be completely happy by the way, though this will surely leave the player with the feeling of having completed a horror game.

Having only equally bad endings is possible, but in general you want your player to think: "That went better than the last time. Still bad, but I managed to get further. If I keep this up I will make it to the 'good' ending!" That means you should think about making endings in multiple shades of bad - from "Game Over" over "I am dead at the end" over "Well, I managed to run away, but I didn't realize there was a trap outside that room" over "I managed to nearly get away - if only I had a weapon to fight that final monster" to "I managed to get away and lead a happy life". With the true ending being "The monster was my sister/ my father/ myself all along..."

But your game has to fit this style. You don't want a totally happy and relaxed game where you suddenly realize at the end that your decisions have led to a bad ending. Imagine for example a Pokemon game (again, I am not affiliated with the company) where you basically have nothing to lose from spending some time trying to catch or train your Pokemon - and in the end you realize that there was a time limit of 100 in-game days to get to the end and now you can't beat the Top Four. That would suck.

posted over 6 years ago

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Secespitus‭

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