The illusion of choice, agree or disagree?
- Thread starter @M
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There are very few games that have actual meaningful choices. Most are just "plays a different cutscene at the end" type things.
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CRT Fetish
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Reminds me of that Telltale walking dead adventure game. Having the illusion of choice revealed so easily, with all choices immediately leading to the same conclusion no matter how retarded the justification was ingame, on a STORY driven game, was such a punch in the gut for me that I never bothered to actually buy the paid chapters, or bother with games from that company at all. What a waste of time. Fuck 'em.
prof
A Great Place to Store Your Dildo Collection
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The only Telltale game I've played was the Back to the Future game. I bought it years ago when it first came out and played through it shortly thereafter. I enjoyed it. Fun point and click adventure game with lots of puzzle and problem solving elements. The voice actors were great, and some of the actors from the movies reprised their roles. The main story was written by Bob Gale who, along with Bob Zemeckis, was the co-creator of the original movies. So all in all, it was pretty dang good. I can't vouch for anything else they've done through.
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oliverclaude
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Playing Cyber-Lip will get you the bad ending, so naturally not playing it will give you the good one: you going out, facing real world. See, there're at least two in any game, just don't forget to get the good one from time to time.
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Bless you, oliverclaude, for not suggesting sex with the wife as the other option to playing Cyber Lip. Everybody knows that one must NEVER choose that route, no matter how hawt she is, the ad made that very clear to us all...
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In The Stanley Parable (a game about agency in games), a fun experiment I tried is to do the opposite of everything the narrator told me to do. After 20 minutes of this I stumbled on a warehouse room. When I entered the room the game removed all exits and stopped all together, and I was left with with some smarmy remark from the narrator. I let the game sit there for another 20 minutes just to see if there were any options left and nope - the game got frustrated with me so it just locked me in a room and stopped. ha.
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I thought this was a philosophical conversation about the actual illusion of choice in real life and the inevitability of death, but games are cool too
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hmmm...interesting, some people think this is the case IRL too. so you are saying you had no choice but to make this thread?
oliverclaude
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Hah, it's probably because this ad was an American, eh, thing and I'm from Europe, that this suggestion never crossed my mind. Bless you M, for letting it cross yours...
Anyway, isn't what you called 'open gameplay' the kind of game where the journey, i.e. all side-quests, is the goal? I'd argue if side-quests are as minor as you said in your initial post. It's rather the opposite, where the quality and diversity of side-quests determines how good an open-world game is. Those extra missions can end in different ways, offer different branching paths and have not much to do with the single goal/outcome at the end. Think of all those DLCs for GTAV, which kept that game alive even years after its release. But yeah, the single goal of any sandbox title is of course a dead hard drive.
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I don't mind games like Might and Magic 3 where you're thrown into a fuckhuge world with no explanation whatsoever and a shit ton of quests you can do in any order, even if the ending is always the same. Freedom of gameplay is also neat, and isn't it what gayming is all about?
Mr. Karate II
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If you want of the games where he has a real freedom of choice on the development of the plot and creating different endings, you should try the visual novels (with titles like 'Steins;Gate' or even 'Doki Doki Literature Club' for example).
The High-end games usually all follow a frozen default path (only a few titles like 'The Witcher 3' have tried to offer some variety).
The High-end games usually all follow a frozen default path (only a few titles like 'The Witcher 3' have tried to offer some variety).
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Listen, ho. We had a good time when I took you to the inn last night and even kept the innkeeper awake before I brought you back to the castle, but I barely know you. I swear, you give a bitch multiple orgasms and they get all clingy.