If there is one outcome, remove the guise of control. Have my character speak for me. I don’t fucking care. I’d rather feel like my character is doing or saying something I wouldn’t personally do than for me to be given a fucking pop-up that means nothing and is just there to reinforce a self-insert facade. At least make a bit out of it if you’re gonna do it. It’s genuinely one of the worst pieces of game design outside of legitimately predatory behavior.
“do you want a pokemon?”
“no”
“whaaaaat??? i don’t think i heard you right! do you want a pokemon?”
WHY THE FUCK DID YOU GIVE ME THE OPTION TO SAY NO
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa
at least just do the decency of kicking us back to the start screen for the bit
Or just let us go into the bushes and get attacked by a pidgey, then wake up in the professor’s lab where he’s like
dialogue ‘options’ half the time be like
> Yes.
> Yes?
> Yes…
> Yes!
I am 100% with you.
Developers need to have the courage to build bad endings in storytelling/RPG games. Make a decision in Act 1 that potentially ruins your day by Act 2. Make a decision in Act 3 that ends in “You Lose” even if you’ve kicky-punchy’d every boss to death.
These don’t have to be Earth Shattering decisions. Maybe you challenge the fencing master to a dual with naked blades and get an eye pocked out. Now you play the rest of the game with an eyepatch. Consequences! Maybe you refuse to take good advice (or follow a bad lead) and one of your party members gets Aerith’d as a result. Maybe you don’t solve the murder, and you never get the promotion that gives you access the best car in the game. Maybe you don’t solve the murder and you get fired and there’s a big “You’re Fired” on the screen before the game would normally end.
These kinds of make-or-break decision moments are what gave games like Wing Commander and Mass Effect and Deja Vu and Elden Ring real replay value. Losing is part of what makes games fun. It doesn’t have to just be mashing the A button to get to the next cinematic.
dragon age origins did it well
do something that will obviously immensely piss off one of your companions and they will just fucking leave lol
The bad guy ending for Knights of the Old Republic rules, too.
Dark Side ending spoilers
Massacring half of your party, and forcing Zaalbar to choke out Mission was some pretty diabolical shit. And if you didn’t take the dark side path for him on Kashyyyk, he tries to kill you on the Star Forge later.
Planescape torment has a choice in the middle of the game where it straight up ends if you take it and I wish more games did that.
Or maybe some kid calls you gay so hard your brain breaks and you go live under a bridge.
That’s pretty much the thing that made The Witcher 3 stand out, that there were just constantly little choices to make with no indication what would just be irrelevant because you’d just leave and never see anyone involved again and what would matter to the story later.
Other way around. Being overbearing and controlling towards Ciri leads to a bad end, while compassion in general leads to narratively better results like when you’re literally put on trial for being a monster hunter only to have all the magical creatures you helped show up to speak to your defense.
Like it consistently strongly favors non-violent resolution whenever possible except in one particular case, even when violence is the appropriate reaction (IIRC you lock one storyline into a bad end if you break the sleazy spymaster’s leg), and generally casts Geralts natural detachment and alienation as bad things.
I have a hard time even calling it particularly lib-brained because pretty much any other game comparable to it does it worse. It was made by a bunch of polish libs who have plenty of bad takes, but seemingly fewer brainworms than their American techbro counterparts.
you’re telling me
X) Yes
Y) Maybe Later (aka yes)
B) No (but still yes)
A) Sarcastic (also yes)
isn’t the best gaming dialogue of all time?
I’ll push back a little and say that multiple dialogue choices with the same outcome can be good if you accept them as minor expressions of character in that moment, rather than expecting them to have sweeping downstream effects. It can feel nice to say “Okay, I’ll do that” in a way that feels more fitting for your character even if there’s no “functional” distinction
I’ve been crawling through FF14, and since it’s an MMO, there really can’t be any choice. But they still constantly give me dialogue options. Anytime you choose the wrong one the person you’re talking to just corrects you and carries on. It’s…completely meaningless. I don’t understand why they bothered, if anything I’d rather go back to being a silent protagonist rather than having it waste my time pausing a cutscene so I can make some stupid quip that immediately gets corrected before we get back to the story.
I don’t understand why they bothered, if anything
To be fair there are some legitimately funny cutscenes/NPC reactions for some of FFXIV’s dialogue options though. Anytime Y’shtola asks the WoL a question - there’s guaranteed to be at least one response where the WoL either makes fun of Y’shtola or simps for her and she is always annoyed by it.
Anytime a MSQ gives you the option to make the WoL reply in a dumbass/snide/etc manner? There’s at least usually some sort of remark that makes it worthwhile.
All the Scions (and half of the various other NPCs) are always so annoyed/off-put whenever the WoL decides to quip or says something dumb they’re always the choices I gravitate towards if given one.
