[POLL] WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MULTIPLE ENDINGS?

author=thatbennyguy
I hardly ever tend to finish a game more than once (especially in RPG Maker games). Do you think it should be compulsory for someone to play a game several times just to get slightly different endings? Even if they are diverse, do they add to the meaning of the game, or are they just there for frills?

Well, Youtube exists. You're boned on the RPG Maker games, of course. Ideally, the different endings should actually be different, a la Chrono Trigger. A bad example of multiple endings can be seen in Mass Effect 3. Like I said, it has to do with how well the game and the endings are written.

If I were going to do a game with multiple endings, I would model it on Chrono Trigger, or do something like the SMT example LockeZ brought up. There has to be enough of a reason to make the player want to go out of their way and experience the differences in the story brought on by the different endings, so changing things up massively and allowing the endings through different routes and completion times seems to be the best way to go about it.

999 had multiple endings as part of its overarching narrative, AE. Each ending made what was happening in the story more interesting, or make more sense, or it fleshed out a character so you could trust/distrust them in the future.

Also Corpse Party Book of Shadows had some shoddy endings because they were so drawn out and useless.

I like the idea of multiple endings if a game is going to give you choices to make. I wouldn't mind being railroaded into a specific story and led to a single ending, but I would feel kind of duped if the game is just giving me the illusion of choice. If you're going to use BIG CHOICES as a plot device I think they should have consequences at least.

If you're worried about not spoiling your experience you could choose not to play the game a second time, of course, but if the game offers me a choice to SAVE THE GIRL and I go through a second time and nothing significantly changed, I'd be a bit miffed.

My preference for having multiple endings would be in a Maniac Mansion, choose your own adventure style, where you're basically creating the ending as the natural result of your gameplay, not just something that's tacked on for cool points and doesn't really flow from the choices made.

it really depends how significant the differences are, and how the player's input affects them. I'm generally not crazy about endings that are completely binary (like the good/evil moral choice thing you mentioned), because all that really does is double the number of playthroughs. endings that branch in a more subtle way, though, are very neat when well-executed. endings that reflect the actual consequences of your actual decisions rather than arbitrarily extrapolating the player character's actions from the value of an integer are a favourite, as are endings that provide the player with new information that will influence their decisions on the next playthrough and lead to another ending (taking Nier, for instance). if it's just choosing endings from a list, though, or reading how many Evil Points(tm) the player has I'd prefer the developer spend their time and effort on fleshing out a single ending instead.

when it comes to branching endings (and not iterative endings like Nier has) I think the biggest important factor is making sure there isn't one obvious 'good' or 'canonical' ending. Silent Hill 2's endings branch not based on how good or evil James is, but on how it perceives his strength of character -- and literally any of them could be the 'correct' ending depending on how the players themselves interpret James as a person. this is what's actually needed to make branching endings 'personal' to the player.

now, if the best ending is a reward that takes an extra level of challenge to obtain, that's another thing entirely! that's more a thing for action games, though.

e: while I'm 'here' here are some 'more' words in 'single quotations', I have a quota to 'fill'

I think I kind of disagree there. content for content's sake isn't necessarily a good thing -- it depends very much on the quality of the content itself. creating replayability is more complex than just gating some of your content away from the course of a single playthrough, and making your ending branch in only a token sense for the sake of checking off 'replayability' on your arbitrary list of features isn't going to pan out as well as making an ending branch organically from the story.

playing most rm games even once is a chore. if it isn't fun the first time, not all the powers of all of heaven and earth can make me play it again.

Multiple endings are great, however it still is important that it's executed well.

I think it's important that the player feels he gets the ending he wanted to without having to use a guide.
I find it rather annoying if games for example offer you to flirt with the female party members and then I'm totally nice to one of the girls and still not end up with her in the end. Or when I obviously try to be the good guy and still get the neutral ending.

Also often the choices don't really have much of an impact to the game and then it's rather boring. Often there is only one good/bad meter or a value for each female character how much she likes you. But that's kinda stupid. If I decide to kill the robbers but still spare those enemy miners that doesn't mean I'm neutral and should get a neutral ending, it means that the robbers should be afraid of me and the miners should like me.
And what's even the point of those "you end up with one of the female heroes" endings when they don't change the gameplay AT ALL? You'll just see a short different scene at the end and then the advertisement says "Over 80 different endings!" basically meaning 80+ different combinations on how the party members can end up. That's stupid.
If I decide to date a girl in the game, it should be right in the game that I marry her and then the story continues completely differently.

A great example for this is Phantasy Star III for me. Here you can decide between two girls, then you will marry that girl and then you will get children together. And after that you continue playing as your firstborn son, which of course will look completely different depending on the girl and also will have different kingdoms (or no kingdoms at all), because of course if you marry that princess you'll inherit her kingdom, but if you marry that girl that saved your life, you will give your son over whatever you had. So at this point the stories evolve completely differently and again you can decide between two girls and again continue playing as the firstborn son (now already 4 different combination possibilities). In that last section the stories slowly get together again because of course no matter who you are now, you still want to stop humanity from going extinct, but the different paths still remain slightly different and consequently the ending are also different.
Hardly have seen another RPG that executed different endings so well.

I think decisions in RPGs should have a big impact on the game. Completely different order in how you visit dungeons and towns and so on.

Castle Chase did multiple endings right.

The ending is one of the most important cut scenes in the game, but it's still a cut scene. I guess it should follow the same rules as any other cut scene in the game.

So if the only scene in the game that changes based on your decisions is the ending, it comes off feeling awkward and forced. Disgaea and FF9 had this problem, and it's a common problem in linear, story-driven games with "bad endings."

But if the rest of the game is very nonlinear and many parts of the story change drastically based on your earlier decisions, then the ending should follow suit, otherwise it will feel like a cop-out that ignores the rest of the game. Mass Effect 3 had this problem, from what I've heard.

Of those two problems, the first one is less of a big deal. Since the ending is, admittedly, one of the most important cut scenes in the game, it makes a certain kind of sense for it to possibly do things that the rest of the game doesn't do. It makes the ending stand out; the problem is just that it's doing so in a way that feels kind of disjointed and arbitrary, instead of building off of the style that the rest of the game was presented in. But at least it doesn't leave the player feeling like they were cheated out of a proper ending, like they feel when the ending lacks elements that were present through the rest of the game.