Now I want a game where an old guy asks you to go on an adventure, but you can just say "nah" and then it's like stardew valley or something

Don't you just hate it when a game shines the spotlight on a choice and hype it up to be something game changing but, in the end, barely affects anything at all?

I feel like this is why dating sims and visual novels lend themselves so well to branching narratives. The scope can be limited to only narrative, art and audio, for the most part. Everything else often fits in 'Ideal, but not Mandatory'. You can remove a lot more and still have the core of the game function as intended. Narrative choices affect the sprites, the backgrounds, the 'CG' artworks, the audio and what narrative you face from there onwards, but a lot of the production is low enough that even one person with a lot of free time, dedication and who has a relatively versatile skillset can make one. They often also include a 'skip read text' feature that allows you to speed through text you already read on previous playthroughs, without the worry of missing new text from a different narrative choice, which removes the 'sluggishness' of replaying it to get a different ending. It's one of the few genres I've found where one person making the game is a feat that I've seen accomplished more than once or twice, and still found the VN/Game to be engaging.

One thing that i hate about choice games is that if you make a choice, it makes you do the other choice anyways, for example, Choice: Go Out With Mike Choice 2: Stay Home Choice 1- YOU: Sure, Lets Go Mike. MIKE: You're in for a surprise Choice 2- YOU: I think i should stay home. MIKE: I insist you should come with me YOU: Ok Mike, Lets Go.

The multiple endings based on your last choice is indeed easy to make, but it's often one of the least satisfying choice systems. That ease with which you can reload your save and pick a different ending is precisely why it doesn't feel very meaningful. That said, there is still a better and worse way to use it. You want to avoid what Yahtzee called the Endingtron 3000, where you pick one of several buttons to press after the game is over to get a different cutscene, a la Mass effect 3 or Deus ex 3 (making the ending cutscene nearly the same with a different voiceover or color filter doesn't help). The first Deus Ex was much better, since you had to play the final few levels differently to get that different ending.

I think Oxenfree is a great example of choice in a videogame. Every single choice you make has only a small effect on the overall outcome, but the experience is different with every choice. They feel like normal everyday choices rather than super important game changing depending on what you pick kind of choices.

Well if you stayed as a moisture farmer, the stormtropers would come and you would have to fight them off and it would probably re-join up. Either a fight with the Stormtroopers using farm equipment (idk?), or a fight with Old-Ben Kenobi.

7:00 Just mentioning the west-east direction change to accomodate in-game lore/logic gives me the chills. It's such a genius AND inexpensive game design choice. I'll definitely check the game out! It reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is one of my favourite games as a child.

I’d like to mention the Zero Escape series. You have to make choices, but you have to make _all_ of them to truly experience what the story has to offer. Nice video, you’ve got a sub!

Minecraft Story Mode,make choices that don't affect the story's outcome at all!

The Fallout games have a really clever way of making choice feel important with the slideshow endings. They tell the effects and aftermath of your choices and actions, making you feel like you had an actual impact on the world with barely any extra work required.

Mass Effect makes one very simple mistake in its system. It's too black and white. And you can't have that in a giant open-ended game like that. Oh, sure. They might make a token attempt to disguise this fact by calling the choices "Paragon" and "Renegade", but we all know what that really means. It's Good and Evil. But even though your options are labelled as such doesn't mean you automatically follow those moral sides. Just because I gave the orphan crippled child a piece of candy instead of spitting in his eye for no reason doesn't mean I'd save a serial rapist instead of letting him fall to his death. Worse still when refusing to do blatant dick moves nobody would ever do unless they actively go for all the dick moves screws over your option to be a hardass fast and loose cop later on. "What's that? You want to select that greyed out 'Execute criminal' option? Oh, no, remember that time you didn't step on that kitten's tail for no reason whatsoever? I'm afraid you're not evi-I mean 'Renegade' enough to do what you think is the best thing to do here. Also, 2 of your teammates are now dead because you're not good enough for the good option either. I mean paragon. Fuck it. Fuck you." arbitrarily limiting choice by a binary morality system is fucking awful. And the worst part is it only fucks up your experience at the point where a dedicated "good" or "evil" player would have racked up enough moral points to select a beneficial option, but you don't because you've been having fun and making complex decisions on a case-to-case basis, which is almost always tens of hours into the game already. A good or bad morality system doesn't work because there will always be options that nobody would pick unless they were only picking options of a specific morality to game the game, which is not fun. Furthermore, it's frankly insulting. Yeah, I decided to shoot the criminal holding the child at gunpoint. Who the fuck are you to decide to label that as evil? I thought it was the right thing to do in this specific situation. The best way to create organic choice is to have choices matter on a case to case basis, just as players would naturally pick them. If you track down the thrice-arrested, never-convicted serial rapist after his latest crime and choose to execute him instead of bringing him in yet again, DON'T label it as flat-out evil, add a bit to the character's evil meter, and have "good" characters react a bit less well to you and "evil" characters a bit better. Be a bit more complex. The people on the street like that you put an end to the problem, the justice system doesn't but can't do anything due to lack evidence, but warns you're on thin ice, your disillusioned ex-cop teammate is glad justice was served and sees you as a more realistic and serious man now, but your young wide-eyed protegeé is a bit less innocent and sees you as less of a perfect man. THEN it makes sense if later on the police won't let you have access to police files, causing you to not know about some kind of secret about your enemy, catching you off your guard, and getting your protegeé killed because he doesn't trust you anymore, after which your ex-cop teammate consoles you and you grow closer as a result. Afterwards, the city inhabitants might come to your aid in a dispute with the law. And it all organically flowed from your choice, instead of arbitrarily being limited in your own choices because you didn't make enough wildly different choices the devs put in the same moral alignment. Binary morality systems are the enemy of organic choices.

Your videos have encouraged me to think more deeply about video games.

I personally think that players always want that "My Way" option from video games. When you have a choice to go in path a or path b, you always feel a need to go on path c. I think that this can be solved in dialogue trees by simply giving the player something like a second or third immediate turn. So usually dialogue goes like this. You talk, I talk, you talk, I talk and so on. I propose that rather than that, there needs to be a way to edit the players sentences mid sentence or add an action (hug, help, shake hand, pat on the shoulder, kiss, headbutt, bail, etc.), before the NPC can talk. A sort of puzzle to keep the player on their toes. Basically, the player might have to start a conversation by greeting, to set the tone of the conversation (cheerful, intimidating, professional, etc.), then the player can either ask a question, say a statement or leave the NPC to talk. Then the player can talk. Once you are given a question, the NPC will react midway through the sentence and give you a non verbal nod to what they think of the conversation. Then it is up to the player to act accordingly. Maybe there is a tense moment where a squadmate NPC is going through a rough time and you as a leader have to give them some comfort or wisdom out of scratch. (think something along the lines of Commander Shepard's speech at the end of Mass Effect 1, but with direct NPC contact) Like a mini game where you need to pay close attention to your squadmate who might start crying and you think, do I start talking to cheer them up, or do I take action and give them a hug? What kind of character are they? Do they need friendship, or reassurance that they'll get revenge? Do they need wisdom to help them deal with this, or a firm new goal to get their mind off this issue. Perhaps instead of having a vast skill tree for your squadmates, you can go talk to them and they will ask you about how what kind of direction they should go in. Say the player is a Berserker who needs a healing mage (Cleric). You could ask your Mage if they know any healing, and then they could low-key give you a mission to get some tomes. Maybe some backstory about how the Mage's father was a necromancer or such. Something that would otherwise seem forced if it was brought up anytime else. It would surely make skill trees seem less like a raw stat upgrade and more of a character development. The possibilities are so much more open than any other I can think of. Every conversation would make you want to know who this person you are talking to, not just from a personal point, but from a gameplay one as well. Cause in the end, the responses you make on your own are more powerful than any three choice system you can get. And although there are finite pieces to play with, in the end, it's like While it would be a little hard to deal with at times, it's basically just a modified if statement, so it shouldn't be too hard to incorporate. Just a little more time spent on aligning many differently formatted sentences into the same response outcome. Outcome gives NPC a status that affects behavior (mad, chill, happy, in love, angry, sad, etc.) and this subsequently affect gameplay, lines and plot decisions (say all squadmates and player have to vote on which path they take, and one headstrong squadmate will just flat out go against you, so you then take the most dangerous path). I wanna know if this makes any sense, so please feel free to write a comment.

Going to your Star Wars: A New Hope example, there actually is that sort of choice in the movie. Luke chooses to go back home. But the movie does the same thing a lot of games do, it makes the final result the same: Aunt Maru and Uncle Owen die, and Luke goes with Old Ben Kenobi.

Zero Escape is also a great example of choice impacting the game through gathered context.

The illusion of choice is usually just as effective as real choice, the problems arises with replaying games. By now anyone who plays a telltale game knows that the choices will only change minor cut scenes or some dialogue, ruining the illusion. That's why pseudo choose your own adventure games often fail in that area, they market the choices as something that will have a huge impact and allow you to replay the games many times, when really it should be presented as a one time experience.

I like how the Shin Megami Tensei series handles player choice with the Law, Chaos and Neutral alignments. Particularly how they give the player a compelling neutral route that doesn't leave them under powered of unsatisfied with the story.

I hate it when you are given binary endings. The worst are ones where you just make one decision at the very end, or played through a stealth game lethal vs non-lethal. Everything else up to that point from a narrative standpoint may as well not have even happened. That's why I liked New Vegas' ending where even though you have one major choice, all the other individual gray choices of who you helped or screwed over throughout the entirety of the game minutely shape how the wasteland will turn out at the very end.

lol 'Shadow the Hedgehog is TERRIBLE!' I laughed way harder than I should have

Ace Combat Zero is a nice example of a good use of an alignment bar system. You can progress through the game as either a Mercenary, a Soldier, or a Knight - As a mercenary, you earn more money, but enemies are tougher, as a knight, you earn less money, but enemies are easier, and as a soldier, it's a middle ground between both. All three paths are interesting to get through, because each of them unlocks exclusive planes and exclusive color schemes, each bring new enemy aces to fight, etc.

There is an old game called Front Mission 3 which has 2 routes depending of your choices, and the party members of one route are the bosses of another. Thats was a really cool way to deal with this issue and i would like to see it again.

I played a lot of interactive games last year but the one I really enjoyed was Life Is Strange 2 mostly because every decision you made had an effect either on Daniel's personality or on his relationship with Sean (which determines how well he listens to him) or both so everything you do counts. And I like how they turned the "final choice determines the ending" on its head. Yeah you make that final choice but the ending you get is determined by how you've raised Daniel and I really liked that. I enjoyed season 1 but it always bothered me that no matter what choice you made the story ended in either two ways and I'm glad the developers expanded from that.

Having the final choice be near the end, for a specific ending, results in that ending not being properly earned, and the player will most likely end up not caring. If all they have to do is reload a save and pick another answer. Its eases gamer fatigue, but it also discourages replay, the big ending choice is at the end, no reason to play the game again. Shadows story failed part due to none of its bits having a proper connection. "Did bad in city? Now your in cyberspace! Did good in cyberspace? now your in floating ruins! Did good in ruins? Now your Space Computer!" Quality of choice plays a big part. Some of the methods shown ease workload, but from a players perspective, they can feel cheated on half the choices, and begin to question "Why even have choice?" Tell Tale is a good example of both 'how to invest the player,' and 'how it can all blow up in their/your face.' Walking Dead Season One still did a great job on characters and player interest, there were flaws here and there, but the characters were what carry it through. Others such as Batman and Game of Thrones (even other season of Walking Dead), end up fumbling a bit, making choices not matter cause they kept this plot line moving. You could be a saint of saints, but the game story still holds you as an evil monster.

Thanks for making this video, it can finally show some people who are deciding to make games that decide “oh, just add branching storylines, lol” is not an easy task.

Also there's Radiant Historia. One of the games that do time travel right. You can pick ALL the choices and then try to figure out which ones you should make to not die horribly or get blocked in your path =p

I was really hoping you'd bring up Dragon Age as a good example of player choice but overall I liked your arguments. You got a subscriber!

SMT has has chaos, law, and neutral with each a significant story difference.

I think Radiata Stories is a good example. The narrative splits about 2/3 of the way through with one major choice and it completely changes which areas you have access to and which allies (there are like 100 total, I think) are willing to fight on your side.

As someone who wants to make indie games, this is a fantastic channel to subscribe to.

That's also one of the most interesting topics in games for me. It's really difficult to have decisions, that are not meaningless and don't result in too different or too many paths. I even wrote a very complex program to model very complex story relationships in a manageable way. In some cases I prefer, when the choice is not a real decision, but completing levels in a specific way or even losing, so instead of dying and retrying, you get a different story path. The problem from Shadow could be solved, when some decisions let you skip parts, especially the boring easy parts at the beginning, which also could cause more interesting difficult content or even additional content after the previous ending.

Doki Doki Literature Club is the only game where the illusion of choice works in its favor.

I'm so happy you talked about tactics ogre. I discuss this game all the time with my friends when they bring up games with narrative choices.

I've been working on a really popular Undertale fangame with a team over the past two years, so I've put thought into how I'm going to make impactful narrative choice in the game I'm gonna make after I finish the Undertale fangame, and one problem I noticed with some narrative games is that sometimes, one choice feels more effective and meaningful than the other. For example, it's pretty obvious that in Undertale, you should go for pacifist, which removes the moral challenge of having to make a decision of what the best choice is. Rather, I think it's best to construct narrative choice in a way where no one choice feels more optimal than the other. I wanna go for a "grey area", where both choices are different, but have their own rights and wrongs. This way, the choices given to the player are very difficult to make, cause it isn't entirely clear which one is the better choice in the end, which makes the choices given more engaging. Of course, these choices have to have some drastic effect on the story where the losses that come with choosing each respective choice make for a very morally challenging situation.

I like way silent hill 2 does its endings.

Very awesome video, thank you for taking the time to produce it!

Just wanted to mention that vaporware doesn't mean a forgettable game, it means one that never materialized in availability. Otherwise stellar and engaging video. Would love to have heard more.

This video was in 2020 still very interesting to watch. Although I missed one example of narrative choice. The No-Choice choice or "but thou must" choice. This option is very easy, because it has only miniscule branching. The player is presented with a narrative choice, but if the player chooses the wrong choice; a joke narrative is displayed only to return to the same choice again. The player is kept in this loop (or in variations of the loop) until the player makes the choice that the developers want them to make. The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest are very good examples of this.

choices right at the end have no meaning if you can save. Looses all importance

Thank you for mentioning Chrono Cross. It seems like it's faded away from recent memory.

I can't wait until you get 100K subs! You deserve it :3

A thought on meters: good/evil(or effectively similar paragon/renegade) is uninteresting and can feel like they trivialize morality So, first thought is to use orange blue morality meters Ie loyalty, empathy/distrust, initiative There are other ones you could do, these are just the first few I could think of The second idea is to use multiple scores to allow more actually interesting choices, and to be sure to remember to develop the middle. That way you have more of a choice besides "do I want to be good or evil" and that choice might represent something actually interesting in the game. Am I loyal to my questionable organization, do I trust people even though I have reason not to, do I take initiative and do things that will help my org even though they told me not to or didn't ask me to?

I just had a cool idea to help the middle morality options, since the extremes always seem to give stronger options So, lets say the good option gives you more pure damage focus, and the evil is more debuff focused, you could make the middle have okay damage but also a focus on less intense debuffs with the damage. Example: good guys first option deals 1000 damage, bad guys is no damage with a 100% paralyze option. Nuetral you get 500 damage and a 25% paralyze.

Way of the samurai is a series of games that deserve more recognition for having some amazing branching story-lines

You forgot to mention Spec ops the line's way of making people think outside the box when it comes to choices

BRO THE MUSIC AT THE BEGINNING IS FROM JADE EMPIRE!!!! FAV GAME

A small RPG called Age of Decadence, from what I've read, has done some incredible things with choices Also, HIGHLY Recommended watching *MrBTongue's* video on Choice and Consequences.

I think one of the best ways that narrative choice was handled was in the horizon series. it doesn't effect gameplay all that much, giving you one helper npc in Horizon Zero Dawn or giving you a choice between a bow or armor set in Horizon Forbidden West, but the way you choose still has lasting impacts. the characters you interact with remember how you treated them and will respond to it even later on in the game. And some of the events in cutscenes change things later on in the games, though they are relatively minor ones such as giving another character a scar. But still, the system as a whole if unintrusive, still gives the player some agency over parts of the story, and can have a lasting, if small, impact in the long run.

Interesting stuff, good video.

If your game uses some good-evil meter, it really shouldn't be hard to let you unlock powers or story options when you are not-good and not-evil, instead of just good and evil. It solves a good chunk of the problems with that system, even if it still isn't very deep. But the only time I've seen this technique is in a single perk in Fallout 3. Maybe more games have it, but I didn't play them.

To be honest, one of the Bioware games that did very good using that tired old system was their torpedoed MMORPG, The Old Republic, more specifically the Sith Warrior storyline quests. The irony here is that it feels as if the writers were torn in two opposite directions with some quests feeling downright silly if you complete them using one morality choice over the other, but the ones I like the best are the ones on Tatooine. The reason for this is that they give you a genuine storyline reason for actually picking the lightside choices, even if you had been playing an evil brainwashed dyed in the wool Sith up until that point: They challenge you to pull off what a Jedi had done before you, and they do so in such a subtle way that I found myself actually enjoying it. So basically, they let you pick the nonviolent choices and still get a satisfying ending for someone desiring to play an evil character despite not force choking everyone you meet, which is a rare thing in such a polarized narrative. When I finished the main storyline on that planet I felt as if I had well and truly OWNED the Jedi, and their pansy-ass teachings, without killing a single one of them XD

I kinda want a game where you make a choice and everyone goes "Nah" and takes the other choice, but *the same happens if you choose differently*. The characters just hate you

Great vid!

I have now heard a big KZfaqr encourage and another discourage saving in branching story games if you can save, then the player will have it easier to see every branch without getting bored as easily. but if you can save, then the player has no sense of meaningful choices because if they don't like the choice, they just load the save-state. I guess that shows that there is never a right answer, just what fits better in that specific context

I'm a simple woman I hear DA:O main theme, I cry Great video, thanks for your work!

thank you for including jade empire's music!!! as a person who played jade empire countless times there is no way in hell i wouldn't recognize its music!!!

You should do a video on emergent narrative

Lets be honest if game let you stay as an moisture farmer it would last about a sequence of you checking a moisture pump - get attacked then it loops back to to "go with ben" progression tree. IF even that. I might just do a dialogue reply "But you must" or "Come back when your ready"

10:14 Vaporwave: "Doc, i don't feel so good"

On the subject of choice, I'd like more games to take a page from the Undertale('s neutral route) book, where it's not about chosing between the nice green option or the evil red option, but the choices you actually make in game, presented as gameplay options, that determine (pun intended) what ending you get. Disgaea DS has a similar mechanic, but I don't really remember any other game doing that

This would be super fun to revisit now that fire emblem 3 houses is out and did a really really good job of this

This video is extremely informative, and as an indie developer it is always nice to think about these things. However, the initial Star Wars comparison is a little laughable to me. Have you never played old Sierra games? When a game gives you a choice like "Go out and save the world, or stick around and be a farmer" that is not the game offering you 2 different games in one. That is the game giving you a chance to go against what it wants and spend a couple minutes (sometimes shorter) going through a little "easter egg" sequence before ending abruptly and starting over so you can go save the world... This is not a problem, this has been solved for over 30 years.

Does anyone know what kind of game engine an app like episode interactive might use?

It’s a war crime that Undertale isn’t mentioned here I’ve been playing the game all my life and I’m still discovering different outcomes your choices can make

Similar to how Ubisoft has put those alternate ending scenes right at the beginning of the last two Far Cry games, I think it would be really funny if a game had you make a choice like "stay home and don't go with Ben Kenobi", and it threw you into a simple farm management sim for a while before showing you the credits.

The fact I heard the Dragon Age: Origins theme and immediately recognized it probably says something about me and my gaming standards...

TellTale is a perfect example how good stories can be ruined (but I still liked most of them) by letting you know in advance who will die. I dont mind spoilers, if game is fun, you will replay it. But I do not appreciate game pretending I am an idiot after repeatedly giving me a choice, only to take it from me. Every time I get a choice to save life again, my reaction is "ou, I wonder how the other one will die ... with who would I like to live a little bit longer?"

Does anyone have good tips of how to WRITE such a story for a game? I am about to created a pixel 2d game in which I want to have like unlimited choice for the player.

Tactics ogre looks like a cool game. I should get around to playing it at some point

*Chill vibes outro music from Chrono Cross*

Another way for a AAA game to solve this is by doing what XCOM2 was going for. Make the game short with the implication that it's supposed to be replayed many times.

Great video. Until Dawn and Life is Strange also handled this very gracefully.

This video needed to talk about Shin Megami Tensei.

4:40 But what if you want to make a sequel of a game with multiple endings?

I've recently started seeing these videos and I am loving them. Surely this one has been told by this point, but Fire Emblem Fates is also an example of how not to handle it: there's only one meaningful choice, who you side with, but in the end that the game was handled as three different versions does a disservice to the choice, it has no real effect unless you have all routes bought (for the full game price each btw). Why am I saying it? Because I think, maybe it's more an opinion, that Fates was marketed as this game where for the first time there would be choices that really impacted the story, and they do in a sense but you need all the games for this to be the case. The Old Republic also comes to mind, it has the light dark side meters, but they really don't affect you much either because other than maybe having a Jedi that could fall to the dark side, a Sith with a moral code, you get the idea.

Chrono Cross sounds like something me and a friend tried to pull off with deep characterization. It was an rpg with permadeath for characters.

Im trying to write my game that is souly based on choices, but i am having difficulty organizing. It's not like making a normal storyboard since there are many different turnouts. If anyone has suggestions on how to organize, i would be very happy.

The star wars scenario could have a flash forward when Luke joins the empire

6:50 Name of the game? Edit: Nvm. He said it right after, Tactics Ogre.

I Remeber you from gnar channel on his let play and I was trying to look for your channel so I had to look back at his video when you first appear

Very very interesting

Fallout (except 3, 4 and ermmmm 76) and all 3 Troika games. They are all very good about choices.

Would anyone happen to know that intro?

Light and dark meter like Shin Megami Tensei games, Law Neutral Chaos alignment

2:04 what is that game called?

Radiant Historia much? it took branching paths, actually made each path interesting and even linked them together. yeah, I really like Radiant Historia....

Fucking love game writing and narrative design

What's the game on 1:09 called?

While talking about AAA games you sometimes showed footage of indie games. Or is that Hellblade game a AAA title?

Shadow The Hedgehog was an actual MASTERPEICE, the active ability to pick up guns made it feel more like a Ratchet & Clank Crash Bandicoot Hybrid, granted it was no longer a sonic feel fast keep spd game but rather a destroy all mobs game, & that was nice, bad plot aside I did beat the game like 27 times.

I feel like people who complain about mass effect not having proper support for a middle ground have never really tried it. At least in mass effect 2 and 3, you can do a hybrid playthrough. In me2, it's a bit tougher. You'll likely be locked out of 1 or 2 of the hardest morality checks if you don't use a guide. But for the vast majority of checks one option is easier than the other, so you have at least one option available to you.

For me the game with the best decision making is ELEX from Pyranha Bytes. It seems like everyone will remember everything, you can kill everyone and it will affect the rest of your gameplay - cities can ban you, you can't enter those cities again, also they can be destroyed when you take some wrong decisions. Every single Quest has different options and every option will result in making some people mad and some people happy. You have to decide who you want to help, which laws you break and what impact this might cause. There are a lot of quests you can loose by making the wrong decisions. I am a game developer and I have no idea how they made this game.

When I play the Stanley Parable, if I want to role play as Stanley - the man who loves following orders and pressing buttons, I will do everything the narrator tells me to but after I reset and eventually get bored of roleplaying as Stanley or expressing myself through player choice, all that's left to do is to find out what remaining content there is to see. Of course, in order to see 100% of everything the game has to offer, you've got to restart over and over and at that point.

What is the game 3,13?

me when he mentions telltale dont say minecraft dont say minecraft dont say minecraft

I enjoyed Shaodw the Hedgehog I understand why people don't like it but it was still enjoyable for me *shrug emoji*

oh OOOOOHHHHH! That chrino cross music gives me chills!

Did he just STARWARS THEMED HARVEST MOON!!!!!

what's the games name at 9:03

I expected this guy to talk about FFXIII-2, since he is used to use the first one as example