Life is Strange 2 (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, December 11, 2019, 13:06 (1612 days ago) @ Claude Errera
edited by Cody Miller, Wednesday, December 11, 2019, 13:14

Remember when I said Life is Strange was good, but dropped the ball on choice?

After finishing, I think 2 is the opposite. It's not BAD, don't get me wrong, but it's not nearly as engaging story wise as the first. However, your choices mattered much more in terms of the ending.

It's almost as if the goals of telling a story with fully realized characters is diametrically opposed to the goal of allowing maximum player agency

Maybe. I’m not necessarily convinced it is yet, but I definitely see the problem.

Just want to point out that I didn't say "opposed to the goal of making a good game", but specifically "maximizing player agency".

I understand.

But I think it can be done if multiple narratives are written such that any type of trait the player assigns the main character through their decisions is incorporated thematically. You basically have to write a bunch of stories: what if the main character is an asshole? What if they are an asshole who stops being an asshole? What if they like so and so? What if they are cowardly? Etc. And they all have to be thematically appropriate to those choices.

A tough task but not impossible.

You must be joking. With more than a handful of options, this task becomes ridiculously large - Choose Your Own Adventure has never been particularly interesting, because you're STILL locked into a small subset of possible paths, but it PRETENDS to give you more agency. I'd rather the environment be up-front about my limits.

Short game + large budget.

Sounds like fun. /s

A 4-5 hour story you could play over and over and see wildly different narratives each time when you make different choices? Yeah, that does sound cool.

Unless the choices are trivial, 4-5 hours of gameplay would require an absurd number of branches - I can't imagine what you're envisioning. To me, it sounds like a hugely expensive game that would sell a fraction of what it needed to sell to recoup the costs involved, and the vast (90+%) majority of players would miss almost all of it.

This sounds super-impractical.

You underestimate the appeal of choice driven adventure games. Games from Supermassive, Dontnod, and Quantic Dream all literally sell millions of units. Detroit sold more than 3 million copies and was only on one platform. Until Dawn sold over 2 million. Tons of people buy these types of games, and they aren’t as expensive as you think. Detroit was only 37 million, and it supposedly had a long story with many unique branching paths.