Life is Strange polarized me (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, October 21, 2015, 16:15 (3321 days ago) @ Korny
edited by Cody Miller, Wednesday, October 21, 2015, 16:19

Have you played Beyond: Two Souls?
It's Quantic Dream's post-Heavy Rain game, and was a bit more focused. There were entire sections of the game that you could miss out on if you didn't do certain things, and not only were there many different endings, your relationships with people (and their ultimate fates) could all be affected by how you played along the way.

Yes I have, but the problem is that you end up in exactly the same place but with minor differences. You can see all the endings in two playthroughs. If there are 12 endings it should take 12 playthroughs. I believe Beyond Two souls had a 30 million dollar budget. Perhaps true meaningful narrative choice in games IS simply unfeasible. That doesn't mean you can;t criticize games that try.

That said, your standards for choice-driven narratives are entirely unrealistic at this point in game development. You want developers to take into account every single choice that you might make, and craft an entire branching story out of it, doing the exact same thing for every possible choice that might come as a result of it. A single game that did that would be bigger than all of the Mass Effect and Quantic Dream games combined

I never said it'd be easy. In the case of Life is Strange, I think they'd have to have added very little to make it work:

1. Various ways out of the darkroom with various people. Right now it's just David. Scene could be with david / frank / warren, etc.
2. The diner scene changes depending on who is there.
3. Obviously who is at the funeral.

Not much, but it would have sold the illusion far more convincingly.