Life is Strange polarized me (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Wednesday, October 21, 2015, 21:49 (3119 days ago) @ Cody Miller

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.

The issue is how you define "ending". In a game such as Beyond (more so in Heavy Rain), there are a limited number of ways the scene before the credits can play out. This is because of the limitations that the developers have to account for. That said, while the final scene may be the same for everyone, the entire journey may be different, so you have countless "endings" along the way.

Mass Effect was a fantastic example of this. All of your choices in the first two games came to a head in Mass Effect 3. All of your relationships and choices came to a conclusion from the minute the game started, all the way up to the final section. Who lived? Who died? Who loved you? Who hated you? All of it was a result of your choices, and all of it played out as a consequence of everything that you did, big and small.
The entirety of Mass Effect 3 was an ending, but people forget all of that because of the very final scene that serves as an ending to your character.
Apart from the final choice (were people seriously expecting hundreds of possible outcomes?), I'd say that Mass Effect has come closest to being the game that you want. And that took three separate high-budget releases.

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.

And you still would have complained...