False Conflicts

This is something I see a lot of in games. There's a conflict, and you win... or you start the conflict over... until you win. There's only one acceptable outcome.

Now, that can be okay for some games. Some games are all about the challenge, and building skill to defeat the challenge, so you can move on to the next one. It is, however, really bad for many story-based games.

Players like multiple endings. We like to feel that our decisions make a difference. Even the very basic choice of the two endings of the original Blood Omen added a lot to that game. The many different endings to Ogre Battle and Princess Maker are in many respects the entire point of those games.

A desperate siege can end like Helm's Deep or like the Alamo. Those are both perfectly valid stories, and when a game's designers choose the outcome for you, they remove a chunk of your ability to participate in the game.

It doesn't even have to be all or nothing, I think you could do a perfectly good game where you had a siege set-up, and a number of story-significant characters... and at the end you'd get a blurb about what happened to each of those characters based on the outcome of the game. Characters who survived could be heroes, or cowards if they escaped, or captured, or whatever. Characters who died could be forgotten, or martyrs, or even just remembered by the enemy as worthy foes.

One of the best games for avoiding false conflicts is Way of the Samurai. Your character wanders into town with no backstory or agenda, and is immediately put in the position of making choices. Stand up for the common folk, or join one of the factions that oppress them? How far will you go for money? And the game is very short, because there's no saving the game, and you're supposed to play through it many many times to explore what different decisions mean.

Possibly the best genre for this sort of thing is, unfortunately, Japanese dating simulations. I say unfortunately, because it's not a genre that really appeals to me. At the same time, the typical dating sim is all about managing relationships with a handful of different potential love interests, and your relationships with each of them are tracked separately on certain scales, and at the end your choices have created some wildly variant outcomes. That's worth a lot to me.

I just wish that there were more action and/or strategy games that took that route. Imagine a strategy game with a large branching tree of scenarios, where losing one battle doesn't mean that the game boots you back to the start of that battle (or more commonly to your most promising saved game), but merely takes you to another battle which is the logical next step after losing. I'd play that.