I’ve been reading some posts to try to get an idea of what people like and what people don’t in terms of endings. But I don’t understand what makes a bad ending…bad feeling for the player.
What I’m trying to say is- I do want to plan to have a bad end in my game. I don’t mean, “hey wrong choice! Now ur dead,” I mean more of an ending to the entire story. Of course I have plans for multiple good endings, but I think a bad ending could be fun. I just don’t want the player to feel like everything was a waste, either.
I’ve read in the forums that people seem to dislike stats coming into play with a bad ending. Some people outright dislike bad endings, while others love them. So… I want to create a poll to try to narrow down these answers (visually).
Context for my idea is that I plan on making a romance heavy / modern fantasy game. The MC would gain the bad end at the very end of the story, either by being wishywashy with the RO’s (aka trying to romance all of them at once) or if the MC didn’t take into account the plot and worked towards the main goal- which involves killing the BBEG basically.
In context of a bad END rather than straight up death, What do you prefer?
I hate bad ends of all kind!
I think bad ends are only bad if they are stat based.
As long as the MC doesn’t die, I can handle a bad end.
With this context, the idea of a bad end could be interesting!
I throughly enjoy bad ends in CoG games!
With this context, the idea of a bad end makes no sense to me.
0voters
I hope my rambling makes sense xD and if you’ve read this post and participated, thank you for your time! <3
What if instead of conceiving it as a “bad” ending, you thought about it as a great-but-different ending?
If the player throws themselves into something other than the main goal, give that to them–they’re telling you that they want that ending. So show them the results of their decision, and show them they have exactly what they worked towards, in all of its glory (even if it’s dreadful for the world or for them personally–they asked for it!) Write out the ramifications and let the player experience it, and maybe even make some choices in that new world state); if the player tries to romance multiple partners, let them experience the outcome in detail. But that’s not really “bad” per se. Perhaps there’s some way that not having to commit (yet) to a partner is a good thing and the character could see it that way.
A bad ending is a bad ending when the author tells you it is, by (for example) plastering the phrase “BAD ENDING” over it. Maybe I wouldn’t have known it was if you didn’t tell me!
The point is that if you can think of it as “here’s a dozen endings” and not “here’s eleven bad endings and one good ending” the player will respond to that and feel it as authorial support rather than being punished. But if I royally screw up and then you let me play with that and experience the results of my choices even if I have utterly made a hash of what my original goals were, then that’s not “BAD,” that’s amazing.
I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a bad ending. For me, a bad feeling ending would be one at which I arrived with little input of my own. Like you say, it’s not stats that make an ending bad per se, as long as the player understands and has control over them.
If I go on a killing spree, I will go to jail. It’s not great, but it’s not a bad ending. In the same vein, if I cultivate a relationship for 90% of the story and one choice makes the person hate me… not ideal, but also feels bad.
I guess it’s a trick of IF to make an ending predictable without the story being so.
I prefer bad endings to be the result of mutilple choices and stats not just “ah too bad this one exact skill was a few points off, start again”. Also I do find bad endings that aren’t just the player dying more interesting like you said
A lot of the time, a bad ending feels like a failure. Like I made a mistake, and I have to replay the whole game to fix it.
I think a more fun way to do it would be to have a bittersweet ending. Like, we didn’t accomplish everything we set out to do, but it was still a meaningful and satisfying experience.
Mmh, I don’t know - I would count an ending where we accomplish everything we set out to do but it turns out to go horribly right a bad ending… I’d love it though.
An ending where the PC ends up in a bad situation at the end, or even dies, due to the actions they took can be really moving. It just depends how it’s framed and whether the player gets something out of that path.
I got what’s probably on the bad side of the ending spectrum when I first played Love Undying: A Kiss Before Dawn. It was really tense and I failed at various things, and I found it a lot of fun. I thought it handled that ending very well.
In my game Blood Money, you can die and become a ghost. I don’t know how many people have ended up doing that but it was tremendously fun to write and, I hope, felt meaningful to those who ended up going that route.
From a purely gameplay perspective, a bad end is (or should be) an explicit failure by the player—you played poorly, you didn’t understand the mechanics, you made bad choices, etc. It is necessarily a punishment. By making certain outcomes “bad endings”, you are telling the players that there are right and wrong ways to engage with the mechanics.
With some exceptions, the main mechanic in ChoiceScript games is making narrative decisions. If you want to make the those decisions (going for multiple ROs, ignoring the main plot) feel legitimate in players’ eyes, you need to, as @Gower said, not consider their outcomes as bad endings from the outset. If you do think those are bad decisions, feel free to tie them to bad endings—just teach your players that these are indeed bad decisions.
Ehh… depends. I’m fine with multiple poor choices leading to a bad ending, but I don’t like fake choices that lead to bad ends. If you’re gonna put em in give us some sort of warning or rollback option.
One WIP has multiple ways to die, obvious before selection. An IF released that warns, this is sure to end, twice, in case of accidental clicks.
I done them.
Another ‘linear’ game that released has go away, or don’t go. The go ended the game to credits. Then once load back in, go away option is gone.
Yet another has a very dark ending. Ending that gave no indicators to not trust a person, or any type of flag. Should been someone else available. This one I won’t do again, bad ending that was the worst I came across so far.
Renegade wasnt used much but exists. Not the only title that has that outcome either.
Some people will go that route if you add it. Others may ignore it. Depends on story and how it hooks me if I go more than once or twice. Oh right and if I end up sharing title to others.
This is an excellent point. Good and bad ends are subjective, and as other posters mentioned above, there are two kinds of bad endings: bad for the character and bad for the player. If I, as the player, spend 50K or 100K words’ worth of story trying to plot my PC’s corruption arc, I would consider them being redeemed at the end to be a “bad end”, even if for the character it’s a better outcome than, oh, going to prison or dying on the battlefield.
Years ago I wrote a game themed around a political marriage, and I planned it with three endings: good, bad, and neutral. As I sat down to write the “bad end” (where the marriage fails) I realized that I didn’t want it to be a bad end anymore. I wanted it to feel right for the player that chooses it. Thus, the same events happen (marriage dissolved, bride sent home to her mother) but the context is different. It became an ending about choosing a difficult path, going against the wishes of those around you, and being willing to accept the consequences of that. I didn’t get much feedback about that ending, but I can tell you that it felt good to write.
Long story short: if you just write the endings with a mind clear of judgment, the player will have the privilege to choose how they feel about those endings. After that, the only key is to make sure that the endings are clearly telegraphed.
I appreciate everyone’s feedback and I’ll absolutely be taking notes on things said! I will say perhaps my wording of “bad” didn’t come off across completely right. But I guess…more of a tragic end (compared to the other endings), is what I’m planning. It’s not a bad thing to get of course, but I suppose I’ll just do my best with the advice given and see how beta readers react when I have enough plotted up for a proper WIP
After all, worse case scenario if it isn’t well received then I can always re-work things and take it as a learning experience since I’m relatively new to writing something more polished ^^ I’ll go ahead and close the poll now since I’ve gathered what info I was looking for. Thank you all <3
Yeah things like that ^^ I’m trying to avoid going into detail since It’d be a spoiler + unsure if it’ll actually stay the way I’m thinking since I’m still jotting out my first rough draft haha
Essentially, I’m aiming for a different ending that has consequences but isn’t…happy. Just something in the realm of possibilities, and hopefully, something that still comes off as enjoyable despite the outcome.
I like awful bad endings. I was reared on visual novels where there were five types of endings:
good, neutral, crack, bad and really, really bad and I like to think there’s merit to it that goes beyond shock value.
If done right it can show us something about the characters that we wouldn’t know from just the best outcome. Sometimes failure can be fun, useful, a tool for characterization.
For example: would the npc ever poison a rival? You won’t know if everything goes right for them. Not if they aren’t the type of person to do it without any additional incentive.
You won’t see what a character is truly made of unless you put them through a wringer - and if faced with the worst possible sequence of events they refuse to fall into temptation of doing something that would benefit them or something they’ve threatened before - well, that’s what we learn.
One thing to be aware of is that VNs have a very low “cost” to a bad ending: you can have multiple saves, usually you’ll only be making a few major choices per game, and (in Ren’Py, at least) you can skip read text and undo recent choices, which make it far easier to explore multiple endings. In un-modded ChoiceScript, the best you can hope for is that the author gave you a recent checkpoint, making the “cost” to the reader far higher, and thus making bad endings far more likely to be the only ending a reader gets.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t have bad endings, but I do think they should be treated more carefully than in a VN.
Also it made a lot of sense to me.
