How do you feel about "Bad Endings" or 'Game Over' states

Game Development Writing and Content
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I don’t have much to add other than what has already been stated, but I’m going to give my opinion on it anyways. :sunglasses:

I do think that there is a very big difference between a mechanical bad ending, like the “game over” screen-o’-death prompted from say, taking a wrong turn, and from an ending that isn’t classified as traditionally happy. And then I also think there are distinctions from those two distinctions to break it down further.

I completely agree that mechanical game overs can be…annoying, to say the least, when they are completely random and not from a narrative given in the game. For example, you are playing along and then your character suddenly gets to a fork in the road. There are no hints given, no information laid before you about either choice, nothing that you could have discerned about this situation - you are simply told to choose between A and B. If you choose A, well congrats! You managed to get eaten by a dragon. Game over, next time choose B.

Yeah, that’s annoying.

That was of course a simplistic reduction of an example, but the point is - a random death shouldn’t be a guessing game. Mechanical deaths can, however, be a part of the story. Like a mystery-puzzle game might have you pay attention to hints along the way that would lead you to choosing something over the other. Or it might have you managing different stats in a strategy-based game that leads to you running out of vital resources. Or you might have to fight insanely tough monster enemies in a turn-based game. Those serve their own narrative purpose and allow for some opposing force. By offering death and a game-over, you have incentive that drives the purpose of that genre. Now these might no be something everyone enjoys, but it can’t be said that they are pointless (and can definitely enhance the experience a lot if done well!)

Narrative bad endings are another thing of their own. I, personally, love a good bittersweet tragedy more than anything. Especially the classic in which the main character sacrifices themselves in a redemption arc. Mmpf. Or my absolute favorite story of all time is a romance manga called ‘Paradise Kiss’. (Spoilers of course) The two main characters are the stars of the whole thing and are very flawed individuals, but their flaws are what make them so perfect for each other. The story is basically a build-up of their crazy relationship and how they grow so much together as people and figure out who they are. You expect these two characters to get stay together in the end, through all of their trials and tribulations they are so in love and you want them to be together in the end, but in the biggest shout-inducing twist that you did not expect, but maybe you did and just didn’t want to accept it,…they end up breaking up. Oh, they love each other. They never stop loving each other. They will always be the ‘one that got away’ and they know this as they are breaking up, it’s just that to be the people that they love, they had to pursue their own paths and those (as heart-wrenching as it is) would never be one in the same. It makes you sad, and angry, and gouges a big pit in your heart…but it fits. A happy story wouldn’t be their story - it wouldn’t be the people they are. And it’s a ‘good’ ending because it’s satisfying, but it’s ‘bad’ because it’s not ‘good.’

Like stated above, it is definitely a matter of preference. Some people don’t like bittersweet, and they hate tragedy, and these type of stories are not their thing. That’s okay, and it’s also okay to love them. I don’t think they are inherently a failure of the author, though, or are meant to make the audience mad. I think that only comes in poor implementation such as - this only exists to make the reader suffer, even though it was given no narrative place. (Just as a happy ending that doesn’t fit out of nowhere can be a bad implementation.) You still have to offer the reader gratification, but sometimes that comes from sacrifice, or a twist, or by something that isn’t a classical happy ending.

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PS: It should be noted that one problem with the ease of getting a Bad Ending is that your Let’s Play series is more likely to end unhappily!

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Wow, I never thought my little post would turn get this much attention,
though i’m glad I stirred up a discussion.

@Interestedparty

this got kind of long and I wanted to reply to people without scrolling down being a hassle

I don’t think I would ‘hate’ you. It’s not the choices themselves that gets me so ruffled,
its when the choices that lead to extreme consequences don’t infer it somehow.

When I talk about a ‘failure state’, i’m talking about an event where you make a choice
and the game declares it the objectively wrong answer, and your progress is halted.

Now I can agree that, when used correctly as a tool, that sort of thing is tolerable.
Say a story has you in front of a mob boss in some dingy underground ‘casino’,
and one of the choices is to go for his gun on the table. You can guess how badly that could end.
I’m sure your average person wouldn’t even try that option, but for those who did, you could use that as a lesson to teach your reader that there are consequences for not thinking your actions through.

But i’ve played games where one wrong choice in the very beginning can determine if you get a real ending or some terrible fake one, and the rest of the game is a slew of fake choices that can’t change the outcome, and thats what I hate so much. Completely arbitrary pitfalls, with no possible way to deduce what is considered “Right” and “Wrong”

@Havenstone

round 2

Yours was my favorite reply, as that quote from the guidelines and your own description of them sum up my opinions better than I could articulate.

On a side note, I did in fact have my own untimely end in Choice of Rebels, however, I still left the experience with an overall enjoyment of the story as a whole. I normally find stories with their own, brand new, jargon tiring and hard to get into (if anyone played Skyrim as their first Elder Scrolls game, i’m sure you know what I mean), but I warmed up to it. My ending was less that satisfying, but I knew that it was my own incompetence that brought it about, so I didn’t begrudge the game itself for it. (Not too much anyway)
I was a poor leader and I was sure that it was the winter that inevitably led to my downfall. I tried to put all the pieces back together in spring, but the only thing my efforts rewarded me with was myself and Breden lying dead in a cave.

That ending was definitely not what I was going for, but I didn’t walk away hating the game.
(Though I haven’t quite walked back to it yet, either)

I wanted to say that @Pleimis is correct.

"The way that @Aamano wrote his remarks it could be taken one of two ways. ‘Bad’ could mean, poorly done, poorly conceived, clunky, a waste of time etc. Or ‘bad’ could mean any less than positive resolution for the character. "

I realize that I could have explained myself alot better. That first definition is the true one.

As far as the second ‘bad’, I wanted to say that I personally love Tragedy. Many of my most-favorite characters across all media are antagonists, and on numerous occasions I would have much preferred to see them succeed. One of my favorites starts out from the beginning as an arguable ‘Hero’ in the story, but as things keep progressing, his quest for self-discovery corrupts his convictions and seemingly drives him insane.

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To my recollection you’re not walking down a street but p!aying in your own yard (!).

AND, sometimes, it was STILL “Game Over” even if you DID run away… because the Sex Predator caught you anyway!

Nasty.

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What you describe are bad Bad Endings.

“Good” Bad Endings occur when the disaterous result is the result of a legitimately bad choice on the player’s part – a choice which the player knows – or, logically should know – will, or may, lead to the disaterous outcome.

It is the result of “not suffering fools gladly.”

Would you really rather that the player be free to do any stupid old thing, with no real consequence at all? Be careful what you wish for, because that’s the hallmark of a bafly written game!

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Well said. Bad endings can still serve a purpose, but they must be handled with care.

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i think it depends on the type of story for how i feel about game overs/bad ends. If its a lighthearted feel good kinda story that focuses on personality stats as opposed to skill stats then they would feel out of place imo but something dark and gritty like choice of rebels then yeah makes sense.

That being said as a rule of thumb bad ends/game overs should be handled the same way you would handle a good end, that is they should make logical/narrative sense and feel earned. If i get a game over as an organic result of my choices and i can look back and say “yeah i see where i messed up and where i what i could do to change how things ended up” thats a “good” bad end/game over in my eyes. On the other hand if you blind side me with a a bad end/game over some inconsequential choices that really should not have lead to whatever outcome this is then thats frustrating.

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Hate, loathe, despise and abominate.

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Bad Ending= ME3 ending is bad m’kay?

Good Ending = Jade Empire (Give you 1 good, 1 bad, and 1 WTF?). That’s how you do it. You don’t go philosophical with the ending shoving it down people’s throats then go ‘What? That was my vision’. Guess what? keep it to yourself then. :roll_eyes:

In a game where you give people choices, you owe them some closure. Not a ‘Screw you, I couldn’t think of a better ending’. In stories, now that’s a different thing…

Proceed to write the bad ending in the story What? I have Gad Poweh! I can do anything I want! :rofl:

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70

I’m personally neutral on bad endings tbh: the ending itself can be awesome and amazing and perfect at resolving character arcs, but I’ll still end up heartbroken and bawling my eyes out because I got too attached to the characters and wanted to see them have a happy ending lmao.

That said, I do actually enjoy game overs when they’re done right. I remember Breach: The Archangel Job had a whole DnD-style system where you weren’t guaranteed to succeed even with high stats, and I honestly loved it, because it always felt like my decisions had a lot more weight, and I had to really think about what I wanted to do and what risks I was willing to take.

However, what I don’t enjoy is when the author punishes the player for deviating from the One True Path, and just decides to kill them off or give them a half-assed ending.

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For me, that’s a major point of distinction between an interactive novel and a game with a storyline. (I refer to interactive novels as games all the time because it’s sort of the custom around here, but in my mind there’s a rather clear difference.) In a game, although ideally the “bad endings” will be interesting (there’s a reason YouTube has hours and hours of complied death scenes from early-'90s Sierra adventure games; they raised hilarious-but-also-genuinely-disturbing game-overs to the level of gnarly art), they won’t (and shouldn’t) be satisfying - you should want to go back and try again. In an interactive novel, even the unhappiest ending should leave me feeling that the story is complete.

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I like having multiple paths to victory and I obviously wouldn’t want to die for picking a wrong option with limited information, but on the whole I’m all for the inclusion of bad outcomes. Especially if they’re fleshed out and fit the genre, or if I’ve already won and am just messing around.

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Depending on the nature of the story, bad endings or game over states really don’t bother me all that much on their own. Was it kinda bull that I died to a bogus stat check in the final climax of a story when the narrative made it out like I should have had resources at my disposal to prevent that? Yeah, sure, that pisses me off, I won’t lie.

What gets my goat more, though, is when you can tell the “bad ending” is an attempt by story or author to punish you for not doing what they wanted you to do - and when I say this, I mean that you’re still following the plot, of course, but if you decide not to do something the game is trying to force you into, or you take a different path instead just to explore the options, the game comes down on you for it and tries to guilt trip you for not going the way it wanted you to.

The most immediate example I’ve played recently is that HG where you get forced into life as a gladiator of Rome. When you get into the gladiatorial part of the story, you can begin looking for ways to escape in earnest - which, for a while, amount to nothing but, “you’re wasting your time, there’s no way out,” and then the story forces you back into arena politicking and character drama. However, one bout in particular has a four month windup time, where you have the option to do nothing but look for escape routes, which you can eventually find and use to, you know, escape.

Only to get home, find your people butchered and your village burned, and then be told by a short epilogue how incompetent you were according to your stat spread. In my case, I hyper focused on escaping over all else, including romance, so the game called me “romantically clueless.”

Given how hyped up this major bout is, it’s clear that the story wanted you to fight in it and be involved in its drama, so escaping instead and getting slapped with all that is pretty telling: “You didn’t fight in my big dramatic fight, so you get a bad ending and I’ll insult you, too.”

Bad endings that exist for no other reason than to mess with you also get on my nerves. Same story, different scenario: All through the story up to the point where you’re forced to swear an oath of loyalty to Rome in order to begin your gladiatorial training, you’re a slave and get treated horribly. So naturally, when the game says that you have to swear loyalty to Rome, at that point, my decision is, “hell no.”

Well, you get killed on the spot if you do that.

That on its own is fine, that’s just Romans being Romans, no surprises there. But what makes it bullshit is that EVERY SENTENCE of you swearing your oath, you get the choice to decide that you’re not gonna do this.

Which leads to you dying.

You either completely swear the oath, or die.

Why is this necessary? It’s pretty well implied that if we don’t obey, we’ll get killed, I see no good reason to keep dangling that fake choice over my head.

And I believe someone mentioned it being crappy when you lose because you didn’t follow the “true” story path? Well, Magikiras is another game that massively annoyed me, and it’s super guilty of that. Magikiras is a war story which I enjoyed playing… right up until I was getting into my power suit, only to be told over comms that it was too late and the enemy set off their doomsday weapon and everybody is going to die now.

Boom, game over, right there.

I was left scratching my head at that, because while I wasn’t completely curbstomping the game, I thought I was making a pretty good show of it.

And then I read the in-game “here’s what you should have done to win” guide, and realized that basically every choice I made went against the author’s intended story path, so I was basically screwed the whole time, but the author just decided to let me kept stumbling through until I inevitably hit an unavoidable game over.

Worse, I played my soldier as sensible. Logical. Practical and conscious of both resources and manpower before ever committing to any major firefight. The game expected me to be a The Expendables level of action hero from the word go.

THAT pissed me off extremely bad. I haven’t touched that game since.

So those are three reasons why I dislike bad endings and game overs.

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Not a fan of Game Overs. I feel like they’re a bit of a cop-out and there’s no point in the game where you can put one in and have it still be satisfying. If a player gets one early on, it’ll break the pacing and ruin whatever immersion you were building up for them. If a player gets one later on, it’ll be incredibly frustrating to have to replay almost the entire game. There’s other ways to punish a player for making poor decisions that don’t involve forcing them to replay the game. Having said that, I did like the Game Over in Highlands, Deep Waters where you can drink some random ass potion and die but the game made it extremely clear what a bad idea it was and also allowed you to continue playing past that point (so not really a proper Game Over I suppose lol).

Bad Endings, sure, as long as they’re satisfying. If they’re used as game overs, then no. I think it’s really hard to determine what makes a satisfying ending though. Imo, a good Bad Ending would possibly:

  • happen at the end of the book
  • be hard to trigger (require multiple decisions throughout the book)
  • be ambiguous (hard to do in a lot of cases but try to allow the player to decide whether it’s “good” or “bad”)
  • have an epilogue that’s got a similar length and detail as a “good” ending
  • not be all bad, include a bit of hope/happiness (if someone dies, you could include a fond memory of something they said and other characters taking it to heart. if the PC dies in something like a failed rebellion, you could allude that they became a martyr for a future revolution)

I tend to think that stat checks should be less about punishing the PC and more about rewarding the player and so ultimately, I think that endings in general should never be a result of passing or failing stat checks and more about the kind of person the reader is playing.

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I like the official CoG policy on game-over Bad Endings. They’re not allowed to happen until at least three-quarters of the way through the story, and they have to be narratively satisfying and in some way “awesome” - a dramatic but fitting conclusion to the character’s arc that is genuinely interesting to read. It’s nearly always cumulative or the result of failing multiple stats checks, and it’s never the inevitable consequence of a particular choice. And usually the text in the “bad ending” hints at what you might have done differently to get a different result.

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Way too simple answer, perhaps, but - I loathe getting them, but objectively, I can see their value.

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As a general rule I like them. But I hate them in CoG games because you can’t make saves whenever you want. Which translates to the game wasting a lot of your time whenever you die.

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I’m fine with them so long as there are checkpoints in the game

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On one hand I do like that I don’t automatically get a great ending whatever I do, both because I get a greater sense of accomplishment from getting a great ending if not all the possible endings are great and because it means that my actions really make a difference.
But I don’t enjoy bad endings either, if it’s too difficult to get a good ending compared to ending up with a bad ending with my preferred play style and types of MCs for a particular COG or HG that takes away a lot of my enjoyment of that particular COG or HG. And even when there’s less chance of this happening, knowing that there are potentially real bad endings I get, makes that COG or HG more stressful for me. I can certainly still enjoy those HGs or COGs enough for them to be among my top 10 COGs and HGs, but I don’t get the same kind of relaxing feeling that I get from my top 2 COGs/HGs.

For me, the sweet spot is when a COG or HG have some endings that are definitely great endings, but also some endings that are average, bittersweet or, if in a kind of low-stakes COG or HG bad-ish, but not full-on bad. I think my favorite COG, Jolly Good-Cakes and ale and my favorite HG-Life of a Wizard, both do this well. Jolly Good-Cakes and ale is quite low-stakes, so the worst that can happen to you is failing to accomplish anything of note and having a quite uncertain future(and also in the absolute worst case scenario, being suspected of being a master criminal, but that’s a worry for the future, and is something that still may be turned around. But you can still get really good outcomes for your MC, like them being elected as the new chairman of their club and the club becoming really popular and/or succesful, finding a romantic partner and ensuring the patronage of their aunt and uncle. So even though the MC can’t get a really bad ending, there are also some endings and end states that are really good, while others clearly aren’t that good, though still not really bad.

In Life of a Wizard, with the possible exceptions of the evil path, which I’ve never tried, your character will never get a fully bad ending. But there’s still two really great endings, that both are a bit challenging, and that you likely won’t get on many of your playthroughs, unless you use the excact same strategy and MC in every playthrough. And there’s also several other accomplishments that will be mentioned in the epilogue and that are part of the end of state and that all takes a certain amount of effort to get(I’m not talking about those that are automatic, like leaving your home town). I do also quite like the way this is done in many of the series, where you can get both good endings and/or endstates where you’re in a good position for the next part of that series and less good endings where things like the MC losing one of their companions permanently, the “bad guy” getting away places being destroyed or other things happening that are putting the MC in a position that is a bit worse for the next part or just make you feel in other ways that your MC didn’t fully succeed, even though they’re still alive.

So, I both dislike when a COG or HG is set up so that the MC will succeed whatever they do and when bad endings are both really harsh and too much of a struggle to avoid. I prefer something in the between, where there’s a chance of not getting a good ending, but the worse endings are either just a little bit bad/averageish/bittersweet or it not being that difficult to avoid the bad ending(s) without being forced into a really narrow path(especially when that narrow path doesn’t even seem intuitive to you.

I was lucky enough to not try any COGs or HGs with early game overs until quite recently, but I won’t deny that I generally find them to be really annoying. There have been a couple of HGs, like Breach and 50, where I can see that they at least fit with the style of the HG and the atmosphere(I guess) that they’re trying to convey. But although this may incline me to be a bit more forgiving, but it is still annoying constantly have to restart because of making a wrong decision(like in 50) or having to restart because of unlucky “dice rolls”(like in Breach). And both of the HGs in question have their own problems when it comes to how those game overs. In 50 there’s just too many game overs and unless and until you’ve figured out the mystery, you won’t be able to avoid a bad ending. In Breach, while most of the game overs seem to be largely avoidable if you play to your MC’s strenghts or at least if you also make the “right” kind of builds for your character, there’s a scene in a mission between the two planned missions where AFAICT, it’s just too easy to get unlucky and get a game over on normal level and harder, even if you develop the “right” abilities for those particular tests. And that game over is a really unheroic one, so there’s not even that more heroic feeling you can get from some of the other game overs in that HG. For reasons that I’ll be happy to share if someone is curious, I’m personally opposed to restarting chapters, so saving checkpoints just don’t work for me.

So, I dislike game overs much more than bad endings and generally find them to be a great annoyance. If a HG has to have early or mid-game/story game overs, I think they should either be easy to avoid or there being a really good reason for them being there and in the second instance, I think the writer or writers should ensure that they don’t become a chore to try to avoid and, generally, that making sensible, genre-savvy and/or intuitive decisions should at least for most playthroughs be enough to avoid them.

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I enjoy these types of endings it feels like my choice actually have Consequences. Also I don’t feel like it’s a failure on the creators part it’s part of the game. It might not be to your taste but hey that’s fair. But going out of the way to tell people not to play seems a little extra.

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