Depends on their implementation. Does the ending make sense for the story and/or our character? Does it offer some kind of resolution? How easy is it to avoid? Are there any signs that this decision might lead to a bad ending? If I have to meta-game my way around those endings, I usually do not like them.
I recently played Disco Elysium and shot Cunoesse (a ten-year-old). The game ended immediately with a newspaper article about what my main character had done. I’m glad that the developers sat us on our asses for this. While there are a lot of questionable things you can do in this game, this one was especially vile and it wouldn’t have made any sense to let us continue our investigation as an officer of the law.
Personally, I not only like bad endings and game overs, I want more of them. I like when they hit. The tragedy, the pain, the sense of failure, makes me happy, and draws me in.
I was playing the Keeper of Life and Death demo, and I picked an option, and woop, my character died, and it was both shocking, sad, and made me more invested in doing it right.
I also was doing a playthrough of ZE:SH, and the highway fight turned into a massacre. It was horrifying, sad, and interesting.
Maybe I’m a masochist, but I like it.
Obviously, poorly written ones suck, but does poorly written anything.
And I do agree with the checkpoint system for deaths.
I think we gotta clarify what it means ‘Bad ending’. A bad ending for me is: My mc doing everything right and the game still gives me the middle finger. A bad ending isn’t just ‘Everyone died’, or ‘You failed! Try again!’, but it is often a disconnection between the 'Everything leading to this and ‘This becomes it suck mightly’.
As in disregarding the THINGS you worked hoping to get the outcome you wanted.
For exemple, think in this scenario! You play as a farmer, and you do everything right. You water your crop, you feed your cows, you pick up the chicken eggs. You expect to get a harvest and sell it for good money to buy more feeds right?
Here come the bad ending! Nope, there was a drought. Nothing grew! You were broke when you started, and the only feed seller packed and left you high and dry! And without feeds, your cows and chicken starve. Try again!
Now if in this scenario the player is lazy like hell, doesn’t water his crop, doesn’t feed the cow and chicken? By all mean, the bad ending is deserved.
But the crappy ending you get no matter what? Those are the Awful Ending I don’t like.
Is it due to bad writing? I don’t think it is the case every time. Sometimes it’s something else. It’s not always due to ‘Bad writing’, sometimes it’s due to limited time and they had to rush, or someone higher forced them to shove that awful ending in there.
I don’t outright hate bad endings. Sometimes you make the wrong decisions and it locks you out of a “better” ending. If it’s written properly and actually makes me feel like I failed rather than a failure on the author’s part, then I’m fine with it.
What I do hate are early endings. Things where you pick a certain option that prematurely ends the game, taking away any satisfying conclusion to the story. The biggest example for me is in ZE:SH, where entering the wrong room in a laboratory immediately turns you into a zombie. This blow is somewhat softened by the fact that you’re allowed to restart from the beginning of the chapter, but chapters in Zombie Exodus are long and it’s still frustrating. I stopped playing right there and haven’t touched it since.
Most games place checkpoints or allow a player to respawn and try again. Choicescript, however, kind of lives in a default “Ironman” or “Permadeath” mode where the player cannot reverse their decisions or restart from a specific point in the story unless the author goes out of their way to program a save system in. So bad or early endings can hit especially hard in a Choicescript game. It can very easily go from an enjoyable challenge to a frustrating challenge, one that makes me have to quit and not come back until the next day, if ever. And this is coming from someone who’s currently trying to marathon every Souls game.
I despise both bad endings and “game overs” with the heat of a thousand suns. Those things piss me off in video games, but in an IF? Where there is no “reload” to a previous state so you don’t have to waste hours of your effing life replaying shit to try to figure out wtf you did wrong? You may as well steal my wallet, give me a pile of camel shit on a platter, and slap me in the face for good measure–no thank you.
First CoG game I ever played gave me this and I nearly gave up on the entire genre. Stat raiser with a bland MC, passable story, ROs your MC spoke to twice before having to decide if they were in lurv, and one wrong choice ends the game early. Luckily, I discovered another one that was more satisfying, then learned how to code dive to avoid this crap as much as possible. Still don’t like it, though, and with the exception of Breach, which allows for a reload of the chapter where you died, I won’t touch a game with this crap with someone else’s ten foot pole.
