For me, in a choice-based game, it’s important for the player to know at least the general background and previous life events that the character they’re playing has been involved in. Otherwise, there’s no way to properly make choices that the character would, which would obviously be shaped by what they’ve done and experienced.
That goes for “seeing” other events as well; if it’s not something the character I’m playing would know, despite trying to not let it color my choices for that character, it invariably will at some point. To me, the whole point of IF is to be able to experience the story from a character’s perspective, and make choices from that same perspective based on their knowledge.
well, I’m not actually aware of the thing the protagonist knows until it’s revealed, so it’s not as if I’m going to be thinking about the backstory before then. Now, if I’m being constantly told there’s a backstory and the game just refuses to tell me the details then I’d find that more annoying than immersion-breaking
There sure is. I haven’t seen the referenced thread but I can guess given what Eric’s last unusual project was. If people want less homogeneity, you need to throw some support behind those projects that deviate from the popular norm. Otherwise creators just kinda go “Well that didn’t work! No one liked it at all!” (at best they get ignored, at worst criticised) and unless they feel like doing another hobby project for themselves, they’ll more often than not head back to the popular formula.
Have no idea why it’d be a selling point, but it is a little thing that can be appreciated. I’ve seen people get quite vocal about being told their character is eating meat or drinking alcohol when there’s no reason they’d have to be. An if statement can nicely fix that and takes little effort in most cases to code in an alternative. (I’ve done it in my own games, it’s usually just an immersion thing).
This is literally the only reason I made a point of watching Knives Out in the theatre instead of waiting for it at home. I WANT more movies like that, so I need to throw money at them so they’re successful. So you can all thank me and my sacrifice for the existence of Glass Onion.
haha I’m glad it worked out for you
I could go on and on about CS projects but from a movie perspective I’d just like to put this here as one of my own examples of this trend: Legion. I’m not usually big into many of the of superhero movies and TV shows being produced of late as a general rule but this was amazing. I told everyone to watch it, but it was so unusual and unpopular that no DVD/BluRay sets were even released past season one outside of the US! They didn’t even bother putting out some bargain bin level CDs. How badly does your show have to be going for that to happen???
The only reason why it got a complete couple of seasons to complete the story arc was apparently one of the higher ups at the production company wanted to know how it would end and greenlit it anyway. (Thank you to who ever it was that did that!) Anyways, yeah. Sadly unusual stuff often has an uphill battle doing well no matter how well done it is
I’d say leaving it unspecified is better than specifiying something that people might have a problem with (and people can have a problem with ANYTHING).
Like, if a player is canoning their character as… I dunno, an observant muslim or something, I’d think that being told they’re drinking any sort alcoholic beverage is a bigger problem than being told they’re drinking an unspecified beverage.
Also saves the bother of not taking into account that one might not want to have the same drink every time. What if I want tea in the morning, but coffee in the afternoon, except when it’s hot and I’d want an orange juice instead?
(It’s just an excuse for a group of people to sit at a table and talk, anyway.)
I don’t love or hate the feature, but I think something like vegetarianism is important for immersion for some folks, especially if there are scenes of the character eating (feasts, parties, dinner dates).
I imagine it would be jarring if a lifelong vegetarian was told their self-insertion character was chowing down on a huge steak or cracking into a lobster. And those kind of details are often important to making a setting feel vibrant. “You and your friends throw a party. There is lots of food there. There are beverages, also.” Is not very vivid.
In Magium you have to choose to have Arraka check with her magic sense for underground tunnels that are not found on the map the king gives you. You don’t need to max premonition or some other stat to get out alive
That’s just bad writing. It’s entirely possible to write a scene that doesn’t necessarily specify food or beverage choice, or without going into excruciatingly detailed descriptions. Give the general vibe of the room. What are people doing? What are people saying? What are people eating/drinking?
Give descriptions that paint a picture, but they don’t have to necessarily specify what the player character is eating/drinking/etc., but they should show what’s going on in the scene, not just tell the player.
I’d think it’s also possible to describe some of the food on table to set the scene, without specifying what the MC is eating (as long as you make sure you have options).
I have two pet peeves really, one possibly more controversial than the other:
Being told I’m attracted to a character or constantly pushed into saying how interesting or compelling they are. I always end up hating them out of pure contrariness
I kind of don’t like see-saw stats! The ones where you have “honest” and “deceitful” on the same bar and increasing one decreases the other. It feels like making the “wrong” choice is so punishing when those kind of stats are involved, because your stat can go down as well as up.
I see your see-saw stats and raise you see-saw RO relationships.
Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck did that, where your relationships with certain ROs depended on you treating their apparent opposites like shit.
I didn’t like any of them, so I tried to keep the bars as neutral as I could because I didn’t have the option of just bottoming the relationship bars out.
Fuck, you’re giving my war flashbacks with that, I had completely forgotten the few WiP and actual games I tried with that nonsense.
Though some games have ‘de-facto see-saw RO relationships’ since the RO choices were constantly ‘side with A or B and if you side with neither, both willl like you less’ even if they don’t appear as such in the stat screen.
Oh God, it’s just the worse. Like, player and MC cannot have their own opinion, instead if you want to romance someone you just become a RO’s “Yes-men”
This actually hearkens back to an old comment I made about how I don’t like suffering ridiculous relationship hits over the most minor stuff.
Choose to hang out with RO 1 instead of RO 2? Lose ten points of friendship with RO 2. Vice-versa with RO 1.
Choose to hang out with RO 1 instead of RO 2, but platonically? Lose five points of friendship with RO 2. Vice-versa with RO 1.
Choose to just hang out on your own to avoid the drama of these two idiots using you as a tug-of-war rope? Lose ten points of friendship with both of them.
Tell the two of them to stop acting like starving dogs fighting over meat? Not an option, pal! But if it was, you’d undoubtedly lose twenty points of friendship with both of them, even if you’re completely justified in calling them out like that.
Assuming you didn’t have previous plans with the other RO you skipped without explanation in favor of hanging out with the other, I presume? (I mean, I would definitely lose relationship points with someone who intentionally stood me up.)
That basically never happens in these stories, from what I’ve seen. You literally just choose to hang out with one versus the other, no prior planning, and whoever you don’t hang out with right at that moment gets miffed about it. If there were a story where you had prior plans, then yeah, the hit would be perfectly understandable.
