As one who was in the same boat in my playthrough, when I told Breeze I was fine with it being only physical with the Lady, the Lady herself broke it off with hir, so she might make the decision for you if you don’t.
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i got the alternative ending. How do i get the ending that have our character from the Hero Rise series??
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Ah thanks, that’s a relief.
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Please don’t read if you have not finished the game. Major plot spoiler.
Is there any way to not sacrifice either Oli or yourself at the end?
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LITERALLY CRYING BECAUSE OF THIS. I’M LIKE “WHAT?!” AND SORRY FOR WRITING IN ALL CAPS MY INTENTION IS NOT TO BE SEEN AS RUDE BUT RATHER AS EMOTIONALLY BROKEN BECAUSE THAT’S HOW I AM RIGHT NOW. LIKE AFTER ALL THE THINGS WE WENT THROUGH ALL THE INVESTIGATIONS WE DID TOGETHER, OPENING UP TO EACH OTHWR LITTLE BY LITTLE, I-
Bye, If you excuse me, I’m going to cry a little more.
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Spoilers:
Yes. There is a third way but I believe you need to have Leader or Officer as your main motivation (must be above 60). When you do, you’ll be able to merge with Dhanoli and become one being.
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Tbh that’s just as bad or even worse.
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You can enter your own mindscape to commune with Oli.
So at least Oli still exists within you if you go with the merge option.
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I’d rather just a ending option where we aren’t merged and one of us isn’t dead or with no body, in fact most of the romances are disappointing, Lady Venuma and you barely even talk to one another and then you seperate.
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I was looking forward to the conclusion of the “Sergiverse”, precisely because it promised a finale and explanation of every major arc in Versus and The Hero Project. Simply put, this promise was not delivered.
While this was supposedly an outlier, my first playthrough resulted in an ending which the game itself had the audacity of telling me “is not canon”. Why the hell would someone make a final instalment in a long series of choice-driven games to mock you by saying that your choices led to a non-canon, not real, ending?
Regardless of that, this was not the major disappointment. The game begins by telling you there will be “a time for Heroes to Rise again”, implying that the plot involving our characters from the Heroes Rise will come after the conclusion of the Versus plot. Well, that is a lie. This is a not a spoiler in itself, but the Heroes Rise characters are mentioned in passing on a brief paragraph at the epilogue, with minor hints, way after any important events in the story, and have literally no involvement whatsoever in the plot. Zachary later implies, on a final note, that there was no technical way to import the characters from another game and that there was no time to tell all the stories in this book, and ends by asking that you fanfic the story yourself, essentially.
This is not an excuse. When you buy a book, you expect to get the whole story, not to make it up on your own imagination. This was not a creative decision, it was a major design flaw not accounted for. As a last resort, you could even have players input their Heroes Rise characters choices and attributes manually, so they could have some participation. The fact that the author did not go the necessary length to deliver on the game’s promises shows that he was not fully committed to the story, and it tells throughout.
This was a major letdown, and it wasn’t because I did not “like” the ending.
Zachary Sergi was the only author from the CoG titles that I supported blindly, after the Heroes Rise trilogy. I regretted that as his style developed into something different during the Hero Project and the second installment of Versus. Now, I regret even spending time playing through all the titles, doing perfect runs, getting all the achievements, and hoping for a satisfying conclusion. The payoffs of various plots felt like slaps on the face, and I can tell from other people’s reactions here that most of them went through the same.
EDIT: You know, they could even have completed the tie-ins with free DLC for The Hero Project: Open Season, or even use code saves to transfer characters and plot elements (as some Hosted Games did). It is simply not technically inviable. Instead, we get a big cliffhanger and an upright middle finger.
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Spoilers for main plot ahead.
I feel really disappointed that there is no option for Oli and mc to be alive together at the end regardless of whatever choices your mc might have made. It feels rather rail-road and it lessens the impact of your decisions. It would have made more sense to me if, for example, Oli could have survived on the route where mc’s main motivation is relationship-focused and then on the route with greater good motivation, sacrificed himself or mc to preserve the peace, etc. That would have made the motivation system much more meaningful and provide a great incentive to keep in characters, and story-wise make the sacrifice even more meaningful when chosen by the players themselves. But that’s just my take on it.
This is still a great story, by all means. The fact that it could make me come back to play COG after such a long period of time speaks volume in itself. Just putting my thoughts out there on how I wish things could have been handled better. Nonetheless I truly enjoyed the game and wish the author the best of luck.
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Preface: I am by no means a fan of sergi’s writing, but I maintain he has potential. However, I’d argue that he is still doing the same not-good thing ever since prodigy:
He is telling his story. Not in the sense ‘he’s the author’, but be it HR or VS, it’s only ever really his own character’s story, with alternate scenes, not paths, tacked on rather begrudgingly it feels. What is really bad though is his tendency to STILL mock people who try to play differently from how he would play, so the according choices are more or less traps.
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How so?
Is there an example of this, because I can’t see where you’re coming from here.
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From the first HR on you have quite railroady games with choices that promise different paths, but all drag you back round to the same course of events:
First HR had the MC being driven entirely by the want for the spotlight, no matter how often you said you don’t care, Open Season forced you to work with people no matter how often you told the game you don’t want to support them. VS is the same, no matter how often you tell the game you don’t want to do X instead of Y it will commonly go round telling you you did Y instead of X after all.
As for mocking people that stray from the canon path: from the infamous ‘patrol the streets’ choice in hr1 to the ‘it’s not canon’ bits now, these bits and pieces are all over the place, unfortunately.
He has gained a bit of infamy in the fandom for this even.
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What? Are there things that aren’t cannon? What are them? I’m completely lost, I didn’t get that message but, if others did, that’s a serious problem. The whole point of IF is that you create your cannon. I’m so confused.
Ok I’m not the user you quoted but this is my perspective: You’re fusing them together. They can’t form a future together as separate individual, can not kiss, can not touch, they can’t see each other. At most, MC can hear him but it’s weird that you’re in a relationship with a person that lives in your head. I mean, sure, they can encounter in dreams but when MC wakes up it’s the same all over again.
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If you sacrifice yourself in place of Doli in the end, you get a “Alternate Ending” message, with the author telling you that you found a non-canon ending, and that you can now play the game again from scratch to find out what would actually have happened if you did what he wanted you to do in one of the pre-destined paths.
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I haven’t played HR so Idk what any of that meant. What are the "it’s not canon bits here?
Oh, for the romance. I have a different L/O.
In the first HR you had a choice about what to do on your first night out as masked hero. Two of these three choices were identical with only a small difference, and the third was ‘patrol the streets’. If you clicked that the game belittled you for making that choice because you could never get your name out quickly like that and you ought to tackle something bigger. It then takes away one of your ‘legend points’ and brings you back to the choicebody to pick between the two remaining (nigh identical) choices.
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Okay but aren’t there still multiple endings?