If it just means no “skill” stats (but still personality), so in turn no skill checks, I’m all for that.
If it means no visual indication of personality flags that affect anything at all (flavour, relationships, endings, whatever), that’d bother me since I obsessively check stat screens to know how my choices/character are being perceived by the story. It really helps to know if there was any miscommunication. I don’t want to play a rude bitch but end up treated as a happy little empathetic girl who’s occasionally snarky.
If it means nothing at all and everything is decided case by case, I would probably be fine but it has the negative side effect of also not allowing any personality to be referenced, only specific choices. As implied, how my character is perceived really matters to me, so I’d find that disappointing.
With nothing I mean nothing. However, with time and via choices you could develop a personality. If you with time choose always options that could be considered sarcastic your flavour text will be more sarcastic. Think more In a Bioware Shepard.
This is because you are an Android prototype just created at the beginning of the game with very specific skills and powers. The reason why you were created.
Stats and personality stats didn’t make sense for my project and simple didn’t work.
You couldn’t choose what you did in the past because there is no past you see your own creation then Your slaver won’t let you have a personality at the beginning of the game.
Discover who you really are, what do you want and Even What is your name is part of the plot of the game. Yes You don’t have name at the start you are Prototype Max-01.
The one thing I hate and what for me is a wrong choice, I want to reset is, when I choose an answer and suddenly it gets a tone that I did not choose or was aware of.
So when I tell someone I am sorry and in the next part I say it in a sarcastic way. I do not mind failing a Check or so, but reacting in a way I did not want or chose is so frustrating that I mostly just stop playing. I might start new in a few weeks but mostly I don’t.
Totally!
IF stats are included, then I aim for success. But if the game system doesn’t include stats and is solely decision based then… I guess that’s even better.
I’m a visual novel player mainly - I play interactive books because I like visual novels, and the two genres have similarities. And only few visual novels have stats, especially nowadays. I’m waaay more used and proficient at games that are solely answer based, and I favor these.
About NEEDING to get a good ending or not, that depends, really. If the story is somber to begin with and it seems obvious you won’t have a good ending, then I’ll take what the game has to offer, knowingly. But if the game isn’t some depressing thing that obviously couldn’t give you a perfect ending, and then discover none of the endings is “perfect” anyway, then I consider that to be not satisfying at all.
Some exceptions exist, though…
I don’t know if you play J-RPG games, but one big exception for me is Tales of Xillia 2.
Major ending spoilers ahead: the only ending I truly love for that one is the Julius ending, where basically, out of love for his brother, the MC kills all of the other characters from the team and dooms the universe, since the only way of saving it would have been to kill his brother. To some people this ending is OOC, but it depends on the choices you make during the story. In my case, the MC was extremely attached to his brother, and that was the only ending that made sense. So yeah, it is the “bad ending” of the game, but it’s the best in my opinion.
Honestly, spending most of my time restarting and skipping through a game because I couldn’t figure out which choice correlated with which skill for the 100th time just ruins my experience completely. Some of those choices are so bloody vague, or as mentioned, end up being completely different dialogue to what I expected. Sometimes I’m so frustrated with keeping track of 15 different stats and relationships, and so tired of my character failing or being humiliated, I just quit and forget about it, which is so unsatisfying.
Focusing on pouring everything into one or two stats for fear of being punished isn’t far removed from playing a linear game anyway, so if railroading players like that is the only foundation for your branching storyline, you kind of scrap the freedom to choose the story readers want to experience, and isn’t that the point of ‘choice of games‘? You wouldn’t play dnd and dump all of your stats save one with an automatic fail for everything unrelated. I would much rather enjoy the story as a role-playing experience and have characters react to my choices or personality. Failure and tension, for example, could be set events, or based off of the character’s past, difficult choices, or fears etc. Wayhaven is the best example of this that I’ve come across.
To be honest, skill based stat min-maxing seems to be so baked into all choice of games, and I’ve played so many now, that my tolerance for being punished by the system is pretty depleted. I’ve stopped regularly checking the app for new games and sadly don’t see myself partaking in them like I used to. I recently quit a brand new game after sinking like 5 hours into it because I was so frustrated by the number of stats and opaque language, I just don’t have the energy to deal with it anymore.
This is just not my experience (luckily) – there are a few (mostly HG games) that are min-max orientated but 90% of the published games can be completed without min-maxing.
This makes sense now.
Min-maxing is a very specific term of art in game-making:
Min-maxing has always been a concern in games at least as long as I can remember … CoG in a general, pro-active sense actually tries to avoid this by encourging many different practices.
That isn’t to say there are min-max issues that don’t crop up in individual games… sometimes to play a certain build and succeed you NEED to min-max within that build…
Most of what you experience is a result of a lack of balance … stat-checks should not be a total road-block, and sometimes we find they are
Perhaps I was being too specific. What I mean to say is that the vast majority of choice of games I’ve played have always been overshadowed by their check-based stats, and perhaps it says more about me than it does the system, but I sometimes find it very disheartening as a player.
Fortunately, I still enjoy the resetting, as long as it doesn’t get too ridiculous, of course.
On that, I agree 100%. I don’t mind stats being there, and playing a role, but I tend to enjoy games with more RP and less stat checks more.
Yeah, Wayhaven is really good on that front. I also felt that with the upcoming Golden Rose.
I ended up ragequitting Welcome to Moreytown for these reasons - I always got stuck in a sort of infuriating failrun and was totally unable to get out of that in ANY fathomable way.
Mind if I ask you what game are you talking about? Just so I can be cautious and keep that in mind, if I haven’t played it yet.
The game I’m currently playing is agent 180. I’m enjoying it, don’t get me wrong, but a couple of choices either totally baffled me in terms of what stat they correlated with, or my chosen stat build didn’t apply to the options so failure was the only option. I just can’t tolerate humiliation or failure in too large a quantity, and from past experiences I know an early mistake can be the difference between passing a big stat check or failing and getting a mediocre ending down the line. I’ve restarted it a few times now and I just needed a break, may keep going tomorrow.
I think maybe being a bit of a perfectionist puts me at odds with this particular style of game more than anything else.
I think the worst-case example of restarting a game for me was Gilded Rails. That game did me in fr, to this day I don’t know what any of the (relatively) successful endings look like lmao.
Hmm Agent 180 isn’t on my to-play list, so at least I don’t have to worry about it. And well, I don’t even know about Gilded Rails, strangely.
Overall though, I think it’s even MORE frustrating if you actually like the game but find yourself unable to play it without failing. If you don’t like the game very much, it’s easier to just put it down and leave it alone.
I’m a perfectionist too, though, and always paranoid about any kind of stat changes, so I’m NOT cut for these games either, but eh, I go by somehow. I would miss out on too much if I didn’t make the effort.
Yes, I find it hard to give up on the games I’m most invested in. Heart of the House and the Superlatives are a couple of my favourites and I restarted them so many times I memorised the answers after a while and had it down pat. I remember playing the first couple of games in the Versus series, and god help me I think I restarted those games like 50 times, I was ready to throw my phone at a passing car.
Strangely I’ve found a few hosted games seem to stray from the formula a little more: Wayhaven and Fallen Hero being two of my favourites. I can play through them and be content with almost every choice I make, it’s like the story naturally falls into place around me, it’s beautiful. Restarting them is usually just due to their replay value; it’s a delight going through them all again and uncovering all the different routes and little nuances. With a lot of other games it’s usually just “finally, a good ending, I’m not touching it again let’s just leave it at that!”
Thank you for sharing this. It helped me make up my mind about buying the game. It will be a hard pass for me, lol.
As for the original question, I loathe games that are so stat focused that it makes it impossible to play it or to have a pleasurable experience playing it. I have played games where I died six times in a row because I didn’t up a stat every single chance I got and, after the sixth time, I was done.
I get what Mara is saying to an extent, but I feel like a COG game should be more story based than stat based. If I want to play something where I have to forego MC development because all that matters is whether your Agility is high enough to avoid being stabbed in the face in the third chapter, I’d rather go play Skyrim or Oblivion or some other sandbox game (where I have to make up a deep story as I go along) and be done with it. If I’m playing a choice games, I want a story that has the MC as the center of it, not a stat-raiser. (That said, I enjoyed the way Breach: The Archangel Job handled stats, even the failures).
Haha, fortunately, I don’t have a lot of that since I restart and restart and restart before reaching the end, and when I reach the finale, usually I’m set up for a good ending. But exceptions are true, like my first playthroughs of PsyHigh when suddenly everything went crashing down (though that was pure inexperience since it was my first choice game other than visual novels), the forever doomed Moreytown, or the other forever doomed Runt of the Litter, where I go by the entire game pretty well, and then my character ALWAYS gets killed right before reaching his destination by the end of the game.
For some other games, I simply learn.
I learn the author’s style, I understand the other characters better and better, I get more and more familiar with the mechanics, I feel more and more connected with the MC. Well, that’s mostly about series, of course. Best example is Samurai of Hyuga. I’ve restarted the first game a lot of times, the second one slighly less, the third one only a couple of times, and the last one like… I dunno… maybe twice? And well, you mostly go blind attunement wise in the last one, and I still remained at 100% at the end.
One may think there’s no “getting gud” in choice games, but that’s not true. One always gains experience and becomes better, even if it’s only about reflection based games.
To add my two cents, unless they result in a death scene (or are the result of too high a value/don’t match up with the stat they’re supposed to be testing) I don’t see the player failing (a) stat check(s) to be an indicator that the game is inherently bad.
I understand that some readers just want their perfect/golden playthrough (and I respect that!) but I also can’t fanthom this idea that a failure is the end of all, even less so if it opens up new plotlines/ways to get around a challenge (which, thank god, I’ve seen done more and more recently).
No, but more often than not you clearly miss out on interesting scenes or plot points that can add up to the overall goal of the story. Not only that, but it’s disappointing having to perfect your stats and your answers through trial and error just to experience friendship or relationship scenes with characters. If you fail at a number of checkpoints, for most of the games I’ve played, it’s like having a bunch of doors slammed in your face and you just end up with an unlikeable, clumsy, unskilled, and lonely character. It’s so obvious you’re missing out on huge chunks of the story that it’s just a real bummer.
Depends on the game, really.
While I usually despise failing checks, on a case by case basis, in some games, I may be okay with that. Mainly in RP oriented games where, as you said, a failure can open new paths. The problem comes from games that are too heavily stat based, and that lock you out of any form of good ending because of a stat fail. That’s basically my predicament in Runt of the Litter.
I don’t necessarily think I game where you fail at checks is inherently bad. I love the upcoming Golden Rose, and I’ve failed a couple of checks in that one, but it’s a heavily RP based game and it won’t impede you from getting a good ending.
Sometimes, my perfect playthrough actually includes some check failures, or even “bad” choices. If I think it fits the story or is unavoidable, and doesn’t lock me out of a good ending.
But when I know the game isn’t RP oriented, or if I don’t actually know how important checks are, I’m getting waaay too paranoid since I don’t want to get stuck in an unwinnable situation because of stats. Even more so, that would mean I couldn’t RP at all, unless I had a very specific character in mind.
Honestly that’s what the majority of the stats are for (especially the hidden ones). I wanted to try using stats to shape the story around your character and try to make it more immersive, rather than just using them to gate content. But then again, I went at it more like interactive fiction than a game.
I am so bad at some choice games, and so good at others. For me it seems to be if I vibe with the author or not, if we are on the same page I never have to look at the stats, it works out anyway (Tin Star, Choice by Gaslight), and sometimes I struggle, but okay runs work out anyway (Heart of the House, Samurai of Hyuga (so bad at attunement)), and occasionally I never get past the demo because it doesn’t make sense even if the writing is lovely.
So, here is what I’ve noticed some writers do and it feels the least invasive while also allowing for descriptive explanations.
Example stats -
Str, Int, Dex, Cha
Every question, if allowing for all options to attempt it, will be laid out = 1. Str, 2. Int, 3. Dex, 4. Cha.
The reader will pick up on this before too long, and a writer no longer has to use a thesaurus to figure out how to use the exact word of the stat in the prompt.
Personally, I think that having skill checks is fine as long as they give benefits which are “good to have” but not essential for story progression.
Using my favourite series as an example, Sabres of Infinity was an excellent game because it clearly indicated what stats were being tested and you could get a decent ending with sub-optimal stats. However, I would have preferred a more “points buy” kind of system which the same author used for Mecha Ace - your core stats shouldn’t change that much throughout the story. But the sequel, Guns of Infinity, was a true masterpiece because there was a difference between specialising in Soldering, Charisma and Intellect, and each gives unique benefits which the other stats may not have access to.
