Yeah, this is going to feel like a bait-and-switch, unless the not-carry-overs are like, “game over, you die, sucks to be you.”
Having beta’d Talon, I can assure you the story as-is flows easily into a sequel. There are in fact a couple of in-story issues that I’d love for the character to tackle (Moser knows what they are) that just aren’t feasible to tackle in the current game’s storyline wihtout expanding the game’s length by A LOT (A LOT a lot, like, the game would have to be about 50% bigger for each of them at least), but can be easily made into a plot point in a sequel.
My preference is wide. I like choices and replayability. I don’t mind “long” games as you’ve described them, as long as the game itself isn’t too long or is paced appropriately. I don’t think deep games are for me.
Oh yes. I think what was learned from all that is you’re better off not even having a particular ending or story path than you are having it but rendering it illegitimate. I think a lot of people were surprised at just how passionate readers got about that. I know I was. But in retrospect it does make sense: by the time a sequel comes around, an early purchaser has been living with this story for some time. If it was popular, and these pretty much all were popular books, you have a sizable amount of people who are now invested in this tale as they told it through the endings available. Now if you swoop in a couple years down the line and say “Only path X will be continued. Everyone on paths Y, Z, 1, 2, and 3 will have their endings retconned/have to start over” you are messing with some powerfully entrenched headcanon for how this person might have wanted that sequel to go. That is something one does at their peril.
It’s not really the author’s fault; presumably they went in with the best of intentions and likely either never planned on a sequel or never realized that what they saw as the ‘true’ ending didn’t jive with how readers saw it. Plus, some of those endings were never viable candidates for a sequel. But it’s certainly not the fault of the readers either. Some people got too worked up about it, but they still had valid points; if you retcon the ending they got, what even was the point of the story for them at all? The ultimate takeaway is that if you have even the slightest inkling of a sequel in your head, temper your width. It makes your future writing easier and your future readers happier.
A very beautiful aspiration and one I strive for, but I’m also a firm believer in perfect being the enemy of good A masterpiece of a game that’s partially-finished because it’s impossible to get down is still only a partially-finished game, even if you learn a lot from the experience (speaking as someone with a lot of unfinished projects hanging around on my computer)
I think there’s a valid question in “which facet will spending more effort and wordcount on produce more enjoyment for my players?”
Anyway, I tend to really dig the long epic games. Lucid’s “Life of” games are pretty awesome, as are Kevin Gold’s Choice of Robots, Alexandria and Magics (Alexandria is humorously a very short long game but a lot of the long games are actually shorter wordcount wise, interestingly) and of course the Infinity series (is it up to twenty years in universe yet?). Most of my fave CoGs are from that side of things.
Width, meanwhile…I like it but there are sound reasons why CoG advises against too much of it. Just remember not to invalidate endings. I think this was a flaw in Choice of Romance, because Gabriel(la) was presented as a valid option for a love interest but her sequel would have to be completely different from the sequel where you romanced the monarch - and the original design was a dating sim for crying out loud, so invalidating any choice you made was kind of meh. I like Affairs of the Court, don’t get me wrong, but that’s an example of how not to do a trilogy.
I am also surprised to see that the very obvious jokes about your phrasing have been more-or-less kept to a minimum
In my experience the best I.F. games tend to be structured similar to the best R.P.G. video games; that is to say mostly a mix of “wide” and “deep”.
Games like ‘Fallout’ or ‘V:tM Bloodlines’ tend to have a large amount of choices and replayability, along with having detailed routes and branches for different choices, making them “wide”; while also having their main narratives be not particularly long and typically focusing more on a short period of time and character development, which help make them more “deep”.
I think that’s why people liked ‘V:tM Nightroad’ so much, it really has the feeling and tone of an older C.R.P.G., and feels like an I.F. adaptation/spiritual successor to the original ‘Bloodlines’.
Totally depends on the game IMO. I’ve seen short narrow games that have been great, and long branching ones that have also been, and everything in between. I’d say if you’re asking from a storefront standpoint, most people will say long as I hear “too short” complaints often and some people will say they won’t try games under x words long, and often readers are not going through games more than once or twice making width of limited value. (Not my personal opinion BTW, I actually do like games where you can see completely different aspects of the story on a second play through )
I think a lot has to do with what the game hopes to accomplish and keeping things in balance enough to stop the game skewing too far in one direction.
Too long for the sake of length and the pacing can be off.
Too wide and without care the game can potentially start to lack focus and become bland or scattered because every eventuality needs to be accounted for.
Too linear and the storyline rails can become obvious.
But yep, if a long game needs that length to tell the story it is designed for that will work. Wide branching games can be amazing, especially if combined with some extra length to finish out each storyline or if done as lots of branch and returns + many variables. Some deep linear games can read more like personalised novels and work that way if the writer is skilled enough and the storyline designed to suited to it. So yep, don’t think I can really vote as it depends. I’d almost say depth->width->length if I had to choose, but that wouldn’t hold true across the board.
I think where a lot of writers new to choice-based writing go wrong is that they can construct a perfectly fine deep linear narrative, but it instantly loses immersion the moment they introduce choices, because the story is too deep. It doesn’t allow for any width whatsoever, because the story is already written. And it’s not even that the reader feels railroaded, it’s more that the world is so fleshed out that they simply lack context for the choices without a major infodump right at the start. The authors attempt to justify this as “well we don’t want to spoil the story!” except… in many cases, the MC knows all of this stuff already. It’s the reader that doesn’t.
Yeah you’ll make yourself crazy doing that. The issue with everyone saying “all of the above” or “I can’t possibly choose” is that the act of writing is making this choice. You have to stop somewhere. You literally cannot write everything.
Uniquely, for choice games, the decision is whether to have loads and loads of branching paths or a linear game with tonnes of detail. If you don’t make the choice early, you’ll eventually get stuck when the scope balloons out of control and the whole game is overwhelming to work on. There are graveyards of abandoned WIPs in this forum and almost always it’s the same issue: the writer got overwhelmed with the amount of work involved when the scope blew out of control.
Set the scope ahead of time. Make the decision early. Don’t force yourself to do a long, wide, and deep game. You’ll burn yourself out.
Though I’ve barely started writing, the expected trajectory for my game is character development, then early branching, then mostly linear, except with a few checkpoints where you can decide to branch out again. So it’s not going to have much replayability on the same major route unless your very early decisions differ, but each major route should be pretty different. And it’s most certainly not going to be long.
It’s a good question. My sense is that my natural instinct is to focus a little too much on width. I like the idea of somebody experiencing a new story each time they play one of my games, and discovering new secrets and subplots and characters that they might not have even suspected existed.
But, as others have said, this comes at the expense of depth - you can’t spend as much time developing the characters or the situations, because there are so many possibilities. Plus, only people who actually do replay the game are going to benefit.
Can we add another option? Mechanically strong games.
Meaning, titles were Author devoted some of their time to build underlying gameplay mechanics that goes beyond classic simple “if this single stat is x or more, then this, otherwise that” AND work(makes sense) narratively.
Some examples include (but not limited to) most of Cataphrak’s games, Kyle Marquis’s works(especially Night Road and second Pon Para), Kevin Gold’s Choice of Magic…
Yeah, often such titles also end up being “monster games”, that are both Wide, Deep and Long(or have atleast two of this attributes), but to me it awlays special kind of enjoyment to play interactive story where author themseves try to stay creative and engaging with stat system they developed.
BTW, answered wide in the pool, but it’s very hard choice in my case.
Still, in the end I think interactiveness is the the main attribute that discerns IF from other types of fiction, and replayability(wideness) plays very strongly on it.
The way I personally define long, wide and deep when it comes to COGs and HGs, is probably a bit different from yours and has more to do with the quantity of the content. That is how much content and in what way much or little content.
I’d consider long COGs and HGs to be HGs and COGs where each playthrough takes a long time, because of the large number of “pages” and also often because they are parts of series.
I consider COGs and HGs to be wide when they are branchy, so that there will be different branches in at least significant parts of the story, including the end, which will come about because of decisions you made during your playthrough.
Deep for me will have more to do with the level of customization, like the level of detail I can go into when creating my character, and also how many choices I get that are nor neither that branchy nor choices that don’t really matter that much at each “page”. By that I mean choices where the choices all will affect what happens short term, like leading to success or failure in that situation, but not necessarily(and usually not, I guess) leading to the story branching out in new directions that are significantly different from the main “story track” you were on.
I think I understand your definition of a long COG or HG and that I at least partly understand your definition of a wide COG or HG, but I don’t think I really understand your definition of a deep COG or HG. So I wonder if you could go into more detail about what you mean when you say a HG or COG is deep. Which aspects are you talking about then? In the same way I also wonder if your definition of wide is about the same as mine or if it also includes customization. I also have to say that I do get the impression that your defintion of long, wide and deep fcuses more on the story aspects of COGs and HGs than the game aspects. Would you agree with me in that assesment?
I doubt the percentages move much from this point on, but I thought I’d memorialize them as of 4/13/22.
23% long, 24% wide, 53% deep. Each approach is favored by a pretty respectable percentage of players. Going into this, I would have guessed Deep would win because I assume folks who value romance and social interactions would usually pick Deep, and that group has always seemed the most sizable to me.
@will
While it may be true for some people and some games, I for example played through titles like Lost Heir, Pon Para, Mecha Ace, Choice of Magic and so one dozens of times. Not as much as Ivan_the_Sword_Angel, but still.
Exactly because they had enough content and variation to leave me engaged for many consequent runs.
I’d definitely hazard a guess that my game is among the most replayed games in terms of percentage. But yeah for the overwhelming majority of players they’re one and done.
A masterpiece of a game that’s partially-finished because it’s impossible to get down is still only a partially-finished game, even if you learn a lot from the experience (speaking as someone with a lot of unfinished projects hanging around on my computer)
but a lot of the long games are actually shorter wordcount wise, interestingly) and of course the Infinity series (is it up to twenty years in universe yet?). Most of my fave CoGs are from that side of things.