Fallout 3 to have over 200 different endings (also, pet dogs :-))!

[Bodhesatva]

Legend11 said:

Bodhesatva said:

That's not really a story, Legend.

Again, look at something like The Sims; that's the ultimate outcome here. There's a game with a near-infinite number of beginnings and endings. Or Oil God, if you've played that. Or Go.

The more options you continue to add (200 endings now. 400 next year. 600 after that), the more storytelling breaks down, and the more it just becomes a series of actions decided by the end user with no real coherent thread decided by the designer. Which, again, is more like story making.

If I decide I have a brother, and I'm nice to him throughout the game, and then I kill him in the end for no apparent reason, okay, those are some of the 200 choices I've made as I played the game as the end user. But that's a completely incoherent story that makes no sense whatsoever.

I'm not talking about games like The Sims. I'm talking about games with clearly defined story elements (aliens invading Earth, etc) in which the God AI, character AI, and physical laws of the game are so advanced that there won't be 10 endings or 100 endings or even 100,000 endings scripted and changed slightly based on your character 's stats and some flags in the game. There will be literally an infinite amount of endings based not only on what your character does but also based on what the AI of all the non-player characters in the game do as well as the course of events in the game itself.

Also I agree it's not a story in the traditional sense but an interactive story in which you are very much a part of it and help to decide where the story goes. I think that's far more excited than playing some scripted story in which you're forced to go from point A to point B to point C by the developers. Really what is the point of playing an interactive story if your control of events is just an illusion? Why not simply go watch a movie, tv show, or read a book if you want no real control and the biggest benefit of interactive storytelling removed? I think fans of WRPGs really want the kind of thing I mentioned in my first paragraph as opposed to some fans of JRPGs who may just want the illusion of control.

I think what you're imagining, Legend, isn't possible. I don't mean because of current technology, I mean because it's logically impossible. You're imagining a future where the user has more freedom... and yet the developer stills maintains control, simply offering the user more freedom as well. That isn't how it works. Either the developer has power over the story, or the user. The more power you give one, the less the other has. That's why games tend to be less story driven the more open they get. 

The reason why The Sims is an important example here is that it shows the drawbacks of giving the player an enormous amount of freedom with their main character; developer-driven story disintegrates. It is not possible to write a coherent and meaningful story... that also begins and ends in 100000 ways. 

What we'll end up with, in reality, is something like we see with The Sims; there are legions of websites were people tell their Sims' stories, about who they are and what they like, and so forth. The game is so customizable that the real point is to tell your own story, that you make.  You have to think like a developer here, or particularly like a story teller; the developer can't tell a story if you're making it up. And the more freedom you give the user to make the story as he goes, the less able a designer is to tell a story to you. 

In a lot of ways, it's precisely what you're describing, except I think you're imagining it being somehow able to maintain a story driven by the developer (which it is not). It's a game where you decide what the main character looks like, acts like, feels like, gets married to, does with his life, and so forth. The Sims is so open and free that a story written by the developers simply isn't possible. Instead, the story is written by me, the user, and I can post it on any one of the scores of websites devoted to just such story telling.