New details, 'over 200 endings' for Fallout 3 8 Comments by Ross Miller Mar 25th 2008 8:00PM Filed under: PC, Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Adventure Fallout fans can look forward to over 200 different endings with the upcoming Fallout 3, according to Executive Producer Todd Howard. Speaking on the OXM podcast (interview starts at 37-minute mark) Howard said, "Being that we are Bethesda, everything gets a bit big. So as of last week, we're over 200 endings. That is not an exaggeration, but it deserves some descriptions." The clarification is that, like other Fallout games, choices you make in the game will affect aspects of the ending, so that figure is really a combination of many sub-endings. The real question, then, is how many times do you have to beat the game to see every sub-ending? Howard also confirmed that Fallout 3 is twice the size than anticipated and close to the size of Oblivion. "The game is easily 100 hours," he said. Howard also goes into detail about the dog companion. Fallout 3 is still on track for release this Fall.

PET DOGGIES!!!FTW!

BOO Cats!!

This just in: script writers resign en masse from Bethesda studios. 

This is why games can't be like movies. Good ones, anyway. You can't write a script that can realistically and poignantly end in 200 different ways. You cannot weave complex theme and meaning into such a fabric. Heck, I'm not sure the very best scripts/novels of all time could even end in 2 ways, let alone 200.

Keep in mind here, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. At all. I'm not. It's great. I'm just pointing out that this is moving AWAY from storytelling in games, not TOWARD. Eventually, we'll have games with thousands of beginnings and endings.

You know, like The Sims. And Spore, presumably. Games that don't have story telling, but story making.

CATS ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS.

I am so looking forward to Fallout 3, almost as much as Starcraft 2. PC retro revivals FTW!!!

It's more a move towards interactive storytelling in which you create the ending to the story. It may be 10-20 (or more) years away but I think we'll see some games in which the designers of the games themselves won't know exactly how the player's game will end, it won't be scripted in the traditional sense.

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 sure there will be five or six (or 10) different endings, with minor things altered (like if a specific character lives, they say something or you get something extra).

Here's a very simple example to illucidate the point I'm making: if your character starts out as a good guy, then later suddenly shifts and becomes a bad guy, that alone isn't "story telling" in the sense we traditionally mean that phrase. That's just... a person making choices at his or her own discretion. It's like the WWE or something. A story requires a coherent sequence of events that fit together logically.

If you had a game with 100000 different beginnings/endings, and you chose to start as a squirrel who later becomes a super intelligent human with magic powers and then loses those magic powers and then becomes a robot, okay, that's up to you. And... in a sense, I suppose you can call that a "story." But does it have logical coherency? No. Does it contain sophisticated theme or meaning that we ascribe to the highest pieces of literature and film? Again, no. It's just... the choices you decided to make with your character. Even if I did put together a coherent story, that would be my decision -- not the developers. Which again, makes it story making, not story telling.

That's the ultimate consequence of games becoming more and more flexible, with more and more user-based decision making and less linearity. Just to emphasize again: I think this is a very good thing, and I'm very glad to see games heading into this direction. So if this comes off as criticism, it's not. Instead, I'm trying to point out, again, that this moves us diametrically away from storytelling in games. 

No, wait. I just thought of an even easier way to explain this. I'm not sure why I haven't stated it this simply before.

Any time you give the user more power to make the story, the less power the developer has to make the story. You can't have both simultaneously.

We're moving away from story telling. Games will not be like movies or books, where the story is "told" (meaning, transmitted by the developer to the user with input from the user). 

Hell yes, I love me some robo-dog.