“Back in the day,” he says, showing his age, “Video game endings were much simpler”.
Plumber defies societal norms and bags a princess. Notoriously nocturnal mammal beats a supposedly genius robo-scientist. There’s nothing like a nice, rewarding payoff to see an adventure play out to leave you all warm and fuzzy.
Nowadays though, we have such a vast amount of happy, sad, middling and twisty endings to round out the stories we’ve invested many hours into.
But what about everything that led to that conclusion? The hours invested in a massive sci-fi saga, only to be whittled down to a rudimentary choice system, for example. Or changing the dynamic of the game from murder mystery to straight up murder simulator?
A truly disastrous ending can undo everything you’ve done in the entire game, and you have zero control over it. There’s even worse, too: Hiding the “real” ending to the game beyond something as nefarious as paid DLC.
Oftentimes, there was a far more conclusive feeling way before those closing moments, and if you’d only turned the game off then, the experience wouldn’t be ruined.
– Spoilers ahead –
