Saving Throw’s short shows an adventuring party of four, trying get by in real life while following RPG rules.
Swapping gear with party members or getting away with a stupid name suddenly become the biggest problems.
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10 responses to “A Short Film About RPG Characters Who Actually Tell The Truth”
Pretty much all RPG characters tell the truth anyway. A weird thing about video game storytelling is that hardly anyone ever lies, because the developers don’t want to pull a fast one on the players. It’s nice in the rare instances that it happens, but for the most part, lying to players is rare.
Considering the backlash that happened when RPG players were even the slightest bit put out (ME3), I can kinda see why. For the most part, RPG stories and even most video game stories are blatantly generic: the bad guy is obviously evil, the ancient treasured artefact will still be sitting in that tomb after however many years because no one else decided to steal it, etc.
There are a few games that I really like that have twisted and misrepresented parts of the story, such as Jade Empire and the Witcher series, but most games don’t want players to feel like they’re being conned.
“Wait, hang on, I never would’ve made that decision I was in possession of all the facts! You deliberately presented me with different information that swayed my decision the wrong way!”
“Yes. Just like real life.”
Jade Empire was a fantastic example, given that it made references so often to it that it was actually part of a puzzle.
And the Telltale Borderlands game had loads of fun with it by narrating the story with two conflicting liars.
(And the backlash over ME3 was people whining that they only had a choice over the future of the galaxy, not the future of Shepard… or rather, not the future they WANTED, since all those fates were pretty different, too, they just weren’t riding off into the sunset to have turian/quarian babies. They were selectively picking and choosing which ‘promises’ from the devs they wanted to remember, remembering ‘it won’t just be A, B, or C’, and forgetting, ‘This is the definitely final end of Shepard’s story’. One of the biggest examples of utterly unjustified whining I’ve ever seen in gaming.)
I felt the backlash was less that, and more because after hyping up how your choices matter long-term throughout the game, demonstrated greatly with the ‘Suicide Mission’ in ME2, that the end ignores everything and you just pick the ending you want.
Personally I was just annoyed that it was a really weak attempt at an intellectual ending. I mean the final 15 minutes contained straight up magic in a sci-fi game. For me the ending of Mass Effect is the entire third game and it was almost flawless right up to the point where you beam up to this weird, poorly written, really shallow 15 minutes.
For a game that until that point hadn’t really presented me with many stupid options ending with a choice between three blunt, stupid options killed my enthusiasm for the franchise. The only other time I felt close to that was the end of Mass Effect 2 where it was either blow up the base or give it to Cerberus. There was no ‘this is too important in the coming war to blow up but too big to give to Cerberus, lets give it to Omega or the Alliance’. Funnily enough before I hit the final minutes my one problem with ME3 was that everyone treated me like my decision at the end of ME2 was to give it to Cerberus out of some sort of loyalty to Cerberus. It didn’t let me defend my actions and even my Shep acted like I did it for Cerberus and not the greater good. I love the idea of forcing the player to make a no-win decision but that just played out like a good option and an evil option.
I went from Mass Effect being my new Star Wars to just not giving enough of a crap about it to even mop up the achievements or buy DLC. I did at least four complete runs of the first, the second I played into the ground, the third I did one and a half plus a tiny bit of multiplayer.
Not that I was one of the people who was out for blood over it. I talked about it a lot but it was never blind rage. I just love talking about Mass Effect, even now it seems. The only time I really got frustrated when talking about it was when people insisted that what I had seen went over my head. I’m by no means a genius but for all it’s attempts to sound deep a bucket of wet hair could have understood that ending. I debunked more claims of plot holes than most people defending the ending. =P
There were actually 4 options, you could shoot at the kid thing remember. I didn’t like the multiple choice at the end way of doing things either, two other games copied it, Deus Ex 3, and Two Souls… Meh, just make one damn good storyline I say with a solid ending, if you screw up then everyone dies or something, simple.
Sort of happened during the SWTOR Beta. You could kill your companions at one point. People complained because they lost them permanently and they felt they were disadvantaged by their own decisions.
I remember an article a while back where a developer was talking about how they couldn’t make the AI in their games “too good” (being able to read subtle hints like shadows cast by the player character, certain noises, a more realistic field of vision etc.) because otherwise players felt like they were being cheated.
I remember a few NPC’s in Morrowind either lied or their dialogue wasn’t updated when the devs moved a quest objective.
That was all surprisingly very applicable and accurate to me.