Branching gameplay and storyline

News & General Discussion
1

Hi,

i was reading about interactive storylines and emergent gameplay in videogames, which i think is something desiderable because after all we’re talking about videogames and not movies/books, so the player is expected to have an active part in this experience, not passive like movies, by definition of game.

So , the more freedom the player has in changing the game world and story , the better, despite such a game design may cost a lot nowadays, but i wish it to be the future trend.

It is better when the player is able to find his own solutions to the problems presented by the game, when the puzzles/problems in the game offer choice on the number of possible solutions to them, and the progress and storyline (if any) should branch on a different path based on how he solved each problem, and on what actions he made.

And i don’t think multiple endings of the game are required, a single ending is already good if the player has many ways of getting to it.

Now i want to ask you all , are there good titles that satisfy this request?
So that i can check them out for fun&inspiration.

From what i’ve read, the following categories of games may satisfy the requisites above, but i have some arguments to share with you and i would like you to comment on my considerations.

----- Visual novels -----

They say that the only games that offer, at the same time, good AND interactive/branching storylines so far seem to be visual novels, like Shadow Of Destiny (PS2/XBox/PC/PSP).

The big problem with these ones is that they explicitly require you to see all/most of the multiple endings to actually understand the story, as each of the story path is just a piece of the story which doesn’t make sense by itself.

So it is like the game has a single story at the end of the day, no? The designers just used this trick to lenghten the time to finish the game, because in each play there are some scenarios common to multiple story paths.

Usually, visual novels present puzzles to solve with multiple solutions, and the story will evolve in a different way based on which solution you find among the possible ones.

And that would make sense for a game, it actually means that the player has choice.

BUT if you, designer, force me to re-play from the start many times to find ALL the solutions for each puzzle, in order to finish the game, then there is not a real choice.

It is like each puzzle actually has a single solution equal to the sum of all of its solutions, because i am required to replay the game to find all of them, right? (not sure if i explained it clearly ) .

So the only real choice left in visual novels is a very basic nonlinearity, that is the ability to walk through the different story pieces in the order i wish, but hey… nothing new here, since even the old 8bit/16bit games had the choice for playing the levels in any order, ex. Super Mario games, Bumpy (MS-DOS), etc.

----- Open-ended games -----
Open-ended , as far as i know, means all of those games without a main objective , so endless. Like Sim City or Dwarf Fortress, right? Or even Tetris if you play in survival mode just for the biggest score.

This type of games are designed specifically to have a lot of emergent gameplay, and possibly to let players build their own stories.

BUT one moment, the lack of a main goal is in contrast with a golden rule for games: when the player does not know why he’s playing, does not know what is he supposed to do, he gets bored, he lacks play motivation because there is not a real challenge presented to him.

These games are like Lego for me, and i get bored too quickly, i don’t know about you.

I’ve read somewhere that for these games actually the players are supposed to define their own main goal as well, but i can’t think of some actually good/fun examples of it.

My biggest score example in Tetris, that i pointed out above, is a player-defined goal, but it’s boring, no?

I need a challenge which is more… i don’t know how to say, maybe “intelligent”, or elaborate.

And about the storyline here.. well i think you already know that a story generated from emergent play usually isn’t compelling. Nowadays the so-called procedural narrative is not so effective, compared to a good human story writer.

About other games i’ve heard of in this context.., what about Fallout 3/4 ? What about Mass Effect series? Deus Ex 1 ? Alpha Protocol ?

Before buying them i am curious to know if they have a gameplay with both actual choice, good storylines and an interesting main goal/challenge, in other words if they are or not the state-of-the-art when it comes to interactivity.

p.s. About Fallout, i am skeptical after reading here: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/220-rpgs-everything-else/67934771

Quote: “Sure, Fallout gives you choice, but it only changes the way people view you, not the actual story. So it would be on an even deeper level.”
Fable 1 has the same problem, right? Whether you behave good or bad only affects how people see you, but the story remains the same, so the moral choice is not very useful there.

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I think Infamous falls into this category. It has a good story line, but not completely linear… and in fact it does have two different “successful” endings that depend on your choices. Despite your argument that multiple endings aren’t necessary, I think it really works for this game. Moreover, as you go, you have lots of choices in what you do; you don’t have to complete all the quests (in fact you can’t, because some quests will be unavailable depending on your karma).

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Games with lots of branching story lines that all come together for the same ending seem lots of fun for the player. :slight_smile: But they require the developer to make multiple games within a game, some of these rarely being played.

I think I remember an Extra Credit video on this. How sad it would be for an indie developer to create a game like this and have really only a few of the paths consistently followed. lol

Besides, to players it will be one game…worth the price of one game, which in today’s market is not a lot unless you are AAA. But to the developer it will be like making multiple games.

The Sims games were popular because as you said, the emergent game play. Go visit a Sims forum and see how players have created many different ways to play. Some play god, others let the Sims surprise them, some create stories which they use like comic books to show others, and still some even role play their sims, giving them goals inside the game.

Not everyone has the imagination to play like this though but the cool thing about games that allow the player to create the goal is that everyone can play their way. Sims can be a strategy game, a simulation game, or even a way to create stories, depending on how you play games. Minecraft is another popular game that can be played many ways.

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I’ll check it out, thx!

Yeah i agree that multiple endings would be a plus, one ending for each story branch.
I’ve just said it is not a requirement, as long as the players have choice on the ways they can reach the end (be it single or multiple).

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I’m one of those gamers they call a “completionist” – I want to do and see everything – but I rarely have time for full play-throughs. It kind of bugged me in games like Skyrim or Fallout 4 to know there were entire sections of content I’d probably never see. I understand the argument that such designs also increase replay value but the inevitable “new character grind” is a big detractor from that as well. If a game starts getting dull, like Fallout 3: New Vegas did for me, I switch from “completionist” to “tourist” and try to overpower my character – or even cheat – just to walk around and see the sights before I shelve it.

I still think it’s a good/intriguing design choice, but I go into those games assuming I’ll miss out on a lot of content.

That being said, just getting a simple linear game finished and shipped can be quite a challenge. Look at all the threads out there about games like Fallout complaining that doing X, Y, Z in the wrong order makes quest Y impossible to complete, etc. … just the planning and writing of a system like that is a huge undertaking.

I taught myself ScriptableObjects by writing a simple dialogue system with variables, simple logic and branching, and links to other dialogue scripts, and managing even a handful of short interactions turns into a lot of work.

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6

Yeah, I agree with this. I also think it would be frustrating to have different branches all leading to the same ending. Once you know the ending, going back to do the different branches would definitely be a chore, not really as much fun as the first time.

Like you, I would prefer to just have the chance to wander the world and check things out than have to start over and attempt to find a different branch that simply gives me the same outcome.

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I think this gets back to what I always see as perhaps the #1 most important design decision to be made early in the design cycle: Is this game meant to be played once, or played many times?

So many other design decisions flow from this, including this one. If it’s a play-once game, then it makes sense for it to have a strong story, and not too much branching. There’s a plot which we intend to bestow upon the player, and once they know the plot, there is relatively little reason for them to play. As with movies, some fans will of course do it more than once, enjoying the spectacle or all the little details or just being in the world you’ve created. But most people will say, “oh yeah, I did that already” and pick something new. So your main goal as a designer is to keep the player playing it (once) for as long as possible.

Also, the game needs to be quite long, with lots of varied content to experience… and you probably want to let completionists like @MV10 experience it all.

On the other hand, if it’s a play-many-times game, then story is really unimportant. You want games to be relatively short; something like Civ, at about 5-10 hours, is probably about the limit; Civ Rev at about 1 hour is even better, and in the other extreme, arcade-style games (Flappy Bird etc.) may last less than a minute. These are usually about building skill, or maybe collecting achievements/trophies, rather than learning a story. Your main goal as a designer is to keep the players coming back for another try.

Sandbox games are a bit of a weird duck, though. They fall more into the play-once camp, but don’t need a story, because the player creates their own stories. What they need is a rich world, and lots of ways for the player to impact that world.

Much as I love the idea of nonlinear story games — and I’ve enjoyed a few (Infamous, and to a lesser extent Spider-Man 2) — it may not be a very good fit for most gamers.

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Fallout 3 had several endings, depending on who you allied with, etc. Fallout 4 I think stitched together little bits of narrative, generating your own unique “ending”, but it was kind of lame. I didn’t really like how much content Fallout 4 locked you out of once you got past a certain point.

In GTA V, I know from experience that it’s possible for Trevor (a playable character!) to die. That one really threw me, since it never occurred to me to make a copy of my save game on a GTA game, since you usually can’t affect the world that much in those. It sucked, since I hadn’t done all of the Trevor side missions yet. The only way to see those would be to start a new game and play all the way through. So sometimes being able to affect the world like that isn’t that great.

Personally I think “affecting the world” can work better for side activities. I’m not sure there’s all that much benefit in having significantly different stories paths for the main branch.

One of the coolest “hey, I’m affecting the game world” moments was in Fallout 3. You could choose to work with a certain NPC to nuke the town of Megaton. If you did, from that point on, that area was desolate and very radioactive. A character you interacted with early on even becomes a mutant. I don’t recall that it had any effect on the main storyline.

So perhaps what’s more important than affecting the main linear narrative is the feeling that you’re affecting the game world and its characters. Like, the illusion of significant choices is maybe more important than real, significant choices. Like you said, a linear narrative is at odds with the active nature of games. What most players may enjoy more is the ability to choose something that has ramifications in the game world as opposed to triggering a canned story branch. That can feel pretty artificial and even arbitrary.

Anyway, I think is was Mass Effect 3 where depending on what you did, certain characters died at the end. Pretty lame if you ask me.

Deus Ex 1 had four distinct endings, but it wasn’t until very late in the game that you had to choose which way to go. I think that’s basically the opposite of what you have in mind, but I thought it worked pretty well. You could see all four endings by just loading a saved game and checking them out without it being a huge time sink. What was probably more memorable was the NPC dialogue that changed based on your actions. One character would scold you for not valuing human life enough if you killed a certain NPC, while another would praise you (and the reverse if you didn’t). That kind of moment-to-moment emotional connection may have more value to players than which cutscene you’re going to get.

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About the Sims, i’ll check it out to have a clearer idea, thanks.
But i guess the only type of audience it can catch is the ones who actively want to invent their own goals, and like to play Lego-like games, but many people don’t like it and need to be “guided” at least a bit and have a main goal to follow, because they say “ok what am i supposed to do? I’m getting bored here”. I have personally seen players/friends of this type while they shut down the console out of boredom as soon as they did not understand anymore which is the next goal.
But ok, i’ll check it out thanks.

About “many games into one”.. you’re right, the development cost would be multiplied for each “branch”, while the price of the game on the shelf remains the same.
And the fact that each gamer perceives the game as “one branch”, and as a consequence, it’s like a single game for a single type of audience… well it depends.
I have an idea, even though i’m not sure if it works.
The designer can be smart enough to catch a much broader audience than like it is a single game, because the choices, different paths, may be each one suitable for a different type of player.
A challenge may have several solution, each one that will be preferred by one type of players instead of other types, so the game actually is catching many different audiences, and the sales would go up, compensating the issue you have pointed out.

Example: at some point in the game, zombies are attacking your city and you have to defeat them.
The game gives you different methods to defeat them.

Method 1 ( FPS ) : the character can walk to them and shoot them like in an FPS, or maybe rail FPS like The House Of The Dead.
For the ones who like this type of action and have those skills.

Method 2 ( plants ) : the player can send several special carnivore plants against the zombies, which are able to eat them.
BUT those plants need to be cultivated first, and cultivating them is a complex task like in Harvest Moon or similar games.
For the gamers who like Harvest Moon et al.

Method 3 ( robots ): you send robots against the zombies, and each robot is equipped with laser guns or other weapons.
BUT the player must program the software which runs on the robots’ operating system.
Maybe in C# or a special scripting language designed for the game.
For the nerdy gamers , for example programmers who like to play games :slight_smile:

Method 4 ( traps ) : you build special traps around the city and you use some kind of bait, beefsteaks, etc, for attracting the zombies to the traps.
This is like a more classic strategic solution.

Etc. etc.

Maybe the drawback is,… your dev team must be good at different game genres :smile:

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No one is forcing you. And assuming each ending is satisfying on its own, you don’t really need to replay the game to get the “true” ending and whatnot, right?

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This strikes me as a real insight. You could build in lots of natural reactions to your actions by various NPCs, which could even impact which NPCs will serve as your companions, without actually changing the plot. So you could go through the story as a nice guy, praised by do-gooders and sneered at by thugs; or play it through as a villain, feared by most but admired by other thugs. But the actual challenges and events, and overall plot of the story, would be the same.

It seems to me like this wouldn’t grow the development costs all that much, as it’s mainly a matter of additional dialog and some flags to control who will join you. But it could make the game feel quite different, depending on how you play, which I personally would find very satisfying.

Note that you wouldn’t have to limit yourself to a good/evil axis, either… it could relate to other aspects of your playstyle. If NPCs see you fight with magic, you get praise from other mages, and offers from sell-swords to watch your back; if you fight with a sword, other swordsmen cheer you on (or challenge you, if they think you’re getting uppity), while mages offer their services as ranged support. Or whatever.

Of course if you go around offending or killing all your potential companions, then you end up having to just do it all yourself… and that’s fine too!

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In case you think that LEGO-like games that don’t have goals only have a limited audience, last summer Microsoft announced that Minecraft sold 100 million copies.

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It could be easy to go too far with that.

Skyrim sort of did that. After a while you generated a reputation, and all kinds of NPC’s reacted to you, depending on what you did. It was a bit much really.

Fallout 3 had a good/evil system, which did affect some stuff, and was actually kind of fun. Trying to keep the meter at “very evil” was actually pretty challenging. :smile:

A little of that can go a long way. In Deus Ex, there were a handful of times where your past actions were recalled later, but a lot of times it was really just a one-off dialogue thing and that’s it.

For players who do care about the fiction, the dialogue can be enough. In my Deus Ex example, it’s the protagonist’s brother who berates (or praises) you, so it’s easy to imagine caring about what your brother thinks.

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Maybe, but a LOT of people played the Sims. A LOT of people play Minecraft. Why? Probably because they appealed to an undeserved population that was starving for more creative gameplay.

I honestly think indies should make the kind of games they love to stay motivated. But it isn’t like their is a lack of story-driven, “guided” games. And it isn’t like the open world exploration games are not popular.

Truth is, there are all sorts of players. You don’t have to justify why you want to make your dream game. Find your audience and develop for them.

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That’s the biggest problems with games that do good/evil … they generally go overboard to punish any evil decisions, even though you’re almost always supposed to believe you’re in a world practically overflowing with it.

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I apologize, because this is going to be very long.

To address your specific recommendations first…

Haven’t played the first three Fallout games. I played Fallout 4 (and new Vegas). F4 has a similitude of a branching narrative, where you have several mutually exclusive groups you can join with near the end of the game. However, there’s a significant amount you can do with each before getting to the “cutoff” point. Fallout New Vegas is much the same.

Mass Effect doesn’t have a branching narrative in any way whatsoever. It’s definitely not an example of what you’re looking for. What it does have are significant character interactions which carry over from previous games, which enhance the “immersive” effect while not requiring the tremendous work of a truly branching story. I really think you should go in without spoilers if you decide to play (and I can only encourage playing–in my opinion it’s the greatest video game “story” of all time, simply because they tied three games together so well), but the third game ends with a very simple choice between three endings (all three are available regardless of your choices up to that point, so it’s not branching really).

Now, Mass Effect 2 does have a kind of branching. There’s an overarching narrative, but the meat of the game is recruiting 12 different characters to your team (you play as “the Shepard,” with 12 “disciples.” The very essence of subtlety…). You don’t have to recruit all of them–you can skip a significant number. Additionally, they will present “loyalty missions” to you, which will secure their loyalty to you if completed. The game’s overarching narrative leads up to a “suicide mission” in hostile space where you have to use all of your team members for various tasks. If you choose the wrong one…they can die. And if they are not “loyal” to you, they may die as well during certain points. This culminates in a section called “Hold the Line” where all team members not with you, the player/Shepard, all defend a point against attack. And certain numerical values are calculated based on each team member’s skill at combat (a static value, not dependent on levelling or anything), where characters can die if their values are too low. Additionally, the characters YOU/Shepard took with you can die. And if both of them die…so do you. You die…and the game ends (it doesn’t give a game over).

So there is a bit of branching there, but it’s not really story branching.

I’ve only played very little of the first Deus Ex, but from what I understand of it, the main narrative is fairly linear while the way you can play the game is completely up to you–stealth, lethal and loud, etc.

Alpha Protocol is much similar to Mass Effect, though it’s only a single game and there’s a bigger focus (and impact) on the value of character interactions. They rarely affect more than a single mission or a couple of missions afterwards, but they have a bigger effect. You gain or lose approval with each character and that determines their actions. For example, there’s one character who you fight at one point of the game, and at another comes to shoot you when you are captured. Depending on his “approval” of you, his actions change at these points (and not just in a positive way). And like ME, it has a wildly branching ending which is largely unconnected to the previous decisions made (almost every possible choice in the ending mission can be taken regardless of what you did before). I found it a very enjoyable game and can only recommend it.

Your comment about visual novels is an interesting point. However, of the visual novels I’ve played (a bunch), a “branching storyline” is really not the reason people play it. And games that do have the branching typically use it for other things than revealing aspects of an over-arching narrative. CLANNAD for instance, a hugely popular VN available on Steam, does have quite a bit of branching (as well as a ton of choices), but it’s basically a romance story, and the branching allows you to pick who you romance. Each branch is for a character. So it’s not an overarching narrative being used there.

Open-ended games. You yourself say that you lose motivation. I can understand that (I’m much the same). But the insane sales of Minecraft mean that there are large number of people for whom that is not the case. And the popularity of rogue-likes such as Don’t Starve (where the goal of the game is pretty much “survive”) implies as well that there are a number of players for whom the gameplay without narrative is enough to sustain their interest. I’m not really one of those. Sounds like you’re not either. But they do exist.

The thing about a game with a branching story is that it would take a ton of work. I mean a ton. Mass Effect largely moved between totally different characters and plot points between each game to keep player choice from snowballing into too much effort for them. The Witcher series, another series lauded for its story and choice+consequences, moved the main character to totally different areas of the world in each game (as well as changing the plot+characters each time).

An additional problem is how to provide equally valuable branches. If a player plays the “evil” route, and kills everyone, how do you show that in the world at later times/games? You might think that you can simply say “tough luck, that’s the result of your choice,” but players will complain. They complained in Mass Effect because Renegade options were “shafted,” even though renegade options tended to be things like killing species off or killing people who didn’t have to die (thereby losing any potential interaction with them later).

Mass Effect 3 dealt with this by having either returning characters or some unknown new person when you reach certain points. But then you get the complaint that your choices don’t matter, because the same thing happens whether or not you save someone. It’s a catch-22.

Mid Wall-of-text edit (the worst kind): Mass Effect 3 does have a couple of great examples of narrative choice/consequence. There are 2 specific situations where you have the option to solve problems which have been a backdrop for the entire series. However, to solve them, you need to have made several (in both cases) very specific choices across the previous game. So it does have a couple of examples, but by-and-large foregoes that.

Unless you’re going to do narrative choice like The Witcher 2 did it, it might simply cause more trouble than it’s worth. The Witcher 2 had three acts. The first act was the same, the third act was largely the same, but the game had two totally different second acts. Your choice at the end of the first act determined which of the second you went down. Both are sufficiently long–several hours–and contain a complete story arc (at least one does–I haven’t tried both, but I’m assuming both do).

But imagine the amount of work that had to go into that. They basically made a 4-act game, with only 3 available to a player at any one time. And when you consider that most gamers don’t play through games more than once (most don’t even FINISH games), it’s a ridiculous amount of work for very little gain.

So basically, there are very few successful examples of real branching stories (though I would definitely pick TW2 as possibly number one) because the amount of work is far larger than a player will likely ever see.

Another thing. You talking about branching story and emergent gameplay. I wouldn’t say these are incompatible, but they are largely unrelated to one another–and often one hinders the other. So they seem like two totally different ideas, weird or difficult to tie together.

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I think the main problem here was that everyone in the world did it, and they did it unrealistically. The random guards from Riften to Solitude (is that the name? I don’t remember) all immediately commented on your faction affiliations or skills, even if there was nothing visible on your person to cause them to come to that conclusion. If people giving sidequests in Whiterun made a comment about you being in the Companions, or someone in Riften whispered to you about the thieves’ guild, or if they only commented on your visible weaponry (maybe with subtle implications but not outright declarations based on your level of skill, such as: “A two-handed blade? Can you really wield that?” if your level was below 25, “A two-handed sword! That’s a warrior’s weapon!” if your level was above 75 or something) it would be better.

I suspect that was a problem with implementation rather than the fundamental idea itself.

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In Fallout 3, the challenge wasn’t so much that it was hard to stay alive against do-gooders or anything; the challenge was in keeping the evil meter pegged all the way. So much of what you could do gave you “good” karma, even when you didn’t want it. After a while it kind of worked itself out. When you were fully evil, men-in-black type agents would show up sometimes to take you out, but if you killed them and, um, made a snack out of them, it was like free delivery. Turns out cannibalism is evil. Who knew?

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Agreed. It would be interesting to see that technique fleshed out a bit more.

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Seriously. The gaming landscape is very wide these days. According to estimates, Stardew Valley outsold 2016’s Call of Duty last year on Steam. A bit surprising.

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