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Someone put a link on the Lyceum a while back to a list of great RPG clichés. It was pretty amusing and pretty accurate. A lot of it applied to Blades of Exile. There was one that seemed to be truer than all the others: “The ending will always be disappointing”.
I want to further that a little. It seems that the bigger and more involved the scenario is, the more of a let down the ending is. To have gone through so much just to get a dialogue box saying “Woo-hoo, the evil lich is dead and, the people of the village are safe!” and suddenly you are thrust back to the opening screen with that dinky little congratulatory message. It usually makes me feel let down and the more time I have devoted to the scenario, the more let down I feel. Most commercial RPGs save up a cool cinematic for the end but in Blades of Exile (the new animation techniques aside) we don’t have that cop-out luxury. So how can you lessen the player’s pain. When they go post a review score, it’ll probably be just after they finish so you’d want to put them in a good mood. Here’s some tactics that people have tried. One last thing before we proceed though. Obviously if I’m going to talk about scenario endings it goes without saying that spoilers follow. You have been warned. For example, did you know that the chick in The Crying Game is actually a bloke? See what I mean? The Gift When Peter Gabriel released his Us CD (or maybe it was So, all those two letter titles get confusing after a while) he released a CD ROM at the same time. It wasn’t so much a game, you got to remix one of the songs and took a virtual tour of his recording studio, there was a scavenger hunt too. Hidden in various pictures was a collection of items and you could challenge yourself to find them all and click on every item. If you succeeded in doing this you got a prize, It was a few custom icons and beep sounds composed by the man himself. For a while afterward, every time I got an error message that opening little swirl from Sledgehammer would come up. This was the inspiration for the gift at the end of my scenario Farmhands Save the Day!!. You walked away from the piece with a prize. In this case it was an old Neverware computer program that was one of the inspirations for the Exile series. An actual tangible reward seemed like a good way to keep the punters happy. In this case, like with Peter Gabriel it was a pleasant surprise, but other programmers have signalled their rewards in advance. The way they have done it is a Hall of Fame. The first people to finish the scenario or do some particularly difficult side quest, or whatever have their names immortalised both on the internet and on version 1.0.1. Not only does this make a player happy that they have finished the scenario, but it helps motivate them to finish it because they know that they will have there name in print on the next version of the scenario itself. It’s great for keeping people interested. The Cliffhanger Keep ‘em eager for more. Paving the way for a sequel by ending on a note of uncertainty is also a great way to end a scenario. The end of Falling Stars is a classic example. It makes you want to rush out and play the next game in the series. Of course, if you play it just after it’s released, there is no next one immediately but if the scenario is any good it helps fuel hype for the next one. A word of caution for designers, you should have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen in the next one or you end up writing yourself into a hole. A good cliffhanger’s impact is taken away if it has a really iffy resolution. Remember in Star Trek TNG when Picard says “I am Locutus of the Borg. All your base are belong to us.” or whatever. Great cliffhanger for the season finale but the resolution at the start of the next season was really lame-o. A Trick in the Tail Ah, the good old surprise ending. I’ve got to admit, I’m a bit of a fan of this one. Rather than make people want to go out and play the sequel like the cliffhanger, this type of ending makes the player want to replay the scenario again relooking at various clues in a different light. You can’t beat that moment of realisation when Ender Wiggin realises his nightmares were the Buggers trying to surrender telepathically in Ender’s Game or when you find out the protagonist from Robert Cormier’s I Am The Cheese is in a loony bin. This what I tried to do in Johnny Favourite. While a lot of people were unhappy with the surprise, it seems it was because the surprise was particularly unpleasant rather than because they saw it coming. Even Akhronath, who hated the scenario and called it “sickening” in his review at the Lyceum went straight ahead and played it again. The surprise doesn’t have to be a nasty one though. You don’t have to give the player the Blades of Exile equivalent of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box. Something unexpected can also be quite cute too if you want it too. Be aware though, not to rely on surprise endings to much or people will start to anticipate them in your scenarios and that will ruin the surprise. There is a law of diminished returns for trick endings, the more you do, the less impact they will have. Look at M. Night Shyamalan. The end of The Sixth Sense was a corker. The end of Unbreakable was still pretty cool even if you knew that there was some sort of trick ending coming. The end of Signs where it seems that Mel Gibson’s entire life was a series of coincidences designed for the express purpose of fighting aliens and therefore his faith is restored and he becomes a priest again was a little tired by this time, though. Blind Them With Node Work You can save your really cool gimmicky programming ‘til the end and blast the player with your computer skills for the final showdown. To make this work, though, you have to be a pretty good programmer. There are always new things to discover in the Blades of Exile engine that will make players’ jaws drop but finding them can be a little difficult. While it’s good to save some fancy programming ‘til the end, people are less likely to see it than if you put it right at the start like Doom Moon II did. Actually it had great programming at the end too but we can’t all program like Andres Gonzales Tomanyi, ca we? Collect the Set Multiple endings. Redemption is a good example of this, where you can either finish or win the scenario, depending on how you feel. This is related to the Tatterdemalion style of scenario where different plot paths lead to different games and increased replay value. Outside of the Blades of Exile world, you have games like Chrono Trigger, quite possibly the greatest RPG ever written. I seriously urge everyone to go out and give this one a go. Anyway, in Chrono Trigger you get the opportunity to go off and fight the final bad guy very early in the game. Not that you’d want to do it that early. Who’d want to fight Grah-Hoth armed with only a stone knife and a leather jerkin? Depending on when in the plot you go off to the final fight, you get different endings. By the time you finished the rest of the game the final showdown isn’t that hard so the replay value was how early you could head off for the fight and which ending could you get after it. I’ve ripped this concept off wholesale for an as yet unfinished scenario but I won’t get too stroppy if someone else in the community beats me to the punch. The Shakespearian Tragedy This is a tough one. How can you sustain interest when everybody knows what is going to happen at the end. There’s no short cuts that I know to this one other than really solid writing like Ryan Phelps did in the excellent Chains. Bathing in the Afterglow Okay boys, as soon as your scenario climaxes you don’t roll over and fall asleep. Some game players like to be held afterwards. Killing the final baddie should not automatically lead to an end scenario trigger. Even in the aforementioned Falling Stars that wants to keep the excitement level up even after the scenario is finished, leaves the action of the final combat and goes back to the relative safety of home base to wrap things up. Think how much less of a film The Godfather would have been if it ended straight after that climactic christening shoot-out instead of going back to having Marlon Brando stick an orange peel in his mouth while playing with his grandson afterwards. |
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