Hi everyone, I’ve been working on a long-form, choice-driven interactive narrative (about 107K words) with multiple endings and failure states, and I ran into something I’d love input on. A lot of the structure relies on players making choices that can permanently close off parts of the story, or lead to early endings without fully understanding the larger narrative. I’m trying to strike a balance between: 1) letting players discover things naturally across multiple playthroughs 2) and giving enough feedback that they don’t feel like they’ve just “missed something important” Because of the length, I’m especially concerned about players feeling anxious that they made the “wrong” choice and lost a large portion of content. For those of you who’ve worked on branching IF, how do you approach that balance?
I can’t speak from a developer standpoint, but I know some games with branching narratives, multiple endings, and an expectation that players will replay the game for the full, multi-faceted story will keep track of which paths the player has been down on previous play cycles and pivot points will indicate which paths the player has been down on previous cycles… e.g. maybe choices the player has never taken are printed in black while paths the player has taken have their text grayed out… granted, such might be better with a split and remerge structure than a deeply branching tree since the latter kind of requires not only keeping track of which branches have been visited, but indicating which subtrees have been fully explored to avoid becoming useless for the early game after a few cycles… Though perhaps a new game + that lets the player return to major decision points and play from there, making a different decision instead of starting from the beginning could work to cut down on retracing parts of the story the player has already been through.
Lots of great points from Jeffery on the player’s point of view. I too am just a player.
I think it may help to internalise the fact that players who feel anxious over those things are not likely to play that type of game in the first place, or if they do, it’s because they are drawn in by other things; but will always remain anxious. I am speaking from experience. I am very much not a fan of branching narratives; I recently playing “Wander”, the bugfolk game, and I loved it, but I was always, at every moment, painfully aware of every possible decision point; I couldn’t enjoy the game properly, not get fully in it, because I was always thinking of the various decision points I could go back to if things turned badly, or when the game ended to explore a different path. It took me out of the game bigtime - but these branching narratives always do that to me.
I am sharing this to alleviate some of your burden. Some players, like me, are just like that. There’s probably nothing you can do about it, and they probably won’t play your game, and you can still try to make it a good experience for those who do play it and come and ask the question you’re asking. Just, you know… you won’t please everyone, and I mean this as a weight to take off your shoulders so you can focus on making your game better and the way you intend it. 
After saying all of that, and now that you know where I stand: I appreciate very clear signalling when I lose content, but not necessarily at the decision point. If I make it through to the end of the game, very aware of the decision points but without the feeling that I missed something, and then the game at the ends tells me about something that I missed and possibly nudges me to what point in the game I could go back to to experience it… I’d appreciate it. Especially when the relationship between choices and result are not always obvious. It’s been a loooooong time since I played choice-based, but my experience, which includes VNs, seemed to have results that didn’t match with their choices just a bit too often.
In fact, I think the single most pleasant experience I’ve had with choice-based was Island, a VN which gives you free access to a diagram of all the choices at all times. It was such a load off my mind, I could finally focus on the story! When the story went a certain way, I could look at the diagram and go back to whatever point I wanted; I didn’t have to manage all the various branches and their choice-points in my head, it was right there easily available. So I just went with the flow of the story. God, but I have great memories of playing that game, for this design alone, over pretty much any other VN I played (a few, but not that many, really).
Everything else I might have to add, Jeffery already said it.
Also if it helps: if a game allows for multiple choiecs and multiple ways to play it, when I replay it I usually go for a very different set of responses than I chose first time. From the beginning. So I, personally, am more receptive to games which branch early and then don’t branch so much. Because replaying a game up until a branching choice point is not much fun.
A thing I would suggest: if a player starts a plot point but then makes a choice which renders it moot (the equivalent of finding a key and a hammer, both of which can be used to open a wooden box)… I recomment immediately discarding the extraneous plot point (if used the key, discard the hammer; if used the hammer, discard the key). As a player, these loose ends which are no longer relevant are only a horrible distraction. It could be a goal no longer attainable, it could be a character or object no longer available, a branching path that made it so that a few things the player learned will now never be useful. As a player, I would much rather know that those things will not be useful, and excise them from the rest of my playthrough, than have them trail along uselessly, taking up my attention.
Hope this little diatribe is useful!
Very helpful, thanks!
i would suggest you look at animalia and 16 ways to kill a vampire at mcdonalds for great examples of signalling missed content at the ending
An achievement system is something I’ve seen used to this effect in a lot of games. At the end of a playthrough, you show what percentage of the achievements they’ve gotten, and this corresponds roughly to the amount of the game they saw. Of course, different games use achievements for different ends. Some will show achievements during a playthrough and give you hints on how to get them. Some won’t show the total number of achievements available until you’ve gotten a certain way into the game. It varies.
I know a lot of games have a completion percentage too, which works similarly, if you want to use achievements for something else. I don’t think I’ve seen a completion percentage in IF, though, only in games like Hollow Knight.
One technique that’s common in ChoiceScript, less common (but doable) in other choice-based systems, and basically nonexistent in parser games is making a certain choice visible but grayed out. If you didn’t negotiate an alliance with the elves, then “call for backup from the elves” appears in the choice list, but is clearly disabled and can’t be clicked. And thus the player knows that it is possible to get backup from the elves if you make different choices earlier on.
This works best in a branch-and-bottleneck structure; in a time cave it’s not much help.
The classic way was to show a score.
In a gamebook you intuitively knew approximately how much of the book you had read, based on the size of the book. I don’t know how that translates into a computer game, but it’s very elegant.
Especially good when the achievement tells you, or hints at, how to unlock it. Not all do. For the purposes of encouraging a player to explore content, the ones that don’t seem a bit useless to me.
These are great ideas. Thanks, everyone!
Personally, the best missed/alternative content signalling is the one I have noticed in recent commercial VN: in the main menu the player can see the branching map, showing clearly the roads taken and not taken (marked with “???” in many cases…)
a major point, the player must be capable of taking an informed decision, so, in a very, uh, ramified ? narrative, delivering in advance the knowledge/lore needed for taking the key decisions later is, IMVHO, critical.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I’d argue the scoring system in a lot of parser games is essentially a percentage completed, or rather, percentage completion is just a scoring system normalized to 100 points in total(though even there, plenty of games with a percentage completion have max percentages above 100% by design(I can name games with completion percentages as high as 200% by design… though that game also has 200.06% possible due to a oddity in the code if memory serves and that’s achieveable in normal gameplay, not sure how high you can go with out of bound glitches in that game).