What Is the Point of Long-Form Multiple-Ending Works?

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
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So, I was catching up on some reviews being posted by various people on this site. I’m not going to call anyone out, but one of the reviewers actually posed a question that I feel deserves to be discussed further. And it probably has, many times, but lets do this again, for the benefit of new people. Posting links to old discussions is certainly on-topic, so feel free to point them out especially if they serve to further an opinion on the topic you want to express.

What actually IS the point of a long-form interactive fiction that has multiple paths and/or multiple endings that are mutually exclusive? (requiring a replay or at least a reload-from-somewhere-and-continue)

For me, I think this goes back to the concept of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The entire point of that line of books was that the reader could experience a story that they had a hand in telling. If there are no meaningful choices in a CYOA book to choose from, then it’s just… uh… a book. If you can’t choose your own adventure, then you’re just choosing an adventure that the author planned all out for you to experience. Even if the details change along the way, you’re still just stuck experiencing a “slightly interactive” story.

So, ideally, a work of IF that is attempting to give agency to the reader must in fact have meaningful choices. It must have multiple paths. It must have multiple endings. Otherwise, you’re taking away all the storytelling agency from the player. The reader will only control minor interactions that pave the way for the author’s storytelling.

Realistically, in a CYOA book, the storytelling agency of the reader is quite limited. They aren’t actually writing the text. They can only pick from existing paths. But at least they can direct the story down one of the pre-told stories that they prefer against the other pre-told stories they didn’t prefer as much. With computer-based IF, so much more is possible for giving agency to the player / reader. Because with computers, you can actually incorporate choices or preferences of the reader into story elements that are more dynamic than is possible in a CYOA book.

Also, there’s the benefit of replay-ability, or re-reading, to see what else could have happened. How could this have been different? Like the 1985 comedy mystery movie Clue (based on the board game), it was interesting to see the multiple endings, just to find out how else it could have gone down.

If I enjoy a work of IF, I like to go back and replay it and see if I can get different endings or experience significantly different story paths. That adds value to shorter games, because the player gets a chance to continue playing the game. For free IF I suppose it doesn’t matter, but for commercial games it definitely matters, as “replay-value” is usually praised by reviewers and gamers.

I am not trying to knock or disparage works of IF that do not have the goal of giving any storytelling agency to the player. There are entire genres of IF that specifically take all agency away from the player for dramatic effect (such as Rameses). Some IF is just a series of puzzles to experience, interlaced with interesting scenery, dialogue, or events. Some IF is just a slightly non-linear story told in a way that pulls the reader into it by giving them choices that may matter but maybe don’t change the plot structure. Some IF are just freeform open exploration experiences that really don’t have much of a story at all, they’re just for exploring and enjoying. Some IF are clever toys, designed to amuse but not really tell stories at all, or at least, not traditional types of stories. And more. And all of those forms of IF are valid.

But of course, the CYOA multiple-path, multiple-ending type of IF is also valid, and hopefully, still being written by folks. Although it is certainly more work to make story arcs that possibly only x% of the players will ever see, that x% will probably really dig it. And completionists who just want to replay every path may enjoy it as well. I am using CYOA here to mean a form of story, not the multiple-choice input style. You could just as easily have a CYOA-style story using parser input.

Any thoughts or perhaps some good examples of CYOA-style games that have multiple paths and story endings available?

-virtuadept

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Those are not at all the same statement!

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True, they were not intended to be the same statement, and I suppose, one could argue that a big “OR” should be between those two sentences.

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Stay? is a pretty ambitious time-loop game: you may not find it successful at all the things it tries to do but its whole point is both different paths through and different endings, and you probably won’t see all of them unless you really work at it (and maybe not even then).

And of course if you want to spend money, anything from Choice of Games fits that pattern too: Choice of Robots is popular, or Brian Rushton wrote about Crème de la Crème recently.

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Yeah, I was going to say, “long games that are meant to be replayed” is one of Choice of Games’s big things.

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There’s a couple different kinds of replayability. When I’m having trouble assigning a point value to games, I use a 5-criteria scoring method (that’s mostly a cop out to avoid just stating my opinion) and one criteria is “would I play this again?”

That can include multiple pathways, but some times a completely linear game can be something I’d like to play again; so the “replay value” here is just something charming or sweet or creepy that I’d like to experience again.

I studied the commercial success of some CYOA games in the past. It was hard to get firm conclusions but I think this is true:
-the impression of multiple paths and endings is more important than the actual amount of paths and endings

So, for instance, I think Choice of Robots is successful because it very clearly indicates other paths you could have taken. Options are greyed out if you took certain laths, your stats are brought up in game and talked about, one of the last chapters is split into one of four different chapters based on your previous choices.

So that game has multiple endings and gives the impression of it, too.

On the other hand some games have significant branching but don’t signal it, and often get reviews saying the games are railroaded, linear or short when they’re anything but that. Some Choicescript games are like that (I can’t remember specific examples; maybe Luminous Underground?)

Other games give a great feeling of branching when there’s really not that much. Creatures Such as We has almost no stat tracking but manages to feel responsive.

(I mentioned choicescript games because most twine games that are very popular either have little branching, like Birdland, or are more like parser puzzlers where the order of puzzles changes but story is similar. Agat’s 4x4 archipelago is a fantastic example of a games that does have multiple paths and multiple endings, as does Skybreak!).

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If we allow visual novels to the mix, the reason they tend to have multiple paths is because they’re gigantic mystery works. Each ending reveals a “truth” about the world, a faction of characters, and a theme – the fun in playing a true route/path is to see how everything from the different endings and routes taken will all resolve into one grand essayistic conclusion.

You can think of visual novels as essays, and each route/path is a section or chapter exploring an idea. And the final path taken is the conclusion, just a very epic one that reveals the ultimate message of the game.

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The deciding factor for whether or not I want to replay a game for additional endings is if I liked the writing or not. If the style appeals to me, I’ll be glad to play it again and uncover something I didn’t get to do the first time. Maybe it’s that the characters are so appealing that you just want to do everything you can with them. Or you’re inclined to go for all the endings for the big picture of how the game generally progresses. I do agree with Kastel’s comment about visual novels in particular — they’re designed so that you want to go down all the paths, otherwise you might miss out on a certain aspect of a character or a plot development.

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I dunno, what is the point of Baldur’s Gate 3 or Dragon Age or Mass Effect or [insert your favourite cRPG here] having multiple mutually exclusive paths / segments / endings? Some people want to experience them all and will keep replaying these games until they feel like they’ve seen everything there is to see. Some people prefer to pick a path that feels good for them and stick with that. (E.g. I doubt that I personally could ever do a proper ‘evil’ playthrough of any of these games.) Some days I don’t feel like making these sorts of decisions at all, so I go play something else instead.

Narrative agency is one aspect that is fundamentally the same between IF and graphical games, I think. Some have a lot of it, some (dare I say the majority?) have very little, some don’t pretend to be telling any particular story whatsoever. All of them can be enjoyable, engaging experiences if executed well.

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I think there are players who have a completionist tendency and some who don’t, or are on a spectrum of “gotta see everything.” I’m more the opposite - unless a game really grabs me, I tend to be happy with “my version” of the story.

It’s very common for Visual Novels to have more than one “romance” path through the game, and a lot of fans of that genre want to see everything. In fact, Ren’py and other visual novel engines cater to this with collectible CGI snapshots (images from the game) of important plot moments, and an option to speed through “already seen” dialogue to get to new material.

One of my old games had the structure of Clue(do) with a randomly chosen murderer and text variation of ending/motive. I was shocked to read a couple of reviews that said they were compelled to obsessively replay to see all the endings.

Another game I wrote had a game over screen with an abstract of “this is ending A, there are also endings B-C-D-E…” which were combinable ending elements. I got so many emails from people asking “how do I get the D part of the ending?”

I tend to think of “multiple path/singular ending” as “[American] football-shaped” plot structure that starts in one place and ends in one place but spreads wide in between the beginning and ending with multiple lanes through a story. A simple example is Doki Doki Literature Club which includes stat-building and relationships and occasional choices that are “plot toggles” but not branches; the story is mostly linear except for a wide bulge depending which character you choose to spend time with during one section of the story. (This of course isn’t just the structure of Doki - there are surprises as it’s a meta-horror - but it’s aping the football-shape of classic romance-path-harem VN where no matter who you hang with, there’s some kind of wrap up event like a prom scene that ties everything back together in the same place.)

Other games employ “mini football” structure or “branch, then gather” with hubs and gates to keep a plot tidy without becoming a time-cave. The plot will branch several times, but at some point gather back together - you might take multiple routes through New York - the subway, the direct route, or the back alleys, but at some point every path will gather where the Statue of Liberty comes to life and attacks. Each branch re-joins the main plot instead of becoming its own mini-adventure.

A slightly similar example from RPGs or some CoGs and the occasional graphic adventure is “mad-libs” structure where the story is linear but elements of the story shift in place. You might choose a class and based on whether you’re a fighter, rogue, or magic user, you’re presented with different concrete plot points and puzzles and situations that “toggle” or switch around based on your stats. At some point in the story it’s scripted that you join your character classes guild, but depending on what you’ve chosen that plot beat swaps out to be a fighter guild, or an underground thieves den, or a tower of magic users. The fighter will never see the mage’s tower as the same encounter is basically shifting in place as appropriate This is mimicking wide-lane football-structure but doing it transformatively by turn-tabling in (repainting?) appropriate plot elements to fit the appropriate situation in what is otherwise the same story.

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I think a VN-type structure could be interesting for a parser game, using either a story-mode style auto-advance on replays or just a direct “skip” rule. Endings aside, many VN’s are exciting because their middles are so wide and repetition is minimized.

I also think “changing outcomes” as a concept is a bit slippery. All outcomes are text in a parser game, and they shift all the time. I know this might sound reductive, but somebody who puts a lot of work into custom responses and non-productive actions is generally offering up varied outcomes turn-to-turn. Endings are emphasized because they are seen as a crowning achievement, but individual acts and decisions can be rewarding, too.

In that spirit, I have been interested in “middles” of varying size as a sort of “see as much as you like” model. In the parser space, I think encouraging replay can be difficult, so the middle is a good place to meet an audience.

I do think multiple endings in games that offer a certain level of mechanical engagement, be they VTM: Night Road or Elden Ring, are quite welcome. With mechanical complexity, the joy of play itself is motivating. I have played and finished Baldur’s Gate 3 three times, for instance, and loved each playthrough.

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Good point! A lot of published tabletop role-playing game adventures are designed this way. A common starting point. A bunch of clues / quests that branch out to different “middle story” parts, which can then be jumped across to gather more clues and see more of the paths, and ultimately, all leading to a final showdown with a “Big Bad Evil Guy” ending. It’s a very useful design pattern for that kind of thing, especially if the adventure is part of an ongoing series. If all the modules in a series end at the same place, the overall plot of the series can be very linear, while still allowing variance throughout the stories to simulate “free will” or “player agency” in the story.

A lot of video games use a similar pattern, such as in Dragon Age Origins (one of my favorite games of all time), but what was nice about DAO is that the climatic battle was pretty much the same no matter what choices you made in the middle (although it could get easier if you worked to gather more allies), but the denouement segment at the very end of the game after the climax was very much based on meaningful choices that the player made in the middle, such as relationships between other characters, how certain problems were resolved, etc. This gave the game a VERY satisfying ending, and made the player feel as if their choices really did matter.

-virtuadept

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Absolutely, there is definitely more ways to reward the reader in IF than just making choices and giving narrative agency to the reader/player. A lot of the fun of many IF works is in the descriptions, the responses to various actions, the interaction with NPCs, etc. Having narrative agency is by no means mandatory to make quality IF, and that wasn’t my intention to ever try to support that position. I would say, it’s hard to do, and for many stories, it’s not even appropriate to do.

I do feel there is value in allowing the player to direct the story in ways that could be mutually exclusive to other story paths. For example, in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, the first 2/3 of the game you waver between the light side and the dark side of the force. But before the climax, you must make a choice to either become a dark side force user or a light side force user. These are mutually exclusive choices. The ending you got depended on this choice. Of course, a lot of gamers would save right before making the choice, then reload and play the other side to see what happens. This gave the story two very different feels, which I thought added value to the overall experience.

-virtuadept

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Oh, yeah. I didn’t read you that way. With specific regard to IF, though, you have the question of replay. Because of mechanical variation, lots of video games (including Jedi Knight) tend to invite replay. In the recent thread about optimization games, variation and replay come up a lot. It leaves me asking “how to motivate or reward replays?” or else “how can a player be so invested in one specific ending that they don’t feel as if they’ve missed out?”

I made a thread (or two) a couple of years ago about these questions, and the feedback I received was that endings weren’t enough to motivate replay. So my question is more about how and where to place optional or variable content. I agree that varied endings are a positive, but how can we make the trip there interesting? VN’s have a good answer, and maybe parser games (I’m only talking about parser games because that’s what I make) could learn something there.

Maybe I (as an author) could also learn something from optimization games that have varied gameplay, since that can be its own reward.

I definitely see value in different endings and enjoy them a lot in video games.

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We talk alot about varied endings and varied paths on the way there, but I’d be interested in more varied randomized beginnings. So many games start with the same intro and Player character and POV, but a digital medium technically frees us from this requirement. Like the overall setting and major outside plot beats are still the same, but the starting location, circumstances, and motivations of the player character, as well as who specifically is the player character, changes each time you start a new game.

Just to illustrate, you could have a game that involves Godzilla attacking a major city, and the major events of that attack, and the humans attempts to rebuff that attack, are largely the same (to allow different players to still be able to compare and contrast their experiences) but in one playthrough you could start as a terrified librarian in the middle of a kids read-along, and temporarily in charge of a gaggle of children in the emergency. Another player might be a seaman on a destroyer trying to fire it’s naval guns at Godzilla as it approaches the city. Another player might be the Chief of Staff to the city’s Mayor, trying to handle the emergency and everyone trying to reach the Mayor, while also trying to discretely reach their significant other who is a doctor in a hospital across the city. Another playthrough you could be that doctor handling the mass casualty event of all mass casualty events while your cell phone quietly blows up. Ideally, there’d be some cross-influence between the various characters, perhaps with new game+ having your choices as one character carry out canonically into the threads of other characters’ stories (who gets to reach the mayor effects human response, how much the doctor ignores their phone effects how distracted the Mayor’s Chief of Staff is, whether you continue firing on Godzilla or simply flee your naval gun effects whether or not if an errant shell lands in the library vestibule, trapping the librarian and their charges, etc, etc), but, as disparate as the stories are, they’re all working in service to tell the same overarching story.

Just seems like an option not often used in IF or even just gaming as a whole. And if we’re brushing off the amount of additional authorial work for divergent paths, why not consider disparate starts altogether?

(ETA: I feel compelled to add that I wrote this immediately after watching the trailer for Godzilla Minus One, so I might have Kaiju on the brain.)

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I’m reminded of several video games…

In Megaman Battle Network 4, There are basically 7 chapters, the odd ones are always the same, but the even ones each take the form of a Tournament where the player is one of 8 contestants and the brackets are randomized, with a scenario for each opponent, so for each play through, you end up playing 3 random scenarios from a set of 7 for each, and you need to play through the game at least three times to experience them all… and the only real incentive to go through the game more than once is that each tournament has two scenarios that grant the player a major upgrade, and the randomization is rigged so all three tournaments grant you one of these scanarios the first time through, two give you their second upgrade scenario on new game plus, and the third tornament gives you its second upgrade on round three, and there’s some post-game content you can only access once you have all six of these upgrades… BN4 also pulls a Pokemon with two versions where the scenarios that grant upgrades are different and provide different upgrades… and with no way of sharing data between the versions that I can recall… All of the enemies get harder with each cycle, but it’s still a heck of a lot of replaying fixed bits, some of which are quite annoying.

Every game in the disgaea series I’ve played had multiple endings that required playing through the entirety of the main story and some others that require a significant portion of the story to be beaten… And often times, the determining factor as to which ending you get is number of ally kills during that particular run(Usually, the "Good ending requires beating the game with zero ally kills, though there’s often a bad ending for amassing at least 99 ally kills and a normal ending between these… And the game tracks endings… Most plot branches in these games usually amount to actually being strong enough to beat a hopeless boss battle the story says you lose or losing against certain bosses that ends up triggering endings of their own(though, in the first game, there are two bosses that you force to join the party according to the story, but if you rack up enough ally kills before reaching them, the game gives you the option to finish them off, triggering endings)… Though one thing that makes replaying most of the story mode for another ending in Disgaea is that everyone in the player’s party retains their level, stats, and equipment from round to round and you can either leave the enemies at normal strength to speed through all the story battles or make them stronger for extra challenge/better grinding(and Disgaea is a series where the level cap is 9999 but the main story has a Level 90 Final boss if the enemies are still on the lowest difficulty(and those hopeless boss battles that trigger alternate endings if you actually manage to win have baseline levels in the hundreds or thousands(and count as check boxes on the game’s list of bonus bosses).

In Zero Escape 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors(and I may have those nouns in the wrong order), which might count as a visual novel for how much story it has between it’s escape room style puzzles(I’ve never actually played it, but my at the time girlfriend read most of the story to me as she played(this was shortly after I went blind), there were three points in the game where you’re given a choice between 3 or 2 paths, and depending on which path through the game you take, there are 3 bad endings(which end after whatever you pick for the third section, one cliff hanger ending(take the correct path for the true ending before the game is ready to give you the true ending, one revelation ending triggered by taking that path that is the exact opposite of the path for the true ending, and the true ending… There’s a total of 18 paths through the game, only one of which will grant you the ending that has all the revelations, and one that will trigger the true ending if you’ve already seen the ending with all of the revelations, and those two paths that lead to the two endings with real substance have no overlap at all… excluding the other two bad endings, you could see basically the whole game in three play throughs with no overlap aside from the Intro, and get all six endings in 5 play through(the cliffhanger ending can be skipped, the true ending will give you credit for it), though there are a few smaller flags you need to trigger on the true ending path to actually get the cliffhanger or true ending instead of getting one of the bad endings… there’s also some telepathy across time and timelines going on(basically, stuff learned in the revelations ending, which in some regards is the worst timeline, gets psychically communicated to the player’s character at the point of the cliffhanger ending, and it is that information that allows the player to progress to the final part of the timeline that leads to the true ending… So, it’s less a truly branching story and more a case of a story told through parallel timelines.

Edit: I like the idea of a narrative heavy game with multiple playable characters where the choice of who to play as results in a completely different perspective on the story’s events… The Disgaea games do usually have at least one alternative story mode with a different main character from the main story, but these almost always take the form of side stories, telling the alternate main character’s back story, or a what if scenario… Sonic Adventure does give each playable character their own story that intersects with the other playable characters, but it’s story is pretty static, and you get most of the story from playing as Sonic and it being debatable how much of the other character’s stories that don’t overlap with Sonic’s add to the story… Sonic Adventure 2 Handled balancing the 6 playable character’s plot importance better, but also condensed things down to only two separate stories and things are still pretty static story wise.

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Great post! Meaningful choices are a very good way to make narrative IF more intriguing. They can work especially well in showcasing how characters react to different situations. For example, making a heroic character break down mentally and becoming a villain might not work in the main storyline, but as a separate path it could be an interesting one.

However, I dislike it when there is an extreme choice that leads to the protagonist becoming evil immediately. Like if you suddenly have the choice to kick a puppy and become a professional puppy kicker. Unless it’s a joke game, it’s better to be subtle and build the change up slowly. Also, the best choices tend to make sense from the character’s point of view. So the character should have a “good” reason to kick the puppy… Ok, I regret choosing that example already.

I think one reason choice-based IF hasn’t become more complex is that writing a branching narrative effectively requires a lot of effort. Since this is a hobby for most, time can be quite limited too. Writing a story with a couple of excellent branches and endings is better than cramming an IF with choices that might not matter at all. In my opinion games with zillions of endings are also a bit intimidating.

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^To borrow terminology from TVtropes, Kicking the dog refers to an act of petty cruelty meant to illustrate just how evil for evil’s sake the villain is. Shooting the dog refers to the hero or one of their allies doing something morally questionable for pragmatic reasons and can be a slippery slope towards a face heel turn.

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Zombie dogs, clearly.

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I often feel “compelled” to replay games and collect different endings if the game itself provides a list of endings. “Obsessively,” no, but by presenting the player with such a list, the game is usually saying “multiple endings are meaningful to my design.” I try to meet games on their own terms. If a game gives me a list, it feels like the game is encouraging me to fill out the list. So I try to oblige. But I don’t tend to have fun.

This has happened many times: I’ll enjoy a game on my first playthrough, and then the ending will prompt me to replay; and I’ll enjoy the second playthrough less; and the third even less; and the fourth even less; and so on. Multiple playthroughs have sometimes made me dislike games that I initially liked a lot.

Nowadays, I’ve started to ignore the “collect all the endings in the list” mechanic when I come across it. This usually makes me feel like I’m missing out on a lot of the game. Maybe even missing the point of the game. But I generally have a better time.

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