Hey all!
I’d like to request recommendations (spoiler free!) for games where you need to make choices, take sides, kill or not kill someone, follow or do not follow orders, but where the consequences actually matter - and most importantly, where the choices aren’t “obviously good choice vs obviously bad choice”.
Give me games where I can choose to side with one kingdom or another, but there’s no clear moral high ground, or where I need to decide to save someone dear to me at the cost of innocent lives. I do not want things like “save all the children and get the happy ending and make flowers grow” versus “kill everybody and everything blows up and the world gets all its water replaced by acid”.
What games fit this requirement?
In Sekiro, while it is not made clear that the decision will end the game (after a boss fight), it is obviously a very important decision, so I don’t think making the stakes actually high is bad design - the stakes being high is one of the reasons I like souls games.
I didn’t like Nier Automata and didn’t play it much, so I don’t know about its abrupt endings, and how they are presented and handled.
Edit: I didn’t mean to be rude in my last comment, I was being genuine - souls games are known for this stuff (not specifically abrupt endings, but rather abrupt meaningful choices).
Your reply made me realize however that it might just be Nier’s implementation of the idea which you dislike, not the idea in general.
Yea, from how you made it sound it seems similar to how it ended up being in nier - make a choice that does seem like it’ll end the game, but really it’s probably not very serious - credit roll, hope you saved recently. It would’ve very much benefited from simply autosaving at the correct time.
Imo it kinda depends on what kind of ending it is, if it’s still conclusive but maybe a bad end, that seems alright. Just if it clearly leaves me unsatisfied I’d be annoyed. I’d still really prefer just having a reload option, but I’d also rather game devs stick to their vision, just like fromsoft ganes really don’t need an explicit easy mode, it makes sense they’d also stick to this if they want to do it. It’ll be great for some people, and others will hate it, and that’s fine.