Jake

Idle Thumbs 171: The Curious Case of the Rhode Island Reader

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Which Silent Hill was it that had your character kill themselves if you spent enough time looking at a knife in your inventory?

... what.

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... what.

 

I had to look this up.  It's SH2.  Apparently looking at the knife repeatedly is one of the things tracked to determine what ending you get.

 

I have to play SH2 now. 

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It's disappointing that PC versions of SH2 and 3 (yes I love 3 too!) are not easily available, maybe if there's enough hype about the new one Konami will consider a Steam release. (There was some trouble with using the original voice actors or something when the HD versions for PS3 were released, and I remember reading that those ports were not technically super great...)

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Player choice doesn't have to mean branching narrative. For me the biggest thing I want in games is choice in how I play and explore. RPGs have always been good for this. You can be sneaky, a big axe swinging brute, a mage etc. I also enjoy games that don't force me to do things in a specific order, at specific times. For example Mass Effect 2 has tons of branching, but very little freedom. There is pretty much one order all the missions should be done in, and the morality system is the standard super good/super bad dichotomy. Dragon Age Origin is possibly the only game I have played with branching choices had non-obvious outcomes. (Especially with the dwarves.)

 

As for games being too linear, look at STALKER vs Metro 2033. Stalker is a bunch of linked open maps that you can explore as you want, do side quests, set up ambushes, and play how you want (Snipe, close range, stealth). Metro 2033 essentially just pushes you down a world of hallways and tunnels, even when you are on the surface. These games have similar themes but have totally different amounts of player choice/freedom. 

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It's disappointing that PC versions of SH2 and 3 (yes I love 3 too!) are not easily available, maybe if there's enough hype about the new one Konami will consider a Steam release. (There was some trouble with using the original voice actors or something when the HD versions for PS3 were released, and I remember reading that those ports were not technically super great...)

I think the main issue was that the HD ports removed the fog and upped the view distance for some reason, in the process destroying one of the most defining visual choices of the series.

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I had to look this up.  It's SH2.  Apparently looking at the knife repeatedly is one of the things tracked to determine what ending you get.

 

I have to play SH2 now. 

 

This is exactly the kind of branching I want more of in games. Basically your choices affect things but in a highly inscrutable way, rather than tangible cause and effect I want things that are shaped by both the player and things the player cannot control.

 

I agree that expecting the world of the narrative to revolve and branch around the player's choices is a foolish endeavour because it's both unfeasibly, and also ultimately unsatisfying. But I don't think there's anything wrong trying to have the player nudge themselves a different way along the path, especially if the player isn't even noticing or certain that they're doing it in the moment.

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On SH2 endings: SPOILERS

Good: healing immediately or not allowing yourself to go yellow for too long with your health, staring at your wife's photo, reading her letter and not staying close to and not checking up on Maria.

Delusional good ending: not read your wife's letter, not looking at your wife's photo, sticking close to Maria, checking up on Maria during the hospital level

Suicide: low health throughout the game, staring at knife a lot throughout game

Oh, the game nor booklet ever tell or hint about these interactions; you find them out by yourself.

There are other endings but those are based in specific items and rooms.

I've memorized all these little things because I've played the fuck out of SH 2 and even knowing all these things, can't get tired of them.

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I remember getting most of the way through SH2, and finding out that I didn't stick close enough to Maria for most of the game and was doomed to a bad ending. So dissapointing.

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I only got the "bad" ending in SH1 because I was totally dense about getting some serum or cure.  It felt really natural for it to end that way.

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I remember getting most of the way through SH2, and finding out that I didn't stick close enough to Maria for most of the game and was doomed to a bad ending. So dissapointing.

 

Genuinely not trying to call you out specifically on this, cause I do it too sometimes but this is the issue with trying to do inscrutable branching options. You need to balance against expectations so that players don't leave feeling exactly this. Even people who aren't big completionists can feel a little bit cheated or irritated that they didn't get the experience they wanted. Games as a whole have a habit of serving the players wants, and the ones that don't tend to be very upfront and often put off a lot of players (unless it's mostly the difficulty that has that effect).

 

So the problem is, how can you signpost this kind of subtle branching without spoiling it by calling attention to it? There are ways but it's a difficult problem.

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Actually now that I think about it I remember being disappointed for the exact opposite reason, because I wanted the depressing ending and was stuck with the 'good' one, heh.

 

Though personally I don't buy it as a good ending, because IMO Laura is just another constructed manifestation of Mary like Maria is.

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So the problem is, how can you signpost this kind of subtle branching without spoiling it by calling attention to it? There are ways but it's a difficult problem.

 

It's not about a branching narrative (as the ending is, I think, always the same), but Deadly Premonition handles a branching experience well thanks to its open, real time world.  At some point, you realize the rest of the town is going on with its life, and that there are opportunities for interaction all over the place that you may be missing.  It's possible to do a perfect, complete run, but the more likely outcome is that you accept that you are creating a path through this story in which there are encounters you will have and encounters you won't.  It's signposted thanks to the structure of the world.

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It's not about a branching narrative (as the ending is, I think, always the same), but Deadly Premonition handles a branching experience well thanks to its open, real time world.  At some point, you realize the rest of the town is going on with its life, and that there are opportunities for interaction all over the place that you may be missing.  It's possible to do a perfect, complete run, but the more likely outcome is that you accept that you are creating a path through this story in which there are encounters you will have and encounters you won't.  It's signposted thanks to the structure of the world.

 

Damn, I need to get back to this. I got a bugged save file that halted my progress so I dropped it but I really wanted to keep going, especially cause a close friend highly recommended it.

 

 

Also yeah I guess using the term branching narrative is narrower than the kind of thing you can do to achieve the same results. Maybe it's best to say 'responsive narrative'

ie. It responds to the players' choices in a way that shapes their narrative.

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I remember getting most of the way through SH2, and finding out that I didn't stick close enough to Maria for most of the game and was doomed to a bad ending. So dissapointing.

Not intentionally singling out your comment, because this is the standard terminology used in this field.

 

But It's unfortunate that the terminology for this is inherited from systems set up with an explicit good / bad / true ending hierarchy, because it colors the discussion into making people assume one ending is preferred to another. If done properly (and I'll submit that Silent Hill 2 mostly was), all the endings should be equally reasonable given the narrative experienced by the player.

 

Of course, there is still a problem of expectation and communication. The player should understand that their actions will affect the narrative, and so have enough buy-in to the experience that they're going to actually be invested in "role-playing" the content. And they should have enough understanding of the kinds of things that might affect the story, while still not knowing the details of how each individual action is calculated. It's also, I think, an issue with people not having the right context for variable stories instead expecting that there's only one "true" version of each story.

 

Silent Hill 2's endings are good because they're fairly distinct. They aren't simply "...but this time X is dead" type endings.

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From what I remember, the "bad" ending of Silent Hill 2 is significantly more narratively satisfying than the "good" ending. The "good" ending's a cop-out.

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It's not about a branching narrative (as the ending is, I think, always the same), but Deadly Premonition handles a branching experience well thanks to its open, real time world.  At some point, you realize the rest of the town is going on with its life, and that there are opportunities for interaction all over the place that you may be missing.  It's possible to do a perfect, complete run, but the more likely outcome is that you accept that you are creating a path through this story in which there are encounters you will have and encounters you won't.  It's signposted thanks to the structure of the world.

I can't for the life of me get this game to work on PC. I try using DPfix (from the guy who made DSfix!) but it just doesn't work. Sad sad. ):

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I think the main issue was that the HD ports removed the fog and upped the view distance for some reason, in the process destroying one of the most defining visual choices of the series.

Oddly related, this same thing is a problem with going back and playing Morrowind on new hardware with an unlimited view distance. The fog made Vvardenfell feel a lot larger than it really was. When you remove it, you realize the only reason the game's scope feels so large is that your movement speed is so slow. IMO it's also why Oblivion feels so small to me in comparison to Morrowind and Skyrim. In Skyrim they used mountains instead of fog, but in Oblivion they wanted to show off the immense view distance and "If you see it, you can go there" selling point.

 

What a tangent.

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I finally got round to picking up Bring Up the Bodies, and have been amply rewarded. Half-way through, it is said of King Henry:

 

on8lSKg.png

 

Surely the thumbs would have acquitted themselves well as royal councilors.

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From what I remember, the "bad" ending of Silent Hill 2 is significantly more narratively satisfying than the "good" ending. The "good" ending's a cop-out.

 

To be fair, I got as far as the scene where Maria died, then played that about 10 times thinking I had done something wrong in that scene. Finally, a friend who was really into Silent Hill let me know that I had to stick close to her for the entire game and I certainly wasn't going to play it again, so I quit.

 

These days I might be a little more patient with it but, at the same time, it's a pretty esoteric reason to kill a main character.

 

Edit: Reading back through a walkthrough, it seems as if I either have a poor memory, or I was misinformed by my friend. I guess that scene is only about half way through the game, and it triggers a game-over if she dies so I don't know what was going on.

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