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Author Topic: You Get Nothing. You Lose.  (Read 10416 times)
Xion
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« on: December 06, 2010, 01:44:33 AM »

Are there (m)any games featuring stories where You Lose In The End? Not even a kind of bittersweet, "I beat the bad guy but I lost my best friend" or "I saved the world in an act of martyrdom" but more like absolutely nothing goes the way it was supposed to, and it stays that way even after the game ends. Particularly I mean games without sequels where everything is righted (but mentioning those is fine too)

note: this is different from a Sad Ending

The only thing I can really think of off the top o' my head is Conker's Bad Fur Day. (Yes.) When I beat that game many years ago on N64 it made me feel So Bad. I was like "What. Sad" Even with his crown and all, Everything Sucked. He Lost.

Anyway, what do you guys think about this kind of story - this kind of ending? I kind of wish I'd see it more often. I love endings that crush my spirit and make me frown deeply.
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« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2010, 02:49:54 AM »

Half Life? You screw up the earth, and then at the end it seems like you screw up some other dimension as well?
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« Reply #2 on: December 06, 2010, 05:12:31 AM »

Honestly, I love this kind of ending.

Gravity Bone is the most effective one of these I've seen. (spoilers) You're shot in the back and left for dead by a rival spy just as you're about to finish the second mission. After a cinematic chase scene, your assailant ambushes you around a corner and shoots you a second time, sending you falling to your death. It goes out of its way to give the impression that you would have played a much longer game had the ending not suddenly occurred, with mission summaries that seem to be building up to a larger plot and inventory items conveniently not filling all the available slots.

Also, Red Dead Redemption. (major, major spoilers) John Marston, the player character, used to run with a violent gang of idealistic thieves. He leaves that life after a close brush with death. With his wife and son, he sets up a small farm to live a peaceful life, but then the government kidnaps his wife and child, using them as leverage to force Marston to hunt down and capture or kill his former comrades. He achieves this after a game's worth of fighting, is reunited with his family, and starts to settle down to a mundane life of farming. However, the government backs off on the deal and sends an unstoppable army against him. Marston sacrifices himself in a blaze of glory so his family could escape. They do, but his wife dies soon after for unexplained reasons and his son eventually becomes a violent gunslinger anyway. The credits don't roll until the player, now taking control of the son, tracks down and kills the government official responsible for Marston's death. It's a hollow victory.

The hardest part is making such an ending feel inevitable (at least in retrospect), since most players have been conditioned to think that such endings are a sign that they did something wrong, and if they only choose path B or were a little quicker in getting to character C, then everything will turn out for the best. Not all games have to be empowering, and there's something to be said for games which acknowledge that not everything in life is under your control.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2010, 05:20:29 AM by Noyb » Logged

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« Reply #3 on: December 06, 2010, 06:44:16 AM »

7 Days A Skeptic. Like, happy ending, and then wham!

Come to think of it, Yahtzee's often a miserablist. The ending to 1213 was pretty brutal, too.
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Evan Balster
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« Reply #4 on: December 06, 2010, 07:23:48 AM »

I like Yahtzee's games a lot.  1213's ending took me completely by surprise.  The  [black=red,2,300]elevator scene[/glow] leading up to it was great.


I think the problem is that the advancement of the average game is contingent on player success, or at least forks between player success and failure.  To make "you lose" games we need to doom the player to fail from the start, no matter what she does.

To this effect, we can either take control away (cutscene failure, which is frustrating), force a specific move that seals the deal (such as in Gravity Bone) or make it so the player's actions were in service of a doomed effort all along, making the player's success irrelevant.  (Conker's Bad Fur Day, sorta, and some of the others mentioned here.)

Any "implementing strategies" I missed?  I guess it's also vaguely possible to make it so the player can succeed and get a Prince-of-Persia style "No, that's not what happened", but that would be a very mean thing to do.
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« Reply #5 on: December 06, 2010, 09:05:51 AM »

I guess Shadow of the Colossus would be an example of a game where you technically lose in the end, though it depends on what perspective you look at it from.

You spend the entirety of the game in the forbidden area, attempting to destroy it's inhabitants in order to revive some God-like thing that can bring the girl back to life, and after doing so the God-like thing takes control of you, reveals itself to be bad, and gets you, essentially, killed. At least, I think that's how it goes, it's been a while, I'm rusty on the details.

I guess it's an interesting concept to follow, but it's very dangerous in terms of audience satisfaction, as it is in any media - after contributing to a game for so long and spending time with a character, if you kill it off and don't do it properly, the audience can be left feeling very bad.

Fallout 3, pre-Broken Steel, had an ending where you could die permanently, and at that point the game itself would end - a lot of people weren't satisfied with that ending at all, despite it making complete sense plot-wise, which prompted the Broken Steel DLC with the extended ending.

Overall, the ending has to make sense both in terms of story and gameplay - open-ended games, such as Fallout 3, shouldn't have permanent endings to them, because it breaks the structure of the game that the player has gotten used to. A more linear game could get away with it though (and yes, I count SotC as a linear game, but not in a bad way at all).
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« Reply #6 on: December 06, 2010, 09:29:07 AM »

Wouldn't most arcade games fall into this category? You play tetris until you top out, you play canabalt until you fall. Typically, they're devoid of any coherent story, but pertinent examples nonetheless.

I've often wondered if a plot to a game could be generated through hidden arcade mechanics. Say each block in tetris would symbolize a character, and the way it landed and who it landed next to would define what the character does in that scene. All these choices build and build on each other until their inevitable conclusion towards the top. Perhaps it's not a workable example, but I think it still illustrates the idea.
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« Reply #7 on: December 06, 2010, 09:38:37 AM »

Not only that, Shadow of the Colossus has a technically "bad" ending (sorta it's hard to explain without spoilers) that as a player, you WANT it.

Any savvy player figures out what's going on pretty quick, realizes the consequences of the actions, and *wants* to make it happen anyway.  It's actually kinda clever.  I like games that have those sorts of endings.  Even in a game where it's a surprise (like 1213), it doesn't make me feel like a bad player.  Rather it makes me more interested in the "world gone mad" concept, where all you can do is survive.

I mean really, Fallout 3 is a bad situation before you even start the game Tongue
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« Reply #8 on: December 07, 2010, 08:21:42 AM »

I would give Shade a shot, I think it's an interesting contrast to a lot of these examples. You don't have a strong goal in the game, so it's not that the ending denies you anything -- but it's undeniably a dark ending.

Likewise the penultimate level of Braid reverses much of what you thought you understood about the plot. Kinda like Shadow of the Colossus, if you're paying attention to the plot you'll have a bad feeling about the direction you're going in, but it's quite a shock when it actually hits. The last level is clever in that it appears to be a "well it's not all bad" sop to the player, but only if you don't explore carefully.
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« Reply #9 on: December 07, 2010, 11:00:52 AM »

Gravity Bone is definitely the best losing game.  Good enough that I want to play it again even though I know I have to lose.
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« Reply #10 on: December 07, 2010, 12:18:47 PM »

increpare's Home is the first game that comes to mind. +1 to the Conker sentiments.
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« Reply #11 on: December 07, 2010, 04:14:50 PM »

Likewise the penultimate level of Braid reverses much of what you thought you understood about the plot.

Wow, yeah, Braid is an excellent example. Makes me think of those movies where a character is looking for some kind of self-knowledge, and in the end that knowledge is a big payoff that makes everything click into place, but is still horrible.

Unfortunately, the only example I can think of is The Machinist, which sucked.

Braid is a good case of a payoff that blew me away. It didn't bother me that the ending was a downer; I was rewarded for all I'd done with an ending that put the entire game to that point into context, which is what I wanted. Downer endings maybe just need to be satisfying downers. I remember PT Anderson saying of Magnolia that his goal with the ending was to give the movie the saddest happy ending he could imagine for it, one that recognizes the characters might well go back to being completely miserable.
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« Reply #12 on: December 07, 2010, 04:18:16 PM »

The only thing I can really think of off the top o' my head is Conker's Bad Fur Day. (Yes.) When I beat that game many years ago on N64 it made me feel So Bad. I was like "What. Sad" Even with his crown and all, Everything Sucked. He Lost.
Love that game
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« Reply #13 on: December 07, 2010, 06:31:59 PM »

Quote
increpare's Home is the first game that comes to mind.

Yes.

Wow, yeah, Braid is an excellent example. Makes me think of those movies where a character is looking for some kind of self-knowledge, and in the end that knowledge is a big payoff that makes everything click into place, but is still horrible.

Have you seen Memento? That's got that kind of vibe, for me. I don't want to spoiler it, but it features a very hollow and sad sort of closure.
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Xion
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« Reply #14 on: December 08, 2010, 12:08:34 AM »

I really need to play some of these games (yahtzee's, braid, sotc, beat red dead red.)

I tried that shade game but apparently I suck at IF because I didn't get much of anywhere (or at least I don't think I did).

But yes, Gravity Bone.

Glad I'm not the only guy that likes these kinds of endings though, thought I might be some kind of weird depressing dude or something.
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« Reply #15 on: December 08, 2010, 12:16:31 AM »

One Chance
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/555181

Or for that matter, Every Day the Same Dream. Both kind of "worst case scenarios", but still the more games that go away from being "winnable", the more flexibility and depth games as a medium will achieve. Imagine Shakespeare without tragedy, where would we be?!
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« Reply #16 on: December 08, 2010, 12:35:23 AM »

SPOILEROONIES!


In Fable 3, if you don't have any money raised for an army at the end of the game, almost everybody in Albion dies and those who survive live to hate you. This is taking into account that unless you spend massive amounts of money Albion will be a dump and everybody will hate you anyway. So unless you want to be hated by living people or hated by dead people, you gotta raise a shedload of money yourself (which is extremely frustrating in itself).

I watched my wife play through to this ending and she found it very frustrating because she could be nothing but nice to people, and in the end the game punished her for it.

I read in RetroGamer there was a game called Flood (or something like that) ages back, a hard puzzle game about water mechanics. At the end of that I believe you finally escaped from the sewer and were immediately run over and killed by a car. It was supposed to be a joke but I don't think people were pleased.
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« Reply #17 on: December 08, 2010, 06:39:22 AM »

Xion:

My favorite movies are Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and The Road.  All of which are famously sad.  You can join my "Sadness-Loving Bastards" club.
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« Reply #18 on: December 08, 2010, 12:03:55 PM »

SOS, or Septentrion, has a depressing ending if you don't take the time to save fellow crew members.

And it's pretty rudimentary, but the It Was All A Dream ending of Link's Awakening was bittersweet when I was in elementary school.
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« Reply #19 on: December 09, 2010, 06:58:58 AM »

Oh, I played One Chance.

Dang, I feel sad now... I saved myself and the girl, but... Sad
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