Narrator voice "Tim moved on from Interplay and began a new journey of game making, from Troika to Carbine -eventually landing himself in Obsidian Entertainment. Now prospering on TH-cam with videos discussing his experiences with game development, viewers wonder what will happen next..."
My guess: he will keep working with people and trying to make his ideas reality until he is gonna sit down and accept the reality for what it was. New dreamers will come out finding their own place in the world and only some of them knew they walk the same road the Tim Cain walked
It's also really fun to check wikis and see all the permutations of the decisions you went out of your way NOT to make. Especially when what's good and bad long-term and short-term don't correlate.
0:45 Tim, you've set off my Simpsons autism. The episode you're referring to is "Homer's Phobia" and the featured song isn't "I've got the power" it's "Gonna make you sweat" which is the song that goes 'Everybody dance now'. Tbf they do sound fairly similar
Yeah everyone just called it Everybody Dance Now even though that wasn't the official name of the song. I certainly remember when that had heavy MTV airplay and of course the Simpson's episode.
"I've got the power" is The Power by SNAP! A German Eurodance group. But I don't blame you for thinking C&C. They sound the same, and both came out in 1990.
These are great. I’ve started working on some interactive fiction but I never thought to deliberately start thinking about where I’d place those variables while it’s still fresh to me. This is such a great channel, thank you for sharing your experience/knowledge
Since I was a child, Fallout 1 and 2 ending slides are still some of the most impactful artistic experiences I have had. Needless to say they spoiled me for good. A hallmark of an impactful memorable fun game. Alpha Protocol had a fascinating spin on it too.
I have always loved ending slides. They may seem like a small addition, but I really think they add a lot to the story and make the world seem more “real” (in that it continues on after the game is over) and helps make you feel like your choices mattered. I always appreciate seeing them in a game, and I’m always disappointed when games that tout themselves as “choice-based” don’t have them.
I do wish there was the most end slides. Fallout New Vegas really pushed the envelope with amount and variations of them. One thing I am missing in the end slide department is including one, possibly final, consequence: player dying. In Fallout 1 Vault Dweller fails in combat or convincing the Master and dies, instead of game over we have one slide and narration that Vault Dweller failed at the end and despite loses bad guy wins (or maybe they were so weakened that factions that remained managed to win). Retire idea of game over and include player death during end slides. No only winning but also loosing could give very interesting consequences.
I really like that idea... it allows permadeath to be a canon end to a campaign in a CRPG either as a part non save iron man or you could meta game to reach an ending route that involves a death if you want. The idea of both finishing the campaign or failing it both being endings, rather than either being game over? I think I'll implement that in my own games now
Thank you about covering how the QA works, so many are clueless in that reguard. I worked in QA for a while and it was very frustrated not knowing how the game was Intended to Function at times. In lvl cutscenes missed because they started and ended in the same location for the player so there was no visually indication that something was wrong when the cutscene never loaded, you just continued on through the lvl, no way for QA to know it didnt load. Half of QA we didnt know an entire skill customization system was implemented into the story campaign, because the game had no hud indication for the menu shortcut and the physical lobby kiosk to use the system pre mission select, was bugged and the prompt to use the kiosk never appeared, but QA never new for Months that the kiosk was supposed to be anything other then premission lobby window dressing clutter. I always thought the that a sequel to a game with end slides, should give the players/community the Cannon slides that the second games world history is based on.
Hi Tim, can you do a video on save files? How do we store the state of a world from a player’s actions and load that state into the world when booting the game? Also, how do we optimize save files so that they aren’t extremely huge from a long play through, especially if you want multiple save files to be stored from a single play through?
I love ending slides or some variation of the idea. But BG3 introduced to me (at least my first time seeing this in game format) a short playable epilogue, with all of your choices and consequences referenced in either dialogue or newspaper or what have you. That was incredible even if admittedly it was added later after its release.
I think the overall narrative team decides which of the possible outcomes will be the ones having the top priority in a sequel. Me personally I don't like this because it destroys the liberty inherited in the first game once you play the sequel itself, like in Baldur's Gate 2 having the party written in stone despite your freedom to end the first game with a personalized group. Gladly at least in KOTOR 2, despite all its technical flaws, had a main story that didn't intrude in the previous events, even further through conversation you had the chance to set in stone two main aspects of the first game that will end up carrying the main story of the second. In my perspective, if a game is established as "free-RPG" like the case with Arcanum, the sequels should always give the player a chance to write their inputs on the first game so the second one runs following those events.
@@PointReflex I think the "problem" is that Obsidian games tend to give you wide options of endings that narratively could resulted in different continuation. BioWare "fixes" this by having 1 ending, but how you get about doing it - that where they give you choices. No matter what choices you made in DAO, Warden *will* defeat the Demon, whether he being Alistair or Loghain, that's up to player choices. In DA2, Hawke *will* inevitably help Unabomber "destroy" Kirkwall. In DA3, The Inquisitor *will* lose his/her hands.
@@PointReflexThat makes me think. I always prefered sequels in Fallout because the games feel standalone enough to accept the world instead of Bioware games which follow path of the same character.
@@PointReflexThat makes me think. I always prefered sequels in Fallout because the games feel standalone enough to accept the world instead of Bioware games which follow path of the same character.
You don't. Writers of stories often work more from a series story beats than from a single fitting "true" narrative. This is doubly true in the case of writers for videogames. You don't want to glue yourself to a narrative that results in a shitty sequel. Especially at the time when you're already scrambling and cutting corners to get the first part out you don't really have time to think about the sequel. So narratives are more often crafted back to front than front to back. And a single narrative is about the most inauthentic feeling thing you can do (other than a Warp in the West style of thing, which tops the inauthentic chart by miles). Take inspiration from historic eh.. historians and let what happened fluctuate according to different story tellers, their biases and how far away (in time, distance and re-tellings of the story) they are away from the events. Based on history you can even fit in some completely opposite narratives about a single event. Just making it clear that every game is told from the point of view of a different observer can smooth over a whole lot of conflicts. Within reason you can put a lot of different end-states into your sequel, as long as you take care not to make anything to explicit. Or everything explicit, like Bethesda did with the Warp in the West.
Hello Tim. I've been watching for a few months and was wondering if youve ever been working on a game and nothing is seemingly coming together how you want (what game you envision vs how your concepts play out while developing it) and how did you resolve it, whether it was by taking a step back and reassessing what concepts you should implement to begin with, or if all you needed to do was view the way youre implementing the current concepts that arent working in a way that allows you to see how to properly mix those concepts
The closest I ever came to a game not coming together was Wildstar. I tried re-making the setting and the story and some of the classes...but eventually I could not get what I had envisioned. The full story is here: th-cam.com/video/YMY5LUNdS-8/w-d-xo.html
Not often I get to fact check you Tim, but C+C music factory did everybody dance now not I got the power. That was the lyrical jesse james whose copywritten lyrics for the group snap WILL NOT be stolen. Now with this power I've got over you, I'd like to ask nicely pretty please with cream and sugar, for more talk about how you run your tabletop roleplaying games. I'm a D&D guy, so that's my favorite Tim content. Thanks. 💀
Hey Tim! Love the content. I was wondering if you'd have enough to say about control schemes and keybinds for a video? How can they be decided for games? What are some cool examples of good control schemes you've seen? What are some bad ones? Is there a lot of arguments had within dev teams for how they should look? Thanks.
Love your videos keep up the awesome work! I’m currently involved in an early memory optimization pass of a pre-Alpha game. This work will require some restructuring of how gameplay logic (Unreal blueprints) is handled. I’m concerned that others on the team will see this as a hinderance to their work and won’t engage with the changes needed. I don't want to come across as the angry programmer demanding changes from everyone so I’m prioritizing tasks that won't block others on the team. Do you have any advice on how to get buy in from other teams for larger features/pieces of work?
As a former tester for a AAA company, that totally is a bug that is handled by testers. We had explicit design docs to follow and we designed test cases around what the documents say should happen vs what the game does.
Thank you for yet another wonderful video! I first saw ending slides in Arcanum and I instantly fell in love with them! I do not understand why more RPG devs don't use them to represent c&c.. Speaking of which what other strategies and systems have you used or experienced for representing long term consequences? Especially before the end of the game. Thank you again for the video and have a great day :)
"I do not understand why more RPG devs don't use them to represent c&c" -- I tend to think it's because most RPG's today don't employ c&c. It's easier to tell stories in the more cinematic fashion many developers attempt to mimic. Bland and flavorless "flavor text" and "missions" that affect nothing whatsoever in the game world along with nonreactivity is the order of the day otherwise. BG3's success might change that overarching trend; might not. Guess we'll see. I wouldn't expect video game developers to write x number of different games-in-one with x different variations on a main story. (And I hope Tim touches on the problem of "canon" endings and possible ways to avoid that.) There's no opportunity for true spontaneity in a prescripted game whereas a TTRPG might provide for it given that it can be changed on the fly and played more or less 'The Endlessly'. There will always be a choice we'd like to make that we can't in a cRPG because it doesn't exist within the finished game itself, but "stories" are stories only if they have an ending as well as beginning, imo. Else, they become cyclical exercises in pointlessness. The things we couldn't do, historically, may have given us pause but didn't necessarily knock us out of the game world completely. I gather that's much of the appeal of AI-generated everything for developers today. They seem to want AI to do what living, breathing TTRPG dungeon masters and players can do in concert. In fact, they seem to think AI can be endowed with imagination. Guess we'll see how that turns out as well.
@@lrinfi Thank you for your insights. Playing through Baldur's Gate 3 there is definitely c&c though it does seem like the exception and not the rule unfortunately. I'm primarily surprised since ending slides are relatively cheap to produce and yet not well used by the industry. Admittedly, the trend towards cinematic experiences you mentioned doesn't help! I do believe AI will be a powerful tool for creating dungeon masters and NPCs but it might take some time. I still find the lack of storytelling systems like those seeing in more simulation-ish games, like dwarf fortress and the Sims, in cRPGs unfortunate. There is so much story space to explore in these frameworks (even without the AI advancements) that I feel like it is a missed opportunity...
How do you decide what order the slides are shown at the end? The order that the choices were made? The order that the consequences would occur? Or based on some kind of narrative "weight" / vibe?
Hi Tim. Thank you for the channel and great insights into your rich career! You mentioned Command & Conquer and made me wonder: Have you ever considered doing a RTS RPG in the vein of Divinity: Dragon Commander? Or maybe depart even further from the RPG genre? Thanks again!
Little note : try putting some LED strips at the back of the shelves or something, film when it's dark and light up the face: instant cool production value & makes it look rater fun overall! also noticed that camera is rather sharp in this one while background gets a bit of a blur : nice little touch! As for C&C : YES tiberium wars were the best, but speaking of choices & consequences - best,critically acclaimed games usually are ether technically great (gameplay & tech is refined - think Half Life, Crysis, Doom) or written really well (meaning : choices and options that are accounted for - Deus EX, FO : NV, Mass effect). Thou it's kind of sad that we dont see a TECHNICALLY great game that also has great writing. I guess there goes the decision triangle i guess!
I did add some LED strips to my cabinets, and they look really cool. But the camera keeps trying to focus on them instead of me, despite being told to focus on faces.
Thanks so much for doing these videos! This talk about presenting consequence to the player makes me ask about something I struggle with a lot as a developer: how do you feel about the many ways to track the state of a game? Examples below: Using and generating individual flags seems to be the most straightforward way to do so, but in my experience has led to longer loading times as the number of flags increased through the lifespan of a playthrough. It also feels unintuitive(?) as a way of representing a fluid, volatile world. Using a hash/embedding would give a more constant retrieval time over the length of the game and may provide a more consistent (read: non-decision-tree-forming) interface for any designers that want to implement non-binary outcomes; however, it requires all possible states to be compiled at build time, and may necessitate a complete rebuild if any modifications are needed. TL;DR: do you like using anything other than flags to manage game state?
Hey Tim :) In Fallout New Vegas theres a place called the Basincreek Building which is supposed to be a reference to Obsidians old office building, I don't know if you worked there at the time or heard about all the stuff that happened there but if you did could you tell me if these are true? like a car crashing into the building, bathrooms always flooding, ant infestations
This was really interesting, keeping track of all decisions that the player can make must be a nightmare, both as someone working with the code or designing the narrative, and even then you have to be convincing with the consequences the endslides show, I wonder if it feels weird when someone plays a character that is not cohesive then.
Thanks for sharing all you do, Tim! I'm curious, do you spend much bandwith thinking about your 'legacy', and if so, does it temper your creative decisions? Does it make you more risk-averse? Not to say you haven't left your mark on gaming history -- with your games and now this channel. I'm thinking of how Tarantino says he's only making 10 movies because of, among other reasons, the possibility of diminishing returns. I'm wondering how an artist might contend with thoughts like that which don't necessarily work in tandem with creativity and passion. Not that art has to be made for public consumption (and not calling you old; merely a legend). This is a very vague and broad q, whether you see it or not thanks again for sharing so much w us.
I'd love to know about how you store player data between sessions. Currently, I'm learning c# in Unity, I've been using playerPrefs to store basic information and recently started using JSON files to store lists of strings. What is commonly used for different game mechanics? For example, Inventory, quest completion, player location and unlocked perks.
Tim, how do you make players feel they’re leveling up? i feel most games do something like this: player’s damage is 2, enemy health is 10 (kill in 5 hits), then they progress and player’s damage is 20 and enemy’s health is 100 (kill in 5 hits). how do you make the players feel they’re getting stronger? thank you!
Hey Tim! Quick question maybe an interesting topic, how do you provide a great feel of reward to a player by creating and placing "legendary" items in the game and how to balance those ? Like how do you decide when to give them away (Crucial story moment or boss fights or even exploration quests) ?
Since Fallout was the title that codified the format for games, I feel like it's worth asking, were there any particular film or show endings that anyone mentioned in comparison during development?
I do love endgame slides. A good epilogue can obviously go a long way when it comes to leaving you satisfied as the story wraps up, and for choice-based games they might just be extra important. Too many supposedly choice-based games just give you one big, final choice and let that determine the entirety of the ending. (And then a sequel might roll in and attempt to brush as many of those choices as possible under the rug anyway.)
I LOVE the endgame slides. It solves a simple issue, and I am surprised we don't see more games (RPG and none RPG) use them because they have a high narrative impact compared to the cost. They also give players a good reason to replay the game without needing the development effort of a New Game+.
Hi Tim! I wanna ask how common and your expreince is the autistic community in Game Industry. As a autistic person myself I wanna know how hard is the Game Industry for autistic people and what are upsides to it etc.
Excellent. I'd like to have End Slides in my game Secret Keep that I'm developing. And it ties in well with my Campaign system which uses a Storylets approach, all based on variables that can open and close and track changes after each mission. Great stuff! Notes taken! :D
Statistics on player choices. When compared to developers, play testers, and other players. This is shown when reaching this stage of the game. These may be mundane, or essential choices for progression. This is displayed to the player as a comparison to what others had accomplished. Its trival information, however its been tracked. This gives a player the means to make a consideration. It may even tempt a player doing it again to score better on their next play through.
I still remember when i have replayed Fallout 1 for the first time and decided to be a super bady. I was so shocked when i have found out from slides that choosing Gizmo and his mobsters for Junktown was actually a better choice for that place.
That's probably my favorite kind of ending-slide consequence: the long-term effect of a good decision making things worse, or the long-term effect of a 'bad' decision making things better.
@@Netherflylove the junktown endings. Having said that endings should make sense (which they do for junktown). You should be able to forsee most "bad endings" etc. Few gotcha moments if you know what i mean
The latter. And especially for managing designers, I am more goal-focused than detail-focused. I tell them what I want and why I want it, and then I see what they make to achieve that.
Hey Tim, I'm new to your vids but I love them almost as much as your games. So I apologise if this has already been answered elsewhere but I have to ask: why does the fallout series hate cults so much? From the Children of the Cathedral to Scientologists, I mean Hubologists, to later games (children of atom, etc.); from a designer perspective, what is the appeal of inserting interesting cults into games?
I can't speak about the goals of the original design team, but my goals included making an MMO for everyone, from hardcore gear-oriented raiders to story-focused gamers to people who just wanted a cool house with fun things in it. That's why the player path system existed, for the players to tell the game what they liked doing. However, there was a contingent who wanted the game to be "hard core only" and pushed really hard for that after I left. You can decide for yourself if they succeeded.
I would like a video on something like "What Fallout/Modern games/The Outer worlds(or similiar) could learn from Half life", I think a lot of modern games could honestly learn a lot from Half life in how it treats the player as somewhat intelligent and competent.
Please forgive me, this is gonna be a bit of a long comment. I am feeling... a bit rambly today, it seems. Today is the very first time I'm hearing "C&C" being used to mean 'choice and consequences.' 'Til now it's always been just 'Command and Conquer.' Maybe that's due to more and more choice-driven RPGs in the console sphere, where Command and Conquer just... doesn't have a presence -- it's still mentioned regularly among PC players, though! Anyway, I just gotta say: ending slides are probably my #1 favorite gaming trope of all time,. Any time I play through a long RPG and don't see any, or many, at the end... I am monumentally disappointed. And it completely saps my desire to play any other similar games for a long while. I'm curious, Tim, whether or not you ever played the first Witcher game? It certainly had some... iffy design choices here and there, but I think it did something really ingenious with its ending slides: basically, the game was divided into many different chapters (I think there were more than 10, but I don't remember) -- and you'd get little slide-shows at the end of each chapter. detailing the major consequences of your choices in the preceding chapter and setting up the next one, often covering events via text that would've been pretty expensive to try and depict (even in an abbreviated form) in-game. The downside to that approach, I suppose, is that it focuses the slides more on major events that have relatively immediate consequences and leaves less room for the fun snowballing of big long-term consequences from little nothing-choices that the player likely didn't ever think would matter, which are often (IMO) the very best sort of thing to see in an ending slide (EG oh you completed a romance quest to hook up these two specific NPCs who are both pretty weird? Well, congratulations, because of that the entire region becomes a utopia two-hundred years later -- that kind of thing). And, of course, it also means taking slides away from the actual END of the game, since they're sprinkled throughout instead, which can make the proper conclusion feel less significant or broad-reaching than maybe it should. Still, I thought it was a really clever way of using ending slides and I've always been kind of disappointed that so few other games have tried iterating on the concept. Oh! And it also helped depict the passage of time, since a slide-show kinda-sorta-always implies that a certain amount of time has passed -- from weeks to years -- in-between events, which really help lends the story a sense of scale it wouldn't otherwise has. Speaking of, I'd LOVE to see you do a video on how to convey time/passage of time in RPGs. Like I know many people didn't like it, but I really liked how in Dragon Age 2 each act would jump the story forward several years. That was a lot more effective to me than the usual little bits of text saying that X days Y hours had passed that we typically get, ad nauseum, in RPGs.
Tim, could you comment on the idea that "dated" features make for a game bad? Do you think there are features legitimately so "dated" that their inclusion in a game is a point against the game? For example, some have criticized modern games for having end slides at all, saying they are "dated". On the other hand, people praise the dice rolling mechanic in Balder's Gate 3 even though that mechanic could be considered dated and even made obsolete by the presence of a computer's processor. Is modernity a critical standard or is the inclusion of so-called dated features a matter of flavor?
I think, BioWare has given us the middle of the road "solutions" but it risk to give an impression of "watered down" narrative. In *all* Dragon Age, the ultimate ending is only 1, so that would only requires 1 slides. So that example of yours *potentially* could be solved with 1 slide, whether or not player able to make somebody led the town, not who led the town. That's the BioWarean way. Obsidian way, I guess we can use the fate of Primm.. I think that's over-complicated for ultimately something that does not matter. Anyway, Tim, have a good day, I love you. And maybe spill some beans out for us folk waiting for TOW2? :)
Something like Dragon Age (or Mass Effect) represents an entirely different discussion, I think. How narrative is approached -- especially long-term consequences of player choices -- is gonna be wildly different in a game that's expected to be followed up soon thereafter by a direct-sequel. You can only do so much with the ending of Draagon Age 3, for example, before you're hitting up against Dragon Age 4. Like a big part of what makes Baldur's Gate 2's ending so 'epic' is how broad and far-reaching the ending slides were... which was only possible because Throne of Bhaal was designed as the grand finale. Larian's efforts decades later notwithstanding, there was never supposed to be a sequel. If Baldur's Gate 1 had ending slides, then the devs'd be stuck either being forced to make certain narrative decisions to maintain consistency with the prior game when making BG2, or spending a lot of time and money trying to accommodate in-game reactivity in BG2 from the previous game, or simply ignoring the previous game entirely, not worrying about any contradictions -- all options that would (at the very least) greatly annoy players who'd finished BG1. And even without BG1 having ending slides, BG2 still had to make certain decisions that disqualified (or retconned) player choices from BG1 (most notably party composition) and even though that wound up being a fairly minor thing... I've met players in the 2020s who are *still* kind of upset about how that went down.
Coming off of Top 5 RPG’s video. I’m sure I speak for a lot people. Love to watch you play these games and give a live commentary in a let’s play style video!. Thanks Tim
Oof. I'd forgotten about that. Thankfully the latest C&C game (at least to my knowledge) was the remaster of C&C1 and Red Alert 1, which wound up being pretty successful -- and hopefully did well enough that we'll see more remasters in the future.
A companion video about end slides... How about you stop killing my beloved companions during the end slides! Arcade Gannon Veronica Parvati (Yes 2 of them are from fallout new vegas, but it was obsidian, before you joined them)
Ah, Tyranny for me was the king of "doing something important and the game not recognising it." From Day 1, I felt I knew exactly what that game is about: running an empire vs establishing an empire. I thought the game was about how law and order had to reign in the agents of war and usher in a new era. After all, you're literally playing a judge who, for the majority of the game is stopping conflicts between combatants of the last war. As someone with a background in political science, it was clear to me as crystal that was what the game was about and I was so impressed by it. Then I found out I was wrong and I dropped the game and did not go back. I spent the entire game playing this loyalist character who was trying to stop the last war from becoming the next war so civil administration could take root and when the game is like "now you're going to rebel" I was just utterly disillusioned with that game. I found out the game I thought was brilliant wasn't and it instantly soured.
idk, endgame slides always feel to me like a easy way out for lazy devs. the ending should speak for itself, there's no narrative need to explain everything. if you see how's the ending the product of your actions then it's ok, but if you don't see real consequences then no amount of slides will change that. me3. even in dao, well acclaimed game, it feels shallow - you can't just say that harrowmont is lame king and can't control stuff, because it's not obvious throughout the game, and belen is good because he gets shit done, because we know he is a total pos and why wouldn't he become an unhinged totalitarian dictator? it's just basically an arbitrary subversion of player's expectations. and if the devs start developing the game with slides in mind then the game becomes just a bunch of isolated triggers to collect along the way instead of a complex narrative weave leading to genuinely different states of the world or even just emotionally different endings.
Narrator voice "Tim moved on from Interplay and began a new journey of game making, from Troika to Carbine -eventually landing himself in Obsidian Entertainment. Now prospering on TH-cam with videos discussing his experiences with game development, viewers wonder what will happen next..."
I read that in Joshua Graham voice
My guess: he will keep working with people and trying to make his ideas reality until he is gonna sit down and accept the reality for what it was. New dreamers will come out finding their own place in the world and only some of them knew they walk the same road the Tim Cain walked
Because gaming... Gaming never changes.
@@wesss9353 What? no, Ron Perlman, obviously.
@@Puerkl8r he's the obvious choice, I had to subvert expectations
I love endgame slides! It's both an adrenaline rush and a reality check to see the results of the decisions I made.
It's also really fun to check wikis and see all the permutations of the decisions you went out of your way NOT to make. Especially when what's good and bad long-term and short-term don't correlate.
@@Netherflyyup and play again and get new endings.
0:45 Tim, you've set off my Simpsons autism. The episode you're referring to is "Homer's Phobia" and the featured song isn't "I've got the power" it's "Gonna make you sweat" which is the song that goes 'Everybody dance now'. Tbf they do sound fairly similar
Oops, you're right. I need to watch that episode again!
Yeah everyone just called it Everybody Dance Now even though that wasn't the official name of the song. I certainly remember when that had heavy MTV airplay and of course the Simpson's episode.
"I've got the power" is The Power by SNAP! A German Eurodance group. But I don't blame you for thinking C&C. They sound the same, and both came out in 1990.
These are great. I’ve started working on some interactive fiction but I never thought to deliberately start thinking about where I’d place those variables while it’s still fresh to me.
This is such a great channel, thank you for sharing your experience/knowledge
Since I was a child, Fallout 1 and 2 ending slides are still some of the most impactful artistic experiences I have had. Needless to say they spoiled me for good. A hallmark of an impactful memorable fun game. Alpha Protocol had a fascinating spin on it too.
Ditto. Really should finish Alpha Protocol
Noticed the Spacers Choice logo on the coat. I am playing that game now. I usually avoid companions but they are all so great in this game.
I have always loved ending slides. They may seem like a small addition, but I really think they add a lot to the story and make the world seem more “real” (in that it continues on after the game is over) and helps make you feel like your choices mattered. I always appreciate seeing them in a game, and I’m always disappointed when games that tout themselves as “choice-based” don’t have them.
C&C will always be command and conquer in my mind.
Ofc never even heard the other cept for in this video.
It is such a minimalist way of dealing with the climax of stories, games still use it to this day but not as much as they should.
I do wish there was the most end slides. Fallout New Vegas really pushed the envelope with amount and variations of them.
One thing I am missing in the end slide department is including one, possibly final, consequence: player dying. In Fallout 1 Vault Dweller fails in combat or convincing the Master and dies, instead of game over we have one slide and narration that Vault Dweller failed at the end and despite loses bad guy wins (or maybe they were so weakened that factions that remained managed to win). Retire idea of game over and include player death during end slides. No only winning but also loosing could give very interesting consequences.
I really like that idea... it allows permadeath to be a canon end to a campaign in a CRPG either as a part non save iron man or you could meta game to reach an ending route that involves a death if you want.
The idea of both finishing the campaign or failing it both being endings, rather than either being game over? I think I'll implement that in my own games now
Thank you about covering how the QA works, so many are clueless in that reguard. I worked in QA for a while and it was very frustrated not knowing how the game was Intended to Function at times. In lvl cutscenes missed because they started and ended in the same location for the player so there was no visually indication that something was wrong when the cutscene never loaded, you just continued on through the lvl, no way for QA to know it didnt load. Half of QA we didnt know an entire skill customization system was implemented into the story campaign, because the game had no hud indication for the menu shortcut and the physical lobby kiosk to use the system pre mission select, was bugged and the prompt to use the kiosk never appeared, but QA never new for Months that the kiosk was supposed to be anything other then premission lobby window dressing clutter.
I always thought the that a sequel to a game with end slides, should give the players/community the Cannon slides that the second games world history is based on.
Hi Tim, can you do a video on save files? How do we store the state of a world from a player’s actions and load that state into the world when booting the game? Also, how do we optimize save files so that they aren’t extremely huge from a long play through, especially if you want multiple save files to be stored from a single play through?
I love ending slides or some variation of the idea. But BG3 introduced to me (at least my first time seeing this in game format) a short playable epilogue, with all of your choices and consequences referenced in either dialogue or newspaper or what have you. That was incredible even if admittedly it was added later after its release.
This makes me wonder how you determine the "true" lore for a game like for a sequel
I think the overall narrative team decides which of the possible outcomes will be the ones having the top priority in a sequel. Me personally I don't like this because it destroys the liberty inherited in the first game once you play the sequel itself, like in Baldur's Gate 2 having the party written in stone despite your freedom to end the first game with a personalized group.
Gladly at least in KOTOR 2, despite all its technical flaws, had a main story that didn't intrude in the previous events, even further through conversation you had the chance to set in stone two main aspects of the first game that will end up carrying the main story of the second.
In my perspective, if a game is established as "free-RPG" like the case with Arcanum, the sequels should always give the player a chance to write their inputs on the first game so the second one runs following those events.
@@PointReflex I think the "problem" is that Obsidian games tend to give you wide options of endings that narratively could resulted in different continuation.
BioWare "fixes" this by having 1 ending, but how you get about doing it - that where they give you choices. No matter what choices you made in DAO, Warden *will* defeat the Demon, whether he being Alistair or Loghain, that's up to player choices. In DA2, Hawke *will* inevitably help Unabomber "destroy" Kirkwall. In DA3, The Inquisitor *will* lose his/her hands.
@@PointReflexThat makes me think. I always prefered sequels in Fallout because the games feel standalone enough to accept the world instead of Bioware games which follow path of the same character.
@@PointReflexThat makes me think. I always prefered sequels in Fallout because the games feel standalone enough to accept the world instead of Bioware games which follow path of the same character.
You don't. Writers of stories often work more from a series story beats than from a single fitting "true" narrative. This is doubly true in the case of writers for videogames. You don't want to glue yourself to a narrative that results in a shitty sequel. Especially at the time when you're already scrambling and cutting corners to get the first part out you don't really have time to think about the sequel. So narratives are more often crafted back to front than front to back.
And a single narrative is about the most inauthentic feeling thing you can do (other than a Warp in the West style of thing, which tops the inauthentic chart by miles). Take inspiration from historic eh.. historians and let what happened fluctuate according to different story tellers, their biases and how far away (in time, distance and re-tellings of the story) they are away from the events. Based on history you can even fit in some completely opposite narratives about a single event.
Just making it clear that every game is told from the point of view of a different observer can smooth over a whole lot of conflicts. Within reason you can put a lot of different end-states into your sequel, as long as you take care not to make anything to explicit. Or everything explicit, like Bethesda did with the Warp in the West.
Hello Tim. I've been watching for a few months and was wondering if youve ever been working on a game and nothing is seemingly coming together how you want (what game you envision vs how your concepts play out while developing it) and how did you resolve it, whether it was by taking a step back and reassessing what concepts you should implement to begin with, or if all you needed to do was view the way youre implementing the current concepts that arent working in a way that allows you to see how to properly mix those concepts
The closest I ever came to a game not coming together was Wildstar. I tried re-making the setting and the story and some of the classes...but eventually I could not get what I had envisioned. The full story is here: th-cam.com/video/YMY5LUNdS-8/w-d-xo.html
Not often I get to fact check you Tim, but C+C music factory did everybody dance now not I got the power. That was the lyrical jesse james whose copywritten lyrics for the group snap WILL NOT be stolen. Now with this power I've got over you, I'd like to ask nicely pretty please with cream and sugar, for more talk about how you run your tabletop roleplaying games. I'm a D&D guy, so that's my favorite Tim content.
Thanks. 💀
Was here to ensnare Tim with a correction on '90s eurotrash music but you beat me to it by 5 hours.
Hey Tim! Love the content. I was wondering if you'd have enough to say about control schemes and keybinds for a video? How can they be decided for games? What are some cool examples of good control schemes you've seen? What are some bad ones? Is there a lot of arguments had within dev teams for how they should look? Thanks.
I choose to believe that Gizmo is the correct choice for Junktown in Fallout 1
Great idea with the slides. Love em in both Fallout and Arcanum.
Love your videos keep up the awesome work!
I’m currently involved in an early memory optimization pass of a pre-Alpha game. This work will require some restructuring of how gameplay logic (Unreal blueprints) is handled. I’m concerned that others on the team will see this as a hinderance to their work and won’t engage with the changes needed. I don't want to come across as the angry programmer demanding changes from everyone so I’m prioritizing tasks that won't block others on the team.
Do you have any advice on how to get buy in from other teams for larger features/pieces of work?
Never knew Vampire had end slides. Now I need to dust it off and finish it.
I misspoke. We actually made multiple in-game endings based on decisions you made in the game.
@@CainOnGames That's OK, still gives me a reason to go back to it. :)
The end slide idea is such an amazing game concept, absolutely brilliant!
Thank you for sharing your priceless experience! Just wanted to make a video about endgame slides and here I see your video 😅
Noah Caldwell-Gervais feverishly taking notes and quotes
CNC = computer numerical control (machines)
As a former tester for a AAA company, that totally is a bug that is handled by testers. We had explicit design docs to follow and we designed test cases around what the documents say should happen vs what the game does.
Thank you for yet another wonderful video! I first saw ending slides in Arcanum and I instantly fell in love with them! I do not understand why more RPG devs don't use them to represent c&c..
Speaking of which what other strategies and systems have you used or experienced for representing long term consequences? Especially before the end of the game.
Thank you again for the video and have a great day :)
"I do not understand why more RPG devs don't use them to represent c&c" -- I tend to think it's because most RPG's today don't employ c&c. It's easier to tell stories in the more cinematic fashion many developers attempt to mimic. Bland and flavorless "flavor text" and "missions" that affect nothing whatsoever in the game world along with nonreactivity is the order of the day otherwise. BG3's success might change that overarching trend; might not. Guess we'll see.
I wouldn't expect video game developers to write x number of different games-in-one with x different variations on a main story. (And I hope Tim touches on the problem of "canon" endings and possible ways to avoid that.) There's no opportunity for true spontaneity in a prescripted game whereas a TTRPG might provide for it given that it can be changed on the fly and played more or less 'The Endlessly'.
There will always be a choice we'd like to make that we can't in a cRPG because it doesn't exist within the finished game itself, but "stories" are stories only if they have an ending as well as beginning, imo. Else, they become cyclical exercises in pointlessness. The things we couldn't do, historically, may have given us pause but didn't necessarily knock us out of the game world completely. I gather that's much of the appeal of AI-generated everything for developers today. They seem to want AI to do what living, breathing TTRPG dungeon masters and players can do in concert. In fact, they seem to think AI can be endowed with imagination. Guess we'll see how that turns out as well.
@@lrinfi Thank you for your insights. Playing through Baldur's Gate 3 there is definitely c&c though it does seem like the exception and not the rule unfortunately.
I'm primarily surprised since ending slides are relatively cheap to produce and yet not well used by the industry. Admittedly, the trend towards cinematic experiences you mentioned doesn't help!
I do believe AI will be a powerful tool for creating dungeon masters and NPCs but it might take some time.
I still find the lack of storytelling systems like those seeing in more simulation-ish games, like dwarf fortress and the Sims, in cRPGs unfortunate. There is so much story space to explore in these frameworks (even without the AI advancements) that I feel like it is a missed opportunity...
Are Fallout end slides were Inspired by Still french movie you mentioned in your 2012 Fallout postmortem in inspiration section?
I don't think so. That movie was more for visual inspiration.
Can you expand on how you handle the programming for a "CNC" narrative? Would you store data in quests, or is there another option you prefer?
I have a video on how I gate non-linear stories coming up next week!
How do you decide what order the slides are shown at the end? The order that the choices were made? The order that the consequences would occur? Or based on some kind of narrative "weight" / vibe?
Hi Tim. Thank you for the channel and great insights into your rich career! You mentioned Command & Conquer and made me wonder: Have you ever considered doing a RTS RPG in the vein of Divinity: Dragon Commander? Or maybe depart even further from the RPG genre? Thanks again!
Little note : try putting some LED strips at the back of the shelves or something, film when it's dark and light up the face: instant cool production value & makes it look rater fun overall!
also noticed that camera is rather sharp in this one while background gets a bit of a blur : nice little touch!
As for C&C : YES tiberium wars were the best, but speaking of choices & consequences - best,critically acclaimed games usually are ether technically great (gameplay & tech is refined - think Half Life, Crysis, Doom) or written really well (meaning : choices and options that are accounted for - Deus EX, FO : NV, Mass effect).
Thou it's kind of sad that we dont see a TECHNICALLY great game that also has great writing. I guess there goes the decision triangle i guess!
I did add some LED strips to my cabinets, and they look really cool. But the camera keeps trying to focus on them instead of me, despite being told to focus on faces.
Played the 1995 CnC a lot. Very fun. But the games didnt keep pushing the envelope like others did so i stopped playing them.
Love this channel
Thanks so much for doing these videos! This talk about presenting consequence to the player makes me ask about something I struggle with a lot as a developer: how do you feel about the many ways to track the state of a game?
Examples below:
Using and generating individual flags seems to be the most straightforward way to do so, but in my experience has led to longer loading times as the number of flags increased through the lifespan of a playthrough. It also feels unintuitive(?) as a way of representing a fluid, volatile world.
Using a hash/embedding would give a more constant retrieval time over the length of the game and may provide a more consistent (read: non-decision-tree-forming) interface for any designers that want to implement non-binary outcomes; however, it requires all possible states to be compiled at build time, and may necessitate a complete rebuild if any modifications are needed.
TL;DR: do you like using anything other than flags to manage game state?
Hey Tim :) In Fallout New Vegas theres a place called the Basincreek Building which is supposed to be a reference to Obsidians old office building, I don't know if you worked there at the time or heard about all the stuff that happened there but if you did could you tell me if these are true? like a car crashing into the building, bathrooms always flooding, ant infestations
This was really interesting, keeping track of all decisions that the player can make must be a nightmare, both as someone working with the code or designing the narrative, and even then you have to be convincing with the consequences the endslides show, I wonder if it feels weird when someone plays a character that is not cohesive then.
Thanks for sharing all you do, Tim! I'm curious, do you spend much bandwith thinking about your 'legacy', and if so, does it temper your creative decisions? Does it make you more risk-averse? Not to say you haven't left your mark on gaming history -- with your games and now this channel. I'm thinking of how Tarantino says he's only making 10 movies because of, among other reasons, the possibility of diminishing returns. I'm wondering how an artist might contend with thoughts like that which don't necessarily work in tandem with creativity and passion. Not that art has to be made for public consumption (and not calling you old; merely a legend). This is a very vague and broad q, whether you see it or not thanks again for sharing so much w us.
Hey Tim,
Any advice for a first time Design Director taking over a project in the middle of development?
I'd love to know about how you store player data between sessions.
Currently, I'm learning c# in Unity, I've been using playerPrefs to store basic information and recently started using JSON files to store lists of strings.
What is commonly used for different game mechanics? For example, Inventory, quest completion, player location and unlocked perks.
I think a comprehensive discussion of data serialization is beyond the scope of my channel. There are MANY ways to save and load data.
@@CainOnGames Thanks for the reply! If that's the case Is there any particular way you think I should try to learn?
Tim, how do you make players feel they’re leveling up?
i feel most games do something like this: player’s damage is 2, enemy health is 10 (kill in 5 hits), then they progress and player’s damage is 20 and enemy’s health is 100 (kill in 5 hits).
how do you make the players feel they’re getting stronger?
thank you!
When you first said C&C I immediately thought about Command & Conquer. To this day, my mind goes there first. Same with FF meaning Final Fantasy.
Hey Tim!
Quick question maybe an interesting topic, how do you provide a great feel of reward to a player by creating and placing "legendary" items in the game and how to balance those ?
Like how do you decide when to give them away (Crucial story moment or boss fights or even exploration quests) ?
I’d define multiple loot channels to provide the new, best items to players. You might like this video:
th-cam.com/video/CqMfiL7ySng/w-d-xo.html
thanks!@@CainOnGames
Speaking of which, in Fallout The Hub always gets destroyed via the end-game slide by the Mutant army no matter what I do. Its fate is always sealed.
Yeah it is a bug. To bad as the Hub is awesome (one of my favorites along junktown).
But the Hub didnt get wiped as it is mentioned in later lore.
CNC has some other meanings too 😅
Hey, nothing is sexier than a 4-axis milling machine that's mature enough to work without supervision.
Since Fallout was the title that codified the format for games, I feel like it's worth asking, were there any particular film or show endings that anyone mentioned in comparison during development?
I do love endgame slides. A good epilogue can obviously go a long way when it comes to leaving you satisfied as the story wraps up, and for choice-based games they might just be extra important.
Too many supposedly choice-based games just give you one big, final choice and let that determine the entirety of the ending. (And then a sequel might roll in and attempt to brush as many of those choices as possible under the rug anyway.)
I LOVE the endgame slides. It solves a simple issue, and I am surprised we don't see more games (RPG and none RPG) use them because they have a high narrative impact compared to the cost. They also give players a good reason to replay the game without needing the development effort of a New Game+.
Hi Tim! I wanna ask how common and your expreince is the autistic community in Game Industry. As a autistic person myself I wanna know how hard is the Game Industry for autistic people and what are upsides to it etc.
Excellent. I'd like to have End Slides in my game Secret Keep that I'm developing. And it ties in well with my Campaign system which uses a Storylets approach, all based on variables that can open and close and track changes after each mission. Great stuff! Notes taken! :D
Statistics on player choices. When compared to developers, play testers, and other players. This is shown when reaching this stage of the game. These may be mundane, or essential choices for progression. This is displayed to the player as a comparison to what others had accomplished. Its trival information, however its been tracked. This gives a player the means to make a consideration. It may even tempt a player doing it again to score better on their next play through.
I still remember when i have replayed Fallout 1 for the first time and decided to be a super bady. I was so shocked when i have found out from slides that choosing Gizmo and his mobsters for Junktown was actually a better choice for that place.
That's probably my favorite kind of ending-slide consequence: the long-term effect of a good decision making things worse, or the long-term effect of a 'bad' decision making things better.
@@Netherflylove the junktown endings. Having said that endings should make sense (which they do for junktown). You should be able to forsee most "bad endings" etc. Few gotcha moments if you know what i mean
Do you lead by order or by task? E.g. "Do this thing in this exact way" or "Do this thing, i don't care how, just get it done"?
The latter. And especially for managing designers, I am more goal-focused than detail-focused. I tell them what I want and why I want it, and then I see what they make to achieve that.
Hey Tim, I'm new to your vids but I love them almost as much as your games. So I apologise if this has already been answered elsewhere but I have to ask: why does the fallout series hate cults so much? From the Children of the Cathedral to Scientologists, I mean Hubologists, to later games (children of atom, etc.); from a designer perspective, what is the appeal of inserting interesting cults into games?
I loved slides. Was a bit annoyed that me killing everyone everywhere still had regular endings.
I miss Command & Conquer
Shouldn't the narrative designers create behaviours for the testers to test? Like bdd?
Mentioning Command & Conquer in the first minute? Fastest like from me you'll ever get. Speaking of C&C, Tim, what are your thoughts on FMV?
As a gamedev, having things not happen when they should and not realizing it until much later is one of the worst possible feelings.
From the worlds of Wildstar. was it designed from the start to be an MMO for the "hArDcOrE" MMO players?
I can't speak about the goals of the original design team, but my goals included making an MMO for everyone, from hardcore gear-oriented raiders to story-focused gamers to people who just wanted a cool house with fun things in it. That's why the player path system existed, for the players to tell the game what they liked doing.
However, there was a contingent who wanted the game to be "hard core only" and pushed really hard for that after I left. You can decide for yourself if they succeeded.
I played a month after it came out, told my group I was a new player and they called me a noob, I never played wildstar again after that.@@CainOnGames
Have you played Starfield?
love your work and your content tim, thank you for putting us on so much game 🔥 (see what i did there)
I would like a video on something like "What Fallout/Modern games/The Outer worlds(or similiar) could learn from Half life", I think a lot of modern games could honestly learn a lot from Half life in how it treats the player as somewhat intelligent and competent.
It still blows my mind how incredibly well-designed the original Half Life is.
Please forgive me, this is gonna be a bit of a long comment. I am feeling... a bit rambly today, it seems.
Today is the very first time I'm hearing "C&C" being used to mean 'choice and consequences.' 'Til now it's always been just 'Command and Conquer.' Maybe that's due to more and more choice-driven RPGs in the console sphere, where Command and Conquer just... doesn't have a presence -- it's still mentioned regularly among PC players, though!
Anyway, I just gotta say: ending slides are probably my #1 favorite gaming trope of all time,. Any time I play through a long RPG and don't see any, or many, at the end... I am monumentally disappointed. And it completely saps my desire to play any other similar games for a long while. I'm curious, Tim, whether or not you ever played the first Witcher game? It certainly had some... iffy design choices here and there, but I think it did something really ingenious with its ending slides: basically, the game was divided into many different chapters (I think there were more than 10, but I don't remember) -- and you'd get little slide-shows at the end of each chapter. detailing the major consequences of your choices in the preceding chapter and setting up the next one, often covering events via text that would've been pretty expensive to try and depict (even in an abbreviated form) in-game.
The downside to that approach, I suppose, is that it focuses the slides more on major events that have relatively immediate consequences and leaves less room for the fun snowballing of big long-term consequences from little nothing-choices that the player likely didn't ever think would matter, which are often (IMO) the very best sort of thing to see in an ending slide (EG oh you completed a romance quest to hook up these two specific NPCs who are both pretty weird? Well, congratulations, because of that the entire region becomes a utopia two-hundred years later -- that kind of thing).
And, of course, it also means taking slides away from the actual END of the game, since they're sprinkled throughout instead, which can make the proper conclusion feel less significant or broad-reaching than maybe it should. Still, I thought it was a really clever way of using ending slides and I've always been kind of disappointed that so few other games have tried iterating on the concept.
Oh! And it also helped depict the passage of time, since a slide-show kinda-sorta-always implies that a certain amount of time has passed -- from weeks to years -- in-between events, which really help lends the story a sense of scale it wouldn't otherwise has. Speaking of, I'd LOVE to see you do a video on how to convey time/passage of time in RPGs.
Like I know many people didn't like it, but I really liked how in Dragon Age 2 each act would jump the story forward several years. That was a lot more effective to me than the usual little bits of text saying that X days Y hours had passed that we typically get, ad nauseum, in RPGs.
Tim, could you comment on the idea that "dated" features make for a game bad? Do you think there are features legitimately so "dated" that their inclusion in a game is a point against the game?
For example, some have criticized modern games for having end slides at all, saying they are "dated".
On the other hand, people praise the dice rolling mechanic in Balder's Gate 3 even though that mechanic could be considered dated and even made obsolete by the presence of a computer's processor.
Is modernity a critical standard or is the inclusion of so-called dated features a matter of flavor?
I think, BioWare has given us the middle of the road "solutions" but it risk to give an impression of "watered down" narrative. In *all* Dragon Age, the ultimate ending is only 1, so that would only requires 1 slides.
So that example of yours *potentially* could be solved with 1 slide, whether or not player able to make somebody led the town, not who led the town. That's the BioWarean way.
Obsidian way, I guess we can use the fate of Primm.. I think that's over-complicated for ultimately something that does not matter.
Anyway, Tim, have a good day, I love you. And maybe spill some beans out for us folk waiting for TOW2? :)
Something like Dragon Age (or Mass Effect) represents an entirely different discussion, I think. How narrative is approached -- especially long-term consequences of player choices -- is gonna be wildly different in a game that's expected to be followed up soon thereafter by a direct-sequel. You can only do so much with the ending of Draagon Age 3, for example, before you're hitting up against Dragon Age 4.
Like a big part of what makes Baldur's Gate 2's ending so 'epic' is how broad and far-reaching the ending slides were... which was only possible because Throne of Bhaal was designed as the grand finale. Larian's efforts decades later notwithstanding, there was never supposed to be a sequel. If Baldur's Gate 1 had ending slides, then the devs'd be stuck either being forced to make certain narrative decisions to maintain consistency with the prior game when making BG2, or spending a lot of time and money trying to accommodate in-game reactivity in BG2 from the previous game, or simply ignoring the previous game entirely, not worrying about any contradictions -- all options that would (at the very least) greatly annoy players who'd finished BG1.
And even without BG1 having ending slides, BG2 still had to make certain decisions that disqualified (or retconned) player choices from BG1 (most notably party composition) and even though that wound up being a fairly minor thing... I've met players in the 2020s who are *still* kind of upset about how that went down.
Ah, “C&C”! You were saying “C&C”, not “CNC”! That, uh… yeah, that makes more sense.
Coming off of Top 5 RPG’s video.
I’m sure I speak for a lot people. Love to watch you play these games and give a live commentary in a let’s play style video!. Thanks Tim
.... also Cheese & Crackers!
Uh yes hello cnc also refers to something WILDLY different
bg3 got a lot of flak for the distinct lack of endings sldies lol
I think C&C stopped being Command and Conquer when it became a phone game. QQ R.I.P.
Oof. I'd forgotten about that. Thankfully the latest C&C game (at least to my knowledge) was the remaster of C&C1 and Red Alert 1, which wound up being pretty successful -- and hopefully did well enough that we'll see more remasters in the future.
A companion video about end slides...
How about you stop killing my beloved companions during the end slides!
Arcade Gannon
Veronica
Parvati
(Yes 2 of them are from fallout new vegas, but it was obsidian, before you joined them)
Yes, CNC, "Choice and Consequence"... Definitely also my first association 🥲
Ah, Tyranny for me was the king of "doing something important and the game not recognising it." From Day 1, I felt I knew exactly what that game is about: running an empire vs establishing an empire. I thought the game was about how law and order had to reign in the agents of war and usher in a new era. After all, you're literally playing a judge who, for the majority of the game is stopping conflicts between combatants of the last war. As someone with a background in political science, it was clear to me as crystal that was what the game was about and I was so impressed by it. Then I found out I was wrong and I dropped the game and did not go back. I spent the entire game playing this loyalist character who was trying to stop the last war from becoming the next war so civil administration could take root and when the game is like "now you're going to rebel" I was just utterly disillusioned with that game. I found out the game I thought was brilliant wasn't and it instantly soured.
Yeah, I had a similar experience. Really disappointing. I mean to give the game another try, though, but yeah.
Hi Everyone Its me Tim
Hi Everyone Its me Tim
Nooo way 😱😱
You're not Tim...
Killian marrying Gizmo??
Lol since then cnc has developed some new less savoury meanings as well...
Nobody tell tim cnc stands for consensual non consent in the bdsm world
idk, endgame slides always feel to me like a easy way out for lazy devs. the ending should speak for itself, there's no narrative need to explain everything. if you see how's the ending the product of your actions then it's ok, but if you don't see real consequences then no amount of slides will change that. me3. even in dao, well acclaimed game, it feels shallow - you can't just say that harrowmont is lame king and can't control stuff, because it's not obvious throughout the game, and belen is good because he gets shit done, because we know he is a total pos and why wouldn't he become an unhinged totalitarian dictator? it's just basically an arbitrary subversion of player's expectations.
and if the devs start developing the game with slides in mind then the game becomes just a bunch of isolated triggers to collect along the way instead of a complex narrative weave leading to genuinely different states of the world or even just emotionally different endings.
How is it laziness not every consequence will occur during the game.
I love you man, but you move from being incredibly insightful to captain obvious too fast.