Bad Endings Options

[Jens of Zanicuud]

Some times ago I was working on a project (now dismissed - or rather, waiting for my current project completion) which was designed to end badly, with the death of every character in the party (this was however related to the plot).

I've seen quite a few RPG with a default (i.e. not optional) bad ending (FFXIII-2 / KH Birth by Sleep - if we can call their ending bad), so I wonder if it's a taboo to make your game ends in a tragic way, or simply players prefer an happy ending to every game they play, since they are playing not to think to their problems...

What's your point about it?
Would you play/create a game with a tragic ending (not optional - main ending)?

If so, why?

That's a feature I've never found in a RPG Maker game (excluding maybe survival horror...)
If you know some link 'bout that, I'd be pleased to give it a look.

Maybe my project will resurrect, who knows?

Jens

[LockeZ]

A lot of this is Game As Fantasy vs. Game As Drama.

If your game is designed primarily as a fantasy (by fantasy I mean make-believe, I'm not using the word to talk about magic) then the player is putting himself in the shoes of the hero. The player is living out his fantasy of becoming a hero and saving the world. In these kinds of games, to not allow the player to actually save the world in the end would be kind of horrible - you would be failing to create the kind of game the player came wanting to play.

If your game is designed primarily as a drama, however - the player is watching a story unfold, and though he can influence it and control things in the world by playing the game, none of the characters actually represent the player - then you can do pretty much anything in your story that you think makes it a better story. If you're crafting a tale for the player to watch, rather than an identity for the player to assume, you shouldn't feel constrained to allow the player to achieve total success at everything he does. The player has a different mindset - what he's trying to do isn't "save the world," it's "direct this team of heroes to save the world." There's a big difference. He's not the hero. He's the player.

Almost any game where you control a party of characters falls into the "game as drama" category. Most single-hero games where the hero has a pre-defined personality also do so. To actually step mentally into the shoes of the protagonist in the game, it often needs to be a blank slate to a degree - though if it were truly a TOTALLY blank slate, there'd be no fantasy to step into. When playing a game like Fallout, World of Warcraft, Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Call of Duty, Rock Band, etc., you either go in with an expectation of what role you get to play as in this game, or you develop a sense very early on as to what that role is. If you're making a game like this, don't yank the carpet out from under the player at the last minute, and tell them, "Oh, sorry, you got 99% of the way there, but you can't actually be a hero." The equivalent of that in a game as drama would be getting almost to the end of the game, and then showing a message saying "For the rest of the game, just imagine the plot as whatever you want." In both cases, you're not following through.