Life is Strange - Another take on choices

[Guest]

Life is strange is a new popular game I picked up recently.

 

It had something in common with Vns, the fact that you have choices, but this time, choices actually matter.

 

It doesn't use the tree mechanism of Visual novels, but a very linear, suttle and clever story which changes according to what each and every player did : "Same story, different paths".

Appart from that pretty unVNesque way of dealing with choices, it had something else.

 

Or rather it didn't have it : Save Points.

 

I didn't realize the importance of save points until now and how they could negativily influence a game.

 

Choices don't feel like choices when you can just redo them when-ever you want, right ?

 

In "Life is Strange", you have to commit to what you do, sometimes with pretty involving and hard to bear choices. But you can't come back, what's done is done, and you'll have to finish the game that way.

 

This is both extremely frustrating - because it's possible you make mistake, it's possible you'll have regrets - and extremely engaging and unique. It's not often a game makes you feel so bad for fucking up, or so happy for managing something, it's almost like you are the character. Unless you start it all over, it's your story you'll have to replay.

 

Do you feel the removal of save points and more controvertial or hard to make choices in VNs could make them more relevant, and do you have another take on the matter ?

[Nosebleed]

I feel like permanently being stuck with your choices is just frustrating at the end of the day for any story based medium.

It's kind of like enforced playing order, it takes control away from you, and that sucks.

I get the argument of "it makes choices weigh more", but if a game is making me mad, that just has the opposite effect and makes me enjoy the story less because it's shoving "haha you messed up" in my face until the end, and I want to be able to fix my mistakes, I don't mind getting bad ends, but I don't like being forced to sit through them with no return point.

The difference between this and things like instant death flags in games is the amount of time you'll waste owning up to your mistakes and having to watch everything crumble down for a lengthy period of time, that's just overkill for me and I hope it never becomes a prevalent thing.

[Guest]

It's not about "bad" or "good" endings, it's different ways to go through the story, some you may or may not like.

You don't get thrown into bad endings without notice. It's just that sometimes, shit happens, but you'll have to deal with it, even if you could have avoided it.

 

Rewinding in many games makes them too easy. You lose the thrill of having to make important choices, if you don't like it or are uncomfortable with the consequences, you can just go back, but then the choice was irrelevant.

[Deep Blue]

Tried to play this game...hated every single character.

talking about choices, I don't think that forcing the player to make a choice is a good idea, it's never a good idea to force something into the player, same thing with time pressure like having to take a choice in 2 seconds in the walking dead games, it just doesn't work.

[Nosebleed]

Even taking good and bad endings out of the equation, i still find it annoying to be stuck with choices all the time. I think the first time it might sound like a fun gimmick, but then you try to redo it and keep messing up in different places and have to stick with it the entire time, that's just bothersome no matter how I look at it., most people will likely just resort to a walkthrough after the first couple playthroughs, and the result ends up being the same, so you might as well just let me read the story at my own pace.

[Guest]

But it is the kind of game which is made to be played WITHOUT a walkthrough and appriciated in a single playthrough !

 

The repayability of such a system exists for the sake of 100% completion and knowing the "different time lines" which are basiclly the same with certain changes. But it's not the main objective at all and wasn't designed for it.

 

And that may possibly be applied to Visual Novels.

[Kaguya]

I don't like VNs because they feel like games, I like them because they feel like books. 

Choices are just a nice thing to make me decide which part of the story I should read first. That's about it. I don't want pressure from them, I don't want them to be everlasting unless I start everything again. I want them to be nice, comfy things that are helpful when I want to read a different part. It's why I praise VNs like Comyu for their skip system- you can choose which part of the story you wanna read at any time with minimal problems. 

Not being able to do that just feels like a hassle. 

[Nosebleed]

I like playing games like this or reading VNs because I want to see different endings, different stories, this mechanic is a needless hindrance to that. I don't know why anyone would construct a game where you're supposed to just accept your first choices and deal with it forever, never even letting you try an alternative path later by giving you save points after you beat it once.

Say what you want about "experience", if i'm getting the same experience multiple times fed to me forcefully, it eventually becomes a drag right? Wouldn't that just diminish the overall value of the story and basically contradict the initial intention?

[arakura]

I really like the idea of removing save points. Decisions matter! Put some heart behind your choices! I like it a lot. Sometimes I push myself not to save at big choices in vns even because it makes the story so much less engaging when you can just get it to tell you what you want it to with ease. Or something similar. That feeling of "oh shi- I messed up this isn't what I wanted" is really interesting when you invest in the story and your decisions-when you decide that you're in it for the long haul. Like maef said, it's not just about the ending you get, but the story that you experience along the way.

When I read a visial novel, I always stick to my choices on the first read through. And if I die or get a bad ending or a good one, I read it, take the story to heart, and most of the time step away from the vn for a while. A few days or weeks or months or years. I can't stand that feeling I get when I read skip around in stories trying to find a place I haven't been. It's so unnatural.

(Also walkthroughs for the most part are dumb for similar reasons. They're okay if you're interested in a certain piece of the story after reading most of it, maybe, but otherwise I don't typically approve of their use)

That said I don't think that other ways of engaging with stories are wrong. They just don't make much sense to me. Do what you want I guess, but I'd keep an open mind and try this out.

At Nosebleed: maybe you could try not reading the same thing over and over. Take 'sticking with your decisions' to the next level, yo. If that's not working for you then I guess it's not for you. The reason people like it is because it's a story that reads differently based on your choices. There's no need to read all or many of the different paths in order to benefit from the dynamic way the story reads.

[Abyssal Monkey]

I haven't played this game, but that doesn't stop me from chiming in.

Choices in games are always scripted, they have to be because we don't have ai yet, and this causes something to happen. That something is misunderstanding. I can't imagine how many times a choice has cone up in a game with multiple options, and they don't communicate to the player exactly what they do. One of the first examples that comes to my mind due to the simplicity of remembering it is all the Mass Effect games. In them you get very simple one word choices or simple phrases to determine what your character says or does next, and these rarely match up with what you as the player expect to happen next. I remember going through that game constantly irritated at how my character wasn't acting how I expected him to. This is why save points are important.

Save points are important because these choices don't always match up with what we would expect the character to do, and as such, break our suspension of the game. When I'm given the choice of intimidate or walk away and I select intimidate, I expect my character to verbally threaten the person, not punch him or coerce him.

[Darklord Rooke]

A few developers have tried this sort of thing, with varying amounts of success. My position really hasn't changed, I'm not a fan of developers telling me how I should play games. I like to play them my own way, and I'll actively avoid games with this sort of mechanism attached to it. 

 

That being said, I hope it does well. 

[kingdomcome]

I love these type of games, I guess that's why I found VN's first because there was a lack of them. Eventually Heavy Rain, and the Telltale games came out. I'm glad there's more and more now.

 

And yes, no save points that allow you to revert back really does change the experience. It makes me play through once and keep to that one story. Only once during The Walking Dead series did I start the whole chapter again because I accidentally pressed the wrong button, but otherwise I just accept the choice and go with it. Love it!

[Zebhra]

I like the idea of game without "save points" why? Becase in this case your choices are actually matters...yes overall story still stays the same, but details are changing and it is more fun when you see a consequences of your choice. If your main argument is "but then I could get the things I don't want to happen" well, choose wisely then, it is more interesting this way and the whole "what will happen if I do\don't do this" is simply amazing and make you care more for the characters. 

Will it be appropriate for VNs? Sure, why not..i played..what was it...?.... "Long live the queen" I guess this thing was short but amazing, I wish there would be more games like that, your actions and skills triggered different cutscenes and routes (you still could use autosave though). I still don't see any problem in this..the hell even on majikoi's Momoyo's route you have to choose right answers to get through.

[arakura]

I haven't played this game, but that doesn't stop me from chiming in.

Choices in games are always scripted, they have to be because we don't have ai yet, and this causes something to happen. That something is misunderstanding. I can't imagine how many times a choice has cone up in a game with multiple options, and they don't communicate to the player exactly what they do. One of the first examples that comes to my mind due to the simplicity of remembering it is all the Mass Effect games. In them you get very simple one word choices or simple phrases to determine what your character says or does next, and these rarely match up with what you as the player expect to happen next. I remember going through that game constantly irritated at how my character wasn't acting how I expected him to. This is why save points are important.

Save points are important because these choices don't always match up with what we would expect the character to do, and as such, break our suspension of the game. When I'm given the choice of intimidate or walk away and I select intimidate, I expect my character to verbally threaten the person, not punch him or coerce him.

That's true, but honestly rarely happens to me.

[castor212]

And still waiting when the chapter 5 gonna be relaesed and then they gonna be releasing a packed version which is gonna be cheap.

[storyteller]

Games without save points frustrate me.

There are enough overlap in the general routes as is, I don't need to go read the same portions over, and over, and over again for every time I mess up.

 

On the other hand, I can't deny there are real merits to losing save points.

The tension is just different. Like playing a game on permadeath mode.

Off the top of my head, there's P4G, where you couldn't save during the story portions, and it took me several tries to not get a bad end.

[arakura]

Games without save points frustrate me.

There are enough overlap in the general routes as is, I don't need to go read the same portions over, and over, and over again for every time I mess up.

[InvertMouse]

I have been loving Life Is Strange from episode one and I am so pumped for the final installment .

 

A lot of VNs have routes where you hook up with a particular girl. This feels like an invite for people to come back later, so the situation might be pretty different. In Life Is Strange, during key decisions, you are unable to go back after passing a checkpoint. However, immediately after making the choice, you often are given the chance to try again, so I feel like they might not have committed all the way with this no going back thing. Maybe they never intended to all that much. Unless people go back and start the whole game over, they will miss a decent portion of the content (and perhaps more important, budget), so it can be a tough one to justify.

[onorub]

A lot of VNs have routes where you hook up with a particular girl. This feels like an invite for people to come back later, so the situation might be pretty different. In Life Is Strange, during key decisions, you are unable to go back after passing a checkpoint. However, immediately after making the choice, you often are given the chance to try again, so I feel like they might not have committed all the way with this no going back thing. Maybe they never intended to all that much. Unless people go back and start the whole game over, they will miss a decent portion of the content (and perhaps more important, budget), so it can be a tough one to justify.

[Guest]

Yeah, I agree, it wouldn't work for "dating sim"-ish games were it's just about doing girls one after another.

 

But in some other kind of Vns, it may have its impact.

 

My example in my life is strange is with Kate, I fucked up, and I had to go through the whole game feeling like shit because they keep shoving it to your face. And I think that was a really great way to make the event much more impactful, because I couldn't redo it.

[storyteller]

Of course you won't like it with a mentality like this. It's not about reading the best ending, it's about reading the story and making choices that matter. And when it ends, that's the ending you get. Not the right ending or wrong ending.

[Molipa]

I think the two possibilities have pros and cons.

In a story where you need to make choices that matter without being able to rewind, you need to think it throught, to take a decision, it's hard but it can be thrilling. I guess it's not for everyone, but if you like being under pressure and having to deal with the consequences of the choice you made, it's great.

On the other hand, if you can rewind all you want, you can always follow the path you wanted, getting to the more exciting route for you AND (and it's an important one) being able to misunderstand an action without having to redo everything. By that I mean if you think "let's dine with her" (for example) means "let's dine with girl A" but it's actually "let's dine with girl B", you juste have to rewind, you're not screwed. And I'm talking about that because it actually happened to me some times, to misunderstand the meaning of a choice and having to load.

 

In the end, I think I like both of these things, it juste depends of my mood. I would love to have a game where you can choose between these two "modes" at the beginning of the story.

 

Also, I think the first possibility is about wanting to play a game, while the second one is about wanting to read a book.

[arakura]

I disagree with the last paragraph you wrote, because I still see them as stories and not games for the most part. But other than that you pretty much summarized it. It's not for everyone but it bothers me to see these people that just don't understand the purpose behind it and approach it with a mindset that ruins it for them.

[Funyarinpa]

I like it, actually. It adds some replay value for later playthroughs. Also it gives a LOT of meaning to choices. However, I wouldn't like VNs to adopt this because VN's usually have multiple endings and much more variation to get to an ending than a game like Life Is Strange. Multiple endings wouldn't work well with irreversible choices if you realize you're about to get a bad ending or enter a route you do not want to get, for example.

[Kenshin_sama]

This game gets points for realism, but that might be a detractor for many. The charm of entertainment media is that you can experience things you normally wouldn't be able too and without all the effects that would normally come with it. In life, whether you make a minor slip, a major mistake, or a bad decision that can be fixed with a better one, your choices will have effect. To those who want to embrace reality at a different angle, this can be a nice game to play. But as with many other forms of non-mainstream entertainment, it will only be attractive to a particular niche.

 

As someone who has never played this kind of game before, I'd be more than willing to give it a try. I do enjoy realism to some extent and I always welcome the opportunity to try something new (unless it's stupid).