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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 6205187" data-attributes="member: 710">There are many things to like, IMO. And a few things one should consider re-using for other games, whether it was intended as such or not. For example...[sblock]Someone else noticed that - each ending is not merely a different ending (and not an ending). It's also a different background. The narrator in the confusion ending is hardly the same narrator that revels at the thought of your unavoidable death or the same narrator that worries about Stanley's demise in the escape route.So your own decisions do not just affect the future - they also affect the past (in this case, who the narrator actually is.)That might be a very interesting thing to explore in a different game.It could be something intentionally weird, like a Portal game with time jumps or something like that.Or it could be something designed into a "normal" game. Take Mass Effect (I pick it because it was so controversial, including to me) - imagine at the end of the game, your responses in the final confrontation with the Illusive Man actually determine the true reason for the Reaper's existence and the true purpose of the Crucible. They could be completely different things. Of course, in the latter case, it might be hard to swallow for some fans, but then... so does the current ending. Though in the case of ME, the game actually does that - if you haven't reloaded a previous Shepard, at the start of the game you can set the choices Shepard did in the past games, at least some of them. You could use the concept multiple times over the course of a game to get people accustomed to the concept.Of course, to some extent, this is the same thing that the authors of Stanley's Parable reflect on - Are your choices still meaningful if every possible choice you could make was anticipated and programmed into the game? But you can't make a game where choices aren't already programmed into? So does something like this shatter the illusion of the choice and reduce the fun of the game? Or can they instead be a powerful narrative tool?[/sblock]</blockquote>

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