Casual Games Reviews, News & Talk
Game Endings
Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 3:38 PM | 2 commentsMany of the casual games come with disappointing or anticlimatic endings. A player that goes that far in a game will have already bought the game, so developers don’t worry as much about the ending as they do about the play as Mark and I discussed this. But, a person who finishes the game can tell others (before buying) that the game has a lousy ending and they won’t bother buying.
Wouldn’t the ending the easiest part of programming and design? After all, they don’t have to require player input. Show images along with content to tie up the story and provide a satisfactory ending. I would think pulling the story together and having a good ending would lead to more sales as word-of-mouth / word-of-mouse marketing could help or hurt a game.
Reviewers don’t always have the luxury of completing a game before doing the write up. For instance, Virtual Villagers 2 (VV2) takes time to play as the game relies on real-time. A player could spend all day on the game and not finish it. However, VV2 has intriguing story happening as you try to learn about the past, but the game never ties up the story.
Subscribe:
RSS or 
E-mail
Newsletter
Search and archives
-
Popular site tags
-
Categories
Other stops
Recommended
Sponsors
All Content © Copyright 2008 Meryl.net. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Privacy Policy | Thanks to Blue Flavor | Valid XHTML and CSS
2 comments
Arthur Humphrey discusses the ending to VV2 in his postmortem here: http://www.igda.org/casual/quarterly/2_3/index.php?id=6.
“2) A Satisfying End Game
We had received many complaints about the ending of the first chapter of Virtual Villagers. We puzzled over this quite a bit. The complaints ranged from “Now what?” to “Is that all there is?” to “This ending sucks!” The ending came when the player solved the 16 mysterious puzzles, and then they were rewarded with a game-end illustration.
In VV: TLC we tried to telegraph more clearly to the player when the end was getting near. Instead of arbitrary linked puzzles, we have the player collecting 4 pieces of The Gong of Wonder. As they collect each of the 4 pieces, the end draws nearer in their mind so that when it is completed the ending does not blind-side the player.
As a final enhancement to the end/post-game phase, we tried to take a page from the World of Warcraft book and add some content that was only present for people who had ‘finished’ the game. In VV: TLC, it comes in the form of special, rare, heavy-duty Island Events (these random, periodical text events that are inflicted on your villagers), that only appear for people who have completed all 16 puzzles. I suppose the verdict is still undecided on the effectiveness of that feature. It takes a long time to get good feedback on such late-game elements.”
frog apple water all water
Post a comment (or leave a trackback)