Designing Canonical Endings

[MarathonGuy1337]

I watched this video recently by Tim Cain and it got me thinking of how to approach canonical endings for multi-branching stories such as RPG games.



His essential ideas for designing canonical endings are;

• Look for the Commonalities in all of the endings, and assume all of those commonalities and nothing else
• Pick one of the endings, and assume this is the canonical ending
• Let the player pick the canonical ending of the previous game, I guess via a series of multiple choice questions be it pre-character build or within the game via dialogue between the player character and a NPC near the start of the game.
• Let the player produce a save game from the previous game which keeps the tracking variables of the different player choices in the last game

I mean those seem like pretty good building points but I was wondering if anyone else had any other fun suggestions...

I suppose one could be build multiple separate games based on different endings from the first game, that would became a absolute spiders web of different games that spawn different games and so on and so forth, and whilst that would make for one hell of a video series, I assume most audiences would have no idea how to nagyagite it. Almost like the game equivalent of Star Wars Infinites.

Mainly food for thought

 

[OttoQuitmarck]

Alternatively you can just set the sequel in a totally different place or far in the future such that the canon ending doesnt matter anymore. Or you design one ending which you just always assume is gonna be the canon one, and you make this fairly clear to the player by framing it as the morally good/most content rich ending.

These arent exactly *good* ways to handle canonicity, however, it can be superior than having choices from the previous game "matter" in one throw away line in the game references the choice made. That can be fine for minor choices, but im reminded of how in mass effect 1 you can choose to save the council or not. And if you dont, the council is just replaced by 3 identical npcs in ME2, essentially making the choice completely moot.

Ultimately there is a whole balance of factors to consider here, and the fact is that if you're planning to make a sequel it is better to not make too many too varying possible endings, unless you're planning to not have said choices matter for the sequel. IMO

 

[MarathonGuy1337]

Alternatively you can just set the sequel in a totally different place or far in the future such that the canon ending doesnt matter anymore. Or you design one ending which you just always assume is gonna be the canon one, and you make this fairly clear to the player by framing it as the morally good/most content rich ending.

These arent exactly *good* ways to handle canonicity, however, it can be superior than having choices from the previous game "matter" in one throw away line in the game references the choice made. That can be fine for minor choices, but im reminded of how in mass effect 1 you can choose to save the council or not. And if you dont, the council is just replaced by 3 identical npcs in ME2, essentially making the choice completely moot.

Ultimately there is a whole balance of factors to consider here, and the fact is that if you're planning to make a sequel it is better to not make too many too varying possible endings, unless you're planning to not have said choices matter for the sequel. IMO

Yeah unfortunately if you go with the all choices "matter approach" that's bound to crop up even then it doesn't really get at the concept of Cannon, like ME1 endings are all player cannon but in the mass effect novelization they have a clear "this happened" mentality making the Mass Effect EU have a set cannon ending to some of the games; oddly rather redundant choices as well.

Still though the idea of having all major player choices matter is very alluring...

(Edited GIF Broke)