The thing is, I don’t think having to reload a save has ever been the problem with bad ends. Some people act like immediately loading a checkpoint or good warnings resolves the issue, but the point of them being bad has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with the bad end being counterproductive to the game element of the game.
If we have, say a simple slime boss where winning continues the game and losing ends in an immobility bad end, let’s consider what the player does to achieve those two things.
In the win scenario, the player has to understand the game’s mechanics and use those mechanics to beat the boss, as well as having to deal with the choices they made previously, if applicable. It’s a challenge, and overcoming that challenge is an accomplishment. And yet by winning, the player gets no immediate fetish reward. They just get to continue playing, hoping that something else gives them what they want.
In the lose scenario. The player just waits until the slime kills them. No challenge has been overcome, and the player doesn’t interact with the game system beyond picking some menu options. However, the player is rewarded immediately with a fetish scene that gives the player exactly what they were looking for. It calls into question why the game even bothers to be a game at all. The gameplay should not be the filler between the content you want to see. It should be the mechanics that drive the experience. Bad end viewers, quick loads, ect. aren’t solutions. They’re band aid things that don’t fix the core problem.
I think anything that doesn’t address this core problem is simply an excuse. I think boss fights are a naturally good place to end a session of gameplay on, regardless of if you have to purposefully lose to get your reward or not. I think it would be much better if the reward was put on the win condition, since the player actually achieved something.
Also, in my opinion, some games’ thematic elements would suffer without bad ends. If you play a reluctant gainer in a world of fattening enemies, it would be a lot harder and sometimes impossible for an author to achieve their vision without bad ends.
2 things with this.
- If an idea causes a problem with the game, that doesn’t mean you should just do it anyway. One of the core parts of any creative pursuit is to know when something doesn’t work and throw those things out in favor of better ideas. “It has to be this way” is not an excuse.
- I don’t even agree that this is even true. You can definitely have a game where you play as an unwilling gainer that doesn’t have this sort of system. Refer back to some of the suggestions I made earlier. All of my suggestions were fundamental restructurings that have potential to create games that fix this problem entirely.
Anyway, I’m more than happy to hear people’s defenses for bad ends. I think this conversation isn’t going to go anywhere unless there are advocates on both sides, so don’t take my rebuttal the wrong way.