Dear Game Developers: ENOUGH WITH THE HORRIBLE ENDINGS TO YOUR VIDEO GAMES

There's a lot of games with bad endings, especially where they aren't obviously part of some continuing story. The first Soul Reaver game literally had "to be continued" in the final scenes, and it wasn't until a few years later that it did. I do think that we are slightly harsher on mediocre/average endings to good/great games, simply because the precedent of gameplay/story made us expect better. Mass Effect's choose your own color endings were a fairly lame cop out, but it was definitely exacerbated by the fact that the games and stories leading up to the endings were pretty damn awesome.

Bravely Default's ending wasn't bad, it just occurred after literally -hours- of repeating the exact same content with tiny differences and minimal story/plot progression, aside from fleshing out alternate universe versions of the Asterisk holders. And not even grinding for hours; it was literally repeating the same content for hours because story progression demanded the repetition.

I think that's why there's been so much push to have new game+ type scenarios in just about every game these days. The gameplay is the highlight (in most cases) and almost no ending is going to really encompass what every player feels should happen in the ending for a given game. So hey, just tack on more shinies after the credits roll!

I will say that for the most part, jrpgs tend to have better and more fleshed out endings than most other types of narrative heavy games. If only because they are usually on-rails stories with combat/mechanics/progression means in between the story chunks. Not 100% positive on the process, but I would imagine the ending to those types of stories is part of the sales package to get something published in the first place.

i think some of you are exaggerating bravely default, while it was stupid having to kill bosses in multiple configurations (it was double boss then triple boss etc or boss variants) I remember it only taking me a few play sessions, by that point you should have figured out all the ways to 1 shot pretty much any enemy (the valkyrie plus some other combo I think) and set spawn to low so you could just breeze through everything and basically just fight bosses. Running through the stupid underground level was more annoying at the end, having to constantly backtrack and so many dead ends.

was a stupid and predictable ending but hardly the poster child for worst

What about Borderlands 1? The entire game you are a vault hunter, at the end you go through a lot to fight the boss protecting the Vault.... and then it ends. WHAT THE FUCK WAS INSIDE

or MGS 5: The Phantom Pain. I still really have no clue what happened, but I stopped at mission 43 and just watched youtube clips of the rest. Da fuq is wrong with japanese people

Yeah, the problem with BD was chapters 5 & 6. 7 & 8 and the actual ending were mostly fine, as JRPGs go.

MGS 5 was just straight-up unfinished.

BL1: Pretty sure the big tentacle rape monster -was- what was inside the vault. Some nascent stage old god type creature that was sealed away that somehow had developed into a "treasure" in the mythos of the planet, since it was in a big ass place called "The Vault." You don't even kill it, it just gets resealed since that's usually why you seal something up instead of killing it: you can't.

How about great ending games? Red Dead Redemption, Betrayal at Krondor, Wing Commander spring to mind. Didn't Tie Fighter and Freespace 2 have pretty sweet endings, as well? Oh, and Starflight.

RDR's ending annoyed the shit out of me for being the opposite of plot armor. Based on the rest of the gameplay, I could have easily killed all those assholes without breaking a sweat. And then it just got even worse by making you play as that punk ass kid to wrap up the rest of it. Had I known what I was getting myself into, I would have hit the eject button right when Marston first returned home.

Celestein_sl said:

The reason for this is because games are mostly developed in a time linear fashion. You make stage 1 before 2, you work on the starting areas of the game before the end ones.

So when a budget or time crunch happens, the only place to cut is in the end of the game. Because of this you often see rushed endings, or endings that make little sense because 8h of content that explains them has been cut and they're no longer completely coherent in the new context.

Publishers and Producers are almost 100% at fault for this. Most game developers aren't going in with the intention to not give a shit about the ending.

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I've also once read that most players don't even finish their games, so best make the first half the better one because that way more players will enjoy the game.

Or is this just a cause and effect fallacy? Do players quit games half way through because they become bad in the late game? Am I mostly playing the first 200 turns of a Civ game because late game is a boring drudge? Or is the late game a boring drudge because everyone plays the first few eras and then starts over?