Walking Dead, stupidity is the only option

[FaxModem1]

So, just finished the latest chapter of Walking Dead, and boy, no matter what you do, you have to follow the plot they set out.

It can all be bolted down to this conversation between the character you're playing, Clementine, and the conversation she has with Kenny.

"Do I have a choice?"
"Of course you do."
"Really?"
"No, not really."

So, here's a spoiler ridden post:
Spoiler

You know Kenny, that crazy murderous asshole who betrayed you in the first game and acted unreasonably every time there was a decision to be made? Yeah, he's in charge now. This eventually leads to getting captured by this guy Carver, who has built a safe settlement full of food, walls, guns, and electricity. He's a murderous, unstable asshole, but he likes you, and wants to take you on as his apprentice.

So, crazy murderous asshole who is an idiot and unreasonable and has no long term plan for survival, and crazy murderous asshole who has an entire town at his command and wants to make you his second in command and in charge after he dies. Guess who you're forced to choose.

That's right, the guy who ensures that you will be running away, in even more fucked up scenarios, and ensure that your party dwindles away.

Remember, you can only choose the option that ensures everyone will die, and can never say no.

[Steel]

I felt the first game had very limited freedom in what you could actually choose do. Now it really has boiled down to making the five choices they give you in each episode and even those make no actual difference.

"X will remember that" - no they fucking wont, inevitably they'll be dead within minutes.

In the first one you could make choices that were practically cosmetic, but did notionally change the progression of the story. This one seems to be that literally nothing makes a difference as within one episode of a choice you make the person is dead.
Spoiler

If you do things differently will the guy from the lodge and the useless kid survive? This one might be possible, given that useless kid says all of 3 words in the next chapter anyway.

They're in a tough situation, as with a game focused on dialogue like this one, even 5 choices that actually make a difference per episode then after two episodes there are 1024 possible ways people could have done things. So one of three things has to happen:

no difference based on what you decide (trivial)
no long term consequences - all effects are resolved to the same conclusion within an episode (have to do some additional dialogue/animating work, but only a bit more)
no conversations relating to choices you made (ridiculous, as these things are the basis of the game)

They've sold a game about 'meaningful choices', but that is quickly mathematically impossible if every choice really does lead you down a different path.

[Grumman]

Not having meaningful choices would be less objectionable if the one route the developers chose to support was the route that players would actually want to explore. After all, in theory a person could play a completely linear game and not realise that it is linear, just because they never took a path that the developers had had to wall off - the same way a person could theoretically walk through an entire maze and not once hit a dead end. Forcing the player to act against their nature forces them to notice those walls, while punishing the player for acting against their nature makes them resent them.

[InsaneTD]

I thought they were taking the choices the majority made in each episode to tailor the storyline of the next episode.

[Cykeisme]

I thought they were taking the choices the majority made in each episode to tailor the storyline of the next episode.

Ah, that'd explain why they always show the percentage of people that selected each option at the end of every chapter.


Needless to say, Clem is going to become a bloodthirsty pragmatist who helps the defenseless.

[FaxModem1]

Well, episode 4 came out. And, well, it furthers the thread. The people who you try to save, or "X will remember that" continues to be meaningless, as by the end, they're dead.

I only continue to play this because I bought the season in advance.

[Steel]

It isn't even possible to buy by episode is it?

This one things were less stupid, but also even less free.

It does look rather like they've collapsed down any outstanding decisions as well at the end. Why the hell did the buggers decide to attack even if you didn't take their stuff?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Not to be That Guy, but to be That Guy for a moment, I was saying this mid-way through Season 1 Episode 3, while THE ENTIRE INTERNET continued furiously masturbating themselves over how this was The Best Game Ever Created And A Total Revolution In Interactive Story-Telling. I played through Episode 5 just out of sheer, morbid need to see the train wreck finish crumpling into a pathetic heap, and yet remained hilariously baffled by THE ENTIRE INTERNET's prostrated praise for this piece of crap "game."

So, to continue to be That Guy, watching people buy the second season for reasons I'll never comprehend, all I have to say is a quote from the Simpsons' ever-present herald of wisdom:

Ha ha.

[Steel]

Now, to be fair, point and click adventure games have never been about freedom. The monkey island games had absolutely no freedom, you couldn't even fail, but they were absolutely entertaining.

I think the problem here stems from the promise of freedom and meaningful choices and the lack of delivery.

Season 1 was still quite entertaining as an adventure game, season 2 as well until the last 2 episodes.

[TheFeniX]

Not to be That Guy, but to be That Guy for a moment, I was saying this mid-way through Season 1 Episode 3, while THE ENTIRE INTERNET continued furiously masturbating themselves over how this was The Best Game Ever Created And A Total Revolution In Interactive Story-Telling. I played through Episode 5 just out of sheer, morbid need to see the train wreck finish crumpling into a pathetic heap, and yet remained hilariously baffled by THE ENTIRE INTERNET's prostrated praise for this piece of crap "game."

"Interactive story" has to be one of the dumbest fucking things the Internet (or morons) came up with. Interactive story is pretty much the definition of a video game that has any dialog. What they really want is movies, but I guess they feel guilty if they can't wiggle a controller around, which works out because WD is on Playstation: the premier movie watching console since PS3.

Now, to be fair, point and click adventure games have never been about freedom. The monkey island games had absolutely no freedom, you couldn't even fail, but they were absolutely entertaining.

Monkey Island wasn't advertised as "Every choice you make completely changes everything. You're writing your own story and we'll totally put it into the show." And Monkey Island is a terrible example of an adventure game because it was decidedly casual compared to the rest of the market, in a massively good way. However, King's Quest and many of Sierra's (and other developer's) other save-scumming bullshit games had actual freedom in the way the story played out.

[FaxModem1]

So, I finished episode five. And what do you know, it actually has alternate endings. The rest of your party dwindles away, either because of random death, or because Kenny, mister crazy himself, scared them away. At the end, you can choose between Jane, the slightly cold but pragmatic survivalist who looks after you, or the psychotic Kenny, who also wants to look after you, as they engage in a fight to the death.

After that, with you've chosen, you either go to Wellington, the town Kenny heard about, and is actually right about, and you can choose to abandon him in a safe town full of people with the baby or spend the rest of your life with him and a baby(tough choice ).

If you chose Jane, you can go back to the hardware store, and establish a colony there, or kick out a family who comes by, with them swearing that they'll be back.

So, I chose Jane, and chose to let the family in. So, while there will be a season 3, I'm not sure how they'll follow Clementine, or if they'll even try. Either way, I'll pass on the next season.

[Eleas]

They're in a tough situation, as with a game focused on dialogue like this one, even 5 choices that actually make a difference per episode then after two episodes there are 1024 possible ways people could have done things.

Given that I dabble in IF, I thought I'd weigh in. This is called the Combinatorial Explosion problem. It's one of the earliest issues that arose when people first tried to write interactive fiction, and while it can be a bitch, it doesn't have to be.

Crucially, the problem is not simply that of (unique choices)^2 = number of unique paths. A game isn't a genealogy chart. Some paths taken will (must, in any interesting game) inevitably funnel into the same end path with only minor variations. Others will simply influence part of the end state without necessarily creating a brand new one. You can have areas where every choice counts, and have lots of choices, as long as the combined weight of those choices serve to funnel you into one or a handful of more manageable end states. It's still going to feel completely organic to the player if done right.

This brings us to the art of leveraging tools. We tend to forget that the first works of Interactive Fiction were not electronic. If we look at gamebooks such as the "Lone Wolf" series by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk, they appear far less interactive than your typical game run on a computer. This is because of the nature of our tool; the computer lets us leverage power. Using Inform 7 or TADS3, it would take me all of ten minutes to create a "game" with five significant choices and paths, all of which would be unique. All I'd need to do would be to off-load some of the creative work on the computer itself, and let it create the appropriate dynamic text.

When you write IF (and The Walking Dead certainly qualifies), the challenge is not just in creating enough content, but to maintain pacing and balance to the story. And that's where it gets tricky in an open-ended scenario. Because if you end up having to start the next game with more than one storyline running in parallel, how can you guarantee the story will be as viable and engaging in all branches? Now that is a combinatorial explosion, and also why we see characters in (for instance) Bioware games behaving almost as if they're opt-in. Because as an author, you do want to compartmentalize as much as you can, for the sake of your own sanity.