Good Day good people.
I am looking for some more examples of Video Games where there is a plot, but for one reason or another, the result of the plot is that nothing happens. My criteria for this is fairly lax on the “how” but in some sense, by some definition by the end of the game, absolutely nothing has happened. I’m hoping some of you fine people may be able to identify some instances of such a thing.
Examples (I've chosen to spoiler tag everything as just being listed gives away certain plot elements. All examples given here are niche titles from over 15 years ago).:
- Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere (specifically the Japanese release): Huge inter-corporate conflict with several different factions and paths you can follow. One you go through all the different endings, the game reveals that it’s just a simulation made by one guy to make sure no matter what happens in an upcoming conflict; your character, an AI, will kill the dude who cucked him.
- Persona 2: Innocent Sin: You spend the whole game fighting Nyarlathotep to prevent him and the Nazis from destroying the world. At the end of the game, you fail and choose to abort the timeline and erase everyone else’s memories, leaving the main character stranded in the doomed timeline.
- Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter: This is the most boring way for this to play out IMO as it’s just a straight coma twist
So please. Let me know any and all games you can think of where the end result of the plot is that nothing happens. The more ridiculous, the better!
(Sorry, for repost. I didn’t know about the crosspost feature)
The Far Cry 4 secret ending.
That part at the beginning where you’re sitting at the table with Pagan Min and he leaves briefly giving you a chance to escape. If you just sit there and don’t do anything for like 10 minutes, he actually comes back and takes Ajay to place his mother’s ashes. Then the game ends without a shot fired.
Similarly, Far Cry 5. At the beginning, when you’re told to arrest Joseph Seed, you can choose to just turn around and walk out the door. The sheriff will agree with you, saying it’s best to just leave him and his cult alone and it would’ve only ended in your deaths if you tried to arrest him. Then the game ends.
Didn’t Far Cry 5 end with a nuclear explosion? Yeah leaving him be is probably the better option
Yes, but the bombs would have dropped regardless. So still the same end result.
Supposedly, the game was supposed to have a lot more atmospheric storytelling. Radios playing in the background, with news reports about rising tensions between the US and some nuclear state. Newspapers left laying around with headlines of nuclear war brewing. TVs playing with reporters talking about some country (Iran or North Korea, maybe?) developing nukes.
These were supposed to be scattered all over the place in ways that the player would obviously cross paths with them. The cult was less “doomsday prepping for no reason” and more “doomsday prepping because they think it’s soon”.
But Ubisoft being Ubisoft, they cut a lot of content because they wanted to launch the game sooner.
I don’t think the nuclear explosion was related to Joseph Seed. He was just a “prophet,” claiming the end times were here. The nukes were going to happen regardless, he was just trying to save as many people as he could, whether they wanted to be saved or not. He was the villain, but only in an “ends justify the means” sense. In the end, he was actually right; the world did fall to nuclear holocaust.
I suppose I’m misremembering, it’s been like 5 years since I played it. Maybe I’ll play it again some day, I remember quite liking the game
It’s my favorite of the Far Cry games. I love the setting and gameplay! I actually wrote a review on it recently and posted it here to Lemmy.
Do secret joke endings even count?
Well, in Hitman 3 you can choose to not kill the last evil guy, which causes you to wake up in the very first game from 2000.