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)
Every Zelda game is a sisyphean adventure where you never really defeat the evil or restore Hyrule, you just reset the board for the next evil apocalypse.
Except there are consequences for failure. See the timeline split stuff.
2017 Prey, sadly.
I get why the ending to 2017 Prey might have been annoying, but I honestly thought it was very in line with the themes present in the rest of the game. The more time has passed, the more I’m satisfied with the ending. That being said, IMO the only right ending is
Spoiler
to murder everyone
The Last Of Us.
The entire plot is about getting this girl to a location, only to get there, kill everyone and leave again. They could have stayed at home and the result would have been the same.
Same with The Mandalorian, the ending in Boba Fett completely invalidated the entire show. But that isn’t a video game.
The Last of Us was more about Joel and Ellie’s relationship growing during their travels.
Had the hospital scene occurred within the first like ten hours of the game, Joel would have had no problem sacrificing her for a potential cure.
I think this highlights the big problem with Op’s question: it’s not all about plot, character development can be as satisfying and as important even if the world objectively doesn’t change.
Edit: by this i mean your point on The last of us
I mean you’re right, but it makes sense in context in both cases because the plot, or maybe better to say the driving motivation for action by the characters, isn’t the real story.
TLOU isn’t the story of two survivors trying to reach a goal- thats set dressing. It’s the story of a man who lost his daughter being given a chance to confront his grief and grow close with another young woman who would be the same age. The relationship growing, their mutual guilt and relief and joy in finding that familial connection in a dying world IS the story. And the climax isn’t Joel shooting 50 more people, it’s when he chooses her over the whole world. Even when thats obviously the wrong choice.
From a plot view, nothing has changed. What actually “happened” was entirely between Ellie and Joel. But lots of stories are like that. If you released a movie where a grieving man connected with his adopted, formerly abused or neglected, daughter- that could be a good movie and you wouldn’t say “nothing happened” because it would be honest and upfront with its stakes. But fewer people would play that as a game so they have to obfuscate their actual story with apocalypse and zombie trappings.
Didn’t play TLoU, but if you didn’t catch it from the start, the point of The Mandalorian was clearly always about Grogu becoming ‘the Mandalorian’. Just cause it didn’t go the way you expected doesn’t mean nothing happened.
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.
Hmm I knew about the crab Rangoon one but not this. Interesting. Also, does anyone know if New Dawn is any good? I’ve skipped the “expansion” titles in the series because I was not a fan of Blood Dragon, but it feels like I’m not giving New Dawn and Primal their due when all the mainline entries in the series have been fantastic.
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.
Gone Home
Good story, tho
Came here to say this. I enjoyed the game till the ending which I thought was terrible.
Was going to comment this as well! I enjoyed the story quite a bit too. Despite nothing really “happening” per se I remember the ending feeling emotional regardless.
Dear Esther
The stanley parable, in a way.
the end is never the end is never the end is never
Stanley walked through the red. door.
the end is never the end is never the end is never
I did LSD and played through the Deluxe Edition - holy fuck, I had fun!!!
Seems like a recipe for an existential crisis
oh, nice. I like getting high and playing surprising games, it usually makes the experience even more pleasant. But I never did LSD, and I’m not sure I could handle it. How does it affect playing something like Stanley Parable ?
Well, it was just funny. It kind of fucked with my brain, but i think i managed to get through the entire game in about 6 hours. I would not play Last if Us, Resident Evil etc, but I also once had a blast in RDR2 on LSD! It was after I had completed the game.
Would love to try something similar to Stanley Parable - I’m looking at Don’t Press The Button! for my next trip in October.
I can understand having a good time in RDR2, that game can be lovely and atmospheric
The Long Dark. Nothing will change. Death is only a matter of time.
Arguably, dark souls 1 (either ending)
The other games leave room for long term consequences but the 1st game is entirely pointless in the broader scope of the story.
If you don’t link the fire, you just did all of that adventuring for nothing. You may as well have just stayed in the asylum and let Gwyn slowly burn away.
If you do link the fire then you just reset the clock for the age of fire to fade again later while you wait for the next guy to come kill you just like Gwyn.
I agree with the point, but would argue that choosing not to link the fire is distinct from never adventuring at all. Letting the dark gradually take over with no wielder/ruler would make events like Oolacile much more likely than if a Lord of Dark was there to control and direct that power, imo.
Dead Rising.
Everything happens with our without your input. You can just chill out, do nothing, and the game ends.
Arguably Mass Effect 1.
You spend the game warning about the reaper threat and you are constantly brushed off. Then the bbg attacks the citadel and you fight them off.
Second game: oh that plot from game 1? Yea, that was an isolated incident by different species and not the enemy you were warning is about.
Game three: HELP!!! The friends of bbg from game 1 are attacking you have to save us.
Mass Effect 2 kind of pisses me off, ngl. The characters are so good, but the plot is really kind of bad. Forcing Shepard to work with Cerberus makes zero sense, especially since my Shepard went out of their way to murder Cerberus employees for what they did to their squad.
A game I like, and I’m not sure this fits 100%, but Voices of the Void.
Keeping things as spoiler-lite as possible, you’re a lone radioastronomer at a deep-space listening outpost in Switzerland. It’s a horror game, so there are “things” out there, but whether or not you get involved is kind of up to you.
Thing do happen, but not to you. You are just a witness to events far beyond your comprehension.
BioShock 3. Game establishes that it is a multiverse. There are many worlds/universes, but there is always a girl, and always a light house. You did something bad and it caused suffering. At the end of the game, you go back and change something, and create a bright happy future. Everyone sings Kumbaya (literally they play a song called break the cycle). The idea is that there was a single event and everything bad happened because of that. Going back and stopping it prevents all the bad stuff. The problem is, that only works with “Back to the Future” style time travel. The game already established it is a multiverse. So yes, you did create 1 future where everything didn’t go to shit. But because it’s a multiverse there are still an infinite number of universes where things are still very bad, and there is suffering. For whatever reason the writers just didn’t think about that I guess? It seemed really asinine at the time I played it.
All the Elizabeths come together to kill their Bookers. It’s not just one universe. It’s every universe. You only get to see your universe’s Booker die.
spoiler
I clocked its ending as you became a coalescence of all Bookers, and since all the Elizabeths kill you it stops you in every timeline in which you exist.
coalescence, I think
One moment going to research that.
Update; you are correct and I changed my original comment. Thanks for the correction.
If it means the same as in french, convalescence is the period of time after an illness during which one recovers. Coalescence would be the action of joining/merging things
btw I never really got the ending of Bioshock Infinite, so your explanation is welcome. It felt a bit masturbatory to me at the time. It doesn’t help that I didn’t really enjoy the game itself, contrary to the previous two
It does. My just having woken up brain mixed the two up.
Also, I was actually a huge(ba-dum-tiss) fan of it. It’s one of my favorites. It’s flawed and you can tell that it had to drop some things to make it out the door but I liked it. My wife and I actually have matching tattoos based on the series.
Firewatch was the biggest disappointment for me because the big mystery they hype up for most of the game just ended up being a nothing burger.
It was incredibly enjoyable for me exactly because I didn’t fall for that “big mystery” hook. Also no, it’s not a nothingburger for any of the characters involved. It’s just not another unrealistic game-y game.
Driver San Francisco kinda. You spend most of the game in a coma, but you do wake up and do some real stuff for the ending.
Depending on your definition of nothing happens, Mad Max too. At the start of the game Max loses his car, meets this car fanatic and for the entire game he helps you build the “Magnum Opus”, the most badass car the wasteland has seen. At the end, you lose your Magnum Opus, he gets killed, and you get your original car back. You have a big impact on other people throughout the story, but as far as the protagonist is concerned, he is pretty much exactly where he started.
That is pretty much Max in every movie bar the first one though. Wanders about, reluctantly helps some people, wanders off on his own again.
I hated the Mad Max ending, so disappointing
The thing driver san francisco was weird, but I enjoyed it.
