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Deus Ex has a few more examples, like the fates of Paul and Jaime, but each of these things is explicitly scripted based on event flags, which explains why ther

• gmueckl 5y ago
  Right, I forgot about those! Still, these moments are designed to mostly be self-contained and have little to no interplay with each other. This keeps a nice lid on the complexity of the narrative. A game's narrative complexity can easily get out of control when impactful player choices are allowed to become combinatorial. Implementing that many different outcomes quickly becomes infeasible.
  • djur 5y ago
    In the interactive fiction world, where a great deal of effort has been put into complex, responsive storylines, a common structure is the "branch-and-bottleneck" -- allowing a variety of paths through a particular area, but all of the paths bunch back together into a single path at the end, with possibly a few major flags enduring for the rest of the narrative. As this article mentions, enforcing some structure on the narrative like this not only makes implementation easier but also tends to make the story more coherent for the player: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/ https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-...