“Player choice” is a cool phrase that developers love to throw around, but never quite deliver on in modern gaming. Sure, you can choose to have Commander Shepard slap a news reporter on the Citadel, but you are playing a single story that must be ꦑwrapped up somehow. All roads will eventually lead to a predetermined end. Developers use multiple endings to show gamers that their choices matter somewhat. The second a game boasts multiple endings, you know gamers are going to be trying to figure out how to get them all. However, a game with multiple endings doesn’t mean that those endings are any good or even make sense.
Not every story needs a good, a bad, or a weird ending, especially if there is a sequel a🍌lready in the works. If the main character is still a good guy in the next game, what’s the point of creating a bad guy ending for the first game? On the other hand, there are endings that have no bearing whatsoever on the game’s universe whatsoever. They appear to be just window dressing or an extra cutscene to watch. There are even endings that undo the entire fabric of an entire universe. The developers just put iཧt in there to have another option, but they only create chaos and confusion.
Multiple endings may give the gamer the incentive to replay th✤e game multiple times, but delivering on a satisfying end repeatedly just by ﷺtweaking some choices is a tall order, even for experienced developers. A lot of scripted endings fall short of even making a lasting impression on gamers, so making a game with lackluster alternatives just make it worse.
(Spoilers Below!)
15 Hunted: The Demon’s Forge
Hunted might have slipped under a few gamer’s radars, but this dungeon crawler did have a few lackluster endings. Elara, the huntress, and Caddoc, the warrior, are sent on a mission to recover an artifact for a mysterious sorceress named Seraphine. Along the way, they encounter a magical substance called Sledge that acts just like Star Power in Mario Kart, but evil.
The idea behind the game is to play with a friend or switch between Caddoc and Elara to accomplish tasks and dispense enemi✃es. If one character drinks too much Sledge, you get an evil ending where your character kills the other. Once you do it the first time, there is no reason to go back. Unless you like spending several hours to see one different cutscene. There isn’t much else that happens after the evil ending, except for one character’s death. It’s just evil for the sake of being evil.
14 Resident Evil
Multiple endings should give the gamer a different feeling about the characters and story, depending on what they chose. Resident Evil’s endings are solely dependent on what characters you save. If you save everyone, you get the “happiest” ending, where three S.T.A.R.S. members exhale profusely as you ride off into the sunset. The other “happy” endings just rearrange who is and isn’t on 🥀the helicopter.
Do you want to see Jill sitting in a helicopter by herself or how about Chris? How about them together? Would it make i🗹t better 𒐪if you throw Barry in there? There is no narrative payoff for saving each character. Instead the gamer is just treated to a few extra seconds with the good guys flying home.
Resident Evil was an industry leader in building and maintaining a unique horror atmosphere. To give the gamer a few more seconds with the heroes, sweating on a helicopter, doesn’t do the game justice or the characte♔rs for that matter.
13 BioShock
After building to one of the biggest twists in gaming history, the final cutscene options nearly sunk the first BioShock. You have two choices throughout BioShock, to harvest the little sisters or to save them. Obviously if you save them, you get the “everything is wonderful” ending. If you harvest them, you get ✅the bad ending. But you can harvest some and still get the bad ending, even if you save most. This is a bizarre choice by the developers.
There is no difference between harvesting one little sister or harvesting them all. You are still treated to a depressing and evil ending, where you use the power of Adam for your own gain. This third option is poi𒁃ntless except to punish a gamer who was experimenting with the game’s mechanics. Who wouldn’t harvest a little sister just to see what happens? The game doesn’t offer a true alternative ending in which the gamer did make some bad choices, but they made way more good choices.
12 Half-Life
At the end of Half-Life, you can refuse the G-Man’s offer by simply standing still, but doing so would undo Half-life 2. That is an alternate universe I don’t want to live in. Valve didn’t know for sure that they were going to make a sequel to their new FPS at the time, 💮but l𒅌ooking at it now, the choice is an illusion.
Gordon Freeman has no free will. He can choose to be stuck in Xen or choose🍎 to be stuck in whatever hell the G-Man cooks up next. Those aren’t very different and they certainly don’t offer any closure to Gordon’s journey. This alternative ending doesn’t succeed in branching the story out in a new direction or show new character development.
Refusing the G-Man only creates all kinds of problems getting Gordon out of Xen and into Half-Life 2. This option serves one purpose, for the gamer to think Gordon died at the end of t🧔he game like a cheap cliffhanger. Who wants that?
11 Amnesia: The Dark Descent
This ground-breaking survival horror game may have had gamers jumping out of their skin, but the optional ending choices𒁃 left s𒈔omething to be desired. You can let Alexander finish the portal, stop him, or use Agrippa’s head to stop him. If Daniel stops him, he makes it out of the castle, but if you pick the other two, Daniel dies. Either way, you need to look at the big picture; the damage was done a long time ago by Daniel and Alexander. They tortured and killed innocent people to make this ritual happen. They did it in grotesque ways, keeping their victims alive longer, even feeding them Amnesia potion to forget what was about to happen to them.
Daniel came to ♋Alexander looking for help to get rid of the shadow that followed him, but in turn became a monster serving it. Whether Daniel stops Alexander or not, it doesn’t make up for what the two of them did. It doesn’t matter how many endings you put on this game, they all don’t change what happened.
10 Heavy Rain
Heavy Rain has so many endings because there are so many characters to wrap up 𒊎in so many ways. Each character can live or die based on several decisions in the final act. Having this many possible endings is exhausting and detracts from the story and characters.
The game becomes about what ending cutscene you can get and less about solving the case of The Origami Killer. This dilution of the narrative creꦐates an end game experience that could have used some serious editing.
Whether Ethan, Madison, Norman, Shaun, and Scott live is important to a crime story like Heavy Rain. The developers could have played with the idea of justice being served by the different outcomes. But what is not important is the varying degrees each outcome plays off each other in execution. There are seventeen possibilities total across four characters. Having that many pꦓossibilities makes endings collectables to unlock and not loose ends to tie up.
9 Indigo Prophecy
Before Heavy Rain, the developer Quantic Dream made Indigo Prophecy. There may have been less playable characters than Heavy Rain, but the multiple endings were 🔯just as irrelevant.
If you fail to win the fight against the Oracle, nothing happens. You go back to your life, start a family, andꩵ no evil plot to enslave the world unfolds. Maybe s🐓ometime in the future the world will be in peril, but that's for some other idiot to worry about.
If you beat the Oracle, but not the AI, the humans live underground and their enemies wait to strike at those not🥀 dying from the cold. But you still fathered the next Indigo child just like in the other endings. And if you beat everyone, all factions go back to their lives, including the bad guys.
So, in summation, regardless of how you compᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚlete the game you will be treated to a similar voiceover where Carla is expecting the factions of bad guys to inflict more damage on humanity and your child will have powers like yo🐓u. What’s was the point of having all these endings, again?
8 Metal Gear Solid
There is another ending to the original Metal Gear Solid game⛎, but it doesn’𒁏t help the story or the characters. It might help the gamer by unlocking a better item, stealth camo. When Snake and Meryl are trapped in the torture chamber with Ocelot, you can fail at the mashing Circle. If you do so, Snake will find Meryl dead at the end of the game. Putting aside the paradox that this creates later in the series, this death and ending has little to no bearing on what happens at the end of the game.
Snake still escapes and the ending cinematics play out the same, only with Otacon in Meryl’s place. Including this ending in the game was for t🔯he sole purpose of creating drama. It had no real consequence on the story because the ending did not change. By not altering the ending to accommodate for Meryl’s death shows how little she really meant to Snake and the story. Yes, there is a big dramatic “Merrrylll!” But gamers who get either ending experience the same end to the story.
7 Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2 has ending♉s that simply exist just for a laugh, but they’re just weird. The franchise is built on some of t൲he most iconic horror moments in gaming history. To have endings with a wink and smile detract greatly from the game.
There is an unlockable ending where James enters a hotel room to see a dog at a control desk, implying that the dog was in control the whole time. Another ending has a UFO abducting James and flying away. There are serious endings to the game where the main characters either live or die, but those endings are cheapened by✃ these joke endings. The developers really missed an opportunity to show more of Silent Hill or even more of Pyramid Head. Horror should have come first when adding endings to really build on the story and atmosphere. These are just more multiple endings that are in a game for the sake of being in a game.
6 Fable 2
The choice you are faced with at the end of Fable 2 is empty and predictable. You may choose to resurrect all that died in the building of the Spire, resurrect your family, or cash in your big pay day as the hero of Albion. It’s not really a choice at all if you follow your hero’s journey. Resurrecting your family is the only op𝔍tion that makes sense for the story.
The option to resurrect everyone, but your family or to take the gold appear to be added to tempt the gamer into thinking either for themselves or for some greater good, respectively. The story is about your family from the very beginning. Now after all the fighting, you have a chance to be with them. The other two options aren’t real possibilities when it comes bringing an end to the story that was started. These other two endings belong to ano🌸ther narrat൩ive and don’t take the story in a new direction.