Video Game Tropes and Design Choices that you hate.

[Kaze no Klonoa]

One thing in particular that's starting to get worse is how poorly developers are handling "Illusion of Choice".

TellTale Games grrr

Most games feel like they need "important" dialogue decisions to affect the game, but nowadays I rarely see that as a thing. The Illusion of Choice is starting to become so obvious that there's no point of playing TellTale games because either certain decisions don't matter or they're put in this simple reputation counter (Which stores points based on players' interactions with other characters). Life is Strange has this massive dialogue tree but unlike TellTale most of it's consequences seriously affect how the game goes out, it affects the outcome of a certain character's life, who gets blamed in a particular issue based off of said character, stuff like that. TellTale Games maybe have some choices that will affect some outcome of the story but for the most part it's very straight forward. Here's a dialogue tree of The Walking Dead: Season 1 to get the idea.

http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/the-walking-dead-graph-by-gamesbeat.jpg

 

Games need to start being creative or allow for more changes in the environment with dialogue choices. Fallout: New Vegas probably is a great example of that, with your actions with different factions affecting a unique ending for the game, where each faction talks about their outcome. In my ending, despite how much I helped Goodsprings, they ended up with a poor outcome because I chose to side with the Republic. On the other hand, because I made the Brotherhood and NCR (The Republic) form a truce, the Brotherhood are now allies with my faction. There's different endings and stories based off of major factions, and various towns you've been to will tell their story of how they were affected by your final actions in the ending. It's really neat, it's a great example of what I want to see in future games. It seems like with time passing, developers are getting really lazy with player decisions and Illusion of Choice.

Edited August 7, 2015 by Inkling no Klonoa