Originally Posted by fylimar
Originally Posted by Lake Plisko
Originally Posted by fylimar
I don't think it is asked too much to just acknowledge player decisions.

Right.

But what I am saying and trying to give examples of is that sometimes it is. So the options are kind of...

Do you want choices that actually matter and can lead to different interesting outcomes, but sequels may have to choose a canon or miss out on some of your choices?
Or do you want choices that just matter way less and don't lead you off into interesting different outcomes, but keep you more on the same rail?

Because when you listen to the gaming community at large they want choice and consequence that actually matter and change the game in significant ways.

This reminds me of the stuff Pawel Sasko, one of the Cyberpunk 2077 devs, was talking about the other day. People were asking them to open up everything in the game, to make it so they can go into every building and open everything up. People have been asking for that from the beginning and saying things like - "We don't think it is too much to ask" as well. But he laid it out for them in a semi-technical way and explained that if they did that it would take years of work to properly do it AND it would become so demanding on systems that not very many people would be able to afford the hardware to actually play it.

But you say that you write stories and I say this honestly... if you are a good enough writer where you can come up with an epic story that tens of millions of people are interested in. You can come up with a world, protagonist, supporting characters and then write out all of their choices, a branching narrative and consequence... then also while writing keep in mind that you must be able to account for every choice while also staying within budget/time constraints of a project like Baldur's Gate 3 AND at the same time take any potential sequels into account...

Then you should make a video game, because you would likely be an insanely wealthy individual.
You can make choices that matter and have a stringent story. You might need more new characters than recycle old ones - because most of the continuity problems have to do with bringing back dead characters, but DA2 and DAI would have worked as well without Leliana. The antagonist in SWTOR didn't really need to be Revan, it would have worked very well with a new character.
I never said, I was writing for video games. I write fictional Stories. But I have to keep tabs of my continuity too, maybe not as complex as a video game, but as I said - reuse fewer characters or make the characters, you want to keep unkillable. Good example was Wynne- you can kill her in the temple, but since she had the spirit of healing inside her, most people were ok with her turning up in Awakening and in a novel.
However, your stories have a single plot line. The story starts at Point A and goes to Point Z in a linear fashion with no options for the readers to change anything that happens along the way. So, it's really easy to track continuity, you can do it with a basic outline. What happens when there are 10 permutations to an event? How many stories are you going to write in order to keep track of all of those possible permutations? What happens when you get to the end of the story, and there are 10,000 possible permutations?

Respecting everyone's choices sounds great, and looks good, in a forum post. It is, however, extremely difficult to do if you're going to have any significant choices. So, either they put everything on rails, which works pretty well for franchises like Tomb Raider, or Assassin's Creed, or, they take into consideration that some of the choices are going to be "per save file", but the main story may well have to ignore some of them. Speaking of BioWare, they handled Virmire pretty well for the franchise. There are some choices there that change who can't appear later, but those are rather limited, I guess. Ashley or Kaidan, Wrex or Wreave, does Kirrahe survive? Those kinds of things were dealt with rather well, but the scope was smaller than twisting everything that could possibly happen in KotoR into a single, takes everyone's choices, including who Revan is, into account. Because, from where I'm sitting, Revan worked out ok, because my main KotoR save file did have a white male Revan.