I'd be interested to know what percentage of Fallout/Skyrim players use mods, and how early they start using them. They keep achievements from triggering for Steam right?
I think the 70~80 non-completion rate tells us is that most people don't really play games for their story, for most games that's valid.
Another thing I was thinking about is how often the 'choices' in a game are invalidated by that game in order to save all of the work that would be required to create those worldstates. That sort of thing is pretty demoralizing for me.
A lot of games do this and still say they're replayable despite you already knowing what the game would be, based on some artificial point of 'divergence'.
With that in mind I'd would say that the reactivity in the Witcher 2 is very good, you're given two very distinct world states based on your actions in the first act, and unlike a lot of games, you actually don't learn the whole story of the second act until you see it from both sides of the battle. I wouldn't say they're incoherent with each other, there's a way events playout with and without Geralt's influence. You're actually allowed to fail quests too, which doesn't seem to happen often in general.
This is very different to the reactivity of The Witcher 3 because everything that happens in the climax of the last game is explained away off screen. If you want to talk about wasted resources, every time a sequel reboots the story, you're talking about using resources to avoid dealing with your established story.
Of course when the term 'reactivity' is used, a lot of the time they're referring to the capacity of the game, to deal with sandbox decisions made by the player. BG3 is very reactive in this sense, including having something dumb like taking the artifact from Shadowheart cause that many variations on how the game plays out. It's probably the most impressive part of the game so far, and the thing I'm most interested in testing the limits of.
Last edited by Sozz; 28/04/23 09:16 PM. Reason: "non-completion"
