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Why do games typically struggle with endings?

Hollywood Hitman

Hollywood Hitman

Gold Member
Just a random thought here, but I actually have a bad case of gaming add these years... Speaking about the last 10 I'd say, I get going and can plug away 20 40 60 100+ in games at times and I finish games but I tend to jump around a bit.

And it hit me that I think a reason I have a hard time just hammering a game from start to finish is because you rarely hear about an omg that ending...i mean some games sure, but overall I always see people say "finished so and so, the ending was a let down a bit. Or the ending just didn't really button anything up, or the ending was just alright"... More than wow that ending was so damn amazing, I think would motivate in alot of cases to be sure to get there and get there soon. I just wonder if hearing about awesome engines more often would help me cut down on some game jumping. Like zelda for instance, I put in 40 or 50 hours and I need to finish it, but all I've heard is the ending is pretty blah. So it kills a bit of my motivation.

Now again that will vary in degrees as some might love a ton of endings, some might agree, but in my passing experiences I just see a lot more complaints about endings.

And in my gaming experiences I tend to also feel that endings just struggle a bit, I finish the games and while the game aspects were great the ends were typically just ok.

And my question to get some opinions is why do a good portion of games struggle to top off their games with a solid, climactic ending?
 
Games are extremely long compared to movies and you usually lose the narrative by the time you've reached your 'we need to be this many hours long' point.
 
Partly because the length of most games causes peoples' expectations to be higher. If a movie is 2-3 hours and has a great ending, how much greater should the end of a 100 hour experience be?

This is why a lot of short games are said to have great endings, like the Portal games for example. No time for the concept to get old or for the player to forget why they care about what's going on.

Also I would like to say on the subject of your last line - "a good portion of games struggle to top off their games with a solid, climactic ending" - I think many games do top off with a solid climax. What people have problem with is the denouement and lack of tying together all the loose ends, providing a satisfying epilogue to every quirky character you met, etc.

Zelda has a sold climactic ending.
 
I think it's something to do with the fact that in a film or a book, it's all very controlled. How the story ends is a controlled environment whereas a game has to make a choice - remove player agency and finish the story it wants to tell (which makes the player feel like a passenger) or keep player agency (which makes the player unlikely to what what was intended).
 
Budgeting towards having more unique assets and development time dedicated to the beginning of a game would go towards explaining why the execution of endings can tend to be on the weaker side, but as for their function in providing narrative or conceptual climaxes; it might be more due to the relatively open-ended nature of the medium.

Open-world games are the most obvious illustration of this - the framing story or main quest line tends to be a negligible part of the overall game, so concluding the game as a whole by providing closure to an aspect that doesn't have much bearing on the parts of the game that people actually derived most of their enjoyment or connection from would naturally lead to the ending feeling underbaked. Majora's Mask providing small segments addressing the endings of all the major sidequests completed during the game throughout its end credits remains a reasonable compromise to address this problem, though it likely wouldn't be feasible with the size of modern open world games.

In any case, it's much easier to deliver on a final act for linear titles - though a linear structure is by no means a guarantee that their endings will succeed, of course.
 
Don't most developers make the beginning of the game first and put comparatively far more resources into it than the end of the game? Look at, say, KOTOR 2 for an extreme example, but even looking at some games with well known cut content much of it is in the latter part of the game.
 
Games having bad endings is just like, your opinion, man.

Edit: I get where you're coming from though. I guess finding a way to sum something up is difficult to execute in a way that makes everyone happy/content.
 
I typically find the reaction to endings (good or bad) to be overblown. Given the nature of games (and other media), the endings are usually the last part of the game we experience and so tend to be given a disproportionate amount of weight when it come to forming our overall opinion. This is why you see a lot of complaints about endings.

So while a game might be a 90 right up until the ending, a bad ending could drag our overall impressions down to 70. Likewise bad games can be dragged up by an above average ending or simply just a satisfying conclusion, see this thread from last week http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1362417
 
To enjoy a movie you play a flat fee and then sit in a chair / couch for 2 hours and have the movie happen at you.

Video games require a lot more investment of time and effort to complete, so to garner attention and justify the purchase to casual players the games tend to be front loaded with the best sequences and action so a conclusion can rarely beat that.

Also writing and gameplay are prone to being pitted against each other. Not many writers can think of how to utilize gameplay as a tool to convey story because everyone plays differently and timing is a big part of effective storytelling. And gameplay doesn't like control being taken away for cinematics.

Let's not forget that video games lately have a desire to be like movies yet more often than not don't have the writing talent to back it up.
 
SomTervo said:
It's the same in every narrative field. Endings are very hard to land.
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Exactly what I was going to say.

Magnet_Man said:
Let's not forget that video games lately have a desire to be like movies yet more often than not don't have the writing talent to back it up.
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Yeah, and that's where developers are going wrong. They need to stop trying to makes games something they're not and use it's own medium to their advantages.

Wiped89 said:
Just throwing it out there, but trophy/achievements prove that over 90% of players will never see the ending. Hell, more than 50% don't seem to get past the first couple of chapters.

Why waste your time making a great ending? Might as well front load all the best content near the start and then pour the rest of your resources into an online multiplayer mode.
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Hell no. That's a terrible way to look at development. If a player doesn't reach the end then that's their fault.
 
Just throwing it out there, but trophy/achievements prove that over 90% of players will never see the ending. Hell, more than 50% don't seem to get past the first couple of chapters.

Why waste your time making a great ending? Might as well front load all the best content near the start and then pour the rest of your resources into an online multiplayer mode.
 
Games tend to end very suddenly after the climax. Like, you kill the final boss and two minutes later the credits are rolling. There isn't a long enough period of falling action to really wrap things up and make the player feel satisfied. Obviously certain games avoid this issue (MGS3, Uncharted 4, Yakuza 0, Persona 5), but it's an issue I see with a ton of others.
 
Magnet_Man said:
Let's not forget that video games lately have a desire to be like movies yet more often than not don't have the writing talent to back it up.
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This is also quite true.

With a few exceptions, games generally fall up short in the comparison to movies for various reasons, but largely because of writing.

Can we come up with a list of games that have satisfying endings and determine what makes them great?

- 999
- Final Fantasy series generally, VIII and X in particular
- The Last of Us
- Link's Awakening
- Metal Gear Solid series
- Persona series
 
WolfeTone said:
This is also quite true.

With a few exceptions, games generally fall up short in the comparison to movies for various reasons, but largely because of writing.

Can we come up with a list of games that have satisfying endings and determine what makes them great?

- 999
- Final Fantasy series generally, VIII and X in particular
- The Last of Us
- Link's Awakening
- Metal Gear Solid series
- Persona series
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Final Fantasy and Persona both generally have extended epilogue sequences after the climactic final battle that send the characters/world off appropriately and leave the player satisfied. MGS is similar. Link's Awakening is one of the few games that nails an abrupt ending because for a decent chunk of the game you know exactly how it has to end - it fits the story very nicely.
 
The Xtortionist said:
Final Fantasy and Persona both generally have extended epilogue sequences after the climactic final battle that send the characters/world off appropriately and leave the player satisfied. MGS is similar. Link's Awakening is one of the few games that nails an abrupt ending because for a decent chunk of the game you know exactly how it has to end - it fits the story very nicely.
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That's quite true. I do have a preference for 'long' endings that tell what happened to every character etc. It's why I've never understood the hate for Return of the King's ending(s). Also why I feel like Final Fantasy VII and XIII (mostly XIII) had weak endings relative to other games in the series.
 
Wasn't there an old saying about most players never reach the end of the game in the first place?

I totally feel that good endings are hard to write in any media.
 
Making a good and satisfying ending is hard in every medium, but in videogames especially it is even harder because of the lenght. The narrative is often driven by hours and hours of gameplay and story exposition, which makes shaping an ending that can encompass all the expectations created by it much harder than a 2hours movie for example.

I suggest playing TLOU though. One of the best endings I have ever seen in any medium. By far the best in the videogame industry imo. One of the main reasons it is my favorite game ever.
 
JigglesBunny said:
Take it from a writer, endings are hard. The hardest part of narrative construction, if you ask me.
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I've heard the best way to write a story is to decide your ending first, and then you can write the rest of the tale leading up to that conclusion, and it makes it easier to drop hints along the way.

I write for a living but I've never written fiction, so it could be duff advice. What do you do?
 
Well you said it yourself. We expect the payoff for a 60-100 hour experience to be worthy of the time invested but it almost never is.

Films already have a tough time making 1-2 hour experiences satisfying
 
Wiped89 said:
I've heard the best way to write a story is to decide your ending first, and then you can write the rest of the tale leading up to that conclusion, and it makes it easier to drop hints along the way.

I write for a living but I've never written fiction, so it could be duff advice. What do you do?
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I usually follow the characters and use them to carve my way to the end. Basically, when I'm about to write something, the characters arc is mapped out so that I know where they start, what happens to them, how they change and how they wind up and then I build the narrative around them to get them through those checkpoints.

That said, there have been plenty of times where I scrap twenty entire pages of a narrative because I feel like the entire conclusion was done poorly. Endings are tricky, especially if you're writing a completely unique narrative and want to provide proper closure for the characters/world you've created. If I could get someone else to write all of my endings, I'd foot whatever bill I had to.
 
The original 1998 MediEvil honestly has one of the best video game endings I've seen. There's nothing shocking or groundbeaking about the ending. It just completes the game and brings it to a proper emotional resolution. The video is great, as is the music, and you leave the game with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. What really makes it work so well is how simple the story was. You have a goal: You started the game with the express purpose of finding the villain and kicking his ass, and when you accomplish it, the game will be over. There's also no sequel hook whatsoever. I wish more games had endings like it.
 
Personally I think games probably do better than films or TV in terms of decent endings. I struggle to think of really poor game endings but it's easy to think of many films or TV series that have fallen miserably at the last hurdle.

However I admit that could be because films and TV are entirely passive mediums so there isn't the same level of commitment to story as you get in games.

For me the best game endings rank up there with the best movies and series. To me something like the ending to TLoU is a near perfect ending in any medium. The story comes to a conclusion but yet still leaves the player to come to their own interpretation.
 
In a game a climactic ending needs to involve the player, it needs to be culmination of not only the story but also the gameplay elements. And that's hard.

A lot of final boss fights don't feel necessary on a story level but seem to exist because someone on the team said 'but we need a final boss'.

See Bioshock, it really should have ended with 'Would you kindly'. The rest is completely uninteresting and only there to give the player his boss fight
 
petran79 said:
Game Over screens are a game's true ending.
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tumblr_inline_onm69xz02f1r33dl7_540.gif
 
Wiped89 said:
I've heard the best way to write a story is to decide your ending first, and then you can write the rest of the tale leading up to that conclusion, and it makes it easier to drop hints along the way.
Click to expand...

This is entirely dependent on the type of story you're trying to tell.

For some it can be useful (the writing staff of Breaking Bad used this technique pretty heavily), however, the ending that you outlined in the beginning might wind up conflicting with the story you eventually tell as it's naturally fleshed out. Like you started with an ending you thought would be cool, but the more you write, the more you realize that ending won't work as is. Then you end up having to force your characters and story back on track so they still arrive at that predetermined ending -- no matter how unnatural or convoluted it ends up being (see: Revenge of the Sith).
 
The biggest issue for me is that so many of them are invested in building a franchise and demand for a sequel so that stories just go completely unfinished so that they have a narrative hook for the next title.
 
RoboPlato said:
The biggest issue for me is that so many of them are invested in building a franchise and demand for a sequel so that stories just go completely unfinished so that they have a narrative hook for the next title.
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I think this is one of the biggest issues. The demand for sequels and franchises make it really hard to have a definitive ending, which are usually the best ones. The Last of Us would've been a great example if they weren't actually making a sequel :)
 
There is also the fact that the majority of players don't see them... so it is not like they need to be omfg
 
While there's the broader issues inherent in crafting an ending to consider, I do think video games end up with some rather unique issues they struggle to get around.

One of them is the simple fact that a game doesn't necessarily know how well prepared or able a player will be for its finale. It's a paradoxical problem that's honestly only been somewhat alleviated by the rise of video walkthroughs and Let's Plays: If the only way to see the ending of a game is to beat the game, then for the majority of players to see the ending, the game must be beatable for that same majority. But there's no 'majority' skill level, expertise, or perspective among users, and so while devs may try their damnedest to have things set up perfectly, many - if not most - will end up unable to create something truly satisfactory for all.

Here's an easy example: Pokémon. The last several games have had fans, particularly older ones who are used to the notion of level grinding, complain as they find it all too easy to reach the end of the game with their 'mons at least half a dozen - if not a full dozen - levels higher than the Champion that is supposed to be the final boss. So for those fans, the whole experience is massively underwhelming as it's just too easy. Yet good fucking lord I remember hating going through the Elite Four as a kid - it's why in half of the times I played Emerald, after beating the 8th gym I would just rush for Sky Pillar, save just in front of Rayquaza, and keep save scumming until I got lucky and could catch it, thus cheesing the whole thing. Either way, the games can't guarantee what you'll turn up with, so if you underutilised or are too good for the system, you can easily land well outside of the intended experience. Happens with basically any RPG.
 
Pretty awesome endings these last years: Uncharted 4, The Last Guardian, Mass Effect Andromeda, Final Fantasy XV (even if I hated the story), Horizon Zero Dawn, Batman Arkham Knight, The Witcher III, and lots of indie games.

Games are getting better and better every time.
 
waveuponwave said:
See Bioshock, it really should have ended with 'Would you kindly'. The rest is completely uninteresting and only there to give the player his boss fight
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Ha, I was going to put Bioshock down for a good ending but I'd completely forgotten about that shitty boss fight! I guess that says something about it!

Bioshock Infinite had a decent ending though.
 
Has anyone seen the end to the series Castle? My god, that was possibly the worst ending I've seen to a series. It ends with the two main characters being shot and then, because it was cancelled shortly before the finale aired, it cuts to 7 years in the future, they're living happily together with two kids and that's it!
 
An ending has to be a do-or-die decisive moment of no turning back, with higher stakes than the game that lead up to it.

Large portions of the market will sell your shit back to Gamestop and cross the sequel off their list if the ending is Hitler himself or the alien hivemind or whatever and after all that sturm und drang he still dies to the same RT-run behind cover-RT loop as every other enemy.

Different large portions of the market will also sell your shit back to Gamestop and cross the sequel off their list if they can no longer power through on their way to devouring the juicy lore nuggets hidden behind it.

The performancist market is utterly nonplussed by the narrativist market's idea of an amazing ending, and the narrativist market actively considers the performancist market's idea of an amazing ending as a deliberate "fuck you!" to them (which is sometimes is!)

The solution is the death of AAA, that disfigured Frankenstein of tying a vaguely unsatisfying but pretty and heavily-marketed example of each into a single $60 package in hopes of sopping up all the money. Blockbusterism is dire for individual films and for the medium of film, and right now it's even worse in games.

Edit: And this doesn't even touch on the simulationists who don't have endings, but phase changes from high- to low-entropy states!
 
waveuponwave said:
See Bioshock, it really should have ended with 'Would you kindly'. The rest is completely uninteresting and only there to give the player his boss fight
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No. I didn't care much for Bioshock's finale either, but cutting the game off after Hephaestus would be even worse; it's a non-ending.


Conker's Bad Fur Day still has one of the best video game endings ever, for my money. A genuine sucker punch of an ending that perfectly capped the journey.

Game Arts used to also be the masters of video game endings; being able to actually play short "epilogue" segments are better ways to close out a gameplay experience than watching a collection of cutscenes.
 
They blow the budget on the beginning of the game because most people don't make it to the end. Resident Evil VII is an amazing example of this. The first half is jaw-dropping, and the second half is dog shit.
 
Almost every artistic medium struggles with endings. How many long running television series end well? Maybe, like, one in ten? How about books? Read anything King has ever written and you will see that it is a LOT easier to start telling an interesting story than it is to finish one. Movies frequently putter out as well as writers try to give us some form of closure without undercutting the narrative as a whole...

Climaxes are difficult. It is easy to build tension, it is hard to resolve it. Narrative themes have a tendency to be tricky to resolve. Ending a story is always going to be a difficult thing to do. This is the way it has always been.
 
Coming up with some hook, characters, and basic lore is the simplest thing in the world.

Working that into a good story with solid character arcs, not so much.
 
I think the problem, in most cases, boils down to the following - many games have bad writing altogether, and then there are some which have what would be okay or good writing but what doesn't fit the medium due to not accounting for gameplay being a primary or additional source of feelings in players, as well as such things as game length. This can be ignored to some level until the ending because there's the gameplay. Then during actual ending there's typically none, so seams get visible.

Another element is that ending is often conceptualized during later parts of development, since unlike a singular movie or a book (but sometimes similarly to some series) it is rarely part of the entire concept of the whole thing, hell, story at all can not be a part of it and end up being in the final product. The book release dates are rarely such a huge deal, the movies are rarely shot according to in-story order of things.
 
Maybe part of the issue is they don't know yet if they'll be doing a sequel.
Running low on time&budget could also be a factor

Other than that, endings are just difficult things to write & even the best endings wont please everyone.
 
Doctor_Thomas said:
I think it's something to do with the fact that in a film or a book, it's all very controlled. How the story ends is a controlled environment whereas a game has to make a choice - remove player agency and finish the story it wants to tell (which makes the player feel like a passenger) or keep player agency (which makes the player unlikely to what what was intended).
Click to expand...

this idea also affects pacing. A novel or film has direct control over pacing. A game doesn't know how many times you failed, or how many side quests you go on, or how much you grind... so where a novel or film can control the speed as to which you get to the ending, a game can't. this can dramatically affect the 'feel' of the ending. for example, if right when you unlock the final battle, you instead go 'clean up' 50 side quests, you'll be that much more removed from the final conflict / main story.
 
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