Game endings in general, I mean - it doesn’t need to be restricted to tabletop.
Take our D&D finale as an example.
We’ve been on a journey.
It was a suitably grand occasion.
For a while, it did look dicey, too.
As it was, though, I bit a bunch of people in half.
I was living my best life.
The event, then, didn’t lack a sense of occasion.
All the energy we’d focused into that point suddenly had nowhere to go.
But it was still there, it hadn’t all dissipated.
We’d come to expect there would always be Something More, but now there wasn’t.
That was it - The End.
It led to the strangest feeling of inertia.
And my mind turned to video games for an explanation.
How, I wondered, do they do it - how do they deal with endings in games?
Is there a consistent method?
It’s the real end.
Or as I like to think of it, it’s the off-ramp for you.
Perhaps that’s what I need.
Or maybe it isn’t about me at all.
Perhaps the epilogue was as much for them as it was for me.
We did get an epilogue from our D&D DM, by the way.
Tim, you are the best.
And it did help me - helped us - wave goodbye.
So are epilogues the answer?
Let’s think of another game - BioWare games!
I’ve played a lot of those.
From what I can remember, they all have epilogues of a sort, although maybe not playable ones.
Were they not there, I think I would feel the story was incomplete.
The only one that didn’t have something like that, at least originally, wasMass Effect 3.
Did it satisfy all the invested energy players had poured into a trilogy?
I actually didn’t mind it.
Is there another option to an epilogue?
But I do think of one prominent example:Half-Life 2.
Maybe that’s what The Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign was doing.
We can take them on other adventures if we like.
Why, really, would it want to let us go?
- I didn’t find anything unshakably conclusive.
Maybe that’s a good way to keep players thinking about your game.
How can you know what individual players will want in any particular circumstance?
How can you know what the story and characters will mean to them?
If you had to end a game, how would you do it?
