The “bad ending” is a very common thing in video games, if you fail to do X or Y then everything will end badly, your friends will die, your country will burn, the Nazis will come back riding dinosaurs, you get the idea. And yet, I believe that despite how widespread they are, these endings are not a good narrative decision. And yet, there is a less used narrative tool that would be more satisfying, a proper tragic ending.
You can probably use much more mainstream examples but because I like to shill for my indie darling bullshit I want to compare two great games and how different they are at delivering the negative ending: the action RPG CrossCode and the management game/visual novel Suzerain.
CrossCode is an action game where your character is a semi-mute gal trapped in a virtual world, you can get one of two endings, the good ending where everybody hugs and lives happily ever after, and the bad ending where your characters dies and everybody is sad. The ending you get depends entirely on whether you found a side quest where you talk with some old dude. That’s it, talk to this dude and you get he happy one, don’t do it and you get the sad one. This is really not a good way to end your game and even the devs seem to have recognized this because they give a player the option to just rewind to before the final dungeon just so you can make sure you speak to the old dude. Ultimately, there is an ending you are supposed to get and there is one you are not.
By contrast Suzerain is a narrative heavy game where you play as the president of a country and you can get about a dozen different endings with their own bells and whistles. But this is not to say “Suzerain is better because it has more endings”, it’s instead the nature those endings that makes them better. They are the direct and logical result of the various decisions you make during the game pilling up and sealing both your destiny and that of your country. Some of these endings are happier than others, but they all follow logically from your actions.
And that following from the character’s actions is to me what separates the “bad” ending from the “tragic” ending. In a good tragedy characters are undone by their own mistakes and flaws, not by serendipitous bad things. The important thing to notice here is that a tragic ending is not a bad thing, a tragic ending is frequently better than the alternative. Macbeth would not be a better play if it ended with Macbeth apologizing for his wrongdoings and retiring to live a peaceful life in the countryside, nor would Romeo and Juliet be better if it ended with the two families hugging it out and approving the two youngsters wedding.
This seems rather obvious, but I think the obstacle with game narratives is that game design is stuck looking at things in terms of winning conditions. You play the game to win, and how do you “win” at a narrative? With a happy ending. But stories and not meant to be “won”, this would be comparable to asking the audience of a play to clap really hard if they want Willy Loman to survive and win the lottery in Death of a Salesman.
A bad ending is a punishment, it can only result in your player walking away frustrated after pouring 40 hours into your game because you as a developer decided that his playthrough wasn’t good enough to get a good ending. And why would you want to do such a thing? Why would you want to make the player’s experience worse?
A tragic ending is by contrast a reward, in the same way that experiencing any good narrative is rewarding. Your player stuck with you to the end, and for that reason he deserves a proper finale.
If the Dreamcast have had survived until the end of the PlayStation 2 lifespan, do you think that we might have had games, for the Dreamcast, with graphics like Black and Yakuza? I mean, the Dreamcast's VGA was definitely better than the PS2's, but at the same time the PS2 had a way better processor and twice the memory. By following up the evolution of 3D for the 128 bits era, how do you think the graphics of the newest (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, etcetera) Dreamcast games would have looked like? Mind posting screenshots from games that you think the Dreamcast would have been able to create similar graphics?