1) Appeasing the masses generally results in stale storylines and gameplay. Individuals are creative. Groups are predictable.

2) Trying to guess at what comes next is 90% of th eenjoyment of ANY story. you don’t have to guess when you’re the one deciding.

3) Episodes are already taking incredibly long when they know what the story is roughly going to follow from the very beginning. You will either end up with your individual episodes slowed down to a crawl, or you will end up with subpar storylines getting pushed out.

4) Not everyone buys their games on day one. How long are the devs supposed to wait for feedback from the players? One year? 2 years? however long it is, after the choice has been made, your incentive to get the game further down the road has been slashed to pieces, if you don’t get it from day 1, you might as well not bother getting anything in the series.

5) People are going to see those choices and want them all. So no one will be completely satisfied no matter what the choice turned out to be.

Generally, it’s theoretically a cool idea, but not one that will ever work as well in practice as it is in theory.

as people who made one choice would hate the fact that their choice for the character lost, and they are stuck playing the story path they didn’t choose.

This is a good point but we end up playing somebody elses story anyway.

Although we get no input in that case, so it is slightly different.

I think it may work for a mod better than a full retail game.

Multiple ending gaming can be done well, Like Wing Commander, where you had 4 options, ranging from Win big, to Lose big. It was based on the outcomes of the battles, with the ability of your battle record even being able to effect the outcome of the game in the middle of it.

What would be an interesting concept for episodic gaming would be to have a multi episode series, each with it’s own choice in it. Light or Dark. and then the next episode is designed around what the majority of users chose in their first run through of the previous episode(which is counted as a vote) I am going to go on record as saying that I don’t see this as a successful episodic model. It would be hemorrhaging users, as people who made one choice would hate the fact that their choice for the character lost, and they are stuck playing the story path they didn’t choose.

However, should we really need such a device? Considering that it is a linear story, the developers should have designed the game in such a way that you would feel a similar reaction to everyone else anyway.

As for an alternative, does anybody remember the good old-fashioned “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series? Why don’t game developers consider those multiple-ending routes of gameplay anymore?

I loved Choose Your Own Adventure. Anyways, I think that the only game (mod really) that implements this feature well is Causality Effect. Even though there was one “true” ending, the one that takes you back to the beginning to Half-Life 2, if the developer decided to do a sequel, it could go from one of the other endings. I think that a game like this that has a sort of alternate storyline would work for something like this though.

Plus, while it supposedly adds the specific elements that the ‘most’ people wanted, it removes the rather important element of ‘surprise’ or ‘suspense.’

People would probably refuse to buy it anyways if their preferred choice was taken out of the game for being the minority.

I’d really prefer that Valve would stop sending out ‘episodes’ of things and revert back to the good ole ‘sequels’ so we can have a decent-sized gameplay with an ending that doesn’t imply ‘To be Continued’

As for an alternative, does anybody remember the good old-fashioned “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series? Why don’t game developers consider those multiple-ending routes of gameplay anymore?