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Bonus Pod - What Makes A Great Choice In Games
🕑 Added 2025-02-17 22:55:28 +0000 UTCThis week on Bonus Pod, host Haley MacLean is joined by best friends Leo Vader and Cobysoft Joe to unpack the complex design problems that choices in games present, with community submissions and Joe's experience as a solo developer hoping to create meaningful choices without blowing the scope of his game out beyond what's feasible.
Here’s a link to the video version of this episode (including video-specific timecodes).
Timecodes (three minutes past each spoiler, we've moved on)
00:06:29 - Joe's mic gets fixed
00:14:13 - Life Is Strange 1 spoilers
00:15:36 - The Last of Us Part 1 spoilers
00:44:16 - 1000x Resist spoilers
00:54:59 - Undertale spoilers
01:07:40 - Metaphor: ReFantazio spoilers
01:15:18 - Bioshock 2 spoilers
01:16:05 - Doki Doki Literature Club spoilers
Optional homework:
Wishlist Joe's game Dome-King Cabbage right this second!
Watch the public version of the Dome-King Cabbage documentary filmed last summer!
Or if you're a Backstage Pass patron, watch the five hour extended cut of that documentary!
Watch or listen to us three on the Bonus Pod episode talking about the documentary after it released!
Thanks so much for supporting and unlocking Bonus Pod. You can call into future episodes of Bonus Pod via Discord by joining the MinnMax Council tier, episodes record every Monday at 4pm Central.
Comments
Christian Feliciano
The Mass Effect trilogy did respect massive choices like letting someone die in 1 and them being absent for the two sequels. I think he’s not remembering it well. It was a long time ago! The thing people complained about is the last hour of the game and the 3 “color endings.”
Kapsilon
I've never gelled with narrative games so I thought I didn't care about choices in video games — but then the director of one of my all time favorites, DOOM Eternal, talked about how they designed the game to be fun by maximizing how many choices the player makes in every combat encounter. I think about that a lot now, that all video games are already a series of choices whether they have a strong narrative or not.
