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Fantasy Wasteland - 31 - HD
🕑 Added 2019-06-16 03:18:03 +0000 UTC"Don't worry, it's roughly the same amount of XP. Well, a bit less. And no boss loot. There was probably an enchanted sword or something inside that thing."
Commentary
Back in the day, I was tired of my villain Damien before the story was done with him, and I joked about resolving everything early with a random meteor.
They Had To Go. Their Planet Needed Them.
I actually can't think of a specific example of a dialogue check resulting in a boss monster simply vanishing like this.
Which is not to say that players can't talk their way into skipping things, including bosses. There's just usually an explanation, or they'll still be somewhere.
That said, there are definitely cases in which you should still be able to do something you talked your way out of, but are unable to.
An example of this is in Fallout 3 in which you can convince someone to give you plot critical information without having to do their dangerous quest. If you do this, their problem remains, and they still need someone's help, but they'll never ask you to do it if you got the information via persuasion.
Comments
Stephen Gilberg
And even if he isn't, he hasn't been shown much.
Daryl Sawyer
Lord Tedd is still out there, but it seems even he may be misunderstood.
ZekeStaright
Heart Attack, the second you pass that check
Stephen Gilberg
I appreciate that EGS has few outright villains and they don't last long. It suggests a relatively positive view. Besides, some webcomics with long-running complete monsters wear me down.
Viktor
Dead Rising was interesting. The game is based on replayability, with levelups carrying over and your increasing player knowledge and skill letting you do more every attempt until you finally get good enough to win. Thing is, there’s a bunch of simultaneous plot lines going on, so if you fail one, the game continues. Mostly, this works fine. Sometimes, though, if you fail a plot line in the middle, future events that you expect just won’t happen, even though they should. Fail the main quest after someone gets bitten but before you find out? She never turns into a zombie. SCIENCE!
Viktor
Mass Effect 2 and 3 do this with some of their missions. ME2, once you trigger the endgame, you get one more side quest. After that, kidnapped people start dying. ME3 put a visible mission counter on high-priority stuff, and if you didn’t get around to it in time, it failed.
coredumperror
The one example of this kind of RPG mechanic (sortof) that I can think of is in Dues Ex: Human Revolution. Any experienced RPG player knows that the world runs on their clock, so any time an NPC says "This is urgent!" you know it's really not. You can go about your day exploring, looting, talking, etc until you're good and ready to do that quest. Not so in the very first quest of DX: HR. When you're told to go rescue those hostages, you actually have to go do so in a timely manner. If you decide do other stuff (like leveling up your hacking skills to try to make the quest easier), when you get to the warehouse, you'll find only the hostages corpses.
Frédéric B.
This reminds me of that game I heard of where if you don't look both ways before crossing the street, a car runs you over, but if you do look, the street is empty for miles.
Thisguy
I can’t think of any examples. But I’m sure there are some games out there which will make an earlier problem you didn’t fix crop up again. Or make things more difficult for you later because you didn’t deal with something. Like some vendors who are supposed to show up later and sell you mission critical stuff don’t because the skunk killed them. Meaning if you want that stuff, you have to hunt down and kill the skunk. (Because it ate them or something, I don’t know, this is an example).
