Open Destiny

The ability of agents to have different narrative arcs between game instances due to the events that took place in the game session.

Many games have characters in their game world. While the meeting of many of these many be ephemeral and their later fates are not considered (or they are sealed by being killed by the player), some are integral parts of the developing story with the prime example being players' own characters. While their stories may be compelling during a first play-through depending on writing and telling additional game instances may have problems have the same effect if their stories are fixed. This not only since the players know what will happen, but also since other parts of gameplay still requires players' attention and from a pure gameplay perspective better put to use there. To avoid this, games may provide Open Destinies so that the unfolding of characters' narrative arcs differs depending on what occurred during gameplay.

Open Destiny has strong connections to the idea of multiple endings, and many more examples can be found in Wikipedia article on the subject.

Examples

The main focus of the interactive drama Façade is to help Grace and Trip solve their marriage issues. However, the player can choose to make them overcome their difficulties or to actively work for them to separate.

A small end scene is shown for all the 'permanent' companions in Fallout: New Vegas (one does not have any for a full game session) that a player has recruited during the game. These companions have up to 10 different personal endings, and which is told is affected both of the overall outcome of the game and if the player has completed their personal quests.. Similar game structures exist for non-player character in Dragon Age and Heavy Rain.

Using the pattern

For different types of ending to be noticeable different there cannot be too many. For example, the exact fate of countries in Victoria 2 can vary in very many different minor ways (government, social reforms, colonies, technology, alliances, etc.) but these have to add up in certain ways for them to become a noticeable major differences in outcome. The rules regarding unifying countries (for Italy and Germany) are however easy to use to see what fate a country had in a particular game instance - either the many smaller countries became a nation state or they did not.

An easy way to provide clear options to players when using Open Destiny is to use Selectable Set of Goals which are linked to a significantly high level to a game's Narration Structure. Each of these goals can then be seen as one destiny and players know that other destinies are possible than the one they are striving for.

It may not be clear to players that NPCs and Factions have Open Destinies. The use of Cut Scenes that describe what happened after gameplay ended can solve this since the act of telling this can indicate that other endings were possible (this is especially clear if the Cut Scenes relate to how players solved or failed to solve goals and Quests). Examples of games which use this for NPCs include BioShock, Dragon Age, Façade, Army of Two: The 40th Day, Heavy Rain, Jade Empire, while Final Fantasy 7 in the Final Fantasy series and Fallout: New Vegas in the Fallout series use Cut Scenes both for the fate of NPCs and Factions. Producing all the possible Cut Scenes for multiple Open Destinies add to the increased effort required for making Narration Structures support Open Destinies in the first place. However, games with Game Masters, for example tabletop roleplaying games and LARPs, do not have this problem since the Cut Scenes can in these cases be improvised.

Algorithmic Agents Non-Player Characters Single-Player Games

Character Defining Actions

Optional Goals

Player-Created Characters Player-Planned Character Development

Quests

Diegetic Aspects

The use of Open Destiny may support Diegetic Consistency simple because the different events taking place in a Game World will have consequences on the NPCs inhabiting that world.

Narrative Aspects

Most aspects of Open Destiny are related to narratives since the pattern is basically one option in how to create Narration Structures in a game.

Consequences

In general, Open Destiny promotes Replayability. It can also give rise to Meta Games based on the Collection goal of reaching all possible endings, and this can be mechanized through the use of Achievements.

Just as Selectable Set of Goals can be used to provide Open Destiny, the existence of Open Destiny with clear differences between the destinies can provide players with Selectable Set of Goals.

Relations

Can Modulate

Algorithmic Agents

History

A rewrite of a pattern that was part of the original collection in the paper Gameplay Design Patterns for Believable Non-Player Characters.

Acknowledgments

Jon Back, Jason Begy, Daniel Bernhoff, Sicheng Chen, Steve Dahlskog, Martin Dujmovic, Anders Elfgren, Erik Fagerholt, Arshad Fendi, Jan Humble, Kristine Jørgensen, Ben Kirman, Robin Kullberg, Dmitry Kurteanu, Jonas Linderoth, Mathias Nordvall, Jonathan Osborne, Gillian Smith, Jaakko Stenros, Anders Tryggvesson, Johan Weisz, Jose Zagal