Spectrum_Prez said:
bootz said:
Dreamfall it had over 30 different cliffhangers way too many and the sequel might come out in 2013
Is that sarcasm or some new rumor floating around? They said at one point that they were doing a serialized series, but that never came to fruition.
I would put the end of Dreamfall: the Longest Journey as
one of the most moving and heartbreaking ending of a game ever, but I don't think it counts as a bad one.
It was kind of reminiscent of Empire Strikes Back, with Han in the carbonite.
Actually, the last I heard was also that Chapters may well be out before 2013, it's really just a question of how long it takes Funcom to finish up The Secret World and have it at least playable. Ragnar Tornquist has always said that he intended Dreamfall to be the first part of a duology, and indeed it seems he'd been setting all this up even in the original The Longest Journey. The name 'Alvane', for instance...
Also, I agree with you on that ending. It got me pretty stoked really, considering we have by no means seen the last of WATICorp, or Samantha Gilmore. And Helena Chang, for that matter. Nor the Prophet. Nor the Seven Sisters. Nor Roper Clacks, or Crow's former master, or that random NPC guard from the first game, or... yeah, I'm just going off on a random tangent here. But seriously, there is a lot to explain, and yet as a gamer and as a writer myself I am pretty psyched and pretty happy at all the cliffhangers.
Which brings me to my answer to this thread. There are times when cliffhangers can be done well, and times when it just gets really stupid and annoying. Dreamfall, and The Longest Journey before it, both did cliffhanger endings pretty well, and left the player wanting more for a good reason. But in terms of bad endings, I have to go with the cliffhanger from Halo 3. No, that isn't a typo. I didn't mean to type '2'. I did mean to type '3'. See, the game ends pretty well on the whole, the Covenant War is over, the Sangheili are humanity's allies now, Earth has been saved, the Flood defeated, yadda yadda yadda, and all the loose ends have been tied up. Except for one niggling thing. John and Cortana are stranded on the other side of the portal, thus in a random place millions of light-years away from Earth, with only half a cruiser and a working cryo-pod to keep the Chief alive. That's bad enough as a cliffhanger, but then after the credits if you beat the game on Legendary, it gets worse. We see the Chief and Cortana briefly discuss the chances of getting home again, then John gets into a cryo-pod and goes to sleep. And the half-cruiser drifts towards an unknown planet (speculated by the novel fans as being Onyx, though this is unconfirmed). If there was going to be a Halo 4, then that would be great, I'd be eagerly awaiting the conclusion to this new twist. But what do we get instead? Halo Wars, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo Reach. Admittedly all great games that I enjoyed immensely, but none of them addresses this ending, and it seems unlikely that it will be outside the novels (which I read religiously, but most of the game fans don't).
The difference is, at least with Dreamfall, we've been guaranteed a resolution by the words of the developer himself, who has specifically said he's committed to finishing the Longest Journey series and getting everything told story-wise. But Microsoft, and 343 Industries, haven't said anything (as far as I'm aware) about another Halo game addressing the cliffhanger, and we can assume it won't be sorted anytime soon. That, to me, is simply bad storytelling, and most certainly a bad ending to a game. I mean, I love Halo and I always want to see a new game appear, but come on. Did they really expect us to just accept that ending without even knowing if they'd have a chance to resolve it?
