Branching missions

Often in pre-planned tabletop gaming campaigns or computer games the Games Master/designers will throw in something called "Branching Missions." Despite the name they don't actually have to Branch that much, just have a couple of different options available that change what missions are available later. These have a number of benefits and detriments, that, in lieu of actual intelligent discussion (which is so common around here, end-sarcasm) I will describe in my own painfully inept manner. I mentioned tabletop gaming campaigns but, let's be perfectly honest, I don't have enough experience with that to be able to do anything other then say "in my imagination, while I'm surrounded by my millions of friends, this is how it is." As such it will be completely ignored.


Benefits: Branching missions encourage replayability. If there are five endings to a campaign then you're encouraging players to go through the campaign five times in order to find an ending they like, or alternatively see the wide variety from "here he comes, the hero of the house" to "you couldn't have cocked that up more, could you?"

Take the game that inspired this discussion. The campaign is remarkably short, being finished in two relatively normal gaming sessions, but the promise of three different endings has had me replaying it no less then four times looking for all these different endings and trying to finish all the mission (well, that promise, and the fact that I'm flying around in a gnarly death machine of awesomeness). I've replayed the same missions over and over again. If I am offered hundreds of thousands of credits in the future to destroy another giant rolling fortress bristling with weaponry I'll be treating that request in the same way I'd treat the request to walk the Dogs.

While I didn't play through all the missions in the first runthrough, the gameplay length has been extended like a manhood through the use of clever branching. What should have been done and dusted inside of 48 hours has instead lasted as long as sex being watched over by your Mum, namely, nearly a week of awkward stop-and-go gameplay with a strong sense of disapproval involved.


Detriments: This was touched on briefly above. Take a standard bunch of missions for a game, and arrange them in a linear manner.

Opening cinematic.
Mission 1
Mission 2
Mission 3
Mission 4
Mission 5
Mission 6
Mission 7
Mission 8
Mission 9
Ending cinematic.

If we're generous and assume it'll take an hour to finish each mission, then from opening cinematic from end will take 9 hours of playtime. Now, let's see what happens if the game branches off after level 3.

Mission 1
Mission 2
Mission 3
Mission 4 OR Mission 5
Mission 6 OR Mission 7
Mission 8 OR Mission 9

Let us once more assume it takes an hour, and now suddenly for the same amount of development work you get a game that takes 6 hours, and feels drastically shorter. Unless the player loved every minute of it, they are not going to want to throw down another 6 hours just to see ending two.

Although this isn't fair, since alot of games with campaign missions will have the choice only in major missions, and the ones in the middle being repeated anyway. But this doesn't avoid the problem that unless there's a significant hook, why would the player want to repeat a mission they've already done four times, just trying to get the third ending.



In short: Developers, Branching mission trees are great. They can really add to the feeling that the player has some control over themselves. However if you're going to make the player repeat missions he's done before try to have some other hook in place. For Armoured Core For Answer (still a stupid name) that hook would be, as mentioned before, that I'm flying around in a customisable gnarly death machine of awesomeness. Seriously, a mission doesn't feel the same if the first time you did it you had a pair of laser blades on an agile plane-thing with legs, and the second time you had a tank-like thing with a bazooka the size of something really huge.

Like your mother.

... Man, what a juvenile note to end on.