The Worst Game Endings - Or How to Ruin Good Gameplay with Bad Writing (Spoilers, duh)

[The Great Citracett]

Fable 3 definitely cops out with the TOUGH choices when it skips such a huge amount of time so you can't prepare. Fuck I hate the Fable franchise now.

Oh yeah I totally forgot about that.

It gives you time to prepare and in between scenes it counts down the days.

Then it fucking skips big chunks of time. And the last time it goes from something like "25 Days Remaining" straight to "OH HOLY FUCK THE MONSTERS ARE HERE NOW AND EVERYONE'S DYING!"

 

[Vault Boy]

Oh yeah I totally forgot about that.

It gives you time to prepare and in between scenes it counts down the days.

Then it fucking skips big chunks of time. And the last time it goes from something like "25 Days Remaining" straight to "OH HOLY FUCK THE MONSTERS ARE HERE NOW AND EVERYONE'S DYING!"

Worse, it was over a hundred days with no warning beforehand. Kind of a fuck up on Lionhead's part, don't you think?

 

[vertexwindi]

Well how else could they make it such a HARD MORAL CHOICE

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

The idea behind it is good, just poorly implemented. If you had actual hard choices to make, like ordering your soldiers to shoot at protesters to protect food supplies, or allow the mob to take them and risk shortages longer term, that would have been interesting. Although turning the orphanage into a brothel was admittedly quite funny. It also had the absolute worst menu and map screens of all time, and that hand holding mechanic which was kindof cute when it was with your childhood sweetheart, but a it weird when it was one of your guards.

 

[BScCollateral]

I think the problems with Fable III can be applied to most moral choice games.

One I played got it right when the choice was between setting fire to fuel tanks which would burn refugees as well as enemy machine gunners, or advancing under fire so the enemy could be taken out surgically.

Evil should be easy mode.

Then there's punching out a journalist, which the game designers thought was bad and not a principle to live by.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

Then there's punching out a journalist, which the game designers thought was bad and not a principle to live by.

That moment when you agree with the people who say video games teach kids the wrong ideas.

 

[Violence Jack]

in a vacuum im kinda surprised they got away with that in the first place. I guess they thought kirk would do that?

It's already been brought up in the thread, but i feel that it bares repeating fuck Dark Souls II: SotFS's ending. It literally does the same thing as the first, but obscures it so it seems different. Now there's a fair bit of extrapolation and speculation involved, but I feel (probably wrong on this) that people don't realize that the throne of want or whatever the fuck is located in a kiln. You're linking the first flame again only this time ((they)) dress it up as a noble act. All the talk of monarchs and changing the world is propaganda created by remnants of the gods designed to keep a steady supply of kindling for the fire. I'm certain that when the camera cuts from you on the throne you burst into flames. In the DLC/Expansion? they give you the option of walking away... just like the first's dark lord ending.

I guess it's a "commentary" on how nothing changes or some shit, but stapling the ending of a good game onto the copypasta fest that is DkS II is pretty insulting if not outright lazy. I hate when people try to justify its inclusion when it does nearly every beat that the first one nailed subtly but worse.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

That moment when you agree with the people who say video games teach kids the wrong ideas.

And then ME3 introduced a real-life journalist, who you couldn't punch.

 

[Pargon]

The ending to the Tresspasser DLC, which serves as the epilogue for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Whether you like the game or not, it narratively fucks you out of half of the romance options ("hahaha, suck it, Dorian stans" says Bioware), can drop you into a situation where you have to kill a party member on account of a decision you made about forty hours back in the vanilla game, the man-behind-the-curtain spouts off some vague motivation as to why he wants to burn down the world and then fucks off. All for a loaf of sequel bait for a game that may now never be made.

 

[Oh Shit I'm Sorry]

General rule of thumb is that any game with important plot elements hidden behind paid DLC is trash and when the vanilla ending doesn't even make sense as a result you're playing a truly awful piece of shit. I'm not going to bother spoilering this because this game is a truly miserable experience and no one should ever subject themselves to it.

In Dead Island you play as some stupid asshole who spends a large part of the game running errands for a guy called Rider you "talk" to over the radio (except you're a silent protag) who offers to help you get off the sewer-infested island in exchange for a "cure" for his zombiefied wife. Eventually you retrieve the "cure" and head to the final area and location where Rider is, the prison. You meet some dickhead prisoner who helps you through a few areas and eventually reach an elevator at which point for absolutely no discernible reason Rider betrays you and puts you to sleep with knockout gas before stealing the "cure" that you were heading to give to him. You continue on and make it up to the roof, take down all of his guards and have a final confrontation with Rider wherein your character(s) all magically lose their weapons at the start of a cutscene and he injects his wife with the "cure" which of course doesn't work and instead gives her retard zombie strength so she breaks out of her restraints, kills him and then becomes the final boss. After taking her down your character(s) along with the one dickhead prisoner get in his helicopter and fly away.

Shortly after the game's release Rider got his own stand-alone DLC pack which is possibly the worst-reviewed one of all time (for the record I never actually played it, I just read this stuff on the Wiki) wherein it's revealed that the dickhead prisoner was actually the true villain manipulating things the entire time and Rider was just an innocent victim in all of it who wanted to save his wife. And they charged like 10 bucks for it.

Fortunately DI2 is stuck in development hell so hopefully we won't ever have to put up with another one of the fucking things.

 

[Zaryiu]

General rule of thumb is that any game with important plot elements hidden behind paid DLC is trash and when the vanilla ending doesn't even make sense as a result you're playing a truly awful piece of shit. I'm not going to bother spoilering this because this game is a truly miserable experience and no one should ever subject themselves to it.

In Dead Island you play as some stupid asshole who spends a large part of the game running errands for a guy called Rider you "talk" to over the radio (except you're a silent protag) who offers to help you get off the sewer-infested island in exchange for a "cure" for his zombiefied wife. Eventually you retrieve the "cure" and head to the final area and location where Rider is, the prison. You meet some dickhead prisoner who helps you through a few areas and eventually reach an elevator at which point for absolutely no discernible reason Rider betrays you and puts you to sleep with knockout gas before stealing the "cure" that you were heading to give to him. You continue on and make it up to the roof, take down all of his guards and have a final confrontation with Rider wherein your character(s) all magically lose their weapons at the start of a cutscene and he injects his wife with the "cure" which of course doesn't work and instead gives her exceptional individual zombie strength so she breaks out of her restraints, kills him and then becomes the final boss. After taking her down your character(s) along with the one dickhead prisoner get in his helicopter and fly away.

Shortly after the game's release Rider got his own stand-alone DLC pack which is possibly the worst-reviewed one of all time (for the record I never actually played it, I just read this stuff on the Wiki) wherein it's revealed that the dickhead prisoner was actually the true villain manipulating things the entire time and Rider was just an innocent victim in all of it who wanted to save his wife. And they charged like 10 bucks for it.

Fortunately DI2 is stuck in development hell so hopefully we won't ever have to put up with another one of the fucking things.

Riptide makes things worse, the actions of the characters cause another outbreak (that native you saved? She was/is patient zero, and the ending stronly imply noting you did mattered (exposure to mutagens during Riptide stories removed the immunity or caused then to become another sort of creatures and they and anyone else that turned zombies on the ship will attack and infect the new island), the mobile game continue after but it's heavily implied everything in Survive Dead Island is an hallucination by the second character you play as

 

[SirQuicksand]

Here's a classic for some of you mates, Turok 2's "good" ending, when you save all of those energy totem things. At least in the "bad" ending, it explains a lot more stuff.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

kingdom hearts three. good job Nomura having fans go through a bunch of half-baked prequals and wait over ten years just to have a conclusion to a series. only to turn it into another sequel bait fans will have to wait for god knows how long.

hell, you could pretend that KH2 is where the series end and you feel much better about it.

 

[Dave.]

FFXIV: Stormblood. Not because of the ending itself, but because the context behind who you're saving and why will make you want to genocide the Ala Mhigans or rather leave them to their fates because they were better off than the shithole they had before.

 

[Fools Idol]

The 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia. Is not an amazingly great game by any standard but the ending was awful. You spend the whole game fighting bosses to restore the land from corruption that was caused by the king who made a deal with an ancient evil demon to resurrect his dead daughter, a bland but a serviceable story. The daughter becomes your companion through the game and the MC falls in love with her but she dies at the end after you defeat and seal the demon. The MC then makes the same deal the king made with the demon.

Everything that you have done in the game is instantly undone by the ending, which is bad enough on it's own but Ubisoft sold a conclusion to the story in the from of DLC.

 

[Local FloRida-man]

Little Nightmares 2. The entire first game builds up to Six, the main character, being overcome by her hunger until she hits a turning point by eating one of the gnomes who was helping her throughout the game. The ending has her eat the main villainess and essentially take her spot as local dickhead.

Obviously, with most modern game writers being talentless hacks, they couldnt continue with that story because closure is anathema to indies. So the second game was naturally going to be a prequel. Cool, whatever. But the ending was fucking stupid. Six betrays Mono and drops him off a cliff because, turns out, she was ALWAYS a homicidal bitch. Oh, and she has a secret evil side that's even more bitchy.

And if you get the secret ending you get a couple seconds showing the prequel game was actually.... prequel! Imagine that.

Edit: to clarify, my problem is that it's just the same twist as the first game, except done worse and in a way it invalidates the twist in the first.

 

[I.B. Niggin]

No mention of Asura's Wrath? I fucking loved that game and it had style in spades but hiding the true ending in DLC is absolute fucking bullshit.

 

[mr.moon1488]

Bioshock Infinite's ending was shit. It didn't really make a lot of sense and was just horrible when you compare it to the good ending of the first game.

 

[PuffyGroundCloud]

kingdom hearts three. good job Nomura having fans go through a bunch of half-baked prequals and wait over ten years just to have a conclusion to a series. only to turn it into another sequel bait fans will have to wait for god knows how long.

hell, you could pretend that KH2 is where the series end and you feel much better about it.

KH3 is just an episode when Nomura took too much LSD

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

The ending of Far Cry 4 was brilliant from a narrative standpoint: "Yeah, you murdered a bunch of people and massacred ten billion dollars' worth of endangered species, yet all you achieved was changing a dictator for an even worse dictator. Good job!" I liked the game's approach to presenting how all the sides were bad.

Two Worlds 2. The game was a poor man's Gothic, had a lot more potential than what they achieved, and its endgame sucked so much it blew.
Since the game is over a decade old I won't be spoiling it for anyone.

Spoiler: no clutter though

Sometime after the end of the first game The Hero and his sister are taken captive by some shady guy in menacing full plate armour who then proceeds to suck their life force every day.
A squad of orcs break you out, take you to their leader, the Prophetess, who tells you how to defeat your foe and free your sister. Then you are set upon the world.

The last area is filled with monsters whose every hit sends you flying and can easily stunlock you while being immune to stun themselves. Then you get to the castle of the evil lord who turns out to be a tragic hero who's been trying to hold back the true evil, the Prophetess. The last boss is the Prophetess' true form, a dragon, which can and will wipe you out in a single hit no matter your level, HP, or armour.

The world was interesting enough to keep me playing all the way to the end.

Sleeping Dogs. That ending was clearly a hook to a sequel that never came.
Same goes for Kingdoms of Amalur.

Bioshock Infinite's ending was shit. It didn't really make a lot of sense and was just horrible when you compare it to the good ending of the first game.

BI's ending was quantum INFINITE POSSIBLE TIMELINES AND REALITIES bullshit. Suffocating one single Booker DeWitt, especially one from after the "timeline split" didn't make any sense whatsoever.