CoD4 has a great endingWelcome to VideoGamer.com's Monday Morning Rant, our regular feature where one of the team gets to vent their spleen on anything that annoys them about the wonderful world of gaming. No subject, no matter how taboo, will be free from our cutting comment and vicious vitriol. Got that Monday morning feeling? Read on, and brace yourself for a wake-up call.
When you play a game you invest a good deal of time in it. Some games only take five hours, others take 20 hours or more, yet there's one thing that will stay with you longer than anything else: the ending. A good ending can lift a good game into great territory, while an OK game can suddenly seem a whole lot better. So why is it that so many games end on such bum notes?
Firstly, I present you with an example of how to do it right: Call of Duty 4. I'm not going to spoil things for you, but the ending will live with me forever and CoD4 will always be the game I bring up when talking about great endings. The guys at Infinity Ward just nailed it, not only in the stunning final moments that had me gawping at everyone in the room to make sure they had seen what just happened, but also the entirety of the last level. And it didn't end there, with more brilliance during and after the credits.
With games these days costing an awful lot of money, it's more than fair to demand a good ending that leaves us satisfied. It doesn't have to blow the games industry wide open due to it sheer brilliance or make you ponder the very game you spent the last month playing, it just has to sum things up in a way that doesn't leave you shouting at the screen and wondering why you wasted the last week of your life.
Of course, you could argue that the game leading up to the end, if good, is more than enough to warrant its purchase, and that's certainly a valid view point. I certainly wouldn't totally disregard the many great games that have been let down by their ending, but when you wanted so much more a poor ending can feel like a kick in the teeth.
Most games don't end so wellSome games even go out of their way to make your final memory a poor one. Lost Planet's final moments play completely differently to any part that's gone before, while too many games to mention go down the cheap route of simply ramping up the difficulty by throwing wave after wave of enemies at you.
The worst cases are surely the games that until the end have thrived on a complex, secretive storyline. When the main thing that's kept you plugging away for hours is the storyline, you're expecting a big payoff at the end. The secret better be revealed and be something brilliant or there really has been no point. So ending with no explanation, instead offering more riddles or ludicrous clues doesn't cut it.
And finally, I come to the cliff-hanger. I don't mind them, but they can't be the ending in its entirety. If the game is good enough I'll buy the sequel because I want to play another game in the series, not because some fool on the design team felt it was wise to end the game by asking more questions than you had before you started. Cliff-hangers work in addition to an already satisfying ending, not in place of one.
So here's my Monday Morning Rant: developers, give your games the endings they deserve.
