: Re: How much can I trust my players to remember previous states of the story and not get confused? In my game, the player may run into deadends in the story, which causes the game to end prematurely.

@Steve161

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My gaming experience is with Bioware games. In those games, choices you make significantly affect the way the game ends. Consequently, it is quite common to play multiple playthroughs to achieve the end you want, or to return to an earlier savepoint and tweak choices - that is, doing manually what you offer as an actual game mechanic (which I think is really interesting).

Bioware offer great stories, and my own gaming style is very story-oriented. However, I do not have the leisure to play every day, or even every week. Consequently, when I rollback to an earlier savepoint, I don't always remember what I've already done, which conversations I've already had, sometimes - what choices I have made on this particular gamethrough.

If you make going back to previous choices an integral part of your game mechanic, you must remember some players would be like me - committed to exploring every possibility, every nook and crevice of the game, but taking a looong time to do it. Remembering everything is not feasible, particularly if you can go changing decisions back and forth - one's got to remember which choice one made this time.

Then you have another kind of players: those who pay only peripheral attention to the story, unless you flash a neon sign that says "this is important" before them. Once they find out something in the past was important, a reminder of what happened would be useful for them too.

Of course, if you highlight the particular choices that are important for gameplay, that makes other choices become boring, irrelevant. Which is boring in terms of storytelling, it reduces your player's commitment to the story. And if your reminders are too blatant, that would become tiresome to players who plough through the whole game in a short time.

A solution I see is expending on the Bioware codex mechanic: all kind of information you find in Bioware games (character bios, letters between NPCs, in-game stories, technical manuals of spaceships etc.) go into an array of text files - codex files, which the player can browse at their leisure. Why not make such a file (text, pictures, whatever) that records briefly everything the player has done this time around, and gets updated with every new choice made? Then, if a player remembers - good for them, this isn't distracting. If the player doesn't remember, they can go and check.

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