5d ago

Games Where Nothing Happens (SPOILERS for various game plots)

Good Day good people.

I am looking for some more examples of Video Games where there is a plot, but for one reason or another, the result of the plot is that nothing happens. My criteria for this is fairly lax on the "how" but in some sense, by some definition by the end of the game, absolutely nothing has happened. I'm hoping some of you fine people may be able to identify some instances of such a thing.

So please. Let me know any and all games you can think of where the end result of the plot is that nothing happens. The more ridiculous, the better!

(Sorry, for repost. I didn't know about the crosspost feature)

71 comments

The Far Cry 4 secret ending.
That part at the beginning where you're sitting at the table with Pagan Min and he leaves briefly giving you a chance to escape. If you just sit there and don't do anything for like 10 minutes, he actually comes back and takes Ajay to place his mother's ashes. Then the game ends without a shot fired.
- Similarly, Far Cry 5. At the beginning, when you're told to arrest Joseph Seed, you can choose to just turn around and walk out the door. The sheriff will agree with you, saying it's best to just leave him and his cult alone and it would've only ended in your deaths if you tried to arrest him. Then the game ends.
  
  Didn't Far Cry 5 end with a nuclear explosion? Yeah leaving him be is probably the better option
  
  Hmm I knew about the crab Rangoon one but not this. Interesting. Also, does anyone know if New Dawn is any good? I've skipped the "expansion" titles in the series because I was not a fan of Blood Dragon, but it feels like I'm not giving New Dawn and Primal their due when all the mainline entries in the series have been fantastic.
- Do secret joke endings even count?
  Well, in Hitman 3 you can choose to not kill the last evil guy, which causes you to wake up in the very first game from 2000.
The stanley parable, in a way.
the end is never the end is never the end is never
- the end is never the end is never the end is never
- I did LSD and played through the Deluxe Edition - holy fuck, I had fun!!!
  
  oh, nice. I like getting high and playing surprising games, it usually makes the experience even more pleasant. But I never did LSD, and I'm not sure I could handle it. How does it affect playing something like Stanley Parable ?
  
  Seems like a recipe for an existential crisis
- Stanley walked through the red. door.
Every Zelda game is a sisyphean adventure where you never really defeat the evil or restore Hyrule, you just reset the board for the next evil apocalypse.
- Except there are consequences for failure. See the timeline split stuff.
- The newer zelda games are interesting since you can see how the world has changed between botw and totk, but on the macro scale you're definitely right. Most zelda games have formula of "all is well, bad guy appears to threaten realm, link saves the day, back to normal". BOTW was an interesting way to change that formula - hyrule isn't restored after you beat ganon, but things change with new settlements being formed and so on in totk
The Last Of Us.
The entire plot is about getting this girl to a location, only to get there, kill everyone and leave again. They could have stayed at home and the result would have been the same.
Same with The Mandalorian, the ending in Boba Fett completely invalidated the entire show. But that isn't a video game.
- I mean you're right, but it makes sense in context in both cases because the plot, or maybe better to say the driving motivation for action by the characters, isn't the real story.
  TLOU isn't the story of two survivors trying to reach a goal- thats set dressing. It's the story of a man who lost his daughter being given a chance to confront his grief and grow close with another young woman who would be the same age. The relationship growing, their mutual guilt and relief and joy in finding that familial connection in a dying world IS the story. And the climax isn't Joel shooting 50 more people, it's when he chooses her over the whole world. Even when thats obviously the wrong choice.
  From a plot view, nothing has changed. What actually "happened" was entirely between Ellie and Joel. But lots of stories are like that. If you released a movie where a grieving man connected with his adopted, formerly abused or neglected, daughter- that could be a good movie and you wouldn't say "nothing happened" because it would be honest and upfront with its stakes. But fewer people would play that as a game so they have to obfuscate their actual story with apocalypse and zombie trappings.
- The Last of Us was more about Joel and Ellie's relationship growing during their travels.
  Had the hospital scene occurred within the first like ten hours of the game, Joel would have had no problem sacrificing her for a potential cure.
- I think this highlights the big problem with Op's question: it's not all about plot, character development can be as satisfying and as important even if the world objectively doesn't change.
  Edit: by this i mean your point on The last of us
- Didn't play TLoU, but if you didn't catch it from the start, the point of The Mandalorian was clearly always about Grogu becoming 'the Mandalorian'. Just cause it didn't go the way you expected doesn't mean nothing happened.
BioShock 3. Game establishes that it is a multiverse. There are many worlds/universes, but there is always a girl, and always a light house. You did something bad and it caused suffering. At the end of the game, you go back and change something, and create a bright happy future. Everyone sings Kumbaya (literally they play a song called break the cycle). The idea is that there was a single event and everything bad happened because of that. Going back and stopping it prevents all the bad stuff. The problem is, that only works with "Back to the Future" style time travel. The game already established it is a multiverse. So yes, you did create 1 future where everything didn't go to shit. But because it's a multiverse there are still an infinite number of universes where things are still very bad, and there is suffering. For whatever reason the writers just didn't think about that I guess? It seemed really asinine at the time I played it.
- coalescence, I think
- All the Elizabeths come together to kill their Bookers. It's not just one universe. It's every universe. You only get to see your universe's Booker die.
Arguably Mass Effect 1.
You spend the game warning about the reaper threat and you are constantly brushed off. Then the bbg attacks the citadel and you fight them off.
Second game: oh that plot from game 1? Yea, that was an isolated incident by different species and not the enemy you were warning is about.
Game three: HELP!!! The friends of bbg from game 1 are attacking you have to save us.
- Mass Effect 2 kind of pisses me off, ngl. The characters are so good, but the plot is really kind of bad. Forcing Shepard to work with Cerberus makes zero sense, especially since my Shepard went out of their way to murder Cerberus employees for what they did to their squad.
Stanley Parable
- I hadn't considered it like that but yeah, if there was ever a game about nothing, the Stanley Parable is it.
Gone Home
Good story, tho
- Was going to comment this as well! I enjoyed the story quite a bit too. Despite nothing really “happening” per se I remember the ending feeling emotional regardless.
- Came here to say this. I enjoyed the game till the ending which I thought was terrible.
Driver San Francisco kinda. You spend most of the game in a coma, but you do wake up and do some real stuff for the ending.
Depending on your definition of nothing happens, Mad Max too. At the start of the game Max loses his car, meets this car fanatic and for the entire game he helps you build the "Magnum Opus", the most badass car the wasteland has seen. At the end, you lose your Magnum Opus, he gets killed, and you get your original car back. You have a big impact on other people throughout the story, but as far as the protagonist is concerned, he is pretty much exactly where he started.
- That is pretty much Max in every movie bar the first one though. Wanders about, reluctantly helps some people, wanders off on his own again.
- I hated the Mad Max ending, so disappointing
- The thing driver san francisco was weird, but I enjoyed it.
Dead Rising.
Everything happens with our without your input. You can just chill out, do nothing, and the game ends.
Damn near every time travel game I've played has ended where you basically stop yourself from starting the whole plot so that none of it ever happens.
In the sense that everything you did was pointless: BlastCorps. It's a "puzzle" game about destroying everything in the way of an out of control truck carrying a world-ending nuke on it, with the goal of having it safely crash into the ocean... But it still blows up and destroys the world at the end. 😩
- Damn near every time travel game I've played has ended where you basically stop yourself from starting the whole plot so that none of it ever happens.
  This ruined Life Is Strange 1 for me. Great game, but in the end she somehow knows that undoing all time travel stuff, including letting your best friend die, means that there won't be a giant storm and not undoing anything will lead to said storm destroying the entire town.
  In the end you only have 1 choice, where your choices throughout the game don't matter because you undid everything, or your choices don't matter because everyone is dead.
  Very anti climactic imo
Firewatch was the biggest disappointment for me because the big mystery they hype up for most of the game just ended up being a nothing burger.
- It was incredibly enjoyable for me exactly because I didn't fall for that "big mystery" hook. Also no, it's not a nothingburger for any of the characters involved. It's just not another unrealistic game-y game.
In Sonic 2006, the entire game plot happens, but the solution to the core conflict is to do some time travel shit and cancel the entire timeline
- Most people wish that game could be erased from the timeline IRL too
Arguably, dark souls 1 (either ending)
The other games leave room for long term consequences but the 1st game is entirely pointless in the broader scope of the story.
If you don’t link the fire, you just did all of that adventuring for nothing. You may as well have just stayed in the asylum and let Gwyn slowly burn away.
If you do link the fire then you just reset the clock for the age of fire to fade again later while you wait for the next guy to come kill you just like Gwyn.
- I agree with the point, but would argue that choosing not to link the fire is distinct from never adventuring at all. Letting the dark gradually take over with no wielder/ruler would make events like Oolacile much more likely than if a Lord of Dark was there to control and direct that power, imo.
Dear Esther
Final Fantasy, if i remember correctly - the time loop is broken so basically none of the bad stuff ever happened.
- Yeah, Final Fantasy 1 and 8, I think
Minecraft ? Other sandbox games ?
2017 Prey, sadly.
- I get why the ending to 2017 Prey might have been annoying, but I honestly thought it was very in line with the themes present in the rest of the game. The more time has passed, the more I'm satisfied with the ending. That being said, IMO the only right ending is ::: spoiler Spoiler to murder everyone :::
Halo 3: ODST. You start with your squad, get separated, get back together, and then the game is over. Nothing significant changes except some sexual tension is resolved and an engineer joins the humans for a brief moment.
The Long Dark. Nothing will change. Death is only a matter of time.
This reminds me that there's an official fan translation for Persona 2: Eternal Punishment PSP version. It has some many quality of life improvements I was holding off on completing the duology until it was available.
- Do you have links ? I'm interested
  
  https://github.com/sayucchin/P2-EP-PSP/
  This isn't the CJ Iwakura patch, but if you're not into fan translation drama that won't mean a whole lot to you. It's fine!
Returnal. Which is Brilliant. But... yeah.
A game I like, and I'm not sure this fits 100%, but Voices of the Void.
Keeping things as spoiler-lite as possible, you're a lone radioastronomer at a deep-space listening outpost in Switzerland. It's a horror game, so there are "things" out there, but whether or not you get involved is kind of up to you.
Thing do happen, but not to you. You are just a witness to events far beyond your comprehension.
Spellforce 1

Might sound like an interesting plot but I was really annoyed the game ended up without giving me the ability to slap the bastard.
What do we think about Everybody's Gone to the Rapture for this? There is a plot, there is a story, but you as the player have no active role in it. You don't even see it play out in real time. You're just there, after, looking at the holes left behind. Nothing changes from the start of the game until the end.
I absolutely loved it, but typing that out, I suddenly realize why most people thought it was really boring.
Bastion.
Braid

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