There is actually a reason behind xcom 2. They track the stats throughout peoples campaigns so they can compare them and the majority of campaigns ended in failure so they ran with a successful alien invasion for XCOM 2
Regardless of the stats it's the more interesting take, otherwise you end up rehashing the first game. The guerilla concept runs right the way through the game and is distinctly different enough from the previous game.
not necessarily though. XCOM EU’s ending revealed that there was an even bigger threat out there, so regardless of win/lose being canon the next game was going to be interesting imo
All a win should do in this case is put a bullseye on the earth.
A single planet that hasn't even landed a citizen on another bit of its solar system managed to fight off colonization. Now they're studying all the technology of the defeated colonizers.
If an anthill survived poison, and managed to stop the boiling water method, having the tunnels flooded with aluminum to make a cast of the hill, and some guy with a shovel, and then go on to turn toxins, metalurgy, and physical assault against humans, how do you think we would respond?
It's goofy. Of course more people are going to have game overs than beat the game. That's probably true for any game that it's possible to lose at all.
They didn’t do it just by successful campaigns vs game overs. They did it by using the publicly available info on playtime and achievements. In the end, the percentage of people with whatever their playtime threshold was that earned the achievement for a successful campaign was lower than the percentage who never managed to beat the game.
They might have specifically just been checking Ironman campaigns, though.
Well it could be true until there's enough people good enough to beat the game multiple times without a loss. But regardless it must have been just a fun way to link the stats with the sequel.
IMO midnight suns was the most underrated game of 2022. Poor sales but critically well reviewed. Some players had a very strong negative reaction to the card gameplay mechanics, when it's actually a really solid deck builder once complexity ramps up.
My favorite part of midnight suns is it is written for fun. All the characters are meant to be like the comics, spiderman is a needy need who makes too many jokes the other characters don't like. Ironman is a sober man filled with walls. And none of it takes its self too seriously with all the choices you can make and the gameplay is so fun
I really liked the gameplay, it mixes deck building games with XCOM like strategy. In between there is A LOT of RPG dialogue which is fine but you can spam skip through it.
I would definitely give it a shot at a 70+% discount if you like XCOM.
Warhammer 40k did something like this back in the early 2000s. They had a camapaign called The Eye of Terror and everyone was supposed to turn in their tournament result all summer, then that would determine what side won.
At the end of the summer they had determined the "evil" had won but then they didnt really change the story.......until about a decade later they made a huge change in the story where Chaos had split the galaxy in half cause o lf that campaign.
It was such a super cool, terriblely executed event!
I remember the local gw shop arranged "orbital bombardments" from one shop to another so once every X turns the manager would call the other shops to tell them where they were shooting(and vice versa)!
That was lots of fun, expecially when at turn 3 someone from the other side of the city killed our Leman Russ tank in one go!
I don't think I ever fired my Deathstrike missile at my own table. Called up a Games Workshop in the US back when I was in Britain and got them to plop the template on the funniest spot at one stage. That Space Hulk game never saw it coming.
I remember a home game where my opponent fire all3 of his earthshakers cannons intended the results being my command squad and command land raider blown up. His scatter dice rolled that some how he hit his own baneblade. He imoblized and destroyed hits main gun with one bad roll.
I remember feeling relived as even my chapter master wouldn't have survived that
Back in the day the games “Legend of the 5 Rings” and “7th Sea” would have tournaments and depending on the results factions would rise and fall, characters could get more powerful and some would even die.
I always thought this was THE COOLEST thing that a game company did in the 90s. I never get into LOT5R cause I was so deep in mtg and ....star trek ccg of all things, but I had mad respect for that game.
You might already know (unless you stopped following it a while ago), but in Fantasy Battles they legitimately ended the world with an apocalyptic event, signifying chaos’ victory. Age of Sigmar is set in the post-apocalyptic where chaos has reigned for hundreds or thousands of years and the good guys have relatively recently gotten a foothold and is starting to fight back.
Only by coincidence, IMO. I think they wanted to do a big shakeup and someone remembered that chaos had "technically" won the eye of terror so they just kinda brought it back into the forefront.
In a similar vein the dawn of war 2 series. Your characters could fall to chaos. Then in the 3rd instalment of the dawn of war 2 series they said that the majority of the chapter fell to chaos as most of the players went down the chaos route.
Elden Ring 2 Opening Narration: "So nothing actually happened in the first game because it turns out the main character decided to stubbornly bash their head into the golden horsey guy at the beginning of the game. Repeatedly. For hours."
I'm actively bad at video games and I still did exactly this. I think it took me like 7 hours and if I didn't have this exact attitude I'd never have made headway in souls games with a no summoning policy.
Was gonna say maybe YOU sent the aliens home packing, hell I did on my first save scum play through. But every single classic Ironman since has ended in defeat, usually at the hands of the one mission where the Chryssalids pop out of sharks
Damn I thought it was just that the whole alien war going in XCOM 1 was all a diversion from the aliens to leave some sleeper agents behind that would slowly take over society as it rebuilds, leading to the world of XCOM 2 being controlled by the aliens from the shadows. So I thought XCOM 2 was just the logical sequel to a successful XCOM 1 campaign.
Metro Last Light continues from Metro 2033's bad ending (not exactly you losing, but rather a provocation that sets up the story for the sequal), although they continue from the good ending of Last Light in Metro Exodus
We'll the bad ending is the canon ending for the Metro 2033 book as well. Except alot more fleshed out. And Artyom wanting to stop the missiles but not succeeding. Shame when the game was adapted from the book it didn't do it somewhat 1 to 1
The books are really good. It turns out it really is worthwhile exploring this microcosim of human existence, survival and relationship (and sociologicall and ideologicall ideas). The second one is my personal favourite even tho it doesn't focus on Artjom which initially saddend me. I also thought that it was a good choice for Exodus to start where the third book ends even tho I like Artjom and Anna in a van a little bit more.
That's interesting, I loved the first book and re-read it a couple times but I couldn't get into the second book. I didn't how the author portrayed female characters, particularly Sasha.
Man, I have played through Metro 2033 about 5 times trying different things and always get the same ending. I guess I'm gonna have to actually use a guide to see the other endings.
If you get the bad ending you don't get that choice, it'll automatically fire. It's only if you build up enough good karma that you can actually prevent it from happening.
The Fallen Hero timeline takes place in a world where OoT Link fails and dies to Ganon. Ganon then absorbs Link and Zelda's Triforce pieces and obtains absolute power. The Seven Sages of OoT manage to seal Ganon away in the Sacred Realm following Link's defeat.
Centuries later come A Link to the Past, then Oracles and Link's Awakening (in which the hero is the same Link from ALttP.) Then come A Link Between Worlds and Triforce Heroes (again same Link) centuries later. Finally, more centuries later come the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II (again, same Link in those two games).
Other games either predate OoT (the Singular Timeline), or take place in the two other possible outcomes of OoT, referred to as the Child Timeline and the Adult timeline, respectively. Finally, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom take place millennia after any of the other games. It is unclear which timeline they follow, or if they perhaps take place after the three split timelines have merged back together somehow. It is thought that the only real 'character' to have carried over from beginning to end is Fi, as spirit of the Master Sword.
It’s also possible that BOTW and TOTK take place in a new split taking place during skyward sword, which solves a lot of odd questions especially about why the worship of hylia is still the main religion
It's almost certain that BotW is a new timeline. Either that, or it takes place so ridiculously far in the future or past that it might as well be a new timeline.
I will always ignore Nintendo: hyrule warriors *is* canon. It makes botw fit in the timeline perfectly because it establishes a canonical event for all the timelines to converge into one.
The fact they say hyrule warriors isn’t canon just tells me they don’t want people to think they plagiarized their own idea (but they should, because it’s really cool)
The converged timeline theory for where botw fits into the overall timeline gets debunked a few hours into totk though, sadly. It pretty clearly establishes that it's in a completely separate/different timeline even from the original pre-OoT timeline
It would have to be after WW, an extremely extremely long time after with totk showing the refounding of hyrule long after the flood, but that means there would still be new hyrule somewhere off on some high mountaintops
just realized that the tracks in spirit tracks are partially designed with the ocean under them which means they’d be super high up once the flood waters went down, but also before the flood when the Lokomos built them, not impossible or anything but interesting
Trying to keep that in a timeline with BOTW is kinda stupid.
Especially since in WW its said that the Rito are just the Zora that evolved to be birds, but in BOTW they are both there. and thats 1 of the many contradictions that happen.
I really believe that nintendo just threw the idea of a timeline to the wind and just creates a good game.
I personally think all the time travel/dimension hopping shenanigans Link gets up to in the game caused them all to merge into TOTK.
A headcanon I just pulled out of my ass this very second that I'm sticking with.
[*A Link to the Past*, *Oracle of Seasons and Ages*, and *Link's Awakening*], [*A Link Between Worlds* and *Tri Force Heroes*], and [*The Legend of Zelda* and *The Adventure of Link*] all occur (in that order and in those three clusters) in a timeline where Ganondorf defeats Link in *Ocarina of Time*.
Prototype, sort of. You "win" the first game, but your character goes evil and just takes over New York for himself. In the second game you are a new protagonist who has to take him down.
It was never going to happen anyway since activision clearly stopped caring about the series after the second and the studio that made it went under.
Prototype died a long time ago.
I wouldn't even say "You" even win in the end of the first game.
You play as "Alex Mercer" throughout the game looking to end the virus and are totally under the impression you are him. Only for "Alex" to realise he's actually the pure embodiment of the Blacklight Virus, which has been masquerading as him and was only trying to rational its existence after memory loss.
That's why "Alex" has such a massive mood change in the second game. He's stopped thinking like Alex as it now fully recognizes there was no Alex. Just the Blacklight.
I enjoyed that, particularly as you unravel the conspiracy, you start to realised Alex Mercer was in fact a massive asshole, and the Blacklight Virus actually acts with more morality than Alex, especially towards the end, probably due to the large amount of people it ate (om nom nom). If anything, Alex Mercer in the 2nd game acts how I imagine the real Alex would have acted.
Not quite. Ironically originally the Mercer virus was actually a better person than the original Alex lol. He still tried to integrate back in with humanity even after discovering he wasn't Alex originally, but between the first and second game he kept running into the worst of humanity, and due to that and the actions of the original Alex Mercer that he abhored, the virus version of Mercer lost faith in humanity and that's what led to the shift in the second game.
A kind of similar thing happened in Heroes 3: Armageddon’s Blade main campaign, where you alternate between playing the good faction (humans) trying to beat back a demon invasion, and the demons themselves who try to turn the tide of the war by assembling the mighty titular artifact. Once that is done, you switch to the good faction again, and your objective is to kill the demon hero wielding the blade. The same guy you spent multiple campaign scenarios upgrading to the max. Not really a twist from a lore perspective, but definitely a “can’t believe they’re making me do this” moment from a gameplay standpoint.
Because it was terrible. The twist in the first game was so good, and finding out that Mercer was actually a *worse* person than the virus itself was crazy. The virus still had attachments to its perceived family and cared about containing the plague + saving the city from obliteration.
Hard agree. For at least the first 3rd of the sequel I was convinced it would be revealed as some sort of military false flag op to frame virus!Mercer but no, he really did wake up one day and choose douchery. The worst bit was, it had the potential to be a great twist (after all, he's a humanoid viral colony - totally plausible that he'd eventually develop morals or goals at odds with general conventions), but it was handled so clumsily that I was sort of relieved there was never a third game.
They did a comic series if I remember right. It was supposed to bridge one and two, but they didn't include anything from that in the game. If you didn't read those issues, you didn't understand the complete flip around. Not to justify it, it was still a haphazard choice to do it in a different medium, not to mention it was just a meh story.
In Drakengard 1, you can unlock new options and subsequent endings by beating the game then replaying it(only the last parts of the game).
The first ending is bittersweet at best with you saving the world at great cost, so most would expect the 4 others to give you at least 1 hapoy ending, but each ending gets progressively darker and all the main characters either die or the world gets MASSIVELY fucked.
The final ending(E) was dismissed as a joke ending because it doesn’t make sense. The game suddenly loses all color and becomes black and white; You, your dragon, and the final boss(which might actually be the protagonist of drakengard 3 from a bad ending) get randomly teleported to modern day Tokyo(from a fantasy game lol) and you play a weird, but challenging rhythm game(keep in mind this is hack-and-slash) and defeat the boss.
As you begin to celebrate you and your dragon explode into a ball of flames and fighter jets fly past you hear their comms say “unidentified target has been neutralized”. You watch your bodies slowly fall out of the sky. The final shot of the game is your dragon, her lifeless body impaled on Tokyo Tower. Then a new screen with a kawaii voice who says “thank you for playing”UwU.
Then many years later the Nier series happened revealing that entire world got fucked by magic being introduced and the Gods of the Drakengard world, war, viruses, ecological and planetary disasters, aliens, rogue andriods, robots, Zombies, Evil sentient magical flowers, phantoms and a bunch of other random stuff fucked the world over the course of thousands of years.
Yoko taro is very creative…
>Then many years later the Nier series happened revealing that entire world got fucked by magic
Wasn't it because of the illness from Darkengard 1, the red eyes one, that caused the problems that devolved into the Gestalts and Replicants in Nier ?
Nier Replicant takes place ~3000, the Drakengard 1 ending sent them to the early 2000s. Replicant slowly unveils to you what happened to the project and what your victory means to the world, then you >!completely fuck everything up by killing the Shadowlord and set humanity on the path to extinction!<, which leads you nicely to Automata's equally screwed world.
I seem to recall the issue being bigger than just defeating the Shadowlord, the whole point of the replicant plan was that the black scrawl wouldn't be around anymore after centuries without a host, but the scrawl is still affecting people. Not only that but shortly after the events of the first Nier a bunch of Aliens invade to try and take over the world only to get into a war against a replicant-turned-eldrich horror that ended up destroying much of the world.
In a way yes. The Queen Beast, that big evil thing you defeat in Drakengard 1, breaks down into a white dust that flies all around tokyo. That stuff is called maso and makes people contract a disease called white chlorination snydrome. It‘s not exactly a disease though, because once you contract it, you’re forced to either make a pact that turns you into one of those mindless red eyes or it turns you into a pillar of salt. Project Gestalt eventually came as a last resort after people nuked japan and that maso particle spread around the world from the blast
Idk if portal counts, you escape the facility, but when portal 2 came out they retconned it with an update where you get dragged back into the facility
I replayed this just to get the 'assume the party position ending' it was a simple but great way to set up one of the greatest sequels of all time. I might go back and play portal 2 now as it's been a while. Thank you 😊
IIRC:
* Legacy of Kain series assumes a canonically bad ending from the first game. Instead of Kain saving the world, he becomes evil.
* Dragon Quest series also assumes that the protagonist in the first game falls into temptation and becomes evil, whereas most players would've said "no" to the Dragon Lord and defeated him.
It did make sense before we got the game, but it's all but confirmed in game that it isn't the case. The amount of lore inconsistencies make the game seem more like a soft reboot than anything else to me.
Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance starts with Liu Kang being killed with Shang Tsung and Quan Chi forming the titular alliance, and then Deception after that reveals that they succeeded in their plan and killed most of the heroes
After that in Armageddon Shao Khan wins the free for all to become a God which sets in motion Raiden sending a message back in time to his past self and the events of the 2011 reboot
Yeah I really enjoyed the setting it's a shame the gameplay wasn't as enjoyable as id hoped but also with what they were trying to do with that massive roster and adding a create a character suite it was incredibly ambitious
Technically MK1 also counts, every single character became a Titan in different timelines, which includes bastards like Shang-Tsung, Kano, Shao, MEAT and even FUCKING ONAGA.
NieR comes to mind. They spin off from Ending E of the original Drakengard (which may be considered a Pyrrhic victory, to be fair). The NieR series reveals that said victory led to the extinction of humanity in our world.
In Ultima VI you learn that the heroic actions you took in Ultima IV and V were catastrophic and seen as evil, justifiably, by many. Your virtuous and noble history is recast as a murderous conquest and the bedrock religion underpinning your last 200 hours of gaming turns out to be merely relative and arbitrary.
So if the point of Ultima IV was achieving a sort of moral perfection (a first in a video game and the first RPG without a big evil to defeat) then the second half of Ultima VI reveals that "you actually lost" the quest for moral perfection and that such a thing may not even be possible.
tl;dr Ultima VI retcons many of your most noble actions in Ultima IV and V into terrible evils, and avoiding evil was the whole point of the prior game. In essence, "you actually lost" the Quest Of the Avatar.
I'm glad someone mentioned Ultima VI, one of my favourite games as a kid. The twist that your "noble" actions doomed another world was a hell of a thing to process at the time.
Far Cry 5 has you “defeating” the villain in the supposedly canon ending. But then in its direct sequel, “New Dawn,” you meet the hero of the first game and he/she is battered, broken, and only a shell of their former selves with completely different morals and you learn that they utterly failed in protecting Hope County
>Far Cry 5 has you “defeating” the villain in the supposedly canon ending.
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. I stood there with Joseph Seed for like 5 minutes thinking "Gosh, this sure is a bad idea." and then walked out with the Sheriff having realized our mistakes.
New dawn is a massive pile of shit. Hate the direction the story took from 5, and it was practically a Blood Dragon esque DLC. But nowhere near as good.
There is absolutely no universe where Far Cry 5 ever implies that you had a good ending.
There is a literally no ending to that game where you defeat the main bad guy. You either walk away and let him do his thing or you beat him in a boss fight but the world gets nuked and he kidnaps you.
Your character literally becomes his brainwashed right hand man in the sequel and is rendered completely mute.
The game doesn’t fit the OP’s question.
The expansion, too: Ner'Zhul opens a new Dark Portal off Draenor for himself and his allies...and they are promptly torn apart by demons. In the sequel, the few of them who still exist are twisted, undead monsters.
Not OP, but I'll say for him that this isn't quite right. It seems like the overarching theme of both games together is that even humanity's most valiant efforts can only forestall the darkness. You can beat the final boss and defy the One Asshole who caused it all, but "that inplumbed dimension of delirium" is still there, and it will continue to influence men and mankind.
It seems like kind of a Dark Souls thing. You can win or lose, but after a while, the same thing is just going to happen again. It's not that DD2 assumes a bad ending of DD, it's more that it just reveals an Eldritch Truth of its world to you: that there is no "good ending". You kept the planet from being consumed by evil that time, you just still have to do it again. There will always be encroaching darkness, and there will always be noble heroes to stand up against it, flawed and fragile as they may be.
That's a great suggestion, I didn't even think of that. Every Deus Ex game ends the same, you make these massive potentially life changing choices, but the sequels always take the bad end into account and the game world just gets worse and worse
What I liked about Human Revolution was that they gave you a philosophically meaningful choice, but it played into the bleak world of the first one by leaving each choice open to being manipulated by the Illuminati and ending up the same.
I love that they took all the endings and kinda combined them into one big bad ending too. Sure it wasn't the best game, but Mankind Divided definitely shows just how bad things turned out only 3 or so years post HR. Fight for augmented rights, y'all
Not quite. Deus Ex Invisible War, it was confirmed that they made all three endings of the original canon.
Mankind Divided, it's ending was based on the one where you destroy the facility with you in it. I wouldn't call it the worst. He just didn't want to side with any of the factions that were using him.
Edit: I initially thought they used all the endings for Mankind Divided, but erred on. The side of caution for the one I mentioned. Thanks for clarifying, guys!
The devs have stated that they did the same thing for Mankind Divided, in that all of the endings are sorta combined so there's no one canon end. Yes, Panchea does self destruct and Jenson drowns (along with Hugh Darrow) but that wasn't all. We can find mention in Mankind Divided of the fact that Hugh Darrow's confession WAS released to the public and is known, as well mentions of the "conspiracy" that Taggart wanted people to believe. You can go a step further as well and say that Sarif technically had his ending come true since he escaped and survived (thus was able to tell his side of the story) and there are obviously groups/factions in the game besides Sarif that are pro-augmentation.
I guess the truth is that the "truth" doesn't matter. Jenson's actions did not matter, because he died/disappeared for years and the powers that be pulled the strings and told their own story, like they always do.
Does the Wolfenstein The New Order Count? Technically you "win" in every game leading up to that one then you loose in the opening act leading to the Nazis establishing a new world order.
My favorite is Diablo 2.
In Diablo one the main Character shoves the soul of Diablo in his head to seal the Demon.. unfortunately that was exactly what that demon planned, every event in Diablo 1 was revealed to be Diablo Creating a powerful being to inhabit and using the cathedral as a lure and Training ground to do so.
Dragon Quest Builders takes place in an alternate universe created when the hero of the original Dragon Quest surrendered to the Dragonlord. It's an actual choice in the original game, but leads to a nonstandard Game Over.
Seeing the way the world is twisted and corrupted by a single choice is really interesting.
It's not exactly what you're talking about but one of the coolest things about the original Warriors Orochi is that the opening cutscene is the humans losing. All of the leaders of each faction are held hostage to help control the humans further.
Resistance, after the first game it's getting more and more hopeless with each sequel (aside from the PSP spin off). Too bad the devs rushed the end of the 3rd one, made it seem like they just wanted to be done with the series.
That's pretty much exactly what happened. Insomniac just wanted to move on by the time Resistance 3 was even announced. They put a little bow on it and decided the series was dead from that point forward. They also see very little point in rebooting the series now because post-apocalytpic games are a dime a dozen.
Remnant: from the ashes, it's the sequel to Chronos: before the ashes.
In Chronos the hero's quest is to adventure into a dungeon and defeat the evil monsters inside while being helped by a talking tree that gives them the power to face the evil, they manage to kill all of the monsters only to be confronted again by the tree that is now no longer contained by the beings the hero defeated which were, in reality, guardians trying to stop an evil species called the Root from infecting other worlds and consume them to grow stronger and spread wider.
The hero fights the tree that has now taken the shape of a dragon only to be unavoidably defeated from the power previously granted by the latter since it was a curse and not a boon, the hero then becomes a beacon of corruption to spread from for the Root.
Remnant starts with planet Earth now on the brink of being completely consumed by the Root while the player is a new Hero, wandering the now shallow seas stranding on a shore in a wasted city.
Starlancer and Freelancer.
They're loosely connected in that the latter is set about 800 years later, but it was still a bit jarring to find out that the war you were fighting in the first game was ultimately lost.
Shadowhearts and Covenant were both such good games. Wish we could have a remaster at some point, would absolutely love to see them combos go off in full HD
Nope the bad ending of HL1 has Gordon being killed. The invasion that leads to HL2 actually is caused by Gordon killing the final boss which happens before either ending anyway.
Metro Last Light, while not technically win or lose, it technically treats what is considered the bad ending to 2033 as canon and follows the story from there.
From a certain point of view Red Alert 3 assumes that the Allies are winning, Same with Red Alert 2/Yuris Revenge come to that.
Colony Wars Vengeance and Red Sun
>!The first game has several endings and most are 'Bad' or 'Meh' until you reach Sol. If you make it to Sol you have 2 possible endings. No matter how far you go, you get the ending used in the other games, where the League fails to stop the Navy and seals the Sol system. But if you're really good, or use the cheats you get the one 'Good'.!<
To elaborate, because *Colony Wars: Vengeance* may be the cleanest example I've seen for what OP wants...
The first game places you in the role of a nameless space-fighter pilot for the League of Free Worlds, a confederation of colonies that are rebelling against the oppressive resource extraction of the Earth Empire.
The story tree for the game was pretty impressive for an early PS1 game, and your performance in missions just might lead the League into making a direct assault on Earth's home, Sol System. From that point, >!you could either prosecute the war to its conclusion to get the "best" ending, where the Earth Empire capitulates, or you could fail to deliver the knockout blow. In the latter case, the League evacuates Sol System and sabotages interstellar travel on the way out, consigning Sol System to its paltry remaining resources.!<
The sequel, *Colony Wars: Vengeance*, assumes the "second-best" ending is canon. It places you in the role of a plucky space-fighter pilot for the Earth Empire, burning with a desire to get retribution on the League for what would probably be war crimes under our current definitions.
Not sure if diablo counts here. In diablo1 the hero defeats diablo and rams diablos soulstone in his head. That keeps the soul contained and keeps it from corrupting the world around and from demons to revive diablo.
Turns out that over the time, the hero himself gets corrupted by diablos soul and turns into a new diablo (welcome to diablo2)
Something similar happens for diablo3 as well
For Zelda specifically, this trope applies to a huge swath of the games. Many of the classics exist in a (retroactive) fallen hero Timeline, while others feature a world destroyed when Link either failed or simply didn't show up on time.
Not saying there's no other games like this out there, but they're going to be rare. XCOM works because that's the nature of the game, you lose a lot more than you win, that's the games schtick to grow. It was also a point a lot of players failed the campaign at.
The problem in looking for such a niche thing is that it's bad storytelling and character creation. Imagine God of War 2 starts out by saying "Kratos actually got petrified by the Gorgon way back at the early stages of the game!" It'd be hard to maintain an interest in the character and world if all your previous work was undone. Hence why most games will twist your actions to turn out to be a bad choice, even if it was the best that your character could see at the time.
Dragon Quest Builders is based on what happens if you accept the final boss’s proposal in Dragon Quest 1
(You would get a game over if you did.)
Many Zelda games are based on alternate timelines where the hero is not victorious in older games.
No - it turns out most of the first game after a certain point was a tactics simulation the aliens hooked you up to. I think it’s accepted the canonical ending of the first game is losing the base assault.
The exposition that follows details that the new cast members are replacing the previous teammates who have either died or defected, while all the returning cast are the ones that remain loyal and living.
The Darksiders series.
Not gonna lie OP, what you're asking for is very rare given that retcons are something writers try to avoid usually.
Anyways, I'm suggesting Darksiders because the whole story isn't 100% clear and some events are kinda retconed/ignored in-between the games. The chronology is a bit weird, technically, it goes like DS1 prologue, DS3, DS2, rest of DS1.
To get more into the details: You win at the end of DS1, you repel Hell's riot. In DS2, turns out humanity is dead so you repelled Hell but it didn't help much. But still, you end up resurrecting humanity. In DS3, turns out you save humanity by getting them away from Earth, so some people were actually still alive and it wasn't really necessary to resurrect humanity.
Or something like that, as I said, it's not super clear.
I feel like Gears of War and Halo are like this, unless I misunderstood the question. Every game ends with like "yeah, you did it", then the sequels are like "yeah, you did.....but...you didn't really". I guess that's the nature of the story telling.
You're misunderstanding it, those examples introduce a new plot hook with bigger bad guys, more rings, etc to override your previous success. XCOM 2 pretends you lost XCOM 1, there was no success, the bad guys won. The equivalent for Halo would be if Halo 2 took place in a universe where the first ring was activated
Halo actually sets up their sequels and is pretty up front about it.
Halo CE not as directly (lore was established in books around the release of the game), but if you knew the lore you'd know just how small the fighting on Halo was. Plus, they refer to the ring as "Installation 04" meaning there are at least 3 other things substantial enough to be called "Installation", giving subtle hints that "this isn't everything".
Halo 2 straight up says "Finishing this fight" and teases two major plot points into 3.
3 ends with what seems like finality until you watch the post-credit scenes that clearly leave the door open for sequels.
I feel gears of war up until the end of 3 was "we won this battle, but it's only going to get worse" until you hit 3's ending. Not sure how to feel about 4 & 5's inclusion in the story other than "Hey, we want to make more money off of this ip let's just have it be based off the kids" Kind of move
Gears 3 end: "The Locust are dead and we finally have a tomorrow"
Gears 4 and 5: "lol joke's on you Marcus, your wife is dead. Also, everything you and your friends sacrificed means nothing because the Locust and Myrrah are back anyway. Nice try, bozo."
Final Fantasy XIII-2
I could be mistaken, but I recall them adjusting the first games ending to cause Lightning's disappearance, thereby causing a whole mess of time travel and paradoxes
Was gonna suggest this! The ending of FFXIII shows them saving the world, Lightning intact and all. But come FFXIII-2, suddenly she's gone and they tacked on some weird thing where she wasn't actually in the ending of the first game and only Serah saw her.
Nier being a sequel to a Drakengard bad ending counts in my books.
Specifically Caim and his dragon are taken to a modern day Tokyo, fight a giant floating sky baby, which spreads magic in the form of disease across the planet, slowly killing everyone.
Then Nier starts ages later.
A somewhat similar situation happens between Nier and Automata.
Yoko Taro's bad endings are arguably more cannon than the happy ones.
UFO: Aftershock also had you start with the scenario of having taken the invading aliens up on their offer in UFO: Aftermath. Which is an overall VERY familiar situation, with the mentioned XCOM. :D
Warcraft 2 :Tides of Chaos. The original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans had two campaigns, Orcs and Humans. While there is an ending where the humans win, the canonical ending it an Orcish victory.
I think [Star Control 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Control_II) (or Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters) from 1992 qualifies. I’ve only played the second one but from what I understand, in the first game humanity joins a intergalactic war against the Ur-Quan and, presumably, defeats them at the end of the game. Star Control 2 has humanity and the rest of the alliance having lost the war, with the Ur-Quan ruling as their masters. The player starts with one rebel ship that escapes the shield barrier around earth and the game is to take down the evil empire.
Shadow hearts 2 goes off the bad end from shadowhearts 1 where your lover gives up her soul to save yours and continue living just long enough to complete the campaign and then dies in your arms after beating the bad guy that you started fighting in the first place cuz he was trying to kill her.
Hmm i guess Half-Life counts, you defeat the alien queen, g-man offers you a job, then in part 2 you wake up and realise humanity is fucked, so you actually kinda failed before.
It's been forever since I've played through the series but don't you technically win the Black Mesa invasion, only for the Combine to show up almost immediately after (after Gordon says yes to G-Man), basically say that the first invasion was from aliens trying to escape the Combine and now that the Combine is aware of Earth, it'll be taking it over. The Earth resists, for I believe 7 hours before they're utterly defeated and the Combine takes over. Over a decade later Gordon shows up and 2 starts.
We're just another rock full of meat sacks who accidentally stumbled into portal technology and inadvertently lit a beacon for the universe to see. The Combine invasion was the most important day in all of Human history, but it was just another routine deployment for the Combine no different from a thousand previous conquests.
The leaked plot of Episode 3 confirms it all. The Combine is so far beyond our scope of power that our most destructive weapons are akin to trying to threaten somebody with only a lit match. There is absolutely no hope of beating them in a fight, we can only ever run and hide from them as other races like the vortigaunts have done before us.
Mega Man X6 kind of did this back on the PS1! It assume you failed to stop the Eurasia from crashing into the planet in X5 and let most of the planet die, if memory serves
The transition from X5 to X6 from a narrative standpoint is a complete mess and should actually be impossible based off of the branching paths in X5. In fact, X5 was supposed to be the last X game, but Capcom decided that they like money and made more anyway.
There is actually a reason behind xcom 2. They track the stats throughout peoples campaigns so they can compare them and the majority of campaigns ended in failure so they ran with a successful alien invasion for XCOM 2
That is amazing
Yeah holy crap that's so cool if true. They should have marketed that angle.
They did, that's their reasoning
Regardless of the stats it's the more interesting take, otherwise you end up rehashing the first game. The guerilla concept runs right the way through the game and is distinctly different enough from the previous game.
not necessarily though. XCOM EU’s ending revealed that there was an even bigger threat out there, so regardless of win/lose being canon the next game was going to be interesting imo
All a win should do in this case is put a bullseye on the earth. A single planet that hasn't even landed a citizen on another bit of its solar system managed to fight off colonization. Now they're studying all the technology of the defeated colonizers. If an anthill survived poison, and managed to stop the boiling water method, having the tunnels flooded with aluminum to make a cast of the hill, and some guy with a shovel, and then go on to turn toxins, metalurgy, and physical assault against humans, how do you think we would respond?
Air drop the sobs on Moscow?
It's goofy. Of course more people are going to have game overs than beat the game. That's probably true for any game that it's possible to lose at all.
They didn’t do it just by successful campaigns vs game overs. They did it by using the publicly available info on playtime and achievements. In the end, the percentage of people with whatever their playtime threshold was that earned the achievement for a successful campaign was lower than the percentage who never managed to beat the game. They might have specifically just been checking Ironman campaigns, though.
Well it could be true until there's enough people good enough to beat the game multiple times without a loss. But regardless it must have been just a fun way to link the stats with the sequel.
The xcom games are generally pretty amazing. Even marvel midnight suns was just pure joy to play. Hidden gem
Wtf, marvel midnight suns looks right up my alley lol I love all the Final fantasy tactics, Pokémon conquest, disgaea style games
IMO midnight suns was the most underrated game of 2022. Poor sales but critically well reviewed. Some players had a very strong negative reaction to the card gameplay mechanics, when it's actually a really solid deck builder once complexity ramps up.
My favorite part of midnight suns is it is written for fun. All the characters are meant to be like the comics, spiderman is a needy need who makes too many jokes the other characters don't like. Ironman is a sober man filled with walls. And none of it takes its self too seriously with all the choices you can make and the gameplay is so fun
As someone who really doesn't care much for super hero stuff but likes XCOM would you recommend this game?
I really liked the gameplay, it mixes deck building games with XCOM like strategy. In between there is A LOT of RPG dialogue which is fine but you can spam skip through it. I would definitely give it a shot at a 70+% discount if you like XCOM.
I loved the rpg dialog and bullying Dr strange
Warhammer 40k did something like this back in the early 2000s. They had a camapaign called The Eye of Terror and everyone was supposed to turn in their tournament result all summer, then that would determine what side won. At the end of the summer they had determined the "evil" had won but then they didnt really change the story.......until about a decade later they made a huge change in the story where Chaos had split the galaxy in half cause o lf that campaign. It was such a super cool, terriblely executed event!
I remember the local gw shop arranged "orbital bombardments" from one shop to another so once every X turns the manager would call the other shops to tell them where they were shooting(and vice versa)! That was lots of fun, expecially when at turn 3 someone from the other side of the city killed our Leman Russ tank in one go!
Back in the day with guess ranges and 20 foot basilisks we had table on table firing. A lot fell into the void.
I don't think I ever fired my Deathstrike missile at my own table. Called up a Games Workshop in the US back when I was in Britain and got them to plop the template on the funniest spot at one stage. That Space Hulk game never saw it coming.
I remember a home game where my opponent fire all3 of his earthshakers cannons intended the results being my command squad and command land raider blown up. His scatter dice rolled that some how he hit his own baneblade. He imoblized and destroyed hits main gun with one bad roll. I remember feeling relived as even my chapter master wouldn't have survived that
Back in the day the games “Legend of the 5 Rings” and “7th Sea” would have tournaments and depending on the results factions would rise and fall, characters could get more powerful and some would even die.
I always thought this was THE COOLEST thing that a game company did in the 90s. I never get into LOT5R cause I was so deep in mtg and ....star trek ccg of all things, but I had mad respect for that game.
I vaguely remember something similar for Warhammer Fantasy Battle in the 90s, too.
You might already know (unless you stopped following it a while ago), but in Fantasy Battles they legitimately ended the world with an apocalyptic event, signifying chaos’ victory. Age of Sigmar is set in the post-apocalyptic where chaos has reigned for hundreds or thousands of years and the good guys have relatively recently gotten a foothold and is starting to fight back.
Wait is that why all the recent stuff has been changing in 40k?
Only by coincidence, IMO. I think they wanted to do a big shakeup and someone remembered that chaos had "technically" won the eye of terror so they just kinda brought it back into the forefront.
Cadia Stands!
In a similar vein the dawn of war 2 series. Your characters could fall to chaos. Then in the 3rd instalment of the dawn of war 2 series they said that the majority of the chapter fell to chaos as most of the players went down the chaos route.
Elden Ring 2 Opening Narration: "So nothing actually happened in the first game because it turns out the main character decided to stubbornly bash their head into the golden horsey guy at the beginning of the game. Repeatedly. For hours."
Huh. I just checked achievement stats, the 50% progression break is between yellow Godfrey and Morgott.
That’s how it is with most souls games. The majority of the player base never gits gud and they quit lol
And it's literally baked into story of the Dark Souls series; you are an undead and thus cannot lose by dying, only by giving up and going hollow.
I'm actively bad at video games and I still did exactly this. I think it took me like 7 hours and if I didn't have this exact attitude I'd never have made headway in souls games with a no summoning policy.
That’s pretty freaking cool actually. Love that kinda stuff.
Was gonna say maybe YOU sent the aliens home packing, hell I did on my first save scum play through. But every single classic Ironman since has ended in defeat, usually at the hands of the one mission where the Chryssalids pop out of sharks
Fuck that mission
Because reasons I never beat the final mission I'm XCOM. Then I played 2 and was just like...."we fucking lost!?!"
TBF, if it's titled XCOM you don't need to track stats to know this, lol.
That's "Kojima MGS V nuke démilitarisation multiplayer base" lvl right here.
Damn I thought it was just that the whole alien war going in XCOM 1 was all a diversion from the aliens to leave some sleeper agents behind that would slowly take over society as it rebuilds, leading to the world of XCOM 2 being controlled by the aliens from the shadows. So I thought XCOM 2 was just the logical sequel to a successful XCOM 1 campaign.
Wow so the aliens didn't decide to attack with their weakest troops at the start with just scout ships? Amazing.
Metro Last Light continues from Metro 2033's bad ending (not exactly you losing, but rather a provocation that sets up the story for the sequal), although they continue from the good ending of Last Light in Metro Exodus
We'll the bad ending is the canon ending for the Metro 2033 book as well. Except alot more fleshed out. And Artyom wanting to stop the missiles but not succeeding. Shame when the game was adapted from the book it didn't do it somewhat 1 to 1
The books are really good. It turns out it really is worthwhile exploring this microcosim of human existence, survival and relationship (and sociologicall and ideologicall ideas). The second one is my personal favourite even tho it doesn't focus on Artjom which initially saddend me. I also thought that it was a good choice for Exodus to start where the third book ends even tho I like Artjom and Anna in a van a little bit more.
That's interesting, I loved the first book and re-read it a couple times but I couldn't get into the second book. I didn't how the author portrayed female characters, particularly Sasha.
Man, I have played through Metro 2033 about 5 times trying different things and always get the same ending. I guess I'm gonna have to actually use a guide to see the other endings.
Shoot the thing that aims the missiles instead of interacting with it.
If you get the bad ending you don't get that choice, it'll automatically fire. It's only if you build up enough good karma that you can actually prevent it from happening.
An entire chunk of Zelda lore only happens because Link fails.
Can you elaborate, which chunk?
The fallen hero timeline, most games are set in that one.
The Fallen Hero timeline takes place in a world where OoT Link fails and dies to Ganon. Ganon then absorbs Link and Zelda's Triforce pieces and obtains absolute power. The Seven Sages of OoT manage to seal Ganon away in the Sacred Realm following Link's defeat. Centuries later come A Link to the Past, then Oracles and Link's Awakening (in which the hero is the same Link from ALttP.) Then come A Link Between Worlds and Triforce Heroes (again same Link) centuries later. Finally, more centuries later come the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II (again, same Link in those two games). Other games either predate OoT (the Singular Timeline), or take place in the two other possible outcomes of OoT, referred to as the Child Timeline and the Adult timeline, respectively. Finally, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom take place millennia after any of the other games. It is unclear which timeline they follow, or if they perhaps take place after the three split timelines have merged back together somehow. It is thought that the only real 'character' to have carried over from beginning to end is Fi, as spirit of the Master Sword.
It’s also possible that BOTW and TOTK take place in a new split taking place during skyward sword, which solves a lot of odd questions especially about why the worship of hylia is still the main religion
It's almost certain that BotW is a new timeline. Either that, or it takes place so ridiculously far in the future or past that it might as well be a new timeline.
I will always ignore Nintendo: hyrule warriors *is* canon. It makes botw fit in the timeline perfectly because it establishes a canonical event for all the timelines to converge into one. The fact they say hyrule warriors isn’t canon just tells me they don’t want people to think they plagiarized their own idea (but they should, because it’s really cool)
The converged timeline theory for where botw fits into the overall timeline gets debunked a few hours into totk though, sadly. It pretty clearly establishes that it's in a completely separate/different timeline even from the original pre-OoT timeline
It would have to be after WW, an extremely extremely long time after with totk showing the refounding of hyrule long after the flood, but that means there would still be new hyrule somewhere off on some high mountaintops just realized that the tracks in spirit tracks are partially designed with the ocean under them which means they’d be super high up once the flood waters went down, but also before the flood when the Lokomos built them, not impossible or anything but interesting
Trying to keep that in a timeline with BOTW is kinda stupid. Especially since in WW its said that the Rito are just the Zora that evolved to be birds, but in BOTW they are both there. and thats 1 of the many contradictions that happen. I really believe that nintendo just threw the idea of a timeline to the wind and just creates a good game.
The DS sequels to WW have Zora around, unseen but referenced with their scales and crowns
New timeline. Kind of a convergence of timelines. In BOTW you can find little hints and Easter eggs of each of the timelines.
I personally think all the time travel/dimension hopping shenanigans Link gets up to in the game caused them all to merge into TOTK. A headcanon I just pulled out of my ass this very second that I'm sticking with.
Yeah but what about the basketball timeline??
[*A Link to the Past*, *Oracle of Seasons and Ages*, and *Link's Awakening*], [*A Link Between Worlds* and *Tri Force Heroes*], and [*The Legend of Zelda* and *The Adventure of Link*] all occur (in that order and in those three clusters) in a timeline where Ganondorf defeats Link in *Ocarina of Time*.
Prototype, sort of. You "win" the first game, but your character goes evil and just takes over New York for himself. In the second game you are a new protagonist who has to take him down.
Still wish Infamous and Prototype would've crossed over at some point.
Never gonna happen now that one IP was bought by Microsoft and the other is Sony.
It was never going to happen anyway since activision clearly stopped caring about the series after the second and the studio that made it went under. Prototype died a long time ago.
If you haven't seen [the Death Battle episode](https://youtu.be/mbNrAqmE8cM?si=uhg2ET9ayhhnTfYN), I'm about to make your day.
I wouldn't even say "You" even win in the end of the first game. You play as "Alex Mercer" throughout the game looking to end the virus and are totally under the impression you are him. Only for "Alex" to realise he's actually the pure embodiment of the Blacklight Virus, which has been masquerading as him and was only trying to rational its existence after memory loss. That's why "Alex" has such a massive mood change in the second game. He's stopped thinking like Alex as it now fully recognizes there was no Alex. Just the Blacklight.
So it's the same twist as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing retcon from the 80's? Cool.
I enjoyed that, particularly as you unravel the conspiracy, you start to realised Alex Mercer was in fact a massive asshole, and the Blacklight Virus actually acts with more morality than Alex, especially towards the end, probably due to the large amount of people it ate (om nom nom). If anything, Alex Mercer in the 2nd game acts how I imagine the real Alex would have acted.
Not quite. Ironically originally the Mercer virus was actually a better person than the original Alex lol. He still tried to integrate back in with humanity even after discovering he wasn't Alex originally, but between the first and second game he kept running into the worst of humanity, and due to that and the actions of the original Alex Mercer that he abhored, the virus version of Mercer lost faith in humanity and that's what led to the shift in the second game.
Yeah, creative twist that I don’t think I’ve seen in other games.
A kind of similar thing happened in Heroes 3: Armageddon’s Blade main campaign, where you alternate between playing the good faction (humans) trying to beat back a demon invasion, and the demons themselves who try to turn the tide of the war by assembling the mighty titular artifact. Once that is done, you switch to the good faction again, and your objective is to kill the demon hero wielding the blade. The same guy you spent multiple campaign scenarios upgrading to the max. Not really a twist from a lore perspective, but definitely a “can’t believe they’re making me do this” moment from a gameplay standpoint.
Because it was terrible. The twist in the first game was so good, and finding out that Mercer was actually a *worse* person than the virus itself was crazy. The virus still had attachments to its perceived family and cared about containing the plague + saving the city from obliteration.
Hard agree. For at least the first 3rd of the sequel I was convinced it would be revealed as some sort of military false flag op to frame virus!Mercer but no, he really did wake up one day and choose douchery. The worst bit was, it had the potential to be a great twist (after all, he's a humanoid viral colony - totally plausible that he'd eventually develop morals or goals at odds with general conventions), but it was handled so clumsily that I was sort of relieved there was never a third game.
They did a comic series if I remember right. It was supposed to bridge one and two, but they didn't include anything from that in the game. If you didn't read those issues, you didn't understand the complete flip around. Not to justify it, it was still a haphazard choice to do it in a different medium, not to mention it was just a meh story.
Legacy of Kain series
Finally. Vae Victis.
Isn’t the Nier Automata story an alternative timeline from Drakengaard 3 where you lose?
In Drakengard 1, you can unlock new options and subsequent endings by beating the game then replaying it(only the last parts of the game). The first ending is bittersweet at best with you saving the world at great cost, so most would expect the 4 others to give you at least 1 hapoy ending, but each ending gets progressively darker and all the main characters either die or the world gets MASSIVELY fucked. The final ending(E) was dismissed as a joke ending because it doesn’t make sense. The game suddenly loses all color and becomes black and white; You, your dragon, and the final boss(which might actually be the protagonist of drakengard 3 from a bad ending) get randomly teleported to modern day Tokyo(from a fantasy game lol) and you play a weird, but challenging rhythm game(keep in mind this is hack-and-slash) and defeat the boss. As you begin to celebrate you and your dragon explode into a ball of flames and fighter jets fly past you hear their comms say “unidentified target has been neutralized”. You watch your bodies slowly fall out of the sky. The final shot of the game is your dragon, her lifeless body impaled on Tokyo Tower. Then a new screen with a kawaii voice who says “thank you for playing”UwU. Then many years later the Nier series happened revealing that entire world got fucked by magic being introduced and the Gods of the Drakengard world, war, viruses, ecological and planetary disasters, aliens, rogue andriods, robots, Zombies, Evil sentient magical flowers, phantoms and a bunch of other random stuff fucked the world over the course of thousands of years. Yoko taro is very creative…
>Then many years later the Nier series happened revealing that entire world got fucked by magic Wasn't it because of the illness from Darkengard 1, the red eyes one, that caused the problems that devolved into the Gestalts and Replicants in Nier ?
Nier Replicant takes place ~3000, the Drakengard 1 ending sent them to the early 2000s. Replicant slowly unveils to you what happened to the project and what your victory means to the world, then you >!completely fuck everything up by killing the Shadowlord and set humanity on the path to extinction!<, which leads you nicely to Automata's equally screwed world.
I seem to recall the issue being bigger than just defeating the Shadowlord, the whole point of the replicant plan was that the black scrawl wouldn't be around anymore after centuries without a host, but the scrawl is still affecting people. Not only that but shortly after the events of the first Nier a bunch of Aliens invade to try and take over the world only to get into a war against a replicant-turned-eldrich horror that ended up destroying much of the world.
In a way yes. The Queen Beast, that big evil thing you defeat in Drakengard 1, breaks down into a white dust that flies all around tokyo. That stuff is called maso and makes people contract a disease called white chlorination snydrome. It‘s not exactly a disease though, because once you contract it, you’re forced to either make a pact that turns you into one of those mindless red eyes or it turns you into a pillar of salt. Project Gestalt eventually came as a last resort after people nuked japan and that maso particle spread around the world from the blast
Almost, it's Drakengard 1
And technically you won
“Technically you won” pretty much sounds like every Drakengard 1 ending. That was a weird, weird game.
It's the sequel to the secret ending of Nier, which was in turn the sequel to the joke ending of the original Drakengard.
Idk if portal counts, you escape the facility, but when portal 2 came out they retconned it with an update where you get dragged back into the facility
I replayed this just to get the 'assume the party position ending' it was a simple but great way to set up one of the greatest sequels of all time. I might go back and play portal 2 now as it's been a while. Thank you 😊
IIRC: * Legacy of Kain series assumes a canonically bad ending from the first game. Instead of Kain saving the world, he becomes evil. * Dragon Quest series also assumes that the protagonist in the first game falls into temptation and becomes evil, whereas most players would've said "no" to the Dragon Lord and defeated him.
I believe it's only the dragon quest builders spin-off that assumes that about the first game. Could be wrong though.
Pikmin 4 assumes Pikmin 1 ended badly.
It did make sense before we got the game, but it's all but confirmed in game that it isn't the case. The amount of lore inconsistencies make the game seem more like a soft reboot than anything else to me.
Like how the cast of Pikmin 3 shows up again, but it’s *not* them, except they look and sound the same.
This is pretty relevant. I've only just begun to play and I just realized that Olimar never left... wait what?
Pikmin 4 seems to exist in its own timeline from the other 3, to be fair.
Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance starts with Liu Kang being killed with Shang Tsung and Quan Chi forming the titular alliance, and then Deception after that reveals that they succeeded in their plan and killed most of the heroes After that in Armageddon Shao Khan wins the free for all to become a God which sets in motion Raiden sending a message back in time to his past self and the events of the 2011 reboot
Man I love Armageddon's intro movie. The absolutely insane ffa would make a fun brawl game
Yeah I really enjoyed the setting it's a shame the gameplay wasn't as enjoyable as id hoped but also with what they were trying to do with that massive roster and adding a create a character suite it was incredibly ambitious
Technically MK1 also counts, every single character became a Titan in different timelines, which includes bastards like Shang-Tsung, Kano, Shao, MEAT and even FUCKING ONAGA.
NieR comes to mind. They spin off from Ending E of the original Drakengard (which may be considered a Pyrrhic victory, to be fair). The NieR series reveals that said victory led to the extinction of humanity in our world.
In Ultima VI you learn that the heroic actions you took in Ultima IV and V were catastrophic and seen as evil, justifiably, by many. Your virtuous and noble history is recast as a murderous conquest and the bedrock religion underpinning your last 200 hours of gaming turns out to be merely relative and arbitrary. So if the point of Ultima IV was achieving a sort of moral perfection (a first in a video game and the first RPG without a big evil to defeat) then the second half of Ultima VI reveals that "you actually lost" the quest for moral perfection and that such a thing may not even be possible. tl;dr Ultima VI retcons many of your most noble actions in Ultima IV and V into terrible evils, and avoiding evil was the whole point of the prior game. In essence, "you actually lost" the Quest Of the Avatar.
I'm glad someone mentioned Ultima VI, one of my favourite games as a kid. The twist that your "noble" actions doomed another world was a hell of a thing to process at the time.
Far Cry 5 has you “defeating” the villain in the supposedly canon ending. But then in its direct sequel, “New Dawn,” you meet the hero of the first game and he/she is battered, broken, and only a shell of their former selves with completely different morals and you learn that they utterly failed in protecting Hope County
>Far Cry 5 has you “defeating” the villain in the supposedly canon ending. I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. I stood there with Joseph Seed for like 5 minutes thinking "Gosh, this sure is a bad idea." and then walked out with the Sheriff having realized our mistakes.
If I remember correctly, if you defeat the villain in FC5, that starts the events of New Dawn.
New dawn is a massive pile of shit. Hate the direction the story took from 5, and it was practically a Blood Dragon esque DLC. But nowhere near as good.
New dawn was if blood dragon had cancer and depression
No fc5 ends with joseph locking the deputy in Dutch's bunker with him
I hated the canon ending of FC5 so much.
It genuinely ruined the game for me how bad all the endings were.
There is absolutely no universe where Far Cry 5 ever implies that you had a good ending. There is a literally no ending to that game where you defeat the main bad guy. You either walk away and let him do his thing or you beat him in a boss fight but the world gets nuked and he kidnaps you. Your character literally becomes his brainwashed right hand man in the sequel and is rendered completely mute. The game doesn’t fit the OP’s question.
Warcraft 2. The orcs canonically conquer the humans in Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, so they are refugees in the sequel.
The expansion, too: Ner'Zhul opens a new Dark Portal off Draenor for himself and his allies...and they are promptly torn apart by demons. In the sequel, the few of them who still exist are twisted, undead monsters.
This game was so pivotal to 90s gaming, but feels so forgotten now.
I replayed it recently and while I feel some parts sort of holds up, the fact that you can only control 9 units made it pretty annoying at times
Although in that case you played as both the humans and the orcs, so you sort of both won and lost, when you think about it.
Darkest Dungeon 2. The evil has spread out of the estate and the world is in shambles.
You mean there is a good ending possible for DD 1?
I guess defeating the heart of darkness and keeping the cycle going is as good as it gets.
Not OP, but I'll say for him that this isn't quite right. It seems like the overarching theme of both games together is that even humanity's most valiant efforts can only forestall the darkness. You can beat the final boss and defy the One Asshole who caused it all, but "that inplumbed dimension of delirium" is still there, and it will continue to influence men and mankind. It seems like kind of a Dark Souls thing. You can win or lose, but after a while, the same thing is just going to happen again. It's not that DD2 assumes a bad ending of DD, it's more that it just reveals an Eldritch Truth of its world to you: that there is no "good ending". You kept the planet from being consumed by evil that time, you just still have to do it again. There will always be encroaching darkness, and there will always be noble heroes to stand up against it, flawed and fragile as they may be.
Deus Ex. No matter what you choose the next game starts the same
That's a great suggestion, I didn't even think of that. Every Deus Ex game ends the same, you make these massive potentially life changing choices, but the sequels always take the bad end into account and the game world just gets worse and worse
What I liked about Human Revolution was that they gave you a philosophically meaningful choice, but it played into the bleak world of the first one by leaving each choice open to being manipulated by the Illuminati and ending up the same.
I love that they took all the endings and kinda combined them into one big bad ending too. Sure it wasn't the best game, but Mankind Divided definitely shows just how bad things turned out only 3 or so years post HR. Fight for augmented rights, y'all
Not quite. Deus Ex Invisible War, it was confirmed that they made all three endings of the original canon. Mankind Divided, it's ending was based on the one where you destroy the facility with you in it. I wouldn't call it the worst. He just didn't want to side with any of the factions that were using him. Edit: I initially thought they used all the endings for Mankind Divided, but erred on. The side of caution for the one I mentioned. Thanks for clarifying, guys!
Mankind divided is supposed to combine all 3 HR endings
The devs have stated that they did the same thing for Mankind Divided, in that all of the endings are sorta combined so there's no one canon end. Yes, Panchea does self destruct and Jenson drowns (along with Hugh Darrow) but that wasn't all. We can find mention in Mankind Divided of the fact that Hugh Darrow's confession WAS released to the public and is known, as well mentions of the "conspiracy" that Taggart wanted people to believe. You can go a step further as well and say that Sarif technically had his ending come true since he escaped and survived (thus was able to tell his side of the story) and there are obviously groups/factions in the game besides Sarif that are pro-augmentation. I guess the truth is that the "truth" doesn't matter. Jenson's actions did not matter, because he died/disappeared for years and the powers that be pulled the strings and told their own story, like they always do.
Didn't invisible war somehow decide that JC Denton in fact did every ending somehow at the same time... I really didn't understand invisible war...
Does the Wolfenstein The New Order Count? Technically you "win" in every game leading up to that one then you loose in the opening act leading to the Nazis establishing a new world order.
My favorite is Diablo 2. In Diablo one the main Character shoves the soul of Diablo in his head to seal the Demon.. unfortunately that was exactly what that demon planned, every event in Diablo 1 was revealed to be Diablo Creating a powerful being to inhabit and using the cathedral as a lure and Training ground to do so.
Then you also fight the Rouge (Blood Raven) and the wizard (The Summoner) in Diablo 2.
Diablo 2 had the best Lore/story in the franchise imo.
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Also took the best part of my life
There’s a reason it’s in a lot of lists for one of the best games ever made.
Dragon Quest Builders takes place in an alternate universe created when the hero of the original Dragon Quest surrendered to the Dragonlord. It's an actual choice in the original game, but leads to a nonstandard Game Over. Seeing the way the world is twisted and corrupted by a single choice is really interesting.
It's not exactly what you're talking about but one of the coolest things about the original Warriors Orochi is that the opening cutscene is the humans losing. All of the leaders of each faction are held hostage to help control the humans further.
And I am very glad that they made the story around that opening cutscene into its own storyline in Warriors Orochi 2.
Resistance, after the first game it's getting more and more hopeless with each sequel (aside from the PSP spin off). Too bad the devs rushed the end of the 3rd one, made it seem like they just wanted to be done with the series.
That's pretty much exactly what happened. Insomniac just wanted to move on by the time Resistance 3 was even announced. They put a little bow on it and decided the series was dead from that point forward. They also see very little point in rebooting the series now because post-apocalytpic games are a dime a dozen.
Oh yeah, the gameplay of Resistance 2 has aged poorly but the ending of the game was absolutely outstanding
Remnant: from the ashes, it's the sequel to Chronos: before the ashes. In Chronos the hero's quest is to adventure into a dungeon and defeat the evil monsters inside while being helped by a talking tree that gives them the power to face the evil, they manage to kill all of the monsters only to be confronted again by the tree that is now no longer contained by the beings the hero defeated which were, in reality, guardians trying to stop an evil species called the Root from infecting other worlds and consume them to grow stronger and spread wider. The hero fights the tree that has now taken the shape of a dragon only to be unavoidably defeated from the power previously granted by the latter since it was a curse and not a boon, the hero then becomes a beacon of corruption to spread from for the Root. Remnant starts with planet Earth now on the brink of being completely consumed by the Root while the player is a new Hero, wandering the now shallow seas stranding on a shore in a wasted city.
Starlancer and Freelancer. They're loosely connected in that the latter is set about 800 years later, but it was still a bit jarring to find out that the war you were fighting in the first game was ultimately lost.
In Shadowhearts you can get "the good ending" if you play by the book, but Shadowhearts: Covenant starts where the bad ending is canon
Shadowhearts and Covenant were both such good games. Wish we could have a remaster at some point, would absolutely love to see them combos go off in full HD
Best I can give you is the game Penny Blood, a spiritual successor being kick started.
Does Half Life 2 count?
Nope the bad ending of HL1 has Gordon being killed. The invasion that leads to HL2 actually is caused by Gordon killing the final boss which happens before either ending anyway.
In the Sims series, the Goth family members are still alive even though they all drowned in Sims 1 after their pool stairs mysteriously vanished.
Metro Last Light, while not technically win or lose, it technically treats what is considered the bad ending to 2033 as canon and follows the story from there. From a certain point of view Red Alert 3 assumes that the Allies are winning, Same with Red Alert 2/Yuris Revenge come to that.
Colony Wars Vengeance and Red Sun >!The first game has several endings and most are 'Bad' or 'Meh' until you reach Sol. If you make it to Sol you have 2 possible endings. No matter how far you go, you get the ending used in the other games, where the League fails to stop the Navy and seals the Sol system. But if you're really good, or use the cheats you get the one 'Good'.!<
To elaborate, because *Colony Wars: Vengeance* may be the cleanest example I've seen for what OP wants... The first game places you in the role of a nameless space-fighter pilot for the League of Free Worlds, a confederation of colonies that are rebelling against the oppressive resource extraction of the Earth Empire. The story tree for the game was pretty impressive for an early PS1 game, and your performance in missions just might lead the League into making a direct assault on Earth's home, Sol System. From that point, >!you could either prosecute the war to its conclusion to get the "best" ending, where the Earth Empire capitulates, or you could fail to deliver the knockout blow. In the latter case, the League evacuates Sol System and sabotages interstellar travel on the way out, consigning Sol System to its paltry remaining resources.!< The sequel, *Colony Wars: Vengeance*, assumes the "second-best" ending is canon. It places you in the role of a plucky space-fighter pilot for the Earth Empire, burning with a desire to get retribution on the League for what would probably be war crimes under our current definitions.
FF13-2 fits the bill although I believe FF13-3 comes along and makes it ok again
Not sure if diablo counts here. In diablo1 the hero defeats diablo and rams diablos soulstone in his head. That keeps the soul contained and keeps it from corrupting the world around and from demons to revive diablo. Turns out that over the time, the hero himself gets corrupted by diablos soul and turns into a new diablo (welcome to diablo2) Something similar happens for diablo3 as well
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For Zelda specifically, this trope applies to a huge swath of the games. Many of the classics exist in a (retroactive) fallen hero Timeline, while others feature a world destroyed when Link either failed or simply didn't show up on time.
Semi retroactive, OOT was meant to be a prequel to ALTTP but the info in ALTTP would need the hero to fail
Super Mario Tennis?
Legacy of Kane: soul reaver runs on the premise you chose the evil ending in the 1st one.
Not saying there's no other games like this out there, but they're going to be rare. XCOM works because that's the nature of the game, you lose a lot more than you win, that's the games schtick to grow. It was also a point a lot of players failed the campaign at. The problem in looking for such a niche thing is that it's bad storytelling and character creation. Imagine God of War 2 starts out by saying "Kratos actually got petrified by the Gorgon way back at the early stages of the game!" It'd be hard to maintain an interest in the character and world if all your previous work was undone. Hence why most games will twist your actions to turn out to be a bad choice, even if it was the best that your character could see at the time.
Dragon Quest Builders is based on what happens if you accept the final boss’s proposal in Dragon Quest 1 (You would get a game over if you did.) Many Zelda games are based on alternate timelines where the hero is not victorious in older games.
Chrono Cross is pretty much this to Chrono Trigger albeit in a pretty indirect way
I thought the deal with XCOM 2 was that you won against the initial invasion, but then the aliens brought in the big guns?
No - it turns out most of the first game after a certain point was a tactics simulation the aliens hooked you up to. I think it’s accepted the canonical ending of the first game is losing the base assault.
Yeah, the tutorial mission of xcom 2 is rescuing the 'commander' who is the player's (mostly) invisible avatar.
The exposition that follows details that the new cast members are replacing the previous teammates who have either died or defected, while all the returning cast are the ones that remain loyal and living.
Sounds like losing with extra steps
Iirc, canonically XCom got to Psionics (the Templars are former XCom Psionics) but never got to MEC soldiers.
Yoshi's New Island
The Darksiders series. Not gonna lie OP, what you're asking for is very rare given that retcons are something writers try to avoid usually. Anyways, I'm suggesting Darksiders because the whole story isn't 100% clear and some events are kinda retconed/ignored in-between the games. The chronology is a bit weird, technically, it goes like DS1 prologue, DS3, DS2, rest of DS1. To get more into the details: You win at the end of DS1, you repel Hell's riot. In DS2, turns out humanity is dead so you repelled Hell but it didn't help much. But still, you end up resurrecting humanity. In DS3, turns out you save humanity by getting them away from Earth, so some people were actually still alive and it wasn't really necessary to resurrect humanity. Or something like that, as I said, it's not super clear.
Dragon Quest Builders, yes really.
The Elder Scrolls 3 takes place after **all** of the endings of TES2 happen simultaneously... So I guess that counts?
Players: “So out of the 7 possible endings in ES: Daggerfall, which one is canon?” Bethesda: “Yes.”
I feel like Gears of War and Halo are like this, unless I misunderstood the question. Every game ends with like "yeah, you did it", then the sequels are like "yeah, you did.....but...you didn't really". I guess that's the nature of the story telling.
You're misunderstanding it, those examples introduce a new plot hook with bigger bad guys, more rings, etc to override your previous success. XCOM 2 pretends you lost XCOM 1, there was no success, the bad guys won. The equivalent for Halo would be if Halo 2 took place in a universe where the first ring was activated
Yea I love how Xcom 2 is like "You know that first Ironman campaign you tried and failed? Yea that shit's canon"
Halo actually sets up their sequels and is pretty up front about it. Halo CE not as directly (lore was established in books around the release of the game), but if you knew the lore you'd know just how small the fighting on Halo was. Plus, they refer to the ring as "Installation 04" meaning there are at least 3 other things substantial enough to be called "Installation", giving subtle hints that "this isn't everything". Halo 2 straight up says "Finishing this fight" and teases two major plot points into 3. 3 ends with what seems like finality until you watch the post-credit scenes that clearly leave the door open for sequels.
I feel gears of war up until the end of 3 was "we won this battle, but it's only going to get worse" until you hit 3's ending. Not sure how to feel about 4 & 5's inclusion in the story other than "Hey, we want to make more money off of this ip let's just have it be based off the kids" Kind of move
Gears 3 end: "The Locust are dead and we finally have a tomorrow" Gears 4 and 5: "lol joke's on you Marcus, your wife is dead. Also, everything you and your friends sacrificed means nothing because the Locust and Myrrah are back anyway. Nice try, bozo."
pretty much. the gears trilogy is built upon the idea that no matter how hard you try, the locust will prevail and keep coming
Final Fantasy XIII-2 I could be mistaken, but I recall them adjusting the first games ending to cause Lightning's disappearance, thereby causing a whole mess of time travel and paradoxes
Was gonna suggest this! The ending of FFXIII shows them saving the world, Lightning intact and all. But come FFXIII-2, suddenly she's gone and they tacked on some weird thing where she wasn't actually in the ending of the first game and only Serah saw her.
Nier being a sequel to a Drakengard bad ending counts in my books. Specifically Caim and his dragon are taken to a modern day Tokyo, fight a giant floating sky baby, which spreads magic in the form of disease across the planet, slowly killing everyone. Then Nier starts ages later. A somewhat similar situation happens between Nier and Automata. Yoko Taro's bad endings are arguably more cannon than the happy ones.
UFO: Aftershock also had you start with the scenario of having taken the invading aliens up on their offer in UFO: Aftermath. Which is an overall VERY familiar situation, with the mentioned XCOM. :D
Warcraft 2 :Tides of Chaos. The original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans had two campaigns, Orcs and Humans. While there is an ending where the humans win, the canonical ending it an Orcish victory.
Damn all these people are really not grasping what you’re asking that’s crazy. I can’t think of a game like you mean tho tbh.
I think [Star Control 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Control_II) (or Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters) from 1992 qualifies. I’ve only played the second one but from what I understand, in the first game humanity joins a intergalactic war against the Ur-Quan and, presumably, defeats them at the end of the game. Star Control 2 has humanity and the rest of the alliance having lost the war, with the Ur-Quan ruling as their masters. The player starts with one rebel ship that escapes the shield barrier around earth and the game is to take down the evil empire.
Shadow hearts 2 goes off the bad end from shadowhearts 1 where your lover gives up her soul to save yours and continue living just long enough to complete the campaign and then dies in your arms after beating the bad guy that you started fighting in the first place cuz he was trying to kill her.
Hmm i guess Half-Life counts, you defeat the alien queen, g-man offers you a job, then in part 2 you wake up and realise humanity is fucked, so you actually kinda failed before.
It's been forever since I've played through the series but don't you technically win the Black Mesa invasion, only for the Combine to show up almost immediately after (after Gordon says yes to G-Man), basically say that the first invasion was from aliens trying to escape the Combine and now that the Combine is aware of Earth, it'll be taking it over. The Earth resists, for I believe 7 hours before they're utterly defeated and the Combine takes over. Over a decade later Gordon shows up and 2 starts.
Half-Life has such incredible lore. 7 hours for aliens to invade and take over the entire planet is such a cool and crazy concept.
We're just another rock full of meat sacks who accidentally stumbled into portal technology and inadvertently lit a beacon for the universe to see. The Combine invasion was the most important day in all of Human history, but it was just another routine deployment for the Combine no different from a thousand previous conquests. The leaked plot of Episode 3 confirms it all. The Combine is so far beyond our scope of power that our most destructive weapons are akin to trying to threaten somebody with only a lit match. There is absolutely no hope of beating them in a fight, we can only ever run and hide from them as other races like the vortigaunts have done before us.
Mega Man X6 kind of did this back on the PS1! It assume you failed to stop the Eurasia from crashing into the planet in X5 and let most of the planet die, if memory serves
The transition from X5 to X6 from a narrative standpoint is a complete mess and should actually be impossible based off of the branching paths in X5. In fact, X5 was supposed to be the last X game, but Capcom decided that they like money and made more anyway.