Since the Beast crew just completed Life is Strange I thought this would be a good time to discuss the ending once more, and (more specifically) talk about my biggest problem with it. (Spoilers, obviously)

So, my biggest problem with LiS's ending isn't that all your choices don't matter anymore, it's not the story and it's not the characters. It's how the game presents the last choice. Because if we are bein realistic here: The odds are pretty much all in favour of saving the town. Not only is it the obvious "good" choice, but even Chloe is telling you to do it. And this feels a bit....dishonest to me. Not that Chloe does that, but the force with which the game tries to push you towards this one choice. And that to me is a problem and was ultimately the reason why I chose the other ending. Because I felt like the game was trying to trick me into choosing what it thought is the "right" option. If you watch both endings, it's pretty clear where Don'tNod's time and effort was spent (hint: It's not the Save Chloe ending) and I think I even read that there wasn't supposed to be a choice at the end, which would make way more sense.

Because the way the choices are presented is basically the game saying "Well, you COULD also do this dumb, stupid choice that only horrible people do, I guess. If you wanna be an asshole...." which, to me, always is a problem in games with choices. It's the same way I felt about a lot of the "evil" choices in "old" Bioware RPGs. There was no nuance to it, no reason other than "I want to be an asshole" which CAN be fine but it ultimately boring to me. I need another reason to kill the cat on the tree other than "I'm evil". And just like those choices the last choice in LiS just seemed to begrudgingly sit there just so people had something to choose.

What should have happened: Either don't have the last choice at all or at least try to give me any reason why you could go with the other ending. How about this: "Maybe the tornado is the thing that's supposed to happen and Chloe is the one who should live? I got my time-poweres just in time to save her, that can't be an accident, right?" Of course that's not a great argument, but it would have at least been anything instead of the game basically screaming KILL CHLOE! into your ear. Or go all out and have Chloe begging you to save her. It would have made the decission actually gut-wrenching instead of pretty easy. That being said, I'm actually surprised how even the split between "Save Chloe" and "Kill Chloe" is.

What do you think?

I don't feel like that at all. Choosing one over the many is, of course, mathematically the "bad" decision, but I didn't feel any extra pressure from the game to save the town beyond this fundamental bit of logic. It's not like they show you the sad faces of everyone dying or anything to make you feel bad. In fact, this speaks directly to your complaint that DONTNOD spent more time on the save ending because it was the "right" ending. Instead of giving us this prolonged look into the destruction where we see who was hurt and killed, or a scene with Chloe flipping out like why did you save me, we just see her and Max driving off to an uncertain future. It's not a happy ending, but it's a hopeful one that makes absolutely zero effort to make the player feel bad.

Apparently, and this is only hearsay, Don'tNod did want "Save Chloe" to be an equally valid choice and ending, but they ran against a time/budget issue. The ending choice is still really clumsy, regardless of whether or not that's true, but I can appreciate the intent for it to be a real choice. People were saying that the Sacrifice Chloe ending did feel right when they got it.

Overall, I'm with Vinny. The ending lacked grace, but it was a hard game to end.

When I first played ep5 at release I actually felt like the game was really pushing me into the direction of "save chloe". Like, right up until the final moments before the decision, Max, throughout the whole episode, is always telling you how she has to do this and do that just to save chloe, how she is the number one priority etc. I wasn't even all that much into chloe as a character the first time through, but it really (to me) felt like giving up chloe was a thing Max wouldn't do and so I decided to stay in character and save the bae. Something I never did again in my more considerate playthroughs afterwards, even though I liked Chloe a lot more then.

I think the fact that as many people chose the "bad" ending is the primary counterargument to you. It was a hard choice and one of the quintessential human choices - be utilitarian and save the most people who you are less attached to, or go with your emotional, personal attachment and save person who is closest to you. It had a very Final Destination feel in that Chloe was somehow doomed and would be repeatedly claimed by death unless enough sacrifices were made, tinged with elements of Butterfly Effect (and every other time travel movie with the message of "time travel is bad bad shit"), and the common story question of how much you would sacrifice or give up to save someone you love. Having seen the Chloe ending it does seem more bare bones, as I was expecting it to linger more on the consequences of your choice by more directly showing the fate of Warren, Chloe's family, or the other secondary Blackwell characters. But beyond that I think the choice itself was the one foreshadowed from the start and fairly well-executed.

The only complaint I would have is that the "good" ending is a little too good in that everything works out perfectly beyond Chloe dying, with no indication that it would all turn out that way. I suppose it would have been doubly frustrating to make that choice and have something happen like Jefferson getting away with it, unless they more fully set for the consequences for the choice, but I do find it a little too coincidental that the one change not only fixes the timeline but also solves every problem you've spent five episodes solving.

I likewise had less of a problem with the fact that it undoes everything, which seems to be a major objection to the "good" ending. The implication from Warren and others, especially in the last episode, is that as much as Max thinks she's changing things and righting wrongs, her time travel appears to be just changing things for her. There are myriad other worlds out there that live on with the consequences of what she has done or undone, and she's forcing people to live through these events. And even if you just focus on Max's timeline, the sacrifice ending just makes it an extremely personal story for her, going through the journey in which she connects and reconnects with the people around her, finding out that her coveted art career is nothing compared to the people she loved in life.

It's conceivable that you could play a version of that game where you don't make any kind of connection with anyone in the Arcadia Bay except Chloe; everyone at blackwell continues to be an ass to you, You have no interest in Warren etc etc. I don't know how well the last episode would account for that, but I felt that if I did play that way the choice might feel different.

You can think that about the ending, but I would like to raise a couple of things from what I've heard other people say and what I generally thought of the ending (not to change your opinion, just some thoughts I have about the ending):

• When I talked to a friend of mine, he choose Chloe over saving the town, and didn't have any qualms about it. His reasoning was twofold: the bond between Chloe and Max, but also what they went through together. Chloe is kind of destined in a weird way to have a rough life. Her father dies, and she is stuck with an imperfect and troubled step father (who isn't actually the root of all evil, but the nuance isn't on the surface when he has to deal with things like Chloe doing drugs). When Max does try and fix her life, Chloe gets paralyzed and is slowly dying, while her family is up to their necks in debt and stress. Between Chloe's not so great life and the week from hell Max went through, particularly with the events in Episodes 4 and 5, my friend's argument was they were both the best things they had going for each other in the game, and he couldn't tear them apart. I've seen anecdotal comments on this very site with people saying the "right" choice was sacrificing the town. Their reasons could very well be different than what my friend said, but that's one take.
• There are probably realities of game development at work. I think Episode 5 had the longest gap between the other episodes, and it kind of shows for what's in there. A lot of different scenes in multiple locations and days. The random tricks the developers pulled that happen in what I refer to as the nightmare section of Episode 5. Rendering the town being destroyed, etc. When it came to the two endings, there was probably fairly equivalent effort put into both endings. Sure, one ending is longer, but both are similar in some respects. There isn't any dialogue, music plays in the background, and it's about reflecting on the past (or rather what happened in the game) and where those characters are going. From a production standpoint, the saving Arcadia Bay ending included the graveyard, characters wearing suits, and a few more time travelling photographs. The saving Chloe ending had fewer elements like this, but also had to render the completely destroyed town. You could probably argue this ending from a couple of different angles. Like you could say there is little to say about the fact Chloe and Max are still alive, so the ending didn't need to be that long. Or you could say they put more resources into the saving Arcadia Bay ending for whatever reason. Maybe they used the same song to draw a parallel between the end of Episode 1, which had a montage of all of the major characters reacting to the changes happening around them, and the end of Episode 5, where all of those people are now dead and there's only Chloe and Max left. Or you could just as easily, and perhaps more convincingly, argue the developers were cheap or their licensed music budget was running low at that point. Personally, I feel like this was the end of the game, and the ending to arguably the most complicated and difficult episode to make, so they didn't have a ton to work with in terms of resources or time devoted to showing the destruction of the town. I still think there is some truth in the fact there isn't a whole lot to say at that point of the story: Chloe and Max are still alive, and they are still together, despite everything that happened. How you feel about that can be up to your interpretation. I've heard people say they were happy Max and Chloe were both still alive, and I've heard people argue that Max should have sacrificed Chloe for any number of reasons.
• Speaking for myself, I struggled a little bit with the final choice. I couldn't initially decide, because I couldn't easily accept sacrificing Chloe or sacrificing Arcadia Bay. In the end, I saved Arcadia Bay. My general reasoning was Episode 5 really focuses on how much control Max has on a given situation. The series dabbled a little bit with this throughout, from how she used her time travelling powers on dumb things like making Chloe shoot at cars in a cool way, but she didn't have them when it was time to save Kate. Episode 5 was directly focusing on this idea, from Max travelling back and forth in time trying to get out of situations, only to go back again because the storm still happened. In the end, I felt like Max was in over her head, in the sense that the universe was out for her and Chloe. People probably have different interpretations, but I always viewed the tornado, the snowstorm, the two moons, and so on was the result of some kind of parallel universes colliding into each other (whether it was a literal butterfly effect where one change in the past caused that destruction or the storm that destroyed Arcadia Bay was a once in a thousand year storm that just popped existence in that time and place). All of that felt like it was just beyond Max and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She just had to accept that everyone dies at some point and there's nothing that can be done about that. This just happened to be Chloe's time.
• Generally speaking, Life is Strange doesn't really have any evil choices. There isn't a choice to save Kate or push Kate off the roof. Siding with so-and-so over so-and-so isn't really about doing it out of spite or trying to be a terrible person. A lot of the choices in the moment fall in a grey area or have pros and cons given the context of the story. The only choices that are closer to being evil are throwing the bone in the street (but Max is remorseful and didn't mean to hurt Pompidou), trying to use the gun against Frank when you first meet him, and (maybe) not warning Victoria about Nathan (I actually haven't seen this conversation myself, and it seemed like only 9% of the people picked this according to the game's stats). So yeah, there is pressure with the game saying "Hey, maybe you should save the town", but I think both choices go along with Max's personality and ethos. People can and have argued which ending is the "better" ending, but I don't think saving Chloe is itself "evil" or anything like that. The game doesn't end with Max putting on sunglasses and saying "Fuck y'all! You guys are all assholes!" as the town gets wasted.

(As an aside, I haven't watched all of the Playdate for Episode 5. Based on Twitter, it sounds like they saved the town. I'll see what their thought process was whenever it's posted, so maybe some of what I mentioned also came up during their playthrough.)

It's not like I don't believe them about the time/budget thing, but man, a lot of that last chapter seemed unnecessary. The last part where you're trying to head to the diner when everything is fucked is really disjointed. You're trying to find Warren so you can reset things, so all of the "save the townspeople" stuff felt really dumb. This timeline is getting wiped in 5 minutes, who cares if some random guy gets electrocuted. And then we have the crazy stuff. I thought some of it was neat, but it went on for way too long.

I saved the town, it wasn't even a hard choice for me. But I laughed seeing how simple the other ending was, and felt bad because that's the ending people actually went for in their game. If it's really because they ran out of time or budget, that's really unfortunate because they put their priority on "I need Scissors 61!" rather than a decent ending for both choices.

It's obvious that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and Chloe herself has agreed to meet her fate. Precisely because of that I knew I had to let Arcadia burn, to show her I cared and I would go to the end to save her.

Yeah, that's basically being the counterpoint I've had in my head to all the people saying that the choices don't end up mattering. Like if you went through that whole game hating everybody that wasn't Chloe, the choice would've been super easy for you. And I'm not faulting anyone who played the game and didn't connect with the characters on the same level that I did, nor am I saying that the choice I made of Sacrificing Chloe was objectively the "right" choice. What I'm saying is that the choices absolutely did matter, just not in the way that people may have wanted them to. They shaped the way you approached the final choice in a way that a purely linear game couldn't have, and I loved them for that.

For me, Sacrificing Chloe was the only option. On a surface level, I couldn't let all those people that I connected to die just to save her. I couldn't kill Joyce, Warren, Victoria, Frank, etc. The way I played that game and went out of my way to save Alyssa in every episode alone, to the point where I restarted Episode 2 solely because I missed her getting hit by the damn toilet roll, dictated that I couldn't just then decide to let the town burn for Chloe's survival.

Relating to that, I really tried to put myself in Max's shoes and do what I thought would be the right thing in every given scenario, no matter how big or small. So like when Chloe was getting chewed out by David for smoking pot, I jumped out of that damn closet and took responsibility because, outside of the story reason of Max knowing how much of an asshole David is from looking in the garage and finding all the surveillance cameras and photos, I'd like to think that I'd jump in between my friend and their parent if it was clear to see that the parent was in the wrong/being unfairly harsh. Or like with the homeless woman behind Two Whales, I'd like to think that I'd warn someone that a giant tornado was coming and would kill them if they didn't leave; regardless of whether they believed me or not. So when the final choice hit, I hoped that I'd make the hard choice and sacrifice someone I loved in order to save the lives of others.

On a deeper level, I thought that the whole game was about Max learning to let go of Chloe. There are so many things, both directly and indirectly, that reference that theme in the game that I couldn't ignore them. The blue birds that you can save in some of the early episodes, the plant that you can water in your room, going back in time to save Chloe's dad in the hopes of giving her a better life and subsequently ending her life to spare her and her family greater pain, the fact that Chloe can die in so many ways that you can undo by rewinding, the early parts of Episode 5 where you are constantly rewinding time to save Chloe: all of that was, to me, leading up to Max letting her go when the time came. She had fucked up so much of time and space and put herself through hell to save her time and again, and now it was time to accept that, no matter what, Chloe will die, but she will always, always live on in Max's memories. In that sense, it reminded me a WHOLE lot of Madoka Magica and Homura's character arc throughout that whole show, and you'll (hopefully) know what I mean when I say that if you've seen that show before.

But yeah, Sacrificing Chloe was the choice I made and I fully stand by it, but I totally get why people would go the other way, even if I couldn't do it myself for the reasons stated above.

I guess but I'm pretty close to that person, I didn't like anyone else in the game nearly as much as I did Chloe or that relationship but I can imagine taking no other option than to save the town.

didn't play the game personally but just sounds like one of those no win situations, where even if you did choose to save chloe you go against her wishes and even though you saved her life, she probably would feel disgusted because her life cost many others theirs. Feel like that relationship would deteriorate eventually and the girl would end up commiting suicide anyways from the guilt and leaving the MC alone. Sounds like a game i probably won't play though if this is the end result :P

The endings are not good/bad. The budget constraints comment being brought up are in relation to them elaborating further on where certain things went because of your choices, i.e. the homeless woman might be shown alive somewhere. Here is the quote from Dontnod's Michael Koch:

"The ending where Chloe lives does not feel ambiguous to me. You sacrifice everyone for Chloe, they leave together, saying they will be together. I don't know, maybe that was a mistake but to me it was clear enough, and beautiful. This kind of choice and sacrifice you do it for love, I didn't feel it was necessary to show more as the message and feeling felt powerful enough. And their smiling in the car felt enough to me to induce what will happen next. Sorry if this wasn't showed enough though.

I also thought that with all the destruction and death it would not have been the right moment for a kiss. This will happen after the ending, the next days, to me this is where it is leading for sure. And this is also the point, their relation is so strong and the player connected to Chloe if he did this choice, so I didn't think anything more had to be shown, because the player knew how both characters felt.

And to be honest we thought a lot about more variations in the car ending, but the production reality and budget also kicked in, so we tried our best to make it work having in mind what I told you. But for sure this ending is only the beginning for Max and Chloe, like in a good book what happens next is also in your own imagination :)"

The good/bad belief along with "the creators obviously wanted you to sacrifice Chloe" stuff seems to come from the fact they executed the "Sacrifice Chloe" ending much better. I think most would agree ending A was executed better. Ending A was unbelievable. Ending B was fine, but felt like it lacked something.

To me, that's more about the fact ending B was a lot harder to pull off. It was meant to be a little ambiguous as to where it goes next. While there is a definitive conclusion to the story if you sacrifice Chloe, sacrificing Arcadia Bay is essentially the start of a new story. People who chose this ending clearly cared about Chloe and probably saw the two romantically, but there was no immediate opportunity to depict romance. I have seen others want some pretty dark things out of this ending, but that wasn't really what they were going for. Also, the camera lingering on dead bodies for extended periods would have been something out of character for the game. When you break it all down, this was just a really tough ending to pull off.

Maybe the way they could have made ending B work was, over the credits, maybe show Max and Chloe trying to make a go of it in LA. I dunno. It ended in the right place, so even though it was off in what it depicted on screen, at least the player can fill in the rest based on how they saw it concluding. That's not to excuse the fact that the execution on that ending should have been better. But it's just kind of a lesser issue to me than say Mass Effect 3 where the issues with that thing went way beyond simple execution.

The ending was rushed and horrible. Choice based games should have endings be indicitive of the choices you made throughout.

Only needed 2 sentences rather than walls of text.

I agree that there shouldn't have been a last choice at all, but also? There shouldn't have been any choices period. Life is Strange is only telling one story, and all the choices do is allow you to have it make more sense or less sense. When I played the game, I ended up having a platonic friendly relationship with Chloe, always gave Victoria and Warren the nice treatment and connected with a lot of the townsfolk. I grew as a person, gaining confidence and responsibility. I saved Kate. When alternate Chloe asked me to kill her to ease both her pain and her parent's pain, I did. I kissed Warren. Then in the end? I killed everyone and drove away with Chloe, smiling, after having nightmares about Warren stalking me and Chloe slutting around with everyone I knew. What kind of bizarre resolution is that to the choices I picked? There is nothing wrong with just having a linear story. The Phoenix Wright games wouldn't be any better if you could choose to romance Maya or not. Giving me the ability to choose all of these minor details only allowed me to sabotage the storyline.

Having said that, the ending was stupid to me for another reason: There's a butterfly that literally flaps its wings and make a storm. That's the most dumb literal interpretation of the butterfly effect I've ever seen. How does that even work, when the butterfly moves around anyway? Why does using your superpowers to save a person suddenly result in two moons, snow and beached whales? I guess I missed the Spider-Man story where he climbed on so many walls that a meteor crashed into the Earth. I just hope that when Life is Strange 2 comes around and you're a person with fire powers, setting fire to things doesn't magically make the oceans transform into mushrooms. The final choice lacks impact to me because the reason it exists is bananas. Actually watching episode 5 again yesterday, I had a great time. It was mostly better than I remembered. But this part is just nuts, and it is all their own fault. There are several time travel stories I've seen these last years where cataclysmic events leading from time travel make complete sense in the context of their universe(Stein's;gate and Madoka, for the record. And they are both about saving people from dying with time travel). This is just silly.

Oh man, I'm so glad someone brought up Stein's;Gate. It's literally all I could think of through that last episode, largely in the context of "This is just Stein's;Gate with less likable characters".

It's a real bummer that it seems the only moral anyone can think of for time travel is "don't do it", which at this point feels super lazy.

I'm still struggling with the decision I made at the end of the game. I felt like it was the right one, but it just felt wrong to me. Am I disappointed that Chloe and Max just ride away into the sunset without even bringing up "WELP, EVERYONE WE KNOW JUST DIED HORRIBLY. TIME FOR VACATION!"? Yes. A little. Maybe I'm not seeing 100% through the romanticized ideas of two lovers running away together, but holy shit dude. like literally everyone is dead. I couldn't stop thinking "WHAT ARE MAX'S PARENTS GONNA THINK? IS SHE GOING TO CALL THEM? DO THEY THINK SHE'S DEAD?"

I like the ending. Love it even. Sure I find faults with it, but it was mostly from me not being able to "get it" enough to not ask those kinds of questions. That's probably not what you want in your dramatic finale, but I just couldn't help it. You do so much, help so many, and then in the end, one of those choices basically makes it all moot. And all I have at that point are questions.

At the end of it all, I was actually more interested in knowing what Max's powers were. "Butterfly Effect" this, "Butterfly Effect" that, but how the fuck does that shit even happen? And two moons? Ghost deer? Dead animals all over the place? Max in the snow globe? I would have killed for some answers for all that mystical shit. Solve the murder, save/improve the lives of people around you, then speak to a warlock or something. I don't even know what I would have wanted to happen, but at least something.

I dislike the fact that is a "push button A for ending A or push button B for ending B" scenario.

I don't buy into the whole good ending/bad ending thing (from a winning the game standpoint, not a moral/quality perspective)

Life is Strange's two endings are both presented as endings with both good and bad things resulting from what happened:
In Sacrifice Chloe ending you may save the town and it's people, but you loose the most important person in your life (at least that is what Chloe was in my game)
In Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending you save the most important person to you but the town gets destroyed and (presumably, although none of this is shown) everybody else dies.

Because there one ending in longer than the other a lot of people seem to see that as evidence that that is the official true ending, where the only reason that ending is longer is that they have to spend more time checking in with different people. This feels a bit like some people deciding that the destroy ending in Mass Effect 3 is the true ending because of the 2 second clip of Shepard taking a breath.

The one problem I have with the choice in the end is that the whole "you are the cause of the storm" comes a bit out of nowhere. It also doesn't explain why you have the visions of the storm before you get your powers or give any assurances that sacrificing Chloe will still allow you to save Kate and stop Mr. Jefferson, you have to take that one on faith, it turns out that Nathan telling all to the police fixes those problems, but there's no way of knowing that beforehand so you're potentially sacrificing Kate and all the girls Mr. Jefferson will kill (you can't act on the info you have of course, that would be changing time, resulting in the storm again)

In the end I chose to sacrifice the town, the bond I had made with Chloe felt like Max could not make any other choice (also in my mind, wouldn't the people of the town get in their cars and leave when they see a huge tornado thing coming towards them, it's not that fast considering all the time Max and Chloe has to spend talking while it hovers ominously on the edge of town). I'm not saying my end was the true ending, I'm not saying it is the bad ending, I'm saying it was the right ending for my story. The choices you make during the game does feed into the ending, but not in a game mechanics way, but in that the journey you've made informs what descision you will take, save Chloe seemed right for me based on my journey, others will be drawn to the other ending because of their journey.

Why?

It's totally not the "good" choice. I've seen both endings now and I am 100% content with saving Chloe as the true ending.

From a role playing stand point saving Chloe should be the good ending considering the entire game is about Max trying to save her or improve her quality of life. I can see how anyone can make the argument of how the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few but that really isn't the case here. If the whole story focused on Max's desire to help everyone then I can understand how saving Arcadia Bay could be the good ending but seeing how much Max went though for Chloe not choosing her over the town just seems wrong.

The Save Chloe ending was what I chose, and the problem I had was that it is weirdly unsatisfying and cold.

Doesn't fit at all with the heightened emotional tone of the rest of the game to have just a short scene where you are just emotionlessly driving through the devastated town and no one says anything. Why is Max suddenly a sociopath? It feels like a 'game over'. It was a pity as it tarnished my experience of the game.

Even looking past the idea of sacrificing a city to save your girlfriend being kind of monstrous saving her just seems like the entire game has gone nowhere at all. People make the complaint that the alternative negates what you've been doing all along but to me it's the only outcome that makes it seem like anything has moved forward.

I would have saved Chloe but the game is totally telling you to save the town.

Except this is an incredibly lazy critique that makes subjective views without anything to back them up, sorry. That's not at all an interesting way to start a discussion. Which is what an opening post in a thread is ultimately trying to do in a topic like this.

Anyway, I am going to have to disagree with you @abendlaender about the nature of a "good" & "bad" ending. I don't think it was nearly that black & white, keeping with the overall theme of the game. If you have to characterise it as anything I'd say noble & selfish but even that is a tad simplistic. I saved Chloe in my game, but I rewatched that ending yesterday after the Beast playthrough finished as people were talking about how it was so weak which I didn't remember thinking at the time. And I didn't feel bad about it. It wasn't a straight forward choice, but at the time I could not imagine Max going through that weak, doing all of that to save Chloe time & time again just to get to this point & accept fate.

I remember being a lot more pig-headed as an 18 year old than that, especially on matters of the heart. Yes, if you do a utilitarian calculation there is only one outcome that seems defensible but put yourself in the shoes of Max. In the heat of the moment with seconds to decide, and only a guess, a feeling, that letting Chloe die would stop this from all happening. Obviously in the meta-sense of watching a film/playing a game you realise that this is the end and that it would be resolved one way or the other, but for the character of Max that context isn't there. And she's having to decide between saving a town which, in my own experience, has seen a good hearted young woman, a friend, jump off the school dorm roof after being drugged & bullied & humiliated. That leads to some negative feelings, as would all your interactions with the Prescott's & their control of the entire town including the police force. Having to choose between saving that town or your best friend, who you may have even stronger, more intimate feelings for, I don't think that's nearly as easy a choice as you make out. You don't have time to make a utilitarian calculation in Max's place, she's going to go with her heart.

I couldn't help put paralysed Chloe out of her misery in Episode 4, even as she begged for it. It was too much for her to contemplate, killing this girl even when it was perhaps the most humane solution. I'm not opposed to euthanasia at all from on a moral level, I had a similar difficulty with it that Austin & Alex both voiced, you just don't want to kill your friend while also trying to respect their right to choose how to die. But that's a lot to ask of an 18 year old, to ask of anybody. So how could I then, having spent so much time trying to save Chloe, just let her be shot by Nathan? I really think the decision was genuinely hard to make but it depends on not just the decisions you made in the game but perhaps how you approached the game, do you roleplay as Max or just play it at a remove? I always tend to roleplay & have a distinct idea of what my character would do in these Telltale-style adventure games (one reason I didn't like the GOT game so much, the sheer volume of characters meant changing roles & perhaps confusing some people with others).

As to the quality of the endings themselves, I'd agree that the Save Arcadia Bay ending feels more satisfying in a way, it wraps the game up with the funeral overseen by Larry David. But sometimes movies & books don't need to have a satisfying, neatly wrapped conclusion: the idea is that life goes on no matter what just occurred, there was already the deer returned to town to hammer that idea in. Max looks shocked at the wreckage surrounding her as they drive through the town but Chloe reminds her that she's there for her, they have a unique connection to one another and can face anything together. They don't know what lies ahead, whether or not the universe will continue trying to kill Chloe in a Final Destination style, whether Max still has powers, whether the freak natural occurrences are over, whether it's all over. But it doesn't matter. When they have each other they can face the world. No words need to be spoken at this point.

To sum up, I'd argue that the choice was absolutely a real & hard choice, impacted by how you played the game not mechanically but emotionally, depending upon the connections & interactions you had throughout the 5 Episodes. And I'd also argue the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay option is well realised. For a game about teens I felt conveniently like video game writing had grown up a little by the end of it: ambiguity isn't necessarily something to be feared in the conclusion of a narrative. Their adventure isn't at an end. Think of Blade Runner. Or how about Inception for a more recent example, or No Country For Old Men?

I've gone a bit so I'll end it now, but I definitely didn't feel cheated or unsatisfied when I got to see the ending of my playthrough, it was just the ending. Being disappointed about it seems to me like being disappointed with how The Sopranos ended. I'd love to know what happens to Chloe & Max from here, if they do get a happily ever after, but leaving doubt in there is no bad thing. It certainly doesn't need to be seen as a setup to a sequel for example, I doubt I'll ever know what happened, but that's a game story that will probably stay with me for a long, long time. It touched me like few other games ever have.

@n7: I think the whole point of the Save ending is to not dwell on all the bad shit that just happened. The moment you really show people the destruction, show Joyce and Warren dead or whatever, or have Chloe flip out on Max like "why did you save me!?", you immediately make it into the "bad" ending.

@billmcneal: I dunno about that, considering the last thing you see before she wakes up is a step-by-step walkthrough of every emotional beat she shared with Chloe.

Maybe I didn`t get as invested in Chloe as some people, but for me at least this was not even a choice. From a personal standpoint I don`t understand how anyone could be willing to sacrifice everyone they know and love for the sake of one person.

As a counterpoint to some people saying showing the death and destruction would have made the save Chloe ending a "bad" ending I actually thing that`s a pretty cheap solution to the problem. The thing that made the sacrifice Chloe ending good in my opinion is that it focuses on the sacrifice you had to make to set things right and shows the pain Max feels for making that choice (the bathroom scene, the funeral etc.). The save Chloe ending on the other hand shows them seemingly bummed about everyone dying for a hot second before going "Well, everyone we know just died, let`s go on a vacation!" and then drive off. This seemed especially wrong for me considering Chloe moments before had asked Max to save the town.

@odinsmana: I dunno, "everyone they know and love"? At most I'd say Max might love Joyce and likes Warren and Kate. Everyone else is just a classmate.

As far as the endings are concerned, I don't know that Sacrifice really is focusing on the bad. I mean yes, you see the funeral and everyone is sad, but at no point do you actually see Chloe. Instead you see everyone else who is alive and a clear, sunny day. It's a good balance that I think was also struck by the Save ending thanks to its brevity.

Personally I'm glad they didn't fall into the "why did you save me" trope that is basically ubiquitous across the genre. If someone just made an impossibly horrible decision in order to save my life, I would feel incredibly lucky and thankful.

@thomasnash said:

There are more games that violate McFart's assertion than follow it. For budget reasons, it's hard to have an ending that acknowledges all the permutations along the way. It's much easier that for some major decisions, there is a corresponding event later in the game that addresses that choice, but these events are usually somewhat compartmentalized, and they don't strive to tie them all together in one big scene.

Mass Effect has little moments throughout that are indicative of choices you made at various times, but the ending of Mass Effect 3 famously doesn't integrate those. The Walking Dead Season 1 has little moments throughout that are indicative of choices you made at various times, but the final episode is "weird dude who has secretly been following Lee puts Lee on blast for any of the bad shit he let Clem get exposed to, then it doesn't really change the ending other than him listing off all the shit you did, and the ending still comes down to whether Clem shoots Lee or just walks away".

Off the top of my head, I can't really think of any choice-based game that actually had an ending that significantly conforms to a variety of choices you made. Maybe they integrate a couple, but the ending is usually the ending, as written by the writers months and months ago.

@starvinggamer said:

I dunno, seems like it could possibly put a bit of pressure on the relationship.

@abendlaender: I liked the weirdness of the last episode , but you're right about that choice. Dontnod wanted Chloe to die at the end to do the Spanish Sahara / funeral setpiece.

I'd throw out Silent Hill 2 as the closest thing to what people seem to want when they broach this subject, but a) the method that game comes up with your ending, and I say this while mentioning Silent Hill 2 is one of my top 25 favorite games of all time, is utter rubbish and people only don't complain about it because everyone knows how to get the endings at this point, and b) the endings don't really change events drastically, but just recontextualize the meaning of the journey.

Bethesda games basically use small 30-60 second endings to quest lines to create the illusion of giant branching ending paths. Mass Effect 3... My god, there has never been a game that breaks the illusion of choice and just puts up a naked numerical evaluation of what your choices amounted to. Mass Effect 2 didn't really have branching ending paths, but just allowed for every character to live or die.

Maybe I need to finally write my blog post on this subject after all I've been meaning to for months as it's a fascinating subject.

@starvinggamer: Everyone she knows an loves is probably an exaggeration for Max, but if I remember correctly she did grow up in Arcadia Bay, so I don`t think it`s just three people she really likes and the rest are just class mates. (I may be wrong though).

They do also start the sacrifice Chloe ending by showing her getting shot (you hear it at least) and then you see her bleed out on the floor with Max sitting there crying, so while it doesn`t just focus on the bad I do think they make you feel the pain of your decision. This is opposed to the other ending where I felt like they didn`t make me think about the bad consequences of the decision, but instead mainly focused on the happy side of it. For me they didn`t find that balance between happy and sad that the kill Chloe ending found.

In the end it all comes down to personal preference and beliefs I guess.

@newhuman: I'm sure it becomes a fight/confrontation somewhere down the line, but in the moment I'm glad Chloe was content to be silently contemplative.

@cav829 said:

I still think the Mass Effect 2 ending (and frankly a bunch of The Walking Dead Season 1 and 2) is a kinda cheap choice. It's much easier to just set up a scenario where if you don't make the right judgment call then you kill various characters, and then simply code the game so that those characters A) aren't important later in the game, and B) don't show up in-world if they died previously. Nonlethal choices are hard, because you have to write responses to both outcomes; lethal choices are easy, because instead of writing two different sets of dialogue, you write one for if they're alive, and if they died you get a free pass to remove the character from the game and then you have to write little more than some short dialogue coming from other NPCs acknowledging how sad it is that they died. Mass Effect 1 has the Kaidan/Ashley choice, and the alive Wrex/dead Wrex choice, but ultimately they kinda marginalize those characters. Especially in Mass Effect 2's case, I wouldn't say that the "ending is indicative of the choices you made" because conveniently the suicide mission is the final thing in the game, and they don't have to have a bunch of follow up scenes with all these permutations of who lived and who died because the game ends shortly afterwards. Then in Mass Effect 3, if any of those characters died, if they were gonna be an NPC in ME3 then they just aren't there and if they were gonna be a party member then you don't get them, simple as that. Similarly in Walking Dead, often if you save a character who could die, that character is basically living on borrowed time and suddenly the writers give that character suspiciously little dialogue and fewer scenes to appear in, and then promptly kill them off in an episode or two, because they don't want to keep writing and animating a character who may be dead for 50% of players.

I think the Telltale-style games where killing off characters isn't very easy (The Wolf Among Us is a prequel, which largely constrains which main characters can possibly die, Life Is Strange takes places in the real world so every murder/suicide has to be a fairly big deal) just highlights how hard it is to have really attention-grabbing choices that are clearly impactful since you can't just go around offing 1-10 characters every game. The Wolf Among Us was weird because it felt like all you could really dictate is whether Bigby was a complete asshole to people, and the only way you really nudge the ending one way or the other is do you kill the big bad or turn him into a harmless animal forever, and then did you rat out your pig friend to the authorities and have him deported, and then does the frog guy like you or not. The Wolf Among Us, moment to moment, actually has way fewer interesting choices with consequences than something like Life Is Strange, where there are issues like "does Chloe have a gun" "is Kate alive" "whose side did you take in a variety of arguments and discussions" "were you nice or mean to this person". Life Is Strange does a fantastic job of having your choices affect future interactions and dialogue with a variety of characters, but like JUST ABOUT EVERY STORY GAME EVER, it has (in this case 2) fixed endings that fit the story and characters, and sorry that those endings don't acknowledge whether you overwatered the plant or signed Ms. Grant's petition or saved that bird trapped in Chloe's house. Silent Hill 2 is somewhat closer to that idealized dream of an ending that acknowledges a bunch of your actions, but also every year I think it gets harder and harder to do that since it just takes a crazy amount of work for artists and animators to do that many variations on the ending, and especially in Life Is Strange, the dev wasn't exactly rolling in budget after the commercial failure of Remember Me.

I really don't know where people got this crazy idea that the ending of story-based game with choices has to be this summation of all your choices. It has almost never happened. The choices exist to let you better define the character as you see fit, as a roleplaying aid, but it seems completely unreasonable to expect very many of those choices to directly come up in the final moments of the game, especially in a game where you make dozens and dozens of little character decisions.

Nobody is gonna say it's an easy task, but it's a lot of hard work for little payoff. I don't think Life is Strange is a better game because you can water the plant or keep Frank's gun, and it changes a few lines of dialogue. But it would be a better game if all of those little set dressing choices didn't exist and the choices that are there instead change the plot down different paths. It doesn't have to be new areas or characters, even. Just having a completely different way of experiencing the story in the game can be very impactful. Undertale has gotten very famous for its different routes recently, and the Genocide run is basically just a "I refuse to participate" run that cuts out most of the puzzles and changes the conversations and a few of the boss fights. I guess how much you value customizing your character and experience is up to the individual, but personally I think the ability to mess around with the one storyline they wrote is worthless while having different paths entirely is an amazing thing. Who cares about choosing which character lives or dies when they either die later anyway or completely leave the story? Weren't everyone pissed when things like saving the council or destroying the reaper or sparing the rachni had zero impact? The result of having lots of choices that can't matter because it would be expensive is that every one of those choices are meaningless except for people who are really into roleplaying a character.

The problem really is the cost, though. It isn't realistic to expect this. As difficult a job as it is to program and perform all those different minor outcomes, different paths might be something that's impossible for developers that aren't making retro 2D games in their spare time or visual novels. Or are Polish, I suppose? I heard Witcher 2 had branching paths and Witcher 3 has a ton of different endings, but having played neither I'm not gonna sit here and say they did what I want to see more of.

Okay, so I have to chime in here.

I really don't feel like Dontnod made either ending stand out more than the other. I think people think the Save Bay ending is the "Good" ending is because we've sort of been conditioned by society to think that yes that is the correct answer in that situation. I think though that looking at it from a mathmatical perspective like ignores a lot of things. Namely, the incredibly brutal struggle Max went through for Chloe. She literally went through time and space for her. And then to snap into reality and realize you have a real shitty shitty choice to make. I chose Chloe over the bay and for a lot of reasons.

First off I don't think that Max would actually make that decision. The second thing running through my head when I made this choice is that sacrificing Chloe was just a "hunch" that it would fix everything. Fact of the matter is Max had her first vision of the storm before her powers were even awakened or she even fucked with time at all. There were no actual guarantees. Now if you look at it strictly as a "video game" then yes obviously sacrificing Chloe was going to lead to what it did. I tended to make most of if not all of my choices by putting myself in the fiction itself and removing my self from the fact that it was a video game. And if you look at it from that angle Max has no guarantees. Shes fucking with time yet again and sacrificing the person she cares about most of all on a dice roll. When every other dice roll she's made in attempts to "fix things" has blown up in her face. Which is why I chose Chloe. Not only because I had an attachment to her and felt that Max's attachment to her would make her choose the same but because it was Max realizing she can't fix everything. And the more she tried to fix things the more she broke them.

And if you make the choice to sacrifice the bay Chloe doesn't hate you. She understands. It doesn't have to linger like the other ending does because the details of who dies in the storm don't matter as much as the fact that Max made peace with her choice and her inability to solve everything.

@abendlaender: I'm totally with you on the topic of player agency in narrative. It's in a weird spot because some games can't decide if they want to present a narrative or give the player the tools to experience their own narrative. So we get a lot of half steps where games try to tell these massive emotional dramas, but then end it with a simple, obvious choice, and sometimes end up fumbling both endings.

Personally, I really like what I'm just going to refer to as the "right choice" at the end of the game. I think it really brings together Max's narrative and ties together the themes of growing up, grief, and acceptance. I think that if I were playing the game, and went the other way, I would have come away from this game really cold. So, I don't think I can outright forgive the bad ending just because I liked the direction of what I saw, but at least they make it pretty easy to see both endings and the telegraph what choice the writers prefer.

I find it odd that a lot of people see no reason to choose the destroy Arcadia ending...put yourself in Max's shoes...

If you had a chance to save your husband or wife would you? I sure would, I wouldn't let anything kill my wife...id let you destroy a whole town before you took away my other half away. Even if Chloe has a final destination ending..wouldn't you do anything just to make sure you spend one more day with her?

No? At least I'd hope not.

I got the sense that, for dramatic reasons if nothing else, Max and Chloe KNEW her sacrifice would undue all their troubles. Even if there wasn't a logical reason to think so I believe the narrative really pushed a sense of "dramatic realization". An "aha!" moment.

I think it's reasonable enough for them to realize that undoing it would stop the storm, and that's enough for me to make what I consider the right choice.

The fact that it also sets in motion the domino chain that ends up solving basically all of the other problems in the game is just a bit of salve to help you feel better about it.

I basically agree with everything you said, just wanted to add that I actually think if a game did end by just extrapolating all of your choices, that would be just as (I think probably more) unsatisfying than anything else. To have control wrenched from you at that moment after a game full of choices? Sounds awful!

@counterclockwork87:

Nope, because I already would've gotten an extra week with her that I'd remember for the rest of my life, and that's worth a lot more than any extra time we might get by letting an entire town die.

My problem is with the other ending (the one the Beast guys didn't get) it is terrible, there are parts of the scene that indicated other people survived, making the beast crews choice seem totally redundant.

@calbags: In the Save ending there is massive destruction of property and at least some loss of life. How is having everyone (but Chloe) alive and well and zero destruction a redundant outcome?

I mean, the cost is the prohibitive factor, like you say. Yes, it would be great if it did work that way, and every choice you make has a huge impact on later parts of the story, and if you save Kate she comes back and now it's Max, Chloe, and Kate, super buds, and there are entire sweeping subplots related to whether you saved the Citadel Council or not, and in some far flung future we'll get game development where human involvement is unnecessary and AI can procedurally generate everything from the game world, to the mechanics, to the story, and it can branch off into all kinds of crazy diversions at no extra cost of man hours. But in the present day, developers have to pick their battles, and if only like 20% of players made a certain choice, it's wasteful of your limited time and budget to craft lengthy scenarios that only 20% of players might ever see.

My understanding of The Witcher 2's situation is that there is a significant choice you make, and following that there are basically 2 alternate versions of the middle section of the game and you either do one version or the other depending on your choice. I haven't heard that it significantly branches the story beyond that, and I think your final encounters at the end of the game are the same regardless of which version of the midgame you get. Also it's kinda fucking crazy that they did that, and most developers would either never get the greenlight from a publisher to do that, or the developers themselves would decide that doing all that is maybe not the greatest use of their time.

Sure, there are a subset of players who get literally angry when they find out some player choice doesn't lead to sweeping storyline branching in future episodes/games. Angry because they feel the developers lied to them, or misled them, or something. I guess it's up to your personal stance, but I can't imagine getting very upset when that happens. It just doesn't bother me, because I know what's realistic. If you go into any game with choice expecting all of them to have long-term impact, you're going to be disappointed. If you go in thinking some of them will have an impact, and you don't know exactly which ones will end up being important in future, you at least think "Well, I'll give this choice some thought because WHO KNOWS! Maybe this is one of the ones that will end up being important." Whether you report Nathan having a gun in the washroom ends up going nowhere either way, because you either say nothing, or say something and the principal doesn't believe you, but A) hey man, sometimes that is life, and you have no proof, and B) to the game's credit, if you choose to report it, it does affect the dialogue and what characters say to Max in future interactions with the principal and Nathan. So that was more of a wash, but on the other hand, whether you go for the choices that give Chloe the gun does factor into whether Chloe is capable of killing Frank when you meet him in episode 4.

I guess I just don't get the mindset that every time you make a choice in a game, some people make a mental contract and feel completely betrayed when that particular choice doesn't end up being a big deal. Does it really matter, did you really think back weeks or months later and say "Hey, they didn't make good on that choice, FUCK THAT ORIGINAL GAME." If the choice felt important in the moment, that you actually had to think about weighing the morals, ethics, and potential consequences of it, I think that's enough. I think the developer should make an attempt to make some of them matter later on, at their discretion, or else the sequel is just this generic story that isn't personalized to your actions in the earlier entry at all, but for me, the fact that say, the Rachni bit in Mass Effect 3 plays out kinda the same whether you spared the Rachni queen or not in Mass Effect 1 doesn't diminish that moment in Mass Effect 1 at all, because it was still a cool moment at the time I experienced it.

Personally I looked at it like I was given this power, There is no point in me having this power if not to save one of the closest people to me. I got the power because of Chloe and for me the universe wouldn't give me this power just to give me an extra week with her, if that was the case the game wouldn't have a choice at the end at all, the universe doesn't give you an extra week with her and then when you choose to save her let that happen. If the universe only wanted me to have an extra week then when I tried to save her it still wouldn't have worked and I would have had to go back and save the town because Chloe still dies.

I have friends that are so close to me I consider them brothers, I looked at Max and Chloe as being like Sisters. I would save my Brothers in this situation over my entire town(which is WAY bigger than Arcadia Bay) I just felt even the people Max cared about didn't compare to Chloe for me, Kate yeah that's sad, Warren had a good last week(beat up his bully, got a kiss from his crush, was going to the drive in with Max) Joyce yeah again sad but between saving an 18 y/o and a 50 y/o I'll save the 18y/o she has more life to live.

Also keep in mind this is all based off my first "point"(the way I personally look at the reason of the powers) I wouldn't sacrifice a whole town without being able to justify it with that reason

One of the very big factors that actually leans me toward 'Sacrifice Arcadia Bay' is just the absolute shit hand Chloe had been dealt in life. The end sequence where she offers to let Max walk out of her life after hearing all the terrible things that happened to her (helping Alt. Chloe die, being kidnapped and photographed by an authority figure she trusted), and has just a massive string of sincere things to say about how she regrets being a brat, etc. is so sweet.

Chloe's biggest fear is practically spelled out as being left by people she cares about, but she gives Max a free offer to leave her life if it would make things better for her. Chloe had clearly grown immensely after losing Rachel for good and hearing what Max had gone through for her.

She says she doesn't think her mom deserves to die in a diner, but I don't think Chloe deserves to die on a bathroom floor without having ever known what a great relationship she and Max would have had otherwise. Chloe dies alone and terrified in the Sacrifice Chloe ending, without anything good in her life to comfort her in her final moments.

The deaths in either ending are horribly cruel and unfair, but I think it's totally okay to want an ending where Chloe comes out of a bad situation a little wiser with someone (Max) who proved beyond the literal limits of reality that she would never abandon her.