@starvinggamer: it's just not as impactful as total and utter annihilation. The other ending feels rushed and as a result actually takes away from the ending the Beast crew got. I stayed awake for ages last night thinking about the ending, got up this morning watched the alternative ending and now I just kinda wish I hadn't.

Maybe the deaths of more than one other person shouldn't have been the other option?

I saved Chloe and thought the ending was great.

Saved Chloe. Ending was exactly what I wanted. Time travel stories are tough, but I think Life is Strange pulled it off well.

I didn't feel that at all, I really felt there were reasons for me to pick both choices. I chose to save Chloe first because I remembered back in Episode 1 or something she said she wishes she could smash it all [arcadia bay] to glass. What happens in both endings made sense and were very impactful to me.

I remember there being a big discussion on this in the 'Episode 5 spoilers' thread that was created on these forums when Ep. 5 was released, where I and others already posted initial reactions.

Also for the 'Sacrifice Chloe' ending:

The amount of times you see Chloe in life threatening situations made me absolutely believe that she is ultimately going to be dead by the end of Life is Strange. If Max never was able to intervene Chloe would have been dead since the start of the game (which is what ended up happening in the Save Arcadia ending).

I think the guys made the right call. Sorry Austin.

@calbags: I guess I just don't share your opinion that a narrative isn't worth it unless it's all-or-nothing.

I chose to save Chloe in my initial playthrough and actually appreciated that they didn't drive home the grim consquences of your choice nearly as hard as they could have. And since Max and Chloe are seen leaving Arcadia Bay I would assume Joyce is dead but concievably some key characters such as Kate and Warren could have survived.

Also the secret true ending is to treat the San Francisco section like an epilogue and stop playing right before Max gets the nosebleed and missed messages from Chloe.

Bunch of very interesting answers and other opinions here, makes me glad I made this thread.

I'd like to know how you would have ended it in that case. Because I've certainly not thought of a better way to do the Save Chloe option. But then I enjoyed what they did & felt it was appropriate, and laid out my thoughts on why you don't need a sense of absolute closure at the end of a narrative. So how could it have been improved? Do you want to show the dead face of Joyce & Chloe breaking down into tears at the corpse of her second parent taken from her too early? That'd be "more impactful" certainly but that's also not what they are going for. It seemed to me like it was an intentional decision to not dwindle on the carnage, (though if I remember right you can see one or two dead bodies in the background of the final scene) that wasn't what they wanted to focus on. It was a more hopeful thing they were going for rather than trying to guilt you for picking the "morally wrong" choice.

I don't really have a horse in this race, but it seems weird for a game that is all "dark" and "real", and about the consequences of actions to suddenly be all "naaaah everything's cool!" with an ending that theoretically kills a BUNCH of people. It seems tonally inconsistent I guess?

I seems the ideal for the "Save Chloe" ending would've been to maybe, yes, have that scene of Chloe crying over her mother and/or just a general reaction to the fucked-up-ness of the town after the storm. Then they still could've ended it on a "Well, at least we have each other" sort of thing. The "hope" still could've been there. That way they could've even used the song for both! The way it is now, it's pretty easy to see which one the budget went towards and even if they didn't intend for one to be right or wrong (or at least one being "more intended by the developers"), it's easy to see how people could interpret it that way.

@bisonhero:I wasn't angry myself at the time either, because I played ME1 and ME2 back to back, and it was easy to see that the choices you make don't impact anything in any meaningful way. Expecting choices to change the game at that point is naive. I think the problem is that because I know how limited the effects are from experiences like that, those choices don't actually feel like they matter to me anymore. Like, say, at the climax of the first Walking Dead episode where two people are being attacked by zombies. That climax had zero punch because I knew whoever I saved would automatically bite it in an already predetermined scene an episode or two down the line. I just picked the person that annoyed me the least, same as Kaiden and Ashley. It's not a moral quandary anymore. The reason the ending is being discussed here is that there are two very distinct outcomes of the choice you make. At that point morals and ethics do come into it, because people want to solve it in different ways depending on how they play(or roleplay), and they imagine what consequences it has for the future.

@bisonhero: @redhotchilimist: That's roughly what happens in Witcher 2 regarding branching paths without touching on spoiler territory. Witcher 2 is also the shortest game in the series likely as a result of it. It was neat having seen it, but it's not something I'd expect to see often. Nor is it necessarily a great use of resources as to what makes games sell. You end up developing a bunch of content, and then a player only sees a fraction of it in each playthrough. But unless the game is short, only a small percentage of players will go back and see the rest. Mind you I like Witcher 2, so I'm not knocking it. As for the endings, Witcher 2's ending system is weird. There are sixteen endings but basically there are really a handful of important distinctions with minor variations to get that total. They're.. fine I guess. Nothing mind-blowing.

Witcher 3 (previously mentioned) uses a Bethesda-style ending system, (minor spoilers about its system) but with a kind of "primary" ending that is more substantial that concludes the primary arc . Witcher 3 does a bit of a math on a couple decisions in the final hours of the game to determine which primary ending you get. However, that aspect of the endings wasn't handled the best way IMO, and many didn't like the execution of it (see: spoiler thread discussing some of that). It's probably not the example to bring up here, as the mechanics behind what they did hurt an otherwise pretty good set of endings.

I think the Bethesda style (I'm sure there are games pre-dating Bethesda that did this, but for lack of a better term, I'm going to refer to it as that) of coming up with endings is perfectly fine for giant open-world RPGs where players want to feel like each quest line had an impact on the larger world. Also, most RPGs "end" those quest lines/side stories in the game, and more just have afterwords than full-blown endings. However, the mechanics behind what those games do don't translate particularly well into other genres. And anything really beyond a set of small small afterwords is going to get prohibitively expensive for the developer real quick. Not to mention to be honest, none of the stuff I've seen that has come from endings of this style have been particularly mind-blowing in quality.

The one application from these games that might have helped LiS is the idea of maybe 1-2 minutes of more footage for Ending B might have helped which showed the homeless woman survived, maybe Kate survived because the hospital was in another section of town, etc. so it reminded players that their choices did change some things, but you couldn't have everything the way you wanted it. The reason Ending B is more a little eh and not really impacting my enjoyment of the game is because all of that could have happened, so it's more an execution aspect than a content aspect. And it sounds like the developers wanted to do just that, but ran out of time and money.

I'm just here to say that I totally agree about the old Bioware games. My only real criticism of Kotor 1 & 2 is that it's not fun to be evil, because you become a cartoon villain with no depth. Don't know what the hell they were thinking.

@cav829 said:

Ending B also leaves us indeterminate on the status of Larry David, which is a risk I'm not willing to take.

Speaking of which, I'm so glad someone already did this.

Here's an extremely reductive but altogether important way to look at this:

One of the core mechanics of this game through the dialog was making choices on what to say to certain people to influence outcomes of given situations, often paired with a notification of "_______________ will remember that."

No, no they won't remember it, because either they're going to be dead in a few episodes or the entire thing will be wiped from existing to begin with, thus cheapening every single scenario that you, the player, worked your hardest to get the best outcome out of. All of that effort you put in didn't mean a goddamn thing in the end, because you get dumped to pick Option A, or Option B. And no matter which one you pick, the last 10 hours of gameplay are all undone and none of it ever really happened.

Let's compare the game to Telltale's first season of The Walking Dead: Remember the first time you played that? Made the decisions you made? You had to live with those decisions. They weren't magically wiped out by some super tornado that was either going to kill everyone or be undone by staring at a photograph, they actually mattered. And while the game ended with one static decision on whether to shoot Lee or leave him the ending didn't undo what the season prior had established; which made the overall experience more important and substantial.

The first 4 episodes of LiS were great, it's too bad they couldn't cap it off in a way that made those matter.

@ottoman673 said:

Except that's not really what happened. Austin summarized the two options IMO during the stream. The final choice is if you accept the consequences of all your actions because it means Chloe lives, or you decide it isn't worth it.

Sacrifice Chloe - You decide all of it wasn't worth it to save her and you accept what "destiny" originally had in store for everyone. You leave sad, but satisfied with the fact you learned your friend didn't really die "for nothing" and get a week of memories you would otherwise not have had.

Save Arcadia Bay - You decide you accept the consequences of all of your choices because Chloe means too much to you. Everything happened. In the end though, your mucking with time had very real, dire consequences, and you have to live with the bad as much as the good.

Either way, your choices were meaningful, but you can't dictate the way everything turned out.

I want to borrow a quote from this Wired article that I adore:

No matter the choice you make here, Max fails. She must sacrifice the town, or the person she loves. Life is Strange is the story of a beautiful failure.

Any choice Max makes threatens to nullify everything she’s done until now. As a player, I can replay episodes and cherish the freedom the game affords me, even if the ending was bittersweet at best. Max doesn’t have that luxury. No matter what she does, she loses.

The choice at the end is a choice in how you fail. I get why some people loathe the ending, as it's such an antithesis to what video games, the ultimate power fantasy medium, are about. Having a choice at the end is important to the story, as the theme of the story wasn't fatalism or inevitability like many stories in the genre, but about anxiety, free will, and how we live with the choices we make.

Changing the mechanics of the ending would have resulted in a different story. To offer some perspective from someone else, as I'm not trying to tell you that you have to think otherwise as I hate that kind of thing, but hearing people say mechanically they had make it so the ending was the result of a summation of choices does irk me. To deny authors the ability to tell the stories they want to tell because, from a gameplay perspective we might want something else, is almost an argument against video games as a legitimate storytelling medium to begin with. It reads a bit like when people say Papers, Please was invalid because it wasn't fun or Gone Home was invalid because it tricked people into believing it was a horror game. I would far rather have more games I might not enjoy because they're not for me than to start placing limitations on authors. So I hope I'm not coming off as a jerk in my reply as I try to watch myself.

I chose to save Chloe because I liked her more than all those other people.

I don't think I bring myself to sacrifice Chloe, mostly because Max has already torn reality apart (torn herself apart, given her whole nose-bleeding-passing-out situation) to save her, so come on, you think she's going to suddenly give up at the end? Plus I think it seems odd for her to use her rewind abilities one more time after the consequences of using those powers are staring her in the face. In this way the end of the game (for me) is about living with your massive, enormous fuck-up. I've got to sit down and finish the game if only because I want to be able to see how I feel at the end myself (I definitely think Austin's call was the right call, emotionally if not morally).

Just finished. I really enjoyed the game, but really hated both endings. This was MY ending:

Choose to sacrifice Chloe, focus on the picture, go back to the start, save Chloe in the bathroom, send David after Mr Jefferson, pretend to have psychic powers, tell everyone the town will be destroyed, explain that first birds will fall from the sky, animals will die, and the thing about the two moons. If all that came true, and I warned everyone to leave beforehand, there wouldn't be a soul left in that town once the tornado hit.

Dammit, if I get magic time rewind powers, I'm going to USE them. That was close to my logic going into the ending that I got. If I get time rewind powers, then there must be a reason for that. If there's a single true destiny at that point, it's darn well going to involve rewinding time and getting things right, otherwise why would I be given the power in the first place.

Also, "let's just assume everyone died and drive off together, leaving any possible survivors, including our friends who may be dead or dying" was just stupid. Good game, but stupid endings.

"Well, you COULD also do this dumb, stupid choice that only horrible people do, I guess. If you wanna be an asshole...."

And, that is life sometimes, you don't get many choices. And sometimes there is only the choice that hurts you and the one that hurts someone(s) else. Yet is is shocking how some people in their real LIVES choose the dumb, stupid choice that hurts others.

As far as the ending goes, I think the story isn't about choices, it about finally accepting that the petty things we want that only make us happy for a short time, are not the best choices. We can make the selfish choices, but we cannot subvert what the pain those choices cause.

People fight me on this, but IN THIS game world, fate is active. FYI: You don't have to believe in fate in your real life; just like you don't have to believe in elves. However, in LiS fate (or teh grim reaper if you want) is real, just as in LotR elves are real. Sorry, you don't to choose what is real in stories you don't write.) Chloe will keep getting killed - until we accept it. Or, we let fate (the grim reaper) have a hissy fit over a town.

My problem is, Chloe seems fine with killing her mom after bitching about losing her dad all that time (if you chose the bad ending that is). There should have been a "Go back and warn everybody to leave town because there is an obvious natural disaster coming" option. Or a "Lets build a GiantBomb shelter" option lol.

The whole lesbian thing kinda threw me off guard as well tbh, i didn't get that vibe during the beast cast play through, they felt like good friends until the sexualization of their relationship seemed to come in out of nowhere. I guess it doesn't happen if Max kisses warren, but it didn't feel like an either or type of situation to me. I don't know, felt a little forced IMO or maybe i just missed the subtle knods to it.

I just finished it 5 minutes ago. I did choose Chloe of course. The whole game is about her, about saving her, from the first minute on. I really liked her character and everything about her. Chloe is the only moral choice imo. The game teaches you about cause and effect and sticking up to the things you did. Reverting everything you did in the 5 episodes is not the moral choice here. This gift to revert time doesn't come out of nowhere, you have it for a reason.

In the end it probably comes down to if you like Chloes character in game or not. The "moral" choice, saving the town, is easy to do in a game but when someone puts you on the spot in real life you would choose your loved ones, every time! No exception.

LiS is a great game and I'm glad it had the ending I always feared I wouldn't be able to get. Wowser!

I chose to save the town but I think that there should be more options to the ending or even in the episodes before. I think that it was Chloes destiny to die in that week, there is no guarantee she would't die soon after the game if you chose to save her. There is this chaos theory that Chloe may have caused the tornado with time traveling/going back but why did she dream it before using her powers - I thought at first that was a premonition - that she was given a power to change things or warn people. There should be more options in epidose 5 how you would do the ending, because after escaping Jefferson 1. time she could warn Chloe, David - about Nethan, gun, Jefferson, possible Tornado on friday etc. and then be safe in San Francisco.

And the most important: she could have saved Chloe's life in the bathroom, because: After option of saving town, Max could just trigger firealarm again or stop chloe from entering that Bathroom somehow (normal way and than not using the powers) or even that there would be an option to sacrifice Max.

If there would be episode 6 or different options in the game I would change:

1. In episode 4: After Chloe asks Max to kill her, I would try to prevent that accident so Chloe wouldn't be hurt/paralysed and her father would be alive + let's say that everything would be very similar to the world before - teenagers can still fight with parents and be unhappy or just that she would be happy but still trying to find Rachel and be besties with her. Or maybe a twist that now Rachel is alive and Chloe isn't and now Rachel helps Max - so Max would be motivated to save/find justice for her best friend. Everything would be an option including what actually happened depending on the decisions/conversations with people.

2. in episode 5: Let's say that she still gets captured and Jefferson could show her a selfie in her journal/diary where she was happy - Selfie with her parents a month before or the one he actually showed her. So that there would be another option of saving Rachel/Chloe: she should try to go in the past where Rachel/Chloe was alive and warn police/David about Nethan/Jefferson - druging/killing

And/or 3. After knowing that tornado is real she could warn everyone (she cares about) and save them - The lighthouse or different shelters...

I still don't understand why didn't people go somewhere safe - it was said that there are tornados every 20 years so they should be prepared anyways? and there are so many weather stations that there should be alarm and less casualties than what we saw in that game??? It wasn't realistic I believe? Snow at 30 °C is also unbelivable because it would melt and turn into a rain,

I see a lot of text in here... I'm just gonna drop in an say that inspire of the bland/cliche/probably-the-morally-correction-choice; I absolutely chose to save Chloe. My only "problem" with the ending was the change in their relationship from super-BFFs (which Austin pointed out as being a rare occurrence in games) to something a bit more, but then I realized that I (in the skin of Max) was willing to doom an entire town to save her, so it totally made justified sense.

Despite there still being some positive things, that entire last chapter felt like a clumsily, and often unresoved hot mess compared to the others. I was very disappointed. However, it was still awesome to watch with the crew.