Everyone knows what a game of Civilization is like. You have your conquest victory goal, the diplomacy victory goal, space race victory, domination victory, cultural victory. They are all quite specific, right there, on a special screen, tracking your steps towards them. However...Civilization is a highly abstract game that doesnt bother to deal with specific people and their actions.

What if there was a game with a more...concrete foundation in reality and common sense ? Would those goals still work and be as desirable ? For example, say you have something of a global RPG kind of thing, like Elder Scrolls. And there is a mission statement, in black on white : "Win the game by finding your father's killer by doing this this and this" -AND- "Win the game by becoming a dark god by doing this this and this". Granted, all RPGs have a kind of a "main quest plotline", which you uncover gradually. What i am trying to define here is this : what would it mean if there are multiple "metagoals", with very specific instructions to achieve them, and the player knows it and can track his progress towards those goals from the very start ? Would it prevent identifying more with the game's characters ? Would it create additional choices to worry about before they become actually important ? Is it a good idea at all, to inform the player of what an endgame will probably be about ?

Everyone knows what a game of Civilization is like. You have your conquest victory goal, the diplomacy victory goal, space race victory, domination victory, cultural victory. They are all quite specific, right there, on a special screen, tracking your steps towards them. However...Civilization is a highly abstract game that doesnt bother to deal with specific people and their actions.

What if there was a game with a more...concrete foundation in reality and common sense ? Would those goals still work and be as desirable ? For example, say you have something of a global RPG kind of thing, like Elder Scrolls. And there is a mission statement, in black on white : "Win the game by finding your father's killer by doing this this and this" -AND- "Win the game by becoming a dark god by doing this this and this". Granted, all RPGs have a kind of a "main quest plotline", which you uncover gradually. What i am trying to define here is this : what would it mean if there are multiple "metagoals", with very specific instructions to achieve them, and the player knows it and can track his progress towards those goals from the very start ? Would it prevent identifying more with the game's characters ? Would it create additional choices to worry about before they become actually important ? Is it a good idea at all, to inform the player of what an endgame will probably be about ?

It is quite simple in non-story based games. In this case you just tell the player the game-rules. Multiply goals are only part of the rule-set and should be presented at the start.

But defining a single final goal, known from the beginning, could get really nasty once you introduce a story. Often a RPG (or other story based game) starts with a final goal which is in fact only a sub goal, i.e. find the killer of your father, once you have found him, you discover that he is not really dead etc .. , in this case the questline in a RPG is in fact your "progress bar", but you never to see the whole progress bar until you reached it. It is hard to tell someone the end of the story (the final goal) without spoiling the story itself.

But on the other hand it is possible. Even an epic adventures like Lord of the Ring has some kind of final goal which is presented at the begining (in this case the ring must be destroyed). But it could be really hard to define more of this early-known goals without spoiling the story.

I would say achievements work the way you described -- you know then from the start, they track your progress and there is a lot of them. Even in story mode RPG's, such as the recent Fable 3.

Now, the question is -- are we talking meta-goal, or multiple end goals? I'll presume the latter. In that case, making a game with a story that has multiple endings (such as Dark Messiah of Might and Magic) could be classified as having a few goals, them not being that obvious, tho. The only difference would be to state "kill your father to be a good hero and win the game", "kill your mother to be a bad hero and win the game", or anything like that (excluding killing of your parents >.> )

As said above, such a spoiler is rather useless in RPG games. In RTS it is obvious and used. FPS games rarelly have more than 1 goal, but some (like Battlefield) have them defined -- conquer all or deplete the enemy count, or both!.


EDIT: About the RPGs. If you think hard enough, you can use story to allow those goals to be known. Like in Fable 3 -- become a tyrant or a good ruler. The choice is yours and both endings differ. Any kind of justification for showing the player his goals is good IMO -- A voice from the sky tells you that you will obtain immortality if you perform one of the three tasks -- skin a boar with your teeth, kill 1,000,000 boars or start a prosperous boar farm. If the character says in bold text that he want immortality, the player will be all to happy to have a choice, even if it a limited one, that provides him with freedom of action.

Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland is an RPsim with IIRC 6 end goals. The goals aren't defined from the beginning, the information about how to achieve them becomes revealed as the possibilities are mentioned in the story. One thing I didn't like about the way that game handled it is that if you achieve one victory condition and get one ending you can't keep playing for the next one, it resets the plot portion of the game (like the NPCs got collective amnesia). That broke my immersion and I didn't want to replay the first part of the game again so I never did get to see the other endings.

Xenallure was also planned to have multiple end-goals, but the structure was different. The game had a certain number of chapters and you could pick a location to be at for the duration of each chapter. When the number of chapters was up you got an ending - the overall story was a time loop and you got to the place where you could choose to jump back to the beginning of the game or stop satisfied with what you had achieved that run-through.

I hope nobody minds if i resurrect this topic, with a bit of an off-shoot question.

If we're talking story based games with multiple endings, most of them follow a sort of point tree approach : you start at the root, and then the choices you make give you points that tip the scales and determine the next branch of story you follow. Be a jerk 9 times and a goody-goody 2 times and to the slightly more evil branch you go. Have 5 events with this character and 0 with that character, and your party members change to accomodate, etc.

Where do you think should the "final choice", a point of no return be placed, closer to the middle of the story, or nearer to the end, and is it needed at all ? If its closer to the end if feels tacked on, like in Bioshock or something. And if its too soon the player is stuck with his choice, being forced to play it out.
If its not needed - should the player be able to potentially switch his story branch at any moment ?
And if he does - should he start at the beginning ? Should there be any penalties to abandoning your previous path ?

Your thoughts ?

How about the end-goals are clear from the beginning, but the side-effects of your choices are not? e.g. you have to kill your own companion character to complete the quest the evil way?