Your Resident Evil 9 Ending can go one of two ways and according to RE.net 56% of players chose the wrong ending on their initial playthrough. If you’ve beaten the game and linked your account you’ll be able to see your own stats alongside the global averages and the initial ending choice was really surprising.
For those of you that haven’t played the game (I’d recommend playing before reading any further).
For those of you that don’t recall how the ending went down. Just 5 minutes prior you have Grace at a computer, pull out the disk that is emphasised as being very important and watch a video of Spencer talking about his regrets. Elpis is mentioned as being hope and while it’s never explicitly said that it’s a good thing it is heavily implied over and over.
Cut to 5 minutes later you have a dying Leon not wanting to let anyone down telling Grace to destroy it and Zlbert Zesker pressuring Grace to release the virus.
So the good guy that everyone loves wants everyone to destroy it, the bad guy wants you to release it and you finally have to make the choice. I think it’s easy to hesitate at this point but you and Grace just got that classic endgame Resident Evil info dump. So despite everything, releasing it seems like the obvious choice right? Apparently not.
It could be that the majority of players just wanted to see what would happen if they chose the wrong ending, but my feeling is the average person just watches the other ending on YouTube with most games. So why did 56% of players choose so poorly? For as much as people joke about yellow paint, did we need it splashed on one side of the screen? Honestly it’s hard to know how much more they could convey the correct ending without explicitly saying it.
Even once you make a choice it plays voice lines from different characters that reiterate what’s going to happen with that ending. You’re then given one final are you sure? This lets you select the other option then you’ll get the different voice lines there and again if you choose the good option, they bash you over the head with lines about hope. Even ignoring everything else, releasing it was the only chance of Leon being saved, unless people really expected Ada Wong to swoop in with a cure at the last second and save the day.
Again I’m sure some people just wanted to see the bad ending but I do find it really interesting that the majority of people still needed to be explicitly told what the wrong ending was here.
There’s always a lot of discourse around game design and the way we signal to a player where to go or what to do, the outrage around the idea of yellow paint ruining people’s immersion. But at the end of the day I think the average gamer more often than not needs more explicit signals, they struggle to get through games more than you or I and I think that’s ok. There is definitely a balance when it comes to this and finding the line for this is what makes designing and writing for games so difficult sometimes but it can be done.
Now let me be very clear, when it comes to the ending of RE9, I would not want them to change a thing about how they signal it. I think they signal it hard enough and if they were more explicit, I think it would have taken away from the ending. From what I understand, you can reload and go for the correct ending if you pick poorly and to me this is probably the best balance you can get. If a player doesn’t quite follow the story, I don’t think there is a better way to punish them than watching their favourite character get their head blown off.
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