Status Quo Is God/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Status Quo Is God in Video Games include:

  • Pretty much every MMORPG, as covered in Perpetually Static. There are exceptions, though...
    • EverQuest II, for example, has occasional events that change the political landscape of the world, usually coinciding with expansions. Gameplay doesn't change much unless you're in one of the new starter cities, but the status quo is sometimes allowed to change.
    • Also, EVE Online. Player organizations can and do control large areas of the game, and ownership changes all the time depending on how the latest war is going.
      • And the in-game story advances with each expansion, as well...
    • Kingdom of Loathing lampshades this by revealing that nothing (almost) the player can do has an effect on the place.
      • The exception is found in some site-wide events, in which you have a choice on which side to choose. The more you work for that side, the better the outcome for you.
    • In Plane Shift, since the game hasn't reached version 1 yet, time is officially frozen and all changes to the world are accomplished via Retcon. The only exception is the brief "Crystal Eclipse" storyline that bridged versions 0.3 and 0.4, which introduced two new gods and left a definite mark on the game's history.
    • City of Heroes flirts with this from time to time. While some villain groups have seen sufficient progress (especially the Fifth Column's eventual destruction and reformation into the Council), many fans have wondered just * how* many times, say, Countess Crey has to get arrested for murdering the original Countess Crey and taking her place for it to stick. The game never offers a reason why she's said to be in jail at the end of the story arc, but gamewise, her company and her persona are still just as effectively evil as ever.
      • Also how many times the "Save Statesman" arc could possibly make any logical sense. You'd think the Freedom Phalanx would at least tie a bell around his neck to stop this from happening so often...
      • City of Villains players know that there is no placating Blue Steel, no matter how hard they try.
      • Averted with such major changes as the return of the Fifth Column and the death of Statesman.
      • Also averted for players in Praetoria, after changes to the engine made it possible to permanently kill some characters -- such as a prominent contact in the gold side starting zone whom you might be tasked with assassinating. If your character goes through with it, she disappears from the game for that character, permanently.
    • Tabula Rasa was a bit of an exception - for example, there were bases which were constantly changing ownership as each of the opposing sides stormed to take it back. This did have some effects on gameplay, though they weren't so huge (when the base wasn't yours you couldn't use it's teleporter or shops and you also lost access to the mission givers there, so sometimes you had to mount an attack on enemy position just to get a quest if you were unlucky). Of course, TR never grown as much as Richard Garriot intended, so we might have seen more examples of this if they didn't discontinue it. And also, to an extent, the original Ultima Online allowed players to build their own houses and in some cases whole cities (on some shards). One such shard was meant as a fairly realistic world, so it had complicated population replenishment, even migration and such and just as the official real economy (just like EVE Online above).
    • RuneScape averts this, as several quests feature prominent nonplayer characters dying and leaving new characters to take their place. Additionally, one quest requires the player to steal several public statues for a garden, after the quest these now empty statue plinths remain permanently unoccupied.
    • World of Warcraft pretty much jumped up and down averting this trope (at least partially) in the Cataclysm expansion which completely remade the original zones (though not those of the other expansions) as well as heavy use of phasing technology to allow players' actions to cause changes to the world, if only for themselves.
      • One part of it that is played straight, however, is the feud between the Alliance and the Horde. No matter how many times they realize they are Not So Different and their conflict in an eternal stalemate, any truce between them will always be temporary. There's far too much history between them for the fighting to end, and far too much relying on it for gameplay.
  • The RPG Betrayal at Krondor is all about the effort of a certain dark elf to bring peace to his race and put an end to hostile relations between humans and dark elves that have been going on forever. The game is based on The Riftwar Cycle and its plot was canonised in a novelisation. Two hundred years later in the series, nothing much has changed about the dark elves.
  • No matter what, Peach will always be captured again and Mario will try to save her. Though Mario and Bowser are willing to bury the hatchet every once and a while.
  • Sonic Adventure had some character development for Tails (who decides to do things on his own now instead of relying on Sonic all of the time) and Amy (who says that she's "going to make that Sonic respect me!" instead of just following him around everywhere like a crazed fangirl) that was conveniently absent come Sonic Adventure 2.
    • This troper disagrees in regards to Tails, in Sonic Adventure 2 (and the Bioware handheld RPG Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood) Tails comes across much more as a hero in his own right, even leading the freedom fighters in Sonic's absence. He returned to sidekick in Sonic Heroes (where, strangely, Amy seems to have retained some degree of her new action girl persona even though she still chases after Sonic)
    • Almost every Sonic the Hedgehog game is this (except for various sub-series and directly tied sequels).
  • 99% of Castlevania games have Dracula as the final boss. 98.9% of them have this, WITH the second last boss as Death as well.
    • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin has both (as you fight Dracula and Death at the same time; you can have two characters, so why shouldn't they as well?), which is at best a minor subversion.
  • Something's always happening in Touhou, whether its the scarlet mist, the moon being replaced, an attempt by the lady of the netherworld to steal the world's spring, a challenge by an upstart shrine, or a haunted mist by party loving Youkai. Despite all that happens, the only really permanent effect these have on the plot is introducing new characters. Of course you might need to do a little bit extra in the game to make sure it is back to status quo in time for the next event.
    • Even as for the cast, whether or not they ever really change with the events that take place, even if it is at the command of The Judge who threatens to send you to hell or worse.
    • The last few games have had an interesting aversion: in 10 Mountain of Faith Moriya Shrine joined the cast; in 11 Subterranean Animism Moriya fuses a dead god with a birdbrain to start a nuclear reactor; in the fighter Hisoutensoku the control system for the reactor is mistaken as a giant youkai lumbering about; and, in 12 Undefined Fantastic Object the combined efforts of pushing Moriya Shrine through the Great Hakurei Border back in 10 and the geysers caused by Utsuho in 11 have broken open Makai and allowed the Palanquin Ship to recover Hijiri Byakuren.
  • No matter how many times Phoenix Wright manages to find the right killer, get the information out of someone, beat an "unbeatable" lawyer, or just generally be proven right, by the next game/case he's still a flat-broke Butt Monkey of a lawyer who nobody takes seriously except for Maya, Pearl, and (sometimes) Gumshoe. Well, except in Apollo Justice where he's a Badass, crazily prepared, Guile Hero Chessmaster.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy has a rare in-universe case of this. The heroes and villains have been waging war in the name of their gods for a while now, but every time one side comes within reach of winning, Shinryu resets everything back the way it used to be, starting the war over again. This is because Shinryu made a deal with Cid, aka the Narrator, that he would keep the war going forever in a Groundhog Day Loop in order to temper Chaos into the ultimate force of destruction. Status Quo Is God? In this case, God is in fact, keeping the status quo!
  • Tekken - Averted. As of the sixth game, the storyline spans three decades and it shows. Technology evolves, characters age, return or not, and some are outright Killed Off for Real.
  • The Warcraft universe averts this very hard. With every game and addon the political and even geographical landscape gets severly altered, with new factions arising as fast as others get obliterated and entire cities and even worlds are taken off the map.
  • Crysis features C.E.L.L, a group of Obviously Evil Private Military Contractors responsible for gunning down the innocent New York plague victims they were supposed to be protecting. By the end of the second game they have been thoroughly crushed by the player character, the aliens, and the US Marine forces, with both their field commander and their CEO dead and their remaining shareholders on trail for war crimes. Their main base of operations has had its Self-Destruct Mechanism pushed, and all their remaining hardware has been commandeered by the Marines. So they're out of the picture for good, right? Nope. They're fully operational 20 years later in Crysis 3, having suffered no penalty from the government and with more than enough resources to attempt a Take Over the World plot.
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