Just finished the game (no spoilers)

[marsy]

Well, I just finished the game, and well... I'm disappointed!

It started really well, and I was very impressed.
But after just 6 hours of playing I had finished the whole game!
And I'm not a "professional gamer" and I had to retry a couple of
sequences.

I didn't get the feeling that my decicions during the game actually changed what would happen any more than in other games I've played (for example Gabriel Knight 3). Also I felt that I was rushed through the game. I never had the time to explore rooms and environments as much as I would like. And I felt that the few times I had some time to explore, the actions I had to choose from was very limited. I also wanted to know more about (without giving anything away) "the enemy", but i felt like I didn't
get a proper explanation what was happening.

Tonight I'll try to play through the game again, doing the opposite of what I did the last time. Maybe that will give me a better experience?

[Jade]

maybe you should also realise that if you could do many things and have lots of options then there would be a thousand of different ends and it would be really difficult to make the game. And if you were in a situatie like the characters in the game you would also have little time to do things and make chooses, so in that point is't really realistic.

But you played the game in 6 hours that pretty quick, i didn't even finished it and i'm already at like 8,5 hours

[UnConeD]

It's nice to hear someone who shares my point of view (see other thread (http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=494458)). But if you thought after a first play through that your choices didn't matter much, wait until you play it a second time. The game gives you plenty of fake choices.

I've heard the excuse that "if they really made it variable then there would be too many endings", and I don't buy it. Just because a story branches at one point doesn't mean it has to take wildly different courses: it can converge again, and differences can work parallel next to eachother.

The developers showed that it is possible to make flexible scenes that react to prior events (diner crime + diner investigation), but then didn't maintain the high standard at all. After the first few scenes, you're stuck on rails, and your only purpose is to figure out what the designers intended for you to do in each scene. And there have been plenty of games before that pulled it off well without having to sacrifice a consistent story (Blade Runner, Fallout 1/2, Planescape: Torment, Deus Ex).

Constructing a dynamic story is not /that/ hard; it's a matter of building a dependency graph and ensuring that it has enough variation at each point in the game.

I think the big problem with Fahrenheit is that the most obvious choices you think you can make actually end up having the least effect.

[Mattlab]

Yeah I have played the game as well. There are thousands of possibilities and no two game experiences will be alike ever unless you pick the exact same choices each time. So in other words try doing different things and you might get a new ending or a whole new story!