game sequels retconning yr decisions (help me figure out what game is on my mind plz)

last night i kept thinking about (but couldn't remember exactly what) a video game where in the original you get the chance to make a choice - like to let a particular character live or die or something dramatic like that - but in the sequel they didn't have a way of carrying over your choice (mass effect style) and so they just retconned one of the two choices to be canon. so if you had picked the other choice - it totally wiped that out. i thought we could list games that have this kind of phenomenon (i thought of a couple that were kinda like this but not exact - baldur's gate 2 does this a little), but really it's just bothering me that i can't figure out what i'm thinking of. help plz!

The Deus Ex sequel, Invisible War, definitely did this, though IIRC, some bits of the other endings you could have chosen did happen.

Also in Deus Ex, your decision whether or not to save Paul in the first game gets retconned as he's still alive in the sequel. Which is pretty major as it's hard to save him in the original - many people didn't even realise it was possible.

all the Elder Scrolls games do this a lot i think

like, Oblivion's take on what went down in Morrowind is def not mine

mortal kombats

liu kang always wins. all other endings are non-canon.

lol yeah Joel was just telling me about this and i'm like "WHY THE FUCK DOES MORTAL KOMBAT NEED A CANON???"

warcraft

haha, good thread premise! Seems like lots of things with "ideal" versus "good-ish" endings would apply here - you know, things where you win, but the closing credits are like "Still, you can't help but feel there was something you left unfinished..." I'm sure that Quest For Glory 2, for example, assumes that you defeated Baba Yaga and freed the Baronet in QFG1, but I don't think you really have to do either of those things to complete the first game.

Would also expect to find this in big, non-linear side-quest-heavy things like Ultima, at the very least at the level of "optional add-on game becomes canon sequel" - the Black Sword is plot-crucial in Serpent Isle but it debuted in Forge of Virtue, a notionally optional add-on toThe Black Gate. (Amusingly, as Wiki reminds me, it's absent in Ultima Underworld II even though it's magically impossible for the Avatar to put the thing down! Which is it, guys?)

woulda been cool if importing a char in ultima had subtly changed the newer game's plot

QFG did that to some limited extent - special areas/quests available only to imported characters. Specifically, I think the only way to become a Paladin in QF2 was to import a character from the first game, and I think it had to be a Fighter. But the whole gimmick of the series in the first place was that you got to access different areas and side-quests depending what character class you picked, which along with a number of day/time specific non-essential events gave badly-needed replay value.

games with manichean Moral Choice Systems (jedi knight, bioshock) have such a gulf by the end between the satanic+messianic versions of the pc they pretty much have to do this if they have a sequel, right? but that mighr be more extreme than what mordy's talking about.