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@Maryland Marijuana Review "Gets paid for doing nothing". He just spent 3-4 weeks researching, writing a script, recording and editing to make a 20 minute video for you to watch. Certainly a lot more productive than some guy who thinks his life's goal is smoking marijuana.
@@popopop984 its literally THE best strategy in the game. Its pretty difficult to do perfectly but if done right, it can defeat anything the game throws at you
Wildermyth does a great job with this. When a character dies, you get to decide how they go out, either dealing a lot of damage or buffing their allies. Then after that, you can build a monument to them that will let them appear in other stories.
@@MeepChangeling by sucking at it? Idk I can't even beat the game at all on harder difficulties. But even on medium sometimes a squishier character will get caught out and attacked by like five things at once.
I never managed to really get "into" Wildermyth, and I think a big part of it was how much it sucked to lose characters because I was rushing things or underestimating my enemies. RNG is a bitch. I'm part of the problem!
Ever since watching a Wildermyth Let's Play on youtube, I've really, REALLY wanted it to come to Switch. Nothing so far :-( But it looks amazing. Like Miitopia but not, y'know, brainless. And with X-Com style fights rather than basic RPG stuff.
It seems that the problem with this trope in video games is fundamental: a heroic sacrifice is fun to watch in a TV show, but it really sucks to play the role of the onlooker that lost their best friend or valuable ally. If you make the loss painful and dramatic, players will do anything in their power to prevent it. In strategy games, you have serious balance problems with sacrificing heroes because it's only worth doing if you're certain to do similar or worse damage to your opponent. Pokemon has had this problem, self-destruct attacks are only useful if they do completely overwhelming damage that will usually take their opponent down with them.
To be fair, Explosion has a base attack of 250, the highest of any in the whole series before any modifiers. In Generation 1, it was effectively 340 (170 but halved opponent's defense) and in Gen 2 was buffed to 500 (250x2) In Gen 3 it was nerfed to where the user faints first before dealing damage, Gen 5 it was nerfed again to no longer half defense. Gen 6 buffed it to deal damage before fainting.
exactly, a heroic sacrifice in a TV show works because the hero decided its the only way, but in games you have options, you are in control, not the hero. so when the game asks you "would you be selfless or selfish" I will just try to find a third option, and if I'm locked out of a third option, not because it really is too hard to do, but because the game decided, I'll just give up, or make a random choice and be extremely disappointed. the game needs to make me WANT to take the selfless route, not force me. and there are ways to do it, lets take the Nier Automata ending for example. players have no reason at all to sacrifice their save for another player, but they still do it because that is the nice thing to do, and there is a real danger here, its not just a disappointing ending you will get, you will lose all your work in the game forever. however one could argue that it works exactly because its permanent. if the game expects me to choose good or evil because the third option is too hard, then I'll just reload the game and keep trying. but if I have only one choice, then maybe I would choose the option with more chances of success. but that can sometimes just turn the game frustrating.
On the topic of Fire Emblem, I once saw a good solution in a D&D houserule to encourage permanent sacrifices: when a character who's on the brink of death/taking lethal damage/choosing to do so of their own volition in a dire situation, their player can choose to permanently kill their character while also getting a strong effect for doing so, like being able to persist several turns after they're "killed" continuing to take out enemies in a final stand, ensuring that enemies won't be able to pass a doorway for several turns, or overchanneling magic through their body to do a very powerful magical attack. Something like that combined with every character in your roster having special short scenes or dialogue afterwards if they sacrifice themselves in certain chapters could really make sacrifices something a lot of people do bc of the narrative it gives along with reintegrating the gameplay and story if the sacrifice helps save another character or lets everyone escape in an escape map, etc.. It'd make each FE playthrough more personal as circumstances come up from how you play a chapter that lead to moments of characters sacrificing themselves, so the story you experience and were involved in making is different every playthrough.
while an interesting decision i wouldn't know if that would work for games like Fire Emblem, it would require people going out of their way to go along with losing characters and if a chapter or map is hard enough that you may end up having to sacrifice someone then losing anyone is more likely to just spell the end for you, death spirals are a real thing in this games and they can begin by just getting one of your tanks critted and basically having to retry the chapter anyway and that's not even going into making later chapters even harder so those same death spirals may just keep happening killing the entire run of the game.
@@enrymion9681 True Resurrection is a spell limited to the most powerful of clerics and other such mages. The vast majority of adventurers won't have access to this spell except in very limited or specific circumstances, and the ones that do are basically one step away from being minor demigods in terms of power level. Also, it takes an hour and 25,000 gold worth of diamonds per a single use of this spell. In short, permadeath is still very much a thing for all but the rarest (and richest) few, mechanics-wise *and* lore-wise.
I think Frostpunk does this really well too. The game puts you in a situation where you *can* theoretically get through the game without anyone dying and everyone living happily and maintaining your moral code. But that's also *really* hard when you're in an end-of-the-world survival scenario. And constantly the game tempts you with easier options like allowing child labor or being able to force your workers to work for 24 hours straight and so on in order to make the game easier. Another one is Battlefleet Gothic. As a 40k game it's all about shit getting worse as time goes on. And you start out with a battle map that lists out all these locations and bastions that give you all of these bonuses. Except you're actually already in control of all of them and already getting all those bonuses. Because you're actually defending them, and very quickly the player is attacked on too many fronts at once to possibly defend them all simultaneously, and the player is essentially forced to choose which locations they want to defend or not, and thus what benefits they're willing to lose. Regardless of how well you play in the actual fight itself. That basically just determines if you lose even *more* stuff if you fail.
I think *Frostpunk* is an amazing game, and I'm a sucker for the snowy style of it, but I think that it's possibly too easy to hit as hard as it could. Going in mostly blind I didn't lose a single person, not to death, not to rejecting them entry, and not to them leaving with the Londoners. Making it harder, or maybe removing the pause feature (which I would _personally_ hate cause I wouldn't play without that) might go a long way towards its theme, "I wouldn't have to sign this law if I had just done better" would have been a very interesting thought to have. *Forcing* you to make at least a few sacrifices could have been interesting, but I don't think that's exactly what they were going for.
my problem with frostpunk is that you can only choose extremes. cool, I decided to force kids to work because I really need them now, but why I can't revoke that decision when things are more stable ? there is no reason at all for any decision in the book of laws to be permanent, besides giving more drama to your choices.
When playing Frostpunk, i was frustated because, with no reason for, i was convinced i HAD to save everyone. Then when i realised youre not *supposed* to make sure everyone survives to win, then i realized saving everyone was the ideal, and so even tho i still tried to save them, if they died i wasnt frustated anymore. I think the main problem is acceptance that not everyone NEEDS to make it, even if we try very hard.
@@lachlanmccormick3486 Funny enough, harder and no pause button is exactly what the game's Survivor mode is (as well as adding Ironman save rules), though there's difficulty sliders as well (survivor mode is automatically the highest). The real trouble it runs into though is that you can't know what difficulty you should play on without playing some, and you can only have your first playthrough once. That said, I've seen plenty of stories from people who absolutely struggled on their first playthrough, without having selected a higher difficulty. I"ll definitely agree though that they weren't trying to truly force sacrifices, except in situations where you are already struggling. It's also quite a bit fonder of a lesser form of sacrifice, with things like efficiency vs. safety, and other things that will ask if you will sacrifice some humanity and ethics for a better shot at survival.
@@danilooliveira6580 Most of the laws are actually just giving yourself the right to do something, so it makes sense that you can't just undo it, it'd be meaningless to the people who remember when you gave it to yourself, and know you could just do it again. It's also worth remembering that it actually takes place over a rather short period of time, all of the scenarios are less than 2 months long, repealing a law would just come off as incompetent and wishy-washy. The real response is to just not do that thing that you gave yourself the power to do previously once you no longer need to, though with Child Labor - Safe Jobs, this does lack benefit, as all the negatives with that law are immediate on passing or scripted events in the first few days of employing children.
I think what might've helped Fallout 3's ending is if getting that massive dose of radiation still hurt rad-resistant companions, like they became insane or feral or something. It would at least justify the "asshole" comments. On the other hand, it would also encourage players to find rad-resistant companions if using them to turn on the purifier was a _good_ ending.
The thing is, we were already given the choice to send Fawkes into a place of obscenely high radiation to do a thing for you, and he does it willingly and without any issues at all. Or you could drug your character up and walk in there in a hazmat suit and survive. The second time we are given the choice (or not given it) we are met with railroading and insults.
I don't think it was saveable really. The more you think about the whole story the less well it works. Like nobody in the game world apart from like one beggar per city actually has problems getting water. In the words of Shamus Young: Dad built a water purifier that didn’t work, for people that didn’t need it, and then made it release radiation it shouldn’t have, to prevent it from falling into the hands of people trying to fix it. This killed the man who had no reason to sabotage it and didn’t kill Colonel Autumn, who had no means to survive. This put the Enclave - an army with no reason to attack - in charge of the purifier, which was of no value to them. Then the player entered vault 87 to recover a GECK, a magical matter-arranger that they shouldn’t need and that would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides fixing the purifier. Colonel Autumn, who shouldn't be alive, captured the player with a flash grenade that shouldn't have worked that was thrown by soldiers who had no way to get there. The final battle was a war between the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel, to see which one would get to commit suicide trying to turn on the purifier that neither of them needed. This resulted in more sabotage that threatened to explode a device that shouldn’t be explode-able, ending with the death of the player character, who had the means to survive but didn’t, and who was never given a good reason for doing any of this.
@@AshenVictor yeah, the entire story falls apart once you think about it for more than five seconds. The bad ending is just a culmination of a bad story.
The other issue is that you originally couldn’t even tell Fawkes to go in. That wasn’t added until a later patch So the choices were either sacrifice yourself or let the girl die, even as the rad resistant companion stood there.
@@AshenVictor I love Fallout 3, but I 100% agree with you. Main storyline is so horribly written. It relies so much on ridiculous assumptions that does not make sense at all. Although you clearly see that Autumn uses some kind of RadAway when James activates the purifier, and I doubt that it would be hard for the Enclave, one of most powerful organisations after the War, to find a way into the Vault 87. I never liked the whole concept of GECK, actually, it seems too magical even for Fallout 2, where it was introduced. With two of them sent into each vault it really feels stupid to have America in ruins and irradiated. But this is another story.
See I've been playing Wasteland, and i think the other big problem is when a sacrifice has really unintended consequences. Like not being able to recruit an NPC because you didn't destroy their home in an earlier choice. Its like WTF I'm supposed to destroy their town to get that NPC to join me!? The sacrifice and the reason don't work.
Tactice Ogre: Let's Cling Together. You are faced with the choice to massacre a village of civilians and blame it on the enemy in order to rally support, or to not do it. And if you refuse and try to protect it you will be blamed for the action and driven into exile. There is a nice lawful character who strongly objects to the action, but in order to recruit her you have to be a mass murder, drive her into exile and then later recruit her as she gets a redemption story. It just felt awful.
@@Duchess_Van_Hoof it also highlights the fact that 'being good and moral' in the theater of war is rarely the logical option. If you choose to oppose the massacre, you're then exiled with only two (IIRC, your sister and the winged), followed with the said lawful character getting the short end of the stick. This effectively made the game significantly harder if this is the first time you play through due to both low level and low number of party member, driving deeper the fact that you're exiled.
ending E of nier automata is a really good sacrifice imo. it gives you the choice with no incentives other than selflessness because that selflessness straight up has consequences for real human beings
Does it? It's a cool moment but my gamer sense went off immediately and I knew based on the way the sequence played out that it was just smoke and mirrors. All it would do would be to maybe add my name to someone's screen, not actually change anyone's ability to access content. I committed to ending D in classic Nier though.
@@SmallsMalone Yeah, you almost *have* to spend several lives to get to tthe chance to give away one. If it were as the game suggests, it would quickly run out of lives to give new players.
@@SmallsMalone You're right that it's fake, but it still matters because choosing to sacrifice your save data is choosing to fully embrace the message of the game. When it asks you after you lose in the End Credits battle "Do you accept defeat?", Is this just a game?", "Is it all pointless?", the game is really asking you if you care about the characters and your journey with them. It's obvious that anyone who's reached this point will care about them, but saying yes to sacrificing your data is much harder decision than saying yes to the previous prompts. While sacrificing your data may not be technically necessary to save some else's, by giving up the opportunity to come back to the game at your leisure, you are declaring that the game has impacted you in a way that transcends the mere entertainment and accomplishment of physically playing it. At least for me, the emotions the game made me feel and the way it made me re-examine my own life's meaning is something that I want to share with others, and regardless of whether my save data get's used a thousand times or none at all, I'll be happy with the sacrifice I made because, even if that sacrifice doesn't mean anything to anyone else, it means a lot to me.
@@SmallsMalone i considered the possibility right after writing this comment, but, in good nier:automata fashion, i choose to believe that it had some kind of meaning anyway
The problem here is simple: On any seemingly lasting stretch of game two things are true: The temporary sacrifice is too cheap to provide permanent upgrade. The permanent sacrifice is too expensive to provide temporary benefit. As a result, you get only three kinds of sacrifices players will take: Temporary for temporary benefit, temporary for permanent benefit, permanent for permanent. In the first case, sacrifice is cheap and thus pointless. In second case, sacrifice is cheap, stupid to dodge and thus pointless. In third case, people study out-of-game materials for optimal ways and consciously distance themselves away from those they need to sacrifice, thus rendering sacrifice pointless. It's all part of one neverending trait of gamers worldwide, which is being extremely good at damage control.
Except for like, good Fire Emblem players. A lot of getting good (at least what the community has agreed "being good" to mean) is to take temporary benefits for permanent losses, because you recognize that "permanent" just means "until the end of the game", so a temporary bonus to the difficult early game can be more useful than a "permanent" benefit which only comes to play in the late game. I find that decision difficult to make though, because I am too used to thinking like you just described, to easily turn it off.
I was hoping you'd talk about LISA: The Painful when reading the title. I'm extremely happy you are talking about it, as it's much too slept on SPOILER: You also could've mentioned the option to attack Buzzo instead of accepting his dilemma, effectively not sacrificing anything if you ca win the battle. But you can't win the battle, it's impossible, so you lose and suffer both consequences of the dilemma
@@Mauripsu There is a bit of difficulty, but no, it isn't a hard game. The DLC however is much much much harder. And yes, it's worth playing, as it's a fantastic game.
I really liked how sacrifice worked in Pyre, or how choices had consequences in general. When you choose a hero to be send back to the overworld you lose a big asset in your team but you also help them to finally realize their goal. Gameplay-wise you are handicapping yourself but narrative-wise you are doing the right thing. What I really liked is the new dynamic that generates out of this. Not only do you have to change your strategies in gameplay, your whole party has new and meaningful conversations and dynamics.
My favorite sacrifice story was recently when some friends and I were playing through no mercy on left for dead. The helicopter had just arrived, I was barely hanging on and made a bad jump, becoming incapacitated in an extremely inconvenient place. I told them to leave me because at that point I had no intentions of surviving. Then I see one of my friends drop down, and barely manage to pick me up in time, and by picking up some adrenaline at the top of the ladder, we were both able to make it, then had to watch as another in the party got swarmed by zombies and died due to just sheer bad luck. The point of the story is, sometimes the best sacrifice is someone else's.
The problem with "sacrifices" is that it is a plotpoint often used in anti-war film or films where "herorism" is the main theme, the problem in games is that we're usually the people who climb to the top/at the top. And sacrifices don't work the same way if you're at the top of the heirarchy vs. at the bottom. Sacrifices is all about creating sympathy or admirerers afterall, and you've most likely been doing that throughout most of the game anyway. I think darkest dungeon and frostpuntk are probably the two that handle sacrifies the best, people won't necessarily get hte same sympathy out of it, but it's a different kind of psychological discovery. Are you willing to sacrifice children for efficiency? are you ready to throw people through dungeons for money, and just throw them away once they lost their usefulness. I like that the game makes most people do this, because it tells a lot about what you're willing to do to keep a few select "safe". I think those are the best times sacrifice are used, I don't think sacrifice is a good plotpoint outside of that. Since it is such a hero-focused thing, where you sacrifice yourself for some "notion" that the people in power will arrive at the "greater good" or something like that, but it is oftentimes just meaningless. That's just my take anyway.
One of or maybe the OG example of sacrifices in gaming is actually chess. Trading a stronger piece for a simple pawn and a positional advantage is a tactic used at every level since the beginning of the Game.
Yep, the classic gambit. In other games you also know this as kiting, or in general, as baiting. I think the issue with narrative sacrifices is that they jump all the steps from "we're going to make it" to "we're dead". There's no "Ok, get our fastest guy, have him pull the enemies away from us, that's our best chance for all of us to survive". Death for the sake of death is meaningless.
Inscryption's sacrifice mechanic sounds a bit like chess - every piece returns for the next game, so making the right sacrifices is considered skilled play, and there is no expectation that you can win while keeping all of your pieces on the board. Harry Potter does a variation on this when Ron realizes he should sacrifice the knight to ensure victory, but since he is playing the role of the knight, he has to take the hit himself to do it. Another interpretation I've heard is that Ron instinctively gives Hermione the role of the Rook because it's the most easily defended of the 3 missing pieces.
ME2’s Suicide Mission really isn’t a good use of the Sacrifice subject, because... well, yeah, it’s not about sacrifice. It’s a place where characters can die for good, sure, but its more of a Final Exam. How well have you been treating them (the Loyalty Missions), how much have you prepared (the ship upgrades), how well do you know who can do what best (the Specialist selections), all that ties into it. That’s honestly what makes the deaths hit harder, the general knowledge that it was your fault that they died, and they didn’t need to. I think one of the sacrifices that I distinctly remember kinda working was from Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the Trooper story, there’s a somewhat more important than normal NPC named Sergeant Jaxo. She’s funny, smart, good moral principles. You can have a fling with her if you’re a guy, or a Girls Night Out event if you’re a woman, but either way she’s really well developed. And then there’s a mission that’s a raid on an Imperial prison camp, and you’re given what’s probably the obvious choice: You can save like a thousand Republic soldiers, or you can save her. Pretty standard, sure. But what elevated it for me was that *she’s freaking the fuck out at you possibly sacrificing her*. She’s pleading to be saved. She knows she could be about to die, and she’s terrified. No stoic warrior falling on the grenade this time. It twists the knife just enough to be memorable, because it’s not quite what’s expected, and it really does make you feel bad either way it pans out. And yeah, you’ll never see Jaxo again if you save her, because story branches are a pain in the ass to handle, but it really is a good sign of how to do a sacrifice choice well: You kinda need both options to be bad ones that you don’t want to do...
There isn't a better sacrifice in games than the Nier series and how it's interwoven both narratively and mechanically, it's gameplay as storytelling to the finest degree
@@jackawaka While that may be true. This pretty much proves the whole point of the video any solution no matter how meta that lets you get out of the consequences always is going to be more desirable on a base level to us humans. Something like save states even count as mitigating consequence of death or loss.
The "sacrifice" in pyre worked really well for me. You travel with a party through an underworld and sometimes get the chance to release one person from your party into the actual world above. Letting someone go is hard because the people i cared most about were the characters i liked to play the most. But i still let them go so they can get back to a better life for themselves.
The game Into the Breach does this well I think. The game is so challenging that it is nearly impossible to beat with no losses (of civilians), and since your characters have permadeath, you won’t normally be willing to sacrifice them. I’ve had several runs where I got genuinely emotional over having to sacrifice a unit, despite the fact that they are all prebuilt personalities.
I thought of a good example myself. Heavy spoilers for Outer Worlds. There's a quest near the end of the game where the player character is tasked with stealing a bunch of chemicals needed to revive the rest of the colonists still in Cryo aboard The Hope. During the quest, the player learns that these same chemicals they intend to steal are being used to keep some people alive, and by taking them, they will be killing these people, who are presumably innocent. The game give you the option to only take a small amount of the chemicals, but doing so drastically reduces the number of colonists you can revive.
Heavy spoilers: I remember that, and it was great. Not only is that an option, but it requires a high stat check to get. It makes you feel like investing in your character that way was smart and you saved the maximum amount of people...but nope. Because you didn't choose to sacrifice the people in the tubes, you minimized the amount of people you could save and condemned your ally to a painful existence because he felt he didn't do enough.
Tbh I never felt so incredibly evil as I felt when betraying the doc and the feeling of power was awesome.... until I got disappointed by the execution of the quest line
@@twinguy9633 I didn't betray him, so I can't speak from experience. It's a shame that part of the quest was poor handled though. Most of the rest of the game was fantastic
@@houraisheperd9721 it was a genuinely hard choice, but I made the same decision you did. Not cause I felt like would be saving the maximum number of people, but because I felt like my 'honorable criminal' character wouldn't be willing to sacrifice the lives of innocent people to accomplish his goals.
@@christopherdubus6769 Man I swear never ever felt I stronger in game than that moment. I had all the informations, I was the key to everything and I turned against it. I thought its like when u go on the dark side in infamous or star wars but sadly it doesn't have an drastic impact. I felt destroyed lmao
I've seen a really interesting sacrifice mechanic in the ttRPG City of Mist recently. Your character sheet is basically 4 mini character sheets and to do any of the advanced level ups you need to sacrifice 1 of your 4 character sheets and start a new one from scratch. The rest of the mechanics support this so that it happens at dramatically appropriate times. You can literally burn 1/4 of your character to take over the story and do a cool thing, which dramatically weakens and changes your character.
@@RAFMnBgaming City of Mist has a pretty good you tube series (th-cam.com/play/PLmB0M4ILJ6vaoMFCKwKtvxgFixFiZD8Fn.html) on its stuff, look for the newer stuff with 2d art in the thumbnails :)
I think there is an element of the trolley problem as well. Most people will push a button to sacrafice 1 person to save 5 doomed persons. But much fewer are willing to push someone in front of the trolley to do literally the same thing. The reason why is supposedly because the more personnel or involved it feels, the worse their consciousness and the less it feels there's a right choice, even if the math disagrees. And video games are very involved and often very personnel. Also I second the shoutout to GiantGrantGames, those videos are brilliant and fun to watch.
The trolley problem is also a stupid ethical dilemma. Life is NEVER that binary, and it doesn't account for the particulars about the people involved. And if the trolley is sizable enough to kill 5 people it can get past one fat dude.
I'd rather push the person in front of the trolley to get rid of _six_ people if I have this sort of situation on hand. Six less problems in the world.
All this just goes to show that sacrifices (like other "negative" outcomes to player decisions) only work well when two things are satisfied. Firstly, they are expected, either from a narrative or gameplay perspective. Secondly, the player can somewhat mitigate them, but not circumvent them completely. This gives the player the sense that the sacrifice is fair and lets them take ownership of it, rather than feeling arbitrarily punished.
I believe that you mix two different problems in this video. Narrative sacrifice and gameplay sacrifice. It's a bad writing to kill off character with Narrative use for cheap drama. But it is not the same as inscryption and darkest dungeon character as resources. The idea they are linked is fine on the surface but the problem is not the same. In game with Narrative sacrifice as you said it can make the game feel unfun, but this is due to a loss of agency and Narrative potential being lost. While gameplay sacrifice is more of a problem with too much agency. You could sacrifice the squirrel and goat for a bear now or maybe I can last one more turn and draw my mantis of a less risky win. Games do have problems with both issues but they don't stem from the same place.
NIce vid as always, but I would like to add another pretty important point which was only brushed over. Two games I feel have to be mentioned when talking about sacrifice in videogame are Nier (as well as Automata which was briefly featured in the video) and Pyre. At the end of the game, the first one asks you to sacrifice all of your save data so that your characters can have a chance at a happy ending. The second asks you at multiple key moments to choose one of your characters to be freed from the purgatory they're trapped in, which is a good thing for them in universe, but means you lose this character as a party member. In both cases you're asked to choose not between two options within the context of the story, but between what's good for your characters and what's good for you as a player. In Pyre, you could free Rukey, the lovable mustached-dog as he clearly doesn't fit in the Downside and want to go back to his family, but that means losing what's probably your best scorer for future challenges and the game is only getting tougher... That's what makes good sacrifices in videogames. Not necessarily that the dilemna be intesting, but that it involves you as a player. This ties back to a video by Innuendo Studio on the game Bastion (here's the link in case someone is interested: th-cam.com/video/IyhrKPLDCyY/w-d-xo.html ) in which he states that, while movies, books or other forms of art can make you feel happiness, sadness or other emotions, only video games, due to their high degree of interactivity can make you feel things like pride and heroism. You are not just following a character doing the righteous thing, YOU are doing it at a (admittedly virtual) cost for yourself. That's why sacrifices in game should affect gameplay. Personally, I'm also not a fan of unavoidable sacrifices, like the end of the first ME and much prefer the suicide mission in ME2. I feel like, if the player is good enough, they should be able to overcome the obstacles they face and still manage to do what's right. Undertale does incite you to never level up during the game, keeping you health pool at a minimum and that's only how you'll get a happy ending for your characters. Even a much more grim and cynical game like Paper Please allows you to save your family without becoming too corrupt if you know what you're doing. It should obviously be much harder than the alternative, but that's what makes it a stronger moment when you do sacrifice something or someone IG, because you know if you played better, you might have saved them and that makes it much more gut-wrenching that the game just telling you "You're going to lose someone dear to you and there's nothing you can do about it except choose who." At which point you can just shrug, resign yourself to it and start coldly calculating the value of each option. I'm not saying this kind of choice should never happen, some stories are explicitly about loss and the fact sacrifices have to be made, but I think it cheapens the message in a way. It's a bit like Spec Ops : The Line judging you for being a complete monster when you had no input on the actions of your character beside guiding them through the levels. While it's pretty effective, mostly because of the awfulness it makes you go through, it doesn't have the impact of doing a no-mercy run of Undertale because in that case, you know that you have the option of doing the right thing. (Yes, I know, it's the second time I mention Undertale, but who can blame me ? It's freaking Undertale, there are a lot of things to admire there.)
Low-key, probably the best sacrifice experience I've had in video games is during hardcore Nuzlocke runs of Pokemon. Having to decide to sac a pokemon for a free switch or gamble with everyone's lives and the whole run by trying to manually switch and tank an attack in the process is really engaging
I think the fact that it's a self imposed challenge also helps since whilst you could technically boot up an old save if something doesn't go to plan, by doing so you're violating your own rules and have thus failed the challenge, regardless of if you reach the end or not.
I think the likelyhood of a "sacrifice" scenario having a positive payoff also depends substantially on the player's temperament. I always thought that I was the sort of person who much preferred games with permadeath or ironman modes - but over the years I've realised that selecting these options just means I'll put the game down sooner than I would have if I'd save-scummed mercilessly. For instance, when a character in DD dies I don't find it to be particularly interesting or meaningful. Its not like some incredible dramatic moment in a movie or a great novel - its just this funny little thing that went wrong and is fairly annoying and chips away and my interest in pressing on - less Iron Giant and more like "oh crap I burned my soup, thats irritating...". Of course the game really doesn't want me to save-scum and I know the creators of the game really want me to have to live with the consequences but the reality is that I'm just not very interested in eating burned soup when I've got plenty of perfectly good un-burned soup to eat. I assume some people experience the Iron Giant thing more than me - but for me its just burned soup all the way down. Luckilly I really enjoy save-scumming & modding, so all is not lost.
I agree on the topic of DD. However, I'd argue that the main problem in that scenario isn't so much that you make sacrifices - it's that the sacrifices don't benefit you enough to compensate for how much you lost. DD is kind of a bad example, bc character death in that game is less "sacrifice" and more "getting fucked over." It'd be much better if each character death created some tangible benefit - like giving you some sort of currency that allows you to buy unique, exceptionally powerful trinkets, or upgrades that permanently improve your roster. That would make death much more of a mixed bag, instead of making it burned soup.
I think Hades does a good job of compensating you for losses, too. There are plotlines and progression unlocks you can only advance by dying - and you keep all the farmable resources you gained during a run when you die. That way, even if you fail to finish a run, you still get something out of it.
@@Drekromancer Yes I enjoy Hades - that particular loop does work for me. Some may say its "trophies for everyone" but I think its smart to give the player more options precisely at the point where their interest in playing-on may be faltering. There is a bit of advice in the TTRPG rulebook "Spirit of the Century" that I think is relevant - basically the author suggests that if the players need to get across a chasm, and falling into the chasm is a real risk then ideally you want "falling into the chasm" to be every bit as interesting an outcome as "leaping successfully to the other side" - much easier to implement in a tabletop RPG of course but worth thinking about all the same! Something like ironman XCOM2 or ironman Rimworld often feel like they go in the opposite direction - e.g. the more you fail the more limited your options are and it becomes harder and harder to recover and make progress. Basically you wind up in a sort of death spiral where each time you go round the spiral your gameplay becomes more and more constrained and less and less interesting. The thing that Adam is describing (and the thing that games like DD are dubiously relying on) is the phenomenon where the player gets more invested in the game the worse things get and counterintuitively they get more interested as their mechanical options get narrower and narrower. I think this can work, but it often doesn't work for me and it seems like a fairly fragile thing to build a large part of your design around. Rimworld though oddly enough sometimes accidentally solves this problem in a way that I think is roughly in-line with the developers vision. Back when I used to play ironman Rimworld I'd eventually & inevitably end up force quitting the game when a particularly useful or beloved colonist died - and then retry from the last auto-save. Sometimes this autosave was, in practise, past the point of "no return" and saving the colonist would be near impossible but, because of how highly random Rimworld is, the game would sometimes generate some new set of circumstances that would give me interesting new options going forward - in these cases I have an interesting choice, e.g. lose the colonist and play-on with new options, or force-quit again and take another chance at saving the colonist knowing that the RNG won't generate the same scenario again (and may well be much worse!). Sometimes I'd take the former option, build a nice tomb for my beloved founder colonist and play-on - which is close to the way the dev (I imagine) would ideally like people to play their game. Its very hard not to think of games as skill tests that are best reinforced by rewarding and punishing the player appropriately - but at the same time I strongly suspect that although this a great scheme of training animals to do tricks its often a recipe for boring games!
One take on sacrifice that I've always found well is the honest narrative sacrifice. This is hard to set up reliably because you first need the player to truly buy in to the story. Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm has an excellent example of a great sacrifice that fails in that regard: Kerrigan's decision to return to the Swarm. If you're playing through the story of Starcraft 2, you hit this moment shortly after completing a whole campaign that concluded with you, as Raynor, managing to de-infest (well, mostly) Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades and ruler of the Swarm. This...doesn't work as well as it should, mostly because Starcraft 1 makes it pretty clear that Raynor's concern for Kerrigan was more of a war-buddy sort of thing than the very romantic take they're pushing in Starcraft 2. But it's a fun enough campaign and it's a lot of work. And, very early on in the Heart of the Swarm campaign, Raynor is missing, presumed captured or dead, and Kerrigan wants revenge....so she goes back to the Zerg to reclaim her power in persuit of vengeance, willingly sacrificing her humanity in the process. By the time she manages to rescue Raynor, she does it knowing she's so far gone that there's no reasonable hope for their relationship. If we had the whole series's worth of investment into that relationship, that decision would be powerful and painful. But...there's the differences in how Starcraft 1 and 2 handle that relationship that inject enough cognitive dissonance that it's hard to get invested in it. There's a couple of other games I can think of off the top of my head that handle this kind of narrative sacrifice much better: Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 10. FF4 has several moments that are real gut punches, but it makes a really annoying narrative choice late in the game that reverses most of them. Cid, Yang, Palom and Porom all go out like heroes, but they only hit hard on the first playthrough, because on a replay, you know what's coming. Tellah, though, his story is committed to, he goes out as the biggest hero of all of these characters, and when he dies, he's gone for good. He's introduced as an old man following his granddaughter, who eloped with a bard (if you know anything about this game, it's probably the "you spoony bard" line when they eventually meet). By the time he catches up with them, the town they were in was bombed by the Red Wings (a fleet of airships under the control of the antagonist, Golbez), and while the bard survived, his granddaughter did not. We leave him there to mourn his granddaughter, keeping the bard safely out of range of Tellah's powerful magic. When next we meet him, he's attempting to climb Mount Ordeals (a pivotal moment in the story for the main character as well - Cecil is there seeking to give up his Dark Knight powers in hopes of becoming a Paladin, since in this world, evil can never vanquish evil), hoping to find the ultimate destructive magic, Meteor, so he can avenge his granddaughter by killing the mighty Golbez. The newest members of the party immediately recognize him as the great Sage - a legendary figure among magic users, but also recognize that at his age, if he uses Meteor, it will cause so much strain on his body that he'll die. (The game handles this really well in the stats too: his MP is pinned at 90 - 9 less than the cost of casting Meteor, thus making sure you don't prove the game wrong by casting it outside of the proper story beat, and his frailty is further emphasized by the fact that his physical stats (strength, speed and ...vitality?) go down slowly when he levels up - he's old enough that physical exertion is slowly draining him, rather than training his body up.) And you succeed in that quest and later, when the moment comes, Golbez attacks the party, and Tellah stands against him, alone, casting Meteor again and again, then collapsing. Golbez turns out to be even more durable than believed, but he's still forced to retreat...and Tellah collapses, dead. It's a big loss for the player too - at that point in the game, his powerful magic and high magic stats make him an extremely powerful and versatile party member. So losing him sucks, even if you're not fully invested in the story. (In stark contrast to the Starcraft 2 example, where Kerrigan rejoining the Zerg and taking on her infested form again is a distinct mechanical benefit.) FFX's sacrifice thing is entirely reliant on you buying into the story, but there's so many themes of sacrifice that it's hard to point out any but the big two: the entire concept of the Summoner's Pilgrimage, and what happens with Tidus at the end of the game. Summoners (Yuna and others) all travel through Spira, from Besaid to Zanarkand, knowing they will die, but maybe they will defeat Sin, granting the world a temporary respite from the endless cycle of death caused by its attacks. This pilgrimage takes up the vast majority of story time, so we're treated to hours of examination this sort of sacrifice. Conversely, Tidus's fate is substantially less well developed, and only really makes sense if you connect some narrative dots that you likely won't on your first playthrough. But he goes in to the end fully aware that destroying Sin and Yu Yevon means destroying himself as well, and hides that fact from his companions until the last possible moment.
My favorite type of sacrifice is when you have to sacrifice your own effort or power in order to do a moral decision rather than sacrificing a person or situation. In the end, sacrificing your own ability, time or effort will always hit hard straight through the screen and can end up with a lot of additional suffering but also often makes it feel rewarding and that you did the right thing. To me, this works a lot better than sacrificing one viritual aspect for another, although that ofcourse does have its place as well if it's well balanced enough and ow oof my feels... I have to mention one of my favorite games as an example; Gods Will Be Watching. The game is hard. *Really* hard. You often wont be able to make it out with everyone alive in the end and seeing the sacrifice you make at sny point last througout the game with a constant reminder of what you did really hits hard, even if it's still mechanically indifferent. You can still save everyone, but it will require you to give up a win in order to try again for a "perfect win" and that caused me so much pain and suffering and it really felt like a meaningful sacrifice. It is one of the aspects that makes the game so unique and ultimately what makes it one of my favorites throughout the times. This is a very complex topic and i'm glad you talked about it! I hope we get to see more games in the future with more well balanced and/or unique sacrifices that carries the impact! Cheers!~
You explained it perfectly at the start, I feel cheated when a game suddenly cuts all my options or nerfs me for a scripted scene and kills a character that I could easily have saved.
I was going to write a long comment about how brilliant Inscryption is mechanically and narratively, but it is impossible to discuss the game without massive spoilers. All I can say is that it is one of my top gaming experiences in the past few years and is certainly worth checking out.
I’d still pay good money for a more traditional, fleshed out, longer roguelike in the style of Leshy’s section. Like the whole game was very cool, but his section was still the absolute best. And I think having four different types of decks got to be a little too much, just two at once was enough. But then again I do want to see the teased battles at the end of the game… GIVE US DLC I SWEAR TAKE MY MONEY lol
Thanks for shouting out Giant Grant Games. I started watching his channel last month and has been quite a trip. I love how he manages to pull the impossible.
amazing video! i was reminded of SIGNS OF THE SOJOURNER, a deck building game in which the cards are the way the protagonist, a traveler, comunicates with other people during their travels. the catch: everyone only comunicates through two kinds of cards, and during the journey you accumulate Fatigue cards that no ones understands. it's impossible to nail every encounter in one playthrough and you have to choose and prioritize, which influences what kind of person your character becomes, the friends he makes, etc. it's a beautiful game. has stayed with me for a long time.
In XC2's credit, while I agree that the situation leading up to the sacrifice could've been done better, the actual sacrifice itself does end up presenting a lot of narrative implications down the line and does actually have a pretty strong effect on the story
At least the game is self-aware. Almost right after that scene plays out, another character chastizes the one who acted like a child in the moment (surpise, he _is_ a child). While the sacrifice can leave a bad taste, especially since I felt like the character could have used some more time, it was pretty satisfying having the game acknowledge that feeling. The other thing that scene has going for it is that it's better on subsequent playthroughs because of a different character in the scene entirely who was so important that Monolith felt the need to give them the music slot.
Also, its actually an incredibly difficult fight, top 3 hardest in the game, and some would argue it's the hardest, period. So you are meant to struggle until you summon Mythra. Granted, if you're just really good it doesn't matter if its the hardest in the game.
I _never_ make tactical sacrifices in turn-based tactics games (except maybe Into the Breach, since campaigns are so short there). Maybe it's because I'm a perfectionist by nature. I'd appreciate some kind of "second chance" system to make this feel more like a viable choice with not-so-permanent consequences. X-Com: Enemy Unknown rolls a dice whenever one of your soldiers hits 0 HP to either kill them or put them in critical condition, allowing you to stabilize them with a med kit or by finishing the mission quickly. This makes the soldier unavailable for a few weeks, and I think there's a permanent debuff on them afterward, but at least they keep their skills and levels. I think it'd be great to have an option to eliminate that dice roll and make this happen to every soldier the first time they fall, and when it happens a second time, they're just dead. The debuff would help keep track of who's in this danger zone, and also incentivize you to not throw bodies at the wall haphazardly lest your whole squad be crippled.
i think no one makes tactical sacrifices in tactical games period. Probably not even the guy making the video because they are just objectively bad choices, if you are in a position where you can only win a Fire Emblem map by sacrificing someone you just made a ton of either very dumb or are deliberately trying to kill said character. As said in the video, those actions just put you on a massive disadvantage that will start a death spiral and you won't even need to restart the game yourself, the game will just kill you and you will have to restart anyway, the concept of sacrifices is cool in a narrative but as a strategy is 90% just a terrible choice to avoid.
in xcom I only ever made sacrifices when the consequence would mean losing more people, but even then I would still opt to save-scumming to find that perfect play that can save everyone. and I think that is the problem, without permanent consequences, we will always try to find the optimal solution simply because we can. otherwise we are just assholes letting a sacrifice happen for the drama.
@@grayfulbester The problem is that sacrifices really rarely hold any advantages at all. Letting a strong character die is pretty much always the objectively worse option. If a character death gave you a permanent bonus that made it not strictly worse in the long run, and lessened the effects of the loss. Of course that's something to be balanced because it can't be too strong, but it would still go a long way.
I was hoping Life is Strange would come up. The life-support sacrifice halfway through the game was so well executed, despite not having an impact on the gameplay, that I was crying for ages afterwards. And what you mentioned about, as a player, making the harder choice for a more rewarding experience is definitely true for that choice, and especially for the final choice. I made "the hard choice" at the end and the ending was much more painful for also much more satisfying and emotionally challenging. It just felt right. The amount of mods that were made to circumvent the final choice in order to create a happy ending is an interesting thing to talk about in terms of players trying to avoid emotional confrontation and sacrifice at all cost, but thereby, as you said, 'sacrificing' a deeper experience. I think the interesting paradox that comes up with sacrifices is that you want the player to make the sacrifice for the sake of the story, but if you don't provide the option not to make the sacrifice, the sacrifice itself loses a lot of its meaning, because then it's no longer a choice, just a forced event. I feel like Life is Strange especially showed this, having a "right" ending, and the ending that only exists to make the "right" ending have more weight through the fact that you had to make a decision yourself as a player. But by doing so, the devlopers risked having a lot of players choose the cheap ending and miss out on the intense, deep emotional experience of the game coming full circle and wrapping up its themes.
I really like this point of yours! Life is Strange is one of my favorites, and I absolutely feel what you're saying. The first time I played it, I felt like "that can't be the end, right? I must have missed something, there's got to be a way to fix it all." And by the time I got to the end of my second playthrough, I learned the lesson. My impulse to go back and try again is exactly what Max felt in the narrative when she used her power. But the game's lesson is "no matter what, there are always consequences. You have to decide which consequences you're willing to accept." And crucially, doing nothing IS doing something. There're a number of little butterfly effects in the game that specifically stem from you not taking certain opportunities. And the game makes no judgment of you either way. It just lets you see the consequences in a way that most games don't until after you've already made the choice. In a way, being able to see a choice play out and then rewind actually makes you more responsible for the one you eventually choose.
the irony of saying sacrifices are inherently undesirable, while showing magic the gathering, were killing 1 creature triggers many other effects, usually better than the reward of sacrifice itself
It's not ironic at all, sacrifices being inherently undesirable means you need a larger incentive to make them desireable (such as activating 15 different effects or something)
@@devforfun5618 Forget mono-black, I have a Black/Green Golgari deck made from cards across both Ravnica sets with two copies of Deadbridge Chant in it and a metric asston of card recovery. My first priority in every game I play with that deck is to *_start filling my graveyard as soon as possible_* so I can play cards from it more or less for free and functionally draw two cards per turn.
Your choice at the ending of nier automata is also an amazing example of sacrifice done right in video games. It's a pretty massive spoiler so I understand why it wasn't included in this video. It's what real sacrifices are like: you lose something and get nothing in return. But you do it anyways because it's the right thing to do. Before playing the game, I would've never made that sacrifice. But the story and message it gave me was so compelling that I had to do the right thing.
I'm still going to defend Mass Effect to the hilt. Not all games are supposed to be the same. The point of Mass Effect isn't to roleplay in a blind playthrough, it's to take the role of the director. You get to make bad decisions for the purpose of making a cooler story and the story you want *is* the reward for doing so. Yes, I've done a "perfect" run of the trilogy, but one of my favourite playthroughs was my Engineer run where I had to jump through hoops to make sure as many characters died as possible. That turned the entire story into a Shepherd desperately clawing every victory they could from overwhelming odds. *I* wasn't doing everything I could to win, but Shepherd clearly was as far as the story was concerned. I still maintain the story of the overpowered badass Shepherd who just gets everything done is also a cool story, however. That's the beauty of the trilogy, by taking the role of director, you get to decide whatever story you think is best for that playthrough.
A correction to the after the video bit. The starcraft to no build challenges were done on the normal difficulty not the hardest difficulty (except for a few missions in the zerg campaign) and it was without building anything, including structures
I'm surprised there was no mention of Wildermyth: In that game when one of your characters drop to 0 hp you can have them survive with a permanent wound (usually a missing limb), or have them die but give a big advantage to the current fight. Given that there's no conventional overaching story you won't miss any story moment specific for that character, and there are ways to get more characters, making it a temporary setback on progression. At the same time their death not only has the mechanical weight of losing a memebr of your team, but through the game you probably built a narrative and a character to that miserable pile of stats, not only via the tactical combat gameplay but also with the various story vignettes the game randomly pulls regurarly, adding narrative drama to the sacrifice.
I've seen this happen as well in Pokemon Nuzlockes here on TH-cam, where instead of treating Pokemon as valued companions, they're treated as fodder for "necessary" sacrifices. I understand specific runs require sacrifices, but because they're treated so callously, so much dramatic tension is lost and it runs completely counter to the idea that Pokemon are your friends. And the whole idea of the Nuzlocke was to make the game harder, both on a technical level and an emotional one.
Typically a person's first Nuzlocke, especially when playing a game blind, is their most engaging. This is where you see stories of trainers holding their precious team together with tape and string, mourning the loss of every party member, finding value in Pokémon they would otherwise have ignored, and being forced to make gut-wrenching sacrifices to save the team. Dedicated "Nuzlocke channels" show the extreme inverse. Players doing their 267th Nuzlocke simply aren't going to have any emotional investement in their teams anymore, and worse, will be so familiar with Nuzlocke gameplay that they end up optimising the fun out of the game.
I really hate that attitude, it’s a fucking reductive and shallow look at Ash’s character (note that her reaction to being told to lead one of the Salarian squads isn’t “what? Those weak little tadpoles can’t be trusted to back me up” but rather more “lets go kick some Geth and Krogan ass lizard bros!”). And really, comparing her with Kaidan kinda gives a lot of the game away, because at least she has baggage. Kaiden’s issue is one that’s very common in ME1, a lot of the characters are very stoic and dry. There’s exceptions abound, sure, but even series standouts Joker, Tali and Garrus come off as stiff and bland by comparison to their portrayals in ME2. Kaidan just gets hit with it the worst because he doesn’t have a unique culture to talk about (why Garrus and Tali are interesting), and the voice actor is playing the character as he is: Reliable and stoic.
I think this take on ME was a bad take. I think the sacrifice in ME1 probably works BETTER because it was those two characters (which had their merits and flaws) exactly because the player could make the sacrifice and keep some of the deeper characters. That is, it does exactly the useful thing of making a big, permanent choice, but making the player not want to quit the game or get frustrated that they cannot save both. Imagine that same sacrifice, but you have to lose Tali or Liara. That might hit harder, but it might hit too hard in comparison. imho, the ME2 take was also a bad take. That section was not about "sacrifice". You could make it through with everyone alive if you were invested. I didn't even know people could die after my first play-through because I was so invested that I had fully upgraded the ship and I knew all the characters well enough to know who had the skills for each specialist mission. Making those choices correctly didn't feel like I was given less interesting options or that the lack of death was less interesting. There was a lot of tension, and I was "rewarded" with the resolution of that tension because I cared about the game's mechanics and characters. I got a better outcome because I prepared, which directly reinforces player agency. In contrast, the "sacrifice" in ME3 was horrible because there were no real options and nothing you did up to that point mattered. No matter what, you lose. That could be fine in some games, but in ME3 it went against the core player agency that was established in the ME series, especially by the end section of ME2. It was clear that the game wasn't actually done when it was released, but I was surprised that ME3's sacrifice failure didn't make it into the video, yet comments about ME1 and ME2 did make it in. The ME3 sacrifice was widely reviled as terrible. The ME3 ending was on par with other worst endings like Dexter Morgan becoming a lumberjack, or whatever you want to call the end of Game Of Thrones.
@@Wraithfighter There is a very fine line between nationalism and racism. ME1 even shows us that most members of Ashley's "Earth First" part are blowing that "xeno scum" dog whistle so hard they are about to pass out. Ashley herself comments on these racists giving her part a bad name and tainting the cause. Or in other words, she claim to be "one of the good ones." But at the end of hte day she says aliens can't be trusted because they will ultimately side with their own kind, circle the wagons, and throw humanity under the bus: so it's only natural for humanity to take the same stand. We have to fuck them over before they fuck us over and true cooperation was never an option. We can never truly rely on them and must seek to exploit them before they exploit us. She may not consider herself a racist, but then again few do.
@@duncanlutz3698 Aye, that's entirely fair to bring up, and she abso-fucking-lutely has prejudicial and racist tendencies that she needs to get beyond and improve on. There's a reason the game lets you call her out on her bullshit, and it doesn't affect her loyalty or even her romancability afaik (well, mechanically at least). There's just a degree of difference between the honest, complex, sincere discussion of racism that you posted there that properly analyzes the situation and her attitude, and what the video did: Call her a space racist and put a KKK hood on her. Hence my umbrage: it's not that she's not racist, but just that dismissing her as a Space Racist Klansman is reductive and shallow as fuck.
@@Wraithfighter Sure, she's more of a xenophobe than a Klansmen, but she's definitely written as someone that is straddling that fine line between the two. As you said, you can call her out on it in-game. I'd just like to add in her views are based on family history. Her grandfather was the first and only human to surrender to an alien force. This lead her entire family into humiliation to the point Ashley's career died before she was even born. Alien's hurt her family. Aliens hurt her career. Aliens can't be trusted. Her views thus come more from a place of personal anger and resentment than any strict philosophical pragmatism. Throwing a KKK hood over her does feel too much, though, sure. Simply calling the racist a racist, however, is fair game.
I loved the way pyre had you "sacrifice" party members by setting them free. You had to think about the gameplay and narrative reasons to pick or not pick each character, and there's no way to play it safe really
For me the #1 issue with sacrifices in video games is the more often than not they reduce the amount of content in the game. (In this context think of content as mechanical choices/ability and story to experience). The problem is that generally speaking there is no straightforward solution to this problem. On the surface you'd think that the solution would be to make equal content both for the choice to sacrifice and not to sacrifice but content isn't infinite in supply. It takes a lot of time and effort to give a game good content and content divided between two different choices is always going to be less than the content one of those choices would have gotten if it was the focus. Of the top of my head I can see two choices, the first is replayability. A full game's worth of content divided across two choices might reduce a single playthrough's amount of content to half a game's worth, but if replayability is a core part of the game then you'll eventually get that full game's worth. I'm personally don't like this solution, however. A lot of the time replayability is done poorly in that it causes you to repeat a lot of the same things over and over again, wasting the player's time and diluting the content the game has to offer. On the other hand if the replayability becomes too streamlined and easy to access it can cheapen the sacrifices. You'll quickly be making "difficult" choices not because they're curious but because you want to know what will happen when you choose them. The second choice, and the one I much prefer, is to make your sacrifices nothing or little in terms of the overall content of the game, instead relying on good worldbuilding to carry it through. This however is incredibly difficult and requires the special skill to create believably breathing, living worlds. But when it is pulled off your choices no longer become dominated by thoughts of content but instead about more raw and emotional thoughts of how your choices effect yourself, the people around you, and the world you inhabit.
Genshin actually did a very good portrayal of Sacrifice in the Aranyaka quest. It's not the player's sacrifice, but this adds something to my daily routine :'). This will be spoilers so if you don't want to be spoiled, don't read. Should be far enough. So the quest is about working with the Children of the Forest, the Aranara in order to get 'Bija' to heal somebody you just met, Rana. Although the relationship between the player and Rana isn't that close, the relationship between the player and the Aranara definitely did. The player first learned that the Aranara are hiding from 'Nara' or humans, because they think that humans are dangerous. But after helping the Aranara and getting their trust, the player gets more information. The Aranara lives in the 'dream version' of the Vanarana village, and the player meets Araja, who is the wisest Aranara in the village. From Araja, the player gets more information about the Aranara but also a huge foreshadowing about the ending of the quest. The Aranara are children of the forest, and their power comes from knowledge or memories. They can use their knowledge in order to unleash powerful abilities, but this used knowledge will disappear after that. In order to get 'Bija', the Aranara needs to make 'happy memories' to which they hold the Festival Utsava in order to make said happy memories. The foreshadowing is, that Araja can't leave the village. He has become the tree that supports the dream version of Vanarana, because of that he can't leave. So instead, Arama accompanied us. In our preparation we get more foreshadowing of what is actually required to get 'Bija'. Neither we, nor Arama will actually realize that Arama needs to sacrifice himself and become a tree. The pain of seeing Aranara lose their memories in order to protect their friends is already sad enough, imagine seeing Arama using himself as the 'seed' in order to get a Bija. That makes me bawl. If you go to Arama's house in Vanarana, there will be a diary written by Arama where he had no clue he had to sacrifice himself. It was only when they arrive in the Lost Nursery that he finally was granted the knowledge that he will be sacrificed. And Genshin is a linear story, which means you have no choice in letting Arama sacrifice himself or to leave Rana to die. It will always be Arama sacrificing himself. This highlights that it's not the player's choice but it's Arama's choice. Every single day now I go to Arama's tree and play the Aranara theme :')
Just wanted to comment you can totally beat those two lanes of bears on Inscryption, me and my friend did it, every boss will do it until you lose at least once or so I've heard. We finished the first run, first try. Its an incredibly interesting and fun game with lots of secrets and its much more than meets the eye.
I always felt that Mass Effect 1's choice was both impressive and unimpressive. A rare, possibly the only, meaningful choice you can't paragon out of, but like you said, between the two worst characters. My only issue when deciding was trying to figure out if there was any reason to not sacrifice Kaiden, as Ashley's shitty arc is better than a nonexistent one. Now imagine if they had the same choice but made you choose between Tali and Garrus. That would have been a sacrifice.
Eh, would it? Garrus and Tali in ME1 weren’t really all that much more interesting than Ash and Kaidan was. Honestly, of the 6 party members, Ash is kinda the second most interesting (behind Wrex, of course), because she has baggage, she has an arc, she has issues that she needs to deal with, even if her resolution of those issues is symbolicly shown as having no issue (hell, demanding to) lead a group of Salarian troops into battle. Garrus and Tali are really only more interesting to us in hindsight because of ME2 and 3, where they returned with much better writing and characterization. Meanwhile, as potentially-dead characters, Kaidan and Ash get one scene in ME2 where they’re saddled with the plot role of giving Shepard no support so the player has to stick with Cerberus, and are absent for half of ME3 and, since they’re still potentially dead, the writers spend more effort on the Definitely (or at least very likely) alive characters like Edi, Joker, Liara, James and, yes, Tali and Garrus (although those two to a lesser extent, Tali in particular, given how late you get her back, damn it).
@@Wraithfighter Very true. I was looking at it from a trilogy perspective. As you said, Garrus and Tali become more central later on, while Kaiden/Ash get removed for all of ME2 and most of ME3. So if you had to sacrifice Garrus or Tali, there would be greater consequences and more missed content over the course of the franchise, making the sacrifice more meaningful.
@@CthulhuInACan this also tracks backwards too. Ash and Kaiden were crappy characters in ME1 because the devs knew that half the players would never see content written for one or the other, so way less effort was put into them as a result.
In my mind, Saren is a much better tale of sacrifice from Mass Effect. The whole game was about Specters, and their quest to keep the galaxy safe, reinfoced throughout. Saren was captured, corrupted by Sovreign, though how much is his own will is hard to tell. In the end though, he realises what he must do and does it. In a way made more powerful by the fact that he doesn't have to, Shepard is more than capable of killing him; but _Saren_ makes the decision to do what he can and, at least in _my_ Shepard eyes, redeems himself. The Ashley/Kaden thing is less a sacrifice and more bad tactics.
The fact that games are bad at presenting sacrifice as interesting comes from the fact that they don't have a way to redefine the parameters of the game if you fail at something. Like for example in real life, if someone dies that you care about, then you have to deal with the emotional stuff, but you also have to figure out how to adapt your life to make it still have a notion of "success" that means anything to you. In games, that isn't an option: failure states mean you have to give up. There isn't a real problem with player engagement, because having such a problem suggests that games are still playable enough to engage with after a loss, and that simply isn't the case for any game that exists. You can't keep playing chess without your king, and you can't modify your goals to account for your lessened capabilities in Fire Emblem. Games all contain brick walls that funnel you towards absolute success or ending the experience. Once someone comes up with a game that's capable of redefining itself after a loss, then the idea of sacrifice can start to have actual meaning.
There are games like disco elysium where even failing technically can lead to better solutions than winning according to personal preference. There is also Planescape torment - where character death is just something you willingly do to progress sometimes
Thats a good point, but I think with many of these cases it simply comes down to the ability to save and load progress that just about every game possesses.
@@aravindpallippara1577 When I played Disco Elysium, I got to a point where I let someone die and I "decided" that that meant I wasn't fit to be a detective anymore, and quit the force. What I mean by redefining the parameters of the game in this context would be something like the game continuing from this point, with you coming up with new goals that fit your new life experience/outlook. The fact that the game ends once I reach a failure state means there is no redefinition. Planescape Torment is the opposite problem: you have the ability to continue from a failure state, but your goals are the same before and after, so there is no redefinition going on here. Death is just part of the game experience leading you to eventual victory along the same parameters as what you started with. If you've ever watched the visual novel Steins;Gate, you maybe can understand what I mean: the main character experiences a singular failure and then spends the bulk of the story learning to compromise his idea of success until it becomes something achievable. That story deals with the subject of sacrifice very well, in a way that no video game ever could.
What if a game makes ending the experience an absolute succes? Not only for you but for another player as well. That's what Nier Automata does, I think.
really good video! I'm glad unsighted showed up! honestly a whole video could be made on unsighted itself. there's a lot more to the sacrifice system you didn't even touch, such how the game's near unparalleled open ended structure effects your choices or the game's difficult hidden ending revolving around self sacrifice at a risky chance to save everyone (which makes me getting soft locked at the end of my hidden ending run that much more fitting)
@@jun533 how is saying "there's a secret ending themed arround self sacrifice" a spoiler? If I really wanted to spoil unsighted there is a thing I could spoil that would be far worse than "there is a secret ending themed around self sacrifice"
@@FakeFlameSprite Because self sacrifice sounds like something you should be told you have to do in an impactful ingame scene where it's like "woahhh" you know but maybe it's just treated like not a big deal I don't know
@@jun533 it's an implied thing. To get the hidden ending in unsighted the player needs to scour every inch of the map to find special items. It's time consuming if you don't know what your looking for, and can easily lead to running out of time and needing. That's why I said it involved self sacrifice.
Enderal (a total conversion mod of Skyrim that may as well be it's own game) comes to my mind when talking about sacrifice in games. Its main story initally starts off as the usual save the world plot but as the plot progresses you deal with more and more sacrifices and deaths eventually leading to a point where I had to make a gut wrenching choice at the ending
Ah, yeah, the inevitable decision of which bland, uninteresting pack mule that's been getting in the way the whole game to execute. Those situations always make me want to take a third option and kill _all_ the options.
In magic, sacrifices are a little bit "balanced" on the fact that you can get "value" from something that was dying anyways... A deck with plenty of "removal" often looks pretty silly against a "sacrifice" themed deck. You can also body-block then sacrifice. But of course, sacrifice decks "truly shine" when you join pieces ("combos") which generate more value than was spent in mana.
2:02 I could just never get invested in Vandham after the first time. I knew that it wasn't really worth it. There are also several fights that you could have won but since you wasn't supposed right before your enemy is defeated the fighting is interrupted since "you didn't stand a chance" even when that is blatantly untrue.
One game series that does the mechanic of sacrifice really well is The Banner Saga. For the entire trilogy you are journeying through a dying world with scarce resources and many people to save. All the sacrifices, whether it be named characters, civilians to protect, or supplies, build up to a fantastic climax that still keeps the initial world-is-ending pace together.
Not so much about scripted sacrifice choices, but more about losing characters/npcs in general: I continously bounce off hard from most D&D simulation games, like the first Bauldur's Gate that's so well spoken of, because death has no tangible narrative heft at all. I remember in my first playthrough, I lost the "childhood best friend rogue" lady in a street fight, and, well... there was nothing. I think I was expected to either pick the items off her corpse and move on, or just load a save, and both of these things sound just so unsatisfying, I immediately dropped that savefile. I guess what I'm trying to say is you really can't get the narrative experience of sacrifice without a proper denoument of some sort. If following through with the situation is meant to be an option, _you gotta write that in._
10:05 when you mentioned pathologic I got so excited that you were going to talk about the original game and how brutal it is but how engaging it can be if you stick with it but you just talked about the sequel
I would love you see you do a video on video game sewer levels. They’re in every game and I don’t understand why. How did SEWERS become such a common level in video games, regardless of genre?
All while watching this I was thinking, Unsighted would be a great example for this video and not enough people have been talking about it, I'm glad to see someone mention it. I picked it up after playing the demo which doesn't mention the mechanic. I didn't look into it really before I bought it, and was a bit disappointed with the timer mechanic since I really hate the stress of dealing with timer and the sacrifice but I'm interested to see how it will actually play out once I finally do lose an NPC, I'm guessing I'll be upset, but it sounds like a great idea. (yes you can turn the timer off but the game is built on it so I don't wanna miss the point). great video btw keep up the great work :D
My favorite thing about Inscryption is that you can actually beat those grizzly bears. If you and ur deck manage to defeat that completely unfair shit, you can actually just keep moving on. I pulled it off on my third run through and felt like a genius.
In Warhammer 40k : Mechanicus, there is an class of troops called servitors, that cost nothing and actually benefit you if they get hurt, encouraging you to play recklessly and send them on suicide attacks, because it ultimately benefits you in the end. However, you only got a limited amount of troops per mission, encouraging you to save some of them for future battles later in the mission. It also helps setting the grimness of 40k via gameplay, which I find interesting. I do which, though, that stronger units could have those kinds of mechanics, getting a risk and reward in getting a powerful character hurt (I’m still at the start of the game, maybe some characters do the same later)
When playing games like FE, it's like playing a stealth game for us, a single death is complete failure, and we have to start the mission again. Sacrifices aren't fun to make. Good story is often unfun to experience
Have tried to play Awakening a few times, got to a point where I compromised with myself about "Only resetting if I lose more than 1 or 2 units", but I couldn't even do that
This is why Wildermyth's "Set In Stone" option is so great, you can't just reload when your favorite character dies. It makes it feel much more like a story with unexpected twists and turns, rather than a story that is on rails.
The original is frustrating as you are seriously weakened if you lose a single character, turning an RNG element into a hard fail state where you turn off the console and either restart it or ragequit.
@@SpriteGuard That just makes me more likely to restart the game or ragequit entirely. Especially if it's not a meaningful sacrifice or one that was outside my control.
@@Healermain15 that's the problem with sacrifice in most games, they are never all that meaningful and are always outside of your control because if you don't like something you can always just go to a previous save, so the game has to force you to commit to it, it becomes either something that happens in the story and is on rails or if it is no prescripted is just something you are forced to deal with after the enemy had a lucky crit.
For Fire Emblem's permadeath problem, a strategy games that I think does death well is Gungnir for the PSP. When a character's HP reaches zero, they simply retreat and drop an item on the battlefield, which can then be picked up. They then get inflicted with a wound that lowers their HP by 10%, which stacks and goes away after not "dying" for a stage. It's only when their HP drops below a certain value do they get overkilled and truly die, for real. So the only penalty for "losing" a character is a lost item and -10%hp. The lost item can be pretty painful, especially if it's a good item, but it's better than losing the character that you've spent time and resources to build, and if you're quick you can pick up the lost item, then the only penalty is just the -10%hp on that character. Gungnir also does a bunch of weird and wacky things that I've never really seen in other Strategy RPG's, but that's beyond the scope of this post. The point is, death is a lot more rarer in Gungnir due to characters retreating before their actual HP reaches zero and die, which makes throwing them into danger and continuing the mission easier. A lot less resetting due to a slight misplay, and a lot more of trying to salvage a victory despite having half the amount of people left in the fight.
The Trolley problem actually has a simpler solution -- ignore the lever and drag the single stranded victim over to the row of people who are about to be run over. Trolley kills all the people, boom, no more problems.
This made me realise just how little I rememeber a lot of character sacrifices in games. period. We usually hear the classic one liner like "Can't wait to see my wife" and INSTANTLY write that dude off as dead. Emotional investment isn't an easy thing to create.
A very interesting video indeed! It is true, a lot of sacrifice mechanics don't have the weight of sacrifice that other media might have, mainly because of gaming's power to turn back time so often to erase that sacrifice. Pathologic 2 (and 1, to a more poorly executed extent) are great at depicting that kinda sacrifice in a almost realistic scenario (while simultainously being very weird and alien in it's own unique way). From the same devs, The Void/Turgor is also very much about sacrifice too - every resource you spend, every choice you make, even every second you allow to pass in the game world - is a meaningful one, and it's very easy to fuck that up and lose the entire game as the world dies and falls into the abyss. I deffo reccomend looking that up if you haven't already! ^w^
Fuga: Melodies of Steel did sacrificing in an interesting way. Every boss fight allows you to use an instantkill move on the boss, at the cost of sacrificing one of your characters for the rest of the playthrough. I genuinely found myself conflicted on whether or not I should sacrifice a character who wasn't particularly powerful, but I was still fond of, which was further impacted by the fact that this was a prequel, and some of these characters were very important to the overall lore of the other games
Interesting topic, I've thought about it some and my current plan for a xianxia inspired game that'd incorporate character deaths without encouraging savescumming and keeping everyone alive too much is to have a reincarnation system where dead characters souls can be used and equipped in various ways and after a certain amount of time and after possibly going through some sort of afterlife they get to be born again inheriting some stuff from their past life.
I think the game that instanly comes to my mind about sacrafice is into the breach, its a tough strategy game, making you pick and priorities multiple objectives, forcing you to make difficult choices on what to sacrifice
I feel like Fire Emblem as a series is an interesting one in this context, as the problem of losing out on game content by letting a character die is a more recent thing, sure, starting with FE6 there were Supports but there was a maximum you could get on each playthrough so it only amounted to 5 small character interactions so for the most part characters were very much disposable and the games constantly gave you new ones to fill in for those that died, sure most players weren't playing it in ironman challenge mode but they didn't always reset either, I myself sacrificed characters, even ones I liked, because they weren't that big a loss, that changed quite a bit starting with Awakening having a bunch of Paralogues which extended the games content by a significant amount and required certain characters to be alive and have maxed out a Support, and with Three Houses' monastery and the Divine Pulse and stuff it feels they've started to design around Casual Mode and characters just never dying because they're more likely to be there the whole playthrough but in turn playing with permadeath feels more punishing. Which I assume is probably why they've turned down difficulty in general, many players would get way more frustrated about the difficulty of not losing units when losing them takes away from the game. When Casual Mode was introduced and there was a a surge in popularity there was a big push of old fans being "gatekeeping" and "elitist" for their preference of permadeath and how they can just play Classic Mode if they want it. But the thing is that the worry was about how the now more popular Casual Mode would affect the game design, in turn making it so if you play with permadeath on you could be playing a less fun version of the game, which is how I felt it because I haven't beaten any post-Awakening game letting a character die, opting to reset because I feel I'd lose way more if I let it happen, before I'd reset if it was a character I really liked or had invested a lot in or if it was the first turn of the map. Even though the games are easier than the old ones they're more frustrating for me.
Metro 2033 Last Light Redux's "bad" ending is probably a good example of sacrifice. Artyom self destructs the facilities after the Spartans lose the battle so that the advanced tech doesn't fall into the hands of the bad guys at the price of his life.
My favorite is probably the suicide mission in Valkyria Chronicles 4. Where one major character volunteers to carry out the mission, but it doesn't stop there. You also have to pick another non-plot important unit to accompany them. Then you set up a squad to cover them, then move them to extraction before the two "suicide" units get to the goal. You'll want to have a decently capable unit on the suicide run to make it to the end safely. There's even unique dialogue on the pre-mission placement map where the non-plot gives inspired or resigned response to being selected. Even in mission as the "suicide" units reach the end there is a voiced cutscene for each one saying how they'll try to buy time. And after the mission they are dead, at least until the post game where you get a feature to bring back perma dead units. But at that point the story's been told and you can play for completion's sake.
Yeah, I never actually finished Darkest Dungeon despite really loving playing it. It kinda sucked all the fun out of it for me when I realized my inevitable victory wouldn't be one of skill or heroism, but rather the economic victory of the town as its unstoppable commercial progress overwhelms the beleaguered cultists and eldritch horrors. Kind of a cool narrative, but not really one I wanted to sink a bunch more time into grinding out sacrificial low-level dungeons. And the unpredictable, high-stakes nature of high-level dungeons meant sending in my experienced adventurers really felt like forcing myself to play sub-optimally. Just kinda sucked all my investment out of the game.
i was sitting through this whole video waiting for the mention of lisa. an amazing game and what i thought of as soon as you mentioned sacrifice in games.
I must admit, I've never cared for these kinds of 'sacrifice'-centric games. I'm too much of a perfectionist, always seeking the 'ideal' game, the golden ending, where everybody lives happily ever after. Looking at it from an in-story perspective, if you have to make sacrifices, it just means you weren't GOOD enough. If you'd been faster, or stronger, or cleverer, you could have avoided that situation. So if a game simply doesn't make it POSSIBLE to avoid such sacrifices, I automatically resent it for fencing me in and refusing to let me play 'my way'. In some cases, if the game is otherwise good enough to hold my interest, I've even gone 'outside the box' to achieve that theoretically perfect run to my own satisfaction, using cheats, save-editing, mods, glitches - whatever it takes to bypass the problem. I may be an extreme case, but I do think that aspect is part of the issue with sacrifices in games. In non-interactive media, those who wind up having to sacrifice for the sake of victory - or those left behind - tend not to be particularly HAPPY about it. Their regret, their cursing of the circumstances, their lamentation at having been unable to find another way, can be quite poignant. So of course, when it's happening to you, you're going to want to find a way around those sacrifices, as in the Fire Emblem example, and resent the game if it doesn't LET you, as in the Fallout 3 example. And because you aren't the CHARACTER but the PLAYER, there is ALWAYS a way to avoid the sacrifice... even if it is just 'turning off the game'.
Well, I was interested in Unsighted but you've successfully talked me out of it. I play games to feel good, not depressed. I get enough of that in my real life already.
Despite how a major of players play Fire Emblem, its at least a better choice than to force Ironman mode I have played extreme casual and hardcore Ironman, and while i do highly encourage people to accept losses, im not going to force them to play recklessly because i wanted to goad them towards a certain path.
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@Maryland Marijuana Review lmao
@Maryland Marijuana Review bruh
I can't afford to monetarily appreciate all the hard work that goes into these videos right now, so for now I hope others will contribute instead.
@Maryland Marijuana Review "Gets paid for doing nothing".
He just spent 3-4 weeks researching, writing a script, recording and editing to make a 20 minute video for you to watch.
Certainly a lot more productive than some guy who thinks his life's goal is smoking marijuana.
@Maryland Marijuana Review I'll take that as a joke. And if it's not a joke, go cry to twitter xoxo 😘
one sacrifice in a game thats done rly well is, and hear me out,,, the monkey temple upgrade in bloons tower defence
No one even does that tho lmaooo
@@popopop984 what you talking about, that's one of the best ways to go late game.
Finally, a man of culture
@@popopop984 its literally THE best strategy in the game. Its pretty difficult to do perfectly but if done right, it can defeat anything the game throws at you
There's no sacrifice though, everyone just buys the correct towers to sacrifice for a max temple. No one uses the sacrificed towers as defense
Wildermyth does a great job with this. When a character dies, you get to decide how they go out, either dealing a lot of damage or buffing their allies. Then after that, you can build a monument to them that will let them appear in other stories.
Wish TH-cam had the "save post" feature from Reddit. I want to check this out now >:c
Literally never had anyone die in that game. How did you get into a situation where someone was in danger of death?
@@MeepChangeling by sucking at it? Idk I can't even beat the game at all on harder difficulties. But even on medium sometimes a squishier character will get caught out and attacked by like five things at once.
I never managed to really get "into" Wildermyth, and I think a big part of it was how much it sucked to lose characters because I was rushing things or underestimating my enemies. RNG is a bitch. I'm part of the problem!
Ever since watching a Wildermyth Let's Play on youtube, I've really, REALLY wanted it to come to Switch. Nothing so far :-( But it looks amazing. Like Miitopia but not, y'know, brainless. And with X-Com style fights rather than basic RPG stuff.
It seems that the problem with this trope in video games is fundamental: a heroic sacrifice is fun to watch in a TV show, but it really sucks to play the role of the onlooker that lost their best friend or valuable ally. If you make the loss painful and dramatic, players will do anything in their power to prevent it.
In strategy games, you have serious balance problems with sacrificing heroes because it's only worth doing if you're certain to do similar or worse damage to your opponent. Pokemon has had this problem, self-destruct attacks are only useful if they do completely overwhelming damage that will usually take their opponent down with them.
To be fair, Explosion has a base attack of 250, the highest of any in the whole series before any modifiers. In Generation 1, it was effectively 340 (170 but halved opponent's defense) and in Gen 2 was buffed to 500 (250x2)
In Gen 3 it was nerfed to where the user faints first before dealing damage, Gen 5 it was nerfed again to no longer half defense. Gen 6 buffed it to deal damage before fainting.
There's not really that much permanence to the sacrifice of using explosion, unless you're playing a challenge run.
exactly, a heroic sacrifice in a TV show works because the hero decided its the only way, but in games you have options, you are in control, not the hero. so when the game asks you "would you be selfless or selfish" I will just try to find a third option, and if I'm locked out of a third option, not because it really is too hard to do, but because the game decided, I'll just give up, or make a random choice and be extremely disappointed. the game needs to make me WANT to take the selfless route, not force me.
and there are ways to do it, lets take the Nier Automata ending for example. players have no reason at all to sacrifice their save for another player, but they still do it because that is the nice thing to do, and there is a real danger here, its not just a disappointing ending you will get, you will lose all your work in the game forever. however one could argue that it works exactly because its permanent. if the game expects me to choose good or evil because the third option is too hard, then I'll just reload the game and keep trying. but if I have only one choice, then maybe I would choose the option with more chances of success. but that can sometimes just turn the game frustrating.
And then you have RTS and 4X games, where sacrifices are your bread and butter.
@@ReshyShira But you'd be hard pressed to call these sacrifices meaningful or heroic. Their emotional impact is basically zero.
On the topic of Fire Emblem, I once saw a good solution in a D&D houserule to encourage permanent sacrifices: when a character who's on the brink of death/taking lethal damage/choosing to do so of their own volition in a dire situation, their player can choose to permanently kill their character while also getting a strong effect for doing so, like being able to persist several turns after they're "killed" continuing to take out enemies in a final stand, ensuring that enemies won't be able to pass a doorway for several turns, or overchanneling magic through their body to do a very powerful magical attack.
Something like that combined with every character in your roster having special short scenes or dialogue afterwards if they sacrifice themselves in certain chapters could really make sacrifices something a lot of people do bc of the narrative it gives along with reintegrating the gameplay and story if the sacrifice helps save another character or lets everyone escape in an escape map, etc..
It'd make each FE playthrough more personal as circumstances come up from how you play a chapter that lead to moments of characters sacrificing themselves, so the story you experience and were involved in making is different every playthrough.
while an interesting decision i wouldn't know if that would work for games like Fire Emblem, it would require people going out of their way to go along with losing characters and if a chapter or map is hard enough that you may end up having to sacrifice someone then losing anyone is more likely to just spell the end for you, death spirals are a real thing in this games and they can begin by just getting one of your tanks critted and basically having to retry the chapter anyway and that's not even going into making later chapters even harder so those same death spirals may just keep happening killing the entire run of the game.
Permadeath makes no sense in D&D. True Resurrection exists.
You'd love Wildermyth then!
@@runakovacs4759 Well that sounds stupid, why does that exist?
@@enrymion9681 True Resurrection is a spell limited to the most powerful of clerics and other such mages. The vast majority of adventurers won't have access to this spell except in very limited or specific circumstances, and the ones that do are basically one step away from being minor demigods in terms of power level.
Also, it takes an hour and 25,000 gold worth of diamonds per a single use of this spell. In short, permadeath is still very much a thing for all but the rarest (and richest) few, mechanics-wise *and* lore-wise.
I think Frostpunk does this really well too. The game puts you in a situation where you *can* theoretically get through the game without anyone dying and everyone living happily and maintaining your moral code. But that's also *really* hard when you're in an end-of-the-world survival scenario. And constantly the game tempts you with easier options like allowing child labor or being able to force your workers to work for 24 hours straight and so on in order to make the game easier.
Another one is Battlefleet Gothic. As a 40k game it's all about shit getting worse as time goes on. And you start out with a battle map that lists out all these locations and bastions that give you all of these bonuses. Except you're actually already in control of all of them and already getting all those bonuses. Because you're actually defending them, and very quickly the player is attacked on too many fronts at once to possibly defend them all simultaneously, and the player is essentially forced to choose which locations they want to defend or not, and thus what benefits they're willing to lose. Regardless of how well you play in the actual fight itself. That basically just determines if you lose even *more* stuff if you fail.
I think *Frostpunk* is an amazing game, and I'm a sucker for the snowy style of it, but I think that it's possibly too easy to hit as hard as it could. Going in mostly blind I didn't lose a single person, not to death, not to rejecting them entry, and not to them leaving with the Londoners. Making it harder, or maybe removing the pause feature (which I would _personally_ hate cause I wouldn't play without that) might go a long way towards its theme, "I wouldn't have to sign this law if I had just done better" would have been a very interesting thought to have. *Forcing* you to make at least a few sacrifices could have been interesting, but I don't think that's exactly what they were going for.
my problem with frostpunk is that you can only choose extremes. cool, I decided to force kids to work because I really need them now, but why I can't revoke that decision when things are more stable ? there is no reason at all for any decision in the book of laws to be permanent, besides giving more drama to your choices.
When playing Frostpunk, i was frustated because, with no reason for, i was convinced i HAD to save everyone. Then when i realised youre not *supposed* to make sure everyone survives to win, then i realized saving everyone was the ideal, and so even tho i still tried to save them, if they died i wasnt frustated anymore. I think the main problem is acceptance that not everyone NEEDS to make it, even if we try very hard.
@@lachlanmccormick3486 Funny enough, harder and no pause button is exactly what the game's Survivor mode is (as well as adding Ironman save rules), though there's difficulty sliders as well (survivor mode is automatically the highest). The real trouble it runs into though is that you can't know what difficulty you should play on without playing some, and you can only have your first playthrough once. That said, I've seen plenty of stories from people who absolutely struggled on their first playthrough, without having selected a higher difficulty. I"ll definitely agree though that they weren't trying to truly force sacrifices, except in situations where you are already struggling. It's also quite a bit fonder of a lesser form of sacrifice, with things like efficiency vs. safety, and other things that will ask if you will sacrifice some humanity and ethics for a better shot at survival.
@@danilooliveira6580 Most of the laws are actually just giving yourself the right to do something, so it makes sense that you can't just undo it, it'd be meaningless to the people who remember when you gave it to yourself, and know you could just do it again. It's also worth remembering that it actually takes place over a rather short period of time, all of the scenarios are less than 2 months long, repealing a law would just come off as incompetent and wishy-washy. The real response is to just not do that thing that you gave yourself the power to do previously once you no longer need to, though with Child Labor - Safe Jobs, this does lack benefit, as all the negatives with that law are immediate on passing or scripted events in the first few days of employing children.
I think what might've helped Fallout 3's ending is if getting that massive dose of radiation still hurt rad-resistant companions, like they became insane or feral or something. It would at least justify the "asshole" comments. On the other hand, it would also encourage players to find rad-resistant companions if using them to turn on the purifier was a _good_ ending.
The thing is, we were already given the choice to send Fawkes into a place of obscenely high radiation to do a thing for you, and he does it willingly and without any issues at all. Or you could drug your character up and walk in there in a hazmat suit and survive.
The second time we are given the choice (or not given it) we are met with railroading and insults.
I don't think it was saveable really. The more you think about the whole story the less well it works. Like nobody in the game world apart from like one beggar per city actually has problems getting water.
In the words of Shamus Young:
Dad built a water purifier that didn’t work, for people that didn’t need it, and then made it release radiation it shouldn’t have, to prevent it from falling into the hands of people trying to fix it. This killed the man who had no reason to sabotage it and didn’t kill Colonel Autumn, who had no means to survive. This put the Enclave - an army with no reason to attack - in charge of the purifier, which was of no value to them. Then the player entered vault 87 to recover a GECK, a magical matter-arranger that they shouldn’t need and that would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides fixing the purifier. Colonel Autumn, who shouldn't be alive, captured the player with a flash grenade that shouldn't have worked that was thrown by soldiers who had no way to get there. The final battle was a war between the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel, to see which one would get to commit suicide trying to turn on the purifier that neither of them needed. This resulted in more sabotage that threatened to explode a device that shouldn’t be explode-able, ending with the death of the player character, who had the means to survive but didn’t, and who was never given a good reason for doing any of this.
@@AshenVictor yeah, the entire story falls apart once you think about it for more than five seconds. The bad ending is just a culmination of a bad story.
The other issue is that you originally couldn’t even tell Fawkes to go in. That wasn’t added until a later patch
So the choices were either sacrifice yourself or let the girl die, even as the rad resistant companion stood there.
@@AshenVictor I love Fallout 3, but I 100% agree with you. Main storyline is so horribly written. It relies so much on ridiculous assumptions that does not make sense at all. Although you clearly see that Autumn uses some kind of RadAway when James activates the purifier, and I doubt that it would be hard for the Enclave, one of most powerful organisations after the War, to find a way into the Vault 87.
I never liked the whole concept of GECK, actually, it seems too magical even for Fallout 2, where it was introduced. With two of them sent into each vault it really feels stupid to have America in ruins and irradiated. But this is another story.
See I've been playing Wasteland, and i think the other big problem is when a sacrifice has really unintended consequences. Like not being able to recruit an NPC because you didn't destroy their home in an earlier choice. Its like WTF I'm supposed to destroy their town to get that NPC to join me!? The sacrifice and the reason don't work.
Tactice Ogre: Let's Cling Together. You are faced with the choice to massacre a village of civilians and blame it on the enemy in order to rally support, or to not do it. And if you refuse and try to protect it you will be blamed for the action and driven into exile. There is a nice lawful character who strongly objects to the action, but in order to recruit her you have to be a mass murder, drive her into exile and then later recruit her as she gets a redemption story.
It just felt awful.
@@Duchess_Van_Hoof it also highlights the fact that 'being good and moral' in the theater of war is rarely the logical option. If you choose to oppose the massacre, you're then exiled with only two (IIRC, your sister and the winged), followed with the said lawful character getting the short end of the stick. This effectively made the game significantly harder if this is the first time you play through due to both low level and low number of party member, driving deeper the fact that you're exiled.
ending E of nier automata is a really good sacrifice imo. it gives you the choice with no incentives other than selflessness because that selflessness straight up has consequences for real human beings
Agreed! I am surprised he didn't touch on this, I can't think of any game choice that has stuck with me like Nier Automata.
Does it? It's a cool moment but my gamer sense went off immediately and I knew based on the way the sequence played out that it was just smoke and mirrors. All it would do would be to maybe add my name to someone's screen, not actually change anyone's ability to access content.
I committed to ending D in classic Nier though.
@@SmallsMalone Yeah, you almost *have* to spend several lives to get to tthe chance to give away one. If it were as the game suggests, it would quickly run out of lives to give new players.
@@SmallsMalone You're right that it's fake, but it still matters because choosing to sacrifice your save data is choosing to fully embrace the message of the game. When it asks you after you lose in the End Credits battle "Do you accept defeat?", Is this just a game?", "Is it all pointless?", the game is really asking you if you care about the characters and your journey with them.
It's obvious that anyone who's reached this point will care about them, but saying yes to sacrificing your data is much harder decision than saying yes to the previous prompts. While sacrificing your data may not be technically necessary to save some else's, by giving up the opportunity to come back to the game at your leisure, you are declaring that the game has impacted you in a way that transcends the mere entertainment and accomplishment of physically playing it.
At least for me, the emotions the game made me feel and the way it made me re-examine my own life's meaning is something that I want to share with others, and regardless of whether my save data get's used a thousand times or none at all, I'll be happy with the sacrifice I made because, even if that sacrifice doesn't mean anything to anyone else, it means a lot to me.
@@SmallsMalone i considered the possibility right after writing this comment, but, in good nier:automata fashion, i choose to believe that it had some kind of meaning anyway
The problem here is simple: On any seemingly lasting stretch of game two things are true:
The temporary sacrifice is too cheap to provide permanent upgrade.
The permanent sacrifice is too expensive to provide temporary benefit.
As a result, you get only three kinds of sacrifices players will take: Temporary for temporary benefit, temporary for permanent benefit, permanent for permanent.
In the first case, sacrifice is cheap and thus pointless.
In second case, sacrifice is cheap, stupid to dodge and thus pointless.
In third case, people study out-of-game materials for optimal ways and consciously distance themselves away from those they need to sacrifice, thus rendering sacrifice pointless.
It's all part of one neverending trait of gamers worldwide, which is being extremely good at damage control.
Fair enough.
it's called min-maxing
Except for like, good Fire Emblem players.
A lot of getting good (at least what the community has agreed "being good" to mean) is to take temporary benefits for permanent losses, because you recognize that "permanent" just means "until the end of the game", so a temporary bonus to the difficult early game can be more useful than a "permanent" benefit which only comes to play in the late game.
I find that decision difficult to make though, because I am too used to thinking like you just described, to easily turn it off.
I was hoping you'd talk about LISA: The Painful when reading the title. I'm extremely happy you are talking about it, as it's much too slept on
SPOILER: You also could've mentioned the option to attack Buzzo instead of accepting his dilemma, effectively not sacrificing anything if you ca win the battle. But you can't win the battle, it's impossible, so you lose and suffer both consequences of the dilemma
Fighting back is the ultimate sacrifice
Is LISA worth playing? I've heard the difficulty spikes too much to be enjoyable
@@Mauripsu There is a bit of difficulty, but no, it isn't a hard game. The DLC however is much much much harder.
And yes, it's worth playing, as it's a fantastic game.
@@Mauripsu just to add, I ended up not finishing it because other stuff got in the way, but I still liked it
Which is funny, because that game is good at making you lose sleep over it.
I really liked how sacrifice worked in Pyre, or how choices had consequences in general. When you choose a hero to be send back to the overworld you lose a big asset in your team but you also help them to finally realize their goal. Gameplay-wise you are handicapping yourself but narrative-wise you are doing the right thing. What I really liked is the new dynamic that generates out of this. Not only do you have to change your strategies in gameplay, your whole party has new and meaningful conversations and dynamics.
I literally never finished pyre because I realized I couldn't send everyone back :(
Exactly!
My favorite sacrifice story was recently when some friends and I were playing through no mercy on left for dead. The helicopter had just arrived, I was barely hanging on and made a bad jump, becoming incapacitated in an extremely inconvenient place. I told them to leave me because at that point I had no intentions of surviving. Then I see one of my friends drop down, and barely manage to pick me up in time, and by picking up some adrenaline at the top of the ladder, we were both able to make it, then had to watch as another in the party got swarmed by zombies and died due to just sheer bad luck.
The point of the story is, sometimes the best sacrifice is someone else's.
The problem with "sacrifices" is that it is a plotpoint often used in anti-war film or films where "herorism" is the main theme, the problem in games is that we're usually the people who climb to the top/at the top. And sacrifices don't work the same way if you're at the top of the heirarchy vs. at the bottom. Sacrifices is all about creating sympathy or admirerers afterall, and you've most likely been doing that throughout most of the game anyway.
I think darkest dungeon and frostpuntk are probably the two that handle sacrifies the best, people won't necessarily get hte same sympathy out of it, but it's a different kind of psychological discovery. Are you willing to sacrifice children for efficiency? are you ready to throw people through dungeons for money, and just throw them away once they lost their usefulness. I like that the game makes most people do this, because it tells a lot about what you're willing to do to keep a few select "safe".
I think those are the best times sacrifice are used, I don't think sacrifice is a good plotpoint outside of that. Since it is such a hero-focused thing, where you sacrifice yourself for some "notion" that the people in power will arrive at the "greater good" or something like that, but it is oftentimes just meaningless.
That's just my take anyway.
Sacrifices are a great trope in books and movies because they’re being made by people other than us.
One of or maybe the OG example of sacrifices in gaming is actually chess. Trading a stronger piece for a simple pawn and a positional advantage is a tactic used at every level since the beginning of the Game.
Yep, the classic gambit. In other games you also know this as kiting, or in general, as baiting.
I think the issue with narrative sacrifices is that they jump all the steps from "we're going to make it" to "we're dead". There's no "Ok, get our fastest guy, have him pull the enemies away from us, that's our best chance for all of us to survive". Death for the sake of death is meaningless.
Inscryption's sacrifice mechanic sounds a bit like chess - every piece returns for the next game, so making the right sacrifices is considered skilled play, and there is no expectation that you can win while keeping all of your pieces on the board.
Harry Potter does a variation on this when Ron realizes he should sacrifice the knight to ensure victory, but since he is playing the role of the knight, he has to take the hit himself to do it. Another interpretation I've heard is that Ron instinctively gives Hermione the role of the Rook because it's the most easily defended of the 3 missing pieces.
ME2’s Suicide Mission really isn’t a good use of the Sacrifice subject, because... well, yeah, it’s not about sacrifice. It’s a place where characters can die for good, sure, but its more of a Final Exam. How well have you been treating them (the Loyalty Missions), how much have you prepared (the ship upgrades), how well do you know who can do what best (the Specialist selections), all that ties into it. That’s honestly what makes the deaths hit harder, the general knowledge that it was your fault that they died, and they didn’t need to.
I think one of the sacrifices that I distinctly remember kinda working was from Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the Trooper story, there’s a somewhat more important than normal NPC named Sergeant Jaxo. She’s funny, smart, good moral principles. You can have a fling with her if you’re a guy, or a Girls Night Out event if you’re a woman, but either way she’s really well developed.
And then there’s a mission that’s a raid on an Imperial prison camp, and you’re given what’s probably the obvious choice: You can save like a thousand Republic soldiers, or you can save her. Pretty standard, sure. But what elevated it for me was that *she’s freaking the fuck out at you possibly sacrificing her*. She’s pleading to be saved. She knows she could be about to die, and she’s terrified. No stoic warrior falling on the grenade this time.
It twists the knife just enough to be memorable, because it’s not quite what’s expected, and it really does make you feel bad either way it pans out. And yeah, you’ll never see Jaxo again if you save her, because story branches are a pain in the ass to handle, but it really is a good sign of how to do a sacrifice choice well: You kinda need both options to be bad ones that you don’t want to do...
There isn't a better sacrifice in games than the Nier series and how it's interwoven both narratively and mechanically, it's gameplay as storytelling to the finest degree
Yeah... The final main route of Automata is osmething really special.
Or you duplicate your save file, get the narrative reward without any costs and feel smug about yourself.
@@tremox9786 then you've missed one of the main messages of the game
@@jackawaka While that may be true. This pretty much proves the whole point of the video any solution no matter how meta that lets you get out of the consequences always is going to be more desirable on a base level to us humans. Something like save states even count as mitigating consequence of death or loss.
@@jackawaka I`m sure people said the same thing to Kirk for Kobayashi Maru.
The "sacrifice" in pyre worked really well for me. You travel with a party through an underworld and sometimes get the chance to release one person from your party into the actual world above. Letting someone go is hard because the people i cared most about were the characters i liked to play the most. But i still let them go so they can get back to a better life for themselves.
I feel Pyre could have been covered here as sacrifice is it's core loop, well, not sacrifice but letting someone go.
He probably avoided talking about that one because it was already talked about already
@@legendarytat8278 yeah that's fair enough, understandable
@@legendarytat8278 doesn't he often give a brief nod to such things though? While also sarcastically mentioning how others already did it
The game Into the Breach does this well I think. The game is so challenging that it is nearly impossible to beat with no losses (of civilians), and since your characters have permadeath, you won’t normally be willing to sacrifice them. I’ve had several runs where I got genuinely emotional over having to sacrifice a unit, despite the fact that they are all prebuilt personalities.
Fan fact: Inscryption is based on a Ludum Dare game (that Daniel made) called "Sacrifices must be made"
It involves *MANY* permanent sacrifices
crazy coincidence with the thumbnail there - who'd have thought!?
@@ArchitectofGames I guess we'll never know
I thought of a good example myself. Heavy spoilers for Outer Worlds.
There's a quest near the end of the game where the player character is tasked with stealing a bunch of chemicals needed to revive the rest of the colonists still in Cryo aboard The Hope. During the quest, the player learns that these same chemicals they intend to steal are being used to keep some people alive, and by taking them, they will be killing these people, who are presumably innocent. The game give you the option to only take a small amount of the chemicals, but doing so drastically reduces the number of colonists you can revive.
Heavy spoilers:
I remember that, and it was great. Not only is that an option, but it requires a high stat check to get. It makes you feel like investing in your character that way was smart and you saved the maximum amount of people...but nope. Because you didn't choose to sacrifice the people in the tubes, you minimized the amount of people you could save and condemned your ally to a painful existence because he felt he didn't do enough.
Tbh I never felt so incredibly evil as I felt when betraying the doc and the feeling of power was awesome.... until I got disappointed by the execution of the quest line
@@twinguy9633 I didn't betray him, so I can't speak from experience. It's a shame that part of the quest was poor handled though. Most of the rest of the game was fantastic
@@houraisheperd9721 it was a genuinely hard choice, but I made the same decision you did. Not cause I felt like would be saving the maximum number of people, but because I felt like my 'honorable criminal' character wouldn't be willing to sacrifice the lives of innocent people to accomplish his goals.
@@christopherdubus6769 Man I swear never ever felt I stronger in game than that moment. I had all the informations, I was the key to everything and I turned against it. I thought its like when u go on the dark side in infamous or star wars but sadly it doesn't have an drastic impact. I felt destroyed lmao
I've seen a really interesting sacrifice mechanic in the ttRPG City of Mist recently. Your character sheet is basically 4 mini character sheets and to do any of the advanced level ups you need to sacrifice 1 of your 4 character sheets and start a new one from scratch. The rest of the mechanics support this so that it happens at dramatically appropriate times. You can literally burn 1/4 of your character to take over the story and do a cool thing, which dramatically weakens and changes your character.
City of Mists is such a cool system, and I really want to play it sometime soon.
That sounds really interesting, I'm gonna have a look.
@@RAFMnBgaming City of Mist has a pretty good you tube series (th-cam.com/play/PLmB0M4ILJ6vaoMFCKwKtvxgFixFiZD8Fn.html) on its stuff, look for the newer stuff with 2d art in the thumbnails :)
I think there is an element of the trolley problem as well. Most people will push a button to sacrafice 1 person to save 5 doomed persons. But much fewer are willing to push someone in front of the trolley to do literally the same thing. The reason why is supposedly because the more personnel or involved it feels, the worse their consciousness and the less it feels there's a right choice, even if the math disagrees. And video games are very involved and often very personnel. Also I second the shoutout to GiantGrantGames, those videos are brilliant and fun to watch.
The trolley problem is also a stupid ethical dilemma. Life is NEVER that binary, and it doesn't account for the particulars about the people involved. And if the trolley is sizable enough to kill 5 people it can get past one fat dude.
I'd rather push the person in front of the trolley to get rid of _six_ people if I have this sort of situation on hand. Six less problems in the world.
All this just goes to show that sacrifices (like other "negative" outcomes to player decisions) only work well when two things are satisfied. Firstly, they are expected, either from a narrative or gameplay perspective. Secondly, the player can somewhat mitigate them, but not circumvent them completely. This gives the player the sense that the sacrifice is fair and lets them take ownership of it, rather than feeling arbitrarily punished.
I love that Adan added his character's eyes to the enemy in the Darkest Dungeon scene at 5:49!
I believe that you mix two different problems in this video. Narrative sacrifice and gameplay sacrifice. It's a bad writing to kill off character with Narrative use for cheap drama. But it is not the same as inscryption and darkest dungeon character as resources. The idea they are linked is fine on the surface but the problem is not the same. In game with Narrative sacrifice as you said it can make the game feel unfun, but this is due to a loss of agency and Narrative potential being lost. While gameplay sacrifice is more of a problem with too much agency. You could sacrifice the squirrel and goat for a bear now or maybe I can last one more turn and draw my mantis of a less risky win. Games do have problems with both issues but they don't stem from the same place.
Inscryption could have done sacrifice with the option to replace a scrybe, but just... didn't.
NIce vid as always, but I would like to add another pretty important point which was only brushed over.
Two games I feel have to be mentioned when talking about sacrifice in videogame are Nier (as well as Automata which was briefly featured in the video) and Pyre. At the end of the game, the first one asks you to sacrifice all of your save data so that your characters can have a chance at a happy ending. The second asks you at multiple key moments to choose one of your characters to be freed from the purgatory they're trapped in, which is a good thing for them in universe, but means you lose this character as a party member. In both cases you're asked to choose not between two options within the context of the story, but between what's good for your characters and what's good for you as a player.
In Pyre, you could free Rukey, the lovable mustached-dog as he clearly doesn't fit in the Downside and want to go back to his family, but that means losing what's probably your best scorer for future challenges and the game is only getting tougher... That's what makes good sacrifices in videogames. Not necessarily that the dilemna be intesting, but that it involves you as a player.
This ties back to a video by Innuendo Studio on the game Bastion (here's the link in case someone is interested: th-cam.com/video/IyhrKPLDCyY/w-d-xo.html ) in which he states that, while movies, books or other forms of art can make you feel happiness, sadness or other emotions, only video games, due to their high degree of interactivity can make you feel things like pride and heroism. You are not just following a character doing the righteous thing, YOU are doing it at a (admittedly virtual) cost for yourself. That's why sacrifices in game should affect gameplay.
Personally, I'm also not a fan of unavoidable sacrifices, like the end of the first ME and much prefer the suicide mission in ME2. I feel like, if the player is good enough, they should be able to overcome the obstacles they face and still manage to do what's right. Undertale does incite you to never level up during the game, keeping you health pool at a minimum and that's only how you'll get a happy ending for your characters. Even a much more grim and cynical game like Paper Please allows you to save your family without becoming too corrupt if you know what you're doing.
It should obviously be much harder than the alternative, but that's what makes it a stronger moment when you do sacrifice something or someone IG, because you know if you played better, you might have saved them and that makes it much more gut-wrenching that the game just telling you "You're going to lose someone dear to you and there's nothing you can do about it except choose who." At which point you can just shrug, resign yourself to it and start coldly calculating the value of each option.
I'm not saying this kind of choice should never happen, some stories are explicitly about loss and the fact sacrifices have to be made, but I think it cheapens the message in a way. It's a bit like Spec Ops : The Line judging you for being a complete monster when you had no input on the actions of your character beside guiding them through the levels. While it's pretty effective, mostly because of the awfulness it makes you go through, it doesn't have the impact of doing a no-mercy run of Undertale because in that case, you know that you have the option of doing the right thing. (Yes, I know, it's the second time I mention Undertale, but who can blame me ? It's freaking Undertale, there are a lot of things to admire there.)
Low-key, probably the best sacrifice experience I've had in video games is during hardcore Nuzlocke runs of Pokemon. Having to decide to sac a pokemon for a free switch or gamble with everyone's lives and the whole run by trying to manually switch and tank an attack in the process is really engaging
I think the fact that it's a self imposed challenge also helps since whilst you could technically boot up an old save if something doesn't go to plan, by doing so you're violating your own rules and have thus failed the challenge, regardless of if you reach the end or not.
I think the likelyhood of a "sacrifice" scenario having a positive payoff also depends substantially on the player's temperament. I always thought that I was the sort of person who much preferred games with permadeath or ironman modes - but over the years I've realised that selecting these options just means I'll put the game down sooner than I would have if I'd save-scummed mercilessly. For instance, when a character in DD dies I don't find it to be particularly interesting or meaningful. Its not like some incredible dramatic moment in a movie or a great novel - its just this funny little thing that went wrong and is fairly annoying and chips away and my interest in pressing on - less Iron Giant and more like "oh crap I burned my soup, thats irritating...". Of course the game really doesn't want me to save-scum and I know the creators of the game really want me to have to live with the consequences but the reality is that I'm just not very interested in eating burned soup when I've got plenty of perfectly good un-burned soup to eat. I assume some people experience the Iron Giant thing more than me - but for me its just burned soup all the way down. Luckilly I really enjoy save-scumming & modding, so all is not lost.
I agree on the topic of DD. However, I'd argue that the main problem in that scenario isn't so much that you make sacrifices - it's that the sacrifices don't benefit you enough to compensate for how much you lost. DD is kind of a bad example, bc character death in that game is less "sacrifice" and more "getting fucked over." It'd be much better if each character death created some tangible benefit - like giving you some sort of currency that allows you to buy unique, exceptionally powerful trinkets, or upgrades that permanently improve your roster. That would make death much more of a mixed bag, instead of making it burned soup.
I think Hades does a good job of compensating you for losses, too. There are plotlines and progression unlocks you can only advance by dying - and you keep all the farmable resources you gained during a run when you die. That way, even if you fail to finish a run, you still get something out of it.
@@Drekromancer Yes I enjoy Hades - that particular loop does work for me. Some may say its "trophies for everyone" but I think its smart to give the player more options precisely at the point where their interest in playing-on may be faltering.
There is a bit of advice in the TTRPG rulebook "Spirit of the Century" that I think is relevant - basically the author suggests that if the players need to get across a chasm, and falling into the chasm is a real risk then ideally you want "falling into the chasm" to be every bit as interesting an outcome as "leaping successfully to the other side" - much easier to implement in a tabletop RPG of course but worth thinking about all the same!
Something like ironman XCOM2 or ironman Rimworld often feel like they go in the opposite direction - e.g. the more you fail the more limited your options are and it becomes harder and harder to recover and make progress. Basically you wind up in a sort of death spiral where each time you go round the spiral your gameplay becomes more and more constrained and less and less interesting.
The thing that Adam is describing (and the thing that games like DD are dubiously relying on) is the phenomenon where the player gets more invested in the game the worse things get and counterintuitively they get more interested as their mechanical options get narrower and narrower. I think this can work, but it often doesn't work for me and it seems like a fairly fragile thing to build a large part of your design around.
Rimworld though oddly enough sometimes accidentally solves this problem in a way that I think is roughly in-line with the developers vision. Back when I used to play ironman Rimworld I'd eventually & inevitably end up force quitting the game when a particularly useful or beloved colonist died - and then retry from the last auto-save. Sometimes this autosave was, in practise, past the point of "no return" and saving the colonist would be near impossible but, because of how highly random Rimworld is, the game would sometimes generate some new set of circumstances that would give me interesting new options going forward - in these cases I have an interesting choice, e.g. lose the colonist and play-on with new options, or force-quit again and take another chance at saving the colonist knowing that the RNG won't generate the same scenario again (and may well be much worse!). Sometimes I'd take the former option, build a nice tomb for my beloved founder colonist and play-on - which is close to the way the dev (I imagine) would ideally like people to play their game.
Its very hard not to think of games as skill tests that are best reinforced by rewarding and punishing the player appropriately - but at the same time I strongly suspect that although this a great scheme of training animals to do tricks its often a recipe for boring games!
One take on sacrifice that I've always found well is the honest narrative sacrifice. This is hard to set up reliably because you first need the player to truly buy in to the story. Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm has an excellent example of a great sacrifice that fails in that regard: Kerrigan's decision to return to the Swarm.
If you're playing through the story of Starcraft 2, you hit this moment shortly after completing a whole campaign that concluded with you, as Raynor, managing to de-infest (well, mostly) Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades and ruler of the Swarm. This...doesn't work as well as it should, mostly because Starcraft 1 makes it pretty clear that Raynor's concern for Kerrigan was more of a war-buddy sort of thing than the very romantic take they're pushing in Starcraft 2. But it's a fun enough campaign and it's a lot of work. And, very early on in the Heart of the Swarm campaign, Raynor is missing, presumed captured or dead, and Kerrigan wants revenge....so she goes back to the Zerg to reclaim her power in persuit of vengeance, willingly sacrificing her humanity in the process. By the time she manages to rescue Raynor, she does it knowing she's so far gone that there's no reasonable hope for their relationship. If we had the whole series's worth of investment into that relationship, that decision would be powerful and painful. But...there's the differences in how Starcraft 1 and 2 handle that relationship that inject enough cognitive dissonance that it's hard to get invested in it.
There's a couple of other games I can think of off the top of my head that handle this kind of narrative sacrifice much better: Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 10.
FF4 has several moments that are real gut punches, but it makes a really annoying narrative choice late in the game that reverses most of them. Cid, Yang, Palom and Porom all go out like heroes, but they only hit hard on the first playthrough, because on a replay, you know what's coming. Tellah, though, his story is committed to, he goes out as the biggest hero of all of these characters, and when he dies, he's gone for good.
He's introduced as an old man following his granddaughter, who eloped with a bard (if you know anything about this game, it's probably the "you spoony bard" line when they eventually meet). By the time he catches up with them, the town they were in was bombed by the Red Wings (a fleet of airships under the control of the antagonist, Golbez), and while the bard survived, his granddaughter did not. We leave him there to mourn his granddaughter, keeping the bard safely out of range of Tellah's powerful magic.
When next we meet him, he's attempting to climb Mount Ordeals (a pivotal moment in the story for the main character as well - Cecil is there seeking to give up his Dark Knight powers in hopes of becoming a Paladin, since in this world, evil can never vanquish evil), hoping to find the ultimate destructive magic, Meteor, so he can avenge his granddaughter by killing the mighty Golbez. The newest members of the party immediately recognize him as the great Sage - a legendary figure among magic users, but also recognize that at his age, if he uses Meteor, it will cause so much strain on his body that he'll die. (The game handles this really well in the stats too: his MP is pinned at 90 - 9 less than the cost of casting Meteor, thus making sure you don't prove the game wrong by casting it outside of the proper story beat, and his frailty is further emphasized by the fact that his physical stats (strength, speed and ...vitality?) go down slowly when he levels up - he's old enough that physical exertion is slowly draining him, rather than training his body up.) And you succeed in that quest and later, when the moment comes, Golbez attacks the party, and Tellah stands against him, alone, casting Meteor again and again, then collapsing. Golbez turns out to be even more durable than believed, but he's still forced to retreat...and Tellah collapses, dead. It's a big loss for the player too - at that point in the game, his powerful magic and high magic stats make him an extremely powerful and versatile party member. So losing him sucks, even if you're not fully invested in the story. (In stark contrast to the Starcraft 2 example, where Kerrigan rejoining the Zerg and taking on her infested form again is a distinct mechanical benefit.)
FFX's sacrifice thing is entirely reliant on you buying into the story, but there's so many themes of sacrifice that it's hard to point out any but the big two: the entire concept of the Summoner's Pilgrimage, and what happens with Tidus at the end of the game. Summoners (Yuna and others) all travel through Spira, from Besaid to Zanarkand, knowing they will die, but maybe they will defeat Sin, granting the world a temporary respite from the endless cycle of death caused by its attacks. This pilgrimage takes up the vast majority of story time, so we're treated to hours of examination this sort of sacrifice. Conversely, Tidus's fate is substantially less well developed, and only really makes sense if you connect some narrative dots that you likely won't on your first playthrough. But he goes in to the end fully aware that destroying Sin and Yu Yevon means destroying himself as well, and hides that fact from his companions until the last possible moment.
Love how your videos make me think about ways I could improve the game I'm intermittently working on. Great thoughts to start the brain moving!
My favorite type of sacrifice is when you have to sacrifice your own effort or power in order to do a moral decision rather than sacrificing a person or situation. In the end, sacrificing your own ability, time or effort will always hit hard straight through the screen and can end up with a lot of additional suffering but also often makes it feel rewarding and that you did the right thing. To me, this works a lot better than sacrificing one viritual aspect for another, although that ofcourse does have its place as well if it's well balanced enough and ow oof my feels...
I have to mention one of my favorite games as an example; Gods Will Be Watching. The game is hard. *Really* hard. You often wont be able to make it out with everyone alive in the end and seeing the sacrifice you make at sny point last througout the game with a constant reminder of what you did really hits hard, even if it's still mechanically indifferent. You can still save everyone, but it will require you to give up a win in order to try again for a "perfect win" and that caused me so much pain and suffering and it really felt like a meaningful sacrifice. It is one of the aspects that makes the game so unique and ultimately what makes it one of my favorites throughout the times.
This is a very complex topic and i'm glad you talked about it! I hope we get to see more games in the future with more well balanced and/or unique sacrifices that carries the impact! Cheers!~
You explained it perfectly at the start, I feel cheated when a game suddenly cuts all my options or nerfs me for a scripted scene and kills a character that I could easily have saved.
I was going to write a long comment about how brilliant Inscryption is mechanically and narratively, but it is impossible to discuss the game without massive spoilers. All I can say is that it is one of my top gaming experiences in the past few years and is certainly worth checking out.
I’d still pay good money for a more traditional, fleshed out, longer roguelike in the style of Leshy’s section. Like the whole game was very cool, but his section was still the absolute best. And I think having four different types of decks got to be a little too much, just two at once was enough. But then again I do want to see the teased battles at the end of the game… GIVE US DLC I SWEAR TAKE MY MONEY lol
Thanks for shouting out Giant Grant Games. I started watching his channel last month and has been quite a trip. I love how he manages to pull the impossible.
amazing video! i was reminded of SIGNS OF THE SOJOURNER, a deck building game in which the cards are the way the protagonist, a traveler, comunicates with other people during their travels. the catch: everyone only comunicates through two kinds of cards, and during the journey you accumulate Fatigue cards that no ones understands. it's impossible to nail every encounter in one playthrough and you have to choose and prioritize, which influences what kind of person your character becomes, the friends he makes, etc. it's a beautiful game. has stayed with me for a long time.
I played that in early access and found it too cryptic, did they keep a focus on figuring out what cards mean, or make it more straightforward?
@@SpriteGuard i found it pretty straightfoward! but i played after release so idk how it was during early acess unfortunately
In XC2's credit, while I agree that the situation leading up to the sacrifice could've been done better, the actual sacrifice itself does end up presenting a lot of narrative implications down the line and does actually have a pretty strong effect on the story
At least the game is self-aware. Almost right after that scene plays out, another character chastizes the one who acted like a child in the moment (surpise, he _is_ a child). While the sacrifice can leave a bad taste, especially since I felt like the character could have used some more time, it was pretty satisfying having the game acknowledge that feeling. The other thing that scene has going for it is that it's better on subsequent playthroughs because of a different character in the scene entirely who was so important that Monolith felt the need to give them the music slot.
Also, its actually an incredibly difficult fight, top 3 hardest in the game, and some would argue it's the hardest, period. So you are meant to struggle until you summon Mythra. Granted, if you're just really good it doesn't matter if its the hardest in the game.
I _never_ make tactical sacrifices in turn-based tactics games (except maybe Into the Breach, since campaigns are so short there). Maybe it's because I'm a perfectionist by nature.
I'd appreciate some kind of "second chance" system to make this feel more like a viable choice with not-so-permanent consequences. X-Com: Enemy Unknown rolls a dice whenever one of your soldiers hits 0 HP to either kill them or put them in critical condition, allowing you to stabilize them with a med kit or by finishing the mission quickly. This makes the soldier unavailable for a few weeks, and I think there's a permanent debuff on them afterward, but at least they keep their skills and levels.
I think it'd be great to have an option to eliminate that dice roll and make this happen to every soldier the first time they fall, and when it happens a second time, they're just dead. The debuff would help keep track of who's in this danger zone, and also incentivize you to not throw bodies at the wall haphazardly lest your whole squad be crippled.
i think no one makes tactical sacrifices in tactical games period. Probably not even the guy making the video because they are just objectively bad choices, if you are in a position where you can only win a Fire Emblem map by sacrificing someone you just made a ton of either very dumb or are deliberately trying to kill said character.
As said in the video, those actions just put you on a massive disadvantage that will start a death spiral and you won't even need to restart the game yourself, the game will just kill you and you will have to restart anyway, the concept of sacrifices is cool in a narrative but as a strategy is 90% just a terrible choice to avoid.
in xcom I only ever made sacrifices when the consequence would mean losing more people, but even then I would still opt to save-scumming to find that perfect play that can save everyone. and I think that is the problem, without permanent consequences, we will always try to find the optimal solution simply because we can. otherwise we are just assholes letting a sacrifice happen for the drama.
@@grayfulbester i think no one makes tactical sacrifices in tactical games period.
Chess: *Am I a fucking joke to you?*
@@grayfulbester The problem is that sacrifices really rarely hold any advantages at all. Letting a strong character die is pretty much always the objectively worse option. If a character death gave you a permanent bonus that made it not strictly worse in the long run, and lessened the effects of the loss. Of course that's something to be balanced because it can't be too strong, but it would still go a long way.
I was hoping Life is Strange would come up. The life-support sacrifice halfway through the game was so well executed, despite not having an impact on the gameplay, that I was crying for ages afterwards. And what you mentioned about, as a player, making the harder choice for a more rewarding experience is definitely true for that choice, and especially for the final choice. I made "the hard choice" at the end and the ending was much more painful for also much more satisfying and emotionally challenging. It just felt right. The amount of mods that were made to circumvent the final choice in order to create a happy ending is an interesting thing to talk about in terms of players trying to avoid emotional confrontation and sacrifice at all cost, but thereby, as you said, 'sacrificing' a deeper experience.
I think the interesting paradox that comes up with sacrifices is that you want the player to make the sacrifice for the sake of the story, but if you don't provide the option not to make the sacrifice, the sacrifice itself loses a lot of its meaning, because then it's no longer a choice, just a forced event. I feel like Life is Strange especially showed this, having a "right" ending, and the ending that only exists to make the "right" ending have more weight through the fact that you had to make a decision yourself as a player. But by doing so, the devlopers risked having a lot of players choose the cheap ending and miss out on the intense, deep emotional experience of the game coming full circle and wrapping up its themes.
I really like this point of yours! Life is Strange is one of my favorites, and I absolutely feel what you're saying. The first time I played it, I felt like "that can't be the end, right? I must have missed something, there's got to be a way to fix it all." And by the time I got to the end of my second playthrough, I learned the lesson. My impulse to go back and try again is exactly what Max felt in the narrative when she used her power. But the game's lesson is "no matter what, there are always consequences. You have to decide which consequences you're willing to accept." And crucially, doing nothing IS doing something. There're a number of little butterfly effects in the game that specifically stem from you not taking certain opportunities. And the game makes no judgment of you either way. It just lets you see the consequences in a way that most games don't until after you've already made the choice. In a way, being able to see a choice play out and then rewind actually makes you more responsible for the one you eventually choose.
the irony of saying sacrifices are inherently undesirable, while showing magic the gathering, were killing 1 creature triggers many other effects, usually better than the reward of sacrifice itself
It's not ironic at all, sacrifices being inherently undesirable means you need a larger incentive to make them desireable (such as activating 15 different effects or something)
@@crisptain6356 but that is the thing, for black decks sacrifices arent even slight undesirable, they are as trivial as paying mana
@@devforfun5618 Forget mono-black, I have a Black/Green Golgari deck made from cards across both Ravnica sets with two copies of Deadbridge Chant in it and a metric asston of card recovery. My first priority in every game I play with that deck is to *_start filling my graveyard as soon as possible_* so I can play cards from it more or less for free and functionally draw two cards per turn.
Your choice at the ending of nier automata is also an amazing example of sacrifice done right in video games. It's a pretty massive spoiler so I understand why it wasn't included in this video. It's what real sacrifices are like: you lose something and get nothing in return. But you do it anyways because it's the right thing to do. Before playing the game, I would've never made that sacrifice. But the story and message it gave me was so compelling that I had to do the right thing.
I'm still going to defend Mass Effect to the hilt. Not all games are supposed to be the same. The point of Mass Effect isn't to roleplay in a blind playthrough, it's to take the role of the director. You get to make bad decisions for the purpose of making a cooler story and the story you want *is* the reward for doing so. Yes, I've done a "perfect" run of the trilogy, but one of my favourite playthroughs was my Engineer run where I had to jump through hoops to make sure as many characters died as possible. That turned the entire story into a Shepherd desperately clawing every victory they could from overwhelming odds. *I* wasn't doing everything I could to win, but Shepherd clearly was as far as the story was concerned. I still maintain the story of the overpowered badass Shepherd who just gets everything done is also a cool story, however. That's the beauty of the trilogy, by taking the role of director, you get to decide whatever story you think is best for that playthrough.
A correction to the after the video bit. The starcraft to no build challenges were done on the normal difficulty not the hardest difficulty (except for a few missions in the zerg campaign) and it was without building anything, including structures
I'm surprised there was no mention of Wildermyth: In that game when one of your characters drop to 0 hp you can have them survive with a permanent wound (usually a missing limb), or have them die but give a big advantage to the current fight. Given that there's no conventional overaching story you won't miss any story moment specific for that character, and there are ways to get more characters, making it a temporary setback on progression.
At the same time their death not only has the mechanical weight of losing a memebr of your team, but through the game you probably built a narrative and a character to that miserable pile of stats, not only via the tactical combat gameplay but also with the various story vignettes the game randomly pulls regurarly, adding narrative drama to the sacrifice.
Can you imagine threatening to kill someone because you decided to not revive your digital dog? Completely wild
I've seen this happen as well in Pokemon Nuzlockes here on TH-cam, where instead of treating Pokemon as valued companions, they're treated as fodder for "necessary" sacrifices. I understand specific runs require sacrifices, but because they're treated so callously, so much dramatic tension is lost and it runs completely counter to the idea that Pokemon are your friends. And the whole idea of the Nuzlocke was to make the game harder, both on a technical level and an emotional one.
Typically a person's first Nuzlocke, especially when playing a game blind, is their most engaging.
This is where you see stories of trainers holding their precious team together with tape and string, mourning the loss of every party member, finding value in Pokémon they would otherwise have ignored, and being forced to make gut-wrenching sacrifices to save the team.
Dedicated "Nuzlocke channels" show the extreme inverse.
Players doing their 267th Nuzlocke simply aren't going to have any emotional investement in their teams anymore, and worse, will be so familiar with Nuzlocke gameplay that they end up optimising the fun out of the game.
Tbh sacrificing things is most fun in card games, because you can build you whole deck around it. So in the end you profit a lot from sacrificing.
"It'd work much better if it weren't the two worst characters in the game: space racist and human-shaped piece of wet bread."
-Adam, 2021
I really hate that attitude, it’s a fucking reductive and shallow look at Ash’s character (note that her reaction to being told to lead one of the Salarian squads isn’t “what? Those weak little tadpoles can’t be trusted to back me up” but rather more “lets go kick some Geth and Krogan ass lizard bros!”). And really, comparing her with Kaidan kinda gives a lot of the game away, because at least she has baggage. Kaiden’s issue is one that’s very common in ME1, a lot of the characters are very stoic and dry. There’s exceptions abound, sure, but even series standouts Joker, Tali and Garrus come off as stiff and bland by comparison to their portrayals in ME2. Kaidan just gets hit with it the worst because he doesn’t have a unique culture to talk about (why Garrus and Tali are interesting), and the voice actor is playing the character as he is: Reliable and stoic.
I think this take on ME was a bad take.
I think the sacrifice in ME1 probably works BETTER because it was those two characters (which had their merits and flaws) exactly because the player could make the sacrifice and keep some of the deeper characters. That is, it does exactly the useful thing of making a big, permanent choice, but making the player not want to quit the game or get frustrated that they cannot save both. Imagine that same sacrifice, but you have to lose Tali or Liara. That might hit harder, but it might hit too hard in comparison.
imho, the ME2 take was also a bad take. That section was not about "sacrifice". You could make it through with everyone alive if you were invested. I didn't even know people could die after my first play-through because I was so invested that I had fully upgraded the ship and I knew all the characters well enough to know who had the skills for each specialist mission. Making those choices correctly didn't feel like I was given less interesting options or that the lack of death was less interesting. There was a lot of tension, and I was "rewarded" with the resolution of that tension because I cared about the game's mechanics and characters. I got a better outcome because I prepared, which directly reinforces player agency.
In contrast, the "sacrifice" in ME3 was horrible because there were no real options and nothing you did up to that point mattered. No matter what, you lose. That could be fine in some games, but in ME3 it went against the core player agency that was established in the ME series, especially by the end section of ME2. It was clear that the game wasn't actually done when it was released, but I was surprised that ME3's sacrifice failure didn't make it into the video, yet comments about ME1 and ME2 did make it in. The ME3 sacrifice was widely reviled as terrible.
The ME3 ending was on par with other worst endings like Dexter Morgan becoming a lumberjack, or whatever you want to call the end of Game Of Thrones.
@@Wraithfighter There is a very fine line between nationalism and racism. ME1 even shows us that most members of Ashley's "Earth First" part are blowing that "xeno scum" dog whistle so hard they are about to pass out. Ashley herself comments on these racists giving her part a bad name and tainting the cause.
Or in other words, she claim to be "one of the good ones."
But at the end of hte day she says aliens can't be trusted because they will ultimately side with their own kind, circle the wagons, and throw humanity under the bus: so it's only natural for humanity to take the same stand. We have to fuck them over before they fuck us over and true cooperation was never an option. We can never truly rely on them and must seek to exploit them before they exploit us.
She may not consider herself a racist, but then again few do.
@@duncanlutz3698 Aye, that's entirely fair to bring up, and she abso-fucking-lutely has prejudicial and racist tendencies that she needs to get beyond and improve on. There's a reason the game lets you call her out on her bullshit, and it doesn't affect her loyalty or even her romancability afaik (well, mechanically at least).
There's just a degree of difference between the honest, complex, sincere discussion of racism that you posted there that properly analyzes the situation and her attitude, and what the video did: Call her a space racist and put a KKK hood on her.
Hence my umbrage: it's not that she's not racist, but just that dismissing her as a Space Racist Klansman is reductive and shallow as fuck.
@@Wraithfighter Sure, she's more of a xenophobe than a Klansmen, but she's definitely written as someone that is straddling that fine line between the two. As you said, you can call her out on it in-game.
I'd just like to add in her views are based on family history. Her grandfather was the first and only human to surrender to an alien force. This lead her entire family into humiliation to the point Ashley's career died before she was even born. Alien's hurt her family. Aliens hurt her career. Aliens can't be trusted.
Her views thus come more from a place of personal anger and resentment than any strict philosophical pragmatism.
Throwing a KKK hood over her does feel too much, though, sure. Simply calling the racist a racist, however, is fair game.
I'm happy some people still make high quality content on TH-cam despite it being less financially sustainable.
I'm surprised you resisted the urge to put a clip of an accidental Spelunky self-sacrifice anywhere in the vid.
I was tempted!
As someone who just got the Fable games, thanks for the warning
I loved the way pyre had you "sacrifice" party members by setting them free. You had to think about the gameplay and narrative reasons to pick or not pick each character, and there's no way to play it safe really
For me the #1 issue with sacrifices in video games is the more often than not they reduce the amount of content in the game. (In this context think of content as mechanical choices/ability and story to experience). The problem is that generally speaking there is no straightforward solution to this problem. On the surface you'd think that the solution would be to make equal content both for the choice to sacrifice and not to sacrifice but content isn't infinite in supply. It takes a lot of time and effort to give a game good content and content divided between two different choices is always going to be less than the content one of those choices would have gotten if it was the focus.
Of the top of my head I can see two choices, the first is replayability. A full game's worth of content divided across two choices might reduce a single playthrough's amount of content to half a game's worth, but if replayability is a core part of the game then you'll eventually get that full game's worth. I'm personally don't like this solution, however. A lot of the time replayability is done poorly in that it causes you to repeat a lot of the same things over and over again, wasting the player's time and diluting the content the game has to offer. On the other hand if the replayability becomes too streamlined and easy to access it can cheapen the sacrifices. You'll quickly be making "difficult" choices not because they're curious but because you want to know what will happen when you choose them.
The second choice, and the one I much prefer, is to make your sacrifices nothing or little in terms of the overall content of the game, instead relying on good worldbuilding to carry it through. This however is incredibly difficult and requires the special skill to create believably breathing, living worlds. But when it is pulled off your choices no longer become dominated by thoughts of content but instead about more raw and emotional thoughts of how your choices effect yourself, the people around you, and the world you inhabit.
GGG is goated. Never thought I'd see him on here!
Genshin actually did a very good portrayal of Sacrifice in the Aranyaka quest. It's not the player's sacrifice, but this adds something to my daily routine :'). This will be spoilers so if you don't want to be spoiled, don't read.
Should be far enough.
So the quest is about working with the Children of the Forest, the Aranara in order to get 'Bija' to heal somebody you just met, Rana.
Although the relationship between the player and Rana isn't that close, the relationship between the player and the Aranara definitely did. The player first learned that the Aranara are hiding from 'Nara' or humans, because they think that humans are dangerous. But after helping the Aranara and getting their trust, the player gets more information. The Aranara lives in the 'dream version' of the Vanarana village, and the player meets Araja, who is the wisest Aranara in the village. From Araja, the player gets more information about the Aranara but also a huge foreshadowing about the ending of the quest.
The Aranara are children of the forest, and their power comes from knowledge or memories. They can use their knowledge in order to unleash powerful abilities, but this used knowledge will disappear after that. In order to get 'Bija', the Aranara needs to make 'happy memories' to which they hold the Festival Utsava in order to make said happy memories.
The foreshadowing is, that Araja can't leave the village. He has become the tree that supports the dream version of Vanarana, because of that he can't leave. So instead, Arama accompanied us. In our preparation we get more foreshadowing of what is actually required to get 'Bija'.
Neither we, nor Arama will actually realize that Arama needs to sacrifice himself and become a tree. The pain of seeing Aranara lose their memories in order to protect their friends is already sad enough, imagine seeing Arama using himself as the 'seed' in order to get a Bija. That makes me bawl. If you go to Arama's house in Vanarana, there will be a diary written by Arama where he had no clue he had to sacrifice himself. It was only when they arrive in the Lost Nursery that he finally was granted the knowledge that he will be sacrificed.
And Genshin is a linear story, which means you have no choice in letting Arama sacrifice himself or to leave Rana to die. It will always be Arama sacrificing himself. This highlights that it's not the player's choice but it's Arama's choice.
Every single day now I go to Arama's tree and play the Aranara theme :')
Wow. I have never heard anyone talk about the ending of Fable II positively. Ever.
Just wanted to comment you can totally beat those two lanes of bears on Inscryption, me and my friend did it, every boss will do it until you lose at least once or so I've heard. We finished the first run, first try. Its an incredibly interesting and fun game with lots of secrets and its much more than meets the eye.
I would gladly sacrifice myself to bring Adam Millard into physical reality from the Dream Realm from which he delivers his videos.
My favorite youtube game design guy talking about my favorite 2021 game!!!!!!!
I always felt that Mass Effect 1's choice was both impressive and unimpressive. A rare, possibly the only, meaningful choice you can't paragon out of, but like you said, between the two worst characters. My only issue when deciding was trying to figure out if there was any reason to not sacrifice Kaiden, as Ashley's shitty arc is better than a nonexistent one.
Now imagine if they had the same choice but made you choose between Tali and Garrus. That would have been a sacrifice.
Eh, would it? Garrus and Tali in ME1 weren’t really all that much more interesting than Ash and Kaidan was. Honestly, of the 6 party members, Ash is kinda the second most interesting (behind Wrex, of course), because she has baggage, she has an arc, she has issues that she needs to deal with, even if her resolution of those issues is symbolicly shown as having no issue (hell, demanding to) lead a group of Salarian troops into battle.
Garrus and Tali are really only more interesting to us in hindsight because of ME2 and 3, where they returned with much better writing and characterization. Meanwhile, as potentially-dead characters, Kaidan and Ash get one scene in ME2 where they’re saddled with the plot role of giving Shepard no support so the player has to stick with Cerberus, and are absent for half of ME3 and, since they’re still potentially dead, the writers spend more effort on the Definitely (or at least very likely) alive characters like Edi, Joker, Liara, James and, yes, Tali and Garrus (although those two to a lesser extent, Tali in particular, given how late you get her back, damn it).
@@Wraithfighter Very true. I was looking at it from a trilogy perspective. As you said, Garrus and Tali become more central later on, while Kaiden/Ash get removed for all of ME2 and most of ME3. So if you had to sacrifice Garrus or Tali, there would be greater consequences and more missed content over the course of the franchise, making the sacrifice more meaningful.
Kaiden grows as a character when you are planning femshep. It gets very romantic if he is your only romance partner in the saga.
@@CthulhuInACan this also tracks backwards too. Ash and Kaiden were crappy characters in ME1 because the devs knew that half the players would never see content written for one or the other, so way less effort was put into them as a result.
In my mind, Saren is a much better tale of sacrifice from Mass Effect.
The whole game was about Specters, and their quest to keep the galaxy safe, reinfoced throughout.
Saren was captured, corrupted by Sovreign, though how much is his own will is hard to tell.
In the end though, he realises what he must do and does it. In a way made more powerful by the fact that he doesn't have to, Shepard is more than capable of killing him; but _Saren_ makes the decision to do what he can and, at least in _my_ Shepard eyes, redeems himself.
The Ashley/Kaden thing is less a sacrifice and more bad tactics.
Oh sick GGG! You guys both rock! Its awesome to see youtubers supporting and shouting out each other
The fact that games are bad at presenting sacrifice as interesting comes from the fact that they don't have a way to redefine the parameters of the game if you fail at something. Like for example in real life, if someone dies that you care about, then you have to deal with the emotional stuff, but you also have to figure out how to adapt your life to make it still have a notion of "success" that means anything to you. In games, that isn't an option: failure states mean you have to give up.
There isn't a real problem with player engagement, because having such a problem suggests that games are still playable enough to engage with after a loss, and that simply isn't the case for any game that exists. You can't keep playing chess without your king, and you can't modify your goals to account for your lessened capabilities in Fire Emblem. Games all contain brick walls that funnel you towards absolute success or ending the experience. Once someone comes up with a game that's capable of redefining itself after a loss, then the idea of sacrifice can start to have actual meaning.
There are games like disco elysium where even failing technically can lead to better solutions than winning according to personal preference.
There is also Planescape torment - where character death is just something you willingly do to progress sometimes
Thats a good point, but I think with many of these cases it simply comes down to the ability to save and load progress that just about every game possesses.
@@aravindpallippara1577 When I played Disco Elysium, I got to a point where I let someone die and I "decided" that that meant I wasn't fit to be a detective anymore, and quit the force. What I mean by redefining the parameters of the game in this context would be something like the game continuing from this point, with you coming up with new goals that fit your new life experience/outlook. The fact that the game ends once I reach a failure state means there is no redefinition.
Planescape Torment is the opposite problem: you have the ability to continue from a failure state, but your goals are the same before and after, so there is no redefinition going on here. Death is just part of the game experience leading you to eventual victory along the same parameters as what you started with.
If you've ever watched the visual novel Steins;Gate, you maybe can understand what I mean: the main character experiences a singular failure and then spends the bulk of the story learning to compromise his idea of success until it becomes something achievable. That story deals with the subject of sacrifice very well, in a way that no video game ever could.
What if a game makes ending the experience an absolute succes? Not only for you but for another player as well. That's what Nier Automata does, I think.
Make no mistakr this channel is just a big Outer Wilds ad (but I love it)
really good video! I'm glad unsighted showed up!
honestly a whole video could be made on unsighted itself. there's a lot more to the sacrifice system you didn't even touch, such how the game's near unparalleled open ended structure effects your choices or the game's difficult hidden ending revolving around self sacrifice at a risky chance to save everyone (which makes me getting soft locked at the end of my hidden ending run that much more fitting)
yall comment people gotta settle with talking about hidden endings with no spoiler warning
@@jun533 how is saying "there's a secret ending themed arround self sacrifice" a spoiler? If I really wanted to spoil unsighted there is a thing I could spoil that would be far worse than "there is a secret ending themed around self sacrifice"
@@FakeFlameSprite Because self sacrifice sounds like something you should be told you have to do in an impactful ingame scene where it's like "woahhh" you know but maybe it's just treated like not a big deal I don't know
@@jun533 it's an implied thing. To get the hidden ending in unsighted the player needs to scour every inch of the map to find special items. It's time consuming if you don't know what your looking for, and can easily lead to running out of time and needing. That's why I said it involved self sacrifice.
@@FakeFlameSprite OH that makes sense okay cool my bad g
Enderal (a total conversion mod of Skyrim that may as well be it's own game) comes to my mind when talking about sacrifice in games. Its main story initally starts off as the usual save the world plot but as the plot progresses you deal with more and more sacrifices and deaths eventually leading to a point where I had to make a gut wrenching choice at the ending
Ah, yeah, the inevitable decision of which bland, uninteresting pack mule that's been getting in the way the whole game to execute. Those situations always make me want to take a third option and kill _all_ the options.
In magic, sacrifices are a little bit "balanced" on the fact that you can get "value" from something that was dying anyways...
A deck with plenty of "removal" often looks pretty silly against a "sacrifice" themed deck.
You can also body-block then sacrifice.
But of course, sacrifice decks "truly shine" when you join pieces ("combos") which generate more value than was spent in mana.
2:02 I could just never get invested in Vandham after the first time. I knew that it wasn't really worth it. There are also several fights that you could have won but since you wasn't supposed right before your enemy is defeated the fighting is interrupted since "you didn't stand a chance" even when that is blatantly untrue.
For narrative driven sacrifice i think red dead redemption does an incredible job of making the sacrifice have an impact without sacrificing gameplay
May I, stand unshaken, amid, amidst a crash of worlds.
One game series that does the mechanic of sacrifice really well is The Banner Saga. For the entire trilogy you are journeying through a dying world with scarce resources and many people to save. All the sacrifices, whether it be named characters, civilians to protect, or supplies, build up to a fantastic climax that still keeps the initial world-is-ending pace together.
Not so much about scripted sacrifice choices, but more about losing characters/npcs in general: I continously bounce off hard from most D&D simulation games, like the first Bauldur's Gate that's so well spoken of, because death has no tangible narrative heft at all. I remember in my first playthrough, I lost the "childhood best friend rogue" lady in a street fight, and, well... there was nothing. I think I was expected to either pick the items off her corpse and move on, or just load a save, and both of these things sound just so unsatisfying, I immediately dropped that savefile.
I guess what I'm trying to say is you really can't get the narrative experience of sacrifice without a proper denoument of some sort. If following through with the situation is meant to be an option, _you gotta write that in._
10:05 when you mentioned pathologic I got so excited that you were going to talk about the original game and how brutal it is but how engaging it can be if you stick with it but you just talked about the sequel
I would love you see you do a video on video game sewer levels. They’re in every game and I don’t understand why. How did SEWERS become such a common level in video games, regardless of genre?
All while watching this I was thinking, Unsighted would be a great example for this video and not enough people have been talking about it, I'm glad to see someone mention it. I picked it up after playing the demo which doesn't mention the mechanic. I didn't look into it really before I bought it, and was a bit disappointed with the timer mechanic since I really hate the stress of dealing with timer and the sacrifice but I'm interested to see how it will actually play out once I finally do lose an NPC, I'm guessing I'll be upset, but it sounds like a great idea. (yes you can turn the timer off but the game is built on it so I don't wanna miss the point).
great video btw keep up the great work :D
My favorite thing about Inscryption is that you can actually beat those grizzly bears. If you and ur deck manage to defeat that completely unfair shit, you can actually just keep moving on. I pulled it off on my third run through and felt like a genius.
In Warhammer 40k : Mechanicus, there is an class of troops called servitors, that cost nothing and actually benefit you if they get hurt, encouraging you to play recklessly and send them on suicide attacks, because it ultimately benefits you in the end. However, you only got a limited amount of troops per mission, encouraging you to save some of them for future battles later in the mission. It also helps setting the grimness of 40k via gameplay, which I find interesting. I do which, though, that stronger units could have those kinds of mechanics, getting a risk and reward in getting a powerful character hurt (I’m still at the start of the game, maybe some characters do the same later)
When playing games like FE, it's like playing a stealth game for us, a single death is complete failure, and we have to start the mission again. Sacrifices aren't fun to make. Good story is often unfun to experience
Have tried to play Awakening a few times, got to a point where I compromised with myself about "Only resetting if I lose more than 1 or 2 units", but I couldn't even do that
This is why Wildermyth's "Set In Stone" option is so great, you can't just reload when your favorite character dies. It makes it feel much more like a story with unexpected twists and turns, rather than a story that is on rails.
The original is frustrating as you are seriously weakened if you lose a single character, turning an RNG element into a hard fail state where you turn off the console and either restart it or ragequit.
@@SpriteGuard That just makes me more likely to restart the game or ragequit entirely. Especially if it's not a meaningful sacrifice or one that was outside my control.
@@Healermain15 that's the problem with sacrifice in most games, they are never all that meaningful and are always outside of your control because if you don't like something you can always just go to a previous save, so the game has to force you to commit to it, it becomes either something that happens in the story and is on rails or if it is no prescripted is just something you are forced to deal with after the enemy had a lucky crit.
pyre is still one of my fav. Like each sacrifice is actually positive from a story perspective but hinders you from a gameplay perspective.
Nier Automata the bittersweet sacrifice game
For Fire Emblem's permadeath problem, a strategy games that I think does death well is Gungnir for the PSP. When a character's HP reaches zero, they simply retreat and drop an item on the battlefield, which can then be picked up. They then get inflicted with a wound that lowers their HP by 10%, which stacks and goes away after not "dying" for a stage. It's only when their HP drops below a certain value do they get overkilled and truly die, for real. So the only penalty for "losing" a character is a lost item and -10%hp. The lost item can be pretty painful, especially if it's a good item, but it's better than losing the character that you've spent time and resources to build, and if you're quick you can pick up the lost item, then the only penalty is just the -10%hp on that character.
Gungnir also does a bunch of weird and wacky things that I've never really seen in other Strategy RPG's, but that's beyond the scope of this post. The point is, death is a lot more rarer in Gungnir due to characters retreating before their actual HP reaches zero and die, which makes throwing them into danger and continuing the mission easier. A lot less resetting due to a slight misplay, and a lot more of trying to salvage a victory despite having half the amount of people left in the fight.
3:35 "objectively the right thing"
_WAIT, THAT'S THE TROLLEY PROBLEM_
The Trolley problem actually has a simpler solution -- ignore the lever and drag the single stranded victim over to the row of people who are about to be run over. Trolley kills all the people, boom, no more problems.
@@CoralCopperHead well even if you do consider that to be a better outcome, it isn't even the trolley problem anymore
Thank you for recommending GiantGrantGames his stuff is really interesting and I would love to see more channels you recommend
This made me realise just how little I rememeber a lot of character sacrifices in games. period. We usually hear the classic one liner like "Can't wait to see my wife" and INSTANTLY write that dude off as dead.
Emotional investment isn't an easy thing to create.
...I spent that level trying to find ways to destroy the thing.
I like stuff like Curly in Cave Story, where sacrifices can be avoided but it's sort of a secret and it's really hard to pull off.
A very interesting video indeed! It is true, a lot of sacrifice mechanics don't have the weight of sacrifice that other media might have, mainly because of gaming's power to turn back time so often to erase that sacrifice. Pathologic 2 (and 1, to a more poorly executed extent) are great at depicting that kinda sacrifice in a almost realistic scenario (while simultainously being very weird and alien in it's own unique way).
From the same devs, The Void/Turgor is also very much about sacrifice too - every resource you spend, every choice you make, even every second you allow to pass in the game world - is a meaningful one, and it's very easy to fuck that up and lose the entire game as the world dies and falls into the abyss. I deffo reccomend looking that up if you haven't already! ^w^
Fuga: Melodies of Steel did sacrificing in an interesting way. Every boss fight allows you to use an instantkill move on the boss, at the cost of sacrificing one of your characters for the rest of the playthrough. I genuinely found myself conflicted on whether or not I should sacrifice a character who wasn't particularly powerful, but I was still fond of, which was further impacted by the fact that this was a prequel, and some of these characters were very important to the overall lore of the other games
Interesting topic, I've thought about it some and my current plan for a xianxia inspired game that'd incorporate character deaths without encouraging savescumming and keeping everyone alive too much is to have a reincarnation system where dead characters souls can be used and equipped in various ways and after a certain amount of time and after possibly going through some sort of afterlife they get to be born again inheriting some stuff from their past life.
I think the game that instanly comes to my mind about sacrafice is into the breach, its a tough strategy game, making you pick and priorities multiple objectives, forcing you to make difficult choices on what to sacrifice
I feel like Fire Emblem as a series is an interesting one in this context, as the problem of losing out on game content by letting a character die is a more recent thing, sure, starting with FE6 there were Supports but there was a maximum you could get on each playthrough so it only amounted to 5 small character interactions so for the most part characters were very much disposable and the games constantly gave you new ones to fill in for those that died, sure most players weren't playing it in ironman challenge mode but they didn't always reset either, I myself sacrificed characters, even ones I liked, because they weren't that big a loss, that changed quite a bit starting with Awakening having a bunch of Paralogues which extended the games content by a significant amount and required certain characters to be alive and have maxed out a Support, and with Three Houses' monastery and the Divine Pulse and stuff it feels they've started to design around Casual Mode and characters just never dying because they're more likely to be there the whole playthrough but in turn playing with permadeath feels more punishing.
Which I assume is probably why they've turned down difficulty in general, many players would get way more frustrated about the difficulty of not losing units when losing them takes away from the game. When Casual Mode was introduced and there was a a surge in popularity there was a big push of old fans being "gatekeeping" and "elitist" for their preference of permadeath and how they can just play Classic Mode if they want it.
But the thing is that the worry was about how the now more popular Casual Mode would affect the game design, in turn making it so if you play with permadeath on you could be playing a less fun version of the game, which is how I felt it because I haven't beaten any post-Awakening game letting a character die, opting to reset because I feel I'd lose way more if I let it happen, before I'd reset if it was a character I really liked or had invested a lot in or if it was the first turn of the map. Even though the games are easier than the old ones they're more frustrating for me.
Metro 2033 Last Light Redux's "bad" ending is probably a good example of sacrifice. Artyom self destructs the facilities after the Spartans lose the battle so that the advanced tech doesn't fall into the hands of the bad guys at the price of his life.
Ah, yes. I remember when a Bethesda-made game told me I'm a horrible person for refusing to kill myself
My favorite is probably the suicide mission in Valkyria Chronicles 4. Where one major character volunteers to carry out the mission, but it doesn't stop there. You also have to pick another non-plot important unit to accompany them. Then you set up a squad to cover them, then move them to extraction before the two "suicide" units get to the goal. You'll want to have a decently capable unit on the suicide run to make it to the end safely. There's even unique dialogue on the pre-mission placement map where the non-plot gives inspired or resigned response to being selected. Even in mission as the "suicide" units reach the end there is a voiced cutscene for each one saying how they'll try to buy time. And after the mission they are dead, at least until the post game where you get a feature to bring back perma dead units. But at that point the story's been told and you can play for completion's sake.
Yeah, I never actually finished Darkest Dungeon despite really loving playing it. It kinda sucked all the fun out of it for me when I realized my inevitable victory wouldn't be one of skill or heroism, but rather the economic victory of the town as its unstoppable commercial progress overwhelms the beleaguered cultists and eldritch horrors.
Kind of a cool narrative, but not really one I wanted to sink a bunch more time into grinding out sacrificial low-level dungeons. And the unpredictable, high-stakes nature of high-level dungeons meant sending in my experienced adventurers really felt like forcing myself to play sub-optimally. Just kinda sucked all my investment out of the game.
i was sitting through this whole video waiting for the mention of lisa. an amazing game and what i thought of as soon as you mentioned sacrifice in games.
I must admit, I've never cared for these kinds of 'sacrifice'-centric games. I'm too much of a perfectionist, always seeking the 'ideal' game, the golden ending, where everybody lives happily ever after. Looking at it from an in-story perspective, if you have to make sacrifices, it just means you weren't GOOD enough. If you'd been faster, or stronger, or cleverer, you could have avoided that situation. So if a game simply doesn't make it POSSIBLE to avoid such sacrifices, I automatically resent it for fencing me in and refusing to let me play 'my way'. In some cases, if the game is otherwise good enough to hold my interest, I've even gone 'outside the box' to achieve that theoretically perfect run to my own satisfaction, using cheats, save-editing, mods, glitches - whatever it takes to bypass the problem.
I may be an extreme case, but I do think that aspect is part of the issue with sacrifices in games. In non-interactive media, those who wind up having to sacrifice for the sake of victory - or those left behind - tend not to be particularly HAPPY about it. Their regret, their cursing of the circumstances, their lamentation at having been unable to find another way, can be quite poignant. So of course, when it's happening to you, you're going to want to find a way around those sacrifices, as in the Fire Emblem example, and resent the game if it doesn't LET you, as in the Fallout 3 example. And because you aren't the CHARACTER but the PLAYER, there is ALWAYS a way to avoid the sacrifice... even if it is just 'turning off the game'.
Well, I was interested in Unsighted but you've successfully talked me out of it. I play games to feel good, not depressed. I get enough of that in my real life already.
There is a mode to turn it off.
Is there anyone aside from a speed runner who doesn’t try to stay alive in Lone Wolf on Reach for as long as possible?
Didn't expect to see GGG here, amazing channel.
Oh and also great video.
Despite how a major of players play Fire Emblem, its at least a better choice than to force Ironman mode
I have played extreme casual and hardcore Ironman, and while i do highly encourage people to accept losses, im not going to force them to play recklessly because i wanted to goad them towards a certain path.