One of my favourite ways of handling player death is in the Portal 2 coop missions. If you listen to the developer commentary, they say they specifically designed death sequences to be quick and explosive with no pomp or circumstance because you're playing as a robot that does have infinite replacements. In that game, they wanted death to feel like just a part of the experience rather than a consequence so they intentionally did exactly the opposite of what you're describing which, in and of itself, is immensely clever.
it also ties in to the story; The only reason GlaDOS, the omnicidal maniac AI that runs those test chamber, uses replaceable robots is because there's no living humans to "use"; the last living one she had has escaped and its not until the end of CO-OP where she gets a fresh new batch of them.
Super Meat Boy is even better at "inconsequential death". No black screen, no "press start", just go back to play immediately. The retro levels in that game have a traditional life counting system, and it changes the gameplay immensely.
@@sponge1234ify there was other humans, but they were in a vault. you, (the co op robots) free them, the hundreds of thousands of test subjects during (if i remember correctly) the 6th chapter of the co op campaign, then the credits roll. then at the 7th chapter (also i might be remembering the numbers wrong) GLaDOS tells you that all the test subjects were killed during testing
Gotta mention Wario Land 2 & 3, where death just isn't an option for Wario. Rather, you are often slightly inconvenienced, you lose money, OR the thing that would traditionally kill you gives you a status effect that can help you progress or explore, such as being flattened by a Thwomp-like enemy, only to become flatter and able to squeeze into small cracks. Gone were the days of fearing enemies, as these games encouraged you to instigate their attacks in order to solve puzzles. This really drove home the idea that you were the bad guy, and things that killed Mario in the past just didn't effect you. In the mid to late 1990s, when the Mario platforming genre was more or less set in stone, a game where none of those rules applied to you (the villain) was delightful and highly praised by critics.
Late reply, but I love comments like these! Mark Brown's videos tend to have intelligent commenters that can provide more examples for Mark's points, twists on those ideas, or even counterpoints.
I had an interesting idea for a death mechanic. In an open-world game, the sort with multiple factions squabbling for terrain, you could have the player be brought back to life, but the game's clock is set forwards to represent the player's recovery time. Thus, the punishment for death would be loss of control over the game world, if momentarily.
The Mount & Blade games kinda worked like this. If you were defeated, the party that killed you would take you prisoner and the world would continue as normal until you escaped. So the political and military machinations of the world would not simply cease with your defeat. You were just removed from them for a couple in game days.
I think the best thing about the system in Dark Souls is that it's a part of the story. Your character is undead, and what's characteristic of a motivated undead in this universe is that every death is an opportunity to learn. The story informs the mechanics and the mechanics tell the story. You aren't just told about the undead curse, you experience it.
this one paragraph was honestly better at explaining the subject than the whole video.. this guy only talked about bloodborn/souls for like 1 min then just listed other death mechanics in other games the entire time. edit - he took bloodborn out of the title now
@@D00000T wich is a good thing that sekiro bosses now aknowledges this,some bosses will comment how many times they killed you,it's not much but added a charm to it.
I am surprised not to see borderlands "kill to revive" mechanic... The game also never tells you "game over". The resurection is justified by the lore and you never feel like you are done with a fight.
One thing you forgot to mention about Bloodborne that's actually different from Dark Souls is that sometimes an enemy will consume your blood echoes, meaning you have to kill that enemy to get them back. This is great because you then have to overcome the challenge that you failed before by getting revenge on what killed you, which removes the awkwardness in Dark Souls where you'd zip into the room you died it, avoid the enemies, grab your souls and run away, only to simply use the souls to get stronger and artificially make the challenge easier. In Bloodborne, you're stuck until you can get good enough to surmount the challenge you failed at, meaning the experience is given far more impact to the player.
That's actually not how it really works, the blood echoes stay on the ground and an random enemy can take it. When I face an hard enemy that is probably going to kill me, I always try to lure him somewhere empty or somewhere with weaker enemies, since it's going to be easier to take my blood back if I die. It's the exact same strategy I use on Dark Souls, so I can't really see a difference. But, what I like about this system is that it gives the impression that everything is happening in real time, the enemies don't depend on you to start moving or doing whatever (at least not aways), and that makes me love the system. I wish From Software would use it more.
I remember way back when, some 25 years ago or so, playing the original Wizardry, and making it ALL the way to the final room to take on the big boss vampire only to have me and my entire team killed. And there was no doing over at that time. You couldn't even save a game at that time. You were DEAD, meaning your entire 40 hours of gameplay or whatever it was was gone, poof. You're dead, man, lol, dead.
+Andrei Thats the beauty of it. you described it as "dying a little on the inside". what do you think your character feels after gradually losing will and hope? they give up and hollow. when you give up and uninstall the game, your character finally loses it. i think its genious how Hidetaka Miyasaki handles death, respawning, and multiplayer by making it a part of the story and world. and not in a simple way like your companion reviving you in bioshock, but in a way thats clear was put alot of effort, thought and love from the devs to make.
I'm sure I'm not the first to mention Planescape: Torment, but it deserves mention here. This is a game in which you play as an immortal amnesiac who always gets up after he's been killed (the game begins with you waking up in a mortuary), and can't remember why. It soon becomes clear that you can't die permanently (though it's still possible to lose in some areas). Solving some puzzles actually requires you to die in order to progress. The game's entire story revolves around an investigation as to who you really are, and why you're immortal. Your ultimate goal is to regain your mortality and die for good.
Funny I never knew about the game and had a similar setting idea for a game , where you are not immortal per say , but you're stuck in limbo where dying just makes you be born again and your goal is to leave this cycle
More aesthetic, but I like Cannon Fodder's imagery where your soldiers are promoted, but if they die, their gravestones begin to fill up your main menu screen. Also Fable, where if you die, you'll come back with a scar, so the more times you die, the more horrific you look by the end of the game. But Wandering Spirit on the game boy is quite cool, where you need to possess another enemy as soon as you die.
***** I loved that Cannon Fodder system. It was really soul crushing to see the hills filled with graves. While the game lives up to its name and you know what you are getting into, it was really hard not to grieve over really highly ranked soldier dying or seeing the body count. Just brilliant overall.
Wandering Spirit is indeed really creative. I wish they'd make a new HD one and release it on steam and consoles. You could take over the body of any enemy when you died, and you get their abilities and weapons, and sometimes you had to think tactically to get past certain sections that only certain enemy bodies could traverse, or try and cross those sections in your ghost form before your ghost form ran out of time and hope there was an enemy to inhabit on the other side. For a game boy game it was really complex. Though I know it's based off an arcade game. But still
Soul Reaver had a good mechanic, where dying in the physical world would send you into a warped version of the same area, where you try to regain health and find a portal back.
i like the "second wind" option in borderlands , sometimes you die in unfaire situations and the oportunity to get up if you kill anyone give me an intense moment
As much as I like the mechanic in theory, the way it was handled was fairly poor, since you HAVE to kill an enemy to get back up. If you kill the last enemy in an area before you die, or the remaining enemies all duck behind cover when you die, then it's super frustrating to not be able to save yourself.
That is true, but if nothing else it discourages fighting too much from cover, which could slow down what is meant to be a pretty fast-paced game. Hitting enemies hard from up-close makes second winds super easy. Conversely, second wind takes away one of the usual problems with sniping in an FPS, since you can survive someone stabbing you from behind by shooting them point blank with your rifle.
@@lancelindlelee7256 no, Shadow of Mordor is "hey, survive this QTE and you get a second chance" and then there isnt another second chance, Second Wind of Borderlands is "Kill anything and get back up" and it happens infinite times as long as you can get a kill
Zombie U is a good example of a game that treats death in a unique way, when your character dies you respawn as a different survivor - you can either choose to retrieve your lost items and equipment by returning to the place of your demise and killing your zombiefied self or simply push on with your quests and abandon your equipment
In Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, every time Senua looses a battle in her mind, she is closer to be consumed by the darkness, you have to fail so many times until this happens, but if you do it, all the progress is lost. And I love that conept
one of my favorite ways that a game deals with death is katana zero. when you’re playing, you’re not actually seeing exactly what happens until you win. up until then, your character is using their precognitive abilities to predict how to complete the room, and until you find the right way, you’re just seeing what could go wrong before it does, but it’s all in your head. good shit.
Recent game Crawl is a great example of 4 player couch co-op for pc. Each player takes control of either one hero or three different ghosts that control the monsters and traps in a dungeon. Who ever gets the final hit on the hero, switches with them.
I’ve been bouncing an idea around in my head for a while. You play as a blob amoeba, recently the subject of an evolution experiment gone wrong that allows you to copy yourself right before death, but changing dna to reconcile what you did wrong, leaving you with a progressive death and level mechanic. If you just missed a jump on generation 1, then generation 2’s jump stat has increased, although another stat decreases, like speed or something, meaning the challenges that you take on literally decide what challenges you can take on in the future. It could also lead to an interesting death count mechanic, where at certain points you remember your dead ancestors, even making it possible to beat the game on gen 1. Provided, you can’t do side quests or such, but you can still win.
I'd really like to see horror games tackle death in a different way. Death is the least scary moment in a horror game, because it's the part where you know you don't have to be afraid of being found or hurt. And if you die too often, the game stops being scary and starts being irritating. But on the other hand, you need a failure state, otherwise there's nothing to fear. One way of doing it might be by giving you control over more characters, each of whom could be permanently killed, in which case you'd continue the game as the others. That way, you'd try to be more careful with your favorite character and you could shape the story in different ways. Do you you play as a coward, or do you let your protagonist sacrifice himself to save the others?
In hellblade the game tells you from the start that if you die too many times, your save file will be automatically deleted. That's one way to keep the anxiety going
spyrosource3 Yeah, but it doesn’t ACTUALLY do that. Once you know that, it’s not scary. I feel like horror game death could be more interesting if: 1. You get turned into a ghost, and have to get through a hellscape to revive or haunt/guide the next life in some way. 2. Dying slowly turns you into a monster - you see the changes, changes in control or dialogue etc, and after a certain amount of deaths you’re a total monster and lose the game. Basically kinda like Hellblade only it follows through with its threat. I only see that working for a short game though. 3 - The death completely changes the story for the rest of the game. It could be like Heavy Rain where the permadeath of one character changes things for the remaining characters, or it could make you turn completely into a monster/evil and flip the game and story on its head.
Or the game forces you to play as the monster to possess your former body. Kind of works with a game like Bloodborne where it's stablished basically anyone can be a beast.
@@TheRogueEight Says the one who can't even learn to write a proper sentence. When you're referring to someone's word inside a sentence you must put quotations around it to contextualize its meaning to the reader. The correct way should be: Says the one who can’t even spell "descendants" correctly. P.S. You also didn't capitalize your sentence, dipshit.
I think the Stanley Parable is an interesting example, in that technically there was never a fail state, even after a "death." Like the loading screen says, "The End is Never." Instead of failure, I guess it has "restart states," and the game makes them all inherently interesting to experience.
It has a few extra states that occur (such as the messy floor state) but none are particularly meaningful. The only time it appears to reset but doesn't has you locked into the path you're currently on.
The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never
Player death should be treated in a similar manner with the game's save system. It has to reflect the tone of the game and what the developer envisioned. Such as most Nintendo games usually have 1-3 save slots despite being able to have multiple saves because the machine is more powerful. Or how the Souls series saves the game after almost every action you take, making things become permenant. In Call of Duty, while bland to have them respawn after 5 seconds, it is actually appropriate to have that system in place. Because it is an action game, it places you back into the action after you "failed", not punishing you for recklessly getting into the action. It also reflects the multiplayer ever so slightly with there being a timeout period before respawning. While games like Fire Emblem treat a death with permenance as if they were a real person. Making each battle even more tense for those who did not level up enough. Forcing you to not only play offensively, but also defensively and to put those units at maximum risk so that they level up to not be dead weight for later. And Dark Souls has a brilliant death system that not all games are capable of pulling off. Death is a reflection of not only the game but also of the player. You become more and more hollow (hollow is the state of insanity where you attack anything because you've lost the will to live) with each passing death. If you still have a reason to fight, you do not become hollow and "lose the game". This reflects the player, if they continuously die, their reason to stop playing grows and eventually snowballs into a ragequit. Making them lose the game because they gave up on the game before they finished it, connecting them to their character even if they didn't know it.
A possible companion piece to this video would be to examine game save/load systems and whether or not they should exist outside gameplay mechanics or be an integral part of them. Playing Alien: Isolation again this weekend reminded me just how crucial its checkpoint system is to maintaining the game's tense atmosphere, yet at the same time many players were also disappointed there was no quicksave (which I can understand would be useful if you suddenly need to stop playing and go somewhere, but at the same time it would have effectively killed off much of the game's tension). Now that the PS4 allows us to suspend any game and continue later, I wonder how that will feed back into design choices when it comes to implementing save systems.
I wonder if you could mix save system with the good old "health drops when you are low on health", and having game (somehow) know when you want to stop playing it and spawning save point accordingly.
Nothing stopping a game from having an autosave-on-exit where the save can only be loaded once (which is exactly what that PS4 feature sounds like it's doing). This shouldn't impact the game design at all because you can't reload the save multiple times - the consequences for death remain the same.
I really appreciate games that include player death in the narrative because it gives the player a personal goal and a reason to become good at the game instead of just playing through it, shrugging off each death as just minor setback.
Shovel Knight does the whole Dark Souls get your loot back before dying again and Fire Emblem also does the perma death of characters you care about like XCOM.
Hollow Knight and Minecraft kinda do the Dark Souls thing as well, but in different ways. In Minecraft, you lose all your inventory items on death and while they don't dissappear on a second death, you have like five minutes to get to wherever you died in order to retrieve them or they despawn and you lose them. Also, some mobs will be able to pick them up and use them, and dying near lava, an explosion or a cactus can just destroy some of them inmediately. I think this makes death very punishing, especially in the endgame and/or during exploration, but there's always mods and the keepInventory gamerule for those who don't like it, so it's not completely forced on the player. In Hollow Knight, dying makes you lose all of your Geo, the currency of the game, which is stored in your remaining Shade; and it will also cause the Fragile charms to break if you had them equipped, requiring you to go visit Leg Eater and pay for him to repair them. The shade doesn't despawn naturally, so there's no potentially unfair time limit: however, just like Shovel Knight, if you die again on the way to it, it dissappears with all your Geo and a new one appears. But to top it off, your own Shade will be hostile and attack you, making the act of recovering your Geo less of a chore and more of a challenge (until you obtain the Void Heart, which makes them passive). And it even acquires new abilities as you earn them throughout the game, making it harder to fight as you progress. You can also choose between trying to go to wherever you died to retrieve it or, after unlocking her hut, return to Dirtmouth and ask Confessor Jiji to summon it for you, making it less frustrating to lose your Shade in a risky place, such as a difficult platforming section or an enemy arena. This requires you to posess Rancid Eggs to give her in exchange, however, and you still have to take a trip to the nearest Stag Station (or to Dirtmouth itself, if you're close enough) without dying in order to get there, should you not respawn in one already. Or you can just leave as much Geo as you want in Millibelle's bank before going somewhere dangerous and return later to get them so that you don't have as much to lose in death (be prepared for a little potential surprise when you come back, though. Not gonna spoil exactly what happens, but don't worry, it's not precisely a bad thing). As for the fragile charms breaking, you can go to Divine and feed her the fragile charms, which she will later give back in their unbreakable forms; getting her to return the charms, however, is VERY expensive, so you better start grinding Geo for them.
Have you ever played Cannon Fodder? It's the first game I can remember where you would level up and grow attached to your soldiers only to have them die and be forever represented by a headstone on a hill (that all the raw recruits had to then march past).
+Game Maker's Toolkit Yeah that's right. Amiga Power wanted to use it on their cover but changed at the last minute to a camo image after the drama (I think it was the same as the box art but all my Amiga games were pirated in lil ole NZ so I'm not really sure).
Nomad soul had an interesting system too... Not as fancy as tombstones for you soldiers but you could literally have a sex change if you died... Or a race change... Or any other unexpected body change...
Ultima online. 1997. OooOOoooOoOOooOooOo. They actually had a skill called spirit speak, which was useless for the most part, where you could communicate with dead players.
I remember feeling that death in Star Wars: Republic Commando was interesting for its time. You didn't die outright, but you could be revived as long as one of your squadmates survived, and you had some choice in how that happened. Would calling for an immediate revive cause your squadmates to die by taking them out of cover? Or would your squadmates lose their fight unless you could get back up to do something crucial that they wouldn't be able to on their own? There were times when one option seemed better than another.
Now that you have made a video on Bloodborne, I have an idea for a video. What if you talk about maps inside videogames? For example, Far Cry 2's map and how it fits with the game itself. Or how in Bloodborne and the Souls games there is no map at all, and the player must make its own on his/her mind. It would be interesting.
Yeah, I definitely want to do some stuff on maps. There's lots of interesting avenues on video game cartography from way finding to treasure maps. Watch this space!
+Mark Brown There's a fantastic analysis of the original Thief vs. new Theif floating around out there. A bit too fawning over the original, but he makes some great points about game maps.
+lleon79 I miss Doom's map. It was useful but un-cluttered; showed where you'd been and where you hadn't; could be expanded in-level with an item and even allowed you to find some secrets through clever analysis. Worked for me. Obviously it wouldn't work for today's more complexly designed levels but the principle could still work surely?
Hollow Knight has a interesting death mechanic, where retrieving your shade is similar to the method seen in dark souls, but the way your shade interacts with you changes depending on the story path you've taken. The shade summoning mechanic was also very unique.
(sorry for bad english) I don't know if it counts but in MGS 3 there are two special items that you can use at any part of the game : the "fake death pill" and the "revival pill". You can use it to simulate your death if you're surrounded by ennemies and then revive when they return to their main positions, or it can be used as a "Restart the mission" button. However there is a boss fight where you actually have to die to defeat the boss callef "The sorrow", he is a ghost so he cannot be killed, and the only way to defeat it is to wait for him to defeat you, and then wake up by using the Revival Pill, and continue the game.
These two items can be used to defeat The Fear. If you fake your death, he will get close to you and turn back. Then, you just got use teh revival pill and thrown a flash grenade, ending him with some automatic gun. Even if the weapon is deadly, his stamina decrease, not his health.
Doesn't Braid work the same as Prince of Persia did, where you just reverse time until you're safe when you die? I haven't actually played Prince of Persia so I don't know.
Something I like in dragon age is if your characters fall in battle they'll get up after the battle but they will have an injury which is a debuff that can only be removed with an injury kit item (even if they injuries didn't always make sense like having a broken arm will decreased magic but not dexterity or strength?)
In A Wizard's Lizard, almost every enemy you kill becomes a ghost, and when you die, you get another chance, but you have to fight both the ghosts (which are harder to kill) and the regular enemies. It's an interesting concept.
The corpse-running thing from Dark Souls also happened in Descent (which might be where corpse-running came from, as 1994 was years before MMOs). In Descent, the level does not reset when you die, any robots that are dead stay dead, and any that have left their initial positions remain where they had moved to when you died. Your collected weapons and powerups are scattered by the explosion around the area where you died, and you return to the starting area with your level 1 laser, down one life. You have to make your way back to where you last died (and possibly face down some dangerous robots!) to get your stuff back. Lives become a resource to be conserved or expended instead of just an archaism borrowed from arcade games. The game's hostage mechanic where you're given a score bonus for rescuing hostages, and all your hostages die if your ship is destroyed, rewards you for completing a level in a single life. The game also rewards you at the very end with a bonus for how many lives you have, so you're rewarded again for minimizing deaths after beating the final boss. Dying and respawning become part of the mechanics rather than just a failure state, and this was more than 20 years ago.
some of my favourite mods for Bethesda's open world titles are the ones that replace your death mechanics. fallout: new vegas has a mod which has your unconscious body get found by a member of the nearest friendly faction, you end up waking up battered and bruised, with some of your equipment (and all of your money) stolen, but the thing that makes this interesting, is the way it impacts your decision making, and save habbits. often in Bethesda games, you save and reload to solve every problem. however this mod suggests that you instead use the autosave system, as the only way you can lose progress is through a game crash (which the unofficial patch fixes) this means that your decisions are perminant.
In Duskers, death is handled in a very interesting way. Sometimes your drones are merely disabled, meaning you can potentially rescue them by towing them to safety and then spending scrap to repair them between missions. However, there's a risk of the drone being destroyed when it dies, meaning all you can do is salvage the modules from ti and leave it behind. It might also be trapped in an inaccessible room, or it could get sucked out into the vacuum of space. You have to find new replacement disabled drones and repair them to use them in missions, or you'll be unable to proceed. It's a very interesting twist on death, and makes your risks all the more real.
Huh, Sometimes You Die looks interesting. Especially since it's pretty much the _exact_ same premise that Jesse Venbrux explored in his short game "Deaths", except in that game, instead of just taking _your_ former corpses, for every level, it loads the 50 last corpses from _all players worldwide_. Not only do those corpses give you hints as to where traps lie, but they also serve as platforms to get further. It's not actually a very good game, but certainly an interesting way to design death in games.
Just wanted to say I absolutely love this series. As an aspiring game developer, the videos are both entertaining as well as thought-provoking. Love your concise and clear narration and scripts. Great number of examples in each video as well. Honestly the only criticism I have is that I wish they were longer! I'd watch 20 minute videos in this style and love them.
I also would like exploring other failure scenarios that don't result in death but rather change up the dynamic somehow. A bit like Elder Scrolls prison system. It would be great if we had more, creative ways where rather than death, we had other scenarios playing out that could also change the way the scenario will play out. Like, you could fighting a mob of orcs, when they defeat you, they don't want to kill you but they drag you to their camp as a prisoner. So, game's dynamics shift in a linear scripted way but would add variety to a mission/quest where different consequences exist besides death. It is harder to than the binary alive/dead state but I think it would be great if the games were moving forward exploring these kinds of ideas more in depth.
There's a game called outward. It's an rpg where you're a random dude adventuring. When you run out of health you get a defeat scenario. These can be anything from getting saved by a traveller to trapped by bandits. You don't die. It's cool
Like how when you die in Undertale, the Temmie Armor becomes cheaper. You can talk to Asgore, and if you died in an earlier attempt at the boss battle, you can tell him that he has killed you once before. Then there's Sans, who is initially able to tell from the look on your face just how many times he has killed you. And Omega Flowey, who will crash the game if you lose the battle, and not allow you to start a new game before you defeat him.
It is worth adding that all in-game portrayals of protagonist are something like 20x20 pixels or so, which adds another meaning to "Sans is able to tell from the look on *your* face how many times he has killed you" (as the fight was the toughest one in the game and was often met with emotional responses).
I love katana ZERO's death system Our character is using a drug that makes him anticipating ennemies. When you play, it is actually your character thinking of what he could do to eliminate everyone in the room. When You manage to clear the room with a lot of failed tries that you will ignore at some point since it's a quick die and retry, ou character thinks "yes, that should work" and then go into the room, kimling the ennemies the exact same way we did "in his mind". The thing is, that those deaths, where our character says "no, that won't work" they are actually related to the story. Since ou character, thinks of the fight before doing it, something unexpected can happen right after managing to clean a room since our character didn't anticipated that. Finally, when our character encounters a person that has the same drug as him, the person must say stuff like "you killed me many times, but it was only in my mind, that's okay." The drug in the story is really important and the fact that you can die a thousand times in one run, while it counts on the story makes, in my opinion, this game special.
No mention of Fire Emblem alongside Alien and XCom? It did the same thing by carrying on after a unit died and had you develop emotional attachments with them, but way earlier.
ArceusDX NIntendo is doing that stupid Creator Program. It's best not to mention nintendo's games if you're not planning to submit your video to their sh**ty program. Also , Fire Emblem franchise isn't even on the whitelist of the program so you Will Lose your video.
There was a Star Trek game called 'Borg' where to beat one of the puzzles you had to be assimilated, watch your character (as a Borg) type in the passcode on something, then it reset so you knew how to get through. I always liked that.
I like Non-standard game overs like killing Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 3. That and The Sorrow's battle again in MGS3 or your first encounter with Seath in Dark Souls where you have to die to proceed with the game. There's also Wario Land II, where you can't die but getting hit makes you lose coins and bosses make you restart the battle by blowing youaway from the arena. Final Fantasy Tactics had permadeath but they yielded a Crystal that could be used to buff your still alive units. Ghost Trick also made you play some mock death scenarios to gain knowledge necessary to really prevent the death. I still like games with the normal death system, not sure why you lambasted it. Not all games need to have quirky death mechanics.
Kirby's Epic Yarn works similarly to how you describe Wario Land II - you lose sequins when you get hit, and you get medals for how many you have at the end. It's actually decently challenging to get through if you want to get the gold medal on some of the bosses.
I wonder if you've come across Shovel Knight's money punishment. It's funny that even at max money with nothing left to buy, I'm EXTREMELY paranoid of dying and the possibility of losing a ton of money (especially since it scales, the more you have). And sometimes your greed for getting it back results in even more money lost. Quite clever I'd say. Breaking checkpoints for money is also interesting.
Your content is fucking gold. I cannot stop watching. These videos feel like they would perfectly fit within a paid membership of some kind. I would pay to keep watching if you ever do get into a service of some sort. Thank you for helping me learn stuff dude
Even in a game where challenges are self-contained and you do end up using "die = reset", something subtle like letting your character hang on with 1HP when taking a lethal blow does help give death impact.
Oh, don't forget anything that gives you more chances when you're weaker. Maybe that seems patronizing to you, but even old-school Mario does it by shrinking your hitbox. The more you can take advantage of the danger you're in, the less you want to die (just so long as the designer can avoid leading the player to self-inflicting this).
The problem with FE's death system is that either you play classic and reset a chapter every time one of your units die, or you play casual which heavily undermines the strategy aspect of the game.
+Butternut, that is false. For some people, classic is a puzzle where the goal is to get past each chapter with all units, and that is quite enjoyable even when resetting; and others aren't interested in permadeath so they remove that mechanic, which is also okay. However you have ignored the many different ways people play Fire Emblem. Some people play casual, and bench certain fighters temporarily after certain criteria, such as: If they died last chapter: do not use this chapter If they died thrice: never use again etc. Some people play classic in ways different than you described: If a unit dies, no resetting to save them If a lord unit dies, sacrifice someone else in their stead Only use x number of units total Only field x number of units at a time Randomize which units are fielded TL/DR: The point of Fire Emblem is that you can complete a campaign in a completely different way than you or any of your friends has done before. You can accidentally kill off 75% of your cast and still win if you know what you are doing. To say that FE's death mechanic limits players to one of two options is a gross misunderstanding of the central themes of the game and a false dichotomy fallacy.
I always wanted to see a Doctor Who based game, where you play as a timelord, and whenever you die, you regenerate, keeping maybe a handfull of core charactertraits, but changing everything else, including appearance.
I really like how the new Tomb Raider deals with death. Because the scenes were so brutal and surprisingly realistic, I felt really bad letting Lara die and usualy took more of a careful approach. This really made me care for the character, because even your death was meaningful instead of turning your character into a ragdoll and making you restart. It's painful to watch these scenes even though, in the end, it's exactly the same as the old videogame deaths, except with more "flare" to it. It doesn't make death per se more interesting as some games mentioned in the video, but does make for the gameplay to be more imersive in a way that you don't really want to screw up.
I feel like survival horror does the best with this. Seeing isaac from dead space get ripped to shreds or leon from resident evil 4 get his head chainsaw off was extremely brutal and something you wanted to work especially hard to prevent rather than just seeing them comically flopping like a ragdoll. Especially with a female protagonist. Every death is just nooooooo lol
I enjoyed Valkyria Chronicles' way of doing it. If one of your guys gets killed they go into a downed state where it depends who gets to them first. If you get another character to them, they get brought to the medic to be used later. If the enemy gets to them first they get executed and are gone forever.
Andrei Despinoiu so...Basically deleted upon death, but just has a shell of a placeholder there for nothing other than saying "you didnt get gud"? It's the same thing the original poster of the comment said, just with an extra part to it, wouldn't call that false. If the character serves no other purpose upon death(can't be revived or used in any way) with literally the only thing to do is get rid of it, the character is pretty much gone upon death.
Life Goes On had a pretty interesting use of the death mechanic. Every puzzle is based around using your dead knights in various ways, like killing yourself so the corpse holds down a button, allowing you to progress. I dunno, could be the same as Sometimes You Die, haven't played it so I wouldn't know.
Hey Mark, this is one of the best channels I've seen in awhile so far, I love how you manage to mention older games like Sands of Time of Far Cry 2. Keep up the good work!
this is probably not totally on topic but i was blown away by mission 43 in metal gear solid 5 the phantom pain. not gonna spoil it though. one of the most incredible gaming moments i have ever experienced
For the most part, death in Undertale was much like the classic death that Mark used Sonic and Mario to exmplify: black screen then start from the last save point. How Undertale gave it a twist, however, was the way that your deaths, saves, and loads were worked into the narrative. Your soul's determination gave you the power to keep going, and your saving and loading represented an ability to manipulate space and time. Like most things in Undertale, it was classic gaming trope with an unexpected twist.
Yeah, like when some characters count the amount of times you die and taunt you for it, or the protagonist informing a character that they've killed them a number of times. Toby Fox did pretty well with that twist.
I love how Undertale explains why you can load your last save file after dying from a lore standpoint, which many games don't do. Variety is especially the spice of life in the world of gaming.
Another cool Death Mechanic is being implemented in Apsulov - end of Gods If you die, you are being warped into a Circular Maze where you'll have to find 2 Orbs and slowly carry them back to the center while being chased by a Monster. if you manage to do so, you are being revived where you died. Otherwise you'll have to play from your last save
I played Bioshock Infinite a long time ago, but if I recall correctly, sometimes Elizabeth revives you, and sometimes you appear in your office and everything is grey, so... **SPOILER** As stated at the endgame, each time you die and appear in the office, an actual Booker DeWitt has died, and a new one is taken from his universe to bring the girl. So actually it's a penalty. Not in the games mechanics, but a penalty after all. ***END SPOILER***
+David DPG Yeah, it's a narrative that is created with each death. meaning that everytime you die, she pulls out a booker that survives from another rift
When it comes to death, I would say one of my favorite systems is Darkest Dungeon's "Death's Door". It works for the game's permadeath system and the amount unfairness in the game by giving your characters a chance to live if they die by having a certain % chance of death each hit, so it let's you recover from an unlucky situation like a character being 100-0'd and give them a second chance
what if there was a game where all the levels were randomly ordered, and dying moved you to a different level, and so on and so forth, but you would restart back at where you died if you randomly get a level youve already died in
Deathloop. Now that's a redefining of how to handle death. In the primary loop, you have 3 lives with a quick reset that doesn't reset the world, except when you don't. Die 3 times in an area, and it resets the whole day and all the work you've done that day (and all the gear you collected).
It sounds odd but Minecraft deaths always feel meaningful because there are real steaks to it and you know that not getting back in time will make you permanently damage your progress.
I guess that depends how far along in a given world you are, in my opinion the penalty for death starts high at the beginning, but as you get more and more it scales down due to you having more resources. But it is still annoying when you die with stuff on you, more so when it's in lava.
@@julianemery718 agree. Not much of a issue nowadays,due to Fire Protection on armor and Fire Resistance potions,but back in Alpha and Beta, falling in lava with important stuff was almost game over.
In the Minecraft mod "Better than Wolves" (which is still stuck in v1.5.2, admittedly) progression up the mod's tech tree from stone age to even a full set of iron tools + renewable food is a slow process. The mod creator implemented an interesting death penalty. You respawn in a pretty large random radius around the spawn point (which can't be changed with beds) and since the coordinates are disabled in the f3 menu, that means you need to progress a ways before you can find your old base again. Even if you installed an add-on to preserve your items before death, that still means you're knocked back to the stone age, but as you play, this also means you're peppering your own world with little bases here and there that you can stumble upon, or if you're lucky, spawn near. Your old base isn't lost forever like in vanilla hardcore mode, but it may be a while before you see it again. Not for everyone, but a really interesting take for sure.
It also makes you plan ahead. Getting extra gear and crafting a recovery compass (or regularly looking at coordinates) before you die can save you many precious diamonds.
I never thought about the weight of player death this much. There are lots of unique takes on how player failure affects gameplay. Thanks for the video.
A little disheartened that you didn't mention the permadeath of Don't Starve! Love the game and love the tension that builds as you realize you haven't prepared in advance for all instances and you've just been revived at the shrine to realize it's Winter and you have nothing to save you from freezing to death!
Zanki Zero: Last Beginning has an interesting twist on it. It's a dungeon crawler that has "achievements" for dying in myriad of ways, and it's basically the only way to get stronger in traditional way, as leveling up doesn't raise your stats, only give you skill points. Dying to poison will make certain character more resistant to poison, dying to specific attack by specific enemy - more resistant to that, dying in unique conditions like being surrounded from all sides will give pretty significant stat boost.
The hollow knight death system has an interesting corpse run mechanic where your corpse becomes docile after a point in the game making it relate well with the lore.
I do remember Everquest did corpse running too. However, you had to get back to your body or ask someone to drag it to safety by giving them permission to do so with a chat command.
Nier Automata, where deaths may/can be canon, as your memories are synced to the main server (basically the save system) and transferred to a second android body (of the same design) as you set out to retrieve equipment from your previously destroyed body. Payday2, you don't die per se, but instead go into custody after getting downed 3-4 times, and the way to get back into the game is by trading a hostage and having that one guy set free. Borderlands series, where your body is recreated using info of you by New-U machines, and before you actually die, you get a few seconds while downed to score a kill and get an instant revive as revenge or sth idk.
I'm amazed how plenty of people are completely awestruck by Shadow of Mordor's "nemesis" concept. Sure, on the surface it appears great, but in reality it has almost zero impact on the actual gameplay. It doesn't really matter which orc is where in the hierarchy, the consequences of your actions boil down to some flavor text, and the supposed variability of enemies ends up being merely cosmetic differences and randomized traits which don't really matter since all it requires from you to discover a weakness is some very brief experimenting during the fight. I mean, I'm a huge fan of the concept where your decisions and actions have an actual impact on the game, especially if these changes are appearing organically instead of simply being pre-scripted. But with SoM in particular I think people are seeing something that is not really there; or better yet is there only if the player makes a conscious effort and role-playing on behalf of the player to experience it, like start keeping track of various orcs, taking their insults personally etc.
You're right, the changes are mostly random and mostly cosmetic. However, SoM is a huge step in players defining their world through their actions. The back and forth, them remembering you, your death changing up the ranks, all of that is a big first step. This isn't a small scale endeavor, it affects the whole game world. At the heart of it, however, SoM just shows that such a system can be implemented. And I think that's where you are right, people are seeing more into SoM's nemesis system more than it truly delivers. I'm not excited about SoM's nemesis system, I am excited for other games to take on such a mantel, and see where it ends. I think this is the next evolution in things like Oblivion's "radiant AI."
I agree it works as a "proof of concept". But bottom line is, I almost always do not really care if the game does something innovative or different if it doesn't really have a noticeable impact on my enjoyment of the game. Like, maybe you have game which responds to real weather conditions in your town or does facial recognition and reacts to your moods. But if it all boils down to cosmetic differences (sky is cloudy instead of sunny, your avatar looks grumpy instead of happy) then.. who cares? It's maybe impressive the very first time you see it (same as it's impressive the first time you realize the orcs in SoM "remember" your actions), but the second, third... hundredth time you notice it.. it's just meaningless fluff.
Yeah, it was really hyped for me, but once I realized that there was almost no way to defeat the entire hierarchy of orcs (without significant time investment) and the orcs that killed you just randomize a little tougher, it was really easy to see the artifice of the whole thing and to mostly ignore that part of the game
playerunknowns battlegrounds. Stop rolling eyes, hear me out: Death in pubg really means it! You loose everything you fought for the last minutes, every bit of loot, every nice weapon you riskly had obtained by fighting 5 other dudes at an airdrop site, everything. Pubg made me fear for my virtual Life more than any other game, because its truly your end there. Oh and then there is the Pokemon Nuzlocke Challenge. For strangers to the topic: To make the games more difficult and interesting for experienced players you give yourself a set of rules: let free every pokemon that goes KO (the nearest possible equivalent to dying in the games ^^), catch a limited count of pokemon (you cant decide witch ones, its just the first one you encounter on each area) and, last but not least, give every pokemon you catch a nice fitting nickname. (this was simplified, if anyone is interested just google it for more details) Every time a pokemon goes KO, (wich happens often in casual playthroughs) it feels like a bullet. Interesting relationships might forge with pokemons that barely survived risky situations, sometimes you were annoyed to encounter them in the first place because you hoped for something else in that area, and when they give their last fairwell it might really be a huge mental loss. So, its kinda the XCOM and FireEmblem formula, but holy shit is death intense while playing these...
Yeah, I'm coming back to this 7 years later and as somebody not related to the industry, just a guy curiose about game design. And my 2 cents here is that back in the COD vs Battlefield 3 days, I loved how in that BtF3 they encouraged to heal and revive your allies, giving same amount of points compared to a enemy take down. That made the whole game different for me and it was really funny to play it with my friends /brother.
pretty much, but not quite.. because I feel like the characters in fire emblem are more unique and have therefore a greater emotional connection than those in XCOM
I like how Outward handles death. It depends on your location but you can wake up in town, captured by bandits, in a nearby cave, etc. Sometimes fully healed, other times not so lucky. Sometimes with your belongings next to you, sometimes missing some objects taken by bandits. Sometimes you can recover stolen items, but not always all of your items. It is very well done.
I love that you mentioned the true first inventors for these "meaning to deaths in games" mechanics unlike other people who only solely references the Soulborne series.....
Platinum Games always have the same punishment for death-- you have infinite lives, infinite continues, and generally respawn right at the start of the fight you lost at... but your rank at the end of the chapter drops one tier. So, if you would've earned a Platinum trophy, you get a Gold on one death, Silver on two, Bronze on three, and on four or more you get a Stone trophy. In The Wonderful 101, you will reappear at the exact place you died-- the enemies don't even respawn. This was a bit controversial, but I'm actually okay with it. After all, death in a Platinum Games game should be fairly uncommon. You actually shouldn't be taking damage at all, with all the s and perfect parry options the games throw at you. That's pretty much the expectation.
Hotline Miami 2 had an interesting twist stage where, unlike every other stage in the series, you don't immediately respawn after getting killed. You're instead treated to the "level complete" music, and watch yourself get carried away and executed by the enemies. This was how they gated off a significant secret area in the game, where you need to complete this stage without dying once, in order to reach it.
I like the way Soul Reaver dealth with that. Soul Reaver's world concept is kind of a redefinied version of the light world/dark world in A Link to the Past, but here it's the material world and the spectral world, a mirror ghost world where the level layout is mostly the same but deformed, so new paths emerge, water has no impact and you can't take anything with you, like weapons. So you switch between the "normal" world and this ghost world constantly to progress and you can die in both, but you are only really dead when you die in the spectral world, where different easier enemies are, when you die in the material world, just your body dies but you get transferred in the spectral world, where you have to feed on souls to get back alive. It's a need concept because in good old "design by subtraction" manner everything revolves around that design, the same thing that Sands of Time made stand out of the crown but earlier. I know most of the people here know about this genius series from Amy Hennig amongst other, but maybe somebody doesn't, then here's a classic for you. You're welcome! ;)
Touhou 13 (Ten Desires) had a mechanic where you collected souls to fill up a meter, and that meter could be unleashed by the player as a sort of alternative to a bomb, a bomb being something you use to clear the screen of enemies and bullets. If you died, it would be automatically unleashed as a last hurrah before losing a life. It helped in boss fights when you died but got to do a bunch of damage before moving on to your next life, but it really used the bonus you get from dying to emphasize that you should use your resources proactively, like the meter and bombs, to avoid death (because if you actively use it before you get hit, you save your life). ZUN uses this death system to reinforce how you should try to play the game; bomb management is a facet of the game which some players getting into the series tend to not think enough about. It's sorta like how Bloodborne has so many amazing systems to encourage playing aggressively, and it turns out that playing more aggressively is a more fun way to play the souls games, so Bloodborne trains players to play the rest of the Souls series in a way that is effective and engaging, whereas the first thing they give you in DS1 is a shield.
3:47 Reminds me of a puzzle platformer I played on Steam called _Life Goes On_ where you play as a bunch of knights seeking out treasure for their king, and you have to throw them to their deaths to progress. Each knight would have a different name, and you would be scored based on how many you took to solve the puzzle.
One example I can think of is from a PSP game Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. Apart from being the most awesome title name ever, it's story is focused around taking a hopelessly weak individual and training him to become an amazing super hero. This is accomplished by navigating through random-generated dungeons, using whatever gear you can find and defeat loads of enemies to level up. The twist is you don't keep your levels between dungeons, you always start at level 1. Levels you obtain aren't waste though, for at the end of the dungeon every level you gain adds to a Total Level counter that has no limit, and a higher Total Level isn't just for more base power. It unlocks other bonuses you can use to get even stronger. How this ties into player death / failure is that if you die in a dungeon, you don't actually die. You are sent back to base and lose every items you have in your pouch and all the money you have on hand, but the levels you gained in that time still get added to the Total Level. There is never a "Game Over" because no matter how many times you fall you can keep getting back up to try again stronger than before, which fits into the overall theme of the game.
![Game Grumps BLOODBORNE - [Streamlined playthrough for better viewing experience]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/W9-jkRJczfs/mqdefault.jpg)
In STALKER, death wasn't just any momentary set back! You had to wait out the long loading screen! Dying in that game is really terrifying!
+DigGil3 "The Zone has claimed another life."
***** Development Hell, amirite?? ;)
"Lost to the Zone" *Boar drags body into corner*
Sounds like Skyrim
Such is life in the Zone.
One of my favourite ways of handling player death is in the Portal 2 coop missions. If you listen to the developer commentary, they say they specifically designed death sequences to be quick and explosive with no pomp or circumstance because you're playing as a robot that does have infinite replacements. In that game, they wanted death to feel like just a part of the experience rather than a consequence so they intentionally did exactly the opposite of what you're describing which, in and of itself, is immensely clever.
Maya Tamika that's also why we play robots in the first place, cause having humans Respawn wasn't logic.
It was also deemed too gross and off-tone to have humans constantly dying horribly.
it also ties in to the story; The only reason GlaDOS, the omnicidal maniac AI that runs those test chamber, uses replaceable robots is because there's no living humans to "use"; the last living one she had has escaped and its not until the end of CO-OP where she gets a fresh new batch of them.
Super Meat Boy is even better at "inconsequential death". No black screen, no "press start", just go back to play immediately. The retro levels in that game have a traditional life counting system, and it changes the gameplay immensely.
@@sponge1234ify there was other humans, but they were in a vault. you, (the co op robots) free them, the hundreds of thousands of test subjects during (if i remember correctly) the 6th chapter of the co op campaign, then the credits roll. then at the 7th chapter (also i might be remembering the numbers wrong) GLaDOS tells you that all the test subjects were killed during testing
Gotta mention Wario Land 2 & 3, where death just isn't an option for Wario. Rather, you are often slightly inconvenienced, you lose money, OR the thing that would traditionally kill you gives you a status effect that can help you progress or explore, such as being flattened by a Thwomp-like enemy, only to become flatter and able to squeeze into small cracks. Gone were the days of fearing enemies, as these games encouraged you to instigate their attacks in order to solve puzzles.
This really drove home the idea that you were the bad guy, and things that killed Mario in the past just didn't effect you. In the mid to late 1990s, when the Mario platforming genre was more or less set in stone, a game where none of those rules applied to you (the villain) was delightful and highly praised by critics.
You aren't mark brown in disguise are you?
I read this with Mark's voice
Late reply, but I love comments like these! Mark Brown's videos tend to have intelligent commenters that can provide more examples for Mark's points, twists on those ideas, or even counterpoints.
Ok that's actually really clever and I'm glad Nintendo did that
Thank you so so much for mentioning those two. I fucking love how insanely creative those two games are in terms of making you lose progress.
I had an interesting idea for a death mechanic.
In an open-world game, the sort with multiple factions squabbling for terrain, you could have the player be brought back to life, but the game's clock is set forwards to represent the player's recovery time. Thus, the punishment for death would be loss of control over the game world, if momentarily.
So shadow of war?
Interesting!
Pretty much Shadow of Mordor/War
That sounds like League of Legends. You are forced to watch all the terrible things enemies do to your allies and Nexus.
The Mount & Blade games kinda worked like this. If you were defeated, the party that killed you would take you prisoner and the world would continue as normal until you escaped.
So the political and military machinations of the world would not simply cease with your defeat. You were just removed from them for a couple in game days.
Absolutely adore this series.
I agree
Is this a statement or a demand? Lol
NCK 522 Yes.
I think the best thing about the system in Dark Souls is that it's a part of the story. Your character is undead, and what's characteristic of a motivated undead in this universe is that every death is an opportunity to learn.
The story informs the mechanics and the mechanics tell the story. You aren't just told about the undead curse, you experience it.
Hidataka Miasaki really wanted to tell a believable story like Ico, so I could see this unrealistic respawning being a bother to him.
What makes it unrealistic in the context of the lore? I think it fits in perfectly
this one paragraph was honestly better at explaining the subject than the whole video.. this guy only talked about bloodborn/souls for like 1 min then just listed other death mechanics in other games the entire time. edit - he took bloodborn out of the title now
@@D00000T wich is a good thing that sekiro bosses now aknowledges this,some bosses will comment how many times they killed you,it's not much but added a charm to it.
I am surprised not to see borderlands "kill to revive" mechanic...
The game also never tells you "game over".
The resurection is justified by the lore and you never feel like you are done with a fight.
Well, that explains why non of the other important characters just come back to life xD Had been wondering about that part.
Dhdhsj
Shailen Veerappen But the fast travel stations are...
How is a game mechanic not canon in the game you're playing? That doesn't make any sense!
Ganonbros ikr
One thing you forgot to mention about Bloodborne that's actually different from Dark Souls is that sometimes an enemy will consume your blood echoes, meaning you have to kill that enemy to get them back. This is great because you then have to overcome the challenge that you failed before by getting revenge on what killed you, which removes the awkwardness in Dark Souls where you'd zip into the room you died it, avoid the enemies, grab your souls and run away, only to simply use the souls to get stronger and artificially make the challenge easier. In Bloodborne, you're stuck until you can get good enough to surmount the challenge you failed at, meaning the experience is given far more impact to the player.
calo9000 Yes.
ExistentialOcto he didn't even talk about bloodborne, the saddest form of clickbait
That's actually not how it really works, the blood echoes stay on the ground and an random enemy can take it. When I face an hard enemy that is probably going to kill me, I always try to lure him somewhere empty or somewhere with weaker enemies, since it's going to be easier to take my blood back if I die. It's the exact same strategy I use on Dark Souls, so I can't really see a difference.
But, what I like about this system is that it gives the impression that everything is happening in real time, the enemies don't depend on you to start moving or doing whatever (at least not aways), and that makes me love the system. I wish From Software would use it more.
I remember way back when, some 25 years ago or so, playing the original Wizardry, and making it ALL the way to the final room to take on the big boss vampire only to have me and my entire team killed. And there was no doing over at that time. You couldn't even save a game at that time. You were DEAD, meaning your entire 40 hours of gameplay or whatever it was was gone, poof. You're dead, man, lol, dead.
+Andrei
Thats the beauty of it. you described it as "dying a little on the inside". what do you think your character feels after gradually losing will and hope? they give up and hollow. when you give up and uninstall the game, your character finally loses it. i think its genious how Hidetaka Miyasaki handles death, respawning, and multiplayer by making it a part of the story and world. and not in a simple way like your companion reviving you in bioshock, but in a way thats clear was put alot of effort, thought and love from the devs to make.
I'm sure I'm not the first to mention Planescape: Torment, but it deserves mention here. This is a game in which you play as an immortal amnesiac who always gets up after he's been killed (the game begins with you waking up in a mortuary), and can't remember why. It soon becomes clear that you can't die permanently (though it's still possible to lose in some areas). Solving some puzzles actually requires you to die in order to progress. The game's entire story revolves around an investigation as to who you really are, and why you're immortal. Your ultimate goal is to regain your mortality and die for good.
Yeah, this is definitely one I need to play. It's on the pile of shame!
+Thagomizer Give me the link T.T
Planescape: Torment is the only game where you can play as a suicidal amnesiac who just can't figure out why dying is so hard!
@@GMTK what about flowey fight in undertale after you die he remind you of your death
Funny I never knew about the game and had a similar setting idea for a game , where you are not immortal per say , but you're stuck in limbo where dying just makes you be born again and your goal is to leave this cycle
"Playing Bloodborne this weekend has got me thinking about death"
Oh, I can relate.
More aesthetic, but I like Cannon Fodder's imagery where your soldiers are promoted, but if they die, their gravestones begin to fill up your main menu screen.
Also Fable, where if you die, you'll come back with a scar, so the more times you die, the more horrific you look by the end of the game.
But Wandering Spirit on the game boy is quite cool, where you need to possess another enemy as soon as you die.
***** I loved that Cannon Fodder system. It was really soul crushing to see the hills filled with graves. While the game lives up to its name and you know what you are getting into, it was really hard not to grieve over really highly ranked soldier dying or seeing the body count. Just brilliant overall.
Phoenix Dawn
We all cried when Stoo died :D
Hahaha.
And it's not just aesthetic in Fable 3, where it makes your character less attractive and that actually affects the game and npc's reactions to you.
Wandering Spirit is indeed really creative. I wish they'd make a new HD one and release it on steam and consoles. You could take over the body of any enemy when you died, and you get their abilities and weapons, and sometimes you had to think tactically to get past certain sections that only certain enemy bodies could traverse, or try and cross those sections in your ghost form before your ghost form ran out of time and hope there was an enemy to inhabit on the other side. For a game boy game it was really complex. Though I know it's based off an arcade game. But still
Soul Reaver had a good mechanic, where dying in the physical world would send you into a warped version of the same area, where you try to regain health and find a portal back.
Yes! Soul reaver has such a unique death
i like the "second wind" option in borderlands , sometimes you die in unfaire situations and the oportunity to get up if you kill anyone give me an intense moment
They nailed this style of gameplay with Krieg. It's the take-damage-to-do-damage rampage approach.
As much as I like the mechanic in theory, the way it was handled was fairly poor, since you HAVE to kill an enemy to get back up. If you kill the last enemy in an area before you die, or the remaining enemies all duck behind cover when you die, then it's super frustrating to not be able to save yourself.
That is true, but if nothing else it discourages fighting too much from cover, which could slow down what is meant to be a pretty fast-paced game. Hitting enemies hard from up-close makes second winds super easy. Conversely, second wind takes away one of the usual problems with sniping in an FPS, since you can survive someone stabbing you from behind by shooting them point blank with your rifle.
That's very similar to the last stand he mentioned in Shadow of Mordor.
@@lancelindlelee7256 no, Shadow of Mordor is "hey, survive this QTE and you get a second chance" and then there isnt another second chance, Second Wind of Borderlands is "Kill anything and get back up" and it happens infinite times as long as you can get a kill
Zombie U is a good example of a game that treats death in a unique way, when your character dies you respawn as a different survivor - you can either choose to retrieve your lost items and equipment by returning to the place of your demise and killing your zombiefied self or simply push on with your quests and abandon your equipment
Yeah I thought that was a cool idea. Absolutely gutting though when you find your old character with all your gear then you die from another zombie :(
In Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, every time Senua looses a battle in her mind, she is closer to be consumed by the darkness, you have to fail so many times until this happens, but if you do it, all the progress is lost. And I love that conept
It's a good concept but its fake. It's all mind games.
@@GaussiArson just like the game itself
one of my favorite ways that a game deals with death is katana zero. when you’re playing, you’re not actually seeing exactly what happens until you win. up until then, your character is using their precognitive abilities to predict how to complete the room, and until you find the right way, you’re just seeing what could go wrong before it does, but it’s all in your head.
good shit.
Recent game Crawl is a great example of 4 player couch co-op for pc. Each player takes control of either one hero or three different ghosts that control the monsters and traps in a dungeon. Who ever gets the final hit on the hero, switches with them.
I’ve been bouncing an idea around in my head for a while. You play as a blob amoeba, recently the subject of an evolution experiment gone wrong that allows you to copy yourself right before death, but changing dna to reconcile what you did wrong, leaving you with a progressive death and level mechanic. If you just missed a jump on generation 1, then generation 2’s jump stat has increased, although another stat decreases, like speed or something, meaning the challenges that you take on literally decide what challenges you can take on in the future. It could also lead to an interesting death count mechanic, where at certain points you remember your dead ancestors, even making it possible to beat the game on gen 1. Provided, you can’t do side quests or such, but you can still win.
Sounds fun. I would play it.
Can I steal this idea? Sounds fun to program 😚
Thanks for sharing this wonderful idea
I like this
Seems like it would make a nice MetroidVania or Open World game, wouldn't work for a linear game i don't think.
I'd really like to see horror games tackle death in a different way. Death is the least scary moment in a horror game, because it's the part where you know you don't have to be afraid of being found or hurt. And if you die too often, the game stops being scary and starts being irritating. But on the other hand, you need a failure state, otherwise there's nothing to fear.
One way of doing it might be by giving you control over more characters, each of whom could be permanently killed, in which case you'd continue the game as the others. That way, you'd try to be more careful with your favorite character and you could shape the story in different ways. Do you you play as a coward, or do you let your protagonist sacrifice himself to save the others?
In hellblade the game tells you from the start that if you die too many times, your save file will be automatically deleted. That's one way to keep the anxiety going
spyrosource3 Yeah, but it doesn’t ACTUALLY do that. Once you know that, it’s not scary.
I feel like horror game death could be more interesting if:
1. You get turned into a ghost, and have to get through a hellscape to revive or haunt/guide the next life in some way.
2. Dying slowly turns you into a monster - you see the changes, changes in control or dialogue etc, and after a certain amount of deaths you’re a total monster and lose the game. Basically kinda like Hellblade only it follows through with its threat. I only see that working for a short game though.
3 - The death completely changes the story for the rest of the game. It could be like Heavy Rain where the permadeath of one character changes things for the remaining characters, or it could make you turn completely into a monster/evil and flip the game and story on its head.
I believe Until Dawn is a game that does this.
@@wingedmirage4226 why did you spoil it man
Or the game forces you to play as the monster to possess your former body. Kind of works with a game like Bloodborne where it's stablished basically anyone can be a beast.
Ancestors are your predecessors, descendents are those that come after you :P
@@TheRogueEight you're so fucking obnoxious
@@TheRogueEight If you're gonna nitpick so hard then capitalize your comment appropriately.
@@TheRogueEight Says the one who can't even learn to write a proper sentence.
When you're referring to someone's word inside a sentence you must put quotations around it to contextualize its meaning to the reader.
The correct way should be: Says the one who can’t even spell "descendants" correctly.
P.S. You also didn't capitalize your sentence, dipshit.
@@anuvette Jesus Christ what did he say????
Maybe not in that game :P
I think the Stanley Parable is an interesting example, in that technically there was never a fail state, even after a "death." Like the loading screen says, "The End is Never." Instead of failure, I guess it has "restart states," and the game makes them all inherently interesting to experience.
It quite literally just restarts. Game even says so.
but it doesn't always restart in the initial state
It has a few extra states that occur (such as the messy floor state) but none are particularly meaningful. The only time it appears to reset but doesn't has you locked into the path you're currently on.
if you watched Naruto Shippuden it's basically izanami
The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never The End is Never
Player death should be treated in a similar manner with the game's save system. It has to reflect the tone of the game and what the developer envisioned. Such as most Nintendo games usually have 1-3 save slots despite being able to have multiple saves because the machine is more powerful. Or how the Souls series saves the game after almost every action you take, making things become permenant.
In Call of Duty, while bland to have them respawn after 5 seconds, it is actually appropriate to have that system in place. Because it is an action game, it places you back into the action after you "failed", not punishing you for recklessly getting into the action. It also reflects the multiplayer ever so slightly with there being a timeout period before respawning.
While games like Fire Emblem treat a death with permenance as if they were a real person. Making each battle even more tense for those who did not level up enough. Forcing you to not only play offensively, but also defensively and to put those units at maximum risk so that they level up to not be dead weight for later.
And Dark Souls has a brilliant death system that not all games are capable of pulling off. Death is a reflection of not only the game but also of the player. You become more and more hollow (hollow is the state of insanity where you attack anything because you've lost the will to live) with each passing death. If you still have a reason to fight, you do not become hollow and "lose the game". This reflects the player, if they continuously die, their reason to stop playing grows and eventually snowballs into a ragequit. Making them lose the game because they gave up on the game before they finished it, connecting them to their character even if they didn't know it.
A possible companion piece to this video would be to examine game save/load systems and whether or not they should exist outside gameplay mechanics or be an integral part of them.
Playing Alien: Isolation again this weekend reminded me just how crucial its checkpoint system is to maintaining the game's tense atmosphere, yet at the same time many players were also disappointed there was no quicksave (which I can understand would be useful if you suddenly need to stop playing and go somewhere, but at the same time it would have effectively killed off much of the game's tension). Now that the PS4 allows us to suspend any game and continue later, I wonder how that will feed back into design choices when it comes to implementing save systems.
I wonder if you could mix save system with the good old "health drops when you are low on health", and having game (somehow) know when you want to stop playing it and spawning save point accordingly.
Nothing stopping a game from having an autosave-on-exit where the save can only be loaded once (which is exactly what that PS4 feature sounds like it's doing). This shouldn't impact the game design at all because you can't reload the save multiple times - the consequences for death remain the same.
I really appreciate games that include player death in the narrative because it gives the player a personal goal and a reason to become good at the game instead of just playing through it, shrugging off each death as just minor setback.
Shovel Knight does the whole Dark Souls get your loot back before dying again and Fire Emblem also does the perma death of characters you care about like XCOM.
Hollow Knight and Minecraft kinda do the Dark Souls thing as well, but in different ways.
In Minecraft, you lose all your inventory items on death and while they don't dissappear on a second death, you have like five minutes to get to wherever you died in order to retrieve them or they despawn and you lose them. Also, some mobs will be able to pick them up and use them, and dying near lava, an explosion or a cactus can just destroy some of them inmediately. I think this makes death very punishing, especially in the endgame and/or during exploration, but there's always mods and the keepInventory gamerule for those who don't like it, so it's not completely forced on the player.
In Hollow Knight, dying makes you lose all of your Geo, the currency of the game, which is stored in your remaining Shade; and it will also cause the Fragile charms to break if you had them equipped, requiring you to go visit Leg Eater and pay for him to repair them. The shade doesn't despawn naturally, so there's no potentially unfair time limit: however, just like Shovel Knight, if you die again on the way to it, it dissappears with all your Geo and a new one appears. But to top it off, your own Shade will be hostile and attack you, making the act of recovering your Geo less of a chore and more of a challenge (until you obtain the Void Heart, which makes them passive). And it even acquires new abilities as you earn them throughout the game, making it harder to fight as you progress. You can also choose between trying to go to wherever you died to retrieve it or, after unlocking her hut, return to Dirtmouth and ask Confessor Jiji to summon it for you, making it less frustrating to lose your Shade in a risky place, such as a difficult platforming section or an enemy arena. This requires you to posess Rancid Eggs to give her in exchange, however, and you still have to take a trip to the nearest Stag Station (or to Dirtmouth itself, if you're close enough) without dying in order to get there, should you not respawn in one already. Or you can just leave as much Geo as you want in Millibelle's bank before going somewhere dangerous and return later to get them so that you don't have as much to lose in death (be prepared for a little potential surprise when you come back, though. Not gonna spoil exactly what happens, but don't worry, it's not precisely a bad thing). As for the fragile charms breaking, you can go to Divine and feed her the fragile charms, which she will later give back in their unbreakable forms; getting her to return the charms, however, is VERY expensive, so you better start grinding Geo for them.
Have you ever played Cannon Fodder? It's the first game I can remember where you would level up and grow attached to your soldiers only to have them die and be forever represented by a headstone on a hill (that all the raw recruits had to then march past).
I have! I think the developers got in trouble with The British Legion for using the poppy or something...
+Game Maker's Toolkit Yeah that's right. Amiga Power wanted to use it on their cover but changed at the last minute to a camo image after the drama (I think it was the same as the box art but all my Amiga games were pirated in lil ole NZ so I'm not really sure).
Nomad soul had an interesting system too... Not as fancy as tombstones for you soldiers but you could literally have a sex change if you died... Or a race change... Or any other unexpected body change...
"Oh, dear. You are dead!" -RuneScape, 2001
Then respawn in Lumby.
* *running across world to reach gravestone before it crumbles intensifies* *
Father, I keep dying!
Oh, that's horrible! Well, at least you keep coming back to life!
Ultima online. 1997. OooOOoooOoOOooOooOo. They actually had a skill called spirit speak, which was useless for the most part, where you could communicate with dead players.
I remember feeling that death in Star Wars: Republic Commando was interesting for its time. You didn't die outright, but you could be revived as long as one of your squadmates survived, and you had some choice in how that happened. Would calling for an immediate revive cause your squadmates to die by taking them out of cover? Or would your squadmates lose their fight unless you could get back up to do something crucial that they wouldn't be able to on their own? There were times when one option seemed better than another.
Now that you have made a video on Bloodborne, I have an idea for a video. What if you talk about maps inside videogames? For example, Far Cry 2's map and how it fits with the game itself. Or how in Bloodborne and the Souls games there is no map at all, and the player must make its own on his/her mind. It would be interesting.
Yeah, I definitely want to do some stuff on maps. There's lots of interesting avenues on video game cartography from way finding to treasure maps. Watch this space!
+Mark Brown There's a fantastic analysis of the original Thief vs. new Theif floating around out there. A bit too fawning over the original, but he makes some great points about game maps.
+lleon79 I miss Doom's map. It was useful but un-cluttered; showed where you'd been and where you hadn't; could be expanded in-level with an item and even allowed you to find some secrets through clever analysis. Worked for me. Obviously it wouldn't work for today's more complexly designed levels but the principle could still work surely?
Thank you for mentioning ZombiU - that game was really inventive and underrated because it was assumed to be 100% gimmick.
Hollow Knight has a interesting death mechanic, where retrieving your shade is similar to the method seen in dark souls, but the way your shade interacts with you changes depending on the story path you've taken. The shade summoning mechanic was also very unique.
(sorry for bad english)
I don't know if it counts but in MGS 3 there are two special items that you can use at any part of the game : the "fake death pill" and the "revival pill". You can use it to simulate your death if you're surrounded by ennemies and then revive when they return to their main positions, or it can be used as a "Restart the mission" button.
However there is a boss fight where you actually have to die to defeat the boss callef "The sorrow", he is a ghost so he cannot be killed, and the only way to defeat it is to wait for him to defeat you, and then wake up by using the Revival Pill, and continue the game.
These two items can be used to defeat The Fear. If you fake your death, he will get close to you and turn back. Then, you just got use teh revival pill and thrown a flash grenade, ending him with some automatic gun. Even if the weapon is deadly, his stamina decrease, not his health.
@@heitornunes6225 Yeah i discovered this one after posting the comment hahah
I was really surprised you didn't include Braid. However this video was still fantastic.
And you also have the game Wario land 2 (advance I think) where you can't die. The enemies can't kill you, they are a solution to make progress ;)
Doesn't Braid work the same as Prince of Persia did, where you just reverse time until you're safe when you die? I haven't actually played Prince of Persia so I don't know.
Something I like in dragon age is if your characters fall in battle they'll get up after the battle but they will have an injury which is a debuff that can only be removed with an injury kit item (even if they injuries didn't always make sense like having a broken arm will decreased magic but not dexterity or strength?)
In A Wizard's Lizard, almost every enemy you kill becomes a ghost, and when you die, you get another chance, but you have to fight both the ghosts (which are harder to kill) and the regular enemies. It's an interesting concept.
The corpse-running thing from Dark Souls also happened in Descent (which might be where corpse-running came from, as 1994 was years before MMOs). In Descent, the level does not reset when you die, any robots that are dead stay dead, and any that have left their initial positions remain where they had moved to when you died. Your collected weapons and powerups are scattered by the explosion around the area where you died, and you return to the starting area with your level 1 laser, down one life. You have to make your way back to where you last died (and possibly face down some dangerous robots!) to get your stuff back. Lives become a resource to be conserved or expended instead of just an archaism borrowed from arcade games. The game's hostage mechanic where you're given a score bonus for rescuing hostages, and all your hostages die if your ship is destroyed, rewards you for completing a level in a single life. The game also rewards you at the very end with a bonus for how many lives you have, so you're rewarded again for minimizing deaths after beating the final boss. Dying and respawning become part of the mechanics rather than just a failure state, and this was more than 20 years ago.
some of my favourite mods for Bethesda's open world titles are the ones that replace your death mechanics.
fallout: new vegas has a mod which has your unconscious body get found by a member of the nearest friendly faction, you end up waking up battered and bruised, with some of your equipment (and all of your money) stolen, but the thing that makes this interesting, is the way it impacts your decision making, and save habbits.
often in Bethesda games, you save and reload to solve every problem. however this mod suggests that you instead use the autosave system, as the only way you can lose progress is through a game crash (which the unofficial patch fixes)
this means that your decisions are perminant.
In Duskers, death is handled in a very interesting way. Sometimes your drones are merely disabled, meaning you can potentially rescue them by towing them to safety and then spending scrap to repair them between missions. However, there's a risk of the drone being destroyed when it dies, meaning all you can do is salvage the modules from ti and leave it behind. It might also be trapped in an inaccessible room, or it could get sucked out into the vacuum of space. You have to find new replacement disabled drones and repair them to use them in missions, or you'll be unable to proceed. It's a very interesting twist on death, and makes your risks all the more real.
Holy shit, someone who actually played Duskers. I can't believe it.
Huh, Sometimes You Die looks interesting.
Especially since it's pretty much the _exact_ same premise that Jesse Venbrux explored in his short game "Deaths", except in that game, instead of just taking _your_ former corpses, for every level, it loads the 50 last corpses from _all players worldwide_.
Not only do those corpses give you hints as to where traps lie, but they also serve as platforms to get further.
It's not actually a very good game, but certainly an interesting way to design death in games.
Just wanted to say I absolutely love this series. As an aspiring game developer, the videos are both entertaining as well as thought-provoking. Love your concise and clear narration and scripts. Great number of examples in each video as well. Honestly the only criticism I have is that I wish they were longer! I'd watch 20 minute videos in this style and love them.
I also would like exploring other failure scenarios that don't result in death but rather change up the dynamic somehow. A bit like Elder Scrolls prison system. It would be great if we had more, creative ways where rather than death, we had other scenarios playing out that could also change the way the scenario will play out. Like, you could fighting a mob of orcs, when they defeat you, they don't want to kill you but they drag you to their camp as a prisoner. So, game's dynamics shift in a linear scripted way but would add variety to a mission/quest where different consequences exist besides death. It is harder to than the binary alive/dead state but I think it would be great if the games were moving forward exploring these kinds of ideas more in depth.
There's a game called outward. It's an rpg where you're a random dude adventuring. When you run out of health you get a defeat scenario. These can be anything from getting saved by a traveller to trapped by bandits. You don't die. It's cool
Like how when you die in Undertale, the Temmie Armor becomes cheaper. You can talk to Asgore, and if you died in an earlier attempt at the boss battle, you can tell him that he has killed you once before.
Then there's Sans, who is initially able to tell from the look on your face just how many times he has killed you.
And Omega Flowey, who will crash the game if you lose the battle, and not allow you to start a new game before you defeat him.
It is worth adding that all in-game portrayals of protagonist are something like 20x20 pixels or so, which adds another meaning to "Sans is able to tell from the look on *your* face how many times he has killed you" (as the fight was the toughest one in the game and was often met with emotional responses).
Crash the game?
The game freezes itself and you have to kill it with the task manager?
Loving your videos I've been watching so many of them recently and I think you're one the best channels out there for gaming content.
This is probably one of the best channels I've ever found next to Extra Credits. Thanks a lot!!!
I love katana ZERO's death system
Our character is using a drug that makes him anticipating ennemies. When you play, it is actually your character thinking of what he could do to eliminate everyone in the room. When You manage to clear the room with a lot of failed tries that you will ignore at some point since it's a quick die and retry, ou character thinks "yes, that should work" and then go into the room, kimling the ennemies the exact same way we did "in his mind".
The thing is, that those deaths, where our character says "no, that won't work" they are actually related to the story. Since ou character, thinks of the fight before doing it, something unexpected can happen right after managing to clean a room since our character didn't anticipated that.
Finally, when our character encounters a person that has the same drug as him, the person must say stuff like "you killed me many times, but it was only in my mind, that's okay."
The drug in the story is really important and the fact that you can die a thousand times in one run, while it counts on the story makes, in my opinion, this game special.
No mention of Fire Emblem alongside Alien and XCom? It did the same thing by carrying on after a unit died and had you develop emotional attachments with them, but way earlier.
ArceusDX NIntendo is doing that stupid Creator Program. It's best not to mention nintendo's games if you're not planning to submit your video to their sh**ty program.
Also , Fire Emblem franchise isn't even on the whitelist of the program so you Will Lose your video.
There was a Star Trek game called 'Borg' where to beat one of the puzzles you had to be assimilated, watch your character (as a Borg) type in the passcode on something, then it reset so you knew how to get through. I always liked that.
I like Non-standard game overs like killing Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 3. That and The Sorrow's battle again in MGS3 or your first encounter with Seath in Dark Souls where you have to die to proceed with the game.
There's also Wario Land II, where you can't die but getting hit makes you lose coins and bosses make you restart the battle by blowing youaway from the arena.
Final Fantasy Tactics had permadeath but they yielded a Crystal that could be used to buff your still alive units.
Ghost Trick also made you play some mock death scenarios to gain knowledge necessary to really prevent the death.
I still like games with the normal death system, not sure why you lambasted it. Not all games need to have quirky death mechanics.
Kirby's Epic Yarn works similarly to how you describe Wario Land II - you lose sequins when you get hit, and you get medals for how many you have at the end. It's actually decently challenging to get through if you want to get the gold medal on some of the bosses.
Dude, you're like Every Frame a Painting for video games. Love your vids!
I wonder if you've come across Shovel Knight's money punishment. It's funny that even at max money with nothing left to buy, I'm EXTREMELY paranoid of dying and the possibility of losing a ton of money (especially since it scales, the more you have). And sometimes your greed for getting it back results in even more money lost. Quite clever I'd say. Breaking checkpoints for money is also interesting.
Your content is fucking gold. I cannot stop watching. These videos feel like they would perfectly fit within a paid membership of some kind. I would pay to keep watching if you ever do get into a service of some sort. Thank you for helping me learn stuff dude
Even in a game where challenges are self-contained and you do end up using "die = reset", something subtle like letting your character hang on with 1HP when taking a lethal blow does help give death impact.
Oh, don't forget anything that gives you more chances when you're weaker. Maybe that seems patronizing to you, but even old-school Mario does it by shrinking your hitbox. The more you can take advantage of the danger you're in, the less you want to die (just so long as the designer can avoid leading the player to self-inflicting this).
This series has been fantastic since it started! Please keep up the amazing work!
No Fire Emblem mention?
Another good one - similar to XCOM (though, FE got there first of course!) Consciously trying to avoid going on too much about Nintendo though ;)
Mark Brown Ah, understandable.
that's why I only play on casual, because it's annoying how a lot of my units jsut keep dying over and over and over, *cough*ricken*cough*
The problem with FE's death system is that either you play classic and reset a chapter every time one of your units die, or you play casual which heavily undermines the strategy aspect of the game.
+Butternut, that is false. For some people, classic is a puzzle where the goal is to get past each chapter with all units, and that is quite enjoyable even when resetting; and others aren't interested in permadeath so they remove that mechanic, which is also okay. However you have ignored the many different ways people play Fire Emblem.
Some people play casual, and bench certain fighters temporarily after certain criteria, such as:
If they died last chapter: do not use this chapter
If they died thrice: never use again
etc.
Some people play classic in ways different than you described:
If a unit dies, no resetting to save them
If a lord unit dies, sacrifice someone else in their stead
Only use x number of units total
Only field x number of units at a time
Randomize which units are fielded
TL/DR: The point of Fire Emblem is that you can complete a campaign in a completely different way than you or any of your friends has done before. You can accidentally kill off 75% of your cast and still win if you know what you are doing. To say that FE's death mechanic limits players to one of two options is a gross misunderstanding of the central themes of the game and a false dichotomy fallacy.
I always wanted to see a Doctor Who based game, where you play as a timelord, and whenever you die, you regenerate, keeping maybe a handfull of core charactertraits, but changing everything else, including appearance.
I really like how the new Tomb Raider deals with death. Because the scenes were so brutal and surprisingly realistic, I felt really bad letting Lara die and usualy took more of a careful approach. This really made me care for the character, because even your death was meaningful instead of turning your character into a ragdoll and making you restart.
It's painful to watch these scenes even though, in the end, it's exactly the same as the old videogame deaths, except with more "flare" to it. It doesn't make death per se more interesting as some games mentioned in the video, but does make for the gameplay to be more imersive in a way that you don't really want to screw up.
I feel like survival horror does the best with this. Seeing isaac from dead space get ripped to shreds or leon from resident evil 4 get his head chainsaw off was extremely brutal and something you wanted to work especially hard to prevent rather than just seeing them comically flopping like a ragdoll. Especially with a female protagonist. Every death is just nooooooo lol
I enjoyed Valkyria Chronicles' way of doing it. If one of your guys gets killed they go into a downed state where it depends who gets to them first. If you get another character to them, they get brought to the medic to be used later. If the enemy gets to them first they get executed and are gone forever.
Diablo has a mode where your character gets deleted upon death. That was worth a mention.
***** hardcore mode is basically a roguelike. the levels are randomly generated.
Andrei Despinoiu so...Basically deleted upon death, but just has a shell of a placeholder there for nothing other than saying "you didnt get gud"? It's the same thing the original poster of the comment said, just with an extra part to it, wouldn't call that false. If the character serves no other purpose upon death(can't be revived or used in any way) with literally the only thing to do is get rid of it, the character is pretty much gone upon death.
Life Goes On had a pretty interesting use of the death mechanic. Every puzzle is based around using your dead knights in various ways, like killing yourself so the corpse holds down a button, allowing you to progress. I dunno, could be the same as Sometimes You Die, haven't played it so I wouldn't know.
I like under tales death mechanic : when you die, you actually change time BUT there's other characters that are aware of it(one being a psychopath).
Hey Mark, this is one of the best channels I've seen in awhile so far, I love how you manage to mention older games like Sands of Time of Far Cry 2. Keep up the good work!
*or Far Cry 2
In planescape torment you're immortal so its worked into the narrative
this is probably not totally on topic but i was blown away by mission 43 in metal gear solid 5 the phantom pain.
not gonna spoil it though. one of the most incredible gaming moments i have ever experienced
Need I say anything more than "Stay Determined"?
For the most part, death in Undertale was much like the classic death that Mark used Sonic and Mario to exmplify: black screen then start from the last save point. How Undertale gave it a twist, however, was the way that your deaths, saves, and loads were worked into the narrative. Your soul's determination gave you the power to keep going, and your saving and loading represented an ability to manipulate space and time. Like most things in Undertale, it was classic gaming trope with an unexpected twist.
Greg Scoggin As I though, I needed say no more.
Yeah, like when some characters count the amount of times you die and taunt you for it, or the protagonist informing a character that they've killed them a number of times. Toby Fox did pretty well with that twist.
I love how Undertale explains why you can load your last save file after dying from a lore standpoint, which many games don't do. Variety is especially the spice of life in the world of gaming.
Another cool Death Mechanic is being implemented in Apsulov - end of Gods
If you die, you are being warped into a Circular Maze where you'll have to find 2 Orbs and slowly carry them back to the center while being chased by a Monster.
if you manage to do so, you are being revived where you died.
Otherwise you'll have to play from your last save
I played Bioshock Infinite a long time ago, but if I recall correctly, sometimes Elizabeth revives you, and sometimes you appear in your office and everything is grey, so...
**SPOILER**
As stated at the endgame, each time you die and appear in the office, an actual Booker DeWitt has died, and a new one is taken from his universe to bring the girl. So actually it's a penalty. Not in the games mechanics, but a penalty after all.
***END SPOILER***
+David DPG Yeah, it's a narrative that is created with each death. meaning that everytime you die, she pulls out a booker that survives from another rift
Who puts the spoiler alert *after* telling the spoiling part smh
When it comes to death, I would say one of my favorite systems is Darkest Dungeon's "Death's Door". It works for the game's permadeath system and the amount unfairness in the game by giving your characters a chance to live if they die by having a certain % chance of death each hit, so it let's you recover from an unlucky situation like a character being 100-0'd and give them a second chance
what if there was a game where all the levels were randomly ordered, and dying moved you to a different level, and so on and so forth, but you would restart back at where you died if you randomly get a level youve already died in
Deathloop. Now that's a redefining of how to handle death. In the primary loop, you have 3 lives with a quick reset that doesn't reset the world, except when you don't. Die 3 times in an area, and it resets the whole day and all the work you've done that day (and all the gear you collected).
It sounds odd but Minecraft deaths always feel meaningful because there are real steaks to it and you know that not getting back in time will make you permanently damage your progress.
I guess that depends how far along in a given world you are, in my opinion the penalty for death starts high at the beginning, but as you get more and more it scales down due to you having more resources.
But it is still annoying when you die with stuff on you, more so when it's in lava.
@@julianemery718 agree.
Not much of a issue nowadays,due to Fire Protection on armor and Fire Resistance potions,but back in Alpha and Beta, falling in lava with important stuff was almost game over.
In the Minecraft mod "Better than Wolves" (which is still stuck in v1.5.2, admittedly) progression up the mod's tech tree from stone age to even a full set of iron tools + renewable food is a slow process. The mod creator implemented an interesting death penalty. You respawn in a pretty large random radius around the spawn point (which can't be changed with beds) and since the coordinates are disabled in the f3 menu, that means you need to progress a ways before you can find your old base again.
Even if you installed an add-on to preserve your items before death, that still means you're knocked back to the stone age, but as you play, this also means you're peppering your own world with little bases here and there that you can stumble upon, or if you're lucky, spawn near.
Your old base isn't lost forever like in vanilla hardcore mode, but it may be a while before you see it again.
Not for everyone, but a really interesting take for sure.
It also makes you plan ahead. Getting extra gear and crafting a recovery compass (or regularly looking at coordinates) before you die can save you many precious diamonds.
I never thought about the weight of player death this much. There are lots of unique takes on how player failure affects gameplay.
Thanks for the video.
A little disheartened that you didn't mention the permadeath of Don't Starve! Love the game and love the tension that builds as you realize you haven't prepared in advance for all instances and you've just been revived at the shrine to realize it's Winter and you have nothing to save you from freezing to death!
cavv0667 That and darkest dungeon, where characters you've groomed and loved get ripped away forever. Rest in peace, Dudley...
Oh yes!!! And the morgue is really funny as well :D
Zanki Zero: Last Beginning has an interesting twist on it. It's a dungeon crawler that has "achievements" for dying in myriad of ways, and it's basically the only way to get stronger in traditional way, as leveling up doesn't raise your stats, only give you skill points. Dying to poison will make certain character more resistant to poison, dying to specific attack by specific enemy - more resistant to that, dying in unique conditions like being surrounded from all sides will give pretty significant stat boost.
The hollow knight death system has an interesting corpse run mechanic where your corpse becomes docile after a point in the game making it relate well with the lore.
I do remember Everquest did corpse running too. However, you had to get back to your body or ask someone to drag it to safety by giving them permission to do so with a chat command.
Nier Automata, where deaths may/can be canon, as your memories are synced to the main server (basically the save system) and transferred to a second android body (of the same design) as you set out to retrieve equipment from your previously destroyed body. Payday2, you don't die per se, but instead go into custody after getting downed 3-4 times, and the way to get back into the game is by trading a hostage and having that one guy set free. Borderlands series, where your body is recreated using info of you by New-U machines, and before you actually die, you get a few seconds while downed to score a kill and get an instant revive as revenge or sth idk.
"Where am I? This weird dream again, déjà vu!" E.Y.E. has the most unnecessarily complex yet fascinating death system I've ever experienced.
I'm amazed how plenty of people are completely awestruck by Shadow of Mordor's "nemesis" concept. Sure, on the surface it appears great, but in reality it has almost zero impact on the actual gameplay. It doesn't really matter which orc is where in the hierarchy, the consequences of your actions boil down to some flavor text, and the supposed variability of enemies ends up being merely cosmetic differences and randomized traits which don't really matter since all it requires from you to discover a weakness is some very brief experimenting during the fight.
I mean, I'm a huge fan of the concept where your decisions and actions have an actual impact on the game, especially if these changes are appearing organically instead of simply being pre-scripted. But with SoM in particular I think people are seeing something that is not really there; or better yet is there only if the player makes a conscious effort and role-playing on behalf of the player to experience it, like start keeping track of various orcs, taking their insults personally etc.
You're right, the changes are mostly random and mostly cosmetic. However, SoM is a huge step in players defining their world through their actions. The back and forth, them remembering you, your death changing up the ranks, all of that is a big first step. This isn't a small scale endeavor, it affects the whole game world.
At the heart of it, however, SoM just shows that such a system can be implemented. And I think that's where you are right, people are seeing more into SoM's nemesis system more than it truly delivers. I'm not excited about SoM's nemesis system, I am excited for other games to take on such a mantel, and see where it ends. I think this is the next evolution in things like Oblivion's "radiant AI."
I agree it works as a "proof of concept". But bottom line is, I almost always do not really care if the game does something innovative or different if it doesn't really have a noticeable impact on my enjoyment of the game.
Like, maybe you have game which responds to real weather conditions in your town or does facial recognition and reacts to your moods. But if it all boils down to cosmetic differences (sky is cloudy instead of sunny, your avatar looks grumpy instead of happy) then.. who cares? It's maybe impressive the very first time you see it (same as it's impressive the first time you realize the orcs in SoM "remember" your actions), but the second, third... hundredth time you notice it.. it's just meaningless fluff.
Yeah, it was really hyped for me, but once I realized that there was almost no way to defeat the entire hierarchy of orcs (without significant time investment) and the orcs that killed you just randomize a little tougher, it was really easy to see the artifice of the whole thing and to mostly ignore that part of the game
It's a roleplay mechanic. Who says it was supposed to affect core gameplay?
Umm... the designers of the game, calling it an "ever-evolving gameplay mechanic"?
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger gave you the feel of being a badass by dodging the bullet that was supposed to kill you giving you a second chance.
playerunknowns battlegrounds. Stop rolling eyes, hear me out: Death in pubg really means it! You loose everything you fought for the last minutes, every bit of loot, every nice weapon you riskly had obtained by fighting 5 other dudes at an airdrop site, everything. Pubg made me fear for my virtual Life more than any other game, because its truly your end there.
Oh and then there is the Pokemon Nuzlocke Challenge. For strangers to the topic: To make the games more difficult and interesting for experienced players you give yourself a set of rules: let free every pokemon that goes KO (the nearest possible equivalent to dying in the games ^^), catch a limited count of pokemon (you cant decide witch ones, its just the first one you encounter on each area) and, last but not least, give every pokemon you catch a nice fitting nickname. (this was simplified, if anyone is interested just google it for more details)
Every time a pokemon goes KO, (wich happens often in casual playthroughs) it feels like a bullet. Interesting relationships might forge with pokemons that barely survived risky situations, sometimes you were annoyed to encounter them in the first place because you hoped for something else in that area, and when they give their last fairwell it might really be a huge mental loss. So, its kinda the XCOM and FireEmblem formula, but holy shit is death intense while playing these...
Yeah, I'm coming back to this 7 years later and as somebody not related to the industry, just a guy curiose about game design. And my 2 cents here is that back in the COD vs Battlefield 3 days, I loved how in that BtF3 they encouraged to heal and revive your allies, giving same amount of points compared to a enemy take down. That made the whole game different for me and it was really funny to play it with my friends /brother.
Wow you didn't mention Fire Emblem? :/
It's pretty much the same as XCOM
I'm surprised too
While the permadeath and relationships to characters are similar; I found the impacts on gameplay to be quite different.
pretty much, but not quite.. because I feel like the characters in fire emblem are more unique and have therefore a greater emotional connection than those in XCOM
It's mechanically the same. Just narratively more emotionally jarring.
I like how Outward handles death. It depends on your location but you can wake up in town, captured by bandits, in a nearby cave, etc. Sometimes fully healed, other times not so lucky. Sometimes with your belongings next to you, sometimes missing some objects taken by bandits. Sometimes you can recover stolen items, but not always all of your items. It is very well done.
whabout borderlands?
Yup, just what I've been thinking
I love that you mentioned the true first inventors for these "meaning to deaths in games" mechanics unlike other people who only solely references the Soulborne series.....
Platinum Games always have the same punishment for death-- you have infinite lives, infinite continues, and generally respawn right at the start of the fight you lost at... but your rank at the end of the chapter drops one tier. So, if you would've earned a Platinum trophy, you get a Gold on one death, Silver on two, Bronze on three, and on four or more you get a Stone trophy. In The Wonderful 101, you will reappear at the exact place you died-- the enemies don't even respawn. This was a bit controversial, but I'm actually okay with it. After all, death in a Platinum Games game should be fairly uncommon. You actually shouldn't be taking damage at all, with all the s and perfect parry options the games throw at you. That's pretty much the expectation.
I'm using this video as a source on why frustration isn't always bad thank you!
New concept: Any time you die the game crashes and you have to purchase a new copy to play again
hellsgate700 there sadly is a game like that being made
These videos are so good! And invaluable to new developers!
Thank you! :)
In Super Wario World 2 you can't die. There is literally no fail-states.
Mordaedil What do you mean? If you fall into a pit or lose baby Mario, you have to start the level over. That's the same as most games.
Super Wario.Land 2, sorry. Not Mario World.
i think to this too..
and this is veri particular, because some time, we need too use somethink that look like a fail to solve puzzle.
Mordaedil
Oh, okay.
Sometimes when you die in undertale some characters remember that you died and it becomes part of the narrative.
This is amazing. Thanks for your time and effort in making these amazing videos!
Hotline Miami 2 had an interesting twist stage where, unlike every other stage in the series, you don't immediately respawn after getting killed. You're instead treated to the "level complete" music, and watch yourself get carried away and executed by the enemies. This was how they gated off a significant secret area in the game, where you need to complete this stage without dying once, in order to reach it.
I like the way Soul Reaver dealth with that. Soul Reaver's world concept is kind of a redefinied version of the light world/dark world in A Link to the Past, but here it's the material world and the spectral world, a mirror ghost world where the level layout is mostly the same but deformed, so new paths emerge, water has no impact and you can't take anything with you, like weapons. So you switch between the "normal" world and this ghost world constantly to progress and you can die in both, but you are only really dead when you die in the spectral world, where different easier enemies are, when you die in the material world, just your body dies but you get transferred in the spectral world, where you have to feed on souls to get back alive. It's a need concept because in good old "design by subtraction" manner everything revolves around that design, the same thing that Sands of Time made stand out of the crown but earlier.
I know most of the people here know about this genius series from Amy Hennig amongst other, but maybe somebody doesn't, then here's a classic for you. You're welcome! ;)
Zombie U is incredibly underrated I’m so glad to hear you touch on it
Touhou 13 (Ten Desires) had a mechanic where you collected souls to fill up a meter, and that meter could be unleashed by the player as a sort of alternative to a bomb, a bomb being something you use to clear the screen of enemies and bullets. If you died, it would be automatically unleashed as a last hurrah before losing a life.
It helped in boss fights when you died but got to do a bunch of damage before moving on to your next life, but it really used the bonus you get from dying to emphasize that you should use your resources proactively, like the meter and bombs, to avoid death (because if you actively use it before you get hit, you save your life). ZUN uses this death system to reinforce how you should try to play the game; bomb management is a facet of the game which some players getting into the series tend to not think enough about.
It's sorta like how Bloodborne has so many amazing systems to encourage playing aggressively, and it turns out that playing more aggressively is a more fun way to play the souls games, so Bloodborne trains players to play the rest of the Souls series in a way that is effective and engaging, whereas the first thing they give you in DS1 is a shield.
Sounds like an interesting UX feature to "Super" from the old Shoot 'em up's.
3:47 Reminds me of a puzzle platformer I played on Steam called _Life Goes On_ where you play as a bunch of knights seeking out treasure for their king, and you have to throw them to their deaths to progress. Each knight would have a different name, and you would be scored based on how many you took to solve the puzzle.
This series is amazing, great job, hope to see more soon!
One example I can think of is from a PSP game Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. Apart from being the most awesome title name ever, it's story is focused around taking a hopelessly weak individual and training him to become an amazing super hero.
This is accomplished by navigating through random-generated dungeons, using whatever gear you can find and defeat loads of enemies to level up. The twist is you don't keep your levels between dungeons, you always start at level 1. Levels you obtain aren't waste though, for at the end of the dungeon every level you gain adds to a Total Level counter that has no limit, and a higher Total Level isn't just for more base power. It unlocks other bonuses you can use to get even stronger.
How this ties into player death / failure is that if you die in a dungeon, you don't actually die. You are sent back to base and lose every items you have in your pouch and all the money you have on hand, but the levels you gained in that time still get added to the Total Level. There is never a "Game Over" because no matter how many times you fall you can keep getting back up to try again stronger than before, which fits into the overall theme of the game.