I would offer Hotline Miami as a good example of a rapid death system. On each floor of a level, you have to kill every enemy without taking a single hit, get hit once you die. However, you only hit the 'R' button and BAM, you're back in it immediately with no load time to try again. It forms this rapid trial and error that will not be the same every time (like little nightmares 2) and encourages trying different approaches. Once you clean up a floor/section you get a checkpoint and go to the next floor or leave the level. Its feels pretty clean and engaging.... well for me anyways.
Definitely. It creates tension in an interesting way, too. It's still that "tension and release" cycle, but at much more rapid intervals. You suck in a breath, engage in a few seconds of frantic violence, die, release that tension, and immediately repeat. The tension comes in short sprints and short breathers, which has a very distinctive cadence that I think a lot of players agree worked really well.
in a similar fashion, super meat boy, instant restarts, and when you finish a level you see all your ghosts running dieing and your successful run all at once
@@DarkPlague20 It also helps that SMB's levels are all really short, so starting from scratch isn't that demotivating (and dying a lot is what the whole game is marketed around).
The more I try to think of a bad death state in a game the more I think about deaths with frustrating down times. Long loading screens, unskippable cutscenes, poor checkpointing. Anything that delays the time between me failing and me making another attempt can really affect my experience in a difficult section.
@@Ziel23987 ''poor checkpointing'' in Dark souls there is a penalty for dying but you are dying because of your skill or to be precise lack of it, if someone is flustrated because of that why would you even try dark souls or other soulsborn games? it would be better to play new assasin games or stardew valley (aka easy games)
One critical thing to keep in mind, is there is no catch all goldilocks zone. Different people want different things, and even for the same person, wants different things for different games. As whole though, I wish more games had fail forwards mechanics though.
There are Quick Saves and Rogue Lights. No one wants Hard Core, but no one wants a cheap loss. As in the majority. There's a point when "load to last save" becomes a chore over challenge.
Technically no, but it can be achieved with a dynamic system, like in Resident Evil 4, that adapts to your abilities so that you always feel right on the edge.
@@rhythmrobber But even that isn't something that's suitable for all players. Players who are playing the game multiple times or are just the type to apply constant scrutiny may notice the adaptive difficulty and lose interest because they realize that their performance is inconsequential.
Yeah, i actually hate the feeling of tension in souls games, but love roguelikes where you lose all progress when you die. It’s like retrieving souls just feel like a chore
Games like Celeste, Super Meatboy, and Hotline Miami are designed with "do small set of challenge, move on to next" in mind. They're designed to be intentionally very difficult with the caveat that you will get unlimited retries that put you immediately back in the action since you will die a lot. The game the video referred to was just a bunch of cheap kills that would only fool you once, which derailed the tension.
I would argue Celeste actually does have a consequence for death. It's just that the consequence is time and another tick on the death counter. Of course, I suppose every game has that as a consequence for death, so your point is still valid.
@VictorLHouette the penalty of death should be directly related to the difficulty of the individual challenges. Celeste has some of the hardest in gaming, but you get to slam your head against it so often it doesn't stop being engaging nor takes too long. Satisfactory can have you take hours to backtrack to where you died and get your stuff back. But unless you're a fool, you don't venture out that far with all your build gear and you'll just have travel gear on you. So you could just choose to rebuild them and go back later. However it's also not a combat challenging game, so while it might take a bit you can probably just go and get it no issue.
@@GoeTeeks Yea, I also feel that platforming games inherently have high tension as the fear of falling is pretty universal and usually and historically, an instant game-over. Their adaptation becomes to make the punishment less severe and so that it's not a touch of death game like crash bandicoot or donkey kong country, which while loved, have a very large difficulty barrier on the stress side.
@@dddmemaybe I do like how games these days tend to just deal damage and reset the player's position when falling in a pit or crashing on spikes. Makes those slight mistakes less severe.
Gotta admit, I disable item drop upon death when I play minecraft. I still like monsters, but the lost loot just pushes my cosy game over the edge to frustration town
Yesssssss. I don't mind fetching my things, but I hate that they just vanish if you take too long getting them. I love when modpacks add a gravestone mechanic so nothing gets deleted, but without one I just used keepinventory.
Multiplayer mode, I don't mind the item drop on death. Other people can pick it up for you, and there's more ways to safely retrieve it yourself. But when playing minecraft solo, it's definitely a demotivator. Just the thought of dropping an Elytra on a spot that's impossible to get to without a backup Elytra (or just losing it to lava...) That's a gut punch to me.
I used to be against this, thinking it spoiled the game. Joined a server that had it on and realized quickly how much it made for, as one friend put it, “much happier gameplay.”
I like to use gravestone mods for this exact reason. Keep inventory is too cheaty for me but losing items after running naked back through deadly unlit caves is also not fun. Also using journey map to teleport back to my death is also mind numbingly boring. It would be better if we respawned within 200 blocks of our death and had a gravestone, and had to work our way back to our death point in a manner of ways. 7dtd has this option and you can even choose to keep hotbar items too which makes it just a tad easier to get your hard earned loot back.
That doesn't necessarily make them 100% bad though. Part of designing a game is engineering *memorable moments*. Look at a game like Noita: The whole meme of that game is you can die randomly due to dumb bullshit. You can lose an entire run due to some extremely specific combination of circumstances that was effectively unavoidable the first time you encounter them. Those moments are *memorable* because they are usually accompanied by a big explosion of some kind. Some of these Unavoidable traps are bad when when they're either un-interesting or too-frequent. Dying to an earth-shattering kaboom is funny, but having it happen every 5 minutes loses it's charm fast.
That is basically the foundation of roguelites and Soulsbornes and other RPGs: you bang your head against the wall unless your head is unbreakable. As such difficulty is a way to pad play time.
Yeah, anything that can insta-kill the player needs to either have some kind of escape mechanism (a dodge or even a QTE) or be at least somewhat telegraphed. If it's just "you step here, you die" and there's *nothing* to indicate that? Awful game design.
9:30 Ludo has a point- it is lying. And just like everything, lying is a tool which you have to carefully consider how you use. Because a LOT of players will have their immersion ruined at best and be quite angry with you at worst if they notice you've been faking.
When I found out how many games’ difficulty is a lie and is just background manipulation it ruined so many games for me. Absolutely hate stuff like resident evil 4’s dynamic difficulty, and I don’t like how JM8 says that all that matters is how the player feels not if the challenge is real. I don’t feel good when devs are bullshitting me like that, as thats not a game, that’s a theme park ride. There is value in an honest and real challenge, it’s probably the reason I love 2d platformers and bullet hells, those games aren’t just playing with numbers behind the scenes to get you through to the end, it’s up to you the player. I want to play something, not dragged through scripted setpieces
i was playing senua's sacrafice or whatever it's called. They claimed "die too many times and your save state is deleted." I knew immediately that was a lie. Thought about playing blind, but looked it up just to see if I was right. It's a bold strat, needs a lot of skill and nuance considering how variable ppl are. Anyway, I quit after like 1.5 hours cause i wasn't feeling it.
@@atrustworthyfellow6887 The deleted save thing made me actively hostile towards the game. Even when I found out it wasn't true, I still didn't feel like giving it a chance. I will never buy a 10+ hour campaign game that even threatens save deletion, as that shows the utmost disrespect towards players.
I agree, I don't like it at all when a game is dishonest about its difficulty. It can feel really condescending and disrespectful. Look at games like DoDonPachi, Ikaruga and Devil May Cry 1 on DMD difficulty for example; extremely difficult games, but entirely honest about what they expect of the player.
Just to be contrarian, there are games where death is practically zero consequence but dying over and over is still a valid indicator of how you're doing, and getting through the section that's destroying you feels like an achievement. Case in point - the various LEGO adventure games, which is what the Little Nightmares discussion reminded me of. Blowing up into studs over and over again doesn't really affect your game experience or performance aside from losing a little money, which only stings very early on. But if you're in a boss fight that's blowing you up over and over and finally defeat the section, you still feel a real sense of relief that you solved it and get to move on to the next part. Of course, obviously the intended audience for LEGO games is young and expected to not have a lot of patience to lose progress, but I think that's important to keep in mind and didn't get touched on in this short vid. The type of game and audience should be carefully considered, because a failure state that's trivial or disengaging for one kind of play experience may be perfect for a different one. Watching people play games where you die a lot without too much consequence can showcase a real sense of fun - with players exclaiming and laughing as they burst into confetti yet again, taunt each other a little, and get back to trying.
Celeste does something similar. Death usually only put you back like 15-90 seconds, but the tension and satisfaction still remain because of the deep focus you need to complete the level and satisfaction at both figuring it out and executing it.
That is very important: the way developers approach in-game death varies but so does the way players do. Some want punishing experience like Soulslikes and others want a stress free one like Lego games or Sims.
Intended audience is a great point to bring up. The OG Pokemon came out when I was 6yr old and my older brother was 8. I dont think I really played it until i was about 8 after Silver was release and my older brother let me play the old game since he got the new one. There are a few areas that cna become almost impassible if you are not careful. First is chosing Charmander as the starter since the first gym is rock. There are NO grass or water type pokemon in the first section, if memory serves its only bug, flying, and normal. You pretty much have to have full party of max level 10 to beat Brock and if you dont you lose money. The only way to make money is to challenge other trainers but if you have already beaten everyone and then you spent all your items on the gym you are out of luck and might as well restart the game. There is a section I remember getting caught unexpectedly by a fight right before entering a city and getting booted all the way back to the previous town. Unlike now, those paths were really long and annoying so to have to do it all overagain with less money to buy items was complete ass. Now the games are barely a challenge but of course I am like 30 now and those games are still targeted at 10 yr olds.
@@sathrielsatanson666 Except Souls isn't really punishing, it's simply about learning the boss's attack patterns and now you are just basically playing Osu. Which is why you have a whole bunch of videos showing players who play with no armor, no dodge, no block and still beat bosses. The punishing part is only from long reloads and losing items (example: Elden Ring - Malenia, Blade of Miquella RL1 No Roll/Block/Parry/Jump/Status) Games that have some randomness to it (like DRG maps) is what creates fun gameplay, because you're not just replaying the same levels having learnt everything, each mission is both familiar and new.
@@GameFuMaster Eh, Souls games are fairly punishing. At any stage in the game, your health remains within 2-6 shots of being wiped entirely, and healing requires you to find gaps to breath in that sweet estus. Like a run in a roguelike it only takes a few errors in the moment, or several errors over a journey, to eat dirt. They honestly deserve their reputation as "Hard but fair" more so than they do "Hardestest geams evur," because while practice, patience and positioning will drastically lower how hard these games can feel, you're always just a few mistakes to a loading screen. Just to be clear, this is coming from someone whose main advice to new players is "Don't get caught up in worrying about soul drops and soul loss and the game will feel 1000% easier," I personally think these games are deceptively easier than they appear, but that doesn't mean I'd ever call them easy or not punishing.
Huge topic directly related to fail states: how game dev's respect player time and how this changes player to player. If dying (or repeatedly dying) negates the last hour of time, but your in college with nothing to do tomorrow, there's a lot of people who just feel more badass when they finally succeed. However, if you have 1 hour of game time after your kid goes to bed, this is a rage quit and thumbs down review moment. Know your audience and what your game is trying to do.
Lost about an hour or more progress in Bioshock 2 (can't remember why, out easily could've been my fault) and just quit and never came back. Having to replay all of it to keep going felt like too much of a chore and I have real chores to do if that's the experience I want
@@ruolbu And the biggest thing that dictates that is how much fun it is to play through that hour again (if it is an hour). If spending an hour doing it again is fun, or you can draw on the experience of the last hour such that you can do that section in 10 minutes instead (this happens a lot in Dark Souls: The first trip through an area is slow and methodical as you find and overcome traps and hunt for treasure, but if you die and have to do it again you can use your knowledge and the fact that you already took all the one-time detours to rush through it much faster), it's less of a problem. If spending an hour doing it again means slogging through the exact same motions as the first time until you get to the part that you screwed up, that gets intolerably tedious (and hearkens back to JM8's older video on puzzle design and the importance of making sure that executing a puzzle's solution happens quickly enough to not lose the satisfaction of figuring that solution out). Across the board, though, I'd say erring on the side of respecting player time is a good thing. Even if some people aren't going to really mind that they lost, say, 10 minutes because the doorbell rang and they had to abandon a boss fight in Dark Souls because it doesn't let you pause (because why not poke that hornet's nest here, just for funsies), some people are, and therefore it's good to try and minimize the number of times players experience that where it isn't their fault, and limit the amount of time that's lost to reduce the chance that you've spoiled somebody's entire play session with one death.
I think the Amnesia devs came out and said something very similar to what you're describing. That their goal the entire game was to create a state where you constantly felt in danger, but if you played in a reasonable way, you wouldn't die. Because dying releases a lot of that tension. I think they also did this because they realized they never actually wanted you to get close to a monster. Seeing the horror makes it less scary. So if its always right around the corner, you feel constantly afraid and that allows the tension to continue to build.
Yeah, and TDD also had good pacing. When the tension is so high for such long periods of time, then it is definitely helpful to have areas where the tension is much less. Like getting to the Back Hall after the water part.
My biggest pet peeves with death in games are; 1) When you don't regain ammunition/consumables upon respawning. (Bloodborne is probably the worst offender for that). 2) When dying inflicts a debuff onto your character, like reduced HP (Dragons Dogma 2, or the Curse mechanic from Dark Souls 1) Both of these mechanics discourage me from trying anything dangerous, and really kill my interest in the game.
I really just have a ungodly preference for the simplest of save systems, aka "save the state of the game" and when I die "load that state of the game", and just allow me to save the state of the game often. Thats it. The way Souls do their saves is enough to make me never want to use consumables, I absolutely despise the idea of using a rare consumable only to fail the fight and not have it anymore.
The first one has just about made me quit playing Dead Island 2 after well over 40 hours put into it. If you run out of ammo and health kits at the wrong time in a boss encounter setpiece and go down to a random effect, you're automatically screwed for the next few attempts until you get enough lucky drops... this is further complicated by the enemy scaling to your level... you're actively punished for becoming more powerful by a heavily punitive fail state
I also dislike DS2 removing the enemies after killing them enough times. Makes dying and losing your souls just that much more annoying, that it makes the whole system worse than that of DS1.
@@SFJake250 I agree with the point about consumables, but the benefit of the souls system though is that all progress is saved; when you die, you don't have to go pick up the items again or re-do NPC dialogue, you retain all of that progress. You also don't have to worry about saving the game all of the time, which is something that takes me out of the immersion personally.
I think you mean the curse mechanic from Dark Souls 2? In 1 you just loose your humanity on death and that's it, but in 2 you loose up max HP on death up to 50%
I think the "why devs lying to you is a good thing" topic is a dangerous line. Too much fake tension and you rob the game of any actual danger of failing, you rob the game of its game part! There are definitely cases where it can be a good thing though so, as I said, I think it's a dangerous line to walk.
This reminds me of Drake of the 99 Dragons. Any time you died in the game, you’d be transported to a spirit garden where a group of floating statues would generate a new body and then send you back to the level you died at. While it seems included as an attempt at creating a coherent narrative (for lack of a better term), considering how often you died in the game, it completely derails any immersion due to the frequent halting of gameplay.
What was that game that was just a series of punishing and ludicrous traps and death causing apparatus, where after hitting one trap, the move you used to bypass it just put you in another trap? The only way to complete it was to discover all the traps through platforming through death after death until you completed that level, and then start again on the next level. I think that was a good example of comedically highlighting how unpleasant that type of gameplay is, and inviting in the hardcore nuts that want to speedrun it. It got you through how unfair it was by being funny, but a horror game can't really do that meaningfully. It's kind of a case in point for the problems that were highlighted in this video with Little Monsters 2, but where the traps were actually integrated into the challenge in an interesting way that encouraged you to be willing to push past them.
It sounds like the spectral plane mechanic from Soul Reaver, except Soul Reaver actually requires you to shift between realms at certain points. You're not supposed to *die* per se, but being forced into the spectral plane can give you a new perspective on the puzzles or reveal an area you can't reach in the living plane.
@Elesario I'm guessing: *I Want to be the guy*? Either that or Kaizo Mario (thoug kaizo is a bit less focused on the hidden traps, instead using them as funny sprinkles on top the challenge cake).
I like the rougue lite system where generally if you die you have to start all over but you may have gained permanent resources for future runs (new items in binding of issac, currency in Hades, etc) I also like the BG3 system where there are plenty of options to res a fallen character, but you are still motivated to keep them alive at fist because of limited resources and later because you've built an emotional connection with that character. I also like that it is optional to res a fallen character so it gives the player agency on how they want their game to be played.
Kingdome come's deliverance save system was really bad actually. Sure on paper should increase tension and risk, but in reality led only to frustration as most of the time i lost progress from bugs or cheap deaths. Also not being able to make bonfires/ camps while in the middle of nowhere in order to save progress made exploration really frustrating .
The fact he actually brought that up as an example of a _good_ idea just about blew my mind. Limited save systems are just flat bad design, a shortcut to raising stakes that instead of adding challenge or suspense just makes the game frustrating, especially if it's as broken as KCD. More importantly here's a game world full of things to see and do and I'm being incentivized NOT to do that because if I don't save and die, I lose hours of progress, and if I do save, I waste precious limited saves better used elsewhere. It's maddening.
I've made this point before: The more punishing your game is, the more perfect it needs to be. Bugs, broken hitboxes, etc..., become exponentially more unforgivable the harsher the punishment becomes, as you feel utterly robbed.
@@VeraTheTabbynx I wouldn't say that limited saves are *always* bad design. I think they're extremely bad design in long games like KCD. In a game you're meant to play for tens to hundreds of hours, limited saves serve only to increase frustration because you stand to lose such an immense amount of progress. But in a shorter game, like the older Resident Evils or the first Fear & Hunger, which can both be completed in 3-5 hours even if you're playing them at a normal pace, I think the limited saves do add an element of significant tension. And because those games aren't too long, you typically never lose more than an hour or two of progress to a death, which isn't too bad. Plus dying and starting over are part of the fun of those games anyway, as the point of them is to memorize where to go, what to do, and what not to do, in order to ultimately succeed. That said, I feel like the discussion of Saviour's Schnapps or whatever they're calling it in KCD2 reeks of "Game Dev Tinted Glasses" where the *designer* knows what they want the system to accomplish, but that doesn't mean it works that way in practice. Crafting limited saves is definitely a way to pressure your players to prepare for upcoming battles carefully, but another way to do that would be to have the preparations be very high impact, like making a poorly maintained sword practically unusable, or making potions have really good and noticeable effects that would make the battle easier. Locking saves behind potions as a "reminder" to prep for battle is an interesting concept in theory, but in practice in KCD I would just craft like 40 or 50 of those things ASAP and then never make a single one ever again for any purpose other than selling them for money. Doesn't really serve the intended purpose at that point, does it Ondrej?
I quite like the way Hades handles player death. The way your friends always have new dialogue after every failed run makes it feel like you're still making story progress, even if you lost all your upgrades and level progress. Normally I can't get into roguelikes because I find dying and having to start over from scratch frustrating, but Hades found a way to soften the blow of death in just the right way to keep me going, without making death consequence-free.
Yes, Hades is my favourite game and I love every part of it, deaths too. Zagreus falling, 'THERE IS NO ESCAPE', the screen going dark, always felt like a kick in the teeth. NPCs would give you abuse based on what killed you too. Still, the fact that you were always advancing, overall, meant it was easily tolerable as you had every reason to think you'd do better next time.
Yeah the way death is an active feature of the game is very clever, to the point where if you're a highly experienced player that starts a new game and breezes through it the game either calls you on having done this before, or the dialog trees don't quite know when to give certain lines because you've played the game "too fast".
Yes. Hades somehow hit the sweet spot of being harsh enough to make death sting while also avoiding feeling hopeless and frustrated. It took me over a month to beat Hades for the first time, and I loved every second of it. Normally I HATE losing that much progress on death, but it doesn't feel like you lost progress because dying over and over again is baked into the game's plot. To this day, it's one of my favorite games of all time.
It also varies from player to player. I personally *hate* the dropped gear/souls/whatever mechanic, because it dramatically increases the stress as I work my way back to get it. Especially since, by definition, that dropped stuff is in the most difficult place I've encountered recently. Some people love that stress engaging, but I find it unpleasant. It encourages me to go get my gear back, then close the game and do something more enjoyable to relax.
Not sure I agree with the takeaway from this video. I used to really enjoy challenging games and harsh death consequences, but as I've gotten older, I've really learned to appreciate "save anywhere" mechanics. It enables the option of "no consequence" gameplay through save-scumming, but on the other side, I can save and quit a game at any point and walk away to take care of something urgent. The way to approach this is to play games in a manner that matches your own challenge expectations. Be honest with yourself first and foremost. Want harsh consequences? Auto-save only. Play Ironman/Honor modes. Want to cheese? Save-scum and don't feel bad about it. I don't need to be told how to play a game by a developer to artificially create a sense of tension and dread. Give me the freedom to play responsibly in a manner that aligns with my current mood.
Agreed, and I think it's important here to have options via difficulty settings or save modes. I have less time to game now, so I want games I can save anywhere and finish in a shorter time-frame. If I need to sink 100 hours into mastering a game to then enjoy the next 200 hours, I'm unlikely to even start.
So much this. I’ve done relatively hard things like beat Baldur’s Gate III on Honour Mode and doing a no death run in Alien: Isolation. But I’ve also done those games on easy mode, because sometimes I just want the vibes, not the careful and deliberate challenge.
What comes to mind for me is limited saves in the old Resident Evil games. It added tension and a deliberate choice to saving your game, and a reward for exploration, but it also led to questions like "do I really need to spend one of these right now to go walk the dog?"
I've always liked the solution of the Quick Save as seen in some early 2000s and earlier games, such as FF Tactics Advance. There's the normal, safe area-only saving system, but if you need to stop playing mid-battle you can make a temporary save state that will immediately quit your game and delete itself when you load it up next time. So you can quit safely at any time, but can't use it to save scum. It's brilliant. That's also why I value my Steam Deck so much. As soon as I need to do something else, I hit the power button and time just freezes on whatever game I'm playing and I can hop back in consequence-free and with no boot up or load delay. And game design is never compromised from this feature (unless it's online, but that's a given).
Guilty Gear as a fighting game famously has the "Guts" system, wherein characters take a ton of damage at the start of their health bar making each hit feel satisfying and chunky, And far less damage near the end of the healthbar, maximising the amount of time a player can feel like they're in a "clutch" situation, a fantastic and very hype inclusion to the genre.
@Vanity0666 There is still predictability with guts. Folks who are competitive know how much less damage they deal per hit in Guts range. That's why when enemies are low health you'll see people go for different combos which include as many hits as possible rather as much damage as possible
@@TheChilaxicle on top of that it's well known among those who play the game a lot that each character has a distinct Guts factor. It's basically their version of the "slow but strong character has more health" thing other fighting games would do (for example the really nimble & hard to hit Chipp folds like paper even at low health while the grappler Potemkin can take a good few hits at low health)
@@BLET_55artem55 not really? It's basically an alternate take on fighting game defense in a game series where health bars will melt really fast anyways (seriously just look up a match & see how fast characters die) & as Chilax mentioned, it helps incentivize trying different combo routes since multiple hits is a big way to beat it out.
Always liked how Hades handled death in its various runs. Death might halt progress for that one run and reset you back to Tartarus and kill the build you had. But you keep various other collectibles and currencies, use those for more permanent upgrades between runs, including an ability that 'defies' your first death or two. And also the extra optional system that improves your resilience by 1% after each failed run. None of these undo the risk of failing a run, that's still absolute. But it gives a sense of always making progress, your time never being wasted, and that feeling of failing forwards does wonders to keep a player motivated for more runs rather than disheartened at constantly seeing their progress reset. Even simple dialogue differences at the house of hades between runs gives a sense that something was accomplished and time was worthwhile spent.
Another thing that helps hades is the variety in weapons, keepsakes and boons that allow you to try new things all the time. Sometimes, the game's RNG may even force you to get creative.
The OG RE4 and the remake were really good at the whole making everything feel like a close call but not really trick, at least early on. The first half of those games you always feels like you are just about to run out of ammo or healing items at which point you are fucked. Except you never do if you are playing reasonably normally. You're always JUST a few shots away or down to one or two health items, never zero. You never have enough to feel secure. At least until the back half of the game where it switches genres to a 3rd person shooter and tension isn't about how many shots you have left but how to manage hordes of enemies coming at you. Everything still feels like a close call but for a completely different reason. God's those are great games.
That's because the game knows what guns you have and when you don't have any health or bullets the likeliness of those items dropping massively Increases but when you have alot then they drop less and you get more money
The remake on hardcore difficulty really threaded the needle. I was constantly scrapping by each fight with a shotgun shell or two and a handful of pistol rounds left over. It was just tight enough for me to feel tension, but never unfair. Then I started from scratch on normal and I was swimming in ammo.
@@SpectreAdept I wasn't even on hardcore mode and the remake still managed to keep me on the edge of my seat with item drops. I spent the entire castle ramparts section balancing 1-2 green herbs at a time.
I woulf argue that the Remake does NOT do that. I played it on hard(which I had done a billion times in the OG) and it was legitimately one of the hardest game experiences I have had in years. I actually got soft locked in the cabin with Luis because my random ammo drops were ASS and I got in there with like 4 healing items and 2 bullets. I eventually just restarted and surprise surprise it dropped me plenty of ammo leading up to it and I managed it far easier.
The thing developers have to get right for me is the nature of the cost of their death mechanic and not so much it’s absolute cost in terms of time or in-game resources: if the cost of death is that I need to play fun bits of your game again that’s fine; if the cost is that I need to something tedious then that’s bad. If death, or any other mechanic, makes you want to play the game more then it’s good and if it makes you want to play less it’s bad, which sounds pretty obvious, but I see lots of mechanics in games that I find it very difficult to imagine make anyone want to play more but are still included for some other reason.
and most of the time the best way to please players is to give them options... like, a story mode if you don't see any value of tension in that game, as well as a harder option to make things interesting if thats your cup of tea - with the video's example of Little Nightmares, having an option to respawn farther behind could give a better justification to those fail states that did undermine the game's tension for them
One thing I'll point out about the corpse-run mechanic of Souls games and Hollow Knight and so on - the major tradeoff is that it penalizes exploration. If you go explore an area that looks dangerous, and turns out to be dangerous, and then die, you feel almost obligated to go back over the same ground, face the same dangers, and reach the same deadly challenge, so as to retrieve your soulrunegeoechoes. Which you might not want to do. So you might look at the dangerous place, decide "this is a future-me problem" and leave, rather than exploring at all. This isn't that bad in Dark Souls. Heck, it expects you to do exactly this if you visit the graveyard early on, rather than pressing into the Catacombs. In Elden Ring, it's kinda annoying, but...at least you can use up your runes on a variety of things, switch your mind over to exploration mode, and just start wandering without worrying about losing your runes. (Until you kill that one bad guy on the way that drops 50 times more than you expected, but if you get enough that you start to care, you can usually teleport. Hollow Knight has it the worst - since Geo is *just* money, you can't burn it on a levelup to get yourself to who-cares levels of Geo, you need to find a vendor to spend it at. There's a limited number of those, and you can't warp around. And it has a bunch of different branching paths to explore. So if you're the goof who beats up the Mantis Lords, proceeds into Deepnest, and then dies in there, you're probably gonna be tempted to keep throwing yourself at that hellhole in hopes of escaping with your Geo rather than going any other direction, all of which are easier. And despite the limited number of vendors, the way Geo is paced out means that it remains relevant for most of the game. (which is good game design aside from this whole thing of encouraging you to not explore alternate paths.)
To be fair Hollow Knight has the fellow in town who will summon your shade to you from wherever it was left, all it takes is trading a fairly common (& otherwise useless) item. Annoying that this service is put behind a locked door, but still, they did try something to address the mechanic.
@@AnotherCraig Honestly, the biggest barrier to use there is the need to go back to town - the Stag Stations certainly make traversal less time consuming than it could be. Or, of course, holding onto that key long enough that you find one of the other places you can use it, and then not having a key for that place when you need it. Though yeah, my intent was definitely not to say that the corpse run mechanic is inherently bad, just that one has to be aware of the impact it has on exploration. (And all of the games mentioned manage to overcome that downside to some degree - it can become a problem when games just copy-paste a mechanic that was in these good games without understanding all the angles.)
@@AnotherCraig I think that NPC being behind a locked door was the biggest mistake about this system. I was excited when I finally was able to afford the key only to find out it had an NPC that was useless for my entire run. Because while losing Geo matters more in HK than losing souls in DS, I died a lot less often in HK because you basically get unlimited heals if you don't mess up.
I dislike it when a game does **not** respawn enemies when you die. In cases like this, dying means nothing but the slight inconvenience of running back to where you died. It also means that my skill doesn't matter since I can just brute force my way through the challenges with little repercussions.
Nothing makes me want to put a game down more then losing too much progress, to death or otherwise. So if it had to be one or the other extreme I'd rather a no consequence death over a lose an hour+ of progress death. This is probably why I've never really been in to roguelikes.
Yeah, always disliked rogue games. It feels like a waste of time until I get into that magically perfect run, after bashing my head bloody, grinding for the past 20 hours.
I would normally agree, but I really like survival settings on games like fallout 4 or subnautica, because they force you to be cautious and to try to plan so you don't lose TOO much progress.
The "progress" gained in any given run of a rougelike is knowledge and experience. The more you learn, the further you can get the next time. On the other hand, there are rougelites, where the death-grind is mandatory to unlock all the features/get strong enough to actually stand a chance (here's looking at ya Rouge Legacy)
That's because you feel obligated to finish a game once purchased, rogue likes are very true to the classics which only few people will ever finish those games by offering 1hr of memorable playtime. Is not wrong to assist the player with a save system but overtime I think it has created this loop of "one and done" playtrough which makes me wonder if most of the people did enjoyed the gameplay in the first place or it was just a flavour of the month.
It seems like the problem with Little Nightmares 2 is less that death has no consequences and more that it's too frequent and arbitrary. The game is so well positioned to be full of those manufactured near-misses you talk about later, but instead it takes every opportunity to actually kill you. That game would not be fixed by making death sting more, but it could absolutely be fixed by making it happen less.
Maybe it could give you a "life" once ever 5 minutes of game time, so when you would fail something, instead the character would automatically avoid that danger. This would allow you to see the first trap and make you aware for the next ones and keep the flow of the game, but not be as lenient as "ok you can die anytime, you'll respawn soon after just beside it" so you don't have to pay attention
I feel that as a general rule, Half-Life perfected the save system with autosave-plus-you-can-save-again-at-any-time. One game where long checkpoints really work, though, is Rainbow Six Vegas, as the often-inconvenient amount of lost progress really encourages you to play smart and stick to cover, which feeds into the fantasy of a tactical SWAT shooter. For a non-video game example, Dungeons & Dragons and related games has whole crazy debates around player character deaths and in particular if the GM should tweak things subtly to keep characters alive. I understand the logic of "if you can't fail, then it's not a real game," but I've found that a character actually dying and then conveniently being replaced by someone else of the exact same level who just happened to be in the next room is very immersion breaking by exposing that the whole thing is actually a facade. Like in action movies, the trick is to make the audience feel like they might die without actually going through with it. In video games, though, the developer has to be prepared to go through with it, and that can just break things.
The funny thing about Dark Soul's soul retrieval system is it ended up having the opposite effect on me, although with a caveat. The system is, like you said, meant to maintain tension after a player dies and also encourage them to take it slow, play methodically, and eventually master the area that's been getting them killed. But what happens when you die a second time anyway and lose your souls for good? What if you died just before getting back to the bit you died the first time after carefully spending a few minutes working your way back because of some bullshit? Two things happen: 1) You get mad and feel like an idiot for spending all this time only for the game to screw you over in the end because of one fuck up. 2) You are FREE! You are released from the burden of needing to care about your lost souls. You have nothing to lose anymore and the game punishes you even when you try to play carefully. So you do the Dark Souls run. You recklessly run through the level like you're a speedrunner, avoiding all the enemies as they form a conga line behind you and hope that you can get to a bonfire, elevator, or boss door before they catch up. Maybe you get smacked a few times, but you were gonna get smacked playing fair anyway. Maybe you die a few times, but you were probably gonna die a few times playing fair and who cares since you have no souls to lose anyway? So a lot of the time, the way I end up playing the souls games is I initially explore the level normally, then after dying a few times, I give up on that and just run. No more tension, just frustration and a desire to be on to the next bit. Now the caveat: This only really turns out this way because you can generally abuse the respawn mechanics to farm souls at various points in the game. So it doesn't really matter that much if I miss out on the level or so I might have gotten from carefully going through that area because I can take a couple minutes and gather up that many souls with virtually no risk. That said, I don't know that this wouldn't be a problem if farming weren't an option, I might have just quit at some point if I kept getting fed up with areas and gradually fell behind on levels.
Yup. This is why I quit trying to bother with Souls games. If I died once, I'm guaranteed to die again. If you're going to punish me, then punish me... don't pretend I have some chance of things being different next time. Regardless I'm going to feel bad about playing your game
Agreed. There's several things the souls games do well, but it's exhausting seeing every little faucet propped up as a masterclass in game design. No, running back for your souls is Bad Actually, and my suspicion is that people who do enjoy it have an adrenaline addiction issue not unlike problem gamblers.
Dark Souls 2 has limited enemy respawns - it's huge, like 12 per enemy, but it's finite. Losing a bloodstain in 2 feels so much worse because that's souls permanently removed from the world.
@@genlando327plays2Literally a skill issue. Your first death was a chance to learn what you did wrong and not do that next time. If you died somewhere that it's literally impossible to survive, like in a death pit, your bloodstain won't have followed you down there.
I think this is part of why I've come to enjoy roguelikes/lites so much. Terms of death are very clear and harsh, but if you're good enough you can start slowly building up items that will help keep you moving, but usually not to the point where the game falls apart, at least not right away, or if it does then you ratchet up the difficulty.
I really liked Subnautica's handling of death -- entering a base or a large submarine was treated as a save point, and if you die out in the world then everything that you picked up after leaving the base was dropped at your death point; however, you were responsible for building those bases and large submarines, and you had to be careful where you built those bases and how they were stocked -- if the last base you visited was a kilometer underwater and you didn't leave a way to return to the surface, you might softlock yourself into a scenario where it was necessary to destroy your own base and then die again in order to respawn at the original spawn point. On the other hand, Pacific Drive's rule of "no saving except at the end of a run, and if you quit you've lost everything *and* caused that area to become unreachable for a bit" really annoyed the hell out of me. That meant that I could only play when I was sure that I had several hours to devote to the game, and any unexpected interruptions meant harsh in-game penalties. If I wanted to be bitched at for not consistently being available for hours on end, I'd be playing WOW.
My gf and I played Divinity Original Sin 2 blind and we got off the first boat and to the first town and she went and talked to some guy on the beach who insta-killed her. I looked for ways to revive her but she actually just didn't want to play anymore at all. She loves playing games where you go everywhere and talk to everyone and dying like that completely killed the game for her. I never went on to play any more without her either.
If one instakill kills the game for your girlfriend, then you can always play on easier difficulties! :) But most of the time death (in DOS2) is just a piece of the puzzle; you can save anywhere and check most elements (NPC stats, enviroment) to solve the problem or just avoid it by going other way Its a bit of a shame giving up so quickly on the game... I mean, just play on a lower difficulty xD
@@Itomon So you're saying the solution to the problem is save-scumming? If that's true then even I don't want to give it another chance let alone my gf
@@Trev625 I fail to see what's so bad about this, it puts you on the control, the best FPS games ever made let you save anywhere and as much as you wanted like Doom, Half-Life, Quake, etc.
I think that's exactly why there are so many, and reviving is so quick. Dying in horror games, especially they are cartoony/lighthearted in some way, is a huge part of the experience.
Yeah I like watching the death animations in games like this, Limbo, and Dead Space. It's kinda part of the fun imo (plus cautious play will alert you to many of these traps if you're paying close attention)
I'm willing to give a lot of the old Sierra point-and-click games a pass for this, too. Not only do they preach "save early, save often" as a mantra, but death in those games (at least the good ones) usually is: a) funny b) the player's fault for doing something *really* dumb (ex. eating horse poop in Freddy Pharkas) c) telegraphed if you bother to investigate and not walk blindly into things d) telegraphed with multiple warnings if it involves a direct action by the player e) given a death message that hints how to avoid it in future attempts f) some combination of the above
@@BAMFshee I agree, and similarly, a lot of them are funny and worth watching just to see the nonsense. Of course if you didn't save, you lose some progress, but the thoughtful way to play those is pretty much to save before you do anything just in case it's a hilarious death.
Horror and comedy are mutually exclusive emotions. Not that a horror game can't have funny moments, but if you're constantly laughing you can't be scared.
If I mess up and get killed in a game, I would much rather have a hard save reload than one of those "corpse run" things honestly. With a hard reload, I don't feel like I'm being kicked while I'm down and I'd wind up learning the layout of an area the same way anyway. I think something that's sort of being overlooked is that systems intended to increase "tension" (no, I do not agree that tension is the holy grail of gameplay design) can instead come across as frustrating or annoying.
That rope reminds me of trying to jump from island to island in the third level of Battletoads, using up all my extra lives BEFORE hitting the BS speederbikes.
The time to recover from a fail state is also important depending on the game. People mention Hotline Miami but I offer: Hero of Ice Fairy. HoIF is a boss rush bullet hell leaning on the difficult side. If you die you're very quickly reset to the first phase of the fight. No overly long death message, no being kicked back to the hub area, no loading screen. It even skips certain story related phases and conversations if you've already been through them. Hell even if you quit for the day halfway through a boss fight, the next time you try it you press two buttons to skip the preboss phases and dialogue. And if you want to swap gear you can do so from the pause menu (this does reset the fight but you don't have to run back to the hub) The boss fight is still hard and beating them still feels satisfying but the fact that the game doesn't waste your time when you die cuts down on the frustration immensely
I suppose this is really two different conversations. The idea of meaningless deaths vs unearned deaths. Meaningless deaths can be fine (savescummers of the world rise up), but unearned deaths are absolutely a quit moment for many people. It seems like little monsters added a third sin, where the unearned deaths also undermine the puzzle elements, because what is the point of a puzzle game that will just arbitrarily kill you in a way you could not have foreseen?
My pet peeve is when death makes the games harder. It's OK if you loose progression and waste time but if you for example loose XP and is dumped at the same place, going forward will be harder that if you didn't die. That makes the games harder for the players that need the game be easier and the game easier for the players that needs it to be easier. Path Of Exile have a little bit of that problem. You loose XP when you die and the monsters you already have killed will stay dead so you don't gain XP when going back to where you died. It's not that bad because you don't loose XP in the begining of the game and you only loose progression to the next level and you can regenerate the level.
Old school NES games were particularly bad about this. Gradius was the worst. A single death in that game meant losing all your power ups and that loss of power made it almost impossible to continue.
You can respawn monsters on any map in PoE by control-clicking on a zone, you can farm any zone in the game and then by the time you're at maps you don't have an excuse since you can just put another map in. I think the XP loss system is an example of a death system done really well since you should not be dying in that game by the time they impose the rule on you. If there was no penatly at all you'd just stack damage and completely ignore defenses as the most efficient way to get experience, which would reward you for playing the game in an extremely boring way (hiding off screen and casting ranged abilities and dying in one shot then respawning and repeating), which is a lot worse.
I still recall my first time playing Bioshock. It was actually kind of scary until I died and realised you just respawn a little bit back. All tension gone, death became a slight inconvenience instead of something to actually worry about. Still a good game just not a scary one.
Yes I loved Bioshock but when I replayed it I realised that the death mechanic meant that you could pretty much throw yourself at enemies, get killed, and their health didn't regenerate. So it was technically possible to chip away at a Big Daddy with a wrench by just suicide-running it - probably a bit tedious but it does take away the tension knowing you could just do that.
@@writerredI went for all the achievements in Bioshock, one of which was completing a run on hard with Vita chambers turned off, and it was honestly the most fun playthrough of the game that I did.
The problem with "the healthbar lying to you" can lead to the player going "wait, why am I getting 2 hit? it took 3 to kill me less then a minute ago."
The problem with making the player feel like they’re in danger but not actually putting them in any in the end...just runs the risk of not really working as soon as the player figures it out. It’s like that DM in D&D that doesn’t actually count monster health and instead just declares them dead when he feels like the players have done enough cool things. Which can work if they never tell you about it, but if the players ever find out - all effect of their actions practically disappears. I guess this idea solves the frustration of receiving punishment for failure and doesn’t make the tension vanish, but at the same time, it can dumb down the tension in the first place and makes success that much less exhilarating as it can be in some of the games you’ve mentioned here, like dark souls. Feels like that’s kind of what people play them for, for that final relief of beating the next annoyingly difficult challenge.
1) devs HAVE to either prevent or make it easy for the player to prevent losing too much effort to a death. The more difficult the death is to avoid, the more true this is (high-difficulty encounters, gotcha traps, etc). Even if the player proceeds to easily overcome the challenge and recoups an hour of gameplay in ten minutes, it cheapens the lost time. 2) death must be as thematic to the game as any other factor. Roguelike deaths can and should feel different from horror deaths. 3) now for the controversial one: where possible, death should push the player FORWARD overall. Unlock a trigger, provide a clue, give lore, ANYTHING. 4) preparation for death should be trivial. It is expected that most players will die several times while learning. That said, this preparation has to be conscious (whether it is a potion from above, accessing a save point, etc) in order for it to be meaningful.
I can agree with 2 and 4 for the most part but largely disagree with 1 and 3. 1 - Entirely depends on the game, games like Jump King, Getting over it, Only up are entirely built around it being easy for the player to lose a notable amount of porgress from a mistake. It isn't uncommon for a difficult plataforming manuever the player isn't expected to know off the bat causing significant progress loss. The entire point of these games is the player not just clearing each challenge once and being done with it but learning to consistently clear the obstacles placed in their way which in turn makes future obstacles easier. 3 - No. Death doesn't need a secondary mechanic alongside it to give the player some advantage if they fail. The player is already making progress because they are learning as they die. This is what allows boss rush games like Cuphead or Furi to work you don't get a reward for dying but you are know in a better position to fight the boss as you have more experience and knowledge.
@@Itomon I can't see how provide a clue is the same as my point in the player learning from their experience. The player learning from their experience is going to happen regardless of the actual mechanics of death so long as it lets players replay sections they failed in. Some games may do this better than others but replaying a section you failed by its very nature will do this to some extent. By contrast OP's wording is much more implying that the player should be given something as if it didn't come backed in with the mechanic. From that I can only take OP 'provide a clue' literally, in the vein of a games that give hints on death screens like -The enemy that killed you is weak to X
This is the main reason that made me bounce off Limbo really fast. Found out very quickly that the game was based on trial and error, where you'd most likely die to something you could not see, be put back right before it happened, then have to repeatthe sectionover and over until you found how not to die.
Based mostly on the title, I have a new want: A soulslike game where you can't die. Taking damage simply heals the boss, with incentives for beating enemies quickly. Might seem quaint. Harmless, even, until the point wherein you realize that a small stint of getting yer ass beat by a powerful boss means that they're now essentially at full again and you may as well have died for all the good not dying did you.
Respect for my time >>>>>>> potential "tension" from death. The best thing the Souls game did in terms of growth was to institute more regular checkpoints with later games. All that remained was the *good* type of tension, the one from the challenge. Sad to hear that even despite the overwhelming feedback about how KCD initially launched in terms of saves they are going to proceed the exact same way in this one. Good to know what to spend my money on I guess, I won't play a game that may end up making me feel like I wasted hours of my precious little free time by readily erasing progress unless I go and do something I shouldn't be railroaded into just for the QoL effect.
Whenever I play Deep Rock Galactic, I tend to try and impose upon myself a sort of reclamation mechanic. When you wipe in a DRG mission, your squad respawns back at the space rig in medical gowns. The medical gown is immediately removed upon interacting with most terminals, especially equipment or wardrobe terminals. I always try to delay doing so as much as possible (unless I absolutely HAVE to change something about my loadout) and try to run the mission back immediately to "regain my honor" so that I can unequip the medical gown. I mean, the difficulty and punishment inherent to failing a mission is really enough in and of itself to function fine for the type of game DRG is, but I like adding the harmless minor stipulation whenever possible because it's interesting. And, I mean, why would Ghost Ship make it possible to wear the med gowns in a mission if that wasn't the intent, hmm? I'd like to think it's totally in character to jump straight out of the hospital right back into the mines, swinging your pickaxe with the patient tags dangling off your wrist. And yeah, yeah, Rock and Stone.
This is going to be something a lot of folks disagree with but the soul collecting Darksouls and its ilk actually undermined the experience for me. The knowledge that I'd have to faff around to get my stuff back rather than just reload killed a lot of the urge to explore or experiment for me.
Same here! I never explored more than I needed to and rarely tried fights before I knew I was ready (especially boss battles) because it is so easy to just lose your souls. I hate having things go to "waste", even if it is 200 souls when you need 20,000 to level up.
I get where you come from but to me it was great for the suspense and atmosphere in some areas. On top of that by levelling up and buying items it's possible to reduce lost souls quite a bit and they're an infinite resource. Once you get used to it you realise losing souls really isn't as big of a deal as it feels at first. Though I think it would be better if the games drop souls outside of boss arenas because otherwise you're basically forced to retry the boss instead of going to a different area first. Sekiro was a bit nicer about that as it lets you buy bags of money which are items so they can't be lost.
How about in the original Prey? When you die, you're immediately transported to a spirt realm full of, well, spirits to shoot. After a few seconds you respawn in the exact spot you died, but the spirits you killed determines how much health you have. Death still stung, but you lost zero progress.
Bioshock is the main game I would think of when discussing about bad death implementation. There are 0 penalty, enemy don't even respawn, You just continue as if nothing happened. Checkpoint system would have been good or take away some of your upgrade currency as an option.
Even just restoring enemy health and taking some money would have been enough, but it literally just moves you to another room with exactly zero consequences.
@@Paddy656 yeah, but on the other hand i dont think i would have played it at all if it didnt have that exact mechanic. you're right, it really did have zero consequences and i admit that probably took most people out of it, but for me it mitigated a couple of other mechanics i absolutely hated (namely stealth and limited ammo as im horrible at both shooting and sneaking) and let me enjoy the narrative of the game without having to watch someone else play it instead. it was basically my easy mode button. they probably should have implemented modes that respawned enemies or something and made the default a selectable easy mode.
@@xSaraxMxNeffx I'm not trying to speak in a way of like "Ohh yeah, I'm sooo good at Bioshock", cause I'm really not. But I did play 1 (and could've done 2, just thought it'd make things spongier though) with no Vita Chambers on the hardest difficulty a few years ago, and it's a lot less stressful than you'd expect. Turns out the game works pretty fine without it. Also things like stealth and limited resources are exactly still complaints, ironically. You still have a LOT of money and ammo, and Bioshock Burial At Sea II made me realize that I really wished Bioshock was more of a stealth game than it is. Cause Burial with Elizabeth is really really fun.
I feel like this is something that could be solved by difficulty settings. An easy setting could use the death mechanic as it exists in Bioshock, but harder difficulties have death mechanics that create more of a challenge (restoring dead enemies and/or losing currency).
why do so many people want a system that makes the game literally harder if you aren't good at it? people that are better at the game will accumulate more XP that they don't need, meanwhile someone learning will play the same game, but harder. It's completely backwards.
I like Xenoblade's cost of death, as it is basically just a small setback, you don't lose items, you don't lose your level nor coins, you just have to restart whichever fight you lost and that's it, you just have to walk a few steps, as the game allows you to revive and go elsewhere to train if needed, you are not forced to start from the fight itself or from your last save point like in some Tales of games. The system I dislike the most is Hollow Knight's, as after exploring for a long time, dying before reaching a bench and having to go all the way back to recover the geo, while having the chance of dying again and losing everything is extremely frustrating to me.
I quit Hollow Knight because of it. If I got into a situation I wasn't prepared for, maybe I'd rather take that as a reason to explore in a different direction, but no. I'm crippled until I fight my way back to where I died. Yes, there was a consumable to "fix" it. I don't care. It wasn't my only problem with the game, but it's the reason I deleted it. I just want my failures to be non-canon. I hate this souls-like trend of death being part of the narrative because it keeps getting applied in ways that don't make sense either due to the setting (Star Wars) or NPCs not reacting realistically.
@@UltimatePartyBearas an avid hollow knight player I get it but it does make sense for some series to have conical deaths and hollow knight is on of them plus your crippled but not crippled that much you get one less mask of healing
I can handle challenging games, but I detest punishing games. Give me an interesting challenge to overcome where I can instantly try again like in e.g. Celeste or Ori or the boss battles in Metroid Dread, and I'm all in. Add a 5-10min walkback from the latest checkpoint and make me lose all my money when I die twice without recovering my shadow, and I just feel like the devs are fucking with me for no reason and wasting my time.
"Game designers lying to their players is a good thing" is going to be a hard sell. I'm sure there are examples where I would agree in principle, but as with many tools in a designer's toolbox, there will be some people who use them well, some people who use them terribly, and some people who would abuse them so badly that you rue they knew of said tool's existence. Deceiving players on a fundamental level about what they're experiencing seems likely to lean towards the latter two... Especially as AAA developers start to use such deceptions to psychologically keep players in a zone where they're more likely to pay for content.
I agree, I think claiming that "lying to the player about the game's difficulty is a good thing" is an idiotic thing to say. I think it's incredibly condescending and disrespectful if the game isn't honest about its systems. This whole moronic idea that the player's feelings are more important than what the game actually is should be thrown straight in the garbage. Some of the hardest games ever made, like Castlevania 3, Ikaruga, Ketsui, Mushihimesama Futari, Ninja Gaiden 2, DMC1 on DMD difficulty etc. are perfectly honest about their own difficulty and all the better for it.
Well, I guess the argument will be that lies have only consequences if they are detected. So a game dev has to have mechanics (for the sake of his fun) that work differently from what the player is being told, but will never find out.
@@steffenknoll9136 I have never seen an example where that would actually improve the game. I think it’s incredibly disrespectful towards the player if they think they succeeded in a really challenging section and felt proud of themselves, but in reality the game lied about the difficulty and the challenge wasn’t actually nearly as hard as the player thought.
I fully agree with the video author on this one. Game challenges are ultimately arbitrary, and while it can cheapen things to find out about the magic behind the curtain, that just means...don't let them find out about the magic. It's the same in a lot of entertainment industries. The player "accomplishes" the same amount of quantitative tasks either way. The only thing that changes is their reaction to it.
I think a big part of what makes a good death is part of how the death is framed. Dying is a necessary consequence, but dying can be frustrating, and the game can do a lot to alleviate that burden. Two of the best examples I know of this are The Messenger and Unworthy. In The Messenger, the in-universe context for how you can die and get respawned is that you have a little greed demon, Quarble, that resurrects you when you die, at the expense of taking a tax on your future resource gains for a short while (which, alongside the well-spaced checkpoints that mean you lose just enough progress that dying stings a bit, but not so much to make it too frustrating, tends to make death in The Messenger a fair consequence). However, Quarble also provides a fair bit of humor, as every time you die he shares a joke that lightens the mood, making death sting even less as he brightens the mood. Unworthy, on the other hand, does something very different. For the most part, Unworthy seems to borrow the souls system from Dark Souls (resources are dropped on death, but you can collect them if you make it to them without dying). However, when you die in Unworthy, it says one thing that reframes death as a whole, and it's just one word: "unworthy". This single word reframes death from "you failed" to "you haven't succeeded yet", so when you take on the challenge(s) that bested you and finish them you feel so much better than if it said something different, like "you died".
This makes me think of classic NES games and how brutal they were with fail states. They did not have any safe mechanic, so a single death could end hours of work. It boggles the mind how developers at the time thought that was a good way of doing things.
@Arkazon Got to remember, that developers in those times were direct descendents of the arcade school of design, where fail states were encouraged to help relieve consumers from their quarters. Over time, design evolved to have the "fun night in front of the TV with the family" ethos in play.
Mainly because devs back then were trying to artificially extend relatively short experiences. Death and cheap memorization heavy difficulty masked the fact that most games clocked in at less than hour or two if you were good enough not to die. Also, back in the 80's game development was mostly inspired by arcades where difficulty was just monetization. Kill the player a lot so they have to pop in a lot of quarters. Took a while for home console stuff to move away from that.
Standards were extremely lax back then. Balancing wasn't really as much of a thing back then as it is now. Devs would just slap shit into a game and went "good enough". SOme games were legitimately impossible to beat unless you purchased a strategy guide. THis is why I laugh when people think the old days were somehow kinder, more passionate and honest than todays devs. I can tell they never grew up in that era.
@@devilmikey00well, yeah, as I said under a different comment: difficulty is a way to pad play time and since back then due to small memory sizes games were pretty short raising the difficilty was the way to prolong the experience. Also since back then kids were fine with ot because with very few games available they could spend weeks or months gitting gud.
I think there is an important point that not many people are saying and that is the amount of storage the games had. You have to sacrifice something to get a game to save progress data and maybe the game they wanted to make didnt make sense to have that
I think an issue with the manufactured close calls is that the second you become aware you’re being tricked, you lose all sense of danger. this is something that should probably be handled via a difficulty choice, with an option to just have the game be full challenge. (although the existence of that choice does clue the player into the experience they’ll be getting so there is an issue there as well) fun in games does not always come from narrowly winning, but from finding the solution to something that’s stumping you or overcoming an obstacle you’ve been running into for a while. annoying and avoidable as the circumstances leading up to it may have been, finally catching that rope was probably a very good feeling. i think the game needs to be able to preserve that sense of progression to be truly fun. the “oh i’m getting better at this” or the “aha! i’ve bested you, game!” if the player knows they’re being carefully monitored and that the situation is adjusting due to weather or not they’re playing bad or good, these moments will not feel earned. a DM can lower a monsters HP mid battle or lie about rolls if it looks like the players are going to get stomped. but if this happens every encounter, battles will stop being exciting and the players will go through the motions until the DM decides they’ve won.
I find the Dark Souls method is just an insanely huge de-motivation factor. Losing all the progress I've made because I slipped up twice just makes me want to completely quit, and it has done that to me for multiple games. The difficulty I find is fine, the punishment I don't. Roguelikes (Hades, Inscryption) tend to feel the best, mainly given that I don't feel like I'm losing much progress in the end. If I win a run or I lose a run, I'm going to the start again anyway. In Hades I get some more currency to spend anyway so it's never a total waste.
If anything I consider this to be the complete opposite. The Dark souls method is less punishing than the rougelike imo. In a souls game you can only lose your souls and progress to the next checkpoint. But both of those are easy to remedy as so long as you're not hoarding souls you can make back up the souls without too much trouble or often make more than that from a boss fight. The loss in checkpoint progress is outside of dark souls 1 minimal compared to rougelikes and in ds1 simply knowing which enemy is where is a huge benefit to making it through the section making it notably easier to retread an area. Meanwhile rouglikes take more than your currency they take your entire build away and make you have to go through and rebuild adjusting to the rng drops. Ontop of that a loss means you need to go through several levels and boss fights to get back to where you last where easily taking several times as long as a souls run from checkpoint to chekpoint. The only advantage a rouglike has is that in some games you can get small permanent upgrades or increases to weapon pools.
I really dislike games that do not put a checkpoint before boss battles. No I do not want to keep walking through half a level just to die against the boss again. Also it pulls back the curtain of the enemy AI when you can more or less ignore it by quickly rolling by (e.g. in Dark souls). Currently playing hollownight for the first time and it has the same issue. TL;DR: Put save points before your bosses!
That's why I never got into the Souls games. The idea to have to slog all the way back AGAIN to try a new approach and getting one shotted AGAIN made me quit the first one. You don't even have to plonk it right before the boss room, but at least make it reasonably near. Or keep the things dead I killed on the way.
@@Virtualblueart Later souls-like games like Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring got a lot better about putting a checkpoint right before a boss fight, for what it's worth. Turns out you are not the only one who got *really* tired of "the runback".
It depends. Sometimes part of the challenge is reaching the boss in a good enough state to survive the encounter. In Dark Souls, though, it's too easy to run past everything, making the runback just a chore.
I really liked what Prey (2006) did. Unlike other fps games of its era (that would typically use generic autosaves), upon dying, you would go to the realm of the dead and hunt spirits/demons that would determine how much health/mana you would respawn with. This little minigame would take about a minute, and in delaying your progress, death would still feel like a setback, but ultimately no progress was lost. And the player characters pseudo immortality was actually part of the plot, too. A more modern game that I like is Devil May Cry 5. Upon death, you get to choose: -spend a small amount of (in game) currency to revive with a sliver of health -spend a medium amount to revive with a substantial amount of health -spend a large amount (or a specific item) to revive with full health/devil trigger (mana) OR -start from checkpoint Also the amount of currency required for the revival would increase by a factor of 10 if you die again in the same mission. So you'd be betting on your own skill ("Can I defeat this boss, who is also almost dead, with just the minimal amount of healing?")
I think it is worth pointing out that there are games that don't use death and restarting as the fail state, but the game keeps going. This kind of innovation started with FIFA and NBA2k where if you lose the season keeps going and you have to figure out what you need to do to still finish the season on top. The Devs at shadow of Mordor said that they took inspiration from this and made it so when you die in their game the game keeps going. If the orc that killed you was just a regular grunt, they get promoted to be an officer. If they were an officer they get stronger. There still is death but the consequences are small because in the lore of the game the story keeps moving forward but the bad guys remember you. Its kind of a cool mechanic.
if we are talking death in a video game "In Stars And Time." has a very unique take on it, your deaths simply became traumatizing parts of the narrative.
Lying to the player backfires the moment they realize what's going on. Just like in real life, lying can be expedient up front but always makes things worse in the long run.
This was my thought as well. If a game deceives the player for the purpose of keeping them in the sweet spot and the player realizes this, the player's trust is broken and all immersion is out the window. It's difficult to feel that flow state when you know that the game has a perpetual interest in keeping you alive, and will break the rules in your favor for that purpose.
Yeah. Lying to the player is one of those "clever game designer things" that seem good on paper and in GDC presentations, but rarely make the game better in any real way.
I abhor RE4's "adaptive" difficulty mechanic (don't know if it's in the remake, but I am referring to the OG). I don't want the game to decide for me to turn the challenge down. I was surprised by the number of people who praised that mechanic.
My personal biggest example of that is in the first Amnesia game. As soon as you realize that the game will remove enemies from certain sections if you keep dying there, all the tension is *gone*. It is a clever little lie that they present (as the game won't tell you this and so you will believe that there are always enemies on the prowl) to keep tensions high, but also eliminate the frustration that goes directly against horror. It's a tough call tbh.
_Amnesia The Dark Descent_ is a game I'm too much of a bitch to complete even though death not only has no conseqeunces but actually _rewards_ you by removing any enemies who kill you from impeding your progress. It gets around the whole problem of death as a punishment to condition the player through negative reinforcement by making the scares themselves so effective that just being in the presences of the enemies -- or even part of the game where you know you're liable to be forced to confront one, like a dead end containig a puzzle -- is all the incentive needed to create th desired experience. It truly managesot transcend the whole problem. At least if you're me and a little bitch.
Funny you should bring this up. I recently heard in an interview snippet with the Amnesia devs that they increased the pressure by simply letting players believe that a total loss of sanity would kill them. Apparently, it doesn’t. You just have sanity loss visual effects and then… regain some sanity.
@@LynceusGlaciermaw Yeah, it wasn't a great system in terms of consequences, but it worked very well insofar as it made it easier for you to keep playing. To keep being immersed. Edit: Also, as has been mentioned, most "consequences" are fake anyway. You don't live with your consequences, you just get your time wasted. Perhaps you learn something and that knowledge is more meaningful when there is high difficulty, but narratively it's meaningless.
@@burningsheep4473 absolutely, it is actually a crafty strategy and doesn’t seem like it would be hard to implement. A smoke and mirrors technique, but that’s really what we want from our media - especially the stuff that’s meant to mess with our heads a little. And I don’t think I’d call it entirely meaningless in the narrative sense. It could be interpreted as the fortitude of the main character in that awful situation - memory lost, mind slipping, hunted, confused, but he shows his true mettle in soldiering on.
ny problem with this game was that it was terrifying and stressful... until I died and respawned. At which point all the tension was gone because like... I died and now was fine. Hey invisible water monster, what are you gonna do? Kill me again? I'll just come back. It didn't matter if the monster was still there because it couldn't do anything to me that hadn't been more than an inconvenience.
As an old school gamer, I had no problem with dying in a game meaning that I would "lose hours of progress". I was used to it and it and created a tension that engaged you because the stakes were pretty high. The first game I ever played where the Fail State was reduced to inconsequential levels was Soul Reaver. I got to a point where I wasn't sure how to progress the story and dying just returned me to the beginning with a pat on the head and a patronising "Keep at it". After a few failed tries to figure out how to get to the next area and some self inflicted deaths since the entire area had been wiped of enemies, I found myself at a place where the game offered no direction and no consequences. Haven't even had the urge to go back or watch a play through.
If there is one thing gamers put on a pedestal above all other game designs is... ..consistency. A game that full of dying, hard challenges, and multiple hurdles to recover progress is wonderful for those that feel progress in the face of high stress. But it would break the gamers' idea of "sportsmanship" if that game was designed to have inconsistent items, challenges, quests, and recovery states. You uncover the core desire of gaming when you break the very thing that gaming does more than IRL challenges. A game is addictive because we assume it to be consistent in items, quests, patterns, and recovery.
I really like games where “death has permanent consequences”. But I don’t really mean permadeath, instead, the opposite, where death doesn’t result in loading a previous save file. Games like dark souls where you can still drop the souls you earned where you die, and you can go pick them up later fits this theme.
I guess Pikmin had another interesting take on dying. If you die in the field, you go back to the ship, day ends, all the pikmin you had with you die*, going forward from that point you have one less day within your time limit. But the game doesn't autosave. It pretty explicitly asks you whether you want to save after summarizing the day's performance, and offers to let you go back to the last save instead. The game seems designed around asking the player to optimize their run through the day like a speedrunner, and the later games' rewind mechanic makes it more explicit *of course when Pikmin die, they can end up leaving seeds so that they will be reborn out in the field, which can sometimes be more annoying than helpful because it means at the start of the day you've got one less Pikmin available to be taken out of the onion for the day's campaign.
Remember in LBP 1, the respawn checkpoint when it’s out of retries it glows in red with an alarm sound effect , it was so terrifying as a kid reminding me that if i fail next time it’s game over
I think a key factor in our reaction to fail state impacts is whether the punishment fits the crime. I began unapologetically save-scumming Red Dead 2 after that random encounter in Saint Denis where Arthur gets mugged - there was no indication I was about to walk into a situation that'd take half my money with no opportunity to fight my way out of it/chase down the perps. Whereas if I die in failing a skill-based challenge that I should really be sailing through unharmed, I'd be more accepting of a harsh punishment due to being a dunce.
this is one thing I really enjoyed about Shadow of Mordor. as in many games, you would die and keep coming back. but here, it was explained by the narrative. rather than a punishment, being reborn actually gained the pc xp - so if I let my less-gamery partner or my nieces play, eventually they might get to a point where they ARE stable, just by bungling. heck, if you DON'T die in Shadow of Mordor? you're missing part of one of its biggest mechanics - the Nemesis System. If an orc never kills you, you never get to get revenge on THAT SPECIFIC ORC - as he taunts you for having previously slayed you. it's a very satisfying experience, I can assure you.
Take Rimworld, for example. If everybody you know and love is down, bleeding out on the floor because some cannibals raided your colony, that might be game over. Or there's an event trigger: a Man in Black arrives. Always armed, you gain control of this newcomer to give you one last shot of saving the day. Played well, and with luck that your savior is actually any good, you might save some or all of your people. Even though your house burned to the ground, that's just stuff. This is a good fail-state imho.
I'd say that Rimworld very rarely goes so bad you actually lose your colony. Events usually appear to save you when you need it the most, or raiders never fully finishes you off. Sure, you lose a lot of progress, but you've got one hell of a story to tell. Which is the point of the game. And what you lose in those situations also scales down any future raids and negative stuff, which keeps the difficulty more even.
Videos like this are really fun, because they give me a glimpse of how my game ideas will work. This one told me that I'm in the right track by explaining this Souls example. Losing resources upon death sucks, but at the same time is a necessary consequence for tension to be present. But being able to retrieve these lost resources by revisiting the scene of your death adds another consequence, a positive one. The game turned your failure into a new objective. It makes the game more engaging.
My favorite game when it comes to death mechanics is Shadow of Mordor. Dying causes the orc who killed you to be promoted and gain prestige, which accomplishes all the things death should in a game. It punishes the player by making that orc more powerful the next time you fight him, it makes the player more invested by turning the orc into a personal nemesis, and it avoids the problem of repetition by adding a bit of entropy to the game world as well (dying advances time, which shuffles the orc hierarchy through their Darwinian infighting). It perfectly succeeds in making death feel like a failure without compromising the experience.
I don't have too many thoughts on game death. My primary one is when a game is insistent on you watching the death animation every time you die in a game where death is common. It wouldn't be bad if respawns were instant, but in games like Dark Souls, it's frustrating waiting, like, 15 seconds just to get to a loading screen.
I think that's the reason why rogue-likes/rogue-lites have become so popular recently. Death has meaningful consequences in that genre, it's all or nothing. And Hades, which is one of the best if not the best title in the genre of action rogue-lites, really leans into the death mechanic. You die and have to start over but everytime you die you get to experience more of the story, get to interact with the characters. There is so much story elements to explore that each death feels like you would still progress giving it both a consequence but also a benefit. I think more games should handle it like that.
Excellent video; this was the exact issue I had with Moonlighter. Not to rehash the great video Jack did years ago on Previously Recorded, but the complete lack of any stakes just killed the whole game for me.
I recently had a bad death experience in Astroneer. I was carrying a backpack full of high value items and immediately died as I got out of my rocket because I glitched through the floor and slipped to the center of the plannet. The way death works in this game is it leaves your backpack behind and respawns you at your last "safe" location. You can go back and fetch it if you want. Respawning in my rocket, I had the option of taking off to another one of my bases and come back later with more gear. However, I was back home, and thought glitches happens and just tried to get out again... The same thing happened. My old body dissappear with all of the gear. Most of it is unique in the world and cannot be crafted again. I. didn't. knew. that. The game never tells you. You have to die with enough rare stuff to be worth trying to get your body to learn about this. I struggled for 2 hours, gearing back up and prepping to get my body. When I finally reached it, and seeing the backpack completely empty with no sign of the old stuff... I was incredibly pissed. If it was a skill issue, I would've been more open to it. Sure you take a risk, you die that's that. This happened because of a _bug_. Something saves are supposed to protect you against! At that point, 30 hours in, I had the choice of starting a new game, or ignoring the problem and essentially play on hard mode for the rest of the game. This wasn't my first playthrough and I only wanted to experience the new end game content tied to these items... it isn't worth the time anymore.
9:07 Bit of a spoiler for Undertale, but the omega flowey boss fight does this exact thing with the lying health bar. The first hit or 2 look like they do more then half of your health bar and puts you on edge, but every subsequent hit takes less and less, as your actual health bar is something like 12 hits or so. Really adds tension without the player immediately realizing they are a lot more safe than they initially thought.
The first thing the game taught me after launching Elden Ring for the first time: "It's fine to die. You're supposed to." Someone else pointed the finger at games that lock you out of playing for a while when you die (cutscene, loadings, having to walk for several minutes...). I agree this is the worst experience. I want two things when dying in a game: - Being able to retry immediately (not necessarily from the same spot, but from a point that feels like the start of the segment where I died at worst). - Understanding what I did wrong (or at least getting a clue) so I can plan, if not a strategy to win, a strategy to observe. Oh, and third, not being killed by a F***ING CLIFF in a non-platformer game. Jumping "puzzles" can go to hell.
There are research papers on "death" in video games. One of the papers noted that although it is usually a "punishment", in capture-the-flag or otherwise "objective" FPS games, there are examples where a player dies intentionally to get back to their base faster. I can't say I never intentionally died in TF2, to build my teleporter faster and have more metal for the other upgrades.
an example of dying to get back to your base that popped into my head when i was reading your comment was the Minecraft minigame Bedwar. if you are unfamiliar it the game mode has it so that you can infinitely respawn until your bed is broken. once that happens you cant respawn anymore so a common strategy is if you see someone at your base from far away (for example using the alarm trap) you jump into the void and try to stop them from breaking your bed, but the downside of that is that you lose all of the items you have on you except your armor (and some tools but those are downgraded by a level) and only have a wooden sword to defend yourself.
Katana Zero has a brilliant in universe explanation for why you get to respawn, and the story plays with this idea in interesting ways. It also pretty nails, so although you only lose at max 2 mins of progress there's still stakes.
So let's talk about Dragon's Dogma and it's sequels super punishing failure states. In the first game you would just die (until you got to the end game) and have to reload a save. It's not a hard game but you had better be prepared for what you were trying to do or you could get wrecked. In the sequel they let you try again from an autosave (with a health penalty) but again if you were not prepared you're better off just running away. This failure system is meant to encourage the same kind of thoughtful preparation and planning you bring up with Kingdom Come. Ironically it would have just been better off with the original system of "oops you died, better save your game more often" because the new system just make players mad that they can't beat a challenge with less health that they were unprepared for in the first place. I know they wanted to have a way to avoid punishing players for dying to something stupid such as falling too far or accidentally blowing themselves up (happened a lot in the first game). You just can't really stop players from using some games systems to make themselves angry.
I like how Outward handles "death". Any time your character is defeated (which will happen fairly often), they are knocked out and wake up somewhere else and sometime later. There are a number of scenarios, from "rescued by someone from the nearby settlement" to "captured by bandits". Your stuff is always nearby, so you don't lose anything as long as you take the time to look, but you'll often have an immediate challenge to keep play interesting. And if you keep getting knocked out, the RNG will eventually put you back in town, where you can lick your wounds and consider your life choices. Occasionally there is a slightly more permanent penalty: some of the main quests are on timers, so getting knocked out runs down the clock. But even if you fail those quests, the game continues. It took some getting used to, but in the end it was nice to know that the game would keep me playing, even if all my plans fell apart.
Personally, I hate repetition and I don't care about getting gud, espetially if it implies repetition. For me the perfect game starts by letting me save whenever I want (plus frequent automatic saving), gives me good information about the challenges ahead and let's me tweak how much I want to risk myself, preferably with multiple ways to solve each challenge. The Souls system works terribly for me, may sound like a great way to balance tension on paper, until you lose a ton of souls once or twice and end up tailoring your playstyle to a very conservative, grindy and ultimately boring way.
I agree with ya on the Souls system for deaths. That system is why I don't play Souls games. Losing all your souls/whatever to some cheap enemy or boss, not fun.
The secret really boils down to "never go to a new place with souls on you", spending any spare change on levels and upgrades (or upgrade materials and consumables) both gives you better odds and peace of mind knowing you've got nothing to lose. Though I really like how some games just gives you a way to retrieve a bloodstain remotely (like the hot springs in Code Vein and the Spirit Candle consumable in Nioh) so you can avoid a stressful dangerous runback if you've dropped too many souls to risk losing.
@@GameDevYal Yeah!, I tend to do that, but it also happens that one of my favorite things in games is exploration and the souls system interferes very negatively with that. Every new path I find, the first thing I do is check the souls: if I have enough to level up or I'm close I go back to the last bonefire and cash them out, which breaks the momentum, but, even if I'm low on souls, new areas usually mean rapid increase in souls as you go, so the further you go into new territory, the less you enjoy it, :/ It also doesn't help that all the great level design ideas are only great the first out of many-many times that you encounter them. I don't know, maybe a scarce item that let's you trap the souls you have into an item could help here.
This is why I like the Bethesda style games. I can explore at my own pace and just see what is out there but if I die it is only a reloaded save away. In Fallout if the enemy is just too hard for me .... well the mirv fatman will solve that problem.
Everybody wants different things from game difficulty, so I think the best thing is accessibility options on top of difficulty options. RE4 had dynamic difficulty settings that adjusted so the player was always on the edge - but the better version of that would be: 1. Give players the choice of Easy, Medium, Hard, AND Dynamic difficulty. 2. If you choose Dynamic difficulty, then give the player options to tweak where the game will settle the difficulty based on your skills. Do you want it to adjust so you're always on the edge, or always comfortable but never steamrolling, or total steamroll, etc.
If dying and not dying breaks tension, then there's a simple solution, just reward not dying but not punish dying. Using Dark Souls as an example, if you die, you immediately deposit your souls, but if you reach a bonfire, you get an extra 50% on your held souls. This creates a nice risk-reward without actually punishing you. You feel rewarded for doing well, but you don't feel like you wasted your time if you died.
in the surge(and lords of the fallen), every enemy you kill increases a multiplier so each enemy after that drops more and more scrap(souls) but dying or vistitning a medbay(a bonfire) resets that multiplier you can also bank scrap(souls) as well but you need to visit a medbay which resets the multiplier
That doesn't work at all in the example you give. Giving a 50% of yout stored souls even if only restricted to new bonfires encourages holding onto souls to get bigger bonuses. But that's far from how souls are meant to function. In DS you're practically never incentivized to hold souls, if anything you're incentivized to spend whenever possible from how easy it is to lose them. The whole point being that spending them on weapons or levelling means you're never going to lose more than a level or 2, which sure can hurt but is easily recoverable. But with this change its now going to be better to hold on to souls to get that 50% increase, you'll be incentivized to not spend souls before a boss to level but to keep them through the boss fight so you can get the bonus. Ontop of that this would just worsen some of the issues in the games. People who're capable of holding on to souls tend to already have too much on hand and overlevel, this change would only widen the soul level gap and make it harder to balance the game when people are going to approach fights with even bigger souls ranges.
@@theresnothinghere1745 your arguments are all over the place. If people can overlevel in the first place, then it's a matter of wasting people's time and grinding out levels to make the game easier for them anyway. Holding onto souls before a boss fight makes no sense if you're struggling. You're either not struggling, which means you can do a "no bonfire run" anyway, or you're not as good as you think you are, and will die in the boss fight anyway, which won't make collecting all those souls a waste of time.
@@GameFuMaster "If people can overlevel in the first place, then it's a matter of wasting people's time and grinding out levels to make the game easier for them anyway" That's wrong. People can overlevel without grind at all because the devs are expecting some souls to be lost on death. All this does is widen the soul gap between people who tend to lose souls and those who don;t. "Holding onto souls before a boss fight makes no sense if you're struggling." But it does not all bosses are difficult to recoup the souls from many bosses in the series either start slowly walking or with an easy to read attack giving the player time to recover their souls. Not to mention depending on the game there are means to circumvent this like repairable equipment that allows you too keep your souls after death. Ontop of that this isn't only for bosses but for world traversal too, rather than picking up their souls in a difficult area then going back to spend them you are encouraging them to continue forward with all the souls they have.
My favorite death state mechanic comes from Outward. When you lose all your HP (which is pretty often early game) the game randomly selects a failure event from a location specific list for your character. You get a variety of things like a beast dragging back to its den, bandits making you a slave, random good npcs taking you to safe space, or simply dragging yourself to the dungeon entrance before passing out. Regardless time passes and your max stats suffer until treatment via items or rest. What truly makes it special in my opinion is that sometimes the failure actually puts you in a more advantageous position. Trying to make your back to town with a pack of loot to sale? Well a hunter might just drag your limp body there for you. Got lost in on the map? Well someone dragged your body to a point of interest where you can get your bearings and rest up? In Outward the deaths never feel like a game over, just an opportunity to retry from a different angle.
It's rather odd, I've never experienced death to heighten tension so much as simply killing my flow. Dark Souls 2 and Sekiro were the games I played with the most punishing death states and halfway through these games, I was just done. I wasn't invested in the story, the mechanics or the supposed reward of success or 'relief' as it's put here. It wasn't even a boss I failed to kill, I just sat there for a minute, realized I didn't care at all about the game and moved on. The reason I tried to play FromSoft games in the first place is because on paper, difficult games are supposed to be right up my alley. But somehow these two weren't. I played Elden Ring shortly after release and had a good time with it, until one day I noticed that I wasn't having a good time -all- the time. Certain boss fights were needlessly frustrating and the constant bait and switch feinting of certain enemies, just bog standard mooks was grating. Considering that Elden Ring's halfway point is much farther in thanh that of DS 2 and Sekiro, I got a lot more out of ER than the other games, but again, I decided one day that I was having more fun with other games. I think the constant feinting was getting on my nerves more than anything. I wish games were designed to allow for setbacks, rather than outright killing you. Sure, you have your checkpoints or your multiple lives and what have you, but why aren't games designed to allow for failure and still progress the game itself? Why is a failure state an automatic game over, or a progression obstacle? We're taught in real life that failure leads to success, and you may argue that deaths in FromSoft games accomplish exactly that, but how many times do you die in real life trying to figure out a problem? How many times are you killed trying to change a lightbulb? Granted, I've not had the pleasure of fighting a mutated knight that has somehow fused with their horse in real life yet but my point still stands on risky or dangerous challenges. Failures should not abruptly end your progress. Progress should be more malleable in games to better represent real life. Here's an example of what I'd like to see in games. Let's say I'm going to do a presentation at an office meeting discussing new product ideas. There will be five board members present who will decide whether or not to move forward with the product. Your job is to convince at least three of them to get the green light. You do your presentation, but this is only one shot for this particular product idea. You can't reload an earlier save to try a different dialog tree, you can't drink a potion of persuasion during the presentation if things don't go your way. Now imagine you failed that presentation. You still have your job, the product you suggested just won't be moved forward and another is chosen. You failed to get the green light, but you did not automatically game over. You won't be fired, you won't be asked to never again make these presentations. And presumably you're not killed for your failure either. However, you learned about the preferences of the people at that meeting and can prepare your next product presentation accordingly, adjusting for their personalities and interests. And maybe the board members you did convince will have you make another presentation for a slightly altered product to get the others on board. You make progress in real live through failure. In games? You simply reload. P.S.: I also take umbrage with doubly punishing a player for dying. You died, it killed your flow, you're set back and then you also lost all resources you collected thus far? Why? Why kick the player while they're down? That just seems cynical and hateful to me.
have you played wario land 2 and 3? wario doesn't die in 'em, and in boss rooms, if you fail you are just removed from the boss room and have to make your way back to 'em.
I think that death is simply the easiest way to represent restarting a task in games, given their frequent action-oriented focus. And I would argue that restarting a task after failure *is* a common outcome of real life tasks. Take the light bulb example. If you fail to change a lightbulb, usually, it means you messed up a step and the smart move is to pick up from where you're certain you did it correctly. It's the same if you fail to complete a math problem, to give another example. Not all real life problems are like this, of course, especially social ones where failure will affect others' perceptions of you -- but it is a model that exists in real life, even if the stakes aren't as high as death. A fundamental part of a lot of games that makes them so satisfying is gradually progressing from being a novice to a master, and the most basic way to accomplish this is through repetition. The same applies to a lot of real life skills; if you want to become a master pianist, you start with an easy piece. If you fail, try again. Eventually, after enough trying, you'll perform that piece adequately, and at that point you'll pursue more challenging pieces to perform. Most games follow a similar loop -- you're given a challenge and put effort into completing it until you have, at which point you're given a more difficult challenge. The office-presentation analogy functions very similarly to video game deaths, actually -- if you fail in either, you're in the same position you were prior to failing, with the advantage of greater knowledge. You know what to expect from the task you've already failed at once, and you have to succeed where you failed last time, using that knowledge. How is that any different from being put back a few steps in a video game? Because if you remove the framing of "death", failing in a video game is just being sent back to the last place you succeeded in getting to. It's rare for a game to send you back to the very beginning for failure.
It's also not common in games. Old school like Sonic or Super Mario you took damage or died it lowered your score it didn't weaken your character that much. You'd have lives so you could get a game over but it didn't screw you completely.
I love Hades because it made death much less frustrating than any other game I have ever played. After being defeated in any game, I am usually angry at myself and disheartened by what I couldn't achieve. In Hades these feelings are lessened because I would always get to see the story progress by either getting new dialogues or accomplishing something else in the lobby area. Even if you lost, the game made you feel like the momentum hadn't been lost completely.
To me it all depends on how many mistakes on my part separate me from "full power" to "failure". If everything is a one-hit KO then I want a smaller punishment. If I can survive a couple of enemy attacks then I'm fine re-running a whole gauntlet.
My favourite most memorable time in any survial horror game is the bit between game start and my first death. The fear of that first death is more important than any failure state or lost minutes or hours of progress. Whilst good game devs can rank up the broken tension again, it is never quite to the same extent.
Reminds me of the time I tried to play “Limbo” where basically you die over and over again in trial and error gameplay until you solve the little platforming puzzle and then it’s onto the next one. I couldn’t play it for long before losing interest. It didn’t feel like any skill was involved or that I was in control of the game at all… just keep dying until you understand the gimmick
Oh yeah, when I finally got to play Limbo I couldn't stand it. I think Inside is a lot better in this regard, from what I've seen of the game at least. Also just more interesting looking narrative.
LIMBO has one trial-and-error puzzle that will instantly kill you (at least I only remember one, after playing through it a few times--it's the bit where you jump on a button and a crusher descends from the ceiling, but there's another button just next to it that you need to jump on to AVOID being crushed, and a naive playthrough has no way to tell which is which that I've figured out). Many, many puzzles can be got through with quick thinking, otherwise, though they're often surprising after the static puzzles with no time factor.
@@erikpedersen4685 No. Just... no. Every puzzle in Limbo will instantly kill you in a multitude of ways. Over and over again. Trial and error is the core game loop. And it's not "quick thinking" that gets you though the puzzles. It's figuring out what each gimmick is where you just have to know what to do, and you can usually uncover it - again - via dying many times over and over.
Exactly my feelings on Limbo and Inside. I heard how highly these two games were regarded so my expectations were high going into them and I just didn't get it. The gameplay was frustrating and not fun.
@@BryanSolo_1 not trying to be mean or anything but I think you might just be bad at puzzle platformer games. I died in Limbo maybe three or so times, one was the first bear trap and the other was the final puzzle. I also remember dying to the electrical HOTEL sign
0:42 Ah, I know how to handle this! If the player dies, they lose the whole game and all their save files, then they have to slot a quarter in to try again!
The Souls games also trivialize death. Once you get stuck at a boss, the longer that lasts, the less you care about dying. Former traps and pitfalls and challenging enemies are now mere annoyances standing between you and a full health retry at the boss. You no longer care about your souls because you got all the levels out them you were going to get before this boss and so the corpse run also becomes pointless for a while. Then tension at that point is the same as a game which you could save-scum, whilst the annoyance is higher cuz RNG keeps aligning against you and you occasionally don't arrive at the boss with full health. Yeah no, I don't like dying in games and will always try to avoid it regardless of how punishing it is. It doesn't matter if the death is right after a save, with an instant re-spawn, requires a little bit of level replaying or or a lot. The only thing that will make me trivialize a death in a game is how "cheap" that death came, the more unfair or unpredictable or uncontrollable it seems the less I care about it. By making saving uncertain and therefore a death more punishing you aren't raising my tension with the game, well ok you are, but at same time you are making me question whether then having to re-do all the progress I lost is the best use of my time and whether perhaps a more certain use of my time, in order words spending it on something that will lose me no progress, might not perhaps be better. In other words you are persistently making me want to play the game less regardless of how rewarding the "relief" of finally being able to secure that progress again might be. I personally would find Souls games a LOT more enjoyable if there was no consequence to death. If I could focus purely on ME VS the enemy in front of me without having to worry about any other factors whatsoever. If every step forward was guaranteed progress and there was far less to constantly re-do.
If Souls games had no consequence for death I might've actually played any of them, or any of the games that advertise themselves as Souls-like. One of the main thing I like in games is exploring, and the moment the game says, "go back to where you died or lose progress," it discourages exploration and encourages safe play. It's like the turtle gameplay of XCOM they tried to get rid of with timed missions.
having consequences for death is overrated. it's already trivial, it's a game, death is just there to point out that i messed up. yes, thank you game, i know i suck at this part. now can i just get back and try it again without you wasting my time through long death animations and replaying a part i've already mastered. i prefer games where death is instant and you can attempt the hard part again within a few seconds. in a lot of games i just think about how much more i'd enjoy them if I could use save states.
Maybe that's why I never experienced any of the highs that people talk about in Dark Souls. Realizing that dying meant losing my souls, I divided my play in two: (1) protracted level grinding and shopping, and (2) progressing through the game's objectives. This meant I paid zero attention to my soul count when not grinding. I could run through new areas trying different approaches and doing dumb stuff without worrying about losing souls. Once you realize that 50,000 souls is only like three minutes of grinding in Anor Londo, the tension completely dissipates.
The corpse run consequence of death is one that I'm particularly not a fan of. Be it lost souls or haze or gear or whatever, it reduces my joy in the game and the gaming experience. Consider that perhaps the reason one died is due to a challenging fight. One dies. One is now measurably weaker due to the "left behind mcguffin-sauce" and must again face the fight that bested them last time, only now they are weaker. Bah, I say. Fie on it, I say. Also, as an aging gamer, I find that the need to stop and save on my schedule, not the game's schedule, is vital to my happiness. Hording save spots/save items/gimmick-du-jour-to-prevent-save-scumming only makes it more difficult for me to properly enjoy the game, so it crimps my joy, so I tend to move on to other games that are joy-crimp lessened. Ya? Also, consider that the tension/release you speak of can also be found in being blocked from advancing the story. If I can't progress the game past a certain point due to dying to a boss, I'm as tense as I could be when there is a "sting of death" consequence. There is already a consequence of being unable to advance the story. Frankly, that's enough.
I think the corpse run mechanic - ironically - can work better in less difficult games. I feel it doesn't matter too much in Diablo 2 though as it's usually not too difficult to retrieve your body without too much danger of dying again. But death is also generally something that doesn't happen a lot so when you have to do a corpse run then that's actually somewhat memorable. A little bit of player story woven around one of the rare deaths. Darkwood ended up having a good compromise on Normal difficulty. On that difficulty you cannot die for good, so while death can be frustrating and you can lose out on some ressource gain, that's it. Even corpse runs are mostly a matter of getting back important items, because they can't easily be replaced and are needed. But they will not disappear and the danger of repeated death is also not that high as you will probably not take the risk of gettting killed again. Especially not while the night is approaching.
I find it very ironic people are treating a corpse runback as a punishment when it isn't. In any other game you would lose all your levels, currency, xp, items unlocked, major enemies killed since the last checkpoint. Because dying resets you to a previous checkpoint before you obtained those. A corpse runback is giving you a second chanece to get back your currency and xp while often letting you keep everything else. Failing a corpse runback is at worst just doing the same thing a reset to checkpoint system does.
I feel that death and failstates are becoming more of a 'well, it's always been done' thing. Early games needed failstates because they were built on simple win/lose mechanics. Also coin-ops needed you to fail to keep spending! Modern narrative-driven games are built on these foundations, but many don't actually need punishing failstates.
I would offer Hotline Miami as a good example of a rapid death system. On each floor of a level, you have to kill every enemy without taking a single hit, get hit once you die. However, you only hit the 'R' button and BAM, you're back in it immediately with no load time to try again. It forms this rapid trial and error that will not be the same every time (like little nightmares 2) and encourages trying different approaches. Once you clean up a floor/section you get a checkpoint and go to the next floor or leave the level. Its feels pretty clean and engaging.... well for me anyways.
definitely one of the better designs. Frequent checkpoints and quick reloads are the key for me to stay invested in a game.
Definitely. It creates tension in an interesting way, too. It's still that "tension and release" cycle, but at much more rapid intervals. You suck in a breath, engage in a few seconds of frantic violence, die, release that tension, and immediately repeat. The tension comes in short sprints and short breathers, which has a very distinctive cadence that I think a lot of players agree worked really well.
in a similar fashion, super meat boy, instant restarts, and when you finish a level you see all your ghosts running dieing and your successful run all at once
Titan Souls on the other hand...
@@DarkPlague20 It also helps that SMB's levels are all really short, so starting from scratch isn't that demotivating (and dying a lot is what the whole game is marketed around).
The more I try to think of a bad death state in a game the more I think about deaths with frustrating down times. Long loading screens, unskippable cutscenes, poor checkpointing. Anything that delays the time between me failing and me making another attempt can really affect my experience in a difficult section.
Especially so if the death is not the result of the actions of the player (worst propably bugs and glitches).
Pretty much Dark Souls
@@steffenknoll9136or unwarned instakill traps/hidden bossfights that lock you in
@@TheFormidibleDan That one boss in sekiro.😑
@@Ziel23987 ''poor checkpointing'' in Dark souls there is a penalty for dying but you are dying because of your skill or to be precise lack of it, if someone is flustrated because of that why would you even try dark souls or other soulsborn games? it would be better to play new assasin games or stardew valley (aka easy games)
One critical thing to keep in mind, is there is no catch all goldilocks zone. Different people want different things, and even for the same person, wants different things for different games.
As whole though, I wish more games had fail forwards mechanics though.
There are Quick Saves and Rogue Lights.
No one wants Hard Core, but no one wants a cheap loss. As in the majority. There's a point when "load to last save" becomes a chore over challenge.
Technically no, but it can be achieved with a dynamic system, like in Resident Evil 4, that adapts to your abilities so that you always feel right on the edge.
@@absolstoryoffiction6615 I've fallen for the "perfect minute" kind of game. It's excrustiatingly hard but you only lose at most 1 minute of gameplay.
@@rhythmrobber But even that isn't something that's suitable for all players. Players who are playing the game multiple times or are just the type to apply constant scrutiny may notice the adaptive difficulty and lose interest because they realize that their performance is inconsequential.
Yeah, i actually hate the feeling of tension in souls games, but love roguelikes where you lose all progress when you die. It’s like retrieving souls just feel like a chore
To flip this on its head .. death in Celeste having virtually no consequence is perfect and necessary
Games like Celeste, Super Meatboy, and Hotline Miami are designed with "do small set of challenge, move on to next" in mind. They're designed to be intentionally very difficult with the caveat that you will get unlimited retries that put you immediately back in the action since you will die a lot.
The game the video referred to was just a bunch of cheap kills that would only fool you once, which derailed the tension.
I would argue Celeste actually does have a consequence for death. It's just that the consequence is time and another tick on the death counter. Of course, I suppose every game has that as a consequence for death, so your point is still valid.
@VictorLHouette the penalty of death should be directly related to the difficulty of the individual challenges. Celeste has some of the hardest in gaming, but you get to slam your head against it so often it doesn't stop being engaging nor takes too long.
Satisfactory can have you take hours to backtrack to where you died and get your stuff back. But unless you're a fool, you don't venture out that far with all your build gear and you'll just have travel gear on you. So you could just choose to rebuild them and go back later. However it's also not a combat challenging game, so while it might take a bit you can probably just go and get it no issue.
@@GoeTeeks Yea, I also feel that platforming games inherently have high tension as the fear of falling is pretty universal and usually and historically, an instant game-over.
Their adaptation becomes to make the punishment less severe and so that it's not a touch of death game like crash bandicoot or donkey kong country, which while loved, have a very large difficulty barrier on the stress side.
@@dddmemaybe I do like how games these days tend to just deal damage and reset the player's position when falling in a pit or crashing on spikes. Makes those slight mistakes less severe.
The funniest part about the bit with the rope is that he's so close his character model clipps right through the damn thing.
Gotta admit, I disable item drop upon death when I play minecraft. I still like monsters, but the lost loot just pushes my cosy game over the edge to frustration town
Yesssssss. I don't mind fetching my things, but I hate that they just vanish if you take too long getting them. I love when modpacks add a gravestone mechanic so nothing gets deleted, but without one I just used keepinventory.
Multiplayer mode, I don't mind the item drop on death. Other people can pick it up for you, and there's more ways to safely retrieve it yourself.
But when playing minecraft solo, it's definitely a demotivator. Just the thought of dropping an Elytra on a spot that's impossible to get to without a backup Elytra (or just losing it to lava...) That's a gut punch to me.
Infinite scaling map size with no teleporting. Hard pass on some of that shit.
I used to be against this, thinking it spoiled the game. Joined a server that had it on and realized quickly how much it made for, as one friend put it, “much happier gameplay.”
I like to use gravestone mods for this exact reason. Keep inventory is too cheaty for me but losing items after running naked back through deadly unlit caves is also not fun. Also using journey map to teleport back to my death is also mind numbingly boring. It would be better if we respawned within 200 blocks of our death and had a gravestone, and had to work our way back to our death point in a manner of ways. 7dtd has this option and you can even choose to keep hotbar items too which makes it just a tad easier to get your hard earned loot back.
Traps with no hint as to how to survive them on the first try are just there to pad playtime.
That doesn't necessarily make them 100% bad though. Part of designing a game is engineering *memorable moments*. Look at a game like Noita: The whole meme of that game is you can die randomly due to dumb bullshit. You can lose an entire run due to some extremely specific combination of circumstances that was effectively unavoidable the first time you encounter them. Those moments are *memorable* because they are usually accompanied by a big explosion of some kind. Some of these
Unavoidable traps are bad when when they're either un-interesting or too-frequent. Dying to an earth-shattering kaboom is funny, but having it happen every 5 minutes loses it's charm fast.
I Wanna Be The Guy
Counterexample, Spelunky
That is basically the foundation of roguelites and Soulsbornes and other RPGs: you bang your head against the wall unless your head is unbreakable. As such difficulty is a way to pad play time.
Yeah, anything that can insta-kill the player needs to either have some kind of escape mechanism (a dodge or even a QTE) or be at least somewhat telegraphed. If it's just "you step here, you die" and there's *nothing* to indicate that? Awful game design.
9:30 Ludo has a point- it is lying. And just like everything, lying is a tool which you have to carefully consider how you use. Because a LOT of players will have their immersion ruined at best and be quite angry with you at worst if they notice you've been faking.
When I found out how many games’ difficulty is a lie and is just background manipulation it ruined so many games for me. Absolutely hate stuff like resident evil 4’s dynamic difficulty, and I don’t like how JM8 says that all that matters is how the player feels not if the challenge is real. I don’t feel good when devs are bullshitting me like that, as thats not a game, that’s a theme park ride.
There is value in an honest and real challenge, it’s probably the reason I love 2d platformers and bullet hells, those games aren’t just playing with numbers behind the scenes to get you through to the end, it’s up to you the player. I want to play something, not dragged through scripted setpieces
i was playing senua's sacrafice or whatever it's called. They claimed "die too many times and your save state is deleted." I knew immediately that was a lie. Thought about playing blind, but looked it up just to see if I was right. It's a bold strat, needs a lot of skill and nuance considering how variable ppl are. Anyway, I quit after like 1.5 hours cause i wasn't feeling it.
@@atrustworthyfellow6887 The deleted save thing made me actively hostile towards the game. Even when I found out it wasn't true, I still didn't feel like giving it a chance. I will never buy a 10+ hour campaign game that even threatens save deletion, as that shows the utmost disrespect towards players.
Yeah knowing about level scaling ruined tons of games for me, particularly Elder Scrolls.
I agree, I don't like it at all when a game is dishonest about its difficulty. It can feel really condescending and disrespectful. Look at games like DoDonPachi, Ikaruga and Devil May Cry 1 on DMD difficulty for example; extremely difficult games, but entirely honest about what they expect of the player.
Just to be contrarian, there are games where death is practically zero consequence but dying over and over is still a valid indicator of how you're doing, and getting through the section that's destroying you feels like an achievement. Case in point - the various LEGO adventure games, which is what the Little Nightmares discussion reminded me of. Blowing up into studs over and over again doesn't really affect your game experience or performance aside from losing a little money, which only stings very early on. But if you're in a boss fight that's blowing you up over and over and finally defeat the section, you still feel a real sense of relief that you solved it and get to move on to the next part.
Of course, obviously the intended audience for LEGO games is young and expected to not have a lot of patience to lose progress, but I think that's important to keep in mind and didn't get touched on in this short vid. The type of game and audience should be carefully considered, because a failure state that's trivial or disengaging for one kind of play experience may be perfect for a different one. Watching people play games where you die a lot without too much consequence can showcase a real sense of fun - with players exclaiming and laughing as they burst into confetti yet again, taunt each other a little, and get back to trying.
Celeste does something similar. Death usually only put you back like 15-90 seconds, but the tension and satisfaction still remain because of the deep focus you need to complete the level and satisfaction at both figuring it out and executing it.
That is very important: the way developers approach in-game death varies but so does the way players do. Some want punishing experience like Soulslikes and others want a stress free one like Lego games or Sims.
Intended audience is a great point to bring up. The OG Pokemon came out when I was 6yr old and my older brother was 8. I dont think I really played it until i was about 8 after Silver was release and my older brother let me play the old game since he got the new one. There are a few areas that cna become almost impassible if you are not careful. First is chosing Charmander as the starter since the first gym is rock. There are NO grass or water type pokemon in the first section, if memory serves its only bug, flying, and normal. You pretty much have to have full party of max level 10 to beat Brock and if you dont you lose money. The only way to make money is to challenge other trainers but if you have already beaten everyone and then you spent all your items on the gym you are out of luck and might as well restart the game. There is a section I remember getting caught unexpectedly by a fight right before entering a city and getting booted all the way back to the previous town. Unlike now, those paths were really long and annoying so to have to do it all overagain with less money to buy items was complete ass. Now the games are barely a challenge but of course I am like 30 now and those games are still targeted at 10 yr olds.
@@sathrielsatanson666 Except Souls isn't really punishing, it's simply about learning the boss's attack patterns and now you are just basically playing Osu. Which is why you have a whole bunch of videos showing players who play with no armor, no dodge, no block and still beat bosses. The punishing part is only from long reloads and losing items
(example: Elden Ring - Malenia, Blade of Miquella RL1 No Roll/Block/Parry/Jump/Status)
Games that have some randomness to it (like DRG maps) is what creates fun gameplay, because you're not just replaying the same levels having learnt everything, each mission is both familiar and new.
@@GameFuMaster Eh, Souls games are fairly punishing. At any stage in the game, your health remains within 2-6 shots of being wiped entirely, and healing requires you to find gaps to breath in that sweet estus. Like a run in a roguelike it only takes a few errors in the moment, or several errors over a journey, to eat dirt. They honestly deserve their reputation as "Hard but fair" more so than they do "Hardestest geams evur," because while practice, patience and positioning will drastically lower how hard these games can feel, you're always just a few mistakes to a loading screen.
Just to be clear, this is coming from someone whose main advice to new players is "Don't get caught up in worrying about soul drops and soul loss and the game will feel 1000% easier," I personally think these games are deceptively easier than they appear, but that doesn't mean I'd ever call them easy or not punishing.
Huge topic directly related to fail states: how game dev's respect player time and how this changes player to player. If dying (or repeatedly dying) negates the last hour of time, but your in college with nothing to do tomorrow, there's a lot of people who just feel more badass when they finally succeed. However, if you have 1 hour of game time after your kid goes to bed, this is a rage quit and thumbs down review moment. Know your audience and what your game is trying to do.
I have way more time to game now that I'm out of college, my degree was hard. Now I get to clock out at 430 and work from home haha.
Even if I had a lot of time, I don't want a game to waste it.
really depends on if the personal goal of 1 hour of playtime is to look back on achieved progress or to look back on 1 hour of funtime.
Lost about an hour or more progress in Bioshock 2 (can't remember why, out easily could've been my fault) and just quit and never came back. Having to replay all of it to keep going felt like too much of a chore and I have real chores to do if that's the experience I want
@@ruolbu And the biggest thing that dictates that is how much fun it is to play through that hour again (if it is an hour). If spending an hour doing it again is fun, or you can draw on the experience of the last hour such that you can do that section in 10 minutes instead (this happens a lot in Dark Souls: The first trip through an area is slow and methodical as you find and overcome traps and hunt for treasure, but if you die and have to do it again you can use your knowledge and the fact that you already took all the one-time detours to rush through it much faster), it's less of a problem. If spending an hour doing it again means slogging through the exact same motions as the first time until you get to the part that you screwed up, that gets intolerably tedious (and hearkens back to JM8's older video on puzzle design and the importance of making sure that executing a puzzle's solution happens quickly enough to not lose the satisfaction of figuring that solution out).
Across the board, though, I'd say erring on the side of respecting player time is a good thing. Even if some people aren't going to really mind that they lost, say, 10 minutes because the doorbell rang and they had to abandon a boss fight in Dark Souls because it doesn't let you pause (because why not poke that hornet's nest here, just for funsies), some people are, and therefore it's good to try and minimize the number of times players experience that where it isn't their fault, and limit the amount of time that's lost to reduce the chance that you've spoiled somebody's entire play session with one death.
I think the Amnesia devs came out and said something very similar to what you're describing. That their goal the entire game was to create a state where you constantly felt in danger, but if you played in a reasonable way, you wouldn't die. Because dying releases a lot of that tension. I think they also did this because they realized they never actually wanted you to get close to a monster. Seeing the horror makes it less scary. So if its always right around the corner, you feel constantly afraid and that allows the tension to continue to build.
Yeah, and TDD also had good pacing. When the tension is so high for such long periods of time, then it is definitely helpful to have areas where the tension is much less. Like getting to the Back Hall after the water part.
My biggest pet peeves with death in games are;
1) When you don't regain ammunition/consumables upon respawning. (Bloodborne is probably the worst offender for that).
2) When dying inflicts a debuff onto your character, like reduced HP (Dragons Dogma 2, or the Curse mechanic from Dark Souls 1)
Both of these mechanics discourage me from trying anything dangerous, and really kill my interest in the game.
I really just have a ungodly preference for the simplest of save systems, aka "save the state of the game" and when I die "load that state of the game", and just allow me to save the state of the game often. Thats it. The way Souls do their saves is enough to make me never want to use consumables, I absolutely despise the idea of using a rare consumable only to fail the fight and not have it anymore.
The first one has just about made me quit playing Dead Island 2 after well over 40 hours put into it. If you run out of ammo and health kits at the wrong time in a boss encounter setpiece and go down to a random effect, you're automatically screwed for the next few attempts until you get enough lucky drops... this is further complicated by the enemy scaling to your level... you're actively punished for becoming more powerful by a heavily punitive fail state
I also dislike DS2 removing the enemies after killing them enough times. Makes dying and losing your souls just that much more annoying, that it makes the whole system worse than that of DS1.
@@SFJake250 I agree with the point about consumables, but the benefit of the souls system though is that all progress is saved; when you die, you don't have to go pick up the items again or re-do NPC dialogue, you retain all of that progress. You also don't have to worry about saving the game all of the time, which is something that takes me out of the immersion personally.
I think you mean the curse mechanic from Dark Souls 2? In 1 you just loose your humanity on death and that's it, but in 2 you loose up max HP on death up to 50%
I think the "why devs lying to you is a good thing" topic is a dangerous line.
Too much fake tension and you rob the game of any actual danger of failing, you rob the game of its game part!
There are definitely cases where it can be a good thing though so, as I said, I think it's a dangerous line to walk.
This reminds me of Drake of the 99 Dragons. Any time you died in the game, you’d be transported to a spirit garden where a group of floating statues would generate a new body and then send you back to the level you died at. While it seems included as an attempt at creating a coherent narrative (for lack of a better term), considering how often you died in the game, it completely derails any immersion due to the frequent halting of gameplay.
Don't forget the loading screens. You get one before getting to the spirit garden and then another before it brings you back to the level
What was that game that was just a series of punishing and ludicrous traps and death causing apparatus, where after hitting one trap, the move you used to bypass it just put you in another trap? The only way to complete it was to discover all the traps through platforming through death after death until you completed that level, and then start again on the next level.
I think that was a good example of comedically highlighting how unpleasant that type of gameplay is, and inviting in the hardcore nuts that want to speedrun it. It got you through how unfair it was by being funny, but a horror game can't really do that meaningfully. It's kind of a case in point for the problems that were highlighted in this video with Little Monsters 2, but where the traps were actually integrated into the challenge in an interesting way that encouraged you to be willing to push past them.
@@Elesario Dragon's Lair?
It sounds like the spectral plane mechanic from Soul Reaver, except Soul Reaver actually requires you to shift between realms at certain points. You're not supposed to *die* per se, but being forced into the spectral plane can give you a new perspective on the puzzles or reveal an area you can't reach in the living plane.
@Elesario I'm guessing: *I Want to be the guy*? Either that or Kaizo Mario (thoug kaizo is a bit less focused on the hidden traps, instead using them as funny sprinkles on top the challenge cake).
I like the rougue lite system where generally if you die you have to start all over but you may have gained permanent resources for future runs (new items in binding of issac, currency in Hades, etc)
I also like the BG3 system where there are plenty of options to res a fallen character, but you are still motivated to keep them alive at fist because of limited resources and later because you've built an emotional connection with that character. I also like that it is optional to res a fallen character so it gives the player agency on how they want their game to be played.
Options are always welcome!
Kingdome come's deliverance save system was really bad actually. Sure on paper should increase tension and risk, but in reality led only to frustration as most of the time i lost progress from bugs or cheap deaths. Also not being able to make bonfires/ camps while in the middle of nowhere in order to save progress made exploration really frustrating .
>lost progress due to bugs
I refunded the game because of that. Not much fun getting soft locked every 20 minutes
That Savior Schnapps mechanic was so obnoxious I found myself a mod to be able to save any time. Really should've been a difficulty setting imho.
The fact he actually brought that up as an example of a _good_ idea just about blew my mind. Limited save systems are just flat bad design, a shortcut to raising stakes that instead of adding challenge or suspense just makes the game frustrating, especially if it's as broken as KCD. More importantly here's a game world full of things to see and do and I'm being incentivized NOT to do that because if I don't save and die, I lose hours of progress, and if I do save, I waste precious limited saves better used elsewhere. It's maddening.
I've made this point before: The more punishing your game is, the more perfect it needs to be. Bugs, broken hitboxes, etc..., become exponentially more unforgivable the harsher the punishment becomes, as you feel utterly robbed.
@@VeraTheTabbynx I wouldn't say that limited saves are *always* bad design. I think they're extremely bad design in long games like KCD. In a game you're meant to play for tens to hundreds of hours, limited saves serve only to increase frustration because you stand to lose such an immense amount of progress. But in a shorter game, like the older Resident Evils or the first Fear & Hunger, which can both be completed in 3-5 hours even if you're playing them at a normal pace, I think the limited saves do add an element of significant tension. And because those games aren't too long, you typically never lose more than an hour or two of progress to a death, which isn't too bad. Plus dying and starting over are part of the fun of those games anyway, as the point of them is to memorize where to go, what to do, and what not to do, in order to ultimately succeed.
That said, I feel like the discussion of Saviour's Schnapps or whatever they're calling it in KCD2 reeks of "Game Dev Tinted Glasses" where the *designer* knows what they want the system to accomplish, but that doesn't mean it works that way in practice. Crafting limited saves is definitely a way to pressure your players to prepare for upcoming battles carefully, but another way to do that would be to have the preparations be very high impact, like making a poorly maintained sword practically unusable, or making potions have really good and noticeable effects that would make the battle easier. Locking saves behind potions as a "reminder" to prep for battle is an interesting concept in theory, but in practice in KCD I would just craft like 40 or 50 of those things ASAP and then never make a single one ever again for any purpose other than selling them for money. Doesn't really serve the intended purpose at that point, does it Ondrej?
I quite like the way Hades handles player death. The way your friends always have new dialogue after every failed run makes it feel like you're still making story progress, even if you lost all your upgrades and level progress. Normally I can't get into roguelikes because I find dying and having to start over from scratch frustrating, but Hades found a way to soften the blow of death in just the right way to keep me going, without making death consequence-free.
Yes, Hades is my favourite game and I love every part of it, deaths too. Zagreus falling, 'THERE IS NO ESCAPE', the screen going dark, always felt like a kick in the teeth. NPCs would give you abuse based on what killed you too. Still, the fact that you were always advancing, overall, meant it was easily tolerable as you had every reason to think you'd do better next time.
Yeah the way death is an active feature of the game is very clever, to the point where if you're a highly experienced player that starts a new game and breezes through it the game either calls you on having done this before, or the dialog trees don't quite know when to give certain lines because you've played the game "too fast".
Yes. Hades somehow hit the sweet spot of being harsh enough to make death sting while also avoiding feeling hopeless and frustrated. It took me over a month to beat Hades for the first time, and I loved every second of it. Normally I HATE losing that much progress on death, but it doesn't feel like you lost progress because dying over and over again is baked into the game's plot. To this day, it's one of my favorite games of all time.
It also varies from player to player.
I personally *hate* the dropped gear/souls/whatever mechanic, because it dramatically increases the stress as I work my way back to get it. Especially since, by definition, that dropped stuff is in the most difficult place I've encountered recently. Some people love that stress engaging, but I find it unpleasant. It encourages me to go get my gear back, then close the game and do something more enjoyable to relax.
It's fine if it drops in a decent location but dropped souls have a tendency to also drop in the most obnoxious location possible.
Exactly why I've never finished Shovel Knight.
Agreed. If that mechanic completely vanished from all games forever tomorrow, I wouldn't shed a tear
corpse run: the game. whee.
If they just put it at the start of a room it would work but most often it's out of reach or exactly where the boss killed you.
Not sure I agree with the takeaway from this video. I used to really enjoy challenging games and harsh death consequences, but as I've gotten older, I've really learned to appreciate "save anywhere" mechanics. It enables the option of "no consequence" gameplay through save-scumming, but on the other side, I can save and quit a game at any point and walk away to take care of something urgent. The way to approach this is to play games in a manner that matches your own challenge expectations. Be honest with yourself first and foremost. Want harsh consequences? Auto-save only. Play Ironman/Honor modes. Want to cheese? Save-scum and don't feel bad about it.
I don't need to be told how to play a game by a developer to artificially create a sense of tension and dread. Give me the freedom to play responsibly in a manner that aligns with my current mood.
Agreed, and I think it's important here to have options via difficulty settings or save modes. I have less time to game now, so I want games I can save anywhere and finish in a shorter time-frame. If I need to sink 100 hours into mastering a game to then enjoy the next 200 hours, I'm unlikely to even start.
THIS.
So much this. I’ve done relatively hard things like beat Baldur’s Gate III on Honour Mode and doing a no death run in Alien: Isolation. But I’ve also done those games on easy mode, because sometimes I just want the vibes, not the careful and deliberate challenge.
What comes to mind for me is limited saves in the old Resident Evil games. It added tension and a deliberate choice to saving your game, and a reward for exploration, but it also led to questions like "do I really need to spend one of these right now to go walk the dog?"
I've always liked the solution of the Quick Save as seen in some early 2000s and earlier games, such as FF Tactics Advance. There's the normal, safe area-only saving system, but if you need to stop playing mid-battle you can make a temporary save state that will immediately quit your game and delete itself when you load it up next time. So you can quit safely at any time, but can't use it to save scum. It's brilliant. That's also why I value my Steam Deck so much. As soon as I need to do something else, I hit the power button and time just freezes on whatever game I'm playing and I can hop back in consequence-free and with no boot up or load delay. And game design is never compromised from this feature (unless it's online, but that's a given).
Guilty Gear as a fighting game famously has the "Guts" system, wherein characters take a ton of damage at the start of their health bar making each hit feel satisfying and chunky,
And far less damage near the end of the healthbar, maximising the amount of time a player can feel like they're in a "clutch" situation, a fantastic and very hype inclusion to the genre.
It's a really stupid decision that removes predictability from a highly competitive game which relies on predictability
@Vanity0666 There is still predictability with guts. Folks who are competitive know how much less damage they deal per hit in Guts range. That's why when enemies are low health you'll see people go for different combos which include as many hits as possible rather as much damage as possible
@@TheChilaxicle on top of that it's well known among those who play the game a lot that each character has a distinct Guts factor. It's basically their version of the "slow but strong character has more health" thing other fighting games would do (for example the really nimble & hard to hit Chipp folds like paper even at low health while the grappler Potemkin can take a good few hits at low health)
@@Triforce_of_Doomcreating an even more of an overcomplicated mess that it had to. What a BS
@@BLET_55artem55 not really? It's basically an alternate take on fighting game defense in a game series where health bars will melt really fast anyways (seriously just look up a match & see how fast characters die) & as Chilax mentioned, it helps incentivize trying different combo routes since multiple hits is a big way to beat it out.
Always liked how Hades handled death in its various runs. Death might halt progress for that one run and reset you back to Tartarus and kill the build you had. But you keep various other collectibles and currencies, use those for more permanent upgrades between runs, including an ability that 'defies' your first death or two. And also the extra optional system that improves your resilience by 1% after each failed run. None of these undo the risk of failing a run, that's still absolute. But it gives a sense of always making progress, your time never being wasted, and that feeling of failing forwards does wonders to keep a player motivated for more runs rather than disheartened at constantly seeing their progress reset. Even simple dialogue differences at the house of hades between runs gives a sense that something was accomplished and time was worthwhile spent.
This works for roguelike, but would it work for a horror game like Little Nightmares?
Another thing that helps hades is the variety in weapons, keepsakes and boons that allow you to try new things all the time. Sometimes, the game's RNG may even force you to get creative.
The OG RE4 and the remake were really good at the whole making everything feel like a close call but not really trick, at least early on. The first half of those games you always feels like you are just about to run out of ammo or healing items at which point you are fucked. Except you never do if you are playing reasonably normally. You're always JUST a few shots away or down to one or two health items, never zero. You never have enough to feel secure. At least until the back half of the game where it switches genres to a 3rd person shooter and tension isn't about how many shots you have left but how to manage hordes of enemies coming at you. Everything still feels like a close call but for a completely different reason. God's those are great games.
That's because the game knows what guns you have and when you don't have any health or bullets the likeliness of those items dropping massively Increases but when you have alot then they drop less and you get more money
The remake on hardcore difficulty really threaded the needle. I was constantly scrapping by each fight with a shotgun shell or two and a handful of pistol rounds left over. It was just tight enough for me to feel tension, but never unfair. Then I started from scratch on normal and I was swimming in ammo.
@@SpectreAdept I wasn't even on hardcore mode and the remake still managed to keep me on the edge of my seat with item drops. I spent the entire castle ramparts section balancing 1-2 green herbs at a time.
I woulf argue that the Remake does NOT do that. I played it on hard(which I had done a billion times in the OG) and it was legitimately one of the hardest game experiences I have had in years. I actually got soft locked in the cabin with Luis because my random ammo drops were ASS and I got in there with like 4 healing items and 2 bullets. I eventually just restarted and surprise surprise it dropped me plenty of ammo leading up to it and I managed it far easier.
The thing developers have to get right for me is the nature of the cost of their death mechanic and not so much it’s absolute cost in terms of time or in-game resources: if the cost of death is that I need to play fun bits of your game again that’s fine; if the cost is that I need to something tedious then that’s bad. If death, or any other mechanic, makes you want to play the game more then it’s good and if it makes you want to play less it’s bad, which sounds pretty obvious, but I see lots of mechanics in games that I find it very difficult to imagine make anyone want to play more but are still included for some other reason.
and most of the time the best way to please players is to give them options... like, a story mode if you don't see any value of tension in that game, as well as a harder option to make things interesting if thats your cup of tea - with the video's example of Little Nightmares, having an option to respawn farther behind could give a better justification to those fail states that did undermine the game's tension for them
One thing I'll point out about the corpse-run mechanic of Souls games and Hollow Knight and so on - the major tradeoff is that it penalizes exploration. If you go explore an area that looks dangerous, and turns out to be dangerous, and then die, you feel almost obligated to go back over the same ground, face the same dangers, and reach the same deadly challenge, so as to retrieve your soulrunegeoechoes. Which you might not want to do. So you might look at the dangerous place, decide "this is a future-me problem" and leave, rather than exploring at all.
This isn't that bad in Dark Souls. Heck, it expects you to do exactly this if you visit the graveyard early on, rather than pressing into the Catacombs. In Elden Ring, it's kinda annoying, but...at least you can use up your runes on a variety of things, switch your mind over to exploration mode, and just start wandering without worrying about losing your runes. (Until you kill that one bad guy on the way that drops 50 times more than you expected, but if you get enough that you start to care, you can usually teleport.
Hollow Knight has it the worst - since Geo is *just* money, you can't burn it on a levelup to get yourself to who-cares levels of Geo, you need to find a vendor to spend it at. There's a limited number of those, and you can't warp around. And it has a bunch of different branching paths to explore. So if you're the goof who beats up the Mantis Lords, proceeds into Deepnest, and then dies in there, you're probably gonna be tempted to keep throwing yourself at that hellhole in hopes of escaping with your Geo rather than going any other direction, all of which are easier. And despite the limited number of vendors, the way Geo is paced out means that it remains relevant for most of the game. (which is good game design aside from this whole thing of encouraging you to not explore alternate paths.)
To be fair Hollow Knight has the fellow in town who will summon your shade to you from wherever it was left, all it takes is trading a fairly common (& otherwise useless) item.
Annoying that this service is put behind a locked door, but still, they did try something to address the mechanic.
@@AnotherCraig Honestly, the biggest barrier to use there is the need to go back to town - the Stag Stations certainly make traversal less time consuming than it could be. Or, of course, holding onto that key long enough that you find one of the other places you can use it, and then not having a key for that place when you need it.
Though yeah, my intent was definitely not to say that the corpse run mechanic is inherently bad, just that one has to be aware of the impact it has on exploration. (And all of the games mentioned manage to overcome that downside to some degree - it can become a problem when games just copy-paste a mechanic that was in these good games without understanding all the angles.)
@@AnotherCraig I think that NPC being behind a locked door was the biggest mistake about this system. I was excited when I finally was able to afford the key only to find out it had an NPC that was useless for my entire run. Because while losing Geo matters more in HK than losing souls in DS, I died a lot less often in HK because you basically get unlimited heals if you don't mess up.
I dislike it when a game does **not** respawn enemies when you die. In cases like this, dying means nothing but the slight inconvenience of running back to where you died. It also means that my skill doesn't matter since I can just brute force my way through the challenges with little repercussions.
Nothing makes me want to put a game down more then losing too much progress, to death or otherwise. So if it had to be one or the other extreme I'd rather a no consequence death over a lose an hour+ of progress death. This is probably why I've never really been in to roguelikes.
Yeah, always disliked rogue games. It feels like a waste of time until I get into that magically perfect run, after bashing my head bloody, grinding for the past 20 hours.
I would normally agree, but I really like survival settings on games like fallout 4 or subnautica, because they force you to be cautious and to try to plan so you don't lose TOO much progress.
The "progress" gained in any given run of a rougelike is knowledge and experience. The more you learn, the further you can get the next time.
On the other hand, there are rougelites, where the death-grind is mandatory to unlock all the features/get strong enough to actually stand a chance (here's looking at ya Rouge Legacy)
That's because you feel obligated to finish a game once purchased, rogue likes are very true to the classics which only few people will ever finish those games by offering 1hr of memorable playtime.
Is not wrong to assist the player with a save system but overtime I think it has created this loop of "one and done" playtrough which makes me wonder if most of the people did enjoyed the gameplay in the first place or it was just a flavour of the month.
When it comes to roguelikes I really started enjoying them when I gave up on the idea of making progress.
It seems like the problem with Little Nightmares 2 is less that death has no consequences and more that it's too frequent and arbitrary. The game is so well positioned to be full of those manufactured near-misses you talk about later, but instead it takes every opportunity to actually kill you. That game would not be fixed by making death sting more, but it could absolutely be fixed by making it happen less.
Maybe it could give you a "life" once ever 5 minutes of game time, so when you would fail something, instead the character would automatically avoid that danger. This would allow you to see the first trap and make you aware for the next ones and keep the flow of the game, but not be as lenient as "ok you can die anytime, you'll respawn soon after just beside it" so you don't have to pay attention
@@Itomon would that not encourage you to stand still for 5 minutes every time you take a hit?
Each second I am "forced" to not play the game I am contemplating starting another
I feel that as a general rule, Half-Life perfected the save system with autosave-plus-you-can-save-again-at-any-time. One game where long checkpoints really work, though, is Rainbow Six Vegas, as the often-inconvenient amount of lost progress really encourages you to play smart and stick to cover, which feeds into the fantasy of a tactical SWAT shooter.
For a non-video game example, Dungeons & Dragons and related games has whole crazy debates around player character deaths and in particular if the GM should tweak things subtly to keep characters alive. I understand the logic of "if you can't fail, then it's not a real game," but I've found that a character actually dying and then conveniently being replaced by someone else of the exact same level who just happened to be in the next room is very immersion breaking by exposing that the whole thing is actually a facade. Like in action movies, the trick is to make the audience feel like they might die without actually going through with it. In video games, though, the developer has to be prepared to go through with it, and that can just break things.
The funny thing about Dark Soul's soul retrieval system is it ended up having the opposite effect on me, although with a caveat. The system is, like you said, meant to maintain tension after a player dies and also encourage them to take it slow, play methodically, and eventually master the area that's been getting them killed. But what happens when you die a second time anyway and lose your souls for good? What if you died just before getting back to the bit you died the first time after carefully spending a few minutes working your way back because of some bullshit?
Two things happen:
1) You get mad and feel like an idiot for spending all this time only for the game to screw you over in the end because of one fuck up.
2) You are FREE! You are released from the burden of needing to care about your lost souls. You have nothing to lose anymore and the game punishes you even when you try to play carefully. So you do the Dark Souls run. You recklessly run through the level like you're a speedrunner, avoiding all the enemies as they form a conga line behind you and hope that you can get to a bonfire, elevator, or boss door before they catch up. Maybe you get smacked a few times, but you were gonna get smacked playing fair anyway. Maybe you die a few times, but you were probably gonna die a few times playing fair and who cares since you have no souls to lose anyway? So a lot of the time, the way I end up playing the souls games is I initially explore the level normally, then after dying a few times, I give up on that and just run. No more tension, just frustration and a desire to be on to the next bit.
Now the caveat: This only really turns out this way because you can generally abuse the respawn mechanics to farm souls at various points in the game. So it doesn't really matter that much if I miss out on the level or so I might have gotten from carefully going through that area because I can take a couple minutes and gather up that many souls with virtually no risk. That said, I don't know that this wouldn't be a problem if farming weren't an option, I might have just quit at some point if I kept getting fed up with areas and gradually fell behind on levels.
Yup. This is why I quit trying to bother with Souls games. If I died once, I'm guaranteed to die again. If you're going to punish me, then punish me... don't pretend I have some chance of things being different next time. Regardless I'm going to feel bad about playing your game
The cool thing is there are so many ways to play souls games. Don't like running? Then dont run. Don't like farming? Then dont.
Agreed. There's several things the souls games do well, but it's exhausting seeing every little faucet propped up as a masterclass in game design. No, running back for your souls is Bad Actually, and my suspicion is that people who do enjoy it have an adrenaline addiction issue not unlike problem gamblers.
Dark Souls 2 has limited enemy respawns - it's huge, like 12 per enemy, but it's finite. Losing a bloodstain in 2 feels so much worse because that's souls permanently removed from the world.
@@genlando327plays2Literally a skill issue. Your first death was a chance to learn what you did wrong and not do that next time. If you died somewhere that it's literally impossible to survive, like in a death pit, your bloodstain won't have followed you down there.
I think this is part of why I've come to enjoy roguelikes/lites so much. Terms of death are very clear and harsh, but if you're good enough you can start slowly building up items that will help keep you moving, but usually not to the point where the game falls apart, at least not right away, or if it does then you ratchet up the difficulty.
I really liked Subnautica's handling of death -- entering a base or a large submarine was treated as a save point, and if you die out in the world then everything that you picked up after leaving the base was dropped at your death point; however, you were responsible for building those bases and large submarines, and you had to be careful where you built those bases and how they were stocked -- if the last base you visited was a kilometer underwater and you didn't leave a way to return to the surface, you might softlock yourself into a scenario where it was necessary to destroy your own base and then die again in order to respawn at the original spawn point.
On the other hand, Pacific Drive's rule of "no saving except at the end of a run, and if you quit you've lost everything *and* caused that area to become unreachable for a bit" really annoyed the hell out of me. That meant that I could only play when I was sure that I had several hours to devote to the game, and any unexpected interruptions meant harsh in-game penalties. If I wanted to be bitched at for not consistently being available for hours on end, I'd be playing WOW.
My gf and I played Divinity Original Sin 2 blind and we got off the first boat and to the first town and she went and talked to some guy on the beach who insta-killed her. I looked for ways to revive her but she actually just didn't want to play anymore at all. She loves playing games where you go everywhere and talk to everyone and dying like that completely killed the game for her. I never went on to play any more without her either.
Exactly, cheesy untelrhraphed instakill traps are cancer that is, thankfully, mostly left in the dust of the past
If one instakill kills the game for your girlfriend, then you can always play on easier difficulties! :)
But most of the time death (in DOS2) is just a piece of the puzzle; you can save anywhere and check most elements (NPC stats, enviroment) to solve the problem or just avoid it by going other way
Its a bit of a shame giving up so quickly on the game... I mean, just play on a lower difficulty xD
@@Itomon So you're saying the solution to the problem is save-scumming? If that's true then even I don't want to give it another chance let alone my gf
@@Trev625 I fail to see what's so bad about this, it puts you on the control, the best FPS games ever made let you save anywhere and as much as you wanted like Doom, Half-Life, Quake, etc.
Counterpoint:
The deaths in little nightmares are really funny
I think that's exactly why there are so many, and reviving is so quick. Dying in horror games, especially they are cartoony/lighthearted in some way, is a huge part of the experience.
Yeah I like watching the death animations in games like this, Limbo, and Dead Space. It's kinda part of the fun imo (plus cautious play will alert you to many of these traps if you're paying close attention)
I'm willing to give a lot of the old Sierra point-and-click games a pass for this, too. Not only do they preach "save early, save often" as a mantra, but death in those games (at least the good ones) usually is:
a) funny
b) the player's fault for doing something *really* dumb (ex. eating horse poop in Freddy Pharkas)
c) telegraphed if you bother to investigate and not walk blindly into things
d) telegraphed with multiple warnings if it involves a direct action by the player
e) given a death message that hints how to avoid it in future attempts
f) some combination of the above
@@BAMFshee I agree, and similarly, a lot of them are funny and worth watching just to see the nonsense. Of course if you didn't save, you lose some progress, but the thoughtful way to play those is pretty much to save before you do anything just in case it's a hilarious death.
Horror and comedy are mutually exclusive emotions. Not that a horror game can't have funny moments, but if you're constantly laughing you can't be scared.
If I mess up and get killed in a game, I would much rather have a hard save reload than one of those "corpse run" things honestly. With a hard reload, I don't feel like I'm being kicked while I'm down and I'd wind up learning the layout of an area the same way anyway. I think something that's sort of being overlooked is that systems intended to increase "tension" (no, I do not agree that tension is the holy grail of gameplay design) can instead come across as frustrating or annoying.
That rope reminds me of trying to jump from island to island in the third level of Battletoads, using up all my extra lives BEFORE hitting the BS speederbikes.
The time to recover from a fail state is also important depending on the game. People mention Hotline Miami but I offer: Hero of Ice Fairy.
HoIF is a boss rush bullet hell leaning on the difficult side. If you die you're very quickly reset to the first phase of the fight. No overly long death message, no being kicked back to the hub area, no loading screen. It even skips certain story related phases and conversations if you've already been through them.
Hell even if you quit for the day halfway through a boss fight, the next time you try it you press two buttons to skip the preboss phases and dialogue. And if you want to swap gear you can do so from the pause menu (this does reset the fight but you don't have to run back to the hub)
The boss fight is still hard and beating them still feels satisfying but the fact that the game doesn't waste your time when you die cuts down on the frustration immensely
I suppose this is really two different conversations. The idea of meaningless deaths vs unearned deaths. Meaningless deaths can be fine (savescummers of the world rise up), but unearned deaths are absolutely a quit moment for many people. It seems like little monsters added a third sin, where the unearned deaths also undermine the puzzle elements, because what is the point of a puzzle game that will just arbitrarily kill you in a way you could not have foreseen?
Like a shooter having you run through a minefield and saying "See you on the other side & have fun!"
@@steffenknoll9136 if the game gives you a mine detector, then its still a playable game, not a slot machine/dice roll
My pet peeve is when death makes the games harder. It's OK if you loose progression and waste time but if you for example loose XP and is dumped at the same place, going forward will be harder that if you didn't die. That makes the games harder for the players that need the game be easier and the game easier for the players that needs it to be easier.
Path Of Exile have a little bit of that problem. You loose XP when you die and the monsters you already have killed will stay dead so you don't gain XP when going back to where you died. It's not that bad because you don't loose XP in the begining of the game and you only loose progression to the next level and you can regenerate the level.
Old school NES games were particularly bad about this. Gradius was the worst. A single death in that game meant losing all your power ups and that loss of power made it almost impossible to continue.
You can respawn monsters on any map in PoE by control-clicking on a zone, you can farm any zone in the game and then by the time you're at maps you don't have an excuse since you can just put another map in. I think the XP loss system is an example of a death system done really well since you should not be dying in that game by the time they impose the rule on you.
If there was no penatly at all you'd just stack damage and completely ignore defenses as the most efficient way to get experience, which would reward you for playing the game in an extremely boring way (hiding off screen and casting ranged abilities and dying in one shot then respawning and repeating), which is a lot worse.
I still recall my first time playing Bioshock. It was actually kind of scary until I died and realised you just respawn a little bit back. All tension gone, death became a slight inconvenience instead of something to actually worry about. Still a good game just not a scary one.
it wouldn't be scary even if you had to play further back, it would just take longer and be more tedious.
Yes I loved Bioshock but when I replayed it I realised that the death mechanic meant that you could pretty much throw yourself at enemies, get killed, and their health didn't regenerate. So it was technically possible to chip away at a Big Daddy with a wrench by just suicide-running it - probably a bit tedious but it does take away the tension knowing you could just do that.
You can actually turn the respawn points off in Bioshock. Might help the game retain some of that scare factor
@@aliquidcowI had to do that once. Ran out of money , bullets and plasmids.
@@writerredI went for all the achievements in Bioshock, one of which was completing a run on hard with Vita chambers turned off, and it was honestly the most fun playthrough of the game that I did.
The problem with "the healthbar lying to you" can lead to the player going "wait, why am I getting 2 hit? it took 3 to kill me less then a minute ago."
The problem with making the player feel like they’re in danger but not actually putting them in any in the end...just runs the risk of not really working as soon as the player figures it out. It’s like that DM in D&D that doesn’t actually count monster health and instead just declares them dead when he feels like the players have done enough cool things. Which can work if they never tell you about it, but if the players ever find out - all effect of their actions practically disappears. I guess this idea solves the frustration of receiving punishment for failure and doesn’t make the tension vanish, but at the same time, it can dumb down the tension in the first place and makes success that much less exhilarating as it can be in some of the games you’ve mentioned here, like dark souls. Feels like that’s kind of what people play them for, for that final relief of beating the next annoyingly difficult challenge.
1) devs HAVE to either prevent or make it easy for the player to prevent losing too much effort to a death. The more difficult the death is to avoid, the more true this is (high-difficulty encounters, gotcha traps, etc). Even if the player proceeds to easily overcome the challenge and recoups an hour of gameplay in ten minutes, it cheapens the lost time.
2) death must be as thematic to the game as any other factor. Roguelike deaths can and should feel different from horror deaths.
3) now for the controversial one: where possible, death should push the player FORWARD overall. Unlock a trigger, provide a clue, give lore, ANYTHING.
4) preparation for death should be trivial. It is expected that most players will die several times while learning. That said, this preparation has to be conscious (whether it is a potion from above, accessing a save point, etc) in order for it to be meaningful.
I can agree with 2 and 4 for the most part but largely disagree with 1 and 3.
1 - Entirely depends on the game, games like Jump King, Getting over it, Only up are entirely built around it being easy for the player to lose a notable amount of porgress from a mistake. It isn't uncommon for a difficult plataforming manuever the player isn't expected to know off the bat causing significant progress loss. The entire point of these games is the player not just clearing each challenge once and being done with it but learning to consistently clear the obstacles placed in their way which in turn makes future obstacles easier.
3 - No. Death doesn't need a secondary mechanic alongside it to give the player some advantage if they fail. The player is already making progress because they are learning as they die. This is what allows boss rush games like Cuphead or Furi to work you don't get a reward for dying but you are know in a better position to fight the boss as you have more experience and knowledge.
@@theresnothinghere1745 about 3, you kinda agree when you state that player is learning as they die (the OP said "provide a clue")
@@Itomon I can't see how provide a clue is the same as my point in the player learning from their experience.
The player learning from their experience is going to happen regardless of the actual mechanics of death so long as it lets players replay sections they failed in.
Some games may do this better than others but replaying a section you failed by its very nature will do this to some extent.
By contrast OP's wording is much more implying that the player should be given something as if it didn't come backed in with the mechanic.
From that I can only take OP 'provide a clue' literally, in the vein of a games that give hints on death screens like
-The enemy that killed you is weak to X
This is the main reason that made me bounce off Limbo really fast. Found out very quickly that the game was based on trial and error, where you'd most likely die to something you could not see, be put back right before it happened, then have to repeatthe sectionover and over until you found how not to die.
Based mostly on the title, I have a new want:
A soulslike game where you can't die. Taking damage simply heals the boss, with incentives for beating enemies quickly.
Might seem quaint. Harmless, even, until the point wherein you realize that a small stint of getting yer ass beat by a powerful boss means that they're now essentially at full again and you may as well have died for all the good not dying did you.
Respect for my time >>>>>>> potential "tension" from death. The best thing the Souls game did in terms of growth was to institute more regular checkpoints with later games. All that remained was the *good* type of tension, the one from the challenge. Sad to hear that even despite the overwhelming feedback about how KCD initially launched in terms of saves they are going to proceed the exact same way in this one. Good to know what to spend my money on I guess, I won't play a game that may end up making me feel like I wasted hours of my precious little free time by readily erasing progress unless I go and do something I shouldn't be railroaded into just for the QoL effect.
Whenever I play Deep Rock Galactic, I tend to try and impose upon myself a sort of reclamation mechanic. When you wipe in a DRG mission, your squad respawns back at the space rig in medical gowns. The medical gown is immediately removed upon interacting with most terminals, especially equipment or wardrobe terminals. I always try to delay doing so as much as possible (unless I absolutely HAVE to change something about my loadout) and try to run the mission back immediately to "regain my honor" so that I can unequip the medical gown. I mean, the difficulty and punishment inherent to failing a mission is really enough in and of itself to function fine for the type of game DRG is, but I like adding the harmless minor stipulation whenever possible because it's interesting. And, I mean, why would Ghost Ship make it possible to wear the med gowns in a mission if that wasn't the intent, hmm? I'd like to think it's totally in character to jump straight out of the hospital right back into the mines, swinging your pickaxe with the patient tags dangling off your wrist.
And yeah, yeah, Rock and Stone.
DRG is truly a magical game. Rock and Stone!
This is going to be something a lot of folks disagree with but the soul collecting Darksouls and its ilk actually undermined the experience for me. The knowledge that I'd have to faff around to get my stuff back rather than just reload killed a lot of the urge to explore or experiment for me.
Same here! I never explored more than I needed to and rarely tried fights before I knew I was ready (especially boss battles) because it is so easy to just lose your souls. I hate having things go to "waste", even if it is 200 souls when you need 20,000 to level up.
I get where you come from but to me it was great for the suspense and atmosphere in some areas. On top of that by levelling up and buying items it's possible to reduce lost souls quite a bit and they're an infinite resource. Once you get used to it you realise losing souls really isn't as big of a deal as it feels at first. Though I think it would be better if the games drop souls outside of boss arenas because otherwise you're basically forced to retry the boss instead of going to a different area first. Sekiro was a bit nicer about that as it lets you buy bags of money which are items so they can't be lost.
How about in the original Prey? When you die, you're immediately transported to a spirt realm full of, well, spirits to shoot. After a few seconds you respawn in the exact spot you died, but the spirits you killed determines how much health you have. Death still stung, but you lost zero progress.
I felt death didn't so much sting as inconvenience, which is not how I want to feel playing games
Respawning where you died sounds like a great way to softlock yourself.
Bioshock is the main game I would think of when discussing about bad death implementation. There are 0 penalty, enemy don't even respawn, You just continue as if nothing happened. Checkpoint system would have been good or take away some of your upgrade currency as an option.
Even just restoring enemy health and taking some money would have been enough, but it literally just moves you to another room with exactly zero consequences.
@@Paddy656 yeah, but on the other hand i dont think i would have played it at all if it didnt have that exact mechanic. you're right, it really did have zero consequences and i admit that probably took most people out of it, but for me it mitigated a couple of other mechanics i absolutely hated (namely stealth and limited ammo as im horrible at both shooting and sneaking) and let me enjoy the narrative of the game without having to watch someone else play it instead. it was basically my easy mode button. they probably should have implemented modes that respawned enemies or something and made the default a selectable easy mode.
@@xSaraxMxNeffx I'm not trying to speak in a way of like "Ohh yeah, I'm sooo good at Bioshock", cause I'm really not. But I did play 1 (and could've done 2, just thought it'd make things spongier though) with no Vita Chambers on the hardest difficulty a few years ago, and it's a lot less stressful than you'd expect.
Turns out the game works pretty fine without it.
Also things like stealth and limited resources are exactly still complaints, ironically. You still have a LOT of money and ammo, and Bioshock Burial At Sea II made me realize that I really wished Bioshock was more of a stealth game than it is. Cause Burial with Elizabeth is really really fun.
I feel like this is something that could be solved by difficulty settings. An easy setting could use the death mechanic as it exists in Bioshock, but harder difficulties have death mechanics that create more of a challenge (restoring dead enemies and/or losing currency).
why do so many people want a system that makes the game literally harder if you aren't good at it? people that are better at the game will accumulate more XP that they don't need, meanwhile someone learning will play the same game, but harder. It's completely backwards.
I like Xenoblade's cost of death, as it is basically just a small setback, you don't lose items, you don't lose your level nor coins, you just have to restart whichever fight you lost and that's it, you just have to walk a few steps, as the game allows you to revive and go elsewhere to train if needed, you are not forced to start from the fight itself or from your last save point like in some Tales of games.
The system I dislike the most is Hollow Knight's, as after exploring for a long time, dying before reaching a bench and having to go all the way back to recover the geo, while having the chance of dying again and losing everything is extremely frustrating to me.
I quit Hollow Knight because of it. If I got into a situation I wasn't prepared for, maybe I'd rather take that as a reason to explore in a different direction, but no. I'm crippled until I fight my way back to where I died. Yes, there was a consumable to "fix" it. I don't care. It wasn't my only problem with the game, but it's the reason I deleted it.
I just want my failures to be non-canon. I hate this souls-like trend of death being part of the narrative because it keeps getting applied in ways that don't make sense either due to the setting (Star Wars) or NPCs not reacting realistically.
@@UltimatePartyBearas an avid hollow knight player I get it but it does make sense for some series to have conical deaths and hollow knight is on of them plus your crippled but not crippled that much you get one less mask of healing
I can handle challenging games, but I detest punishing games. Give me an interesting challenge to overcome where I can instantly try again like in e.g. Celeste or Ori or the boss battles in Metroid Dread, and I'm all in. Add a 5-10min walkback from the latest checkpoint and make me lose all my money when I die twice without recovering my shadow, and I just feel like the devs are fucking with me for no reason and wasting my time.
"Game designers lying to their players is a good thing" is going to be a hard sell. I'm sure there are examples where I would agree in principle, but as with many tools in a designer's toolbox, there will be some people who use them well, some people who use them terribly, and some people who would abuse them so badly that you rue they knew of said tool's existence. Deceiving players on a fundamental level about what they're experiencing seems likely to lean towards the latter two... Especially as AAA developers start to use such deceptions to psychologically keep players in a zone where they're more likely to pay for content.
I agree, I think claiming that "lying to the player about the game's difficulty is a good thing" is an idiotic thing to say. I think it's incredibly condescending and disrespectful if the game isn't honest about its systems. This whole moronic idea that the player's feelings are more important than what the game actually is should be thrown straight in the garbage. Some of the hardest games ever made, like Castlevania 3, Ikaruga, Ketsui, Mushihimesama Futari, Ninja Gaiden 2, DMC1 on DMD difficulty etc. are perfectly honest about their own difficulty and all the better for it.
Well, I guess the argument will be that lies have only consequences if they are detected.
So a game dev has to have mechanics (for the sake of his fun) that work differently from what the player is being told, but will never find out.
@@steffenknoll9136 I have never seen an example where that would actually improve the game. I think it’s incredibly disrespectful towards the player if they think they succeeded in a really challenging section and felt proud of themselves, but in reality the game lied about the difficulty and the challenge wasn’t actually nearly as hard as the player thought.
@@Bluesine_R Ace in single-player; destroyed in multi-player.
I fully agree with the video author on this one. Game challenges are ultimately arbitrary, and while it can cheapen things to find out about the magic behind the curtain, that just means...don't let them find out about the magic. It's the same in a lot of entertainment industries.
The player "accomplishes" the same amount of quantitative tasks either way. The only thing that changes is their reaction to it.
I think a big part of what makes a good death is part of how the death is framed. Dying is a necessary consequence, but dying can be frustrating, and the game can do a lot to alleviate that burden.
Two of the best examples I know of this are The Messenger and Unworthy. In The Messenger, the in-universe context for how you can die and get respawned is that you have a little greed demon, Quarble, that resurrects you when you die, at the expense of taking a tax on your future resource gains for a short while (which, alongside the well-spaced checkpoints that mean you lose just enough progress that dying stings a bit, but not so much to make it too frustrating, tends to make death in The Messenger a fair consequence). However, Quarble also provides a fair bit of humor, as every time you die he shares a joke that lightens the mood, making death sting even less as he brightens the mood.
Unworthy, on the other hand, does something very different. For the most part, Unworthy seems to borrow the souls system from Dark Souls (resources are dropped on death, but you can collect them if you make it to them without dying). However, when you die in Unworthy, it says one thing that reframes death as a whole, and it's just one word: "unworthy". This single word reframes death from "you failed" to "you haven't succeeded yet", so when you take on the challenge(s) that bested you and finish them you feel so much better than if it said something different, like "you died".
This makes me think of classic NES games and how brutal they were with fail states. They did not have any safe mechanic, so a single death could end hours of work. It boggles the mind how developers at the time thought that was a good way of doing things.
@Arkazon Got to remember, that developers in those times were direct descendents of the arcade school of design, where fail states were encouraged to help relieve consumers from their quarters.
Over time, design evolved to have the "fun night in front of the TV with the family" ethos in play.
Mainly because devs back then were trying to artificially extend relatively short experiences. Death and cheap memorization heavy difficulty masked the fact that most games clocked in at less than hour or two if you were good enough not to die. Also, back in the 80's game development was mostly inspired by arcades where difficulty was just monetization. Kill the player a lot so they have to pop in a lot of quarters. Took a while for home console stuff to move away from that.
Standards were extremely lax back then. Balancing wasn't really as much of a thing back then as it is now. Devs would just slap shit into a game and went "good enough". SOme games were legitimately impossible to beat unless you purchased a strategy guide. THis is why I laugh when people think the old days were somehow kinder, more passionate and honest than todays devs. I can tell they never grew up in that era.
@@devilmikey00well, yeah, as I said under a different comment: difficulty is a way to pad play time and since back then due to small memory sizes games were pretty short raising the difficilty was the way to prolong the experience. Also since back then kids were fine with ot because with very few games available they could spend weeks or months gitting gud.
I think there is an important point that not many people are saying and that is the amount of storage the games had. You have to sacrifice something to get a game to save progress data and maybe the game they wanted to make didnt make sense to have that
I think an issue with the manufactured close calls is that the second you become aware you’re being tricked, you lose all sense of danger. this is something that should probably be handled via a difficulty choice, with an option to just have the game be full challenge. (although the existence of that choice does clue the player into the experience they’ll be getting so there is an issue there as well)
fun in games does not always come from narrowly winning, but from finding the solution to something that’s stumping you or overcoming an obstacle you’ve been running into for a while.
annoying and avoidable as the circumstances leading up to it may have been, finally catching that rope was probably a very good feeling.
i think the game needs to be able to preserve that sense of progression to be truly fun. the “oh i’m getting better at this” or the “aha! i’ve bested you, game!”
if the player knows they’re being carefully monitored and that the situation is adjusting due to weather or not they’re playing bad or good, these moments will not feel earned.
a DM can lower a monsters HP mid battle or lie about rolls if it looks like the players are going to get stomped. but if this happens every encounter, battles will stop being exciting and the players will go through the motions until the DM decides they’ve won.
I find the Dark Souls method is just an insanely huge de-motivation factor.
Losing all the progress I've made because I slipped up twice just makes me want to completely quit, and it has done that to me for multiple games.
The difficulty I find is fine, the punishment I don't.
Roguelikes (Hades, Inscryption) tend to feel the best, mainly given that I don't feel like I'm losing much progress in the end. If I win a run or I lose a run, I'm going to the start again anyway. In Hades I get some more currency to spend anyway so it's never a total waste.
its worse in demons souls, especially if you play offline because of that world tendency nonsense
If anything I consider this to be the complete opposite.
The Dark souls method is less punishing than the rougelike imo.
In a souls game you can only lose your souls and progress to the next checkpoint. But both of those are easy to remedy as so long as you're not hoarding souls you can make back up the souls without too much trouble or often make more than that from a boss fight. The loss in checkpoint progress is outside of dark souls 1 minimal compared to rougelikes and in ds1 simply knowing which enemy is where is a huge benefit to making it through the section making it notably easier to retread an area.
Meanwhile rouglikes take more than your currency they take your entire build away and make you have to go through and rebuild adjusting to the rng drops.
Ontop of that a loss means you need to go through several levels and boss fights to get back to where you last where easily taking several times as long as a souls run from checkpoint to chekpoint.
The only advantage a rouglike has is that in some games you can get small permanent upgrades or increases to weapon pools.
I really dislike games that do not put a checkpoint before boss battles. No I do not want to keep walking through half a level just to die against the boss again.
Also it pulls back the curtain of the enemy AI when you can more or less ignore it by quickly rolling by (e.g. in Dark souls). Currently playing hollownight for the first time and it has the same issue.
TL;DR: Put save points before your bosses!
Blood West is a modern example of this, although they might have changed it since I last checked, with it being pre-release.
That's why I never got into the Souls games. The idea to have to slog all the way back AGAIN to try a new approach and getting one shotted AGAIN made me quit the first one.
You don't even have to plonk it right before the boss room, but at least make it reasonably near. Or keep the things dead I killed on the way.
@@Virtualblueart Later souls-like games like Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring got a lot better about putting a checkpoint right before a boss fight, for what it's worth. Turns out you are not the only one who got *really* tired of "the runback".
Well, luckily, they did apply this philosophy in Elden Ring
It depends. Sometimes part of the challenge is reaching the boss in a good enough state to survive the encounter. In Dark Souls, though, it's too easy to run past everything, making the runback just a chore.
I really liked what Prey (2006) did. Unlike other fps games of its era (that would typically use generic autosaves), upon dying, you would go to the realm of the dead and hunt spirits/demons that would determine how much health/mana you would respawn with. This little minigame would take about a minute, and in delaying your progress, death would still feel like a setback, but ultimately no progress was lost. And the player characters pseudo immortality was actually part of the plot, too.
A more modern game that I like is Devil May Cry 5. Upon death, you get to choose:
-spend a small amount of (in game) currency to revive with a sliver of health
-spend a medium amount to revive with a substantial amount of health
-spend a large amount (or a specific item) to revive with full health/devil trigger (mana)
OR
-start from checkpoint
Also the amount of currency required for the revival would increase by a factor of 10 if you die again in the same mission. So you'd be betting on your own skill ("Can I defeat this boss, who is also almost dead, with just the minimal amount of healing?")
I think it is worth pointing out that there are games that don't use death and restarting as the fail state, but the game keeps going. This kind of innovation started with FIFA and NBA2k where if you lose the season keeps going and you have to figure out what you need to do to still finish the season on top. The Devs at shadow of Mordor said that they took inspiration from this and made it so when you die in their game the game keeps going. If the orc that killed you was just a regular grunt, they get promoted to be an officer. If they were an officer they get stronger. There still is death but the consequences are small because in the lore of the game the story keeps moving forward but the bad guys remember you. Its kind of a cool mechanic.
That can't be used nowhere else because it's copyrighted/patented by the publisher 🗿
if we are talking death in a video game "In Stars And Time." has a very unique take on it, your deaths simply became traumatizing parts of the narrative.
Repeated deaths even more so as you spiral in to despair alongside Siffrin.
Lying to the player backfires the moment they realize what's going on. Just like in real life, lying can be expedient up front but always makes things worse in the long run.
This was my thought as well. If a game deceives the player for the purpose of keeping them in the sweet spot and the player realizes this, the player's trust is broken and all immersion is out the window. It's difficult to feel that flow state when you know that the game has a perpetual interest in keeping you alive, and will break the rules in your favor for that purpose.
Yeah. Lying to the player is one of those "clever game designer things" that seem good on paper and in GDC presentations, but rarely make the game better in any real way.
I abhor RE4's "adaptive" difficulty mechanic (don't know if it's in the remake, but I am referring to the OG). I don't want the game to decide for me to turn the challenge down. I was surprised by the number of people who praised that mechanic.
Exactly, once I realized a game was doing that, I would stop playing it.
My personal biggest example of that is in the first Amnesia game. As soon as you realize that the game will remove enemies from certain sections if you keep dying there, all the tension is *gone*. It is a clever little lie that they present (as the game won't tell you this and so you will believe that there are always enemies on the prowl) to keep tensions high, but also eliminate the frustration that goes directly against horror. It's a tough call tbh.
_Amnesia The Dark Descent_ is a game I'm too much of a bitch to complete even though death not only has no conseqeunces but actually _rewards_ you by removing any enemies who kill you from impeding your progress.
It gets around the whole problem of death as a punishment to condition the player through negative reinforcement by making the scares themselves so effective that just being in the presences of the enemies -- or even part of the game where you know you're liable to be forced to confront one, like a dead end containig a puzzle -- is all the incentive needed to create th desired experience.
It truly managesot transcend the whole problem. At least if you're me and a little bitch.
Funny you should bring this up. I recently heard in an interview snippet with the Amnesia devs that they increased the pressure by simply letting players believe that a total loss of sanity would kill them. Apparently, it doesn’t. You just have sanity loss visual effects and then… regain some sanity.
@@LynceusGlaciermaw Yeah, it wasn't a great system in terms of consequences, but it worked very well insofar as it made it easier for you to keep playing. To keep being immersed.
Edit: Also, as has been mentioned, most "consequences" are fake anyway. You don't live with your consequences, you just get your time wasted. Perhaps you learn something and that knowledge is more meaningful when there is high difficulty, but narratively it's meaningless.
@@burningsheep4473 absolutely, it is actually a crafty strategy and doesn’t seem like it would be hard to implement. A smoke and mirrors technique, but that’s really what we want from our media - especially the stuff that’s meant to mess with our heads a little.
And I don’t think I’d call it entirely meaningless in the narrative sense. It could be interpreted as the fortitude of the main character in that awful situation - memory lost, mind slipping, hunted, confused, but he shows his true mettle in soldiering on.
ny problem with this game was that it was terrifying and stressful... until I died and respawned. At which point all the tension was gone because like... I died and now was fine. Hey invisible water monster, what are you gonna do? Kill me again? I'll just come back. It didn't matter if the monster was still there because it couldn't do anything to me that hadn't been more than an inconvenience.
No this was my biggest gripe with the game. As soon as this happened to me I treated the rest of the game as a spooky visual novel
As an old school gamer, I had no problem with dying in a game meaning that I would "lose hours of progress". I was used to it and it and created a tension that engaged you because the stakes were pretty high. The first game I ever played where the Fail State was reduced to inconsequential levels was Soul Reaver. I got to a point where I wasn't sure how to progress the story and dying just returned me to the beginning with a pat on the head and a patronising "Keep at it". After a few failed tries to figure out how to get to the next area and some self inflicted deaths since the entire area had been wiped of enemies, I found myself at a place where the game offered no direction and no consequences.
Haven't even had the urge to go back or watch a play through.
Exactly why I don't like puzzle games. Most of the time they just expect you to figure everything out yourself with the no failsafe measures
If there is one thing gamers put on a pedestal above all other game designs is... ..consistency. A game that full of dying, hard challenges, and multiple hurdles to recover progress is wonderful for those that feel progress in the face of high stress. But it would break the gamers' idea of "sportsmanship" if that game was designed to have inconsistent items, challenges, quests, and recovery states. You uncover the core desire of gaming when you break the very thing that gaming does more than IRL challenges. A game is addictive because we assume it to be consistent in items, quests, patterns, and recovery.
I really like games where “death has permanent consequences”. But I don’t really mean permadeath, instead, the opposite, where death doesn’t result in loading a previous save file.
Games like dark souls where you can still drop the souls you earned where you die, and you can go pick them up later fits this theme.
I guess Pikmin had another interesting take on dying. If you die in the field, you go back to the ship, day ends, all the pikmin you had with you die*, going forward from that point you have one less day within your time limit. But the game doesn't autosave. It pretty explicitly asks you whether you want to save after summarizing the day's performance, and offers to let you go back to the last save instead. The game seems designed around asking the player to optimize their run through the day like a speedrunner, and the later games' rewind mechanic makes it more explicit
*of course when Pikmin die, they can end up leaving seeds so that they will be reborn out in the field, which can sometimes be more annoying than helpful because it means at the start of the day you've got one less Pikmin available to be taken out of the onion for the day's campaign.
Remember in LBP 1, the respawn checkpoint when it’s out of retries it glows in red with an alarm sound effect , it was so terrifying as a kid reminding me that if i fail next time it’s game over
I think a key factor in our reaction to fail state impacts is whether the punishment fits the crime. I began unapologetically save-scumming Red Dead 2 after that random encounter in Saint Denis where Arthur gets mugged - there was no indication I was about to walk into a situation that'd take half my money with no opportunity to fight my way out of it/chase down the perps. Whereas if I die in failing a skill-based challenge that I should really be sailing through unharmed, I'd be more accepting of a harsh punishment due to being a dunce.
this is one thing I really enjoyed about Shadow of Mordor. as in many games, you would die and keep coming back. but here, it was explained by the narrative. rather than a punishment, being reborn actually gained the pc xp - so if I let my less-gamery partner or my nieces play, eventually they might get to a point where they ARE stable, just by bungling. heck, if you DON'T die in Shadow of Mordor? you're missing part of one of its biggest mechanics - the Nemesis System. If an orc never kills you, you never get to get revenge on THAT SPECIFIC ORC - as he taunts you for having previously slayed you. it's a very satisfying experience, I can assure you.
Take Rimworld, for example.
If everybody you know and love is down, bleeding out on the floor because some cannibals raided your colony, that might be game over.
Or there's an event trigger: a Man in Black arrives. Always armed, you gain control of this newcomer to give you one last shot of saving the day. Played well, and with luck that your savior is actually any good, you might save some or all of your people. Even though your house burned to the ground, that's just stuff.
This is a good fail-state imho.
I'd say that Rimworld very rarely goes so bad you actually lose your colony. Events usually appear to save you when you need it the most, or raiders never fully finishes you off. Sure, you lose a lot of progress, but you've got one hell of a story to tell. Which is the point of the game. And what you lose in those situations also scales down any future raids and negative stuff, which keeps the difficulty more even.
Videos like this are really fun, because they give me a glimpse of how my game ideas will work.
This one told me that I'm in the right track by explaining this Souls example. Losing resources upon death sucks, but at the same time is a necessary consequence for tension to be present. But being able to retrieve these lost resources by revisiting the scene of your death adds another consequence, a positive one. The game turned your failure into a new objective. It makes the game more engaging.
Ludo does not fear death, death fears Ludo.
My favorite game when it comes to death mechanics is Shadow of Mordor. Dying causes the orc who killed you to be promoted and gain prestige, which accomplishes all the things death should in a game. It punishes the player by making that orc more powerful the next time you fight him, it makes the player more invested by turning the orc into a personal nemesis, and it avoids the problem of repetition by adding a bit of entropy to the game world as well (dying advances time, which shuffles the orc hierarchy through their Darwinian infighting). It perfectly succeeds in making death feel like a failure without compromising the experience.
I don't have too many thoughts on game death. My primary one is when a game is insistent on you watching the death animation every time you die in a game where death is common. It wouldn't be bad if respawns were instant, but in games like Dark Souls, it's frustrating waiting, like, 15 seconds just to get to a loading screen.
At least if animation you have something to watch, but when its 15+ seconds of just the screen going dark before starting loading.....
It annoys me to no end when games don't auto skip the intro cutscenes of bosses and make you listen to the same repeated dialogue every attempt
That is what games like Super Meat Boy and Hotline Miami did well: death is common but you get instant respawn to try again.
Or even like the Arkham games where you get a bit if smack talk from villain A and you can't skip it.
I think that's the reason why rogue-likes/rogue-lites have become so popular recently. Death has meaningful consequences in that genre, it's all or nothing. And Hades, which is one of the best if not the best title in the genre of action rogue-lites, really leans into the death mechanic. You die and have to start over but everytime you die you get to experience more of the story, get to interact with the characters. There is so much story elements to explore that each death feels like you would still progress giving it both a consequence but also a benefit. I think more games should handle it like that.
Excellent video; this was the exact issue I had with Moonlighter.
Not to rehash the great video Jack did years ago on Previously Recorded, but the complete lack of any stakes just killed the whole game for me.
I recently had a bad death experience in Astroneer. I was carrying a backpack full of high value items and immediately died as I got out of my rocket because I glitched through the floor and slipped to the center of the plannet. The way death works in this game is it leaves your backpack behind and respawns you at your last "safe" location. You can go back and fetch it if you want. Respawning in my rocket, I had the option of taking off to another one of my bases and come back later with more gear. However, I was back home, and thought glitches happens and just tried to get out again...
The same thing happened. My old body dissappear with all of the gear. Most of it is unique in the world and cannot be crafted again.
I. didn't. knew. that.
The game never tells you. You have to die with enough rare stuff to be worth trying to get your body to learn about this. I struggled for 2 hours, gearing back up and prepping to get my body. When I finally reached it, and seeing the backpack completely empty with no sign of the old stuff... I was incredibly pissed. If it was a skill issue, I would've been more open to it. Sure you take a risk, you die that's that. This happened because of a _bug_. Something saves are supposed to protect you against!
At that point, 30 hours in, I had the choice of starting a new game, or ignoring the problem and essentially play on hard mode for the rest of the game. This wasn't my first playthrough and I only wanted to experience the new end game content tied to these items... it isn't worth the time anymore.
9:07 Bit of a spoiler for Undertale, but the omega flowey boss fight does this exact thing with the lying health bar. The first hit or 2 look like they do more then half of your health bar and puts you on edge, but every subsequent hit takes less and less, as your actual health bar is something like 12 hits or so. Really adds tension without the player immediately realizing they are a lot more safe than they initially thought.
The first thing the game taught me after launching Elden Ring for the first time: "It's fine to die. You're supposed to."
Someone else pointed the finger at games that lock you out of playing for a while when you die (cutscene, loadings, having to walk for several minutes...). I agree this is the worst experience. I want two things when dying in a game:
- Being able to retry immediately (not necessarily from the same spot, but from a point that feels like the start of the segment where I died at worst).
- Understanding what I did wrong (or at least getting a clue) so I can plan, if not a strategy to win, a strategy to observe.
Oh, and third, not being killed by a F***ING CLIFF in a non-platformer game. Jumping "puzzles" can go to hell.
There are research papers on "death" in video games. One of the papers noted that although it is usually a "punishment", in capture-the-flag or otherwise "objective" FPS games, there are examples where a player dies intentionally to get back to their base faster. I can't say I never intentionally died in TF2, to build my teleporter faster and have more metal for the other upgrades.
an example of dying to get back to your base that popped into my head when i was reading your comment was the Minecraft minigame Bedwar. if you are unfamiliar it the game mode has it so that you can infinitely respawn until your bed is broken. once that happens you cant respawn anymore so a common strategy is if you see someone at your base from far away (for example using the alarm trap) you jump into the void and try to stop them from breaking your bed, but the downside of that is that you lose all of the items you have on you except your armor (and some tools but those are downgraded by a level) and only have a wooden sword to defend yourself.
Katana Zero has a brilliant in universe explanation for why you get to respawn, and the story plays with this idea in interesting ways.
It also pretty nails, so although you only lose at max 2 mins of progress there's still stakes.
So let's talk about Dragon's Dogma and it's sequels super punishing failure states. In the first game you would just die (until you got to the end game) and have to reload a save. It's not a hard game but you had better be prepared for what you were trying to do or you could get wrecked.
In the sequel they let you try again from an autosave (with a health penalty) but again if you were not prepared you're better off just running away.
This failure system is meant to encourage the same kind of thoughtful preparation and planning you bring up with Kingdom Come. Ironically it would have just been better off with the original system of "oops you died, better save your game more often" because the new system just make players mad that they can't beat a challenge with less health that they were unprepared for in the first place.
I know they wanted to have a way to avoid punishing players for dying to something stupid such as falling too far or accidentally blowing themselves up (happened a lot in the first game). You just can't really stop players from using some games systems to make themselves angry.
I like how Outward handles "death". Any time your character is defeated (which will happen fairly often), they are knocked out and wake up somewhere else and sometime later. There are a number of scenarios, from "rescued by someone from the nearby settlement" to "captured by bandits". Your stuff is always nearby, so you don't lose anything as long as you take the time to look, but you'll often have an immediate challenge to keep play interesting. And if you keep getting knocked out, the RNG will eventually put you back in town, where you can lick your wounds and consider your life choices.
Occasionally there is a slightly more permanent penalty: some of the main quests are on timers, so getting knocked out runs down the clock. But even if you fail those quests, the game continues.
It took some getting used to, but in the end it was nice to know that the game would keep me playing, even if all my plans fell apart.
Personally, I hate repetition and I don't care about getting gud, espetially if it implies repetition. For me the perfect game starts by letting me save whenever I want (plus frequent automatic saving), gives me good information about the challenges ahead and let's me tweak how much I want to risk myself, preferably with multiple ways to solve each challenge. The Souls system works terribly for me, may sound like a great way to balance tension on paper, until you lose a ton of souls once or twice and end up tailoring your playstyle to a very conservative, grindy and ultimately boring way.
I agree with ya on the Souls system for deaths. That system is why I don't play Souls games. Losing all your souls/whatever to some cheap enemy or boss, not fun.
The secret really boils down to "never go to a new place with souls on you", spending any spare change on levels and upgrades (or upgrade materials and consumables) both gives you better odds and peace of mind knowing you've got nothing to lose. Though I really like how some games just gives you a way to retrieve a bloodstain remotely (like the hot springs in Code Vein and the Spirit Candle consumable in Nioh) so you can avoid a stressful dangerous runback if you've dropped too many souls to risk losing.
@@GameDevYal Yeah!, I tend to do that, but it also happens that one of my favorite things in games is exploration and the souls system interferes very negatively with that. Every new path I find, the first thing I do is check the souls: if I have enough to level up or I'm close I go back to the last bonefire and cash them out, which breaks the momentum, but, even if I'm low on souls, new areas usually mean rapid increase in souls as you go, so the further you go into new territory, the less you enjoy it, :/ It also doesn't help that all the great level design ideas are only great the first out of many-many times that you encounter them.
I don't know, maybe a scarce item that let's you trap the souls you have into an item could help here.
This is why I like the Bethesda style games. I can explore at my own pace and just see what is out there but if I die it is only a reloaded save away. In Fallout if the enemy is just too hard for me .... well the mirv fatman will solve that problem.
Everybody wants different things from game difficulty, so I think the best thing is accessibility options on top of difficulty options. RE4 had dynamic difficulty settings that adjusted so the player was always on the edge - but the better version of that would be:
1. Give players the choice of Easy, Medium, Hard, AND Dynamic difficulty.
2. If you choose Dynamic difficulty, then give the player options to tweak where the game will settle the difficulty based on your skills. Do you want it to adjust so you're always on the edge, or always comfortable but never steamrolling, or total steamroll, etc.
If dying and not dying breaks tension, then there's a simple solution, just reward not dying but not punish dying.
Using Dark Souls as an example, if you die, you immediately deposit your souls, but if you reach a bonfire, you get an extra 50% on your held souls.
This creates a nice risk-reward without actually punishing you. You feel rewarded for doing well, but you don't feel like you wasted your time if you died.
in the surge(and lords of the fallen), every enemy you kill increases a multiplier so each enemy after that drops more and more scrap(souls) but dying or vistitning a medbay(a bonfire) resets that multiplier you can also bank scrap(souls) as well but you need to visit a medbay which resets the multiplier
@@mylesfrost9302 do you bank your scraps upon death in the Surge?
That doesn't work at all in the example you give.
Giving a 50% of yout stored souls even if only restricted to new bonfires encourages holding onto souls to get bigger bonuses.
But that's far from how souls are meant to function.
In DS you're practically never incentivized to hold souls, if anything you're incentivized to spend whenever possible from how easy it is to lose them.
The whole point being that spending them on weapons or levelling means you're never going to lose more than a level or 2, which sure can hurt but is easily recoverable.
But with this change its now going to be better to hold on to souls to get that 50% increase, you'll be incentivized to not spend souls before a boss to level but to keep them through the boss fight so you can get the bonus.
Ontop of that this would just worsen some of the issues in the games. People who're capable of holding on to souls tend to already have too much on hand and overlevel, this change would only widen the soul level gap and make it harder to balance the game when people are going to approach fights with even bigger souls ranges.
@@theresnothinghere1745 your arguments are all over the place.
If people can overlevel in the first place, then it's a matter of wasting people's time and grinding out levels to make the game easier for them anyway.
Holding onto souls before a boss fight makes no sense if you're struggling. You're either not struggling, which means you can do a "no bonfire run" anyway, or you're not as good as you think you are, and will die in the boss fight anyway, which won't make collecting all those souls a waste of time.
@@GameFuMaster "If people can overlevel in the first place, then it's a matter of wasting people's time and grinding out levels to make the game easier for them anyway"
That's wrong.
People can overlevel without grind at all because the devs are expecting some souls to be lost on death. All this does is widen the soul gap between people who tend to lose souls and those who don;t.
"Holding onto souls before a boss fight makes no sense if you're struggling."
But it does not all bosses are difficult to recoup the souls from many bosses in the series either start slowly walking or with an easy to read attack giving the player time to recover their souls.
Not to mention depending on the game there are means to circumvent this like repairable equipment that allows you too keep your souls after death.
Ontop of that this isn't only for bosses but for world traversal too, rather than picking up their souls in a difficult area then going back to spend them you are encouraging them to continue forward with all the souls they have.
My favorite death state mechanic comes from Outward. When you lose all your HP (which is pretty often early game) the game randomly selects a failure event from a location specific list for your character. You get a variety of things like a beast dragging back to its den, bandits making you a slave, random good npcs taking you to safe space, or simply dragging yourself to the dungeon entrance before passing out. Regardless time passes and your max stats suffer until treatment via items or rest.
What truly makes it special in my opinion is that sometimes the failure actually puts you in a more advantageous position. Trying to make your back to town with a pack of loot to sale? Well a hunter might just drag your limp body there for you. Got lost in on the map? Well someone dragged your body to a point of interest where you can get your bearings and rest up?
In Outward the deaths never feel like a game over, just an opportunity to retry from a different angle.
It's rather odd, I've never experienced death to heighten tension so much as simply killing my flow. Dark Souls 2 and Sekiro were the games I played with the most punishing death states and halfway through these games, I was just done. I wasn't invested in the story, the mechanics or the supposed reward of success or 'relief' as it's put here. It wasn't even a boss I failed to kill, I just sat there for a minute, realized I didn't care at all about the game and moved on. The reason I tried to play FromSoft games in the first place is because on paper, difficult games are supposed to be right up my alley. But somehow these two weren't.
I played Elden Ring shortly after release and had a good time with it, until one day I noticed that I wasn't having a good time -all- the time. Certain boss fights were needlessly frustrating and the constant bait and switch feinting of certain enemies, just bog standard mooks was grating. Considering that Elden Ring's halfway point is much farther in thanh that of DS 2 and Sekiro, I got a lot more out of ER than the other games, but again, I decided one day that I was having more fun with other games. I think the constant feinting was getting on my nerves more than anything.
I wish games were designed to allow for setbacks, rather than outright killing you. Sure, you have your checkpoints or your multiple lives and what have you, but why aren't games designed to allow for failure and still progress the game itself? Why is a failure state an automatic game over, or a progression obstacle? We're taught in real life that failure leads to success, and you may argue that deaths in FromSoft games accomplish exactly that, but how many times do you die in real life trying to figure out a problem? How many times are you killed trying to change a lightbulb? Granted, I've not had the pleasure of fighting a mutated knight that has somehow fused with their horse in real life yet but my point still stands on risky or dangerous challenges.
Failures should not abruptly end your progress. Progress should be more malleable in games to better represent real life.
Here's an example of what I'd like to see in games. Let's say I'm going to do a presentation at an office meeting discussing new product ideas. There will be five board members present who will decide whether or not to move forward with the product. Your job is to convince at least three of them to get the green light. You do your presentation, but this is only one shot for this particular product idea. You can't reload an earlier save to try a different dialog tree, you can't drink a potion of persuasion during the presentation if things don't go your way.
Now imagine you failed that presentation. You still have your job, the product you suggested just won't be moved forward and another is chosen. You failed to get the green light, but you did not automatically game over. You won't be fired, you won't be asked to never again make these presentations. And presumably you're not killed for your failure either. However, you learned about the preferences of the people at that meeting and can prepare your next product presentation accordingly, adjusting for their personalities and interests. And maybe the board members you did convince will have you make another presentation for a slightly altered product to get the others on board.
You make progress in real live through failure. In games? You simply reload.
P.S.: I also take umbrage with doubly punishing a player for dying. You died, it killed your flow, you're set back and then you also lost all resources you collected thus far? Why? Why kick the player while they're down? That just seems cynical and hateful to me.
yep
have you played wario land 2 and 3? wario doesn't die in 'em, and in boss rooms, if you fail you are just removed from the boss room and have to make your way back to 'em.
I think that death is simply the easiest way to represent restarting a task in games, given their frequent action-oriented focus. And I would argue that restarting a task after failure *is* a common outcome of real life tasks. Take the light bulb example. If you fail to change a lightbulb, usually, it means you messed up a step and the smart move is to pick up from where you're certain you did it correctly. It's the same if you fail to complete a math problem, to give another example. Not all real life problems are like this, of course, especially social ones where failure will affect others' perceptions of you -- but it is a model that exists in real life, even if the stakes aren't as high as death.
A fundamental part of a lot of games that makes them so satisfying is gradually progressing from being a novice to a master, and the most basic way to accomplish this is through repetition. The same applies to a lot of real life skills; if you want to become a master pianist, you start with an easy piece. If you fail, try again. Eventually, after enough trying, you'll perform that piece adequately, and at that point you'll pursue more challenging pieces to perform. Most games follow a similar loop -- you're given a challenge and put effort into completing it until you have, at which point you're given a more difficult challenge.
The office-presentation analogy functions very similarly to video game deaths, actually -- if you fail in either, you're in the same position you were prior to failing, with the advantage of greater knowledge. You know what to expect from the task you've already failed at once, and you have to succeed where you failed last time, using that knowledge. How is that any different from being put back a few steps in a video game? Because if you remove the framing of "death", failing in a video game is just being sent back to the last place you succeeded in getting to. It's rare for a game to send you back to the very beginning for failure.
It's also not common in games. Old school like Sonic or Super Mario you took damage or died it lowered your score it didn't weaken your character that much. You'd have lives so you could get a game over but it didn't screw you completely.
Agree on the part about wanting to kys after beating that boss after 40 tries and not being happy
I love Hades because it made death much less frustrating than any other game I have ever played. After being defeated in any game, I am usually angry at myself and disheartened by what I couldn't achieve. In Hades these feelings are lessened because I would always get to see the story progress by either getting new dialogues or accomplishing something else in the lobby area. Even if you lost, the game made you feel like the momentum hadn't been lost completely.
To me it all depends on how many mistakes on my part separate me from "full power" to "failure". If everything is a one-hit KO then I want a smaller punishment. If I can survive a couple of enemy attacks then I'm fine re-running a whole gauntlet.
My favourite most memorable time in any survial horror game is the bit between game start and my first death. The fear of that first death is more important than any failure state or lost minutes or hours of progress. Whilst good game devs can rank up the broken tension again, it is never quite to the same extent.
Reminds me of the time I tried to play “Limbo” where basically you die over and over again in trial and error gameplay until you solve the little platforming puzzle and then it’s onto the next one. I couldn’t play it for long before losing interest. It didn’t feel like any skill was involved or that I was in control of the game at all… just keep dying until you understand the gimmick
Oh yeah, when I finally got to play Limbo I couldn't stand it. I think Inside is a lot better in this regard, from what I've seen of the game at least. Also just more interesting looking narrative.
LIMBO has one trial-and-error puzzle that will instantly kill you (at least I only remember one, after playing through it a few times--it's the bit where you jump on a button and a crusher descends from the ceiling, but there's another button just next to it that you need to jump on to AVOID being crushed, and a naive playthrough has no way to tell which is which that I've figured out). Many, many puzzles can be got through with quick thinking, otherwise, though they're often surprising after the static puzzles with no time factor.
@@erikpedersen4685 No. Just... no. Every puzzle in Limbo will instantly kill you in a multitude of ways. Over and over again. Trial and error is the core game loop. And it's not "quick thinking" that gets you though the puzzles. It's figuring out what each gimmick is where you just have to know what to do, and you can usually uncover it - again - via dying many times over and over.
Exactly my feelings on Limbo and Inside. I heard how highly these two games were regarded so my expectations were high going into them and I just didn't get it. The gameplay was frustrating and not fun.
@@BryanSolo_1 not trying to be mean or anything but I think you might just be bad at puzzle platformer games. I died in Limbo maybe three or so times, one was the first bear trap and the other was the final puzzle. I also remember dying to the electrical HOTEL sign
0:42 Ah, I know how to handle this! If the player dies, they lose the whole game and all their save files, then they have to slot a quarter in to try again!
@@flameofthephoenix8395 sounds good to me lmao
The Souls games also trivialize death. Once you get stuck at a boss, the longer that lasts, the less you care about dying. Former traps and pitfalls and challenging enemies are now mere annoyances standing between you and a full health retry at the boss. You no longer care about your souls because you got all the levels out them you were going to get before this boss and so the corpse run also becomes pointless for a while. Then tension at that point is the same as a game which you could save-scum, whilst the annoyance is higher cuz RNG keeps aligning against you and you occasionally don't arrive at the boss with full health.
Yeah no, I don't like dying in games and will always try to avoid it regardless of how punishing it is. It doesn't matter if the death is right after a save, with an instant re-spawn, requires a little bit of level replaying or or a lot. The only thing that will make me trivialize a death in a game is how "cheap" that death came, the more unfair or unpredictable or uncontrollable it seems the less I care about it.
By making saving uncertain and therefore a death more punishing you aren't raising my tension with the game, well ok you are, but at same time you are making me question whether then having to re-do all the progress I lost is the best use of my time and whether perhaps a more certain use of my time, in order words spending it on something that will lose me no progress, might not perhaps be better. In other words you are persistently making me want to play the game less regardless of how rewarding the "relief" of finally being able to secure that progress again might be.
I personally would find Souls games a LOT more enjoyable if there was no consequence to death. If I could focus purely on ME VS the enemy in front of me without having to worry about any other factors whatsoever. If every step forward was guaranteed progress and there was far less to constantly re-do.
If Souls games had no consequence for death I might've actually played any of them, or any of the games that advertise themselves as Souls-like. One of the main thing I like in games is exploring, and the moment the game says, "go back to where you died or lose progress," it discourages exploration and encourages safe play. It's like the turtle gameplay of XCOM they tried to get rid of with timed missions.
@@AnotherDuckactual big baby gamer here
@@manjackson2772 People feeling the need to insult and put others down are the real babies. Just come here and insult, I mean, how empty is your life?
@@AnotherDuck Just play them with a cheat table, you get rid of the punishment and you can enjoy everything else the game has to offer.
@@shardperson3777 That's what I do with Minecraft, but it's easier there. Just disable inventory drop on death.
The death punishment in the Souls games is the one thing I hate about them. They don't respect my time.
having consequences for death is overrated. it's already trivial, it's a game, death is just there to point out that i messed up. yes, thank you game, i know i suck at this part. now can i just get back and try it again without you wasting my time through long death animations and replaying a part i've already mastered. i prefer games where death is instant and you can attempt the hard part again within a few seconds. in a lot of games i just think about how much more i'd enjoy them if I could use save states.
If no one tells you that you suck, will you know?
on the other hand, as a narrative device, tension through death/failstate can be immersive and engaging, sometimes
Maybe that's why I never experienced any of the highs that people talk about in Dark Souls. Realizing that dying meant losing my souls, I divided my play in two: (1) protracted level grinding and shopping, and (2) progressing through the game's objectives.
This meant I paid zero attention to my soul count when not grinding. I could run through new areas trying different approaches and doing dumb stuff without worrying about losing souls. Once you realize that 50,000 souls is only like three minutes of grinding in Anor Londo, the tension completely dissipates.
The corpse run consequence of death is one that I'm particularly not a fan of. Be it lost souls or haze or gear or whatever, it reduces my joy in the game and the gaming experience. Consider that perhaps the reason one died is due to a challenging fight. One dies. One is now measurably weaker due to the "left behind mcguffin-sauce" and must again face the fight that bested them last time, only now they are weaker. Bah, I say. Fie on it, I say.
Also, as an aging gamer, I find that the need to stop and save on my schedule, not the game's schedule, is vital to my happiness. Hording save spots/save items/gimmick-du-jour-to-prevent-save-scumming only makes it more difficult for me to properly enjoy the game, so it crimps my joy, so I tend to move on to other games that are joy-crimp lessened. Ya?
Also, consider that the tension/release you speak of can also be found in being blocked from advancing the story. If I can't progress the game past a certain point due to dying to a boss, I'm as tense as I could be when there is a "sting of death" consequence. There is already a consequence of being unable to advance the story. Frankly, that's enough.
I think the corpse run mechanic - ironically - can work better in less difficult games. I feel it doesn't matter too much in Diablo 2 though as it's usually not too difficult to retrieve your body without too much danger of dying again. But death is also generally something that doesn't happen a lot so when you have to do a corpse run then that's actually somewhat memorable. A little bit of player story woven around one of the rare deaths.
Darkwood ended up having a good compromise on Normal difficulty. On that difficulty you cannot die for good, so while death can be frustrating and you can lose out on some ressource gain, that's it. Even corpse runs are mostly a matter of getting back important items, because they can't easily be replaced and are needed. But they will not disappear and the danger of repeated death is also not that high as you will probably not take the risk of gettting killed again. Especially not while the night is approaching.
I find it very ironic people are treating a corpse runback as a punishment when it isn't.
In any other game you would lose all your levels, currency, xp, items unlocked, major enemies killed since the last checkpoint. Because dying resets you to a previous checkpoint before you obtained those.
A corpse runback is giving you a second chanece to get back your currency and xp while often letting you keep everything else.
Failing a corpse runback is at worst just doing the same thing a reset to checkpoint system does.
I feel that death and failstates are becoming more of a 'well, it's always been done' thing. Early games needed failstates because they were built on simple win/lose mechanics. Also coin-ops needed you to fail to keep spending!
Modern narrative-driven games are built on these foundations, but many don't actually need punishing failstates.