Are Lives Outdated Game Design?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 พ.ค. 2024
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Are lives an outdated relic of the arcade era, or are they still relevant to game design in 2020?
=== Before you watch ===
Disclosure: Crash Bandicoot 4 game code provided by the publisher
=== Sources and Resources ===
[1] Super Meat Boy's McMillen Explains 'Why So Hard?' | Gamasutra
www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1...
[2] Sonic Mania’s Save System Sucks | USGamer
www.usgamer.net/articles/soni...
=== Chapters ===
00:00 - Intro
00:57 - What is a Lives System?
02:54 - The Argument Against Lives
03:41 - The Argument For Lives
04:51 - Innovating on Lives
06:31 - Flipping Lives Upside Down
07:40 - Conclusion
08:19 - Patreon Credits
=== Games Shown ===
Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (Toys for Bob, 2020)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Intelligent Systems, 2019)
Battletoads (Dlala Studios, 2020)
Pac-Man (Namco, 1980)
Super Mario 3D World (Nintendo, 2013)
Super Mario World (Nintendo, 1990)
Sonic Mania (Sega, 2017)
Kirby Star Allies (HAL Laboratory, 2018)
Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981)
Donkey Kong Country (Rare, 1994)
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (Retro Studios, 2014)
Rayman Legends (Ubisoft Montpellier, 2013)
The End Is Nigh (Edmund McMillen & Tyler Glaiel, 2017)
Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo, 2017)
Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010)
Streets of Rage 4 (Dotemu / Lizardcube / Guard Crush Games, 2020)
Mega Man 11 (Capcom, 2018)
Disney's Aladdin (Capcom, 1993)
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (Konami, 1993)
Super Mario Bros. 3 (Nintendo, 1988)
Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1988)
Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985)
Celeste (Matt Makes Games, 2018)
Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990)
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy (Vicarious Visions, 2017)
New Super Mario Bros. U (Nintendo, 2012)
Furi (The Game Bakers, 2016)
Kero Blaster (Pixel, 2014)
Sonic Generations (Sonic Team, 2011)
Spelunky 2 (Mossmouth, 2020)
The Messenger (Sabotage Studios, 2018)
Shovel Knight (Yacht Club Games, 2014)
Panzer Paladin (Tribute Games, 2020)
Ori and the Blind Forest (Moon Studios, 2015)
DoDonPachi Resurrection (Cave, 2008)
Sonic Forces (Sonic Team, 2017)
Trials Evolution (RedLynx, 2012)
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Inti Creates, 2018)
=== Credits ===
Music provided by Music Vine - musicvine.com/
=== Subtitles ===
Contribute translated subtitles (and see translation credits) - amara.org/en-gb/videos/rKJAzf... - เกม
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"Asking players to make fundamental game design decisions before theyve even started playing" - excellently worded
Fallout New Vegas was the first game I ever encountered this. You get slapped with a huge paragraph that essentially says "Hey want to try Survival mode? You'll get totally wrecked something chronic and you need a totally different playstyle than you've ever needed before by introducing multiple new time-based factors to worry about you never otherwise had to, in fact it's so hard we just recommend you don't even play on it."
I was so turned off by the idea of it I didn't even try Survival. I've since found out it can be quite fun and makes towns and cities way more valuable, reinforcing the post-apocalypse styling. No more taking 3 weeks to loot every filing cabinet because you just don't have enough food and water to do that. But the way it was presented was practically a "Put your hand in this bear trap? Yes/No (Recommended)"
I really feel this, especially with The Witcher III. I feel like I can't decide which version is the "real game". Part of me thinks I need to go all the way to Death March to "really play" the game, but then that seems unnecessarily brutal, then I get burnt out and stop playing. It's like if composers wrote their songs at 4 different tempos, each with slightly different arrangements. Which one is "the real song"?
@@SamChaneyProductions Exactly, excellent analogy. I've seen plenty of games described in a way where "To really play the game *for real* you need to play on _____ difficulty." Crushing for Uncharted 2, Hardened for COD, Heroic for Halo. I could easily see the exact same thing happening there, "You don't really appreciate the music unless you listen at ______ tempo" type arguments.
And then you get hyper elitist people who actively go out of their way to mock people who play on lower difficulties or with certain modifiers. Risk of Rain and it's sequel are plagued with this unfortunately. It's a game all about unlocking items and stacking them, like Binding of Isaac, and I always want to play on easy to get the items unlocked, then hard later when I have all my options available. Yet for some reason, the die hard superfans will mock people playing on the easy difficulties, even if they are new or just want to get the unlocks first. There's a modifier that lets you pick exactly what items you want instead of randomizing them, and even though this is extremely fun, and opens new build ideas, instead the people using it get mocked because it makes the game easier.
Well, mock all you like, I'm having way more fun stacking 20 syringes and energy drinks to turn my character into an A-10 on legs than you are dying first round on the hardest difficulty and complaining about bad drops.
@@SamChaneyProductions Death March was the perfect difficulty after the first 5-10 hours of the game. It's one of those Mastery games, where you have to master the system to feel at home. Mastering it on anything lower felt very boring.
witcher 3 lets you change difficulty on the fly, and since it has a typical RPG inverted difficulty curve i started on a lowish setting and ended up at death march
Werent lives originally put into games to rob kids of their precious quarters in arcades which then carried over into console games?
Pretty much, though don’t bring that up too much, a few publishers might get a few bad ideas.
In early home console gaming, it was to ensure people don't quickly complete the game and then refund it.
Definitely not. Unfortunately, that's a much heard repeated talking point.
i imagine it was just to give the other kids a turn when you game over
@@devangnivatkar2649 along with blind jumps and bullshit trial-and-error traps to waste your time and cause restarts over and over like the lion king game
_"This is 20 pages of software license"_
*"Dear God..."*
_"There's more"_
*"NO"*
RIP Rick May
"It contains a 24 page privacy policy agreement"
And that's a bucket
lmao
Lives aren't expressly outdated, but the game has to be designed with them in mind.
they fit well in score focused games as a way to limit what qualifies as good enough and what isn't.
In "home" games that involve a score table, I'm all for abundant or unlimited continues. You know, to make a differenciation between starting the last level from the beginning and starting from a checkpoint at the middle, which isn't at all a harsh punishment IMO, even considering if there's an additional save system that also works per-level, and not per-checkpoint. Though in order to avoid exploiting for the total score, it should be cleared whenever the lives are over, and perhaps update the save accordingly.
Sounds fair enough?
@@firerat1653 exactly
@@firerat1653 An alternative I've seen in some games is to deduct half of a player's score for using a continue, which to me seems fair if said game has a firm ending and doesn't continuously loop.
The question is "what are the stakes?", e.g. "what do you lose when you fail?". In most games it's your time. In arcades, it's quarters.
Yeah, thats what made lives so popular in the first place but they're not entirely outdated either. My favourite kind of penalty however, is those that carry over instead of making you repeat something that can be boring, such as losing a character or sth
Well, more like your progress than time, and also often it’s currency
The point of the "lives system" is to teach the player that death is inevitable, and that life is ultimately meaningless.
------
This is meant to be humorous, to anyone who takes my statement seriously.
I loved celeste's take on it. You don't get punished at all for dying, you respawn in the same screen. The point is to beat short but hard platforming challenges and permanently save afterward. The difficulty doesn't come from being concentrated for long periods of time but rather from actual platforming. It still counts every death and shows them after each level so you will see exactly how bad you are.
Yea Celeste has no need for lives but not all platformers are built for short sections like Celeste
Sounds like it took that straight from meat boy. Definitely my preferred way of doing it
They show how many times you die, but they try to spin it from "look how bad you are" to "look how much you tried, this is all from your determination". I personally love that way of seeing it
And the use of Golden Strawberries for those who want the extra challenge is a nice addition
And they even managed to nail raising the stakes without lives at the end of levels by having one (relatively) long section that was more lenient than many of the sections that came before it, but tested how well you can improvise and adapt.
Lives are indeed outdated. The new way to do that is an energy-bar where you have to wait 24h or pay 5 bucks to keep playing ;)
@@CardmanOfficial they already do that though, it wasn't OPs idea lol.
Mobile games in a nutshell
I mean I think battle cats does it well
Isnt that just a $5 life then?
@@CardmanOfficial That's why i can't play mobile games
I really like how Doom Eternal has extra lives as an automatic revive when you die. They make a great collectible and raise the stakes even more because you obviously don’t want to lose your limited amount. In an already very high skill game, extra lives reward exploration instead of punishing repeated failures.
And this is useful for beating the game in Nightmare difficulty, because if you die, you had to start all the way from the beginning. An Iron Man mode, basically. And you had to do everything in one shot.
I totally agree, especially since Doom Eternal can get pretty hard and because how the levels are. A live system that gets you game over will be to unforgiving. Imagine playing Ancient Gods, getting a game over and having to restart a almost 3 hour long level.
Speaking of which, why in the hell was Doom never mentioned in the video? That was pretty much the first action game to forgo a life system and prove it wasn't necessary to have one to have a fun game or a good challenge.
@@Trimint123 extra lives aren’t in ultra-nightmare. They are turned off and replaced with sentinel armor. If you could get more than one life it would screw with the game modes intent.
However you can get extra lives in all the normal modes.
Same with rougelikes like isaac
The limited lives really made my palms sweat while playing those weird trippy levels in Super Mario Sunshine without the water gun. Because it's so annoying when you run out of lives in them. However, it seems like there's always an extra life hidden somewhere near the beginning.
*PTSD intensifies*
A frustratingly useful way to farm lives..
It's almost like the game designers were trying to find a loophole to the lives system while not realizing they could just... You know, take it out completely.
@@thegodofalldragons But having 1-up mushrooms in strategic spots is no guarantee a player is going to reach them every time. Sometimes, going for one actually adds another challenge since that can mean taking more risks to get it. Taking lives out of _Super Mario Sunshine_ would make it into a different, and I daresay not better, platforming experience.
@@reillywalker195 This is exactly the reason why i'd say that they are implemented well in those levels in mario sunshine. You still need to play a bit before getting one so you could potentially fail and it always takes a little time collecting one. I felt encouraged from the way they were used, the devs showing that they know a hard part is coming and rewarding me to overcome the small challenge at the start of it.
I had no idea that Crash 4 rewarded you for doing well and not dying, even if you chose Modern Mode. That's really smart.
He didn't mention it, but some levels have a VHS tape you can find if you get to its spot without dying. Those tapes then unlock bonus levels styled as training tapes from before the first game in the series. Those are in addition to the "3 deaths or under" gem.
@@twarnold14 the game also has Perfect Relics, that you gain by finishing the level without dying and with all boxes broken
Well i dont think that this is that smart, because it is a mechanic present since the very first crash game, and it would feel a capped experience if that was removed from the modern mode.
@@Daniel-bi5ci Well the fact they chose not to take it away is fairly smart.
Crash 4 is constantly holding your hand with pity power ups. If anything it's another game trying to cater to the masses.
I'm surprised you didn't even mention the whole Dark Souls style "recover your corpse" mechanic as an alternative to lives, considering that it is used for the same purpose and was copied by at least one of the games you showed in the video.
I do like games that do this, it's more challenging and less frustrating than losing all your lives.
Yeah! I remember dying in hollow knight and finding my shade with all of my money where I died.
well Dark Souls wasn't really the one to pioneer the recover your corpse mechanic as that was pioneered in the 90s, with the Diablo franchise being a good example.
Actually, Dark Souls has lives in the form of the estus flask. While it's not 1 to 1, the flasks also give you a limited number of oppertunities to continue before you're flung back to a previous part.
@@lilowhitney8614 Not sure if it is in other Dark Souls games, but Dark Souls 2 also has healing magic and items to add to Estus flasks, but healing magic requires having equipment for casting, having the stats to give a good heal and a good amount of them, and having the time to cast as it is a very vulnerable animation. The healing items, have a pretty lengthy animation, but you can still move a little, however, their major drawback is not healing instantly like Estus Flasks and instead healing slowly, over a span of 5 to 10 seconds (I think). However, slow healing is basically the traditional RPG "regen" magic which has an additional use of giving you basically extended health because you will heal health as soon as you are damaged... but in Dark Souls 2, you really need to plan well for this to actually be useful.
So basically, both systems work as long as you actually put effort into working them into your game instead of lazily throwing them on top?
Mario 64’s live system seems pointless. Game over and you’re yeeted all the way outside the castle. Now you have to go all the way back to the level, which isn’t much of a penalty either. Lives are also never saved, quitting will reset the number of lives. But the game does have some checkpoints, inside the pyramid, the volcano, and Tall Tall Mountain slide allow you start from inside those sub areas if you die. Lose all your lives and you’ll have to start the level normally once you get back to it. Even with these checkpoints, if you’re trying to get the 100 coin star, dying will reset the amount of coins you had. So everything you collected outside is lost since there’s no way back outside, except the slide, which is better to start collecting coins from there since you don’t want to spawn the star on the slide.
It was more a psychological situation. I was so afraid of the game over, that I never got one. As a kid I farmed lives from time to time to avoid the game over. I never thought what happened, I didn't care. I just didn't want to lose all my lives because that's what the game doesn't want you to do. It's hard to explain for me but the situation is very easy.
@RockManLP I am not sure of that. It feels great playing without any fear, just enjoying the game and trying to get better because you actually enjoy playing well. Mario Odyssey for example rewards the player with an amazing gameplay if he manages to master it.
@@Alfonso88279 woo you made me remember I used to be super scared of game overs, I thought they were gonna remove the whole game if they happened lol, I too used to farm lives to avoid them when I was close to 0 and I never had one for a looong time
Agreed. The best thing to come out of the lives systems is that some ROM hacks use it in tandem with checkpoints that actually matter, though even then it's not a huge deal, and many hacks disable lives completely these days.
Pointless and annoying, I'd say. I recently purchased the 3D All-Stars version, and was reminded that the game really did come out almost 25 years ago.
My story is of the penguin race at Cool, Cool Mountain. It took me somewhere between 15 and 20 tries to finally get the star there. It's not a long challenge, so every attempt only took less then a minute or two... except for that every 5 tries I had to take some extra time to run back to the painting from outside the castle.
So getting a game over wasn't really making the game "harder", because the extra actions I was performing weren't difficult. It just made the game arbitrarily longer, which isn't a great. Granted, the game is old, but updating it to be more like Odyssey would probably have involved more work than Nintendo was willing to put into it.
I want to give points to Celeste here for its golden berrries
The game never punishes you for constantly failing. Hell, I finished the Farewell chapter with over 5,000 deaths and never felt punished for it.
However, the golden berries, in order to collect them, require you to complete the stage deathless, adding an extra challenge.
The game also never gatekeeps content behind the golden berries, they're purely there for those willing to seek the challenge
Yo wait what the hell? This is the first time I heard about the existence of these things.
@@alyastastic you have to beat all of the B-sides to unlock them.
Seeing the deaths rack up after a hard level is also pretty satisfying. That's 5000 times you could have given up but didn't.
Agree! Celeste's collectables in general are always great and serve the gameplay well. They're like an extra challenge in every situation. You could do something really easy to complete the room, or you could beat the room in a way more difficult (but interesting) way and get a collectable.
If Celeste had a lives system that booted you back to the title screen after a Game Over, I probably wouldn't even have completed the first level. I simply don't have that kind of patience.
I like how DOOM Eternal handels extra lives. If you don't have any, you get sent back to the last checkpoint you cleared. But if you "explore" the levels and collect them, your health simply get refilled on the spot when you die. So the fight immediately continues rather than you having to walk there again.
That sounds more like a fairy from Zelda
That sounds more like a totem of undying from Minecraft
Thanks a bunch for featuring Panzer Paladin in this video!
This video also started an entertaining game dev discussion at the studio. :D
I just heard about the game through this video and now I see it's dev in the comments, might give it a try, looks like a fun game!
@@lidge1994 it do :))
Lives as a concept isn't outdated but how they are implemented are. I feel many game developers have to rework lives so that they actually mean something instead of just getting a game over screen. Really, it just comes down to what works best with your game.
That's exactly what the video is about lol. Most games don't need lives though. Even old games, you remove the system entirely and nothing is lost. That's why the general consensus of what the "lives" system is is argued as being outdated. If you have to drastically turn it on its head to make sense or be better, then yes it is outdated.
THIS
Lives always just seem like a “restart the level” thing
They should be much more permanent; restart an entire section if you lose your life
@@hilotakenaka Doom Eternal Ultra Nightmare.
@@hilotakenaka That would be the exact same thing, just lifting up the stakes. It has the exact same flaws
@@Ayoul Actually that argument isn't totally valid. Many older games that weren't too long and were very arcade like in being beat in an hour I think enhanced the experience. The contra games are the sole example of the lives system feeling justified to me. While getting a game over isn't the end of the world since the games lengths aren't extremely long the idea of losing makes the stakes feel quite high since getting that far is basically one basic gaming session and it forces you to actually learn the mechanics or nuances of the game to actually beat it. I will always state there has been few games that have given me a thrill like contra 3 on hard mode with a limit of 3 lives and whatever continues. When you are in the final stages of that game and you know your chances are limited, it creates this really thrilling feeling. It's the same arcade mindset like pacman or donkey kong where you have been in the game for quite a while and you are in your last life which basically forces you to play at your best. It's a great psychological trick. There has been many older games where I would carry myself on the very last life because as humans we tend to unlock a lot of our great potential when the consequences become pretty apparent. I think the problem with some games having a checkpoint system is that my mind instantly goes into auto pilot. I become a computer and just try many different ways until the game is satisfied with what it wants me to do repeating the same section constantly. A good example is celeste, a game I enjoyed but started to feel extremely repetitive by the end, doing the same idea of trial and error until I completed the game. The live system was made in the first place to compliment arcade games or games with short lengths so people wouldn't move on so easily to the next game but I'd argue in some cases it makes certain games much more engaging. I will also state that shmups are in a similar camp, stuff like axelay gave me similar thrills.
1cc's aren't exactly no death clears. They're just beating the game in question without losing all your lives and having to continue (or insert another credit, if you're playing IRL).
60 shmuppers know their stuff ;)
yeah I was about to say XD It also typically means not using "extra lives", as some shmups have cheat codes or options to have more lives. A 1CC of a Touhou game typically means that you don't crank your lives up to 8 in the beginning lol (at that point, you could probably clear Normal mode on your first try)
I think the point is, 1cc runs aren't possible where credits/continues aren't a concept.
You can't "1cc" a run of VVVVVV for instance, you can only do a no-deaths or limited-deaths version.
In Touhou you can only get the true endings by doing a 1CC, it feels satisfying to git gud at the game to obtain extra bits of lore, that's why Touhou is one of the only shmups that holds my attention, the mix of intense gameplay and story/lore is very balanced.
@@shyguy1932 It feels better if you did 1CC LNN (Lunatic No miss No bomb)
Another thing that came to mind: In games with lives, where lives ultimately didn't matter, they still gave me a little sense of earned progress and freedom. Going from "only 3 lives and I'll be reset all the way back to the beginning" in the first parts of the game to "I still got 10 lives, I can risk some of them to do more exploration, or try some crazy stunts/jumps" and finally getting to "I got so many lives, I can do and try whatever I want - I'll beat this!". This sense of progression is missing to me in games that hand out unlimited lives from the beginning.
Oooh that's a good point. Just like Spyro! I felt so powerful as a kid seeing that 99 in the top corner :)
Of course I was still horrified of dying - then I'd only have 98! And, gosh, well, wouldn't want someone to walk in and see that!
I like how you asked a "yes" or "no" question with an "it depends", but in a way that feels like you answered the question in a satisfying manner instead of the alternative "it depends" answer of leaving the viewer feel like they were tricked into watching a video that didn't serve it's purpose.
I really like the idea of rewarding players for keeping their lives rather than punishing them for running out of them. It feels more motivating and less intimidating.
i disagree
One aspect that wasn't mentioned is the eventual need to *grind* for lives when your low. And when you do grind for them, it's always gonna be near the max amount so you don't do it again
I mean, you don't HAVE to do it. If the player wants to go through the tedium of grinding and save themselves the worry of a game over, they should be able to. You can also apply this to grinding EXP in RPGs.
@@papersonic9941 Another arguably outdated model, or at least controversial.
I absolutely love Celeste, because honestly I suck at games, and Celeste has super precise and complicated platforming but anyone can beat it with enough dedication and patience, and when you beat the level it feels soo good. If Celeste had lives, I wouldn’t buy it
Definitely and with the assist mode it makes it even better for all sorts of gamers.
"If this game designed around the lack of lives had them, the game would be worse" - yeah, duh. In games with lives you can also beat them with enough determination, you just tend to have bigger stakes per death.
u suck at games? lol thats funny.
Question from someone who’s pretty new to games (I’ve played BOTW and some Minecraft) is Celeste a good platformer to start with? I wanna get into them, but stuff like Super Meat Boy just seems unachievable
@@nataliedavis8675 Celeste is difficult but the assist mode allows you to slow the game speed which will let you react to hazards faster. Also gives multiple other options (falling won't kill you, double and triple jumps etc).
I think the worst thing about lives was always that they incentive you to basically farm and horde them, especially if your not good at a game. It already sucks to be bad at a game and keep being punished, but then you also have to replay the first level over and over to get you in a position to finish later ones
This is precisely why lives don't even try to do their job.
Exactly. It encourages you to spend more time in easy levels to find lives & less time in hard levels to avoid the risk of a restart so you don't get good at the hard levels because the game is discouraging you from trying.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles is supposed to be about speed or exploration but the lives system encourages you to tie a rubber band to your controller & leave the room for several minutes at the beginning of Launch Base 1 to kill hawks.
You absolutely right lives in video games it's such a bad thing same as microtransactions, in fact this was the way to grab more money on arcade days
i played megaman 2 because i wanted a hard game, and i got a hard game. if you hate the mechanic, dont play the game.
@@waled7564 lol no get gud.
Lives are a way to make sure the player learn the game and get good at it. (unless it was an arcade game)
Lives should punish the player because why would anyone get rewarded for doing badly? that only incentivizes reckless gameplay in non hard games
To avoid the grinding issue lives should have a low max (like 10) unless the game is brutal in which case there should be 3 lives max.
In games with lives there shouldn’t be any permanent respawn points at checkpoints instead the beginning of the level should be the only permanent save. Wait scratch that if the player loses all their lives and continues then they respawn at an earlier part in the game with all the stuff they earned before they got the game over. This would punish the player while also keeping morale high as they will just have to retry the levels.
Something that wasn’t mentioned in depth was how lives created exit points for your game session. When I was a kid, if I ran out of lives and hit the game over screen, sometimes I just stopped playing for a while. Instead of trying over and over and feeling increasingly frustrated, I could calm down and come back later, maybe see something new about the place where I was stuck and make some progress. I do understand lives have tons of other problems though. They definitely fit some games better than others (Celeste with lives?? No thanks)
Yeah and they were especially important in arcade days so that games would be profitable for the hosts
Removing lives doesn't mean removing fail states. If you fail and have to restart to a checkpoint or the beginning, that's still an exit point. The only difference is there no currency depleting (which could still be a thing like Mario Odyssey with coins) or "game over" screen which also means nothing nowadays.
@Jordy Aguilar to be fair All the Mario games could be finished by young children ...try again
@@Ayoul, well the thing you're missing there is that if you don't have the game tell you to stop at some point, perhaps by ripping you out of the experience with a big old "GAME OVER", and you're just starting over and over, soon enough, you're going to look outside and see that you've been deemed legally dead for a week. Just ask any Civilization player.
So you’re arguing that lives can make games better by making you not want to play them anymore?
I want to talk about Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze being in the "meaningless lives" camp. I agree that lives become so abundant in that game when you're playing on your own that they lose value. You can only ever lose one life per run and chances are you'll also be able to get at least one life per run before you do so, unless you're at an exceptionally difficult section. The single player experience in DK has zero need for lives, they're just a number that displays when you die that will probably never run out.
But in multi-player it's a totally different experience. Any time either player dies in multi-player you lose a life and respawn immediately. Unless both players die at once, you can keep going indefinitely so long as you have lives available. This can lead to real spirals in difficult areas where you lose dozens of lives in quick succession. I played through Tropical Freeze entirely in multiplayer, and it was frequent that we would have to go back and stock up on lives in order to finish levels.
Without lives, multiplayer DK would either be much too easy or much too hard, hinging on whether you would allow players to respawn during a run. Infinite respawning means you only have to make sure the two players aren't making risky moves at the same time and you'll always finish every run every time, but no respawns would leave it basically back to a single player experience much of the time, unless the two players are equally skilled and very well coordinated, except whichever player is alive is hamstrung because you don't get to control both Kongs.
So there's this dilemma, where you have the option of playing this game multiplayer, and a desire to not just leave one player as a spectator because that's boring, but some way to not trivialize the completion of levels or rewarding safe, guarded play that is frankly less fun than dashing through levels like a mad ape, and this has to coexist with the single-player experience because the same file can be used for single- or multi-player. And a solution to that is... lives. You never need them in single-player, so they might as well not be there, but multiplayer hinges on them. They even the playing field by maintaining that requirement for skill and memorization and setting the stakes, but making sure nobody is ever left out of the game for very long, because when you die you just pop a balloon and you're back in the action.
This is probably the best defense for lives in a platformer. It’s the same with 4 player Super Mario 3D World, you get so many lives in single-player but in multiplayer, unless you go for the infinite lives tricks from the start, it’s a real challenge to have a good life buffer. It really adds a good, fun challenge for multiplayer and really ups the stakes.
@@jertz_tv8238 I'd argue that's a strong argument against the system. Having to go back and farm lives? Having the game be much harder in multiplayer than single player? Sounds like big no-nos in game design to me. Having a set amount of lives per level like Fury seems like the way to go for what you guys are talking about.
@@Ayoul Agreed! It's not perfect by any means.
I think it would be difficult to use a set number of lives per level in multiplayer too, though - easier levels you might only use a couple between the two players, but the more difficult stages are absolute meat grinders. Legit went through the entire pile of 99 lives before the first checkpoint in a few spots. A little banana grinding (or just buying a few dozen balloons from Funky) lets you reset a little before you throw yourself back into it - or choose a different path.
Just made a similar comment, then scrolled down and saw this. I agree!
@@Ayoul The game isn't harder in multiplayer, the lives system just prevents multiplayer from breaking the game. The game is full of challenging platforming, but in 2-player mode, it's easy to daisy chain through a level's difficult parts. Having limited lives is necessary to give 2-player gameplay the stakes it needs to remain fun.
"The most amazing games come about when every single system is added with intention, thought, and care." I loved this quote!
Let me throw in a perspective that probably isn't initially considered when discussing this; a girl I was seeing for a while really liked the Crash remakes. She wanted to play them whenever she was over, but she wasn't really great at them. She'd usually die a bunch of times, and then she'd get a handle on what she was missing, and get a bit better. She'd build momentum. Then, she'd run out of lives, and lose that momentum. Often, very disheartening, to the point where she'd hand me the controller to finish the level so she could move on.
I see a lot of comments about how the fear of restarting a level motivates them to play better, but I'd say we need to make sure we're not just designing for the most hardcore of the hardcore. Watching someone who was enthusiastic about games, but not good at them, get disheartened because the game wiped her progress in a level for dying too many times.. it just felt mean spirited if I'm honest. I remember as a kid it was the sort of thing that'd make me take the disc out and play a different game.
Of course, some games are meant to be hard. But if you're pushing your game as anything but a hardcore challenge, I really think you should at least consider *optional* toggles to make the game more accomodating and forgiving for players who aren't as quick, or can't play as often, but are still trying their best.
Can I also say that as someone that really enjoyed and finished Super Meat Boy, but basically hated the Crash Bandicoot games, that this isn't necessarily just a "hardcore gamer" thing either (unless you want to say SMB is a casual game... which would be brave). It's just a design choice.
Interestingly, Meat Boy also had these "warp zones", where you had to finish 3 levels in a row, and each level gave you 3 lives, but if you ran out, then you were kicked back to the map. The biggest annoyance in the game was having to wait for it to show the unskippable animation of you entering the level, which could take as long as you could finish some of those levels.
@@SimonBuchanNz hate is a strong word dude Crash Bandicoot doesn't deserve that Crash Bandicoot deserves nothing but love
Tell her to get better noob
@@sirreal2741 Crash is a creation of the devil. It's almost perfectly designed to make me pissed off with instant death everywhere and long long delays to get back in after running out of lives. Thing is, I used to enjoy it a lot more as a kid when I was visiting others, but I guess now that it's on me to finish it rather than just messing with levels it's a chore.
@@SimonBuchanNz you're making me feel like a pro gamer because I beat the Crash Bandicoot series when I was only 7 years old.
Celeste is one of my favorite games. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be if it had a lives system. The games brilliance is that it's brutal difficulty isn't very punishing so it's hard to get discouraged
Plus Celeste gives advanced players the option to beat all the levels without dying through the golden strawberries - so there is a permanent life system if you want it.
A game like Celeste didn't really need a lives system, it would be out of place, I think
Try Halo 2 on Legendary.
Rayman origins and legends anybody???
@@calebp6114 I honestly don't think an item makes up for the tension that a live system provides. Celeste isn't bad but it never gave me the "don't fuck this up!" adrenaline rush that games with live system have, specially since missing a golden strawberry just feels like a "meh, next time I guess"
This is another reason why I love Super Mario Odyssey. They gave a reason to collect coins (purchasing moons, outfits etc) and then found a way to punish you for dying by losing those coins. This allows you to explore and experiment with the game, but gives you that small "pang" every time you see the coin counter go down, and encourages you to be strategic.
I like it too, although not so much when I give my 4 year old the controller and she just starts jumping off the side of the map over and over for fun lol (thankfully I can switch to assist mode)
You only loose 10 coins. Which never feels punishing. Mario Odyssey isn't made for lives, but you should have lost more coins, like 20 or 25.
its a great game, but the punishment for dying was so negligible i would never hail it as a good example on the topic.
Just like Lego Games
Agreed
Lives can have a really meaningful impact on games like BroForce, where each life will be a different character and on hard core you only have as many lives as you have characters in the game.
Basically like a nuzlocke?
Brawl had a similar system in its story mode & I liked that. It feels more like an extended health bar with a price than it feels like a traditional lives system. Like I failed as Lucas but I can still win if I make up for it by playing well enough as Charizard.
Lives were originally implemented in arcade games as to way to force to player to stop playing and insert another coin. Home consoles simply carried on the tradition, with the added bonus of stretching out games that would have been over in a few hours otherwise thanks to limited cartridge memory. Neither of those things apply with modern games, if a game is going to use a lives system, it should have a reason beyond "it's tradition" or "it makes the game harder".
The opposite is true regarding arcade games, actually. Lives in arcade games serve to extend gameplay time before the player is forced to drop another credit into the machine or quit altogether, an important point for newcomers and veterans alike. New players can use extra lives as opportunities to learn from mistakes and try again, while skilled players can earn bonus lives to continue playing the game as its difficulty ramps up and failure becomes increasingly likely.
Lives were the result of the anti-arcade design of home games. We were past that with the advent of saving.
Lives is not only used for «it’s tradition» is also used because of the players. Some games require some sort of “resting” place for the player, so the player won’t get frustrated when a game starts from the beginning, having lives and checkpoints will help and encourage the player to try again. As a game designer myself I have made players playtest a lot of games and gotten a lot of feedback about this, telling me and other designers that they either feel frustrated and can’t seem to finish the game cause they have to start all over again, or they tell us that they loved how they can “save” themselves, and feel they have actually accomplished something difficult and can finally “rest”. (Hard to explain hehe)
Anyway, having lives and checkpoints and all that really depends on the game, some games need lives to ensure that the player will continue playing, while others don’t and have another way to encourage the player to play the game
making the game harder is a fine reason to implement something, if it makes the game harder in an interesting way. which lives systems do not tend to
Those games were designed around lives though. You get 3 lives per turn and if you are particularly good you can earn extra lives which would extend your playtime. If you are good enough you can beat the game with only one coin. Then there's the whole social aspect to arcades that doesn't really exist with modern games. As for NES titles, the games are generally very short but that's kinda the point. The good nes games like contra or castlevania are some of the most endlessly replayable games I've ever played. You eventually get so good you can basically beat the entire game in a single run. It's actually genius game design considering how limited the technology and knowledge of game design was at the time. There's a reason why many modern hard games like dark souls or the dmc series still use many of the so called out dated aspects of arcade games.
This is the very issue I’m struggling with right now on my current little indie project, so pretty good timing! Gets the juices flowing
Oooh that sounds interesting!
What’s the game called?
Yea what is it called? Also what is it about if you don't mind me asking
@@maniram5089 VERY early stages, no official title :)
@@theflaminglionhotlionfox2140 No title yet, early stages. It's a puzzle platformer of sorts, but has a particular mechanic which makes lives more of a consideration
This captures everything I'd say around how lives *can* still hold value for *certain* game structures. Penalizing a repeated failure can ultimately cause a player to behave more thoughtfully and strategically, which in turn has them engaging with a game's design instead of just banging their head against a problem until they stumble through it by sheer luck. In games without lives, I can sometimes stop seeing a level as a whole, and more as a series of checkpoints that I have to hit, which ironically makes it feel *more* game-y. Moreover, lives-free checkpoints can be abusable; if you enter an area low on health, it can be beneficial to deliberately fail in order to "reset" your character to full health, which is almost always disingenuous.
The rub, as you hit on repeatedly, is *balancing* it such that the game doesn't feel discouraging for players that are struggling with a particular section, through from checkpoint placement to distribution of boons, as well as determining whether a game benefits from penalizing poor play to begin with. Dark Souls demands caution and high stakes; Mario doesn't need you to re-take the "how do see-saws work?" portion of a level.
I think my favorite current hybrid is the Classic Mode in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. In theory, you have nearly infinite lives and seamless continues - but it comes with a score hit unless you spend a costly ticket, and you can't achieve the maximum difficulty/score unless you make it to the final boss in one run. For players who don't care about high scores, it basically doesn't matter, but if you do, you get to choose whether it's worth "buying" a score-neutral second life, or you want to start over for a perfect run. Optionality to cater to all players is always a plus!
This is a good reason for the Classic mode to be so short. It’s shorter than every previous incarnation of the mode, but it means that there’s no wiggle room - if you fail, there’s no extra fights at the end to climb back up to perfect difficulty.
Well said. You bring up a point I didn't even consider, too: Deliberately dying to restore health/other resources.
Too long
Given Mario's iterative level design (see a five year old video on this channel) I kind of can see a reason to knock someone back if they're struggling, if you are struggling with the see-saw over a lava pit going back to see-saws over bricks could be a good way to get you to learn the mechanic. Maybe going all the way back to the beginning of the level is a bit much for most circumstances, and with crown crown crown lives you'll never actually get to experience it, but if lives were tied to checkpoints I think it could work, especially for less experienced players (and lets be real the star road levels probably don't have any checkpoints anyways, so it won't effect those looking for the greatest challenge).
@@googlymooglyman If you think that's long, you should see my own comment.
For me the argument is not so much about games having lives but having systems that guide and incentivize the player to excel at the game, making you feel rewarded when you manage to clear a section of the game without losing lives, taking hits or losing any unit. From just having hp that doesn't regenerate, some punishment after dying, traditional lives or perma-death.
One aspect that very few people mention about live systems and the like is that these highlight the challenge found in the level design and enemy attack patterns. Not only by having the player be extra careful with how they approach a level and try to understand how to survive it's challenges but also by not letting the developer be too cheap about it since poorly designed challenges will stuck like a sore thumb in comparison to games in which you can just try again as many times as you want. Some games will be tough but fair like Mega Man or old Castlevania while others will just be incredibly cheap and reliant on raw memorization like Battletoads in the NES while in games with unlimited lives/regenerative health no one will care since you can just try again over and over.
There's also this rewarding aspect involved in games in which players who suffered less loses than other player are clearly distinguished from one another in one clear way (lost less hp/lives against a boss/tough level) Games with regenerating health are really bad at this since taking damage just feels like part of the equation instead of something that can be avoided with great skill, sometimes there's absolutely no reason not to half-ass it since losing health will mean nothing in 3 seconds.
There's nothing that bores me more than a game in which dying just feels pointless, with no tension involved in the process at all. For example while playing Uncharted in crushing it just felt like cheap trial and error until I memorized enemy spawn points and after clearing any section of the game I didn't felt anything rewarding just kinda glad I wasn't stuck in the same area.
Also regarding Crash 4's take on live systems I actually think it's terrible. The game feels kinda cheap if you play it with lives (poorly telegraphed hazards here and there) so instead of feeling like a game that caters to both audiences it just feels like they tacked on a live system on top of a game that wasn't never carefully designed around this. It kinda reminds me of those games in which you can deactivate waypoints but you can notice really easily that the game was never designed in mind to be played without them and you only end up playing something clunky if you turn off the option.
My issue isn't nessessarily having to restart the level from the beginning (although that is kinda frustrating), it's being sent back to the title screen and having to go through all the menus just to try again.
I was such an innocent kid/manchild when I thought dying in Sonic 1 would send me to the beginning of the first act of the zone instead of the title screen. >_>
It's interesting that the End is Nigh is shown because it does actually have a lives system but only in the 2nd half. The first half of the game lets you retry every stage as much as you want, but how many lives you have to beat each section in the 2nd half, is based on how many tumors you got in the first half. And however many lives you get in the first half you will start will all of those lives in each chapter of the 2nd half. So you can make the game easier or harder on yourself by how much you explored early on, and can go back and get more tumors if you find the 2nd half of the game too difficult.
Yeah, I really liked how the game's system felt. I remember my surprise when I got a "Game Over" when I was used to not really being punished for dying, and that half became quite the journey towards doing each area as cleanly as possible to save up lives for later
For a while now, I’ve been generally on the “Lives are outdated” side. While I still stand by that, I do think it’s a great idea for games like Crash to at least allow that option to have lives or not. And now that you mention, I also really like the concept games like Shovel Knight have like rewarding not using checkpoints like that. A type of game design I really value is making a game open to new players while also leaving room to give a returning player/ someone more hardcore the opportunity to have more of a challenge. While there are still many games I don’t like the concept of having lives for, I think that if a game can have a well thought out system to have lives then yeah it may not necessarily be a bad idea
A Rouge Like with lives sounds perfect, it's like Minecraft hardcore with 3 totems of undying
I love more options, because it means people like me can worry less and just play a fun game while others can make it harder for themselves if they want
I'd say that what's outdated are checkpoints... I wouldn't mind losing lives if it didn't mean repeating the same portion of a level again and again... Think of switching Crash Bandicoot's lives for Aku Aku masks...
@@DonVigaDeFierro How would you go about not having checkpoints? Would you just have the game automatically clear the obstacle you couldn't beat? Generous checkpoint placement is exactly what keeps you from playing the same part again and again, so I really don't know what you mean when you say checkpoints are outdated.
@@DonVigaDeFierro but then would you just respawn right in front of the pit you fell in? That just seems a little too excessive
I mean, even back then I am willing to bet the number 1 GameSharked thing was infinite lives and continues. Konami code anyone? So the "gamers are worse at games" argument for this is flawed. Lives and limited continues seem to have been a way to lengthen games in a time when games were shorter by limitation.
Both answers can be correct it doesn't have to be one or the other. Why do newer Mario games still use limited lives? Certainly not to increase game length due to limitations. I'm not disagreeing with you I'm just saying I think both sides are valid arguments.
@@ethanpitts864 In the video, they mentioned how Mario is phasing out lives, so that is a pretty bad example to bring.
@@ethanpitts864 I mean, Mario is super easy it's almost impossible to lose all your lives it's more of a tradition at this point.
You seem to forget, that most of these classic games had MANY AND INTERESTING WAYS for you to gain lifes. You could find them in stages, for examples. Extra-lifes - like all tools of survival in general, can be an interesting and organic way to put more substance to a gaming world.
Also: "Challenge" stredges a game ALWAYS. It's in the nature of challenging things, that they require you to put more of your time into them. Just look at games like "The Messenger" or "Shovelknight". They don't feature a life-system, yet you have to die even more, than in your average action-game from the late 80's/early 90's.
If anything, many older games featuring a life-system, seemed way more balanced in their difficulty, than your average retro-action-game these days.
@@erfolgreich I would hardly describe any of these retro game's ways of getting lives and continues as "interesting". Contrived for the purposes of selling Nintendo Power and strategy guides, maybe.
Some times, I find it hard to stop playing games. Losing a few lives makes me realize I need a break.
THIS. I knew I wasn't the only one who felt like this.
This resonates so much with "Are Score Systems Still Relevant?" video. My 2 cents: McMillen (2:36) got a point for several genres and, from there, we could discuss the pros and cons of two different philosophical approaches: punish the bad behaviors or reward the good ones (like in the Crash Bandicoot 4 modern mode, in fact).
How did you comment a day ago its 28 min old
@@strebicux6174 Patreon
@@strebicux6174 24 hour Early Access for Patreons.
I think giving an extra reward after finishing a level with a certain challenge, ie not dying, is a great way to reward good players. Btw by reward I mean something like extra in game currency.
Score system still relevant because leaderboard exist
Just a quick point that I feel like was kind of glossed over. An argument for lives systems that I feel you didn't expand on enough.
The intentional gating of progress to keep players from getting too far ahead of themselves. It allows the designer to keep the challenge fair while throwing more at you than if you only had to clear a level once. The megaman example was spot on for this point.
It forces you to learn patterns and tricks that stick with you, because you had to master each individual aspect of a level. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey and all that.
This! I was waiting for him to say this, but he never did.
A lives system means players can't just brute force or get lucky on a part of the level, get to a checkpoint, then get stuck. Or completely bypass a tutorial section somehow, get to a checkpointl and become unable to go back. If you have a lives system, it means that if a player has gone too far without mastering the mechanics, they can be taken back to an easier part to hone their skills.
This. "Getting sent back" in lives-based games often isn't just a punishment but also a "gift" to the player. The early parts is where you get to practice, it's where you make your "player progress". Locking a player in a segment he's not ready for isn't doing anybody any favours.
Tedium
@@macmcskullface1004 Exactly. Remove the lives system and either do like you said or simply don't have checkpoints like we see some games and especially in rythm games. Some tracks have this one hard section only towards the middle or end and it's all about mastering the rest so you have the highest "hp" to survive that section.
This argument would work if lives were set at the beginning of each level. But it completely falls apart of lives carry over. If you already have 50, it's no problem. If you have 1, you're better off dying and restarting with a fresh 5 or whatever. It's dumb.
Honestly, I think most adults who no longer have much time to play don't want to waste time playing the same thing over and over.
I know I don't.
I mean, we all rather do something fun than frustrating.
Im an adult all u need to do is manage your time
@@princealmighty5391 some adults have more time than others. Time management isnt magic. Everyone has 24 hours each day but some have more responsibilities than others
@@jacksmith-rl9ln you must have at least 2 hours or something
@@IAm-zo1bo Let's create a hypothetical scenario in Skyrim where you only have two hours to play, shall we?
4-5 minutes to boot up everything, desktop, laptop, console, etc..., at least 5 minutes of actually figuring out what to do, 10 minutes of walking across the map, oh no I died after I fell off a mountain, restart, 15 minutes to walk back, you're pissed off and decide to explore a bear cave, enter a dungeon and rush through to clear it in 15 minutes without exploring or killing any enemies, kill a boss after 8-10 minutes of hacking and slashing, exit the dungeon, fast travel and spend 5 minutes walking to the quest giver.
One hour to clear a single dungeon for a single chest and an iron helmet with an archery enchantment.
In MGS: Ground Zeroes, a casual playthrough can take anywhere from 20-40 minutes, and clearing the entire base takes 70 minutes at a medium pace.
I think that among all genres, the one that would benefit the MOST from a lives system is ironically the one LEAST prone to using one - the roguelike. Lives can work well in a game with the following conditions:
1. The game is short but hard, and the point is to improve your skill to the point where you can beat it in one sitting.
2. There is a high skill ceiling in early stages, and playing well in the early game can earn you a large number of extra lives.
In such a case having to replay the early stages again when you get a Game Over isn't a chore - it's an opportunity to improve your skill and in doing so earn more lives to survive the later stages. It also prevents the fatigue that comes from having to replay the same boss over and over again until you finally beat it, with no breaks.
This system would be perfect for a roguelike! In fact, a roguelike with randomly generated levels adds another dimension to this - losing a life means retrying the stage from the start, but now you know what's coming and will have an advantage.
But I think that because the original roguelikes leaned heavily on "only one life", that mentality is "traditional", so if roguelikes implement lives at all, they hand them out extremely sparingly. Meanwhile it's progressive platformers that is only now beginning to shake itself free of the lives system that has followed it since the arcade era.
Sonic 2 did a good job at that (except for the final boss)
@@baylordiamond8819 Weren't Sonic games designed to bring out the best in lives - retrying stages over and over to get better at them?
Yeah, I like Hades' death defiance system
I don't know, I played a lot of Nethack decades ago and having just one life added so much. It didn't matter why you died or how many weeks of play you had put into a game; when you died it was over, abruptly. That instant finality, though often a gut punch, added so much excitement, dread, anticipation, and in a way realism. Despite having only alphanumeric "graphics" it felt real, because you dreaded your player's death almost as much as you did your own. Having savepoints or other replay attempt mechanisms would have ruined that accrued emotional investment, or the incredible payoff if you did survive and win. (technically there were ways to cheat death, but those are nothing like a life system).
I'm sure Hades implemented TWO life systems, one of 3 lifes, and infinite revives but only one per room. Definitely prefer the former because it ironically gives you more leeway on later stages.
Hades has another great take on life systems: You can choose between having 3 continues (Death Defiances) in a run that restore 50% of your health, or having one continue that restores 30% health, but which refreshes after each room (which also means you can heal back up to that amount by intentionally dying in that room). There are also a few ways to recharge or improve these continues, via shops and god boons.
And even if you lose all continues in a run and die, you still keep most things you've collected, plus you advance the story anyway - so you never feel like the time was wasted.
Indeed. Stubborn Defiance is good for new players because it gives them a regenerating health pool in every room, so the attrition of slowly losing HP over the course of a level and having to spend gold to restore it is pretty much eliminated. It's also nice for Feather runs, since you can mostly disregard safety in your pursuit of speed.
However, a fully upgraded Death Defiance is usually much better for experienced players who will be taking very little damage from normal enemies, and so would rather have more retries going into the more difficult end-game bosses.
When picking Death Defiances you really cherish them because you want all of them for the final boss. The feeling when you lose all of them and manage to beat him is incredible.
I recently finished Mario Galaxy, and noticed that I liked that there were multiple tiers of reward: Stars for finishing levels, and 1-Ups for secrets and challenges. I'm pretty sure I never ran out of lives, but it still felt very rewarding to collect a smaller reward that felt significant. Meanwhile, in Mario Odyssey, there are only Moons, so it somewhat devalues them when beating a boss can be worth the same reward as breaking a crate.
On the other hand, I think if I had ever run out of lives and needed to restart entire levels too often I would've hated the life system, so I might just enjoy easy games...
No, the problem is that lives are usually an unnecessary addition to any game. What you want is... well, more rewards. You appreciate lives because they are another reward. That's all. Remove them entirely and just add trophies or stickers or peanuts, anything to collect, to the game. Congrats, your game just leveled up.
@@Alfonso88279 I do think the fact that they have function beyond collectibility is part of the attraction.
@@Jack_Pottage It's psychological. You said they were actually useless. Just give some function to the collectibles. Unlocking something or making the character stronger, whatever.
@@Alfonso88279 Yeah, fair enough, that would probably be better.
@@Alfonso88279 Maybe have a few tiers of collectibles, but one collectible counter. The lower the tier, the less the counter would go up. The higher the tier, the more it would go up. The lower the tier, the more common. The higher the tier, the less common. This could also lead to fun challenges where you try to complete the game by collecting as many of the small collectibles as possible as opposed to the big ones or vice versa.
The psychological aspect is the counter, as it might be a natural inclination to want it to go up.
Very interesting! I for one like live systems to an extent but they can certainly limit gameplay from my POV. I also liked that you brought back your intro "GMTK" for the video.
I'm really glad you talked about Kero Blaster, I loved that game
I just wrote up a post about this the other day, but I really like the Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion's approach, where each level has a set number of lives depending on the type and difficulty of its challenge, and the penalty for losing them is not great, but it serves as a reminder that you can quit and come back later if you have been banging your head against a particular challenge for a long time.
I think a lives system is fine is the game is built with it in mind, such as older games, or games designed with a retro thing in mind (i.e. Sonic Mania) but if you're just building a game and tacking a lives system on for the sake of it (pretty much every Mario game for the last 20 years before Odyssey got rid of it) then it's pointless. Then again, I'm 33 and grew up with a lot of games that had a lives system so it doesn't really bother me if a game has it. I'm not against not utilizing one either. It just depends on the game and the challenge. I can die over and over in Borderlands 3 with no lives system and play Sonic Mania with a lives system and still feel equally challenged because the challenges are constructed specifically for each of those games.
I'd argue that _Super Mario 64_ and _Super Mario Sunshine_ had some uses for lives. In the cases where those games had checkpoints, losing a life would set you back to said checkpoint while losing them all would set you back to the hub world. In some cases where a challenge has been failed (particularly in _Sunshine_ with its hub world secret stages), losing a life could be less punishing than being sent back to the hub world without losing any lives while running out would mean getting sent back anyway, so having some extra lives is a good idea.
The ori option, spending currency to make a checkpoint, seemed to me to be too player hinging. If the player simply forgets to do so, their entire play session could go away. Or, if they run out of the currency, they can't stop playing the game.
For a "modern lives system" I actually thought of Mass Effect 3, where the health system was revised so that Shepard only partially heals to the next segment if hurt. You can only heal fully by spending Medi-Gel, of which is a finite and can only be found as pickups. Medi-Gel also has extra dimension where it is also used to revive all downed teammates between checkpoints, and if you use it in a panic before what segments you have remaining haven't healed fully, you also won't get a full bar of health either.
In this way I wonder if healing items in general have kind of become the new lives, since a more granular system of gauging how much leeway you have before failure (health) also demands a more granular approach of resources (health packs). Perhaps we should frame lives more explicitly as a subset of a health and health resource system.
Finally, the whole "losing all your lives pushes you back very far to the last permanent save point" makes me think of discussions around Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It, and the idea of challenge and punishment: the game has no lives or health system, but there is absolutely the chance of making a small mistake that ends up with a catastrophic fall back to the starting point, erasing many hours of progress. Errant Signal has a video on the topic, discussing the argument for these kinds of "punishing" games: th-cam.com/video/DCcA4FyWeXI/w-d-xo.html
The best use of lives is to aid with learning the level's mechanics. In many games levels try to teach you the basics for the mechanics for that level early on and give you more complex or harder challenges as the level goes, so if a player is dying over and over it might simply be that they brute forced their way through the early part of the level and didn't learn how the level's mechanics, so taking them back to the start is a way to help them learn what they are doing wrong so they can succeed without just banging their head against a wall until they get through.
wouldn’t it make more sense to just make it impossible to progress past the start of a level without understanding and using the mechanics introduced there
It can be simple and easy while still requiring you to figure out a new mechanic to get through
@@gaphic Its hard to create an obstacle in a level that is impossible if you don't full understand the mechanics but easy if you do. People can frequently get past the learning section of a level with luck and brute force, a lives system if well designed can tell the player that this is the wrong approach.
There's nothing inherently good or bad about lives. They're just another tool, and the proper use depends on the game you're making.
The main question is: do I want players to master the game and beat it, or do I want them to play and experience it? If you're making a tough game with intricate systems, forcing players to replay parts of the levels assures that they will eventually learn to play the game. However, if your game is more about experiencing certain kinds of feelings, punishing players too heavily or too often may make that difficult, so challenge takes a back seat. It's something of a scale, with "there's no penalty but there are things compelling you to try harder" being the middle ground.
One thing that wasn't mentioned in the video is the Dark Souls model, that was greatly misunderstood by new players. In that game, if you die you return to a permanent checkpoint, but the experience you got before you died remains where you last died, and if you can get it back before dying again, the penalty effectively disappears. Instead of softening the blow of forcing a restart, this caused players to become extremely stressed, as if the game was punishing them for losing, even though it let them get their score back.
@@stayskeptic3923 That's true but I think this is rather a problem about allowing such cheap tactics, the game should be better balanced in a manner that it doesn't allow for easy win strategies.
I know that feeling when I was fighting against the "Old Hero" in Demon's Souls, I just abused the hell out of his blind weakness running to the end of the hallway and just shooting with the bow. Wasn't that engaging or challenging but I didn't wanted to replay that sadistic route on the shrine of storms. xd
@@stayskeptic3923 "Cheesing" is one of the main reasons why many older games combine lives with a timer or other limitations, to make a "cheesing" tactic impossible.
OP: I think when it comes to making a player experience *certain* feelings -- say horror or tension -- teeth-kicking difficulty and high stakes are very underrated. In the end it all comes down to what game you are trying to make, but personally nothing kicks me out of an experience so much as having my input (or failings) as a player not matter.
@@baseddepartment9656 Good idea on paper, but I don't think it would work in practice. People learn differently, some won't die in a level at all, others will get stumped for hours, other still are Dean Takahashi.
In the times where even indie titles can reach tens of thousands of people, you're not going to be able to create an ideal difficulty curve. Obviously, your game shouldn't start off being too demanding right away, but you can't hope to provide smooth practice to everyone.
I felt less stressed with dark souls death system then I did with donkey Kong country
@@baseddepartment9656 "repeat the same content", "lose tons of progress"... You know, once upon a time we used to play games because it was enjoyable to play games, not just for some promise of a reward at the end of the rainbow.
Hey, great video as usual.
A bit off topic but are you planning to ever make a video about MMORPGs and the design philosophy behind the more successful MMO titles out there?
I’m currently writing a Pac-Man World 4 script and I took into consideration about the lives system from the previous games but ultimately decided to go the Odyssey route and have the penalty be losing 15 Pac-Dots (the currency for this game) when you die and they don’t respawn, thanks for this video, it really opened my mind on this topic and how to approach it.
wait is this a thing thats being worked on offically?
@@Deadlymang027 Unfortunately no, this is a fan run project that a small amount of us Pac-Fans are working on BUT I am planning to submit this to Bandai Namco as a pitch by the end of this year, if you want to learn more you can view my channel see if you’re interested or not.
As a side note, how apprpriate is it for a game aimed at younger gamers to have a 20 page legal document before being able to play? Does Sony expect someone who might be 11 years old to understand everything they are signing up for here? If the game has been rated for 10+ surely the legal notice should be worded to reflect that?
Trying to make laws sound understandable to 10 year olds is a sure way to make them not be legal, therefore, nullifying the whole thing.
But putting them as they are at least gives them the excuse: "We expected the parents to be responsible and read, or at least for the kids to call them when they did'nt understand it."
I think the idea is that their parents or legal guardian would be the one reading and agreeing to those terms, rather than the child.
That, and most of the stuff on there is about things most children don't even know are possible, like "Don't make a copy of this game" "Don't steal our assets from the game" "Don't hack your console in order to play a pirated copy of this game" "Don't sue us because you sat too close to the TV and hurt your eyes", which is why most people will just skip over everything, since most of it is just common sense anyway.
Over here, none of that legalese is binding anyway, since a 10yo is not of legal age, and therefore cannot be held accountable for anything, so whatever...
Yeah, I have several questions about that.
Considering the average adult reading age in the UK is that of a 9 year old a simplified version of what you're agreeing to should be at the start of the document. In this case it's fairly harmless "you agree not to steal our stuff". Some places have you agree to things in the terms that would make you think twice about using the service.
Post-64, pre-Switch Mario games used lives as something to give you for exploring and finding secrets. You were probably never going to get a Game Over in Super Mario 3D World, but it was still satisfying to find a 1up mushroom or collect enough coins for a 1up. Super Mario Odyssey does kind of the same thing except now instead of finding hidden 1ups you don't need, you find hidden coins you don't really need either (but actually do have some use for, as touched in the video).
I really like the way you break things down for people who have no development experience. Even as a long time gamer, some mechanisms or the reasons behind certain development choices are not always clear to me, but having these extra layers of understanding really gives me a new perspective when looking at games. Thanks dude!
Thanks for your great videos.Will you do a video on the old Syndacate (Bullfrog) and I'd there will be any legacy to that great game?
Misinterpreted the title and I had a 10 minute existential crisis before I realized he was talking about video game lives
XD
agreed
I literally beat Celeste by just mindlessly doing the same thing for hours at a time until it worked (over 10k deaths by the time I was done with the game, no that's not a joke). The sting of losing is definitely lessened when there's no consequence for it.
I was never sure about why I dropped that game and now I think this may be the reason. I was just tired of the mindless "Die, respawn in the same room, die again" grind and the endless lives never gave me a risk to try better. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed what I played of the the game but it just never kept my attention because of this.
@@yesimgamer It lacks tension and the challenges/rewards for those who want to avoid losing lives just wasn't intriguing for me.
The reason I dropped Super Meat Boy. Instead of engaging with the challenges, the game actively pushes you into brute forcing them and I got tired of going on autopilot pretty quickly.
It's also kinda why I didn't think so highly of Cuphead after finishing it. Unlimited lives, alongside the lack of boss health bars, made the fights feel more like a test of patience than eg. in a Mega Man game, where every move you make feels a lot more impactful and where you can feel more tangential results of your progress than the [YOU WERE THIS FAR AWAY FROM DEFEATING THE BOSS] prompt after dying.
@@mariocisemusic I think as a general rule of thumb, when the punishment for losing in a game simply is that you spent your time doing it, that's probably not a good thing. Time is such a subjective thing, I have a lot of it but someone else maybe has a free hour or two a week, so for me this consequence is meaningless while for the other person it's gamebreaking. Even an arbitrary lives system is a better in-game punishment than just irl time.
I finally get to hear about 1CC on a gmtk video.
Lots of people talk about finishing or speed running souls games but nobody mentions 1CCs of Battle Garegga lol.
Here commenting so YT algorithm can see Mark's video so he'll read the entire software license and privacy policy
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I find it rewarding when I repeat a certain section that was giving me trouble and I complete it in my first try. A punishing life system is not only a good way to ensure you are getting good at the game, instead of just barely passing through, but also a way to show you how far you've come.
I found celeste to be at times a frustrating experience, the game has such a skill curve that I was allways playing at my maximum, feeling that I wasn't very good since I allways can barely play through the levels. Only when I missed a heart and went back to a previous level did I notice my improvement, to the point that I thought that I could probably beat the whole level with limited lives.
I think is valid building a game that asks you to become good at it, and not only asks you to be capable of beating each individual section of the game. I'm a big fan of the contra franchise and I personally think that those games would not work with unlimited lives
The fun in having lives on a game is also mostly correlative with the fun and fairness you experience while playing the game, I will set three examples: First, Hollow Knight, while you don't have lives in this game you have other ways of being punished for dying (losing a bit of progress and having to get your shade back) this makes you feel like the hollow knight, I'm joking, this makes you cherish you life while also giving you a hand while attempting the harshest punishments, like beating bosses and such. Another example is, like you mentioned, Furi, which gives you three lives for every boss. The thing with this three lives is that they give you enough room to practise a boss' mechanics at the limits while, if you can't beat him, it will force you to go back to the starting phase, which underlays the base mechanics and moves of the boss, making you learn his moves properly and make you feel like you beated him in a fair duel. The last example I wanted to give is Sonic Mania, I was, for the most part of the game, ok with having limited lives, the levels were quite fun and going through them once more wasn't much of an ordeal, the problem I had was in the last Zone, it was mostly a one way path to the boss and the challenges it set weren't fair but frustrating making me rage quit at the final stage of the final boss (and I haven't touched the game since). What I'm trying to say is that the problems of a game don't lay on the lives system but in where and for what they are used for, which is mostly what you say in the video xd.
Im looking at YOU Soul Master and Nosk!
@@nicke.8622 hey, nosk wasn’t too bad. The radiance however...
@@jlin592 True, it just felt like an inconvenience having to go back all the way to Nosk when I died. I felt like a god when I finally beat the radiance lol
@@nicke.8622 not to mention having to beat the hollow knight over and over just to get to the radiance. I redid it so many times I could do it in my sleep now haha
@@jlin592 😂
Always keep the option open. Do not force novice players with fleeting attention spans to play the same level over and over and do not force people who actually care about getting better at things to lower their skill thresholds.
I feel like I learned a lot from this. I've never really thought about the lives system in platformers. I've just seen it as a thing that just "is". I do like the idea the new Bandicoot games are doing, I'll be thinking about this for a while now
Crash 4 also has the perfect relic (basically collect everything and don’t die in one run ) it’s very tough💀
i still play the older castlevania games, so i'm alright with lives as long as i don't have to start the whole game over if i run out
-glares at sonic 1-
*Laughs In Sega Mega Drive Collection*
I've had this conversation with other retro game fan friends of mine, and I loved the arguments and takes here, they've echoed a lot of our thoughts but with Mark's signature insight. The only thing that I think is a major factor only briefly touched on here is what Mark calls the relic of the arcade era. Early console games were limited in the amount of data they could hold on a cartridge, and so you had a situation where the difficulty had to be ramped up hard and the lives system more restrictive and punishing to make a game feel like it had an adequate amount of challenge and value. Today, players can beat the original Super Mario Bros. in five minutes, the original Contra in ten minutes, the original Castlevania in twelve minutes - the only thing that made those games feel so consistently satisfying and challenging was the difficulty and lives systems. Today, games can be much longer, with more content that developers likely want players to be able to see and enjoy, as larger game files allow them to do more with their level design and mechanics, and to create difficulty in different ways. This isn't a point wholly apart from any Mark is making here, but I do think that game size/length specifically is a huge contributor here to the origination of lives systems as well as them falling away over time even within genres built on them.
Great video as usual. My take on lives is that it depends on the type of challenge you want your player to overcome. In my opinion a "difficult" game should feel rewarding when you actually beat it, regardless of how many retries it took you to master it. Also, in the more modern games (with a cinematic and/or story-driven plot) having to repeat an entire level would be too boring and it would take away the immersion.
I'm absolutely in favor of games having a lives system, or to be more specific, having _real_, consequential Game Overs. I'm not saying EVERY game needs it, of course; A Super Meat Boy that kicked you back to the start of a world if you failed too many times would be horrible. But a game can be designed around failure to incentivize player attention and replay value, and what really got me thinking about this was a recent playthrough of Paper Mario. In that game, running out of HP will send you all the way back to your last save block, and when you're deep in a dungeon, that can carry a LOT of consequence.
So if my HP is low and I’m on the ropes, even simple enemies pose a genuine threat. In a more "modern" game, I might not CARE so much, because if I fail or even throw the fight, I could just respawn like nothing happened, use a few healing items, and walk right through it. But because there are such heavy consequences for losing, I _have_ to focus, I have to plan my tactics well and use every item at my disposal, I have to TRY. If I fail an action command, fail to defend well, and get a Game Over, I’ve lost a lot more than just one fight, I’ve lost a ton of progress. This completely changes the tension of the game, how invested I am in it, and what I’m willing to risk to stay in it.
Okay but that was accomplished without a lives system lol. You could just make checkpoints sparse or add more challenging encounters if you wanted to incentivize people to play with more care, dark souls did it and the hardcore crowd defend that games honour with rusty shivs.
I totally get where your coming from pushing through a tense moment is better when there is something to loose.
But in that same situation I often find myself leaving the dungeon to go back to town to grind my level on weaker enemies and grab potions.
Paper Mario: The Origami King really pushed this idea hard. For example, the Scissors boss fight has an instant-kill attack it can use on every single turn. But the previous save isn't before the boss - it's before a second boss you had to defeat first! So that instant kill sends you back to fight two bosses in a row again. The game is full of moments like this where you're threatened with the loss of an unusually harsh amount of progress due to deliberately antagonist save point placement: The final boss's final attack, the Sudden Death round in Shy Guys Finish Last, even at the very beginning of the game where you're forced to fight your first Paper Macho enemy before you're allowed to hit a save block in Toad Town.
Hi Josh! I'm reminded of your video about Classic Sonic design, and I feel it ties into the lives system. When you lose your lives in Sonic 1, 2, as well as standalone Sonic & Knuckles, you go back to the beginning of the game. Punishing, but by starting over you get to experiment and hone your skills in the easier stages, as well as getting a chance of exploring to earn extra lives. All this contributes to making the later stages easier. Whereas in other games you might just bash your head against a wall until you beat whatever hard part is giving you trouble.
And of course, lives and punishing failure states can add a ton of tension to seemingly simple scenarios. The final boss of Sonic 2 always felt threathening, despite a simple pattern, due to the price of failure. One mistake and you're back to Silver Sonic, and too many and you're back to Emerald Hill.
@@Eon2641 _Paper Mario_ doesn't have a lives system, either, but it has serious consequences for hitting 0 HP without any revival items on hand. Lives can help with that in some cases. The point is to build a system that, while forgiving, doesn't encourage sloppy play.
Basically lives change the challenge from a moment to moment skill check to one based on attrition and strategy as far as preserving health and so on. Just different ways to make a game challenging. I don't think one is better or worse, it depends on what your aim is.
Having played through and loved all the classic Castlevania games I can't really get on board with everyone saying lives are pointless and stupid.
Those games are the way they are because they have limited lives to complete a level. Otherwise you could just rofl through the hard points bashing buttons until you make it. You don't have to learn the enemies patterns or how to beat enemies efficiently.
It's not even about losing progress and fear of having to restart. The challenge is literally getting through the whole level without taking X amount of damage.
All games have these systems in place, even Celeste and super meat boy. It's just that those games split themselves into much smaller chunks, so they can have much higher difficulty in those chunks. But it's just different, not better or worse. You are still having to be reset when you die, it just resets you closer. But you also die after a single hit. This is fine, I love those games too. But it's different.
To me, having health or lives (because really it's the same thing just in different forms) makes you feel more connected to your characters journey, you feel each hit more because health/lives are a finite recourse.
Absolutely WORD. The worst is most of the time games implement it without balance their system around is so you end up with way too much lifes which leads people to believe that way makes no sense anyway. Crash 4 itself is a good example, where the whole system was balanced around modern mode and the wumpa fruit requirement which they had to implement to have a reason collecting still the "coins of crash bandicoot" and they couldn't come up with anything better. Because of that life crates were turned to huge wumpa fruit crates that grant you 30 fruits. But even when you died on modern you would get still the 30 Wumpa fruits at some points in the game there are 4 huge wumpa fruits next to each other giving 1 live and 20 fruits which leads to the phenomenon that your life count still increases even when you keep dying.
First clever implementation of lives system I remember is from Space Invaders which has two game over conditions: either you lose all lives or aliens reach the bottom. Another one is from Tank Battalion/Battle City series. In that series, game over happens if you lose all your lives or if the enemy tanks manage to destroy an eagle. So sometimes it's worth losing a life if it means not having an instant game over.
Galaga series has another interesting implementation. You can let one of your ships be captured, losing a life. But in return you rescue your ship which rewards you with extra firepower.
If the Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon series is any indication, I'd say there's plenty of room for lives as a mechanic. A good arcade feel that wouldn't punish you the same way an arcade machine would.
For years I've found the "Lives are outdated" side of the debate more compelling but honestly just showing footage of Castlevania gameplay in the context of this argument is all I needed to reel my opinion back to "it depends on the game" lol. I'm glad we no longer live in an environment where just about every video game expects you to either know it backwards and forwards or try really really hard or both. But I wouldn't want those experiences to be gone altogether (so Celeste wins again, I guess.)
These classic castlevanias accumulate this system so well yeah I think linear games that don't allow backtracking, lifes are at best.
Imagine Dark Souls with a “Lives System”...
Don’t give them ideas!
They kinda did that, it's called Nightmare Creatures. (well, it's more Bloodborne-like)
Still completed it.
If reclaiming your bloodstain got your life back, sure. You might need to rethink boss barriers a bit, though: getting committed to beating a boss or restarting the game is a bit much.
Honestly a lives system and permadeath sort of play the same role
You can view dark souls as a series of levels divided by campfire checkpoints and your health as the lives you have before you have to go back to the last checkpoint. So especially in boss fights you master the early stages so you have enough health (lives) to the later stages
Uh, Sekiro? The resurrection points system is a perfect example of what a modern "lives system" could look like, and how it can be adapted to fit the game's design rather than just slapping on the age-old arcade mechanics.
Mark's definition is "lives dictate how many times you can retry a challenge before you're forced back to some earlier part in the game." So the only part that is questionable here is the word "retry", because in Sekiro it's more about how many times you can *continue* a challenge. Personally I don't see that as a meaningful difference, I see it as the "lives checkpoint" being "right now," but maybe someone has a reason why that distinction is important.
dude you might be one of my new favorite TH-camrs. most s videos like this I don't stay to the end but with your videos I do
Your videos are so enjoyable to watch. Thanks for making great content!
Doom eternal had a very good style of lives where regular deaths will send you to a checkpoint, but lives - which are hidden around the level - will immediately respawn you on the spot without losing progress, but eating a life up. There are usually only 2 a level and the whole economy makes it rewarding to players willing to spend the time searching, but allows people who are just there to fight to do that
In essence (pun intended), the essence flasks from Dark Souls can be seen as a lives system, and I'd say a great one at that. They stimulate exploration because you get them back when you respawn at the bonfire so you might as well use them, and they reward player skill because you're required to master a stage in order to have as many available when attempting a boss fight (the argument you made for MegaMan).
thank you for writing out my thought :D
Dark Soul's save system is what made me quit the game and never look back. Just at the second boss, there was a checkpoint where if you failed the boss fight, you had to go back 15 minutes of game play to the last checkpoint and grind your way through the entire stage again. So you'd have an unforgiving boss fight that depended on you learning specific skills that didn't even come up elsewhere, and every time you got it wrong, you'd have to waste 15 minutes grinding through the boring filler (note that it was fun the first time!) to try again. Forget "practicing". Later on I learned that after that boss fight, there would be another 15 minutes before reaching another checkpoint. I guess it's good I quit before wasting more time on *that*.
Ultimately I decided that if I wanted to spend hours grinding muscle memory, there were more productive things to do with it. Such as piano practice. And so I did that instead and never looked back.
With piano, if you ever want to master a given piece, you have to practice in sections. If you just start over at the beginning over and over, you'll never learn the end, and it will take much longer to learn than it otherwise would. Also, even if you play through the piece in its entierty each time, by the time you return to a trouble spot, you will have forgotten what you learned the last time through and end up practicing your mistakes. You have to practice each trouble section over and over so that you can focus on it and keep it fresh on your mind the entire time. Also, as you learn a piece, you'll find that you master 90% of it, but have 10% that gives you trouble. Practice the parts you have trouble with instead of wasting time playing the part you've already mastered again! Dark Souls enforces bad practice technique.
It's annoying since the game had a lot going for it. The combat system was fun, and the setting was interesting, as well as the level design. Even the boss fight would have been fun, if only the game didn't spoil it by making you repeat an entire level over and over again until you mastered the boss fight, 30 seconds at a time. A single design decision, just one, that ruined the entire game.
The flasks sound like they just make the downtime between boss attempts more frustrating. Yes, it's fun exploring to find them, but after that, when you've seen everything the level has to offer, now any mistake in between deprives you of practice time in the 30 seconds you actually get to try the fight before the next downtime round.
I think humanities are more like lives, they are a depletable resource that deprives you of summoning and ability if you use them and your human form is lost on death with only your liquid humanity being retrievable.
@@Keldor314 Are you talking about the Taurus Demon as the second boss? I find many strange points with your presentation of the game, especially since the bonfire after fighting him is merely a few minutes away past what is essentially an estus flask check.
@@IrvineTheHunter I'd put the humanities in the same boat as your souls, an expendable, but ultimately optional resource that is tied to some form of player power. Where running out of that resource doesn't cause you to die and go back to your last save point (which does happen if you run out of flasks and health).
5:03 The Monster Hunter series does this, every quest gives you 3 lives that are shared between your entire team.
I think Monster Hunter is a game that wouldn't work without lives, not only do they make the long quests much more leniant (it's not uncommon for a single quest to last more than 20 mins), but they also add a risk-reward aspect to multiplayer.
Asking other players for help makes things easier to handle, as the boss's attention is divided between 4 targets. But it also means that the boss has 4 targets to lower the lives counter. So one big mess-up can make things go south much faster than in singleplayer.
I have just finished a game called 'Jetboard Joust' which is heavily influenced by 80s arcade games as well as modern roguelikes and I spent ages thinking about the best way to deal with lives. Not having any lives (i.e. a 'pure' roguelike approach) was too harsh, yet dealing out several lives at the start felt too easy and not 'rogue' enough. And if I didn't have permadeath, 'game over' ceased to have any meaning. In the end I settled on a permadeath system (nothing is carried over between games) but you can use the in-game currency to 'buy' a life when you die. The cost for this increases the more you do it and the further you are into the game. I'd never seen this approach before but it seems to work really well in practice and also works as a nice throwback to the 'continue game?' stage of old arcade games where you had to pump more money into the slot to keep playing. You can also find 'lives' within the game as very rare hidden treasure and I give one away before each boss fight. Sorry, this turned into more of a blog post than a comment - Jetboard Joust is released on Steam this week!
I don't play a ton of "retro" games but my experience with them is that if the game gives me a lives system I'm likely to just try to grind for more lives. Like, when I played the N. Sane Trilogy I ended up just grinding the initial levels in each game repeatedly so that I could get enough extra lives to actually get through the tougher later stages.
I also really liked the checkpoint system in Ori and the Blind Forest, since the currency you need to make save points is also used for other things like opening doors or doing the blast ability, so there's always a trade-off.
Yeah, but see you have to trick the system at its own game in N. Sane trilogy so that's not really good game design cause you found a way to devalue your death.
@@OlafLesniak yeah, I feel like a lot of 90s game design decisions like that weren't really thought through that well, they were just a relic of the arcade days and the days when running out of lives meant going all the way back to the start, and even after they stopped doing that they just continued putting lives in games because it's what they were used to.
@@christopherbohling5719 Yeah, but in 90s it was more acceptable considering the first Crash would send you all the way back by several levels depending on how far you've gotten. So you would have to repeat certain levels, therefore mastering them to a point where you could build up enough lives that you could now get far enough into the game.
Compare that to N. Sane Trilogy which has you start only one level from the start instead of several ones depending on how far you've gotten. So cheating the system as we've said does more harm to the intended challenge of the game than it did in the 90s. In those days it was more balanced.
I also forget if the 90s Crash wouldn't let you pick up lives from crates once you complete a level meaning the life crates would from that point on turn to multiple-wumpa fruit crates.
This was addressed and solved back on the N64 with games like Goldeneye and Star Fox 64 where you are rewarded for doing well.
You get unlockables and open up more challenging paths.
Why is this still a conversation 23 years later when this stuff was solved in 1997 (or there about)?
Oh... because fuck unlockables based on performance, just slide your credit card here for that content.
Hey Mark. Not a game developer, but I always take something interesting from your videos that change the way I think the next time I sit down to play some video games. You really have a one of a kind channel, don't know if you'll read this tho, but keep being so awesome.
God I love this channel. Totally informs how I think about games when I make a video.
Maybe this isn't the same thing, but in Hollow Knight, there isn't a lives system, but when you die, a ghost of you is placed where you died, and your mana gauge is able to hold less. The ghost has all of your money.
If you kill it you get your money back and your mana gauge goes back to normal. If you die again before killing it, you lose your money permanently. You can still fix your gauge by killing the new ghost though.
The reason I love this system is that there's no loss of progression for dying but it still incentivizes never dying.
You also unlock a permadeath mode after beating the game, and that mode makes it a really intense challenge. It's my favourite mode, but I'm so glad it wasn't the starting mode lol
The ghost system has it's own problems in my opinion. Metroidvanias are games about being able to expore, collect new powerups, become stronger, and take on new areas and new challenges, so reasonable responses to a death in a metroidvania game could be to go somewhere else to either get stronger, or just to ease the frustration of dying in the same place over and over via a change of scenery. The ghost mechanic, however, encourages throwing yourself at the same obstacle over and over again, rather than exploration, since you don't want to go somewhere else in your weakened state, die, and lose all your money. You of course could still go get your ghost and then leave, but its a rather annoying that you have to go where you don't want to be first, especially earlier in the game when you don't have a ton of fast travel points unlocked. There are even instances where your ghost gets placed so far in a boss room that you have to get locked into the fight to retrieve your mana, and money.
It's not a bad system by any means, as money isn't super necessary most of the time so losing it all isn't exactly progress loss, but it still creates tension since you definitely want to hold on to it, and don't want to have to walk back to where you died. I just think that in a metroidvania, it somewhat conflicts with the overall theme of growth, and exploration.
I agree with Mayonnaise Hellmann. I'd say the disadvantages of this system outweight the advantages. Dying sends you back to the last bench anyways, which is often punishement enought.
@@legrandliseurtri7495 I admit killing your ghost gets tedious after a while, but it's just the kind of game Hollow Knight is. Celeste's non punishment system works because it's designed around the challenge of the screen alone, it fits the game design. Hollow Knight is a completely different game. It has a darker tone, a lore to service. Hallownest is suppsoed to feel like it's kicking your ass. That there's real concequences for dying
Lives can also be a sort of dev safety net for teaching the player. Any player can probably get through a portion of any level in any genre through sheer luck and/or brute force, but if repeated failures send them back to those portions they will eventually learn to do them the right way. This is very important if those portions of a level or game teach key mechanics that stay relevant for the whole game, for example. Without lives, the player might get to a point where they don't know what to do but have advanced far enough that the game expects them to, and then they'd get stuck. Of course, there are other ways to accomplish this, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
This! I was thinking something like this, but you said it much better!
The thing is I believe many players go in with a wrong mindset with this, they believe lifes are only there to make you "suffer", while they actually give you room for error. The thing is on long-term they will prove their value without most players noticing it that's why they are probably so unpopular. Many games that allow bruteforcing are critizied for becoming too demanding later, this goes for Crash 4 as well. The thing is, lifes ensure that you built up experience and understanding of the game mechanics, they prepare you for the next level more or less by leaving the statement: "if you can't finish that level without dying x times, don't even bother trying the next one" in the end it keeps you from becoming overwhelmed and frustrated by sheer difficulty and prevents that bruteforce design of these so called "masocore" plattformers.
this channel is a goldmine of information for people at the precipice of executing on game ideas, but uncertainty about the details of classic game systems and how they'll affect the players' experiences
3:53 That's part of what makes me dislike lives, personally speaking. Obviously it depends on the context, but for a lot of retro games, I don't feel rewarded for completing a challenge I previously failed at, if i have to take ages to get back to that challenge in the first place.
It makes me feel jaded, and honestly pulls me out of the game's story, which is what I value more. It reminds me that the enemies and obstacles have set positions, and tells me that I'm supposed to memorize them, and memorize the perfect route if I want to play optimally.
And again, that can work depending on the context, especially if there isn't much story present. But in general, I really dislike having major setbacks when playing a game. I feel like designer is having me "prove myself" all over again, even though I already beat a stretch of the level perfectly only to lose one too many times at the part where I was struggling. It makes everything else feel like a glorified loading screen when I'd rather just be able to retry the section i was struggling with immediately.
I feel that a playstyle where players make more calculated decisions is inevitable, lives or no lives, and is only really encouraged by rewarding players for dying less and less like you bring up at the end of the video. Otherwise, I feel lives just make the game needlessly stressful in most cases.
Seems like rouge-likes are more up your alley in that regard.
One thing that more annoying than a poorly designed life system: a time limit.
I'm not born when Prince of Persia (1989) released, try playing the game two years ago for the sake of retro-game research, have a very bad impression: 1. clunky movements, 2. time limit, 3. I don't know how many levels left ahead. That's result me in manual reloading the save practically every time I die and try to premature optimizing for speed run to ensure I have enough time left for the rest of the run. Just to find out a hard way that there are 13 levels in total and I have less than 3 minutes left when I start the final level. Realized the impossibility, I have to restart the whole game to squeeze tiny bits of time here and there and that's frustrating rather than fun. Wonder till this day why don't they just design multiple endings in the first place, says, bad end when times up, and good end otherwise?
there is a bad ending when the time is up, the princess dies.
Yeah, that is quite annoying. That's why I never managed to finish Dead Rising 2.
@@dotanuki3371 yes there is a bad ending, but the game doesn't let me finish all of the levels and go to the princess chamber to see that she's dead. it just ended with a cut scene, left me in the middle where i can't explore more, can't practice combat more, can't doing anything more. it just end and force me to restart the whole game.
Well, I guess I'll chip in with my experience of Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 (styled after NES Castlevania), which also implements various challenge options, from infinite lives to finite lives to finite time. I've flip-flopped between these on different days.
I went with "finite lives" on my first run, and it felt REALLY good, especially when I was struggling but managed to locate extra lives or acquire enough points for one. But then I found out that you basically have to repeat the game 3-4 times in order to see everything the game has to offer, and because I didn't really have enough time to dedicate to that experience, I notched myself down to the "infinite lives" difficulty and breezed through things much quicker, at the cost of making most pickups worthless because the points no longer mattered.
There's no question that I had a more satisfying time with the life counter, so I would hardly call it obsolete, but it absolutely should be a standard feature to give players a choice tied into the difficulty of the game.
Great video on a great subject. Personnaly, I DESPISE having to wast time redoing stuff I already did. I hate games that have a live system (or any sort of checkpoints too far apart really). My reasoning is simple : I failed a challenge, I should'nt have to waste 10/20min to attempt it again.
Excellent video! Had never thought too deeply about the lives system
My answer to "is X outdated" is always "if it's done in a balanced and meaningful way, it's not outdated".
Furthermore, if you take lives away and you're not handling what it changes in a balanced and meaningful way, then it comes across as nothing but a careless gap in your design.
If you have to balance or change how it's usually done in a "balanced and meaningful way" when it used to be not balanced and meaningful, then it literally is an outdated concept.
Do you have an argument for lives of is this just a generic statement?
I loved this video. Mega Man was the game that taught me the value of lives, and I'm glad you mentioned it. Few of its challenges are THAT difficult, but they're set up in a way where the real challenge is making it through it all with enough lives and health.
Although, I kind of wish that if you arrived at a level with less than the standard 3 lives the game would just give you 3 lives. As it is, you get the silly situation of throwing yourself into a pit to get more lives.
every time I watch your vids my steam wishlist grows :))