I'm surprised you didn't mention PoP Sands of Time, in where the entire game is a story told by the prince, and when you dies he (as the narrator) goes like "No, no. That didn't happen. Let me begin again."
+Victor Kruger One of the first games to play with that concept was Full Throttle from 1995. In the end, the protagonist has to escape on his bike and if he fails, the screen goes black and he's just like "lemme try that one more time"
Damn you took mine. But yeah that was an interesting way of doing things. But it was always funny when you just wake up as someone new and this someone new just picks up exactly where the other left off as if they were the same. It's like they were all frozen on ice and unthawed each time another died.
AnimeQuest I think the idea was that the prepper just found another survivor while you were dead and gave them a while to sleep before guiding you, kind of like how in the beginning there was a turned survivor who was helping too while you just finish setting up the base
Assassin's Creed has diagetic respawns. Basically the Animus is a video game within a video game. Your ancestor's "death" is historically impossible if it contradicts with what really happened so the memory resets.
I find it funny you brought up that Prince of Persia game because the games that came before it did a much better job of this. You were being told a story and when you died the narrator admitted that they must have made a mistake in telling it and went back a bit to start over. You are both part of the narrator and the character in the game, it's brilliant.
Pretty late addition, but Shadow of Mordor handled death in a great way. Basically dying levels up your killer and there are a number of levels orcs can go through. The thing that makes this so interesting though is that the orc that killed you becomes your nemesis, and if you go fight him a number of things can occur. If you died to it there will be a short cutscene where you cross swords with the new Warlord and he will mention that he already killed you. If you lit him on fire he'll have burn marks, if you hit him in the eye with an arrow he'll have an eyepatch and so on. It's extremely interesting
Well, you can die to mines in Talos Principle although death merely restarts the current puzzle and considering the puzzles are short it's not that big of a deal. It's worth mentioning that "death" does work in the narrative in that game since the entire plot takes place in a virtual reality.
The Batman Arkham series has the enemy talking to you when you die. Always loved that. Also, the permadeath of Fire Emblem has been a personal favourite.
There's Destroy All Humans where you play as a clone of yourself whenever you die. It gave a bit more of a sense of loss with every death than it would a normal respawn.
In the title "Everspace" you also play as one of the thousands of clones of a scientist, on a gauntlet to some "goal" you don't know about until the end of the game. You can even find "your" ruined ships on the latter runs. The game is a sci-fi spaceship rogue-lite, by the way. You only get the info about being a clone IF you get to the third chapter in one of the runs though.
I have always admired Wario Land II's approach to the Game Over feature - They made Wario immune to death, but introduced the 'condition system', which meant enemies and dangerous environments will affect Wario in various ways. For example, if Wario is struck by a Goom, he'll be launched back and will lose some of his coins. A Bee's sting will inflate Wario, carrying him upward until he hits a ceiling, where he'll deflate and return to his normal form. A Cook will throw cake at Wario, causing him to become even more obese and a Zombie will turn Wario into...well, a zombie. All of these conditions alter the gameplay and often result in the player losing progress in the level. This teaches players to think outside of the box when dealing with enemies and surrounding environments, but also drives them when they face an annoying area or boss. Removing the fear of death really suits Wario as a character, because canonically his lust for treasure would outweigh such mortal restrictions. The following two Wario Land titles followed the same 'condition system', but also brought the standard health system back in, which I feel over-complicated the flow of the gameplay.
Tokyo Jungle has a cool death mechanic that plays into it's loose narrative. The main mode is Survival, something intrinsic to the animal kingdom. You need to eat as much as you can, grow stronger, claim territory, find a good mate and pass on your family line. The better the mate you get, the more children you make. Every time you breed, you switch over to that new generation, playing as one while the others follow. Dying means taking control of one of the back-ups. No back-ups = game over.
Although it doesn't make sense sometimes, GTA at least acknowledges your death. Sending you to the hospital and charging you (Only 5000$ for exploding in a plane AND falling out of it? Those are some amazing doctors) which is better than simply not acknowledging death in most games. One of my favorite thing about Dark Souls is that dying is an essential part to the story. You already mentioned that though. Really, I just want games to at least acknowledge your deaths, instead of just pure immersion breaking YOU DIED, RETRY? YES/NO. Not that that alone makes it a bad game, for example i LOVE the MGS series.
I myself haven't played DkS2 yet. But been hearing that with every consequent death your total HP is reduced by some percentage until it is reduced to half of your HP. And to regain HP to full you have to use item called human effigy or something. I like this approach :3 But kind of reminiscent to curse debuff that i so hate from Dark Souls.
It's only 5% per death, unless you somehow manage to die on the same part 10 times, you're fine. The game IS harder than DS1 imo, but not because of the health whatsoever.
Prince alucard remember the beggining of the game when you got the bloodministration? Pretty sure thats the whole reason you can use blood vials and the hunters dream, which is basically how you respawn, though some characters stop dreaming, not sure why but they arent immortal
Boy, I know I'm 2 years late, but in case you're still interested in this, I'd like to clarify that in Bloodborne, it's the fact that the hunters are spiritually connected to the hunter's dream that makes them not be able to die. They're bound by contract to that realm. In fact, all the events in the game happen in various states or layers of reality, akin to dreams within dreams. You could argue that even the normal Yarnham you initially play in is stuck in some sort of realm created by the great ones. The Nightmare of Mensis for example is a tangible reality accessed by projecting your mind and materializing inside of it. By dreaming, essentially. Micolash exclaims that he'll wake up and forget everything as he dies, not knowing that in reality, his body has long rotted away (the corpse you touch to access Mensis). Also, in the DLC, you visit a separate manifestation of Yarnham, which has been created by a different Great One, but is still Yarnham, albeit more twisted. Who's to say the original Yarnham with the eternal Hunt isn't also a separate realm? In that sense, the Hunter's soul, or thoughts, are materialized physically in Yarnham, and upon death are reassembled to continue the contract you have as a Hunter. And that's their explanation for death in that game.
There's a nice point that no one ever talks about. Good job! There's a Wii game called Lost in Shadows (Kage no Tou/影の塔/Tower of Shadows) that does integrate failure pretty well with the narrative. You take control of the Shadow of a boy that has been separated from the body, and try to go back to its "owner". Thing is, the boy's shadows are forcibly cut from him every time a shadow fails to climb the Tower, and every time a shadow fails they leave their memories behind - so much that the first shadow you control has no memory whatsoever. The memories you collect throughout the stages are memories from the shadows that came before the game begun, and they all give a hint to what led to their failures - shadows of monsters that killed them, being smashed by moving shadows of certain objects, spending too much time in the light, and so on. There are even some that talk about a creature that devours shadows - the last boss of the game. Whenever you die, a message says "Shadow #(number) fell at (Floor Number)F", and the next Shadow starts from the beginning of the level. It's even written on the Save File which shadow you are in, and even at the end they mention which shadow succeeded, if memory serves. It's something that's always integrated to the narrative.
The First Borderlands game also had a very good explanation for character death (New-U) but was sadly removed from canon by Anthony Bitch. This is my personal favourite because it also explains why the human enemies also respawned
Undertale made a very clever turn on dying and loading by having some characters be aware of what an incredible super power the player has like for example counting how many times theve beaten you or gives up on fighting you and just lets you go and even going so far as to have one of the bosses literly taking and using the power or load save against you.
And then a year later a game was released with a clever use of death. .. Shadows of Mordor... One where you even got the chance of taking revenge on your killer with him even commenting about the fact he saw you die ... And the other way around. .. Gotta love the nemesis system 😉
The Nemesis system is one of the coolest things I've seen in video games, when it first got announced, I thought it'd be a gimmick but it was fucking brilliant and worked so well with the game, after playing Shadow of Mordor, I predicted a lot more games would use the Nemesis system but unfortunately no one really has and that's a shame cause I can think of 1 or 2 games that could've used the Nemesis system, first one that comes to mind are the Souls games since after Shadow or Mordor: Bloodborne and DS3, if they integrated the Nemesis system into the dying and respawing nature of those games, it would have been fucking brilliant.
that would be so cool if Dark Souls series integrate that system into the games well, they would need to make the bosses have some kind of interaction with the player first tho
I loved the way Sands of Time implemented death. The prince interrupts his story, saying "wait a second, that's not how it happened." And starts off from earlier on. It's a really nice touch.
Crackdown. If I remember correctly, upon death you would be informed that human cloning had been perfected. Therefore you were the clone of your previous character... Agent....
Really good video Brit. I remember a Star Wars flying shooter, rouge squadron I think. Anyway, when you die in that game, you take over one of the other characters in your squad, making your allies your extra lives. This is an interesting mechanic, which I think could be used in modern day FPS's where a lot of the characters are just generic personality-less soldiers anyway. I love how we're analysing how these things we've always taken for granted affects the story. Keep up the good work Brit.
Infinity Blade. First game, it's your family taking up quest, Second, you're a deathless, will respawn after death(have to start route all over again at certain points of death).
I know this video is old as fuck, but 2019's Katana Zero has a pretty cool approach to respawning. The main character is never in the fights, he's just planning how will they play out. Once you die, he just makes a different plan (giving you a new try), and once you clear an area, he executes on what is sure to be a success. The story actually revolves around this fact. Pretty cool game
I usually don't see myself as the character I'm playing. If the person I'm controlling already has a personality and motivations then how am i supposed to project myself onto them? When games give me class options it's a little easier to but the only way I can fully see myself as the character is if their a blank slate that I can build entirely by myself. As a result I see myself as someone helping the games protagonist. Save points and re-spawning are parts of the universe that I'm in command of not the character so it somewhat resolves the inconsistencies in the narratives universe. I like it when games give me, the player, small abilities that the character doesn't have. To give another example in most third person games you can peek around corners or look for enemies while your character is hiding.
I love discussion of game mechanics integrated with narrative and theme. Video games are the bold new frontier of storytelling but you'd never know that playing most games. I'd be interested in any videos in the future that continue on the subject.
Jeeze, it never amazes me how utterly brilliant you are at wording arguments and conveying opinions. I honestly draw inspiration from you scripting. Love your videos, keep up the awesome work! XD
In Spore, if you die, your current monster dies. Then, you get to play as a child of the same species. Pretty neat way of handling death, if you ask me.
Prey from 2006 played with the concept of player's death vety creatively. In the begining of the game you are normal human being, which can die, thus you restart from checkpoint. But the feather on you get throught the story protagonist will gain the power of rebirth, which is tightly connected with indian folklore in the plot, because his granpa was some sort of an experienced shaman. There were sequences in the game's plot, where you learn more about that thing in some kind of astral world, that was clevel, atmospherical and authentic at the same time. Prey builds upon this aspect even deeper, letting you leave the body and control your spirit. Hell, that's spirit control is also used during puzzle sequences, where you sometimes needed to leave your body on the moving platform and then press the button as the spirit. When you die in Prey after getting this supernatural abbility you just forced to fight some evil ghost as a spirit to settle in your body again, homever those deaths were some of the most annoying in video games, because Prey forces you to play the same mini game all over again.
Very pleased to see Soul Reaver getting some recognition. I was almost starting to think it was forgotten from the game scene entirely. In my eyes it is and will remain the best game ever made for a very long time.
Shadow of Mordor made death effect the game world significantly, making important enemies mention it in dialogue calling you the "grave walker" or saying how they'll kill you again and keep you dead, other Uruk and even slaves would start making myths and rumours about you, and if a important enemy kills you they gain power and can even get promoted, etc. Extremely well done.
I want horror games (or really games of any genre, but horror would fit best) with Heavy Rain style perma-"death". If a character dies, is captured, is injured into unconsciousness, etc, they're out of the game, but you have multiple characters all with their own factions and roles in the narrative. Imagine a horror game set in a manor similar to RE1. One character witnesses another character, who was previously playable but is now identified as the bad guy, do a bad thing. The witness is seen and tries to flee. If the player succeeds, getting away, that character reveals the identity of the big bad to the rest of the group. If they fail, the rest remain in the dark, and will realize (or possibly come to the wrong conclusion and the bad guy gets away with it) the identity of the bad guy later.
The disconnect is a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is the authoritative structure of stories. A story is simply defined as a sequence of events. You might see how that might be a problem. Especially since that's not even the aspect we give a shit a bout. The shit we do care about aren't the least bit bound by that structure. The only real issue games have is pacing, but non-linear games still manage that via the creation of hotspots and correct algorithms - I see no reason for narrative to be different, but it's yet to be proven one way or the other, so don't expect any publishers to be smart with their money until somebody sets the standard.
Could it be possible to have the Bioshock revival tactic, but instead have enemies spawn through these? It would be useful in a non-linear area as it can be harder, as well as making choices like destroying it, or damaging it to the point it can nerf or kill enemies. However, the choices affect you as you could have a limited amount of these in a section and must choose. You can repair them, but the choice of how you do these helps in the long run of the game(Bosses don't count).
In the Siren games when you kill an enemy they only stay dead for a little bit before coming back to life which forces you to flee the area (and focus on more stealth).
+Biozim98 I know its a very VERY late comment, but Bioshock's whole regen system was a carbon copy of System Shock 2's but done far worse. In SS2, regeneration charged you 10 nanites ( in-game currency ) and brought you back with little health. Since it was an RPG with very little resources, it felt fair because even though you whittled away the enemies health, you still had less bullets and degraded weapons after the fight. Also, the enemies sporadically respawned.
Silent Hill 3 I think is a good example. The idea is that the save points are a symbol of rebirth and god, and the demonic fetus in Heather makes it so she can't die and is revived at these save points. Even more disturbing is seeing god's servant, Valtiel, come to drag her dead body away (presumably to a previous save point to be revived), made even more uncomfortable by the fact that Valtiel is only ever seen in the background areas. The disconnect of death is a particularly bad mood killer in horror games, but SH3 works around it by not only contextualizing it, but making it even more hopeless because not even death is an escape.
Planescape Torment, as mentioned in the end, does a great job at integrating death into the story as you always revive and permanent death is the actual goal of the game instead of a lose state. The entire plot of this game is focused on the aspect of live and thus also on death or rather the non possibility of death.
Any case of using Jak II footage in a video is a case of instant win. Also, Silent Hill 1 had an interesting save system, where your saves are the notes you leave to whoever might find them later.
PoP 2008's lack of death was horrible, though. It might have worked had it put you further from the place of your failure, but as it stands it basically removes fail states altogether and ruins any tension in the platforming sections. If you die, your only punishment is repeating the last 5 seconds. Previous PoP games handled death much better, because the time-travel abilities gave you a chance to escape otherwise certain death and even if you died, Prince acknowledged it and a mistake in his narration and the retry was basically him retelling the story.
Nevets t. Smith Exactly. It's the same way when a game kills you and shows the game over screen before you hit the ground. It just feels weird, unfinished.
But many of the deeper levels, especially in the city of light, had 30-40 second segments where you never touched the ground. The fact that you didn't have to go through a loading cycle let them design some really long and really well flowing long platforming sections where you're on poles, vines, running on walls, or flying through the air for a much longer time. If anything killed that game it was the garbage combat and one-button platforming that was more about watching things happen than doing it yourself. Pop 2008 still looks pretty as fuck in motion, the animations are beautiful and the stylised artstyle aged well. The platforming and lack of death really weren't that bad. The previous PoP games let you rewind time so you didn't even have to go as far back as the last solid platform as long as you had enough sand. Sands of time even gave you a ridiculous amount of sand tanks(10 by endgame) so actually dying because you fucked up platforming was rather hard.
Frikgeek I probably didn't even get that far, simply because the game seemed so dull and repetitive to me. All of the starting levels looked the same and lacked the puzzles and clever level design of the previous games, so after about 6h of running on brownish walls in empty locations with the exact same objective every time I just gave up. I tried to give it another chance a while back, but it was even worse. I'd say the solution in Sands of Time was much better. The game gave you an option to save yourself, it didn't hold your hand. The time-travel ability also wasn't just a hidden checkpoint, like Elika's rescue, but an actual mechanic that could be used at different times, even when you wanted to simply change the direction of your jump. It made the platforming more fluid and encouraged experimentation, whereas PoP's solution just took all tension out of it and made my actions seem inconsequential.
Indigo Prophecy was pretty neat because every game over had the character narrate about how it was "The end" or how "They never went on to learn the truth" or something like that. There were lots of variations at each one, so it was kind of a neat way of turning a game over screen into like 100+ "Bad Ends".
say what u want about pop 2008, to me it holds a special place in my heart as a memorable childhood game the atmosphere, the characters, the dialogue, the music, the art style are just mind blowing to me when I first played it in 2008
I see where you're coming from and I actually saw a developer on kickstarter talk about this. Though the game wasn't funded, the kickstarter will try again in the future when there's less things to worry about. It's called Ozombie and the creator was thinking of how in Oz you can't really die and how he could play with it. Honestly I would love to see games do that.
I love Maximo's treatment of player death. It revived the whole antiquated "lose all your lives, start from the very beginning of the game" mechanic. They modernized this approach and took the opportunity for characterization in the form of the Grim Reaper, who will provide the service of resurrecting you provided that you use a scarce game currency. So from that, players concerned with dying find themselves the incentive to explore the game world thoroughly while others can play the purist way.
People have brought up Sands of Time already, talking about the narration, but another cool facet of that game is that quick saving is part of the game, since at any time you're able to rewind time and try a section again, in-universe.
I liked your video and will respond to the query at the end: In the game, "Clive Barkers Jericho" you control a squad of up to 6-8 (!) characters, each with their own guns, personalities, abilities and backstory. Even though the game itself (especially at the beginning) is horrendously generic, its only when it picks up that having to switch between them against certain enemies makes the game unique. The main character is actually dead but has the power to bring your party back to life.
This War of Mine has a unique way of driving the narrative forward because the end story is based on whatever choices you as the player made in the game, whether it was stealing from an elderly couple or helping people trapped under rubble. When a character dies it has a huge implication on the other characters, they can grow sad and eventually lead to suicide or they could recover. in this instance I think that death is diegetic because it lasts until the end of the game and people will continue to mention the character throughout the experience. Add to that you can see their body wherever they may have died and your characters won't just forget that they existed.
wow, i've been trying to develop designs for a large scale game and this is one of the topics i've bee thinking about a lot. Thought i was the only one... finally... This helps, to see other ppls comments/thoughts on this, thanks.
SMT IV handles death by integrating it to the lore in a rather interesting way. You arrive at the river Styx, and must pay macca to the ferryman in order to return to the point previous to the fight.
I'm glad that Soul Reaver is mentioned here, that was always one of my go-tos when it comes to that topic. It's surprising to me, particularly because PoP 2008 was a big part of this video, the overall way superior and also when it comes to this topic better PoP Sands of Time wasn't even mentioned. Here it's the central mechanic, a dagger that can rewind time, plus some other time-based features, can be used to diegetically negate mistakes within the rules of the game world, so most of the time you have that one going playthrough. And even when you die in the game, since the dagger needs energy, the second layer is that the prince is telling the story and goes something like: "that didn't happen this way, let me start over". And again, it's even the central hook of the story, not some sidenote, even Dark Souls imported that and the fog gates and the souls, although the theme of Dark Souls is fire and not souls, from Demon's Souls, where the explaination of the neverending cycle made a lot more sense, since the story revolved around that a lot more...
I love the game over screen in Last of Us. Cutting to black right as the monster starts tearing into you. It feels like the climax of a nightmare, leaves me a bit shaken every time. The more I failed, the more I got immersed in the world where I'm surviving by the skin of my with the possibility of horrific death around any corner. That feeling can only come from a non-diegetic game over. Yes, when you complete the game it means that Joel didn't actually die at any point even when you saw him die. But it reinforces the idea that you conquered a real threat, and from a diegetic standpoint those game overs you remember feel like vivid imaginings of what could have happened if you made even a slight mistake. Overall, I just prefer a more definitive failure state than these diegetic ones have to offer.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about Bayonetta's midboss save points. I absolutely LOVE that game, but that always destroyed the tension and excitement for me, to the point where I had to make up my own tension by striving to beat the boss without dying... and even then, it wasn't quite the same.
I wonder if they had those for the Japanese version of the game. I know the game can be REALLY difficult during the bosses, and maybe they wanted a way to prevent western gamers from rage-quitting. Not like it worked for Too Human, though...
Its funny that you mention Bioshock in this vid. I am running through System Shock 2 atm and the Regenerator chambers are the same thing, but so is the persistence of enemy spawns and enemy health is returned upon your shortcomings. It feels like SS2 handled the respawn refrigerator better since it also felt like your enemies were using it as well. It also helps that the area is littered with corpses that were desperately trying to reach that much like you are.
You're the first person I've seen bring up Prince of Persia '08's non-death system as a narrative positive point. Most people only seem to care about how it "removes tension" or conversely, removes load times. You made a fair point about it, though.
There's a few, like games the Zero Escape games, that have multiple (and I mean multiple) endings that involve the character either dying or failing because the choices the character made. This also affects how the narrative plays out, and explains how these outcomes work in a very clever way (no spoilers). I also remember games like Fire Emblem and Aliens: Infestation for DS where if you die, your character stays dead. Conversely, the Walking Dead games, despite seaming that it has these aspects, has that disconnect. If you die in a quicktime event, you stay alive. Anyone who can die in the game will die despite the choices you've made.
I believe MGS2 Substance had this crazy meta narrative in the Snakes Tales portion of the game. A quote from the Snakes Tales missions “Do you realize what this means? When your game is over in the VR system and you try again, the potential for existence for that very universe is denied and eliminated as never having existed. That means that every single time you replay the game, an uncounted number of universes are destroyed!” A story that uses infinite universe could work I think.
It's a similar concept in Prince of Persia SOT where the whole story is practically being narrated to you (but turns out to be your friend Farah in the end) and if the Prince dies, he will say something like 'that didn't happen'. This also spurs you on to complete the game as you believe the Prince will eventually prevail
Also the term game breaking is sort of a harsh term yes it lessens the immersion in the game but it also doesn't make people go hours back through a dungeon to get to a boss again. Yes it lowers difficulty immensely and can ruin some bosses or even games if used wrong enough even if it does have some narrative sense there should still be some valence between infinite life, the knowledge gained from a past life and the ability to not repeat the same area over and over but sadly this wont be soon
Never would have thought of it in that way. I wonder if Nintendo would implement that sort of design in the Mario games. True, the "watch us play the level, then you try" mechanic is in more recent Nintendo games, but to outright remove or at least alter death states in their action-oriented games would be very interesting to see. Anyway, thanks for the insight.
Morrovind implemented the quicksave system quite well. In the gameworld one of the bosses tells you tat your a godlike being who can manipulate spacetime, on top of that he doesent want to figth you since youll come back and attempt to kill him over and over.
I know it hadn't come out yet when this was published; but Pyre does this brilliantly, dying adds to the narrative and there are no failure states. However, stakes are still high but not crippling, one of your friends may be trapped in the downside by the end but you still gain xp and still have that character to use in future combat
There's the game Obscure, that was originally launched on PS2, but today it made his way to steam, on that game, you controll a few characters, but when one dies, he dies permanently, and gives you control over the other character.
Now that you mention it, one title I thought handled its fail state mechanic in a rather interesting way is ZombiU. When a player gets killed, they are revived as a different character. To get their equipment back, they have return to where they were previously killed and kill the zombified previous character. However, this mechanic does clash with the narrative in certain instances. Namely, NPCs treat the new character as if they were the old one.
In Shin Megami Tensei IV everytine youd die youd be faced with Charon, a ferryman in hell who would offer to bring you back in exchange for money. that or you could just let your self stay dead and reload from a save.
Two of my favorite examples are Neverdead and Limbo. In both cases you can't really die, but it's integrated into the story in a way where it makes sense, and even without the real threat of a Game Over it doesn't feel cheap or take away from the difficulty in any way. And in the case of Neverdead it's just plain goddamn hilarious.
In Reigns when you die you become a descendant of your previous character. In order to progress in the game you have to go through a certain number of relatives until you complete the various tasks needed to trigger special events. The game necessitates your death, and has a cool system to explain.
A new game called Routine that will come out some time will feature no save point (Or deleted save on deaht) and force you to restart the whole game from the very start when you die. This creates tension and enhances the horror aspect of the game, not only that the replayability will be different with some doors being open and some need unlocking, along with the whole place the game is set in is mostly open to explore from the get go.
I liked the way how Majora's Mask handled its saving feature where you can only save your progress by essentially starting the entire game over again. While this added tons of replay value, allowing you to take on your favorite quests over again at any time, it also gave the player a sense of urgency and paranoia that helped them from dying often. It still implemented checkpoints at every dungeon, but after you died you would have less time to finish. Here, death has a huge toll on the player.
This is one reason I was so excited for the og prey 2. Each time you die, you get cloned and begin back at your apartment, but any progress you did will be saved. But. It’s like GTA where you have to fee, but if you run out of money, game over.
I never played it so I might be off about this but I think that if you die in ZombiU you start off as a completely new character and you lose all the upgrades you had with the previous character
I like watching your videos as a gamer, i always refer to some of your videos when people shit of game as a art for or a means of comfort, keep up the good work. you create discussions that ate highly recommendable. It also shows forward think, But also understanding tradition like you did with the devil may cry and metroid review
For as meh of a game it was SCP containment breach did a really good job at integrating manual saves. In the lore your character is an scp and you are essentially seeing the future of certain actions and simply avoiding them so lore wise your deaths aren’t happening they are just possible outcomes which you are predicting.
In the Visual Novel type game Virtue's Last Reward there are many endings, many which result in death or an ending which would imply death as a result, because they cause irreversible finality in the story. These are the only failure states in the game, and since you cannot die before these story moments you can mostly only watch as things go down hill. But most interestingly, death and retrying in this game from a previous point to deliberately trigger a different designated path and chain of events, is actually a story element in this game. And this ability is actually crucial to the motivations of the main plot. This isn't a checkpoint, the game merely restarts at the beginning of the story, and you can skip to a predefined section on the story tree that you have already been to. This was a story element originally added near the end of the game's predecessor 999. While that game did not have many endings, in that failure in a lot of them resulted in stock endings, getting the true ending mean deliberately using information from a certain route that you would not be able to obtain in the route that needed it to get to the perfect ending. But 999 did not allow you to skip to certain sections like that whenever you wanted. The solution to that game came from remembering elements from certain choices and finding the right combination of story occurrences to win. But this element allowed the game to contextualise, and canonise the player and the hero gaining this strange ability, so that they could learn form the mistakes. In VLR the story relevance of this is slowly drip-fed to the player so it becomes a plot twist in itself that the player becomes reliant on. This plot point that causes the necessity of branching paths forming non-linear story, is the reason why this game should be held up not simply as a story that you play, but a story heavy game that could only be accomplished in an interactive medium. While the game requires you to do certain things, the meta-path you took from switching between the story branches technically becomes your linear story, merely expressed across time. This makes the story progression seem more natural and in your control because even if you inconsequentially went to a different path to search for something, only to return to the place the game wanted you, thematically, that was your journey, and technically the story's journey, since the game justifies those actions.
One example similar to Legacy of Kane in use of death is Prey for the Xbox 360. When Tommy dies, he is transported to a spirit world. In the spirit world, the player must shoot different colored ghosts to restore Tommy's health and spirit force so that Tommy may be revived. This mechanic ties in rather well to the narrative because much of the story progresses with interaction with the spirit world, and many puzzles are solved with use of the spirit mechanic. Unfortunately, the revival mechanic essentially eliminates any penalty for dying, as Tommy can be resurrected an infinite number of times, provided the player kills sufficient ghosts in the spirit world. Still, it was one of the best utilizations of death with regards to the story I've seen. I'm interested in seeing how death can be tied into the narrative well without making the player's character seem immortal; while immortality works better for games like Prey, where the duelist approach is taken throughout the plot and gameplay, it wouldn't work as well for games where a more realistic tone is conveyed.
Coming from the future i think sifu is a notable entry in this collection as death increases the characters age and each death can change your stats. It's weird because there will be an optimal age you can play as where you'll need to die on purpose a few times to achieve it
Infinity Blade 1 was awesome in that sense, at least before the following games screwed the story up. The notion of playing your son who has to avenge his father's death added a sense of weight to the proceedings, as though by dying, the player forsakes not just his personal life but also directly jeopardizes his offspring's. The permanence of every death was also great, forcing another attempt entirely before a player could face the boss that killed the character's father previously. (I am aware that the sequels changed this concept later on to the usual predictable godly immortal hero, to their loss.)
They Bleed Pixels takes an interesting approach to user saving. You can put down checkpoints pretty much wherever you want (with a few restrictions) but you need to earn the ability to put down a checkpopint by collecting coins and being generally succesful at the game.
An example I can think of is in NMH2 when you died against a boss, you could button-mash for a potential continue. What's neat about that is that the player no longer sits there & thinks "oh great, back to the start of the fight" (which is a huge disconnect, but rather the energy put into mashing gives them a feeling of desperation and makes it a bit more immersive.
The Borderlands series handles respawning pretty well too. The New-U Stations in the game serve as respawn points, by copying and then rebuilding the player in case they die. Fun thing is, this applies to the enemies as well, to a degree, at least it's implied in the second game by various enemy callouts when you kill a bandit one of their mates wanted to kill, for example. Also in the second game, there's a quest given to you by the villain, with the objective to commit suicide. The extra joke is that the New-U stations are actually owned by the villain's corporation.
Braid did a good job with death. As a time manipulator, you can just rewind time to a point where you aren't dead. And it's even used for some of the games puzzles. Fire Emblem, with it's permadeath (or a character retreating in Casual Mode) also does failstates pretty well.
I'm surprised you didn't mention PoP Sands of Time, in where the entire game is a story told by the prince, and when you dies he (as the narrator) goes like "No, no. That didn't happen. Let me begin again."
***** I don't remember, I only played The Two Thrones once.
Yep, but the Empress was narrating TT, not the Prince.
+Victor Kruger
One of the first games to play with that concept was Full Throttle from 1995. In the end, the protagonist has to escape on his bike and if he fails, the screen goes black and he's just like "lemme try that one more time"
Call of Juarez:Gunslinger is basically this concept but applied to the whole game, and it's an absolute joy to play because of it
Well, the same happens in Bastion. It doesn't happen throughout the game, but I don't remember if it was so in Sands Of Time, either.
ZombiU had a very cool integration of death, you'd respawn as a different person and you could potentially encounter yourself afterwards as a zombie.
Damn you took mine. But yeah that was an interesting way of doing things. But it was always funny when you just wake up as someone new and this someone new just picks up exactly where the other left off as if they were the same. It's like they were all frozen on ice and unthawed each time another died.
AnimeQuest I think the idea was that the prepper just found another survivor while you were dead and gave them a while to sleep before guiding you, kind of like how in the beginning there was a turned survivor who was helping too while you just finish setting up the base
Assassin's Creed has diagetic respawns.
Basically the Animus is a video game within a video game. Your ancestor's "death" is historically impossible if it contradicts with what really happened so the memory resets.
I find it funny you brought up that Prince of Persia game because the games that came before it did a much better job of this. You were being told a story and when you died the narrator admitted that they must have made a mistake in telling it and went back a bit to start over. You are both part of the narrator and the character in the game, it's brilliant.
Pretty late addition, but Shadow of Mordor handled death in a great way.
Basically dying levels up your killer and there are a number of levels orcs can go through.
The thing that makes this so interesting though is that the orc that killed you becomes your nemesis, and if you go fight him a number of things can occur. If you died to it there will be a short cutscene where you cross swords with the new Warlord and he will mention that he already killed you. If you lit him on fire he'll have burn marks, if you hit him in the eye with an arrow he'll have an eyepatch and so on.
It's extremely interesting
Victor Viridian Try Stanley Parable or Talos Principle.
No death mechanic, yet remain awesome games.
Well, you can die to mines in Talos Principle although death merely restarts the current puzzle and considering the puzzles are short it's not that big of a deal. It's worth mentioning that "death" does work in the narrative in that game since the entire plot takes place in a virtual reality.
The Batman Arkham series has the enemy talking to you when you die. Always loved that. Also, the permadeath of Fire Emblem has been a personal favourite.
There's Destroy All Humans where you play as a clone of yourself whenever you die. It gave a bit more of a sense of loss with every death than it would a normal respawn.
In the title "Everspace" you also play as one of the thousands of clones of a scientist, on a gauntlet to some "goal" you don't know about until the end of the game. You can even find "your" ruined ships on the latter runs.
The game is a sci-fi spaceship rogue-lite, by the way. You only get the info about being a clone IF you get to the third chapter in one of the runs though.
So glad that you acknowledged Soul Reaver.
Senile Snake I'm happy as well
As long as people keep rememember, the Lok Series will never die. Kinda like Raziel.
I have always admired Wario Land II's approach to the Game Over feature - They made Wario immune to death, but introduced the 'condition system', which meant enemies and dangerous environments will affect Wario in various ways.
For example, if Wario is struck by a Goom, he'll be launched back and will lose some of his coins. A Bee's sting will inflate Wario, carrying him upward until he hits a ceiling, where he'll deflate and return to his normal form. A Cook will throw cake at Wario, causing him to become even more obese and a Zombie will turn Wario into...well, a zombie.
All of these conditions alter the gameplay and often result in the player losing progress in the level. This teaches players to think outside of the box when dealing with enemies and surrounding environments, but also drives them when they face an annoying area or boss.
Removing the fear of death really suits Wario as a character, because canonically his lust for treasure would outweigh such mortal restrictions. The following two Wario Land titles followed the same 'condition system', but also brought the standard health system back in, which I feel over-complicated the flow of the gameplay.
Wario land 3 didn't have health, and imo adding it in Wario land 4 wasn't too bad if you know what you're doing. Love those games to death though
Tokyo Jungle has a cool death mechanic that plays into it's loose narrative. The main mode is Survival, something intrinsic to the animal kingdom. You need to eat as much as you can, grow stronger, claim territory, find a good mate and pass on your family line. The better the mate you get, the more children you make. Every time you breed, you switch over to that new generation, playing as one while the others follow. Dying means taking control of one of the back-ups. No back-ups = game over.
Although it doesn't make sense sometimes, GTA at least acknowledges your death.
Sending you to the hospital and charging you (Only 5000$ for exploding in a plane AND falling out of it? Those are some amazing doctors) which is better than simply not acknowledging death in most games.
One of my favorite thing about Dark Souls is that dying is an essential part to the story. You already mentioned that though.
Really, I just want games to at least acknowledge your deaths, instead of just pure immersion breaking YOU DIED, RETRY? YES/NO. Not that that alone makes it a bad game, for example i LOVE the MGS series.
I myself haven't played DkS2 yet. But been hearing that with every consequent death your total HP is reduced by some percentage until it is reduced to half of your HP. And to regain HP to full you have to use item called human effigy or something. I like this approach :3 But kind of reminiscent to curse debuff that i so hate from Dark Souls.
It's only 5% per death, unless you somehow manage to die on the same part 10 times, you're fine. The game IS harder than DS1 imo, but not because of the health whatsoever.
Prince alucard remember the beggining of the game when you got the bloodministration? Pretty sure thats the whole reason you can use blood vials and the hunters dream, which is basically how you respawn, though some characters stop dreaming, not sure why but they arent immortal
Yeah but i wouldnt call it infected, every human can become a beast, but you just happen to also be a hunter, hence the blood vials and whatnot.
Boy, I know I'm 2 years late, but in case you're still interested in this, I'd like to clarify that in Bloodborne, it's the fact that the hunters are spiritually connected to the hunter's dream that makes them not be able to die.
They're bound by contract to that realm. In fact, all the events in the game happen in various states or layers of reality, akin to dreams within dreams. You could argue that even the normal Yarnham you initially play in is stuck in some sort of realm created by the great ones.
The Nightmare of Mensis for example is a tangible reality accessed by projecting your mind and materializing inside of it. By dreaming, essentially. Micolash exclaims that he'll wake up and forget everything as he dies, not knowing that in reality, his body has long rotted away (the corpse you touch to access Mensis).
Also, in the DLC, you visit a separate manifestation of Yarnham, which has been created by a different Great One, but is still Yarnham, albeit more twisted. Who's to say the original Yarnham with the eternal Hunt isn't also a separate realm? In that sense, the Hunter's soul, or thoughts, are materialized physically in Yarnham, and upon death are reassembled to continue the contract you have as a Hunter. And that's their explanation for death in that game.
There's a nice point that no one ever talks about. Good job!
There's a Wii game called Lost in Shadows (Kage no Tou/影の塔/Tower of Shadows) that does integrate failure pretty well with the narrative. You take control of the Shadow of a boy that has been separated from the body, and try to go back to its "owner". Thing is, the boy's shadows are forcibly cut from him every time a shadow fails to climb the Tower, and every time a shadow fails they leave their memories behind - so much that the first shadow you control has no memory whatsoever. The memories you collect throughout the stages are memories from the shadows that came before the game begun, and they all give a hint to what led to their failures - shadows of monsters that killed them, being smashed by moving shadows of certain objects, spending too much time in the light, and so on. There are even some that talk about a creature that devours shadows - the last boss of the game.
Whenever you die, a message says "Shadow #(number) fell at (Floor Number)F", and the next Shadow starts from the beginning of the level. It's even written on the Save File which shadow you are in, and even at the end they mention which shadow succeeded, if memory serves. It's something that's always integrated to the narrative.
Bastion did it brilliantly, where it translates as the narrator stumbling or having a brain fart ("now where was I?").
Just like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
@@TheULTIMATE450 Just like Call of Juarez Gunslinger
Supergiant really just wanted to make the perfect blend between narrative and gameplay and they perfected it with Hades
The First Borderlands game also had a very good explanation for character death (New-U) but was sadly removed from canon by Anthony Bitch. This is my personal favourite because it also explains why the human enemies also respawned
Undertale made a very clever turn on dying and loading by having some characters be aware of what an incredible super power the player has like for example counting how many times theve beaten you or gives up on fighting you and just lets you go and even going so far as to have one of the bosses literly taking and using the power or load save against you.
you need more subs dude, one of the best reviewers on TH-cam in my opinion.
And then a year later a game was released with a clever use of death. .. Shadows of Mordor... One where you even got the chance of taking revenge on your killer with him even commenting about the fact he saw you die ... And the other way around. .. Gotta love the nemesis system 😉
The Nemesis system is one of the coolest things I've seen in video games, when it first got announced, I thought it'd be a gimmick but it was fucking brilliant and worked so well with the game, after playing Shadow of Mordor, I predicted a lot more games would use the Nemesis system but unfortunately no one really has and that's a shame cause I can think of 1 or 2 games that could've used the Nemesis system, first one that comes to mind are the Souls games since after Shadow or Mordor: Bloodborne and DS3, if they integrated the Nemesis system into the dying and respawing nature of those games, it would have been fucking brilliant.
that would be so cool if Dark Souls series integrate that system into the games
well, they would need to make the bosses have some kind of interaction with the player first tho
Mordor had a cool system, too bad it was hard to fail in any other activity than that one qte that pretty much instakills you.
The nemesis system is the best thing that's been introduced this generation of consoles.
Now there's going to be an expansion for XCOM 2 that was inspired by the Nemesis system.
I loved the way Sands of Time implemented death. The prince interrupts his story, saying "wait a second, that's not how it happened." And starts off from earlier on. It's a really nice touch.
Crackdown. If I remember correctly, upon death you would be informed that human cloning had been perfected. Therefore you were the clone of your previous character... Agent....
Awesome seeing Sou Reaver mentioned by you! Hope you´ll give it a proper go at some point in a full video as well.
This has got to be my favourite video by The Gaming Brit so far! Keep up the great work!
Really good video Brit. I remember a Star Wars flying shooter, rouge squadron I think. Anyway, when you die in that game, you take over one of the other characters in your squad, making your allies your extra lives. This is an interesting mechanic, which I think could be used in modern day FPS's where a lot of the characters are just generic personality-less soldiers anyway.
I love how we're analysing how these things we've always taken for granted affects the story. Keep up the good work Brit.
Infinity Blade.
First game, it's your family taking up quest, Second, you're a deathless, will respawn after death(have to start route all over again at certain points of death).
I know this video is old as fuck, but 2019's Katana Zero has a pretty cool approach to respawning. The main character is never in the fights, he's just planning how will they play out. Once you die, he just makes a different plan (giving you a new try), and once you clear an area, he executes on what is sure to be a success. The story actually revolves around this fact. Pretty cool game
I usually don't see myself as the character I'm playing. If the person I'm controlling already has a personality and motivations then how am i supposed to project myself onto them? When games give me class options it's a little easier to but the only way I can fully see myself as the character is if their a blank slate that I can build entirely by myself.
As a result I see myself as someone helping the games protagonist. Save points and re-spawning are parts of the universe that I'm in command of not the character so it somewhat resolves the inconsistencies in the narratives universe.
I like it when games give me, the player, small abilities that the character doesn't have. To give another example in most third person games you can peek around corners or look for enemies while your character is hiding.
freazeezy that's a cool thought
Yeah, it makes you feel like some sort of guiding cosmic hand, there to give the character an advantage over the overwhelming odds.
I love discussion of game mechanics integrated with narrative and theme. Video games are the bold new frontier of storytelling but you'd never know that playing most games. I'd be interested in any videos in the future that continue on the subject.
Jeeze, it never amazes me how utterly brilliant you are at wording arguments and conveying opinions. I honestly draw inspiration from you scripting. Love your videos, keep up the awesome work! XD
In Spore, if you die, your current monster dies. Then, you get to play as a child of the same species. Pretty neat way of handling death, if you ask me.
I knew all this, but it was nice to hear an extended analysis of this gaming trope.
Prey from 2006 played with the concept of player's death vety creatively. In the begining of the game you are normal human being, which can die, thus you restart from checkpoint. But the feather on you get throught the story protagonist will gain the power of rebirth, which is tightly connected with indian folklore in the plot, because his granpa was some sort of an experienced shaman. There were sequences in the game's plot, where you learn more about that thing in some kind of astral world, that was clevel, atmospherical and authentic at the same time. Prey builds upon this aspect even deeper, letting you leave the body and control your spirit. Hell, that's spirit control is also used during puzzle sequences, where you sometimes needed to leave your body on the moving platform and then press the button as the spirit. When you die in Prey after getting this supernatural abbility you just forced to fight some evil ghost as a spirit to settle in your body again, homever those deaths were some of the most annoying in video games, because Prey forces you to play the same mini game all over again.
Very pleased to see Soul Reaver getting some recognition. I was almost starting to think it was forgotten from the game scene entirely. In my eyes it is and will remain the best game ever made for a very long time.
This was a good topic. And kudos on referencing Soul Reaver. That was a great example.
I knew my patience would pay of and would upload another video :)
Shadow of Mordor made death effect the game world significantly, making important enemies mention it in dialogue calling you the "grave walker" or saying how they'll kill you again and keep you dead, other Uruk and even slaves would start making myths and rumours about you, and if a important enemy kills you they gain power and can even get promoted, etc. Extremely well done.
Once again, another damn good video from The Gaming Brit.
I want horror games (or really games of any genre, but horror would fit best) with Heavy Rain style perma-"death". If a character dies, is captured, is injured into unconsciousness, etc, they're out of the game, but you have multiple characters all with their own factions and roles in the narrative. Imagine a horror game set in a manor similar to RE1. One character witnesses another character, who was previously playable but is now identified as the bad guy, do a bad thing. The witness is seen and tries to flee. If the player succeeds, getting away, that character reveals the identity of the big bad to the rest of the group. If they fail, the rest remain in the dark, and will realize (or possibly come to the wrong conclusion and the bad guy gets away with it) the identity of the bad guy later.
play corpse party... but it looks more like pokemon in style.
HulK TopF Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a look.
TrueFriends HelpMoveBodies
dont expect too much, its 16 bit design
HulK TopF Hardly matters.
EVRY DARN TIME I SEE YOU. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!
finaly someone talks about legacy of kain
The disconnect is a symptom, not the disease.
The real problem is the authoritative structure of stories. A story is simply defined as a sequence of events. You might see how that might be a problem. Especially since that's not even the aspect we give a shit a bout. The shit we do care about aren't the least bit bound by that structure.
The only real issue games have is pacing, but non-linear games still manage that via the creation of hotspots and correct algorithms - I see no reason for narrative to be different, but it's yet to be proven one way or the other, so don't expect any publishers to be smart with their money until somebody sets the standard.
Could it be possible to have the Bioshock revival tactic, but instead have enemies spawn through these? It would be useful in a non-linear area as it can be harder, as well as making choices like destroying it, or damaging it to the point it can nerf or kill enemies.
However, the choices affect you as you could have a limited amount of these in a section and must choose. You can repair them, but the choice of how you do these helps in the long run of the game(Bosses don't count).
In the Siren games when you kill an enemy they only stay dead for a little bit before coming back to life which forces you to flee the area (and focus on more stealth).
+Biozim98
I know its a very VERY late comment, but Bioshock's whole regen system was a carbon copy of System Shock 2's but done far worse. In SS2, regeneration charged you 10 nanites ( in-game currency ) and brought you back with little health. Since it was an RPG with very little resources, it felt fair because even though you whittled away the enemies health, you still had less bullets and degraded weapons after the fight. Also, the enemies sporadically respawned.
Ass Creed had you de-sync from your memories or something like that.
the anus* FIFY
Aptly named.
Silent Hill 3 I think is a good example. The idea is that the save points are a symbol of rebirth and god, and the demonic fetus in Heather makes it so she can't die and is revived at these save points. Even more disturbing is seeing god's servant, Valtiel, come to drag her dead body away (presumably to a previous save point to be revived), made even more uncomfortable by the fact that Valtiel is only ever seen in the background areas.
The disconnect of death is a particularly bad mood killer in horror games, but SH3 works around it by not only contextualizing it, but making it even more hopeless because not even death is an escape.
Planescape Torment, as mentioned in the end, does a great job at integrating death into the story as you always revive and permanent death is the actual goal of the game instead of a lose state. The entire plot of this game is focused on the aspect of live and thus also on death or rather the non possibility of death.
Your point about Bioshock was very accurate.
Any case of using Jak II footage in a video is a case of instant win.
Also, Silent Hill 1 had an interesting save system, where your saves are the notes you leave to whoever might find them later.
PoP 2008's lack of death was horrible, though. It might have worked had it put you further from the place of your failure, but as it stands it basically removes fail states altogether and ruins any tension in the platforming sections. If you die, your only punishment is repeating the last 5 seconds.
Previous PoP games handled death much better, because the time-travel abilities gave you a chance to escape otherwise certain death and even if you died, Prince acknowledged it and a mistake in his narration and the retry was basically him retelling the story.
Also, there's just something about seeing your character go splat that really enforces that feeling of failure in a weirdly satisfying way.
Nevets t. Smith Exactly. It's the same way when a game kills you and shows the game over screen before you hit the ground. It just feels weird, unfinished.
But many of the deeper levels, especially in the city of light, had 30-40 second segments where you never touched the ground.
The fact that you didn't have to go through a loading cycle let them design some really long and really well flowing long platforming sections where you're on poles, vines, running on walls, or flying through the air for a much longer time.
If anything killed that game it was the garbage combat and one-button platforming that was more about watching things happen than doing it yourself. Pop 2008 still looks pretty as fuck in motion, the animations are beautiful and the stylised artstyle aged well. The platforming and lack of death really weren't that bad. The previous PoP games let you rewind time so you didn't even have to go as far back as the last solid platform as long as you had enough sand. Sands of time even gave you a ridiculous amount of sand tanks(10 by endgame) so actually dying because you fucked up platforming was rather hard.
Frikgeek I probably didn't even get that far, simply because the game seemed so dull and repetitive to me. All of the starting levels looked the same and lacked the puzzles and clever level design of the previous games, so after about 6h of running on brownish walls in empty locations with the exact same objective every time I just gave up. I tried to give it another chance a while back, but it was even worse.
I'd say the solution in Sands of Time was much better. The game gave you an option to save yourself, it didn't hold your hand. The time-travel ability also wasn't just a hidden checkpoint, like Elika's rescue, but an actual mechanic that could be used at different times, even when you wanted to simply change the direction of your jump. It made the platforming more fluid and encouraged experimentation, whereas PoP's solution just took all tension out of it and made my actions seem inconsequential.
Indigo Prophecy was pretty neat because every game over had the character narrate about how it was "The end" or how "They never went on to learn the truth" or something like that. There were lots of variations at each one, so it was kind of a neat way of turning a game over screen into like 100+ "Bad Ends".
say what u want about pop 2008, to me it holds a special place in my heart as a memorable childhood game
the atmosphere, the characters, the dialogue, the music, the art style are just mind blowing to me when I first played it in 2008
I see where you're coming from and I actually saw a developer on kickstarter talk about this. Though the game wasn't funded, the kickstarter will try again in the future when there's less things to worry about. It's called Ozombie and the creator was thinking of how in Oz you can't really die and how he could play with it. Honestly I would love to see games do that.
So much new games that deal with death in interesting ways, this video needs a remake
Nobody say "Pokémon"? with the pokémon center thing? :p
Or Portal 2 co-op
I love Maximo's treatment of player death. It revived the whole antiquated "lose all your lives, start from the very beginning of the game" mechanic. They modernized this approach and took the opportunity for characterization in the form of the Grim Reaper, who will provide the service of resurrecting you provided that you use a scarce game currency. So from that, players concerned with dying find themselves the incentive to explore the game world thoroughly while others can play the purist way.
Soul Reaver mention FTW
And two years after this video, Undertale came out. Where death and file saves are essential parts of the plot
yay a new gamingbrit video, please upload more often if you can i really enjoy your content :)
People have brought up Sands of Time already, talking about the narration, but another cool facet of that game is that quick saving is part of the game, since at any time you're able to rewind time and try a section again, in-universe.
I liked your video and will respond to the query at the end:
In the game, "Clive Barkers Jericho" you control a squad of up to 6-8 (!) characters, each with their own guns, personalities, abilities and backstory. Even though the game itself (especially at the beginning) is horrendously generic, its only when it picks up that having to switch between them against certain enemies makes the game unique. The main character is actually dead but has the power to bring your party back to life.
Just take a look at Fire Emblem. For there, death of even main chars are final ;-) You really start to value your companions^^
This War of Mine has a unique way of driving the narrative forward because the end story is based on whatever choices you as the player made in the game, whether it was stealing from an elderly couple or helping people trapped under rubble. When a character dies it has a huge implication on the other characters, they can grow sad and eventually lead to suicide or they could recover. in this instance I think that death is diegetic because it lasts until the end of the game and people will continue to mention the character throughout the experience. Add to that you can see their body wherever they may have died and your characters won't just forget that they existed.
wow, i've been trying to develop designs for a large scale game and this is one of the topics i've bee thinking about a lot. Thought i was the only one... finally... This helps, to see other ppls comments/thoughts on this, thanks.
SMT IV handles death by integrating it to the lore in a rather interesting way. You arrive at the river Styx, and must pay macca to the ferryman in order to return to the point previous to the fight.
I'm glad that Soul Reaver is mentioned here, that was always one of my go-tos when it comes to that topic.
It's surprising to me, particularly because PoP 2008 was a big part of this video, the overall way superior and also when it comes to this topic better PoP Sands of Time wasn't even mentioned. Here it's the central mechanic, a dagger that can rewind time, plus some other time-based features, can be used to diegetically negate mistakes within the rules of the game world, so most of the time you have that one going playthrough. And even when you die in the game, since the dagger needs energy, the second layer is that the prince is telling the story and goes something like: "that didn't happen this way, let me start over".
And again, it's even the central hook of the story, not some sidenote, even Dark Souls imported that and the fog gates and the souls, although the theme of Dark Souls is fire and not souls, from Demon's Souls, where the explaination of the neverending cycle made a lot more sense, since the story revolved around that a lot more...
I love the game over screen in Last of Us. Cutting to black right as the monster starts tearing into you. It feels like the climax of a nightmare, leaves me a bit shaken every time. The more I failed, the more I got immersed in the world where I'm surviving by the skin of my with the possibility of horrific death around any corner. That feeling can only come from a non-diegetic game over. Yes, when you complete the game it means that Joel didn't actually die at any point even when you saw him die. But it reinforces the idea that you conquered a real threat, and from a diegetic standpoint those game overs you remember feel like vivid imaginings of what could have happened if you made even a slight mistake. Overall, I just prefer a more definitive failure state than these diegetic ones have to offer.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about Bayonetta's midboss save points. I absolutely LOVE that game, but that always destroyed the tension and excitement for me, to the point where I had to make up my own tension by striving to beat the boss without dying... and even then, it wasn't quite the same.
I wonder if they had those for the Japanese version of the game. I know the game can be REALLY difficult during the bosses, and maybe they wanted a way to prevent western gamers from rage-quitting. Not like it worked for Too Human, though...
I doubt that was the case. If it was, that would be incredibly stupid, since there's a difficulty setting.
Its funny that you mention Bioshock in this vid. I am running through System Shock 2 atm and the Regenerator chambers are the same thing, but so is the persistence of enemy spawns and enemy health is returned upon your shortcomings. It feels like SS2 handled the respawn refrigerator better since it also felt like your enemies were using it as well. It also helps that the area is littered with corpses that were desperately trying to reach that much like you are.
Watching this now, i think a lot of Hades and how well they handled it
Hades is a masterpiece
After seeing that Total Biscuit comment about intonation, I can't unhear it. :(
You're the first person I've seen bring up Prince of Persia '08's non-death system as a narrative positive point. Most people only seem to care about how it "removes tension" or conversely, removes load times. You made a fair point about it, though.
thank you for mentioning soul reaver, those games need more people talking about them
There's a few, like games the Zero Escape games, that have multiple (and I mean multiple) endings that involve the character either dying or failing because the choices the character made. This also affects how the narrative plays out, and explains how these outcomes work in a very clever way (no spoilers). I also remember games like Fire Emblem and Aliens: Infestation for DS where if you die, your character stays dead. Conversely, the Walking Dead games, despite seaming that it has these aspects, has that disconnect. If you die in a quicktime event, you stay alive. Anyone who can die in the game will die despite the choices you've made.
I believe MGS2 Substance had this crazy meta narrative in the Snakes Tales portion of the game. A quote from the Snakes Tales missions
“Do you realize what this means? When your game is over in the VR system and you try again, the potential for existence for that very universe is denied and eliminated as never having existed. That means that every single time you replay the game, an uncounted number of universes are destroyed!”
A story that uses infinite universe could work I think.
It's a similar concept in Prince of Persia SOT where the whole story is practically being narrated to you (but turns out to be your friend Farah in the end) and if the Prince dies, he will say something like 'that didn't happen'. This also spurs you on to complete the game as you believe the Prince will eventually prevail
Also the term game breaking is sort of a harsh term yes it lessens the immersion in the game but it also doesn't make people go hours back through a dungeon to get to a boss again. Yes it lowers difficulty immensely and can ruin some bosses or even games if used wrong enough even if it does have some narrative sense there should still be some valence between infinite life, the knowledge gained from a past life and the ability to not repeat the same area over and over but sadly this wont be soon
Never would have thought of it in that way. I wonder if Nintendo would implement that sort of design in the Mario games. True, the "watch us play the level, then you try" mechanic is in more recent Nintendo games, but to outright remove or at least alter death states in their action-oriented games would be very interesting to see.
Anyway, thanks for the insight.
Morrovind implemented the quicksave system quite well. In the gameworld one of the bosses tells you tat your a godlike being who can manipulate spacetime, on top of that he doesent want to figth you since youll come back and attempt to kill him over and over.
I know it hadn't come out yet when this was published; but Pyre does this brilliantly, dying adds to the narrative and there are no failure states. However, stakes are still high but not crippling, one of your friends may be trapped in the downside by the end but you still gain xp and still have that character to use in future combat
There's the game Obscure, that was originally launched on PS2, but today it made his way to steam, on that game, you controll a few characters, but when one dies, he dies permanently, and gives you control over the other character.
Undertale is about the save mechanic too, if no one mentioned it here yet.
Now that you mention it, one title I thought handled its fail state mechanic in a rather interesting way is ZombiU. When a player gets killed, they are revived as a different character. To get their equipment back, they have return to where they were previously killed and kill the zombified previous character. However, this mechanic does clash with the narrative in certain instances. Namely, NPCs treat the new character as if they were the old one.
Infinity Blade implements death in the narrative pretty well, but mostly if you're dying against the God King.
In Shin Megami Tensei IV everytine youd die youd be faced with Charon, a ferryman in hell who would offer to bring you back in exchange for money. that or you could just let your self stay dead and reload from a save.
Henkoshi 404 the first megaten had the exact same mechanic, I think
A cool game that implemented failure in its narrative is GODS WILL BE WATCHING.
Two of my favorite examples are Neverdead and Limbo. In both cases you can't really die, but it's integrated into the story in a way where it makes sense, and even without the real threat of a Game Over it doesn't feel cheap or take away from the difficulty in any way.
And in the case of Neverdead it's just plain goddamn hilarious.
In Reigns when you die you become a descendant of your previous character. In order to progress in the game you have to go through a certain number of relatives until you complete the various tasks needed to trigger special events. The game necessitates your death, and has a cool system to explain.
Braids time rewinding is a good example, using the primary gameplay mechanic as a way of getting back from being killed.
A new game called Routine that will come out some time will feature no save point (Or deleted save on deaht) and force you to restart the whole game from the very start when you die. This creates tension and enhances the horror aspect of the game, not only that the replayability will be different with some doors being open and some need unlocking, along with the whole place the game is set in is mostly open to explore from the get go.
I liked the way how Majora's Mask handled its saving feature where you can only save your progress by essentially starting the entire game over again. While this added tons of replay value, allowing you to take on your favorite quests over again at any time, it also gave the player a sense of urgency and paranoia that helped them from dying often. It still implemented checkpoints at every dungeon, but after you died you would have less time to finish. Here, death has a huge toll on the player.
The Return of the GamingBrit!
This is one reason I was so excited for the og prey 2. Each time you die, you get cloned and begin back at your apartment, but any progress you did will be saved. But. It’s like GTA where you have to fee, but if you run out of money, game over.
I never played it so I might be off about this but I think that if you die in ZombiU you start off as a completely new character and you lose all the upgrades you had with the previous character
Prey has a nice way of acknowleding Player Death
I like watching your videos as a gamer, i always refer to some of your videos when people shit of game as a art for or a means of comfort, keep up the good work. you create discussions that ate highly recommendable. It also shows forward think, But also understanding tradition like you did with the devil may cry and metroid review
For as meh of a game it was SCP containment breach did a really good job at integrating manual saves. In the lore your character is an scp and you are essentially seeing the future of certain actions and simply avoiding them so lore wise your deaths aren’t happening they are just possible outcomes which you are predicting.
In the Visual Novel type game Virtue's Last Reward there are many endings, many which result in death or an ending which would imply death as a result, because they cause irreversible finality in the story. These are the only failure states in the game, and since you cannot die before these story moments you can mostly only watch as things go down hill.
But most interestingly, death and retrying in this game from a previous point to deliberately trigger a different designated path and chain of events, is actually a story element in this game. And this ability is actually crucial to the motivations of the main plot.
This isn't a checkpoint, the game merely restarts at the beginning of the story, and you can skip to a predefined section on the story tree that you have already been to.
This was a story element originally added near the end of the game's predecessor 999. While that game did not have many endings, in that failure in a lot of them resulted in stock endings, getting the true ending mean deliberately using information from a certain route that you would not be able to obtain in the route that needed it to get to the perfect ending.
But 999 did not allow you to skip to certain sections like that whenever you wanted. The solution to that game came from remembering elements from certain choices and finding the right combination of story occurrences to win.
But this element allowed the game to contextualise, and canonise the player and the hero gaining this strange ability, so that they could learn form the mistakes.
In VLR the story relevance of this is slowly drip-fed to the player so it becomes a plot twist in itself that the player becomes reliant on.
This plot point that causes the necessity of branching paths forming non-linear story, is the reason why this game should be held up not simply as a story that you play, but a story heavy game that could only be accomplished in an interactive medium.
While the game requires you to do certain things, the meta-path you took from switching between the story branches technically becomes your linear story, merely expressed across time.
This makes the story progression seem more natural and in your control because even if you inconsequentially went to a different path to search for something, only to return to the place the game wanted you, thematically, that was your journey, and technically the story's journey, since the game justifies those actions.
One example similar to Legacy of Kane in use of death is Prey for the Xbox 360. When Tommy dies, he is transported to a spirit world. In the spirit world, the player must shoot different colored ghosts to restore Tommy's health and spirit force so that Tommy may be revived. This mechanic ties in rather well to the narrative because much of the story progresses with interaction with the spirit world, and many puzzles are solved with use of the spirit mechanic. Unfortunately, the revival mechanic essentially eliminates any penalty for dying, as Tommy can be resurrected an infinite number of times, provided the player kills sufficient ghosts in the spirit world. Still, it was one of the best utilizations of death with regards to the story I've seen. I'm interested in seeing how death can be tied into the narrative well without making the player's character seem immortal; while immortality works better for games like Prey, where the duelist approach is taken throughout the plot and gameplay, it wouldn't work as well for games where a more realistic tone is conveyed.
Coming from the future i think sifu is a notable entry in this collection as death increases the characters age and each death can change your stats. It's weird because there will be an optimal age you can play as where you'll need to die on purpose a few times to achieve it
Infinity Blade 1 was awesome in that sense, at least before the following games screwed the story up. The notion of playing your son who has to avenge his father's death added a sense of weight to the proceedings, as though by dying, the player forsakes not just his personal life but also directly jeopardizes his offspring's. The permanence of every death was also great, forcing another attempt entirely before a player could face the boss that killed the character's father previously. (I am aware that the sequels changed this concept later on to the usual predictable godly immortal hero, to their loss.)
They Bleed Pixels takes an interesting approach to user saving. You can put down checkpoints pretty much wherever you want (with a few restrictions) but you need to earn the ability to put down a checkpopint by collecting coins and being generally succesful at the game.
An example I can think of is in NMH2 when you died against a boss, you could button-mash for a potential continue. What's neat about that is that the player no longer sits there & thinks "oh great, back to the start of the fight" (which is a huge disconnect, but rather the energy put into mashing gives them a feeling of desperation and makes it a bit more immersive.
The Borderlands series handles respawning pretty well too.
The New-U Stations in the game serve as respawn points, by copying and then rebuilding the player in case they die. Fun thing is, this applies to the enemies as well, to a degree, at least it's implied in the second game by various enemy callouts when you kill a bandit one of their mates wanted to kill, for example.
Also in the second game, there's a quest given to you by the villain, with the objective to commit suicide. The extra joke is that the New-U stations are actually owned by the villain's corporation.
Braid did a good job with death. As a time manipulator, you can just rewind time to a point where you aren't dead. And it's even used for some of the games puzzles. Fire Emblem, with it's permadeath (or a character retreating in Casual Mode) also does failstates pretty well.