Death: From Dungeon Crawl to Meat Boy
mandible.net
mandible.net
First, Braid, where your character can die in the usual way for a 2D platformer, killed by monsters or falling in holes. But the game lets you manipulate time, so the answer to death is just to rewind a few seconds while the music plays backwards and you come back to life.
Second, the original Monkey Island. Unlike the Sierra click puzzlers of the time (King's Quest etc) you couldn't die. But if you stood at the edge of the cliff, you fell off and got a Sierra-style Game Over screen... for a few seconds. Then you bounced back up on a 'rubber tree'.
Finally, there's the original ZX Spectrum isometric platformer version of Batman. In that game, if you died in a particularly frustrating way or at the same puzzle repeatedly, the game would sometimes give you a "Dog's life", an extra life as a consolation prize.
Interesting article.
I really liked how checkpoints are presented in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (at least, not sure about others in that series). It introduces the game as retelling of a story and if you mess up enough to "die", the main character says "no, no, that's not how it went" and then you continue from the last checkpoint.
By which I mean a combination of games that are increasingly difficult with no meaningfully fun easier mode and the disdain for anyone wanting such a thing.
In particular I miss out on some awesome story and design work by authors and artists because I lack the reflexes and/or hours of dedication needed to be able to truly experience these games. When I ask (or find where someone else asks) about how to deal with difficulty and the NICE responses are "this game is not for you" it is a real letdown.
Take roguelike games for example, dying can be a good thing, you might have been stuck with a weapon or ability you got at the start, and by dying to get rewarded a new 'random' package which happens to be much better.
I normally quit my roguelike binges when I stop caring about keeping my characters alive, even on a good/long run. In fact, too good a run can even get boring, when I get too confident in my capacity to survive (though this naturally resolves itself when I inevitably splat because of that confidence).
But never because I haven't gotten the fun of dying recently; its because I stopped worrying about the possibility/consequence.
E.g. you might play a game like XCOM or Europa Universalis on ironman, and that is what will give the situations you encounter the seriousness / gravitas that they deserve, and it can be thrilling.
On the other hand, a game like Everspace actually pulls of the "fun of dying" quite nicely. Games are relatively short, especially early on, and unlike most roguelikes your character's skills and weapon choices do survive deaths to some degree. So much of the time, you're dying with a smile on your face, because you know you've just achieved an important milestone, and you can't wait to try again with whatever you just unlocked. I thought it was an interesting hybrid take on the roguelike genre.
Those are roguelites, not roguelikes.
"coffee break" only implies short length.
Perhaps a good analogy is with horror movies. Horror movies are meant to scare you. Horror movies can often be funny. But a movie that was intended to be funny is not a horror movie, it's a comedy.
I wouldn't say roguelikes encourage shorter games; they encourage long games, and are mechanically designed around long sessions. The difficulty makes it more ..difficult.. to achieve a longer game, but there's absolutely nothing to encourage killing off your character.
Someone new to roguelikes, I think, might be perceive that everything revolves around the initial roll of the dice, and the items you find, but the games are balanced such that you should be capable of surviving regardless of the initial roll (except in really, awful, just plain terrible starts). And you'll still trivially die with even a great start.
You're encouraged towards a long session, but unlike most games, roguelikes fight really hard to not let you have it. in a similar fashion as https://i.imgur.com/mHXiz.png
roguelites on the other hand encourage shorter sessions to some degree, by the usual mechanic of meta-rewards that persist between sessions. With it, it's not just less punishing to die; it actively encourages you to die, because you'll be able to start again with a better character, with better equipment, abilities, whatever. And this will inevitably mean you take more risks with your character (like say, investing more in health, because you have a guaranteed strong weapon), and eventually reach the same point as where you died but stronger than before. They push death onto you, whereas a roguelike offers next to nothing.
Just another roll, but you'll get those anyways if you push on..
[1] My main experience is with ToME, which I believe is considered a roguelike rather than a rogue-lite, and I'm pretty sure games don't tend to go into dozens of hours, normally. Assuming you don't die very early, it's probably closer to 5-6 hours, in my experience, which is far shorter than other normal games.
More extreme down that line would be dwarf fortress, particularly adventure mode (fortress mode doesn't help my point: they even have the motto "losing is fun"...)
I agree that roguelikes are self-aware, and make it mostly painless to restart, but I think its more a result of roguelikes actively working with the permadeath mechanic, whereas ironman is more of a "game mode"; that is, the game isn't built with iron man in mind. Ironman is a variant of the gameplay. Both I think still are primarily valued for the fear of death, and I don't think either require, expect or encourage death. Its just more that, ironman is worse at the mechanic, primarily because its a rather shallow, incidental feature, rather than at the heart of it.
It happens to be easy to tack on ironman mode, on a non-ironman game; you just remove the save slots, and delete it on death. But they're still normal, non-permadeath games at heart.
Dying was a serious business and being a robber/PK/looter was super lucrative. Going outside the city was the biggest adrenaline rush ever.
Nowadays they just pick another game.
If you died, you'd lose 10% of your experience points(which amounts to multiple levels the higher you are), your inventory and there was a chance you could lose a piece of equipment.
It makes you work on your survival skills both in PvE and PvP, this in turn makes PvP combat and PK an extra challenge which awarded skill, awareness and creativity. Even before Twitch or even YouTube were hits there was already a thriving community recording videos of their PvP gameplay.
Premium players could use in-game currency to buy bonuses to reduce the effects of death(plus an item that would prevent you from losing any inventory), which made upgrading to a Premium account a must for anyone who plays enough of the game.
And in the end it shapes the community and the ecosystem, people would separate in groups and wage wars for dominance, these were wars of attrition as getting big kills means creating major setbacks until one group has to surrender.
In hindsight, it's amazing how some simple mechanics enabled people to emulate real life systems.
Based on the alternatives that actually exist the cure may be worse than the disease. In many modern AAA games you never really have to learn anything, the game just lets you progress regardless. Unless you play on the extremely hard difficulty modes that just completely break the balance of the game (the hardest difficulty mode on the Uncharted remastered is a good example of this).
And afaicr, none of the bosses weren't mostly clear from the get-go, with most moves being pretty heavily telegraphed.
Still not easy, mind you, but imo they were never so cruel as to hide their intent, and not provide hints as to what was coming.
So today you see all kinds of mechanics helping player agency (like "fate" points that serve as extra lives), wanton PC murder like Gygax' Tomb of Horrors mostly sells to nostalgic players these days.
The game also had a fairly deadly combat system; often the only way to "win" was not to fight. (If you died, you could always introduce a replacement character at the next spaceport.)
It probably cost them some popularity long term, but it also made for an entire galaxy of world building.
(Younger kids will probably not realize that Traveller was likely an inspiration for the "Firefly" show. When I first saw the show, I said "That's Traveller.")
> And more specifically, let's talk about losing in a PvE game, either solo or cooperative.
And through that lens, the death system for WoW is pretty lame. But I'd beg to differ for PvP or RPPv(E|P). The run-back system allows people to camp your corpse. This would cause you to request help from your guild or hop on an alt and get help in trade chat. Now you have an overworld faction battle going on. For RP, it becomes an RP element.
These days, the length of that runback, at least for M+ content is actually important, and there's interesting interactions and strategy around using/abusing it in higher-level content.
Basically, you screw up, and you could lose anywhere from maybe 5m to an hour.
Now at worst you'll respawn at the most recent checkpoint, usually a 10s to 30s runback, and even that is usually avoidable via failure detection pylons and such. It's a different world.
> there's interesting interactions and strategy around using/abusing it in higher-level content
Yeah, was fascinating watching the MDI and seeing some teams purposefully suicide run and rez up on the fair side to skip hard packs.
Moreover, it does not go to extremes (I mean, I didn't expect Saw-like scenario, or Russian Roulette). E.g. "You Only Live Once" is even harsher. Once you die, you die. There is not "play again?": https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/505914 (warning: Flash)
Still, after dying, I could play again.
Now, this "play/learn, lose, repeat" lasted (IIRC) for about 1-2 months until I finished the game. I then continued playing it for a little more time to discover more secrets and/or improve my score. The thing is that I never was angry that I needed to repeat these stages because I had learn that the game was fair (balanced).
That was also the case for some (not all) arcade games I remember like Shinobi, Double Dragon, Snow Brows, Bubble Bubble etc; you needed to play them some times to discover their secrets and become better and then you'd be able to reach further and further with a single credit (and even finish them).
This experience was contrary to what I felt when I played games that were not properly balanced (which felt non-fair to me then). For example, I remember that while I played Castlevania on the game boy I was always frustrated, I had reach the final stage but I couldn't pass some obstacles; and if I could was by pure luck. It was like dropping a coin 10 times and needing to get heads in all 10 times. One time after many hours of trying I had reached the final boss but I was killed before actually seeing anything on how he attacks etc. I was so frustrated that I thrown the Gameboy at the floor and broken it! The game was so unfair!
TL;DR: If the game has good gameplay and is properly balanced then repeating stages is not bad; not many games are properly balanced though :/