It’s 1993. I’m playing on my NES. I’m about to fight Bowser at the end of Super Mario Bros. It’s time for dinner, however, and my dad has called into the living room probably five or six times. I don’t want to eat because I’m about to finally save Princess Toadstool, but I’m seven and I have no choice so I put it on pause.
When I come back, after eating and doing the dishes, my console’s turned off. I stare in horror at my dad who is now watching television. And because the original game didn’t let you save due to technological limitations, I find myself back at the first level when I finally turn the console back on. There are eight more worlds left to go and I will never get close to the end again.
Games have been flirting with their portrayal of failure and game overs for years–they’ve been dodging the subject of death for even longer. Arguments have been made for and against severe consequences in the digital world for over two decades. Each game treats the topic differently. Some don’t let you save often if ever, others put a checkpoint around every bend. Sometimes, a game over screen means starting from the beginning while other times it just means restarting from an earlier level. And, in the case of Super Mario Bros., saving and thus restarting without penalty wasn’t possible until later titles in the series–the game over screen was permanent, whether it was reached by personal failure or an external error. When Mario failed, it was all over.
When I had to restart after being so close to the end of Super Mario Bros., it killed the game for me. Today, realizing I never beat the game, I wonder why it bothered me so much. For some reason, I felt entitled to a save feature and a restart, but it makes me wonder why restarts even exist in video games in the first place. After all, there are rarely second chances in any other forms of entertainment–nor are there any in real life. Yet in video games, it seems, we take them for granted and get disgruntled when they aren’t there.
Perhaps we shouldn’t.
Back in 1998, Sierra Entertainment bought the rights to Tolkien’s Lords of the Rings series. The topic of virtual death quickly became forefront in their hype machine for their upcoming MMORPG. It cropped up first in an issue of PC Gamer where the developers discussed gameplay elements of Middle-Earth Online such as dungeons, character customization, and player vs. player combat. While explaining what happens when a character dies, they touched on a concept referred to as “true death” that they hoped would be able to be put into the world.
Much like the name implied, true death meant that your hobbit, your dwarf, your elf–they lived a single life. In this version of the Middle-Earth, death was meant to be as real as it is to us right now. Unlike other video games, there were no restarts or resurrections in MEO. If a stray arrow pierced your heart and your screen faded to black, you never came back from it.
Unlike Sam and Frodo, you never get to return to the Shire if you fall down in battle. Sierra had planned a real and tangible–quite horrifying, really–consequence for failure.
I suspect it would have never made it into the actual game anyway, although the concept was interesting. It was hard to imagine being implemented correctly due to game balance. It would be a nightmare for developers to ensure that players didn’t get griefed needlessly by malicious players and that an untimely server disconnect wouldn’t wipe out someone’s elf forever in what was then the age of 56K modems and disconnects. There was also the question of what players would do if their character did die, as MMORPGs are on the whole very character centric. Would they become disenfranchised and quit? Or simply play as their character’s daughter or son, inheriting some of their wealth for another adventure? Unfortunately, the game was never completed so we never got to see the idea in action and what effects it would have had on the gaming world. Sierra’s parent company, Vivendi, bought the rights in 2001 then relinquished them to Turbine who eventually did the version of Lord of the Rings Online that we all know about. And Sierra, broke and out of steam from their vacation in Minas Tirith, didn’t touch on the genre again.
In other MMORPGs, death has had a much lighter penalty by comparison to what could have been. Some of the harshest of the genre in terms of difficulty level, Everquest and Lineage II both gave a loss of experience upon death that was extremely noticeable at higher levels. Final Fantasy XI, in turn, copied them shamelessly. Turbine’s first title, Asheron’s Call, took heed from Ultima Online and experimented with players losing their most valuable items when they died–although people just started to carry expensive throwaway items with hopes those would drop instead of their rare Olthoi helmets to combat it. A death in World of Warcraft costs equipped items their durability and requires a long corpse run, but durability became a laughable punishment as gold started to get easier and easier to make.
In fact, death in World of Warcraft is so light that after a wipe in a raid, players are often back into the fray only a minute or two later. In the upcoming expansion, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, it’s rumored that there will even be raidwide resurrections for guilds of a certain caliber–thus removing any punishment whatsoever. Deviating far from the MMORPG norm, Blizzard seems to have chosen to make death more trivial with every patch. But it wasn’t always this way. In other Blizzard titles, death wasn’t such a laughing matter.
Blizzard’s Diablo II is somewhat famous for its hardcore mode. The game had two modes–normal and hardcore–but hardcore was renowned because if you died once, your character would be dead forever. Items were lost as well unless the player was playing with others and they were able to loot their corpse. It was a choice, but a rewarding one. Completing a game in hardcore mode brought players notoriety. Players were rewarded for not dying doubly so whereas players who died in this mode were punished unbelievably hard. They lost everything. While some games had used this before as a feature, Diablo II did it best. Players got social status and credit as a gamer solely for surviving.
Other games have continued on this path of optional difficulty, but they didn’t revolve around death and game overs quite as much as Diablo II chose to. Difficulty levels exist for a reason–although most simply introduce more health to enemies or decrease damage output. They aren’t particularly brutal in their consequences, even if their difficulty is enormous. Resident Evil’s difficulty levels make players extremely fragile, making a simple run-in with a zombie become fatal if they even touch you. But while you should make no mistake, they’re hard, you can restart as many times as you want. It doesn’t have a long-term effect. In Left 4 Dead 2, realism mode makes the infected harder to kill and takes away obvious gameplay features like items glowing from a distance so they become harder to find. But none of these modes really touch on death, even if they allow you to die faster.
You still respawn and live another day to kill the hordes of undead.
It’s just not the same as being unable to save a game for its whole duration or facing the loss of a character forever due to a simple mistake–for better and for worse.
In games based on stories, such as most RPGs, death tends to have a predictable role as a plot device and nothing more. Players get knocked out in Final Fantasy and there is virtually no penalty for this. Throw a Phoenix Down and it’s like nothing ever happened; Selphie Tilmitt’s back with even more energy than before. It would have been interesting if in Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth killed a character whenever they got knocked out permanently. Of course, it wouldn’t have worked, because players would be lucky to make it to the end with even Cloud Strife left. Maybe something simple instead like the ability to change the storyline directly–what if he could have killed Aeris at any point in the game, a cut scene triggered the first time the player let her die in combat to create a feeling of causation, as though the player was directly involved in Aeris’ murder by their own incompetence and inability to keep her alive in a battle.
But alas, death was simply a scripted event in the majority of Final Fantasy games and otherwise didn’t matter. It’s a plot element–nothing more. Failing as a whole was meaningless, too; your whole party getting knocked out only sets you back to the last save point. There was no consequence at all. And in other games like Pokémon, death doesn’t even exist. Since it’s mostly a kid’s game, it’s not too surprising that the creatures can’t even die, but it’s still disappointing. Starting back at a PokéCenter only sets you back a few minutes and leaves no punishment for failure–no lingering game over screen with a real impact.
I remember when Heavy Rain was sold as the game where any character could die at any time, and it would change the story even if it wouldn’t provide a game over screen. It sounded cool and difficult. The reality was somewhat different, though. The introduction still contains an unavoidable loss of life and, even if you can choose how some people die, it’s a scripted choice. It’s inconsequential.
It’s a tight line to walk. Developers have to make their games fun and challenging. And death is hard to define, though it certainly is an element that can up the challenge or take it down a notch when removed entirely out of the equation. It can be a nuanced plot device or a method of challenge, but developers frequently stray away from it for fear of doing it wrong. Some have, of course, embraced it and used it well. Bioware is particularly brilliant about death sometimes as seen with Baldur’s Gate 2 and its permanent death gameplay mode as well as Dragon Age’s character deaths. In Bioware’s Mass Effect, you can choose who lives and dies by who you send on a mission near the end of the game. It’s a defining and sad scene, as you’ve spent many hours getting acquainted with these characters–one of them even having a chance to become Commander Shepard’s lover. But without an option to save both based on performance, it becomes a little less meaningful. One of them will die and you’re only choosing. You can’t save them by any means possible. Mass Effect 2, conversely, learns from its predecessor’s mistakes. It allows players to set up a party on the final stage of the game that can either succeed or fail depending on how well Shepard has defined their roles and won their loyalty. It largely gets it right, showing a good example of performance related to death–and their deaths are quite horrifying, should they happen. As Kelly Chambers dies in a vat of acid, dissolved into nothing more than bits of blood and bones, Shepard’s failure shakes the player to their core.
You could have saved her, but you failed. Her death was the consequence of your poor judgment.
Developers shouldn’t be so afraid to use death to change their games more. From RPGs to FPSes, death should be more involved–either as a plot device with player interaction or a difficulty mode. Add new optional gameplay modes that make death permanent in action games and use character death in a more impressive manner in titles driven by their storylines. At worst, you end up with a frustrated player or two who are mad their favorite character died. But at best, you end up with a quirky game like Planescape Torment where death was used repeatedly in the game to move the storyline onward and spark quests–the player dying and being sent to the morgue is only one example of many.
Unfortunately, as long as developers avoid death like they do, games can’t evolve and the importance of consequence and the regret of failure is downplayed. As in the case of Heavy Rain, death becomes inconsequential.
But it shouldn’t be. After all, we would have never had Counter-Strike if its creator hadn’t been decided on making a player’s death have more consequence. Although just a simple FPS, CS made players wait until the end of the round once they died unlike most first person shooters such as Team Fortress Classic or Quake III where a respawn happened almost instantly after being fragged. While sometimes death was just a few seconds, other times it was minutes in competitive CS rounds. It made the game more tactical in comparison to other titles of that generation. It made players stealth around corners and lie in wait for what was coming rather than charge into the fray with their guns blazing. If you died, you let your team down for the entire round. This responsibility was different than most FPS games. And this changed the genre as a whole, arguably for the better, by giving diversity to titles with different styles of gameplay.
The thing both players and developers have to realize is that we don’t always need second chances. Sometimes we should feel consequences–or at least have the option to. We don’t need to go back to no saves like Super Mario Bros.–our technology has definitely advanced beyond that point–but we can explore different game over options. Instead of just losing experience when we die needlessly in a MMORPG, add a different penalty. And realize that character deaths, important elements in the plot, can be even more important when players help contribute to them. Let us save Brad Vickers from Nemesis in Resident Evil 3 next time, or at least have a say in how and when he dies.
I implore game developers to think outside the gravestone from time to time. I believe that gaming, as a whole, will be better for it.
I get your point and its an interesting subject, but the successful use of death within games (real perma death) largely depends on what the games trying to achieve and why people are playing it.
First up most old games didnt have saves for purely technical reasons that the technology was either to expensive or didnt exist, my 48K spectrum for instance was incapable of creating save files (or any files) so saves were out of the question.
Games which can use it well are games where you have a party and aren’t reliant on one character. But broadly speaking if you have a main character only it serves no purpose to have a mechanic for perma death. None whatsoever – not unless you also remove the ability to change the game.
As long as saves exist its really a pointless mechanic cause honestly how many players wouldn’t just reload the game at a previous save and restart, how many would actually start the entire game again?
As I say it has some merit in party based RPGs, but in most other games it just plain annoying. Also your article seems to confuse no save games with perma death games and then later Counter Strike which doesnt perma kill you as much as force you to waste a few minutes. Its a totally different genre and death in that doesnt mean youve wasted 2 months of your life.
Im currently playing Demons Souls for the PS3 which is awesomely difficult, and unashamedly old school, its all about repetition and learning the levels, its nigh on impossible to play it first time and not die, no in fact it is impossible. The fun in the game is from learning its many dastardly traps and tricks and eventually beating it, it would be stupid (for instance) to have perma death in that game.
Where as an old favourite of mine Jagged Alliance was a squad turn based tactical battle game, in that your hired mercs did permanently die. It worked cause you could replace them with other hired mercs but they wouldn’t be the same, each of them had a distinct personality and abilities so keeping the good ones alive became very important.
Basically if it works as a mechanic to make a game more engaging and fun then it can be awesome, but if it simply is in the game to frustrate and waste your time then its the opposite of awesome… whatever that is :)
No offense, but I didn’t confuse Counter-Strike with permadeath. I played in CAL. I actually just related that developers are afraid of difficulty in death, or using death differently–that is to say, before CS, people tried to make death instant respawns in FPSes. CS made you sit until the round’s end.
Similarly, I would never argue for permadeath to exist without an off button–or no saving. I hated Super Mario Bros. for that, but I wondered why I did hate it. That’s what spurred this article.
That was the impression I got as well. You’re simply talking about death in games and how it could be done creatively, right?
I am really not sure how Avellives managed to uh… confuse what you were saying. Heh.
Methinks he needs a new pair of glasses.
My point which may not have come across well, is that the two things are linked.
You cant have real death consequences which mean anything if you have modern save features. There is a tipping point of acceptability. Granted that will differ slightly from player to player, but generally speaking anything very harsh or permanently game changing is just going to elicit the > quit > reload old save > retry > response from most gamers until they achieve whatever it is without dying.
The only way to make real death work is to either remove saves, which no one would want, or to have very limited forced autosave points and only 1 save file allowed, which would equally annoy more people than it would excite.
I see where you are coming from and done well death consequences can enhance a game (as I said), but I already feel like there is enough variation around to cater to most tastes, just to look at the MMO genre you go from games like WOW where it has virtually no consequence to games like EVE where it can totally ruin you character forever.
In pure story telling games (like Heavy Rain) its definately something which could be expanded but in most other games its either already there to some degree or would be just be extremely irritating.
There’s room for compromise between the two extremes. The Roguelike genre has a tradition of permadeath, but is structured to make getting back in the game quick and enjoyable.
Spelunky is an amalgamation of Roguelikes — with the typical permadeath and random level generation — and action platformers. With a strict time limit (an instakill monster spawns in almost each of the 16 stages after 2.5 minutes, and there’s a prize for beating the whole thing in under 10 minutes) each run doesn’t take much of a time investment, so every moment becomes more valuable as you play it. And yet, as soon as a Yeti bounces you off a wall into a set of spikes, you want to dive right back in.
The character dies, but the player gains the experience necessary to improve at the game and eventually win.
I think the reason we don’t see this yet is because even with our awesome new PC’s and PS3′s and 360s, gaming still hasn’t come very far if you don’t look at the graphics.
Games like Mass Effect 2 claim that the story develops based on decisions your character makes, when in truth its more like a mad-lib where you toss in names and verbs.
Video games are like interactive storybooks for me, and I would love to see truth death for all characters in every game, but that would require an extreme amount of hardware power since the storyline of the entire game could be changed if key character was killed too early on. It would require game designers to put a lot more effort into the actual game and not what it looks like.
I imagine we’ll be waiting another 10-20 years before true death is in out vidya.
I think I am not fully equipped to handle the consequences of death in a video game.
I get cranky and annoyed when things go awry in normal life that the thought of my destresser (video games) forcing me to be more careful about how I play would turn me off entirely.
That said though, I think I understand the sentiment. :)
For me the death in video games that bugged me the most was prolly the Suikoden Tactics game. Permadeath was HORRIBLE there and it WOULD NOT stop. Chars would be under level so you couldnt level them up without risking their forever deaths. It sucked.
But I would like to see devs explore and expand on gaming and death more. Like you I feel that everytime that game gets handled poorly, devs get cold feet and move away from the topic.
Good post :)
Good piece.
Games are one of the only artforms where designers have to factor in death, or more generally the fail state. So far from missing an opportunity to deal with the issue, it is one that is a primary issue for any game creator. I don’t see any other medium play with the notion so directly.
I would also say that deaths in Heavy Rain are incredibly consequential, they could barely be more so, and I have the cold sweats and goosebumps to prove it!!!
Hah, the first time I played Heavy Rain, I got the girl killed in the part where the apartment complex catches on fire. Even though I was aware of how the game was designed to play, I still expected to restart. When the game kept going and just moved on, that was an eye opener. I was immediately reminded of all the dangerous things I let the characters do and how close to death I put them…and how horrifyingly reckless that was of me. :D
Death in games has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Trying your best not to die will create the advantage of more exhilarated/nail-biting game-play experience, or die and there will be consequences which in turn creates the disadvantage for you as the player. We all know this from our gaming experiences. But true death will not work in every game. Sure, have it as an option if someone would like to see how the game will be like when rule #1 is NOT to die or you’ll have to start all over again. But think how frustrating that will be if true death was forced on an MMORPG?
I mean really… Playing good from the start making your character a worthy and strong opponent for months, then that fateful day comes where you get pwned tragically, or simply lost in an honest, epic battle to the end, and all that time spent on that character is out the window… Damn, that will not just upset me, I’ll be quite pissed! But some gamers take games more seriously, and can become depressed over the loss of their character they spent weeks or months on. It’s like formatting your PC and forgetting to backup your files and saved games. You loose the will to play all over again due to the loss of so much effort, and to get there again is just too much as you’ll end up loosing it all again. Screw that! :P
In the FPS genre, Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch allows you to respawn after you died to continue playing, as it’s a fast passed shooter game. The goal of the game mode is to hunt/seek out other opponents and shoot them repeatedly, and only so many players are allowed on a server, so if they didn’t respawn after they got shot, would make for a very short gaming experience. But in the case of S&D (Search & Destroy) where the opponents don’t spawn once they get killed, at least they can wait for the round to end before they can spawn again, and continue playing. So implementing TRUE death in an FPS should then kick the player off the server once he gets killed, so that won’t work either lol.
RTS pretty much has that anyway lol. When you defeat an opponent, he’s out for that game.
Another thing you mentioned: Game saving/save points.
That is a touchy subject with me. The old days where almost every PC game had the option to safe your games’ progress, to simply pick up where you left off. And the wonderful quick-save/quick-load buttons.
Thanks to our friendly console lovers, game dev’s don’t bother with proper game saving functions when it’s also made for PC, as the consoles work different! They need save points FFS. Yes, areas where the game is programmed to automatically save once you reach that point in the game. A good idea, but also a bad one if you scrap the old way of saving your progress in the process. Like when you’re not at all satisfied with how you did the last or a previous section of the game. Maybe you’ve wasted too much ammo, or forgot to pick up ammo, or needed a health pack, but got distracted by something that wanted you for dinner or your phone rang or whatever, and then you go past that point, the game saves, and there is now no way to reload to do it better for your own advantage! No, the only option is to “Continue Game” where it loads your last save point… sigh. AvP 2010 is a recent example. It would have been a much better gaming experience if they didn’t port the fracking console version to PC. Either make the game for both platforms, or stick to one. Thanks for thinking of us PC guys so that we could also at least play the game on the PC, but it would have been better if it was built to work correctly as a PC game too, instead of a console port! Porting sabotages the gaming experience for the player on the platform it wasn’t intended for!
Save points in other games could be beneficial. Like my latest experience in Titan Quest. Where you can save at any time, but you’ll spawn at the last found fountain. And of course all monsters/enemies will be respawned too. In a way it’s cheating imo, as you can level your character a bit more with every time you load your game, and re-killing the monsters. And with the added bonus of getting more loot in the same areas you’ve already gathered loot the last time, because that also resets after loading the game.
And also when you die in TQ, it’s not like in Diablo II where you have to go back to your body to get your gear back. You keep everything, but only loose experience. But like in MMORPGs, the higher your level, the more experience you loose when you die. So the consequences are merely a set-back than fearing to start over. But with true death, spending so much time getting so far and then having to start all over again… would you really want that? As an option maybe, but not the only option.
The ability to save your game progress is essential, but it has to be done right for the genre, play style of the game and the platform imho.
The inconsequential game over or deaths… sure game difficulties can be implemented with the consequences of dying to be more severe the higher the difficulty, but to start over once something went wrong in game or not, that should rather be an option to choose (like a difficulty level) rather than the only option in the game.
X-com (and Syndicate) had death as well. Though you could replace people in your squad with rookies fairly cheaply, you did lose the exp (improved stats) of the veterans. That worked perfectly in my eyes, it made it a bit harder if you died a lot, but no game over until the entire squad died. There is no other game I want to see a direct port of to 360, or updated for new PC’s more than X-Com.
I personally see WoW and its lack of death penalty as a bad thing also. WoW has gone more and more towards the ‘casual’ side of gaming. Making the game jokingly simple for those of us that have played video games for more than a couple years. Now its all about the grind for gear/reputation/etc, not skill (or fun). I honestly would not be surprised to see a nerf on mouse users just to cater to the keyboard turn-ers.
Thats great for Blizzard and WoW, but with its success, a lot of MMO’s are copying that ease of play. Thankfully there appear to still be some other dev’s out there who still make games for gamers.
Xcom did have an interesting method for deaths. And while every loss was usually painful, it was manageable.
I started gaming when i was 10 years.
The father of a friend owned a pub – and in that pub was a video game, a gaming machine with big red buttons and a good old joystick.
Unfortunately that video-game-machine was not owned by his father and required coins to play.
That was a long time before i got my first Atari 2600.
We could not afford more than about 1-2 coins a day, and most of the time, the games where over in about under 1 hour.
But Boy, that was exhilarating fun. Every move was holy, every button pressed counted. If you cant simply reset/restart it becomes pure Zen. We knew every move and my friend always adviced me while i was playing against incredible odds (and i co-piloted him on his turn). We did this for about 2-3 years, almost every day. Some days were frustrating as hell, but the overall experience was “real” (for lack of a better word).
The games were “Bomb-Jack”, “Ikari Warriors”, some kind of side-scrolling Karate Game with an ugly Wizzard Endboss on Level 4, cant remember the name…
But the images, the spawn points, sequences and the childish screams when we finally finished the last boss/level are burned into my brain forever.
When the environment is hard and its impossible to cheat, you become a master.
Compared to this erm… “natural selection”, my later Atari 2600 and all following consoles were almost boring.
Ikari Warriors was a top game, even better was commando which it was kinda ripped off from, the side scroller wouldn’t be Double Dragon by any chance would it, I wasted countless hours with my mate in Herne Hill playing that on an arcard machine… ah the nostalgia
Double Dragon was fun too, think i played it much later on the Amiga.
And uhh good old “Bruce Lee” on C64…
The “Karate-Game” was (pardon) “Kung-Fu-Master”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBTgiNPOEzM&feature=related
I’m kind of looking forward to dying as a… certain bounty hunter. As I play that game very sporadically, shifting to his er… successor will be quite refreshing.
Here’s where I board a different train of thought and speculate. Since Blizzard has formally stated that their top secret next-gen MMO won’t be based on any of their current franchises, I wonder if it might be set in the old west.
EVE online has an interesting death penalty. You lose your ship completely.
A great genre that uses complete perma-death is rouge-likes (in particular, Nethack). In a rouge-like, you create a character and explore dungeons and sometimes towns. But any death, no matter if you were 1 step from beating the game, is permanent and even the character’s save file is wiped (of course you could cheat by backing up the file but what’s the fun in that?).
This mechanic gives these games a feeling of atmosphere. Every move counts and could mean life or death.
Something that helps make this mechanic work is that a full out game is not long. If you’re good enough, you can build a new character and have them highly leveled and equipped within hours rather than months.
Hi, this is a great article, i have been wondering the overall outcome of not having a game over screen.
I haven’t been into gaming lately, not since the good old N64, but i bought an XBOX 360 and played Gears of War 2, i thought the game was great, but it seems to me that there are just so many checkpoints, as you stated before, when i died it didn’t feel like i died, just a retry loosing only a minute or so in game play.
If you want a game where death is consequential try playing Fire Emblem, in that game if one of your characters die, they are gone for good.
I’m a little confused how Heavy Rain’s use of death as a game mechanic is “inconsequential” while Mass Effect 2′s it a “good example of performance related to death”. They both seem to relate the same idea, that your choices have effects on the end game.
You also argue that “there are rarely second chances in any other forms of entertainment–nor are there any in real life.” I would argue with both of those statements, as other forms of media are not interactive, so why would you need a “second chance”? And, aside from death, there are plenty of second chances in life, just more for some than others.
Overall I think you make an interesting point that death needs to have an affect, but I would argue instead that the effect death has ultimately changes the game. You site CS as a great example of how the effects of death change the fundamental mechanics of the game. You also mention how Diablo 2′s hardcore mode changes how one plays that game. However, some games (if not most now) are designed to give a narrative experience to the consumer, and death is just a minor annoyance of lost time simply so that this narrative experience can be achieved. Dying permanently in Uncharted 2, per se, would prevent most people from finishing it. If this type of game is seen as simply an interactive movie (albeit, a good one) then having to restart your movie arbitrarily (and let’s face it, games have cheap deaths) after getting so far would hinder the emotional impact of the narrative. Death is a good idea to toy around with, but perma-death is not a good idea for every game (although it might get me to play more sports games).
And also, as an adult with not as much time to play games as when I was seven, and one that wants to experience more media, I find the arbitrary time-loss mechanic that death brings as one I can do without. After all, the only reason we try not to die in most games is because getting back to the point we are at just takes more time. But why does time spent have to be the only punishment? I agree that more games need more creative punishments, but making me waste time just seems lazy. I like changing end-game things, or how my character functions. I think interesting things can be done, but your entire essay is in argument FOR the gameplay mechanics of old when I think things need to be done towards a better gaming future.
I think I felt in Heavy Rain that it was doomed to happen, as if I was watching it happened–but that might be just me. I will concede that. But for me it was particularly in the case of Jason and opening up like that, you could never save him nor even change his death so it felt like it wasn’t a choice nor revolutionary, whereas in ME2 you could get it down to killing ‘em all or saving only one. It felt like a difference.
I also really dislike wasting my time. I wouldn’t play on a permadeath mode anymore–I have a full-time job, I blog, I play other games. I don’t have time. But I still think it’s interesting how game developers avoid throwing int hat option, or avoid making death more meaningful sometimes because of an inherent fear of doing it wrong or because of complaining in the past.
I agree with your last paragraph a lot; I haven’t slept for nearly two days here (crunch time at work) so I’m terribly incoherent, but I think it would be better to break beyond even what we know–the old–and form new experiences of death.
Anyway good comment, this kind of feedback is invaluable and I appreciate it :)
I think this all comes down to whether you want a game to be “Nintendo Hard” or not. I totally agree w/ having an off button for those who don’t want it. On the other end of the spectrum are games where inconsequential death is a game mechanic, as in most Nifflas games, such as Knytt Stories. If perma death existed in Knytt stories, it would be about as much fun as breaking a toe.
Death doesn’t really feature into Nifflas’ games, which for the most part are presented (in my opinion) as explorations of the game world, rather than challenges which the player must conquer.
Each of the game’s little challenges simply leads the player to increasingly interesting destinations and the conquest of every challenge broadens the player’s ability to experience the world. Most of the game’s locks and keys have, like the Metroid series, ludic purpose. A “lock” may simply be a high platform which the player can’t reach without having the “key” of being able to jump boost.
Knytt Stories offers an experience where every challenge is simply used as a tool (or plot device) to get the player to see cool new things. Unlike many other games, where boss fights and challenges are an end to themselves (e.g. the accumulation of new powers to use against bosses in Megaman who suffer from various weaknesses), Nifflas’ Knytt Stories places the focus on the journey, rather than the destination.
Yeah, it is kind of apples & oranges.
Counter-Strike was not the origin of the teamplay FPS (player dies, must wait for the round to end before he is able to play again). The Teamplay game mode was first invented in a surprisingly little known mod for Q2, Action Quake II. AQ2 was also the origin of the “realism” mod, which is also widely and falsely credited to CS.
Great article, I love people like you who treat video games as the spectacular art form they are.
Nice write up on the evolution of video game deaths. Dying in hardcore-mode in Diablo II was the ultimate lethal slap in the face.
This game I am playing Buccaneers and Lobsters has you as an individual controlling a fleet of ships, your character never dies but many of your men can. I think however that the game does it well because you don’t underestimate the value of your men.
[...] getting to talk to our benevolent rulers (j/k) but also quite serendipitous since they recently posted an article that ties in very well to the focus of this month’s ‘cast: Death in [...]
Does anyone remember Cannon Fodder? Your squad mates all have persistent ranks and I found that after a while you’d become attached to your starting recruits. I took to lamenting the death’s of my veteran squad mates and actually having less regard for the green horns as they filed over the hill, ready to plunge themselves into the increasingly blood thirsty conflict. The number of recruits waiting became your extra lives and you were reminded at your success (or lack of) when the rolling hills of your base become covered in the graves of the fallen.
Oh yeah, I remember Cannon Fodder. I watched a video of the game earlier today. I used to get so attached to my recruits that it felt wrong to treat them for what they were: expendable. They were expendable, truly, and the game carried a great social message about how young men join the army in droves, only to be thrown away like cannon fodder. My hills were littered with the graves of the recruits by the time I was done.
“War has never been so much fun.” Who d’ya reckon they were trying to piss off with that then?
Death is the best way to get at meaningful choices in games. Unfortunately it is easiest thing to compromise in the face of the industry. Are you trying to make a product that will affect peoples lives? Or are you trying to make something that people will want, and beyond that, play for the longest time possible?
I was so excited for Heavy Rain when you could lose characters at any time. I came close to buying a PS3 for that game. But the inconsequentiality of it all keeps me on my PC.
Since I was just reading your article on Starcraft I’ll use an example from SC2. There are a few choices you get to make as you go along the story line, because, of course, making choices is cool! At least these weren’t tied to a morality mechanic… Anyways, each choice changes the game a bit, but they all resolve in your favour. The only way you should be making these choices is due to how you want the next missions to play out. But other than that they’re meaningless. Unknowable information comes to the fore and it turns out, hey, great choice!
I’m fine with games putting check points after each turn. As long as they give me an option to turn it off. Diablo II certainly did it well. It’d be hard to make a game that you could sell to everyone if you permanently died while you were trying to get the hang of the game.
I think achievements can play a role here. If the game says you’ll get a reward for beating the game in under 3 hours without dying, you know it’s possible. This gives you something to shoot for and notoriety if you do it. I say, give us the speed runs and the hardcore modes. Always.
Something I wanted to add.
Games have the hardest time when it comes to creation. If you get to a word you don’t understand in a book, the book doesn’t close until you find a dictionary. For a game, the players ability is what drives the narrative. You can literally play a game that you CANNOT beat. I’m pretty sure my mother could never get through Halo CE if she were ever to try. But even someone who can’t read could have the story told to them, and unless you are blind you can get through a movie. You might not pick up on the subtext of either of these mediums to truly “get” the piece, but you’d have a rudimentary understanding of it. That’s what easier difficulty levels afford us.
Check out the Flash game “You Only Live Once” for some really clever and funny commentary on dying in video games vs reality.