Gaming A Death Worth Having

Interesting that it's not been commented on, but The Getaway: Black Monday had a system based on being allowed to skip failed missions, which changed the ending.
I agree with most of the article, but can't suggest any alternatives!

 

There was an older game for the PC called 'Omikron: The Nomad Soul' where death lead to new gameplay. In it you originally played the role of a cop on another world in which you the player possessed. If you died in the game you inhabited the body of the last person you spoke to. It could be a fellow cop or the stripper you just tipped at the local club...or even a robot/mech. Depending on the person you were inside of you could get access to closed out areas and sometimes storyline content. That game stays in mind often when a topic of this nature comes up. Despite it's lackluster reviews it had a lot of great things in it that lead to some very unique gameplay experiences.

Also there are ton of freeware games that play with death in various ways...my personal favorite are roguelike games where the world is procedurally generated so that when you do die and it's over and try to replay the world has move on and changed.

The aspect of death/punishment and wining are part of the reason why many games today are considered too easy...but like the author I have no clue on what needs to be done to get games to be challenging again.

 

Maybe I'm just old school, but I like the idea that bad players don't get to see the end of a game. Go back, do it again, get it right or do one. A game should not be like a movie or book, because you don't just read or watch a game, you learn it, you improve at it, you master it then you complete it. Or at least that's how it ought to be. Anybody who finishes a game ought at least be competent at it.

 

The worst possible death scenario is the "replay unskippable cutscene" scenario. Pretty much every JRPG of all time does this, especially starting with FF7 - a 5 minute long cutscene followed by a difficult boss battle. Die in the battle (which you will), and you are punished by having to watch this 5 minute long cutscene again and again.

At least replaying the level requires some interactivity. I agree though, L4D has it correct.

 

The other side is that if I paid $60 for the game, I should have the right to experience the fullness of it. All that's really required is cheat codes - maybe print them on the back page of the manual or something.

 

Colony Wars: Vengeance on the PS1 was a great game with a massive, branching mission structure that branched one of two ways after every mission depending on your success or failure. There were about 10 possible endings to the game.

I think think sort of branching and acceptance of failure could work really well in games like Half-Life, where the result of each major encounter with the enemy results in your being routed in a particular way. With a system like that, failure wouldn't be a barrier to seeing content, and it wouldn't carry a stigma. It would just be another possible outcome, with its own implications for the story.

 

Braid had a decent death mechanic - death was permanent, so you had to rewind time a bit and try again. Fit with the canon of the story and worked because death wasn't the obstacle, the puzzles were.

Death became trivialised when quick saves were invented, as they essentially provided immortality. Instant respawns were invented to encourage players not to rely on them all the time, and unfortunately players have gotten used to not having death hold them back, hence the current situation.

 

gta has been tweaking its handling of this for several games now, and yet no mention.

 

Some of the suggestions only build on that thou, if you die you get captured and the actual escaping could be harder then the bit where you died. Not sure what would happen if you died while trying to escape thou...

 

As someone mentioned, demons souls has a brilliant way of dealing with death. Coupled with the fact it autosaved after EVERYTHING. So whatever decision you made, you have to live with it for the rest of that characters life. (something I really wish mass effect had, personally I never went back and changed a decision after I made it, but it would have given those decisions even more weight.)

 

I quite like the BFBC2 *optional* respawn system online. What I mean by the optional is that other medics with Defibs can revive you literally half a second after you die, creating a sense of teamwork and fast-paced action. Fair enough it's unrealistic, but it's a game and that system works well. Of course you will get games where you NEVER get defibed, but when you in one of those matches where the medics are reviving like they are on steroids, i love that system. it actually prompts me to wanting to play medic so i can feel a vital part of the team.


of-course this is only multiplayer and the single player is basically just retry over and over.

but yeah.

 

EvE is a game with an interesting death mechanic, and one I persoanlly enjoy more than others, because it changes the ultimate failure state. death isn't a failure state, it becomes an obstacle, the failure state then becomes poverty or loss of rights (losing control of vital infrastructure or space)

another game I'm surprised hasn't come up yet: Heavy Rain.

true enough its more of an interactive story, but death is not a "failure state" it becomes just another part of the story.

 

I'm glad you aren't involved in making games then. Why should games be just for the 1337 players? I'm the complete opposite, I've had my day at playing the mindless action games when I was a teenager. As an adult I want a game with a bit more substance and meaning in the form of a story. Something that makes you really "think" rather than something only people blessed with good reactions can play.

 

also, PROPS to the steel battalion reference, that game is possibly the only reason I still own my old black brick of an xbox. Sometimes I wear my dad's motorcycle helmet when I play it to make me feel like I'm actually a mech pilot. Sadly it's such an annoying game sometimes.

 

Prey has the same death mechanic as Soul Reaver II. You don't die, just go to netherworld and collect souls to fill your health bar and come back to the world of the living. Devil May Cry has to death mechanics, one is you die, you go back to your last checkpoint (game generated) - sometimes the very beginning of a level or you use Yellow Orbs to restart from the last cut scene but that costs you credits and the more you use it, the more expensive it becomes.

I like the way FF has used, your character dies in battle and you can bring him or you have to replace him if possible and have to revive it outside the battle.

I think the creation of checkpoints is better. You die in a certain level but when you restart the whole thing you will try your best to create the best checkpoint possible because everything is as new.

I've made that in Metal Gear Solid 2. Trying to complete the game going completely undetected and it was possible. When I thought something was going to get rough, I would save and then try. If I failed, what I previously have done remains and the whole scene can be done from scratch without giving an edge to the player nor the game. Maybe the best possible way to have a death mechanic (which was really emotional, not because of Mei Ling crying, Colonel screaming but because sometimes it made me crap real bad because I got spooked).

 

Death in Ultima Online was always a time to panic for me. It mean't finding an NPC to ressurect you then having to to dash back to your previous body to collect your hard earned stuff before it dissapears, without being killed again by the thing that killed you in the first place.

 

I've been toying with an idea for a game for a while where you are an immortal from the outset. The result of failure would be not death, but delay. Miss that jump? You get to walk around from the bottom of the canyon and try again, and yeah, maybe have to deal with some enemies along the way. If you go charging into a hoard of enemies you get surrounded and while you will eventually make it out, it's going to take a long time and eat up a bunch of your resources.

Such a game would have to have some interesting mechanics around timing and puzzles, i.e. if you don't complete the task in the allocated time it's going to take a lot of work to find another way past that point. It would also require multiple solutions to each problem, which means content the player might not see.

The "boss fight" could be against another immortal where the the goal is not to kill them, but rather to achieve an objective or prevent them from achieving an objective.

One of the problems with branching game play is that it means there is a lot of content the players may never see, and content is expensive to develop. Studios don't want to spend time making things that may go to waste, so you end up with either linear plots or sandbox games where you have to go to each location on the map to complete the game.

Something else that would be nice to see is more procedurally generated content. The developer lays out the ground, but creates algorithms that define what goers on that ground. For example, lets say that there is a piece of ground you have to travel over repeatedly in the game. The first time through you deal with one set of enemies, but the next time there may be a completely different set, or maybe a village has popped up. Maybe one time nobody's home, but the next there is an impenetrable fort and you have to go around. The next time the fort has been abandoned or destroyed, or is now occupied by a different faction. The right combination of procedural generation and environmental persistence could make for a nearly infinitively replayable game.

 

Asassins Creed's death mechanic made sense as you were in the animus, Ezio's "Death" meant you unsynced from the memory you were playing and had to retry (although Desmond seemed to be immortal and couldn't die no matter how many times you were hit or how far you fell).

Batman: AA when you died you had a small clip of the current villan taunting you (and there were a few different ones for each villan).

 

Where are you stuck? I found the typically 'most difficult' levels of far cry to be the ones I played over most just to check out all the possible options. Catacombs is the one I disliked most because of trigens jumping out unexpectedly!

 

I'm at the beginning of the one after tree-house; I'm quite sure that with a bit of patience I would make more progress. But the thing is that I only get an hour or two every few days to play due to work/commute/family etc etc. So gaming can be a rare treat at the end of a long day.

In that situation, it can be very frustrating to spend an hour on it and finish up with no sense of progress at all. So my tendency is to drop games pretty quickly if they are leave you in a long die/reload loop too readily.

The biggest bugbear, of course, is spending precious time redoing a long period of easy stuff for the sake of a few difficult bits later on -- Far Cry isn't quite so bad at this but another game that got demoted for the same reason was GTA: San Andreas where getting killed typically meant doing the same long driving bit again before you could retry the actual fight. And worst of all, it didn't even help you 'learn the game' and get better at the difficult fighty bit.