Gaming Whatever happened to three lives and you're dead?

In X3TC playing "Dead is Dead" became popular in the community with people doing writeups on their progress. The Devs eventually introduced it as a a game mode in a patch.

 

Anyone who wants to be a top end Gamer needs to spend 2 years in EVE in 0.0
This will teach you how to harden up and learn that there is still a penalty for being stupid.

S*D

 

I like my space free of other people

 

I was glad to see Dark Souls mentioned in the article, but have to say... it's not that hard. Okay, stop laughing, I'm serious. Not because I have several hundred hours played between Dark and Demon's Souls but because the design of the games, specifically Dark Souls. They're more difficult and unforgiving than most modern games but are a far cry from brutal arcade style games. Even the Souls games, known for being punishing and difficult, softened up their sequel. Yes, Dark Souls is difficult and the enemies themselves are challenging, but it's riddled with safety nets. Dying no longer cuts your health in half, life restoring items are no longer finite in supply per playthrough, healing items are restored upon death, and NPCs aren't as critical to completing the game.

Now, whether or not that's a good thing is a different subject. The challenge is still there. Even basic enemies can still kill you with ease, zones are still littered with traps and tricks, and bosses are still more than happy to squash you to bits. Dark Souls allows players to try again with less frustation and tedium, but critically nothing is any easier. You're just trying again with largely the same tools provided to you which you obviously failed with before, it's no walk in the park. Is that better than Demon's Souls where the content is equally challenging, yet the punishment for failure is far greater? It's a more hardcore experience, but is the frustration and tedium of having to work back to where you were before simply not worth it?

I'm on the fence on the matter. On one hand, I love the challenge without frustration found in a game like Dark Souls. On the other, I love the brutal punishments and sense of accomplishment from games like Demon's Souls, or even more so from "three life" style games. My opinion, therefore, is somewhat middle ground: when designed from the beginning to work with either system a game can be fun. That's really the problem I see with the three life style games in a modern setting. Modern games are big money projects with expansive stories and rich gameplay, people understandably want to spend a long time playing their games and get a lot out of them. Such a long game can't fit with too punishing a system, you would never be able to beat a 10 hour game if only a handful of mistakes put you back at the beginning. Trying to shoe-horn in a punishing system ends up with things like checkpoints, effectively breaking the game up into several smaller chunks. It's often clunky leads to frustration and confusion as the placement and frequency of those checkpoints is quite a large deal and hugely effects the difficulty of the game. Place two too close together and you set players up for something too easy, then spread them too far out or too far before a challenging section and you end up with an overall difficulty that wavers and fluctates, annoying players.

What I would like to see is a game designed ground up to work with a lives and game over system. A game which only takes 1-2 hours to complete but with such a challenge that players won't beat it first try, instead they'll end up spending 10 hours trying again after dying, replaying with new characters or difficulties, or playing bonus challenges. Recently this model has only been used by smaller developers in retro clone games or in mobile games and the quality of them has suffered because of it. I'd like to see something fresher, built from the ground up.

Also, if anyone reading that has some recommendation please, fire away! I've been playing a bit of Touhou recently but am not a huge bullet hell fan.

 

Eve stopped being a fun game for me when I lost a Battleship I could have sold for 60 real pounds. And I had no insurance. Not a big deal in terms of my wealth in the game as I had other battleships but annoying in real life to lose 60.

 

I was directly responsible (Fleet Commander) for an Enemy alliance losing Titans (8000 dollars real world) and hundreds of other ships, to say the total loss cost them a million real world dollars is a conservative figure. Lesson: Be the winning Alliance.

Yours in Excellence through Victory Plasma,
Star*Dagger

 

Yeah that doesn't sound fun.

 

Wonderboy on the SMS was a pain in the backside.

I'd play before school, pause it expecting to continue where I left off only to find the game get's bored of being on pause and gives you a game over.