Gaming A Death Worth Having

I agree that games should challenge players and reward expertise accordingly. But you can find a middle road by having additional content and story lines available to people who finish the game on different difficulty levels for instance. So that everyone can have a complete experience, even if they are not good at the game, but for those who are good and can play at a higher level, the experience is bigger, better and more interesting.

For instance, by finishing level 1 on the highest difficulty, you then get a longer and more interesting version of level 2 or you get access to more interesting side quests. So it is possible for a beginner to complete a plain vanilla version of the game on an easy difficulty level, while an expert can get to experience all the bells and whistles by playing on a harder difficulty level.

 

Ah yeah, that'll be the level where you discover the big trigen on the operating table. There's a fun bit where you can release some trigens to fight the mercs in this level too I think but yeah, you've got a long way to go...

That was an annoying thing in Just Cause 2 with it being so big and incredibly dull in between places (actually just a dull game all round). GTA IV had the convenience of taxis which I used all the time. Saints Row 2, however, was so much fun all over that it was a pleasure to have to drive from one end to the other -still my favourite game on the PS3

 

What about X3 Terran Conflict where part of the player base started playing Dead is Dead where if you die it is game over. Has become popular enough as a play style that Steam added into the game options when they started selling it.

 

As Xtrafresh mentioned eve is similar but lacks the murderer difference, getting killed sucks no matter who are you (lose your ship, any items in cargo, ship fittings and if you aint careful any implants and even skill points.)

In both games there's a downside thou, there's this overwhelming fear of losing your ship that alot of people have thus hugely limiting pvp in most areas of the game. A softer death penalty would most likely improve this but at the cost of the satisfaction you get from winning.[/QUOTE]

With Eve Online, that's not quite correct. Yes you can pay to have a clone, but that clone holds up to a certain number of skill points, providing you keep your clone ahead of your skill points there is never a risk to your character. If going in to PvP then it is a simple matter to switch from a char with implants to one without and should be how you fly through high risk areas, when at war, etc.

Ships can be insured and give back some small part of the loss of any ship, albeit never completely and aside from named items and the higher tech levels is easy and cheap to replace them.

Eve is known for having quite a few griefers but a sharp pair of eyes on local and for those industrial chars staying aligned to a safe spot or station, pretty much guarantees safety. Low sec and 0.0 are a different ball game and have acceptable risks.

 

The question is now what are the developers / studios going to be doing about it?

 

That situation, I believe, it was used on the Devil May Cry 4. If you missed a platform jump, you would fell to the bottom level and kill a bunch of fiends waiting to take a bite at you. It gets boring when the jump is quite tricky because of having to climb up again, not the kick ass part although sometimes you get away unscathed and others on the brink of death.

 

Borderlands is another good example of a game that at least attempted to do something different with death. The punishment for death itself was pretty minor - cost you some money to pay for a clone that appeared at the last checkpoint you found.

But the last stand mechanic actually added a bit of tension to it. When your health dropped to zero you had a few seconds of bleedout time. If you managed to kill an enemy during that period, you'd get a Second Wind and pick yourself up again, avoiding death. You certainly felt awesome when you'd manage to pull it off. If the punishment for failure had been a bit more serious the mechanic could have been very interesting indeed.

I expect most games will continue to use the checkpoint-based fail state, if only because it's become the norm. I would at least like to see developers augment it with some ideas from the racing game genre, though. In racing, your fail state is not winning a race. Usually the player can tailor the difficulty of the challenge by switching various driving assists on and off - Racing lines, automatic gearboxes, and suchlike. Rather than having difficulty settings just boost enemy health, you could give players the option of various assists - Bullet time when health is low as in Vanquish, A VATS-esque targeting option, the speed of health regen, and so on. Players who like a more difficult challenge can then turn these off if they wish.

The idea being that if you can't make the death -> life transition better, you can at least make the life -> death transition a threat, but occur with less frequency. Rather than "I died again" it becomes "I nearly died, but I managed to scrape through".

 

Regarding being disallowed future content, some of the older space sim games (Freespace, Wing Commander) allowed skipping missions if you got stuck, though Wing Commander IIRC posed a penalty on too many missions failed.

Another interesting "death" system is with most Japanese visual novel games. You end up having a lot of choices at one point or another, and the game assigns different flags, so it may be that you die at a point in the game because of a decision you made three choices ago. Then again, most decisions outside of action scenes do lead to a "slower" death than usual, giving you a chance to experience some unique death story, and learning something from it.

For example, take Fate/stay night. It's been remade into an anime for the interaction-impaired, too, and there'