I personally don’t think that ‘liking challenge’ is bad, or ‘Like to play for pleasure’ is wrong. I think they are both fine options and should both be a possibility in a game. Because it always depend on the individual.
I understand how some peoples like playing with stats and challenges (There is a thrill there), just like some peoples play for escapism and don’t wanna feel like they are ‘working’ instead of ‘blowing up steam and relaxing with a game’.
Having both should be an option. Maybe one day we’ll find a balance between the 2.
I think I’m probably not typical for my response, but here goes.
I don’t like failure, but not solely for the sake of failure. I usually don’t enjoy negative circumstances or things out of my control in games, so if I establish that a game has challenging stat checks, I lose some of my role-play. I will feel compelled to maximize my stats, so that I can pass stat checks. Like in ME3 I print the list of findable artifacts, I will not end the game until i have checked off every findable artifact from the list.
That probably sounds boring, and I do like to play different types of characters. When game feels stat heavy, I tend to feel more forced in a certain direction.
As for paths, I will replay a choice game repeatedly until I’ve seen all the content I want to (romances, flavor text, endings, etc.). Some games I may play upwards of ten times back to back. Even given the number of replays, I don’t like failures, but some low impact failures are okay.
I will restart if I mess up badly enough, but generally I prefer to play it out (unless it’s started a downward spiral). This has lead to many first PTs without an RO, apparently I am terrible at choosing. Though that’s not a consequence I enjoy, its one I’ll live with to learn the game.
Failures that are fun can be different. I’ll even accept an early end, if it’s funny or helps me learn.
If you read all that, thanks for sticking around. I think it’s a difficult question, and the answer is: it depends.
I am a BIG fan of the PoMA method of having an option to just auto pass stat checks. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible to fail, there are some opportunities that are only available if you have done other actions previously, but I’m more open to failing in circumstances where I haven’t done something, as opposed to just not doing math right to calculate being at the right stat amount for a certain point in a game.
I have a weird relationship with failure since i codedive to plan my character before I play. It helps me avoid unnecessary replays since most of the time I would rather restart a game than roll with the punches and see where my choices take me if I fail a stat cheek I intended to succeed.
I do like the challenge of making a successful character build that lets me bypass most of the stat cheeks I want while simultaneously being truthful to the way I want to roleplay my character. In the end I don’t mind compromising the stat optimizing or even changing aspects of the character so they could fit the game better.
I’m okay with failing some stat cheeks and I enjoy reading the alternate texts for failure. I just codedive to control when I want to fail and to know that I’ll get the ending I want in the end.
I have my fun my own way but what works for me doesn’t work for everyone and it’s always enlightening to see different perspectives
I’m constantly so paranoid about this that I always feel forced to pick every single RO option for whoever I latched onto. It bothers me a lot but I have no clue what the criteria is for any given game so I just have to pick every one, even when I don’t want to. It’s a frustrating problem that really kinda breaks immersion. It’s a similar thing to why I used to always check personality stats, because I wanted to make sure the game is reading my PC correctly, just in case it’s taking options different to how I read them.
While it really does just come down to the execution of it and how well it’s written, I really do like failures and losing in fiction, especially when it’s thematically or narratively satisfying to do so.
It’s been brought up further up thread and I know I’ve talked about it in other threads, but Disco Elysium is kind of the gold standard for it as far as main stream video games go. It has the range of failures being side splittingly funny to heartbreakingly tragic, and even though it’s done through a dice system, you don’t really feel cheated out of a choice, usually. Sometimes it’s even more beneficial to fail certain stat checks. There’s even a late game choice where you will ‘lose’ the roll no matter what, but passing the check changes some of the narration and character reactions afterwards.
I’d honestly have to stew on it more and flesh out the hypothesis, but DEs system probably works because it sort of takes the concept of “Yes and?” used in improv and uses it as their narrative guide. You will always sort of fail forward, for another way of putting it. A failure is just another branch instead of it being the end of one.
There’s also stuff like A Mage Reborn where the story ends with your death and I find it personally compelling, though something like that is admittedly maybe not in the scope of the question. That’s maybe less losing and more a loss, if that makes any sense. More of a tragedy than losing. There’s a couple WiPs I’ve seen floating about with your inevitable death being the framing device and I’ve always been a bit partial to that.
I think the only time I’m not really keen or genuinely put off with losing in an IF is if it’s one that leans more into stat management, or has more archaic and obtuse stat checks. Like on one hand, if I try to make X choice without having the resources to do it and it blows up in my face, that’s on me, that I can roll with. But if it’s framed or presented in a way where I’m unsure of what stat or resource is gonna get checked, or if it’s a threshold that would require a very specific and particular progression to get to, then I do tend to get annoyed by that. But that’s more a mechanical problem than a narrative one, arguably, though with the medium they tend to inform one another
I think while the game isn’t going to appeal to everyone, Disco Elysium failures work well for a lot of reasons - partly because of the excellent writing and the way the world is presented as very grim and the protagonist being a loser himself, partly because of the entertainment/story beats that open up due to losing. I think there is a UI/UX element of it too - there is always clarity of the test difficulty, plus the ability (in many though not all cases) to retry tests after a certain amount of time has passed which are marked in the map/journal etc. Without all those aspects working together, I’m not sure the failure responses would be so satisfying to play through.
I dont mind failure when it’s obviously my fuck up, but if its failure just because plot demands so, then yes i will be somewhat salty. Even more so if there are long lasting gameplay/story affecting consequences.
Also while i don’t mind failure or even bad ends/death of MC, but i very much hate having to restart book because of that. Always include rollback option or some sort of checkpoint.
Building onto this, and going the other way, what if there was no lose possibility? Stat fails would have a different outcome but it’s like success with injuries as opposed to clean successes. With maybe big failures leading to other people’s death but you never get game over?
Would a loss then be okay or would it rob victories of oomph given you are guaranteed to win, if at varying costs?
This is a very interesting question. I’ve wondered previously how the CoG audience would go with a choice novel that is entirely without stats and it is just presumed you will succeed at what you attempt to do.
I, personally, would be fine with automatic successes (as evidenced by the fact that I already stat edit to make them auto successes) but I’d be very curious how others would feel about it.
Creatures Such As We and Blood Moon have no personal stats for the PC and have done very well. Games in which stats and failures exist, but failures don’t result in game over as @Dryinspection describes, are basically what happens in almost every CoG game (Choice of Rebels and a few outliers notwithstanding), all HC games, and most HG games.
I don’t think injuries, depending how they are implemented, really work as a punishment for failure. If they are inconsequential, then there is no point, if they give stat or other penalties that can lead to failure cascade, where your stats are lowered and player fails more and has stats lowered, and repeat.
Best case for implementing failure into games is them having open ,for better or worse, another path.
Come to think of it, you don’t even have to add a cheap menu or fancy stuff like that. You only need an auto check pass option and you’re ready to go. The fact that failure can open up new exciting branches also doesn’t do it for me, because I still feel like I’m failing the very thing I wanted to do in the first place. If I want to catch a train or bus for example, then by God, I want to catch that bus or train. If I wanted to see those exciting failure options, I could always come back for it later in another replay. So, in short, just add a kind of story mode where all checks will pass automatically. During replays, we can always come back and check the other options.
I dislike failure, especially in games without checkpoints because I’ll have to do over. I also dislike games with impossible options or one incorrect path that will doom the characters. Automatic success is great when I only want to read the story.
To me, Donor is the gold standard of handling failure. You can die if you fail the minigames, but you are warned ahead. They are also optional. There are also multiple checkpoints, achievement guide and in game help to offset the risk of failure .
I hate it when video games start with you in control while fighting the end-game boss so you WILL fail. I get it. Foreshadow the boss, start the story while down on your luck, etc, but I’d prefer it to be a cutscene without my control. It makes me feel icky.
As for premature Game Over failures, from the very beginning, I’ve avoided them. The point of them is that the player would want to replay with their new knowledge, but you can’t guarantee that, especially after just experiencing a failure and I don’t like the idea of a player walking away with that shortened and poor experience as their opinion of the whole game.
But, what about making the choices count and the victory even sweeter? Especially in an RPG-style game where you’ve spent an entire story crafting what you can and cannot do. Can you “win” a game if there’s no way to lose? Should games even BE won?
That’s the tough part. I’ve had some mixed successes and failures, and even those are experienced in different ways by different players.
Coincidentally, my current project started with a rethinking of the ”losing” mechanic in games. I’m still in the process of creating a new game system for it, but one aspect is that I’m essentially considering a reward for when you lose a stat check. Although I suppose it’s still a variation of just lessening the effect of the loss.
My last game used difficulty settings to deal with losing. This could be ramped up to the point of creating a “story mode”, which is basically an ultra easy setting.
Or is it possible to write a game/story with no losing, so only a variety of successes? Or would it feel boring like your choices were meaningless without “losing” as a consequence? Or is that just a mirage? Great topic.
You should go check Creatures out. It came in top 10 in that year’s IFComp (2014/5, I think). Before things like Hand Me Down, Lake Adventure et al, there was this. A game where you meet the developers of a game. It’s very reflective. If you like that one, go check out Writers Are Not Strangers, another reflective IFComp entry also written in Choicescript.
