Proud together!
2 Likes
Yes why not… MC isn’t a God and if the MC dies why not make a checkpoint so the player can go back and replay it without starting at the beginning.
2 Likes
Depending of checkpoint frequency, they can be tolerated. But if they are more than 30min apart, then that just shit game design. Even then most rpgs i have played allow saving anywhere, maybe not direct combat/encounter. I also consider games with limited/restricted saving inferior to those which have free saving.
Only thing i learned that i picked wrong choice/ choice meant something different that i meant/ choice wasn’t aligned with stat/ stat i picked at start was too low for a choice i picked at start. No great knowledge gleamed here.
Struggle here being: clicking exact same choices as before just altering the last one and hoping for the best. Such great win!
Again only consequence here is me clicking exact same choice i made previously to get back to the spot. Or do you think i would re read exact same text every time i have to restart.
1 Like
People who understand the subconscious, and how being able to undo mistakes effects it. Making decisions more, and more meaningless.
Ah the beauties of Fallout 4 survival mode. You choose your risks, and your rewards.
1 Like
Assuming death = failure, then death should definitely be something authors should take care about. There should be plenty of ways to avert death and players should not be slapped with a “failure” sticker for simply making one wrong choice.
1 Like
If the story stops at death, and your game is about a story rather than a ‘simulator’, then no.
The fear of death makes the player more cautious about their choices and as such the gameplay becomes warped toward less exciting options. Why take the risky, but cool option, if you’ll have to play everything again after an arbitrary cut-off point by the author?
Ever seen a movie or read a book where the main character dies before the story is finished(and thus the movie/book also ends without turning to other characters)? Yeah, there’s a reason for that, because it’s frustrating and makes the entire story pointless.
Personally I’ve played a few IFs where death is an option, and it’s almost never satisfying to me, but rather causes me to rage-quit the entire process since it’s so utterly meaningless. The story has set up certain plot points and expectations, and they’re cut off due to my death caused by not having a high enough stat at a certain point, or such? Most disappointing. Essentially you’re using scissors and cutting off the rest of the story without any sort of payoff.
Now, if you’re making a simulator where the whole idea is the challenge and see ‘how well you did’, then sure, death can be a part of it since that’s part of the risk-calculation gameplay.
Or if you can somehow make the death interesting in a meta-narrative way, or something like that, like if another character continues the story after the player’s death, then it could be amazing. But if all it does is that I have to either play through everything from the beginning again, or use a checkpoint, or load a save, then there’s zero meaning to it and I’ll just assume it’s laziness on the creator’s part since they didn’t care to handle the consequences of the player’s choice. And if that happens, I can’t quite understand why put the death even in the game, since all it does is make the player enjoy the experience less.
I find alternative ‘failures’ far more interesting to player death. It’s vastly more interesting if an NPC the player likes dies as a result of the player’s actions, than if the player dies, since the story still continues and in fact will be very different from how it was before.
If you want to ‘punish’ the player for a choice, or you think it should logically result in something ‘bad’, then don’t kill the player, but instead change the narrative so that it makes more sense. Obviously you can’t do it in such a way that it makes no sense that the player can’t die, but don’t put the player in such situations in the first place in that case.
The overall point for me is this: Everything you implement in your work should increase the enjoyment of the player, not decrease it. Whether player death does one or the other depends on your work itself.
3 Likes
I can’t seem to find it right now, but the Choice of Games official game standards documents were released on this forum at one point, and they have two rules about death for games published under the official label: it can’t happen before a certain point in the game (I don’t remember the exact percentage, but I think it was around the two-thirds mark), and it has to be awesome in some way (so that it feels like an interesting end to the story rather than a failure state). I’d say that’s not a bad guideline overall, although certainly there’s room for exceptions.
2 Likes
Or if you can somehow make the death interesting in a meta-narrative way, or something like that, like if another character continues the story after the player’s death, then it could be amazing.
If you look at how the Red Dead series went about it, I think those are great examples. Your main character dies in both Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2, but then, someone else keeps the story going on and just as exciting.
I’m reminded of one COG where you’re the pilot of a starship that houses an entirely antagonistic, probably psychotic AI, and you have the option at the very beginning of the game to just snap and beat the living hell out of your ship until it, and you along with it, slam into the ground at Mach speeds and die, with the AI calling you out the entire time all, “Whoa, whoa! Bro, chill! It was just a prank, man!”
It’s a game over, yes, but it happens so early as to be inconsequential (you have to read a small handful of pages up to the fatal choice again, that’s all), the ship AI goes above and beyond to provoke it, so it’s perfectly in character, and considering what all else happens in the story if you decide not to suicide yourself into the planet’s surface, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched for a pilot to just be all, “yeah, no, screw this.”
It’s honestly one of my favorite game overs.
5 Likes
Relating to the game over I just mentioned, another cool thing is that it happens so early into the game that the only plot you’ve had set up for you by that point is that you’re a pilot and your ship’s AI is a prick, so you ultimately lose out on nothing from going that route.
Do you remember which one this is? Sounds interesting.
1 Like
Choice of the Star Captain: Interactive Science Fiction Novel | Choice of the Star Captain
One of my faves too, thanks to Lloyd the computer.
2 Likes
I need to play that again, it’s been so long all I remember is that it basically manages to parody every science fiction franchise in existence.
2 Likes
Yes, I think that a lot of the people with problems about death come from them being handled poorly, rather than being a bad idea. For example, kids drink cleaning chemicals, but we don’t decide to never clean, we make sure to use them responsibly.
2 Likes
This. I really have no objection to death event itself. I Have objections to being tossed back to very start and having to click through entire thing again.
Well sometimes the opposite is true, I died honorably in Sabres of infinitely. I died for honor, that is well honorable. Not the best ending, but it’s the one I got. I made my bed, but I’m not given the choice to sleep in it. I think dying honorably is a very fitting end, but the author was so scared of people complaining about the option to end it wasn’t even there. You could start it at the beginning, but I was hoping for some sort of end slide show, or a taste of the afterlife with the saints. I knew I would probably die when I selected that option. Zombie Exodus gives this option, I don’t use it because I wanted to succeed, but it is appreciated.
Maybe a good way is when you die the camera keeps rolling.
Maybe read what people say at your funeral, or the obituary, maybe a history textbook decades later talking about the effects you had on the future, maybe your descendants write a book about you, and you get to read it, even if it’s just the story again, but with your interactions already put in.
you go to the afterlife. Whether heaven, hell, purgatory, Valhalla, Pathaguraouses world of forms, or even reincarnation. Maybe you turn into a ghost and still have to accomplish your goals, but with added complications. Even in realistic fiction, most people throughout history believed/believe in a life after this one, so what is realistic is somewhat based on perception.
Even if it’s not an in-universe event/document you can always put on a Fallout style slide show. If you died it would be interesting to show what happened because of it.
3 Likes