It’s been over six hours. You just shopped and watched cut-scenes in Gohtza city, fought on top of a train car, traversed a maze of back alleys, then hit and pulled switches in a sewer system. The entire journey may seem meager, but you spent the vast majority of it carefully leveling in each area, administering skill points like a surgeon, and equipping items to absorb the largely superfluous magic or skills that accompany it. Your party is a machine, one capable of massive destruction. You haven’t needed to save, and why would you? It’s not like you have anywhere to go tonight.

The assembled party is working together harmoniously, practically effortlessly, until that insipid boss in the sewer, a crane, fucks it all up. You weren’t paying attention, or maybe you were too dazzled by the lights, but it got the big one off. And now your party is dead. Game Over.

Those hours of senseless grinding, all those attributes are gone. They never existed. Lost Odyssey doesn’t care what you have completed, or how much time you just poured into the experience. You are bitter, rattled, and frustrated. Is it just momentary, or is this a big one? Will you ever pick up the game again, especially considering all the work you just completed then lost?



The Crying Shame

Game Overs are as aged as popular video games. While most early games did not gift players with the thankless screen, it is all one in the same - starting over after a hard days work. The video games that we play and enjoy today are exceedingly more complicated than the ones of the past. The new games all possess (to some degree at least) storylines, progressive scaling, interactivity, and are usually segmented by what we loosely call “levels.” Essentially, there are many more hours of enjoyment to be had and much more to be remorseful of if one opts not to save when prompted to.

Why should today’s games still be constricted to the same old archaic mold? Why not think of different ways that “punish” players for their poor play instead of making them rehash the same hour over and over again?

A few weeks back, Chris Baker from Wired got Lionhead Studio’s Peter Molyneux to sit back and talk about his newest title, Fable 2. In this interview, Molyneux divulged a tasty tidbit about what his initial result for falling battle was. Instead of screwing players out of hours of their time, Molyneux decided that his scarring system could be taken advantage of. He presented the idea that a fallen player would simply lay limp on the forest floor while enemies knocked the shit out of him until he was scarred fairly atrociously. In this way, time is not lost nor have items or weapons picked up from the last savepoint gone astray. Rather, players are forced to deal with the fact that NPCs will react differently.

So, instead of “Game Over,” Molyneux wanted a lesser consequence to the player, and a more direct consequence in the game world. The problem? The massive team of testers that Molyneux employs apparently did not like the outcome, and found themselves hard resetting the game. In the end, a frustrated Molyneux just stripped out this feature.

Pavlovian Conditioning and RPGs

“Game Over” screens are frustrating for anyone that is trying to complete a game. While the screen may be more acceptable in genres like first-person shooters, or platformers, there are still steps developers take to dull anxiety. Auto saving has become a clear indication that players do not enjoy traversing the same territory continuously to reach the portion of the level in which they were conquered.

In the modern RPG the repercussions of losing in battle can be quite severe. Just like the poor player presented in the introduction, tons of content can be lost. Items, weapons, statistics, story elements, and character growth are all thrown away to the whim of the last save point reached. I am pretty sure that death pisses off the majority of our genre’s players, and I am absolutely certain that it ticks me off. RPGs may have progressed with more save points and opportunities to save content, but players still run the risk of losing it all.

What is it that made those game testers in Fable 2 turn off the consoles? Did Molyneux make the repercussion of the scarring too severe, or were they just experiencing something too unfamiliar? Have we been trained, through years of play, to just accept the fact that we have to go backwards because of some bullshit lightning attack that killed the entire party?

Quit Killing Me Completely!

I am completely tired of losing progress in my RPGs, and it has become a clear concern to my gaming experience. My training is not of acceptance of the screen, it is the tolerance of save screens with their cute little progress bars. When I play a game that is glitch-ridden like Oblivion, or even when I traverse a linear Eastern RPG like Final Fantasy XII, I save religiously. Every few levels I’ll stop and save, regardless of how far I may have to travel or how long it will take. Every boss fight, I save. Every accomplishment or long cut-scene down, I save. It’s an endless cycle that I am tired of repeating

When one talks about immersion, especially with the RPG genre, saving is the ultimate catalyst. It’s hard to feel a part of Ivalice, Gohtza, or Algoi when a menu is almost invited after every accomplishment. If anything, saving keeps the player aware that this is a video game, and he better be weary of losing his work. If an RPG lacks immersion, what more is it than a fanciful book with moving pictures?

I want what Molyneux wants. If I screw up, fine, punish me. In fact, I want to be punished for it. Losing battle should be a part of the experience, not some weird shift in the time continuum. Scarring is an excellent way to keep the immersion and promote the fact that being defeated is ultimately a weighty thing. Here’s an idea; if a person doesn’t like the feature and still wants to get shifted out of all his time, how about an option to turn it off? Let them check out the “Game Over” screen and lose all of their statistics.



MMORPGs and Dealing with Repercussions

MMOs handle death a little differently, given the perpetual nature of play. Typically, item degradation or money loss is accompanied by having to run back to the spot of demise. Some MMOs take it a bit further, and force players to lose levels and gear. Is this fair to the MMO player? Perhaps it is not. The competitive nature of MMO grinding gives items and levels a special meaning to the player, especially when the time between level 68 and 69 may be counted in days as opposed to hours. Could something like a scarring system be utilized in the MMO realm? At the least, some kind of negative prohibition for dying should be considered. One that doesn’t penalize the time the player puts into the game, considering that he pays for it monthly.

In the end, we all deal with the repercussions of dying. The FPS enthusiast rehashes the same scene, with the same amount of enemies pouring over the walls. The RPG player has to watch the same cut-scenes, get the same items, and do all the stuff that was accomplished previously. Game players shouldn’t remain passive about this anymore. Don’t blindly accept the fact that the screen says, “Game Over.” We should be encouraging developers to figure out different solutions with death. I’m tired of losing all my shit, quitting games permanently, or losing my progress. You should be, too.