Every week, sort of, Destructoid Features Editor Anthony Burch monologues about games in his "Rev Rant" series.
This week's rant is about failure, and how curious it is that we've accepted the act of stopping the player's momentum and forcing them to replay up to ten minutes worth of stuff they've done before as a punishment for failure.
I also realize how odd that may sound coming from someone who regularly sings the praises of both The Void and Far Cry 2 permadeath runs.
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Contest:
3:00 PM on 02.18.2010
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Did they pop back up in a vita chamber? Maybe, but I still felt amazingly guilty when I couldn't protect them.
Either grow that fucker Taliban Style out or shave the shit. You cannot do both!
Beards are fine man, but you gotta maintain them.
I'll take more of that any day, and I Love Mega Man games.
The unique queen system doesn't translate well to bigger budget titles because with notable exceptions like Gordon Freeman characters are expected to be voiced or at least be central to the narrative so replacing them with essentially faceless and unimportant (if you can be replaced you lose the feeling of being the one true hero) units would be a big shift and likely an unpopular one.
I don't like to be so negative because you raise a very good point but its difficult to see how one could adapt linear story based games and save game mechanics to alter the carrot and stick system we currently have.
Where do you live man? I heard in Phoenix area, is this rumor true? If so look at my CBLOG, trying to get an AZ NARP going. Maybe Dave & Busters in Tempe the first time.
BTW Anthony is just growing that monster out for his halloween costime.
beard.
anyway: I think that the premise that one of your characters can die during Heavy Rain is one example of this mechanic, I still haven't played Heavy Rain so I can't talk how this works. But when trying to make the player have some kind of sense of loss it's more easy to present a character that it's somewhat close to the player and than taking it away ( Wander and Agro or Cloud and Aeris ). But it's more difficult to make the player care about the character he's controling since this character has multiple lives and the game can't continue without this character.
That's why I'm interested in the mechanic Heavy Rain brings to the table. With multiple characters if one of then dies, the plot can still goes on, since the goal of the game it's to catch the killer. Not reaching the end of the game with one particular character ( or all of them )
The problem with making the game harder for players who die is that make a couple of mistakes and you've ramped the difficulty up significantly. Thats going to cause a lot of anger and frustration.
Good show.
I on the other hand am disappointed with the overall difficulty of current games so you got Goldeneye where learning where every guard is and how many people sneezed is crucial to survival. Yes it has some trial and error gameplay but trying to find a better hiding place in order to shoot the guards that will be alarmed by something you can't avoid doing, is immensely satisfying. Now we got regenerative health, who on earth came up with that crap? You don't replay stuff anymore in games sadly and this is partly because today there are too many options for the gamer so it is easier to just give up if a game is hard (kinda what some of my friends did with Little King's Story yet it is the best thing since sliced bread I assure you)
So yeah the fact that there are too many developers make games easier. If half of them close down, then we will see harder games (you know with health bars and limited respawn points) again.
I don't think the idea is new, and it sort of relates in the games on the early 90s like Rocket Knight Adventures. You have a life system but the game is hard as hell, so if you died you had to start all over again.
Stating that the character should be just plain dead is hard to transmit in this medium, because we will always want to try again to do it right.
I remember spending hours on Donkey Kong. You play, you lose. That's it. There is no punishment. You don't have to feel gut wrenching emotion about having your princess ripped away from you by a dirty ape. You just shake your head, grin, think "damn that was a good run" and restart.
That's the fun of video games. There's no real loss except time. You can care about the characters but they're never really gone. And that's what makes you pick up your controller and do it all again.
Regardless, I really don't think I've ever played a game where the failure option made me think. Nearly everything either punishes you too hard (Old Resident Evils) or not hard enough (Bioshock's Vitachambers).
Demon's Souls, to me, is a very good middle ground. Yeah it's very punishing to people raised on newer generations, but it does make you strive to get better and figure out patterns that enemies have. It's almost like playing smart with an immense reward since you can level.
Games however are meant to be fun and with that in mind developing a game that punishes all players who play will have a limited market. For example demon's souls even though they employ repetition after death they made it an integral part of the game. Games tend to do better (not always) with low punishment penalty other than re-playability on the death part because it makes the game more accessible to a wide market.
The only game that comes to mind currently that employs a fail punishment scheme other than replaying is Heavy Rain where it is possible to lose a character and still continue the story. Not sure how it'll do in the long run in sales.
Also, beards.
I was ridiculously attached to my starting 4 dudes, and I would reload save after save to make sure those guys made it all the way through. There was no in-game mechanic which punished you for this, as the extra soldiers were just as useful mechanically as your veterans. But I didn't need gameplay impacts to encourage me to keep those little dudes alive.
Apparently now freeware: http://www.games4win.com/games/cannon-fodder/
bustballs:
Fuck, good point. When the hell is that going to show up on GoG?
Couldn't resist.