Totally agreed, and you presented an interesting idea.

However, that idea would have to offer something to player if they do choose to sacrifice themselves.

Because really... if you know you will die and lose your save-data then... whats the point? Why would you logically choose to castrate half of the game and end it early, if your "greater good deed" has no real gameplay effect other than the game telling you "good job!".

That's where the suicide mechanic will fall shot and become meaningless in of itself. Unless you added a special twist Planetscape Torment style where if you sacrifice yourself, it prevents you from reloading the game previously and will have you be rebirthed in this new world, and basically have stuff you needed to accomplish but now you were starting from square one again instead of continuing on with your super gear.

It would have to take a buttfuck ton of really really heavily anylized gameplay design and story progression to get such a thing right, but if it is done right it would probably be the greatest "moment" to happen in a video game since virtual sliced bread.

yay!!! rev rants back. good argument too. when fallout 3 ended, me and my brother were just left looking at each other saying, "wtf?" for about 10 minutes. we then concluded it was the dumbest ending we had ever seen in a videogame. now that's probably wrong, but it really didn't suit for the game that fallout 3 was.

Your intro was bitching motherfucker.

The only problem with setting the suicide option in the middle of a game, is that if you do choose to kill yourself, there's the possibility that you would have to start over from the very beginning, like you said. I'd rather have some sort of twist mechanic where you where about to sacrifice your self, but Bruce Willis comes in, and forces you to live, ala Armageddon.

Then, you would have to face the consequences of Bruce Willis dieing, saving the (insert things that need to be saved here), but leaving open some sort of plot development in the future.

Or you can be a dick and not have anything saved, like a real man...of genius.

You're twice the man I am.

I've only played the game once, so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about, but I personnally thought it was stupid that whether you're evil or not there's only one possible end situtation. Finish your father's work. I wish we could've done something like, say enslave all the super mutants and rule as a king. Or something more clever, but anyway.

The ending was an ending. The bad bit being that no matter what option you pick, you'll always feel screwed over. It COULD have continued on after, but I don't hate it for not (Like it has been said, you can just load an earlier save). I do however hate it that the options were "Suicide, Save the broken remains of civilisation", "Send in someone else, live in the broken remains of civilisation but not" or "Save the guys who try to shoot you with lasers, kill everyone who didn't."

All in all, your screwed over In Character and screwed over Gameplay wise.

Either way, great rant. I'll need to start listening to more RetroForceGo!

Also, there is the other, much larger logical problem with the end of the game where, if you had Fawkes with you(and, by all logic, you could have/should have had Fawkes with you) he could have gone into the chamber and entered the code sequence because, as the story sets up, he's immune to the radiation. That's why he was able to get the GECK in the first place.
Normally, I don't care about "logic" problems in a game, but this one was so blatant that it frustrated the hell out of me. Why did I have to die? With Fawkes, no one would have had to die because he's a goddamn super mutant and he's immune to radiation!

KorJax:
That's a good point -- starting a game over from scratch may not be that much different from loading an old save apart from the fact that it takes longer and is more frustrating.

Someone in the YouTube comments suggested something like what Fable 2 does in some instances, only on a much higher scale -- if you do the "right" thing and save the people, then you lose a fuckload of levels while the monsters around you stay the same. That seems potentially more graceful, but then again -- what is the consequence of that, save for you're weaker in the face of your enemies and thus you die way more, which just leads to the same problem of saving and reloading your game?

Maybe if you could make the act of starting a game over somehow make the entire game feel fresh...like with randomization or something. I dunno.

bwark kupo:
I really walked straight into that one.

Nice to see the rants back! I miss them on RetroforceGO.

I forgot how much I missed the Rev Rant. Knights of Cydonia also made me smile. I definitely want to see more of these

@craigbezzle

You remind me of these people.

I think the whole idea might work a lot better in an MMO. Usually dying doesn't have too strong consequences as death is a constant part of battle and player-frustration would be unbearable when death was always finite. But there could be instances offered where voluntary death is an option and is truly finite and all that is left of a player-character is some sort of inscription telling about the heroe's moral choice.

Now that I think about it this would be pretty awesome in the context of WoW and the likes.

Disclaimer-Myself nor the collective @ destructoid do not condone MJ use

Personally I think the problem with this sort of thing is that when you die, the world dies with you.

Now however, put these choices into an MMO, or some kind of persistent world, then things could get interesting.

Now imagine someone had got their character to the highest level, spent ages getting all the best armour and weapons. Suddenly the player stumbles upon an event or quest (possibly chosen at random) requiring the player to make a choice. Choosing to save themselves would result in the destruction of their home city, resulting in the loss of that city for EVERYONE on that server. Choosing to save the city however results in their character being gone forever.

Now that your choice actually effects other people, you really can become a hero or a coward.


This probably wouldn't work in reality, but I enjoy the idea anyway.

I enjoyed the vid, by the way.

Good rant, I had the same idea when I got to the end of the game.

Also, spill suppression helps take the green (or blue) reflected light off of the object that is being inserted onto another background. I'm sure theres a plugin for it in FCP, but I don't know exactly what it is. (I use Shake for keying)

Heres a video about it for Shake, probly not all that useful for you, but you'll get the idea.
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/shanks_andrew/dv_keying3/video-tutorial.php

The best way to avoid key spill in the first place is to just separate yourself from the background more so the reflective light doesnt hit you.

This talk of implementing the suicide idea in a MMO is very, very interesting. I actually wish it WASN'T so interesting, because I tend to hate MMOs and want to hog all the cool design shit for singleplayer games, but what you guys are saying seems to (in a really tangential way) fall in line with some suggestions Jason Rohrer made at GDC about how multiplayer games hypothetically have more artistic power than singleplayer ones.

wanderingpixel:
"When players restart their game they can choose to play it differently then they did before. Perhaps in their first playthrough they are a complete jackass, killing anybody who gets in their way, however, the second time around they may attempt to use non-violent problem solving to achieve their goal. This keeps the game fresh"

I'd like to believe this could be possible, but I think gamers tend to, at least until they beat a game, play everything in pretty much one way unless they're literally forced to do otherwise. What if it was a class or skill-based game, and when the character died you forbade them from using that class again when they restarted until a certain amount of time has passed or something? Like, you're a warrior, and you kill yourself to save a town, so the game says that for the next two weeks or something, you can't play as a warrior again (and it connects to an online server to check the time so you can't change your internal console clock). So you've gotta play as a conman or a mage this time, or whatever.

@craigbezzle: There's no expiration date for bitching. And it didn't seem like he was bitching, more like he was exploring a more interesting scenario.

@RevAnthony: Spill suppression gets rid of those jagged green edges when keying out a color, (in this case green) but if not done right, then you'll end up getting rid of the edges of yourself. Of course, I'm not an expert on keying stuff either.

This is the first RevRant I've ever heard, because I've never listened to RetroForceGO! (Every episode is sitting in iTunes, I've just never listened to them.) and I like it. I really need to listen to RFG.

On that note, I need to play Fallout 3, too.

I'd like to see a game that rewards you for doing the right thing without telling you that it's going to. Imagine if in Super Metroid, at some point in the game you were given the opportunity to save the baby Metroid, but you didn't have to. If you chose not to, Samus would actually die at the end because no one was there to save her. But at the time you originally made the choice, you had no way of knowing that that was ever going to make any difference.

The only time I've ever really felt like my decisions mattered in a game was when I was playing an MMO. I used to play this free MMO called Tibia. There were times when I would help out a lower level player if other players were trying to kill him, or if he needed help completing a quest or something. Sometimes it would pay off because the player I'd helped would eventually grow to a higher level and help me. Or sometimes I'd just decide to be a dick and kill people who were weaker than me, and those people would be friends with higher level players who would hunt me down and kill me. So the decisions I made actually effected me. I don't know if any single player game could ever offer that same level of meaning when it comes to how much your choices actually matter. AI is always going to be limited compared to actually interacting with other players.

I would never choose to kill my character in a game in order to save hundreds of fictional lives and cut my play time short. Though, it wouldn't be the middle of the game, and would just become the end if, like you said, you just start over from the beginning.

Unless a game makes me actually care for the characters and doesn't throw in some mechanic to make the "moral dilemma" fit into game play (I'm looking at you, Bioshock), then I'm always going to do what makes my play experience better. If that means sacrificing a character (or several) to extend my own play time, then no skin off my nose.

That's why that part of the ending works. Sure, it's meaningless, but the entire game is. Blah blah blah, all games are meaningless, blah blah blah, everything is meaningless, blah blah blah, /suicide.

spill suppression is an effect you do after you've pulled your key
its basically a streamlined color correction processes that tidies the greens that bounce on to your face or white shirt and also helps make the edge pixels (that you cant key out or you lose your shape) that are green not green

depending which version of fcp you have "bought" you may have keylight installed (it comes with 6) which is has built in spill suppression and is a really great keyer

otherwise there's a plug in in the keying section of fcp called spill suppressor-green and you just dial up its strength in the effects window

you may also find that once you've applied the spill suppression that you can go up the chain and soften your key a little to get back some of your hair
as you wont be getting so much green

anyway pulling a "perfect" key from dv(or hdv) is a bit of a dark art that's not worth bothering with but a little tweak you might get rid of the green halo next time

er videogames

Glad to see you back to making Videos Anthony!

Yea, Youtube sucks in the sense that you only get to choose between 3 thumbnails (I also look like a moron in most of them). You'll need to become a youtube partner before you are able to upload your own custom images.



I rant and rave about games all the time on my show, but i also do articles and Im trying to find the right balance - Do I talk about what I said in the article or do I do two completely different pieces?

So it should be interesting to see your thoughts in video form rather than articles - I'm looking forward to them

Nice!

yay rev rant.

I've often played games like Oblivion in a similar way - if I die, whether it's from an ambush, or tripping off a cliff, I'll wipe the saves - what you're suggesting goes further than that, of course. However, for many people, there wouldn't -be- a choice. Continue along the game, or replay 10+ hours, only to come to the same choice? In order to "complete" the game, the only true path in such a case would be a total douche - I think fallout did it reasonably well, the ending didn't piss me off to badly, but yes - the choice was, at the end of the day, as meaningless as Bioshock's little sisters - it influenced the ending cutscene, little more. A concept I feel could work would be one of a persistent gameworld, similar to how if you die in WoW, there's no game over screen in such a traditional sense (or so I've been led to believe) - in my "Perfect" RPG, if your character died, they'd be dead, but the world they inhabit wouldn't - you would start a new character, afresh, in the same world, affected by your previous actions. In the case of FO3, people would talk about the Lone Wanderer as a hero, and hopefully the player would feel an emotional response, knowing that while their character will be remembered, they are dead - their items, skills, "characterisation", are gone. Of course, I said "Perfect", it'll never happen, because such a theoretically branching storyline would take either a fantastic procedural quest generator, or one hell of a lot of time.

I'd buy that game.

This is a really interesting game mechanic that I don't think any company in their right minds would ever implement.

The ending does suck, but I still consider Fallout 3 one of my favorite games of all time. Anything that gets 60 hours out of me is worthy of that title (WoW only got 25 hours).