Again, it's all about how much stock you place in each character AS a character. They could have put the entirety of War And Peace as the character's backstory into those games, but if the player didn't care about any of it then that death would seem as impact worthy as dieing in a FPS and respawning.
I'm not saying there aren't ways of working that extra emphasis on character into games, but it's all up to the player to care.
Agreed. No developer can force a player to care about any character. But in Halo: Reach, in Firefight, player characters spout one liners, and you can arbitrarily customize your appearance, which in turn could breed a similar feeling of connection, making each death suffered (despite the ability to respawn) heart wrenching.
Just because a character doesn't have a backstory doesn't automatically mean the player can't create one for him/herself. Although I do agree that those characters that are crafted by developers are usually more engaging.
I'm not putting a spoiler box for this. You should already know by now or you don't care.
In Metal Gear Solid, where you try to survive interrogation. If you fail, Ocelot kills Meryl and you rescue Otacon. If you succeed, Otacon sacrifices his life so Snake and Meryl can escape. Strangely, according to MGS4, both of these endings are true. Maybe Otacon managed to make it out safely? Maybe Meryl broke out of her cell or Ocelot spared her?
In Silent Hill, you can either kill or exorcise the cop.
Dunno if this counts, but the Little Sisters in Bioshock? You either kill them, or restore them and they join you.
OMG I couldn't care less about her dying. People get so emotonal over this. I had no feelings whatsoever. In my mind I was just thinking about who I should give her materia to.
OMG I couldn't care less about her dying. People get so emotonal over this. I had no feelings whatsoever. In my mind I was just thinking about who I should give her materia to.
The point wasn't whether or not it affected you, it was whether you saw it coming, which no one did. Games usually don't kill a party member halfway through, especially not back then.
Int
Hell, i talk to people and they say they hate Canas because of his average stats but, whenever i level Canas he gets close to maxing out almost every major Magic stat like RES and MAG.
Even his DEF and SKL get pretty high.
so did i.
In the last few chapters before the last one all i did was give him a Flux and set him by himself.
epic Lulz were had.
Also, I think third tiers in FE10 kind of ruined the challenge, despite the interesting additions. Near the end of the game you can power through practically any unit without worrying.
I feel kind of the same way, except right now im fighting the Dragon King Disgnhia.
Dragons....Dragons everywhere.
This chapter is really unfair.
Even Ike is having trouble against white Dragons, and most of his stats are max!
OT: Character death is rarely done well because its rare that all characters except the main prot and antagonists, the friend and the love interest actually matter; since every unit in FE matters in some way, it feels a bit more personal when they die.
Agreed.
One thing that makes Fire Emblem one of my favorite games is that the backstory for Each and Every character is awesome.
Even characters id never use would pull at my heart strings once i learned their backstory.
The purpose of this thread, as I am sure you were wondering about, was to collect your opinions of games where dynamic character death was done well. I put forward the Fire Emblem series. Characters there had individual histories, personalities, and relationships. They interacted with each other, and in some cases the player character. And damn near all of them were, in the end, expendable. Throughout a full campaign in FE, it was damn near impossible to not have a few of these characters die, and that can seriously affect you. You felt twice as much loss. Yeah, that Paladin you leveled up since the beginning of the game is gone forever, but you also know that his friends will miss him, he'll never return home, somewhere an orphan is created etc.
Y'know, I read the topic title and though, "yeah, someones going to mention Fire Emblem." Lo and behold, it happens in the first post. The series is well known for its permanent character death, and that's one of the reasons I love it so much. The characters are often well developed, or at least memorable, but they're all mortal (except in those rare instances where the character would just get seriously wounded and retreat).
Actually, there is one game in the series where you can revive characters (at great cost, after the first one): Seisen no Keifu (aka Fire Emblem 4). Of course, that game also...
...kills just under half the cast midway through the game as part of the story. Honestly, that scene made me feel far more sad than most character deaths in games (Aeris in particular didn't really affect me).
Also...
Gigaguy64 said:
Rawle Lucas said:
Gigaguy64 said:
That makes me feel bad actually....
Im playing Radiant dawn and iv never had so many opponents hit me with Rates that go as low as 8%.
I wonder if i just have bad luck...
Also, the webpage in my previous post suggests that Radiant Dawn might not have the RNG averaging system. Can't say I've ever had a run of luck like that when I played the game.
Interesting.
Really PoR and RD are the only Fire Emblem Games where it got as bad as i described, all the others were pretty fair with the occasional wtf hit or critical, but that's to be expected...
Persona 3 did Shinji's pretty well in that he was set up as a badass with a heart of gold and just as he resolves his problems with Ken, he's shot down. it's made somewhat sadder because in the end only your party is going to remember the guy for who he is instead of his public identity. His Social link with FeMC in P3P helped flesh out his character making his death/coma all the more heartbreaking
The purpose of this thread, as I am sure you were wondering about, was to collect your opinions of games where dynamic character death was done well. I put forward the Fire Emblem series. Characters there had individual histories, personalities, and relationships. They interacted with each other, and in some cases the player character. And damn near all of them were, in the end, expendable. Throughout a full campaign in FE, it was damn near impossible to not have a few of these characters die, and that can seriously affect you. You fell twice as much loss. Yeah, that Paladin you leveled up since the beginning of the game is gone forever, but you also know that his friends will miss him, he'll never return home, somewhere an orphan is created etc.
How? releasing a pokemon into the wild once it faints?
Also, I sorta liked Infinite Undiscovery. Faina was a bit annoying, but her death was heartrending for Capell, and really changed him like you would expect a real life person to react. I don't know how often that's been done in games, but I could count it on my left hand.
How? releasing a pokemon into the wild once it faints?
Also, I sorta liked Infinite Undiscovery. Faina was a bit annoying, but her death was heartrending for Capell, and really changed him like you would expect a real life person to react. I don't know how often that's been done in games, but I could count it on my left hand.
In a town called Girdershade, there are only two people, one woman with a Nuka-cola collection, and the man protecting her.
The guy secretly loves her, right?
So he asks you to help HIM to complete HER collection with 30 bottles of Nuka-cola Quantum, and have her fall in love with him.
I was all for this, of course (Wasteland Romance? D'awww.) so I agreed. I went back into her house to tell her I would help them both with the project, and she was happy.
As soon as I walked back outside, I found his body, decapitated. Killed by a radscorpion.
I was shocked by his death, and worried about the woman's safety.
That was the most effective Dynamic Character Death I've seen.
Character death is a very powerful thing that greatly affects the player, and if it's not done well, it can be disastrous to a game. In fact, any single event with that much power and influence must be handled carefully. Remember Star Ocean: Till the End of Time? Or how about FF8's infamous "orphanage scene?" While those are not examples of character death, they were both events that, for better or worse, wielded great power. So much power, in fact, that they ruined the respective games for many players.
In Star Ocean, the plot twist was when your world came under attack from seemingly supernatural beasts. In a desperate attempt to stop them, you went to the edge of the universe and stepped through a portal that brought you into the 4th dimension. Your characters come out of a large monitor and it's revealed that you and your characters were just NPCs within an MMORPG, and you literally just jumped out of the computer screen. The supernatural beasts was the Game Master's way of trying to delete you. It was a game within a game. A lot of players rejected this, saying that Star Ocean ruined the suspension of disbelief, and made the entire game's actions and characters meaningless.
In FF8, you and your party come across an orphanage, where it is revealed that everyone had grown up together, but the use of their "Guardian Forces" caused them to lose these memories. This was supposed to bring the party closer together, and make the player care about them more as a whole group, but many players saw this as an overly cheesy and ridiculous way of doing so.
Like I said, those didn't have character deaths, but the influence was the same.
For character death specifically, I think the game needs to accomplish three main things with the player.
1) The game must make the player accept the death. I don't mean simply carry on with the game after it happens, I mean the player has view the death as an unfortunate necessity. Mass Effect 1 and Final Fantasy 7, while not being very dynamic, are great examples of this.
You had to leave a character behind because enemy reinforcements arrived at just the right moment to leave you with only enough time to save one character. In terms of gameplay, the bomb was already set, and enemy reinforcements arriving to slow you are both perfectly logical and believable things. Thus, players accepted the death.
Aerith knew what Sephiroth was ultimately trying to do (summon meteor) and she knew that she was the only one who could summon Holy to stop him. She had grown to care for Cloud and the others and she didn't want to drag them into danger, so she left on her own. If everyone had been there to try and defend Aerith, Sephiroth would've killed them to reach Aerith. Sephiroth knew Aerith was the real threat to his plan, so that's why he let Cloud and the others live after he dispatched her. Obviously, this upset a great many players, but in the end everyone knew that without Aerith doing this, Meteor would have destroyed everything regardless of the fact they eventually killed Sephiroth.
2) The game must allow the player to mourn the death. After a character dies, the game obviously still has to go on, but if that character is never mentioned or remembered again, it doesn't allow the player to recover from the death. Conversely, constantly reminding the player of the death isn't good either. Again, ME1 and FF7 demonstrate their design strength by occasionally paying their dues to their fallen characters, but not dwelling on them for too long.
3) The player has to care about the character. Yeah, obvious, I know. If the player doesn't care about the character, then the whole thing doesn't really matter and the game can go on as usual.
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So, after typing that whole wall of text, I realized that I haven't played a single game with the specific death mechanics the OP mentioned. I mean, I've played games where characters die as part of the story (Metal Gear Solid) and games where characters can die as part of the story (Suikoden) ... but not games where characters can die at any time should something go terribly wrong. Well, unless you count games like the Elder Scrolls, then I guess I have.
Ah well, maybe someone will find my ramblings to be mildly interesting anyway.
EDIT: HOLY SHIT HOW DID I FORGET FINAL FANTASY TACTICS?
A lot of the story's characters ended up joining your squad, in addition to any generics that you hired. In FFT, whenever a character died, they'd become permanently dead if you didn't raise them (or end the battle) on their 4th turn. This made it so that you couldn't just abandon KO'd characters for a battle and that every time someone's HP hit 0 it actually meant something. This threat of permadeath made myself and a lot of other players realize that our generics were just as important to us as the named characters were.
Well I can't say too much about dynamic death, but one game where death affects my harsh is Oblivion. Yes the characters are just overrated props. But each death hits me the same way as in your Fire Emblem feelings.
Such as the Kvatch mission. It's possible for so many of the guards to fall that by the end the only survivor is the Captain. Or during the great gate battle where those two key characters you've been "friends" with most of the game can die. Especially post game where your just wandering around, knowing those characters would be there chilling peacefully, but died during the battles.
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