Permanent Character Death
- Thread starter SquirrelPants
- Start date
Recommended Videos
But why should gamers be forced to do anything? I don't want to spend my gaming life fretting about a character because 100 hours of hard work could be wiped out just around the next corner. Getting killed repeatedly is frustrating enough, and I think most gamers see having to do a certain section again punishment enough for a failure. Good games can make you fear things (or feel anything they want you to, in fact) without having to resort to cheap, shitty mechanics like this.Crazzee said:
I like the save ability that you were talking about. For the kind of nervousness your talking about when entering an unknown area I'd soon just increase the difficulty level.
I remember reading an interview with Kojima some while back where he said that he'd like to make a game that just stopped when you died. No save points. No retry. Game Over. If you wanted to start again. You bought an new game.
When you can spew out a new character every two seconds, the game stops being about skill and more about brute force. I'll just keep sending wave after wave of PCs until I just overcome my nemesis. Kind of like a zerg rush actually. For that reason, I always believe that death should come with a heavy consequence. That's actually one of the reasons that I love D&D. If your character dies, you have a heavy price to pay in order to bring them back.
Maybe but it would still be a flop. Becuase MMO need new blood. Vet get bored sooner or later. When this happends they stop playing. If bully kills new blood on his demo time. He will get fed up and not pay for the game. That waisted resores. So in the end it would be a nightmare. Plus MMO are grind worth. Not many want to keep doing the same level again and again. To loss all progress is a death kiss. Then again if it's a choice like only one server does it. It might keep it freash for vetssirbryghtside said:
Games have rules. As long as you play the game, you are forced by them. If there are no rules, there is no game.GuerrillaClock said:
It's not like you are forced to. You can play some other game. Right now there are almost no games which feature long-term character development and permanent death. There are many of us who'd like to see a few such games being made into the mainstream. If you are not convinced, you would still have the 99% of forgiving games. Why would you want to deny us the 1%?
Oh? How do you propose to make the player fear death in Steel Battalion if not with this "cheap, shitty mechanic"?
OK, the "play something else" card that you seem to be playing here is totally irrelevant. If I didn't like a game, I would play something else, of course. That hardly affects the fact that the idea is dumb.Nutcase said:
Yes, games have rules. Of course they do, but, again, this has nothing to do with the issue at hand. If a gamer wants to try something out, they should be free to do so without the fear of having hours of hard work brushed into the bin. If I want to attempt a shortcut in a racing game, my car shouldn't be at risk of exploding, because it would make the risk-taking and excitement that people play games for redundant. If I want to try flanking someone in a shooter, and it doesn't work out, why should I have to die permanently just for trying something off the wall?
Fire Emblem is the only series that I've played (never played Diablo 2) that did this mechanic well, and I admit it could be made to work in games where you control a party of characters, as in Fire Emblem it wasn't game over when you let someone die, but it was a harsh punishment. What I am taking issue with is the idea that gamers should be forced to spend hours tiptoeing around a level without wanting to make progress because they know everything they've done so far will be scrubbed off if they put a foot wrong. First and foremost, games are toys. They need to entertain. If a game wants to pass itself off as art, that's fine too, but it needs to be entertaining first for it to fit the bill of a good game. If people want to play a game like that so they can shout about being 'hardcore' on the forumz, then I'll happily let them, but it won't change my mind that permanent character deaths in most games are a ridiculous and unnecessary idea.
Ah, now I remember some time ago that Hideo Kojima (the MGS guy) wanted to do a game where you die once and that's it for both your save file and disc, so that players can understand how precious lives are...real ones...I think it was Kojima...or was I dreaming?
That's exactly what I was thinking: unnecessary and for teh hardcorez.GuerrillaClock said:
If you are making a game with permanent character death, make it optional, otherwise I will use a trainer or some sort of hack.
I get really attached to my characters, enough to try very hard not to die. I don't need the fear of permanent death as an incentive to get more involved in the game.
I don't think so. I just find it annoying.Nutcase said:
That may be ideal, but I do not think it works in actual practice.
I don't think it works even as an ideal, but that may be just me who finds that to be the, well, antithesis of what I would want in a game.
I think largely the idea of character death is an illusion that doesn't even have greased tissue paper concealing it. Because no matter what, the risks are not real because you can always replay the level or the game in it's entirety.
I don't think character death is in any way a useful tool for designers to use because it just doesn't even apply anymore. The only reason to have character death is to allow repetition of the same actions carry some merit, like seeing how many Space Invaders you can shoot before you lose all three laser bases. But today's games with their plots and/or multi-leveled gameplay, repeating the same stage over and over again is no longer a virtue so much as an outdated annoyance. It's an old way of playing tacked onto new games and it's not a good fit. Games need to evolve beyond what they have been and be what they need to become.
It also makes Fire Emblem one of the most frustrating, irritating games in existence for people who prefer lighter fare on handhelds (I liked Disgaea DS and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and A2 far more because they seemed to understand what platform they were on.)Pankeyman said: