RPS Demands: I Want To Live Forever

Written by John Walker on September 18, 2008 at 10:12 pm.

Irony in a lollipop.

I have a challenge, developers. I know you’re reading. I want a high profile, big budget, mainstream action game in which the player character is invincible. I believe that the next truly great game will be the one that does this.

Games have come close. There have obviously been infinite lives for many. Mario, as he ages, becomes far more generous with his back-up existences – anyone who played Galaxy will know it was hard to have few than a few dozen laying around. Then of course there’s Quicksave, which creates an artificial invincibility, so long as you remember to hammer it frequently enough. And perhaps the closest to the goal would be time travel, with games like Prince of Persia and Braid demonstrating that you can have a great deal more fun if you’re not constantly condemned to death.

However, they’re all still a significant distance from my desired goal. I want a character who cannot be harmed. Impervious to bullets. Unbothered by spikes. Swinging blades? They bounce off him or her. Falling from the top of a giant building? A nice, safe thud at the bottom. This person, for whatever narrative reason, simply cannot die.

This of course doesn’t mean he or she is otherwise supernatural. A wall is still a wall, and if it cannot be broken, it cannot be broken. An impassable cliff face cannot be mysteriously ascended. Swathes of enemies still impede progress, their blasts of laser fire sending you reeling backward. And, most of all, actions can have consequences. You may not die, but you can still regret.

I interject here for clarity – I’m not talking about games where death changes nothing. A regular MMO will bring you back to life with minimal penalty, your pre-death actions still seeing their results in the world (well, to a point, clearly – the dragon you killed is probably alive again by now, but that had nothing to do with your demise). But if anything, an MMO kills you far more often, and in far more ways, than most games, lacking the rescuing Quickload. We’re talking about a game in which you never, ever die.

Eat his sandy time.

This isn’t just some peculiar fantasy of mine. There’s a purpose behind this challenge. Imagine the difference it would make to a game’s design. Imagine the old, reliable themes that would no longer be there to keep a weak scene buoyant. Imagine how inconvenient it would be to the average action game if falling down a hole wasn’t a way to kill you.

Of course Prince of Persia deserves another mention here. When Sands Of Time was first revealed in Montreal in 2003, I was one of a group of journalists staring slack-jawed at the screen in sheer wonder at the painful obviousness of it. This didn’t happen when we were first shown it on the big screen. It looked nice there, but it didn’t yet make sense. It was when we were sat down to play it for ourselves.

The idea for rewinding time came to producer Yannis Mallat while he was in the shower. It was an idea so good that when PoP creator Jordan Mechner heard it, he moved himself and his family to Canada, so he could oversee the game. These are big, important moments. It’s time for another.

I was playing Sands of Time that day for quite a while before I used the sand. PoP’s excellent acrobatics were instinctive and simple, letting me perform superb moves without much trouble. But then I messed up a big jump, and watched as I fell to my death. Years of ingrained training had taught my immediate reaction: Oh crap, when did I last save? How much will I have to do again. I hate it when… wait a second. And I jabbed the Rewind button and watched my error so beautifully undo itself before me.

I can’t capture that moment for you, but I can show you this:

That sort of thing.

But then you run out of sand. The glass goes empty, and some big, stupid baddy twats you with a sword, and you’re gone. At that point that Rewind button becomes accursed. You hit it, despite knowing it won’t do anything. You hammer at it uselessly, watching the stupid, dead Prince slump to the ground.

Hurry onto PC, will you?

Think of any first-person shooter. In fact, don’t. Think of Half-Life 2 Episodes. Valve make their games in a much discussed (and yet all too often ignored by the developing community against all reason) way – they playtest the code with outsiders every single week of development, the dev team forced to watch helplessly as Joe Public haplessly fumbles with the current build. They take notes, noticing when the player gets stuck, when they stare in confusion at a wall for fifteen minutes, when they get lost, and most of all, when it’s not clear what they should be doing next.

They then go back into their game knowing exactly what needs work. They reiterate, and refine, and the result is games that glide like a buttery penguin on an ice rink. Valve take this even further. After Episode One was released, their frightening Steam-based spybots noticed that many players were getting horribly stuck in the car tunnels. People were dying down there an awful lot, and as a result, very many just gave up on the game at that point. It’s Valve’s desire that people see all of the game they made (despite already having that person’s money, which is quite nice), so they released an update that made the sequence simpler. People preferred the game, and far more people went on to complete it.

I don’t say this to celebrate Valve, although certainly I think they deserve it in this instance. I say it because it so helpfully demonstrates that people don’t want to die over and over again. Difficult sections in games are a good thing. Dying because it’s difficult is not. And that’s my challenge.

I want games to get more difficult because they are more challenging, not because they are more deadly. In my utopia, cranking the difficulty level at the beginning of a new game would not increase the number of enemies intent on your death, or weaken your defences to their attacks, but rather make the game more challenging. And I think the best proof of this would be the first developer to create a game in which you simply cannot die.

Let me be clear. I am in no way talking about simplifying games. A badly implemented understanding of Valve’s iteration process could lead to a stupefyingly easy game, which doesn’t kill you simply because you’d have to actively seek out death and jump into it. My challenge is to make a game that’s every bit as involved, frightening, imposing and impactful as the best action games out there, but without being able to dangle the scythe of Death over your head.

Imagine what would have to happen. Removing the overly familiar would force a developer to think in brand new ways. People wouldn’t be fooled by a lousy physics puzzle every fifteen steps, they’d want a lot more. Think of what new, inspired scenarios we’d encounter to push us to our gaming limits, without their relying on wearing away at my life bar. Don’t ask me what they would be – that’s not my problem! There are amazing, imaginative minds in this industry whose job it is to invent such things. Minds I argue that aren’t being exercised, because of the gaming default of, “Oh, just make it hard not to die in this bit.”

So who’s going to take me up on this? Make a pledge. Pledge to be the developer who will set out to make this breakthrough.

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Gravatar Dr Snofeld says:

It’s not big-budget, action, recent or even the right platform, but if anyone remembers Wario Land 2 and 3 on the Game Boy, you were invincible in those games.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

Gravatar Obdicut says:

The new commenting system has me doubleposting. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Planescape, though.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:21 pm

Gravatar cyrenic says:

I would argue Portal came very close to this as well. Yes there were several ways to die, but personally I only died a few times playing it. The challenge of the game was the portal puzzles.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

Gravatar Obdicut says:

Prey.

Yeah, I know, it doesn’t really fit, and in fact proves your argument well. The “death” in Prey meant absolutely nothing, throwing you into a really dumb minigame that had no real penalties for failure.

To put it another way: I too prefer the comic book version of the crow.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:23 pm

Gravatar Anonononomous says:

I honestly think Valve’s playtesting is overrated. I can’t recall getting horribly confused by the layouts of any non-Valve games. It seems to me that Valve level designs are always ridiculously simplified just so that a toddler will be able to stumble through them no matter what. I heard something about how Valve once had a section in HL2 where you could take 2 paths to the same point and because their tester was dumb he just kept running in circles so they took it out and, as usual, the game is a single straight line from start to finish. I very much prefer games where I have options in how to get from point A to point B.

The new Prince of Persia looks like it ought to be up your alley, at least in terms of the acrobatics. Elika won’t be running out of magic, as far as I know, and she’ll reset you if you fall to your doom.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:25 pm

Gravatar Leeks! says:

I’ve gone on this very rant to my friends in the pub before. Not only would it make for some clever game play opportunities, but think of what you could do with that narrative, if you were clever. It’s an inherently defensive ability, where most games give their protagonist inherently offensive powers. Just by flipping that around, what are you saying about the nature of power in the medium? You could subvert the hell out of that dominant paradigm! Hoo-ah!

I mean… Glad to see someone important shares my views.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:28 pm

Gravatar The Archetype says:

I never would have remembered those Wario Land games, but they actually were really creative in how they used the invincibillity. In every level (in 2 at least, I never played 3) you tryed to get treasures, and a lot of the puzzles actually required that you get hit by enemies in order to be lit on fire/blown up like a balloon/frozen/turned into a zombie/wrapped up in a giant ball of yarn/turned into a vampire so you could turn into a bat and fly etc…

There are probably other action/puzzle type games where you can’t die (Braid is pretty close to that from my understanding). There’s probably more untapped territory in other genres, but I certainly can’t think of any sort of game where you couldn’t die that wouldn’t have to be based more on puzzle-solving than combat or platforming.

Edit: Now that you’ve got me thinking about the it, I’m realizing just how prevalent death is for no good reason.

How many old adventure games have you played where you’ve had to redo a few hours of puzzle-solving because the designers felt that there needed to be some way for you to cock things up and die and you’d forgotten to save regularly?

September 18th, 2008 at 10:30 pm

Gravatar greeneggsnsam says:

You can’t build up the suspense like that and then tell us that you’re not going to tell us why it’d be cool!

September 18th, 2008 at 10:36 pm

Gravatar Meat Circus says:

So, Braid then.

You want to play Braid.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:39 pm

Gravatar beermaster says:

is it really better to tell the player ‘you’re stupid’ when they can’t move forward in this sort of game rather than ‘you’re uncoordinated’ as you do in more traditional games? i’m not convinced it is.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:41 pm

Gravatar Rudolf says:

I like the concept, try monkey island, I never died in there xD

September 18th, 2008 at 10:42 pm

Gravatar Schadenfreude says:

Monkey Island?

September 18th, 2008 at 10:43 pm

Gravatar BrokenSymmetry says:

Yes, I love it this idea! I simply hate dying in any game. Sands of Time is a great example, because even if you run out of sand, you’re put back to the previous checkpoint with an exclamation of “No, no, that’s not how the story went!”. The subsequent Prince of Persia games are so much worse in this respect, because not only do they give you less sand to play with, but they also send you back to a “Game Over” screen when you die (the worst sin of all!).

September 18th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

Gravatar JulianP says:

I promise I’ll make it happen within the next 25 years.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

Gravatar Carra says:

You also played an immortal in Planescape Torment. Dieing just meant you’d wake up a bit later. There were even some puzzles which could only be solved by dieing in the correct place.

As for Monkey Island, it even made fun of dieing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENeRZEnn2Fc

September 18th, 2008 at 10:52 pm

Gravatar Noc says:

To be clear, are we specifying no death, or no failure states?

The titular Escort Mission is an example of this: the enemies, in many cases, pose no real danger to you, but keep offing the poor jerk you’re supposed to be protecting. Player death is only one kind of failure state, and in many cases only one of several similar ways of handling a particular failure.

For instance, in a platform game, you miss a jump and fall into a pit. One of a couple things happens. Either you a) die, and quickload back before the jump to try again, b) die and get zapped back to a checkpoint before the jump, to try again, c) fall into a nonlethal pit where you can run back up and try again, or d) rewind time so you can try again. In all of these cases, failure at a task allows the player to repeat the task, hopefully with better results.

And the obnoxious part of dying repeatedly isn’t that you’re dead repeatedly. It’s that you’re replaying the same sequence over and over again without any clear progress. This isn’t something particular to death. Rather, it’s a function of failure states in general. The same thing happens in adventure games, even the ones which don’t let you kill yourself or lock yourself in corners: the frustration from repeatedly trying different combinations of something with no apparent progress and no clear path to success is identical to that of being killed over and over again every time you step around a corner in an FPS.

The way to beat this isn’t to rule out death, it’s to rule out failure. You will succeed every time, just with varying degrees of success. But then it simply becomes a game of high scores, and we already have plenty of those; THAT’s not a particularly novel concept.

[Edit, and addendum: And if you think about it, a high-score game is simply a game where you fail by not doing well enough. People shooting for high scores tend to replay the same stages over and over, and reset/quickload if they make a serious mistake along the way. But yes, if a developer is rejecting both failure states and high scores/completion percentages/whatever, then it would require them to build a much more compelling and sophisticated narrative. Or a much larger and deeper world. Since, you know, they don’t have a game anymore.

September 18th, 2008 at 10:59 pm

Gravatar Hoernchen says:

Prey ! The game was not awesome because of the graphics, or the portals, but becaus it was the first shooter that managed to solve the problem of dying without breaking the game.

September 18th, 2008 at 11:06 pm

Gravatar kafka7 says:

In gaming, death is just an analogy for failure. But there are plenty of other analogies that could be used. The problem is that games need to find some way of representing success and failure. It just so happens that life/death is the most fundamental analogy for success/failure since, well, the beginning of human storytelling.

September 18th, 2008 at 11:12 pm

Gravatar Dr_demento says:

There’s definately a trend here. Games always used to have limited numbers of lives, a throwback to the arcades, and that’s virtually eradicated now everywhere except dinosaurs* of gaming like Mario. Likewise with non-recharging health; who wasn’t surprised to see BioShock still using medikits to keep you from death? Well, Valve I guess, but personally I think persistent health meters are an irritating distraction, like managing your carrying capacity in Oblivion. It’s there for a reason and it always has been, but in the end it’s trading off your love of shiny items against your hatred of making dozens of round trips to carry all your ph4t l00t back to your house. Invulnerability is certainly coming, and might indeed make game design more interesting.

It’s not just health/lives that this has happened to, either. Force Unleashed has recharging Force; Braid has unlimited time-rewinding; Black had virtually unlimited ammo; even Oblivion had recharging mana. If you remove the permanent consequences, the player feels much more free to experiment and try stuff differently in the short term. “Sure I’ll try using a fire spell on the house to force my victim outside; it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work.”

Quicksave is still a terrible invention, though. Frequent and intelligently-placed checkpoints are far easier to get right.

Also: colossal, intensive, serious end-user playtesting really does help games. Read this, it’s fascinating.

* “dinosaur” is unfair… it’s been around forever without changing, but is still a rea competitor. “crocodile” would be better.

September 18th, 2008 at 11:13 pm

Gravatar Nelsormensch says:

It’s an interesting challenge, John.

Most the games that have tried this feel a lot more like puzzle games, e.g. Portal or Braid. Action-based games are fundamentally a matter of reacting quickly and accurately. If the player fails to do so, they have to try again at some level of granularity. If we remove the reflex-based modality, what’s left? If not having to try again, what interesting consequences can an action game have?

Shifting things to “… everyone else in the world needn’t be invincible. There’s people to save!” isn’t necessarily a good solution. If you fail to save other people, what are the consequences? If there aren’t any, what’s the motivation? If they’re too severe, then it’s even worse than the player dying because now the entire game has become one giant escort quest. Given how atrocious every escort quest basically ever has been, it’s pretty clear the player’s ability to succeed in the game can not be contingent on NPCs.

A fantastic proposal though. I suspect this subject will be on my mind a lot in the next few days.

September 18th, 2008 at 11:15 pm

Gravatar Cybergangster says:

Funny - I was thinking about this recently after playing Superman. The guy’s supposed to be invincible so why not make him so? If he takes a beating then slow him down a little, make his punches a bit more laboured until he gets a chance to rest…? The only thing that can kill the S bird is kryptonite, so when that finally shows up, start out by diminishing his super powers before we finally see our protagonist stumble and fall. Damn, I wish I’d gotten into game development…

September 18th, 2008 at 11:16 pm

Gravatar Plinglebob says:

How about this for a game idea. In X years BC, the game character was blessed by Random God X with immortality. Fast forward to now and the guy is fed up with life and so spend the entire game looking for a way to kill himself. No in game deaths or forced restarts and could be quite fun as an action game if done right.

September 18th, 2008 at 11:19 pm

Gravatar andy says:

I also wish there were more options as to play style when playing games.

I’m one of those gamers that plays for the ‘escape’ and fun factor, not for some pretend achievements, or sense of accomplishment, or challenge.

Case in point: A while back i bought a used copy of Crackdown for the 360. Didn’t take me long to realize that the game play style wasn’t going to be one i would be any good at, nor would i enjoy the constant dying.

i looked online to see if there were any cheats for the game, as i was still interested in enjoying the story aspect of the game, or at least discovering if there even was a decent one in there.

i found out that there was some cheat built in that would let me play on invincible and do absolutely everything i could want and have a blast, BUT… i couldn’t save the game at all, so unless i wanted to do something as stupid as leave my 360 on for days on end (for multiple gaming sessions), the cheat was useless.

bottom line, i wasted $10 and never touched the game again. i’m glad i didn’t buy it retails, and i guarantee you i won’t buy the sequel, if there is one, as it’ll just be more of the same (i.e. me sucking at it)

even though it was nice of them to include the feature, why would they include such a stupid rule along with it? what are they scared of? that i’m going to enjoy the game’s story not in the intended manner?

games should have more of these FUN modes built in, with no strings attached. since the market these days seems to be nutz about the stupid achievements and points and junk, they can even include some off the wall achievement for completing the game in cheat mode in some short time or some huge score or whatever, giving both the achievement tramps something to enjoy, as well as the rest of us who just want to enjoy a good story, WITHOUT BEING FRUSTRATED!

why do the devs have to be so elitist? superiority complex? inferiority complex? closed minded? can’t think outside the box? need to turn sales away?

everyone keeps whining about development costs, and then they turn around and limit the potential base of people who will even want to buy the games with their decisions.

i would have loved to have played devil may cry, or ninja gaiden, or pretty much 85% of all the games that get put on the shelves. but i won’t ever buy them.

Why? because i know i don’t have the skills (or time for the effort required to gain them) to enjoy these games. I know i will be frustrated with them, so i don’t waste the time or money on them.

So go ahead developers, keep spending more and more millions on your games, and then keep telling us only the ‘leet’ need apply.

i guess i see why fluff like the sims is in the top 10 for the last 100 years.

September 18th, 2008 at 11:29 pm

Gravatar Schadenfreude says:

You can actually die in The Secret of Monkey Island, but you’d have to be really, really rubbish to do it. The scene where Guybrush is tied to the idol and thrown in the harbour; if you don’t do anything effective in ten minutes or so Guybrush will turn funny shades of blue, purple and green and start to float to the surface.

Game over.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlDwUAaKbaI&NR=1

September 18th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

Gravatar Thingus says:

Returning to the Wario Land example, though excellent, I still found certain parts of those games frustrating, due to the aforementioned sense of ‘trying time and time again without getting anywhere’. One level involved you having to find an owl, and fly though a maze of spikes. Touching one of the spikes would scare the owl off, and you would have to trek all the way across the level to find another. Even though the main character couldn’t die, this was frustrating due to the constant repetition.
(Last played the game at age 14, mind…I might’ve changed a bit since then. Maybe.)
Maybe instead of penalizing failure, through loss of health, lives, McGuffin, ect, games should lean more towards rewarding success? Perhaps an invincible action game character should be rewarded with goodies for, say, defeating enemies in a particularly stylish manner, like in Devil May Cry, ,clearing an obstacle course in record time or exploration?

(EDIT: Longest post I’ve ever made. On anything, ever, I think. Yay for intellectual stimulation!)

September 18th, 2008 at 11:35 pm

Gravatar John Walker says:

To people suggesting adventure games and so on, that’s why I stressed action at the top. There are many games where death is irrelevant, and so I’m not really talking about them here. I want to see how someone could make an action game without death. As for Prey and Planescape - you still die. Their ideas are definitely great, but you still die.

And that takes care of Braid too, which is a platform game, and not an action game. Of course, I cite it because it’s significant for a similar argument that would otherwise need making in the platform world.

And yes - I worded the part about saving people poorly. I’ll fix it now, but it’s quoted in the above comments to remind people of my wrongness. Clearly escort missions are the worst thing ever, and if a game replaced the player’s death with having to prevent the deaths of others, it would be no better. What I meant to say was there are consequences to your actions, and other people might matter to you. Having to keep them alive would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Your choices having consequences is perhaps a possibility. But I made the mistake there of making a suggestion, rather than just the challenge.

Plinglebob - I LOVE that idea!

September 18th, 2008 at 11:36 pm

Gravatar matthew says:

With what knowledge do you make the claim that absolutely no developer other than Valve understands the value of playtesting?

September 18th, 2008 at 11:45 pm

Gravatar John Walker says:

I don’t believe I state that “absolutely no developer” does any such thing. I believe I make some light-hearted comments about my frustration that Valve’s particular technique is not more commonplace. Clearly all developers use playtesting. However, most use it differently. I’ve edited the post so hopefully this is more clear.

September 18th, 2008 at 11:47 pm

Gravatar Pantsman says:

I believe there was actually a recent Superman game in which you were invincible, but rather than a health bar, the city itself had a health bar, and if it dropped to zero, you lost. Apparently it was rubbish.

September 18th, 2008 at 11:52 pm

Gravatar The Poisoned Sponge says:

Building on Plinglebob’s idea, and kind of moving off from it, I think a game where you are invincible but trying to do something like perhaps saving the world or somesuch while staying under the radar would be rather brilliant. Obviously you can’t die, but if you alert the police or evil doers of your intentions it would make the game a hell of a lot harder for you. Think sort of The Fugitive mixed with Superhero Movie. In a game.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:03 am

Gravatar Power Liche says:

Having adversaries that waste your time instead of killing you is horrible. And everyone hates escort missions. I agree that people should try new things, I just don’t see why you think this in particular is a good idea. The immortality thing is why Superman is so boring that they had to invent kryptonite just to make him mortal again.

p.s. if you can’t die it’d be fairly confusing if anyone bothered attacking you after watching you casually wander around the battlefield trying to use your sniper scope to look up people’s noses.

p.p.s. play Doom in god mode and tell us how you could make it fun.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:04 am

Gravatar Rufus T. Firefly says:

Along similar lines, I would also like to see an RTS game that didn’t focus on genocide as a win condition.

What would these games be like if “Kill everything” wasn’t an option? Alpha Centauri and some other 4X games have other win conditions, but not SupCom, StarCraft, etc…

September 19th, 2008 at 12:12 am

Gravatar John Walker says:

I love how Sponge’s and Liche’s comments so beautifully capture the difference between the imaginative optimist, and the cynical pessimist.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:12 am

Gravatar Power Liche says:

Sponge’s idea definitely communicates what’s fun about the idea a lot better than the post. Don’t see how it works though - is it a stealth game, are you campaigning for a revolution? Why are you not just saying “I’m immortal, bitch” and charging at whoever is opposing you?

September 19th, 2008 at 12:21 am

Gravatar John Walker says:

I’m not suggesting how it could be done. I’m putting out the challenge.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:26 am

Gravatar Hypocee says:

cf. Tom Francis’ The Invincibles.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:32 am

Gravatar futage says:

Noc’s argument seems right to me. And assuming your examples (Braid, PoP) are intended to illustrate the rough direction you think things should move in, I really don’t think rewinding time is functionally different from quickloading. It’s a bit more sensually pleasing and perhaps makes the player think of it as a ‘tool’ within the game rather than something external to the game but it loses something too.

There’ve been many games where I’ve enjoyed quicksave-quickload play. It’s allowed me to explore far more freely than if death were final. It’s allowed me to revise tactics and find a way of doing x thing without dying. Exploring the branches of possibility and then choosing one is unique to video games and I’d really love for someone to make it internal (and possibly central) to a game rather than feel like cheating.

What I think would better discourage f5-f9 gameplay (perhaps combined with an intelligent approach to not dying) is deferred consequences for the player. So that rather than trying something one way, not liking the results and then quickloading and doing it the other way I have to wait for… an hour or two before the consequences (of death/’failure state’, even (with Planescape in mind)) become evident. Or perhaps actions and results become less tied together in pairs, more organic and cumulative.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:33 am

Gravatar GiGinge says:

I’ve just come back from the pub and am drunk but this seems like a really interesting idea I hope that some developer somewhere can come up with a great gameplay concept based around this, I’d def buy it!

However I’m somewhat tipsy and may well read this tomorrow and wonder what the fuss is about lol

September 19th, 2008 at 12:35 am

Gravatar Thiefsie says:

I’m not a fan of the Valve over testing either… I can’t remember the amount of times I was picking apart the levels going oh duhh, they’ve lit up that area obviously so joe boring figures out where to go. Insipidly boring came to mind a fiar bit, even though their games are great. I wanted a bit less predictability and a bit more feeling that I actually solved something myself, rather than being signposted with EVERY SINGLE THING I’m meant to do. Same goes for Halo 3.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:41 am

Gravatar Power Liche says:

Walker - I was trying to ask Sponge about his idea particularly, not clear, sorry.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:44 am

Gravatar Stu says:

That Soulja Boy clip is fantastic as an example of what happens when games-as-art meets the real world…

As for an imaginative take on the concept of a game where you’re invincible — don’t look at me, I’m drunk. I can barely keep it together enough to type this, much less offer a reasoned argument as to why this may or may not be a great idea.

September 19th, 2008 at 12:46 am

Gravatar Janto says:

Ideas…

I had an idea for a superhero game with 3 different characters where the characters would be invulnerable in different ways. One became stronger and heavier through damage, one was an ethereal electronic wraith, and the last was a forcefield generator.

The basic setup would revolve around the early Authority plots - maximising the potential of your team in saving lives on a massive scale, although I never pushed out the idea on how (a) the 3 characters work together (b) what penalties there are for failure and rewards for success in saving lives, and (c) what opposition you would face.

Well, I did work it out for the main brawler character. Basically, for her (supergirl superfriends forever) the game centers around causing the maximum amount of mayhem in the shortest amount of time to keep powering up, so like Mirror’s Edge, the game is all about maintaining momentum. I imagine this character being thrown or jumping into a mass of space invaders, ripping open bomb bays and smashing a missile into the cockpit, then using the explosion to leap to the next target before eventually falling to ground and demolishing an entire building. Although you’re technically saving lives, it’s probably similar in structure to most of the missions in say Freespace where success or failure on any mission objective was not essential to advancing the plot, you just have the shame of seeing your ‘civilians saved = 20%’ and ‘civilians killed=200′ and not getting sparkly stuff like medals, or newspaper stories or whatever. The enemy should quickly realise that you are invulnerable, and be doing their best to prevent a powered-up version of you from ripping their motherships to shreds by using blast weapons to knock you off course and disrupt your momentum.

(For some reason I think the idea of someone who can’t actually fly having to fight an airborne enemy is great. Oh, and it’s probably a situation where you aren’t saving people just to get a high score, you’re also saving them because if you don’t they’ll join/strengthen your enemies. And it would be cool to also have antagonists who were also invulnerable.)

September 19th, 2008 at 1:12 am

Gravatar perilisk says:

Hmmm… maybe you’re a do-gooder with a gothic curse/blessing. You’re invincible, but your soul is always at risk. Your goal is to get a bunch of good-guy points, Ultima-style, to bring your soul into balance and be freed from your curse and from life.

However, you always have the Skull of Mondain option to deal with things — kill bad guys indiscriminately, you lose good guy points, and have to work harder to win. Needless to say, dealing with things the ethical way is more challenging that dealing with things the bastard way. Especially since killing is usually unjustified for you (if no innocent lives are at stake). You can’t exactly claim it was “self defense” if you’re immortal.

September 19th, 2008 at 1:17 am

Gravatar ._. says:

permalife? i thought this was a troll until i clicked to read more and saw it was tl;dr.

September 19th, 2008 at 1:23 am

Gravatar Jezebeau says:

Putting out the challenge isn’t worth much if you aren’t more specific. Do you want a game with no failure conditions, or a game without death?

In a game without death, being captured effectively by enemies or falling into a pit without a way out is, mechanically, death. You reload your game and try again.

A game where you can’t lose, however, is going to be frustrating if it just means attempting the same problem again and again. For a game with, perhaps, an interesting take on “immortality”, try ‘Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS‘. It might not quite be what you’re looking for, but it’s probably thematically close.

September 19th, 2008 at 1:27 am

Gravatar Reverend Speed says:

Am obliged to mention that Soul Reaver > Prey.

And what a twist in SRII.

Yes, from a pure mechanics standpoint one could argue that you die in Soul Reaver, but the gameplay and story are so wrapped up in those mechanics that one could argue it never broke the flow of the experience (dynamic loading helped a LOT).

September 19th, 2008 at 1:30 am

Gravatar K says:

You are Doctor Manhattan.

September 19th, 2008 at 1:31 am

Gravatar suchchoices says:

I’m playing through clear sky at the moment, on the highest difficulty setting. It’s a glorious festival of quickloading, with the occasional crash to desktop. I’ve even had one crash that corrupted a savegame. double plus masochism :|

braid has failure states, in the levels where there are objects that are non-rewindable - nothing to do but restart the stage.
there’s also the massive failure state where you need to restart the entire game from scratch if you miss grabbing one of the collectables on your first pass through

September 19th, 2008 at 1:38 am

Gravatar Pijama says:

“You may not die, but you can still regret.”- That is the core principle. And I got a pretty heavy Planescape vibe here.

Such a game is very well within possibility. If I were a designer, I would integrate the gameplay totally with setting and story - but I would have to make a BLOODY AWESOME setting and story. Having an invincible character means that the player will disregard his/her safety, so we should compensate it with something that makes the player care so much. Creating a family for him/her and developing it very deeply to the point that if something happens during the course of the game you get genuinely sad/pissed/frustrated/*insert powerful emotional state here*. This is just a scrap in the surface, of course.

It is a genuine challenge; But one that could, perhaps, bring a revolution to gaming.

September 19th, 2008 at 1:39 am

Gravatar Darth Benedict says:

How about a game where you play one of those ubiquitous ancient evils that always rises again. The goal is to get through the whole game without ever revealing your plan to supposedly defeated heroes while cackling maniacally.

September 19th, 2008 at 1:57 am

Gravatar Dudelet says:

You mean a game when you never die? Or never see the “Game Over” screen? They are two different things. Killing NPC can sometimes end up with Game Over.

Anyway, guys, you’ve all overlooked one thing. ~Godmode
Max Payne 2 comes to mind. Godmode on, go for New York Minute. A lot more fun when you don’t have to worry about painkillers all the time, and just bullets.

September 19th, 2008 at 2:07 am

Gravatar John Walker says:

I mean, to clarify for everyone, that you never see a game over screen. You don’t die/lose. You’re invincible. The game’s challenge isn’t to stay alive, but to progress. But I’m not offering how that might work.

September 19th, 2008 at 2:16 am

Gravatar aiusepsi says:

To be totally contrarian, I’d say that offering a challenge without any plausible suggestions or scenarios for solving it is pointless - the challenge you present may not actually have any solutions!

It’s like challenging a physicist to produce an analytical solution to the the Schrodinger equation for the Helium atom - such a thing just doesn’t exist. The same could be true with games - there could be no region in the gameplay parameter space that doesn’t include death or a functionally equivalent failure state. You need a counter-example to prove that such a region actually exists at all.

Like other people have said, if you don’t have a failure state, then pretty much any action you take will lead to you finishing the game, save standing up and walking away from the computer. You’ve just removed the stakes.

Not to mention that removing death severely circumscribes the potential variety of fiction you can use. Most people in most stories can die - making your hero one of the kind that can’t inevitably introduces sci-fi/fantasy elements that might be unwelcome.

@andy, re: Crackdown - It’s well worth trying again, try ignoring killing people for a while and just have fun exploring and collecting agility orbs. Building up the ability to leap over buildings in a single bound is not only fun, but helps you run away if you’re about to be dead. It’s the worth the perseverence because as you level up, you quickly become pretty impervious to dying.

September 19th, 2008 at 2:23 am

Gravatar feffrey says:

There is a great flash game called Indestructo tank
http://www.addictinggames.com/indestructotankae.html
You drive a tank that is invincible. to kill enemies (helicopters jets, etc) you must get hit by their weapons. Once you get hit you go flying into the air. once air born you control your movement to hit enemies. Every time you blow something up, you fly higher into the air.
Lots of fun

September 19th, 2008 at 2:30 am

Gravatar Muzman says:

re: the Valve method. For all its vaunted greatness in keeping things fun and interesting, Half Life and Half Life 2 feature quite long and seemingly self indulgent sections that I just hate and find extremely dull. Episode One was utterly forgetable in nearly every way and is remembered like it was made from the aforementioned annoying bits of the previous games. Episode 2 on the other hand is just about perfect; well paced and eventful enough that the Half-Life design ethic wasn’t obviously leading or frustrating for its limitations (even though it is) and still seeming challenging. It’s the only time I could say I believe in the Valve method (well, Portal as well really but that had a novel mechanic to help). Did the same methods really create all these games, I ask myself. I wish I was a tester sometimes. Some of the stuff people get from testing and focus groups; I’d stick a pin in that fun balloon they reckon they understand so well. boy howdy.

Anyway, I don’t really want to derail things. This idea could be some way to actually make a good Superman game for once and do what plenty have always wanted; lose kryptonite.
You just have to rescue people or stop meteors or god knows what. You could muck around with time a bit there as well.

September 19th, 2008 at 2:36 am

Gravatar Mister Hands says:

Along the lines of the “no death, still regret” idea… you’re immortal. So that means not only can you not be killed by external forces, you also don’t age - eventually, leaving you detached from the world… everyone you know dies, entire generations seem like blinks of an eye.

Hard to capture in a regular game, but it’s an interesting idea for, say, episodic gaming. Your character never, ever dies, but the world around you keeps progressing. The NPC characters you get close to in early episodes can actually age, and you could either have quests to make them immortal somehow, or show the consequences of living through the deaths of every single person you know.

I’m in way over my head here. :p

September 19th, 2008 at 2:48 am

Gravatar compuguy1088 says:

Boris: “YES! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!”

Because no one posted that quote to go with that picture :D

September 19th, 2008 at 2:55 am

Gravatar Carlton says:

At first the idea of no death made me reluctant to agree with the post, but when you think about it for a long while it starts to make sense. For instance the new Prince of Persia was turning me off just for that reason, because a lot of people find dying in video games synonymous with challenge.

But the really, really difficult part is coming up with a different penalty that hits a different emotional response. In the case of say, a Superman game, it would have to be something like two terrible events are happening and the player has to make a choice. Theoretically there could be a way to take care of both because you’re Superman, but you could take too long at one or just not get to the other because of something on the way and people die because of it.

That could result in gameplay changes that just make it more difficult for you to help people in time and do your job. For instance the train crash you didn’t get to that killed dozens of people creates a vengeful antagonist and he just becomes another problem that gets in your way when you’re trying to save lives. A game like that would actually be refreshing because your goal would be saving lives rather than punching people all the time.

It would have to be done really, really well, though. The player would have to feel bad in some way for letting a bunch of people die, and that could be hard to do for a gaming culture that is becoming increasingly desensitized. It’s also a lot of work, and suggests an open world structure so dynamic that I don’t know it would be worth doing it.

September 19th, 2008 at 3:35 am

Gravatar Tom says:

I never play games on their hard setting for one simply reason, nine times out of ten all that affects is the amount of bullets the enemies can absorb, which spoils it for me. I don’t care how hard they are, a shotgun blast to the head is going to, at the very least, send any enemy with their their brains in their heads reeling backwards.
I long for the day when increasing the difficulty increases the enemies cunning. I don’t mind dying so long as I feel the AI deserved the kill - I enjoy being surprised by AI.
The Half Life demo Uplink was a good example of this.
(Is it just me, or did Valve dumb down the AI in Half Life? I remember being amazed by the tactics of the AI in Uplink, but surprised by the apparent lack in Half Life.)

September 19th, 2008 at 4:14 am

Gravatar hart says:

Some of the replies to this thread are really quite dense. To the guy at the beginning of the comments who said “enemies who waste your time without killing you are pointless blah blah” - when they kill you, they ARE wasting your time! Enemies in games exist to be an obstacle, nothing more.

Here’s my take on (what I feel is) a pretty obvious solution to the challenge set here:
The protagonist can dodge or take almost every attack, punches, bullets whatever. They still have an effect on him, but cannot truly hurt him. Knock-downs, pushes, stuns, whatever. Not going to detail that stuff for you. Implement some combat mechanics that focus on *dodging* attacks rather than surviving them.

Timing and position. Failure simply means you get pushed back in an inconvenient direction, maybe even back to a previous environment or level.

I’m actually picturing a kind of Superhero styled Diablo game. Even something like Gears’ 3rd person view would work. Something that allows you to focus on the important things - position and movement.

September 19th, 2008 at 4:20 am

Gravatar Kong says:

wthf I love americans whatever
Bitch dies jumps doesnt die. hey again, I love americans.
In GURPS nobody dies except on purpose or bad chance. 50k bullets to kill one vietcong, that statistic does not apply in pc games. Emptied 4 mags onna bitch inna bush and bitch still kicking and hollerin.
Feed me!
“March or die” L. Kilmister

September 19th, 2008 at 4:26 am

Gravatar Daniel Purvis says:

Though tthis isn’t exactly what you had in mind, I found myself turning down the difficulty in The Force Unleashed so that I could just appreciate the environments, feel like the invincible super-badass that The Apprentice is supposed to be and just enjoy rolling through the level.

Though not challenging, it was definitely enjoyable.

September 19th, 2008 at 4:30 am

Gravatar Skaal-tel says:

I hate to have nothing particularly helpful to add this discussion BUT — I agree with everything Noc said.

I disagree with the writer’s points. You want a game where you’re invincible yet have challenge? No death? What is “Death” in a video game? Simply redo the section again in one way or another.

In a more shooter based environment, what do you want? The game to change entirely when you fail so you don’t do the same thing again? Sounds like…… Tetris.

September 19th, 2008 at 4:46 am

Gravatar mister slim says:

Dynasty Warriors would be an easy game to start with. It’s fairly hard to die in the game as it is, and people still seem to find it entertaining. Just make it so the health bar can’t completely empty and I doubt many players would care. To make it a little more interesting just add in optional time-based objectives that give the player more interesting weapons or powers, so the player’s incentive to improve is driven by shiny new toys rather than death.

September 19th, 2008 at 5:50 am

Gravatar No Picnic says:

Ever hear that Ok Go song “Invincible”? Here’s the first verse:

“When they finally come to destroy the earth, they’ll have to go through you first.
I bet they won’t be expecting that.
When they finally come to destroy the earth, they’ll have to deal with you first,
and now my money says they won’t know about the
thousand Fahrenheit hot metal lights behind your eyes!”

At the end of Bioshock, I was so ridiculously powerful. It felt good, baby! I want to feel like an unstoppable titan. I want to feel like Neo at the end of the Matrix. I want to feel *feared.*

I really like the idea of a game that would make me invincible. Maybe it could outline someone gradually discovering their powers. Maybe it would play more like an interactive movie than a game where it’s easy to get stuck. I just think the idea sounds exciting.

September 19th, 2008 at 8:03 am

Gravatar Turin Turambar says:

So.. you don’t want an action game
I mean, the challenge still has to exist. If the challenge doesn’t come from the thing that can kill you, it has to come from another things, like the scenario and certain difficult situations.

Well, that’s not new. They are called adventure games, and puzzle games, in some cases with bits of stealth or platform games.

September 19th, 2008 at 8:06 am

Gravatar Joe says:

Bioshock, Planescape Torment, Psychonauts (you just wake up), System Shock (if you use the scanners).

Nuff said.

September 19th, 2008 at 8:08 am

Gravatar Lukasz says:

@No Picnic

Diablo was like that. After you replay the game you are practically invincible to non-boss characters. slaughtering everybody and everyone.
and 99 leveled fallout 2 character with everything maxed out, with best equipment is practically unbeatable.

September 19th, 2008 at 8:16 am

Gravatar Myros says:

Funny Ive always wanted the opposite … where death is invincible ;p

As in part of the story of Tad Williams’ Otherland series about a boy who plays in an MMOrpg where death is permanent. People’s accomplishments seemed, in the story, to mean so much more because mistakes really can be fatal.

A practical path to that may be something along the lines of dynasty control eg you control the current hero of a family, upon his/her death you then set your ‘heir’ to assume the role who recieves the inheritence of some equipment and money etc. And through choices of the previous hero might have some development pre-set so your not starting totaly from scratch again.

IMO that seems far more interesting than being invincible :)

September 19th, 2008 at 8:16 am

Gravatar yns88 says:

How about this: A game called Phoenix. When you die, you become reborn in a massive fiery explosion - this is your only offensive mechanism.

In other words, you’re not really dying, you’re merely provoking your opponents (and the puzzles) into setting off your secret weapon.

Also, I think the complaint about the mechanic of death in video games can oddly enough be responded to with permanent death in much the same manner as with invincibility.

Myros: Ever played roguelikes? After playing NetHack, one can really relate to the online game in Otherland. This is probably because that MMO itself is based on Rogue-style RPGs of the early 90s.

September 19th, 2008 at 8:23 am

Gravatar Jim Rossignol says:

@Joe - you’re not actually invincible in any of those games, just immortal.

September 19th, 2008 at 8:59 am

Gravatar Psychopomp says:

Whats with some of the spite towards difficult games?

Believe it or not, there are those of us out there who *like* a game that pushes our skills. I have no problem with easy games, but Prey’s method completely ruined the game for me. Which is odd, since I adore Bioshock.

HOWEVER, if anyone could ever do as the author set forth, than we will quite possibly have the single biggest milestone in gaming since Nintendo saved the industry.

September 19th, 2008 at 9:01 am

Gravatar The Sombrero Kid says:

monkey island is exactly what you seek

edit: just noticed you ruled out adventure games which is a little unfair because the principle is the same you could die in a lot of adventure games and it was annoying as hell like you say and they found a way to make it work without that, the techniques in monkey island can be directly applied to action games without edit

September 19th, 2008 at 9:02 am

Gravatar Acosta says:

I know adventures are out of question, but this reminds me to what happened in adventures when Lucas decided not to use deaths anymore (after Last Crusade I think), suddenly they couldn’t rely in using that way of challenge and their next games were better, imaginative and brilliant (we could argue how important was erasing death for that, but I think it was quite important). Could this be a parallelism of what you are trying to expose, John?

September 19th, 2008 at 9:04 am

Gravatar The Sombrero Kid says:

i was actually talking about the other day is that all games should be able to rewind or fast forward all the way through them like a film, to get to the bits you liked easily or whatever, i think i was getting at a similar thing to this.

September 19th, 2008 at 9:07 am

Gravatar Plinglebob says:

An idea for a different penalty to death would be NPC death and the consequences of that down the line. Being invincible means you can be careless with what you do, but if you had a reason to care about the NPC’s around you either through in game rewards or good story telling (preferably the latter) it could change the way you’d play.

The best example I can come up with is the first mission starts in ancient times, your fighting and you have 5 NPCs fighting alongside you. As the game progresses through the years, the descendants of the original 5 NPCs follow you through (same character models used, similar voices etc) along with other families you get to know along the way . However, if an NPC dies, the bloodline is severed and they wont appear again. This could mean anything from being a man down in a later mission (because the NPC’s great grandson was supposed to fight with you) to losing out on a particular weapon (because the guy you failed to save was going to invent it 20 years later).

Expand this through 2000 years of history and you could have some fantastic story telling (the families you save marrying etc) and could also show the loneliness immortality brings because if you just didn’t care and let them all die, you would be on the final mission alone instead of with what could end up being an army friends fighting beside you

September 19th, 2008 at 9:15 am

Gravatar Crane says:

You want a game where you can’t die. Fine… but who said anyone else gets the same treatment?

You play an angel. You’re completely invulnerable to all forms of harm, obviously.
Your job is to watch over the Hero. Who’s the Hero? Dunno. Could be an Indiana Jones-esque archaeologist trying to prevent the opening of an ancient tomb, could be a hard-boiled private eye trying to bring down a drug ring. Doesn’t matter. But he can’t be allowed to die! Everyone knows, the hero never dies, because…

You are what make the protagonist invincible.

You flick aside the bullets of the Hero’s enemies, you catch him as he leaps over the waterfall, you shield him from the blast of that bomb that he couldn’t quite defuse in time, you reflect the sun into the eyes of the sniper on the rooftop. The whole story is about the Hero, about his quest to save the world. He, and all the other NPCs, will never know you exist. You’re invisible to them, and all your actions will be put down to luck. But if you don’t keep the Hero safe, it’s the end of the world.

So, you can only fail if the Hero dies before he can save the world. BUT, that doesn’t mean it can’t be a sad ending. Maybe you can’t stop the assassin from executing the Love Interest. Maybe you can’t save the Hero, right at the end; he saves the world but dies in the process. Maybe you can’t push a bystander out of the way during a car chase, and the Hero plows through a group of school children, and winds up bitter and emotionally traumatised, killing himself at the end.

You only have to ensure the world is saved… There’s nothing that says the hero has to be happy when it’s over.

September 19th, 2008 at 9:38 am

Gravatar Quater says:

“I believe there was actually a recent Superman game in which you were invincible, but rather than a health bar, the city itself had a health bar, and if it dropped to zero, you lost.”

Glad to see I’m not the only one who instantly thought of Superman as a prime example of the problem we’re talking about here. While Braid is an example of this type of game done as a small indie arty thing, your big-budget blockbuster would essentially be a Superman game finaly done right. I’d like to point out here that some people say the problem with Superman is that his indestructibility makes him inherently boring - what a load of piffle. How could playing as an unstoppable, indestructible, irresistible force of good be boring? Superman stories are never bad because of the character, they’re bad when the WRITER has failed to use his imagination and ingenuity to do the character justice.

With all we know about the character and his motivations, imagine a situation where your enemy threatens to blow up Earth, and you fail the mission (which *can* be won) for whatever reason - but the game *doesn’t end*. You simply have to keep going and live with the idea that Superman has failed at his fundamental task to not suffer a second time the loss of his home and loved ones. Now your only option is to pursue the villain across the galaxy for revenge. Now that would be pretty damn cool.

September 19th, 2008 at 9:56 am

Gravatar Kev H says:

I do like the concept that the enemies can’t kill you, but just impede you - it would provide a good excuse for swarms of enemies that you need to forge a path through, more complex physical structures that you need to conquer. The idea concept would be something akin to forging your way up a building that contains hordes of nicely-varied enemies and numerous pitfalls all set to send you back to the lobby.

And the dropping of save points from within levels would then remove the need for a time limit, as there would only be two possibilities: succes, you reach the end of the level; failure, you get pushed back to the start and have to go again.

In essence you would be left with a more interesting, electronic version of tug-of-war.

September 19th, 2008 at 9:57 am

Gravatar AbyssUK says:

OK my idea, your already dead! You play a spirit who can take over the living. Once you take over somebody/thing you become them, if they die you return to spirit form and have to find a new host. You can only be released by dying so to swap over from say a dog to a cow you have to either be killed as the dog or commit suicide somehow, then become the spirit. You then also need enough power to take over the new living, this power can be built up by completing missions, side quests, killing things… etc.. but there are always critters about that are rock bottom level.

Different living things will have different abilities dogs can smell stuff, birds can fly, people can use stuff,.. cows can erm… moo ?? different people have different abilities id cards keys etc..

In later levels less living things can be around so that when your host dies it takes you longer to find another host.. or only weaker hosts are about.. or not having a certain host at certain points means you have to take a different path/direction one path may open up more of the story while the other does not. Also certain “ghostbuster” or physic creatures can push you away or trap you and remove your power but only while in spirit form to force you into a crappier host. When in a host it’ll be like Hitman nothing knows anything is wrong until you do something strange.. like bite people or attack things.. when they do they act to try and stop you by killing you. Certain living can push you out of a host maybe.. or force you into themselves even!

I’d buy this game and you as the spirit never die.

p.s. Fridays in the lab are always very slow so that’s why I had enough time to do this… the shame…

September 19th, 2008 at 10:21 am

Gravatar The Sombrero Kid says:

i totally agree with the article in that, it’s saying yes you need a carrot and a stick but the stick we use just now is totally shit, lets come up with some other intelligently crafted sticks, not ones based on the guys who wrote games in the 60’s it’s actually ridiculous that we’re still clinging to these game mechanics from 50 years ago cause we’re too lazy and scared to come up with one that maybe fits better.

September 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am

Gravatar Dug Briderider says:

Just cos no ones mentioned it yet. Peter Molyneux has attempted to defeat death in action/adventure Fable 2 (at the cost of XP the hero rises up in a last stand kind of way).
I know PM talks things up a bit but he wanted the player to never have to replay sections of the game again which sound like the aim here.

September 19th, 2008 at 10:40 am

Gravatar Diogo Ribeiro says:

I don’t think I have anything worthwhile to say. Not so much because I can’t think of ways to introduce invincibility to a game but because I think these would largely apply to very specific contexts (ie., an elemental creature who can never truly die as it travels through, absorbs and controls anything based on, electricity), or invulnerability (ie., you’re an experiment gone wrong and are now invulnerable, but your body gives you both powers and weaknesses as you interact with others).

I had been messing around with a similar concept the last couple of months but it did not use immortality or invincibility per se. Rather, it used a protagonist who “cheated”, meaning, he had to alternate between functions such as “god mode”, “noclip” and “notarget” to advance through levels and solve puzzles. I guess one could work that in a way so the protagonist was invincible.

On the example of the character who is an experiment, you could make it so he is invulnerable but his body reacts to certain materials. For instance bullets ricochet off his skin but his body begins to absorb the properties of the metal, making the body become dense. The draw is that while being hit by a burst from an automatic rifle would increase the character’s ability to hit harder and even destroy the environment, his speed would drastically slow down. This could apply to all sorts of weapons. Of course, there should also be a way to release that energy, maybe work it into a special attack or temporary ability (as in, expelling the density accumulated by bullets would release metal pellets in all directions, which could hurt enemies).

Note that either the positives or negatives of coming into contact with a given type of attack could bring new ways of solving puzzles or overcoming obstacles, as well as posing a challenge. It’s not just about being Neo or somesuch - note that while invulnerable, enemies are still a nuisance. Let’s say you’ve alerted the guards and reinforcements are on the way. What do you do?

1) A couple of guards open fire at you. You hear through their comm radios that more an on the way. You absorb several AK47 blasts to become denser, rip open the elevator doors and drop through the shaft, destroying the incoming elevator and its troops.

2) A couple of guards open fire at you. You hear through their comm radios that more an on the way. You absorb several AK47 blasts to become denser, rip open the elevator doors and throw them at the two soldiers. When the elevator arrives, you unleash the energy and kill them off.

3) A couple of guards open fire at you. You hear through their comm radios that more an on the way. You absorb several AK47 blasts to become denser, kill them off, then go rampaging through the walls until you find a safe spot away from the reinforcements.

Other possibilities could include fire (ie., able to conjure fire projectiles, or increase the temperature of a given object or area; but unable to fully control your body as it becom