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.
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.
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.
Related Stories:
Quater: No. “Feersum Enjin” =)
Good call, sir.
I’ve not read all the other comments, so please forgive me if this has been mentioned in some way before.
If you’re going to give the player’s character immortality, I’d like to see it done in context. For example, you could pick the Japanese mecha scenario – first part of the game has you playing as a young kid with a bunch of rebels, and they are guarding you through to the enemy stronghold where there’s a big robot suit. Stuff happens, and your character gets in the suit – now you have to protect your previous protectors. Make the gameplay cool as hell, lots of variation etc. but the thing you want to impress on the player is that they should protect the gang that risked their own lives to get the player there in the first place. For each rebel person who dies, it could be another story thread chopped; if the player gets to the end with the rebels all killed, then give ‘em the sad as hell ending.
Sorry for rambling on, I had a thought and it came out of my fingers. Doesn’t happen very often. That is all.
Unfortunately, I feel that Noc’s response effectively nullified this whole article. which is unfortunate, since I really liked the idea. plus, I’ve noticed people keep pitching what are essentially puzzle games, or varients on Messiah and Omicron.
as for an action game with no death ? I remember playing metal gear solid in godmode (gameshark), and there still a bit of a challenge, because if you were spotted, the whole area would lockdown and you’d be required to hide, and retry intruding that area again. but in line with Noc’s arguement, just because I didn’t die there, didn’t make it inherently more interesting. I was inconvenienced, and ended up wasting a lot of time retrying in the same areas. thats not necessarily conducive to fun or innovaton.
Can’t believe it’s not been mentioned already, and I know it’s not exactly what you’re thinking of:
Lego Star Wars: You can die quite easily (especially with that bloody camera angle), but you have infinite lives, the worst you have to do is repeat a short section.
This makes life easier for less skilled gamers, and for the type of people round here, well, there’s always pride in not dieing all the way through a level (plus the many, many collectables)
It’s nice to read this many comments on a post which isn’t on piracy, Bioshock or WoW.
I have to agree with a couple of above posters that Tom Francis’ idea on this is excellent. The idea of the challenge coming from a race against time, or an invincible enemy is really exciting to me. I’m kind of envisaging a super hero career game, perhaps with character creation similar to CoH and a dynamic story (let’s see how Far Cry 2 does with that). Maybe you could post your best characters to the web. Come to think of it, could this work as an MMO? Dying is such an artificial obstacle in WoW style MMOs anyway.
Howard: sounds a bit like Altered Carbon et al also. (Use of weapons >> Feersum Enjinn, mind)
Banks’ writing of the Minds, especially Excession, shows how much fun you can have with essentially godlike powers, and also how hard it is to write compelling narrative at that power level (one book every three years?).
Love the guardian angel idea, reminds me of, umm Action Force 2? You played a sniper protecting a commando climbing a building…
Interesting idea. I’m a little bit afraid of the “it’s ok to fall down, you just have to climb up again” remarks. I’ve certainly been in situations where I’ve messed up a jump at the end of a difficult platforming sequence, fallen off the whatever it was, and wished that I’d died so I could respawn at a nice checkpoint halfway up. Instead it’s a long slog up the gameplay-face only to fail the difficult jump again.
Do you think a lack of death could remove tension? Compare the sort of MP game (at which I am terrible) where you only get one life per round (and therefore you have to value your skin a lot more) with the sort where you can respawn as much as you like and can act like a gung ho nutcase.
Actually that’s maybe a poor argument – I’ve been just as tense trying to get the last couple of frags in Q3A DM as I ever was in Counterstrike or Call of Duty. And I enjoyed Quake a lot more :)
Coming back to the tension thing, it’s probably important to avoid a war of attrition situation because again it deals a terrible blow to tension. If you know that you’re not really going to fail, you’re just waiting until you have enough guys/points/chutzpah to progress past the current obstable it can be quite dull.
Case in point would be the first Darwinia ant level – I never felt threatened by the ants, I just had to out produce them and that was the point where the game went from being charming to boring for me.
Similar case would be early Braid – you can’t die, because you can always rewind. But at one point I was rewinding about 50 times to get a pixel perfect jump lined up – not tense because I knew I’d get it eventually, but no real skill involved and no fun had during the attempts.
But just because it’s possible to come up with worrying counter examples doesn’t mean the original idea isn’t a good one. Are there games out there which offer this kind of mechanic with fun and challenge and tension at the same time?
Anyone here reading The Escapist or TTLG? ;)
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122429
Wario Land
So wait, the fact that every Valve game is made for stupidest common denominator from the fighting aspect to level design is a good thing?
Half Life 2 is the New Bioshock?
Damn, the internets move fast.
@ Diogo Ribeiro
Your idea about alternating between god-mode/no-clip/no-target actually sounds a bit like what crysis tried to do with the nano suit. You had a choice between faster, tougher, stronger or invisible. I think it could have been a far better game, but that was one fun thing about it.
As for the idea of not dying, EVAR, I think its important to distinguish between dying and losing. In halflife2 if you lost the vehicle on any vehicle level you were screwed. Dying is an annoying inconvenience, but its the fundamental idea of replaying sections that I believe we’re talking about here. And that really is a challenge.
How do you make an objective both necessary and un-necessary at the same time? If I have to protect an NPC for five minutes, and I let him die, I can’t go on as if nothing happened. If a player fails an objective, there is either a consequence, or there isn’t. The game goes on, or the game must repeat.
In order to ‘win’ a game, we must achieve some ultimate objective. Kill the bad guy. Collect all the things. Solve the Puzzle. These are all definite objectives. If we fail to achieve them, we must re-attempt them. If we can ‘win’ without achieving them then they were never important in the first place.
We could create a game in which there is no way to win. In essence, a game which goes on forever. Some game which is basically a set of endless, ever more intense and difficult sidequests. But without an arc story, without narration, sidequests by themselves are meaningless. One would really need AI so complex that it would engage the player in a real story everytime. Perhaps build NPCs that over time become companions or nemeses. Eventually we come back around to things threatening our NPCs.
This goes into what Mister Hands said about NPCs around you ageing. It all becomes about trying to protect the ones you love from harm.
————————————-
I just read Noc’s post which basically says everything I just said, but I’ve been typing for ages so I’m posting anyway.
=P
@roryok:
Very true, although I can’t quite remember an ability that worked like “noclip”. However, the “cheats” would probably be a cross of developer code and powers in my example, so it’s natural to find parallels between them and Crysis (or any other action game with similar powers).
yeah I thought about that, the strength option let you jump quite high, similar to the fly mode that no-clip often allows, but it is a bit of a ‘jump’ I suppose. har de har.
It’s been a long time since I played any game with God mode turned on. I actually find that I’ve missed it. The only time I ever used it was when I played consoles, I’ve never used a God mode on PC.
Typically, to have an invincible avatar they would have to be something either super-natural or excessively advanced in development. I feel a Species game coming on(eek!).
Playing a couple of action games with god mode on might inspire some new ideas, but one thing that sticks out now is that games do not have to be a challenge for them to be worthwhile. Bioshock only has a short life-span if you scan every inch of the game world for every piece of narrative. Games can be great solely on their narrative, which should NOT be confused with story. Vortigaunts becoming allies of the resistence and revering ‘The Free-Man’ is narrative; Valve has told us nothing about the story for it. Assassin’s Creed on the other hand bombards us with story but little narrative.
Gorgy: by story, do you mean backstory?
Loved Crane’s guardian angel idea. An idea that might be quite difficult to implement but would add challenge is that you can’t be too obvious in saving your hero. So maybe you have the ability to fry anyone in his path with lightning, but if you keep doing that he gets cocky and doesn’t bother killing anyone himself, giving you even more work. So you have to find more subtle ways to get him through – maybe you help his bullets stay on target, or stop the enemies getting to him in the first place.
Also agreed with Will Vale that I’d rather re-load or kill myself (both in game and, after multiple attempts, in real life) than face replaying even a small chunk of level, especially if that too was fairly challenging.
Obviously you’ve got to have some sort of reward/penalty system in place to make the game worth playing (or do you?) and the suggestions that caught my eye were the ones that offered narrative consequences rather than wasting the player’s time in some fashion (by forcing them to replay any of the game). So the challenge would be to make players care enough about the narrative/NPCs/whatever OR to think of some other way to reward success.
Apologies if I’m reiterating things that others have said – I read all the comments but had almost forgotten the original post by the time I finished :P
Crane’s idea sounds a bit like one of the original ideas for Uplink – they wanted to include missions where you hacked into a building’s security system and helped a team infiltrate it, opening doors and cancelling alarms and so on and so forth. You’d basically be Luther from Mission: Impossible 2. I thought it sounded superb but pretty hard to implement; you’d need a huge bank of voice samples so the team could tell you what was going on, and it would be difficult to work in trickier challenges (power cut in the east wing to draw guards and let your team in the west, etc) in a way that encourages the player to experiment with HAL9000-type comedy.
Similarly, you – the player – couldn’t die; so long as you had the necessary bypass tools, you’d be safe in their system, but your team could get captured or killed or fail to achieve their objective. Essentially the same thing; it’s basically a squad RTS without the micromanagement and with much cooler visuals. The best gunfights are the ones you imagine because someone shot out your security camera.
The problem with most suggestions here is that nobody’s really come up with concrete examples of how immortality could be incorporated into changing how the game works for the better by removing player death.
Let’s pick Deus Ex. As a stealth/shooter (forget the RPG bit for a while) it’s especially prone to quicksave play. Entering a dangerous new area? Better save. Get discovered? Sometimes it’s better to reload. And it has conversations. Of all the annoyances of failure, nothing is worse than having to repeat conversation pieces, even cut-scenes
Clearly, a lot has to change about Deus Ex in order for it to work with an immortal character, but there are a couple of obvious leads. Take saving Paul. I didn’t, because I killed everyone and jumped out the window, but the act itself doesn’t change the mechanical outcome of the game significantly either way. But it changes the emotional weight of the story. Obviously there needs to be some sort of threat to Paul’s life that you being immortal can’t solve – you can still be stunned while he’s executed, or otherwise be removed from the fight for a while if you mess up, but the point is the story and the game moves smoothly on whether or not you succeed or fail.
And once you’re done with Paul, you have a long and dangerous trek to the train station and Gunther, who is, honest to god, immortal and will arrest your ass no matter which way you try and run. But dying here is the one place where it doesn’t mean game over, because you’ll always wake up in prison, and that’s the second interesting pointer that Deus Ex has for challenging an immortal character, especially for games that are all about branching narratives. (Well, it would be if you could actually end up somewhere else if you evaded the guards and had the option of discovering the code you need to destroy Gunter.) Imagine that basic principle applied to the whole of Deus Ex – any time the player ‘dies’, something happens that moves the plot forward. Maybe a support character dies in their place rescuing them. Maybe they wake up in a field hospital location and are given a new objective. Maybe they’re abducted by terrorists who attempt to explain themselves to you, and you can agree to become a double (or even triple) agent if you’re interested in what they say, or just try and bust your ass out of there. There’s a bunch of obvious flaws to this, the most significant of which is coping with multiple character deaths on a single arc, which is why the transition needs to be extreme, you can’t just keep respawning in your jail-cell, your minders ever-negligent enough to let you slip out one more time. Instead, each take-down obliterates your previous objectives and replaces them with new ones, and advances the clock on the story in certain ways. The other big flaw is simply the sheer volume of additional assets any game with such a branching structure would need.
Obviously, I’m talking about a character which can still be ‘hurt’ but never killed, which isn’t quite John’s challenge. The thing is, normal failure in the GTAs (getting busted or wasted and respawning at the local hospital or police station) was never an issue, and made the character immortal, but failing missions was a pain in the ass, even if you survived they had to be restarted. But if the scope of the missions were expanded, to the stage where you could use any and all means to accomplish your ends, not just some gimmick or timed event – if you’re hunting a target for a hit, then even if you mess up an attempt and they go to ground, you can use favours to ask your contacts for their next location or something – and were more self contained, so they’re not all propping up some massive narrative of gangsta back stabbing that requires everyone to shuffle off at the appointed time.
Another example that’s fairly topical to the site would be Dreamfall. Advenure game, sure, but it’s the game’s action elements I want to address specifically, ie the stealth and fighting.
Dreamfall’s all about the story. But the (admittedly weak) challenge offered by the action elements in the game buggers up the story’s flow in a way that classic adventure game head-scratching doesn’t (as much) because they allow you to fail, WHICH CLEARLY DOESN’T HAPPEN IN THE STORY, while wandering around trying to figure out what to do usually makes more sense, especially if your character is also confused and down the rabbit hole, so to speak. Clearly your character should be immortal because the story has their fate written strictly into it, but how could action elements be incorporated in a way that’s (a) engaging for the player and (b) makes sense, in-game?
Apparently Dreamfall’s combat should have been more about choosing your approach tactically than hammering people with strong attacks (or something). Let’s say you’re invulnerable because you’re Kian and be bestest swordsman in the whole world, anyone tries to hit you, you block em automatically. But quick as you are, dodging and blocking takes time, time you can’t use to hit people, so mobs of enemies can force you onto the defensive. So you need to use your defensive movements tactically to isolate yourself and individual enemies to overcome their own defenses. Or you’re Zoe, and just have your fists but are really good as dodging, and basically have to move around, taunt and use your environment against attackers, such as having someone punching the wall behind you or stumbling past you and getting a kick in the arse to send them into the fireplace. Importantly you can have multiple methods of dispatching enemies, and can’t ’spoil’ finishing objects if you don’t quite manage to lure someone into your trap.
What about stealth sections? Nothing to my mind says quicksave/load like stealth sections, because these often lead to far more ‘repeat until timing is right’ situations. Even if some sort of lockdown or mission failing scenario doesn’t happen, you tend to have to wait for the guards to reset to their routines and attempt another run, which can get a bit tedious. I’m tired, so I’m stumped on that one for the moment, I but i do believe there is a more elegant way of handling stealth as well. I mean, I gave up on Trilby, Art of Theft because i became frustrated at being spotted and failing missions.
This thread, along with the Lugaru 2 stuff and someone mentioning protecting reminded me of Black Shades, another game by Wolfire Software.
“In Black Shades you control a psychic [and INVINCIBLE] bodyguard , and try to protect the VIP (dressed in white) from a horde of zombies, snipers and other assorted would-be assassins.
Unique Features
Infinite randomly generated city
Rag-doll skeletal animation
Soul release mode
Fluid aiming system
Stop assassins by shooting them, knocking them unconscious, disarming them, tackling the VIP out of the line of fire, or any combination of the above.”
Actually, I think you could be exploded by grenades. But you were never under attack yourself. It’s all about escorting the blissfully ignorant vip amongst a dynamically generated crowd where anyone could suddenly draw a gun or a knife. Another fun unrelated feature was the Action Half-Life-esque bleed-kill. With the smaller handgun, unless you scored a headshot, your target would only die within a second of getting shot. This allows the possibility for them to still stab your target to death. Hence, you have to either realistically double-tap them in the torso or drop them with a headshot.
Anyhow, highly reccomended. A game I carry on my USB stick: Check it out.
The idea is nice…for some people. I mean I know I enjoy a challenge, and while the thought of different motivation other than replay or death is nice, and I think that is the main point here…but in some cases I WANT replay. If there is a permanent plot change that I caused and did not like(I let the world get destroyed) I would want to be able to go back and change that. A new motivation is nice, but not everyone would want it, just as not everyone likes ones present now. And I don’t think a quest for new motivation is new, but consciously looking may be.
To answer Funky Badger’s very important question: No.
Back-story is just the story in a past-pretense. Stories are told, narrative is shown; merely put on display. You have to listen to a story, but narrative is optional and happens regardless of any observer. The thing about the Vorts is that there isn’t any story to their history or their present: only narrative. We are shown them as they were in the past and how they are now and are allowed to come to our own opinions of what might of happened. We are not burdened with the responsibility of knowing what happened in order to be allowed to understand what happened.
Assassin’s Creed is completely the opposite to Half-Life and Bioshock: we have little choice, we are not shown what happens but forced to learn and know it. What little narrative there is gets seperated completely from the gameplay and confined to Desmond’s timeline: a gameplay-free enviroment.
Examples of narrative:
1. Completing a mission in GTA and having a random news announcement on the radio talking about it from the non-player perspective.
2. Gordan Freeman becoming an exalted messiah to the Vortigaunt race in between Half-Life 1 and 2 while he’s in stasis.
What is not narrative, but story:
1. A cutscene at the beginning, middle or end of a mission in GTA.
2. Gordan Freeman being told he has met Alyx Vance before at Black Mesa but he probably doesn’t remember her. This is complicated because Freeman is the avatar of the player and Valve cleverly manage to have Freeman’s knowledge line-up with the player: neither of them know who Alyx is when they meet them. In one narrative video-cast Dr Breen berates Combine soldiers for not capturing Freeman who is ‘not trained as a soldier’ as most players won’t be and is described as an over-paid under-achiever that hadn’t put in the work appropriate to his pHD. Freeman is a mish-mash of what demographic archtypes a player is: a slightly-lazy nerd with a love of puzzle-solving, pragmatic thinking and above average fitness.
Such a complicated avatar is genius narrative in itself. He’s either a lucky idiot, depressed tough-guy or mute prodigy with a crowbar. A protagonist we can impose our personality on not because he’s bland, but because other people are reacting to him as if he has their unquestioning respect, which we all want. No one gets angry with him, no one is intimidated by him and they want him to like them. JC Denton can’t make the same claim.
I totally agree. I don’t know how many games I’ve played through in God mode, or how many games I quit playing because there was no God mode, but it’s probably over 20 each.
Having thought about things a bit more, I want to rebut the argument that removing failure states from a game would turn it into a non-game, and I think RTSes (especially Darwinia) demonstrate an approach towards failure that’s much more in tune with the idea put forward by John.
Now, most RTSes, you’re a godlike, incorporeal entity, so obviously you can’t be killed, although some may give you semi-avatars, like Total War’s generals, who have stats that can affect battles and can be killed. And in the tradition of C&C and Blizzard, each scenario has to be completed with certain limited resources and is a fixed stepping stone on the road of some scripted military campaign in which success is the only option.
But even within that limited framework, players typically have a lot more wriggle room between success and failure, because they can create secondary bases and other forms of insurance that help keep them in the game. Sometimes you can build yourself into a corner or mine all the resources from the map and squander them on a war of attrition, but even a crushing military defeat is typically more of a setback than it is a failure. You can gather more resouces, train more troops, rebuild your base.
This is taken even further by games such as the Total War series, where each battle takes place within a larger strategic context. I would never reload a failed battle, even if it swung the game against me, mostly because it was quite hard to fail battles where you weren’t horribly outnumbered or did sometimes foolish, and because loosing a battle was again a setback, not a failure. Lose and you’re back in the campaign map, and there’s armies to raise and provinces to be re-taken. Even if I knew I hadn’t a hope in winning a battle, I would still try and do my utmost to inflict the maximum amount of damage on my enemy’s army so they would be weakened for my counter-attack.
Darwinia really embraced the idea of the player being unable to fail in an RTS, in a game-over sense. You can reset levels if you get stuck with an out-of-control viral infection, but even that’s not a failure state, because it’s the player choosing to restart and take a different approach, rather than being forced to try again. Within the game, your units cost nothing to build and are only limited by your command slots, and are completely expendable. You have no base to assault, so you can never be destroyed permanently, even if all your units are wiped out. The closest it comes to failure states are the missions where you have to harvest souls released by the viruses, where it’s possible to get a bit carried away destroying the virus and not gathering souls.
The point is, there is a critical difference between the setbacks offered in Darwinia, even when it comes to the loss of units, and dying in an action game. (Incidentally, comparing the frustration of dying in an action game to being stuck in an adventure game as like-and-like is nonsense, as anyone who’s played hybrid games like the latest Broken Swords will know. Dying repeatedly is a far more annoying situation than being stuck.)
Fuck. Ever since Braid came out, thoughts have entered my head that revolve around how alienating Death is in games; how developers should always avoid the death of the player in games with a strong or realistic narrative. Theres nothing less realistic, less immersion breaking, than when you look at a ‘You’re Dead’ screen. It’s definately A way forward.
@Gorgeras: Mate, you definately have the concept of story/ narrative (or plot) the wrong way round. I refer to plot seeing as the two elements of narrative of information giving are story and plot.
Story = everything contained in the canon of the fictional world, i.e. A man sitting at a desk talking about his life.
Plot = the cause and effect sequence of events that lead from the beginning and end of what the viewer is shown, i.e. A woman entering the room and telling the man she wants to have an affair with him. From then on the plot is just the cause and effect of choices and events we see, the story something seperate entirely.
Okay I have to finish on this here post.
Narrative = the method a storyteller adopts to present the diegesis to the viewer. Basically everything you said was part of the narrative of those games.
EDIT: It’s meant to say ‘narrative or information giving’ in above post.
An interesting take on this would be where death is just an inconvenience while you “regenerate” a la Mr. Immortal of the Great Lakes Initiative.
You fall down a pit of spikes, maybe die, but then need to pull yourself off the spikes and find a way out of the pit. Maybe you meet up with gun-toting thugs, either you beat them somehow, or they fill you full of lead, laugh at you, then leave, depriving you of the opportunity to stop them.
“Dying” in this situation is just a gameplay mechanic, and you don’t replay scenes barring reloading the last save. You’ve just gotta figure out a way to carry on regardless of failures. No failure ever “stops” the narrative, but it does have consequences.
That’s my 2 cents.
Not a bad idea man. In a sense that’s kinda what Walker was saying- although you don’t die, you regret; you have to live with what mistakes you’ve made. I guess you’re taking death into account, and incorporating it into that idea.
It’s been done.
As I recall, the Superman game that Tiberon did, the movie tie-in, featured an invulnerable Superman, and a vulnerable Metropolis (on most stages). In theory, the CITY took damage (which would eventually cause you to lose the mission), but hits to you, as Superman, could only knock you down at best.
The player wasn’t invulnerable in that game, only the player character. The player could still lose (die if you want to be vulgar about it) if the City’s health bar reached Zero. To be honest, it was pretty clever, but a bit of a dull game overall.
What’s being discussed here is a game where you can’t lose at all. The closest you come to “losing” would be when you regret an action in the past; although the game would never actually end through the player’s actions, you can’t die or lose in that sense.
One of the most interesting incorporations of “death” into the game I’ve seen is in World of Warcraft where to get the key for Molten Core (or something like that) you have to run in, die, and then as you walk back as a ghost you see another ghost on a tomb who gives you the key. Pretty clever/wierd.