Comments on: Making Failure Acceptable

By: Belthil

Belthil — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0000

I think the problem with quick saves is that you never know if the next room has a super boss or a bunch of empty chests. so you just end up saving before any door. this can be helped with fixed save points that you put before bosses for example. Then you do not have to save all the time at least.
As far as the punishment for dying in between goes it seems to become more and more popular to not punish it at all (prince of persia or little big planet as jsut 2 examples). I think this is very viable for games that are fun based. At least I did play DA:O for the story and dying was only annoying. It might be an idea to punish dying only in higher difficulty levels (first take some exp away in normal, then exp and gold in hard and then loose items on nightmare and permadeath in a diablo2 like hardcore mode eg)
If you combine the 2 you can pick your own level of annoyance in between bosses and still have the save before very hard parts of the game.
I am not a big fan of replaying the same thing either.

By: scrusi

scrusi — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:02:09 +0000

I’m somewhat torn on that. I think you should fear death, but I also think the choice shouldn’t just be death or victory. If death is your only way of making the player fail, you either need to make them win all the time (which according to Sid they want, but which seems lame to me) or have a very soft death penalty. I’ve thrown away many a game because it made me replay too much of it after a failure.

I think this is easier to accomplish in, say, strategy games than in RPGs or FPSs. Partial failure in the latter two is hard to imagine for me – making the character lose an arm or a leg seems somewhat odd In a strategy game, you can lose a battle and still be able to win the war without saves and reloads. In other genres.. I don’t know.
.-= scrusi´s last blog ..Making Failure Acceptable =-.

By: We Fly Spitfires

We Fly Spitfires — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:08:41 +0000

Interesting article! And glad you had a good time skiing and didn’t wreck yourself

I think the issue of “death” and failure in games is an interesting one. I would aruge that dying in a single player game like DA:O or in WoW is really no different – you end up back where you were within a few minutes and nothing has changed.

To me, the whole point about death is that you should fear it and not want it to happen. That’s achievable in single player games by taking away save points and in MMORPGs by introducing harsh death penalities. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fear death in WoW
.-= We Fly Spitfires´s last blog ..The Price Of Success =-.