Let's talk about player death

I think that is an interesting idea. It won't work in our game though, but I can see it in more combat oriented games. We don't have radar or magic in our game.

I absolutely agree with making it part of the game though and even giving players something to do. Imagine a game where player characters have the opportunity to become the hunted because of their own in-game behavior. A player who continuously kills innocents, whether other player characters or NPCs will be treated like a criminal, not welcome within the city walls, no merchants will sell to him, and he attacked/captured on sight. He lives as an outlaw, which could be fun and exciting for some players while frustrating to others.

Of course, even the most hardened criminal can redeem himself and if he changes his behavior, he could be welcome back into society. Or he could choose to find a group of like minded folks somewhere. In our game, you will be better off if you work with other players, just like in real life. You can go it alone, but it will be hard.

All of this would happen through game mechanics and our design work.

 

I do not entirely agree with that statement. Maybe you could elaborate?

....

As you can see, I relish things that can suck up my time. I get maddeningly bored, sometimes and a game that serves as a black hole for a period of time that I would otherwise be contemplating things like the problem of evil and man's intrinsic value... well, it's just the best.

 

It's simple: any design decision done to extend content artificially is at the cost of gameplay. Therefore in the interests of making a great game, you shouldn't add artificial timesinks.

 

That is a very well-articulated opinion that I do not entirely share.

I like random dungeons and dead ends.

and I've played minecraft more than I will ever admit to here....

And I don't connect with a game unless it tries to murder me, and if getting killed isn't painful I can't enjoy the game at all.

Horror is also my favorite genre, except nothing scares me anymore in games.

 

You haven't mentioned an artificial timesink though. You've mentioned things that are integral to gameplay. An artificial timesink isn't integral to gameplay and solely exists to disguise the lack of content.

- A random dungeon is procedural. You can still get lucky and complete it quickly.
- Minecraft exists as a whimsical, creative experience. It has no artificial timesinks.

 

I was wondering if you thought there was a distinction. Makes sense then.

 

I consider myself a hardcore gamer but when it comes to multiplayer I find permadeath is too much even for me in any environment where I spend a lot of time doing meaningful character development. I do enjoy systems where there are harsh penalties for dying such as full looting, xp loss, etc. but unfortunately in all of the online games I have played of this nature eventually they eat themselves and leave a desolate world behind.

My favorite games of this genre were titles such as Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot(pvp ffa servers), Shadowbane, Darkfall, Eve Online, Perpetuum Online, etc. Eve is still going strong of course but it seems to be the exception and has incredible depth in the social and economic aspect which balance things out and keep people engaged.

"Designing Virtual Worlds" by Richard Bartle has some good observations by the guy who basically created MUD but I don't agree with all his conclusions, and it can be a dry read in parts. If you are an old MUDer though it is worth a read just for nostalgia sake. He goes into why he thinks permadeath is a good system quite a bit in a couple of the chapters(which I don't agree with).

 

I think his ideas have merit. Your sentiment is common, which is why this hasn't been done before. The games you mention are all AAA games. Why would they use anything controversial? It would destroy their market for the game, which really are the masses of players out there. As an indie developer, we cannot compete with any of those, but we can capture niche markets.

Hardcore gamers are not always hardcore role players, although some hardcore roleplayers are hardcore gamers. Like I said, there is a niche group of players that wants a game that is built for role play rather than for the masses and that is the niche we are trying to please. Not everyone fits into that niche.

Thanks for bringing the discussion back to player death and away from time sinks. Could you guys create your own thread for time sinks? I think that is a worthy area for discussion.

 

They are entwined a lot. Death used incorrectly is an artificial timesink.... So probably can't avoid it in this discussion.

 

Intertwined how? As in running back to your corpse, or as in restarting from level 0?

 

Good job bring it back on topic!

Can you tell us in more than a sentence how death is used incorrectly as a time sink? Do you mean the traditional die and hunt for your character's body/stuff? Or the time it takes a character to resurrect?

What about other methods that could be considered time sinks, such as slower healing. Could a time sink be used correctly if it is used to encourage players to do other things than combat?

 

I've been trying to think of any examples I could of an artificial time sink and the only thing I could come up with was a multiplayer beat em up game called Charlie Murder for Xbox 360.

There wasn't a whole lot of content and what content there was repeated itself extremely.

One of the things that it got criticized for the harshest was its seeming lack of any checkpoint system whatsoever.

Coupled with the fact that the difficulty level really had no balance to it whatsoever and some levels would be twice as hard as the previous level despite the fact that your character couldn't really level all that quickly, it was quite awful.

I think looking at it through the context of what hippo coder is saying they were trying to make the play time of the game longer by making you go through the same levels more than once.

To achieve this, rather than adding more content they just made it so that you died more often and lost more progress when you died.

The game received some favorable reviews, but universal love and a strong following never developed. Contrast that with Castle Crashers, which became a cult smash hit within the genre.

Castle Crashers was a grind, but there was considerable character development and even though you died often it was always your own damn fault for not balancing your character properly or failing to perfect your air juggling skills.

Dying a lot was a feature in Castle Crashers, rather than a timesink.

I don't entirely get why.

 

This thread has convinced me to add a "hardcore" mode to my game for players like Misterselmo who enjoy a good challenge.

I think that as far as penalizing death to get players to try things other than combat, I'd rather focus on making the other things as fun as combat. It's something I think most games are really bad at. You can craft items. Why? Combat. You can build recipes and make food. Why? Combat. If you want to RP the life of a banker, you should be able to do so without ever picking up a sword, but there should be other ways to engage the player.

 

Player death was originally invented to cause the player to spend more money. This is because arcade machines invented gameplay death as we know it. By killing the player off, the player needs to spend more money to continue, or let another paying customer play.

With the advent of home computing, death was poorly understood. Developers merely assumed that lives were part of what made a game, without understanding the commercial origins of having lives instead of endless gameplay. Therefore many games included lives without much thought behind it. The same pattern of abuse continues among amateur developers. AAA has wised up to this mostly.

Now with modern day games, death is a tool. How that tool is used is up to the developer: It can make a short game be more value for money (if abused as a timesink), it can increase the fear factor so that the player feels excitement or it can be used poorly without any thought behind it (something most new developers fall into a trap with).

The key is if you're going to have death, make it meaningful, it should serve a purpose and affect the player in a away you feel suits the experience, rather than ever be punishment. There's no need for death to actually be punishment if it'd designed right, and by that I don't mean make it so pointless that you might as well not have death.

 

I think all games should have an ultimate difficulty setting. I have one game in particular I dream of making, where the highest difficulty is FUBAR. where some weaker mini-bosses appear as regular enemies, many enemies are mutant variants, zombies become zombie cyborgs, etc. The HP for the weakest enemy in FUBAR mode is 2-3x the strongest enemy in the last stage of the previous difficulty, everything has dots and mob adds, it's just insane.You would have to grind for hours just to start getting the gear you need to hack it. It would be the only true way to defeat the final boss, who up until now has simply been jumping back in time before you kill him in the final stage...

I like that over the top, how did I survive...!? Feeling. Please do include an insane difficulty but don't make it feel tacked on, add original content as well so it feels special.

Ultimately, I think punishment is a form of play. However, there must be tangible reward for taking this punishment. I've even imagined defeat strengthening a player, ever so slightly, increasing their chances of not being affected by statuses by fractions of a percentage point, contributing to stats like Resolve, Grit, etc. Which, for example, could increase hp recovery speed slightly, and add to the likelihood of my favorite skill triggering.. a fatal blow has a % chance to leave the character with 1hp. So badass.

 

Good analysis. I think that as a developer, if you are spending a lot of time figuring out how to punish the player, you probably aren't playing your own game enough. High difficulty is rewarding, but spikes in difficulty should feel fair.

 

So risk vs. reward basically? One thing I want to do is make the AI more challenging at higher difficulties rather than just raise and lower numbers.

 

There are a few things I want to discuss more in depth, but today is my daughter's birthday so it will have to wait.

 

Ya, I like that. Also you can add extra mission goals so you can't simply beat it by raising your numbers.

For me, it's not about "risk" alone. There's a certainty of death, pain and punishment in playing beat em ups, for example, and beating up the bad guys is only part of the equation. Watching your guy get the snot pounded out of him is a big part, too. It's visceral. I think if you just float through the game, picking up daisies and there's no Creeper lurking in the shadows, what's the point? Just my opinion.

 

Something that I am thinking perma-death mechanics really encourage is breadth as apposed to depth. It's probably something that a lot of the rougelites don't really understand. Of the ones I can think of, all of them try to push progression toward some kind of apotheosis in combat potential. The Binding of Isaac is the big one on my mind at the moment where all of it's elements seem to just push you purely toward being more powerful in a pretty linear way.

I would imagine this probably has more to do the fact that the DNA of rougelites really comes from typical 30 hour action games with light RPG elements being compressed into a highly replayable 3 hours.

 

I don't think of it as punishment but as a consequence of the player's actions. One fights a creature that is difficult to fight or they are not prepared for and they have the risk of dying.

 

Or if your back is to a cliff face and a single arrow with a little knockback drops you into a pit of monsters.

 

Debatable. Hotline Miami treats death like you came to an incorrect solution to a problem and just resets the puzzle to let you try again. On the other hand is Dark Souls which fiercely punishes any play that Dark Souls deems unworthy of Dark Souls, albeit without a ton of consequence so long as you weren't hoping to buy something with those souls. I could probably go on for too long with how Dark Souls is S*** design wise though.

 

If you can somehow contort your views to a broader design scope, and not just be purely about bashing one game, make a topic.

 

I agree. Game designs come in all flavors, which is rather nice because we can pick and choose what game we play. My guess is for every criticism a particular game gets here on the Unity forums, there are many players who love the mechanics.

So, rather than bash a particular game that feels punishing to a player, how do we design games that give death serious consequences without making it feel like a punishment? Or is that possible. Is it necessary? Is that feeling of punishment something that everyone in the game feels or is it something to do with the personality of the particular player?

I suppose if one wants to do whatever they want and can't do it because of game mechanics, the frustration they feel is akin to punishment, such as the parent or teacher making them sit in the corner.

On the other hand, I suspect many players would prefer the limitations if it increases the excitement and flow of the game. If it is a multiplayer/MMO game, most players like limitations, even if they don't know it, because it can help to prevent behaviors that ruin an online game.

My personal opinion on this is that games need rules and limitations to be games. Death serves several purposes. As Hippocoder stated, it can serve as a time sink, a way to slow down the progression of the player (or encourage people to spend money although that is a recent development and death has been around for a while). Death also serves to make the fight more exciting, more risky. It also makes the player think, or it should, although I am guessing that death is so meaningless in today's games that most players don't care anymore. They know their losses will be small because game companies are fearful of players quitting their game. Death is a an obstacle to overcome rather than a punishment. You can always avoid death. I am the poster child of avoiding death in games.

Death in a game should be used to add to the overall design of the game, which means it should be personalized to the game. Rather than do it like everyone else is doing it, find a way that suits your game style.

Lots of good ideas in here: Allowing players to be ghosts (great for a horror game), having player characters transcend to some other power level, eliminating death all together, permadeath, etc. A creative designer might be able to find even more ideas.

 

Yeah well, no sympathy from me! If you are fighting a monster with your back to a cliff face, then you have a pretty good chance of falling into the pit. As a player, it is your responsibility to think before you leap. Don't you watch movies? lol

 

Of course. And if you don't look, instead leaping with reckless abandon... what should you expect?

Hint: not for a magical angel of life to appear and carry you to a soft tuft of grass, where a picnic has been laid out for you.

Death is an example of structure. It's there, at least in modern designs, for the same reason that the walls are there in Pong.

However, I suspect the setback to a checkpoint has less to do with design and more to do with getting you someplace the same monsters won't kill you immediately. I have yet to see a fps where after death, you lose a life and flash for a while.

 

A rather pertinent issue with Dark Souls is that it requires trial and error and also punishes it. The only way to know where to go for the first several levels is to find the softest beef gate, which is basically just finding the path of fewest deaths. Even when you are on the right track, it's still fairly easy to not realize that it is the right direction because you will still die a ton. And I haven't even gotten to unintuitive combat mechanics that are more or less essential to learn.

It's bi-polar game design. It encourages the very thing it condemns.

 

I think you are right about why they whisk your character away from the area of danger. Although I would argue that is still about design. Most games have some story behind the death, like cloning in a sci fi game or some special magical reason for coming back to life. The design comes in after you are whisked away.

 

Seems to me that people play the game to try to beat it and the more punishment that is dished out, the more determined people get to win. At least that is what I see from the comments here. Why play a game that makes you miserable? Maybe the game developers had the right idea. They knew that a certain population of players would not quit until they finish the game, no matter how hard it might be. I guess when you do win, it must feel pretty good.

 

The more bitter the battle, the sweeter the victory.

 

The irony is the way to play well is to not get caught up in it and to take it slowly. I'll fully admit that I think most people play the game because it's "hard" and not because it's good.

Even just saying it's difficult comes with caveats. Most of it's difficulty comes from not being clocked in to the game's pace, which usually is slow. Another thing is it's all downhill after the Mario and Luigi boss fight which marks the beginning of the last third of the game. The New Londo Bros. are the hardest it gets and everything else is spring cleaning. Even the ending is a hollow victory (pun intended). Congratulations, we were going to throw a bonfire in your honor, but we ran out of wood, so would you just throw your desiccated husk on top of it? Thanks.

 

I am a huge fan of Dark Souls series, and I like the hope/chance of retrieving all lost souls.
I also like the idea of the story continuing/branches if you lose at a certain fight, I think some games did it.
Also I like the idea of a Skyrim mod (Death Alternatives) where your items gets stolen and a random quest/events of 20 or so starts to retrieve your items, I think these guys done it right.

I think the classic continue from last save is dated, and pretty much all platforms are capable of auto save.

Not a big fan of perma death, there should be some sense of progress somewhere. I don't know if Rogue Legacy qualify as perma death, but I find the good kind of perma death.

I guess I agree with the opinion that perma death should be a player's fault, when the boss fight begins, give the player a chance to reconsider or run away, and it should be easy to do so, not 5~10 seconds channeling/chanting a retreat item/spell than could be easily interrupted by the boss.

Fire Emblem series has a perma death as well, makes you care for the characters, but can be frustrating if they got crit and you had to restart the level, but you always have the choice of just accepting their deaths.

From the classic story driven RPGs, when you see a character you can't change his equipment, you instantly suspect he will leave the party/die, but in a certain game, they didn't do that, he was of of the main cast, when he died, you find his equipment/skills after a while.

Speaking of perma death MMO, have anyone tried Mortal Online? I didn't play it much to form a solid opinion on it.

About difficulty settings, I am not a big fan of huge HP bars, but I loved the boss fights in Monster Hunter series (20~40 minutes), I am not sure how they managed to do it, the trick is finding the pattern in their movement and exploiting it, but it never gets old.

 

Well I would say full looting and harsh death penalty systems are far from mainstream these days, permadeath is about the only thing more extreme. In shadowbane you could siege and destroy clans cities which took them months and months of work to build. I can see it working in a game where the focus is not combat and everyone roleplays(like you suggest), but not for the more combat oriented games.

In a game focused on combat you run into the issue when you have harsh death penalties that players only attack when they feel safe and the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor, adding permadeath to it would in my opinion make it even worse, which is my main disagreement with Bartle's book as I don't think it makes for a fun pvp game. Sure fun random battles will happen but as the players have more to lose it degenerates into ganking those obviously weaker than you or your group and loses the fun factor for both sides.

 

I am waiting for my new Bartles book to come in the mail so can't recall it in detail. But does he talk about games focused on combat or in general? Remember, that book came out in 2003. Games have gotten much grittier and more dangerous since that time. Combat is much more intense since those good old days.

I do agree that in many of today's games, where combat rules supreme, permadeath would not work. Most games focus so heavily on combat that the main source of progression depends on combat, XP. Even non-combat skills are created to support the combat. One makes armor to support the combat. One makes food to heal the combat. One entertains to support the combat. XP comes mostly from combat.

I used to check out new games to see if they might be different but they never were. Inevitably, they had classes, all combat classes, with some side crafting you could do for fun. Now they add more side stuff but it still all leads to combat. Having to start over and over again after your character dies in combat permanently would ruin the game, I agree, if combat was the only think you could do to feel important.

Permadeath requires an entirely new way of progressing characters. It means combat should be an option, rather than the rule. It means that players can choose to progress in a variety of ways, avoiding death if they so choose. The design of the game should include choices for players, so they don't have to put their character's lives at risk constantly but still have fun. I realize that many players find combat the most enjoyable part of the game. This is why this sort of game is a niche game.

On the other hand, for a player like me, this is a dream game. Imagine a game where I can be as important as the dude who kills stuff all the time. I can be important, not just for supplying armor or food or potions to combat guys but for my own deeds and experiences.

 

Yes definitely, in that type of setting where combat is not "the norm" it could be a great role playing aid. I agree with pretty much everything you've said, can you link your game when it is ready? From what you've said it definitely sounds interesting, more akin to MOOs and MUSHes of old than MUDs.

 

Certainly, Tiggus.

Unlike MOO's and MUSHes, it will have progression in skills and the like but you have a very good point. I played a MUX for a while and I would say it is more like that. I had forgotten all those nice text alternatives. They are so far in my distant past. lol

 

I didn't find dark souls difficult, and breezed through it. It mostly punishes people who aren't willing to figure it out. It's not actually difficult as a game, each boss took me between 1-10 tries, which mostly was spent figuring out the boss because I refused to read any guides on the game at all. This is considerably less attempts than a WOW guild figuring out a raid boss on average.

Once the boss is understood, it becomes a game of calm wits and not using all your stamina. That's a game that rewards intelligence and patience, not someone who can press buttons faster and have more trail and particle effects with flashy sounds and visuals.

So perhaps that's a S*** design for you. In any case, the game isn't hard if you approach it correctly. It's very hard if you don't - a bit like say, driving a car steering with your feet.

Dark Souls becomes hard if you play it going against the grain. Is that really punishing the player? I think most of the people who had trouble with it feared it before they even started and continued to try and play it like any hack and slash, which will not get anyone far at all.

It's a very predictable game, with very little RNG.

 

Makes me wonder about the purpose of death. Modern mobile games use death to enable perfect play - try again and again and again, in rapid fashion. RPG's use death to indicate that you haven't leveled your skills far enough - avoiding death on the next highest monster becomes a goal.

So what is the purpose of permadeath? In A-Dark-Room and the follow-up Sentinel, permadeath is similar to a typical RPG, except with a nod toward at a meta-game. In Roguelikes (and even Minecraft), avoiding death becomes the primary goal of the game. In my training games, failure/death means you made too many little mistakes or one big one (ex. killed the patient) and need to try again.

This thread has me thinking.
Gigi

 

You might want to catch the second post where I basically say the same thing. The problem is it does nothing to elaborate on which way the grain goes. It is a car with all the normal bells and whistles, it just forgets to explain how exactly you are supposed to use the steering wheel that's on the floor.

 

I think you're missing the point of it though. These kind of games expect the player to figure it out. There is no right and wrong, the manual is the difficulty.

Path of least resistance and all that. If you keep running at a wall and it hurts, maybe it's time to figure out something else.

 

The only thing the game does is say you're doing things wrong. The only form of communication it has is driving your corpse into the ground like a stake. It does absolutely nothing to teach the right ways to do things. There are at least half a dozen vital mechanics that are left completely unexplained like shield stability, poise, dodge roll I-frames, etc. Even the path of least resistance isn't useful, as it's quite probable that you will hit walls where the answer is to just keep bashing at it.

It's greatest crime is it ASSUMES. It assumes its teaching methods are actually instructive. Better yet is the fact that it's teachings are inconsistent. The first thing the game does is punish exploration, yet it more or less encourages it the rest of the time. I'll go back to my comment about bi-polar game design.

 

Wow..this game really has gotten a lot of attention here. Maybe it should get its own thread. lol

 

It's not unrelated at least. There is a slight tangent with how it teaches, but it's still tied into death which is pretty much it's answer for everything.

 

Well, the fact that it is now saying the same thing over again, not sure it is related to death as much as how "stupid" the game is. lol

 

Or maybe we need a separate thread just to discuss difficulty in games? I'd be more than happy to type one up if people think it would be useful.

 

Dark Souls has the title of "Prepare to Die" - it's a game about constant dying - I can't think of any game more suited to this topic.

The entire game is built around making the mechanic of player death useful as opposed to punishing, mostly in that it is designed to get you a little further each time you do die, and changes what you do when you die.

Also, roguelikes have much relevance to this topic as well.

 

Wow. So is Dark Souls really that challenging? It has a 9+ rating everywhere. And by the same crew as Tenchu? How's the music? I don't play many games these days but that seems worth a try.

 

It's tough but probably one of the few games where I cheered when I killed a boss.

 

Tough is fine, I don't like a game that gives up the goods to easy.