How should game designers deal with the fact players don't like to be inconvenienced or punished ever, for any reason
Are there any games that make fail states feel motivational rather than demotivating
How should game designers deal with the fact players don't like to be inconvenienced or punished ever, for any reason
>game TOS tells you that you lose your items if they fall in lava
>accept TOS
>items fall in lava
>items stolen
>"WOOOOOOOOW I DINDUNUFFIN"
Every time
>How should game designers deal with the fact players don't like to be inconvenienced or punished ever, for any reason
>
>Are there any games that make fail states feel motivational rather than demotivating
They should stop punishing you for death. you still have to go from checkpoint/base/respawn to the previous place and that takes time which is a punisment already why punish gamers more for no fricking reason?
>Are there any games that make fail states feel motivational rather than demotivating
The closest games i can think of are those with meta-progression. dying means upgrading your next character.
>OH WOW
>AM I BEING PUNISHED FOR BEING A SHITTER?
>DEVS YOU REALLY NEED TO ADDRESS THIS
This is what you sound like.
>How should game designers deal with the fact players don't like to be inconvenienced or punished ever, for any reason
By making the game so fun that you keep playing anyway. THATS why Fromsoftware make the best games of all time
>Fromsoftware make the best games of all time
yeah I love dying in first dark souls because I want to the placd I shouldn't go because game doesn't tell you where to go and punishes you for choosing wrong
Lol their games rely entirely on the fact zoomers fell for the "whoa bro these games are so hard bro!" meme. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were mocked on release for shit designbefore the meme got started.
>people mocked it in the past so it means it's shit!!!!
you are no better than the zoomers you claim to cause this
Anon if the game is only good if you buy into the social hype around it, is it really actually good or are you just trying to fit in with your peers? Should game devs prioritize social engineering over good game design?
If you don't want to lose your stuff when dying you can change the settings yourself so you don't lose anything when dying.
Only by normalgays, Yahtzee is a perfect example of this with how he went from shitting on Demon's Souls to becoming a "fan" after it got popular.
I actually appreciated his stance on the series before he got subsumed by the mass formation psychosis of the Souls fanbase. It seems like you cant criticise anything about those games, even shit that has nothing to do with difficulty like the constant technical issues lest you be told to git gud, yet at the same time normal discourse was preserved for other games. The selling point of the games being that they were hard completely overrode everyone's critical thinking and fostered the cult mentality that few dared step outside of. From Software were and are a C tier developer using the same assets over and over to breaking point, yet no one ever calls them out of it because the identity of the series is so ingrained now. So many games have been lambasted for less because they made the unfortunate mistake of not making being hard their selling point.
Demons Souls got a 4/5 on xplay at release
Yeah, and?
Deathloop lets you accumulate knowledge and eventually equipment even if you get killed
Developers should not try to cater to players who do not wish to play the game after a failure, as they would not stay motivated to play for long either way. Otherwise you're making a product.
Then it comes down to individual design. Sometimes it is fair to give players a second chance, to reduce punishment if they succeed the next attempt. Other times it is instead more benefitial to punish player more severely to make sure that they learn from mistakes.
Unfair games are fine too as long as they align well with the goal you're trying to accomplish as a developer, and as long as there aren't any major flaws in your gameplay loop which would completely disallow player from acting during such scenario.
There is plenty of an audience for games that do punish the player for being stupid, even if they aren't the norm.
I'd say you either just choose to accept most people don't want a slap on the wrist, or you make games for the type of people who like to learn from their mistakes.
people have never liked permanently losing shit. The best way to do it is to make it an optional mode for that 2000 or so EBIN HARDCORE people that exist, instead of costing your game sales by forcing it on normal people.
Losing possibly days of work over one death is not a justified setback. It's a way to permanently lose that player.
Have you tried not dying like a moron?
Games with permadeath create much higher stakes and result in more memorable experiences as any major decision you make is final.
Works well if the game isn't a time sink, and you can quickly get a new playthrough going.
Returnal would have sold so much better with a cute protagonist and optional hardcore mode
gibe name of gorl
she's got some huge cowbreasts now
Who is she
moonchild 77
My favourite is dying to some shitty End spawn.
/gamerule keepinventory
the game offers you plenty of tools to avoid that fate, so stop being a crybaby and actually use them instead of hoarding them for "when its needed"
Most good games actually make you want to retry after losing or dying.
Celeste, Cuphead, Sekiro, Rabi-Ribi, Rhythm Heaven, and many others. Some encourage you with positive in-game messages, others are designed to make you want to retry without giving you a penalty with generous checkpoints, making you respawn right next to the boss area etc. Generally the more a game respects the player and his time, the better it is.
Games that make you lose all of your stuff after dying like Dark Souls, Lies Of P, Hollow Knight etc are just a waste of your time in the most literal sense. Sure, there is merit in increasing the stakes for the player by putting some resources at risk but I don't think temporarily restricting exploration to make you go back to where you died is a good mechanic, in any game. Mechanics that find their roots in braindead slop genres (turn-based RPGs) tend to be nefarious for most games because they're just outdated and are designed to waste your time.
You were so right until you brought up turn-based RPGs. So close.
Losing is great, it makes the stakes higher
I don't mind getting set back to the title screen if the game can be beaten in 30 minutes or less if I become proficient at it. When you spend hours progressing and one thing you do negates hours of play time then that is a problem. The longer the game the more considerate it should be about the players time.
You could try playing games that don't punish you. Not every game can or should even try to cater to everyone.
I don't know a single person who is like
>I lost all my shit?
>FRICK YEAH. DUDE I SPENT HOURS ON THAT
>I LOVE JUST THROWING EVERYTHING AWAY TO ONE MISTAKE
And they're actually being completely honest and sincere.
This is why hard-core players always make me laugh
>sweatlords started playing hardcore in classic wow so someone killed almost everyone on one of the final raid bosses on purpose so each of the other 40 players would instantly lose hundreds of hours of their life
Deserved
I play roguelikes, so i am that person.
The difference being is that every single time i die - i die to my own mistakes which i could've avoided. Learning things and experimenting is incredibly fun, coming up with unexpected solutions in edge case scenarios is very rewarding, and loosing is always harsh and punishing. No game with saves can achieve this.
I play ones that have consistent power increases between runs because I like having the feeling of progression in a videogame
People that do it in a game where it takes hundreds of hours to reach max level + max gear and might clip through the ground and fall to their death at any moment deserve to be laughed at
Roguelikes. Not arcade shit.
I experience that power curve over the course of a single run, and dying in a funny way or learning something new is much more interesting than unlocking a 5% boost to damage for all my future runs.
Not him but I like games with meaningful metaprogression that actually requires you to achieve the unlocks. Rogue's Tale is a good example of it. Instead of unlocking +5% damage you unlock a sword and buckler instead of carrying out a shitty dagger, and you unlock it not by dying on the first dungeon's second floor 1426 times to earn enough gaycoins, but you unlock it by surviving long enough to have a character with all the "warrior" skills. Instead of +5% damage resistance you unlock a leather chestpiece and helmet that replace your naked ass, and you unlock them by defeating a powerful "monster" tier enemy, which is a feat of its own to a new player.
Is it true they had their characters rolled back by the admins because of that?
No, originally he did it because hardcore was just run off of an addon and player imposed so the 'hc only' guild let a girl get off scot free for a death that was obviously her fault and not a bug, but then blizzard made real hardcore servers with no appeals and no mercy that everyone rerolled onto
He bought a character, snuck into that same guild and did it again, just youtube 'judgement day 2.0' it's great
Hi it's me playing Rimworld losing my entire base to two raids followed by a pack of maneating deer bashing in the one door I forgot to upgrade from Wood.
Does Rimworld still do the scale with value thing? That was always the reason it was hot garbage.
I was playing Randy Random so idk. Cassandra is a brutal c**t.
If I remember correctly Randy Random doesn't ignore the scaling, it's just more random.
I mean someshit like mario just moves you back to the last checkpoint, which isn’t that bad.
But yeah, you’re a huge homosexual.
Punish them harder. If you don't like it, frick off.
In dark souls, when I have a shit ton of souls that I'm afraid of losing or trying to get back after dying, I play overly cautious. When I die I now have nothing to lose and can have fun again
skill issue
I suspect this is why soany roguelites adopt metaprogression, so even when you lose a run and have all your progress burn to the ground - you are given some manner of reward based on your perfomance.
At the end of the day basically everyone plays basically every game "for the story". Here, the concept of story is understood very broadly: often it's hypercompetency fantasy and rags to riches story involving numbers going up. Losing your stuff in that story is like an unlikable villain winning in the end without as much as bittersweet silver lining or lesson learned by the protagonist.
So, the solution is to tell a different story, one where loss-states (or win-less states) are narratively compelling, and one that has more nuance to it than numbers going up. I don't know what game "losing all stuff in lava" refers to because it seems weirdly specific, but for instance the game has to work my consistent and predictable rules: if you can get breathed on by a dragon without your equipment being incinerated, or fall from unrealistic heights without dying, or dive into water while carrying your full inventory with you, then "losing stuff to lava" would likely also feel like deus ex machina sent just to spite you (besides the fact that it interrupts the story of numbers going up), which is narratively unsatisfying.
Doesn't Disco Elysium do something like that, where the fail states are just as interesting to encounter as the success ones?
I think that's a good point to make. Make failure interesting, make it narratively make sense. Have it so when you frick up it's just as much a part of the story as when you succeed.
This does also require some discipline on the part of the player though, to own their mistakes and keep playing. I've been doing that with games and it's honestly more fun IF the game keeps it going.
Playing New Vegas and trying to do the quest with the whisky woman, and then I take on another side quest I thought was unrelated only for whisky woman to get mad at me when the plasma store explodes. And then having to do the violent mission objectives instead, murdering some other people that I was helping, wasn't what I intended but I enjoyed how it turned out.
>This does also require some discipline on the part of the player though
One begets the other. You never reload in Disco Elysium BECAUSE you know the failed save will be just as interesting
True. I mean more in the stuff I mentioned, previously I might have reloaded a save when I realized I fricked up that quest with the companion but I decided to follow it through and still enjoyed the outcome.
I did the same thing on my first playthrough, except for basically the entirety of Honest Hearts - I blasted the friendly tribal at the start by mistake and basically 'beat' the whole dlc in like an hour or two of wandering into the end camp and then back. I realised my mistake when I got the ending crawl, but decided to keep playing because I thought it was funny and in character for my dude to do that.
No, on Disco the fails states just move you forward with a different dialogue. The game is very linear and doesn't really have any branching paths.
There are alternative endings hidden in sidequests and some dialogue trees though, so not entirely true.
But the bulk of the game is linear.
>Alternative endings
I mean, that's really kind of a lie. It's an alternative line of dialogue, not a whole ending.
>doesn't know about advesperascit and warship archer
More games should punish you permanently when you frick up.
Yeah, it's kind of a double edged sword.
Knowing that you'll be heavily punished in failure is a good thing. It makes you play more carefully, it makes you plan and consider risks of whatever you do. The threat just makes a game more exciting.
But yes, actually losing stuff is a bummer.
It depends a lot on the run times. If you take hours in a game then die and instantly delete all progress that's just wasting time.
There are a few factors which mitigate this.
It all depends on how easy it is to fail, and how much real time it takes to get to the point of failure. If a game will take just a few frames or one input as an excuse to set you back several hours, it will be difficult to not give up. If on the other hand you have a mercy mechanic like a health bar or lives, it allows for the player to learn and keep going, while still having to pay attention.
The length of a game sequence, and the time it takes to complete it, is also a factor. Super Meat Boy is insanely hard at times, but it's also very satisfying because levels only last a few minutes tops.
Now, for the egregious example. Take for example Path of Exile. If you play hardcore you can lose several dozen hours of playtime without ever knowing what you did wrong. That is bad game design. This is also why nearly no one plays hardcore any more.
>turn keep inventory on
its gaming time.
Just start making a statistic page and give archivements.
Deaths:_ Items lost:_ Total party wipes:_
zoom zooms are so mind broken, they'll get dopamin over ANY number going up, even embarrassing ones.
I think it depends on how 'fair' the failure feels. If you make a stupid decision or a risky gamble that doesn't work out then it feels more justified to lose progress/resources compared to if the game doesn't obey its own rules, bugs out or even SEEMS to bug out because of insufficient info.
Project Zomboid is a good example where there's enough little things in it that feel like bullshit that I feel justified in adding things to make it easier. Things like not being able to see when a car door/window is open so getting scratched/bitten by a zombie when you're inside, or animations being fricky when fighting zeds.
KSP is another, where incomplete information/ability to test things out, physics bugs etc make me very unwilling to play on anything approaching 'hardcore' mode or without the ability to roll back to an earlier save; whereas if I make an error in judgement, I'm more willing to play through it.
Minecraft is one where I feel like it's stable/'fair' enough where I'll accept when I die, even to something stupid like getting hit by an arrow and knocked off a ledge to my death.
Just don't erase the player's progression and force him to grind it back
All roguelites ever created