Limited lives, what do you think about them? Do you think they’re an outdated design from the arcade era, or do you think they have a place in modern games for creating a good challenge?
Limited lives, what do you think about them?
Limited lives, what do you think about them? Do you think they’re an outdated design from the arcade era, or do you think they have a place in modern games for creating a good challenge?
Modern gaming is shit so a good idea like lives won't be found in them. The average sub 85 IQ modern gamer loses his mind when the game is in any way an actual challenge.
>a good idea like lives
lmao
The literal only thing they're good for is getting arcade quarters
Worthless time waste
They don't work.
I tend to finish classic sonic games with like 20-30 of them.
>I tend to finish classic sonic games with like 20-30 of them.
Because you got so good at those games the concept of lives is irrelevant. But imagine it being a brand new game you've never played before, what do you think then?
That happens in brand new games I've never played all the time. Lives are largely irrelevant at this point, with a few exceptions
GIT GUD
no wonder they had to get rid of the lives system
if whose demographic pretends to be the average low IQ mutt who can't be good at gaming because they are literal morons
>But imagine it being a brand new game you've never played before, what do you think then?
NTA but when I first played sonic 2 as a kid I never died outside of the death egg.
Younger gens of people are fricking stupid so games get made easier and easier.
Eh, they were good back in the day but eventually they just servec to take you out of the action and waste time. Yeah I fricked up the boss, I don't feel like doing the whole ass level over.
I really liked Mario Odyssey's method of just subtracting from your coin count and giving you unlimited retries, it let the devs make stuff actually hard at times because they knew you could just keep going over and over.
Not to mention a lot of games that have a life system also tend to have some easy way to get infinite lives, intended or otherwise, defeating the purpose entirely.
That being said, when I played DKC2 with my girlfriend we were fricking SWEATING on some sections/bosses because losing all your lives felt like such a setback, so I don't hate the idea entirely or anything.
>it let the devs make stuff actually hard at times
This. Limited lives also somewhat limits the devs concept of difficulty. When a game has limited lives they have two options: either make it a fair challenge and limit how difficult the game can be, or be completely unfair and just challenge you and not give a shit if you have to replay the levels over and over again to get better. Removing the live system lets them be creative and actually challenge you in games without it being completely unfair. The player still gets the satisfaction of doing the challenge correctly after attempting multiple times.
>I really liked Mario Odyssey's method of just subtracting from your coin count and giving you unlimited retries, it let the devs make stuff actually hard at times because they knew you could just keep going over and over.
This.
Crash 4 ALMOST had it right by having rewards for finishing the level in under 3 deaths and challenges with no deaths, while having a counter to say how many times you died or giving you the option to still play with lives the old fashioned way. Their issue was while Odyssey made challenges bite size, Crash 4 made levels too big so that not dying was actually the least of the problems with completion.
>good challenge
Live system punishes you for dying on harder parts by forcing to replay the easier parts of the level, completely redundant and useless shit
Lives for arcade games are fine but personally I dont care for any game that sends me all the way back to the beginning if I have to blindly play a level later on in the game for the first time. Then I have to play the entire game again just to replay the level I messed up on.
/thread
This is why all the classic re-releases like the mini consoles or whatever that Switch Online thing is have save states now. People would drop all the games fast if they had to keep restarting because people won't have the patience or time, but people will power on through to the end now as they can just jump back to before "that" obstacle.
If people really love the game, they'll then challenge themselves to do it without save states.
inb4 "you didn't complete the game" gatekeeping
>inb4 "you didn't complete the game" gatekeeping
That's true though. More specifically you didn't really play it. That doesn't mean you can't have an opinion on its level design or enjoy your own experience with it, but you didn't overcome the challenge the game presented to you. Gatekeeping is almost always a good thing so while save state users can offer something important to discussion, they will almost always be less informed on the game than someone who beat it without them. Information retention is going to be far lower when you just brute force your way through a tough segment 30 times before you make it through, versus someone who had to play very carefully and did it in 10 tries.
Someone who literally does not want to engage with a game's systems will almost certainly have a less valid opinion than someone who did, regardless of whether or not that latter person liked or disliked it. It's like someone who plays basketball with a triple dribble rule engaging in discussion on the game. It's not like he has nothing of interest to share but his experience is totally warped compared to that of others.
Lives are a good way to challenge You.
But if You lost all Your lives You would just re-load Your game, right?
Or should You?
I wouldn't.
Not Everyone likes unlimited continues with no penalty.
>Lives are a good way to challenge You.
Lives don't add to a challenge at all, they were simply a means of draining money from children in arcades.
They didn't drain your money in console games.
Exactly
They make it nonviable to just die constantly and force yourself through a game despite never mastering any of it
Sonic 2 has a brutal gauntlet of levels near the end, from Metropolis to Wing Fortress and ending on the Death Egg. The value of the life system is shown here because you need to actually get good at the game to not just get through these levels, but get through them with enough lives left over to take on the next one. You might go into Metropolis as a somewhat new player with 10 lives, come out of it with 4, and then game over in Wing Fortress. The next time you make it maybe you enter Metro with 15 lives, you get to WF with 11, and take on the Death Egg with 5 lives, you figure out Silver Sonic's tricks eventually but Robotnik takes you out and it's back to the start for you. Do you see my point? It's about proving that you have the skill to beat the levels WITHOUT dying a gorillion times
They're good and requires me to git gud. Games that challenge me leave a longer lasting impression.
Indeed.
I treat games like real life. If i mess up or die then I have re-start. However I still lemember everything inthe current playthough. Makes Me eish I could delete My memories of a certain game after playing It.
The real hardcore mode would be actually treating it like real life, if you die you're done, uninstall and never think about that game again, it doesn't exist anymore
Then I would be soft-core.
I think games should be designed around being able to beat It in one play without dying, if You're smart and keen enough. I really dislike dying in games where there's no way to avoid an obstacle without dying or messing up first.
The lives system works because games feel good when you overcome a challenge.
One of the reasons Mario Odyssey felt especially easy was that dying only meant losing some coins.
No game over screen or jingle, no tired/panting Mario having to make his way back to whichever painting bested him, no Luma telling you that you did good for beating a level that you struggled with etc.
That sense of progression and improvement is lost and the sense of triumph is lessened because you never have a real set-back implanted in your memory.
I like how your only argument for lives is that they give you na false sense of accomplishment.
>your only argument for lives is that they give you na false sense of accomplishment
My brother in Christ, that's the only reason to waste your limited time on this world playing video games.
If it's going to be a false sense of accomplishment regardless, I'd want it to feel as good as possible.
They have no real place in modern gaming an only exist as a remnant of arcade gaming.
They work in arcade style games but really, a lot of other things have kinda replaced it with "you died? get fricked, spend another few hours getting your progress back" (limited saves/spots to save do that)
I only see them being relevant in modern games with regards to making you lose checkpoint progress if you die too many times on a given stage/mission, requiring a retry from the start of it.
I think a discussion about something that simple and mundane is the most offensive waste of time a human being could do. Might as well start larping about the grass height, homosexual.
At least it's vidya related, unlike your coomer bait thread nº 15637. And it's not that simple and mundane, it's a big part of game design and how the game is made.
stop projecting.
Lives as they function traditionally don't make sense in a post-save file world.
They can work, but they need to change to accommodate the ways in which saving between levels changes the core game experience.
They are stupid, especially if the boss fights consist of jankenpon.
punishment for failure needs to exist or you'd beat every game in 1 sitting
having 1 life left tends to make you play better too as there's something on the line
if any section of your game can be completed simply by bashing your head against it over and over and not learning anything, then rework that section so it's less luck-based
I prefer bashing my head against the wall indefinitely instead of not being able to do that after 5 times.
>lives
Those are guys
Fricking idiot
>every live lost is one Sonic you killed
They're a shit concept used to pad out a game.
When I play a game with unlimited lives I tend to experiment and have more fun with the game. With limited lives it's more "I don't want to risk that or I might game over"
I am usually of the opinion that limited lives that send you back to the start of the game upon losing them all are totally antiquated, but limited lives that send you back to the beginning of the level upon losing them all are fine. Castlevania had that figured out in 1986. The former can lend a stronger intensity to your experience but can also come off as encouraging the designer to throw complete horse shit at you.
The landscape is also very different now. Back then, if you had three games to play at once, you were rolling in it. Now we have a limitless number of games and nearly no barrier to entry. Digital marketplaces with constant sales, subscription services like gamepass, and the wonderful world of piracy mean thousands of games are competing for your attention. I can whine about "kids these days" but the truth is I doubt I'd be able to put up with a game willing to set me back to the beginning upon failure even if that game was relatively short overall. When games set back your progress beyond a few minutes, it feels like they aren't actually interested in having you test yourself against what their current challenges. The most notable "hard game" of the last 15 years was Dark Souls which only ever set you back a few minutes of running.
Mostly outdated. Celeste and Super Meat Boy have ruined a lot about this discussion because those games caused everyone to think lives are never necessary. I still believe removing lives in the latest Monkey Ball was stupid. Some games are designed around lives. Beating levels individually is not the reward, it's making through a series of challenges in one go. Games like Warioware wouldn't work without lives.
>Beating levels individually is not the reward, it's making through a series of challenges in one go.
This. Removing lives in a game like Monkey Ball shows the designers missed the point of the original.
If you can't consistently beat a level in Monkey Ball then it simply means you don't know how to beat it. In the original games you could also skip levels if you were good enough to reach the alternate goal posts, so It's not like you even needed to beat ALL the levels.
My only problem is the original game where you literally can't lose a single life to do the master levels. That was too strict. Monkey Ball 2 improved that by making it so you just have to 1CC it to unlock master levels.
Dark Souls doesn't have lives and gamers like Dark Souls so devs should just say they're cutting out loves to be like Dark Souls and gamers won't complain
not having lives gives designers care blanche to make the game as hard as they want because of you can try forever then you won't get discouraged by a game over, and you can get back into the action sooner. This is why stuff like Meat Boy end up fairly popular with normies despite having more difficult challenges than your Mario's. In reality, lives only serve to drag out a home console game and empty out wallets at arcades, and don't make a game much harder.
Prinny is the only game that had an interesting twist on limited lives I think.
who the frick would prefer playing Sonic without limited lives? There would be nothing pushing you to aim for 100 rings or score highers through mastering stages and special stages and avoid traps&ennemies
the respawn generation.
Mastery is its own reward
Being able to come back from a checkpoint in a minute-long level is not
I also like the lives system in sonic, but it's pretty easy to wanna do those things because it feels good, intrinsic motivators exist for these, it's just that no everyone has those motivators and systems like these are a way to push practice/refinement onto people who don't.
Game overing in these games means you're being forced to refine your skills until you can handle something. The actions that give you lives in Sonic are generally tied into mastery, and to an extent this is true in any good lives system. Even a casual player can identify
>I keep running out of lives because I keep taking stupid deaths or can't get past this brick wall
>I should get more lives on my way back to where I got a game over
And that process usually means further exploration and attempting to play more consistently well. You know, skill development, through practice that a lives system forced them into.
>I keep running out of lives because I keep taking stupid deaths or can't get past this brick wall
Something not exclusive to games with life systems
>I should get more lives on my way back to where I got a game over
busywork that lowers the skill ceiling by allowing for more mistakes the more a player is willing to grind for them
>Something not exclusive to games with life systems
Never tried to say it was. You're right in that a life system is in many ways replaced by a health bar and a death system that adequately encourages consistency. However, not every game benefits from that kind of system either.
>busywork that lowers the skill ceiling by allowing for more mistakes the more a player is willing to grind for them
Depends on the game, because that depends on how you get those extra lives. Also, even in a worst case scenario where grinding lives is easy, that lowers the skill floor, the ceiling is unchanged because nothing is preventing you from getting good enough to not need extra lives. In classic Sonic games, the only ways to get lives are tied to skill and exploration, to use the common example in this thread.
I'm not gonna deny that a lives system can be done poorly and result in what you're talking about, but the well done ones don't. Is a health system with less forgiving checkpoints better? All comes back to the simple fact that nothing in game design has a one-size-fits-all solution.
What I will say is that the vast majority of lives systems on non-coin-op games are bad due to other choices that prevent such systems from showing their strengths. Mario 1 and 3 have good ones if you ignore the tricks to get infinite ones, but world has a bad system because being able to replay levels makes grinding them way too easy. In this example, it was a better decision for that game to allow you to replay levels from the overworld, which kinda gets across why games moved away from lives systems, they don't play well with a lot of things we consider convenient and pleasant about home console/PC games.
Short version separate from the rest: Not all lives systems are born equal, and not every type of game can benefit from one, but some can benefit from even a really basic system.
It might sound obvious to say not every game benefits from a lives system, but what I'm saying is that even different 2D platformers can be designed in such a way that a lives system adds very little.
In a quick and dirty sense you can gauge how much I like the presence of a life system based on how differently a replay of a level can go. The worst thing a game over can mean is replaying a portion of a game where nothing is different except your level of experience with it.
Sonic is my go-to example for a lives system doing good. Sonic games were inspired in large part by how fun it was to replay the early parts of SMB1, specifically how satisfying it is to improve at the game and be able to maintain high speed. The trilogy evolved to make this process more interesting as things went on, giving levels more routes and secrets so even casuals can "improve" by finding more item monitors to help them through. Past a certain point of skill, lives systems stop mattering, and this is a good thing, it's pretty much by design that this system forces unskilled players to redo easier content and has no impact on the people who "get it". One thing I will criticize about Sonic is that these systems had much less of a point the moment save systems were introduced, since the punishment for running out of lives is much lesser.
RockMan games are a bit of an interesting part of the equation in my eyes because while the lives system does a solid job encouraging consistency throughout the stage (and game as a whole, in a minor sense), I think that there are multiple preferable alternatives to it. Two games with death systems I would suggest for a replacement in mega man are Shovel Knight and DMCV. Character count is running low so I won't explain those or why I think they're better for MM unless someone asks.
I don't like Shovel Knight's checkpoints. It's like it doesn't matter how much you get hit, because each checkpoint is a full refill.
Breaking the checkpoints is a band-aid fix. It's a weak incentive to try to discourage the player from abusing the checkpoints. I like the idea of trading safety for rewards, but it doesn't fix the problem.
Also, money dropping on death pulls in the opposite direction. It makes it more attractive to intentionally die somewhere safe near a checkpoint.
Rockman's lives are kind of dumb, too. There should really be some way to practice parts of the stage without having to go through the rest of the stage and spend lives.
Why do you like Shovel Knight's checkpoints?
>Why do you like Shovel Knight's checkpoints?
I like the idea of trading safety for rewards.
>It makes it more attractive to intentionally die somewhere safe near a checkpoint.
I've never seen people do that, but I guess you're right in that being a hole with the system.
>Rockman's lives are kind of dumb, too. There should really be some way to practice parts of the stage without having to go through the rest of the stage and spend lives.
I think at this point my ideal death system for the rockman games would be DMCV's with one addition: the option to restart from the midstage checkpoint. That way if you reached the boss with 3hp you can go back further to get a better chance, without having to redo from the very beginning.
That said, even the current way DMCV works is fine, the stages in Rockman aren't such a long endeavor that redoing them to improve is that huge of a chore. That said I'm a roguelike fan so maybe my tolerance for being sent back in a game is abnormal.
carryover from arcade machines, no real need for them now that we have saves and it doesn't cost change to try a round
>Lives are a carryover from arcade machines!
Arcade machines effectively had unlimited lives, just keep feeding it credits. As far as game design goes they weren't even a good thing back then. If you really want to simulate that experience play mobile games where you have to pay a premium currency to refuel your limited stamina pool rather than wait a few hours.
They are not outdated whatsoever in function. They are a small example of the many casualties in current games in the name of deemphasizing player skill development so they can be railroaded to the end as smoothly as possible to "experience" the assumed content of the game to say they did so. Incidentally Sonic as a series has always flown in the face of this mindset.
>deemphasizing player skill development
That's what live systems do lmao
They are literally something that exist entirely to introduce a weighted allowance for player mistakes into a game that doesn't have a proper health system to do that for you
An allowance for player mistakes in the form of a currency that requires you to maintain them for the entire playthrough of the game, adding incentive to master different stages of the game to keep more lives for later as well as adding a scope for experimentation to learn new strategies without negating punishment fully. One that is separate from health which features often in games with lives as well, so bringing that up is pointless.
>that requires you to maintain them for the entire playthrough of the game
Anon, I don't know how to tell you this, but Contra-tier life management is not actually the industry standard implementation of this mechanic
I don't know what you're getting at, just about every game with lives gives you a set at the start, with opportunities to gain more few and far between while requiring skill and understanding of the game, but this is in regards to lives as a mechanic exclusively, not any one implementation of it and how popular it is.
This guy understand the point, including the very sad reality that so few people play games to play them anymore.
>just about every game with lives gives you a set at the start, with opportunities to gain more few and far between while requiring skill and understanding of the game
Your premise was that of a game where running out of lives starts you at the beginning of the game, which is the only context where such a system would actually encourage growth, and is not common whatsoever outside of old arcade games and roguelites that allow you to gain extra lives
Those are a large number of games and the bulk of where lives systems exist to begin with. Most older console games also had similar systems when using lives as well. The ones that were different still gave significant penalties to losing all your lives in regards to progress etc. and the idea still stands.
You are thinking of continues, which are a separate system that usually worked like that, but are rarely ever found outside of games that consist of a single continuous 'run', because that's the only context that can give that kind of system meaning
Lives shouldn't be limited, the amount of times you get to retry should be limited.
For example, in Baba is You, you can kill Baba as many times as you need to for a puzzle's solution. But you're only allowed to retry it once per selection.
Or another example, Hotline Miami and Killer7 give you as many retries as you have masks or personalities activated.
You should be able to die, but you shouldn't get as many retries.
Outdated in the old sense of running out of lives/continues sends you all the way back to the start of the game. They still have their place but it requires a bit more thought.
I don't like how easy some games were back in the day at a GAME OVER.
A Game Over screen should really make you lose ALL progress and start you at the beginning. But there should be Lives and Continues (Credits) that you can obtain in the game.
Limited lives are great, they force you to get better at a stage and actually adapt and learn.
Limited continues are moronic though, frick playing through the entire game from scratch. Its only acceptable when its done like in Super Ghouls N Ghosts, where levels always have enough money bags for you to never run out of continues as long as you've been collecting all or at least most of them.
Definitely not an outdated idea.
They're your impetus to improve at a single-player game skill-wise, without lives you could brute force a lot of games without ever improving much.
Why learn how to consistently beat a level in Super Monkey Ball's challenge modes when you can just brute force them and never engage with the concept of each level like you're supposed to?
If lives weren't a mechanic I wouldn't be as good as I am at certain games because I never would have had to improve to beat them.
They also add a sense of urgency to the player.
Sonic is a good example. Before I mastered those games, lives would make the end-game really tense since I know I only have so much more allowance for failure before I have to start all over.
Lives force you to master the mechanics, but you don't need them. Celeste for example has a death counter for each level so you can simply try to finish each level with 0 deaths, which will force you to master the levels anyway.
Lives can be implemented decently and many games are better with them, but in the case of things like Sonic and Mario which are usually casual games, they don't serve much purpose except to frustrate kids.
I like them because they turn the game into a gauntlet and expects the player to seek out secrets for 1 ups. Now if the game is long as frick, I don't think it's that great of a system. For example in SMW the lives don't really do anything since you can save anyway.
The issue with lives is that players who need more of them won't earn enough of them to help them because they'll keep dying and not doing well. Whereas good players don't need the plethora of lives that doing well gives them. The limited resource can make games more intense as you have more to lose when you die. I'm not fond of them. I dislike when you beat a hard level, go to the next stage with one life left, die to something you've never seen before, then have to start the whole game over.
In fact more important than a game to have "lives", is it to have achievements integrated into the game, and I'm not saying garbage like "get 10,000 coins", but achievements that are directly linked to the technical mastery that the player has the game, in this case, finish the challenges without dying, or dying in a limit of X times.
they're an unnecessary filter
once you get good you start amassing them
Lives are good when implemented correctly. They add tension when there otherwise wouldn't be and extra lives serves as a decent incentive to do something, like completing a mission or exploring a stage.
Obviously it's not suited for every game, but this mentality of the entire mechanic being outdated is dumb and shortsighted. It's simply a tool for game design.
>They add tension when there otherwise wouldn't be
If your game lacks tension outside of a tacked on abstract lives system, your game is either not challenging enough, or not engaging enough
>and extra lives serves as a decent incentive to do something
If the reward for doing something is extra lives, not only do I stop wanting to do it, but I feel insulted for having my time wasted
Archaic design that was only implemented in the past for arcades and to deter rentals, but one that should be preserved for those that want to actually challenge themselves as an option.