/v/ - Video Games

>>13744893

Because you need some form of punishment for the ability to git gud. If you have no punishment, the experience is lukewarm and forgettable. If you quit because you cant get around it, then you either don't enjoy it or you are a pussy who wants a participation trophy.

>>13744911

Wow, first post in and we're already cranking the retardation to 11.

>>13744922

>lol retard

Good counter

Lives give a threshold of skill that plsyers need to achieve in a stage to be able to move on. Limited continues are 100% a time waster though, they just make a player waste time redoing things they've already mastered.

>>13744893

Listen to old radio shows; they're basically vaudeville.

Watch old TV shows; they're basically radio shows.

Play old video games; they're basically arcade games.

>>13744911

This makes sense.

>>13744934

I like this explanation as well however, we expand it further. If one sees Continues as "Life-Lives" or "Master lives" then one can treat Continues as a way of ensuring that you can't beat the whole game unless you have a certain amount of proficiency in totality.

>>13744893

lives and continues began in arcade cabinets that were meant to eat your quarters they carried over to home consoles because of habit

Games with lives and continues have chunks of levels meant to be played from beginning to end, typically in a single season. Sometimes a "chunk" is the whole game (Contra), other times a series of levels (Super Mario World).

Also this >>13744972

>>13744911

Honestly if you have to drag the player back 3 levels if they die too many times because your game is short and needs padding to make it seem longer than it actually is, then that's sad

>>13744922

Nothing retarded about it. It's subjective, but it's true that you feel nothing from a lack of effort. Do your dopamine levels reach an all-time high from brushing your teeth? Likely not because there's no difficulty.

>>13744999

They're not tough, it's just that easy accessible videogames in CY+2 made us think less. Who needs to figure out patterns and timing when you have a linear cinematic shooter with auto-aim and context sensitive action buttons?

>>13744893

Lives are necessary while continues are a thing most games can do without. The only game that I wish was more lenient on the lives/continues thing was one of the NES Ninja Gaiden games. It made me so angry having to re-do the easy levels just because I died in the hard levels too much.

>>13744893

>Why do they do this

It's a psychological tactic that encourages the player to play better. It's the developer going, "We're giving you X amount of tries to see how well you can complete these series of challenges. If you fail, it means that you're not as acquainted with our game as you think you are. Go back and practice until you can get here without making as many mistakes."

Arcades banked on the idea that players wanted to git gud, so they offered a series of challenges and they'd get paid relative to the buying power and motivation of each player. Most devs didn't make an impossibly difficult game, just one that requires foreknowledge and effort to complete. Consoles just took this tradition and removed the monetary penalty.

>but what about the fact that your lives are technically infinite?

Yeah, you can play as long as you want, but the lives system is just a simple mechanism that will punish players for poor performance. You die, you lose progress.

You're basically asking, "What's the importance of having enemies that deal damage? I 'technically' have an infinite health bar when you think about it, so aren't health bars moot'? Yeah, your health bar is technically infinite, in the sense that when you die it will be restored to full, but enemies exist to deal damage, and the whole point of the game is to use your abilities to kill enemies and traverse the course, and perhaps participate in a boss battle.

>>13745068

Your whole comment addresses lives and the idea of restarting a level from the beginning. I never really had a problem with that in Cuphead. I hated having to restart the level from scratch due to using a Continue with Mega Turrican though, however, when I lost a life in Mega Turrican, I basically respawned at the spot I died.

I realise now, thanks to your comment, I was just mad that I had to restart the whole level and my sense of entitlement came from Cuphead that actually doesn't have long levels at all, Cuphead's levels are short. Learning the levels and boss fights and then executing everything perfectly is what makes things difficult so the levels feel long.

Its artificial lengthening of the game. If you had a checkpoint at the start of every level you could come back to, you'd beat the game in just a few hours. But because you have to do it all in one sitting with one set of lives, you will fail many times over until you finally do beat the game.

Seriously, if Streets of Rage had saves at the start of each zone/level, the games would be criminally short. Yet they are full price. Games couldn't really deliver big, lengthy experiences so had to up the difficulty to keep you playing and feeling your money wasn't wasted.

>>13744893

Lives and continues were used as a method of balancing out the difficulty of a game, too few lives and too few continues and your game could become tedious and a chore to play, too few and your game becomes too easy. Lives and continues were eventually replaced in certain genres by checkpoints and the ability to quicksave/autosave, meaning lives/continues became obsolete due to enhancements in technology.

As some anons have already pointed out, lives and continues were very much carry overs from arcade games. Hell, ports of arcade games still needed lives and continues due to the fact that they were designed around making you pay more money to keep playing the game in hopes of winning. The only way to supplement the 'credit' system of an arcade machine on a home console was to add lives and methods of achieving more lives. For example, the home port of Time Crisis 2 gave you extra continues every time you got a game over, eventually giving you a total of around 9 continues with which to beat the game. People were also used to the 'credit' system of the arcades and so it made sense for developers hoping to develop an 'arcade' style game, to implement a system of lives, continues and passwords

>>13746985

*too many and your game becomes too easy

I really should proofread my posts, christ.

>>13744893

>why exactly were lives and continues featured into every game?

Lives were introduced so that you don't go back to the beginning after you die once. Continues to give you an opportunity to begin at the last stage or beginning of a subset of stages.

The concepts of punishment for making mistakes and limiting the total number of mistakes that a player can make are very important aspects of skill gratification. They also allow for derived gameplay in the form of risk-reward mechanics. Should you risk damage or death to grab that 1up on the ledge over there to increase your overall amount of retries? This is a form of mechanic that can only function in a video game with limitations on retries. It incentivizes more elaborate level design to facilitate these kinds of scenarios. In addition, a game that forces the player to replay something after losing progress due to too many mistakes is a game that is forced to put considerably more thought into making levels compelling enough to still be fun and interesting on replays.

Those people who think that these mechanics are "just a relic from arcade games" have never even beaten games like the original Super Mario Bros. or NES Contra without cheating, and they just assume that the way modern Nintendo makes lives utterly meaningless in a game like Super Mario Galaxy is the only way lives can implemented (rather than an extremely poor implementation of it). The answer is not to remove mistake limitations entirely like indie hacks like Edmund McMillan would have you believe. The answer is to make them functional.

TL;DR: Because it's simply good game design.

>>13744999

Game length is not a metric of quality. Some of the best games ever made take less than 15 minutes to beat.

>>13745068

>just one that requires foreknowledge and effort to complete

Foreknowledge requirement is generally pretty bad design and most arcade games that featured it didn't last very long because people thought they were blatantly unfair and didn't want to spend their money on them. There are a few exceptions like Dragon's Lair, but that's the general trend.

Lives made reaching the end of the game a struggle and more of a reward. You have a clear fail condition that causes you to start from the beginning.

I remember as a kid, playing games over and over again and getting further and further as I got better. You'd get further and further each time. I remember the first time I made it to world 8 in SMB3 I was shitting my pants. I tried for a long time to get there and I never could.

Meanwhile, games without lives, there's no loss condition. You can keep playing the same level over and over again and dying, there's no loss for doing so. There's no risk. I just don't care for them. What's the point? If you keep playing you'll get to the end eventually, even if you suck.

It just doesn't feel rewarding to beat a game or level if you don't have lives. I really like the feeling of

>oh fuck, that boss was hard, I used a ton of lives, I need to get my shit together

You don't get that with no lives. The game just becomes

>lol that boss was hard what's next

>>13747067

this guy gets it

>>13747728

<I play sports for fun. That's why I only play against 5 year olds, so I can win easily. Else it'd be like a job.

>>13732908