/v/ - Video Games

I think it could be fun, but the ethos of completionism that games (especially Japanese games) have instilled within many of us would make it difficult to fully enjoy.

>>15381570

Yeah, I don't really think it would work for anything but RPGs. You'd want the game to revolve around 'completing' a character instead of 'completing' the game in one go. Who cares if you didn't do all the content involving crime if your character is a hitman and doesn't "do" theft.

I have a severe form of autism that does not allow me to be proud of anything vidya-related but 100% perfection. Strategy games like Fire Emblem - unless there is a way to do a chapter that's 100% consistent, a stage is not done until there is such a method ready.

>>15381591

>unless there is a way to do a chapter that's 100% consistent, there is no satisfaction

>>15381606

Like every idea taken to its extreme it would require a dedicated true AI to implement perfectly, but I think that using it as a design pillar would lead to more interesting RPGs.

What are Obsidian RPGs?

>>15381546

That would prevent Battletoads from being fun, so, no.

True Crime: Streets of LA kind of had this actually. It wasn't a lot, but at a couple of chapters, if you failed a mission, the story got sidetracked into completely new directions and levels. 100%ing the game required failing a couple of missions to unlock these alternate paths. Star Fox 64 had something similar where successes and failures took you on different branching paths.

Failure offering alternatives rather than straightforward Game Overs is an interesting idea but obviously it would cause a lot more work. Though as others said, a lot of people are perfectionists who couldn't handle continuing with an acknowledged failure on their part. But there's plenty of more casual players who would.

>>15381546

>Can you stand to deal with suboptimal outcomes?

depends, often I find this so infuriating, that I'll reset back to the previous checkpoint

everyone would restart from the latest checkpoint anyway, so unless you put a somewhat intrusive auto-save feature it's not going to work

Freespace kind of had this. There are quite a few missions where you can fail the main objective; it hampers the war effort but you carry on.

Isn't this one of the gimmicks of David Cage games? That they continue even if you make "bad" choices or player characters die?

>>15381546

I think you hit it on the head for games like when you mess up stealth but can still continue. Problem is, even for games that reward skilled gameplay, like the minigames in FFVII, I'm too much of a perfectionist not to save scum.

Just make it seem like the player didn't fail.

>>15381546

Not gonna happen, OP, because having that shit means having to implement additional content, which means more work, which means nu-devs ain't gonna do it.

>failing forward

When did this become the replacement term for "being a decent GM"?

>>15382307

It's just a name for a technique decent GMs use.

Heavy Rain, of all games/"games", had this to a degree. Its a cool idea and I'd like to see it more. Problem is development, its a lot easier to program a game over and make the player do it right than give players multiple states beyond the initial failure that they can react to and bounce back from.

>If this was applied more to narratives

Yikes

The solution to save-scumming is to implement a dark souls-esque auto save system. Sure, people would just restart if an outcome happened they weren't happy with, but if it auto saves and that is the only method, then what are they gonna do? The answer is call your game shit.

You would need to implement limited saves to prevent the player from just retrying until they get the best outcome. And even then, I imagine a lot of people myself would become frustrated at not getting the perfect outcome and restart the entire game over and over until getting burned out and not playing it anymore. I already do this on games with any missable content.

>>15382512

I disagree, purely on the fact that failure is natural, especially with the amount of people who suck dick at video games.

On the /tg/ side, the last D&D session I had, a party member rolled a critical failure on investigation, and our GM sent us to the other side of town where we met a boy who we could get answers out of and find a secret path to the manor we wanted to go to. I think that OP is talking about failure states like these, rather than just straightforward, fail > encounter. Obviously, the natural mindset is to be perfect and not fail, but what if they led to different paths? Different characters?

Shadow of the Horned Rat.

Fail the first missions.

Get different missions there after and an Imperial Steam Tank, because you are clearly incompetent and have to get an advantage.

I have rarely seen something like it since then.

That was ~20 years ago.

>>15381546

What you're describing is a branching path. These are virtually extinct in modern video games because publishers don't want to pay for the production of content a consumer might never see, and they don't want the special needs lowest common denominator to get confused.

LISA: The painful lets you do this, I guess. You can lose party members and limbs permanently, get robbed, etc. But you're stilll more than capable of finishing the game.

>>15381546

Isn't this exactly how they did Heavy Rain and Detroit Becoming Human?

I hated the QTE shit in that game so I returned my rental copy without completing it, but I remember that's what happened and I heard that DBH was similar to that end.

>>15382556

The second part is likely more the reason.

The mental state of the average modern gamer is shockingly low. I genuinely cannot believe how lazy and stupid and whiney they are.

>>15382512

I think you're taking it too seriously and reading too deeply into what is honestly a very simple thing. It just describes the concept that failing something should still be significant rather than just being a roadblock. Getting caught in a ruse and being captured and thrown into jail is still failing forward, because it progresses what is happening. Getting caught in a ruse and the guard saying "no, fuck off" is not failing forward. I don't think every single thing should fail forward (failing to pick a lock would probably just still leave you where you are), but most actions should have consequences, positive or negative.

It's just a term that describes a technique used to keep the plot moving and the characters interested. Failing forward is an aspect of being a good GM for sure, but there is still value in isolating what it is so that you can work on being better at it and teach it to new GMs.

It's like in cooking, there is a concept of "mise en place", which is simply getting all your ingredients and materials in place before starting to cook so that everything goes as planned and you're never looking for anything. It's something every cook should do, and every good cook does, but it's still worth having a unique name so that you can analyze, discuss, and teach it. You can't just say "that's being a good cook" and pretend that it's not worth discussing.

>>15381546

this is why quicksave is cancer, it's basically god mode because you don't live with any mistakes

auto-saving is essentially the one part of the modern industry i agree with

Pokemon Yellow does this. If you lose the first battle in the game, against Blue in Oak's Lab, he later evolves his Eevee into Vaporeon, giving your Pikachu a type advantage. If you go out of your way to beat him on the route between Viridian City and Indigo Plateau, his Eevee instead evolves into Flareon, which isn't a type advantage but is an infamously shitty pokemon. If you win the battle in Oak's lab and also go out of your way to beat him outside Viridian City, his Eevee later evolves into Jolteon, which I guess is less shitty than the other two, and you can argue it has plot significance as you beat him so hard he made his starter an Electric type like yours. This whole thing would have worked better if Eevee could have evolved into a type strong against Electric though.

>>15382589

Checkpoints only work when the game is 100% linear. Instead of savescumming for the ideal outcome, you're just accepting the removal of any other outcome except the ideal one.

>>15382512

Or how dark souls did it, fail to spot and fall for the trap in the sewers and you drop down several levels. Now you are completely lost and as far as the player knows nowhere near a bonfire (checkpoint) also has some really fun enemies down there but nothing you shouldnt be able to handle at that point unless you panic like a faggot because you just fell down a hole and lost of a load of health.

>>15381546

Honestly I'd usually rather just get a game-over and start over. It's more fun to know you did something properly, than to charge forward and be stupid but progress anyway.

>>15381546

The problem with implementing this concept in a video game is that unlike in Tabletop where there is infinite more flexibility with how you can help circumvent the players putting themselves into a permanent fail state. It would be harder for a developer to integrate the number of features and considerations necessary to mitigate save scumming or whatever else you assiciate with shooting for a perfect run.

Using your Metal Gear example. If you engage in the shootout and burn all your ammo how do you get more? You could make it so that you can steal ammo from the guards but now are you tracking how much each guard expended? Or are you just going to have each one drop enough ammo to help the player continue on to the next encounter? Same for health? If guards are carrying health items now to compensate the player do they also get to use them for themselves? How hard are you simulating this.

Because if you don't account for these kinds of variables, if your player enters into that shootout and survives. They can be in a position where they have no health or ammo and a boss is right around the corner so you now have them either continue to death/reload. Or find ways to give them those resources and somehow keep them scarce enough that they don't have the ability to just coast on your generosity.

Well you see anon, that takes effort and a bit of creativity. These things are banned in vidya.

Detective Pikachu does this, I’m pretty sure you can fail every QTE without any real consequence. It’s a pretty sadistic way to play though since it would basically mean Pikachu getting constantly beaten up throughout the story.

>>15381546

Yes. Existence of even a minor choice and consequence element in a video game is always a sign of complexity, depth and thoughtful design choices with genuine effort put in them.

I enjoy stuff like alternative death mods for games like FNV where dying causes you to respawn somewhere with penalties and no items, so the progress you made in quests/killing enemies isn't lost but you have to find a way back to your stuff all while suffering from some debilitation. Of course with such a mod you need to never savescum, you shouldn't have to load a save anytime other than loading the game. It'd be nice if the game was built from the ground up with this in mind though with stuff like timed/failable quests to make everything more high stakes. It also has to be the case though that you don't die super quickly and deaths are more the result of consecutive bad decisions or poor resource management, and healing items need to be very limited to compensate. I just modded them to all be much heavier and somewhat less potent so they don't give you the ability to play recklessly all the time.

I'd say KC: Deliverance and Mount&Blade work like this, but both display different ways of implementing it.

In KC, quests have multiple ways of going about them, either by actually doing skillchecks (conversation) or combat, stealth etc. Failing a quest doesn't mean restarting a game. They're designed in a way that only dying is a complete roadblock. If you fail to convince someone to do something, beat them up or kill them, the game continues as normal.

In Mount&Blade, the system is much more rudimentary, but still works in the context of the game. There's no death. If you lose a battle and fail to escape, you're taken prisoner by the enemy and dragged around until the game decides you can escape. It takes away some of your inventory, cash, army etc. You don't however lose your stats, standing with factions, properties you own and such. It's not nearly as complex, but neither is the game itself.

As a different example, Shadow of Mordor/War's nemesis system is kind of that, I suppose, making you feel like your failure actually had impact on the world, but if you take away Orks leveling up, it's still just a simple consequence-free death system.

The resources to do something like that would be more financially intense than you'd think.

Also if you're trying to establish a mood and the player acts like a drunken retard, it kinda ruins things. Good for a laugh though.

"Failing forward" games, huh? If they did existed somehow, I reckon they wouldn't be for me. I've yet to fail or get a game over in a game before.

>>15384019

Well, I'm not using the food thing as an analogy. I'm just saying that "it's just being a good GM" is not a reason to not have a name for it or to discuss the concept. Many fields have things that are inarguable good practice that everybody should do, but nobody says "That's just called being a good programmer" or "that's just called being a good mechanic". There is value in breaking down and discussing something even if it's inarguably a good thing. That was all I was trying to get across, not that "failing forward" is anything like "mise en place", but more that just because it's generally good practice doesn't mean it shouldn't have a name and be analyzed.

I also don't think it's relevant to every video game. Some narrative-based games do it alright (Baldur's Gate does it, but that's kind of cheating being a D&D game). It is absolutely a lot of extra development work, which is why most games that do it at all only do it in very minor amounts.

I think every GM should be aware of the concept, though, and there are very few situations where it's appropriate to straight-up block the players when they fail a check, especially if it involves NPCs.

>>15385150

best part is the chicken.