/v/ - Video Games

back to previous save point/check point, remove quick saves from existence as they are only for casuals

Having limited lives doesn't make sense unless it's a permanent restart if you run out. Checkpoints and unlimited lives but handicaps every time you die are the only sensible routes to go.

Unlimited continues for the exact level and checkpoint you're at. Checkpoints are fine as long as they're sparse.

No game overs, we're not playing fucking arcades anymore, nor do we have all the time in the world as we did when we were kids.

No permanent changes to the game save when you die, it's way too forced a consequence and makes the effort to not die a chore rather than a self-imposed challenge.

>>15790983

Like with most things, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. It really depends on the type of game.

Anons always seem to praise quick saves, but they are some bullshit let me tell you. With quick saves, how the fuck am I supposed to know what's a reasonable spot to save if I don't know what's a ahead? Obviously the game's creator would know better than me what dangers are ahead. If I save frequently, I just end up feeling like I'm savescumming, it gets too easy and I just start to lose interest. If I don't save at all then I'm left to repeat very easy portions of the game that are just tedious, and I lose interest. But if I save infrequently, then I risk saving myself into a deathloop.

Maybe don't have it if the game would support that. Just replace it with landing in jail or something like that. Sid Meier's Pirates did it well. But of course it wouldn't work in platformers and such.

Why not leave it to player choice?

One thing I hate is having to do a whole section and then a boss fight. It feels like a huge waste of time and it's frustrating having to get a boss's pattern down while also having to do another tedious run through a level. Then again I'm old now and way more of a casual so I just don't have the same amount of time to waste.

They should boot you back to your last save, but the games themselves should let you save anywhere, get rid of autosaves and checkpoints, if you lose hours of progress it's entirely your fault.

I believe every time you die, a live bee should be released from the PC or console.

>>15791078

Only if they supply you with said bees, i ain't paying for them.

>>15791092

Pirate them.

>>15791078

>easy mode releases flies

>normal mode releases bees

>hard mode releases wasps

I'm okay with this.

Normal game ending given for a standard play through with saves/checkpoints while the true end is behind the ironmode and/or permadeath.

>>15791046

because players will do anything they can to suck the fun out of a game

>>15790983

It really depends on the game.

I like how EYE handled death as an unlikely (and eventually reversible) stat handicap and a 5 second time-out. But EYE's style of just poofing back to life wouldn't work in MGS, for example.

However, >>15791077 and >>15791078 are both fair and reasonable solutions for the majority of games.

>>15790983

i have a saying that goes, if the player wants to cheat, let him, roguelikes and their like shouldnt bother protecting the gamefiles for permadeath, it only makes things worse for players that are just messing up whit the mechanics or when the game bugs and/or crashes.

>>15791113

Lucky bastard.

>>15791102

>dante must die mode: releases 3 wasps, and if you want to keep playing you have to catch them and put them back in the console, otherwise it locks up forever

>>15791078

What about handhelds? Should it release Fire Ants?

>>15790983

Depends entirely on the game and the tone the dev wants.

Roguelikes need single lives with the failure state being a complete reset of your stats/equipment and starting over from the 1st floor of the dungeon.

Limited stocks of lives were the BnB of Arcade games, but still have some use outside of suckering your coins because it gives the player a set number of times to complete a task and failure means starting over from the beginning usually.

Unlimited lives, but checkpoints favors slamming your head against a wall. Rolling saves + checkpoints is another way to do this as well. You can flavor this with other consequences like Demon Soul's does by taking half your health bar or other things.

>>15790983

Depends on the game type.

Arcade action: Lives, continues, each can be earned by uncommon pickups/points/widgets

RPG: Load last save, or, divert the plot to acknowledge a non-fatal defeat to allow the player to recover, but lose money/equipment/experience from the failure.

Adventure: Far too easy to fall through the fucking geometry and die in modern adventure games, so checkpoint+save system is fine.

FPS: Depends on the realism level. From lowest to highest: Respawn posts, checkpoints, beginning of the level, beginning of the whole damn chapter, reload from a manual save or start the whole game over.

Shameless bump.

>>15790983

If you die in the game, you die for real. Once you die - the game deletes itself from your hard drive, and it's wiped clean from your game library, thus you have to repurchase it again to get a second try.

The opposite of King Crimson's ability: progress in everything except location is still intact. No real penalties besides forcing you to walk back if you died far away from a landmark.

Xenoblade Wii does this.

>>15793320

So basically an arcade game for the modern era.

>>15793336

No, it's a conventional game with at least hundred hours of content with forced cloud savestates on gameexit. Alt-f4 is treated as a special command that continues the gameplay for at least 10 seconds then tries to save&exit the usual way, if that's not possible then the game is forcefully closed. Any other way of exiting the game corrupts the game files and is treated as instant death on next launch of the program.

>>15793380

Run it in a VM & just suspend+snapshot the machine state. Boom, unlimited tries

>>15790983

every video game that lets you continue should have an in-game explanation of why, like in Prince of Persia where it's just the prince getting the story wrong

>>15791078

>play video game with violence in it

>any time your character gets damaged, the pain is simulated on the player's body

>burns are actual burns, lava levels become EXTREMELY dangerous

>the player can't actually die, but would instead feel the excruciating pain of being stabbed in the heart or shot in the head

>player's legs can actually become crippled in real life from falling from heights in platformers

I like the idea of a two layer difficulty mode.

Layer 1 is Lives vs No Lives. Basically making it so if you die with an extra life it lessens the penalty to one stage less than your chosen difficulty.

Layer 2 is the usual Easy Normal Hard. Easy is a minor penalty with lives basically being extra health, maybe like sent back to the last platform, health kit, a last stand thing, etc. Medium is you die and go back to the start of the level, or checkpoint in the level if you have lives on. Hard should be if you die with no lives entire wipe of the last biggest chunk of the game. So like an entire world in a platformer or reset the world to the last major gameplay event. With lives just like how medium is.

You know, I've thought about loss way too much. Super Mario Bros., for example, has been described by Miyamoto something along the lines of "when you die you go back to the beginning". But even in the first game, beginning meant a lot of things. When you lose a single life, you either get sent back to the start of the level, or to an invisible checkpoint you passed at some point. Similarly if you get a Game Over, you either get sent back to the start of the game, or to the start of the world you were on if you use a code. Let's contrast this with Wario Land 2, where you can't die. You still get sent back and impeded by various tricks and traps, but it's not contextualized by death. Branching out, starting from the last save point is pretty common, and in JRPGs Dragon Quest popularized the concept of keeping all the EXP you got, but losing half your money and whatever items you used in the meantime. The Wonderful 101 lets you start over where you died, but docks your rank by a letter grade every time you do so, and as we all know Platinum games are really about the score. Then you have games like Yume Nikki where it seems like you can't really lose, and yet getting sent back to the waking world while you're balls deep in the dream world is about as big of a physical setback as getting a Game Over in Mario. In many arcade style games, it's really only a matter of time until you die. In Rogue-like games, losing is basically your practice and you need to get back into things quickly. I guess the question is what kind of experience do you want the player to have? And more importantly, what qualifies as a loss state?

i dont care that much, but if its a game where youre expected to die a whole lot keep the downtime low and definitely give the option to skip cutscenes or at least put the checkpoint after the cutscene.

Depends on the kind of game really.

Where do you want the challenge in the game to lie? Do you want it to throw incredibly difficult obstacles at the player, on the grounds that the death penalty is lenient. Or do you want a punishing death penalty, on the grounds that the obstacles are leniant enough that the player can reasonably overcome them even when they are met with set-backs?

The thing to realise is there is such thing as a difficulty threshold, where the player will just run out of patience with the game. You can't just go "every aspect is really hard because it's a hardcore game for hardcore gamers such as myself!"

>>15793985

Always online, the "removed from library" should have hinted at that.

The real answer is that it depends entirely on the game in question and everyone who doesn't take a wholistic approach to game design is a mouth breathing shithead

>>15791046

The obesity epidemic is a very good example of why you don't leave it to "player choice". People, given the choice tend to always choose whatever is the most gratifying in the short term, even if it makes the experience less gratifying overall. Its your job as a dev to maximise fun by balancing this.

>>15794477

>being a ludonarrative dissonance fag

>>15796599

The fundamental issue you're addressing is that some people playing your game will be smarter than others. A truly good game gives options to both. Usually the game will offer a satisfactory option with little practice and an excellent option with a substantial amount of practice or cunning. Most people call this a high skill ceiling. What you're proposing is to simply cater a game for retards.

I delete my character when I die in an elder scrolls/fallout game.

>>15790983

playing with unlimited lives and a save anywhere option makes the game pointless you can just brute force it no skill required no consideration ultimate normalfag-tier gaming

It Depends

In hindsight I believe the Vita-Chambers in Bioshock or the reconstruction chambers in the System Shock games actually really fit the game. Normally with reloading a save you'd have to go through all the busywork of looting containers and bodies for resources again, which in itself isn't that fun to do over and over. It's just busywork. It makes more sense to be able to continue after death while having a minor punishment incurred so you don't have to go through all that shit again.

But because it's possible to reload saves and try to redo something perfectly an infinite amount of times, most people find it more preferable to spend their time retrying a situation over risking a long-term loss of resources and living with their mistakes. Even though the latter provides more interesting gameplay opportunities and long-term decision making as opposed to trying to brute-force perfectionism. Prey: Mooncrash showed how much design issues inherent to these type of games just evaporated when the ability to savescum was removed (in favor of permadeath).

>>15791023

Most cringe worthy post of the day

should be made so you have an opportunity to reverse it before it happens always and should always be more players own fault not game design failure

I think a restart to the beginning of the level Doom style should be standard. Maybe to make it a little less hard on the player, have some sort of comeback mechanic that adjusts itself to the difficulty level.

>Easy is almost everyone could get it

>Normal is missable but not reliably so

>Hard is flat out a few fractions of a second

>Very hard is that you dont have it at all

>>15794505

>any time your character gets damaged, the pain is simulated on the player's body

<player's legs can actually become crippled in real life from falling from heights in platformers

You wanna draw that sentence out?

>>15790983

Depends on how you design your game. In games like roguelikes or bullet hell or similar, the individual challenge tends to be rather easy and the game would get laughably trivial if you could just quicksave. It's the compound difficulty that brings the challenge. Games like RPGs, however, are built around (assuming they aren't shit) giving you challenged that are difficult on their own and for which a compound difficulty would be simply ridiculous. You aren't expected to clear each challenge on the same try, rather it's expected that you'll fail the challenge several times before you git gud and manage to overcome it, after which you're allowed to save. Often, you then get to repeat the same challenge many times, as most encounters aren't bosses but regular enemies, which (in a well designed game, unlike modern AAA shit) should all offer serious challenge if you don't pay attention or underestimate them. Things like learning their movesets, deciding which ones to block and which ones to dodge, equipping the correct gear, choosing the right terrain, etc. You cannot obtain this knowledge without failing several times first, and even after you do learn their weakspots, you're liable to fuck up and get wrecked. Doing a compound difficulty in such a game would be ludicrous – you'd be getting your shit pushed in literally all the time, being forced to retread the same paths and fight the same enemies over and over. The game would become a tedious bore. It would not be an enjoyable experience. The only exception to this is that saves should be disabled during fights, so that you cannot cheese through parts where compound difficulty is actually intended, such as encountering a group of enemies – if you could save mid-battle every time you killed one, you'd bypass the actual intended difficulty.

I like dark souls

Death

And checkpoints

Worst save system is elder scrolls cuz of cheesing

>>15791102

>Extreme mode: game releases mosquitoes with Malaria

>>15790989

THIS

quick saving is for save scumming faggots and if you willingly use it in any game you are shit

>>15790983

Fuck off with your market research.

You should be able to get life insurance

Would be nice if there were a choice, tied to difficulty maybe. Easy lets you save scum, normal allows checkpoints, hard restarts the level and the top difficulty is permadeath/total game reset/limited lives to maybe compensate.

>>15791025

I always love when games add limited saves as part of a Hard mode, but would like it more if it was an actual central mechanic like RE had - save rooms were safe places where you could catch your breath, reorganize and plan your next move, which added to the overall atmosphere

How about upon every failure, Tyrone comes over to fuck your wife/gf/sister/mother?

>>15791078

I would die on purpose.

>>15805106

>That webm

Get better reflexes.

>>15805106

>not checking your corners

The hell you're trapped in is of your own creation.

>>15805120

>reflexes

nigger that has nothing to do with it

running around a corner sideways gets you killed.

>>15796599

The food industry filling 99% of food with sugar, fucked up wheat, and all manner of poison is more responsible for that. They make food as addictive and unhealthy as possible, often while falsely marketing them as healthy. People do have a say in what they eat, but a lot of the times they may not even realize what they are eating is terrible for them. I know what you are getting at, but I don't think that is a great example. Polite sage for off topic.

>>15796599

The cost of every type of raw or packaged food has more than tripled in the last twenty years, while the prices on every fast-food dollar menu has remained the same. Meanwhile, wages have only increased maybe 50% at most from back then, and people have to work two jobs so have no time to scratch their ass, much less make their own meals.

People don't choose their diet; society chooses it for them. They can either eat shitty foods, or eat NOTHING.

You die once and the disk flips out of your console and spontaneously combusts on the floor.

>>15797329

>>15790989

Auto saves are for consoles because nip retards don't understand the concept of a computer.

>>15791102

>wasps

>not asian giant hornets

>>15805888

>People don't choose their diet; society chooses it for them. They can either eat shitty foods, or eat NOTHING.

eat the kikes, food war now.

>>15796841

Get that cock out of your mouth, shortbus.