F'ing Up Isn't So Bad
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I dislike the impossibility of succeeding in MP3. No matter what you do, he's always going to fail- even when you can see his mistakes coming, there's no way to avoid them. This really rubbed me the wrong way.
Still, it's miles better than ME3's chances of "failing" because you haven't been 100% P or R up to that point.
Still, it's miles better than ME3's chances of "failing" because you haven't been 100% P or R up to that point.
Mistakes are great in any aspect of life. One of the best ways to learn something is to fuck it up entirely. And some fuck ups in life are truly memorable.
In terms of games, I agree wholeheartedly that scripted events have a time and place but the unexpected things, good or bad, are the ones that you remember:
Recently I started a game of FIFA Street and instead of passing back to my team, I tried lobbing back to my team. The lob ended up being an own goal into the top corner that the goalie misjudged. Did it suck for me? Yes. But it is still the goal I remember the most in that game.
In terms of games, I agree wholeheartedly that scripted events have a time and place but the unexpected things, good or bad, are the ones that you remember:
Recently I started a game of FIFA Street and instead of passing back to my team, I tried lobbing back to my team. The lob ended up being an own goal into the top corner that the goalie misjudged. Did it suck for me? Yes. But it is still the goal I remember the most in that game.
What about a system similar to Bioshocks Vita-Chambers? The way they work is that, even if you fuck up, the game world continues on and you simply respawn in another location, the world still been afflicted by the fuck-up you caused earlier. Unfortunately that can't work for every game (and there are those who think that Vita Chambers didn't work for Bioshock anyway).Zhukov said:
The problem here is that you don't truly fail as progress is merely stalled. This can lead to pacing issues where a death puts you back a few rooms rather then auto-loading you to the begining of the room you died in (which is a system also riddled with problems that hinder gameplay).
The problem with these systems is that they may be restricted by the narrative/themes of the game or if implemented, might actually grate against the intend of the games narrative and themes.
In fact, that can be seen as an issue in itself... narratives/themes in games try to emulate Film (films being a linear and rigid medium inherently). There aren't many game narratives that are specifically tailored towards gaming, that actively works in favor of Gamings interactive and emergent potential.
I completely agree. There is only one thing better than doing something awesome in a game that works, and that's when you do something awesome that fails horribly to do what you were trying to do but still gets you the win.
When those things happen they are the best conversation materials. The world would suck if no one ever F@#ked up! How would we judge success if we couldn't compare them to failure? Well I guess we could compare them to each other, but then it just would turn into a who did the most insane thing contest. After a while it would be like, "Oh, you blew up 2 planets? Ha, I blew up 3!".
Besides, sometimes some people need to F@#k up.
When those things happen they are the best conversation materials. The world would suck if no one ever F@#ked up! How would we judge success if we couldn't compare them to failure? Well I guess we could compare them to each other, but then it just would turn into a who did the most insane thing contest. After a while it would be like, "Oh, you blew up 2 planets? Ha, I blew up 3!".
Besides, sometimes some people need to F@#k up.
I was one such person. I always played with the vita-chambers turned off.Ragsnstitches said:
The problem with those and systems like them is that they remove the consequences for fucking up. They don't even penalise your progression the way a checkpoint or quickload does.
A perfect system would allow you to fail, penalise you for it, but then (at least in the case of a non-terminal failure) allow things to keep going without compromising the narrative... somehow.
The only example I can think of is losing a battle in a strategy game. You suffer a failure, but the wheels keep turning. However that sort of thing can't really be adapted to other forms of gameplay.
The bit you said at the end there, like we'd never know happiness without sorrow and stuff, I still think chocolate would taste brilliant even if we didn't have broccoli. Broccoli, in no way, affects the taste of chocolate. I think Lindit Bunny's taste better than Cadbury's cream eggs, not because cream eggs are bad, but that Lindit Bunny's are better by comparison, even though I love Cadbury's cream eggs. There doesn't need to be a binary switch between happiness and sorrow, there can be inbetweeny bits, and some inbetweeny bits are better than others. But happiness compared to extreme happiness, I would choose the latter, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't have happiness because one is better. But yeah, I see what you mean.
I think Zhukov ment that it would be neat if you could mess up in a game in more ways than just having to die, and reload.Ragsnstitches said:
Like in MP3 you can mess up the bullet time jump, but you won't "automatically" die because of that. Not that it won't increase your chances to die.
This is like my pet peeve. Though it's sort of forgiveable (not okay, but forgiveable) in most third person action games nowadays because it's doing kind of an RPG thing where it's just shoving you along a predetermined narrative, but the blue shells in Mario Kart have no such excuse. The game is so afraid to let people fail that it explicitly snatches victory away from the guy in first place, that's some kind of Harrison Bergeron shit happening there. And what makes it extra tragic is that it's a race, it's literally not over till it's over, even if you fuck up there's a whole race ahead of you to make things right, so they're literally "fixing" a problem that doesn't even exist. I value all the time I spent getting stomped in Street Fighter games because it resulted in me becoming awesome at it.
I don't think it is very likely to "believably" remove the "die" and "start over" bit in most games. Don't get me wrong, some games could probably pull that off, and have it fit the narrative. But with a lot of games you can get to certain points where continuing without starting over wouldn't make sense, or it would be like a reverse of the "suppose to lose" fights that you can't fail.Zhukov said:
I think adding in mechanics that you can succeed/fail at without having to die directly because of the failure is the best way to go.
I was just thinking this on my first playthrough of Diablo 3 gradually anticipating the point where I could finish the game and actually play it at a level of difficulty where I could fuck up.
Then I realised that I had to play through on the easy mode for EVERY FUCKING CHARACTER.
Since then I have been playing the Arma II mod, DayZ a glorious Roguelike PvP environment spread over 220 square kilometres of imaginary central Europe, and has
-Hunger that needs to be fed with baked beans and tins of sardines, or the occasional murdered cow assuming you have a knife to butcher it with and matches to light a fire.
-Thirst that goes up faster the more you run to be managed by quaffing soft-drinks or from trusty canteens that are never full when you find them.
-Managed body temperature, managed blood pressure (You bleed a lot.) Morphine for broken bones, pain killers that act more like hard liquor because all they do is stop the shakes.
-Zombies. Lots of zombies. Zombies that will jump at you in the dozens if you make too much noise forcing you to fight for every bullet, bandage, and can of spaggetti-o's. And if you run out of bullets for the zombies chasing you, pray for nighttime so you can throw a road flare to distract them (If you have one.)
-And a sparse population of other players who might help you out, or, far more likely murder you and nick all your stuff.
Id been managing all these things quite well. I had a couple of cans of baked beans, two canteens of water, a decentish rifle with a couple of full magazines, a good pistol and the shitty starting one with ammo for both, a tent, a decent racksack, compass, map, and binoculars. Then I fell off a set of stairs and broke both my legs.
I lay there unconscious until I bled out.
Much better than Diablo.
Then I realised that I had to play through on the easy mode for EVERY FUCKING CHARACTER.
Since then I have been playing the Arma II mod, DayZ a glorious Roguelike PvP environment spread over 220 square kilometres of imaginary central Europe, and has
-Hunger that needs to be fed with baked beans and tins of sardines, or the occasional murdered cow assuming you have a knife to butcher it with and matches to light a fire.
-Thirst that goes up faster the more you run to be managed by quaffing soft-drinks or from trusty canteens that are never full when you find them.
-Managed body temperature, managed blood pressure (You bleed a lot.) Morphine for broken bones, pain killers that act more like hard liquor because all they do is stop the shakes.
-Zombies. Lots of zombies. Zombies that will jump at you in the dozens if you make too much noise forcing you to fight for every bullet, bandage, and can of spaggetti-o's. And if you run out of bullets for the zombies chasing you, pray for nighttime so you can throw a road flare to distract them (If you have one.)
-And a sparse population of other players who might help you out, or, far more likely murder you and nick all your stuff.
Id been managing all these things quite well. I had a couple of cans of baked beans, two canteens of water, a decentish rifle with a couple of full magazines, a good pistol and the shitty starting one with ammo for both, a tent, a decent racksack, compass, map, and binoculars. Then I fell off a set of stairs and broke both my legs.
I lay there unconscious until I bled out.
Much better than Diablo.
Some games do that, at least kinda.Imp Emissary said:
There's this one bit in Human Revolution where you have to protect Malick, your pilot. If you don't dispatch the enemies in time she dies, but the game keeps right on going.
Of course, that doesn't stop people from quickloading the failure away, which is exactly what I did.
Something tells me Yahtzee wants some Cadbury's Créme eggs.
OT: Strongly agree with the points. Juxtapositioning things is such an important aspect of making games -or anything- entertaining. As Jim said in his latest show, it wasn't the number of shooters that made E3 dull; it was the lack of anything different. I'd find it a lot easier to get into modern shooters if they broke things up a bit, even if it was just the main character having an acid trip, seeing the world in rainbows and the enemies as clowns, pirates and ninjas.
(Captcha: Million dollars. Yes I would like that captcha, how did you know?)
OT: Strongly agree with the points. Juxtapositioning things is such an important aspect of making games -or anything- entertaining. As Jim said in his latest show, it wasn't the number of shooters that made E3 dull; it was the lack of anything different. I'd find it a lot easier to get into modern shooters if they broke things up a bit, even if it was just the main character having an acid trip, seeing the world in rainbows and the enemies as clowns, pirates and ninjas.
(Captcha: Million dollars. Yes I would like that captcha, how did you know?)
They didn't, because allowing for fuck-ups doesn't mean denying the ultimate fuck-up (dying for good). If you fuck up in Deus Ex then the good bit is recovering, just missing out on death, re-enacting your plan from another angle or altering it completely. (Or running the fuck away.) The same principle works for something far less dynamic like The Sands of Time - you get retries, but you can still actually die.Ragsnstitches said:
The Vita chambers don't do that. They eliminate death, and subsequently all manner of threat, completely. The game's harder if you fuck up, yes, but only in an irritating way. I'm not forced to reconsider my plan, I just start hitting stuff with wrenches until they start dying and I stop respawning.
Ha, I got into Day Z about a week or so before D3 came out. I don't give a shit about Diablo, but my friend had been waiting for it for fucking years. I showed him Day Z, and even though he doesn't admit it, I'm pretty sure he plays it a lot more than Diablo 3. Before Diablo 3 he was talking to me about it quite a lot, now if we talk on Steam it'll only be about Day Z.ACman said:
Anyway, Day Z certainly knows how to do fucking low-points like nothing else. Last time I met another player the idiot caught a zombie's attention whilst I was in a barn, then the bloody thing followed him in, ran head-first into me and on its first hit managed to break my legs and caused me to start bleeding.
After taking out about 50 of them all waddling into this barn, neither of us had morphine, so I couldn't fix my legs up. He went into the nearby town to try and find some, 10 minutes later (of me sitting in a barn), a little message pops up in chat says he's been killed.
So, only one thing for it: I drag myself around this fairly large town for 15 minutes before finding the body of another survivor and 3 morphine shots in his back. After that I'm back to full health, the town's full of loot (as is the body of the guy who got me into shit in the first place, which I find being eaten by 3 zombies), and now my character's been alive for around 15 hours, in spite of being a gnat's dick away from death.
That was infinitely more interesting, exciting and tense, than any set-piece dreamt up by one of the many failed filmmakers that seem to have wormed their way into mainstream developer studios.
That's pretty much how I felt during certain parts of the game. Mainly whenever there was a high place I could jump from, something I could jump through, or something I could blow up. Max Payne 3 had these little things here and there that were just screaming for you to use them.DVS BSTrD said:
Sure Max, you could hide behind that crate, dodge a few grenades, take out the enemies in this room with some diffulty then do the same for the second wave so you can run up the stairs and across the cat walk to the next section.
OR you could shotgun the fuck out of the guys in front of you, force your way up the stairs while returning fire, finally get to the catwalk shooting at whoever's up there and then bullet dodge off the catwalk as the next wave of enemies enter the room while raining death from above.
It took me about 8 times to actually pull this off.
And it was completely fucking worth it!