The Death of the Death Penalty

[Signa]

One interesting thing that no one has pointed out about Bioshock is how the death system worked itself into the story

Spoiler

You were Ryan's clone, and that's why you kept being revived at the vitachambers, because they were built for him.

Of course I turned off that mechanic after the first playthrough, but I did feel like that part of the story was deadened by quick-loading all the time.

And I also wanted to nod at Guild Wars for doing death penalties right. Some one said that was shit because it might make a section impossible after a while, and that was true, but if you had to give up, all you had to do was instantly warp back to town to remove the penalty. It gave you incentive to not die, but it didn't rape you for one mistake. Only after 4 or more mistakes did it really matter.

Also, another nod to Too Human for being retarded with the death penalty. It almost was slapping you in the face for not being good enough in a game that was hard. For a game where I heard the devs were OBSESSED with game flow, I have no idea why you'd implement a feature like that which slowed the flow down to a snail's pace.

 

[Rpground]

the death penalty is needed,if there wasnt or it was very lenient it wouldnt be very fun. you unfairly compare "Too Human" to "WoW" now lets look at this.

in "Too Human" if you were playing a melee fighter death was CONSTANT every 5-10 seconds you died,then a 20 sec un-skipable cutseen,then you would once again die in said time frame then repeat about 5-10 times in nearly every encounter.if you played ranged you wouldnt die as much though you would have to pick away at each individual enemy with at least 20 hits each to take one down. out of that there was no other penalty.so invulnerability there...if you dont mind the wait.

now compared to "WoW" if you die a few things happen. first when you die the fight you were in all things left alive (unless their boss specific mobs) would regain their lost live and remove all debuffs. next you will have to release your spirit and track down your corpse to revive,its no so bad even if its a 5 min walk cause in that time you can think/discuss of an new strategy to defeat that encounter/boss,and on top for that your equipment gets damaged by 10% everything you have equipped. its a loss of money,and repairs get pretty expensive after some time. and with this you can only die a set amount of times before you HAVE to go back to a town/settlement and repair.but that can be cutout threw engineering if you get not only the mats but also the recipe itself.so again another time waster. lastly it makes it a learning experience,it allows you to adapt and (once again) think instead of just throwing yourself at it again. (i might have missed something else but i cant remember for not playing for a while)
all in all its a death experience that you want to try and avoid,though its not too demanding to make you fear death and afraid to take risks.

though you really cant compare the 2 seeing as one is an MMO and the other is a SPE.

but all it really comes down to is tastes,some people like death to be a challenge to overcome,while others want a more relaxed death penalty.

i would prefer if death was something to be feared,but not so much so that it scares people away from risks. your saying that the already relaxed death penalties area bit too much,i say let them be in the middle at least hardcore to the rare extreme,but any easier,then death wont be a fear or something to avoid again in the near future.

just my 2 cents...

 

[Space Jawa]

I have to disagree. When I played Kirby's Epic Yarn, as cute as the game was I couldn't help but notice that when the only penalty for getting hurt was a loss of beads (or whatever those things were), the game became a lot less challenging and pretty soon, it began to suck a lot of fun out of the title. By the time I reached the end of the game, I found myself wishing that Kirby wasn't so darn invincible. I can't help but think that the lack of an ability to die (and by default, a death penalty) is a large part of the reason why I've made little effort to play the game anymore since I beat it.

Contrast to games that do offer a more traditional death penalty, such as the Super Mario series (particularly since I just got the All Stars game). When I can die and get sent back to the beginning of the level or the half way point, or have to start all over while trying to collet 100 purple Luigi coins, I get a much greater sense of accomplishment out of actually pulling it off than when I'm playing Kirby where getting to the end of the level is a guaranteed thing. Plus playing the levels themselves is a lot more intense when I have the worry that one wrong move could cost me big time.

So I think that when done right, death penalties actually do make games more fun.

 

[gravitii]

Arguably death should be a set back, but still fun. Idk how to explain like a previous poster was saying death works in most single player action games like call of duty because it's a quick back to last checkpoint thing so you have to find a different way to beat that one part, and this is a lot less noticeable than running back to your corpse and then back to wherever it is you're questing in a MMORPG. I guess the difference is what you do when regaining that lost time back. I guess a good death animation which sets you back but not necessarily by replacing you far away would work, or if some logic was applied to where you come back, like at the nearest hospital-ish place could help build realism, but overall if dying makes the game boring it's not working right. Frustrating as all heck, sure, but avoid boring.

 

[Zukhramm]

I have to disagree. When I played Kirby's Epic Yarn, as cute as the game was I couldn't help but notice that when the only penalty for getting hurt was a loss of beads (or whatever those things were), the game became a lot less challenging and pretty soon, it began to suck a lot of fun out of the title. By the time I reached the end of the game, I found myself wishing that Kirby wasn't so darn invincible. I can't help but think that the lack of an ability to die (and by default, a death penalty) is a large part of the reason why I've made little effort to play the game anymore since I beat it.

If you read the article you'd see Shamus clearly stating that removing all punishment for death is bad for this very reason.

 

[Space Jawa]

I have to disagree. When I played Kirby's Epic Yarn, as cute as the game was I couldn't help but notice that when the only penalty for getting hurt was a loss of beads (or whatever those things were), the game became a lot less challenging and pretty soon, it began to suck a lot of fun out of the title. By the time I reached the end of the game, I found myself wishing that Kirby wasn't so darn invincible. I can't help but think that the lack of an ability to die (and by default, a death penalty) is a large part of the reason why I've made little effort to play the game anymore since I beat it.

If you read the article you'd see Shamus clearly stating that removing all punishment for death is bad for this very reason.

Must not have paid close enough attention to the full article. >_<

 

[DenSomKastade]

Borderlands almost perfected death, with the only loss was some money and that you respawned not so far away. Left 4 dead was also good at death, you got a little break and lost your equipment but that could be found right next to your corpse so your friends could take it for you. In single player in battlefield: bad company it was just to easy, you respawned right next to were you had died and you had infinite lives. As long as you had ammo you could get through anything.

 

[Dhatz]

both of "MMO"s I play have no death penalty, they are Die2nite(this is built around dying) and TDP4 team battle(only top 100 people and those playing player-made tournaments care about their deaths)

 

[bjj hero]

I think there should be additional rewards for "acing" a section without dying/damage rather than punishing failure. That way the hardcore get their reward for putting the time in and doing it "right" and your kid sister can bumble her way to the end racking up 64 deaths. If the combat mechanics are good players should want to get through without dying.

Eve seems to have a big following and the death penalty there can be quite steep. I'd also like to add that I loved my time on Endwar where experienced units could be killed rather than just defeated. It changed peoples strategy and cut out the rambo tactics with powerful units, if hey were defeated and isolated then they could be killed perminently before the evac chopper arrived. Added a whole new level of spite and entertainment that would not be there otherwise.

The game becomes more real if a kill feels like you have struck a major "blow" to the enemy rather than thinking hell respawn in 5 minutes and well go again.

Interestingly I don't think you need a huge penalty for deaths to make the hardcore take it seriously. If there is death tally that is easily viewed by anyone then the serious crowd would hate this to show they keep getting smashed up.

I think they have to lighten up death penalties in games because they actually might be getting HARDER these days.

Harder than Contra? Gouls n Ghosts? Druid? Bionic Commando? Thunderforce? You died an awful lot on those games. Unless I ramp the difficulty up to hardest I rarely die on modern games unless its something like team deathmatch.

I beat 3 on that list without cheats, I'm not sure I have the stomach for it now though. I'm now an adult with other time commitments.

 

[Cognisant]

I think the industry may need to rethink the whole mentality of success and failure, this may seem a bizarre question but why do games need death at all? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about something like Fable 3 where death is irrelevant, I'm talking about having something other than death, because y'see the problem is that death is an ending, but in the process of trial-&-error that is play we don't actually want our games to end, as such.

So why not make death a new (bittersweet) beginning?
I remember when I used to play ES:Oblivion I would eventually get bored of playing whatever character I'd created then go back and create a new one so I could experience a different style of play or readjust my attributes or whatever. So what if (hypothetically) dying in a MMO means you lose your character, but you get to start again with that character's son/daughter/protégée/apprentice/whatever who has... oh I dunno, an innate stat boost or something.

This could completely change the way MMOs are played, instead of taking one character up a linear path of ascension the player would instead raise each character to the height of their potential, then (willingly or not) pass the proverbial baton on to the next, effectively going back and forth in terms of power, so their current character can "stand on the shoulders of giants", so to speak.

Obviously this is a very rough idea, but you get my point right?
Death need not be an ending, it could be a trade-off, a subplot, a sacrifice, even the goal of the game itself if you've got a twisted mind.

Also I'd like to see characters die of old age in MMOs, which again helps to expand out of the linear nature of these games, just imagine if WOW was like the game "kind of the hill", if levels were actually meaningful.

 

[veloper]

A multiplayer game has to have a death walk or another penalty for losing, because there's no way to reset without ruining it for other players.

A single player game should simply set the player back to the point before things started to go wrong, usually somewhere before encountering the mobs that killed the PC.
A quick kick to the load menu will do nicely.

 

[Michael O'Hair]

Failure should always have a penalty like death. Players should be glad there's no perma-death or limited continues in the games they play. If there was, they would have to play the game well to keep playing. But those days are gone, no one wants to be hassled when they play poorly, and everything is catering to the lowest denominator. Sometimes I wonder why people don't give up entirely and watch a movie instead of playing a challenging game.

 

[Keshie]

I entirely agree that death should be much harsher than it is. Especially in MMOs. You mentioned Ultima Online. Dying in UO in the Second Age *was* something to be avoided, so any risks you took, in combat or adventuring, had more gravity to them. If you owned precious items, you did not walk around dungeons flaunting them. If you and your buddies decided to start murdering and robbing people, you had to realise that there could be painful repercussions. Predators play a dangerous game, after all.

The rewards of facing dangers like that (losing valuable gear - for good, spending hours or days rebuilding afterwards) were priceless though. Real courage, real responsibility and real character. All I see in games without that kind of danger are apathy, materialism and ridiculous (and pathetic) displays of status and bling.

Having said that, don't forget the experience of dying through no fault of your own. There are few things more enraging than Death Through Game Glitch. Whenever I died alone in the wilderness of Britannia it was usually because the game lost connection, or just lagged me to death. In UO we called that "bad weather". I called it "bad ISP".
I doubt there's an easy solution for that problem so I'll just go ahead and say I support a harsh death in offline games, and something softer in MMOs.

Just not too soft. I hate games that nanny and hand-hold the player.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Experienced Points: The Death of the Death Penalty

Is it time to retire the death penalty in games?

Read Full Article

In some games perhaps, but games like WoW? Instant rez during a boss fight suddenly seems less of a challenge to me. Like all that work I did getting my Kingslayer title before Chill of the Throne was removed was worthless if death meant nothing.

I dislike the fact that games like WoW are changed by the LCD (not monitors you dolts, lowest common denominator) whiners who complain that "x is too hard" or "y doesn't drop enough" or "I should have Shadowmourne appear in my mailbox when I make new toons as a BoA". Ok the last is a stretch but you get my meaning. Lowering difficulty because a few people are complaining that they can't "do it" (learn a bossfight when there's innumerable sources out there) because "its too hard" (I don't know how to play my class). I am not the best WoW player, I don't claim to be. I'm not someone who raids every night of the week, I'm lucky if I can get in one raid per week and I am ok with that. I don't down on players who don't know every aspect of the game but are willing to ask questions and learn. I do however get disgusted with the entitlists I see on a daily basis. People who complain because Portals were removed from Dalaran and now they have to walk/ride/fly or hire a mage (which makes mage portals viable again). WoW's death penalty is light, and it takes usually 20-30 seconds to get to your corpse unless you die in an enemy city, then they tell u to go fuck yourself and hike.

 

[Shjade]

I think XP removals are one of the best death penalties. Just wastes some of your time without punishing you un-necessarily (Y)

Ugh, no thanks. Gold penalty > XP penalty any day.

Why?

Because if you lose gold maybe you can't afford to buy the new shiny you wanted as soon. If you lose experience you could lose the level and skills you already earned. Meaning you then have to backtrack to easier content to grind it back before you can even re-try what you were doing if you were diving into new content. (This happened to me more than once in Everquest. In fact, it became sort of a running joke that whenever I hit a new level once I got 50+ I was almost guaranteed to get knocked back to the last level at least once within the next hour, given that death was something like a 15% XP penalty so any death would de-level you until you got at least that far into the new level. It sucked.)

Making me repeat stuff I've already done in order to try new things is not cool. Take the gold.

 

[w00tage]

Relevant question - what's the penalty for failing in a non-video game?

Answer - Total and complete loss of everything you did and you have to start all over from the beginning.

So why is a minor setback to progress in a video game such a big deal to people? It's WAY less than you are hit with in every other kind of game.

Next relevant question - why are failure penalties so harsh in non-video games?

Answer - because a central concept of non-video games is to get you to improve your abilities through effort, and the fear of failure is a fundamental motivator.

So there's a clue to the answer to the death penalty conundrum in video games. If the game is fundamentally conceived around getting the player to improve their gameplay, harsh death penalties are a positive motivator. If the game is essentially conceived to give people a distracting experience, death penalties are counterproductive.

 

[SnipErlite]

I think XP removals are one of the best death penalties. Just wastes some of your time without punishing you un-necessarily (Y)

Ugh, no thanks. Gold penalty > XP penalty any day.

Why?

Because if you lose gold maybe you can't afford to buy the new shiny you wanted as soon. If you lose experience you could lose the level and skills you already earned. Meaning you then have to backtrack to easier content to grind it back before you can even re-try what you were doing if you were diving into new content. (This happened to me more than once in Everquest. In fact, it became sort of a running joke that whenever I hit a new level once I got 50+ I was almost guaranteed to get knocked back to the last level at least once within the next hour, given that death was something like a 15% XP penalty so any death would de-level you until you got at least that far into the new level. It sucked.)

Making me repeat stuff I've already done in order to try new things is not cool. Take the gold.

I don't mean taking away skills and levels. Like a Titan Quest XP penalty, without level rollback (rollback was only present in hardcore mods of the game). Just something that will make you have to spend a bit of time recouping in a similar fashion to gold.

Taking away skills and levels I agree is bad.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

Death penalties need to be absolutely removed. They invariably punish bad coincidence encounters and only encourage you to re-grind your already grinded progress. EVE Online is a dastardly offender as if you get shot in your pod (after losing your ship) and you didn't update your clone, you can and will lose up to a year worth of real-time training.

 

[Ethylene Glycol]

We can look at this by taking these ideas to their extremes. A game where death is permanent would only appeal to the hardest of the hardcore masochists.

That's true. Masochists love them some Roguelikes. And extremely high-speed Tetris 0.e;

 

[LTK_70]

No, those are infinitely worse - for the simple reason that screwing up even once makes you feel like your entire playthrough should be canned no matter how far you managed to get.

At best you will force completionist players into compulsively saving-and-reloading to avoid tarnishing their record - the very behavior you're trying to get away from. At worst, they won't be ABLE to save and reload, and instead be trapped at the mercy of checkpoints, at which point they will play frisbee with your game disk and play something that won't immortalize their failures in carbonite.

That's a good point, but the sort of behavior that zero-death-rewards induce in the completionists is very similar to the 'hardcore mode' that erases all of your progress in The Witcher 2. The difference here is, quitting after one death is voluntary. If you absolutely have to have every single reward available, then yes, you'll feel like dying once ruins your entire game. But you don't have to stop playing, so the level of difficulty depends on the player, and if they are prepared to start over for a small bonus, then that is up to them.

A mechanic like this will work best in a level-based game, like the indie platformers we get a lot of. There's no compulsive quick-saving possible there, and the borders of a level are often very clearly defined.