Death Consequences
by arkeus
Was walking home today and was thinking about how I should handle the consequences of dying in battle. I’m not a fan of losing everything since your last save when you die, for a few reasons. First, it’s extremely frustrating if you aren’t constantly taking time to save and then you lose a bunch of progress. Second, I have to make the game much easier otherwise I lose a lot of players due to that frustration. And finally, because I think saving is something you should do before you quit, not something you should be forced to do constantly even though you have no intention of quitting.
As such, I think the solution I’m going to go with is that if you saved on the map you are currently on, you’ll return to that spot when you die with all the monsters on the map respawned. If you didn’t, you will simply return to where you entered that map, also with the monsters respawned. However, any progress you’ve made you will keep, including items, experience, treasure chests, etc. This way you are penalized, but there is much less frustration involved. Also, if for some reason you are underleveled, this will help catch you up both by keeping your experience, and by the monsters respawning.
This also makes me want to have an auto save feature (such as after every battle and every map change), but I’m not entirely sure about that. I know a lot of people like the freedom to save back and forth between different save files. Perhaps I will have an option that will auto save to whatever file you loaded/last saved to, and allow you to turn it off. That should cater to both audiences, and by having auto save on by default, you won’t lose a lot of progress if flash suddenly decides to crash.
Any thoughts?
I’ve always been a fan of optional “hardcore” mode in games where death is an important mechanic.
Fallout Tactics did this very well, ramping the intensity of each battle up tremendously by disallowing saves during. Rewarding the player with bonus XP or items for playing in this mode is always welcome.
Personally I’ve been thinking about death as a game mechanism a lot. It’s fundamentally a negative feedback to the player, and the resulting penalty is most often the loss of time by having to recover whatever amount of progress was lost, even if this means reloading.
Why have death at all? I’m not asking this for your design, just as a general query. I think that when designing games we need to examine closely how the player needs to be punished for failure, and that the particular mechanism need to compliment the design as closely as possible.
Did I ever tell you about my FPS where the dead players play on as ghosts, affecting both the dead and the living world…? Zero down-time.
I completely agree about tailoring negative feedback to fit the design. There are definitely a lot of games that would make more sense to have some other form of punishment, and a lot of them can incorporate gameplay into that to make the negative feedback not just a loss of time. Being able to play after “dying” is a great method (and the dead players playing as ghosts that affect both the living and the dead sounds an amazing implementation).
I know some games have a middle ground that works great. Rather than dying and backtracking, they simply get stunned for some amount of time. They lose time, but are able to pick right back up where they left off. Though this usually works better in multiplayer games, as if you’re the only playing, forcing you to sit and wait when nothing is going to change over that period of time feels like a waste.
However I think in traditional RPGs death works great, as it is a sign that the area you are in might be too powerful, or you need to work on your tactics. There are some games where I’ve completely disagreed with the penalties of death (Diablo 2, for example, where death causes you to lose experience, which can mean hours instantly wasted when you’re at high levels).
I think it also depends a lot on your audience. In a deep game with a hardcore audience, you probably want something different than a casual flash game. And the idea of optional hardcode mode brings the idea of different difficulties to mind for my game. I’m going to have to do some serious thinking on whether that is something I want or not in For Fate.
I just stumbled onto your blog as I was looking for a way to credit you with my post about your game Arzea (thanks for a couple great hours of entertainment, btw!) – Anyway…I just wrote a post the other day about death mechanics as I’m planning a Metroidvania style game myself. My current idea is to have the character turn into a ghost that can ignore gravity to get back to an altar to respawn, like a save point or something.
The biggest thing that keeps nagging at me as I think about death in my game is that I really don’t want the player to ever feel out of control of their character, including teleporting them back to a previous save point where they may not know where they are and have to get their bearings for a bit before getting back into the flow. Just some food for thought.
Let’s see… I’d say it depends on the audience. Those like me wouldn’t want to have to do a lot of replaying, so generally putting spawn points in intervals of 1 minute of real-time gameplay (for fast-paced games like your Arzea) would do fine.
Set the interval too long, and it won’t be good. Games with a death count and autosaves generally piss me off, since in order to aim for perfect, I’ll have to restart the entire game, which can consists of long hours that, in some really bad cases, I’d just quit entirely. In another example, games with save points that are too sparse don’t please me either, since that not means I’ll have to keep staying alive for long, but also have to spend lots of time to get back to the previous state.
As for the punishment for dying, I’d say having to start the small area over again is enough punishment. Anything more will offend perfectionists, and pushing it further and your game’s hero would start looking like a 1HP wonder, and ultimately narrowing the audience band. (There are people who prefer insanely difficult games, though; so making your game too difficult isn’t neccessarily a bad thing.)
And of course, providing options is always good. Do you want autosave? Do you want to respawn at the last checkpoint or the last save point? This option can be surpassed by seperating both saves, though – when you sart the next game, would you start from the last manual save point or from the last autosave?
I think you must consider each elements of your game and how those elements interact. Such as if your RPG is full of random battle encounters than adding a few extra save points and/or having auto-saves/check points will be appropriate for that situation, but if combat could be avoided such as having touch-encounter battles than having just save points and perhaps having a death penalty of ending combat with 1HP and maybe a 10% gold penalty (depending if the RPG in question is very shop-gear dependent). I know this reply creates much more questions than answer, but if you have any questions or have any more details about this RPG that you can reveal, I’d be happy to help.