Lone_Scout: As long as it's not the "soulslike" way of dealing with it, I'm ok with any system, even the most punishing permadeath.
huppumies: I'm genuinely curious as to what makes soulslike so terrible for you, could you elaborate? As far as Dark Souls goes, it's not that different from how say Super Mario handled it. Heck, you even have infinite lives, so technically it's even more forgiving. If you die in SMB, you lose your power up, in Dark Souls you become hollow. Yeah, you have to pick up your dropped souls and humanity, but that's about it. In both you get thrown back to the previous checkpoint. Am I missing something?
In SMB, you can't lose more progress than you started a playing session with.
In a game like Hollow Knight, you can lose money that you had at the start of a playing session, and the game auto-saves when that happens.
If a game is going to do something like this, it should not auto-save, to allow the player the option of losing progress since the last save instead (like the way Dragon Quest handles it).
dtgreene: In many (most?) video games, there are failure conditions of some sort. For example, in games where you control a character and there's combat, if the character dies, that's a failure condition. The question here is, how should the game handle it?
On one extreme, there's roguelike-style permadeath, where on death your save file is erased so you have to start all over. On the other, there's games like Celeste where you respawn instantly at the start of the room you were in (or at the last checkpoint in games where checkpoints are really common, like VVVVVV) with no penalty. And, of course, there are plenty of in between approaches.
So, how do you prefer failure states to be handled in videogames?
paladin181: I like the Dark Souls system. It punishes failure without being overbearing (most of the time)
If you die, you go to the last save point (not exceptionally common, but not too spread out, either) and lose all your money/experience (they're one in the same in this case) that has not been spent on items/levelups. You now must get back to where you were before to retrieve it. If you die again, it is gone forever. If you get it back before dying, then you are good to go, unless you die again before you spend it down, in which case you have to go retrieve it again. I believe Diablo II had a similar system in which you'd drop items and money and have to run and retrieve them, which was bad because it was all your equipped gear. Great. I have to get back to what killed me without the stuff that was preventing me from dying in the first place!!
This sort of thing is precisely what I dislike about games like Hollow Knight (and Shovel Knight, though at least in SK the game doesn't actually save anything until you complete the level, and you can get your money back by exiting the level first).
I also dislike how many MMORPGs would cause the player to lose experience points on death or resurrection. (Do modern MMOs still do this?)
