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General discussionDo you like permadeath?(55 posts)(55 posts)
(55 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted February 18, 2016
- Do you like horror movies?
Yes. I don't really like "movies" in general, but given a pick of genre, I'd choose horror over anything else.

- Have you been playing permadeath?
Yes.

- Do you like permadeath?
No.

- (optional) Why / why not?
Because I invested time and effort into a character, and I don't like that effort to go to waste. Some games are not well-randomized, and restarting involves slogging through known content until I get to the point where I died. Some games are heavily luck-dependent, and restarting after a lucky streak which ended in failure and not getting the same awesome stuff is disappointing.

The main and critical difference between horror movies and permadeath in games is that horror characters are not me and a horror movie only lasts 2 hours, tops, while the protagonist of a videogame is me, in a sense, and the game lasts longer (or it had better).
Posted February 18, 2016
I can't say if I like permadeath personally, but I feel it is necessary to all of us. I wouldn't want my grandmother coming to haunt me as a rotten corpse over and over again, and then overpopulation would get much worse too if the old people just kinda stayed around, or respawned.

I know hindus and buddhists don't believe in permadeath, that's their prerogative. They have a bit different take on it, there will be no overpopulation because people will respawn, ie. there apparently is a limited amount of souls or something. Just recycling the same people (and animals) over and over again, everyone trying to advance from an ant or a maggot to a human, or an elephant. So if everyone had their way, there would be no ants, maggots nor dogs, but we would have all evolved to either humans or elephants or whales or something majestic.

As for liking horror movies, depends on the movie. Some horror movies I find simply boring, some give me an uneasy feeling (like peeling off your face in Hostel 3 etc.), and so on. I like maybe psychological horror movies more, which are less about blood and violence. Jacob's Ladder was quite a good horror drama.
Post edited February 18, 2016 by timppu
Posted February 18, 2016
1. Sometimes
2. Sometimes
3. No
4. Too much frustration. I want to get some fun and relaxation not to get an anger fit.
Posted February 18, 2016
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KasperHviid: Loren the Warrior Princess! Here, the player takes the role as the title characters sidekick!
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Leroux: And if the sidekick dies, the game goes on? I doubt that. The sidekick becomes the hero of the story, more likely. ;)
It's a RPG without permadeath, and any character can be revived unless you get a TPK, so yes, it goes on, and no, it's not really relevant to the discussion. But since said sidekick is the main party healer, it's reaaaaaaly inconvenient.

But yes, the "sidekick main character" does change from "obedient slave fanboying over the princess" to a hero in its own right during the game. Which is fortunate, because seeing my character fawn over every one of Loren's arbitrary bullshit at the beginning of the game was kinda getting to my nerves ^^
Posted February 18, 2016
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bevinator: Permadeath is fine as long as it's not a savegame-erasing event. In Darkest Dungeon, for example, your characters can easily die permanently, but that's not usually a game-over condition. It's a setback, and it sucks, but it doesn't erase the hours of time you spent playing the game. (On the other hand, there's so much RNG in Darkest Dungeon that oftentimes characters will get killed unavoidably, though no fault of your own. In many cases, there's no lesson to be learned there.) In Ziggurat, even though your save gets erased when you die, permadeath is fine because the game is so short. It's intended to be replayed over and over, and the RNG is pretty fair for the most part. Generally, if you die in Ziggurat it's because you aren't skilled enough yet or you made some mistake.

In Don't Starve, though, permadeath is terrible and stupid. I love the game, and I hate it immensely when a world I've spent dozens of hours working on gets deleted for something silly. There are ways to resurrect yourself, but most of them have significant drawbacks and/or aren't reliable. And if you're out of rezes (or you hit one of several glitches) all of your hard work is completely destroyed. On one of my worlds (with over 300 days survived) I got killed by 6 depth worms almost immediately upon entering a cave, only to get my world deleted even though I had unused touchstones on the surface. That was due to a glitch that was later resolved, but my world was still gone. The fact that you can back up and restore your saves in most games, permadeath be damned, makes the concept even sillier.

tl;dr Ultimately, control over the game's method of saving should lie with the user. Games exist to have fun, and people have fun different ways. Don't go breaking their stuff without their permission.
Yeah, I like games where failure has consequences that can be played through and can be fun, forcing you to adapt (Darkest dungeon, dwarf fortress, stuff like that), but not games where failure means you have to start over from scratch and replay the same stuff. The "retry if you die" is good for short games with enough variety that you will get a different playthrough, like FTL, but it's seriously boring for game with a long evolution (like most RPGs) or story-centered.
Posted February 18, 2016
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dtgreene: The first of those terms I have not heard about before the post.

The second term I usually see in connection of roguelikes, and not with other genres.

The save point approach often works well enough in many games: There's still some penalty for failure, but you aren't forced to play for extended periods of time without a save.

Every now and then, I read a post by a user who lost hours of progress due to forgetting to save. That should not happen.

Also, I could point out that Wizardry 4 intends you to make heavy use of the save/load feature. There is a penalty in the sense that all enemies respawn when you do, but they also respawn when you switch floors. (There's a reason I specifically excluded Wizardry 4 when mentioning the Wizardries I use save states in.)

Finally, I could mention another thing: When you can save frequently, risky strategies are fun. Taking risks is fun; having to replay 30+ minutes is not. I especially enjoy it when deliberately taking damage, or even deliberately dying, is a good strategy to get where you need to go. (On the other hand, I don't care for the "death cures everything" rule that many RPGs have.)

Remember, damage and death are part of the game: The game should encourage the player to make use of those mechanics, not force the player to avoid them at all costs.
Ya, I agree with everything.
It depends on the game, then it also depends on the person.
Gaming should be fun, challenge does not always lead to fun.
Posted February 18, 2016
1. Real horror ? Yes!
That jump scare bs ? No...

2. Only a few games (XCom 1&2 or Torchlight), and most of the time I stop after the first death, after that I tend to play the normal mode.

3. I hate it, losing a character you played with for a long time suddenly dies because of a minor mistake...it´s the worst.
Posted February 18, 2016
- Not particularly
- Yes
- Except when I nerd rage over it...
- Adds an extra layer of tension to a single player game.
Posted February 18, 2016
Only in Diablo 2 and Blade of Darkness. And this, only because they reward you, in a way...

In diablo 2, your dead character can still be used for chat, but not for game. They get the sprite of the dark wanderer, which is pretty cool and awesome. Also, getting a hardcore character die, but having earned the exquisite, unique titles of the hardcore mode beforehand, is like, badass! Especially if you are of considerably high level, enough to be displayed on leader-board charts!

And Blade of Darkness... Such a satisfying combat physics and gameplay mechanisms... Danger and survival to its best! Hell, even wounds, bloodstains and armor tearing/cracks are displayed! When you die, you almost FEEL it! And the less number you save your game, the greater the description of the save file for your feat, is going to be! It works like earning a title or something! Besides, the feeling of getting an upstart weakling and smashing mercilessly your way through 3-4 stages in a row, before you save even for your first time, all this adrenaline rush, whee!
Post edited February 18, 2016 by KiNgBrAdLeY7
Posted February 18, 2016
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Kardwill: Yeah, I like games where failure has consequences that can be played through and can be fun, forcing you to adapt (Darkest dungeon, dwarf fortress, stuff like that), but not games where failure means you have to start over from scratch and replay the same stuff.
Actually, I go further: I like games where failure has consequences that are actually beneficial to the point where sometimes the best course of action is to fail on purpose.

One interesting (though minor) example comes in Wizardry 8: In that game, if you fail to cast a spell (because you aren't skilled enough), your skill might still increase from casting the spell; in fact, IIRC, your skill might actually increase *more* from failure than from success. Furthermore, in some cases (like casting Identify Item) a success prevents you from trying again for practice, but a failure does not.

Also, there are a few games where being level drained can be used to the player's advantage. Wizardry 2, for example, has a trick that lets high level characters gain experience at an exponential rate. (Wizardry Gaiden 3 has a similar trick, though it's less effective (but more reliable).) Final Fantasy Tactics provides a way to affect a character's stat growth (switching jobs), so you can level up with good growth and level down with terrible growth. In some of the SSI AD&D games, you can use a combination of level up/down and save reloading to get extra HP; level down, reloading until you don't lose many HP, and then level back up, reloading until you gain more HP than you lost.

A good non-RPG example is damage boosting. Sometimes, you can skip part of the level by getting hit in the right spot on purpose. In La Mulana, one particular treasure that would be permanently missable otherwise can be obtained later thanks to a rather tricky damage boost. (One could argue that that method is easier than the intended method of obtaining it, but it's still tricky.)
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Community
General discussionDo you like permadeath?(55 posts)(55 posts)
(55 posts)