When games don't have a large enough penalty for losing.

[Murkrow]

Does anyone else feel like they're cheating if you're playing a game, and it lets you retry a level over and over again and there aren't any side effects to constantly dying?

This doesn't apply to all games I play but recently I've felt this way when playing some. It doesn't often come up in first person shooters because they usually just have a checkpoint or try again from your last save system, but Bioshock has a system where if you die, you're revived straight away and any enemies you were fighting keep whatever health they're at, so you can just keep dying and attacking them until you win.

Maybe it's the nuzlockeing I've been doing but I've also developed this for Pokémon as well. If I lose a battle, losing some money just doesn't feel like enough of a negative. Honestly it feels just as cheap as saving before a battle and resetting the game as soon as I lose. It's unbelievably frustrating, and makes me want to stop playing the game. I wasn't always like this :(

How I feel about dying in Minecraft varies wildly. Sometimes I intend on playing a game until the first time I die, but that just makes me feel like I'm lying if I play it any more after that, but at the same time, losing all of the items you're carrying makes a really good penalty and in fact is the reason I'm terrified to go into caves in that game.

So it's mainly games that respawn you that bother me.

What's everyone else's take on what games should do when you die/lose?

 

[Noctowl]

No. I hate it when you have to do some annoying sequence all over again if you die. It becomes repetitive, boring and frustrating.

 

[Tailsy]

I don't really like penalties for sucking! That just makes me angrier and thus the game becomes less fun, for me anyway. I'm not very good at video games so I usually need a lot of retries to get there, and (especially with life systems) I'll get annoyed and stop playing if there's too severe a penalty for me dying.

I don't think it's all that fun. :o(

 

[Murkrow]

No. I hate it when you have to do some annoying sequence all over again if you die. It becomes repetitive, boring and frustrating.

I'm not sure what you're saying "no" to? I was asking for ideas not a yes/no question.

Not all games are the same so sometimes it works better when there isn't a penalty for losing but surely having to do something again is better in other games? If you don't have to do it is all over again, what's the challenge? I don't see how just having to do something again is much a penalty.
I'll admit that that is partly what frustrates me sometimes in games if it sends you back to a checkpoint a long time ago and you have to fight back through that bit, but that's not what I'm talking about!
In cases like Pokémon, it's not the fact that I have to battle the gym leader again, it's that losing to a gym leader isn't all that different from saving right before and trying again. In fact it could be argued that it's easier than saving before and trying again and again since you keep experience you gain every time. It takes away the feeling of it being a challenge at least for me, when you can try as many times as you can with little penalty.

I think a lot of what it depends on is whether the game requires you to be good at the game to beat it, or if it's just a purely difficult game. If it were possible for you to beat it easily if you were good enough, then I think there should be a penalty as a further motivation to get better at the game. If the game is just hard at a certain point, then I agree with you - there's nothing quite as annoying as having to fight a boss over and over and not getting much closer to beating it just because it's a hard boss.

I don't really like penalties for sucking! That just makes me angrier and thus the game becomes less fun, for me anyway. I'm not very good at video games so I usually need a lot of retries to get there, and (especially with life systems) I'll get annoyed and stop playing if there's too severe a penalty for me dying.

Life systems can be good depending on the game I find.
Like the oldest Mario games are really annoying since you lost all of your lives and you have to start from the beginning of the game, but the newer ones have it right when you just have to start that level from the beginning instead of from a checkpoint.


I'm not fond of severe penalties myself, I'm not good at games either. I'm just hoping someone shares my dislike for some games having a lack of a penalty, and looking for any good ideas people might have for what's a good balance.

 

[fresh fruit for Adol]

it depends on the game i'm playing. a game like Megaman, Castlevania or Demon's/Dark Souls, i much prefer that they start you off from the last checkpoint that you hit; while it can be very frustrating, it allows you to perfect your skill for that portion and helps prepare you for later hardships in the game, and potentially lets you see exactly what mistakes you're making, especially if you keep screwing up in the same spots

while i'm not a perfectionist by any means, i like to see what mistakes i'm making and learn from them, try approaching something differently. part of why i like Demon's/Dark Souls so much is not only the unforgiving difficulty and the way the game punishes you for mistakes, but there are literally dozens of ways for the player to approach every situation the game throws at you

on the other side of that argument, while checkpoints are nice, i can't stand it when a game starts you from a checkpoint with absolutely nothing (AAAAAAAAAARRRGH R-TYPE); R-Type is one of the biggest offenders. you could be doing great, have all these amazing Options and missiles and an amazing charged beam, and then you make a single mistake at the boss. then boom, you're at the halfway point of the stage with absolutely none of your weapons.

that's that shit i really hate in a game :S

 

[I liek Squirtles]

PMD is another big offender. You lose all your money and half your items. In Fire Emblem (the first one that had Lyn) if you lose a teammate you can't use him again (as far as I know). But in some games it should be progressive; the better you are, the worse the penalty.

 

[fresh fruit for Adol]

PMD's penalties are standard for most roguelikes, dungeon crawlers and mystery dungeons. theoretically you could go back and get your things again, but considering the randomly generated maps, that makes it impossible

same with Fire Emblem's to most strategy games; it kind of adds to the whole strategy thing. every Fire Emblem to date has perma-death, the only one without is Awakening's Casual mode

not enough games use the idiosyncratic difficulty though. the two that i can name off the top of my head are God Hand, which causes enemies to grow in strength and difficulty the better you play, and the higher level you are, and DoDonPachi, which hands you a meter that increases your score and power as it rises, allowing you to use Hyper Mode when it fills, but conversely, the amount of bullets from enemies is increased almost tenfold in addition to the playing and bomb style you choose, and difficulty level

 

[Tailsy]

Life systems can be good depending on the game I find.
Like the oldest Mario games are really annoying since you lost all of your lives and you have to start from the beginning of the game, but the newer ones have it right when you just have to start that level from the beginning instead of from a checkpoint.

Ehh, I much prefer checkpoints and punishing me for dying too many times in a platformer (where I generally have to do well-timed jump sequences, which I am god awful at) just makes me really annoyed. The original Crash Bandicoot is basically unplayable for me because a) it's fucking hard and b) there are no checkpoints. Every sodding time you die you have to go back to the start of the stupid-ass complicated platforming you just did!!!

That and once I'm out of lives and get returned to the level select (OR WHATEVER) screen it feels very discouraging. But maybe I'm a weenie, idk u__u

 

[Vipera Magnifica]

I much prefer games that just have you restart a level from the beginning or at a checkpoint. If there were any bigger penalty for losing I would find that game incredibly frustrating, especially since I have to play a difficult level about 20 times before beating it.

Kid Icarus' penalty system is actually pretty great. If you die, you are stuck playing the level on a lower intensity, where the game is easier but you get less rewards. Even though I hate the way that games with a difficulty select seem to undermine any sense of achievement you get, this one was pretty good.

Minecraft is absolutely terrifying. I'm afraid to go into a cave or go anywhere at night when it means I could lose all my loot. Though, to be fair, at least you can pause the game and switch to "peaceful" difficulty whenever you're in particularly hot water. You feel cheap for doing so but at least you still have your stuff.

 

[Music Dragon]

I kinda think BioShock's got it right, actually.

Bioshock has a system where if you die, you're revived straight away and any enemies you were fighting keep whatever health they're at, so you can just keep dying and attacking them until you win.

That's always been a fairly common complaint - so common, in fact, that shortly after the game's release, a patch added the option of disabling the Vita-Chambers that resurrect you. Instead, dying will return you to the main menu and you'll have to replay from your last save. BioShock autosaves quite infrequently, so this can ramp up the penalty for dying quite a bit, depending on how often you save manually. In any case, it does mean you can no longer whittle away at enemies slowly while repeatedly getting yourself killed.

The great thing about this system is that it allows you to choose how you want to play the game. You want more of a challenge (more of a penalty for dying, that is), you turn off the Vita-Chambers. Otherwise you play as usual. Everyone wins. Bastion has a similar system, where there's a "No-Sweat Mode" that grants you infinite lives if you're just trying to reach the end of the story (or you're just not very good). Played the regular way it's a pretty challenging game, though.

Of course, knowing that you can manually adjust the difficulty can be a turn-off in its own right, but hey, can't please everybody.

 

[Tailsy]

Yeah, I'm gonna agree with MD there. I think the right kind of balance is to give players the option of having severe penalties -- especially in story-heavy games! I mean you're never going to please everyone on earth anyway, so really it's the best compromise...

 

[ultraviolet]

Bastion has a similar system, where there's a "No-Sweat Mode" that grants you infinite lives if you're just trying to reach the end of the story (or you're just not very good). Played the regular way it's a pretty challenging game, though.

Bastion also gives you the option of making the game harder with the totems (which grant stronger enemies and stuff).

I dunno! I've never really felt like pokemon for example really lets you cheat by letting you save before big battles because it's not like it really changes the outcome of the battle? I mean if your team isn't strong enough to beat a gym leader you're probably going to grind your team until it's easier or try and beat the gym with an underleveled team, which is usually harder anyway.

I tend to like games that have a life system where you can work towards earning new lives by collecting shit (like crash bandicoot and i'm pretty sure mario does this too) because generally if you suck at advancing through the game you'll find running around collecting stuff reasonably easy anyway. But i think it really depends on the game!

Portal doesn't have a life system at all (I mean, you can die pretty infrequently anyway) but that's because it's not really that focused on getting somewhere alive or getting past enemies, it's about problem solving. The best way to get through Portal is to just avoid anything that can kill you, and it's something the game actively encourages you to do, so when you do die, you're usually just dropped where you were before you did whatever killed you. In that sense it is pretty easy on you for getting killed, but really you get punished when you're not doing things properly by only enabling access to new areas once you get things done right.

The only life system that really, really pissed me off was in one of the newer Spyro reboot trilogy games (eternal night maybe???) because the game was devoted almost entirely to beating up waves of bad guys, and it was very easy to get overwhelmed because the player character moves extremely slow in comparison to the enemies... and then when you die you have to do all those waves again, and usually watch a video sequence that you can't skip. That was the absolute worst. Making a player do something tedious over and over again as punishment for not being able to get past obvious flaws in the game design is really shitty okay

 

[Adriane]

Most people, I think, found Kirby's Epic Yarn to be excellent — and you can't die at all in it. Also, newer Mario games still have checkpoints, so I'm not sure where you got that from.

Ideally, games with deaths should have varying difficulties or otherwise customisable settings if you want the game to be accessible. Skippable cutscenes are very nice, too.

 

[Murkrow]

Also, newer Mario games still have checkpoints, so I'm not sure where you got that from.

I wasn't talking about what happens when you die there, but about what happens when you run out of lives.

 

[nothing to see here]

Like the oldest Mario games are really annoying since you lost all of your lives and you have to start from the beginning of the game

What? None of the old Mario games made you start the entire game over every time you ran out of lives...

Super Mario Bros.: You start over from the beginning... unless you hold down A when you press Start to start over. If you did that, you get to start from the beginning of the world you died on instead (so if you die on 8-4, you only get set back to 8-1 instead of 1-1.)

Super Mario Bros. 2: Comes the closest to "losing all lives = restart," but it does give you a couple of continues first, so you at least have to run out of lives multiple times before it would send you all the way back.

Super Mario Bros. 3: Losing all lives just means starting the current world over again (and you wouldn't even need to repeat every level; the castles would stay destroyed even after the restart.)

 

[Worst Username Ever]

Super Mario Bros.: You start over from the beginning... unless you hold down A when you press Start to start over. If you did that, you get to start from the beginning of the world you died on instead (so if you die on 8-4, you only get set back to 8-1 instead of 1-1.)

Well, to be fair, that's not something everyone will know/knew when they first played the game.

 

[fresh fruit for Adol]

doesn't mean that it made you restart from the beginning, the choice was always there, whether your knew about it or not

 

[sv_01]

Well, I prefer the ones where you can try the level over and over with stuff resetting to the default state. And games that don't save are the worst.

 

[fresh fruit for Adol]

Well, I prefer the ones where you can try the level over and over with stuff resetting to the default state. And games that don't save are the worst.

so most NES games, early Mega Man and arcade games are a huge no for you?