Indie dev Dan Marshall thinks player death in videogames is usually “a bit shit”, and that it’s quite an archaic way of adding threat and challenge to a game. But he’s not sure what we should be doing instead. What do you reckon?
It’s a standard videogame trope: you fight, you lose, you die, you respawn from the last checkpoint. But with an increasing number of games looking to tell intricate, character-driven stories, does that even make sense?
Dan Marshall, of Size Five Games, thinks not – but he admits he’s been having trouble thinking of a workaround in the company’s upcoming platformer, The Swindle.
And having attended Marshall’s talk at the Bit of Alright conference in London on Friday, and chatting to him about the problem, we have to admit we’re a bit stumped too. So many games use death as a central component: the ‘fear’ of it forms your main reason for not fucking up. If you remove death in an action game, don’t you also remove the challenge?
So we’re turning to you. Death in games: is it shit? And, if so, what can we do about it? Super Meat Boy (pictured) is one example of how to make death make sense while being fun and interesting… but how else could we do it? Do we even need ‘death’ at all?
Sound off in the comments below. We’ll lob the best ideas to Mr. Marshall and try get you all consultant credits on The Swindle. (We may not have actually checked this over with Size Five Games, but y’know.)
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It all depends on the game – Lucasarts adventures (ah, how I miss you) always made sure you weren’t killed for doing the wrong thing. Kings quest games (ah, how I hated you) killed you with impunity for simply daring to walk to a new area.
Shooters? Platformers? Who cares? You die, you restart and carry on, it’s never really mattered. Did anyone really care about why Willy had 8 lives in Jet Set Willy? No, you really only cared about him falling and losing them all in one fell swoop. But I never wondered why a man with an insane mansion filled with monsters had multiple lives. (Lasercat’s got it about right on that front really. You die and it doesn’t matter, apart from maybe you dropped a key so you go and pick it up again and try to get it saved before you mess up and die again. Rinse and repeat.)
Are you thinking too much about it all, maybe?
Death in games means even les than death in comics. Trying to get it to ‘make sense’ seems like an exercise in futility.
If you’re worried about the story being spoiled because someone’s confused how the protagonist died multiple times before succesfully rescuing the princess and yet no-one’s mentioned it, maybe include a movie of a flawless playthrough of the game as an unlockable feature? Like watching all the footage from Dragon’s lair or Space Ace as a cartoon, rather than a game? Though I suspect anyone dumb enough not to understand that the bits where they died *didn’t happen* in the ‘completed story timeline’ wouldn’t also be sitting there trying to scratch their head, wondering why there were so many copies of the hero to begin with.
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gigerpunk (February 6th, 2012)
The upcoming MMORPG Salem looks set to deal with death in a very interesting way: permadeath. When your character dies, that’s it. There’s no spawn points, no lives, no checkpoints. When you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s an interesting concept, that would make danger far more threatening and tense, but if you’ve slaved away on a character for hours and hours and then they’re just gone, you’d be crushed.
Heavy Rain handled it well, as instead of using death as a punishment, your story simply branched in a new direction when you failed. I don’t think it was possible to get a ‘game over’ screen, and it worked brilliantly in the context of what the game was trying to do, as it added weight and importance to every action and decision.
This is probably the best way of doing it, as it means you’re never replaying the same sections twice, there’s a lot less frustration involved, and it creates a stronger attachment to your character. But, in practice, this probably wouldn’t work in a bunch of genres. So, basically, I’m as stumped as Dan
Oh, and without spoiling anything, when our NeverDead review goes live tomorrow, you’ll see exactly how death shouldn’t be handled.
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Jamie Donnelly (February 6th, 2012)
I feel the same as Gigerpunk, the correct story is the one you survived. Like Prince of Persia’s Sands of Time with the Prince telling the story and if you died the prince just went “No that’s not how it happened.” Genius.
The one thing that does need addressing is load times, some games you can walk 15 feet from the spawn point, die, yet the game feels the need to reload the entire ??????? level? It can’t be that different. That is one thing Super Meat Boy got very right.
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James Haresign (February 7th, 2012)