Also exploring a world and learning a story piece by piece can be fun in and of itself, but then why bother with a failure state at all
This. Exploration/adventure/story games don't really benefit from fail states. It's actually the opposite, these games benefit the most when they have few or no game over states like op was getting at with visual novels, instead continuing into a state reflective of the player's actions and decisions.
Funny you mention sekiro cuz that game was actually pretty successful at making death meaningful in an adventure game context. If you look at the overall structure of the game it's basically an adventure game or simple rpg where the core progression is talking to people to get hints about what to do, or finding items and giving them to people. But the more you die, the more people get cursed, locking you out of interacting with them. So the combat aspect of the game is actually related to being able to complete the different questlines and endings. It's a good solution, cuz yes, the combat is ultimately about just trying over and over again till you win with no scoring system or any metric for player performance, but death still has meaning and consequence.
7 Name: Rakka2024-10-07 14:56
>>5 what you describe in the first paragraph of your post is present in this action-rpg called Outward. getting knocked out will have different results based on when, where and how it happened. got your head smashed in by bandits? wake up in their lair as a prisoner or slave. got pinched by a giant hermit crab on the beach? wash ashore near a fishing village. it's not always a 100% chance to get a result from a specific KO situation, sometimes you'll get other results like waking up in a camp that someone set up when they found you and they'll have left some tea and snacks for you, or if you're playing on hardcore mode every knockout has a small chance to result in save deletion. waking up in a bad situation after failure is fun. it gives meaning to failure. there are also a few quests that can be failed but failure only leads to different outcomes and consequences. Outward has issues though, and not minor ones at that. the combat is clunky and not in a good way, and most of the story elements failed to catch my interest. but it's still a pretty good game. apparently there's a sequel coming, hopefully it's more of the same but better and with less story. Kenshi also does this. in Kenshi, the only true end (good or bad) to a game is when you're dead, but dying is pretty hard. you'd have to get knocked out in a bad place, like alone in the desert or near a pack of hungry carnivores. most knockouts end up with you waking up in a slave camp or city jail, depending on why and by whom you've been sent to sleep. being a slave is actually one of the best outcomes during the early game when you're weak and frail since your slavers will feed you and the work that they force you to do enables you to develop muscle mass, plus you can practice combat and lockpicking while you're there.
i like the way that Receiver 2 handles player death. in this game, you have to collect audio cassettes in order to rank up, while avoiding killdrones that take the form of turrets and flying taser drones, while being equipped with nothing but a handgun, and that handgun is where the core mechanics of the game are concentrated. it is difficult to handle at first because every operation of the weapon has a keybind, but once you get a hang of it it feels really natural. for example, reloading a semi-automatic necessitates four different keys and at least twelve keypresses whereas in most games it necessitates only one. each rank brings new and more enemies as well as a few changes to the level generation. rank up five times and you win. each death bumps your rank down by one. when you're at the lowest rank, death does nothing other than reset your rank progress. it is quite simple but it succeeds in making the player fear death. another mechanic from that game that has good synergy with this rank system is that death is very easy to bring upon yourself. getting shot, even only once, will kill you. falling from twice your height will kill you (shout out to games with intense fall damage, gotta be one of my favorite genders). shooting yourself in the foot twice (once with high-caliber handguns) will kill you. glass shards falling on you will kill you. shooting metal can make your bullet ricochet, which can kill you if it hits you. it is easy to fail but the only punishment to failure is a temporary loss of progress, and you're also rewarded for reaching the same higher rank multiple times by unlocking new handguns, so if you want to unlock all of them you will need to fail multiple times.
This. Exploration/adventure/story games don't really benefit from fail states. It's actually the opposite, these games benefit the most when they have few or no game over states like op was getting at with visual novels, instead continuing into a state reflective of the player's actions and decisions.
Funny you mention sekiro cuz that game was actually pretty successful at making death meaningful in an adventure game context. If you look at the overall structure of the game it's basically an adventure game or simple rpg where the core progression is talking to people to get hints about what to do, or finding items and giving them to people. But the more you die, the more people get cursed, locking you out of interacting with them. So the combat aspect of the game is actually related to being able to complete the different questlines and endings. It's a good solution, cuz yes, the combat is ultimately about just trying over and over again till you win with no scoring system or any metric for player performance, but death still has meaning and consequence.