You forgot the worst part of the Xcom death spiral, the fact that if one of your best soldiers dies, it can cause your other soldiers to panic and cause the death of more of your good soldiers, leading to you failing that mission and losing all of your experienced troops. If your troops panic after a death, its almost always a death sentence to that whole squad
Dead State had a similar panic mechanism where characters could panic, causing even more characters to panic until you lose control of your whole team. Similar to Darkest Dungeon.
Dying repeatedly in Sekiro causes a disease called Dragonrot to spread. Not only does Dragonrot prevent you from progressing in the other characters questlines it also reduces your chances of receiving unseen aid which periodically keeps you from losing experience points and money.
but dragonrot can be cured with an item that can be sold by any vendor for very little money, and you can buy ~5 dragontears any time you have it, and it resets when you cure it, so you cant ever not have the cure as long as you have more skill than an IGN reporter
It's VERY easy to cure tho and tbh wether your % of keeping your souls is 30 or 20% ain't that much of a difference so dragon root basically is just decoration supposed to scare you, originally it was supposed to kill the characters who are infected but they sadly changed that
Demon's Souls has a gameplay mechanic called world tendancy. Dying repeatedly will turn your world tendancy black which will make the enemies tougher and deal more damage. Also when you die you come back as a spirit which cuts your health in half.
@@PristianoPenaldoSUIIII Doesn't it also cut the number of accessible healing items? I know there was something that becomes less accessible in a black world
Does that not eventually lock a player out of the game entirely? If someone is struggling with the game, making it harder would only make it worse, until they can't progress at all.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga decides that if one of the Bros. goes down, not only should you be penalized to do 1/2 the normal damage and lose out on dual combos, but the healthy Bro has to literally carry the other one's unconscious body, meaning that dodging attacks becomes twice as hard!
It's thematically appropriate, acting as an physical analogy for the mental burden the surviving brother has to carry after watching his own blood being violently slaughtered in armed combat. Or he's literally trying to bring his deceased brother's body back with him, so they can have a proper funeral - whichever one hurts more.
@@NorthernRealmJackal...Woah. Now I want a game with the Mario & Luigi combat & brotherly bond but with the dungeon delving and horror mechanics of Darkest Dungeon. A young brother having to pull the corpse of their sibling out of a lovecraftian pit just to push them out to sea on a burning raft. Some poor guy losing his mind after watching his friend/brother get torn in half, eventually sharing his fate.
That Xcom death spiral is also a danger in the Fire Emblem games. Especially in the older ones, where there's fewer safety nets and more spawn ambushes.
Oh lord, the original FE(as in the NES one) with its objectively worse units coming later in the game. "I see you lost your Swordfighter(Navarre or Ogma), here is one with objectively worse bases(Radd and Caesar), that joins at a lower level with lower growths across the board." There's a reason Shadow Dragon included the stupid OP units in the newly added Gaiden Maps. Specifically as death spiral safety nets.
One of the old Xcom games also made things harder if you were doing good by raiding your base with harder hitting Incursions. I wonder if we'll see that in the next game.
Not sure if this is worth an entry in the sequel vid but; Middle-Earth Shadow of War ups the ante of progressively stronger Orcs, because not only can they reach a maximum level of 80 (as opposed to just 20 in the first game), but some Orcs will be so pleased with killing you that they will stalk and ambush you across Mordor again and again until you break the cycle and finally kill them.
I've had my game broken because if you die enough times to your rival early in the game the quest where you have to defend the gates can become almost impossible to beat.
Not to mention as they get stronger they gain abilities and immunities while losing fears and weaknesses. So keep getting ambushed and killed by an orc and the list of options to deal with him gets shorter. They can even follow you to other regions. I still remember Flogg the Raven, berserker assassin immune to execution, frost, stealth, fire, arrows, and poison, couldn’t be attacked from the front or side, couldn’t be vaulted over, did massive damage, enraged only at low health, and had a deadly dark blade attack he’d use to kill my bodyguard. Took a good long while to kill him using a commander with a defender army.
In fairness, even if you _do_ kill him, there's no guarantee he won't just come back. I had one grunt get promoted all the way to the top (for the achievement) and he became my rival. Between Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War I must've killed this guy 6-7 times, and he just kept coming back. By the end he was more metal than flesh. Infinitely coming back from the dead is my thing, dammit!
And let's not forget the random chance of an olog captain breaking your level 80 legendary sword that also happened to be the only sword you had because you didn't need any other sword.
I watched my sibling play this game and rage against it numerous times, lol. I hated hearing that, as I loved hearing the dialogue of the game. Like, you don't usually get that much detail and voice acting with the characters on battlefields in games. It also seemed approachable as a non-LOTR fan (my sibling isn't one, either).
I caught my mom, an early Gen Xer, with "how long ago were the 70s" because mostly, if you can remember the 90s, you got really comfortable with doing the math based around 2000, and we almost collectively think of the 70s as being 30 years ago. Telling my mom that her first job hired her almost 50 years ago caused Mom.exe to crash. I suppose I say this to mean that it's not just Millennials who experience this loss of two decades in our calculations.
One of my proudest gaming achievements was finishing X-COM: Enemy Unknown (with the Enemy Within DLC) without losing a single unit. It was hard AF, but worth it
I'd argue that Middle Earth SoW is even more punishing because the orcs come with levels. And die a few times and you're left staring down a orc that even an endgame player is going to have difficulty with... while your level is in the single digits.
@@SWProductions100 Yeah, it's a really cool mechanic. I believe there are some other things that make them betray you sooner as well. It's cool, but it does hurt if your bestie stabs you in the back cause you suck, lol :P
Haha this is why I spent literally a whole year playing shadow of war. The nemesis system is one of the most interesting and fun mechanics I've ever messed around with in a game. Also the game is massive compared to shadow of Mordor, and the combat is even better. More unique orcs too.
I still find it amusing that the death spiral was so common in XCOM: Enemy Unknown that it was made canon in XCOM 2. The few people who did beat it (I'm also surprised they exist) must have been surprised to go from "We won!" to "We failed horribly." off-screen.
@@ArkaneStephanie Well you only lost because the whole EU campaign was just a simulation that the Commander was put through by the aliens. Aside from the Enemy Within campaign featuring Exalt, the XCOM 2 campaign is better anyway, at least in my opinion. Plus, it has Jonathon Frakes, Michael Dorn, and Marina Sirtis in it. Someone there like Star Trek: TNG!
@@danielharvison7510 While Xcom 2 was indeed the more polished game, it was also more unfair. Not only the time limit but also that discovered aliens got 1,5 extra turns before you could even react to them.
@@ArkaneStephanieYou didn’t lose, you only won against the Vanguard, in the first game you only fought a token force of the Aliens. It’s the, you won the battle, not the war type thing.
For reals. Even I was like, oh you silly Elle. It's been almost 20 years. 😅 Then I had the sudden realization that I left out an entire decade, and it's actually been almost 30 years. 🤯😭
Killer 7 has a fun one, it's a first-person shooter with seven main characters. If one of them dies in a level you're booted back to the last save room to select another character. Each character has their own play style, so you may not be using your favourite character or enjoy their weapon. You can get the character you killed back but only if you fight your way back to the place they died using "The Cleaner" who has the weakest gun in the game and if he dies it's game over.
I don’t, I was born that year. Oh well, it can’t be that long ago I still live in the same room and play video games in most of my free time so I must be a little girl, a nerdy LITTLE. GIRL.🫠
I'd say almost all strategy/resource management games fall into this category. You're sailing as long as you stay ahead of the curve, but fall behind, and you'll be spending most of your resources putting out fires. I'll put down Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress as big examples. Once your citizens get stressed, they'll start stressing out others, often leading to a downwards spiral. People begin starting fires, breaking stuff, attacking each other, wailing and randomly killing livestock. Of course, THAT'S when the gaint bugs attack.
Lots of games that have separate missions that you complete and then get to carry resources forward to the next mission--say money earned or upgrades bought--will fit into your model also. If you're playing well, you can afford all the upgrades to keep playing well. Play just "fine" and you'll keep just playing fine and scrape by completing levels until you hit a wall where you need that upgrade you can't afford or skills far beyond what you have. If you had those skills, you could afford that upgrade.
Rimworld will give you a break if things go too poorly. That doesn't necessarily mean that things will be easy or smooth, but at least you're less likely to get a heatwave, rabid bears, toxic fallout, plague, space pirate raiders, a meteor shower, and a murderbot drop assault all at the same time.
@@alltat While it is true that booth DF and RW tailor the threats towards how big and successful your settlements are, it is very possible to grow your size beyond your level of preparedness. On a semi-related note, Centipedes are the worst. I'd put 11 uranium slugs in one, 2 of them in critical systems, along with a bunch of small arms fire, and it was STILL nuking away at my colonists.
@@chillhour6155 I think they're still trying to find the funds to work on/complete the other chapters of Pathologic 2, so I wouldn't look for 3 any time soon.
That game was great, but I quit when my A team refused to go on the next story mission because they got over leveled doing side missions and now it was beneath them.
The other way that Dark Souls 2 punishes you for playing poorly is inadvertently in it's despawn mechanic. Eventually, if you kill enemies repeatedly (12 to 15 cycles, I believe), they stop spawning in. You'd think that would help players who die a lot, but if you're doing so and not able to make it back to collect your souls, you now have less resources to farm to level up.
Honestly dark souls 2 gives so much souls anyway, leveling up isn't that issue. And there is that bonfire item which will like give ng+ to an area & respawn enemy so you can technically still farm. Personally the hp being capped for dying was more annoying.
@@nurunkabir1893 True, and I didn't really have an issue leveling up, but for someone who's struggling, it may be. And if they're struggling on NG, sending an area to NG+ isn't really a viable solution either.
@@Kuroitakai Like come on. A player who cleared an entire area of enemies 12-15 times that they can't farm an area anymore. Even if they lost souls cause of dying, they ain't that bad. But suddenly they will struggle just because of ng+ enemies. Ds2 has many problems. Not having enough enemies too kill ain't one of them. The bonfire item to ng+ was just in case. Just ng+ an early area that you are most comfortable fighting.
Extinction kicks in after you've killed an enemy 10 times, by my count. I used it explicitly to farm enemies as a means of progressing through an area. Not having enemies in the way makes runs to bosses much easier if you're terrible at finding shortcuts/bonfires. Honestly, if dying in an area so many times that you cause an enemy to go extinct without keeping your souls, I think there's more of a skill issue at play.
Gladius and R-Type. You get to level 3 untouched but died halfway through the level? Here... now you have nothing for the part you just died at. Have fun!
Star Wars The Old Republic was one of these at launch and for some years afterward. Each time you died your gear degraded, costing a lot of credits to repair. As credits were hard to come by, you were often left unable to repair your gear so your stats were lowered until you ground enough credits to repair or buy new, or luckily found something new in the wild.
Could be worse. Earlier MMOs like Final Fantasy XI and EQ had you lose XP when you died. This could cause you to *de-level*. WoW was considered extremely "friendly" at launch for not including that particular mechanic.
@@brentbourgoine5893 I had a friend back in Everquest whose parents insisted that she let her little brother play on her account, so therefore he knew the password. Well, he got pissed at her for something, so he logged in on her max level high elf and 'death hopped' all the way to the dark elf city of Neriak, binding her at the Soul Binder (that's how you pick where you respawn upon death) deep inside the city at the absolute minimum level where you stop losing xp. Also, not only did you lose xp, but you also left all your gear and money on your corpse, and had to return to the place where you just freakin' died to get your gear back. So there she is "naked' in Neriak with around a hundred bodies across the game and no idea where her body with her gear and gold was located.
As I listen to people talk about playing XCom I realize more and more that I play it weird. Cause once I get a squad up to the 4th rank, I split them off into three squads and fill the other slots with rookies. I use the big guns as the “officers” and help them build up their own new squads. By the time the games at midgame, I have four or so roughly balanced squads that I rotate through. The idea being that a squad is at 100% when every individual member is. That means I progress slower I suppose but it’s way more stable.
Its like pokemon! I used to just power level my starter and it was ok for the AI battles but as you get more experience you realise a more even team is better
Guild Wars- that 15% reduction to health and stamina each time you died (up to 60%) was brutal. And how do you reduce the death penalty (if you aren't lucky enough to have morale boosts)? You have to gain experience by- yep, you guessed it- fighting the monsters/boss you JUST failed to beat at full health and energy, very likely getting stuck in a death loop until you have to reset the instanced area.
I think that spawned from Ultima Online where if you were a murderer, and died upon your 4th kill (and thus were red), you had to take a stat loss to ressurect every time until your murders were cleared which took 8 hours of real life gametime a piece. and then they timed you out if you tried to serve those hours unattended.
The second thing on the list is easily the best example of why holding the nemesis system under patent is absurd and honestly wish we had it with most games so it wouldn’t feel like you only have “true allies”or “mortal enemies” and nothing in between
The Fire Emblem series features permadeath for all of your units (aside from the main character(s) and certain characters on certain missions, who will instantly cause a game over if killed), and up until fairly recently, this *wasn't* optional. Opportunities to get new characters are typically extremely limited, and especially in earlier games in the series, often require one of a specific handful of units talk to them on the battlefield in order to recruit them (so if those units are dead, you can't add the potential new recruit to your team) This means that if you're bad at the game and your units keep dying, your army is only going to decrease in size as the game progresses while the enemy armies get stronger in level and numbers. Sure, this means that there's less competition for precious XP (especially in the games without optional repeatable battles, where there's only so many chances to get XP) so your surviving units might end up stronger than they would in a team with plenty of living party members, but it also means that you have to expose those precious few units to even more danger and that you'll lack the manpower to optimally play objectives, hunt down optional loot, and build a defensive frontline to protect your squishier units like Priests or Mages. Also, Fire Emblem has a Support system where units that have spent enough time together get offensive and defensive buffs whenever they're close to each other, which means that the fewer units you have, the fewer of these buffs you can stack, and every death means losing buffs you already have.
I'd say Pokemon Mystery Dungeon would be a good entry for the list. If you faint in a dungeon, you lose all of your money and almost all of your items, making the next few runs so much harder. Or, if you are really unlucky, it softlocks you. Happened more than once to me...
I thought that leaving the dungeon so you could grind in a lower level one was an option? It's inconvenient as heck, but I thought it was always an option? Then again, I've only ever played PMD Red and Blue Rescue Team, so the GBA games might not softlock as easily.
I started RRT recently and only got like five dungeons into the game before my first death. I was kind if stunned that a mechanic that punishing was in a Pokemon game, but then again it probably is fairly common in other Mystery Dungeon series
I remember people suggesting cheesing the Master Sword issue by staying at 3 hearts** and just beelining it to Faron to stock up on Hearty Durians. Then cook 5 of them in a pot for a ton of temporary hearts because the restriction that forbids you from using them to get the sword in the first place cuts both ways. **"But you need 13 to get the sword in the first place!" There's a glitch that lets you claim it earlier. Failing that just gun it for 13 hearts, get the sword, and then visit the statue that lets you trade them for stamina vessels.
Even worse: The "present day" sections of Back to the Future are further in the past than the "past" sections were when the film was released; and the "future" has already happened.
As someone who came of age in 1995, I can absolutely confirm that it was a startling THIRTEEN years ago. There are children born that year who are making the same terrible decisions we made back then.
I hate to make it worse, but 1995 is actually eighteen years 😬 Those kids have made their terrible decisions and can legally drive now Edit: Actually, wait, my math is wrong - OH NO
Blaster Master- the more weapon energy you have the more powerful your primary weapon becomes. Get hit though and your weapon energy goes down. This holds true in the remakes in Blaster Master Zero 1-3 too.
@@SimuLord Blaster Master Zero is so much easier by comparison! i actually enjoyed it so much i accidentally got 100% and had to look up the non-100% ending on RUclips, lol.
It's pretty much the original basis for Hello Neighbor, the more you die, the more the AI learns to anticipate your actions and sets traps to block off previous routes.
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume was interesting for this. Basically the game gives you an "I Win" button that makes one of your party members insanely overpowered, but they permanently die at the end of the battle. But maybe you don't want to use that. That's where the Sin meter comes in. Every story fight requires you to fill a Sin Quota, by either overkilling enemies or sacrificing allies. Meet it and get rewarded. Double it, and get even better stuff, but fail and the game is suddenly much harder since you now have to fight off demons that are designed to force you to use the sacrifice mechanic.
There's Vanquish, where picking up excess ammo for a gun upgrades it, but upon dying it gets downgraded by a level. Guns only have 3 levels above default, but it can still be disheartening to go in to a tough fire fight, fail once, and even after getting it the second time around feeling like you've made a net loss.
The Resident Evil games come to mind, with their typewriter saving mechanics.. If you die too much and use them too often to help progress through the game, you'll run out of ink ribbons and won't be able to save anymore.
And if you don’t manage your inventory properly you could end up going against some nasty bosses/areas without needed herb for healing or sufficient ammunition. Saving was sometimes detrimental if you dug yourself into a hole. This was definitely a plan for it or pay for it game with the caveat being you never knew what you were planning for or if you’d ever be able to return to an area.
Dark Souls 2 also has "soul memory". In short, the more times you die without recovering your souls, the higher level the people who invade you can be. Starting out, the invaders would be around your level, but the more souls you lost, and they spent, the greater the level difference could be.
Honourable mention for Legacy of Kain Soulreaver? Where you loose your magic arm-sword as soon as you take damage and cannot kill anymore vampires unless you have a spare physical weapon at hand, which when you die stays at the spot you died so you can't access it straight away again?
What about Minecraft where the zombie that killed you can pick up and use your dropped equipment, making it harder to pick up your blocks which despawns after 5 minutes.
I'd say it depends on when you die. If you die early on it really sucks, but dying in the lategame doesn't really matter too much as you're probably gonna have more than enough resources anyways.
Particularly nasty about Pathologic 2 is that you’ll eventually be offered a deal with a supernatural figure to restore your debuffs. This is, of course, a trap. If you take the deal, you are irrevocably locked into the game’s worst ending, regardless of what else you do.
Don’t starve. Everything is trying to kill you. There are countless ways to screw it up, and most of them are deadly (like you actually need to restart from zero, no save points) there are occasional resurrection stones, but you drop your inventory at the site of your death. (Which possibly burned or sunk, but your food will definitely be devoured by wild animals.)
In Mordheim: City of the Damned, your troops usually become injured, if they lose consciousness in combat. You have to either pay for treatment for these troops or retire them. The healing process takes time in which they can't be used in combat. The injuries may be permanent (still requires the initial treatment), giving your unit a permanent debuff. It is also possible for a warrior to just die as a result of being bested in combat. The better you do in combat, the less taxing on your troops. Also, you can afford to have your troops walk around and loot more... Having your army Rout involuntarily may cause them injuries and a loss of equipment.
2:13 There *is* actually a way to stop it entirely! You just have to complete all three DLCs and collect King Vendeick’s crown, then use the ashen mist heart to enter the memories held within his armor! From then on, whenever you wear one of the four crowns, you don’t lose HP on death. So, basically, you have to prove that you don’t really need it.
Chronos: Before the Ashes has a similar mechanic to SIfu where you age a year every time you die. But as you get older it gets harder, and eventually impossible, to increase your strength and dexterity. And it's a souls-like.
In Dark Souls 2 you can get 2 rings that keep you from hollowing when you die. While they do break when you die, pretty early on in the poison dlc you can find a tree that just loves being whipped and for a bonus it repairs your stuff with its love.
Cave story was my first very memorable experience with this. You fully upgrade your weapon to become heck on earth, only to take a few stray hits and now you are stuck with a weaker one until you can claw your way back to max level!
Ah, shadow of mordor. It took me a while to work up the skills to leave the starting area. I died too many times and difficulty locked myself out of the rest of the game because my rivials had promoted too many times. To the point i was getting one shot in the first level 😂
Natural Doctrine. You have a very very finite amount of magic you can use through the entire game. the magic is insanely powerful in return and can save you on some of the ridiculously difficult fights. Honestly, the game on the easiest difficulty is harder than any souls like out there. but if you use any of it, the game becomes less and less winnable because the final level is scaled to a point where you were intended to use ALL OF IT. so good luck
With Xcom 2 being built on the premise that the Aliens won you can at least find solace in the fact that being bad at Enemy unknown is the canon way of playing it
the game Hobo: tough life debuffs your vital stats 5% of their original value each you respawn after dying from one of those same vital stats being too low and rapidly degrading your hp, so by the ninth time or so you respawn you are already basically dying. There could be a way to reverse a debuff or two, or negate them, with bonuses, but as a newer casual player I have no idea b/c handholding is minimal and the fandom guides are fairly limited.
Technically, any game that has you lose items/currency when you die is making it harder for you because it leaves you with fewer ressources - particularly if they are limited. So it's actually more common than people think, even if it's on a small scale. The same goes for games that have introduced experience or skill point loss. They don't make it harder so much as they make it more tedious because you'll have to spend more time and items getting back to where you were, but it's a nuance as well.
Demon Souls, the predecessor to Dark Souls, had a mechanic which each death with restored humanity made the world darker. Each step made enemies harder and at a certain level of darkness new, harder enemies would appear. So you could either play all game with half health or restore that bar and risk making the game harder.
A lot of the NES side-scroll shooter games would fall into this group. Life Force, Gradius, Contra, and so on. Manage to dodge every inch of damage like a pro, and you'll grow into more and more of a cheezing god, with better dodging speed, piercing/wide-spread mega guns, and even shields to start absorbing glancing blows from minor slip-ups. Snowballing the game into a glorious Easy Mode. The moment you die, however, you're all the way back to having the agility of a slug, and a single teeny pea shooter, and the difficulty slider snaps right back up to the "Nightmare" level.
You could argue that Dark Souls 2 is actually more forgiving in making you progressively loose more health after humanizing yourself, instead of losing all of it, like the other Souls. But leaving that half empty health bar there was cruel
@@addison_v_ertisement1678 I didn't say it's forgiving. I said more forgiving. Anyway, iamtheoceaniamthesea already let me know my memory was only correct about Demon's Souls.
Any game with troop death, obviously. Also, any game with power-ups. I'm especially reminded of overhead shooter titles where you die and a third of the power-ups you had pop out of your plane to recover. Also also any game that gives you ratings for your performance and then grants rewards tied to those ratings. And, you know, just any game with permadeath. Because "game over" makes it pretty hard to reach the ending. But for a slightly odder example, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker has a bit of swordbeams syndrome, except in MJ's case, it's that your attacks -- which normally have extended range via sparkles -- don't sparkle any more. Also, your most powerful moves cost health, so if you're too beat up, you can't use them.
2:14 well there are mechanics that stop HP loss form dying in Dark Souls 2(i will include them down below for anyone who wants to know, but late enoguht that it will not be spoiled accidently) First one is available in Shrine of Amana, if you go to certain place in there while with reduced HP and no reversal items, then you can simply pray at shrine to get HP back for free. Second way is much more hard to pull off. You must get all crowns(that is vendrick, sunken king, iron king and ivory king) which simply means complete all of DLCs and then interact with vendric cloak after getting ashen heart to get his blessing. Form now on while wearing any of the four crowns you won't loose HP from deaths
Soul Reaver: fairly early on in the game, you as Raziel get the Soul Reaver sword. But take one bit of damage and you lose it until you're at full health again. Only beaten by Soul Reaver 2, where the sword would start to consume your life bar if you used it too much. Annoying either way!
Came here to say this! It should also be noted that your health drains constantly as long as you're in the physical realm, meaning you have to constantly be searching for souls to eat to maintain your corporeal form. Having the Soul Reaver prevents this health drain, but only as long as you avoid any damage whatsoever. So an enemy landing a lucky hit on you in a fight means you lose your most powerful weapon AND your very existence is now on a timer. And totally agreed re: the Soul Reaver in the second game. I used to say it was like having a Bengal tiger strapped to your arm. XD
Star Fox 64 presents a lot of threats that take multiple hits to go down--they break fast if you're fully powered up on the wings, but take awhile on the weaker starting laser. Problem is, you lose your wings with enough hits, and every time you lose a level, you come back with the starting laser only. The last dogfight on Venom is unwinnable with the starting laser--after one loss there, you may as well start the game over, rather than have 7-8 hopeless dogfights with the peashooter.
Then there's Expert mode, where even the slightest collision will cause you to lose one (or even both) of your wings. The game knows this, too, so enemies will be far more aggressive than in Normal and will constantly try to ram you.
1995 is my birth year and I turn 28 in two months. So there you go. Now you have to live with that. Please don’t tell me that in three years my back will just spontaneously develop a hernia, like most of the internet apparently had when they turned 30
DD2 is actually quite opposite. Every time you fail the game gives you an option to apply a buff, which grows with every loss. And there are no permanent loses. For the original game (as for every game with enforced ironman mode) it is kinda true, but you can recover from any loses simply by recruiting more people for free... well unless you play on stygian difficulty, of course.
Anyone else expected the sentence during the hitman segment to go like "Concepts like disguise and undetected and silent assassin and not being Mike."?
@@molybdaen11 I don't mean they are incompetent. I mean it isn't easy to be fully self-sufficient these days. Myself still live with my parents, and I am a Millennial.
There’s a very interesting discussion to be had about difficulty in the Middle Earth games. The Nemesis system is at its most compelling when the player dies periodically. However, some of the orcs can develop immunity combos that make them nearly invincible. As a result, I remember Shadow of War ended up with tons of difficulty modes patched into it after launch to try and get players a difficulty mode where they still died often enough to make interesting nemeses, but without it feeling cheap or letting enemies compound their power too much.
Fun fact: when Ellen was talking about Ginger Rogers my brain provided Ginger Baker instead and I was briefly confused by the "backwards and in heels" bit.
Demon's Souls and Bloodborne are the worst offenders because of consumable healing items :( If you're struggling with a boss and getting the hang of it, but burning through those herbs, the game forces you to take a break and grind forever getting healing items for another go. And, to add insult to injury, you can't get a good farming spot until you kill the Tower Knight, who is a massive source of herb consumption. And I didn't even know about the world tendency 😅
Best early game farm in DeS is probably 4-1. Skelly bois are weak to blunt so just beat them with your bare fists. Even at sl1 it wrecks them in like 3 hits. You can also get the crescent falchion in the same level to kill them pretty easy. Farming the first reaper in 4-2 is also a good idea. And in Bloodborne, I genocide central Yharnam until I kill Blood Starved Beast and beat the first chalice. Then I can use cummfpk to get all the vials and bullets I'll need for the whole playthrough.
@@themightymcb7310 Oh yeah! I ground up enough souls there to one hand the uchi! Herbs are hard to come by though. It’s a really fun farming spot actually.
@@Deekanthrope oh you grind souls to buy the herbs, the drop rates suck and aren't worth dealing with. I suggest freeing Graverobber Blige from his cell in 4-1 for half moon grass and doing Patches' little quest in 4-2 to have access to full moon grass.
@@themightymcb7310 ahhh, that makes a lot more sense than the method I was using 😅 I think the blue eyes drop one half moon each, so I was heading up the shortcut in 1-1
The problem with shadow of Mordor is that if you're good at the combat then you'll never have any fun encounters with the enemies. In shadow of war they over compensated for this turning half the uruks into unstoppable killing machines that have almost no weaknesses and are invulnerable to 2/3ds of the ways of damaging enemies.
I remember some orcs that would have insane combinations like immune to fire, immune to vaulting, combat master (counters normal attacks), immune to stealth attacks, immune to ranged attacks, immune to beasts. It's like "Yo! Game! What the actual hell am I supposed to kill this guy with if he's literally immune to everything?!"
I’d argue soulsborne as a whole punishes poor play. Because if you’re doing so poorly you can never recover your souls it becomes really hard to progress. Had a friend way under-leveled when they played because of this.
Also depends on where you are in the game. I'm in the Ringed City DLC now and I hate it with a passion. Them sticking Ringed Knights all over and putting 5 Herald Knights on those stairs should qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. When I went to talk to Lapp in that room I finally decided that fighting the 2 knights wasn't worth it and actually managed to lose the aggro of the first run and by running clockwise around the building in the way avoided the second knight noticing me at all. There's difficulty and then there's bs, and both DS3 DLCs bring in an alarming amount of bs with their enemies, both the type and the quantity.
@@hundred2949 That said, Bloodborne has, imo, the best farming in the games, particularly when you make it to the Lecture Building and if you're doing the chalice dungeons. When I ran low on vials I knew where I needed to head to farm up some echoes to restock my vials or to level up if I was short a few thousand. I have trouble remembering good farming locations in DS3. Maybe the stairs with the Lothric Knights on the way to the Twin Princes.
@@SolaScientia herald knights are weak to plunging attacks and have a unique plunge animation. Bait them up those little walkways and stand in a corner. They should attack you (roll through it against the railing or something and you'll be fine) and fall down. Then you can drop on them and get a one shot plunge or close to it.
@@themightymcb7310 Yeah, I know. I killed the first one in the Dreg Heap that way. The trouble is that there are so many of the shits on those stairs that it's not worth all the trouble of killing them. I took a look at the map and pretty much nothing in the area is worth the bother for me to get. I did talk with Shira though, so that's done and I have a chime I'm never going to use, lol. I'll run around the swamp to gather up some stuff and get that other gate open. I'm going to see if I can avoid that one judicator wandering the swamp since he can summon in some annoying NPCs. I've already tangled with Ledo and determine that he also isn't worth the bother at this point. It's the judicator and the 2 knights near the purging monument that have me a bit worried. I'm basically kind of burned out on DS3. I love the main game a lot and it always felt fair to me. Both DLC have me annoyed and fighting Friede was one of the worst boss fight experiences for me until I caved and summoned Gael. She ranks up there with Laurence as one of the worst boss fights for me. I'd rather fight the Orphan or Nameless King before I fight Friede again.
That dark souls 2 feature is one of the many improvements the game makes over the rest of the souls series. Other souls remove a bigger, fixed amount of health after your first dead. Most people played games like demon's souls always at 50% because human form is so hard to get(same for DS and DS3. DS2 only makes it that bad if you die a lot
dark souls 1 never has an health reduction from death except for curse which is relatively rare and losing you ember isnt even close to halving your health so imo death is way worse in ds2 then 1 or 3
Improvement? 😂 Lore wise, it's make sense. You keep dying, you are slowly losing yourself. Implementation wise, it sucks. And only demon souls had it. It's just less shit than demon souls. But shit feature nonetheless.
Memories of my playthrough I put on RUclips where I was telling myself "don't open the door" just before I opened the door and lost three of my best characters.
There’s that game “Nevermind” where you’re supposed to wear a heart rate monitor and the more scared you get, the scarier it gets. Meant to incentivise you to calm down, apparently…
@@SimuLord It's not that losing is fun. It's that winning is more rewarding when you really had to overcome something. And that's coming from a casual, 100 % unashamedly bad at games. (Not a fan of the DS2 punishment, though.)
As someone who felt the same for a long time, is bad at games, and now loves Soulslikes, let me tell you: Most Dark Souls fans are either very shitty at selling the games, or are actively trying to discourage people from playing.
@@SimuLord there's 2 mecanics in souls-like that are generally talked about as "kicking you when you're down" The first one is dark souls 2 health penality (talked about in this video) which is pretty bad (and exclusive to ds2) The second one is the fact that you drop souls upon death, which I'll try to defend : It's here for 2 things : -make you less avert to losing, because you'll get more elsewhere -incintivise you to be more consistant in your results, since it drops you a few steps before where you died (ie you only need to kill ennemies you already killed once). And consistancy is very important against bosses, because you're supposed to gradually improve as you fight them
well actually you can disable the health drain effect in ds2 if you play the main quest through and obtain the kings crown and do all the dlcs and get 3 more crowns and then get a blessing which makes the crown make you immune to the hollowing effect. sadly you do have to collect all the items in a single playthrough and the immunity effect only lasts for that playthrough, it will not carry over to ng+.
Earth 2150 is a game that might get harder or even unwinnable if you loose too much. Not only you can loose experienced and/or expensive units to make the game harder, but as your main goal is collecting enough resources in set amount of time to escape the dying earth if you loose to many missions and fail to collect what you need you can loose the whole game ending up with no more time or places to get what you need (and, to be fair, you can fail as many of those as you want... till the time runs out and you burn with the world). Fun (yes it is! I heartily recommend this fine classic strategy game).
I used to be a player and GM for a Mac only MMORPG called Oberin. Your character level was based on class specific skills, on death you dropped ALL items you had in your inventory (except your raft) AND you lost experience in ALL skills, including skills that impacted your character level. If you were unlucky you would lose enough XP to lose 1 class level, it was not hard to get the XP back if you died once or twice, but if you died a lot it could take you hours. Losing your gear and potentially losing a level meant that going back to your corpse could be hard. Especially since monsters gained levels for killing players and some monsters could loot some of your things, those monsters could despawn if kited too far from their spawn point, so you could lose some stuff. Also there was a 1 hour timer on player corpses, so if you were lucky and no player or monster looted your corpse, you could still lose everything you had. Most gear was not super important in that game since players could craft almost everything or buy almost everything from stores, but rare items could be lost forever.
"I'm still a hero!"
The Master Sword looks at the 7 terrible things that you can do in TOTK video. It shakes its head, thoroughly unconvinced.
What part of the Master Sword is the head? Only true heroes know.
"I am a hero"
Master sword: Chad pose
@@penguingonemad if Fi’s design is any indication, the blade.
@@penguingonemadwhichever that enters an orifice first I presume
that judgemental sword doesn't understand the terrible things the koroks did.
To be fair Pathologic is not so much a "punish you if you die" kind of game but a "punish you no matter what you do" kind of game
A game worthy of all the mods I have for it.
I just wanna see the world and story.
Pathologic is just random f'ed up shit happening all at once.
It's a bad game. That concept is stupid. Where is the reward?
@@sjhmagic1the whole point of the game is that games don’t need to be rewarding or fun to be good
@@sjhmagic1 Modern human rejects anything that isnt instant gratification
You forgot the worst part of the Xcom death spiral, the fact that if one of your best soldiers dies, it can cause your other soldiers to panic and cause the death of more of your good soldiers, leading to you failing that mission and losing all of your experienced troops. If your troops panic after a death, its almost always a death sentence to that whole squad
Love those games!
You can loose the equipment, too.
It arguably gets worse in the Long War mod.
Dead State had a similar panic mechanism where characters could panic, causing even more characters to panic until you lose control of your whole team. Similar to Darkest Dungeon.
It can't even come close to the 90's version where 1 chrysalid or one mind-controller could take out your entire 16-man squad.
Dying repeatedly in Sekiro causes a disease called Dragonrot to spread. Not only does Dragonrot prevent you from progressing in the other characters questlines it also reduces your chances of receiving unseen aid which periodically keeps you from losing experience points and money.
though, honestly, I was quite surprised at how lenient that system is given FromSoftware's whole MO.
but dragonrot can be cured with an item that can be sold by any vendor for very little money, and you can buy ~5 dragontears any time you have it, and it resets when you cure it, so you cant ever not have the cure as long as you have more skill than an IGN reporter
@@middox239 😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@middox239 facts😂😂😅
It's VERY easy to cure tho and tbh wether your % of keeping your souls is 30 or 20% ain't that much of a difference so dragon root basically is just decoration supposed to scare you, originally it was supposed to kill the characters who are infected but they sadly changed that
Demon's Souls has a gameplay mechanic called world tendancy. Dying repeatedly will turn your world tendancy black which will make the enemies tougher and deal more damage. Also when you die you come back as a spirit which cuts your health in half.
Also because healing items are finite, every one you used on a failed run is gone forever
Only when you die in human form. That's why a lot of players would travel to the nexus to kill themselves after a boss battle.
@@PristianoPenaldoSUIIII Doesn't it also cut the number of accessible healing items? I know there was something that becomes less accessible in a black world
@@homerman76 black wt increases drop rates and soul rewards
Does that not eventually lock a player out of the game entirely? If someone is struggling with the game, making it harder would only make it worse, until they can't progress at all.
I feel the Hitman Blood Money one was specifically against Mike
I was honestly waiting for a background “Mike comment” haha
Hitman: WoA’s Freelancer mode should have gotten an honorable mention here.
I'm surprised they didn't get Mike to present that specific example
Waltuh
@@yoshilu7451 I'm surprised that the gameplay shown wasn't Mike's.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga decides that if one of the Bros. goes down, not only should you be penalized to do 1/2 the normal damage and lose out on dual combos, but the healthy Bro has to literally carry the other one's unconscious body, meaning that dodging attacks becomes twice as hard!
Gets worse with Partners in Time, when you introduce Baby Mario and Baby Luigi.
@@AgentMonochromeyes, but was kinda funny everytime baby mario screamed “WIGI!!”
It's thematically appropriate, acting as an physical analogy for the mental burden the surviving brother has to carry after watching his own blood being violently slaughtered in armed combat. Or he's literally trying to bring his deceased brother's body back with him, so they can have a proper funeral - whichever one hurts more.
@@NorthernRealmJackal...Woah. Now I want a game with the Mario & Luigi combat & brotherly bond but with the dungeon delving and horror mechanics of Darkest Dungeon. A young brother having to pull the corpse of their sibling out of a lovecraftian pit just to push them out to sea on a burning raft. Some poor guy losing his mind after watching his friend/brother get torn in half, eventually sharing his fate.
The worse you do at watching this video, the more viciously Ellen will roast you in the comments.
I managed to watch it in reverse with subtitles in Esperanto.
She’s to busy having a crisis over how long ago 1995 was
Pain
i want to be roasted by ellen!
come on, give it to me! 😅
Wait...what video? Did I miss something?
That Xcom death spiral is also a danger in the Fire Emblem games. Especially in the older ones, where there's fewer safety nets and more spawn ambushes.
yup i learned that the hard way.
Oh lord, the original FE(as in the NES one) with its objectively worse units coming later in the game. "I see you lost your Swordfighter(Navarre or Ogma), here is one with objectively worse bases(Radd and Caesar), that joins at a lower level with lower growths across the board."
There's a reason Shadow Dragon included the stupid OP units in the newly added Gaiden Maps. Specifically as death spiral safety nets.
One of the old Xcom games also made things harder if you were doing good by raiding your base with harder hitting Incursions. I wonder if we'll see that in the next game.
Not sure if this is worth an entry in the sequel vid but;
Middle-Earth Shadow of War ups the ante of progressively stronger Orcs, because not only can they reach a maximum level of 80 (as opposed to just 20 in the first game), but some Orcs will be so pleased with killing you that they will stalk and ambush you across Mordor again and again until you break the cycle and finally kill them.
I've had my game broken because if you die enough times to your rival early in the game the quest where you have to defend the gates can become almost impossible to beat.
Not to mention as they get stronger they gain abilities and immunities while losing fears and weaknesses. So keep getting ambushed and killed by an orc and the list of options to deal with him gets shorter. They can even follow you to other regions.
I still remember Flogg the Raven, berserker assassin immune to execution, frost, stealth, fire, arrows, and poison, couldn’t be attacked from the front or side, couldn’t be vaulted over, did massive damage, enraged only at low health, and had a deadly dark blade attack he’d use to kill my bodyguard. Took a good long while to kill him using a commander with a defender army.
In fairness, even if you _do_ kill him, there's no guarantee he won't just come back.
I had one grunt get promoted all the way to the top (for the achievement) and he became my rival. Between Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War I must've killed this guy 6-7 times, and he just kept coming back. By the end he was more metal than flesh. Infinitely coming back from the dead is my thing, dammit!
And let's not forget the random chance of an olog captain breaking your level 80 legendary sword that also happened to be the only sword you had because you didn't need any other sword.
I watched my sibling play this game and rage against it numerous times, lol. I hated hearing that, as I loved hearing the dialogue of the game. Like, you don't usually get that much detail and voice acting with the characters on battlefields in games. It also seemed approachable as a non-LOTR fan (my sibling isn't one, either).
Any game where you drop your entire inventory when you die.
Minecraft?
That's nothing. In Valheim you also lose 5% of your total exp.
@@BigJasonMc the exp loss in Valheim is so unnecessary
@@BigJasonMc thanks for letting me know so I can never play that game
runescape was my introduction to this game mechanic. I did not have a good time.
I caught my mom, an early Gen Xer, with "how long ago were the 70s" because mostly, if you can remember the 90s, you got really comfortable with doing the math based around 2000, and we almost collectively think of the 70s as being 30 years ago. Telling my mom that her first job hired her almost 50 years ago caused Mom.exe to crash. I suppose I say this to mean that it's not just Millennials who experience this loss of two decades in our calculations.
One of my proudest gaming achievements was finishing X-COM: Enemy Unknown (with the Enemy Within DLC) without losing a single unit. It was hard AF, but worth it
I still can't beat classic mode.
I'd argue that Middle Earth SoW is even more punishing because the orcs come with levels. And die a few times and you're left staring down a orc that even an endgame player is going to have difficulty with... while your level is in the single digits.
On top of that, the more you die, the more likely YOUR Orcs are to betray you
@@crowhaveninc.2103
Makes logical sense, but big oof
@@SWProductions100 Yeah, it's a really cool mechanic. I believe there are some other things that make them betray you sooner as well. It's cool, but it does hurt if your bestie stabs you in the back cause you suck, lol :P
Haha this is why I spent literally a whole year playing shadow of war. The nemesis system is one of the most interesting and fun mechanics I've ever messed around with in a game. Also the game is massive compared to shadow of Mordor, and the combat is even better. More unique orcs too.
I still find it amusing that the death spiral was so common in XCOM: Enemy Unknown that it was made canon in XCOM 2. The few people who did beat it (I'm also surprised they exist) must have been surprised to go from "We won!" to "We failed horribly." off-screen.
Sequels usually take the bad ending as Canon which sucks.
Yeah I booted up Xcom 2 after spending ages scraping through Unknown and was told I lost. Wtf game that was really hard
@@ArkaneStephanie Well you only lost because the whole EU campaign was just a simulation that the Commander was put through by the aliens.
Aside from the Enemy Within campaign featuring Exalt, the XCOM 2 campaign is better anyway, at least in my opinion.
Plus, it has Jonathon Frakes, Michael Dorn, and Marina Sirtis in it. Someone there like Star Trek: TNG!
@@danielharvison7510 While Xcom 2 was indeed the more polished game, it was also more unfair.
Not only the time limit but also that discovered aliens got 1,5 extra turns before you could even react to them.
@@ArkaneStephanieYou didn’t lose, you only won against the Vanguard, in the first game you only fought a token force of the Aliens. It’s the, you won the battle, not the war type thing.
I like to imagine that the whole 1995 thing started as a joke, and then Ellen had a real meltdown on realisation.
For reals. Even I was like, oh you silly Elle. It's been almost 20 years. 😅 Then I had the sudden realization that I left out an entire decade, and it's actually been almost 30 years. 🤯😭
As a child of the 80s I find her assertion cute and yes, I know I am getting old.
@@dreadcthulhu5 om there with you on regards of age matre
Hey, leave us alone for melting down about this fact lol
I graduated high school in 1994. No comment.
Killer 7 has a fun one, it's a first-person shooter with seven main characters. If one of them dies in a level you're booted back to the last save room to select another character. Each character has their own play style, so you may not be using your favourite character or enjoy their weapon. You can get the character you killed back but only if you fight your way back to the place they died using "The Cleaner" who has the weakest gun in the game and if he dies it's game over.
It is twisted, and tests every inch of skill when it comes to using the Cleaner 🤦
And can't be upgraded. None of that thick blood is going to him. This becomes very bad in, say, Killer8 mode.
That was a fun game i need to replay that one
Ah, 1995. I remember it well because it wasn't so long ago. Please let it not be so long ago.
I'm sad to tell you, your Nirvana t-shirt is now considered vintage. 💀
And by "your", I mean "my".
I don’t, I was born that year. Oh well, it can’t be that long ago I still live in the same room and play video games in most of my free time so I must be a little girl, a nerdy LITTLE. GIRL.🫠
I mean, if you consider 28 years as not so long ago, then you're good ^^;.
@@faylinnmystiquerose2224 Holy shit, has it really almost been 3 decades??? woah lol
I didn't exist in 1995.
I'd say almost all strategy/resource management games fall into this category. You're sailing as long as you stay ahead of the curve, but fall behind, and you'll be spending most of your resources putting out fires. I'll put down Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress as big examples. Once your citizens get stressed, they'll start stressing out others, often leading to a downwards spiral. People begin starting fires, breaking stuff, attacking each other, wailing and randomly killing livestock. Of course, THAT'S when the gaint bugs attack.
At least in rimworld you could say "screw it", take your components and the 3 competent colonists and leave the map to start somewhere else again.
Lots of games that have separate missions that you complete and then get to carry resources forward to the next mission--say money earned or upgrades bought--will fit into your model also. If you're playing well, you can afford all the upgrades to keep playing well. Play just "fine" and you'll keep just playing fine and scrape by completing levels until you hit a wall where you need that upgrade you can't afford or skills far beyond what you have. If you had those skills, you could afford that upgrade.
Rimworld will give you a break if things go too poorly. That doesn't necessarily mean that things will be easy or smooth, but at least you're less likely to get a heatwave, rabid bears, toxic fallout, plague, space pirate raiders, a meteor shower, and a murderbot drop assault all at the same time.
@@alltat While it is true that booth DF and RW tailor the threats towards how big and successful your settlements are, it is very possible to grow your size beyond your level of preparedness. On a semi-related note, Centipedes are the worst. I'd put 11 uranium slugs in one, 2 of them in critical systems, along with a bunch of small arms fire, and it was STILL nuking away at my colonists.
Pathologic 3 might add debuffs that prevent Ellen from petting cats and dogs.
Don't you even joke about that!
What's fun in Pathologic 2 is that you can get a bargain to prevent all debuffs...
But it locks you into the darkest, bleakest ending!
Is Pathologic 3 real ?
@@chillhour6155 I think they're still trying to find the funds to work on/complete the other chapters of Pathologic 2, so I wouldn't look for 3 any time soon.
Darkest Dungeon will always be punishing, but _especially_ if you don't play it optimally
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
That game was great, but I quit when my A team refused to go on the next story mission because they got over leveled doing side missions and now it was beneath them.
@@garrik37 😂😂😂😂😂 that moment you realize you need to invest in more heroes
DD1 is basically the Xcom formula mixed up and more balanced.
@@FelipeKana1 stress doesn't make any of it balanced. The fact that stress heroes stress the rest of your team even more is a terrible spiral.
The other way that Dark Souls 2 punishes you for playing poorly is inadvertently in it's despawn mechanic.
Eventually, if you kill enemies repeatedly (12 to 15 cycles, I believe), they stop spawning in.
You'd think that would help players who die a lot, but if you're doing so and not able to make it back to collect your souls, you now have less resources to farm to level up.
Honestly dark souls 2 gives so much souls anyway, leveling up isn't that issue.
And there is that bonfire item which will like give ng+ to an area & respawn enemy so you can technically still farm.
Personally the hp being capped for dying was more annoying.
@@nurunkabir1893 True, and I didn't really have an issue leveling up, but for someone who's struggling, it may be.
And if they're struggling on NG, sending an area to NG+ isn't really a viable solution either.
@@Kuroitakai Like come on. A player who cleared an entire area of enemies 12-15 times that they can't farm an area anymore. Even if they lost souls cause of dying, they ain't that bad.
But suddenly they will struggle just because of ng+ enemies.
Ds2 has many problems. Not having enough enemies too kill ain't one of them. The bonfire item to ng+ was just in case.
Just ng+ an early area that you are most comfortable fighting.
There's a covenant that stops them despawning.
Extinction kicks in after you've killed an enemy 10 times, by my count. I used it explicitly to farm enemies as a means of progressing through an area. Not having enemies in the way makes runs to bosses much easier if you're terrible at finding shortcuts/bonfires.
Honestly, if dying in an area so many times that you cause an enemy to go extinct without keeping your souls, I think there's more of a skill issue at play.
Every single SHMUP. "Oh, did you lose all your powerups, well enjoy fighting this end loop boss with a peashooter"
*Yells angrily at Raiden*
*Loses will to live in Strikers 1945*
*Laughs in Tyrian 2000*
Starfox when you lose your laser power up ;-;
Gladius and R-Type. You get to level 3 untouched but died halfway through the level? Here... now you have nothing for the part you just died at. Have fun!
Ellen’s constant reminders of how long ago 1995 was is the gut punch I didn’t need
Makes it all the more gutting that I was born in that year. I am so fully aware of my age, I feel it's plastered above my head.
@@zoltankotolacsi6892Well I was 7 in 1995. So I feel you just added an extra half decade +
28 yrs ago did 1995 exist
Star Wars The Old Republic was one of these at launch and for some years afterward.
Each time you died your gear degraded, costing a lot of credits to repair. As credits were hard to come by, you were often left unable to repair your gear so your stats were lowered until you ground enough credits to repair or buy new, or luckily found something new in the wild.
Could be worse. Earlier MMOs like Final Fantasy XI and EQ had you lose XP when you died. This could cause you to *de-level*. WoW was considered extremely "friendly" at launch for not including that particular mechanic.
That probably traces back to Diablo at least.
Guess BioWare learned too much from System Shock 2.
One of the only benefits of being in a guild is giving me allowance to help with repairing my gear lol.
@@brentbourgoine5893 I had a friend back in Everquest whose parents insisted that she let her little brother play on her account, so therefore he knew the password. Well, he got pissed at her for something, so he logged in on her max level high elf and 'death hopped' all the way to the dark elf city of Neriak, binding her at the Soul Binder (that's how you pick where you respawn upon death) deep inside the city at the absolute minimum level where you stop losing xp. Also, not only did you lose xp, but you also left all your gear and money on your corpse, and had to return to the place where you just freakin' died to get your gear back. So there she is "naked' in Neriak with around a hundred bodies across the game and no idea where her body with her gear and gold was located.
As I listen to people talk about playing XCom I realize more and more that I play it weird. Cause once I get a squad up to the 4th rank, I split them off into three squads and fill the other slots with rookies. I use the big guns as the “officers” and help them build up their own new squads. By the time the games at midgame, I have four or so roughly balanced squads that I rotate through. The idea being that a squad is at 100% when every individual member is. That means I progress slower I suppose but it’s way more stable.
Its like pokemon! I used to just power level my starter and it was ok for the AI battles but as you get more experience you realise a more even team is better
Your not playing it weird your playing it smart.
The Long War and Long War 2 mods make this a necessity by implementing fatigue/infiltration, respectively
Guild Wars- that 15% reduction to health and stamina each time you died (up to 60%) was brutal. And how do you reduce the death penalty (if you aren't lucky enough to have morale boosts)? You have to gain experience by- yep, you guessed it- fighting the monsters/boss you JUST failed to beat at full health and energy, very likely getting stuck in a death loop until you have to reset the instanced area.
I think that spawned from Ultima Online where if you were a murderer, and died upon your 4th kill (and thus were red), you had to take a stat loss to ressurect every time until your murders were cleared which took 8 hours of real life gametime a piece. and then they timed you out if you tried to serve those hours unattended.
The second thing on the list is easily the best example of why holding the nemesis system under patent is absurd and honestly wish we had it with most games so it wouldn’t feel like you only have “true allies”or “mortal enemies” and nothing in between
Demons souls definitely gets harder the worse you are. World tendency black...
The pain...
Honestly, the Game of Life™ is the ultimate "harder as you go" game. This is demonstrated by Ellen confronting the passage of time x.x
The Fire Emblem series features permadeath for all of your units (aside from the main character(s) and certain characters on certain missions, who will instantly cause a game over if killed), and up until fairly recently, this *wasn't* optional. Opportunities to get new characters are typically extremely limited, and especially in earlier games in the series, often require one of a specific handful of units talk to them on the battlefield in order to recruit them (so if those units are dead, you can't add the potential new recruit to your team)
This means that if you're bad at the game and your units keep dying, your army is only going to decrease in size as the game progresses while the enemy armies get stronger in level and numbers. Sure, this means that there's less competition for precious XP (especially in the games without optional repeatable battles, where there's only so many chances to get XP) so your surviving units might end up stronger than they would in a team with plenty of living party members, but it also means that you have to expose those precious few units to even more danger and that you'll lack the manpower to optimally play objectives, hunt down optional loot, and build a defensive frontline to protect your squishier units like Priests or Mages.
Also, Fire Emblem has a Support system where units that have spent enough time together get offensive and defensive buffs whenever they're close to each other, which means that the fewer units you have, the fewer of these buffs you can stack, and every death means losing buffs you already have.
I'd say Pokemon Mystery Dungeon would be a good entry for the list. If you faint in a dungeon, you lose all of your money and almost all of your items, making the next few runs so much harder. Or, if you are really unlucky, it softlocks you. Happened more than once to me...
Yes…….happened to me on mystery dungeon explorers of sky 😢 got soft locked in palkia dungeon….
I thought that leaving the dungeon so you could grind in a lower level one was an option? It's inconvenient as heck, but I thought it was always an option?
Then again, I've only ever played PMD Red and Blue Rescue Team, so the GBA games might not softlock as easily.
ahhh yes the Pokémon Mystery dungeon series… the only series with more BULLSHIT mechanics than Shin Megami Tensei
I started RRT recently and only got like five dungeons into the game before my first death. I was kind if stunned that a mechanic that punishing was in a Pokemon game, but then again it probably is fairly common in other Mystery Dungeon series
Wait what? How do you get soft locked?
I remember people suggesting cheesing the Master Sword issue by staying at 3 hearts** and just beelining it to Faron to stock up on Hearty Durians. Then cook 5 of them in a pot for a ton of temporary hearts because the restriction that forbids you from using them to get the sword in the first place cuts both ways.
**"But you need 13 to get the sword in the first place!" There's a glitch that lets you claim it earlier. Failing that just gun it for 13 hearts, get the sword, and then visit the statue that lets you trade them for stamina vessels.
“Troops, I did it again” is a great line
They played with the words
In videos 'bout games
I like Work hard, plague hard
Fun fact, we're closer to 2050 than we are to 1990
Even worse: The "present day" sections of Back to the Future are further in the past than the "past" sections were when the film was released; and the "future" has already happened.
@@gwishart Few things are more jarring than watching old media where the "future" is like... 1999
39 years until we reach the year of The Jetsons.
As someone who came of age in 1995, I can absolutely confirm that it was a startling THIRTEEN years ago. There are children born that year who are making the same terrible decisions we made back then.
I hate to make it worse, but 1995 is actually eighteen years 😬
Those kids have made their terrible decisions and can legally drive now
Edit: Actually, wait, my math is wrong - OH NO
Considering my younger sibling was born in '95, I am Very Aware of how long ago it was.
@@SWProductions100 as someone born in 1995 who turned 28 this year, I'm pretty sure, this made me have a small crisis lol
Ah 1995 I remember it like it was yesterday. I was a spry negative seven year old.
Try 28 years...lol
Blaster Master- the more weapon energy you have the more powerful your primary weapon becomes. Get hit though and your weapon energy goes down. This holds true in the remakes in Blaster Master Zero 1-3 too.
@@SimuLord Blaster Master Zero is so much easier by comparison! i actually enjoyed it so much i accidentally got 100% and had to look up the non-100% ending on RUclips, lol.
It's pretty much the original basis for Hello Neighbor, the more you die, the more the AI learns to anticipate your actions and sets traps to block off previous routes.
Which sadly the ai was so broken in the full release none of this ever happened
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume was interesting for this. Basically the game gives you an "I Win" button that makes one of your party members insanely overpowered, but they permanently die at the end of the battle. But maybe you don't want to use that. That's where the Sin meter comes in. Every story fight requires you to fill a Sin Quota, by either overkilling enemies or sacrificing allies. Meet it and get rewarded. Double it, and get even better stuff, but fail and the game is suddenly much harder since you now have to fight off demons that are designed to force you to use the sacrifice mechanic.
There's Vanquish, where picking up excess ammo for a gun upgrades it, but upon dying it gets downgraded by a level. Guns only have 3 levels above default, but it can still be disheartening to go in to a tough fire fight, fail once, and even after getting it the second time around feeling like you've made a net loss.
1995? Sorry, Ellen. That was like nine or ten years ago.
The Resident Evil games come to mind, with their typewriter saving mechanics.. If you die too much and use them too often to help progress through the game, you'll run out of ink ribbons and won't be able to save anymore.
I've never run out of ink ribbons. I've always ended the game with like five left and been so mad about how stingy I was with my saves.
And if you don’t manage your inventory properly you could end up going against some nasty bosses/areas without needed herb for healing or sufficient ammunition. Saving was sometimes detrimental if you dug yourself into a hole. This was definitely a plan for it or pay for it game with the caveat being you never knew what you were planning for or if you’d ever be able to return to an area.
Dark Souls 2 also has "soul memory". In short, the more times you die without recovering your souls, the higher level the people who invade you can be. Starting out, the invaders would be around your level, but the more souls you lost, and they spent, the greater the level difference could be.
Honourable mention for Legacy of Kain Soulreaver? Where you loose your magic arm-sword as soon as you take damage and cannot kill anymore vampires unless you have a spare physical weapon at hand, which when you die stays at the spot you died so you can't access it straight away again?
Such a great game franchise...
What about Minecraft where the zombie that killed you can pick up and use your dropped equipment, making it harder to pick up your blocks which despawns after 5 minutes.
I'd say it depends on when you die. If you die early on it really sucks, but dying in the lategame doesn't really matter too much as you're probably gonna have more than enough resources anyways.
Particularly nasty about Pathologic 2 is that you’ll eventually be offered a deal with a supernatural figure to restore your debuffs.
This is, of course, a trap.
If you take the deal, you are irrevocably locked into the game’s worst ending, regardless of what else you do.
What!?
Y’all really nailed the comedic bits in this one. Well done!
I've heard 'Company of Heroes 3' gets a lot harder if you don't use 'Tactical Pause'...
Ellen's understanding of how long ago the 90's were matches my own. 🤔😂
Don’t starve. Everything is trying to kill you. There are countless ways to screw it up, and most of them are deadly (like you actually need to restart from zero, no save points) there are occasional resurrection stones, but you drop your inventory at the site of your death. (Which possibly burned or sunk, but your food will definitely be devoured by wild animals.)
In Mordheim: City of the Damned, your troops usually become injured, if they lose consciousness in combat. You have to either pay for treatment for these troops or retire them. The healing process takes time in which they can't be used in combat. The injuries may be permanent (still requires the initial treatment), giving your unit a permanent debuff. It is also possible for a warrior to just die as a result of being bested in combat.
The better you do in combat, the less taxing on your troops. Also, you can afford to have your troops walk around and loot more... Having your army Rout involuntarily may cause them injuries and a loss of equipment.
2:13 There *is* actually a way to stop it entirely!
You just have to complete all three DLCs and collect King Vendeick’s crown, then use the ashen mist heart to enter the memories held within his armor! From then on, whenever you wear one of the four crowns, you don’t lose HP on death.
So, basically, you have to prove that you don’t really need it.
Cool lore, weird endgame.
I’m with you, Ellen. How is Jonny Lee Miller 50?!? 😂😂 1995 was just last year, right?? RIGHT?!?
Chronos: Before the Ashes has a similar mechanic to SIfu where you age a year every time you die. But as you get older it gets harder, and eventually impossible, to increase your strength and dexterity. And it's a souls-like.
*shudders*
In Dark Souls 2 you can get 2 rings that keep you from hollowing when you die. While they do break when you die, pretty early on in the poison dlc you can find a tree that just loves being whipped and for a bonus it repairs your stuff with its love.
Cave story was my first very memorable experience with this. You fully upgrade your weapon to become heck on earth, only to take a few stray hits and now you are stuck with a weaker one until you can claw your way back to max level!
Ah, shadow of mordor. It took me a while to work up the skills to leave the starting area. I died too many times and difficulty locked myself out of the rest of the game because my rivials had promoted too many times. To the point i was getting one shot in the first level 😂
I legit broke an xbox controller over the fact that I couldn't even beat the starting level because I died too often.
Natural Doctrine. You have a very very finite amount of magic you can use through the entire game. the magic is insanely powerful in return and can save you on some of the ridiculously difficult fights. Honestly, the game on the easiest difficulty is harder than any souls like out there. but if you use any of it, the game becomes less and less winnable because the final level is scaled to a point where you were intended to use ALL OF IT. so good luck
With Xcom 2 being built on the premise that the Aliens won you can at least find solace in the fact that being bad at Enemy unknown is the canon way of playing it
Ellen's ending was the most genuely honest funny thing that i've watched in a while. Thanks for the laughs 😂😂😂
the game Hobo: tough life debuffs your vital stats 5% of their original value each you respawn after dying from one of those same vital stats being too low and rapidly degrading your hp, so by the ninth time or so you respawn you are already basically dying. There could be a way to reverse a debuff or two, or negate them, with bonuses, but as a newer casual player I have no idea b/c handholding is minimal and the fandom guides are fairly limited.
Totk actually is the first game to break the tradition because if you wear the champions leathers you can shoot a beam whenever
In Minish Cap there is a scroll that lets you shoot beams at one heart remaining, in addition to a scroll for the standard full health beams.
@@jamesv337 I did not know that thanks
Outside Xtra: Come for the funny list videos, stay for the existential millennial crisis. 🤣
Technically, any game that has you lose items/currency when you die is making it harder for you because it leaves you with fewer ressources - particularly if they are limited. So it's actually more common than people think, even if it's on a small scale.
The same goes for games that have introduced experience or skill point loss. They don't make it harder so much as they make it more tedious because you'll have to spend more time and items getting back to where you were, but it's a nuance as well.
Demon Souls, the predecessor to Dark Souls, had a mechanic which each death with restored humanity made the world darker. Each step made enemies harder and at a certain level of darkness new, harder enemies would appear. So you could either play all game with half health or restore that bar and risk making the game harder.
A lot of the NES side-scroll shooter games would fall into this group. Life Force, Gradius, Contra, and so on. Manage to dodge every inch of damage like a pro, and you'll grow into more and more of a cheezing god, with better dodging speed, piercing/wide-spread mega guns, and even shields to start absorbing glancing blows from minor slip-ups. Snowballing the game into a glorious Easy Mode. The moment you die, however, you're all the way back to having the agility of a slug, and a single teeny pea shooter, and the difficulty slider snaps right back up to the "Nightmare" level.
Loved the outro on this one, good job
I'm 37 and Ellen isn't joking about how long ago 1995 was.
You could argue that Dark Souls 2 is actually more forgiving in making you progressively loose more health after humanizing yourself, instead of losing all of it, like the other Souls. But leaving that half empty health bar there was cruel
No... no it's not. How is that forgiving? Just because it's not substantially worse?
It's definitely more forgiving that Demons Souls
Eh, in ds1 you don't lose health after dying at all (except if you get cursed) and in ds3 it's 'only' 35%
Lose*
@@addison_v_ertisement1678 I didn't say it's forgiving. I said more forgiving. Anyway, iamtheoceaniamthesea already let me know my memory was only correct about Demon's Souls.
Any game with troop death, obviously. Also, any game with power-ups. I'm especially reminded of overhead shooter titles where you die and a third of the power-ups you had pop out of your plane to recover. Also also any game that gives you ratings for your performance and then grants rewards tied to those ratings. And, you know, just any game with permadeath. Because "game over" makes it pretty hard to reach the ending.
But for a slightly odder example, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker has a bit of swordbeams syndrome, except in MJ's case, it's that your attacks -- which normally have extended range via sparkles -- don't sparkle any more. Also, your most powerful moves cost health, so if you're too beat up, you can't use them.
That One Orc: "Gravewalker!"
*Shudder*
Even after you decapitated it, it came back as a final boss before the final boss.
2:14 well there are mechanics that stop HP loss form dying in Dark Souls 2(i will include them down below for anyone who wants to know, but late enoguht that it will not be spoiled accidently)
First one is available in Shrine of Amana, if you go to certain place in there while with reduced HP and no reversal items, then you can simply pray at shrine to get HP back for free.
Second way is much more hard to pull off. You must get all crowns(that is vendrick, sunken king, iron king and ivory king) which simply means complete all of DLCs and then interact with vendric cloak after getting ashen heart to get his blessing. Form now on while wearing any of the four crowns you won't loose HP from deaths
Soul Reaver: fairly early on in the game, you as Raziel get the Soul Reaver sword. But take one bit of damage and you lose it until you're at full health again. Only beaten by Soul Reaver 2, where the sword would start to consume your life bar if you used it too much. Annoying either way!
Came here to say this! It should also be noted that your health drains constantly as long as you're in the physical realm, meaning you have to constantly be searching for souls to eat to maintain your corporeal form. Having the Soul Reaver prevents this health drain, but only as long as you avoid any damage whatsoever. So an enemy landing a lucky hit on you in a fight means you lose your most powerful weapon AND your very existence is now on a timer.
And totally agreed re: the Soul Reaver in the second game. I used to say it was like having a Bengal tiger strapped to your arm. XD
Star Fox 64 presents a lot of threats that take multiple hits to go down--they break fast if you're fully powered up on the wings, but take awhile on the weaker starting laser. Problem is, you lose your wings with enough hits, and every time you lose a level, you come back with the starting laser only.
The last dogfight on Venom is unwinnable with the starting laser--after one loss there, you may as well start the game over, rather than have 7-8 hopeless dogfights with the peashooter.
Then there's Expert mode, where even the slightest collision will cause you to lose one (or even both) of your wings.
The game knows this, too, so enemies will be far more aggressive than in Normal and will constantly try to ram you.
@@HylianFox3 the hell? Please don't tell me there is an ending behind that
No why must you remind me how long ago it was... My aching joints and inability to stomach dairy was more than enough to remind me that I'm old...
1995 is my birth year and I turn 28 in two months. So there you go. Now you have to live with that. Please don’t tell me that in three years my back will just spontaneously develop a hernia, like most of the internet apparently had when they turned 30
Totally expected the Darkest Dungeon games, but maybe they're too traumatizing for Luke and Ellen? It is for me.
DD2 is actually quite opposite. Every time you fail the game gives you an option to apply a buff, which grows with every loss. And there are no permanent loses.
For the original game (as for every game with enforced ironman mode) it is kinda true, but you can recover from any loses simply by recruiting more people for free... well unless you play on stygian difficulty, of course.
@@blacktigershearthstoneadve6905 the fact that I knew none of that tells you how much success I've had... 😅
“Just look at Tingle!”
Oh, gods! No!
The fact that the dark souls 2 footage is mostly in the executioners chariot runup has given me vietnam flashbacks. Cheers oxboxtra lol
Anyone else expected the sentence during the hitman segment to go like "Concepts like disguise and undetected and silent assassin and not being Mike."?
It is upsetting to know those who were born in the year 2000 can drink and potentially live on their own. Emphasis on potentially in this economy.
Blaming the next generation to be incompetent is a running gag since the time of the old greeks.
@@molybdaen11 I don't mean they are incompetent. I mean it isn't easy to be fully self-sufficient these days. Myself still live with my parents, and I am a Millennial.
There’s a very interesting discussion to be had about difficulty in the Middle Earth games. The Nemesis system is at its most compelling when the player dies periodically. However, some of the orcs can develop immunity combos that make them nearly invincible. As a result, I remember Shadow of War ended up with tons of difficulty modes patched into it after launch to try and get players a difficulty mode where they still died often enough to make interesting nemeses, but without it feeling cheap or letting enemies compound their power too much.
I love that you can increase notoriety of someone who already has a bald head and a bar code. 🤣
Awesome Video!
Shadow of war upped the ante since fighting the captains could see them gain immunities making the subsequent fights either harder or annoying
Fun fact: when Ellen was talking about Ginger Rogers my brain provided Ginger Baker instead and I was briefly confused by the "backwards and in heels" bit.
As someone born in 1995..... Ellen's bit w/ Sifu feels Personal 😂 I'm WELL AWARE of how long ago 1995 was and *I hate it*
Same, my friend 😅/😢
"that look as if their heads could simply be kicked off" really got me.
Demon's Souls and Bloodborne are the worst offenders because of consumable healing items :(
If you're struggling with a boss and getting the hang of it, but burning through those herbs, the game forces you to take a break and grind forever getting healing items for another go. And, to add insult to injury, you can't get a good farming spot until you kill the Tower Knight, who is a massive source of herb consumption. And I didn't even know about the world tendency 😅
Best early game farm in DeS is probably 4-1. Skelly bois are weak to blunt so just beat them with your bare fists. Even at sl1 it wrecks them in like 3 hits. You can also get the crescent falchion in the same level to kill them pretty easy. Farming the first reaper in 4-2 is also a good idea.
And in Bloodborne, I genocide central Yharnam until I kill Blood Starved Beast and beat the first chalice. Then I can use cummfpk to get all the vials and bullets I'll need for the whole playthrough.
@@themightymcb7310 Oh yeah! I ground up enough souls there to one hand the uchi! Herbs are hard to come by though. It’s a really fun farming spot actually.
@@Deekanthrope oh you grind souls to buy the herbs, the drop rates suck and aren't worth dealing with. I suggest freeing Graverobber Blige from his cell in 4-1 for half moon grass and doing Patches' little quest in 4-2 to have access to full moon grass.
Thanks for the tips!
@@themightymcb7310 ahhh, that makes a lot more sense than the method I was using 😅
I think the blue eyes drop one half moon each, so I was heading up the shortcut in 1-1
The problem with shadow of Mordor is that if you're good at the combat then you'll never have any fun encounters with the enemies. In shadow of war they over compensated for this turning half the uruks into unstoppable killing machines that have almost no weaknesses and are invulnerable to 2/3ds of the ways of damaging enemies.
I remember some orcs that would have insane combinations like immune to fire, immune to vaulting, combat master (counters normal attacks), immune to stealth attacks, immune to ranged attacks, immune to beasts. It's like "Yo! Game! What the actual hell am I supposed to kill this guy with if he's literally immune to everything?!"
I was just thinking about this the other day. Right on time.
In Super Mario Bros, every time you die, you are punished by having fewer lives left, meaning you're closer to losing the game.
I’d argue soulsborne as a whole punishes poor play. Because if you’re doing so poorly you can never recover your souls it becomes really hard to progress. Had a friend way under-leveled when they played because of this.
Bloodborne is easily the worst for this. Not having healing if you do bad is brutal
Also depends on where you are in the game. I'm in the Ringed City DLC now and I hate it with a passion. Them sticking Ringed Knights all over and putting 5 Herald Knights on those stairs should qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. When I went to talk to Lapp in that room I finally decided that fighting the 2 knights wasn't worth it and actually managed to lose the aggro of the first run and by running clockwise around the building in the way avoided the second knight noticing me at all. There's difficulty and then there's bs, and both DS3 DLCs bring in an alarming amount of bs with their enemies, both the type and the quantity.
@@hundred2949 That said, Bloodborne has, imo, the best farming in the games, particularly when you make it to the Lecture Building and if you're doing the chalice dungeons. When I ran low on vials I knew where I needed to head to farm up some echoes to restock my vials or to level up if I was short a few thousand. I have trouble remembering good farming locations in DS3. Maybe the stairs with the Lothric Knights on the way to the Twin Princes.
@@SolaScientia herald knights are weak to plunging attacks and have a unique plunge animation. Bait them up those little walkways and stand in a corner. They should attack you (roll through it against the railing or something and you'll be fine) and fall down. Then you can drop on them and get a one shot plunge or close to it.
@@themightymcb7310 Yeah, I know. I killed the first one in the Dreg Heap that way. The trouble is that there are so many of the shits on those stairs that it's not worth all the trouble of killing them. I took a look at the map and pretty much nothing in the area is worth the bother for me to get. I did talk with Shira though, so that's done and I have a chime I'm never going to use, lol. I'll run around the swamp to gather up some stuff and get that other gate open. I'm going to see if I can avoid that one judicator wandering the swamp since he can summon in some annoying NPCs. I've already tangled with Ledo and determine that he also isn't worth the bother at this point. It's the judicator and the 2 knights near the purging monument that have me a bit worried. I'm basically kind of burned out on DS3. I love the main game a lot and it always felt fair to me. Both DLC have me annoyed and fighting Friede was one of the worst boss fight experiences for me until I caved and summoned Gael. She ranks up there with Laurence as one of the worst boss fights for me. I'd rather fight the Orphan or Nameless King before I fight Friede again.
That dark souls 2 feature is one of the many improvements the game makes over the rest of the souls series. Other souls remove a bigger, fixed amount of health after your first dead. Most people played games like demon's souls always at 50% because human form is so hard to get(same for DS and DS3. DS2 only makes it that bad if you die a lot
dark souls 1 never has an health reduction from death except for curse which is relatively rare and losing you ember isnt even close to halving your health so imo death is way worse in ds2 then 1 or 3
Improvement? 😂
Lore wise, it's make sense. You keep dying, you are slowly losing yourself.
Implementation wise, it sucks.
And only demon souls had it. It's just less shit than demon souls. But shit feature nonetheless.
Memories of my playthrough I put on RUclips where I was telling myself "don't open the door" just before I opened the door and lost three of my best characters.
There’s that game “Nevermind” where you’re supposed to wear a heart rate monitor and the more scared you get, the scarier it gets. Meant to incentivise you to calm down, apparently…
Yeah... this just makes me want to avoid souls games even more.
You aren't missing much, They are just mediocre Action RPG's that got Mandela effected to the Hype status by a specific kind of playerbase.
@@SimuLord It's not that losing is fun. It's that winning is more rewarding when you really had to overcome something. And that's coming from a casual, 100 % unashamedly bad at games. (Not a fan of the DS2 punishment, though.)
there's a reason dark souls 2 is the only game with that mecanic : nobody liked it.
As someone who felt the same for a long time, is bad at games, and now loves Soulslikes, let me tell you: Most Dark Souls fans are either very shitty at selling the games, or are actively trying to discourage people from playing.
@@SimuLord there's 2 mecanics in souls-like that are generally talked about as "kicking you when you're down"
The first one is dark souls 2 health penality (talked about in this video) which is pretty bad (and exclusive to ds2)
The second one is the fact that you drop souls upon death, which I'll try to defend :
It's here for 2 things :
-make you less avert to losing, because you'll get more elsewhere
-incintivise you to be more consistant in your results, since it drops you a few steps before where you died (ie you only need to kill ennemies you already killed once). And consistancy is very important against bosses, because you're supposed to gradually improve as you fight them
well actually you can disable the health drain effect in ds2 if you play the main quest through and obtain the kings crown and do all the dlcs and get 3 more crowns and then get a blessing which makes the crown make you immune to the hollowing effect. sadly you do have to collect all the items in a single playthrough and the immunity effect only lasts for that playthrough, it will not carry over to ng+.
Lol that is so pointless
Earth 2150 is a game that might get harder or even unwinnable if you loose too much. Not only you can loose experienced and/or expensive units to make the game harder, but as your main goal is collecting enough resources in set amount of time to escape the dying earth if you loose to many missions and fail to collect what you need you can loose the whole game ending up with no more time or places to get what you need (and, to be fair, you can fail as many of those as you want... till the time runs out and you burn with the world). Fun (yes it is! I heartily recommend this fine classic strategy game).
I used to be a player and GM for a Mac only MMORPG called Oberin. Your character level was based on class specific skills, on death you dropped ALL items you had in your inventory (except your raft) AND you lost experience in ALL skills, including skills that impacted your character level. If you were unlucky you would lose enough XP to lose 1 class level, it was not hard to get the XP back if you died once or twice, but if you died a lot it could take you hours.
Losing your gear and potentially losing a level meant that going back to your corpse could be hard. Especially since monsters gained levels for killing players and some monsters could loot some of your things, those monsters could despawn if kited too far from their spawn point, so you could lose some stuff.
Also there was a 1 hour timer on player corpses, so if you were lucky and no player or monster looted your corpse, you could still lose everything you had.
Most gear was not super important in that game since players could craft almost everything or buy almost everything from stores, but rare items could be lost forever.