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Why did you even include card games in this? Their failure mechanics exist for the sole purpose of forcing people to buy 'x tokens' with real currency so they can get the chance to roll dice for the fleeting chance to have a 'real good' card. Whatever argument you were making about failure and reward loops has been undermined by your inclusion of potionomics. The whole industry of video-card games is a money grab. I challenge you to name 5 video card games that don't have a purchasable alternate currency that's absolutely required to level up after a certain point.
@@Grimpy970 you do realise that Potionomics is a single player game with zero microtransactions, right? it doesn't even have booster packs! You get the cards at specific, deterministic points depending on which friendships you advance. Also: Slay The Spire Monster Train Inscryption Griftlands Card Shark
Another failure state I don't like is when cRPGs punish you with a Permanent -3 Strength Debuff and there's nothing you can do to remove it. My thought was "I'm only in the first act. There's no way I'm gonna play the rest of the game with a -3 Strength Debuff"..
"Losing is fun" is a popular saying in the Dwarf Fortress community, and "Fun" has become a tongue-in-cheek blanket term referring to any feature that can cause horrible catastrophes in your fort. Your Space Engineers story was great, sounds like lots of Fun.
DF has the same thing that was mentioned about Kerbal: _there is no defined "win" state._ Every fort will only end in either ruin or boredom (or framerate death, a superposition of the two). KSP will let you launch silly rockets until Kerbol itself turns into a red giant. You _define_ your own goals.
I was looking for this comment. Friendly Reminder that the graphical steam release is coming out in a month! There will be much !FUN! to be had for many a new player
The issue with wanting to have a "perfect" play through is very real. I'm guilty of that very often. But part of the reason is that many games are long and I know I'm probably only ever going to play them once. So I want to get the "best" ending, because that's the only ending I'm going to see. I'm not going to waste 10h of my time recovering from a mistake if reloading brings me back to the same place in 10s. This is even more true in games that have intermediate failure states that permanently handicap me for the rest of that play through (losing a soldier in X-COM for example). But this has come up on this channel before: how do you reward the player for doing well, without effectively penalising the player for doing badly in a way that snowballs out of control? I don't have this in rogue-lites/rogue-likes, because I know my mistakes have a very limited shelf life.
I think that GMTK did a good video on this too. The example that comes to mind is the active reload from Gears of War. Balancing around it was difficult since you either make the game too easy for skilled players or too hard for novices. The solution, spoilers ahead (since the solution isn't mentioned till the end), !!!!! was to make the last couple of bullets in the magazine have bonus damage on them. The devs discovered that skilled players always manually reload, before the gun is empty, so that they can get the active reload bonus, however the novice players would always fully empty their clip. This gave some bonus damage to novice players without incentivising skipping the active reload for the skilled players since the active reload was still ultimately better (and let's be honest, feels awesome to do successfully).
You are spot on... and this problem is not caused by the players. It is caused by the short shortsightedness of the developer. There should be plenty of ways to have a "perfect" play-through. But as long as the "mechanics" for winning are rigid and strict, then it really only leaves one possible "perfect" to achieve and when my creativity is not possible in a game, I find less interest in playing it. So if winning means jumping each platform just right in the correct sequence... my interested does not hold on for long. But if I have the choice to fight to win, use steal to win, or talk and win... now you can hold my interest. Now there are at least 3 or more possible ways to have a perfect play through. Some you might want to fight direction, or sneak past, or talk you way out of. And this can be in any possible combination. With each option, not counting bugs/glitches, the number of ways to win grow exponentially. The 3 example I gave earlier if you have those 3 choices just 3 times that is 9 possible outcomes to a play through... and it only grows from there!
@@underdoug That's a slightly different problem though, and I really hated the solution. The problem there was about balancing between players of different skill levels so that less skilled ones didn't fail so often - not the same thing as making failure more fun/interesting (or at least less off-putting) for the player.. And the solution was to make an intelligent tactic (always reload when possible) less good by giving a bonus to *not* doing it. It's essentially rewarding less intelligent play, as a crutch. Why on earth should there be balanced between more skilful and less skilful play? That removes the entire point of doing something well! You might as well say that all bullets are homing, so that players who can't aim are not disadvantaged against players who can. Not to mention that such cryptic balancing doesn't work in the long run, eventually people will realise the "magic bullet" trick and deliberately not reload (when appropriate), giving good players who know the meta yet another advantage other those who don't. The real problem in Gears of War was having players face a challenge that was not well matched to their skill level. The solution to that in MP is to make match-making in the lobby more intelligent by keeping track of how successful players are and matching them up accordingly (like in a league or an elo-type rating, either public or hidden). In SP you can address the equivalent problem by having a difficulty level, either chosen by the player or dynamically adjusted like in Resident Evil 4. But trying to mitigate the effectiveness of good play such that bad play can stand up to it goes against the entire concept of a player getting better at a game.
@@CD-vb9fi That's a different issue though. Sure, you can have a way to fight, sneak, or talk your way to success. But which ever one of those options you pick, you can succeed or fail. You can lose the fight, you can get caught sneaking, or you can blunder the conversation. If you can't fail any of those options, such that you get a worse outcome than if you'd succeeded, then there's no tension. But if you can fail, how do you make it so that the player rolls with the failure rather than trying again? I think the solution is to make the consequences of failure real (so that there is meaningful tension), but reasonably short term (as to not prevent an eventual perfect ending).
I can also fall into that trap; esp as I rarely finish or have the time to invest in games these days. But I also know I can be quite bad for ruining my own fun sometimes with games. So Mini motorways was fantastic and I loved it; the evolving puzzle / problem-solving nature of it. But once I'd gotten myself to a level where I was punching quite high on some of the leaderboards I then I began to reset every time I had too big of an early setback as I knew the run wouldn't be leaderboard worthy. My shift in my personal expectation of myself and by raising the bar of 'perfect' kinda ruined the game for me.
I think there's an important factor in respecting a player's time in this too. You know if it takes like ten minutes to play a game back to the last point of failure, and the reason for that failure is clear. That's a lot less of an ask than hinging a whole 30+ hour campaign on one fight and getting slaughtered so you basically have to either reload a save or restart the campaign. It's part of why I think Terra Invicta is bad. The game asks a stupid amount of time from you, doesn't present what it offers in very meaningful ways, and is full of mean spirited traps. So it insures when you have learned something you have to restart the whole 40 hour campaign. The problem is that many developers in the strategy genre do no leave room for suboptimal play, which creates a if you're not always winning then you're losing effect in players.
My favorite game that usea death creatively is the Shadow or Mordor/War series. If you're killed by a lowly ork, he gets named and promoted to captain and is pretty easy to get revenge on. But if you're killed by a higher rank captain, he may level up enough to take down a warchief and now he's got bodyguards and even more resistances than he had before. It's an interesting mechanic where instead of enemies that kill you multiple times gaining some kind of weakness to help you kill them later, they just get stronger every time you fail
that's only good up to a point, but the big problem is how it can snowball into very unfair and unfun fights. in SoM it wasnt uncommon for a high ranking ork to get some very unfortunate combos, like counters with 1-hit ko+ no comeback. so you went for a hit, gets countered and just die without being able to do anything.
It also got a bit much with how often these 'rivals' came back, There were some that showed up seemingly every other place you go, and you might have no choice but to run away because of unfortunate combo's as mentioned previously.
This mechanic made me so cautious, that i wouldn't take risks and never got a real rival and nothing interesting happened. the final "rival" fight was just some orc that i killed that still had a 1hit kill weakness.
@@ditheraith I had a similar experience in SoM, where the 'Nemesis' fight in the endgame was just this one orc I encountered repeatedly but could never kill because they were afraid of everything (including me) and had the high movement speed trait. However, for that fight they seemed to have gotten over all of their fears. Was still trivial at best, but at least I got an actual fight out of it.
Kenshi is also great at treating failure. The only way to lose is to get all of your characters killed. Pretty standard, but you can have up to tens of characters doing their own stuff in every corner of Kenshi's massive world. However, you start with maximum of like 5 hobos, or, for example, only one starving vagrant with a stolen sword. You need to hire more and you need to go and explore the world And the world is brutal. Step out of the city and immediately get captured and enslaved. And that's the best case scenario, because you didn't get eaten alive by a swarm of vampire spiders. But also, slavery is a great way to upgrade your character and escaping a slave camp is like gaining 10 levels in a normal RPG Kenshi, however, is not normal. You level up your survivability by, and I shid you not, getting brutally beat up and bleeding out. If you manage to not lose consciousness, limp away and patch up, you will be rewarded with much higher resistance to getting killed. That is, if you don't lose any limbs. In that case you definitely lost the fight, but if you survive losing your leg and painfully crawl to the nearest prosthetic (which you might have to steal in a city that's 30 miles away), you now run faster than a car. Literally. That's because the ability to run is levelled up by moving for a long stretches of time. And you just spent last week crawling through the desert while being showered by acid rains and angry sky lasers Kenshi is GREAT, it's endless hours of cheese and dumb fun. Steal a bandit from a camp, strip him naked and use him as a training dummy, knock him out, stop him from bleeding out, then carry him around to level up your strength and repeat. It's a psychopath simulator, but your little psychopaths only get stronger when they lose
yeah, I was playing as two characters (a giant warrior woman with an even bigger sword and her sidekick healer with a crossbow), and at some point they learnt to run faster than a car without any prostetics. I don't know how to teach them fight and survive better and if I even need to if I can outrun literally anything in that world.
I love kenshi for this. One of the best tactics is to go to a tower filled with goats and have them brutally beat the ever loving crap out of you for a week straight. You'll enter the tower a weedy child and leave a roided up god
I just with Kenshi ran better. It makes my computer cry and every time I upgrade my processor I check how it works. I think they were too ambitious with the engine. I am REALLY looking forward to Kenshi 2 which has been pretty hush but apparently in the works.
Disco Elysium handles failure well too. As an RPG, it's chock full of skill checks that you may not be sufficiently skilled to pass. But failing these checks often results in funny moments, and alternate pathways, and even succeeding (most prominently when trying to pitch a physics defying billionaire a business idea)
My experience of Disco Elysium has been pretty much the opposite of this where about half the dialog options lead to a random morale loss which causes an inescapable "quit being a cop" or "kill yourself" options and the only way back is to reload an older save. I might be playing it wrong though...
I tried that game. I basically got insulted and belittled the entire time even when it made so sense. Even when something right, it didn't feel like I accomplished anything. So, I gave up on it.
in tabletop role-playing games, we have this concept of "failing forward": to tell a good story, a failed roll should push the story forward and bring about some interesting change to the narrative circumstances, rather than just leaving the players right where they started. the ideas discussed in this video reminds me of that!!
You should absolutely check out Fantasy Flight Games' star wars ttrpg. They straight up have mechanics based around failing forwards. When you make a roll you get the standard success result, but you also get something that alters the result of it (for better or worse). For example I once fucked up a hack, set alarms blaring off, however it successfully hacked a different objective, meaning we could still progress but with slightly higher stakes and in a slightly different way
That's definitely a good concept, It always sucks when it's like "Okay, you make a roll to open this lock... 3... nothing happens...Okay, so... I'll try again until I get it, I guess?"
@@saphironkindris yeah that's exactly what shouldn't happen with lockpick rolls or stuff like that. If someone has proficiency in thieves tools most of the times they can open a lock given enough time (look at the lock picking lawyer). The roll should only be made if the thief is under a time constraint so that if the lock isn't opened in time with a successful check something happens (they get spotted by a guard or someone on the other side of the door manages to escape) or maybe if the lock is so genuinely difficult and made specifically to not be lockpicked that if the check fails the lock breaks and the characters have to find another way around. I'm pretty sure the dnd 5e rulebooks specifically talk about "taking 20", as in "if you don't have a time constraint or stress or something like that you can just keep going at a task until you succeed without needing to roll".
Supergiant’s Hades did an awesome job with handling failure, I think. When I ended up inevitably dying, I wasn’t even mad about it because it gave me more chances to interact with the characters in the House of Hades and progress the story forward from there! I love that game so much lmao
Surprised you didn't talk about Deep Rock Galactic, Mann vs Machine, or other co-op games of similar nature: while it's fun when your team works as a well-oiled machine, it's when somebody messes up and the game turns into the "oh snap" mode the memorable moments get born.
I'd like to inform you that your very brief mention of Trombone Champ was all the information I needed to go and play that game immediately. I've not laughed this hard in a long time. Bless you.
Great video. I'm surprised that you didn't mention Pyre in this discussion, which is designed around the idea of living with your failures, and moving on in spite of it (Via sports metaphor of all things). It goes as far as to make the player doubt whether winning is actually the best option, at times.
My problem with "failure is fun" type of games is that usually the loss is way more than any potential gain. In XCOM it's not worth it to carry on a mission after a single death, because the most you can gain from a mission is less than the smallest setback the game can inflict on you. I'd liken it to a casino, where the minimum bet is let's say 50 grand, but the most you can win with that bet is maybe 10 grand, so obviously the moment I lose a single soldier I'm restarting the mission.
This is why I don't like rts that have persistent resources across missions. It feels like setting me up for a soft lock down the road, or at least a soft lock for a scrub like me. It's also why people rarely use consumables in souls like. This video even says so, failure is bad when it makes you worse in the long run.
A great way of making Failure interesting is basically to approach it as a flow chart and where it be ideal to go down the win path, there shoumd always be unique and interestong thongs down the lose path. Your intro story about your space engineers adventure demonstrates that perfectly.
You know, I never really thought of the souls dropping thing as a way of engaging the player when they die, but it really is a way of turning death into a high intensity situation rather than just a “get fucked, back to the bonfire” moment. Great as always Adam, love the vids
You know what might be fun, a rouge like where you get a cool ability from the thing that kills you. You could do a lot with that both mechanically and narratively.
This is a really cool idea! Tying your "overworked" progress to which enemies kill you. You could get interesting abilities that are valuable in general, but also buffs that specifically makes you stronger against that type of enemy. This would also work as an automatic balancing system - it can be assumed that you generally die from the enemies you struggle with dealing with, and so the more you die from the enemy you struggle with, the less hard they will be to fight. (I imagine an S curve would be the best way to model this relationship - the first several deaths give you little (apart from maybe some cool new ability?), but then there's a more rapid progression, until the curve flattens out). "Lorewise", it would be easy to explain the system as you learning of new weaknesses of the enemy or something whenever it kills you.
I really like the failure states in outward! You don't die, you get "knocked out" and a variety of random things can happen like getting saved, kidnapped and robbed, taken to the nearest town etc. Its a great way to keep the adventure flowing
To bad outward is extremely content sparse, has clunky combat, traveling is both insanely tedious and unfun, and overall very ambitious with no actual competency with the execution of any of its ideas.
I had that realization to just let go of the perfect run and go with the flow while playing Metal Gear Solid V. I spent way too long trying to play perfect stealth and not having fun with it. Once I let go of that, it became a much better game for me. Kudos to Outer Wilds for being one of the first games that made me embrace the failure state by going into full "screw it" mode and doing things that I was too afraid to try otherwise. Death is knowledge.
Yeah, it's hard to recall, but I probably did obsessively retry missions, too. Adapting and letting go of perfection fits the game's overall narrative arc as well. On being perfect: as I see it, one major design flaw with MGS was how strong the non-lethal arsenal became. Even in MGS2, it's generally preferable. Not only is it cleaner, but you have a sort of moral high-ground, too. It would have been cool to actually feel pressured when sparing combatants and needing to become less empathetic as the stakes were raised in the "tragic" story of MGSV. On harder difficulties, I think adding a longer time to neutralize and maybe needing to target already inattentive guards during specific windows to mask the projectile impact (yawning, doing physical labour, laughing, etc.) would better differentiate it from the typical weapons. Also, for spicing up the rules of engagement, intercepting warring factions would probably have been fun as you have to scout out both squads from a good vantage point, then try to protect those you want to fulton. There could potentially be hard choices between either faction's officer units if they are both threatened during the firefight, too.
My problem with the game, is that it gives you boatloads of options in terms of tools, and the optimal one remains just using the tranq gun, and sending to motherbase all enemies.
A lot of what you talked about reminded me of this concept I wrote an essay about on reddit I call forgiveness. It's basically what the player has to do to return to the pre-failure state after failing. I also have some personal experience with save state spamming hurting fun. I abused these pretty hard on PMD and it totally ruined the gameplay
I think Matthew Colville had this as a subject as well, though related to tabletop games. But it boils down to basically the same: games need to have more failstates than simply gameovers, turning a failure into an opportunity.
Tabletop games are a bit different, since there's really no concept of reloading. You also have a GM who can adjust the story and gameplay to suit whatever mess the players inevitably force their way into. But that's for the new mentality of GMing. Old school was to just kill players if they didn't git gud, and was more about GM vs players.
I'm inspired. I'd like to share my most memorable not game over video game failure. When I did a Nuzlocke run of Pokémon Moon version, I had my worst Nuzlocke loss against the Totem Lurantis fight. I lost 4 Pokémon to it. Two thirds of my team. Including my starter. I felt terrible afterwards and needed a couple of days break to restabalize my emotions and feel ready to continue my journey and rebuild my team. Definitely memorable and was interesting in how it brought these different feelings out of me.
The occasional thing I love about these video essays is when they use a game I've been checking out but been on the fence about getting. Knowing that potionomics does something interesting with fail states makes me want to play it even more. Great video as always!
15:33 That sequence is genius. Indeed, Soldier of God, Rick, is the game's strongest boss. Just in case someone takes this seriously, Soldier of Godrick is literally the optional tutorial boss, a normal enemy upgraded to boss status without any of the perks, as its stats are barely buffed. It is optional, because Elden Ring's tutorial is a hole you can ignore by taking the obvious door. The Tree Sentinel, however, is the boss made to teach you, as Maxor masterfully put it, "how to flee in fear". But the community has a meme of Soldier of Godrick being the strongest boss in the game, renaming it Soldier of God, Rick.
This is why I love the indie H-game Degrees of Lewdity: Losing a combat encounter is never a game over. It just kicks you down into a proverbial ditch. Heck, there’s no game over at all. You’re just pushed into a worse situation
I really like how the Korean monster management & RTS game "Lobotomy Corporation" handles losing. Basically, your job in that game is to send Agents to work with various different monsters (called "Abnormalities") to create energy. The longer you play and the thurther you go, the more energy you must produce and the more Agents and Abnormalities you have to juggle. If (or rather, when) you make a mistake, it's highly likely that one of the Abnormalities will breach containment, which leaves you with a choice: you can either restart the day, losing all progress but also reverting any deaths that may have happened that day; or you can try and suppress the escaped Abnormality, saving time and progress while risking losing more time in the event that you make another mistake and more Abnormalities breach. This, in my eyes, creates a system where players will be less willing to restart unless they created a completely unsalvageable situation. However, the impact of restarting is somewhat lessened by the fact that you are almost expected to restart often, putting you in the mindset of "ah well, shit happens, it is what it is" TL;DR: By making time both the price for restarting, and the wager you make when not restarting, players are less likely to restart upon making a small mistake; By putting the player into the mindest of restarting often the player doesn't mind restarts as much as they would otherwise
There's another aspect to LC that ties to this discussion. Early on Agents aren't worth much and the days are easier to pass meaning its sometimes viable to lose an agent to clear a day though most people might prefer restarting. But as the game goes on the difficulty increases much more than the Agent's ability does leading to a point where players begin to consider the death of a few units as a completely acceptable price for finishing the day. Despite the fact that there was probably some way to keep them alive the player is discouraged from repeating the day due to its sheer difficulty. Which opens players up to consider more sacrificial strategies including machines that trade Agent lives for other benefits. Not only is this a great demonstration of making players accept losses as part of the gameplay, it ties in to the greater narrative as this whole process mimicks the emotionl rollercoaster of the protagonist throughout the game.
@@theresnothinghere1745 I straight up treat my new recruits as D-class. If I get a new monster I send in the newbie, if he gets horrifically gibbed: "well damn, guess I won't do that with my experienced agents"
I love the medical system in RimWorld. Most injuries can be recovered from, but often with scarring. And a successful surgery can then get infected, or cause a mental break from the pain which ends with then back in the hospital again because someone had to knock them out. Even total game over can be refreshing because you get to try a new setting or mod.
@@qwertyuiop3656 I'm not familiar with PS4 ports, but there are a lot of good mods for the PC version. If the PS4 version can also be modded then it's worth it. Otherwise, I would prefer the PC version, if you have the option. It runs pretty well even on older laptops.
Rimworld is the kind of game you are always losing. Or more accurately its always trying to kill you, particularly for doing well and normally you will lose the colony and not build up a glitterworld empire. (It does have a win condition for escaping the planet, and over the years they added alot of features that make longterm survival easier) I think because the point is you are expected to lose, the game is actually fun to lose. (Both by design and by player mental state)
I love that at 15:25 you show Elden Ring having Tree Scrub as an easy tutorial boss and Rick, Soldier of God as a terrifying foe that puts you in your place.
Disco Elysium is a game all about failure. You're a trainwreck of a human being and the game actively knows this. The most interesting choices in the game come as a result of "failed" dice rolls.
Getting Over It and the many, for a lack of a better term, tower ascension games are very relevant to this discussion. Their whole appeal is that failure is a setback. They can build up great amounts of tension, as clearing certain sections requires risking incredible setbacks. All of the popular ones I've seen have some form of clunky controls. The games revel in their ability to deliver frustration.
I think untitled Goose game deserves a spot in this video, the worst thing that can happen is that you get shooed away and lose like 5 seconds of progress and have to try and solve the puzzle again.
A big factor in it is managing player expectations. Normally humans are very loss averse, but in some games losing is something you laugh at instead of getting frustrated or mad.
I love that we are moving away from the coin eater arcade type games. We've kinda explored that alot, and i will always love them, but new types of games are great too.
True say. I love arcades too, but I liked it when Adam said that 'lives, game overs, and the concept of losing' are relics of the arcade age. I also hope gaming will evolve and do new things.
Going back to arcade gaming has actually made me appreciate them more, there was a lot of BS in those games but many of them had fantastic difficulty curves, they were hard because they wanted your money but not so hard that they would chase you away, especially since you didn't own the game so they had to keep your attention away from other cabinets and get you too keep spending money. It sounds predatory but ironically they had no idea how to manipulate the human psyche like we do now, so instead the games are either amazingly well made and engaging challanges or its bullshit that should be abandoned
@@Jabroni_14 That's a really cool point. They operated under conditions that produced a certain kind of game. Current conditions make it possible to purpose build online environments that present continuous monetization opportunities from multi-player engagement. As a design principle it seems questionable, but its the raison d'etre of big business.
@@proximacentaur1654 exactly, I also think more psychology concepts have been implemented into games sometimes this make the game better like when finding out the limits of a humans mental stack and try to design experiences around that or learning how attention works to design a map that makes the player understand how to navigate it in a way that is fun but still mechanically interesting.
I am a fan of the fail forward type systems you often see in table top games. Oddly I think a lot of the problems with fear of failure comes down to game length. Unfortunately the money factor of wanting to get as much bang for your buck as possible tends to hurt the pacing of games as they often end up too long and over stuffed. I personally view the larger gaming culture's tendency to view a shorter game as a bad thing detrimental to game design. But at the same time I understand that games are expensive and people only have so much money to spend so its a difficult problem.
My rule of thumb is to say that losing in new and interesting ways is fun. Getting stuck is not fun, but there is a thrill in running into a new situation, bouncing off it, and then realizing the solution.
honestly, the borderlands approach seemed like a good concept, with some lots of things to iron out. the second wind had so many good moments, but on the other hand if you were hit by a swarmy enemy, you were unkillable, while boss fights without mobs completely removed the concept. it also had some fun interactions like "AoE weapons might kill you by removing your respawn chance"
Don't Starve does this pretty well by unlocking new characters only when you die, solidifying the fact that you're supposed to when you're new at the game.
Failing can be fun, not always, specially when the game makes it unfun For example, in Dark Souls what made me give up was the long treks between spawn points and bosses which was just extra repetition, the bosses where fun, repeating the mooks on the way wasn't Super Meat Boy however barely sets you back a minute tops, so loosing is barely an issue Freedom Planet 2 bosses can be challenging to beat within the par time of the level and even more-so no-hit which is required for the highest rank. The harder boss fights do not have a prior level to go trough, they drop you right at the boss, so retrying is still fun Even then this time limit is optional in case you are getting frustrated Failing in itself is not fun, improving with each try is, but a game can easily offset that fun with tedious design
A surprising omission here is Shadow of Mordor and its Nemesis system. While it occasionally brings back orcs that you defeated, it shines when your humiliating death creates an enemy you are really motivated to beat.
This alone is why Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War should be played on their highest difficulties. It really gives the Nemesis system a great way to shine.
4:24 Corpse running is actually one of the things I get frustrated with in games like minecraft and ark: survival evolved. I can go along, having a great experience crafting new things and exploring, only to run into some dino, get overwhelmed, and then respawn back at my base. Then the gameplay comes to a screeching halt as I feel encouraged to take the long trek back to the same dangerous territory so I can get my stuff back and try again, but unarmed this time, and probably lose again. And then I repeat that cycle until I either ragequit or cut my losses and start gathering resources to craft some of the stuff I lost all over again. Sometimes reaching the point of me feeling like there's hardly any point to crafting better gear, because I'm just going to lose it again. Unless I force myself to try to come up with better ways to survive and learn to accept a loss more easily, I end up trapped in this cycle of frustration, and the game ends up feeling tedious rather than challenging. I'm tired of losing items and getting teleported back to my bed. If all I lost were crafting resources, that would be one thing. But I think it would be better if I didn't lose equipment as well. It ends up feeling like playing a metroidvania, but you lose all of your suit upgrades when you lose a fight.
When I play modded minecraft 1.12, I use a mod called corpse complex for it's selective keepinventory feature. I have it set so that when I respawn, I keep the stuff in my hotbar, armor slots and offhand, but drop the stuff in my main inventory. This makes it so that you keep your equipment so that you can still jump back in and try again, but also makes it so that if there are resources you want to prioritize keeping, you can add them to a slot in your hotbar. This, I think, makes for an interesting resource management aspect to mining and exploring. Do you really need that flint and steel in your hotbar, or would you rather put it away and use that slot to carry that redstone you found? Got some diamonds? What will you put away to make room for them? Your food? Your water bucket?
I remember being really surprised when I realized that Fable 2 didn’t have a failstate. Getting knocked out felt like a consequence, but never required reloading saves
Even though you only briefly showed it. Jedi: Fallen Order incorporates this well into it's narrative, even though the gameplay is very souls like, the narrative is has a major lesson in showing and saying that "failure is part of the path." I had not played a souls like game before it and that bit of narrative lesson being in the game really helped me continue to be confidant and willing to power through and learn how to defeat powerful and bosses and enemies.
X-COM is a spot-on example. I always felt that losing a soldier puts you in a worse position, but doesn't create an interesting problem to solve. So, the only rational move is to reload and try again. It would be much more interesting if instead of dying, you would have to rescue and rush a wounded soldier to the extraction point. Making it easier to replace fallen soldiers would also make reloading less "mandatory". It's not really a good comparison, but Rimwolrd for instance have both of the above.
@@MarsofAritia Yes, but training them up from Rookie level can really hurt in the next few levels, if you lost an advanced unit in the middle and late game.
Losing my first XCom 2 game was a blast. The Avatar countdown had spiraled out of control. I lost both my A and B squad. I had no supplies, and I was forced to hit a facility with rookies. Even though everything was burning down around me, I killed the Chosen witch and screamed, "If we burn, you burn with us!"
For me the first genre to make this works(losing is fun) was fighting games, you keep learning how to beat stronger players/oponents(AI) and keep getting better, its so rewarding, seeing you grow up and doing cool combos, after fighting games was roguelikes and now soulslike. In fighting games even if i lose, i am having fun, learning and adapting to my enemy. The game that got me into the genre was for honor, now i play mortal kombat and street fighter and have so much fun learning its systems and losing online xD
So I have been taking notes on the next TTRPG project I want to work on and the way you talked about darkest dungeon and failure states made a few ideas finally fall into place. Thanks for that, you just made my next game a bit better (I hope)
Another great example of a game getting failure right is Crusader Kings 3. While there is a game over state you can hit, there is quite a lot of ways for things to wrong that don't get you there. The point in my first dozen or 2 hours when I realized I'd likely be playing the franchise forever was when I finally accepted one of those failures (surrendering my Kingdom of Ireland to viking conquerors) and kept playing. It opened my eyes to other aspects of the game that I hadn't been learning by restarting any time I lost my primary title.
I disagree with one point. There is loosing because you weren't paying attention or made a mistake and then there is loosing because you got shitty deal from RNG. Which is why I really don't like X-Com and Darkest Dungeon, where few unlucky rolls can ruin a run that otherwise was going perfectly. I don't feel like I lost, I feel like I was scammed.
Damn you were spot on why I dropped Enter the Gungeon cause it's incredibly boring when you die to a stray shot and have to start all over again. I did however get 100% achievements for Hades because even dying leads to some tangible progress.
Part of the fun in a lot of PVP games is the pace, if you can jump into a game fast after losing, you can get into a sort of trance, for better or worse, where losses make you more on edge and more likely to continue pushing. It's actually a sort of a paradox, especially in competitive games, the more you win the more likely you are to say "Alright i'll stop so i wont lose my progress" and the more you lose the more likely you are to say "ITS DOUBLE OR NOTHING!".
This, a great example is smash and its percentage mechanic, it has about 8 stages (4 failure and 4 victory) subtly integrated into a single mechanic. The way you interact with your enemy VASTLY changes depending where your range of percentage is, unlike classic fighting games with health bars. Winning Phase 1, enemy at 0-30%: weak attacks that can combo are the best, slower and stronger attacks are too risky to be worth it Winning Phase 2, enemy at 30-70%: You can't combo the enemy as easily, if at all anymore, but can be now juggled and pushed away from neutral very easily, weaker attacks not as worth anymore, medium attacks while the best, a well timed strong attack can be very worth it too. Winning Phase 3, enemy at 80-90% or more: You NEED to nail a good killing attack before your enemy makes you be as damaged as them. Heavy emphasis on set ups and dodgees. Winning Phase 4, enemy at 0-30%, but with a stock less: Now you need to rack up as much damage as possible before the enemy finishes your life, or your small victory will be sorta meaningless. ___________________ Losing Phase 1, yourself at 0-30%: Getting comboed is bad but not the end of the world, and you can easily come back to neutral and recover Losing Phase 2, yourself at 30-70%: You can't be comboed as easily anymor, but will be constantly pushed away from neutral if you aren't careful enough, risktaking is still recomended so you don't fall behind Losing Phase 3, yourself at 80-90% or more:: You need to be as careful as possible, risks are not worth it, your mission is to make sure you opponent is also at this stage so you can make a comeback Losing Phase 4, yourself at 0-30%, but with a stock less: You lost the advantage, but now your risk are extremely low, which gives you the confidence to nail that strong attack you struggled so much to do before. Your mision is to take your opponent stock as fast as possible so you can recover equilibrium and a chance at winning the match
I don’t know if it was intended, since it didn’t happen in all bosses, but in Hyper Light Drifter, during my first boss (West) , I remember seeing how much health it had and thinking I had to get stronger, but after my first death the game not only put me right before the boss, but it didn’t stop the boss music, and that little thing just gave me the drive to die a few more times until I beat the boss
I always like to say "I would rather lose spectacularly than win boringly." I was playing through Monster Hunter Rise and Sunbreak and have never seen the quest fail screen (except for the rajang arena quest cycling trick). Then one day with title update 2 of sunbreak we fought Flaming Espinas with friends and we got decimated completely, not once, BUT TWICE. We had failed the quest twice in a row and truth be told, we were all excited to jump back in and fight it knowing that losing was finally a possibility for our group! We had a similar experience in Iceborne against alatreon where we failed at least like 6-7 times constantly adapting our strategies and approach in order to beat it with our full 4-player squad (I didn't want to solo it because I'd be robbing us all of a fun first-time experience together). The whole process was fun, from the repeated failure, but it also made the victory all that more glorious and we were insanely excited, which is not something we would have felt if we could just beat everything on our first try.
I agree, that losing in a blaze of glory is better than winning boringly. I've played World of Tanks for years, and the most memorable matches were the ones where my team won or lost barely. 15-0 victories or defeats are nice, but boring. They make me feel that I didn't contribute anything.
With all its flaws Outward had the great idea of actually never killing you, but putting you very different situations when you died. From prisoner, to miner, to saved by a wanderer to saved by some alien creature.
the way this guy talks about games makes me think he does and doesnt play video games often. On one hand he is by far the most professional sounding video essays about games I've heard, on par with like razbuten. but then on the other hand he talks about experiences he's had in games with friends and recommends the most obscure indie games i've never heard of. love these videos, keep it up!
One important thing to making failure fun is what actually made you lose. Is it something you had control over? Something you could have done better? Or was it something that you had no control over? Was it just plain bad luck? Or a beginner trap with no way to avoid it without prior knowledge? If its the first one, its usually fun, because that encourages you to keep trying until you win. The second one is usually just frustrating, since it tends to make it feel like trying again is futile, since that same random unfair thing could just as easily screw things up again every single time you try. Basically, does the game feel like it wants you to try again? Or does it feel like it arbitrarily decides that you aren't allowed to win sometimes? Does it feel like YOU killed yourself? Or does it feel like the GAME killed you?
It’s a great point about games evolving, so old concepts of death and failure don’t have to stay the same, but can evolve as the range of gamers and their desires becomes more diverse. On the one hand, as you say, some people love that hardcore challenge, so Soulslikes have become popular. On the other hand, other people want a more relaxed experience, so sandboxes, casual games and so-called “walking simulators” have also become hugely popular too. Not every game needs failure states or even a sense of challenge to be a rewarding experience, and for some of us these can actively detract from the experience. I’m glad that some games in the middle of the spectrum allow options to temporarily reduce challenge, so that people can test themselves up to their point of comfort, but still be allowed to continue rather than quitting or treating the game as a chore if they get stuck. For instance, I loved the exploration, art style, puzzles and some of the less punishing combat of Tunic, but I really couldn’t stand the boss fights, and would have quit if I’d had to spend hours “gitting gud” before I could progress. But it gave me the option of turning invincibility on for a while, so I could get through and enjoy the rest of the game. Maybe for some people that would destroy the sense of achievement from “beating” the game, but for some of us it’s not about achievement but just experiencing the interesting world the developers have created.
9:50 - "Dwarf Fortress does, however, look and play like garbage." Well, luckily not for long. In exactly a month (6th of December) we're getting the Steam release with major UI overhaul (to be up to quality of life standard of modern games) and some very nice graphical layer on top of it. I highly recommend picking it up when it's out if you enjoy colony sims even slightly, as DF can be unironically called "the" colony sim.
The first few times i played Kenshi i used the quicksave option a TON but more recently i did a playthrough where i would only allow myself to save in a town (either my own or an existing one) Meaning every outing into the vast, dangerous wilderness was incredibly tense and i had to pay close attention to everything that was happening It forced me to have contingencies in game rather than relying on a recent saved game, i would have a backup squad stationed nearby that could go in and save my main expedition if they happened to get ambushed and left bleeding out/eaten alive by beak things or cannibals Kenshi is really forgiving when it comes to failure. i really love the mechanic that a character can grow more resistant to damage by being beaten to within an inch of their lives and then given time to recover. So by allowing bad things to happen, instead of quickloading every time i fail to steal something, and recovering from them i was rewarded with a battle hardened squad that could take more of a beating next time
I've definitely had a problem with restarting whenever I do even one part wrong for a game esspecially since I like getting time trial records even when I'm starting out with the mechanics in games like Sonic or Spark. More recently, I am trying to just experience more of the game and find its quirks which also helps with going back to previous areas and seeing eerything that I can get better with. It's difficult for me not to get frustrated while messing up but I try to look at my improvement with it and knowing I can make it eventually. Remember that games are supposed to be fun and finding those fun aspects for you (whether it being the story, gameplay, looking at the history of it, or breaking it in ways no one could imagine before) is the most important part to enjoy them.
BR games are the worst example of failure states. Dying means that the player will always stop playing for a little while and ruin the flow of the match. Getting into another game also takes time. Most of the match is spent preparing for the late game and if the player does it wrong in any way that means he is penalized. It's basically a system in which newer players are barred from enjoyment and punished by making them lose real time and agency. This type of games should incorporate a mechanic which lets defeated players engage in another type of activity equally as interesting as playing the Battle Royale while their teammates respawn them. The Gulag mechanic is not the answer to this problem though as it basically putting the players in the shoes of mediocre high school student: If they failed the first exam why you think they will excel in the second one?
I LOVED that in Titanfall 2 multiplayer the matches ended with the players having one life left and the losing team is forced to try and reach an escape ship to evac out of the map. Even when your team lost the game that final "Escape" objective gave better players a chance to try and protect their teammates as they escape or hold off attackers at the ship to prevent them from destroying it. This "Escape" objective for the losing team gave those players one last challenge to overcome in the match and it was both a social goal & an individual goal. Some matches you were barely getting by and you just want to get out ASAP but other times you just barely lost and want to flex by doing everything you can to get your whole team out alive. This one simple feature added to the end of their multiplayer matches gave everyone who "loses" a chance to "win" at the end without detracting from the victory achieved by the overall match "winners". Titanfall 2 was the pinnacle of multiplayer FPS games in my personal opinion/experience. The movement, the Pilot+Titan weapons, the Titans themselves, the MASSIVE variety of enemy pilot/Titan executions: that game was a series of perfectly prepared elements "baked" in a well designed multiplayer "pan" that organized these elements in their most effective configuration..... Unfortunately the final step was getting pushed out to the "public" by EA with all the visibility of a back alley pop-up shop..... and that release was also sandwiched between the launch of the two new FPS entries one from COD & the other was Battlefield (which used to be good & popular believe it or not) Its really frustrating to see good games killed via mediocrity & poor publishing. The fans of Titanfall will testify to the quality of that second game and fight anyone claiming that game's poor performance was due in any way to the game's design. The design & execution were perfect, those devs got done dirty by their predatory publisher who has since killed the original franchise in favor a truly "dumbed down" version which reduced complexity, lowered the skill ceiling, removed TITANS and made a number of other downgrades to the point that Apex is only set in the Titanfall universe because Respawn says it does. Nothing about Apex feels like it exists in Titanfall because Titanfall was all about movement, Apex is all about the battlepass.
Appreciate how you've articulated the failure state. It's a material design choice in a game and an attitude that a player brings to the game. That's a minor revelation for me - I've been trying to make sense of why I stop playing some games. Thanks for a top video.
I'm surprised you didn't talk about Supergiant's Pyre. The entire game is about failing forward, and how life goes on after we lose with even the highest of stakes.
Losing is fun if you know why you lost. To see that you have an avenue for improvement. Far too many games unfortunately just make you lose due to bullshit. RNG, undodgeable/unblockable attacks, new enemies appearing out of nowhere, etc. etc.
While I do agree that the death system in Darkest Dungeon is good in theory, I would never use that game as a good example. My main gripe with it was that in many cases death was random and downright unfair. For example: The turn order in DD is essentially random (base stat + rng roll), so it can happen that the enemy gets enough turns in a row to take out one of your guys before your healer even gets a turn. The ultimate pinnacle of unfairness were the Darkest Dungeons themselves though. Apart from the general surprises that the game throws at you, it had the special rule that once entered you cannot leave again unless you sacrifice somebody. So picking the right equipment was pure trial and error (and you *really* needed to specialise your equipment). One floor even required you to equip have a certain inconspicuous trinket in order not to get one-shot by the boss. Also they had the arbitrary rule that the same team is unable to re-enter the Dungeon again after a successful run, so it would make no difference if your team was successful or got wiped. You say that fallen heroes could get "easily replaced" but that is very relative. It could take like *2 hours* of boring grind to have a new hero ready to join your main party again in the late game. I literally had to save-scum my way through the end because I was tired of the pointless grind just to receive a little piece of information that allowed me to have an actual fair chance at success on the next run. So I'm sorry but, *HARD* disagree on calling Darkest Dungeon a prime example about how to handle death in a videogame!
Some of my favourite moments in the Hitman games (even the older ones most of the time) is when things "go a bit Mike" and you discover something new while panicking or just happen to take out your target by accident in the ensuing chaos as you try to flee an angry mob.
I love the idea of a game that lets mistakes become the story. At least in the games Ive played, the mistakes are usually just “now youre dead. Sucks to suck. Git gud.” My favorite memories in Skyrim are when I ran away in the middle of a fight I could t handle instead of save scumming to get the perfect combination of burst damage and dodging attacks to win.
Games like Skate are a very good example to look at because there's a very natural pairing of low stakes and casual progress built in to them. You can ride around doing the main fun activity of the game - skating - while traveling to different objectives, exploring the map, doing challenges etc, all of which have no serious failure state beyond 'try again'. This allows you to always be engaged while not currently engaged in achieving the next goal and given the space to experiment, iterate and practice when you are attempting a challenge. I can't really think of a time I ever became frustrated playing a Skate game.
That Hunt trade at the end was brutal. Great example of death being a setback, not the end, though. There's no timer on reviving your teammates unless someone sets them on fire. And even then, if you go get a bounty token, you can still revive them.
A game you didn't mention that makes losing fun is Kenshi. It's a squad based RPG where you run around a post post apocalyptic desert world trying to survive from hunger, slavers, and a fauna. One of the main skills is "Toughness" and you gain XP in it by getting beaten and knocked out which then makes your character able to withstand more punishment. Also you do not lose if a character dies, as long as there's one person left even if all their limbs get chopped off you can still make it back to town and find new recruits and prosthetics. Very unique
I've seen it discussed in the context of a few games, but Unexplored 2 is the main one I know of which is worth mentioning. I haven't played, but the idea behind how it handles failure is that your character is a designated hero of sorts, undertaking an important quest. If you fail, the game skips ahead to the next generation's designated hero to try again. In a lot of roguelike games, your death resets everything and the world starts completely from scratch. In Unexplored 2, it keeps the world you died in, but advances time by a few years and changes where the borders are drawn between nations as they fight for territory. You come back to the same world at a different stage in its ongoing history. The fact of your previous death becomes a note in the history books of your people, and you go on to try and be the hero who succeeds where so many others failed. I don't know how well the game lives up to this idea (as mentioned, I haven't played) but I think it's an interesting approach to incorporating narrative into gameplay and failure states into the narrative. Another one I find interesting is Wildermyth. Whe a character gets reduced to 0HP, they don't *necessarily* die. You can choose to let them die, with 2 options for their heroic final moments, or you can retreat them from battle at the cost of a permanent injury. The heroic death can either inspire the survivors with a buff that lasts several turns, or just deal a bunch of damage as they fall, with the game clearly stating what each of these two options will do before you choose it. If you choose to retreat, all you know is that your character will be injured, without the exact details explained for how that injury will affect them. It always changes their appearance (often significantly) and reduces one of their attributes. I had one time where my super-tanky warrior tried to tank a little too much damage, and fell in battle. He managed to crawl away from battle, but his leg was mained and had to be amputated. He came back to battle with a peg leg and a -1 modifier to his speed. He'd already been built to be slow, and I worked around it, so this loss just made his movement even more restrictive. I found use for him in defensive missions, and he remained a powerful fighter, but that loss of speed made him less effective for some other mission types.
Darkest Dungeon is a FAILURE of a video game.. and a masterclass at world building. Sure, they accomplished what they set out to do, but was that really such a good idea? It wasn't. As a gamer, I want my time to be respected.. and I was not about to waste my time grinding over terrible RNG.
I grew to love failure and avoiding cheating like save-scumming . Dark Souls showed me the satisfaction of overcoming struggle and after that grew to love games like Darkest Dungeon and Escape of Tarkov.
a game that does this surprisingly well in my opinion is mindustry, a factory builder where your tasked with landing in a sector, build an infrastructure of drills, pumps and processing plants, the resources of which you use to build units to destroy the enemy base and supplying your turrets to defend against the waves of enemies coming from that base your trying to destroy. some of the most fun moments i had with the game was after the enemies breached my defenses and destroyed a good chunk of my infrastructure, so i had to scramble to build it back up, having to decide whats more important all while trying to rebuid my turrets before the enemy unit production escalates even further. and when you do die, you come back to the sector, having to play a good hour or so of basebuilding again, but with better knowledge of the map and the enemies base, every playthrough is substantially different, as theres always something to optimise about your factory So Anyway, just wanted to talk about mindustry, because its a great game with 95% positive reviews, which i think deserves more recognition (even tho 16000 positive reviews is quite the achievement)
I find Enter The Gungeon's gradual expansion of the world far more enticing than the, "switch your entire playstyle or you don't get new gameplay content", of Hades.
Thanks for this video! I'm a game developer and my last game - KingSim - is based on trying out different decisions, dying, and repeating. The game has 100+ endings, so it's pretty interesting to find out "what will happen if I do this?". Thanks for the video, a lot of inciteful information there. Keep up the good work)
I finished IGI 10 years later when I returned to it, that mission 7 "Border Crossing" was amazing lol And MOHAA had a "Sniper Town" that took me a few months or a year when I was a kid 😂
![Stromae, Pomme - “Ma Meilleure Ennemie” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Visualizer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1F3OGIFnW1k/mqdefault.jpg)
The one kind of losing everyone can support is losing money to patreon and getting cool stuff in return! (NOTE: THE ARCHITECT OF GAMES LLC ACCEPTS NO LIABILITY FOR THE TEMPERATURE, METAPHORICAL OR OTHERWISE, OF PATREON REWARDS): www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames
Follow me on twitter! Everything seems to be going really well there right now and I can really see sticking around there longterm, what a great website: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
Where is the full cover of Mozart on trombone champ
Why did you even include card games in this? Their failure mechanics exist for the sole purpose of forcing people to buy 'x tokens' with real currency so they can get the chance to roll dice for the fleeting chance to have a 'real good' card.
Whatever argument you were making about failure and reward loops has been undermined by your inclusion of potionomics.
The whole industry of video-card games is a money grab. I challenge you to name 5 video card games that don't have a purchasable alternate currency that's absolutely required to level up after a certain point.
@@Grimpy970 you do realise that Potionomics is a single player game with zero microtransactions, right? it doesn't even have booster packs! You get the cards at specific, deterministic points depending on which friendships you advance.
Also:
Slay The Spire
Monster Train
Inscryption
Griftlands
Card Shark
@@ArchitectofGames fair. I was wrong. Good on ya. I clearly need to examine my own biases. Thank you for being more polite than I was
You _lost_ me at “patreon”
me when darkest dungeon gets brought up again:
"ok good adam hasn't been replaced with a clone"
haha yes exactly what I, not a clone, would want you to think. everything is fine. it's totally okay to let your guard down even for a second.
@@ArchitectofGames nice fake out chucking the RimWorld soundtrack on a couple seconds earlier, got me good!
Ah brought up just a couple minutes later
I got addicted to Butcher Circus,god game of chance
Mr. Architect, you were told to keep the XCOM 3 thing under wraps. You now have a 99% chance of not facing any consequences.
phew I'm in the clear
And 10% chance of it being a crit hit
@@ArchitectofGames you've played XCOM before, surely you realize you are NOT in the clear.
Another failure state I don't like is when cRPGs punish you with a Permanent -3 Strength Debuff and there's nothing you can do to remove it. My thought was "I'm only in the first act. There's no way I'm gonna play the rest of the game with a -3 Strength Debuff"..
@@One.Zero.One101 Oof.
"Losing is fun" is a popular saying in the Dwarf Fortress community, and "Fun" has become a tongue-in-cheek blanket term referring to any feature that can cause horrible catastrophes in your fort. Your Space Engineers story was great, sounds like lots of Fun.
Whoops, commented too early, lol.
There is no such thing as "fun" im Dwarf Fortress.
Nah, not even Sseth can make the pain and agony in Dwarf Fortress more bearable
@@frds_skce Hey, don't yuck my yum.
DF has the same thing that was mentioned about Kerbal: _there is no defined "win" state._ Every fort will only end in either ruin or boredom (or framerate death, a superposition of the two). KSP will let you launch silly rockets until Kerbol itself turns into a red giant. You _define_ your own goals.
I was looking for this comment. Friendly Reminder that the graphical steam release is coming out in a month! There will be much !FUN! to be had for many a new player
The issue with wanting to have a "perfect" play through is very real. I'm guilty of that very often. But part of the reason is that many games are long and I know I'm probably only ever going to play them once. So I want to get the "best" ending, because that's the only ending I'm going to see. I'm not going to waste 10h of my time recovering from a mistake if reloading brings me back to the same place in 10s. This is even more true in games that have intermediate failure states that permanently handicap me for the rest of that play through (losing a soldier in X-COM for example). But this has come up on this channel before: how do you reward the player for doing well, without effectively penalising the player for doing badly in a way that snowballs out of control?
I don't have this in rogue-lites/rogue-likes, because I know my mistakes have a very limited shelf life.
I think that GMTK did a good video on this too. The example that comes to mind is the active reload from Gears of War. Balancing around it was difficult since you either make the game too easy for skilled players or too hard for novices. The solution, spoilers ahead (since the solution isn't mentioned till the end),
!!!!!
was to make the last couple of bullets in the magazine have bonus damage on them. The devs discovered that skilled players always manually reload, before the gun is empty, so that they can get the active reload bonus, however the novice players would always fully empty their clip. This gave some bonus damage to novice players without incentivising skipping the active reload for the skilled players since the active reload was still ultimately better (and let's be honest, feels awesome to do successfully).
You are spot on... and this problem is not caused by the players. It is caused by the short shortsightedness of the developer. There should be plenty of ways to have a "perfect" play-through. But as long as the "mechanics" for winning are rigid and strict, then it really only leaves one possible "perfect" to achieve and when my creativity is not possible in a game, I find less interest in playing it. So if winning means jumping each platform just right in the correct sequence... my interested does not hold on for long. But if I have the choice to fight to win, use steal to win, or talk and win... now you can hold my interest. Now there are at least 3 or more possible ways to have a perfect play through. Some you might want to fight direction, or sneak past, or talk you way out of. And this can be in any possible combination. With each option, not counting bugs/glitches, the number of ways to win grow exponentially. The 3 example I gave earlier if you have those 3 choices just 3 times that is 9 possible outcomes to a play through... and it only grows from there!
@@underdoug That's a slightly different problem though, and I really hated the solution. The problem there was about balancing between players of different skill levels so that less skilled ones didn't fail so often - not the same thing as making failure more fun/interesting (or at least less off-putting) for the player..
And the solution was to make an intelligent tactic (always reload when possible) less good by giving a bonus to *not* doing it. It's essentially rewarding less intelligent play, as a crutch. Why on earth should there be balanced between more skilful and less skilful play? That removes the entire point of doing something well! You might as well say that all bullets are homing, so that players who can't aim are not disadvantaged against players who can. Not to mention that such cryptic balancing doesn't work in the long run, eventually people will realise the "magic bullet" trick and deliberately not reload (when appropriate), giving good players who know the meta yet another advantage other those who don't.
The real problem in Gears of War was having players face a challenge that was not well matched to their skill level. The solution to that in MP is to make match-making in the lobby more intelligent by keeping track of how successful players are and matching them up accordingly (like in a league or an elo-type rating, either public or hidden). In SP you can address the equivalent problem by having a difficulty level, either chosen by the player or dynamically adjusted like in Resident Evil 4.
But trying to mitigate the effectiveness of good play such that bad play can stand up to it goes against the entire concept of a player getting better at a game.
@@CD-vb9fi That's a different issue though. Sure, you can have a way to fight, sneak, or talk your way to success. But which ever one of those options you pick, you can succeed or fail. You can lose the fight, you can get caught sneaking, or you can blunder the conversation. If you can't fail any of those options, such that you get a worse outcome than if you'd succeeded, then there's no tension. But if you can fail, how do you make it so that the player rolls with the failure rather than trying again?
I think the solution is to make the consequences of failure real (so that there is meaningful tension), but reasonably short term (as to not prevent an eventual perfect ending).
I can also fall into that trap; esp as I rarely finish or have the time to invest in games these days. But I also know I can be quite bad for ruining my own fun sometimes with games. So Mini motorways was fantastic and I loved it; the evolving puzzle / problem-solving nature of it. But once I'd gotten myself to a level where I was punching quite high on some of the leaderboards I then I began to reset every time I had too big of an early setback as I knew the run wouldn't be leaderboard worthy. My shift in my personal expectation of myself and by raising the bar of 'perfect' kinda ruined the game for me.
I think there's an important factor in respecting a player's time in this too.
You know if it takes like ten minutes to play a game back to the last point of failure, and the reason for that failure is clear. That's a lot less of an ask than hinging a whole 30+ hour campaign on one fight and getting slaughtered so you basically have to either reload a save or restart the campaign. It's part of why I think Terra Invicta is bad. The game asks a stupid amount of time from you, doesn't present what it offers in very meaningful ways, and is full of mean spirited traps. So it insures when you have learned something you have to restart the whole 40 hour campaign.
The problem is that many developers in the strategy genre do no leave room for suboptimal play, which creates a if you're not always winning then you're losing effect in players.
My favorite game that usea death creatively is the Shadow or Mordor/War series. If you're killed by a lowly ork, he gets named and promoted to captain and is pretty easy to get revenge on. But if you're killed by a higher rank captain, he may level up enough to take down a warchief and now he's got bodyguards and even more resistances than he had before. It's an interesting mechanic where instead of enemies that kill you multiple times gaining some kind of weakness to help you kill them later, they just get stronger every time you fail
that's only good up to a point, but the big problem is how it can snowball into very unfair and unfun fights. in SoM it wasnt uncommon for a high ranking ork to get some very unfortunate combos, like counters with 1-hit ko+ no comeback. so you went for a hit, gets countered and just die without being able to do anything.
It also got a bit much with how often these 'rivals' came back, There were some that showed up seemingly every other place you go, and you might have no choice but to run away because of unfortunate combo's as mentioned previously.
This mechanic made me so cautious, that i wouldn't take risks and never got a real rival and nothing interesting happened. the final "rival" fight was just some orc that i killed that still had a 1hit kill weakness.
@@ditheraith I had a similar experience in SoM, where the 'Nemesis' fight in the endgame was just this one orc I encountered repeatedly but could never kill because they were afraid of everything (including me) and had the high movement speed trait.
However, for that fight they seemed to have gotten over all of their fears. Was still trivial at best, but at least I got an actual fight out of it.
The minecraft 5 min panic run when you die is almost as iconic as underwater level music
Is it?
O
M
G
XD
I play hardcore so everywhere is a panic run
Try falling in lava
Kenshi is also great at treating failure. The only way to lose is to get all of your characters killed. Pretty standard, but you can have up to tens of characters doing their own stuff in every corner of Kenshi's massive world. However, you start with maximum of like 5 hobos, or, for example, only one starving vagrant with a stolen sword. You need to hire more and you need to go and explore the world
And the world is brutal. Step out of the city and immediately get captured and enslaved. And that's the best case scenario, because you didn't get eaten alive by a swarm of vampire spiders. But also, slavery is a great way to upgrade your character and escaping a slave camp is like gaining 10 levels in a normal RPG
Kenshi, however, is not normal. You level up your survivability by, and I shid you not, getting brutally beat up and bleeding out. If you manage to not lose consciousness, limp away and patch up, you will be rewarded with much higher resistance to getting killed. That is, if you don't lose any limbs. In that case you definitely lost the fight, but if you survive losing your leg and painfully crawl to the nearest prosthetic (which you might have to steal in a city that's 30 miles away), you now run faster than a car. Literally. That's because the ability to run is levelled up by moving for a long stretches of time. And you just spent last week crawling through the desert while being showered by acid rains and angry sky lasers
Kenshi is GREAT, it's endless hours of cheese and dumb fun. Steal a bandit from a camp, strip him naked and use him as a training dummy, knock him out, stop him from bleeding out, then carry him around to level up your strength and repeat. It's a psychopath simulator, but your little psychopaths only get stronger when they lose
This video made me think of Kenshi too!!
"hey hey people"
yeah, I was playing as two characters (a giant warrior woman with an even bigger sword and her sidekick healer with a crossbow), and at some point they learnt to run faster than a car without any prostetics. I don't know how to teach them fight and survive better and if I even need to if I can outrun literally anything in that world.
I love kenshi for this. One of the best tactics is to go to a tower filled with goats and have them brutally beat the ever loving crap out of you for a week straight. You'll enter the tower a weedy child and leave a roided up god
I just with Kenshi ran better. It makes my computer cry and every time I upgrade my processor I check how it works. I think they were too ambitious with the engine. I am REALLY looking forward to Kenshi 2 which has been pretty hush but apparently in the works.
Disco Elysium handles failure well too. As an RPG, it's chock full of skill checks that you may not be sufficiently skilled to pass. But failing these checks often results in funny moments, and alternate pathways, and even succeeding (most prominently when trying to pitch a physics defying billionaire a business idea)
My experience of Disco Elysium has been pretty much the opposite of this where about half the dialog options lead to a random morale loss which causes an inescapable "quit being a cop" or "kill yourself" options and the only way back is to reload an older save. I might be playing it wrong though...
Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau would agree ;)
@@robertwilliams5979 ah yes, physical run too? try being a magnesium powered being
That reminds me of games by Failbetter, especially Fallen London. Failure lines for Dangerous checks are especially hilarious.
I tried that game. I basically got insulted and belittled the entire time even when it made so sense. Even when something right, it didn't feel like I accomplished anything. So, I gave up on it.
in tabletop role-playing games, we have this concept of "failing forward": to tell a good story, a failed roll should push the story forward and bring about some interesting change to the narrative circumstances, rather than just leaving the players right where they started. the ideas discussed in this video reminds me of that!!
You should absolutely check out Fantasy Flight Games' star wars ttrpg. They straight up have mechanics based around failing forwards. When you make a roll you get the standard success result, but you also get something that alters the result of it (for better or worse).
For example I once fucked up a hack, set alarms blaring off, however it successfully hacked a different objective, meaning we could still progress but with slightly higher stakes and in a slightly different way
Good one!
Nice concept
That's definitely a good concept, It always sucks when it's like "Okay, you make a roll to open this lock... 3... nothing happens...Okay, so... I'll try again until I get it, I guess?"
@@saphironkindris yeah that's exactly what shouldn't happen with lockpick rolls or stuff like that. If someone has proficiency in thieves tools most of the times they can open a lock given enough time (look at the lock picking lawyer). The roll should only be made if the thief is under a time constraint so that if the lock isn't opened in time with a successful check something happens (they get spotted by a guard or someone on the other side of the door manages to escape) or maybe if the lock is so genuinely difficult and made specifically to not be lockpicked that if the check fails the lock breaks and the characters have to find another way around. I'm pretty sure the dnd 5e rulebooks specifically talk about "taking 20", as in "if you don't have a time constraint or stress or something like that you can just keep going at a task until you succeed without needing to roll".
Supergiant’s Hades did an awesome job with handling failure, I think. When I ended up inevitably dying, I wasn’t even mad about it because it gave me more chances to interact with the characters in the House of Hades and progress the story forward from there! I love that game so much lmao
THIS
Though tbh it is a roguelite, so the entire point is to fail upgrade and go back in.
Surprised you didn't talk about Deep Rock Galactic, Mann vs Machine, or other co-op games of similar nature: while it's fun when your team works as a well-oiled machine, it's when somebody messes up and the game turns into the "oh snap" mode the memorable moments get born.
I'd like to inform you that your very brief mention of Trombone Champ was all the information I needed to go and play that game immediately. I've not laughed this hard in a long time. Bless you.
14:35 I laughed so hard when I realized that you changed the health bar to correctly identify the thing in that room which kills you.
Great video. I'm surprised that you didn't mention Pyre in this discussion, which is designed around the idea of living with your failures, and moving on in spite of it (Via sports metaphor of all things). It goes as far as to make the player doubt whether winning is actually the best option, at times.
My problem with "failure is fun" type of games is that usually the loss is way more than any potential gain. In XCOM it's not worth it to carry on a mission after a single death, because the most you can gain from a mission is less than the smallest setback the game can inflict on you. I'd liken it to a casino, where the minimum bet is let's say 50 grand, but the most you can win with that bet is maybe 10 grand, so obviously the moment I lose a single soldier I'm restarting the mission.
This is why I don't like rts that have persistent resources across missions. It feels like setting me up for a soft lock down the road, or at least a soft lock for a scrub like me. It's also why people rarely use consumables in souls like. This video even says so, failure is bad when it makes you worse in the long run.
A great way of making
Failure interesting is basically to approach it as a flow chart and where it be ideal to go down the win path, there shoumd always be unique and interestong thongs down the lose path. Your intro story about your space engineers adventure demonstrates that perfectly.
You know, I never really thought of the souls dropping thing as a way of engaging the player when they die, but it really is a way of turning death into a high intensity situation rather than just a “get fucked, back to the bonfire” moment. Great as always Adam, love the vids
You know what might be fun, a rouge like where you get a cool ability from the thing that kills you. You could do a lot with that both mechanically and narratively.
Oo! A bit like reverse plunder chess. I really like that idea!
This is a really cool idea! Tying your "overworked" progress to which enemies kill you. You could get interesting abilities that are valuable in general, but also buffs that specifically makes you stronger against that type of enemy. This would also work as an automatic balancing system - it can be assumed that you generally die from the enemies you struggle with dealing with, and so the more you die from the enemy you struggle with, the less hard they will be to fight. (I imagine an S curve would be the best way to model this relationship - the first several deaths give you little (apart from maybe some cool new ability?), but then there's a more rapid progression, until the curve flattens out).
"Lorewise", it would be easy to explain the system as you learning of new weaknesses of the enemy or something whenever it kills you.
@@Tutorp If you like the idea it is yours.
@@worthasandwich Unfortunately, I do not know how to program a game. But thank you! :-)
I really like the failure states in outward! You don't die, you get "knocked out" and a variety of random things can happen like getting saved, kidnapped and robbed, taken to the nearest town etc. Its a great way to keep the adventure flowing
To bad outward is extremely content sparse, has clunky combat, traveling is both insanely tedious and unfun, and overall very ambitious with no actual competency with the execution of any of its ideas.
Some call it failure states. Some call it fast travel.
I had that realization to just let go of the perfect run and go with the flow while playing Metal Gear Solid V. I spent way too long trying to play perfect stealth and not having fun with it. Once I let go of that, it became a much better game for me.
Kudos to Outer Wilds for being one of the first games that made me embrace the failure state by going into full "screw it" mode and doing things that I was too afraid to try otherwise. Death is knowledge.
The great part about Outer Wilds is that 90% of the achievements are just for messing around and doing stupid things that get you killed
Yeah, it's hard to recall, but I probably did obsessively retry missions, too. Adapting and letting go of perfection fits the game's overall narrative arc as well. On being perfect: as I see it, one major design flaw with MGS was how strong the non-lethal arsenal became. Even in MGS2, it's generally preferable. Not only is it cleaner, but you have a sort of moral high-ground, too. It would have been cool to actually feel pressured when sparing combatants and needing to become less empathetic as the stakes were raised in the "tragic" story of MGSV.
On harder difficulties, I think adding a longer time to neutralize and maybe needing to target already inattentive guards during specific windows to mask the projectile impact (yawning, doing physical labour, laughing, etc.) would better differentiate it from the typical weapons. Also, for spicing up the rules of engagement, intercepting warring factions would probably have been fun as you have to scout out both squads from a good vantage point, then try to protect those you want to fulton. There could potentially be hard choices between either faction's officer units if they are both threatened during the firefight, too.
My problem with the game, is that it gives you boatloads of options in terms of tools, and the optimal one remains just using the tranq gun, and sending to motherbase all enemies.
Losing in Hades is the most fun losing iv'e had in gaming. Would always be so happy too talk to the gods in the house again
A lot of what you talked about reminded me of this concept I wrote an essay about on reddit I call forgiveness. It's basically what the player has to do to return to the pre-failure state after failing.
I also have some personal experience with save state spamming hurting fun. I abused these pretty hard on PMD and it totally ruined the gameplay
I think Matthew Colville had this as a subject as well, though related to tabletop games. But it boils down to basically the same: games need to have more failstates than simply gameovers, turning a failure into an opportunity.
Tabletop games are a bit different, since there's really no concept of reloading. You also have a GM who can adjust the story and gameplay to suit whatever mess the players inevitably force their way into. But that's for the new mentality of GMing. Old school was to just kill players if they didn't git gud, and was more about GM vs players.
3:03 I appreciate the nod towards Dwarf Fortress (via Rimworld), the only game whose official motto is Losing is Fun.
I'm inspired. I'd like to share my most memorable not game over video game failure. When I did a Nuzlocke run of Pokémon Moon version, I had my worst Nuzlocke loss against the Totem Lurantis fight. I lost 4 Pokémon to it. Two thirds of my team. Including my starter. I felt terrible afterwards and needed a couple of days break to restabalize my emotions and feel ready to continue my journey and rebuild my team. Definitely memorable and was interesting in how it brought these different feelings out of me.
The occasional thing I love about these video essays is when they use a game I've been checking out but been on the fence about getting. Knowing that potionomics does something interesting with fail states makes me want to play it even more. Great video as always!
15:33 That sequence is genius. Indeed, Soldier of God, Rick, is the game's strongest boss.
Just in case someone takes this seriously, Soldier of Godrick is literally the optional tutorial boss, a normal enemy upgraded to boss status without any of the perks, as its stats are barely buffed. It is optional, because Elden Ring's tutorial is a hole you can ignore by taking the obvious door. The Tree Sentinel, however, is the boss made to teach you, as Maxor masterfully put it, "how to flee in fear". But the community has a meme of Soldier of Godrick being the strongest boss in the game, renaming it Soldier of God, Rick.
Yes I really enjoyed that he swapped the Solder of god, Rick with the tree sentinel
This is why I love the indie H-game Degrees of Lewdity: Losing a combat encounter is never a game over. It just kicks you down into a proverbial ditch. Heck, there’s no game over at all. You’re just pushed into a worse situation
Perfect timing. Lost my best Plaguedoctor in Darkest Dungeon to 2 consecutive critical hits 5min ago and did a ragequit. :D
Oof, I feel that
I really like how the Korean monster management & RTS game "Lobotomy Corporation" handles losing. Basically, your job in that game is to send Agents to work with various different monsters (called "Abnormalities") to create energy. The longer you play and the thurther you go, the more energy you must produce and the more Agents and Abnormalities you have to juggle.
If (or rather, when) you make a mistake, it's highly likely that one of the Abnormalities will breach containment, which leaves you with a choice: you can either restart the day, losing all progress but also reverting any deaths that may have happened that day; or you can try and suppress the escaped Abnormality, saving time and progress while risking losing more time in the event that you make another mistake and more Abnormalities breach.
This, in my eyes, creates a system where players will be less willing to restart unless they created a completely unsalvageable situation. However, the impact of restarting is somewhat lessened by the fact that you are almost expected to restart often, putting you in the mindset of "ah well, shit happens, it is what it is"
TL;DR: By making time both the price for restarting, and the wager you make when not restarting, players are less likely to restart upon making a small mistake; By putting the player into the mindest of restarting often the player doesn't mind restarts as much as they would otherwise
There's another aspect to LC that ties to this discussion. Early on Agents aren't worth much and the days are easier to pass meaning its sometimes viable to lose an agent to clear a day though most people might prefer restarting. But as the game goes on the difficulty increases much more than the Agent's ability does leading to a point where players begin to consider the death of a few units as a completely acceptable price for finishing the day.
Despite the fact that there was probably some way to keep them alive the player is discouraged from repeating the day due to its sheer difficulty. Which opens players up to consider more sacrificial strategies including machines that trade Agent lives for other benefits.
Not only is this a great demonstration of making players accept losses as part of the gameplay, it ties in to the greater narrative as this whole process mimicks the emotionl rollercoaster of the protagonist throughout the game.
@@theresnothinghere1745 I straight up treat my new recruits as D-class. If I get a new monster I send in the newbie, if he gets horrifically gibbed: "well damn, guess I won't do that with my experienced agents"
I love the medical system in RimWorld. Most injuries can be recovered from, but often with scarring. And a successful surgery can then get infected, or cause a mental break from the pain which ends with then back in the hospital again because someone had to knock them out. Even total game over can be refreshing because you get to try a new setting or mod.
I want to buy RimWorld on Ps4. Haven't played it, but it looks fun. What do you think?
@@qwertyuiop3656 I'm not familiar with PS4 ports, but there are a lot of good mods for the PC version. If the PS4 version can also be modded then it's worth it. Otherwise, I would prefer the PC version, if you have the option. It runs pretty well even on older laptops.
@@drag0nfi You can't mod any game on the ps4 because it's a "closed system"
Rimworld is the kind of game you are always losing. Or more accurately its always trying to kill you, particularly for doing well and normally you will lose the colony and not build up a glitterworld empire. (It does have a win condition for escaping the planet, and over the years they added alot of features that make longterm survival easier)
I think because the point is you are expected to lose, the game is actually fun to lose. (Both by design and by player mental state)
@@jasonreed7522 the game was inspired by dwarf fortress heavily and tbh, needs 2-3 mods to be enjoyable at the start, at least for me
"as an opportunity to create fun, rather than as a punishment."
Hidetaka Miyazaki: "And so I took this personally. . ."
In old school adventures not solving the puzzle is often much more funny than solving it.
I love that at 15:25 you show Elden Ring having Tree Scrub as an easy tutorial boss and Rick, Soldier of God as a terrifying foe that puts you in your place.
Disco Elysium is a game all about failure. You're a trainwreck of a human being and the game actively knows this. The most interesting choices in the game come as a result of "failed" dice rolls.
Getting Over It and the many, for a lack of a better term, tower ascension games are very relevant to this discussion. Their whole appeal is that failure is a setback. They can build up great amounts of tension, as clearing certain sections requires risking incredible setbacks. All of the popular ones I've seen have some form of clunky controls. The games revel in their ability to deliver frustration.
I think untitled Goose game deserves a spot in this video, the worst thing that can happen is that you get shooed away and lose like 5 seconds of progress and have to try and solve the puzzle again.
Maybe someone takes a thing from you and sets it down somewhere, while they distract themselves.
The art of failure, still one of the most difficult things to design.
A big factor in it is managing player expectations. Normally humans are very loss averse, but in some games losing is something you laugh at instead of getting frustrated or mad.
I really appreciate the editing of this video. So many "hidden" jokes in the footage, it's great.
I love that we are moving away from the coin eater arcade type games. We've kinda explored that alot, and i will always love them, but new types of games are great too.
True say. I love arcades too, but I liked it when Adam said that 'lives, game overs, and the concept of losing' are relics of the arcade age. I also hope gaming will evolve and do new things.
Going back to arcade gaming has actually made me appreciate them more, there was a lot of BS in those games but many of them had fantastic difficulty curves, they were hard because they wanted your money but not so hard that they would chase you away, especially since you didn't own the game so they had to keep your attention away from other cabinets and get you too keep spending money.
It sounds predatory but ironically they had no idea how to manipulate the human psyche like we do now, so instead the games are either amazingly well made and engaging challanges or its bullshit that should be abandoned
@@Jabroni_14 That's a really cool point. They operated under conditions that produced a certain kind of game. Current conditions make it possible to purpose build online environments that present continuous monetization opportunities from multi-player engagement. As a design principle it seems questionable, but its the raison d'etre of big business.
@@proximacentaur1654 exactly, I also think more psychology concepts have been implemented into games sometimes this make the game better like when finding out the limits of a humans mental stack and try to design experiences around that or learning how attention works to design a map that makes the player understand how to navigate it in a way that is fun but still mechanically interesting.
@@Jabroni_14 Very true. It's possible to use those concepts to make better games.
I am a fan of the fail forward type systems you often see in table top games. Oddly I think a lot of the problems with fear of failure comes down to game length. Unfortunately the money factor of wanting to get as much bang for your buck as possible tends to hurt the pacing of games as they often end up too long and over stuffed. I personally view the larger gaming culture's tendency to view a shorter game as a bad thing detrimental to game design. But at the same time I understand that games are expensive and people only have so much money to spend so its a difficult problem.
My rule of thumb is to say that losing in new and interesting ways is fun. Getting stuck is not fun, but there is a thrill in running into a new situation, bouncing off it, and then realizing the solution.
honestly impressed you guys didn't just reload the Space Engineers save or rebuild the blueprint.
honestly, the borderlands approach seemed like a good concept, with some lots of things to iron out.
the second wind had so many good moments, but on the other hand if you were hit by a swarmy enemy, you were unkillable, while boss fights without mobs completely removed the concept. it also had some fun interactions like "AoE weapons might kill you by removing your respawn chance"
Don't Starve does this pretty well by unlocking new characters only when you die, solidifying the fact that you're supposed to when you're new at the game.
Failing can be fun, not always, specially when the game makes it unfun
For example, in Dark Souls what made me give up was the long treks between spawn points and bosses which was just extra repetition, the bosses where fun, repeating the mooks on the way wasn't
Super Meat Boy however barely sets you back a minute tops, so loosing is barely an issue
Freedom Planet 2 bosses can be challenging to beat within the par time of the level and even more-so no-hit which is required for the highest rank. The harder boss fights do not have a prior level to go trough, they drop you right at the boss, so retrying is still fun
Even then this time limit is optional in case you are getting frustrated
Failing in itself is not fun, improving with each try is, but a game can easily offset that fun with tedious design
A surprising omission here is Shadow of Mordor and its Nemesis system. While it occasionally brings back orcs that you defeated, it shines when your humiliating death creates an enemy you are really motivated to beat.
This alone is why Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War should be played on their highest difficulties. It really gives the Nemesis system a great way to shine.
4:24 Corpse running is actually one of the things I get frustrated with in games like minecraft and ark: survival evolved.
I can go along, having a great experience crafting new things and exploring, only to run into some dino, get overwhelmed, and then respawn back at my base.
Then the gameplay comes to a screeching halt as I feel encouraged to take the long trek back to the same dangerous territory so I can get my stuff back and try again, but unarmed this time, and probably lose again.
And then I repeat that cycle until I either ragequit or cut my losses and start gathering resources to craft some of the stuff I lost all over again. Sometimes reaching the point of me feeling like there's hardly any point to crafting better gear, because I'm just going to lose it again.
Unless I force myself to try to come up with better ways to survive and learn to accept a loss more easily, I end up trapped in this cycle of frustration, and the game ends up feeling tedious rather than challenging.
I'm tired of losing items and getting teleported back to my bed.
If all I lost were crafting resources, that would be one thing. But I think it would be better if I didn't lose equipment as well. It ends up feeling like playing a metroidvania, but you lose all of your suit upgrades when you lose a fight.
When I play modded minecraft 1.12, I use a mod called corpse complex for it's selective keepinventory feature.
I have it set so that when I respawn, I keep the stuff in my hotbar, armor slots and offhand, but drop the stuff in my main inventory.
This makes it so that you keep your equipment so that you can still jump back in and try again, but also makes it so that if there are resources you want to prioritize keeping, you can add them to a slot in your hotbar.
This, I think, makes for an interesting resource management aspect to mining and exploring.
Do you really need that flint and steel in your hotbar, or would you rather put it away and use that slot to carry that redstone you found? Got some diamonds? What will you put away to make room for them? Your food? Your water bucket?
I Absolutely agree with everything you said
Making failure an essential part of learning and growing makes a rich game experience. My favorite example of this is Oxygen Not Included
I remember being really surprised when I realized that Fable 2 didn’t have a failstate. Getting knocked out felt like a consequence, but never required reloading saves
Not that you ever really had to reload Fable, unless you kept selling all your phials. I mean I did, but even then potions aplenty.
In my experience, the games that I enjoy the most are ones where losing is a learning experience, rather than just a punishment.
Even though you only briefly showed it. Jedi: Fallen Order incorporates this well into it's narrative, even though the gameplay is very souls like, the narrative is has a major lesson in showing and saying that "failure is part of the path." I had not played a souls like game before it and that bit of narrative lesson being in the game really helped me continue to be confidant and willing to power through and learn how to defeat powerful and bosses and enemies.
X-COM is a spot-on example. I always felt that losing a soldier puts you in a worse position, but doesn't create an interesting problem to solve.
So, the only rational move is to reload and try again.
It would be much more interesting if instead of dying, you would have to rescue and rush a wounded soldier to the extraction point.
Making it easier to replace fallen soldiers would also make reloading less "mandatory".
It's not really a good comparison, but Rimwolrd for instance have both of the above.
just hire another soldier lol
@@MarsofAritia Yes, but training them up from Rookie level can really hurt in the next few levels, if you lost an advanced unit in the middle and late game.
Losing my first XCom 2 game was a blast. The Avatar countdown had spiraled out of control. I lost both my A and B squad. I had no supplies, and I was forced to hit a facility with rookies. Even though everything was burning down around me, I killed the Chosen witch and screamed, "If we burn, you burn with us!"
For me the first genre to make this works(losing is fun) was fighting games, you keep learning how to beat stronger players/oponents(AI) and keep getting better, its so rewarding, seeing you grow up and doing cool combos, after fighting games was roguelikes and now soulslike. In fighting games even if i lose, i am having fun, learning and adapting to my enemy. The game that got me into the genre was for honor, now i play mortal kombat and street fighter and have so much fun learning its systems and losing online xD
So I have been taking notes on the next TTRPG project I want to work on and the way you talked about darkest dungeon and failure states made a few ideas finally fall into place. Thanks for that, you just made my next game a bit better (I hope)
How's the game now?
hades death/ failure is so well integrated that i always look forward after my death for the story progression
Thank you for the mention!
I've been wanting a video on this for ages. Thank you!!
Another great example of a game getting failure right is Crusader Kings 3. While there is a game over state you can hit, there is quite a lot of ways for things to wrong that don't get you there. The point in my first dozen or 2 hours when I realized I'd likely be playing the franchise forever was when I finally accepted one of those failures (surrendering my Kingdom of Ireland to viking conquerors) and kept playing. It opened my eyes to other aspects of the game that I hadn't been learning by restarting any time I lost my primary title.
I disagree with one point. There is loosing because you weren't paying attention or made a mistake and then there is loosing because you got shitty deal from RNG. Which is why I really don't like X-Com and Darkest Dungeon, where few unlucky rolls can ruin a run that otherwise was going perfectly. I don't feel like I lost, I feel like I was scammed.
Damn you were spot on why I dropped Enter the Gungeon cause it's incredibly boring when you die to a stray shot and have to start all over again. I did however get 100% achievements for Hades because even dying leads to some tangible progress.
Part of the fun in a lot of PVP games is the pace, if you can jump into a game fast after losing, you can get into a sort of trance, for better or worse, where losses make you more on edge and more likely to continue pushing.
It's actually a sort of a paradox, especially in competitive games, the more you win the more likely you are to say "Alright i'll stop so i wont lose my progress" and the more you lose the more likely you are to say "ITS DOUBLE OR NOTHING!".
This, a great example is smash and its percentage mechanic, it has about 8 stages (4 failure and 4 victory) subtly integrated into a single mechanic.
The way you interact with your enemy VASTLY changes depending where your range of percentage is, unlike classic fighting games with health bars.
Winning Phase 1, enemy at 0-30%: weak attacks that can combo are the best, slower and stronger attacks are too risky to be worth it
Winning Phase 2, enemy at 30-70%: You can't combo the enemy as easily, if at all anymore, but can be now juggled and pushed away from neutral very easily, weaker attacks not as worth anymore, medium attacks while the best, a well timed strong attack can be very worth it too.
Winning Phase 3, enemy at 80-90% or more: You NEED to nail a good killing attack before your enemy makes you be as damaged as them. Heavy emphasis on set ups and dodgees.
Winning Phase 4, enemy at 0-30%, but with a stock less: Now you need to rack up as much damage as possible before the enemy finishes your life, or your small victory will be sorta meaningless.
___________________
Losing Phase 1, yourself at 0-30%: Getting comboed is bad but not the end of the world, and you can easily come back to neutral and recover
Losing Phase 2, yourself at 30-70%: You can't be comboed as easily anymor, but will be constantly pushed away from neutral if you aren't careful enough, risktaking is still recomended so you don't fall behind
Losing Phase 3, yourself at 80-90% or more:: You need to be as careful as possible, risks are not worth it, your mission is to make sure you opponent is also at this stage so you can make a comeback
Losing Phase 4, yourself at 0-30%, but with a stock less: You lost the advantage, but now your risk are extremely low, which gives you the confidence to nail that strong attack you struggled so much to do before. Your mision is to take your opponent stock as fast as possible so you can recover equilibrium and a chance at winning the match
I don’t know if it was intended, since it didn’t happen in all bosses, but in Hyper Light Drifter, during my first boss (West) , I remember seeing how much health it had and thinking I had to get stronger, but after my first death the game not only put me right before the boss, but it didn’t stop the boss music, and that little thing just gave me the drive to die a few more times until I beat the boss
I always like to say "I would rather lose spectacularly than win boringly."
I was playing through Monster Hunter Rise and Sunbreak and have never seen the quest fail screen (except for the rajang arena quest cycling trick). Then one day with title update 2 of sunbreak we fought Flaming Espinas with friends and we got decimated completely, not once, BUT TWICE. We had failed the quest twice in a row and truth be told, we were all excited to jump back in and fight it knowing that losing was finally a possibility for our group!
We had a similar experience in Iceborne against alatreon where we failed at least like 6-7 times constantly adapting our strategies and approach in order to beat it with our full 4-player squad (I didn't want to solo it because I'd be robbing us all of a fun first-time experience together). The whole process was fun, from the repeated failure, but it also made the victory all that more glorious and we were insanely excited, which is not something we would have felt if we could just beat everything on our first try.
I agree, that losing in a blaze of glory is better than winning boringly. I've played World of Tanks for years, and the most memorable matches were the ones where my team won or lost barely. 15-0 victories or defeats are nice, but boring. They make me feel that I didn't contribute anything.
With all its flaws Outward had the great idea of actually never killing you, but putting you very different situations when you died. From prisoner, to miner, to saved by a wanderer to saved by some alien creature.
the way this guy talks about games makes me think he does and doesnt play video games often. On one hand he is by far the most professional sounding video essays about games I've heard, on par with like razbuten. but then on the other hand he talks about experiences he's had in games with friends and recommends the most obscure indie games i've never heard of. love these videos, keep it up!
One important thing to making failure fun is what actually made you lose. Is it something you had control over? Something you could have done better? Or was it something that you had no control over? Was it just plain bad luck? Or a beginner trap with no way to avoid it without prior knowledge?
If its the first one, its usually fun, because that encourages you to keep trying until you win. The second one is usually just frustrating, since it tends to make it feel like trying again is futile, since that same random unfair thing could just as easily screw things up again every single time you try.
Basically, does the game feel like it wants you to try again? Or does it feel like it arbitrarily decides that you aren't allowed to win sometimes? Does it feel like YOU killed yourself? Or does it feel like the GAME killed you?
Crucader Kings is another amazing example of making failure fun. Its a shame it wasn't mentioned.
It’s a great point about games evolving, so old concepts of death and failure don’t have to stay the same, but can evolve as the range of gamers and their desires becomes more diverse. On the one hand, as you say, some people love that hardcore challenge, so Soulslikes have become popular. On the other hand, other people want a more relaxed experience, so sandboxes, casual games and so-called “walking simulators” have also become hugely popular too. Not every game needs failure states or even a sense of challenge to be a rewarding experience, and for some of us these can actively detract from the experience. I’m glad that some games in the middle of the spectrum allow options to temporarily reduce challenge, so that people can test themselves up to their point of comfort, but still be allowed to continue rather than quitting or treating the game as a chore if they get stuck. For instance, I loved the exploration, art style, puzzles and some of the less punishing combat of Tunic, but I really couldn’t stand the boss fights, and would have quit if I’d had to spend hours “gitting gud” before I could progress. But it gave me the option of turning invincibility on for a while, so I could get through and enjoy the rest of the game. Maybe for some people that would destroy the sense of achievement from “beating” the game, but for some of us it’s not about achievement but just experiencing the interesting world the developers have created.
9:50 - "Dwarf Fortress does, however, look and play like garbage."
Well, luckily not for long. In exactly a month (6th of December) we're getting the Steam release with major UI overhaul (to be up to quality of life standard of modern games) and some very nice graphical layer on top of it.
I highly recommend picking it up when it's out if you enjoy colony sims even slightly, as DF can be unironically called "the" colony sim.
Outward and Pathologic 2 make excellent use of "failure". Both don't end your game but open more options and interesting turns of events.
The first few times i played Kenshi i used the quicksave option a TON
but more recently i did a playthrough where i would only allow myself to save in a town (either my own or an existing one)
Meaning every outing into the vast, dangerous wilderness was incredibly tense and i had to pay close attention to everything that was happening
It forced me to have contingencies in game rather than relying on a recent saved game, i would have a backup squad stationed nearby that could go in and save my main expedition if they happened to get ambushed and left bleeding out/eaten alive by beak things or cannibals
Kenshi is really forgiving when it comes to failure. i really love the mechanic that a character can grow more resistant to damage by being beaten to within an inch of their lives and then given time to recover. So by allowing bad things to happen, instead of quickloading every time i fail to steal something, and recovering from them i was rewarded with a battle hardened squad that could take more of a beating next time
I've definitely had a problem with restarting whenever I do even one part wrong for a game esspecially since I like getting time trial records even when I'm starting out with the mechanics in games like Sonic or Spark. More recently, I am trying to just experience more of the game and find its quirks which also helps with going back to previous areas and seeing eerything that I can get better with. It's difficult for me not to get frustrated while messing up but I try to look at my improvement with it and knowing I can make it eventually. Remember that games are supposed to be fun and finding those fun aspects for you (whether it being the story, gameplay, looking at the history of it, or breaking it in ways no one could imagine before) is the most important part to enjoy them.
BR games are the worst example of failure states. Dying means that the player will always stop playing for a little while and ruin the flow of the match. Getting into another game also takes time. Most of the match is spent preparing for the late game and if the player does it wrong in any way that means he is penalized. It's basically a system in which newer players are barred from enjoyment and punished by making them lose real time and agency. This type of games should incorporate a mechanic which lets defeated players engage in another type of activity equally as interesting as playing the Battle Royale while their teammates respawn them. The Gulag mechanic is not the answer to this problem though as it basically putting the players in the shoes of mediocre high school student: If they failed the first exam why you think they will excel in the second one?
The thumbnail is apt, since Dwarf Fortress is coming out next month
I LOVED that in Titanfall 2 multiplayer the matches ended with the players having one life left and the losing team is forced to try and reach an escape ship to evac out of the map. Even when your team lost the game that final "Escape" objective gave better players a chance to try and protect their teammates as they escape or hold off attackers at the ship to prevent them from destroying it.
This "Escape" objective for the losing team gave those players one last challenge to overcome in the match and it was both a social goal & an individual goal. Some matches you were barely getting by and you just want to get out ASAP but other times you just barely lost and want to flex by doing everything you can to get your whole team out alive.
This one simple feature added to the end of their multiplayer matches gave everyone who "loses" a chance to "win" at the end without detracting from the victory achieved by the overall match "winners".
Titanfall 2 was the pinnacle of multiplayer FPS games in my personal opinion/experience. The movement, the Pilot+Titan weapons, the Titans themselves, the MASSIVE variety of enemy pilot/Titan executions: that game was a series of perfectly prepared elements "baked" in a well designed multiplayer "pan" that organized these elements in their most effective configuration.....
Unfortunately the final step was getting pushed out to the "public" by EA with all the visibility of a back alley pop-up shop..... and that release was also sandwiched between the launch of the two new FPS entries one from COD & the other was Battlefield (which used to be good & popular believe it or not)
Its really frustrating to see good games killed via mediocrity & poor publishing. The fans of Titanfall will testify to the quality of that second game and fight anyone claiming that game's poor performance was due in any way to the game's design. The design & execution were perfect, those devs got done dirty by their predatory publisher who has since killed the original franchise in favor a truly "dumbed down" version which reduced complexity, lowered the skill ceiling, removed TITANS and made a number of other downgrades to the point that Apex is only set in the Titanfall universe because Respawn says it does.
Nothing about Apex feels like it exists in Titanfall because Titanfall was all about movement, Apex is all about the battlepass.
Appreciate how you've articulated the failure state. It's a material design choice in a game and an attitude that a player brings to the game. That's a minor revelation for me - I've been trying to make sense of why I stop playing some games. Thanks for a top video.
I'm surprised you didn't talk about Supergiant's Pyre. The entire game is about failing forward, and how life goes on after we lose with even the highest of stakes.
I HAD A FEELING THERE WOULD BE A VIDEO TODAY OMG
Losing is fun if you know why you lost. To see that you have an avenue for improvement.
Far too many games unfortunately just make you lose due to bullshit. RNG, undodgeable/unblockable attacks, new enemies appearing out of nowhere, etc. etc.
While I do agree that the death system in Darkest Dungeon is good in theory, I would never use that game as a good example. My main gripe with it was that in many cases death was random and downright unfair.
For example: The turn order in DD is essentially random (base stat + rng roll), so it can happen that the enemy gets enough turns in a row to take out one of your guys before your healer even gets a turn. The ultimate pinnacle of unfairness were the Darkest Dungeons themselves though. Apart from the general surprises that the game throws at you, it had the special rule that once entered you cannot leave again unless you sacrifice somebody. So picking the right equipment was pure trial and error (and you *really* needed to specialise your equipment). One floor even required you to equip have a certain inconspicuous trinket in order not to get one-shot by the boss. Also they had the arbitrary rule that the same team is unable to re-enter the Dungeon again after a successful run, so it would make no difference if your team was successful or got wiped.
You say that fallen heroes could get "easily replaced" but that is very relative. It could take like *2 hours* of boring grind to have a new hero ready to join your main party again in the late game. I literally had to save-scum my way through the end because I was tired of the pointless grind just to receive a little piece of information that allowed me to have an actual fair chance at success on the next run.
So I'm sorry but, *HARD* disagree on calling Darkest Dungeon a prime example about how to handle death in a videogame!
Some of my favourite moments in the Hitman games (even the older ones most of the time) is when things "go a bit Mike" and you discover something new while panicking or just happen to take out your target by accident in the ensuing chaos as you try to flee an angry mob.
This video gave me a rush of dopamine. Your ideas are incredible. This is very thought provoking. Thank you for doing the work to make this video!
Spoiler, Hellblades fake save deleting mechanic was why I did not buy they game.
I love the idea of a game that lets mistakes become the story. At least in the games Ive played, the mistakes are usually just “now youre dead. Sucks to suck. Git gud.” My favorite memories in Skyrim are when I ran away in the middle of a fight I could t handle instead of save scumming to get the perfect combination of burst damage and dodging attacks to win.
Games like Skate are a very good example to look at because there's a very natural pairing of low stakes and casual progress built in to them. You can ride around doing the main fun activity of the game - skating - while traveling to different objectives, exploring the map, doing challenges etc, all of which have no serious failure state beyond 'try again'. This allows you to always be engaged while not currently engaged in achieving the next goal and given the space to experiment, iterate and practice when you are attempting a challenge. I can't really think of a time I ever became frustrated playing a Skate game.
That Hunt trade at the end was brutal. Great example of death being a setback, not the end, though. There's no timer on reviving your teammates unless someone sets them on fire. And even then, if you go get a bounty token, you can still revive them.
A game you didn't mention that makes losing fun is Kenshi. It's a squad based RPG where you run around a post post apocalyptic desert world trying to survive from hunger, slavers, and a fauna. One of the main skills is "Toughness" and you gain XP in it by getting beaten and knocked out which then makes your character able to withstand more punishment. Also you do not lose if a character dies, as long as there's one person left even if all their limbs get chopped off you can still make it back to town and find new recruits and prosthetics. Very unique
I've seen it discussed in the context of a few games, but Unexplored 2 is the main one I know of which is worth mentioning. I haven't played, but the idea behind how it handles failure is that your character is a designated hero of sorts, undertaking an important quest. If you fail, the game skips ahead to the next generation's designated hero to try again. In a lot of roguelike games, your death resets everything and the world starts completely from scratch. In Unexplored 2, it keeps the world you died in, but advances time by a few years and changes where the borders are drawn between nations as they fight for territory. You come back to the same world at a different stage in its ongoing history. The fact of your previous death becomes a note in the history books of your people, and you go on to try and be the hero who succeeds where so many others failed. I don't know how well the game lives up to this idea (as mentioned, I haven't played) but I think it's an interesting approach to incorporating narrative into gameplay and failure states into the narrative.
Another one I find interesting is Wildermyth. Whe a character gets reduced to 0HP, they don't *necessarily* die. You can choose to let them die, with 2 options for their heroic final moments, or you can retreat them from battle at the cost of a permanent injury. The heroic death can either inspire the survivors with a buff that lasts several turns, or just deal a bunch of damage as they fall, with the game clearly stating what each of these two options will do before you choose it. If you choose to retreat, all you know is that your character will be injured, without the exact details explained for how that injury will affect them. It always changes their appearance (often significantly) and reduces one of their attributes. I had one time where my super-tanky warrior tried to tank a little too much damage, and fell in battle. He managed to crawl away from battle, but his leg was mained and had to be amputated. He came back to battle with a peg leg and a -1 modifier to his speed. He'd already been built to be slow, and I worked around it, so this loss just made his movement even more restrictive. I found use for him in defensive missions, and he remained a powerful fighter, but that loss of speed made him less effective for some other mission types.
Darkest Dungeon is a FAILURE of a video game.. and a masterclass at world building.
Sure, they accomplished what they set out to do, but was that really such a good idea? It wasn't. As a gamer, I want my time to be respected.. and I was not about to waste my time grinding over terrible RNG.
I grew to love failure and avoiding cheating like save-scumming . Dark Souls showed me the satisfaction of overcoming struggle and after that grew to love games like Darkest Dungeon and Escape of Tarkov.
15:30 I see you were defeated by soldier of god, Rik as well. Even the best of us can not win this fight, it seems.
a game that does this surprisingly well in my opinion is mindustry, a factory builder where your tasked with landing in a sector, build an infrastructure of drills, pumps and processing plants, the resources of which you use to build units to destroy the enemy base and supplying your turrets to defend against the waves of enemies coming from that base your trying to destroy.
some of the most fun moments i had with the game was after the enemies breached my defenses and destroyed a good chunk of my infrastructure, so i had to scramble to build it back up, having to decide whats more important all while trying to rebuid my turrets before the enemy unit production escalates even further.
and when you do die, you come back to the sector, having to play a good hour or so of basebuilding again, but with better knowledge of the map and the enemies base, every playthrough is substantially different, as theres always something to optimise about your factory
So Anyway, just wanted to talk about mindustry, because its a great game with 95% positive reviews, which i think deserves more recognition (even tho 16000 positive reviews is quite the achievement)
I find Enter The Gungeon's gradual expansion of the world far more enticing than the, "switch your entire playstyle or you don't get new gameplay content", of Hades.
Thanks for this video! I'm a game developer and my last game - KingSim - is based on trying out different decisions, dying, and repeating. The game has 100+ endings, so it's pretty interesting to find out "what will happen if I do this?". Thanks for the video, a lot of inciteful information there. Keep up the good work)
I finished IGI 10 years later when I returned to it, that mission 7 "Border Crossing" was amazing lol
And MOHAA had a "Sniper Town" that took me a few months or a year when I was a kid 😂
Really great video as always! Btw, I really expected you to rickroll us at that time but it was just a music masterpiece lol!