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[droqen]

DF versus XCOM

This is true; although I laughed when I read "Dwarf Fortress ... playable and winnable".

However I think that one of the main distinctions between these two games is that Dwarf Fortress puts the focus on "screw around and die a lot" while in XCOM you really do have the end goal of win (however that happens; I suck too much at it to get very far).

DF gets away with difficulty that flails around wildly, while XCOM aims to actually present a consistent challenge.

[Parthon]

This is true; although I laughed when I read "Dwarf Fortress ... playable and winnable".

However I think that one of the main distinctions between these two games is that Dwarf Fortress puts the focus on "screw around and die a lot" while in XCOM you really do have the end goal of win (however that happens; I suck too much at it to get very far).

DF gets away with difficulty that flails around wildly, while XCOM aims to actually present a consistent challenge.

Well, yeah. Technically winnable if the RNG is nice.

There's also the case that an entire fort in DF can be lost in a matter of moments due to error or unluckiness.

In XCOM loss normally comes slowly in the form of attrition through tactical errors or unpreparedness. As well as the RNG.

They both highlight the importance of individuality though. In both games the units are valuable for different reasons. In the early game, a loss of a single unit can be horribly devastating. It's almost like the player has to nuture the units until they are strong enough as a whole to stand for themselves. It's that kind of close scrutiny that makes the player attached to the unit. It's not "Frank the blacksmith." It's "Frank who fell into the pit and I had to order a staircase built just to save him, then he went mad and made some artefact pants and is now the leader of the army and single handedly destroyed a goblin patrol by himself with nothing except his leather pants and a hammer."

All I can say is that we need more games like this.

[gimymblert]

How does DF story generation mechanics work actually?

[droqen]

neoshaman: Not at all. It has story generation in the same way that real life has story generation.

Except for Legends, that bit is different (it runs through worldgen and creates events that happen and real heroes that did real heroic stuff) but I don't think that's what you were talking about.

[Seth]

Pita, what you said made perfect sense to me. In the context of a game where it's possible to keep everyone alive and there's nothing to be gained through failing to uphold that quality of survival, it's the worst feeling to give up -- not quite so much because of caring for the character, but simply because there is future content you might be missing out on.

Maybe a solution would be to make these games virtually or even actually unwinnable without casualties?  That's be more realistic, too.

[droqen]

Please: Disregard my idiocy

Maybe a solution would be to make these games virtually or even actually unwinnable without casualties?  That's be more realistic, too.

Well, that's the route most games take: Losing an important character means you lose.

But I disagree that it's more realistic. Very frequently, people die when they are in conflict and one of the sides has to come out a winner (usually).

[jwaap]

I had this idea yesterday, while watching the venture brothers, of numbering your troops. Like henchmen, a bit. YOu'll get #1 2 3 4 5 etc.

Battles keep going, in the end, if #5 is still alive, you are going to love #5.

Red Alert does this a bit with the leveling of rts units (I'm talking about a different kind of games a bit, yeah), but does not make them individuals. I think this shallow but effective way might achieve this.

[Seth]

Maybe a solution would be to make these games virtually or even actually unwinnable without casualties?  That's be more realistic, too.

Well, that's the route most games take: Losing an important character means you lose.

But I disagree that it's more realistic. Very frequently, people die when they are in conflict and one of the sides has to come out a winner (usually).

Huh?  I think you thought I meant the opposite of what I meant.  To be clear, I'm arguing for a game where the player can't expect to win without losing soldiers (and characters).

[SirNiko]

Maybe a solution would be to make these games virtually or even actually unwinnable without casualties?  That's be more realistic, too.

Well, that's the route most games take: Losing an important character means you lose.

But I disagree that it's more realistic. Very frequently, people die when they are in conflict and one of the sides has to come out a winner (usually).

Huh?  I think you thought I meant the opposite of what I meant.  To be clear, I'm arguing for a game where the player can't expect to win without losing soldiers (and characters).

You might make it a design where the player has to sacrifice a character (of their choice) in order to complete a stage. You could make this a hard coded decision (player picks who to sacrifice during a cutscene) or a choice dictated by natural game mechanics (like the suicide bomber units in Warcraft 2). If you go this route, it needs to be abundantly clear to the player that there is no way around this. You also need to consider that players are going to want to replay the game in order to see what happens if they choose a different unit. The game needs to have enough replayable content to keep the player happy when they do this.

If you make it so that even under the best circumstances the player loses one character/unit, but there's a possibility to lose even more, you haven't addressed the core issue: players wind up replaying missions to avoid losing characters they could have saved. Replaying missions ad nauseum to slightly influence the outcome or later missions leaves a bad taste in the mouths of most players.

Also, the idea that this is realistic or that is not tends to have no place whatsoever in game design. If you're making a simulation (which is not a game) then yes, more realism is better. Realism only has a place when it helps the player use their knowledge of real world situations to predict game behavior. RTS and SRPGs tend to not have much need for even the latter scenario.

-SirNiko

[droqen]

Seth: Whoops o_o

[Seth]

SirNiko: Um, I definitely think realism is useful as a dramatic feature if nothing else.  And when I play through a war game where none of my soldiers die, I think it certainly hurts the game not just because it's unrealistic but what the hell does that say about war when it's even possible to win the ENTIRE war with no casualties on the good guys side (besides from hardcoded events or characters outside your control).

Another thing, I think you can make it clear to the player that their characters will die just by making it too hard to win with all characters living.  I mean in Starcraft you don't expect every unit to live--why can't that same principle be applied but to a lesser degree, maybe?

And replaying missions in a game should be an action that is heavily discouraged, maybe by making save scumming impossible or a pain in the ass to do, by having something like that mole-guy in Animal Crossing--he was pretty effective, believe it or not!

[SirNiko]

I dislike the idea of 'solving' the problem by forcing the player to suck up and deal with it, such as making it prohibitively difficult to save-scum. The player doesn't like permadeath because it takes 20+ hours of effort and spoils it when they lose a unit they need for a better ending, or to help them beat later missions. Whether or not this is realistic is a moot point: it's not fun, ergo, it is bad for the game.

Either you eliminate the individuality (The death of the characters have little or no long term impact on the game, like in Starcraft) or you reduce the length of the game and encourage players to try again and again (to do better or choose to lose different units).

Making the game 'realistic' doesn't solve any of the above points. It just suggests that narrative justification is a substitute for good game design, a concept I oppose vehemently (This is not a slight against you: I've long campaigned against narrative justification in many other games).

I think you could make an RTS/SRPG game that features perma-death of meaningful characters as an enjoyable mechanism to flavor the game, but it'd have to be drastically different than the game designs currently available. In all the games I have played, permadeath of meaningful characters is handled poorly.

-SirNiko

[Seth]

I think you could make an RTS/SRPG game that features perma-death of meaningful characters as an enjoyable mechanism to flavor the game, but it'd have to be drastically different than the game designs currently available. In all the games I have played, permadeath of meaningful characters is handled poorly.

Were you thinking I was suggesting this be a feature just arbitrarily added in to any already existing game?  On the contrary; I think the game would have to be carefully designed with it in mind.

The player doesn't like permadeath because it takes 20+ hours of effort and spoils it when they lose a unit they need for a better ending, or to help them beat later missions. Whether or not this is realistic is a moot point: it's not fun, ergo, it is bad for the game.

It's not fun if you actually have to face consequences from the choices you make in gameplay?  I disagree completely.  I love roguelikes for their permadeath--knowing that if I am not careful I can screw things up makes the game much more intense.  Yeah, it can be rough, but it shouldn't necessarily be a gamebreaker and I don't know why you're suggesting that I think it should be.

[droqen]

The player doesn't like permadeath because it takes 20+ hours of effort and spoils it when they lose a unit they need for a better ending, or to help them beat later missions. Whether or not this is realistic is a moot point: it's not fun, ergo, it is bad for the game.

It's not fun if you actually have to face consequences from the choices you make in gameplay?  I disagree completely.  I love roguelikes for their permadeath--knowing that if I am not careful I can screw things up makes the game much more intense.  Yeah, it can be rough, but it shouldn't necessarily be a gamebreaker and I don't know why you're suggesting that I think it should be.

The issue here is the way the game is designed.

A Roguelike is designed such that, with its randomness and punishing difficulty, you expect to die every time you start up a new character -- as a result, content is created with that in mind.

Many other games are designed such that you play one save file to completion; if you lose, you reload. This is the real problem I have with hardcore mode in Diablo II -- while it is permadeath, it is not interesting permadeath.

If a game isn't designed to handle replaying early sections over and over again, permadeath is simply a nuisance that exists to make you replay sections that weren't meant to be played over and over and over again.

edit:
In the same way, an RTS/TBS campaign (for example) is generally not designed to make playing the first few missions over and over into a fun experience. Rather, they are usually the most boring and basic of the whole game, existing only to guide the new player. If a player realizes that, because of choices he made, there's now no way to beat the final 10 out of 20 total campaigns, he is more likely to feel discouraged (I have to start all over again?!) than to feel like jumping in and trying again.

[SirNiko]

Were you thinking I was suggesting this be a feature just arbitrarily added in to any already existing game?  On the contrary; I think the game would have to be carefully designed with it in mind.

I think I might be misunderstanding you on this point. I feel that games that currently use permadeath (for example, Final Fantasy Tactics, and of the Ogre Battle games, Fire Emblem) have done so poorly. Rather than making the player feel anguish at the loss of a beloved character, they feel compelled to reset the game and replay the mission, which is not the intended result.

Making loss of a character mandatory, or preventing them from resetting would not improve these existing games. I felt like you were suggesting these solutions would 'fix' existing examples mentioned in the thread. If you're not, I apologize for misreading you.

-SirNiko

[droqen]

Simply applying said things (enforcement of permadeath) to already-existing games won't make these games better -- but applying "forced permadeath" to a game during its design phase will, for the most part, make a better game than one that simply has "restart permadeath".

[Mikademus]

It's not "Frank the blacksmith." It's "Frank who fell into the pit and I had to order a staircase built just to save him, then he went mad and made some artefact pants and is now the leader of the army and single handedly destroyed a goblin patrol by himself with nothing except his leather pants and a hammer."

Well, there's him, and there's 70 Urist McFodder lyemakers and other forgettable useless denizens whose only value for you lies in eventually getting a fay mood so he'll make you an artefact floodgate menacing with spikes of cats and perhaps becoming non-forgettable... But yeah, the Founding Seven you won't forget

[Craig Stern]

I think I might be misunderstanding you on this point. I feel that games that currently use permadeath (for example, Final Fantasy Tactics, and of the Ogre Battle games, Fire Emblem) have done so poorly. Rather than making the player feel anguish at the loss of a beloved character, they feel compelled to reset the game and replay the mission, which is not the intended result.

I can tell you how I've chosen to handle this in my upcoming strategy RPG: characters that die stay dead, but you have a character--Luca--who can revive them. Reviving a character uses a soul charge, of which you have a limited number. Luca can get a new soul charge only by finishing off a weakened enemy with a weak attack she has called Soul Suck. So it's not permadeath, but you have limited resources to keep reviving dead characters. Meanwhile, farming souls becomes a sort of secondary objective in battle. I think this strikes a pretty good balance between making character death meaningless and making the consequences so severe that players will reset the game rather than accept them.

There's another thing: every cut scene in the game has a number of alternate versions that account for who is alive at the time they play. So if you let someone die, even if you revive them later, you'll miss out on what they have to say in certain situations between battles.

As for character attachment, I've chosen to handle it by A) letting you customize your characters' stat progression, and B) making each character unique and interactable through dialog. You can go to headquarters and just talk with each of the characters, learning about their backstory and personality through dialog trees.

[SirNiko]

I can tell you how I've chosen to handle this in my upcoming strategy RPG: characters that die stay dead, but you have a character--Luca--who can revive them. Reviving a character uses a soul charge, of which you have a limited number. Luca can get a new soul charge only by finishing off a weakened enemy with a weak attack she has called Soul Suck. So it's not permadeath, but you have limited resources to keep reviving dead characters. Meanwhile, farming souls becomes a sort of secondary objective in battle. I think this strikes a pretty good balance between making character death meaningless and making the consequences so severe that players will reset the game rather than accept them.

There's another thing: every cut scene in the game has a number of alternate versions that account for who is alive at the time they play. So if you let someone die, even if you revive them later, you'll miss out on what they have to say in certain situations between battles.

As for character attachment, I've chosen to handle it by A) letting you customize your characters' stat progression, and B) making each character unique and interactable through dialog. You can go to headquarters and just talk with each of the characters, learning about their backstory and personality through dialog trees.

Can players accumulate souls by replaying easy missions? I would see a player going to a simple mission they can complete without a death, accumulating extra souls, and then saving then in case they need to revive somebody.

How significant do you see the cutscenes changing? I can see two extremes: you either give each character a generic comment that nobody cares if they miss, or you create some dependencies that can trigger special scenes if you have the right guys alive (or possibly dead). Something like, if Joe and Sam both survive, Joe tells Sam he is the bad guy's uncle. If one or the other is dead, you miss out on that scene altogether.

Sounds like a cool idea.

-SirNiko

[Craig Stern]

You can't replay missions, but there are a few areas where you can fight randomly generated battles. So you could go harvest souls in those areas if you needed to. I don't want to go all Fire Emblem on everyone and force the player to play every battle exactly once in a linear sequence.

How significant do you see the cutscenes changing? I can see two extremes: you either give each character a generic comment that nobody cares if they miss, or you create some dependencies that can trigger special scenes if you have the right guys alive (or possibly dead). Something like, if Joe and Sam both survive, Joe tells Sam he is the bad guy's uncle. If one or the other is dead, you miss out on that scene altogether.

Right now, the game has both. An example of a dramatic one: in the first mission, the swordsman Griffin is breaking you out of prison. If he dies in the first couple of battles during that sequence, instead of continuing, you get a cut scene where your character gets lost, and is found and killed.