After all the heavy commentary lately (creating something of a Mass Effect ;), I decided to return to a lighter topic: death.
We’ve discussed this before, from different angles, in Death And The CRPG, Would You Mind Dying?, Would You Mind Not Dying?, Save Me!, and Save Me Again. Yeah, it’s popular ;).
One issue that none of these addresses, however, is the question: just how often does the character (or party) die in a game? One would think from all the discussion that your avatar is dropping dead every other move.
In the early CRPGs, yes, that could easily happen. Your party was sent out as poorly-equipped level-one wimps and often crossed paths with multiple groups of enemies. These games weren’t well-balanced, and death occurred often.
That isn’t true nowadays, at least in my experience. Generally, I’ve found that most combats are set up fairly. It seems to me that, when the character (or party) bites the dust, it’s meant as a lesson.
The lesson is usually: “You’re not strong enough for this yet”, “You need to re-think your tactics”, or “Next time, don’t be so careless”. For a shooter, I could add: “You must react faster”.
So really, death in games is a learning experience. Your approach to the fight was wrong in some way, and needs correction. If the game is properly balanced, that is most likely to happen in a “boss fight”, because by far the majority of combats is with cannon fodder.
I save often – because you never know what’s around the next corner – but it’s been rare for me to reload because the character or party died. Actually, I don’t wait for that. If things are going poorly, I’ll restore right then if possible, and reconsider the situation.
Of course, there’s always the chance you’ll run into a “boss fight” that’s exceptionally nasty, and may require several reloads before victory is achieved. That sort of thing is a design flaw, especially if different tactics aren’t working well.
So tell me: just how often do you die in these games?
Some games track your deaths. I had over 100 in Titan Quest, but I played a melee character, a fighter, so I had no choice but to get up close and personal. If there were enough monsters and especially if they managed to surround you, death came pretty quickly.
Most games seem to either resurrect you with little or no penalty or others force you to reload the last save. Bioshock with it’s resurrection chambers is an example of the former, as well as the early Ultimas. If you died in them Lord British would resurrect you.
I like the approach Spellforce 2 takes. Any member of your party can resurrect a fallen comrade, or if you happen to get the entire party wiped out you can still resurrect them at a temple for a cost in gold. They also put a timer on the resurrection process so if one of your party gets killed and you don’t resurrect them within a couple minutes due to being in a pitched battle or other circumstances then they are beyond reviving and you are forced to reload a previous save.
And then there’s the “Iron Man” mode of Diablo II – die and ITS OVER!
Xian, hmmm, you really took your knocks in TQ. I never died anywhere near that much. Then again, I relied more on magic and distance killing. It’s usually safer ;)
But do you run into the same problem with Spellforce? Or are you dying less often?
Coyote, I know Iron Man in D2 all too well. Lost my Necro just before the “big fight” at the end of Act III. Oooo, that hurt. I did go back, start a new guy, and finish with him. But after that, never again! This was a “You were careless” lesson. I didn’t keep a close eye on the health globe. Didn’t make that mistake a second time.
I was struggling with a certain optional encounter in Avernum 2 this weekend. To make a long story short, it’s set up in such a way that you have to get lucky with the enemy positioning, the PC positioning, and the enemy casters’ choice of spells to have any chance of winning without an overpowered party. If both enemy casters throw Divine Fire in the same round, the party is pretty much guaranteed to lose. It’s a tedious fight, what with all the reloading to get a favorable formation and then more reloading when the damage rolls are unkind. It finally took around a dozen attempts–real adventurer-y. Do I even need to mention that there’s no special lewt from this fight? If I hadn’t gotten lucky with my characters’ Luck rolls, it would have been the same old Empire raider trash treasure as always.
So of course after writing the above complaint, I went back to do some more tactical research at that fight and won it about 4 out of 5 times. Using essentially the same tactics every time, as all attempted variants on the basic “nuke ’em till they glow, then shoot ’em in the dark” proved seriously suboptimal.
Then I went to the nearest castle, trying to identify my best lewt, and found better lewt waiting to be (easily) stolen than I had just gotten my behind whipped a dozen times for. One of those adventuring days… No good deed goes unpunished. No evil deed gets called to account.
Verbose, yeah, some days are like that, all right. That, however, sounds more like an unbalanced setup if you have to rely so much on getting just the right rolls on both sides. And no really good stuff afterwards sure bites.
The lesson here is: never trust game designers ;)