Wouldn't that just give me the added task of backing up my game files after every session? Might as well just let me save.

two modes of expert of Diablo and commonness are quite good!Can love according to the player to same game of play different form!
If the Castlevania can make in to liked thus!I think very good

I don't know if this has been stated earlier, but IMHO to would be best to give player a chance of choice - you like risk, choose "hardcore" - after death, you can't load saved game, you are permanently dead.
If you don't like wasting X hours of game in situation, when you died just because your little sister run into room while you were fighting with something weak - choose "normal". That way, game could theoretically fit into tastes of both groups.

Just like it was in Diablo II :-)


EDIT: I didn't see Minornan's message yet when I was clicking on Replay button :-)

It's more about what the player takes away from the game than whether the game is in an entirely different world (although redundancy can be very annoying). In skill-based games, the player learns and develops as a skilled game player- initially, their characters are better because they, the players, are better at the game- this can allow the players to speed through areas they spent hours on previously without any game play mechanics to enforce accelerated play. That prospect, however, does require games highly oriented around player skill and strategy as opposed to level grinding (which is tedious and boring anyway as far as I'm concerned).

In the end, trying to force permadeath on players in a single player game, as coderx75 so aptly noted, would merely be a hassle for any moderately clever gamer- there's no good way you can prevent them from reverting to a previous state if they want to avoid permadeath. Well, I take that back, there is one way- make dying less of a hassle than 'cheating'- design your game around permadeath as its core mechanic, and focus on non-linear game play; if you don't make them do the same things twice in the same way, and don't force them to climb back up a level progression ladder, then you will have created a viable permadeath aspect in your game.

So if the strategy in your game is quite undiluted by the tedium of character level progression, and you've designed it for re-playability, I don't think you'll have any problems with permadeath (but achieving those things and keeping the game fun and challenging could prove difficult in itself).

Grim, what do you mean by: "And remember that no-death is permadeath. If you can't die, you have permadeath in your game, whether you wanted it or not." That doesn't seem to make sense to me; the very notion of permadeath is loosing your game state- a progression through the game that isn't guaranteed continuous- lack of any death seems to be the very opposite.

A few games have done this. Most noticably Diablo II's hardcore mode. You can get around it by backing up your character's save file, though. I like the idea, death should have a penalty.

Quote:

Original post by BioMors In skill-based games, the player learns and develops as a skilled game player- initially, their characters are better because they, the players, are better at the game- this can allow the players to speed through areas they spent hours on previously without any game play mechanics to enforce accelerated play. That prospect, however, does require games highly oriented around player skill and strategy as opposed to level grinding (which is tedious and boring anyway as far as I'm concerned).

Define "skill-based games". Personally I immediately though of a system where character classes and character levels were replaced by character skills and learning, and still the player skills are irrelevant (as it is really the character skills the success in the game is based on). If you mean games that are based on the player skills only (as you seem to), then you are moving away from the concept of having a separate character in the game — I'll refrain from using the term RPG here, as it doesn't necessarily imply this, depending on how you see the concept. If all you do is based on player skills and not on character skills or attributes, there'll be no character development (because any development would be futile). You might argue that there is still character development in the plot and getting equipment, but inventory management is not character development and plot development is implicit.

I'm not saying that it is a bad solution per se, but you are changing the game type. It's no longer character-oriented. Personally I like character-oriented games more, so this solution could just make me ignore the game completely and make me go back to play Angband.

I don't think level grinding is tedious inherently. Well, yes, level grinding maybe, but a class/level-based character development doesn't need to. If you want to accelerate the early game, why not just make the current level 19283 the actual level 1? No one is forcing you to make all characters start at the level of a handicapped amoeba, as usually in action RPGs.

Quote:

In the end, trying to force permadeath on players in a single player game, as coderx75 so aptly noted, would merely be a hassle for any moderately clever gamer- there's no good way you can prevent them from reverting to a previous state if they want to avoid permadeath.

You could do all sort of nasty things such as encrypting the saves and putting them intertwined in the middle of the game data, keeping records on what saves have been already loaded and not loading them again, etc. While it is true that you can almost always find a way to bypass this system (one exception given in the very end of the post, another at the end of the paragraph), it's not necessarily solved as simply as just backing up the saves. It can be made arbitrarily difficult, and at some point the players just don't want to waste the time in order to bypass the system. Sure, it'd be a hassle, but if you make it annoying enough, they won't do it. After all, you're not supposed to do it. If I really wanted to enforce permadeath, I could make it so that you can't save at all. And you wouldn't like that, would you? So having that one save is really a luxury. (Also, as coderx75 demonstrates, the one save is really tempting people to move on the dark side of savescumming. One save to rule them all, one save to find them. One save to bring them all and in the darkess bind them.)

Quote:

Well, I take that back, there is one way- make dying less of a hassle than 'cheating'- design your game around permadeath as its core mechanic, and focus on non-linear game play; if you don't make them do the same things twice in the same way, and don't force them to climb back up a level progression ladder, then you will have created a viable permadeath aspect in your game.

I'd say you're on the right track here, but throwing character development into the waste basket? What I mean is, the whole post seems to imply that you should just forget about the concept of having a separate character and making the whole game player-oriented and based on the skills of the player? It's a completely different game then. What if I want both permadeath and a character-oriented system.

Even after that I'd say that you speak words of wisdom (provitionally). If you have permadeath, you must build the whole design around that concept. Having a fixed game world won't do, as players get bored after seeing the same world a hundred times even if the items they get or npcs they meet are randomized. A permadeath game can't be about a pre-written plot (well, it can, but it won't be as much fun), a permadeath game is about exploration. There is a vast, fascinating world out there and you have the possibility to explore it. If you die (as a character and not as a player, hopefully), you'll have yet another world to explore. And I don't just mean walking about in the wilderness, but meeting interesting characters, learning about the local politics etc (let it be noted that I'm by no means saying that generating this kind of world is trivial). Do remember that permadeath is not just a "feature". It is an integral rule of the game and needs to be balanced. Not being able to walk through walls is another such rule, yet I hear no one wailing "why, O why do we have perma-solid walls?"

And the gameplay shouldn't be based on the assumption that the player finds getting levels rewarding alone. The levels aren't the main point, they're just a tool. You see, I do agree with the fact that just running about slaying orcs is not a particulary exciting way of getting levels, but that doesn't mean you have to get rid of the concept of having levels (or something similar; having the game be focused on character skills still has a level system, it's just much more freeform). Make character development more interesting and in-game (instead of just counting points from kills and then saying "Welcome to level 23531."), e.g. instead of just adding a few spells into the user interface, have the player's character report to the local mages' guild and the guildmaster will teach the spells to him. I know it's basically the very same thing, but it would be in-game and not as obvious and annoying.

Quote:

So if the strategy in your game is quite undiluted by the tedium of character level progression, and you've designed it for re-playability, I don't think you'll have any problems with permadeath (but achieving those things and keeping the game fun and challenging could prove difficult in itself).

I'm all for replayability, but it is not mutually exclusive to character development (as in getting levels etc.). Permadeath isn't a viable choice for all games, and for some it is a must. Tetris would be boring if it hadn't permadeath. The Secret of the Monkey Island would be a chore to play if it did have permadeath. Replayability is truly the key word here.

Quote:

Grim, what do you mean by: "And remember that no-death is permadeath. If you can't die, you have permadeath in your game, whether you wanted it or not." That doesn't seem to make sense to me; the very notion of permadeath is loosing your game state- a progression through the game that isn't guaranteed continuous- lack of any death seems to be the very opposite.

It was just pedantry... From a logical point of view it is true. Permadeath means permanent death. Assuming that you can't die, every time you die it is permanent. Every time you die, the savefiles are removed and you can never load them again. It's the kind of "for all x: if x is in the empty set, f(x) is true." The statement is true, because there are no elements in the empty set, so x belonging in the empty set is always false. And statements where false implies something are true. Having no death at all is actually having permadeath and it is the ultimate way to force permadeath, because you can't bypass it in any way. [grin]

Well, after my brain stops spinning from that last paragraph I'll try to make sense of it ;)

The player can always find ways around not saving- i.e. saving the game state by taking a snapshot of the program's state and saving that. Most emulations have a save state option (be it platform or OS emulation)- I always found that convenient when playing a game that makes saving difficult, or has no pause feature, and I have to go right away. Even if they can't save characters, they can still save if they're clever, and it's not really all that much effort to do it save for initially setting the game up in some sort of emulated OS or finding another way to save the state more practically. The only sure way to prevent them from saving is make it a game playable only while connected to the net, and store their basic character stats on a server somewhere, where you also do some key game rules so they can't just hack the game or set up a mock server.

Granted, it may be a lot of effort, but if it's more effort to play through the game again, people will do it (I know I would, either that or stop playing the game).

That said, I'm definitely not against permadeath- in fact I'm implementing it in my project. The entire game, however, is designed around and with that. It is a player skill based game, but does have strong character progression and change.

I do agree somewhat on the idea that the total lack of character progression could cause a game to stop being an RPG, but there are other things than raw power a character can become. For example, there's always the good and evil spectrum- your characters' very alignment may vary, which in itself provides a massive well of replayability. Think outside the box, or in the very least in the corrugations; there are many more aspects to character development than their ability to kick ass. You can most definitely have your character oriented cake and kill it too, but it requires a strongly character oriented game design.

Quote:

Original post by BioMors The player can always find ways around not saving- i.e. saving the game state by taking a snapshot of the program's state and saving that. Most emulations have a save state option (be it platform or OS emulation)- I always found that convenient when playing a game that makes saving difficult, or has no pause feature, and I have to go right away. Even if they can't save characters, they can still save if they're clever, and it's not really all that much effort to do it save for initially setting the game up in some sort of emulated OS or finding another way to save the state more practically. The only sure way to prevent them from saving is make it a game playable only while connected to the net, and store their basic character stats on a server somewhere, where you also do some key game rules so they can't just hack the game or set up a mock server.

You are correct in that forcing permadeath can be next to impossible (unless you have no death at all, which was proven to be the ultimate way to do it [rolleyes]), but making it annoying is by all means possible. Besides, any designer who deliberately makes saving impossible for the sake of permadeath is just unnecessarily cruel. You'll still want to pause the game every now and then, especially if the game is supposed to take days to complete. The problem is that the only way to truly save the game state for the purposes of taking a long pause from the game (in a similar sense to just pressing the pause key) is to save the game state as it is. This save system can be abused for other purposes, but just because you can abuse the system doesn't mean it should be easy to abuse it. I'm not against saving or even taking backups from the saves, but coderx75's comment was really of the kind "Wouldn't that just give me the added task of hex-editing my game files before every session to give me millions of cash? Might as well just let me have infinite money." If you really want to cheat (take backups), then you'll have to find your own means to do it. I'm not stopping you. I mean no offence to coderx75 with this, I am merely trying to emphasize the point of view that permadeath is a rule, and not just a feature.

Quote:

I do agree somewhat on the idea that the total lack of character progression could cause a game to stop being an RPG, but there are other things than raw power a character can become. For example, there's always the good and evil spectrum- your characters' very alignment may vary, which in itself provides a massive well of replayability. Think outside the box, or in the very least in the corrugations; there are many more aspects to character development than their ability to kick ass. You can most definitely have your character oriented cake and kill it too, but it requires a strongly character oriented game design.

I'm not against emphasizing the player skills — I've always considered that actual role-playing is something that happens in the mind of the player and not in the game mechanics. Besides, the player skills are needed at some point or otherwise you'll get yet another Progress Quest. However, you must draw the line at some point and that point will define whether you game is rather an action game or a tactical game. Also, if the exemplary alignment was to have any notable in-game effect in actual story of the game and it was possible for it to change (e.g. a noble paladin butchering the whole order of the saintly monks would probably not retain his noble aligment), you'd need to store it somewhere in order to determine it whenever it has an effect on the story. Thus it would be much like a character skill — in order to get it to a certain value, you might need to go through a lot of work and the permanent death would make all that work go to waste (in a sense). All in-game character development has the same, unfortunate aspect.

For the sake of being malicious let it be said that I don't really believe that any true axis of good vs. evil even exists, and even if it did, it wouldn't really be an axis, but rather a mystical nonmetric space of very high dimension or something like that. But once again I drift way beyond the realm of the thread subject, so maybe I'll better stop...

"Besides, any designer who deliberately makes saving impossible for the sake of permadeath is just unnecessarily cruel."

Granted, I'll agree on that point. Not only is it not completely possible, it's just annoying and inconsiderate of players' time if they will be forced to repeat something they don't wish to.

"Wouldn't that just give me the added task of hex-editing my game files before every session to give me millions of cash? Might as well just let me have infinite money."

Haha! Very true. Well, if the method of obtaining money is as tedious as repeating a level, it would. In my opinion, the only worth while progression is that which eliminates tedium to the greatest extent possible- it's not worth killing hordes of monsters continuously when there's really no thought involved- rather than forcing the player to spend hours doing that to accumulate money, the designer should just provide the money needed. When designers make poor decisions and impose tedium upon the players it will always encourage many of them to cheat.

"I am merely trying to emphasize the point of view that permadeath is a rule, and not just a feature."

I see your point, but if a game rule is inherently bad because it doesn't fit well into the overall design, it will seem to prove necessary to cheat a little to make the game fun again. The only other option might be to not play at all.

"For the sake of being malicious let it be said that I don't really believe that any true axis of good vs. evil even exists, and even if it did, it wouldn't really be an axis, but rather a mystical nonmetric space of very high dimension or something like that."

I agree completely, I'm a relativist, I was just using that for the sake of argument; as an example that there can be more to character development than the linear progression of becoming more powerful.

What I meant to express by these alternate means of character development is that the player needn't always feel inclined to return to the same direction he or she once took- with power it's generally a one way thing, but with character development it's free. If I'm making my character very evil, and he/she dies, I may choose to make a very good character the next time and continue exploring the game play that way. Furthermore, in a non diametric morality scale (as you and I both realize is the case), one may choose any of an (apparently) infinite number of moral directions to take, vastly adapting the character concept each time.
For me, a game is more about exploring the world and the characters than becoming powerful and killing stuff more efficiently. I want to test reactions of the environment to my actions. I want to save a town and burn it down- do things we cannot do in our own world, and even do thing that we can, observing the difference in reaction to get a better grasp on the world I am experiencing.

This assumes, of course, that the story is rather non-linear,

"if the exemplary alignment was to have any notable in-game effect..."

There's doesn't necessarily have to be an exemplary alignment, merely different ones. Creating more and more replay value with varied reactions in the world without actually re-generating the entire world every time you load up the game. It's a potentially better method because the player becomes more and more familiar with the world- exploring it reaches an entirely different level.

Quote:

Original post by BioMors "Besides, any designer who deliberately makes saving impossible for the sake of permadeath is just unnecessarily cruel." Granted, I'll agree on that point. Not only is it not completely possible, it's just annoying and inconsiderate of players' time if they will be forced to repeat something they don't wish to.

Actually I just realized what I typed earlier and I see I didn't type it as precisely as I really wanted to... While the statement I made above is not completely different from what I meant, I really meant "not allowing the player to save for the sake of taking a pause (as in having just one save and that's it) just in a desperate attempt to enforce permadeath is unnecessarily cruel." Not allowing several saves etc. is ok in my book — the purpose of the save is to save the status so that you can continue later. Preparing for the future should be an in-game action, and saving is far from being in-game; it is not the character who saves, but the player. Thus using the traditional save game option for preparing for the future (e.g. quicksaving before every enemy or so...) is like having to travel all the way to the Guild of Resolution Changing Knights just to change the resolution used by the game or using your mana for casting the "Increase Music Volume" spell. Mixing in-game elements with player-related stuff on this level is not very sensible.

Still, in a game where the story is deterministic for the most part (and dying would mean a lot of repetition), permadeath is not really a viable option to begin with. That still doesn't mean saving is a must — the idea I'm trying to advocate once again is really the fact that saving for the purpose of being prepared (i.e. saving makes it safe to do whatever, since you can always reload) should be replaced with an in-game "save" which is something the character does (e.g. waypoints in Diablo II can be seen like such an element; the beauty of the thing is that it has a logical, causal reason to work in the game world unlike traditional saving), but still you should always have the save feature for taking a pause. You shouldn't "punish" (i.e. reset the game world to a degree as in Diablo II) the character if the player needs to go to work for a while, but there's nothing wrong with "punishing" the character if the idea is just to get a safety-net for the character in future in-game efforts.

I'm sorry if my rambling of saving is starting to annoy those who follow the thread, but I just wanted to make a point of levels of abstraction once again...

Quote:

"Wouldn't that just give me the added task of hex-editing my game files before every session to give me millions of cash? Might as well just let me have infinite money." Haha! Very true. Well, if the method of obtaining money is as tedious as repeating a level, it would. In my opinion, the only worth while progression is that which eliminates tedium to the greatest extent possible- it's not worth killing hordes of monsters continuously when there's really no thought involved- rather than forcing the player to spend hours doing that to accumulate money, the designer should just provide the money needed. When designers make poor decisions and impose tedium upon the players it will always encourage many of them to cheat. "I am merely trying to emphasize the point of view that permadeath is a rule, and not just a feature." I see your point, but if a game rule is inherently bad because it doesn't fit well into the overall design, it will seem to prove necessary to cheat a little to make the game fun again. The only other option might be to not play at all.

I agree wholeheartedly — this has been my point all along. Game rules aren't supposed to be there to make life difficult and annoying. Just dropping permadeath in like Diablo II does is not the proper way to introduce the concept. Permadeath is a very delicate concept that needs careful balancing in order to make the game fair and entertaining, but just because permadeath has been taken too lightly in some cases doesn't make it inherently a bad game rule. As you said yourself earlier on, it is more important to make the original game concept fun with permadeath than to just put it in at the last moment and hope no one minds that the game just become a chore. Permadeath in that sense is a fundamental (if not the fundamental) concept that defines the rest of the design philosophy.

Quote:

"For the sake of being malicious let it be said that I don't really believe that any true axis of good vs. evil even exists, and even if it did, it wouldn't really be an axis, but rather a mystical nonmetric space of very high dimension or something like that." I agree completely, I'm a relativist, I was just using that for the sake of argument; as an example that there can be more to character development than the linear progression of becoming more powerful. What I meant to express by these alternate means of character development is that the player needn't always feel inclined to return to the same direction he or she once took- with power it's generally a one way thing, but with character development it's free. If I'm making my character very evil, and he/she dies, I may choose to make a very good character the next time and continue exploring the game play that way. Furthermore, in a non diametric morality scale (as you and I both realize is the case), one may choose any of an (apparently) infinite number of moral directions to take, vastly adapting the character concept each time. For me, a game is more about exploring the world and the characters than becoming powerful and killing stuff more efficiently. I want to test reactions of the environment to my actions. I want to save a town and burn it down- do things we cannot do in our own world, and even do thing that we can, observing the difference in reaction to get a better grasp on the world I am experiencing. This assumes, of course, that the story is rather non-linear, "if the exemplary alignment was to have any notable in-game effect..." There's doesn't necessarily have to be an exemplary alignment, merely different ones. Creating more and more replay value with varied reactions in the world without actually re-generating the entire world every time you load up the game. It's a potentially better method because the player becomes more and more familiar with the world- exploring it reaches an entirely different level.

I too value the exploratory possibilities in a game much more than conflict and agree in the sense that sometimes it is fun to explore the same world from a different point of view. Choosing a different kind of character can help you understand the game world better. Still, a similar argument could be had in the sense that what if it was not the world you wanted to see from different points of view but the character? Having the same character concept in different environments can be neat too. My point here is that while you are correct in the sense that there are a whole lot of ways to incorporate replayability, but the one thing I've started to miss is random world generation (the ironic bit here is that the thread was originally about strategy games and they usually have random maps...). It's really a question of what do you really expect from the game.

Also, regenerating the world keeps up the element of surprise. After a few games, you'll know you way around the map all too well and it becomes a chore to move from place to place. If you always start at the same location it will become monotonous to restart no matter how non-linear the rest of the story is. Personally I find it tiring to play in the same world over and over again — keeping in mind the fact that I would still like to play some of the worlds several times if there was many — but basically I prefer several short-span games to a long overly epic one, and usually several games with a same kind of character. Having a random world but with the option to play any given world several times could be a great solution in the sense that it both allows you to change the world or to explore it with different characters.