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Original post by Oluseyi In my opinion, the only future for gaming lies in virtually eliminating performance penalties. Where a traditional game would have you fail a task - die, for instance - a "new" game would have you narrowly escape, then plot an alternative, perhaps lengthier trajectory for you to accomplish the goal, or even a lesser goal. Every complete play session would end in success/victory, but at varying costs and of varying reward. What can I say? I hate reloading.

I don't think its a question of removing performance penalties but one of creating risk by adding varying degrees of success and failure that are also interesting. The only problem with this is that it would require a very different kind of game then people are used to playing in order to be effective. Otherwise you would end up with several small prescripted outcomes or a case where the player can never fail removing all risk and challenge from the game.

I don't see what the OP is presenting to us that would be the future of gaming. Right now, all those things do exist, just not in the same game. Video games get prettier all the time. If you want a prettier game, wait a year. You'll have a prettier game.

I imagine that the future of gaming would provide us with a more immersive gameplay. Take a look at games coming out in the near future. Game designers are finally starting to "go big". Where, in the past, we played games like Warcraft and commanded a few units to take over a small map, tomorrow we will tell entire armies to take over an entire world in Supreme Commander. Another example would be (go ahead everyone... start groaning) The Sims. IMO, it's a stupid game but I think it contains a very important game mechanic. The "people", which I'll refer to as units, all interact with eachother to cause interesting situations. Imagine this on a grander scale, for example, in an RPG. Interacting with a unit could cause "ripples" of events throughout the world.

I'm not too concerned about the future of gaming. Things could always be better but there's a lot happening and we're DEFINITELY moving forward. I could care less about the representation of what the player/characters are doing. I'm more interested in what they CAN do.

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Original post by Oluseyi In my opinion, the only future for gaming lies in virtually eliminating performance penalties. Where a traditional game would have you fail a task - die, for instance - a "new" game would have you narrowly escape, then plot an alternative, perhaps lengthier trajectory for you to accomplish the goal, or even a lesser goal. Every complete play session would end in success/victory, but at varying costs and of varying reward.

I've got your back!!! [grin] I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities here.

But there are some challenging design problems, as well. One is the loss of morale from having things handed to you. I can only describe it as an experience akin to grade inflation. You succeed not because of anything to do with you, but because the system gives you a pass.

One big challenge, then, is to define what the experience of failure will be. It's difficult to figure out if failure should be fun, and if so, how to motivate the player if all things are nearly equal (varying reward, as you say). Different people are motivated different ways, so you can't take a one size fits all approach. You also must balance frustration with the burst of pleasure one gets from overcoming challenges (it can be like hunger, whetting the appetite).

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Have you tried Project Eden? It's a very-combat light, environmental puzzle heavy action-adventure game. You can't permanently die in the game, if you do, the only thing that happens is that you (in the form of 4 switchable specialists) respawn at a regeneration point. It's nice because if you get fried by an electrical floor or falling off a girder, you just lose a little progress time.

What's bad, though, is that it completely cheapens combat, and can even kill some of the immersion. My friend and I were resorting to jumping off ledges and killing characters just so we wouldn't have walk all the way back to some respawn point. Your idea of having various reward "penalties" so to speak would probably have been good for this game.

Worms Armageddon had rewards penalties in that you could attempt a mission as many times as you wanted, but you got worse medals the more times you tried it (which directly affected the awarding of special options for custom games). As the levels were fairly short and puzzley, this had the desirable effect of making players attempt levels over and over again until they got a gold medal, but still allowing them to progress to new missions.

While this works in a based puzzle game where the players success or failure in one level doesn't affect the next, it would be much more difficult to implement in any game with character or story progression. If the player can't retry a section that they didn't get the optimal outcome for, or if not getting an optimal outcome will leave them with a weaker character or not getting the best endgame cutscene, then they will just quickload. Hell, some people quickload if the rocket they fired missed. Good luck getting them to sit through "you failed to secure the weapon plans, steal a prototype of the weapon instead" if stealing the prototype means that the weapon will cost more in the game, or be weaker or some other penalty.
On the other hand, if there was no penalty to failing the primary objective (say, if stealing the prototype had the exact same game effect as stealing the plans), then there's no real motivation to go for it.

Deus Ex dealt with this by changing dialogue and giving you minor rewards depending on your actions (such as success or failure in resolving the subway hostage situation), but generally didn't have long term game consequences (a major success, such as saving your brothers life, is only referenced a couple of times later in the game).

@Wavinator:
I haven't tried Project Eden. I remember it coming out, and I remember that the final gold version looked much blander than the promise of the early "sneak previews." I passed. (As almost everyone knows, I don't actually play that many games.)

My post stemmed from my experience playing Jade Empire, which I love, but which I sometimes also hate. Early in the very first chapter, there is a battle on the beach with a couple of bad guys where I kept dying. Every time you die, you have this lengthy reload cycle, only to "respawn" right before that challenge (unless you had saved earlier and thus selected to reload something else). It took me several tries to beat that, and it was literally ten minutes (if you disregard all the dialog and reading) into the game.

I finally got the hang of things and have since progressed almost to the end of the third chapter, but I am stuck with another repeated combat failure. This time, my save point right before the encounter has me at medium health, meaning I go into a battle with eight opponents or so in less than optimal form (my follower effectively promptly collapses, leaving me to do all the dirty work, and backtracking through the large level looking for power-ups is the definition of tedium). This got me thinking, why not have the cost of failure in this battle be that I have to find another way to accomplish the larger objective (steal a flyer), albeit with the penalty that my opponent (Gao the Greater, for those who have played it) knows that I am there and probably seeking to steal a flyer?

It's not quite a case of having successes handed to you: achieving the victory condition in each encounter results in an optimal path through the game, but failing an encounter opens up an alternate path that may be longer, but is composed of a series of challenges of increasing difficulty, such that they, in effect, teach you how to overcome the challenge you originally failed.

Comments solicited.

So, you're advocating that if a player fails an area, they are diverted along another route which serves as a time punishment and brings up their skills.

Good players who lost because they happened to be on low health will be annoyed that they have to sit through another hour/ten minutes/whatever of basic, tutorial level style gameplay just because they happened to be on low health. A better fix would be to tighten up item placement in the game so that players didn't go into difficult combats on half health.

Now, what if a poor player lost through genuine lack of skill. Gao the Greater now knows where they're going (I assume this leads to a more difficult combat later?). If they don't improve on the diverted path as much as the game designer wanted, you now have a worse player fighting a tougher enemy.

If the alternate path for people who couldn't pass the combat gave concrete advantages to compensate for the players lack of skill, such as experience leading to a stat increase, then many, many players will see that as the better path, because they like seeing high stat numbers.

It sounds like the frustrations with combats that you mentioned with Jade Empire could be overcome with simply lowering the enemies difficulties if you fail a certain number of times. Withhold minor rewards that don't have a big effect on the outcome of the game if this happens, or change the dialogue to reflect that other characters aren't impressed with their performance.

Your idea also has consequences in terms of content creation: Multiple paths and all the content, encounters, and dialogue that come with them is a lot of resourses for a developer to sink into content that a player, by definition, will only see half of (or less) on their first run through.

Perhaps. But the core idea is not alternate paths or item placement; those merely spurred the core idea. The core idea is alternate definitions of "failure."

I don't doubt that that video game industry will crash, but that doesn't mean that video games themselves will disintegrate into thin air. Nintendo will most likely go out of business, but Im fairly convinced that both Sony and Microsoft will stay afloat on the next generation of game consoles. The fact is, gamers have continued to grow up and older, allowing a new generation to come in and play the new games. I've met more than my share of younger gamers who were just toddlers when I was playing the games that shaped my impression of the industry years ago, some of them never even held the sweetly designed controller of the SNES.

The industry will suffer a loss and stagnate, with more than a couple businesses closing for good, but video games won't disappear.