quote: Original post by SpittingTrashcan
As for having it as an integral part of the game, I''d rather not play such a frustrating-sounding game, especially as I really like replaying levels to find all the cool stuff in them. However, that''s just me, and if you can find others who like the idea, more power to you.

Before you cast the idea aside as overly annoying, I would like to put forward the suggestion that ALL non-MMORPG online games follow this schema, when they are based around player vs. player structures.

I argue this on the basis that, firstly, no-one ever plays their game exactly the same way, you may add one of a particular unit to see if there are any wholly incredible effects or otherwise. Secondly there is no saving and no going back within a particular game.

While this is a common direction for RTS games to follow, I will admit that oftentimes RPGs allow a healthy amount of replayability, even in multiplayer, but this is a sensical approach since in any such case, the aim is not to kill your ''opponent'' player, because you''re generally not playing against an opponent player.

With that said, I believe that the concept perfectly extendable to non-multiplayer games. X-com has been a recurring example here for me, and once again I will bring it up, because it demonstrates strategically critical random map generation, in a host of different environments. No map could ever be played twice once it had been left (there were a few exceptions, bases etc.).

I''m fully a proponent of this idea, because it introduces the concept of gaming with intensity. What if, you couldn''t even replay the same level if you restarted with a new character? I assure you that you would not skip on looking for secrets, because you would know that you couldn''t come back for them later.

It''s much less a matter of general design, as it is a matter of gross mechanical design, because the game would need to be fine-tuned to this mechanism if it used it.

Finally, I do think that this can be done with any genre of game.

George D. Filiotis
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!

there is a huge difference in have random levels in which you rman objective is to destroy other ceatures to continue the game, and an exploritory RPG where you can never save nor go back to explore the world. furthermore "savegame cheating"? last time i checked that only affects the single player expeirnce (if you allow saving for mulitplayer it should be done server side). also what stops ppl from creating programs that freeze the game and capture its state (mmeory, cpu registers etc), while slightly difficult not overly impossible at all.

cheating techniques aside (since thats not the crux of this design) if this game was free ppl would literly play it once make a mistake, die, and then wasted their time. now if you have sepcial levels with this restriction that dont effect the main storyline at all then ok. how do expect a player to get good if they play the first level on their brand new game and die quickly? what is left? 8 or 9 secnarios oops, i mean chances to play the game and hope they can get good enough so when the expainsions come out they can actually beat a scenario and learn how the game is played. stick with the idea that a player that dies restarts the scenario and have special hardcore levels that have limited play restrictions. cause a good player that beats all the secnarios (or bad player that loses early in them all)will have nothing to do and find another game to play. these players will also most likly bash the game and sales will hurt.

savegame based games dont all have ridiculously hard points. as i recall non of the ff games had ridculosly hard points, nor did hl or many of the games i played. you may just need to disallow saving during secnarios and only allow saving between scenarios.

just realize that alien vs predator had a limited save option and it was patched a month or two after release from ppl complaining about the difficulty and not being able to save. so i would highly suggest you not go down this route of no saves unless you feel you dont care about the majority of gamers and only want hardcore gamers playing yoru game.