What are your favorite death discouragement mechanics?

[Nemesysbr]

As we all know, death is a pretty common theme on videogames. In almost every game you are risking your character's virtual health in order to finally complete your objective. However, death is something that can me radically different things depending on the game. You can have games like Super Meat Boy, where death is expected and even nodded at several times during the story, to the point where taking hundreds of deaths to beat a single stage is considered a crowning achievement of perseverance, further encouraged by the simultaneous replays of every gruesome failure your character has suffered thorough the stage.

Some games even consider death a mere stepping stone into bigger and better things. Rogue legacy is a perfect example of this, where death is not only expected, but also rewarded , assuming you were able to survive enough to hoard a huge amount of gold that will only be usable by your next character.

There is also the other type of game, the one where death is a way to punish the player for his own failures, where the sole purpose of death is to make the player feel the weight of his own decisions. Such games are usually revered by hardcore fans when done well, and that much is true for Dark Souls, a game that makes you lose all your precious souls every time you bit the dust. This is also true for most of the Fire Emblem games, where letting your non-essential(Almost every single one) companions die will result in a total disposal of not only their fighting abilities, but their dialogues and cutscenes, after all, they ARE dead.

And that's my very long-winded way of saying death is a unchangeable fact of life, but not so much in video-games. So how do you like your games handling your failures? Do you have any interesting video-game death story to share?

edit: grammar

 

[Patrick]

Reminds me a lot of this video.
I think Fire Emblem had the best/worst discouragement method. I remember at some point there's a cut-scene followed by an attack and you have to be really lucky to push back the enemies and not lose someone you need.

 

[Nemesysbr]

Reminds me a lot of this video.
I think Fire Emblem had the best/worst discouragement method. I remember at some point there's a cut-scene followed by an attack and you have to be really lucky to push back the enemies and not lose someone you need.

Fire emblem probably sits at the top of the mountain when it comes to freak deaths. Every chapter feels like game of thrones and I don't blame anyone that chooses to save-scum their way through the games.

It really is a pretty punishing experience, since we are forced to treat our soldiers like people, instead of chess pieces. The positive thing about it is that one would expect the drama of sending a single archer to distract a group of enemies would not be the same you would expect from a actual battlefield, but it is on fire emblem, since it's not just about winning, its about winning and avoiding casualties at all costs. "Please, come back in one piece" is a movie trope that usually doesn't work to the fullest with tactical games, but fire emblem actually manages to give me that(in exchange of my sanity).

ps: Gonna watch the video you linked now

 

[guruproto]

Permadeath and killing off party members are my favorite mechanics. Nothing makes you more cautious and focused than the constant threat of losing everything you worked for. The consequences of permadeath gives a high-risk high-reward playstyle that is absolutely thrilling to me. It makes you sit and think about the outcomes of your decisions and makes the loot you gain and the fights you win all the more rewarding. It can grow aggravating to have to start from scratch after what seems like a cheap death, but the rush of finishing a level with a sliver of health is immeasurable.

Killing off party members is another good consequence. This is especially the case if you get to name your party members and grow attached to them. It gives the game more life and immersion when you stop thinking about the other NPCs as replacement soldiers and heal bots.

 

[Kaitara]

I find that some death penalties are so harsh it's a deterrent to playing the game at all. The Japanese dungeon crawler system, for example, in which you lose all the loot you haven't carried out of the dungeon yet (similar to Dark Souls mechanics). Fire Emblem and FF Tactics mechanic of losing units permanently on death is also a major buzzkill for me.

Then there are the deterrents that are just plain annoying. Final Fantasy XI used to have you lose something like 10% of your level's max XP when you died, which often led to deleveling during events and having to work for an hour or two to gain back your level (if you did badly enough to lose a lot of XP). And modern gaming has conditioned me to love save points, so that starting all the way back at the beginning of the game when you die in older games puts me off too, when it never used to before.

But then there's systems like Final Fantasy XIV which doesn't punish you enough, perhaps. The only thing that happens to you when you die is your gear wears out a bit and you have to stop to repair it sometimes. It doesn't feel like a punishment at all.

I guess the proper balance is very hard to strike when it comes to penalties for dying in a game. You don't want it to feel too severe, but you do want to feel like death has some consequences.

 

[ScorpionWaterfall]

I usually don't care about video games death, with two exceptions. In the old-school Nintendo games, most of the time, if you died, you went back to the beginning. When you are near the end and have been playing for hours, it is more than a little aggravating to be sent back. I also hate when a game tells you that you have died. "YOU ARE DEAD." Wow, God of War, you don't say!

 

[Honeymoon]

I like perma-deaths the most, but ONLY when it adds to the story of the game. Normal deaths that you get from failing to kill a certain monster or boss is fine and expected and that's the standard one for every game with a fighting system, so that's fine. But REAL deaths? As in deaths of an NPC or your character's friends? I need them to add to the story.

This is why I like games where you can pick what to say and what to do. One even leads to the other. Sometimes you pick the wrong option and one or more of your friends end up dying. And that's fine, because the game is giving you a lesson. It's also especially great because it's a balanced mix of punishment and [a lesson].

 

[giovanniiiii]

In Monster Hunter, dying is punished by reducing the quest reward by 1/3 which will be discouraging and often I just restart the quest especially if I go on the quest for the reward money alone. In the 3rd death during a hunt, the hunt becomes a failure and you will be returned to town. This kind of punishment is light compared to Dark Souls' reduced hp when dying repeatedly.

 

[JaiGuru]

Everything in balance, of course, but that said I do like my failures to have a consequence. I am deeply unimpressed with the modern "no punishment" ethos of game design that has become entrenched in the industry. "Fun" is a hard concept to peg in a succinct way, but reasonably there must be challenge for fun to exist. Challenge is a product of risk, and what risk can there be if there are no consequences for failure? Nintendo has become a prime offender here. I almost never play a modern Mario game where I don't have 100 lives by the time I reach world 2 and it just saps all the fun right out of it. I can die and die and die and die and it simply doesn't matter. Death ceases to be a mechanic at that point. Why even have the death scene or hits in the first place, then? Old Mario games punished you for repeated failures, making you start over when you died. They were not "Contra hard", but they still had a meaningful challenge that you had to overcome. I still go back to those games on occasion, but I'm fairly certain I'll never replay even a single one of the "New Super Mario Bros" series specifically because they're "you can't lose" propositions.

Can a title like that even really be called a game by the strict definition of the word?

 

[WarVet]

I belive that death in video games should be portrayed as realistic as possible. I know that it is a video game but i apprciate the realism. This reminds me of Dead Space. The death scenes punishes you for being careless and the scenes are gruesome.

 

[OursIsTheFury]

Hardcore Mode in Diablo 2 basically means that death = game over. No more accidentally dying because you got greedy, no more lame dying like you needed to go to a trip to town but you ran out of portals. It's an awesome feeling but also it gets tiring, as the higher difficulties really make the HP of opponents incredibly high, while reducing your damage output a lot. It's like trying to hit a wall with a sponge, so it's gonna take a while of repetitive mouse clicking to beat enemies at times.

 

[Deathisue]

The Dark Souls saga has one of the best systems of punishment for me, a game where we will die again and again where to survive is everything, but even so we will not be able to stop our inevitable destiny, a game where if you die you will lose each and every one of your souls, something that adds pressure to it, I love it and even with that it motivates me to follow.

 

[Aitherion]

In the Borderlands franchise, when you die, you just respawn at one of the New-U stations, which doesn't make sense in some cases. In the second game, Jack actually pays you to kill yourself, and does it, implying that he knows you're a part of the Hyperion New-U system. It makes you wonder why he wouldn't just disconnect you from it. Of course the player needs that system for when they die, but logically, Jack could just take you off the system then kill you.

 

[user238]

The best?

You lose all your stuff. That usually makes it pretty clear that no one wants to die, because no one wants to be lose all the stuff that they worked really hard for. I don't think that it's right for someone to just kill their character, hardcore mode is just over the top, for my tastes anyways. Still though, I can see the attraction for it.

 

[OursIsTheFury]

I belive that death in video games should be portrayed as realistic as possible. I know that it is a video game but i apprciate the realism. This reminds me of Dead Space. The death scenes punishes you for being careless and the scenes are gruesome.

If you want realism, dying in games should mean it's permanent game over and you have to start a new game. Far too many times gamers voluntarily died if they made a mistake, or to make it easier to cheat the system by removing enemies or refreshing the ammo count. If you want to be as realistic as possible, and if you want to play like your life defended on it, you should play where if you die, you have to start a new game and start fresh. Nothing will make you more careful (and paranoid) when playing.

 

[WarVet]

If you want realism, dying in games should mean it's permanent game over and you have to start a new game. Far too many times gamers voluntarily died if they made a mistake, or to make it easier to cheat the system by removing enemies or refreshing the ammo count. If you want to be as realistic as possible, and if you want to play like your life defended on it, you should play where if you die, you have to start a new game and start fresh. Nothing will make you more careful (and paranoid) when playing.

Oh yeah, i appreciate this. Or rather I appreciate this to an extent. There was this Amnesia DLC (Justine I think it was called) where you had to go through three stages and you couldn't die or you'd have to start all over again. A worthy shot at realism though I have to admit I did lose a bit of my sanity there haha.

 

[konomi]

uuuggghhh I HATE permadeath in Fire Emblem!! I refuse to let any of my characters die, so I end up resetting over and over. For me, it just gets frustrating & makes the game not fun at all. If it was 100% about skill, or 100% within the control of the player, it wouldn't be quite so annoying. But when you have a luck stat, then you sometimes die/lose characters due to no fault of your own, and that gets super frustrating when you're already having trouble. On easier difficulties permadeath is fun, cause it motivates you to try harder instead of just barely scraping by. But on the hardest difficulty it's just...torture

 

[OursIsTheFury]

uuuggghhh I HATE permadeath in Fire Emblem!! I refuse to let any of my characters die, so I end up resetting over and over. For me, it just gets frustrating & makes the game not fun at all. If it was 100% about skill, or 100% within the control of the player, it wouldn't be quite so annoying. But when you have a luck stat, then you sometimes die/lose characters due to no fault of your own, and that gets super frustrating when you're already having trouble. On easier difficulties permadeath is fun, cause it motivates you to try harder instead of just barely scraping by. But on the hardest difficulty it's just...torture

Yeah, no death runs can be quite the pain. You're not enjoying yourself as most of the time you're being so paranoid about dying, while the other half involves you restarting the game because you made a mistake and died. It's not fun because you'll be so sick of the same starting area, dialogue, quests, etc. that you will really hate the game's starting point, only to die and do it all over again. No thanks.

 

[giovanniiiii]

Has anyone else mentioned the death punishment for Minecraft? If you die outside of hardcore mode, you lose all your experience and ALL YOUR ITEMS in your inventory, including that sturdy armor you have worked on so hard to enchant. If you die in hardcore mode though, your world will get deleted or if the server is not yours, you cannot log in anymore in the server.