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Failure as a positive game mechanism?

Kaucukovnik

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Mar 26, 2009
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I'd just like to share some ideas going through my head lately and hear what others can say about them.

If you read a book or watch a film, the plot is moving ahead in an interesting way not only through the characters making the right decisions and winning conflists, but as well through error and failure, and different degrees of success/failure.
Every single CRPG is dumbed down compared to this. You didn't accomplish something the way you wanted? Then it's either pre-scripted (thus inevitable) or you did something wrong and probably should reload in order to enjoy the game further.

What I mean is that for example a combat does not necessarily end with either side being dead. The enemy can lose and beg you to let him live. You can lose and do the same. Retreat is possible. And every option should let you benefit somehow so that it is a valid option, not a failure. I mean, you encountered a strong enemy and you managed to stay alive. Killed him? Your combat skill is getting better for sure. Lost but convinced the opponent to let you live? Not only that you can fight better thanks to the experience (not meant as XP), but also your diplomatic skills got some practice.

In similar way screwing a quest could offer you some interesting possibilities later. And the game should assure you in some subtle way that you are getting somewhere, for example some NPC could say that the person you failed to rescue didn't deserve to live anyway in his opinion.

The best thing will be an example. Imagine you are playing a game based on Lord of the Rings. Frodo, your character, is starting a combat with Gollum due to his treacherous nature. A succes in this conflict is defeating him so that he ends up captured or dead - that's what you are trying to accomplish by fighting him. But if he manages to get away, in the end of the quest he becomes helpful. And of course the game should make you aware that either your victory or his withdrawal is possible - maybe through previous battles with insignificant foes, where they also fled sometimes in the same manner.

Maybe that's the key to why so many films and books adapted to games result so poorly. You don't play the twists, you are given them through the pre-scripted story, so that the story feels very artificial. It is the same for games without a model, it's just not that obvious.

Ultimately I'd like to see a game (ideally made by me, of course :)) where the events wouldn't be just waiting for the player to make them happen the right way - if you didn't complete a quest, someone else (NPC) could do it, for example. It would be immensely hard to script so many possibilities, but the game world would really come alive.

On the other hand, I'm afraid that the player could feel very unsure and confused. We are too much accustomed to the game expecting optimal gameplay from us.

Do you think such a game would be enjoyable?
 

Darth Roxor

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Kaucukovnik said:
if you didn't complete a quest, someone else (NPC) could do it, for example.

Age of Decadence is said to have a similar design (when you leave town for a longer while, all quests you didn't do get 'autodone' with 'default' outcomes).

Apart from that, I generally agree with what you said. In today's mainstream gaming, it would seem that the developers are very keen on never showing you a 'GAME OVER' screen, and while the idea alone is stupid as fuck, expanding on it would be great. So, you botched one of the more important lines of the main quest? Why not let it open new possibilities instead of just forcing you to reload or putting you at the 'last checkpoint'?
 

thesheeep

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Darth Roxor said:
Why not let it open new possibilities instead of just forcing you to reload or putting you at the 'last checkpoint'?

Because game development actually is based on budgets?
As much as I'd love to see a AAA title doing that, I doubt that such a thing will ever exist there.

The only teams capable of doing stuff like that are indie game developers and "hobby" teams, since they usually don't have such harsh deadlines while also not being forced to implement uber graphics and other stuff mandatory for mass market titles.

So, good idea? Yeah.
Possible? Yeah.
But don't expect any of those ideas in games developed by big teams ;)
 

Shiny

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PST had a great mechanic that forced you to "die" in order to continue progressing in the game, and what made this so spectacular is that often our single driving purpose in ANY game, nevermind RPG's, is to stay alive. By making your failure to keep your character alive part of the character progression, it allowed you to understand and empathize with your character more completely than if they'd taken the "safe" road.
 

racofer

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GAME OVER text in games is known to cause depression, inferiority complex, broken gamepads/keyboards/tvs/monitors and suicide among our youth, and therefore was abolished from any kind of digital entertainment systems as of the Next-Gen Proposition was approved.
 

Forest Dweller

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I recall in Deus Ex there were a couple of moments where you could fail an objective and the game would continue.

In the Fallouts you could certainly fail quests.

As for the combat thing, in Gothic 1 and 2 if you defeat an opponent you would then have to do a "finishing move" in order to kill him. Likewise a lot of times people wouldn't kill you either, just rob you once they defeat you. Technically the game would say you got "beat up" if that happened, which is retarded if swords were used.
 

Shiny

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Dicksmoker said:
I recall in Deus Ex there were a couple of moments where you could fail an objective and the game would continue.

If I recall correctly, in order to finish Deus Ex, you had to complete one task but fail in two others? Hoora for choices and consequences... of course that was all fucked up by the aborted deformed fetus that was invisible war.
 

Kraszu

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Kaucukovnik said:
On the other hand, I'm afraid that the player could feel very unsure and confused. We are too much accustomed to the game expecting optimal gameplay from us.

Do you think such a game would be enjoyable?

Yes but I think that expectations are the problem, player could be unsure if he can still complete game becouse the game would work differently then what he knows.

Maybe make tutorial that explain how the game works, rather then this press w to go forward nonsense that is useless.
 

Kraszu

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BearBomber said:
Kraszu said:
BearBomber said:
But most players will usually just reload, so why bother?

Make it save and quit only.

People will copy savegames to protect their charactersfrom permadeath.

Game don't necessery has to ave permadeath just some significant cost for dying + optional hardcore mode.
 

John Yossarian

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But removing save and reload does nothing to address the fact that the players still want to reload.

You could argue that they only want to reload because games have up to that point make success (and its repercussions) more entertaining than failure, while in "this" game both are just as entertaining so players won't want to reload a little after the failure. However, save and reload are also useful for other stuff, like trying different strategies without having to replay the entire game in the exact same way up to that point, or to keep attempting a challenge, not because you don't want to fail, but because you want to improve your skill (like replaying a fight in JA2).

So, how about just teaching the player, in the beginning of the game, that failure is not less entertaining, by say, making sure he can't possibly succeed at all of his initial quests? Then depending on which quests he succeeds/fails at, the gameworld will treat the PC this way or that.
 

DraQ

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Kaucukovnik said:
Ultimately I'd like to see a game (ideally made by me, of course :)) where the events wouldn't be just waiting for the player to make them happen the right way - if you didn't complete a quest, someone else (NPC) could do it, for example.
FFE did this in 1995.

As for the entirety of the OP:

HEAVAN!
 

DraQ

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John Yossarian said:
So, how about just teaching the player, in the beginning of the game, that failure is not less entertaining, by say, making sure he can't possibly succeed at all of his initial quests? Then depending on which quests he succeeds/fails at, the gameworld will treat the PC this way or that.
Sounds like a plan.
 

Kaucukovnik

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DraQ said:
John Yossarian said:
So, how about just teaching the player, in the beginning of the game, that failure is not less entertaining, by say, making sure he can't possibly succeed at all of his initial quests? Then depending on which quests he succeeds/fails at, the gameworld will treat the PC this way or that.
Sounds like a plan.

Agreed. If the player percieved a non-fatal failure as an interesting way to direct the character and/or the story, then the impossibility to complete everything during a single game wouldn't be an issue. Instead of simple quantifiable "how much" of the content was "done", this would be about quality - HOW, in what manner things are handled by the player.

Also many cheap tactics wouldn't needed to be prohibited - they would be incorporated in the gameplay, instead of forcing the player to do things in a way they were originally meant to be done. This seems also more logical to me. If you are hired to kill some bandits, the requirement isn't to prove that you are able to beat them, but to make them dead, so that they stop robbing travellers. And the way you do it is your decision.
Well, excluding obvious bugs - clipping errors and such.


EDIT: And you are right that removing the possibility to save/reload wouldn't be any solution, because if the need to reload remained, the player would become frustrated.
 

Rosh

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I like this topic, as it has always been a consideration of mine in terms of design. Theoretically in a CRPG, there should be no "right" or "wrong" way of playthrough.

Please do continue.
 

lightbane

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well, I don't know if it counts but in Deus Ex there's the hostage mission that you can purposely fail by stating "hostages are an acceptable casuality" and triggering the explosives, the game continues despite this. Later then there's the mission that you have to protect the daughter of a certain guy, if she dies the game does not end.
 

Rosh

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DraQ said:
In practice "wrong" should be reducible to protagonist's existence failure and maybe some random royal fuck-ups on part of the player.

Oh, I do agree. But this is where it gets fun.

Resolution of the royal fuck-up. A GAME OVER screen is just too little to be expected lately. If anything, show what kind of impact the player's actions had thus far up until their demise. The Vault Dweller might have offered hope for the inhabitants of Shady Sands by eradicating the raiders, but when the Vault Dweller sold out their Vault to the Lieutenant, Shady Sands was quickly taken as an afterthought. Gizmo, once proud owner of a casino, remains the proud owner of that casino as well as the rest of the super-mutants' R&R base.

Something like that for each of the areas the player had influenced.

What I also like to do is offer gameplay that is determined by fuck-ups. Perhaps getting caught by the police would in turn introduce you to a character you wouldn't have otherwise met if you simply had the entire town go aggro? Insulting the right person might in turn lead to another liking you far, far better, which would in turn lead to other possibilities.

Yes, I've been designing against min-maxing, in particular against cheating of setting all skills to max. Some places, it might help to fail a check, or purposefully choose to fail a check (if the skill is high enough it might give this option as well).

For another example, consider a security guard near a locked door. If you walked up to him and initially asked to be let in, the speech option to persuade would be initially higher than in the following example. Going up to the door and standing for the few seconds you need to set your Ultra-Hack 3000 Pro to work on the lock is also out of the question. If you walked up to the door as if you belonged there, and tried to use it (causing a denied beep and red light on the reader to flash), the security guard would most likely think the door is having a malfunction (like it has been all week) and forgets who besides security is allowed to enter. After a mild speech check to persuade him to let you in, he zips his card and lets you on through. Depending on how competent you want to have him, he could even take a name to later verify, which might bite the player in the ass if they allow it to get back to them. The initial check, to block against a bit of min-maxing, would be the guard also discreetly takes a picture of the player, as they were already initially more untrusting of someone who didn't already look like they belonged there by trying their personnel card on the door.

And so, having a high speech skill and using it from the start might not be such a good idea.

Unless a player had a list of how to get through all of this, cheating might not be such a beneficial thing compared to actually playing the game.

Please do continue.
This.

I so rarely find worthwhile discussion on forums lately, that doesn't reduce down into playing with trolls and irking some fanboy (and particularly these forums), that really befits my time spent on forums. Right now I should be optimizing code and adding another layer into the AI algorithms, but I find the occasional 15 minute break to span into something longer. I'd rather it be spent discussing RPG design.
 

John Yossarian

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Rosh said:
For another example, consider a security guard near a locked door. If you walked up to him and initially asked to be let in, the speech option to persuade would be initially higher than in the following example. Going up to the door and standing for the few seconds you need to set your Ultra-Hack 3000 Pro to work on the lock is also out of the question. If you walked up to the door as if you belonged there, and tried to use it (causing a denied beep and red light on the reader to flash), the security guard would most likely think the door is having a malfunction (like it has been all week) and forgets who besides security is allowed to enter. After a mild speech check to persuade him to let you in, he zips his card and lets you on through. Depending on how competent you want to have him, he could even take a name to later verify, which might bite the player in the ass if they allow it to get back to them. The initial check, to block against a bit of min-maxing, would be the guard also discreetly takes a picture of the player, as they were already initially more untrusting of someone who didn't already look like they belonged there by trying their personnel card on the door.
I like that a lot. Combinations of actions, skill checks and dialogues that influence each other like that would be a great addition to RPGs, since they'll encourage a little more strategizing, and get the player thinking in gameworld terms.

I so rarely find worthwhile discussion on forums lately, that doesn't reduce down into playing with trolls and irking some fanboy (and particularly these forums), that really befits my time spent on forums. Right now I should be optimizing code and adding another layer into the AI algorithms, but I find the occasional 15 minute break to span into something longer. I'd rather it be spent discussing RPG design.
Maybe stop over at ITS and take a look around the Design subforum. It's been pretty dry lattely with VD busy and the most prolific design contributors quiet, but if you like a topic and add something intersting it might bring them out.
 

Rosh

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John Yossarian said:
I like that a lot. Combinations of actions, skill checks and dialogues that influence each other like that would be a great addition to RPGs, since they'll encourage a little more strategizing, and get the player thinking in gameworld terms.

I think that is the most important part of the game experience, the feeling of the game world. When it feels like you are penned into a narrow path, it doesn't seem so fun. When you are given options, it makes the world feel more alive.

Maybe stop over at ITS and take a look around the Design subforum. It's been pretty dry lattely with VD busy and the most prolific design contributors quiet, but if you like a topic and add something intersting it might bring them out.

Though I have been quite busy lately, I'll drop by and see what I can do. I've been thinking a lot about what could be added to this genre, which is out of my hands for the immediate future given that my RPG trilogy is still looking at a 6+ years left of development time. Our TB Strategy game super-secret codeworded as "Subterranean Siege" will be out a bit before then.
 

Seboss

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John Yossarian said:
So, how about just teaching the player, in the beginning of the game, that failure is not less entertaining, by say, making sure he can't possibly succeed at all of his initial quests? Then depending on which quests he succeeds/fails at, the gameworld will treat the PC this way or that.
I believe TES games mention this in the manual since Arena :?
 

John Yossarian

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Well it's a step, now they just need to put it in the games.
 

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