FAIL STATE INFLATION - Monocled, or degenerate?

[Infinitron]

Let's define a FAIL STATE in a CRPG. When the player has irrevocably messed up his game, and he must load a saved game and try again, we say that he has reached a fail state.

What is FAIL STATE INFLATION? Let's look at an example. In a traditional party-based CRPG, the fail state is generally a total party kill. When your entire party is dead, you must reload. However, many players expand this fail state beyond its original design. For instance, they might decide, on their own accord, that even a single dead party member is a failure that necessitates reloading. They won't keep on playing and try to tough it out after this happens.

In short, fail state inflation is the phenomenon of players expanding the game's fail state beyond what the game designer defined.

Fail state inflaters see themselves as hardcore perfectionists. They're placing additional challenges upon themselves, after all. They accept nothing less than the best, and they'll reload again and again until they get the results they want. They often accuse those who criticize their playstyle of having short attention spans and no patience (which puts those people in the same category as decline popamole consoletards).

Critics of fail state inflation see it as a form of "degenerate" gameplay behavior. To them, there's nothing monocled about cheesy reload spamming and an utter refusal to contend with a large percentage of the game's possibility space. They reason that the more you inflate the fail state of a game you're playing, the more you're railroading yourself along one single optimal path through the game, in which your characters gradually become laughably overpowered simply due to never having failed at anything they did.

Critics of fail state inflation are divided among themselves in the solutions they propose for this phenomenon.

Some preach the virtues of the "Iron Man" gameplay style, in which saving and reloading are minimized or eliminated. To them, it is the player's responsibility to abstain from using features beyond what the game designer intended, should he choose to do so.

Others believe that combating fail state inflation is the designer's responsibility, not the player's. They propose that CRPG design incorporate features that actively discourage fail state inflation. For example, by making those situations which are commonly perceived as failures by fail state inflaters less punishing, thus making them less likely to be perceived as such. "Gamist" CRPG designers such as Josh Sawyer fall in this camp.

Their opponents, both in the "Iron Man" camp and the fail state inflater camp, contend that this method of combating fail state inflation dumbs down games. Indeed, one can claim that by making situations such as death of a party member less punishing, one is simply doing to the game what fail state inflaters do to it anyway - railroading the player through an optimal, failure-less path.

What do you think? Personally, I believe that the game design-based approach towards combating fail state inflation has merit, even if it comes at the cost of "taking the edge" off of certain situations. I think there's a middle path between completely eliminating all consequences to player failure, consoletard popamole-style, and making those consequences so punishing that gameplay degenerates into a series of reloads for a large number of players. I think it's a game design philosophy that deserves a chance, alongside the more traditional ones.

 

[evdk]

Just let me play and reload how I wish? I really dislike people trying to tell me that no matter what I believe I actually do not enjoy my playstyle at all and would like theirs much more. "Degenerate gameplay"? Ain't no such thing.

 

[Gord]

I was actually expecting some rant about Dead State here when I read the title.

Always expecting the worst. This is what the Codex has done to me...

 

[JarlFrank]

I'm one of those guys who often reload until they get the desired results - which does include, yes, no party member dying in a party-based game.
And I'm glad that games allow me to play this way cause not allowing it would just be a pointless restriction of a certain playstyle.

 

[octavius]

If some gamers enjoy the reload spamming to get a perfect result, let them.
Introducing things like no death for party members and auto healing after combat to discourage the fail state inflation only hurt those gamers who prefer a more challenging iron man style of game.

 

[Roguey]

Balancing a game around an arbitrary number of failures sounds quite dumb to me considering the large skill gap that exists with people who play games. If the majority of players reload when hit with a failure that has long-lasting strategic consequences (as I believe they do, and Sawyer knows they do from actually watching hundreds of people play) then yes it should be balanced to account for that.

 

[Gord]

While I'm no die-hard perfectionist, I'm someone who will (often, not always) reload if a "fail state" brings too many disadvantages.
I might reload if death of one character means substantial loss, e.g. because ressurection is not possible and I felt this character was valuable, or because ressurection has some heavy (usually experience) cost attached to it.

It also depends on the design philosophy behind the game.
Many games seem to be designed with reload in mind - an especially punishing fight that you can't win until you find the weakness of the enemy, half-way thorugh a 80 hours game, often requires several reloads.
Playing Ironman in such a case would be pretty frustrating.
On the other hand, there are a few games that encourage the player not to reload too often. E.g. Frayed Knights had the interesting "Drama Star" system, that provided special bonus points at certain events, that could then be used up to give your character some buff to get through a tough situation, restore their HP and exhaustion or bring them back from unconsciousnes. This made drama points somewhat valuable, but the catch was that you would lose them when reloading.
Imho this was a nice incentive to carry on even in case of sub-optimal outcomes.

 

[Shadenuat]

Deep (no pun intended).
On the one hand, a set of encounters is also a strategical challenge. At least it should be. So playing each of them perfectly means smart resource management.
On the other hand, reloading makes a lot of valid tactics obsolete. Like reconnaissance. Scouting ahead is useless without ironman unless encounters are randomized.

I think making encounters less punishing is not the only way to make player act more naturally and roleplay. DA:O tried that, it did't turn out that well. Let's say reloading means more than hitting F9. Maybe every time you reload, it means that your party retreated the dungeon. If enemy AI will change tactics and positioning of it's units every time player does that, a lot of "degeneration" could be avoided. That's just... random idea, anyway.
But just inflating things like resources, injuries and even death... it seems like a very narrow minded, low design focused approach to me.

 

[Infinitron]

If some gamers enjoy the reload spamming to get a perfect result, let them.
Introducing things like no death for party members and auto healing after combat to discourage the fail state inflation only hurt those gamers who prefer a more challenging iron man style of game.

Yes, as I said, there's sort of an alliance of convenience here, between the perfectionist save-scummers on one side, and the Iron Manners on the other side. Both of them support the old status quo of CRPGs with "realistic" punishing consequences. Save scummers don't actually need to care about punishing consequences - they just reload, while maintaining the illusion that they're playing a "hardcore" game. Iron Manners want punishing consequences so that their chosen playstyle remains a challenge worth bragging about.

The question is, is that in the interest of most CRPG players? Is it in accord with the way most of them actually play these games? Wouldn't they possibly find that a system that lets them experience a wider variety of game states is actually more enjoyable? I think that's a question that's worth exploring.

 

[Cosmo]

If what you consider a problem only exists on the player side of gameplay, then it's not a problem : it's just you being a meddler.
And if those people that view their way of playing as the RIGHT way really exist, then they can go fuck themselves.

Others believe that combating fail state inflation is the designer's responsibility, not the player's. They propose that CRPG design incorporate features that actively discourage fail state inflation. For example, by making those situations which are commonly perceived as failures by fail state inflaters less punishing, those making them less likely to be perceived as such. "Gamist" CRPG designers such as Josh Sawyer fall in this camp.

I think Sawyer is more a proponent of equal chances in front of gameplay (and no unfair mechanic) than equal results. This philosophy of his doesn't extend further than the game's core mechanics, whereas what you describe as "fail state inflation" does (that's why the fail state inflaters as you describe them only look like obsessive weirdos).

Let me take an example : when i'm in this state of mind while playing a CRPG, it's not that i'm focused on the narrow goal of beating the game with the highest possible margin. On the contrary, it's because i like so much what i'm doing that i'm not satisfied until i drilled the best amount and quality of content out of the game. Which means not only mastering combat and such obvious winable mechanics, but also having an optimal build for quest choices, world exploration, that is to say also every aspect of a CRPG that has no clear-stated win or fail state.
Which doesn't mean everyone should do the same : a CRPG is both a game and a world to explore, and both aspects are intricately linked. So long as someone is able to attain the final win state (game's ending), why would any approach be better the other ?

Having said that, i think fail state inflaters enjoying themselves is a good indicator of the solidity and quality of gameplay. For example the endless grinding that a lot of JRPGs require from this type of player is very telling of the game mechanics' overall quality.

 

[Infinitron]

If what you consider a problem only exists on the player side of gameplay, then it's not a problem : it's just you being a meddler.
And if those people that view their way of playing as the RIGHT way really exist, then they can go fuck themselves.
...
So long as someone is able to attain the final win state (game's ending), why would any approach be better the other ?

I guess you can think of it as a kind of gaming analog of cinema's auteur theory. That the game designer's role is to encourage players to experience the game according to his creative vision (which doesn't necessarily mean cinematic railroading, mind you)

I think that that commonly seen tactic of "let's try every option and reload until we get the optimal result" can be harmful to the experience many games are trying to convey. It sort of splits up the game in the player's head into a series of discrete optimization puzzles, rather than allowing it to exist as a continuous, harmonious whole. (That method of gameplay can certainly be satisfying, but IMO it's best reserved for one's second or third "gimmick" playthrough.)

 

[FeelTheRads]

then yes it should be balanced to account for that.

Balancing by removing any chance of such a failure. Fuck yeah, Sawyer balances.

Also, fuck the majority of players and Sawyer together with them. Majority is the lowest common denominator. I don't see why I should accept games targeted at the lowest common denominator.

I really dislike people trying to tell me that no matter what I believe I actually do not enjoy my playstyle at all and would like theirs much more.

You just don't know any better, bro. Just like those savages that don't know civilization, you don't know how to play games. Please allow Sawyer to buttfuck the RPG genre tell you how it's done.

 

[CrustyBot]

I tend to think that the binary nature of encounters in RPGs leads to a lot of save scumming. If you can increase the range of results, with varying degrees of success and failure, while minimising the chances for a TOTAL FUCK UP state, then you discourage a lot of the save scumming. The way skill checks are handled is a pretty good example of what I'm talking about in how their binary and randomised nature encourages savescumming. Imagine a typical skill check + story choice paradigm. Then contrast that with Alpha Protocol and how it handles story/dialog choices. While the former can be incredibly arbitrary and binary in it's outcomes, the latter provides a larger range of results that don't amount to basic success and failure states.

If you take a design path that sets perfect success and unmitigated failure as extremes rather than your only options, then you can create a viable range of success and failure states where the player goes "It's not perfect, but I can live with this".

In terms of relating this to combat and other forms of gameplay, there are various methods of achieving that kind of design such as a source of expendable team members and introducing mechanics or situations that involve surrender, taking prisoners, fleeing, etc. Anything to broaden the range of results from "enemies are all dead" to "party members are dead". Introducing long term wounds, injuries and various perks/changes also may aid in getting people to live with sub-optimal results as having a party member with the "Blinded Warrior: -50% to hit, + 5 Perception" injury personalizes the playthrough that little bit more.

I think going further than that would be unnecessary. I'm not particularly bothered about so-called "degenerate gameplay" nor am I particularly fussed about Iron-Man playthroughs, either. I think that both kinds of playstyles should be available if players wish to play that way. Ultimately, people play the way they want to play. What I don't want is for games to push players to one sort of style due to a lack of forethought by the designers or a lack of attention to how certain things work, which is often the case when it comes to savescumming.

The point I'm making I guess is that in a perfect world, with a well-designed game, savescumming for the sake of flawless victories becomes boring as the imperfection and variations of your playthrough becomes a mark of uniqueness. If, in such a scenario, people still wish to strive for perfection in their playthroughs, let them. Where the issue with savescumming lies with me, is how the binary nature of situations in games encourages players to go outside their typical/planned behaviour in order to get optimal results because they can't accept failure.

That's not to say that there shouldn't be incentive for players to play well, or that you should insulate players from failure at all, either. Simply making the game easier or removing failure states altogether is retarded and the wrong way to go about it, but it should come about as an accumulation of good/bad decisions rather than hitting the player in the face because they made a shit dice roll.

An example of this would be say, how laptop guy's reputation amongst the mercs is handled in Jagged Alliance 2. If you lose too many mercs in a short amount of time, your reputation is shot to pieces and people will tell you to fuck off if you want to hire them forcing you to resort to other options (M.E.R.C, recruitables). However, your reputation gradually improves over time, especially as you do things to improve it (like conquering towns). I actually think it shouldn't improve over time without player action, but the game only had a limited pool of mercenaries to play with so I guess they needed to account for the possibility of someone fucking up that badly.

That said, all of that assumes a few things about the type of game it is (party based, permadeath, non-linear, dialog choices). With a change in the type of game, other changes in regards to how failure state inflation is discussed/handled, must occur as well.

 

[Blaine]

In a traditional party-based CRPG, the fail state is generally a total party kill. When your entire party is dead, you must reload. However, many players expand this fail state beyond its original design. For instance, they might decide, on their own accord, that even a single dead party member is a failure that necessitates reloading. They won't keep on playing and try to tough it out after this happens.

If the game is designed to increase in difficulty as it progresses (as most games ought to be), then the loss of even one valuable party member is a bad omen. Battles in games with difficulty curves are only going to get harder, never easier, and moving forward with a weakened party invites the death of a second party member somewhere down the line, then a third, and at that point (if not sooner) it's probably game over. As the saying goes, it's all downhill from there. Additionally, most party-based games balance their design around a full, non-crippled party. To encourage players to accept losses, there must be a feasible way to retreat and find an acceptable replacement member within a reasonable time frame.

Here's a real-life comparison: You're climbing a mountain trail. You slip and sprain your wrist. A sprained wrist isn't a particularly big deal in normal circumstances, but you've got to clamber over rocks frequently on your way up the trail. Your weakened wrist could give out, cause you to slip, and perhaps sprain or break your ankle. At that point you'd be well and truly crippled and forced to climb back down the trail. Do you continue climbing with the sprained wrist?

For many years, I've been aware of a related paradox in computer gaming. Players who play a game well (not by scumming, but by actually playing well) and take the time to explore tend to have stronger characters, better items and so on than those who are less skilled and don't explore as much. The game, which is already less challenging for the skilled player than the unskilled, becomes even easier with the aid of superior stats, items and currency (or whatever), yet it's the unskilled player who technically "needs" that extra help.

In short, fail state inflation is the phenomenon of players expanding the game's fail state beyond what the game designer defined.

Fail state inflaters see themselves as hardcore perfectionists. They're placing additional challenges upon themselves, after all. They accept nothing less than the best, and they'll reload again and again until they get the results they want. They often accuse those who criticize their playstyle of having short attention spans and no patience (which puts those people in the same category as decline popamole consoletards).

Critics of fail state inflation see it as a form of "degenerate" gameplay behavior. To them, there's nothing monocled about cheesy reload spamming and an utter refusal to contend with a large percentage of the game's possibility space. They reason that the more you inflate the fail state of a game you're playing, the more you're railroading yourself along one single optimal path through the game, in which your characters gradually become laughably overpowered simply due to never having failed at anything they did.

If the game is actually properly designed to account for the occasional death of a party member or two, then this is a fair assessment. If it's only designed for a full-strength party, and if losses cannot be replaced reasonably (or at all), then I'd say it's an unfair assessment. People who constantly save scum and reload every time anything goes wrong are definitely on the side of the decline, but someone who only saves occasionally and accepts poor results and failures most of the time might nevertheless to choose to reload if his party is permanently crippled. It's not quite a black-and-white issue.

 

[Cosmo]

I think that that commonly seen tactic of "let's try every option and reload until we get the optimal result" can be harmful to the experience many games are trying to convey. It sort of splits up the game in the player's head into a series of discrete optimization puzzles, rather than allowing it to exist as a continuous, harmonious whole. (That method of gameplay can certainly be satisfying, but IMO it's best reserved for one's second or third "gimmick" playthrough.)

Personally i don't know any player that would behave so obsessively. I think it's the game itself that tells you from the get-go in what way you'll get the maximum of enjoyment out of it. After all, a major part of game design (but near-invisible from the player's end of things) is to teach players on what to expect from the game they're playing, and how deal with it.

Personally I'm sure i'd never play AoD as i played Fallout or Toment for example.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I thought it's going to be about tentacles pumping characters with slime until they explode.

 

[Infinitron]

If the game is actually properly designed to account for the occasional death of a party member or two, then this is a fair assessment. If it's only designed for a full-strength party, and if losses cannot be replaced reasonably (or at all), then I'd say it's an unfair assessment. People who constantly save scum and reload every time anything goes wrong are definitely on the side of the decline, but someone who only saves occasionally and accepts poor results and failures most of the time might nevertheless to choose to reload if his party is permanently crippled. It's not quite a black-and-white issue.

Naturally.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Fundamentally flawed. Will post in detail later.

 

[Gozma]

Every performance-related reload is equivalent to using a cheat code or trainer or something; it's a judgement on my part to patch something in the design because I find it shitty.

E.g. if you are playing a Gold Box game and one of your guys gets charmed, then you have a TPK, when the combat ends you are left with a party with only the charmed character in it and everyone else lost forever with all their equipment, including critical path quest items. reloooooooooooooooooooooad

 

[Infinitron]

You're playing a CRPG with permadeath. You're engaged in a pitched battle against a large orc horde. Everything is going reasonably well, until suddenly, a few of their warriors get lucky rolls and your fighter and cleric both go down. You now face the challenge of having to dispatch the rest of the horde with just your thief and mage. Pretty cool, huh?

Oh wait, you can just reload a saved game instead. Phew, challenge averted!

Unless of course, you're a bad ass Iron Man player who just Deals With It, even though he's just permanently lost a fighter and a cleric who he invested hundreds of hours of game time in.

Traditional RPG status quo: Good for save scummers, good for elite-level Iron Manners, not as good for everyday ordinary average CRPGers.

Does that mean every CRPG needs to be made less punishing? No. But it does mean it's an approach worth exploring (without resorting to the excessive dumbing down and removal of consequences seen in AAA console RPGs)

 

[Cosmo]

I guess you can think of it as a kind of gaming analog of cinema's auteur theory. That the game designer's role is to encourage players to experience the game according to his creative vision (which doesn't necessarily mean cinematic railroading, mind you)

I think that that commonly seen tactic of "let's try every option and reload until we get the optimal result" can be harmful to the experience many games are trying to convey. It sort of splits up the game in the player's head into a series of discrete optimization puzzles, rather than allowing it to exist as a continuous, harmonious whole. (That method of gameplay can certainly be satisfying, but IMO it's best reserved for one's second or third "gimmick" playthrough.)

I forgot to add that the problem lies more often with designers not respecting their own views, for commercial purposes, i.e. appeal to the lowest common enominator. Gameplay is a frame within which players should do what they want to. But that's also their limit, and designers are responsible with the player's freedom of action, precisely because they created the frame.
If resting in dungeons is detrimental to the game experience, then take it away FFS.

You're playing a CRPG with permadeath. You're engaged in a pitched battle against a large orc horde. Everything is going reasonably well, until suddenly, a few of their warriors get lucky rolls and your fighter and cleric both go down. You now face the challenge of having to dispatch the rest of the horde with just your thief and mage. Pretty cool, huh?

Oh wait, you can just reload a saved game instead. Phew, challenge averted!

If a combat relies more on luck that tactics, then it's still the designer's responsibility. Beside if this combat was greatly conceived, you still learn something from the experience : perhaps your strategy was lame and you would have won by luck anyway, or perhaps it was sound and you just need to try it again.
On the other hand true savescummers dig their own grave, they've got only themselves to blame if they stop enjoying a game.

 

[Infinitron]

I forgot to add that the problem lies more often with designers not respecting their own views, for commercial purposes, i.e. appeal to the lowest common enominator. Gameplay is a frame within which players should do what they want to. But that's also their limit, and designers are responsible with the player's freedom of action, precisely because they created the frame.
If resting in dungeons is detrimental to the game experience, then take it away FFS.

That's definitely a problem. A designer might design the game such that it relies on certain constraints to remain balanced/difficult, only for those constraints to be removed by somebody higher up later on in the game's development process, thereby ruining that carefully designed balance. Design by committee always sucks.

 

[Cosmo]

Video gaming is expensive and will always be somehow a slave to business.
But at least in a CRPG you can create various playing modes. Only adding challenge should mean tweaking/adding/suppressing gameplay mechanics, not adding to enemy damage and HPs.

 

[evdk]

You're playing a CRPG with permadeath. You're engaged in a pitched battle against a large orc horde. Everything is going reasonably well, until suddenly, a few of their warriors get lucky rolls and your fighter and cleric both go down. You now face the challenge of having to dispatch the rest of the horde with just your thief and mage. Pretty cool, huh?

Oh wait, you can just reload a saved game instead. Phew, challenge averted!

Unless of course, you're a bad ass Iron Man player who just Deals With It, even though he's just permanently lost a fighter and a cleric who he invested hundreds of hours of game time in.

Traditional RPG status quo: Good for save scummers, good for elite-level Iron Manners, not as good for everyday ordinary average CRPGers.

Does that mean every CRPG needs to be made less punishing? No. But it does mean it's an approach worth exploring (without resorting to the excessive dumbing down and removal of consequences seen in AAA console RPGs)

So, do you have any solution, or are we just philosoraptoring here?

 

[Cosmo]

Offering various playing modes (based on mechanical differences) would be a good safety net against this type of exploits.