7 ms·

Serious emotional games are hard to do. Either they’re on point and really short (cool, but ultimately forgettable) or they’re probably too long to make their p

• dharmab 8y ago
  Some examples you should look into: - Diablo 3's hardcore mode, where you have a single life and your gameplay and saves are on a cloud server - Far Cry 2 permadeath journals - Roguelike strategy games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld - One chance, a browser game designed around a single playthrough (although the saves are hidden in a cookie that can be cleared)
  • robertAngst 8y ago
    re Diablo 3 HC- Just focus on Vitality, pick a low difficulty level, and slowly grind the game. Never died, had 1 close call due to Frozen.
    • mcguire 8y ago
      That's probably a metaphor for reality.
    • dharmab 8y ago
      The point of Hardcore mode is to play on the ranked seasonal ladders where you get permanent rewards for high scores, which means raising the difficulty. "Games aren't hard if you lower the difficulty" is a strange argument to make.
    • kakarot 8y ago
      If you're optimizing for not dying, that sounds great. If you're optimizing for a good time and a difficult challenge then that's not going to work.
    • reitzensteinm 8y ago
      Actually, the real secret to Diablo 3 HC is that characters are completely disposable, and only the equipment matters. You can take a level 70 weapon with a gem of ease, jump in at Torment VI and level a new character from 1->20 in sixty seconds even when playing solo.
    • james_s_tayler 8y ago
      >had 1 close call due to Frozen Let it go.
  • 32bitkid 8y ago
    I would also like to add x-com on Ironman. Losing a soldier because you got sloppy and arrogant; putting them in an indefensible position and watching them get slaughtered. Do that enough times and you literally cannot win with just rookie replacements. But yea, I felt actually bad for losing some soldiers in my Ironman runs.
    • realityczeque 8y ago
      XCOM no doubt. I once lost a veteran ranger and I was bummed for days. He was mind-controlled by the enemy and a panicked friendly shot him. Tragic.
    • enraged_camel 8y ago
      XCOM has too much of an RNG factor for me. You can make the right choices (gearing, squad composition, positioning, targeting, etc.) and still lose soldiers due to streaks of misfortune. I personally hate being punished (usually brutally) due to factors outside my control, so I eventually gave up on the game.
    • billfruit 8y ago
      Also Darkest Dungeon. But problem with DD is that though you may lose characters permanently, it is impossible to lose the game, as both time and number of new recruits are essentially infinite. Atleast in Xcom there is someway to lose the metagame, if enough countries withdraw support(I think), but in DD, it continues as infinitum.
  • shostack 8y ago
    There's also the interesting looking One Hour One Life that I haven't had a chance to play yet. It will be cool if it gains enough traction to really see mass progression due to how the mechanics work. The reviews are hysterical. https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/
    • jere 8y ago
      OHOL is fantastic and is, at heart, about parenting, aging, and death. I'm a big Rohrer fan and death seems like a recurring theme throughout his games: -Passage: where you pass through an entire life in 5 minutes -The Castle Doctrine: a permadeath home defense MMO where you set death traps and try, often impotently, to defend your small family. When you fail to defend them, you'll get to watch the security tapes in detail and come home to their mutilated corpses.
  • CydeWeys 8y ago
    Minecraft hardcore mode too. It's like permadeath in roguelikes; one bad move and everything you've worked on for hundreds of hours is insta-deleted.
  • isodude 8y ago
    In Moria/Morgul you spent forever to build your character, learning spells and getting nice equipment. Then you die of a poisionous rat and was presented with a gravestone and had to start over with a new character. It was painful to die to say the least.
• nikofeyn 8y ago
  one only needs to look at the team ico games to find examples of truly emotional games that don't handle player death in a realistic way. in each game you can die, fall off the level, etc. and you just come back after some ambiguous resurrection. but all three games have deep emotional content.
• Moru 8y ago
  NetHack only has permadeath mode, or hardcore mode as it's called in most new games. Savefile is deleted once it's loaded to make it slightly less easy to cheat but ofcourse you can make a backup of it before loading.
  • billfruit 8y ago
    No, there is an Explore mode(at point of death, you can continue gameplay) as well as Wizard(essentially a god-mode) mode in NetHack.
    • naniwaduni 8y ago
      Both are strictly opt-in: the choice is made before you die (which can be very close to death, but then most deaths are related to not seeing the death coming, so that doesn't necessarily help), and disqualification from high scores (and/or community acknowledgement) occurs immediately upon making the decision, regardless of whether you subsequently die. The default is assumption, however, is permadeath.
• kakarot 8y ago
  This is one reason Final Fantasy Tactics was such a powerful game. You could basically lose any character other than the protagonist and it really hammered in the weight of your decisions on the battlefield.
  • blattimwind 8y ago
    In the first Ghost Recon games all soldiers had permadeath and the incentive not to lose them was them gaining (significant) experience and abilities with each mission, which are lost with the soldier dying.
• opencl 8y ago
  Legacy board games have the same issue as you described in fire emblem though: players can ignore deaths by save scumming or not performing the instructed physical mutations of game pieces. I've certainly been in a group that decided to ignore the outcome of a session where we had particularly bad luck on the dice rolls because of the expectation that it would've made subsequent sessions unwinnable/not fun. There's arguably more incentive to do this in the board games because restarting from a 'ruined' game state in fire emblem requires pressing a few buttons, doing so in the board game requires spending $70 again.
• pbalau 8y ago
  The only game, that I have played, that made me cry is the first Bioshock. Somehow I managed to not kill any of the girls (probably because I didn't catch the benefits) and the ending was so rewarding. I don't think I can achieve that anymore, I tried many times
• dorchadas 8y ago
  > I haven’t seen this model used anywhere, but I could imagine a video game where you buy the right to do one irreversible play through of a story mode, cloud saved on their systems so you can’t manage the data yourself. Ooh. I'd love to see a Fire Emblem style game like this. No main character, so any of them can die and not end the story. If a main character dies, someone else can take up their path, or it can slightly diverge. Ending depends on who's left alive at the end. It'd be a mess to do I think, especially dealing with when characters die and adjusting the storyline, but it'd be super interesting and you could easily get multiple playthroughs. I'd even say that the game allows you to do multiple ones, with each death/recruit being an autosave, so you can't undo it.
  • b_tterc_p 8y ago
    Hmm. That’s a really cool idea. I like the notion that the state of the game is driven purely by who is alive, and maybe, who they have relationships with. You, as the player, get to make no choices. A simple narrative justification would be that they just make decisions democratically, and each character has predetermined (and fairly predictable) views. So if you want to force a choice, your only option is to allow some people to die before the ballot is cast.
    • dorchadas 8y ago
      That is very true, and I feel a democratic discussion could kinda work in a game like Fire Emblem. Like, the overall story is the same, but if it's kinda an open world, you could do it in any order, and that would be dependent on what characters you've recruited and are still alive. The reactions and bosses and such would require that too as well. Supports would be the harder to thing to find to influence the game at that point I think...But maybe you could even just do that down to NPCs commenting about how so-and-so look so in love, or how they glare at each other. Might flesh out the world a little more. Even maybe make them have rumors about ones who've died who they've heard about. It's just a matter of bringing everything together I think. That's the annoying bit of it.
  • slavik81 8y ago
    If you haven't played X-COM: Enemy Unknown, you really should give it a try. It's similar to the game you're describing, though the story for your characters is much less authored. I bought the extra skins DLC pack and rewarded each soldier with unique armour when they reached the rank of Major. It was great.
• NegatioN 8y ago
  Serious emotional anything, is hard to do i would argue. People react so differently to these things that you really have to distill a piece of the human experience, and present it in a novel way. Buy even if they're short, they can be unforgettable. I would urge everyone interested in such a story to play "Brothers: a tale of two sons", which might have been some of my best 2-3 hours of gaming ever. Presenting it on this context might spoil some of it, but go in without any judgment or preconceptions and you'll have an experience that sticks.
• darren_ 8y ago
  The old Amiga game cannon fodder did this well - you had named soldiers that rose in rank as they survived missions, but if they died they were gone forever. The increased rank didn't improve them gameplay wise, so you wouldn't reload just to get them back (er, can't even remember if the game had saves in the first place), but you got pretty attached to them the same. Every dead soldier also added a grave to a hill in the mission select screen.
  • mpeg 8y ago
    RIP Jools, thanks for your service. It also had a great intro with goofy pics of the dev team (who the soldiers were named after) in military attire.
    • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      War! Never been so much fun!
• archagon 8y ago
  I've played hundreds of games, but Jason Rohrer's Passage is one that I keep coming back to in my mind. It's a 5-minute-long, linear indie game with blocky pixel graphics that was probably made over the course of a week. A game doesn't need to be a grand, million-dollar masterpiece to really and truly mean something to a player. In fact: I'd rather it wasn't, since empirically I remember almost nothing about the AAA games I've played, except for a vague sense of having had fun.
• wtracy 8y ago
  > Most players just restart each battle until deathless runs are achieved- either due to emotional or practical concerns. So, when someone dies, it’s not sad, it’s annoying. How about balancing a handful of levels so that it's impossible to finish without losing someone? You could replay in hopes of saving a character...at the expense of losing a different character.
  • b_tterc_p 8y ago
    I feel like I have seen this a few times although I can’t name any off the top of my head. I don’t think it’s as effective because it feels like someone had to die. It’s really hard to set this up such that you avoid either having no control or complete control- and neither is effective for emotional impact I feel.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• lloeki 8y ago
  A way to design around the reload issue is to have long winded, chained, or cumulative consequences, meaning that the player would have to lose many hours of gameplay, and even then he may not be sure to achieve his goal. Thinking about Mass Effect or Heavy Rain.
• vbezhenar 8y ago
  Server-dependent games like Diablo hardcore are not interesting for me, because I can't control my Internet or my power. Single lag, my character is dead and hours of gameplay are lost, not because of my skill, but because of things I have no control over. Even if that does not happen often, I still don't want to even try.
  • b_tterc_p 8y ago
    I don’t think Diablo is emotional in that way. But besides that, I don’t think real time gameplay is a good driver of emotional impact anyway. Inevitably there are random variables that will screw in a way to take away agency. Good emotional impact comes as a result of making choices for some trade off of greed, virtue, practicality, risk, etc.
• j_4 8y ago
  This is not a new concept in video games, usually known as "hardcore" or "ironman" mode. I think a core issue for games is that loss is fundamentally at odds with player agency. In pre-written stories it ends up feeling cheap even if it was influenced by player choice. It is much better suited to games with emergent narrative, such as Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Crusader Kings II, or X-COM, but still stings more as an annoyance than something deeply emotional.
  • b_tterc_p 8y ago
    I enjoy emergent games and rogue likes (dungeon crawl!). A lot of people are recommending them, but I think it’s a different idea. Such losses are emotional, but not in the same way as well written narratives about mourning and acceptance.
• falcolas 8y ago
  I think the “hardcore” gameplay, in an attempt to give more empathy about death, would not work as expected. Based off my experience with Diablo Hardcore characters, you just stop caring about individual characters, since you know they’re expendable. The only hardcore character I remember from Diablo 3 is the first - of hundreds.