Just completed it, and it required alot of saves as doing the same thing over just isn't fun.

I had one save called Dave one called scared and one called aa and they were all needed 

The bottom line is the quality of a game. If its fun and balanced the save and death/health system isnt much of a problem imo 

"...when the player kills an enemy, the residual life-forece of the enemy flows into the player."

Just like in many old games killed enemies left health packs 

I dont see how that solves the death/punishment issue. Alice had a similar thing except that it was mana rather than health, and so was used as ammo basically (for all weapons). The idea can work but when you die, you still have the problem of replaying most the level. 

I think something I touched on in my last essay but didn't really expound upon as I should have is that balance is a relative term when it comes to sp. Something I find easy others may find hard, and vice versa, even with the same group of people in my skill level. A mapper can only map with a limited granularity of skill settings in mind (3 seems about right). Thus quick saves act as a cushion to the fact that you can't plan for every set of abilities and every play style.

So actually there are two things you can do about the problem of people replaying too much of the level after they die:
1) change the punishment scheme
2) change how difficulty affects the game world or how difficulty is determined

I think if you jigger around with both of them you won't have to do anything too radical. The problem of people forced to replay too much of the level when dying is what this thread has really become about, isn't it? 

like in descent, where you respawn with nothing, but can go back to where you were to pick up your 'spew' ... weapons, items, etc... 

as stated, it was slightly off-topic. Just an idea that might help balance the game *shrug*.

Never played AvP or Alice.

Bleh! To paraphrase Shambler; easy should be easy, normal should be challenging and hard should indeed be hard. 

re: bonuses as major part of game:
i don't know, but wouldn't bonuses, by thier very definition, be extraneous to the main game?

re: "The problem of people forced to replay too much of the level when dying is what this thread has really become about, isn't it?"

aard's health issue has more to do with lack of feedback. you're fine one mintute, and dead the next, with no real inbetween. 

lack of feedback is usually only an issue when there's instant deaths involved, I think watching your health go from 100 to 0 is feedback enough :)

The problem of course I guess is that you function the same as at 1 health as you do at 100 health (apart from player caution influences at lower health levels). 

Degrading player performance with health loss can lead to feedback situations (lose health->less effective->lose more health->...) that you probably don't want. (Unless you're sadistic. Which is always an option.) 

re: "I think watching your health go from 100 to 0 is feedback enough :)"

sure it's decent, but I tend to side with the idea that more feedback is better. the goal is to make the game feel more responsive.

and I think aard's choice of words, (ie: punishment) is a bad one. the designer is not against the gamer. feedback doesn't have to be negative.

it's just as good (if not more so) to do things like pumping up the music when the player's health is low. 

metl: you misunderstand my claim. of course armour is useful, it brings me further away from that single expression of punishment, i.e. death. But the armour itself doesn't do anything, still all the effect of having armour or not comes together in one single moment, where either the frustration (no quicksaves) or apathy (quicksaves) kicks in.

yup that is one other difficulty of the health system and Gilt also mentions this: any alternative system for saving need to take into account that certain saves may be "useless" because they were reached with 10 health with 10 instant hit monsters in the next room. I'd rather fix this with a different mechanism for health/death than by an eleborate save mechanism with multiple backtrack points.

Gilt: allowing powerups to be taken away from you is even worse, as it enhances chances of death (it is "slippery slope", as in the article someone referred to).
Yes in FPS you have very few things to work with, so maybe that's why maybe the gameplay should be extended with something that has exactly the purpose of giving more options for "punishment".
You may not like the word, please suggest something different, and I will happily adopt it. It is just you often express gameplay in terms what rewards and opposite of rewards are the consequence of the players actions (forced upon him by conflict). 

so, do we reward players when they do it the right way, or punish them when they misbehave.

or both? 

wrath: reward.

aard: I'll suggest the word feedback instead. but the word doesn't really matter, I just wanted to it make clear that 'punishment' doesn't (or even shouldn't) need to be a negative thing. perhaps it could just be a less positive thing then a reward, or be neutral.

And yeah my example, as it is, is broken. Hence the large disclaimer about "keeping it fair" at the end. But what is far more important then the example itself, is the idea that the focus of the conflict should be shifted somewhat away from just killing the player. 

Here's something I though of while reading distran's post. I'm going to put it in the form of rpg because that's how I'm imagining it:

The player doesn't actually die. When he is attacked, he loses health, and eventually passes out and the battle ends if he reaches 0. The battles he enters and the monsters he encounters will be based on his current health. If his health is next to nill, he'll be fighting weak monsters. If his health is strong, he'll be fighting powerful monsters. The only way to heal himself is to defeat enemies. By killing enemies, he heals a bit more, which allows him to fight more powerful enemies, which will heal him even more than before. Somewhere around mid-health, a transition occurs where he no longer has an advantage over the enemy and it's more of a battle (the previous battles were playing cathup, but he could still lose occasionally).

The reason this is important is, the harder enemies produce more experience, more gold, better rewards alltogether. He can level up faster, and build up his defenses and abilities better. He may also need to be at a certain level to progress through the story line, fight a boss, etc. There may also be certain enemies which do not alter their difficulty based on the player's health (so the player has no chance of defeating them until he builds himself to full health again).

The monster difficulty has a random range of about 20%: they can be 10% more powerful, or 10% less powerful, than the player. The player can choose to engage in battles that are risky, or run away (he would be penalized in health, but not as much as if he got the crap beat out of him). If he fights a risky battle and loses, he can lost most or all of his health and be back to low-level, low-development again.

Whaddya think?


BTW, I think you guys are looking at the health issue the wrong way. The glass is actually half-full. I can run around getting punished by losing health, and as long as I don't hit 0, I'm fine. I can run around with next to no health in quake, and as long as I don't get hit, I can get away with it. That's rather encouraging, isn't it? >;)

I like Front Mission 3 (strategy rpg), where you can lose an arm or your legs, and you only lose the functionality of the weapons equipped on that arm, or their legs don't work well so they can barely walk, but if you lose the mech's body, it's over, no matter how healthy the other parts are. 

Under a certain light, knowing when to quicksave is something of a skill. Ideally, the player won't know exactly what is comming up next, but should be given an idea when he has a moment to breathe. There's a certain limit on how much damage you can take before quicksaving becomes risky, which is another skill a player should pick up.

It's probably not fair to the player to be forced to pick up such a skill, but that's another matter. 

pushplay: I'd be careful with that argument. you're just a hop away from saying that a bad UI is good, since battling with it adds a whole new mini-game to the play. 

No, I covered that in the last sentance. Also, I wouldn't say that the saving mechanism falls under UI. 

sure, you can have a game with just rewards. It is just that in an fps, the rewards are pretty weak, in fact, progress (seeing a new area) is the only real reward. Finding items is not a strong reward, not in the sense that finding items in an RPG is, anyway. Most of the feedback in an FPS is negative. You are welcome to suggest more kinds of positive feedback to build on.

wazat: I really quite like your idea, but as you say it sounds more suitable for an RPG. Also you would need a good way to explain how come same-looking monsters can suddenly be much stronger than before (can feel frustrating), or you need to have a large amount of monsters that scale nicely (but then you need to explain why monsters are placed differently every time.

Also, your level design etc. must be such that monsters can walk away after they have slain you, and you can regain consciousness and health without being immediately attacked again (as it would be quite cool doing all this without having to respawn at a different spot in the level).

One problem in an RPG is that it does take away some incentive. Yes you get more gold/experience by playing well, but why do you want more experience? so you can slay the more difficult monsters more efficienly as you need this for future quests. But if you die a lot and monsters stay at the weakest level, then you can finish all quests and the game being weak, probably at almost the same pace as an expert player. This takes away some incentive. In classic RPGs, if you suck at slaying monsters you have to compensate by taking much longer slaying a lot of weak ones / doing side quests to increase your experience, so you can trade off skill for time. This gives a very strong incentive for playing good and collecting as much experience as possible. 

Unfortunately you're right. I tried to cover myself by saying you would have to be at a certain level to progress through the game, but that's a weak argument. And it would be terribly difficult to do in fps as well.

You're also right about items not being nearly as strong a reward in fps as in rpg. It's really tricky trying to give the player any enjoyable rewards that don't make the game too easy, without making the game too hard without them to compensate.

I think Quake2 had some good ideas though. The adrenaline is a wimpy bonus alone, but since they build up over the course of the game, you can slowly increase your max hp by 20% or so. When used in chorus with the health items that heal beyond your health, and with armor that protects quite well, the player can go far in giving himself a very protective buffer to prepare for whatever surprises or challenges the game may present.

Things that will stay with the player permanently are usually pretty good. Things that gradually enhance defense, health, ammo capacity, attack power, or provide the player with additional abilities beyond just a new weapon will go far to make the player feel that he's benefiting from his hard work, in a greater sense than avoiding failure.

Some ideas:

Minimum armor upgrades: The player has to pick up armor, and when it's gone, it's gone. But with these upgrades, the player will develop a minimum amount of armor that will begin to regenerate several seconds after he stops taking damage (the player finishes killing the enemy or escapes, and 5 seconds later his armor begins to regenerate from 0 to 20 yellow).

Abilities: When the player can learn and equip abilities, based on experience from killing enemies or progressing through the game, he has even more incentive to kill and charge forward than just to get through or get some ammo. If the player has a certian number of slots he can fill with abilities (the number of which can be expanded by certain activities) and each ability takes a certain number of those slots to equip (4/10 slots etc), there's now more involved than point, shoot, run. He now has more abilities than he can equip at one time, and needs to decide which are valuable to his particular situation. It gets more interesting when the "equip slots" are not based on him, but instead on his weapon. Now he can choose which abilities to equip on the rocket launcher versus the abilities he chooses to give his shotgun. Perhaps the player also has slots that affect him personally, or affect all weapons to a lesser degree etc.

Abilities can range from greater damage, lower ammo cost, ammo regeneration, instant death (each attack has a certain small percent chance of instantly killing the enemy based on how much damage it's doing versus the enemy health), faster attack rate, slowing surrounding opponents' movements and attacks, etc. Notice that many of these abilities are similar to rune abilities in many mods. You don't have to go far for ideas.

The difference between this and runes is how it's presented. Runes you just find and use. Abilities you earn, equip, and manage. And they're permanent, unlike runes. 

the boon of so many concept design meetings.

you know what? fuck character progression, fuck character driven games and don't stop fucking until they rot.

If I wan't character progression I'll play a RPG. Easy as that.
YOU should learn to bunny-jump, YOU should learn how to utilize the environments, YOU should learn how to rocket-jump. Why give all that to your in-game avatar? The pro of putting the player in the big seat is that I can go over to my friends house and kick his ass in halo or super smash bros, instead of moping around about how much whoop I'd handed him if I had my 'Conan the Barber'-character here.

If you're doing a deus ex or a baldur's gate. Fine, gimme stats up the ass. But in a straight on-a-rail shooter? Fuck off.

This, coupled with the 'story-driven' fad is one of the reasons we have so many shitty games. Too many jackasses with a "vision", not enough game-designers willing to work out good solid game-play mechanics to build upon. 

yeesh.

I agree with you on the more intelligent parts of the case you seem to be making. Parts of them, anyway. 

Informative post.

"I agree with some of what you said, but I won't tell you what parts. Also, who I'm replying too will be shrouded in mystery." 

Your point about having the player gain skills instead of the character/avatar is an important one. However, there are skills that players learn in RPGs and use to succeed. Instead of combat skills like timing and aim, skills like character management and battle deployment are the focus.

Also, i hope you recognize that even in a game like quake, there are obstacles that can be overcome only by equipping your character. Sure, you don't need to get to level 30 so you can beat a boss, but m4d sk1llz won't open a locked door -- you need a key, which is something that your character aquires, not something the player learns. And, you aquire it just like you would a magic spell or a bunch of experience points -- by covering ground and fighting guys. 

well, since you have to design for the lowest common denominator, lovingly refered to as "bird-brains", you can't really make character management a skill per se. The game can't stop your progression just because you misplaced a few experience points on account that you didn't now what the game would throw at you around the corner.
It must always give you a fighting chance, even though your skill-tree is but a revoltingly ugly bonzai-shrub.

and your quake argument don't really hold up, since the "equip" you are talking about is a standard argument from the designers as to why the player has to haul ass across the level instead of saying "to hell with it" and blow the door to pieces.

To me, it's not equipment if you HAVE to have it to get past a certain place, then it's just a bottleneck requirement.

However, using the door example, say that the game uses lockpicks, and you have chosen to carry around a battery of those instead of toting around a gun the size of a small pacific island, then perhaps one can say there is some equipment skill involved. Get the blue key or use your lockpicks.