So I have a new game, Torchlight, a role-playing game (RPG) in the tradition of Diablo. I’ve been at it a few hours, made level 30, and still haven’t used a healing potion. The monsters, hordes of them, all die with one hit.
This is a perfectly good game but I’m bored.
Have I turned into a gaming god without knowing it? It would seem so, since I’m playing at the ‘average’ skill level. I guess I could crank the difficulty up to hardcore, but why is the baseline so low?
It isn’t just general game play that seems so unchallenging, death itself presents no obstacle. When my character finally dies, due to supreme over-confidence, I get three choices for what kind of death penalty I want, from annoying to minimal to nothing. Never before has death presented options like this, and this change in approach to death is most representative of the change in game design philosophy from a decade or two ago.
Games are meant to be fun, but the definition of fun seems to have changed over the years. Games are now very commonly designed with the belief that any hardship, any setback, any challenge, is not fun and thus shouldn’t be part of the game. Every game that comes out seems to offer lesser so-called “death penalties,” faster leveling and challenges that are reliably solved by ‘brute force’ over any sort of subtlety or skill.
Do they even make games with real difficulty in them anymore? Such games used to be common.
Take Everquest, for example. In that game, death was a horrible event. So bad your character would actually lose experience points. Other online games also made death a thing to be feared. It wasn’t just dying that was brutal, either. Getting a high level character in these games took dedication that not every player possessed. This type of challenge-the-player attitude wasn’t just in role-playing games, even Sid Meier’s first Civilization game had no way to save and keep playing a game from within the software. It also used fixed random number generation, to further discourage players from cheating by saving and reloading to get a better result in combat — and this was a strictly solitaire game!
Computer RPGs are based at least loosely on tabletop RPGs and that’s where “death is hard” likely came from. If your character died in the earliest editions of pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons, he was likely dead for good. If the other players felt like resurrecting him, it might take a major quest; if the rest of the party didn’t want to go through the trouble, they might gamble on reincarnating the dead character, who could come back as a squirrel or something equally worthless. Similarly, getting a character to high level, high enough to actually challenge the mightiest foes in the game, was a rare achievement in old D&D, only possible with years of dedicated adventuring.
Nowadays most games are like World of Warcraft, where dying is just a bump in the road, and you can make it to maximum level in a few weeks of steady play, with every update speeding up leveling and reducing possible frustration. Consider APB, an online game set in an urban world of folks shooting at each other with guns, gaining levels and loot. There’s no magic in this world, but when you die in APB you lose…nothing. No loss of experience, dollars, or anything, respawning good as new in a few seconds. Even 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons has succumbed to the new philosophy, with death trivially overcome and every character is created with the expectation that he will make maximum level and eventually achieve godhood within a year or so of play.
Am I the only one to miss the good old days where beating a game was an achievement and death meant more than -2% to skills for five minutes?
Read [Opinions @ Gamertell]
I remember playing Everquest back when you died you not only lost XP, but if you didn't go and retrieve your body you lost all your stuff too. And if you died at the feet of some horrible beastie and didn't have a way to summon your body out of agro you'd die again, and again… it was brutal. Good times.
This is so true. I remember when City of Heroes made you earn an extra 1/20 of a level's worth of XP when you died and that was considered too extreme, so they nerfed it back dramatically.
Every time I play Borderlands and die, losing 7% of my accumulated cash (which I always have more of than I can ever spend anyway), I feel kind of like I'm cheating…or being cheated.
I remember Asheron's Call, having to make 'corpse runs' to save a friend's equipment from vanishing if we didn't recover the corpse fast enough. It gave a reason to socialize and ask for help. Good times, indeed.
Borderlands, much like Torchlight, falls into the same trap of "nothing can go wrong", and every problem is easily solvable with some application of brute force, nothing else necessary.
Yes, they soften up penalties, like in City of Heroes…they do it because players complain. But I really think developers have got it wrong. Yes, players complain, but that's not a good reason to change the ruels. Players stop playing, THAT's a good reason. Nobody complains about a game being boring, however, they just stop playing the game, creating a very screwed perception of what is 'fun'.
Funny thing is, there are games out there like that, and most review sites bitch about the difficulty, or at least feel the need to point it out as a fault. I'm old, though. I grew up on games that were designed to kill you in two minutes so the kid behind you could get his quarter in the machine.
I would like to see a game wherein, if you are killed, you don't get to play the game again, because you are dead!
Tony, it's not quite what you were asking, but I believe that on the "extreme" difficulty setting, dying once in Torchlight kills your character for good.