Playing Past Your Mistakes
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- Опубліковано 10 чер 2024
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In the manual for Elder Scrolls 2, Bethesda encouraged players to avoid reloading a save game after making mistakes. So why should gamers follow this advice, and how can designers help them play past their screw ups?
Sources
The Illusion of Intelligence | Bungie
halo.bungie.org/misc/gdc.2002....
Find out more
Metal Gear Solid V’s Failure Spectrum | Tom Francis
www.pentadact.com/2015-09-13-...
[ZIP] Fault Tolerance - from Intentionality to Improvisation | Clint Hocking
clicknothing.typepad.com/Desig...
Darkest Dungeon: A Design Postmortem | GDC Vault
www.gdcvault.com/play/1023435...
GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack | Designer Notes
www.designer-notes.com/?p=369
Games shown in this episode (in order of appearance)
Splinter Cell: Blacklist (Ubisoft Toronto, 2013)
Valkyria Chronicles (Sega, 2008)
Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook Studios, 2016)
Hitman (iO Interactive, 2016)
Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018)
Assassin's Creed: Origins (Ubisoft Montreal, 2017)
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (Arkane Studios, 2017)
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (Bethesda Softworks, 1996)
Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft Montreal, 2008)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017)
Gunpoint (Suspicious Developments, 2013)
XCOM 2 (Firaxis, 2016)
Invisible, Inc. (Klei Entertainment, 2015)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Kojima Productions, 2015)
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (Kojima Productions, 2014)
Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games, 2018)
Call of Duty: WWII (Sledgehammer Games, 2017)
The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013)
Mark of the Ninja (Klei Entertainment, 2012)
Middle-earth: Shadow of War (Monolith Productions, 2017)
Pyre (Supergiant Games, 2017)
The Long Dark (Hinterland Studio, 2014)
Dead Rising 2 (Capcom Vancouver, 2010)
Dark Souls (From Software, 2011)
Heat Signature (Suspicious Developments, 2017)
Music used in this episode is by Chris Zabriskie
chriszabriskie.bandcamp.com
Contribute translated subtitles - amara.org/v/C3BE6/ - Ігри
"So Mark, what would you say is the first step to creating a great ga- "
"Far Cry 2"
Still waiting for far cry 2 two too re-african'd edition
I hope they remaster or remake it one day, and add more neat stuff, such as more sickness and sickless mode, as well as a larger wild life.
Remastahd
@@gustavowadaslopes2479 they would just reskin far cry 5
I love Far Cry 2.
You may be surprised by what happens next.
"Quest failed"
Lmao!
😂😂
Exactly. That's why it's so important to not just tell players not to savescum, but to make it part of the design
"Happy Wheels" has a huge Failure Spectrum. You can still achieve sweet victory if only a severed limb crosses the finish line.
lmao, that's true!
What's fun is that only the character's heart counts. I've won numerous levels by exploding and having the heart just fling into the right part of the map.
Literally saving before every main skyrim quest because of bugs..
Yeah, Fallout 4 "Survival" mode sends its regards.
Before after and during the quest u mean
"Given the opportunity, modders will optimize the bugs out of the game"
Todd Howard
Im at the point of quicksaving every 5 minutes in Fallout 4 because of the constant crashes and freezing.
Literally saving every 30 seconds because of mods
'Failure Spectrum' is a new term I heard today, and one which is rather fasinating in concept too. Having a game evolve rather than just stop and rewind on mistakes is certainly more interesting, if done well of course.
I adore this term. I'm already thinking about everyday tasks with this in mind.
I guess the simplest failure spectrum is a health bar, the more you fail the more the more aware you are of the chance of failure, the more you'll play differently.
The health bar alone does not work alone. The damage output comes into account. And the 1HP to 0HP gap is usually huge. Some games try putting the dying state so the player can pull a medkit or be rescued by a team member.
Reminded me the level desing in classic Sonic games. You don't get a game over when you mess up a jump. Instead you fall to an alternate path below, which is slower but still gets you to the end of the level.
And you don't die when you hit an enemy either, you can recollect coins and get higher on the failure spectrum again :) Same with finding a way to get back up
One of the biggest things that keeps me savescumming from a story perspective is that character permadeath often leads to a vastly worse story. Making it possible for party members to die in combat sounds like a neat way to amp the stakes, but if that character has an associated storyline you might find yourself unexpectedly cut off from that content. I'd love to see a game with alternative character quests if a character dies. Maybe it could be a "carry out their legacy" thing if that character had some goal they wanted to achieve, so you could achieve it in their stead and get an additional bittersweet ending if they aren't around to see it.
I agree. It reminds me of my first play through of the original Disgaea, in which you only get the good ending for not accidentally killing any of your units, which can be surprisingly easy to do with many of the best attacks doing area damage. I remember playing through those mistakes, being punished for it and having to replay the game for a satisfying ending, and it poisoned failure and mistakes even in other games. After all, if a mistake can result in a bad ending, why settle for less? So, I found myself save scumming constantly after that, and on especially technical moments it can make a game exceedingly frustrating.
Fire Emblem needs this
I'd argue that this is the best way of doing things - failure shouldn't be something which *locks you out* of content - instead, have *new content* to replace that which was lost. Maybe have some NPCs mourn over the loss of a character you could have saved, and then give you quests and lore you wouldn't have recieved otherwise. An NPC might've been critically injured in a mission, making them unable to complete their next task and requesting you do it instead. Make it so that a single playthrough won't let you see absolutely everything, but enough is given to a player that they don't feel like they're "missing out" by choosing their own path. The content from each "path", so to speak, should be equal.
Don't feel like you've lost out by failure, instead feel like you've forged a new path with an equal amount of content.
@@sylphanscribe6492 Fellow Disgaea player here, I personally had to intentionally kill off friendlies for the multiple endings. If Geopanel kills counted as ally kills however. >_>
I wonder what kind of units you used that accidental ally kills were common, I personally spammed mages. I ran every weapon type, but mostly cleared the story with a healer that had mastered all omega spells thanks to pupils.
All I will say is that having two spears and spamming impaler drop and a nekomata while also having a mage spam aoe giga ice with a dragon (honestly, I have no idea why I ran 4 monsters but whatever, that's part of the fun IMO) isn't the best idea in hindsight. This was on Disgaea DS, which was my first experience with the franchise, so I didn't know that having any ally kills gives you the bad ending. Oh, and a spoiler for anyone wanting to play that game...
for some reason Flonne was at least 13 levels higher than everyone else and had tons of gun skills, and not having her on the final fight made things a lot harder than they needed to be. Lots of grinding, followed by a single moment of "yay I finally won" only to be met with "Laharl dies, the end" left me feeling awful.
Edit: Also, I tried circumventing a "no-throw" spot somewhere in the game by using the nekomata first skill. And I forgot to unequip the weapon. On my mage. Oops. Moments like that don't help.
Great video ! I most often find myself *save-scumming* in games with dialogue wheels... because they never actually show what you are picking, they just give a vague idea of what that thing you're about to click on, actually is. So I very often find myself reloading a save, because suddenly what I thought was a passive question, turns out to be an aggressive insult out of nowhere.
>Glass him
I've never been that surprised before, did stick with it though
God yeah, like in the Witcher 3, where that one dialogue option to "forcefully shove" a certain character actually turns into Geralt just intentionally breaking his leg.
That is the most frustrating thing! I hate it when you get a choice between, say, "Say nothing" and "Ask about her parents", and the latter option turns out to be "Why the fuck did you let your parents die? Any decent person would have died to save them!"
"What? The great clockwork dick is stumped?"
“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.”
So true. When I first played Dishonored, I very much wanted the achievement for never getting spotted and I was constantly save scumming. The game was... okay. Then I went back to do the high chaos playthrough and didn’t care about being seen, and suddenly the game was *amazing.*
This is why I always recommend starting out with a 'whatever happens, happens' philosophy for the first playthrough. It's an absolute blast.
I remember being entertained and mildly horrified by everyone's dialogue everytime I got back to the Hound Pits. I'd honestly rush out of the boat after talking to Samuel just to check in with the other Loyalists.
I loved Emily's creepy-ass comments. Those were the best.
I did normal playthroughs first and when save scumming when going for the low chaos no kills never seen achievement. Which to me was fun to keep trying to overcome a certain area but also chocking out every single enemy
This happened to me in Deus Ex Human Revolution. Stealthy saint playthrough - kind of a pain. Psycho serial killer playthrough - holy shit amazeballs!
Dishonoured us an amazing game if you don't care about being perfect and dint mind throwing away a plan
I had the same type of thing going into dishonored 2. I wanted to play smart and stealthily but decided not to do any save scumming as it soiled my experience a bit with dishonored 1. What happened instead was an interesting moment that felt so cinematic to me in the moment that it was absolutely worth playing past. What happened you may ask?
I always like to play stealth games as being as invisible as possible (of course) and without killing anyone. In a game like dishonored I really like role playing a bit with the character. Like having a moral compass that says even though i'm going through these missions to get back at those who wronged me I wont kill them by my own hand. With that setup I was going through a normal story mission about as textbook as it can go. Narrowly avoiding guards knocking them out at random times and just exploring the area. At one point though I walked right into a guard face to face and was of course immediately spotted. They attacked to which I parried and after a second of sword to sword wrestling I pushed her back off me and backwards through a glass window down to her death. That was an amazing organic experience and after my initial jaw dropping jumped down to clean up my devious act and hide the body with no one but me knowing I did in a (more or less) innocent guard.
Hope this reply doesn't feel out of left field or too long but I really wanted to share this story somewhere as its one of my favorite gaming moments and really showed to me how unique the gaming medium can be.
I actually had this happen when playing the new hitman for the first time the other day. I messed up in the first mission (after the tutorial) and got found out very early on. Instead of quitting out I decided to play it out and see what happened, and lo and behold around the first corner I darted was my first target, so I took him out, punched out a few more guards, and then managed to actually disappear and disguise myself.
My brother and his friend were cracking up the whole time because they couldn't believe I actually managed to get away. You get a lot of interesting and entertaining moments when you play things out.
Yeah, i have a similar story. At the beginning of the second level in Hitman: Contracts (Infamous Meet King's Party) Agent 47 knocked out one butcher and leaved him in the truck. Me and my friend thought, that he killed him, because the cutscene was weirdly shot. But we got it all wrong. The butcher was sleeping for a few minutes in a large truck, so you should have took his clothes and close the truck's door by pressing the button. Firstly butcher was constantly running away and compromising our cover, which was both unexpected and hilarious (watching some half naked dude running like Forest Gump and speeking funny quotes in romanian).
Then my friend replaced me. During his playthrough he was constantly forgeting to hide butcher's hook, so he just kept getting compromised during the frisk. Therefore our local meme was born: Hide the hook! It's sounds dumb, i know, but that was really hilarious, when he kept accidently pulling out it. That was so memorable, that i kept saying "hide the hook!" to him in real life XD
Some of my favourite moments come from panic moments in the new Hitman games. Hitting the wrong button and going "I just did what?!". Also, running arou d frantically leads to discovering hidden areas. Such as the plague docter get-up in Sapuenzia. Went through a wrong door, and now have a plan for a cheezy slasher flick playthrough.
If you're making a stealth game with a level scoreboard and want to avoid people save scumming, a good way is to replace vague "stealth scores" with factual stats. Getting an 82%% stealth score, or a C+ letter grade feels like crap because your player thinks they played sub-optimally. But getting a screen that says: you incapacitated this many people, you let this many witnesses escape with their lives, etc. lets the player decide what exactly an "optimal" stealth run is to them.
I feel like I've save scummed the most when I've played games that gave me a letter score or a percent grade at the end of the level, because I was never sure what would count towards that score. So I tried to put myself in the developer's head and play in the "best" way possible, even if it wasn't as fun to me.
You are running into another issue if you do that though.
A scoring system that's just numbers will always remain somewhat ambiguous over how well the player actually did. Most scoring systems already show you most of their variables (in this case incapacitated people/witnesses alive etc)but will give you something more solid at the end (A rank= you did well, B Rank = not bad, C rank = Apply yourself etc) so removing them could end up hurting those who genuinely care about scoring systems even if it makes some players avoid save scumming. Some players might even see their bad rank as an incentive to get better at the title instead of just feeling bad about it or savescumming to get a higher score so it's a "solution" that will only work for some players while potentially making other players just ignore getting better at the game altogether.
Gods Will Be Watching addresses this by showing statistics gathered from all the players, such as "30% let no one die, 25% let one person die, 20% let 2-3 people die", etc. That way, the player can choose their own priorities but also evaluate how well they did on fulfilling them.
Not really the place for this, but I just want to say that getting a C+ really should mean that your did slightly better than acceptable/average. "A" is exceptional, "B" is good, but a "C" shouldn't be seen as a bad score.
Unless you got SSS+++, you ain't shit in Japanese games... A = Average, B = Bad, C = Can't you try harder?, D = Don't try anymore plz, E = End your misery!
;P
I agree with Selestrielle. After completing a mission in MGSV, for example, you get to see all sorts of stats about your performance, which is great, but it also combines those stats down into a grade from S to E, which I think is a mistake. MGSV has a widefailure spectrum, as discussed in the video, and so many opportunities for emergent gameplay that it feels like such a shame to boil all of that down into a single letter. When I played it I regularly got A, B and C grades for being stealthy but slow, which is how I prefer to play the game. Just out of curiosity, I went back in to a couple of missions and did them as fast as possible, in what felt like a reckless manner, even getting spotted sometimes, and still got S ranks, because you get so many points for speed. That being the case, I'd honestly rather just not know my rank. Let me play my way, and as long as I'm good enough to complete the missions (which I am), don't tell me that I'm doing something wrong.
"I refuse to play the Casual mode in the new Fire Emblem games."
"Whoops. A unit died. Better start the chapter over."
I know people joke about it, but they're very different things. Casual Mode means that your strategy while going through a level can be way more aggressive and sacrifice units to push forward. At worst, all you lose is the experience and level ups from that chapter because the character comes back. Classic with resets means that you're encouraged to improve your strategy to actually play without the loss (or you can just reset for crits/hits, but you generally have workarounds to stack the odds in your favor even with poor RNG and there are better strategies than hoping than your mage manages to dodge 50% of incoming attacks). So Casual is a different experience than Classic with resets, or Ironmans where you let the character die, but which can actually be easier than resetting.
I remember the good ol' days of fire emblem back when your characters could die.
*cough cough* three houses *cough cough*
@@Prodawg I actually think permadeath in those games makes them actively worse. I started playing FE when Awakening came out. I play turn based strategy games on the hardest difficulty always and I can tell you my experience with Awakening was FAR worse than with Darkest Dungeon or XCOM. Because units can permanently die and you can't recruit replacements; I'd retry the FE mission every single time until I won without any losses. The support system exacerbates this tenfold. In FE, if your characters die, you actively miss out on tons of dialogue and a chunk of the game. Men in XCOM/ Darkest Dungeon are expendable; it sucks to lose a favorite unit, but losing one does not make you miss out on a part of the game, it just gives you more of a challenge. It also makes the playthrough more dynamic and allows you to tell a story of overcoming adversity rather than simply reloading a mission until you finally win.
@@Prodigial i was calling out 3H for being easy as fuck but ok
@@Prodigial awakening's hardest modes are BS, so I wouldn't use it as a example of FE as a whole. Other games can be ironmanned on the hardest difficulty. Look up Mekkkah's channel for example.
Leave it to Mark to take a 1996 game manual and make a fascinating video out of it 🤣
Crazy thankful for the feature in the Mark Recommends section! It means a lot
They recently tweeted about it, I recall. He probably saw that lol
Hey Jelani, that's fair haha, although I wouldn't put it past him to be sleuthing about some old paper tutorials!
@@skipthetutorial Although now I'm not sure if he's the one who tweeted it. Because he just might have
Just checked, he was the one who tweeted it!
Surprised it made the cut for a whole video. He tweets cool stuff like that manual pretty regularly.
Hey man, 1996 was a fantastic year for game manuals! All of the early to mid 90s really. I think it was Theme Park's that was essentially a short book on business strategy and management. Sure I was 11 and didn't read much of it but I appreciated it nonetheless.
I thought this was gonna be the video about the game jam games and I was like "damn that's harsh" lmao
Haha, same!
same. rofl
yup... now we're 4
Lol me too
That's what I thought too
Kingdom Hearts 2 has an interesting mechanic in this regard. As a fast paced action RPG, it's not a game you'd typically save scum anyway. Normally, you die and the try again from the last room or load a save. However, KH2 actually *adds* a failure spectrum through the addition of Mickey. In most boss fights, death has a chance to trigger being saved by Mickey, where you play as him. You're able to damage the boss as Mickey, but your main goal is to charge up his healing spell in order to restore the party's HP. After casting the spell, Mickey disappears and you get another chance as Sora. Instead of feeling like you've failed, it mixes up the gameplay a lot, since there are entirely different mechanics at play.
5:45 "Reload their save game" - as you reload the shotgun.
"Thrown off course" - as you launch a molotov.
You cheeky boy, Mark.
The problem with letting / encouraging players to gamble is that, enticing as it is, and as much fun as it feels to win, gambling by nature is set up to cause worse and worse loss. Complacency is boring, but being overly cautious due to believing you're constantly a moment away from losing everything is a pointless way to play
Funny you would say this: I know it's a different type of gambling, but now gaming has a problem where literal gambling mechanics are put in games. For profit.
Mr. Resetti
Hello There
Domo arigati, Mr. Resetti!
...I just want an announcement of a mainline Switch game in the franchise...
I mean... that's one way to do it. Just annoy the fuck out of the player so they will never do it again. I'm actually kinda sad that Resetti is optional in New Leaf because Animal Crossing is much more fun if you do things as they come and just roll with the punches.
Oh my god Mr Resetti worked so well to stop people changing the DS calendar
There's another subject I'd love to see you cover, and that is "Inspiring Disobedience". Like at the start of the video, the game is about players writing their own stories, what are some games that encourage you to get lost in the world or play in an unconventional manner rather than pursue the main questline? Fallout New Vegas is the most aggressive version of this that I have seen: The main story has a very petty inciting incident(As far as the wastelands goes), instructs you to literally walk the opposite direction from the glitz and glam of New Vegas, and every stop on the journey lands you in an interesting place with a deeper story such as Primm or Novac. It's like the game wants you to instead ignore the main quest and sneak past the super deathclaws to go straight for Vegas and you would practically have to be a robot to just follow the main quest without a single distraction.
The game that gave me this more defiant attitude was, naturally, Bioshock 1. It really puts things into stark reality how much for granted the player going along with the story some games can expect. in Skyward Sword, in the room where Fi introduces the sword to me, I was literally able to walk out of the room, leave the temple, and go all the way home without a peep from Fi. I explored Skyloft, met the people who lived there, jumped off a couple times for the giggles, and accidentally discovered that sitting in a chair heals you. The game seemed to have no idea what to do when I refused to pull the sword; it was amazing.
I spent a very long time in Skyloft. There was a lot to do and discover. And I found the idea of the monster under the island to be very fun to investigate. I did the same with Breath of the Wild. I discovered Korok seeds and actively refused to jump off of the plateau until I was satisfied that I had found them all. Along the way, I discovered the big rock enemy and was surprised that something like that was completely skippable and just hiding in the woods.
Can we talk about how that first rock encounter is just amazing ? Because it's incredible
I'd love to see a video about this as well
Skyward Sword is absolutely not an example of being able to go off the beaten path or get lost in the world. Good for you, you didn't pull the sword. Good for you, you went and explored a small village that was already open to you. Do you know what actually happened? The game completely locked you in place and stopped you from exploring outside of that small village until you pulled the sword. It wasn't amazing, you simply failed to notice the game slamming on the brakes because you hadn't yet done something that other players had already done long before the part where you pull the sword. If you had already explored Skyloft, you would have realized there was nothing for you. Pull the sword or be bored until you pull the sword. It's not amazing. It's not praiseworthy. It's bad design in a game that holds your hand from start to finish.
LOL no, the game doesn't want you to sneak past the deathclaws, they are very high level mob for a reason.
"Failure Spectrum" is so important for games! One of the best concepts for mods for skyrim was a mod called "Death Alternative" When you die in combat, you dont die, rather you get lethally injured and come close to death. You might wake up in a close by inn, or you might get robbed of your stuff. You can then find your robbers and get your stuff back. Playing past your mistakes raises the stakes, adding tension and suspense! =D Great video! Added it to my game design playlist! :)
I recently finished Golf Story, which, like golf itself, really wants you to play past your mistakes. many smaller objectives in the game require you to complete a challenge in a certain amount of swings, but the game does not let you reset at any point during the challenge. you must play every hole, even after you're guaranteed to fail. this fought my natural inclination to reload after making a mistake, but it made me play every hole before allowing me to retry, which in the long run helped me learn the course in a way I wouldn't have if I fell into familiar play patterns. I quickly came around to the design decision.
The Karl guy had the best quote ever in gaming history
"Hello, I'm Karl."
-Karl
Such inspiration.
R.I.P.
F
He might actually say that when you recruit him! I forget
Truely the words of a great man.
The Winston Churchill of his era, no doubt.
I actually really dislike achievement in stealth games, they are really likely to make me not live through my mistakes, because the games basically tells me that I'm a failure at the end of the mission and it feels really bad. And even knowing that I'd have more fun just ignoring that simply going through the game I still do it which is really frustrating =/
That part about players optimizing the fun out of a game rings really true for me, if at any points a game pushes me to do something not fun and rewards me with useless collectibles I'll have to struggle really hard not to do it, it just doesn't feel right if I don't do it. Like doing the sidequest in missions in shadow of war despite it being more fun to actually play my own way.
Another thing that makes it really likely for me to make me not live through my mistake is if I'm worried I'm missing out on something. A really good exemple for that is fire emblem. Not only are characters unique and in limited supply, but some of them unlock other characters. On top of that they sometimes die with a unique weapon or a weapon I don't know if it's actually unique or not. That many things combined makes it really hard for me not to cheat, even when I really want to (and downright impossible when sometthing like same turn reinforcement happen without warning and kill off a unit).
Losing something unit that I don't know if I'll want or need later or not feels really awful to me (but not having that risk makes the game boring).
I played awakening yesterday and in one of the chapter there is a village to protect which I failed to do. I had to actually check that the item in it wasn't a unique item to talk myself into not resetting.
It's really frustrating when my whole brain seems to actively try to force me not to have fun xD
Those achievements are really for repeat playthroughs, so perhaps a solution is that they are not shown on the first playthrough.
Yeah or just let the player disable them. Really if I had an option to not have the game give me incentives to destroy my fun I'd be so happy!
The problem is that the reason many people play video games is to feel like they accomplished something. I mean, that's not their intention, but when you play a game and you complete a mission, it feels the same as as when you completed a real life mission, a goal in your personal life. So, for many people, the entire reason to play games is already associated with trying to accomplish something in a fictional enviroment, which makes these small accomplishments (for not being seen, for exemple) much harder to ignore, because they are not at all distinguished from what we find so appealing in games in the first place. People who play games just to see interesting things happening, however (and you may know someone like that), will have a much easier time getting out of this pattern and ignoring the accomplishments.
Achievement on resident evil 5 is good as you only need to achieve 1 time. On metal gear solid 5 however is annoying, they always judge you on every mission.
this is why i havent beaten dishonored 1 or 2 divinity 1/2 and a hand full of other games
Other options include:
• Unavoidable mistakes, like in "hold on for as long as you can" kind of games.
• Remove saving altogether, as seen in most rogue like games.
• Having an incentive to continue playing anyway, like in narrative driven games.
• Not revealing to the player the consequences of their actions until a few hours later, so they have to live with it unless they are truly stubborn beyond reason, like in the amazing scene of the trial in Chrono Trigger.
Been binging your videos recently. It really gives you a lot to think about in designing and even playing games. Thank you for these awesome videos!
Stories with failure are way more interesting to play, so it's pretty unfortunate that many RPGs don't provide you with anything enjoyable when you don't do things right. It's either quest done right or quest failed; fights won or reloading a save because you're dead. I think that developers could offer way more to broaden the failure spectrum here. As an example you can take the modification for Skyrim "death alternative" which creates scenarious whenever you are defeated, depending on what defeated you: Bandits may rob you and throw you out of their hideout thinking you're dead - whereafter you may awake, get help from someone friendly who stumbled upon you or meet up with yet another bandit who tries to take whatever's left from your inventory. Fanatics may imprison you for a ransom or sacrifice ritual and so on. This allows you to play a more believable inhabitant of the game world and make you feel like your character is actually progressing instead of being a god among mortals. And of course it may be a nice challenge to enter that bandit hideout again without that precious weaponry of yours and try to reclaim your belonging from foes which were able to beat you before equipped with nothing but makeshift low quality equipment!
A few hours ago I wrote about the Death Alternative mod too, I think it's a perfect mod to add to Skyrim. On top of it increasing the "failure spectrum" and editing your path/story; it adds so much immersion to the game. It no longer feels like you're a god who can never fail; the setbacks feel like they're part of the story instead of this immersion breaking rewinding of time where you suddenly find yourself alive again, preforming the same things you did before. It's still a setback, but it's an exciting setback. The tension of not knowing what happened to your character until your vision returns is so much more enjoyable than "oh no, I have to do it all again". The narrative of your character flows with death alternative, I would love to see more games implement mechanics like death alternative in the future, it seems like there is so much untapped potential around it
Shoutouts to all those FE Units we've lost because we were to far to reset
I'll never forget having to sacrifice Boyd to finish the port level of Path of Radiance. The game completely bamboozled me when the Black Knight came out of that nondescript hut in the middle of the map. My whole strategy had been about funneling my units through that little mid-section, since it wasn't heavily guarded. Boyd was my favorite character at the time, and it was PAINFUL.
you're never too far to reset
I always reset even if it is literally the last turn of a chapter. I feel like Fire Emblem is more challenging when you play to keep everyone alive.
I wish FE were playable on higher difficulties while Iron-manning. But the best units are just too good to lose sometimes. I really enjoyed Conquest because you could capture generics and they felt OK to sacrifice in a pinch.
I think Fire Emblem has a different aim in its gameplay feel than the idea of playing past your mistakes. Fire Emblem is fun because it is rooted in making judgement calls (Do I reset my game because X unit that I love or am invested in was killed or do I press on because this map took me 2+ hours to get to this point and I will have to replay the entire chapter). In this way there is a significant punishment for reseting (playing the entire chapter over again) but the cost is losing a unit you may care for a lot. The weightiness of that decision makes the games more fun because they actively force you to get emotionally invested.
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin taught me about this, back when it came out(2004?). I started out save-scumming, but some of the bugs in those early days, combined with my relative inexperience with stealth games, meant I spent a lot of time looking at loading screens. I got frustrated and decided to play through missions just to see how it went. And while it took a few playthroughs to get competent, I realized I was having way more fun trying to think my way through a problem while shooting back at the hornet's nest I'd kicked up. After that I started saving to preserve progress, not as a fallback to correct imperfections.
Great video!
I like the idea of the Darkest Dungeon style of save-scumming prevention, but the problem with that is that you are only one random bug or death loop away from losing all your progress completely. If you are going to use the autosave-overwrite system then there should still be a few saves that are permanent (eg. at the start of a chapter or level), so there is less ground to make up if things go completely wrong.
Transistor actually handles failure in a very interesting way. In every fight it is very unlikely that you'll actually die, but if you take too much damage you can temporarily loose access to one of your abilities. This can make fights more intense, since you can suffer many setbacks within one fight without dying, which raises the stakes and tension, and also means that you'll never die to "just a stupid mistake" since you essentially get second chances.
It also has more permanent consequenses in that after you've lost an ability it won't be available for the next couple of fights. This forces you to improvise and come up with new loadouts to tackle future challenges and helps you find more interesting ways to play.
Sure, there's probably some way to save scum in that game, but since failing can lead to so much fun I never bothered to find out.
Also helping this are the little "tests" in the Backdoor that force you to use a certain loadout. With that, losing a function for a couple of fights isn't a reset-level setback, because you can think "well hey, I may not have Breach() anymore, but I was pretty fantastic with Flood() in the test. I'll try that instead"
...though admittedly, I *did* tend to reset when I lost Void(Ping(), Crash()). AoE huge damage and a temporary stun is honestly just too good to give up, especially for only 6 MEM.
@@eimazd Void was my personal favourite as well. My plan essentuially consisted of first gathering enemies together using Ping(Get()), then debuffing using Void(Crash()), and finally oneshotting everything with Cull().
Flexibility becomes a real issue with that though. If you've lost Cull your damage immediately becomes pitiful, even with the massive debuffs. Even Jaunt with breach deals more damage than ping...
I haven't ever played Transistor, but just hearing you say "since failing can lead to so much fun I never bothered to find out [if save scumming was possible]" means, to me, that the devs have succeeded completely.
Super giant are pro's at this. Pyre featured in the video and it has a great example for failure. There is no death in the game but end goal of the game for you and your enemies are basically the same, losing to an enemy can mean they achieve their goal at the expense of a member of your squad. Leading to interesting dialogue and story outcomes (this was hard to write without spoilers - and i still may have given too much away)
Transistor was just a damn well made game all-around.
When I saw the notification I thought you were streaming playing more game jam entries... calling them our mistakes
I love how Braid takes this concept of kind of save scumming and integrates it as a core part of its gameplay and of the ideas the game presents to the player: What if you could learn from your mistakes, but avoid the consequences?
I think Braid is a really interesting game, maybe you could do a video on it!
I guess I should share one such anecdote.
Long, long time ago, when Assassin's Creed was a newfangled new IP and a single game not yet tied to a conveyor belt, I was hunting a target. Since I can't be arsed to look up his name, let's call him a fat sultan - because he was fat and wore a turban. I've spectacularly fudged my takedown attempt, and was treated to a visage of blobby sultan bolting down the streets in the direction of the guards' compound with surprising speed - but instead of reloading my save, I decided to give chase.
We ran through an entire district, and the sultan managed to reach the safety of the compound just in time...for me, blinded by the excitement of the chase, to jump over the fortified wall and plunge the blade into my quarry's neck. Right in the middle of the courtyard filled with guards.
~Benny Hill theme plays~
Mark Brown needs to do a video about fast travel. I have mixed feelings myself. Fast travel can prevent you from being engaged in an environment. Fast travel can also prevent backtracking especially in a large map from being tedious and boring. God of War did fast travel phenomenally. In God of War fast travel starts very limited and gradually takes you to more places. By the time you can fast travel anywhere you have explored most of the map and are collecting what you previously missed.
Fast Travel is a really weird one for me. I hate TES/Fallout 3+ style fast-travel where you can essentially teleport at will, with the passage of time and distance crossed meaning little if anything - Most importantly in terms of gameplay is skipping all the potential combat between where you were and where you're going. On the other hand, playing Fallout 4 on Survival can be incredibly tedious when walking between settlements.
Mods like Horizon (Can't recommend it enough for anyone who thinks Fo4 should be more challenging) bridge the gap by having it only possible between settlements that meet a given requirement, but again the journey and passage of time themselves are completely inconsequential. Still, gameplay's much more compelling when you have to plan your way in and out of the more dense, enemy-rich areas, consuming your resources to fight or sneak your way out and potentially running into fights or situations you're no longer prepared for because you over-extended.
If a game omits fast travel, the world you move through manually needs to be dynamic and interesting by its own right. If it does include fast travel, making use of it should mean something.
Razbuten did one if you're interested.
@@jelanistowers6504 he's the one that shit on the concept for the entire video? Has over a million views. That shit makes NO SENSE. All about what kinda game your making. Getting around in Spiderman PS4 w/o FT and Fallout 4 w/o FT( as they shipped) would be drastically different.
I think my biggest personal issue with fast travel is that using fast travel frequently destroys the open-world concept. If I only use fast travel, then it feels like I'm playing a game with various levels, and I'm just loading in between them.
On the other hand, not using fast travel can become rather tedious after 100 odd hours, especially when some games have you travel between two places somewhat frequently. Although that does make it seem like I'm truly learning the environment of the game world, what areas are dangerous, which ones to avoid if I'm not looking for a fight, it can sometimes be boring.
Ultimately, I'd say a form of restricted fast travel is probably the best compromise between not having fast travel, and having fast travel to any known location at will. As Morbo513 points out, the mod Horizon for FO4 did a good job of balancing it, and even in Skyrim if the fast travel were restricted to the carriages between cities, I'd be fine with that.
I like when fast travel is woven into the game's world. When playing Skyrim, for example, I would just forgo standard fast travel and only use carriages for quick travel.
I personally think that Nintendo does really well with making fast travel a part of the game's world. For example:
-In Super Mario Odyssey, Mario's cap flies toward the selected checkpoint.
-In Zelda games, it's a transition with magic or being carried by something(such as a bird, witch, or cyclone).
-In Metroid Prime 2, you're given a suit that allows you to travel between the major areas of the game through light, but only after you've completed all the areas.
Just give me a form of fast travel that fits in the game, don't just make it so that I select a point on the map and I'm instantly greeted with a loading screen with no explanation of how my character got there without running into any combat encounters.
Its fascinating that adding inconveniences, when kept minor, can actually keep a player from restarting. Humans are weird. Great video as always :)
for some reason, even though the game has lots of permanent consequences, high difficulty, and yet I found my self playing through my mistakes in LISA
cause most choices in lisa are both bad lol, there is only the roulette part that is save scum intensive
Hey Mark, you brought up XCOM and how the design of the game makes you want to save scum. This makes me want a video where you focus on trying to fix XCOM 2 with examples of it being done right. I think this is an interesting topic and would love to see you handle it in a future video.
About games with single save files: don't do that. I understand the intent, but I've had to stop playing some games because the only save file was corrupted.
Plus, if your game has collectibles and it force saves throughout levels with no way of going back to pick up the stuff you forgot in the previous room (now locked for arbitrary reasons), I will stop playing. I really don't have time for games that tease me with empty collectible slots, and prevent me from going back to fill them. Even if it's unimportant shit.
do you often play multiple save slots concurrently?
Sligguy You mean, use them? Listen. I'm that person that finishes every game with 200 saves.
But even for a normal human being, I suppose you could possibly want to play different runs at the same time let's say multiple people in your house use the same Steam/Playstation/XBox account for instance. Or maybe you're a streamer and you want to be able to play the next chapter ahead of you streaming it. Or maybe you're a speed runner, etc.
How does having multiple save files save you from corruption? Are you constantly making backups? That is *very* abnorm.
"if your game has collectibles and it force saves throughout levels with
no way of going back to pick up the stuff you forgot in the previous
room (now locked for arbitrary reasons)"
this one riles me up. ive played some fps games and i want to look for all the secrets in the level but then i cant go back and explore the previous areas again.
@@ActionGamerAaron Save rotating is way normal though and that seems to be what OP is talking about. Having to redo a few hours of content over the whole game is way more manageable and will keep me from stopping. It's not as uncommon as you think, most people I know do it. It takes zero effort and is a life saver in any case it is actually needed.
I read the title as "playing your mistakes" and I thought he had uploaded the game jam stream or something
Savage!
sneaky snek > ded snek
*you don't say*
Newest MGS main character. "Dead Snake". :P
@@Duchess_Van_Hoof just him lying on the ground with an empty lifebar
This is something I've been thinking about a lot over the years. I always used to reload if I messed up in games but lately I'm forcing my self to continue even after I fail and it's made for some of my most memorable gaming experiences in years.
Small correction: Dark Souls saves automatically all the time, when resting at a bonfire, picking up an item, etc. Every save is a "permanent" save, so you can never go back to a previous point (like resting at a bonfire), unless you savescum by alt-tabbing.
It wouldn't be a GMTK video without the obligatory Far Cry 2 reference :P
Maybe because far cry 2 has everything about good quality gaming??
sa3doZ 22 It really doesn't. It had a lot of great ideas that they failed to execute properly. The "setbacks" like gun jamming and malaria were very easy to avoid, and only amounted to QTEs in the rare cases that they did happen. A Far Cry 2-2 could easily be the best game in the series with modern sensibilities; I'd love a more survivalist, oppressive open world game. But the Far Cry 2 that actually released just doesn't have the content breadth to hold up.
Because its a masterpiece
Gun jamming. Everyone thinks it's annoying and the ones that don't are smart enough to buy guns from the store instead of looting it off enimies. Like seriously the whole discussion about is dumb. It isn't interesting game design when it can be avoided super easily. It just punishes you for picking weapons of soldiers, which already has little incentive to do so.
@@pomfrod1263 why does everyone thinks malaria is like a Hitler of far cry 2
Not to undermine the “failure spectrum” point, but when there are story or achievement reasons to avoid failure states, can we get games that set those up for us?
For example, Dishonored has both lethality and detection tracked. When I am going for a nonlethal run, it would be massively beneficial if my game would automatically fail me when someone dies accidentally. That way, I would at least know when accidents happen.
I agree here... Achievements/Trophies are an aspect that drive save scumming that might be overlooked otherwise.
I bear a forever grudge against the first Dishonored, which I played in full non-lethal mode, save scumming like mad, and never got the Steam achievement for because one of the side quests broke non-lethal runs.
(I quenched my thirst for vengeance by doing a no-detection full-lethal run. That mansion party? Let's just say there was no one left alive to talk about it.)
OH, I didn't know one of the side-quests broke non-lethal runs, that's probably what happened to me then. I also tried to play fully non-lethal but never got the achievement in the end, I assumed some corpse must've physics'd and broke someone's neck.
The whole experience turned me off from trying to force perfect runs in stealth games so hey at least there's that.
It's the side quest with the witch lady. If you poison the elixir batch of the street gangs for her, she'll later ask you to kill the gang leader. If you refuse, you have to fight and kill her. If you run away, I think it counts as if you'd killed him. Something like that. It's been a while.
Like he said, devoted individuals will try to go for the achievements even if they have to save-scum, but for the most part people would have more fun if they were to roll with h3 punches.
Just saying, that's not really how the Dark Souls save system works. It just saves whenever you move a certain distance or do basically any significant action. Looting, killing an enemy, aggroing an enemy, getting a new area name pop up, crossing enemy aggro ranges/leashes, spending Souls, etc. It probably saves any time any flag of any kind is tripped.
Having crashed a few times playing through the series, I can attest that the save system is pretty robust and saves often, not just at bonfires.
ya'll are missing the point a bit. The bonfires function *like* a save point because they're where you'll return if you die. That's what a save point is used for in other games. Functionally speaking how often the game saves data is irrelevant when talking about how the player 'saves.'
But the subject of the video is letting mistakes roll vs save scumming, which seems to be more about when a game saves and updates the state you can return to, which happens constantly in Dark Souls. You can only effectively save scum in a Soulsborne game if you're quick on the Alt+F4 just as something horrible happens, and can't go back to previous save slots in the way Mark talks about with other examples.
I understand your point about perception for the player, but I think Mark's description here is somewhat unclear and could probably use clarification in regards to how "letting it roll" works in Dark Souls.
Edited for clarity and brevity: Dark Souls allows you to keep most progress on death, however what you lose is physical progress through the environment (and souls). So the bonfires serve as a save point because they are a cap on that loss of physical progress. The save on exit is more of a suspension as far as the player is concerned as there's nothing to return to. You can always return to bonfires (especially with a lordvessel). But you can't classically 'save' a world state and return to that. That system forces the player to 'play through' because they can't return to a world state before they talked to the wrong damn serpent again.
That's just how I interpreted what he was saying about it. I thought the video was perfectly cromulent in its explanation ;)
Yeah, I'm surprised how wrong he got it. Bonfires aren't save points. More like new spawning points. The game saves all the time. You can quit out at any time and come back in except in the middle a fight.
Great video - I'd just add that "optimising the fun out of a game" brings its own kind of enjoyment. Min-maxing and finding that optimal route is something I personally enjoy immensly.
Payday 2 is an example of a game I enjoy trying to "play it out" in the case of setbacks, but that's actually despite (based on the criteria set in your video) the game doing it poorly in a lot of circumstances. When you play, you're often going for stealth or loud, and if you're going with stealth, the majority of those missions can still be completed loud. However, if your crew goes all-in on stealth in terms of skills and weapons for a mission, it's especially difficult to carry out the mission from there, and oftentimes people will restart. In other words, if you don't plan your team's loadout for a mission to be sub-optimal for stealth (by having the ability to go loud if needed), then loud can become prohibitively difficult and just worthy of a restart. It's an interesting example in a multiplayer game, and I do find some of the most fun can come from those situations where things are almost perfectly stealthed and then you have to make a mad dash for the getaway.
It's exactly like that with Mark of the Ninja. If you spec into full stealth if you get spotted it's easier to just reload.But the game has pretty generous checkpoints and plenty of other playstyles.
The big problem with Payday 2 is people not even wanting to attempt stealth either due to level difficulty or playstyle preferences (I bought this DLC so I could use a rocket launcher) so unless you've got some buddies who are willing to play nice you get screwed over a lot.
I think the most rewarding stages in PD2 are the ones that reward you for going stealth, but don't reset your progress when shit hits the fan. Stages like the Jewlery store or bank heist for example, feel incredibly satisfying to "lock down" on a perfect stealth run but if you screw up it doesn't change all the objectives like in some of the more frustrating stealth levels like Framing Frame. Day 2 of Firestarter is a decent compromise too, as one man can go in quiet and rush the vault if detected while his team goes in to support armed to the teeth as a sort of plan B but a lot of levels are kind of hit and miss with the stealth/loud balancing and I find a lot of players just want to run loud if given the option (despite the game offering additional monetary rewards for being stealthy) as it's often quicker or easier to pull off and requires less knowledge about the level objectives and layout to pull off. It doesn't help that the game sort of forces you between loud/quiet playstyles so if you have a prefered loudout/style it makes you want to snub some heists since it deprives you of your favorite tools.
And this is why Overkill is the best difficulty to play PD2 on. It gives you the largest set of meaningful tools to play with in stealth (luring guards with broken cameras, blowing/picking safe locks, etc.) and if you fail and go loud, it's forgiving enough that even with no loud skills if you know what you're doing you can just barely scrape through. I hope that in the future they implement more missions where semi-stealth is a viable approach (Counterfeit being the perfect example, Scarface Mansion being a little too unforgiving to really make it work).
I don't even play stealth in Payday 2 anymore because the stealth mechanics are just unenjoyable and pretty much always slower than going loud. Not to mention that playing with other people in stealth is just frustrating, it's way more enjoyable to just ignore stealth for me
The issue with payday is lazy difficulty, higher difficulties just duplicate enemy health and damage, making low difficulties boring and higher ones just unfair since taking a shot is pretty much insta death
It also makes a lot of builds useless in higher difficulties
So yeah, you can press on, but if you are fully equipped for stealth on high difficulty then you're wasting your time by trying because you aren't going to beat enemies that down you in 1 hit and take 2 magazines to kill swarming you
I'm surprised Fire Emblem didn't crop up, given the subject of this video - it's kind of got the same issues as XCOM does with regards to unit death, where players will just reload if one of their units, or a recruitable enemy unit, dies. More recent games have implemented a "casual mode" in which fallen units come back at the beginning of the next battle, but before that anyone that died was just Gone.
It handles this exact problem pretty badly, in other words.
Agreed, I was hoping FE would come up. I'd say that Fire Emblem handles the problem "badly" for a reason, though. Unlike XCOM, FE's whole shtick is that all of your units have names and personalities and relationships to each other, so if any of them die, it's really painful for the player. That's one of the major themes of the series -- war is meaningless and painful because innocent people die. I've always seen the choice between resetting and losing all of your progress in a level versus soldiering forward and accepting the loss as one of the most interesting hidden "mechanics" in the game. It's not explicit, but it forces the player into a meaningful personal choice.
Don't expect Japanese games like Fire Emblem pop up in this kind of channel, no offense here but it seem like this channel most likely belong to the "core gamer" archetype, which you can normally seen around Reddit website.
On the topic of Fire Emblem casual mode, I can generally assume that people who think that casual mode is bad has most definitely never played that mode at all. Even for a FE veteran(I have played every mainline FE games in existence beside 1, 2, 3 and 15 on multiple different difficulty and I know I have nothing to proved but my words) like myself, I find casual mode to be breath of fresh air to play with especially on higher difficulty mode, it allows you to use kamikaze tactics which open up a lot more room for flexibility and new options to develop your strategy, so in a sense it allows you to intentionally make a mistake or a short term loss to gain the upper hand on your enemies without having fear of losing too much
They didn't say the mode is bad, they said that it doesn't fix the issues mentioned in the video: instead of being punishing and "forcing" people to just load their saves it simply remove a lot of the consequences of failure.
It removes the long-term consequences, the ones that are most likely to motivate save-scumming, but you still get to play through the rest of the chapter with fewer units, which can lead to some interesting scenarios and improvisation that risk-averse players would usually just avoid altogether and not get to ever see.
Personally, i feel that my Fire Emblem experience has been improved by Casual Mode's inclusion. And since it's a just an option players can choose or not, it also doesn't harm the experience for players who still want to play Ironman.
If you want a better example of a possibly heavy-handed, consequence-less approach to this problem, look to Fire Emblem's Phoenix Mode instead (though in that case, you can just consider that a stress-free version for players who might not have played at all without the mode anyways and just want to have a very relaxed session)
@@moonrazk saying FE casual mode completely removing the consequence is really a overstatement, temporary losing 1 units on higher difficulty means a lot and you are much obviously on a disadvantage for the whole chapter and you can't really abuse the kamikaze tactics all the time unless you know what you are doing
One benefit of save-scumming for me is it encourages experimentation. If I know that by screwing something up, I can just instantly go back and get a do-over, I'm more likely to try goofy or random tactics to see what will happen than I would if I knew my every move was essential. It's not always about trying to *beat* a section, but more just seeing what I can get away with, knowing I have a safety net to fall back on if I screw something up. And I've found that playing this way, I find myself rarely ever going back to an older save and retrying anyway. Just psychologically, knowing that option is there changes the way I play something.
One game that made me do this was mass effect because I often felt like the dialog option short descriptions given didn't wind up matching what was actually said or they would take you out of the dialog tree unexpectedly before I had finished getting all the backstory. It was very annoying.
Some games are hard not to save scam because often your plans are going wrong due to a bug like guards suddenly starting to see through walls or an NPC getting stuck in a doorway.
Other games force you to save scam because consequence of your actions are often completely unjustified or unpredictable. Think of a Riverwood's chicken in Skyrim. You were fighting vampires and accidentally hit that chicken? Now the entire town is out to murder you, and your only options are to either kill every villager there or run away and never return to Riverwood again. All that for accidentally hitting a chicken while you were saving the village from vampires.
Yeah, the "Failure Spectrum" of XCOM 2 is horrible. You're not even allowed to have wounded soldiers in fact, because each time a soldier gets wounded they roll a "panic check". And by "They", I mean not only the wounded soldier, but your entire squad. If they fail that check, they become panicked. If they are panicked, they can start shooting at random, including against other members of the squad. This often leads to critical wounds, as your squad members are rarely at cover from other squad member. This leads to more panick check, more panicked soldiers and more grenades launched AGAINST YOUR OWN FREAKING TEAM. This is devastating.
And, as you said in your video "How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves", the game forces you to put your soldiers at risk by putting a time limit on the missions. And as you said in this video, losing soldiers lead you to recruit rookies, who are awfull soldiers, and you're just going to lose other missions because of that. The worse is that the game actually let you play more and more missions despite you having already lost, because you'll never be able to stop the avatar project at this point.
TL;DR : As the military would say, "Failure is not an option" when you play XCOM2.
Yeah, not being able to recover from failure was the biggest flaw of XCOM 2. I started two playthroughs on Veteran difficulty. Ironman of course, cause I was too proud to save scum. Both times things were fun, the missions were challenging but doable... until one mission went wrong, everything started spiralling into shit and eventually I realized there was no way I was gonna turn this around and quit the playthrough. Frustrated I started a third and final playthrough on Rookie difficulty. And while it still was fun, there was no challenge in steamrolling the enemy in any mission, no tension in knowing the missions were so easy nobody was going to die.
Yeah, xcom 2 both forces you too play aggressively while also punishing you for it, and failures snowball far too quickly and certainly, I find that it's not so bad further in the game when you have more good soldiers and items, but it's nearly impossible in the early game
Is Xcom: Enemy Unknown better in this regard? I haven't played either and was wondering which to pick up.
@@dyciefisk2535 Failure is still not recommended at all in Enemy Unknown ; however the game is also much easier as you have infinite time to complete the missions.
Strangely they also did a better job with the "Enemy Within" DLC than with XCOM2.
In this DLC you have optional objectives in the form of canisters of MELD that you have to recover within a time limit during the missions.
While they provide an advantage, as I said, they're optional, and missing them doesn't lead to failure at all.
Thanks fuck for mods letting you remove the time limit. Time limits in games are absolute cancer.
I've been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and I'd say it does this really well.
Trying to sneak in and override the biggest machine in the area doesn't always work out, but I never felt like I was left in a situation where I was overwhelmed in combat (Aside from the early-game of course). And the save system compliments it well, because the save points are often right on the battlefield, which encourages you to clear out every enemy to claim it.
Alternatively, I've also played a lot of Prey recently, and I'd say it has the opposite problem because it offere a quicksave feature that you can access at any point, so I found myself doing exactly that...quicksave before doing anything stupid! And sometimes to re-do combat once I figured out how to defeat certain enemies and could make the fight more efficient.
0:53 *You may be surprised by what happens next* Typically a quest breaks or you fall through the world and the game becomes unwinnable.
I guess another way to stop save scumming is to make consequences hard to immediately notice. For example, The Witcher series is basically that. Without any guidebook it's pretty much impossible to guess everything, and some of the decisions are actually cross-entry. (It's said that things in The Witcher 3 would even get impacted by what you've done in The Witcher 1 if you pass the save file all the way down.)
Oh and, it works great for The Witcher, especially the third entry, because usually both choices are regretful.
That just makes me google what's going to happen in a guide. Obsfuscating information is just a waste of time.
Tom Franco
The Witcher 1 has a "best result" for act 2, but all the possible results in act 3 isn't good. In The Witcher 2 the main choices are just choices (but you will always have a bad ending regardless what you choose). The Witcher 3 is done properly that there's always bad consequences to good results, making the guide book pretty useless as both aren't "good choices".
So, the way these games stopping you from using a guide is by making both options "not good" (or disable the good choice during first playthrough) and thus there's no point to use a guide. In fact I'd say the only time you can really use the guide in the whole Witcher trilogy is during act 2 in the first game. But even so, it's like, you just killed one or two less people and that's it.
@@FlameRat_YehLon What? That's not stopping me from using a guide at all. Like for example, when there's the really hard issue of deciding whether to help the tree spirit or the witches of crookback bog, all I had to do was look at a guide, look at the consequences and decide which was the least bad outcome. IMO, the best outcome forces you to let the orphans be killed. It's an interesting moral choice, but it's not anything which discourages looking things up in a guide.
I'll always remember one of my buddies in farcry 2 saving me in a firefight at a base before dying himself, it was sadder than any written story I've played
Great video. Have to point out that in my experience, when I get bad dice rolls, I don't let things play out. Because there's literally nothing I hate more in gaming than getting screwed over by RNG to the point of "I had a really well set up system." to "Oh RNG just figured it'd give me 3 of the worst rolls in sequence", which is irrecoverable.
To this I personally figured a dynamic luck system should be in place in every RNG heavy game. A "karma" system that takes your wins and your losses, and makes sure that you still have randomness in your game, while still keeping it fair. So less to no chance of having 3 of the worst rolls in a row. But also not having too much luck that would make the game too easy.
And hey, if it's programmed properly, the karma system could even be integrated into the difficulty setting. Not just to see how much karma would intervene, but also to give players a negative feedback loop that they'd have to struggle their way out of, or a positive feedback loop they'll have to try and prolong for as long as possible.
that's a great concept
I think a whole video on "Making Failure Fun" would be really interesting and helpful.
Darkest Dungeon probably wasn't the best example. I understand the intention behind it's autosave system, but failure there isn't fun or interesting. Affliction means either loosing acess to that member for a week, or carrying that member hoping he doesn't screw your team over. Death means several hours of rebuilding a team in a low level dungeon, then grinding mid tier dungeons for loot. It's punishing for the sake of being punishing.
i dont think so... the permadeath made me quite nervous at some times in which i wouldnt be if i could just reload or the consequences werent so severe. playing this i felt like when i play some pen and paper games where u can actually fuck up and have to roll with it
Darkest Dungeons failure to me is that they both want You to invest in your characters and yet not care about them.
The outcome of this why one of the best money making methods is just suicide run new teams. People are disposable...but doing this isn't consequential at all. It's just mundane grinding.
Yet the game, clearly, wants you to invest in heroes and upgrade them. I feel they wanted you to have multiple teams and lots of investment, making choices matter. But this can only occur after you waste weeks grinding new teams.
ShadowEcto It's true that permadeath makes the game better until you fail, but in my experience that comes at the expense of making it worse after you fail. I once got stuck on an XCOM 2 mission and kept losing teams to it. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong because I couldn't retry without using a very weak team or spending a long time rebuilding. It completely ruined any sense of progress or danger. Personally, I think the "lose your team" mechanic only benefits games until it actually happens.
For that reason I find I prefer my permadeath games to be short, with death outright ending the run and new options opening up across successive runs.
Why is punishing for the sake of being punishing a bad thing if that's the intention?
They want you to consider your actions, so they harshly punish you for wrong decisions. They want you to understand what's at stake and what the potential dangers are. The best way to do that is harsh punishment.
@@highestsettings it's bad if it prevents you from completing the game, or forces you to halt all momentum and regress, which is not all that different than reloading, and possibly worse. XCOM2 has a notorious feedback loop, as mentioned in this thread and video. You lose your high ranking soldiers, and if you don't have a reliable backup, your game ends because the missions don't get easier and your replacement supply is all scrubs. You just keep failing. Punishing or consequential gameplay is fine, but devs need to be careful not to create a scenario where the only player choice is wipe the save and start over.
More great examples that I'm surprised you didn't bring up when on the subject of stealth games are the Deus Ex reboots, and the way they punish you for imperfect play. You get dramatic EXP bonuses for completing a level unseen and un-noticed, and this EXP is what unlocks new augment abilities, so by the end you have less options to work with if you have played more poorly.
I think you could revisit this game as we had many interesting experiments in this "deal with your mistakes" situation with games such as Pathologic 2 and Disco Elysium
I made a far less concise video with a very similar message on Immersive Sims like a year ago. I didn't know most of the terms you used and wasn't aware of some of the features you mentioned from other games, so this insight is extremely enlightening. It was awesome seeing your take on this issue.
You cover a really big spectrum of genres, but I want to bring another genre to your attention *Real Time Tactics*
or the game *Shadow Tactics Blades of Shogun*
The *Commandos* and Desperados games were in isometric perspective, and since they were in realtime with quite short "failure spectrum" and therefore requiring pattern memorization, quick save/load buttons were almost always required to pass.
So for making a game in that genre, devs for Shadow Tactics employed a quick save/load function and made it front and center as opposed to tucked behind pause menu. It showed (with color coded indicators) your time since the last quick save.
They took the opposite route you suggested.
Yep this game really does work well because of how difficult it actually is to get perfect first try. Basically it let you play as a badass team of assassin while you actually suck, making sure that you can make mistakes, but that what happens in reality is actually what would happen with competent assassins.
That's unlike something like dishonored for exemple where you can fail so hard that you sometimes can't feel like you are playing as a competent assassin. In shadow tactics if you make a play that isn't what the characters would do, you'll most likely have to reload. And despite that you are given so many options that you don't feel like you are stuck to any playstyle. I really liked playing that game ^^ (but it's very differently designed than a game that try to make consequences matter)
I've always felt that the quicksave/load mechanic in Shadow Tactics is meant to emulate the "planning stage" of any operation. Meaning that the characters are essentially going over the possible outcomes, and then building on top of that. A 'what if we did this or that' kind of deal. Meanwhile you are also learning the patterns of the patrols, the placement of enemies, hostages, interactables, etc, and thusly designing the most optimal plan to successfully complete the mission, just like the characters would.
Pyre definetly is my favourite example of living with failure in gaming.
Furthermore I'm always glad when it is mentioned. I feel like this gem of a game is a little bit overlooked.
agreed, i'm surprised he didn't talk more about it, honestly. failure as something to be learned from and definitely not something to be save-scummed is basically right there in the text of the game. whereas something like MGS V does have a real fail state that is just many setbacks away at any given moment, pyre basically upfront denies the idea of a fail state.
Not to brag or anything, but I found the game so easy that I never got to experience the failures you are presumably talking about. But from what I understand, it's not just that you can live with failure, but that you don't actually have to succeed at all. You can lose every Rite and still complete it with more or less the same ending. I bought the game on day one but I ended up being pretty disappointed with it.
@@FlintlockYT mild spoilers for people who haven't played through pyre:
on true nightwing mode I found the game to be pretty difficult, but even on my first playthrough on normal difficulty I found myself facing a choice I'd never really faced in a video game: being given the choice between succeeding and saving one of my guys or intentionally failing to give an "opponent" their chance at redemption. Sure you could play every rite to win and I imagine a lot of players did, but feeling moved to let the cpu, the game, essentially, beat you adds a lot to the idea of this "failure."
Holy shit I'm glad you mentioned xcom 2 there was this bad mission which resulted in a dead squad member and my other vets all being gravely injured. So I had to use a squad of rookies (some were only slightly levelled) in the next mission which happens to be one of the missions where you have to protect civilians.
It was awful, most of the enemies killed my squad members in one to 3 shots other times it's that the procedurally generated map placed civs too far away for me to get to them on time leading me to basically being screwed in the long run. I had to restart it so many times before I could get a good placement with the civs and enemies and managed to pull it off.
When attacks are almost completely reliant on good RNG things get bad very quickly. Yeah skills are important I needed them to keep my squad alive during that mission but missing a 95% shot is very upsetting and fatal.
"And remember, losing is fun!" -Dwarf Fortress
I really like celeste's system. the game is really hard but really generous. you can try at a level as long as you like, and slowly chip away at it. the game encourages you to keep playing even if you're bad at it, cause at the end of the day you only need to get past the level and you can move on.
I totally agree with that point about reducing the impacts of failure. I have no problems with save scumming in principle but I think things like Darkest Dungeon's save system are too crude of a fix. Those bits about Metal Gear and Farcry 2 were a great example of how to offer setbacks without making the player feel like they have to reset.
I also like Mark of the Ninja's approach. While it does reward you for playing well, it gives you the ability to replay any old mission with all of your unlocked gear at any time so you're not forced to play perfectly all the time or reset until you manage to pull off the perfect run on any given level. It gives you the leeway to make mistakes and, if a level is hard to pull off perfectly, you can come back later with more powerful tools to try and equalize the playing field and hunt down those last elusive objectives.
I started doing this in my new nightmare Prey playthrough. I like it because it becomes less of a chore of choosing the most optimal path and I'm actually enjoying scouring for resources and using the limited health, skeletal, and suit kits I have.
Man your channel is so awesome. I'm a gamer but not THAT hardcore but I enjoy gaming even more when I learn about the mechanics and the science behind the creation of games. Your videos share so much passion and enthusiasm behind the development mechanics and strategies of every single aspect in a variety of games it made me become even more fascinated by gaming than only playing itself. To be honest I recently had a job interview at an investment bank. As one can imagine, personal fit (since you spend a lot of time of your life with your colleagues) and especially technical knowledge of the relevant finance topics are crucial for an offer, even as an intern. When it came to free time activity/hobbies I did not want to state generic stuff like riding bike, skiing and playing chess but I really played the card of gaming. I really told the analyst and the executive director that I have a passion for gaming. But because of your videos I was able to be more precise and explained what mechanics and thoughts do give gaming a scientific and also intellectual aspect while developing them. I really just reproduced a lot of videos and topics I have enjoyed watching from you and I have to say I convinced my interviewers, obvioulsy, because I got an offer with the comment that nobody else in a long time was this honest about their actual hobby + presenting it in such an elaborate and interesting way.
@Mark Brown: I do not thank you for getting this important internship because I am convinced that my relevant skills and know-how would have been sufficient BUT I thank you sincerely for your view on gaming, your knowledge of it and the fascinating way of presentation about a topic every viewer and subscriber you have does enjoy and love. To understand the hobby I love even more THAT is what is so satisfying about your work.
When I played dishonored I decided to play and let things happen, and then I liked the game so much that I decided to play trying to get the achievements for perfect stealth and others. But you really have to like a game to play it two or three times in a row
A variation on this that I’ve been struggling with lately is narrative save scumming in games with branching stories. As the manual says, I’m playing these games for the stories and sometimes it feels like the choice I picked just led to a more boring story, so I reload. i.e.: trusting someone that will later betray you is not “optimal” play, but it’s a great story whereas having an interesting character enter and leave the game within two seconds never to be seen again is just annoying.
Playing Earthbound, I was fighting a boss and one character got hit HARD by its last-ditch attack, but the rolling HP mechanic meant their health was a steady drop instead of an instant kill. It meant another character was able to get the final blow before anyone got KO'd, and it's what I thought of right away when you talked about failure spectrum allowing for last-second victories and interesting gameplay moments. Awesome video!
I feel like you really undersold how effective XCOM's Iron Man mode is. My first playthrough of XCOM: EU was on Iron Man mode, and it was one of the most tense, gripping, gut-wrenching gaming experiences I've ever had.
In the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series, some dungeons will quicksave your game before entering. This causes a reset to count as a loss which in turn makes you lose almost all your items you went in with. Noticably, the dungeons in question are only the difficult and grindy ones that you unlock you've beaten the main game. Additionally, like in Dark Souls, you can create single-use saves while inside the dungeons if you wanna take a break.
There's this mission in Mass Effect 3, where you have to choose between the Geth and the Quarians, Legion and Tali, both very much close to me, Tali especially. When I did screw up and Tali died, I was so heartbroken that I replayed that entire mission again, with that same result. I played the entire game again, but now the entire Geth race dies. I just cant play with the guilt of letting one of your closest teammates die along with their entire race.....so I never finished it
relevant term i learned in a somewhat related context: failing forward
the idea being that failure should still generally result in something interesting.
I love your videos.
This one in particular probably helped me through my latest stump in Dragon's Dogma, an RPG where you easily miss quests with its pseudo-single save system and is a nightmare for completionists like me. In my latest mishap I made the mistake of not speaking to a character and missed out her entire quest line, and it immediately zapped all my enthusiasm in playing the game (even though the gameplay is what I enjoy most). I've resorted to looking up quest progressions to ensure I don't miss stuff because I don't plan on playing through the game more than once, but somehow still ended up "screwing up". I even tried to use tools to manually edit my save but end up fruitlessly not able to restart the quest line.
Thanks to your video, I think it kinda cleared the cloud for me to accept my loss and move on and just play the game as it is, since the gameplay is what interests me the most anyhow. So again, thank you for these videos. Please keep making them.
So stop making "perfect stealth, no kills, collect every object, etc." -achievements!
AugerHybrid or maybe only add them after you complete the mission or game first. In hitman it’s cool to be able to rank up against others, but it just means I’m to scared to make huge risks
I like that aspect of stealth games and nothing you design will stop me restarting if I am seen 🤣
No. There fine. Except they should add them after finishing the game
Its actually the opposite of what you think. those would perfectly fit the achievements section instead of beeing necessary to finish the game properly, and thats the point
6:20 Mark calls them meaningless, and I agree with him. Achievements are just optional goals to go for and don't have any power over gameplay unless the player decides to go for them. And something like a "never spotted" is hardly ever gone for. How many people ACTUALLY go for the perfect stealth achievements? What about those who go for it right from the get-go? Cant be more than 1%.
I'd say just stop putting so much weight into achievements like that. Especially on your first play-through. They're pointless. It's just a checklist for people who want some kind of reward for that challenge. It's really not the game dev's fault you give the achievements that much weight.
once I tried to steal something in Skyrim and ended up having to kill the whole village I was in. then I realized that they wouldn't respawn and that it was now a ghost town
Mark is just the best at breaking down and analyzing games, and explaining his discoveries in a digestible way. Love it.
Wow, I’ve been looking for a channel like yours for a while. Interesting commentary on the design process behind games, I hope as I dig deeper into your videos I can learn a lot more because I really want to know about game design and the industry itself. Thanks for your hard work.
Save scumming in Darkest Dungeon is extremely easy: just click ALT+F4 before the shadow of your dead team member completely disappears. This game also doesn't offer any different gameplay experiences for failing, just more time spent grinding new low level adventurers... as if there wasn't already enough of that. Additionally it punishes the player at random, often without giving any chance to recover. Darkest Dungeon's system is a BAD example.
Thanks for the tip. Darkest Dungeon, while a good game, has serious flaws in this area. Great points and well-made
+Paxton Wulgus Darkest dunheon is a shit game owing entirely ro abysmal game design that trounces every other mostly positive aspect of it.
That's the entire central story though. Yeah, there's something something secrets in the manor, but the actual story is about managing a group of adventurers who try and more often than not fail to grow and to fight through harder and harder dungeons. It's not perfect, it could use a bit less grinding/easier starter dungeons, but without that main mechanic it would be just like any other dungeoneering game
0:28 This is exactly why I play tabletop roleplaying games.
Watching this reminded me of the time I save-scummed in majora's mask. I was trying to do that "shoot the aliens" side-quest, wich game logic-wise, is an absolute pain in the ass to set up to retry, and I kept dying without figuring out what I was doing wrong(didn't know aliens could sneak in from the back), so I ended up making a quick-save before beginning, copying that quicksave to the second file, and if I were to fail, re-copy the quick save.
Incredible video. Have been feeling burnt out on games a bit and the last two videos i’ve watched of yours has given me a great sense of perspective.
Funny enough, using save scumming in games that have disabled save scumming actually added more fun to those games for me.
For example in FTL, I always backup my save after getting to next area (long live PC). Saves are still rare, one per area, but I'm not forced to lose all progress due to bad role of the dice.
This especially increased enjoyment of the last boss phase of the game. Without this, it was just plain awful for me.
player1 yeah , i felt that way when playing xcom 2, I do limit save scumming, like I won't reload for percentage rolls, but if the game does something really stupid and I lose a solider for no real reason I will reload
The point that the Darkest Dungeon designer brought up is also why all roguelikes have permadeath. Permadeath is at the very core of the genre design for this exact reason, to make you consider your actions and live with their consequences instead of just loading a savefile.
Roguelites are like the deconstruction of the points in this video. When you die in a roguelike/lite are you playing your mistake? If playing after you die is playing your mistakes, then Mark's whole argument becomes unstable. Because playing after you die in any game becomes playing your mistakes.
A better way of talking about the whole thing may have just been; how to keep people from loading a save file, as opposed to how to get people to play their mistakes. What does that phrase even mean, particularly when the examples of failure are borderline failure states at best. Being found in a stealth game is not failure; it's often a main component of how the games are played (did you see the arsenal in MGSV?).
Using Pyre as an example; is the failure state when your opponent gets the ball? When they score? When they win? When they send someone home? When they send everyone home and you're stuck? What about in the sports games Pyre is inspired by? What what point do you "fail" in a FIFA career?
You could argue that games like FIFA get their players to "play their mistakes", but it's probably easier to just say that they don't usually load earlier saves.
phreakinpher Yeah, rougelikes are a horrible example of playing past your mistakes. Rougelikes don't let you play past your mistakes. They immediately hit the reset button and force you to start over. There's never a chance to play past your mistakes.
You two are forgetting the *other* states in the "Failure Spectrum" here. Yeah, sure - you don't get to play past *death.* But you *do* get to play past *injury,* and many roguelikes urge you to stick with files where you've sustained injuries or other small setbacks simply because of how roguelikes work. Yeah sure, you've only got 2 hearts left, you've already used your Potion and your only healing is coming from gold piles picked up by your Shopkeeper Familiar, but you're still gonna stick with the run until it ends rather than reset and start fresh.
Let's take NetHack as an example: Even putting on a cursed amulet of strangulation (which constantly deals damage, and can't be taken off normally) is no death sentence.
There are scrolls, wands, spellbooks and monsters, which can break items. Nymphs can/will steal this item. Or simply praying can get it off.
Or your pet can die almost randomly, gear might degrade/get destroyed, and so on.
There is a huge list of possible mistakes, that don't end the game.
Permadeath is only the most extreme mistake, and yes, it will punish you for that. But it strengthens all the other mistakes, because they are more serious, so you need to play accordingly.
In the end, taking a risk is not an interesting decision if you can just go back and try again.
These videos are my favorite on youtube. Kudos, Mark Brown, for helping us think deeply and intentionally about games
Great points there, Mark! There is also one mod for Skyrim called Death Alternative, which turns almost every previously fatal failure into positive feedback loop, for example: you've got beaten by some bandits, they now have your loot in some hideout and you can retrieve it, but you have no gear, so first you have to obtain something new...
"Given the opportunity, a player will optimize the fun out of a game." - Soren Johnson
So true.
This has always been my thought about X-Com. The reward for playing perfectly becomes an easier game, and the punishment for mistakes is a more difficult game. This to me seems like the opposite of what the game should be doing in those cases, but I haven't played it myself, so I'd be happy to hear if they've put in systems to work around this.
The talk of punishing save design really reminded me of Lisa:The painful’s pain mode, and in general the sparsity of save points and the surprising variety of places to go to and events to encounter. I remember expecting to find a post-boss save point just to get my expectations turned upside down with nearly tougher challenges and a shocking amount of serious plot after what looked like a joke boss. The Lisa serie could have its own essay about open world pacing really
One of my favorite playing past a mistake moment I had occured in the park simulator Jurassic Park Operation Genesis, which was this early video game where you get to build and managed your own Jurassic Park. I had a moment where I had a decently built park with some good dinosaurs like Dilophosaurus and the T-Rex, but suddenly a tropical storm hit my park. I did manage to get all my guests to the safety shelters in time, but all I could do was watch the storm tear apart my park, causing the dinosaurs, including an infected T-Rex to wander about and eat each other. Once the storm passed, I had to very quickly use whatever finances I had to rebuild all the broken fences and then quickly use my chopper to try and tranq my T-Rex and get it back in its pen before it ate all the other dinosaurs. It was a tense moment, and I felt a genuine fun thrill of being just THIS close to disaster, but then immediately succeeding!
I really disagree with failings being unpredictable because they feel like bullshit. If failing is something that you know that could happen, it's a lot more bearable
When did he say that?
Depends on the genre. Rouge-likes are all about preparing for the worst and improvising. Without unpredictable problems, you can't have that.
@@wylie2835 Each room in a rouge-like might be random, but what happens in the room shouldn't be unpredictable or at least that unpredictability shouldn't lead to a failure state or that failure will feel cheap and not the player's fault and they wouldn't want to play again. That is why I don't like FTL, because all of my deaths never felt like my fault, while in Hades it did because nothing unpredictable happened that caused me to fail.
When I played Dragon Age: Origins, I had hundreds of save files because I saved between almost every fight.
Love these videos, glad to see you always have topics to talk about.
Interesting side note to this excellent video in the tabletop RPG scene there is the concept of fail forward which is simply put a failure in performing an action should not stop the story in its tracks, this can be done in a couple of ways ranging from succeeding with a cost (instead of opening the safe silently you open it with a loud noise alerting the guards) to a twist in the story (you fail to take out the guards so now you have to break out of prison). This also ties in with the general consensus that if there is nothing at stake then there probably shouldn't be a test (or in video game terms it should be a cut scene). All this so the story never stalls and peters out or in more video game speak that the player should never have to reload to be able to continue.
Anyway loved the video, it is just that I am fascinated by the (potential) overlaps between tabletop and video game design
"Hello, I´m Karl" -Karl, retorical genius, rest in peace friend
I notice you mention Shadow of Mordor a lot in your videos...
I think it's so fascinating! One of the only truly "next gen" games I've played. It holds so much potential for procedurally driven narratives. Shame the sequel squandered it.
Personally, my main quarrel with the sequel is how they totally screwed the combat. The first one was very fun, on the sequel they added so many orc captain attributes that can't be easily countered that most of the time you have to spam one attack/ability to win the fight, which makes it totally boring.
Actually I'd love if you do a video comparing both combat systems in the future.
@@GMTK that's interesting. What games are also really next-gen in your opinion?
@@GMTK you should make a couple videos about it. Even shadow of war. They are my favorite games. Micro-transactions didn't bother me at all. They kinda never forced you to use it
Mark Brown honestly even though I love the game I’m one of its greatest critics and I see many things it could have done much better.
Great video. I just discussed this with a colleague. We were playing Wolfenstein 2 The New Colossus and we were talking about how easy it is to be sneaking one moment and shooting enemies with two shotguns the next without the game punishing you for playing either way.
Being able to then recover to a state where you can sneak again makes it very enjoyable and hardly incentivises you to reload a previous save game.
This is EXACTLY what I've been trying to figure out a work-around for and I'm so relieved that this video exists