The thing about death...

[Zambaku]

One thing I've never understood about videogames...Why is it so that when you die you can load a save state and *poof*, your alive and healthy again. The saved state defeats the purpose of death and that renders death a little more then an annoyance and dosn't really mean anything...That's the general formula for all games nowadays. Except for a special genre - namely roguelikes. For you that don't know what a roguelike is, it's basically an rpg with randomly generated areas and items. And where death is permanent and lets you die in tons and tons of ways. For example: You have found a lot of exciting items and have gotten overencumbered, and you are wielding a corpse of a basilisk for example that turns anything it hits into stone...You walk down a staircase and fall down due to the weight of your items, you drop the corpse you are wielding and it lands on you, you turn to stone, you die...Now, what would people say about permadeath in Fallout? When you die your dead and that's that. Make a new character. I think that would be alot of fun, trying to stay alive and flourish the best you can. Would make exploration a hundred times for exciting, atleast in my little world.

 

And ofcourse - a hunger/thirst system would be awesome aswell. If you don't eat or drink you would starve/die of thirst.

 

So, what do you think? Is there something to it or am I just a rambling oaf?

[TGBlank]

Roguelike-death is not everyone's cup of tea.

 

Also keep in mind one thing: nothing is stopping you from not reloading after death and starting out a new character.

[anlashok]

The style of gameplay of roguelikes is different from rpg's, at least when you play with permadeath and not cheat etc. The value of permadeath largely depends on the game. Specially, there are some gameplay aspects that work very badly with permadeath.

 

First is luck. Obviously, if you have a game which requires you to kill thousand monsters before winning and for every given monster you have 50% change of killing it or dying (no modifiers apply), permadeath is not a good thing and beating the game is not a sign of your skill as a player, more like lack of better things to do.

 

Another is heavy reliance on character (or equivalent) stats or equipment. Let's take the game discussed above and modify it so that you are required to beat one level 999 monster to win and you can fight it any time you want, but as before losing means death. There is also a monster for every level 1-998 which you can also fight any time you so wish. The rules are as follows: every time you kill a monster, you advance to it's level, plus one (you can't lose levels). If you fight a monster above your level, you die always. If you fight monster equal to or below your level, you win always. This game is not dependent on luck but your ability to stand the tedium of grind. Again, completing the game requires zero player skill.

 

Also, if the completion of the game requires a long amount of time (and the danger of dying exists thorough the game), things start to go bad unless the game is really easy. Another extreme is rock-paper-scissors, which is in essence permadeath (if you lose, you lose), but because average game takes maybe three seconds, losing is no big deal.

 

Of course the above examples hopefully don't exist. The implication was, as someone might have guessed, that permadeath works best when used in a game that relies heavily on _player_ skill, meaning you at the keyboard. It can have grindy and lucky aspects but if those dominate, the game either becomes unfair or boring. Those few mainstream permadeath-games (ADOM and D2HC) I have played both require the player to grind and especially in ADOM's more difficult dungeons the luck factor is really big. One good alternative is Unreal World which has nothing to do with Unreal or UT, precisely because "I think that would be alot of fun, trying to stay alive and flourish the best you can. Would make exploration a hundred times for exciting, atleast in my little world." is a very true statement.

 

Now, the virtue of permadeath in a suitable game is that it provides an unparalleled feeling of excitement and forces you to focus like no tomorrow. And this is a wonderful feeling! Especially if you are confronted with a really dangerous or otherwise difficult situation and best it, the result is a dopamine rush that is actually capable of addicting you (this is what has happened to extreme sport maniacs - but I think even games that can't physically hurt you can do the same to a lesser extend).

 

But I really don't think permadeath would suit current FO3. I don't feel there is enough tactical choices in battles, so the difference of winning and losing is a matter of your stats, equipment and luck. Even the shooting skill doesn't matter very much because most of the weapons have big spreads that reduce the chance of hitting to a dice roll. One point of view is that FO3 is first and foremost a RPG, which means the player wants to live in the world and explore anything in it. I'm not sure what to think about this. I think a world is much more immersive if you actually have to be afraid of certain monsters and places, instead of just going anywhere you want and using save/load more often if the place is hard. However, here we meet the third aspect above. It would suck really bad having played FO3 for 100 hours and dying in the last unexplored dungeon, just before you opened the final door. Obviously, that would make reaching the final room of the last dungeon huge achievement, but still...

 

So as a summary I don't think permadeath is a good thing for current FO3, but with some mods it might become a good option. But for those disagreeing with me on the reasons above, there is always the way of simulating permadeath TGBlank stated.

[TGBlank]

One more important aspect i forgot to mention..

 

All roguelikes have something very important: randomized dungeon/loot. Randomized things in general. This is very important as no two games will be the same.

 

Fallout lacks such randomness and the ability to include it (dungeon-wise).

[anlashok]

One more important aspect i forgot to mention..

 

All roguelikes have something very important: randomized dungeon/loot. Randomized things in general. This is very important as no two games will be the same.

 

Fallout lacks such randomness and the ability to include it (dungeon-wise).

 

Ah yes, I completely missed this. Randomized gameplay means that even though the game would be grindy in nature, it might not be completely boring. The randomizing is only tactical in current games, at least in those few I've played, (there is a best order or a finite number of near-best orders for doing dungeons and quests, determined before you start playing) and not strategical. What I mean is that you don't actually have to change the way you play while playing but instead can follow a walkthrough from the beginning to the finish, which IMO is not a good thing. True strategical randomness would obviously be really difficult to code well, which is probably why we haven't seen it yet. Or have we? My knowledge here is limited.

 

Edit:

Here we see the lack of importance of tactics in FO3. You could somewhat easily randomize the starting positions of the monsters in a building or dungeon, but that wouldn't really make any difference. Compare this with games like SWAT 3 and 4, where the knowledge of positions of enemies is extremely meaningful and the result is that the game becomes boring really slow.

[TGBlank]

Dunno, ADOM/Nethack both had a good chance of random stuff happening, at one time you may drink on a fountain and have the luck of getting a permanent boost/resistance, and at another you may just as well choke to death. When you add unknown potions with randomized descriptions, and randomized loot and maps, you get a fairly different experience.

 

The problem is not having the same stuff happening on the macro level, as it is pretty hard to get bored of those, the critical part is changing as many things on the micro level as possible, as that's where the player spends most of the time.

[anlashok]

Dunno, ADOM/Nethack both had a good chance of random stuff happening, at one time you may drink on a fountain and have the luck of getting a permanent boost/resistance, and at another you may just as well choke to death. When you add unknown potions with randomized descriptions, and randomized loot and maps, you get a fairly different experience.

 

The problem is not having the same stuff happening on the macro level, as it is pretty hard to get bored of those, the critical part is changing as many things on the micro level as possible, as that's where the player spends most of the time.

It's true the tactical level is where the action is and that's why diversity there is more important. But if a game had diversity also on strategic level, it would be even better. Strategic decisions are usually harder to master and thus have potential of preventing boredom the tactical decisions just don't have. But it is undeniable that if tactical level is not interesting, the game is not interesting, regardless of what happens on strategic level. Having both interesting is of course the best option.

 

Edit:

Also, I don't think wells/fountains are very good decisions in a tactical or strategical sense, because you have no chance of predicting what might happen. Of course there are some situations, like needing some ability that can be with some probability obtained from a well and having to decide whether to take the chances or obtain the ability by some other way or not obtaining it at all, but most of the time I don't think there is much actual deciding going on in drinking from wells.