Norfleet
Moderator
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2005
- Messages
- 12,250
Personally, I think the balance point is that the game needs to be of sufficient difficulty that some WILL die, that this is pretty much an unavoidable occurrence, simply because the odds are so massively stacked in favor of deaths. Perhaps the game covers a sufficient duration of time such that every unit is mortal and eventually dies, period, like a Total War game: All of your generals WILL eventually die of terminal oldness, if nothing else. Faced with the prospect that they're going to die anyway, glorious death in battle isn't unacceptable anymore. The fact that it's a question of when, not if, makes losing a man acceptable if the victory you buy with his life is worth it.Exactly, there is a good balance to be found on the death of a soldier being meaningful without being too dramatic.
Another point is that it should be a decision. In a Total War game, for instance, when a general dies in battle, it's most likely because you made a choice to risk and sacrifice him. While the danger of random death always exists, in Total War, it's sufficiently low that the death rarely comes across as a product of spiteful RNG. It was invariably YOUR choice to charge the general's unit into melee. You probably didn't have to do it, but you did. And if you won the battle doing it, maybe at the end, you'll decide it was worth it. Or at least acceptable, otherwise you have to fight the battle again because the chain of the events that led to this began long ago.
In contrast, X-Com deaths are often total RNG. There isn't any realistic way to keep a unit largely out of harms way and yet still effectively utilize them, and whether they live or die tends to come down to a single roll of the dice entirely outside of your control. Even this may fall within the bounds of acceptability if the soldier in question is sufficiently replaceable and the price is right. Their survival isn't integral to the game experience.
At extreme end of the spectrum are those Tactical RPGs with named, handcrafted characters that contain storylines that you will never see to the end. If you lose one of these characters, your game experience has basically been amputated. Usually these characters don't die because the combat mechanics are sufficiently "soft" to avoid sudden death, but often losing such a character is considered a game over condition worthy of a reload, sometimes even a hard one enforced by the game itself (X MUST SURVIVE).