What Causes You to Die in Games?

As the title asks: What is the main cause of death in games?.

For me its usually familiarity. I end up taking chances to make the game a bit more interesting, and then fuck up. I'm having a hard time with X3: Albion Prelude atm because I can start the game in a shit ship, have a dogfight for over and hour - while outclassed and outnumbered 10:1 - and win, but then take a chance by trying to get some salvage and fly into a random missile.

Or accidently press the boost button instead of the brake and fly into a station.

I admit to retardation for the second example, but in games like X-Wing Alliance, they had a "target nearest missile" button that gave you an idea where things were. You have to manually target the missile under your reticle in this game. I consider that to be major developer retardation.

Its still a great game though.

 

Fatigue.

 

Not hitting the quickload key quick enough.

 

Ever hit quicksave when you meant to hit quickload instead? Good times.

 

Off screen bullets

 

dutch courage:

when you take on a enemy nine levels higher than you in openworld games and get raped in two seconds haha

 

I usually keep them on F6 and F7 respectively just to keep me sharp.

 

Recklessness.

 

If I make a mistake or die it's the developer's fault.

 

I've been replaying Underrail and so far I've died from bites, claws, stings, bullets, arrows, grenades, traps, knives, hammers, psi blasts, energy beams and food poisoning. Oh, and once I stepped on my own psi-trap and fried myself.

 

HP hitting zero.

 

I follow the Ulysses S. Grant strategy. Barrel right toward the enemy and hope numbers win the day.

If I die, I'll just try again.

 

The ultimate source of difficulty for a true crpg player. Trying to support my Ironman, anti-reload agenda over here

Going to throw off another bone : Avellone, when he created Torment, did it around one idea - not the idea of creating a game of literary proportions, but creating a game where player death wouldn't just mean a reload. There's really only one way to make death not something stupid and irrelevant in a crpg : either you make it part of the narrative, or you integrate it as a part of the overall difficulty in roguelike, ironman-design (essentially, you make rpgs more like strategy games). Other options are antiquated and nonsensical by definition

 

I definitely die relatively often because I'm bored of the game, ready to finish it and am no longer trying that hard. Because of this I occasionally turn games down from "hard" to normal in the final stages just to get them over with. I recently did this with Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order and Doom Eternal.

Usually in RPGs though I'd say it's not being prepared. Not casting the right buffs, equipping the right gear or bringing the right party members to make the encounter easier. I'll often be stubborn and try to plow through as well, which can cause more deaths. When you finally beat a hard encounter with a poorly done party setup though, it can feel pretty cool. I recently did that in Pathfinder by entering the spider caves at the end of "the bloom" with no poison resistance spells and only a handful of scrolls. It was a total bitch to finish it with tons of permanent debuffs, but it felt good to do so.

 

Biggest source of vidya game deaths? Jumping wrong.

 

Poison.

 

-Shitty camera - it's a plague in Japanese games. At this point I prefer to play the games with fixed camera since then at least I don't have to struggle with it so much
-Getting angry - I get killed a few times, get angry and get killed a lot

 

Where the fuck is being drunk?

 

I play genres where to enter a fail state you merely have to be human, as opposed to mentally retarded e.g. try and clear Raiden Fighters 2 without dying 100 times in the process.

 

Same thing that causes death in real life.

The devil.

 

No 1 main cause of death: too damn stubborn to back out.
No 1 main cause of beating games: too damn stubborn to back out.

 

Bringing habits from modern popamole interactive movies "games" into old stuff, including carelessness, lack of focus, putting too much faith in forgiveness and deceiving though that game is so easy you must try really hard to fail.

This and lead poisoning.

 

ladders

 

off-meta picks I think I'm fairly good at