Why so few games with permadeath/ironman/hardcore modes?

[Cryomancer]

I was re playing M&M VI/VII/VIII and was planning to complete the trilogy till 10 January, where I will have to go back to work. You can see M&M VI screenshots and M&M VII screenshots in the screenshot thread. But M&M 8 - Day of the destroyer is my least favorite M&M game. So I changed my mind and try to play with a self imposed perma death mode. AS I liked to play Kingmaker and KoTC1 in this mode(but never finished both, died around lv 13 in KoTC1 and lv 16 in kingmaker). My self imposed rules are :

• No save scum
• When(not if) my char dies, is game over. I can't continue the run.
• If any party member dies(not the MC), I can't resurrect him. No matter what.
• I can pick the items for his corpse but no resurrection. From temples, from scrolls or spells.
• Unconscious is not death. I can continue playing if my char is unconscious.

Obviously I don't plan to complete the game with that rules, merely see how far I can go as M&M is a very high lethal game with that rules. So far, I reached lv 13 as a necromancer. Playing it with this self imposed rules changed a lot how I approach to challenges. For eg, I was using expensive scrolls before opening chests. Investing a lot in disarm trap. Rushed to get levitation in my vampire party member(only to him die). In M&M VII, I did the quest to be promoted from Sorc to Wizard at lv 8, using a fly scroll and a suicide tactic against water elementals to pick the hardest golem piece to pick. In M&M 8, I don't fell prepared for the promotion quest. I'm far more cautious and had almost died in few hours of play many times. One time I run diagonally towards the temple jumping and attempting to dodge all spells being thrown at me. Spells like Dragon's Breath, I just rarely use as the risk of killing myself is too big.

At Dark Magic skill level = 10, it deals 10~250 damage or 130 average damage while my necromancer has merely 56 hit points. If I get hit by my own spell, I will probably gonna die. At this part of the game, I would have been far way and using way more risky tactics like getting close to a dragon and using sharpmetal do dish colossal damage on him. It changed a lot of how I approach to certain situations and the order that I do the things. In kingmaker, my permadeath first death was a bit before Pitax since I got ambushed while resting and then ambushed again despite building my party to minimize this odds.

This type of risk makes everything more interesting.

Sadly very few RPG's offers the option to have permadeath(except if you self impose). And some of then are even online games. I will not play DDO in hardcore mode cuz dying for a lag spike would be too frustrating and I already have too much frustration IRL.

 

[Catacombs]

I can't imagine investing dozens and dozens of hours in a playthrough, make it pretty deep into the game, die from something stupid and lose all that progress. Props to people who can play like that.

 

[Justicar]

Because autists are only a very small part of human population thank god for that.

 

[buffalo bill]

all roguelikes

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

It's pretty much pointless since you can just delete your saves yourself.

 

[Butter]

Anyone who wants that mode is willing to impose it on himself.

 

[JarlFrank]

I hate permadeath. It incentivizes careful and conservative playstyles and discourages experimentation. You're 100 hours into an action RPG and you see a cool place you might just be able to jump towards with some luck? You're not going to attempt the jump, because if you fall to your death it's 100 hours of effort down the drain.
You're playing a challenging combat-focused turn based RPG and spot an encounter in the distance that would be really fun to attempt, but it looks like it might be a very tough fight? You avoid it and grind out some levels with easy random encounters before attempting it, because if you lose, it means game over and 30 hours of progress down the drain.

Permadeath sucks and makes you play in less fun ways, because you end up avoiding risks. And no risk, no fun.

 

[buffalo bill]

I hate permadeath. It incentivizes careful and conservative playstyles and discourages experimentation. You're 100 hours into an action RPG and you see a cool place you might just be able to jump towards with some luck? You're not going to attempt the jump, because if you fall to your death it's 100 hours of effort down the drain.
You're playing a challenging combat-focused turn based RPG and spot an encounter in the distance that would be really fun to attempt, but it looks like it might be a very tough fight? You avoid it and grind out some levels with easy random encounters before attempting it, because if you lose, it means game over and 30 hours of progress down the drain.

Permadeath sucks and makes you play in less fun ways, because you end up avoiding risks. And no risk, no fun.

Like I said, all traditional roguelikes have permadeath, and what you describe just doesn't occur in those games. Sometimes the games are designed so that difficult scenarios are more-or-less unavoidable—as in dungeon crawler roguelikes like DoomRL, NetHack, Infra Arcana—and you have to seriously think about how to overcome them in order to get to the next level. In more open-world-like roguelikes (ADOM, Caves of Qud, Cataclysm DDA), you decide whether to take risks or not depending on the perceived reward, and often it seems worth it to try a difficult encounter (even though a failure leads to permanent death of course). In these games, the risk-taking is often incentivized with a time-based mechanic like hunger (e.g. Cataclysm) or mutation (e.g. ADOM) or insanity (e.g. Infra Arcana), such that you really need to take some risks sometimes.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Because it would make codexers shit their diapers if they can't abuse savescumming.

 

[deuxhero]

Crashes

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I hate permadeath. It incentivizes careful and conservative playstyles and discourages experimentation. You're 100 hours into an action RPG and you see a cool place you might just be able to jump towards with some luck? You're not going to attempt the jump, because if you fall to your death it's 100 hours of effort down the drain.

wow so you might play it like a tabletop RPG instead of minecraft?
huh... really gets the noggin joggin...

 

[Cryomancer]

You're 100 hours into an action RPG and you see a cool place you might just be able to jump towards with some luck? You're not going to attempt the jump, because if you fall to your death it's 100 hours of effort down the drain.

Well, why not try spells like feather fall before jumping? Is a spell which I rarely use but always maintained memorized in DDO while I played in HC mode.

Anyway, in tabletop, death is semi permanent. Is possible to try to bring someone back(2E) but is never sure.

Because it would make codexers shit their diapers if they can't abuse savescumming.

LOL. Just imagine Tomb of Horrors + ability to savescum. The module will become extremely boring...

Because autists are only a very small part of human population thank god for that.

Yep. Everyone who enjoys rogue likes and play D2 in HC have autism.

-------------------

EDIT : Just died. Balthazar Lair vs crusade triton. I tried to get out of the dungeon since I was losing but failed. Ended at lv 17 with Dark Magic(Master) - lv 11. Now my M&M 8 save will be deleted.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Because storyfags demand long and linear plots and romances, many combatfags demand long and tedious tacticool encounters with no real tension, and popamolers want side-quests with unique rewards to hand-hold them through the game. They're agents of decline.

Many old-school games autosaved after a character death, and a full party wipe meant a serious setback, but that didn't mean the game was over since the clue-gathering part of the game wouldn't be lost so a well designed game would let the player to quickly advance in the the game with a new party, and smart players would have saved planty of gold, some magic equipment, or even one or two high level PCs to help new parties anyway.

 

[octavius]

Yeah, I loved how the old Bard's Tales and Wizardries did it.
Even this

was not Game Over.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't even want ironman/perma-death mode, I just want "your choices actually matter" mode.
Dork souls did this.

Basically I want this

as a game mechanic.
And games explicitly don't design their games this way because they're all designed around savescumming.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

I don't even want ironman/perma-death mode, I just want "your choices actually matter" mode.
Dork souls did this.

Basically I want this

as a game mechanic.
And games explicitly don't design their games this way because they're all designed around savescumming.

Frayed Knights and Expeditions Conquistador did a great job at this (better than Daggerfall at the very least) while still letting players to savescum their way out of hopeless situations.

 

[Cryomancer]

I don't even want ironman/perma-death mode, I just want "your choices actually matter" mode.
Dork souls did this.

Basically I want this

as a game mechanic.
And games explicitly don't design their games this way because they're all designed around savescumming.

Nice point. Mount & Blade also is amazing in this aspect. Is probably the best sandbox RPG. In one of my runs, I as a noble under a king authority an captured a enemy city. I could just save scum till the king gave me the the ownership of a city that I've conquered since he refused to allow me to keep my citadel due political BS. Instead, I decided to break my vassalage towards him, let the enemy re capture teh citadel while I was building a huge army only to re conquer it and have it for myself. Much time later, the same king declared war on my kingdom and the kingdom from teh city that I've conquered too, meaning that I was like Germany in the two world wars, in a battle of two fronts. Had great loses, managed to maintain my cities but my economy got crippled as no Caravan could enter my cities and my villages was constantly raided but survived enough to capture a lot of nobles from the two kingdoms and last till a peace treaty was proposed.

All of this cool stuff would't happen if I had loaded till I get my citadel.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

Witcher 2 had a permadeath mode tacked on, wasn't any good when you were more likely to die from the game bugging out or real life interrupting you than you were from making stupid decisions.

Dark Souls' compromise with limited save locations, single save slots, autosave and corpse run is more tolerant of the realities of videogames, particularly action ones.

 

[Jigby]

Not popular enough to center all of the design around it. If you don't care about the design you can just houserule it.

 

[Not.AI]

(a) "And games explicitly don't design their games this way because they're all designed around savescumming."

Exactly. Part of the true answer, IMO.

People like most protagonists of stories, be it novels or games, because they are larger than life.

In other words, they like reading or playing characters who try to do things that real people simply don't "dare" try to do - keyword here is try. I didn't say succeed. But at least try. Permadeath means the character can no longer try. The time of the player is too valuable.

Furthermore, games people like to play tend to put the fictional player characters in circumstances so dire and deadly that were it not for streaks of luck, there can be neither progress nor victory. It is the reason that all such same circumstances or problems in life have almost always bad outcomes or are never resolved but almost always resolved in fictional stories and games. The characters are luckier.

Summary. (i) Players can't play larger than life characters so they have no fun. (ii) Game design must be low on danger and drama and no fun. (iii) So games with permadeath tend to be no fun. In the same way real life is not nearly as much fun and people rather play games to have fun. Harder to sell a game that isn't fun.

Game player want to have more fun than real life and game makers want to sell their games as easily as possible.

(b) Game that are not predicated on players being able to save and reload tend to be very short. Most of the time is spent on restarting and replaying the game after some error that leads to a character's untimely demise. As soon as any player win, however, they realize how bloody short the game is and are displeased. Whether they paid for the game or for items or characters in a game that is free to play. You can make short games, but probably they must be free. And if they make games with permadeath that are long, most content is wasted. Almost nobody ever sees it. This goes double for open world Deus Ex or Gothic type games where much of the content is already due to branching choices far in the game and will be missed by most players. Too much time needed to experience it then and most players will never see and won't credit it to the game maker, leading to larger chance of commercial failure. Bad.

(c) It leads to shorter, less interesting quests. See MMOs. After all, longer quests and almost no player will get to the end.

Etc.

However, can a fun game with permadeath for characters be designed? Probably. But also probably very, very, very hard.

It will start with the handicaps (a), (b), (c) and the developer must overcome these.

 

[perfectslumbers]

I think part of this is that video game rpgs are more linear than tabletop rpgs. If you wipe 40 hours in a permadeath video game rpg, you have to go through 40 hours of the same content. If you wipe 15 sessions into a tabletop rpg you'll probably end up playing a completely different campaign and doing entirely different things.

 

[Fedora Master]

"Why are there so few games with permadeath/ironman/hardcore modes?"

 

[Humanophage]

Some games are fun to restart. RPGs are not. Roguelikes like ADOM are fine to restart, "roguelikes" like Battle Brothers are not.

In RPGs, it would encourage gameplay without challenge, since you will avoid challenge on account that it would risk your playthrough. What is the tradeoff to risk except saving time? The devs will design encounters accordingly. For example, in strategies I typically avoid any combat until I have overwhelming advantage due to management - and the management is fun (usually more than the combat). But what is the equivalent of management in RPGs? Mainly the trash fights, peaceful questing, and exploration - but there's usually not enough of the latter two. The upshot is that you'll be grinding until every fight is easy.

One possible solution is if you could retreat or avoid fights rather than fights mainly being to the death. Fleeing from everyone a la early ELEX could be somewhat of a solution. Another is to have several deaths, perhaps weaving them into the narrative a la Sir Brante. Or you could "die" and lose all your equipment a la older MMOs (but then you'll just use trash equipment - which might not be bad, but it works better for MMOs).

Perhaps the worst thing is that it discourages you from playing when exhausted or not fully concentrated because you risk ruining your long run. It is hardly very different from you losing because of connection issues in DDO. Whoops, opened the game after not playing 5 days and having a hard week; time to restart.

Of course, it should be an option for anyone who wants it, but it is best not to design games around it. All the best and most complex RPG combat seems to be in games which don't bother with ironman. They focus on making the encounters challenging and reducing the volume of trash fights. Prominent ironman outside simple roguelikes tends to be a gimmick to extend play time (Darkest Dungeon and especially Battle Brothers being the prime example).

P.S. Rusty's opinion on this topic is invalid. He thinks MMO quests are OK.

 

[Justicar]

Just delete your saves if you die you autistic faggots here I just made ironmode for every game that exists and has a save feature.

 

[NerevarineKing]

I like returning to Angband every now and then to see how far I can get, but outside of rougelikes I don't see the appeal.