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

[CryptRat]

Well, what are some good examples or permadeath/ironman/save limitation implementations in rpgs and rpg-adjacent genres (excluding classic roguelikes)?

Evowok Breeder uses permadeath, you also gain a few luck points (= extra lifes) along the game. It's a pokemon clone and you don't die when you lose a fight so it's a very specific game though'. However there are definitely plenty of situations where you can lose a life if you're not careful. It's a very long game, even longer because you need to grind a bit, what's certain is that its implementation of permadeath and having to deal with the consequences of your actions, including the risk of death, is excellent, and it's also different from classic roguelikes.

It's a very specific game, and traditional roguelikes have specific features too (single character, procedural content ...) and I like roguelikes, but I like even more completely handcrafted, party-based games with a normal save system where I can regularly save my progress.

 

[octavius]

Well, what are some good examples or permadeath/ironman/save limitation implementations in rpgs and rpg-adjacent genres (excluding classic roguelikes)?

Games where you have an endless pool of possible characters, like Wizardry 1-3, 5, Bard's Tale 1-3, Xcom and Terror From the Deep.

 

[Cryomancer]

I have no idea who is the target auditory for such a mode in a game like PoE or P:KM, except those couple of outists who are willing to replay 40-hours just because they blinked at a wrong moment.

The point of mode with permadeath in PF:KM and PF:WoTR is not to beat the game. IS to see how far can you reach and have the tension. I only played kignmaker once wiht permadeath, reached lv 13 and died while ambushed on rest was incredible tense and fun. I would't re play in this mode but am glad that this option exists.

 

[Fowyr]

Well, what are some good examples or permadeath/ironman/save limitation implementations in rpgs and rpg-adjacent genres (excluding classic roguelikes)?
From what I've played, the only games that come to mind are the early wizardies, dark heart of uukrul

Yep, DHoU had very interesting system of body decomposition as well. I remember dying due to "poisoned air" (the first stone heart's place) and shambling back with half of my party dead. It was intense.

Hand-made encounters are always better than procedural randomness.
Fact.

Depends on the execution. I could easily imagine shitty hand-made encounter. Also, you should play ADOM, it tried to take the best from both worlds.

 

[infidel]

Hand-made encounters are always better than procedural randomness.

Fact.

I'm a little late to the party but you've been repeating this for years in every thread that mentions procgen. Case in point: every single open-world Ubisoft game. All hand-crafted by hordes of trained monkeys. Yet somehow I doubt that you'd have fun going even to 50% completion in any one of them. Because even a highly-trained monkey is severely limited by the toolkit. If the tools are a) drop buildings A-F; and b) drop 5-10 enemies A-C with paths or idle, the result will be much better served by procgen. I believe that mediocre or filler encounters very much can be done by with a solid algorithm (even if it's based on some kind of preset templates). And soon a lot of these monkeys will be out of work. In fact, I recall watching a GDC presentation from the guy Ubisoft hired to do some procgen on Far Cry 5. He described how he implemented good tools to help populating the map with geometry faster and such. For example when the map monkey drew a road, the tools automatically drew bushes, power lines and stuff like that around, and connected the roads correctly to other map elements. I forgot what the other things were but most were related to heightmap editing.

 

[Zeriel]

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.

I think it's fine. Entire game has to be built around it, though. Grafting it piecemeal onto a game as an "optional" mode is bullshit. Original X-COM shows how to do it: it's part of the game, but doesn't end the game. You have to design things around it, not throw it onto an already finished game.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

what's the point of having risk if you can just press one button to undo it?
the truth is that without choice permanence, there is exactly 0 risk for any action whatsoever.

 

[Bigg Boss]

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.

I think it's fine. Entire game has to be built around it, though. Grafting it piecemeal onto a game as an "optional" mode is bullshit. Original X-COM shows how to do it: it's part of the game, but doesn't end the game. You have to design things around it, not throw it onto an already finished game.

Jarl is forgetting that usually you play Iron Man on games you know what to expect.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Case in point: every single open-world Ubisoft game

Are you sure that there is no proc-gen in these open worlds? I am not.

 

[Zeriel]

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.

I think it's fine. Entire game has to be built around it, though. Grafting it piecemeal onto a game as an "optional" mode is bullshit. Original X-COM shows how to do it: it's part of the game, but doesn't end the game. You have to design things around it, not throw it onto an already finished game.

Jarl is forgetting that usually you play Iron Man on games you know what to expect.

Yeah but I agree with him there that is kind of bad design. If it's a "toggle for when you replay we lazily layered on top"... well, if people like that, fair enough, but it's not adding a whole lot of its own.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

git gud

 

[Cryomancer]

Recently I played DDO in hardcore mode and reached lv 10, almost lv 11 as an squishy wizard. Most people in hardcore die without even reaching lv 5. Since it is an mmo, you can't just quickload. I forgot to cast displacement and died as my own fault. BTW, in DDO Pale Masters only start to become good at lv 11. Wanting to get tier 6 spells ASAP made me play a bit less careful.

In the next league, I will play as an Carceri storm warlock and lets see how far I can get in DDO as an WLK.

 

[Glop_dweller]

I had an intense play-through of Grimrock 2 (Ironman, and single use crystals). This was not permadeath —unless all members of the party died. As it played out, the party had one or possibly two healing crystals per map, and they only work once in the game.
The game only saves at the crystal when it's used; offering one save each.

Crystals do resurrect and heal the full party —excepting cases of petrification. Best and most challenging game in a long time.

 

[infidel]

Are you sure that there is no proc-gen in these open worlds? I am not.

Up to the recent ones, pretty sure. I think that procgen is only now starting to wiggle into the AAA games.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm curious if the same people who hate "procgen" would hate encounters generated based on say, your current reputations with various factions/NPCs, people you've offended, and possibly even people you've helped showing up to aid you.

--

My most notable moment in the Shadow of War game was early in the game when I almost died and was about to be executed only for a human sergeant to intervene and save me and defeat the two orcs captains together. Its been a while since I played it and that's one of the few things I remember about the game.

I'm almost certain that it's completely random, and it can only happen during the early game due to story reasons.

 

[Sykar]

All RPGs offer permadeath/hardcore mode, just delete your save files after a party wipe. If you cannot even manage that much you have no right to demand it from developers.

 

[Zombra]

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

Two reasons:
1) As has been said, RPGs generally require a huge investment of time in a single playthrough. Making a single mistake and wiping out 20, or 40, or 80, or 200 hours of playtime just isn't great design.
2) RPGs by and large are not designed with interesting consequences for failure, as failure either means an immediate game over, or a 'failure spiral' that soon leads to game over.

The ways forward for RPGs (and all games) that want true consequences and the elimination of save scumming are:
1) Low investment per playthrough, as in roguelikes.
and/or
2) "Fail forward" design that allows a playthrough to continue after defeat, to build back up after being knocked down. In other words, no more Game Over screens. Many games are doing this now with rolling autosaves and non-catastrophic consequences, but traditional RPGs can't until they lose the Game Over screen.

 

[gurugeorge]

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

Two reasons:
1) As has been said, RPGs generally require a huge investment of time in a single playthrough. Making a single mistake and wiping out 20, or 40, or 80, or 200 hours of playtime just isn't great design.
2) RPGs by and large are not designed with interesting consequences for failure, as failure either means an immediate game over, or a 'failure spiral' that soon leads to game over.

The ways forward for RPGs (and all games) that want true consequences and the elimination of save scumming are:
1) Low investment per playthrough, as in roguelikes.
and/or
2) "Fail forward" design that allows a playthrough to continue after defeat, to build back up after being knocked down. In other words, no more Game Over screens. Many games are doing this now with rolling autosaves and non-catastrophic consequences, but traditional RPGs can't until they lose the Game Over screen.

The high stakes are precisely what make an Ironman run so exciting though. And not only is it more exciting, it's more like actual roleplaying, because you're moving cautiously forward, as you would if you were actually that character irl (sort of).

I'm generally on the side of irl convenience with games, so rolling autosaves and or rolling quicksaves is the best - if you can forget about saving enough to get immersed, that's good enough for me. But it can't be denied that doing an Ironman run gives you a special feeling that you just can't get from playing with the safety net of saves.

 

[Zombra]

gurugeorge I agree that high stakes are good, and that's where roguelikes come in. A trad RPG with ironman added and 200 hours can be gone forever due to a misclick .. sorry that's just too high.

The ideal is to have the stakes be as high as the player can possibly stand and still able/willing to continue playing after losing those stakes. This is a tough balance to strike.

For example, in a party based RPG, a lot of games completely allow you to have characters permanently die and be replaced, but also encourage a high level of investment in every character. For example if one of my lovingly crafted and nurtured Wasteland 2 characters died, I could technically have kept playing and made a new character, but it wasn't fun or worth it. If I hadn't been able to reload a save, I would have stopped playing entirely. On the other hand you have meat grinder strategy games where units aren't unique, and no particular person is expected to live - in fact, if the conflict is at all fair most of your units will die. Some games are multigenerational and have characters die of old age and replaced by descendants, but those aren't usually traditional RPGs either.

So the question becomes: what kind of design, and/or story, and/or setting will allow true RPG levels of attachment to characters, provide systems for guiding those characters to success or failure, and enforce severe, systematic consequences for failure; yet not so severe that the game ends, or that the player loses the motivation to continue?

 

[Sykar]

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

Two reasons:
1) As has been said, RPGs generally require a huge investment of time in a single playthrough. Making a single mistake and wiping out 20, or 40, or 80, or 200 hours of playtime just isn't great design.
2) RPGs by and large are not designed with interesting consequences for failure, as failure either means an immediate game over, or a 'failure spiral' that soon leads to game over.

The ways forward for RPGs (and all games) that want true consequences and the elimination of save scumming are:
1) Low investment per playthrough, as in roguelikes.
and/or
2) "Fail forward" design that allows a playthrough to continue after defeat, to build back up after being knocked down. In other words, no more Game Over screens. Many games are doing this now with rolling autosaves and non-catastrophic consequences, but traditional RPGs can't until they lose the Game Over screen.

The high stakes are precisely what make an Ironman run so exciting though. And not only is it more exciting, it's more like actual roleplaying, because you're moving cautiously forward, as you would if you were actually that character irl (sort of).

I'm generally on the side of irl convenience with games, so rolling autosaves and or rolling quicksaves is the best - if you can forget about saving enough to get immersed, that's good enough for me. But it can't be denied that doing an Ironman run gives you a special feeling that you just can't get from playing with the safety net of saves.

So RPG = moving cautiously, gotcha. After decades we finally figured out what an RPG is guys! Time to pack up, the codex is not needed anymore, we have the answer!

 

[CHEMS]

Darkest Dungeon has these features: permadeath (you actually can ressurect dead units, but it's very rare to have the opportunity to do so) and anti save scumming features. I don't know why the codex seems to not like the game very much, though. I think it's an awesome game.

 

[gurugeorge]

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

Two reasons:
1) As has been said, RPGs generally require a huge investment of time in a single playthrough. Making a single mistake and wiping out 20, or 40, or 80, or 200 hours of playtime just isn't great design.
2) RPGs by and large are not designed with interesting consequences for failure, as failure either means an immediate game over, or a 'failure spiral' that soon leads to game over.

The ways forward for RPGs (and all games) that want true consequences and the elimination of save scumming are:
1) Low investment per playthrough, as in roguelikes.
and/or
2) "Fail forward" design that allows a playthrough to continue after defeat, to build back up after being knocked down. In other words, no more Game Over screens. Many games are doing this now with rolling autosaves and non-catastrophic consequences, but traditional RPGs can't until they lose the Game Over screen.

The high stakes are precisely what make an Ironman run so exciting though. And not only is it more exciting, it's more like actual roleplaying, because you're moving cautiously forward, as you would if you were actually that character irl (sort of).

I'm generally on the side of irl convenience with games, so rolling autosaves and or rolling quicksaves is the best - if you can forget about saving enough to get immersed, that's good enough for me. But it can't be denied that doing an Ironman run gives you a special feeling that you just can't get from playing with the safety net of saves.

So RPG = moving cautiously, gotcha. After decades we finally figured out what an RPG is guys! Time to pack up, the codex is not needed anymore, we have the answer!

Quiet in the cheap seats.

 

[Athena]

RPGs are a terrible genre for Ironman modes. You're 100 hours into the game and bad RNG makes it all null. No thanks. Maybe for hybrid RPGs in the mold of Deus Ex but that's about it.

 

[Desiderius]

It's a cool option for people who missed out on coin-op to get a taste of what that was like, but it's always going to be pretty niche for people who experienced it ourselves since we have lives and kids and can't really afford to throw away that much time investment.

Tinman is a happy medium, or just having to turn off the game for a night or a week if you wipe if you want to add some pressure. The thing I like about Tinman is that it makes me design as if I were playing Ironman so I end up with things that make the game go smoother instead of just chasing incremental damage or whatever.

 

[Desiderius]

RPGs are a terrible genre for Ironman modes. You're 100 hours into the game and bad RNG makes it all null. No thanks. Maybe for hybrid RPGs in the mold of Deus Ex but that's about it.

The best RPGs give you tools to take the RNG out of the equation and/or fail forward modes where they don't. Bugs and glitches are a different issue.