Both times I managed to equip it right before getting ambushed by a difficult boss 
Don’t think I’ll bother with the fragile charms anymore. The busywork they punish you with for dying isn’t worth it.
Both times I managed to equip it right before getting ambushed by a difficult boss
Don’t think I’ll bother with the fragile charms anymore. The busywork they punish you with for dying isn’t worth it.
To answer seriously, a major part of the reason it started off that way was because video games were for a while mostly the purview of arcades and that sort of time-wasting death mechanic was the most obvious way to get kids to keep pumping in quarters. Make sure the game was hard enough that death was likely and frequent but if you wanted to keep going from where you died instead of starting over, just pop in some more money. Even for home consoles though, that sort of death mechanic was a way of padding out the game, making what was actually very little content seem longer because you have to keep redoing the same stuff.
As with the majority of shitty things in this world, when you trace them back far enough, you discover the profit motive (therefore capitalism) at their root.
I would say though that with the way games are played now in a very different set of circumstances compared to the 80s, the time punishment for player character death is used mostly just as a way to make the stakes feel high. I know I’m not saying anything that everyone here doesn’t already know, but if there are no negative consequences for dying, then there is much less incentive to avoid death and the tension the game relies on to feel meaningful would just be sucked out. The soulslike solution to making death consequential actually works pretty well imo in a lot of cases, but still can be very annoying (and sometimes detrimental to a game) depending on a lot of other factors, ranging from how well it fits with the rest of the game’s mechanics to individual player skill.
Well, that and technical limitations. On the console side of things, at least, password systems and then save batteries proliferated fairly quickly once they became viable.
I never really bought this as an argument in favor of Soulslikes because a negative consequence for death was codified long before they emerged as a genre: you fail whatever challenge killed you and have to try again if you want to progress.
Well sure, that’s one of the more obvious consequences and it works great for some games (someone mentioned Super Meat Boy, and another example is Celeste though those aren’t soulslikes) and works great even in some scenarios within soulslike, such as losing a health pip when you hit spikes but start back immediately where you were before hitting the spikes to try again. But that doesn’t mean other penalties can’t further improve the kind of tension that a creator of a game wants to evoke or the kind of risk vs reward that a player is meant to consider. With games where longer term exploration is a big part of what is meant to drive the player, a mechanic that penalizes multiple or continued health losses with being set back a ways in exploration is often a good way to maintain that tension. It’s not some evil thing that developers are trying to do to make players mad, it’s a balance they’re trying to find to varying degrees of success. For example, I love metroidvanias, and I love it when they are difficult in terms of putting high demands on a player practicing a platforming sequence to get it right, because when as a player you do get it right, it feels really good, but in my opinion, as I said in a different thread, Silksong has gone too far in towards heavily punishing players by giving them too little health, making enemy damage too high, and payer-character damage too low, with the runbacks are usually too long. But I can still understand why it is that way and what the game’s creators were trying to do, I just think they missed the mark by overshooting too far on the penalties. It’s not an either/or kind of thing. The soulslike death mechanic works better in some games than in others, though I’d agree that it’s probably being overused at this point and often put in games where it’s a lot harder to justify its presence.
I might just not have the right psychology for this, because the only tension Soulslike mechanics have invoked in me is a kind of weary “Ugh, if I lose this fight I’m going to have to do so much shit before I can try again.” My brain just processes the whole thing as an unwelcome interruption of my attempt to beat the challenge in front of me. It doesn’t matter how fun I normally find the core gameplay loop, in that context it feels like having to fill out and submit paperwork to get the approval to retry the challenge I just failed.
I know this was a typo, but I’m going to pretend it was a pun about how Silksong constantly makes you spend ingame money to do routine tasks.
It’s pretty funny that you say this actually, because I’m exactly the same but with a different variation on it. I tend not to like bosses in general. They often feel like they ruin the flow of a game for me and just become this bottleneck that if I am not able to overcome it relatively quickly, just becomes a chore I have to get through in order to continue on doing what I want to do by exploring the world. Pretty much exactly as you describe above, where it’s a skill check that if I can’t pass, I am denied the approval of the game to continue playing and progressing. I understand why bosses are there, and there are some that I’ve come to enjoy fighting again after I’ve beaten them and they are no longer a barrier to me being able to able to play, but in most cases I just wish they weren’t there, or rather that they are optional instead of mandatory (as is sometimes the case). It’s not a pleasurable experience to butt your head against a wall repeatedly and told you aren’t allowed to go further because you weren’t good enough to beat this one specific thing. But I realize I’m in the minority there, that most people enjoy boss fights a lot more and even find them be the highlights of the game. So needless to say, I hear you on just plain not liking that death mechanic. I think it does just come down a lot to personal preference though, some things just click with some people and not others.
lol, uh yeah… I uh meant to say it that way as a subtle criticism of Silksong’s highly flawed economy… really, it was intentional (*winkwink*)
@BeanisBrain@hexbear.net you called it lmao
What did I say that he “called”?
He said elsewhere in this thread
But I didn’t do that.
“no you don’t get it that’s the point”
“probably imply you suck at video games”
That’s not at all what I said, not even a little bit. BeanisBrain asked the question: “how did “Hey let’s waste the player’s time if they die” ever catch on.” And I answered. I started with the reason it began like that and continued with the reason it is so common in games today. Nowhere did I imply anyone “didn’t get it” and I wasn’t even defending the reasoning. Please don’t accuse me of things I didn’t do.
Absolutely nowhere did I even imply that BeanisBrain or anyone else “probably suck at video games.” Stating the fact that the degree to which a person can enjoy a game mechanic that demands high skill can be heavily influenced by how readily able that individual is able to meet that demand is not a putdown, and it’s disingenuous to act like it is. I am not very good at video games, it takes me a long time to get the movements down to muscle memory, but I am privileged enough to be able to have enough time that I can practice at it and build that skill anyway, so I am able to enjoy difficult games despite having poor reflexes (due at least in part to a TBI). I absolutely do not blame, look down upon, or cast even the tiniest bit of negativity on any person who either lacks the inherent skill to learn how to play a game quickly (like me), or any person who simply doesn’t have the time to put into a game, especially any game which has high demands on players to learn its mechanics.
I’ve actually said many times that I literally despise the “git gud” attitude and its ubiquity when people criticize the difficulty of games. Here is an example from a year ago where I also mention coming around to being able to enjoy a genre I had previously decided I was simply not good enough of a player to be able to enjoy. Whenever the argument about whether or not games should have difficulty settings so that anyone, regardless of their skill level (again, it’s usually just a function of how much time they’re willing or able to put in to practicing it) can play a given game, I am always the one advocating for the inclusion of difficulty levels that allow everyone to be able to play the game even if that’s not how the developers “intended it.” I am literally the opposite of the kind of person who just jumps in to tell someone they suck at video games and I am genuinely offended that you’re trying to paint me that way.
I retract the claim that you were implying anybody is bad at video games