How should this game handle ingame deaths?
How should this KQ game approach dying? Specifically, should it have a "Restore/Restart/Quit" popup with only manual saves, should it have a "Try Again" popup with autosaves set right before encountering unavoidable death, or should it have less frequent autosaves and still require you to manually restore?
Do you have any different ideas?
Do you have any different ideas?
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except for giving the game a classic feel and increasing difficulty (which many people actually want.)
I went with provide a choice. It would be simple to do and would make more people happy.
It doesn't "increase difficulty". It increases the annoyance of having to constantly mash the save key every few minutes or lose some progress when you inevitably die in some strange way. Nothing about the game itself becomes harder, it just becomes more annoying.
But either way, I already said let there be choice.
The way I see it, if there's going to be a retry or autosave function then why have deaths at all? That sense of danger is completely gone and it turns into a simple puzzle game.
So, make it a choice.
It's less a sense of danger for me and more a sense of "God, I am sick of hitting save after every other step I take." The way deaths worked in 302 was perfect for me.
It's still a mostly unnecessary annoyance. The only tangible difference between auto-saving after you solve a puzzle and manual save is that you have to poke around on a save menu constantly with manual saves.
I kind of agree, actually. An experienced adventure gamer will automatically save as a sort of mechanical Pavlovian reaction anyway. It's not really a matter of skill or strategy. It's like periodically saving a text document you're working on in case something screws up; it's just kind of a good idea, and a prudent person knows to do so. If the games were really meant to be cruel and difficult, they wouldn't let you save at all, like their arcade and action game contemporaries that would send you all the way back to the beginning if you died. Most other game genres have check points and autosaves now, and those seem like a reasonable thing to include in adventure games too. Since King's Quest is a nostalgic franchise, and fans expect nostalgic gameplay from it, though, I think Telltale should definitely give the player a choice.
Which is why I absolutely HATED the newer Tomb Raider games and the Uncharted Games. If I screw up and the game only backs me up like ten seconds then it takes all the pressure off me to play properly.
As opposed to something like Demon's Souls where if you screw up you could potentially lose hours of hard work.
There's still plenty incentive to play properly. Anybody can finish an Uncharted game, but it still takes a lot of skill and effort to complete it on a high difficulty level and with decent "score". That, to me, is the best of both worlds.
Yeah see I want a game to challenge me because it's a challenging game, not because I set the difficulty setting higher. There's a difference between a challenging game and a difficult game.
This statement baffles me to the point where I'm at loss for words. Well played.
I think what you're missing here is my point that there's a huge difference between a game being a good challenge and it being difficult just because there's a setting I can change so that the enemies do a ridiculous amount of damage to me. Making the ghosts travel ten times faster in Pacman might make it more difficult, but that's not a "better" challenge.
In the same light, I don't see how increasing the "difficulty" setting on Uncharted makes it any better. It doesn't change the mechanics of how the game plays at all.
How is being sent back to play through the same area you've already completed earlier more challenging than raising the difficulty to the point that you have to play extremely carefully to avoid being killed?
This is really a mindset thing and how specific people look at adventures. I doubt people with an opinion like yours, Shodan, will even understand it. (that was in no way a jab or an insult) That's why I ask for a choice.
This right here, it's just a different mindset about what makes a game good. If a good game to you is one that just changes the damage variables so that you die 600 times in every area that's totally fine. That's just different from what some other people consider to be a proper challenge.
Don't be such a patronizing dick. The generalizations are uncalled for.
Wow, easy tiger. It's perfectly okay to have a difference of opinion but there's no need for you to start calling names.
As for in-game deaths - I just don't like to see my character die, and that's enough to create a sense of "danger" for me. Dying feels like failure. Sure, I'll poke the wasp's nest just to see what happens, but I'll probably only do it once (unless it leads to an amusing death that begs repeated viewings).
Manual saves don't really add anything to the experience for me, so I'm all for KQVII-style "try again" popups. I sure don't mind if the player gets to choose autosave frequency, but I'd be going the least manual route.
The main problem I see with that is it's extra work to code multiple methods into a game like that and I don't really see Telltale wanting to spend that time or effort required to do so. They do the games and get them out the door. I'd love to see that, but I don't expect it at all.
LucasArts games never had auto-save.
True, but my statement still holds true. The only game from LucasArts (LucasFilms Games as it was known at the time) that I can recall that you could actually die (or be captured, as was the case) in was the first one, Maniac Mansion.
The Indy games, too. Zak McKracken also had its fair share of dead ends.
Meh, never much of a LucasArts fan back in the day.
If you stayed underwater for 10 minutes in the first Monkey Island, the game would become unwinnable, too.
This.
I want a Restore/Restart/Quit screen. If I have an an autosave function, I want to it only save at various checkpoints or when I get a point for doing something. I don't want to go right back to before I died. I voted for having a choice.
Shodan, you've played too many LucasArts games and too few Sierra games to understand the value of making the player save early, save often and be careful about overwriting ealier savegames.
In KQ3, you're made to walk down the mountain at least once to get to town. If you fell off the mountain and the game gave you a Retry screen and put you right exactly next to where you fell, then there would be no feeling of precariousness. There would be no thought of "oh, crap I hope I don't fall... maybe I should save right here so I don't have to walk all the way down again if I die."
Also, say you're playing KQ6 and wandering the catacombs. If you walk into a room with a trapfloor, die and get a Retry screen, you would be put in the room immediately before you walked into the trap. Such a thing would drastically reduce the feeling of peril you get from playing the game.
But if you don't want the feeling of peril, then fine. I voted for choice anyway.
Wasn't there also a dead end where you could waste all your pieces of eight on the Grog machine or something?