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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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My synthesis take is that the ideal game has actual narrative consequences for gameplay events. You fail a fight? Someone dies saving your ass. It's the total divorce of choice from consequence that so many modern games favor that makes the design space feel stale, everyone is afraid to actually make choices matter.

I don't think people really want this, I think you'd see most loss averse people (aka most people) doing what they can to rewind or close the game out if this were to happen in order to avoid taking the hit.

I think people don't actually know what they want, until you give it to them. Baldurs Gate adopted a lighter version of this philosophy to smashing success, I think if you made it both possible to save-scum at lower difficulties, and difficult to perfectly recreate a path (Lots of small random chances that shape outcomes leading up to specific choices) it would be wildly successful. It's not gonna be my next project, but I have some notes in this regard for the game after the one I'm working on where I plan to add some elements like this to a Fire Emblem style tactical base game.

People play roguelikes, including the ones that take dozens of hours per run, and it is my impression that most of them don't rewind (if only because it's inconvenient to constantly backup the savefile).

I'd expect players who don't like irreversible consequences to simply not play the game.

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