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Forums - Gaming Discussion - I wish they would make a RPG you could actually fail at

If you want to experience this try playing Final Fantasy the After Years and then fail to include a certain combination of party members in your Team near the end of the final chapter which results in the death of your strongest party member with no way to get said member back. The game became so frustrating and tedious after this that I quit playing and deleted the game. A year later I came back to it and beat it, but I still do not regard it as a decent game.

I do not care for games where you need to read walkthroughs in advance to get through it or avoid permanent mistakes that cannot be undone. I am all for alternate endings as mentioned above or challenging sections that require a lot of problem solving skills, but getting permanently screwed over is too much like real life in my opinion and is what I play games to escape from.



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I think you can fail at the end of Mass Effect 2.



Lube Me Up

Double post



LMU Uncle Alfred said:

I think you can fail at the end of Mass Effect 2.

If I remember correctly, if you don't do any of the personal side quests for your crew, they all die in the final mission, but you'll still finish the game. I'm not sure, it's been ages since the last time I played a Mass Effect game. It seems like I'll have to get the remastered trilogy after all :).



That's not very good design. Now make the game able to adapt and possibly give alternate ways to solve things once you've e.g. killed a wrong person, and I'm in. Simply getting stuck because you've killed a single person is not nice, but if the game adapts and e.g. another person steps in to take the killed person's place, now that's good. It doesn't even need to solve the block every time, the game simply has to adapt appropriately.



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Zkuq said:

That's not very good design. Now make the game able to adapt and possibly give alternate ways to solve things once you've e.g. killed a wrong person, and I'm in. Simply getting stuck because you've killed a single person is not nice, but if the game adapts and e.g. another person steps in to take the killed person's place, now that's good. It doesn't even need to solve the block every time, the game simply has to adapt appropriately.

But what I ask is for a game to allow us to actually fail. A bad ending isn’t to fail. Not being able to finish a game because of decisions you made is to fail. 



Spindel said:
Zkuq said:

That's not very good design. Now make the game able to adapt and possibly give alternate ways to solve things once you've e.g. killed a wrong person, and I'm in. Simply getting stuck because you've killed a single person is not nice, but if the game adapts and e.g. another person steps in to take the killed person's place, now that's good. It doesn't even need to solve the block every time, the game simply has to adapt appropriately.

But what I ask is for a game to allow us to actually fail. A bad ending isn’t to fail. Not being able to finish a game because of decisions you made is to fail.

I get what you're talking about, and I kind of agree. I just don't want the game to allow people to allow to fail too easily, in an unfair manner. If the player can come up with a reasonable way to fix the situation, the game should allow it. Otherwise it's just annoying if you can fail without even knowing it and not be able to fix it when a reasonable solution exists but is not allowed by the game. But sometimes it's definitely OK to be able to screw up big time, and I do wish games would move more towards that direction - but if a reasonable way out exists, the game should also allow that. I imagine it's a difficult thing to pull off though, which is probably why we don't see games doing it more often.



Just be a gamer like me, who's pre game ritual is a bottle of Southern Comfort mixed with whatever hallucinatory drugs I just happen to have at hand, you will definitely fail but in return even the most mundane rpg will look and feel like nothing you have experienced in your life .



Research shows Video games  help make you smarter, so why am I an idiot

People already mentioned a bunch of other games, besides those the most recent one I've played that touches this is Kingmaker although it's mechanics are a bit odd. But more broadly I would say the idea of "you fail you can't keep playing" is odd, because it's not even realistic. Unless you die (which you already don't care about), "Failure" doesn't mean there is no future, it means that future is worse than what you wanted. Lose ww2? OK, now the Nazis win and deal with repurcussions of that. The idea of game informing of failure that prevents play like this just breaks any immersion of world continuity. So instead of focusing on literally unplayability which sounds more like bug than good game design, I think best idea is to focus on things that allow very bad outcomes which may be experienced as failure. In term of the game I mentioned (Kingmake) it has plenty of things like that, where timers on bad things aren't made clear, or how to navigate between 2 choices isn't made clear, etc. That essentially allows for alot of variance in playthrus, and even if you have some inkling of the cause, it's not always obvious how you "optimally" avoid all negative outcomes etc.



Plenty of old computer games are like that. For example, Dragon Slayer Jr. Romancia for MSX.