I have always kind of rolled my eyes at permadeath. I recall reading the ‘official’ rogue-like definition long before the term “roguelite” came into being and feeling kind of insulted by it. Don’t get me wrong, I do ‘get it’, I disagree that it is about valuing your achievements more(That sounds more like the obvious thing that someone reaches for when trying to explain why they like it while not actually analysing their experience, there are much better ways of making people feel awesome about succeeding) but rather feel that it adds a new spin to the opportunities that it allows one to engage it. It removes trial-and-error as a free option, which is huge, and ramps up the tenseness by making a single flaky moment result in death-by-repeatedly-trying-to-run-through-a-shocker-brute’s-tile, but making things more tense is only really a thing in horror games, and those tend to be frustrating if you have to start repeating things.
It is kind of ironic that permadeath is primarily about preventing repetition but is inherently about promoting repetition. I find that a lot of rogue-likes really miss the ball when it comes to permadeath. Rogue works well because it is consistent. You are always looking for that next big item, sure, it goes from seeking out a decent leather armour and a ring of slow digestion to trying to cram enchantments onto a two-handed sword, and there are the special moments when each character first meets a troll, but it is all basically looting and levelling and leaving-judiciously while hoping to find the amulet. F.T.L. is another example of a game that makes great use of permadeath, outside of seeing a particularly compelling run to its conclusion there is not much difference between a given moment of a game. Certainly things change, the feel shifts a bit as you go from a dinky schooner that is nigh-invulnerable with two shield layers to a rampaging death-box that can be promptly ended by a single ion-bomb in the shield-room but the basic theme remains pretty much static throughout. Then you get something like T.o.M.E. that just completely misses the point and has all sorts of weird and wonderful new environment types that you will only ever see if you are completely immune to flaking-out and find the endless level-scumming to find the specific resistances that are strictly required, or save-scum… Realistically, most people will spend most of their time with strictly low-level characters(before the classes majorly diverge or any skill and/or item synergies can be established) in strictly low-level environments(which tend to be a little on the simple(dull) side of things even before the repetition) and will miss out on much of the game-experience.
Really, I feel that Cata kind of suffers from being a bit too easy, and that permadeath wouldn’t work if it wasn’t. There are near-perfect counters to most everything which sort of takes away the menace. It is basically a Batman simulator, and as everyone with any sense realises, Batman has superpowers, they just aren’t obvious ones. Batman is never in any danger at all, the challenge is not in overcoming anything, it is in figuring out preparations in advance and making sure that all the necessary materials for those preparations will be available. Cata is limited as a horror game because if one takes their time and does their due diligence, then there is no real threat. Cata fails as an advancement game because there is a lot of advancement and you can lose all your progress from a single mistake, and to get back to the same amount of advancement that one previously possessed one will generally do much the same things to get there and reach much the same result by doing so. Someone in it to build their own base from scratch will likely find permadeath, if it becomes an issue, to be frustrating. Accidentally driving over your collection of logs and smashing a week’s worth of lumber-jacking into tooth-picks is not the sort of thing that leaves someone with a sense of accomplishment for having overcome, nor is it typically satisfying to have taken precautions to prevent it(though keeping your ridiculous pile of logs in a cute little shack can be satisfying from a roleplaying perspective…).
To cut a long story short, I just sort of feel that Permadeath sort of fails when applied to complex games with transitioning gameplay…
All of this is not a request to have permadeath removed, obviously lots of people like it, a lot, a whole lot… I just sort of feel that giving people the option to save is a position that tends to attract hostility for some reason and I felt like randomly defending it… It would be nice if there were an option to remove it, aside from the obvious nuclear option of saving the entire world file manually. Of course, I do not know the specifics of what would be required in implementing such a thing. If, for example, the game ran directly off of the world file then the problem would be a bit more complex and could produce a lot of wasted space in the form of junk saves of the entire world…
I have gotten pretty far through Rogue without save-scumming, but never found the amulet. I once save-scummed my way through and it was really interesting to see how it was actually possible to win if one just had a perfect run and never did anything stupid. But I am a bit of a flake, and games with no save option are never really going to work for me because, given enough time, I will inevitably do something absent-minded and those weeks that I spent trudging through Mirkwood will all suddenly vanish because I hit the “engrave floor” button by mistake and merrily knelt down on the ground and started finger-painting as greater demons did their summoning-orgy thing… Not to mention the fact that depth-divers have more fun… Nor that gear-grinders are being particularly sporting…
So yeah, I am a save-scummer and proud of it!
