The complexity of this game has surpassed non-optional permadeath

[whiran]

The only times I “quit without saving” are when I purposefully, well, dick around. It’s the same as using the debug commands, and I kinda think that the game, unless it’s literally Ctrl+Alt+Del’d off, should really save the current game before closing. Instead, a proper “quit to main menu without saving” or “load saved game” option could become a debug menu option. That’s about the extent of how far I’m willing to go to introduce something like an “option” to skip permadeath in the game. But it stays off any menu a regular player can regularly see.

Why?

I’m really curious about this.

Does it matter to you if someone else saves their game and reloads it? Or if they edit their savegame and give themselves every awesome item in the game? Or creates a mod that introduces a ridiculously powerful item that makes doing everything in the game trivial?

Or, if there was a save game / load function, would you feel compelled to use it?

I’m genuinely interested to hear your views on this because I’ve often wondered. If there was a save game and load function, do you think you would use it and would that ruin your game experience? If the save game / load function were only enabled as an option in a new game would you find yourself turning it on?

[quote=“Coyote, post:162, topic:5464”][quote=“KA101, post:150, topic:5464”](For those of you who questioned whether devs would lose time on this? This thread’s cost me at least an hour of time I could have been using to make “dig downward stairs” a construction-menu option. I think most players would welcome that. Do you mind?)

Yes, because whining when a fan suggests a perfectly reasonable idea is a very mature way to treat the players. It’s not like that’s shitting on the very idea of having a “Suggestions, Comments, and Future Plans” forum in the first place. Especially when he’s been nothing but civil.[/quote]
There are, inevitably, times when a suggestion has to be shot down. It either clashes with the intended design goals of the game, or would be too hard to properly implement for too little gain. The very idea of having a “Suggestions” forum means that “suggestions” are posted in it for the consideration of the devteam and the playerbase, and ultimately, one way or another, the devteam are the ones to make the call. They have the ultimate power to accept or shoot down a suggestion, and even if their reasoning may seem flimsy or unfair to the players, it’s not the players who are driving forward the actual development of the game. Pushing for a suggestion after it’s been repeatedly, and with strong justification, shot down by the developers, is just asking them to start wording their rejections harsher.[/quote]
Or, the dev team members who aren’t interested in continuing the discussion after they’ve made their “final decision” could elect to ignore the continued conversation.

Complaining that reading a discussion that is 100% optional to do takes away from doing something else is… silly and reveals bad time management skills. If developing a feature is deemed to be a priority then it should be a priority and one should ignore / pass on reading topics that are lengthy. That’s basic priority and time management.

[Sean_Mirrsen]

[quote=“Sean Mirrsen, post:163, topic:5464”]The only times I “quit without saving” are when I purposefully, well, dick around. It’s the same as using the debug commands, and I kinda think that the game, unless it’s literally Ctrl+Alt+Del’d off, should really save the current game before closing. Instead, a proper “quit to main menu without saving” or “load saved game” option could become a debug menu option. That’s about the extent of how far I’m willing to go to introduce something like an “option” to skip permadeath in the game. But it stays off any menu a regular player can regularly see.

Why?

I’m really curious about this.

Does it matter to you if someone else saves their game and reloads it? Or if they edit their savegame and give themselves every awesome item in the game? Or creates a mod that introduces a ridiculously powerful item that makes doing everything in the game trivial?

Or, if there was a save game / load function, would you feel compelled to use it?

I’m genuinely interested to hear your views on this because I’ve often wondered. If there was a save game and load function, do you think you would use it and would that ruin your game experience? If the save game / load function were only enabled as an option in a new game would you find yourself turning it on?[/quote]
The primary reason is that of intended game design, and how it relates to my choice of playstyle. When a game has a save/load mechanic built in, that means it is perfectly fine to use the save/load function in regular play, and “playing ironman” means consciously limiting your own choices - you literally can’t “do anything you want”, because there are things that the game can do, that you are yourself preventing yourself from using. When it’s a start-of-game option it’s easier, but when you are playing that way you are still left with a bad aftertaste, because every time your ironman game fails and you restart the game, you see the options to start the game non-ironman, and you know that it’s perfectly acceptable to play the game without losing all your progress every time you fail, and the longer you keep doing that the more you are likely to become frustrated with your own choices, especially if the game you’re playing is as unforgiving as Cataclysm.

All of that disappears if you know that “ironman” is not merely a tacked-on game limitation, but actually the way the game is designed to be played, and there is no option, within the game, to do otherwise. “Don’t Starve”, not being nearly so lax about its permadeath as Cataclysm, actually did a great deal to accommodate me to the idea, as well as the idea that your “achievement” does not have to lie only in “beating” the game or attaining some kind of score that can be “farmed” through the system, but that it can be merely the time for which you manage to keep playing the game at all. Being forced into that specific limitation means that you can, truly, do whatever the hell you want within the game, without limiting yourself - it’s the game that does the limiting for you.

And in doing that, it extends the enjoyment you get out of discovering the game’s content. If you were unrestricted by the game, or if you only restricted yourself, you would either quickly find out everything the game has to offer, through save/loading to the very end of the game’s progression, or you would grow tired of intentionally choosing the hard path when taking the easier path is equally meritous as far as the game is concerned. With the game taking the “hard” option for granted, and designing itself around that fact, you are treated to more and more of the game’s content naturally as your grasp of the game world’s rules improves, and the lack of option to make the game easy helps you concentrate on just improving that grasp. Meaning that you’re essentially forced to start enjoying the “hard” game if you want to keep playing. That’s the point of the “niche”.

Let me once again direct you to this image:

That’s what is going on here. You try again, and again, and again, and again, until you finally learn to succeed and have all the fun you want. It’s more true for DF, of course, but DF is more complete than Cataclysm as well, and that ^ line of thinking is exactly why I enjoy Cataclysm so much. Being forced into that line of thinking, like in almost any roguelike, simply removes the stress of choice. You have no choice to play the game without permadeath, at least without cheating - therefore, you either get good at the game and enjoy it, or fail at it and stop playing. Adding the option to play it in “safe mode” would, to me, mean that I am, again, just limiting myself, preventing myself from seeing everything the game offers to everyone else. It’s a complex thing, I can’t exactly put the cause of it into concrete terms, but I would feel that I am cheating myself out of my own enjoyment if I were trying to play the game on Ironman and repeatedly failing (as one is wont to do in a game like this), when all I have to do to start having fun is switch one setting in the game’s options menu.

[CIB]

All of that disappears if you know that “ironman” is not merely a tacked-on game limitation, but actually the way the game is designed to be played, and there is no option, within the game, to do otherwise.

Sorry, but this reads as: You can not enjoy permadeath if it’s your own choice to play the game that way. Rather, other people must tell you it is the “good”/“right” way to play the game that way.

I don’t even have anything to say to that. Someone might as well tell me “Ants shouldn’t be in the game because the flying Spaghetthi monster really hates ants”.

[kevin.granade]

so, no (non debugging*) use cases for in-game save loading other than what I outlined, and no disagreement on the reasons I outlined that it’s unnecessary? If that’s the case we can call the issue closed because ther is no rationale for it improving the game experience.
*If you need a fast reload feature for testing we can hide it behind the debug flag so it doesn’t go out with the release builds.

[Sean_Mirrsen]

[quote=“Sean Mirrsen, post:165, topic:5464”]All of that disappears if you know that “ironman” is not merely a tacked-on game limitation, but actually the way the game is designed to be played, and there is no option, within the game, to do otherwise.

Sorry, but this reads as: You can not enjoy permadeath if it’s your own choice to play the game that way. Rather, other people must tell you it is the “good”/“right” way to play the game that way.

I don’t even have anything to say to that. Someone might as well tell me “Ants shouldn’t be in the game because the flying Spaghetthi monster really hates ants”.[/quote]I am, throughout that post, describing my own view, so the various “you’s” are mostly “me’s” but meant to be more readable, and to invoke a sense of empathy with the speaker.

Regardless, that is not what I meant by that saying. Not that you cannot enjoy it, but that that enjoyment itself comes with a conditional - you must be winning.

If you play a roguelike and you keep dying, you are going to want permadeath off just so you can “effin play the game”, in the hypothetical player’s frustrated words. If you get good at playing enough that you have fun and start progressing, you will not mind permadeath - up until the point where a later difficulty spike starts killing off your much more advanced and involved characters with regularity. But one way or another, the game does not provide an option to play it in another way - so like it or not, you are playing the game. Or not, as it were. Or you cheat - but then that’s always an option, be it a debug menu or simple savescumming - but it’s out of your immediate reach when playing, so you learn to get better gradually, trying and failing to survive until you try and succeed.

Now then if the game were to come with options - like, oh, I don’t know, Starbound - you literally don’t have much of a choice if you’re starting out. If you play Ironman, unprepared, you will die to the first random tough monster and that’ll be it. And then you will have to start again, possibly spending another hour or so getting your tools and materials dug up and crafted again, only to die once again at some other random happening like a pool of magma. You literally have no choice but to play one of the two easier difficulties when you’re starting out, otherwise you will be “enjoying” hours of repeating grind every time you start a new character - that game is not designed with permadeath in mind. It’s not a game where a character is anywhere reasonably competent at the outset, and it has a mandatory period of boring digging around at the initial phase of every new character - that’s in addition to your initial choice of planet being random, meaning you could randomly start on an poison-water world with meteor rains. It’s literally a game where you are expected to repeatedly die as you play. You do not play Starbound on Ironman in order to enjoy the experience of dying again and again - and starting over again and again - you play it once you’ve gotten good enough at it that you can succeed, in the face of it not being meant to be played that way. You will only enjoy a tacked-on Ironman mode when you succeed at playing it. Unless you enjoy a boring grind, of course.

Cataclysm on the other hand, as well as other games like it, is built around the idea that death is always permanent. This is why it has no “start-up” period, for one - you are expected to be capable of surviving the start of the game, at least by running away in the correct direction. It’s less “being told that it’s the right way to play”, and more it actually being the right - and only - way to play. When the game’s entire design is based on the premise that the player can survive from the start - is expected to survive, even - it means that even an inexperienced player, starting out, can achieve a sense of accomplishment by repeatedly going out and trying again and again, without any boredom from the start.

As to why it applies to me? I am not yet an experienced Cataclysm player. I am not at the point where my character is driving around in an impregnable battlefortress, his collection of power-armor suits clanking merrily in their display racks in the back, right next to the entire armory of weapons, food stockpile, and medical facility. I am still prone to lose my starting characters to stupid mistakes, and I covet the characters that do succeed. I have still not discovered everything this game has to offer - I do not want to be put in a position where I am tempted to discover them all without any risk and sense of discovery that playing the game as it was originally meant to be played would provide. Because when I no longer have anything to find within the game, I will lose that bit of entertainment that I get from it. And I don’t want to reach that point any sooner than I have to.

[Hyena_Grin]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:167, topic:5464”]so, no (non debugging*) use cases for in-game save loading other than what I outlined, and no disagreement on the reasons I outlined that it’s unnecessary? If that’s the case we can call the issue closed because ther is no rationale for it improving the game experience.
*If you need a fast reload feature for testing we can hide it behind the debug flag so it doesn’t go out with the release builds.[/quote]

I definitely disagree, I’ve spent a lot of time outlining why I disagree. Improved user experience is subjective, not objective, and if you can easily accommodate a group of people whose subjective experience is different from yours, without harming your own experience of the game, I have yet to hear a good justification for not doing so. The only arguments have come down to people explaining why they like the game the way it is (not why people shouldn’t like the game for other reasons), and pointing to ‘design decisions’ that use the exact same justification. So, apart from being tired of repeating myself I’d be happy to continue to have that discussion. But I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon, so where it comes to the justification, I’d call it ‘agreeing to disagree.’

And given that this is more of a representative democracy than it is an actual democracy, I’m more than happy to compromise.

[Sean_Mirrsen]

[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:169, topic:5464”][quote=“Kevin Granade, post:167, topic:5464”]so, no (non debugging*) use cases for in-game save loading other than what I outlined, and no disagreement on the reasons I outlined that it’s unnecessary? If that’s the case we can call the issue closed because ther is no rationale for it improving the game experience.
*If you need a fast reload feature for testing we can hide it behind the debug flag so it doesn’t go out with the release builds.[/quote]

I definitely disagree, I’ve spent a lot of time outlining why I disagree. Improved user experience is subjective, not objective, and if you can easily accommodate a group of people whose subjective experience is different from yours, without harming your own experience of the game, I have yet to hear a good justification for not doing so. The only arguments have come down to people explaining why they like the game the way it is (not why people shouldn’t like the game for other reasons), and pointing to ‘design decisions’ that use the exact same justification. So, apart from being tired of repeating myself I’d be happy to continue to have that discussion. But I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon, so where it comes to the justification, I’d call it ‘agreeing to disagree.’

And given that this is more of a representative democracy than it is an actual democracy, I’m more than happy to compromise.[/quote]I’m of the opinion that this debate is only ongoing because of your insistence to push a “suggestion” beyond the bounds of a “suggestion”. There is no democracy here. We have people here who have definitive right to accept or reject a given suggestion. Kevin being one of the most prominent ones. On grounds of conflicting with the desired final design of the game, the suggestion has been rejected.
[glow=black,2,300]
GAME OVER - Press spacebar to Quit.

Do you have any last words? ____________________________________[/glow]

[Hyena_Grin]

Actually it hasn’t been rejected. Kevin has made a very generous offer of a compromise. The nature of a compromise is that two or more people who have different needs/desires/requirements find some common ground way to give everyone the closest thing to what they want, that everyone can agree on.

But if you have this burning need to snarkily declare victory, feel free? I guess?

[Sean_Mirrsen]

[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:171, topic:5464”]Actually it hasn’t been rejected. Kevin has made a very generous offer of a compromise. The nature of a compromise is that two or more people who have different needs/desires/requirements find some common ground way to give everyone the closest thing to what they want, that everyone can agree on.[/quote]Correct. And the closest thing that, as indicated by his last posts, Kevin is willing to agree on, does not include main-game-optional permadeath. I am fine with an approximation of it being a debug menu feature. As long as it is clear that it’s not something that the game itself offers as an intended feature for regular play.

[Dominae]

[quote=“CIB, post:153, topic:5464”][quote=“Kevin Granade, post:151, topic:5464”]many game mechanics simply break with the addition of quick save/load, some examples are mutagen, cbm installation, npc interactions, combat, monster spawns, mapgen, disease effects, medicine. yea, that’s most of the game.

Though as you’ve said, it’s much easier to just use debug to cheat if that’s what you after. Having the ability to savescum, doesn’t mean you’ll do it whenever you can benefit from it.

I think this mostly boils down to: Do I play the game to give myself, as a player, a challenge? Or do I just want to immerse myself in the gameworld and create an interesting story, aka roleplay? Personally I fall into the latter category, so that’s why I don’t really benefit much from enforced permadeath.[/quote]
Psychologically, it doesn’t work that way though. If players have the option to savescum as a regular menu option, they will see it as an intended part of the game. When it’s not an intended part of the game, this can cause a LOT of balance problems. There are things you can do to make it appear more or less so. Gunpoint is a great example of ‘savescumming’ being a part of the game that people wouldn’t even think of NOT using, to my knowledge, because of the way it is represented, and avoiding that sort of situation in Cataclysm is important.[/quote]

Your post made me think of an article so I dug it up. Loved the article.

http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=369

Game design article from one of the Civilization developers entitled Water Finds a Crack discussing the phenomenon of players in games always finding the path of least-possible-resistance to “winning” even if it is detrimental to their play experience.

Good read, really.

[kevin.granade]

now that’s a thread ender.
tl;dr if we give players the opportunity to break the game, they will. then they’ll blame us for letting them.

[CIB]

There is no democracy here. We have people here who have definitive right to accept or reject a given suggestion.

Very much false. You fail to understand the principles of open source software. There is no person with the “right” to accept or reject suggestions. There are, however, people with the responsibility to do so.

To be more blunt: There’s nobody here who really gets to decide which direction the game goes or anything. There’s just somebody here(kevingranade) who is generously taking on the responsibility of looking at what the community(in particular the devs) want, and reaching a decision that is agreeable with the majority.

If he were not doing that, if he were just coming up with decisions of his own, regardless of what others think or whether these decisions ultimately benefit the community, somebody would make a fork, and that fork would gain critical mass over the main project. It’s essentially a form of “selection through competition”(which is ironic, because open source development is often viewed as more communistic-leaning).

The consequence of this is, that nobody in this community actually has the power to permanently lock the game into a direction that appeals only to a minority of potential users(even if that minority currently is the majority of actual users). It’s very much possible for such a fork to exist, but it’s not possible to lock down all forks. Open source projects are, by nature, inclusive.

As we add certain features, such as tileset support, more extensive crafting and survival gameplay, a more open and widely-themed sandbox world, it is my guess that the game also becomes more interesting to players who aren’t strictly speaking interested in a roguelike/permadeath. My suggestion is to accept this, and to allow the game to diverge into this direction naturally. There’s no telling that no-permadeath would actually become the prelevant playstyle, and even if that were to happen, it would likely take a long time.

However, refusing even the slightest step into that direction, is certain to alienate potential users. Most of them will leave as a result. The fact that there’s so many in this thread arguing for the option, who have not left as a result of the highly hostile reaction to such suggestions, indicates that these people aren’t that few.

But meanwhile, we are adding more and more other features, that raise the interest of such people in the game, and maybe at some point there will be enough “inertia” behind this for an actual fork to crop up. At that point, will we really be willing to add increased effort for merging and managing patches(yeah, fork X fixed that bug, but it’d be difficult to merge into our fork, sorry), just so players interested in permadeath don’t have to be bothered by the option to turn it off?

That’s what I’m worried about. I think we can all agree that the matter of adding such an option or not is incredibly minor. It’s the mentality and long-term consequences of said mentality that could get really ugly.

[Hyena_Grin]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:174, topic:5464”]now that’s a thread ender.
tl;dr if we give players the opportunity to break the game, they will. then they’ll blame us for letting them.[/quote]I have never had that problem. I have never had an issue avoiding an overpowered mechanic or a guaranteed strategy.

In Oblivion I found out you could enchant gear to get constant near-invisibility by stacking it. I never did it. In countless games where character/team/deck/whatever meticulously crafted ‘builds’ were publically available, I avoided them like the plague and came up with my own builds. In multiplayer games like Battlefield there are spots in the geometry you could hide in and shoot out without people seeing you. I never use them. In every game I’ve ever had with cheats built into the interface, I have only rarely ever used them.

I don’t think you’re giving people enough credit. I certainly don’t think that the author of that article was talking about the niche playerbase that chooses to play games like Cataclysm.

Saying that people ‘just can’t help themselves’ is easy to do. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But people can’t help themselves primarily when they’re given the choice between an immediate bad outcome and an immediate good outcome. This is one of the reasons I don’t think a quickload/quicksave system is appropriate. If everyone had to make up their mind about consigning their character to permadeath at the moment of the character’s death, then that would not be in the spirit of the game. But I do think that an option in-game at the start of world/character creation is appropriate. People have no difficulty making commitments to something when the consequences are unknown and in the future, and if they are forced to live with those commitments, then the situation has not changed from the default experience.

But if people can’t bring themselves to commit to a permadeath playthrough when the option to opt-out is available, and they blame you for that, that is an easily ignored complaint in my opinion. And that is still a better outcome than telling people what the ‘correct’ way to have fun, is.

Here, just take a look at the last paragraph of the article:

We solved this problem by turning this feature into an option on game start. Players who want the chance to reload a particularly unlucky roll can use the old exploit, but the game, by default, discourages this work-intensive strategy. [b]Ultimately, the designer can’t go wrong putting the player in control of his or her own experience.[/b]

Couldn’t have said it better myself. (Emphasis mine)

[Fniff]

If this were an ideal universe, people would not abuse it. In a universe like this where people can argue for days on end and get absolutely nowhere (Even the “compromise” has been planned out before this discussion), well…

[system]

“We can’t have this because people won’t control themselves and savescumm” - All your posts in a goddamn nutshell.

You don’t abuse every fucking game mechanic you can dipshit. It’s a fucking game. If you are that goddamn play to win you should go play COD or something less random. So what if I fucking savescum? What if a noob does it? It doesn’t fucking matter, if you want to savescum you are going to savescum. The only difference is the amount if tedium.

Seriously, quit shouting the same damn thing over and over like a flock of braindead sheep.

[stone94]

I’m completely neutral on this topic, whether its added or not doesn’t concern me, but as far as i can see so far both sides have offered pretty valid points, i like being able to keep a character and i like losing them, sometimes i like casual play and then i like immersive play, either way adding the option isn’t hurting anyone beyond taking the time to code it, as far as the arguments goes all i see through walls of text are “because i like it” vs “no i don’t like it”. no one says anything about removing the debug menu which is worse in my opinion

[Sean_Mirrsen]

[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:176, topic:5464”]Here, just take a look at the last paragraph of the article:

We solved this problem by turning this feature into an option on game start. Players who want the chance to reload a particularly unlucky roll can use the old exploit, but the game, by default, discourages this work-intensive strategy. [b]Ultimately, the designer can’t go wrong putting the player in control of his or her own experience.[/b]

Couldn’t have said it better myself. (Emphasis mine)[/quote]And yet, ultimately, if a game’s identity is better served by limiting the player, then limited he must be. The examples are too numerous to list, it basically goes down to the very basics of game design. A platforming game character can only run so fast, and jump so high, not because the designers feel like arbitrarily limiting the player for the heck of it, but because the whole point of the game is navigating complex obstacles with running and jumping, and being able to go from the beginning to the end of a level in one big jump, while certainly scoring the player a “victory”, does nothing to make the player appreciate the work that has gone into making the level he just ‘skipped’ challenging. A simulated chess game does not normally simulate ending the game by bashing your opponent over the head with the board in frustration, even though many real-life games of chess ended that way (I can attest to that), and while it could certainly be fun, it goes against the entire point of the game being about chess. In a survival game, the player is limited by having one life only, and the entire game is built around making the player appreciate the challenge of surviving, not because it’s fun to see the players suffer deaths again and again, but because that’s the whole point of the game - giving the ability to survive indefinitely and avoid any death by reloading a game would be tantamount to giving Mario a jetpack so he can better skip the challenging parts of the levels at no cost, or to giving yourself a gun in a chess game, holding it to the other player’s face with the ultimatum of “make no ‘wrong’ moves or I shoot” - going against the entire point of the game being a battle of wits, not weapons.

“It goes against the design we want to have” is a perfectly valid reason not to have something.

[system]

This topic.
Pons Asinorum
sutor, ne ultra crepidam
Fuck you all, nothing changes. Everything stays the same. Gtaguy becomes a cynical asshole.
Pons Asinorum

[Stingray]

I’m fairly new to this game, but from what I could gather thus far: the game ends when your character dies and only then. From that I could deduce that the goal in the game is to not die.

Why is an option to remove the only goal from the game being discussed? Or is there some other end goal already in the game or planned to be added?

Edit - I’m trying to play unspoiled, so no direct spoilers please.

[Uneron]

[quote=“Stingray, post:182, topic:5464”]I’m fairly new to this game, but from what I could gather thus far: the game ends when your character dies and only then. From that I could deduce that the goal in the game is to not die.

Why is an option to remove the only goal from the game being discussed? Or is there some other end goal already in the game or planned to be added?

Edit - I’m trying to play unspoiled, so no direct spoilers please.[/quote]
Nope, it is, as you put it, the only goal and will always be the only goal (as written in the design document).