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The Agony of Defeat?
It's good to be back! Not to be a downer, but for my first post-vacation blog I'd like to talk about defeat. Crushing failure. Abject ownage! Here's the game design question of the day: How do you make combat in a game feel exciting, without punishing failure?I bring this up because Peter Molyneux, designer of Black & White and Fable, is wrestling with this issue for Fable 2 and is trying to come up with novel solutions. Check out what he says in this Gamasutra interview:
"I hate repetition, sitting through the same cutscenes... At the moment, we have only have tension in combat because players know they'll have to play the game over again if they die. We've been trying to think up a better way of having tension. Everyone is going to die sometime in the game. Death is part of drama but in Fable 2, it won't be a frustrating thing. That's our golden nugget." -Peter Molyneux
Instead of forcing players to replay the combat, Fable 2 gives them the option of popping right back up to continue fighting after a laydown, but at the price of acquiring permanent scars and disfigurements for your character. Will vanity be enough of a reason to keep combat tense? That's the question.This is an age-old design problem that designers have wrestled with for decades. It's an even bigger issue in the MMO space, where penalties for dying are part of the overall game balance between players. Early games made player death a big deal, which made combat hella more tense (although in reality it simply forced players not to take risks.) World of Warcraft moved in a different direction, where the only price for a player death was a short jaunt back to where you died. Players seemed to overwhelmingly like this method better. But at what point is failure such a non-factor that combat is meaningless? That's a tough line to walk.
Speaking of MMOs, the 2Moons Open Beta has started. You can try it out here on FilePlanet, part of our Free MMO Club.
-Fargo
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