THE COST OF REPETITION

It's a fairly well-written post but I don't know what I'm supposed to get out of it, LockeZ. You don't like Bioshock, I guess? Almost all of my recent games have featured stress-free game overs and I haven't heard a single complaint. They don't keep their damage like the enemies do in Bioshock (I think? That's what it sounds like you're saying? I never played it), and I don't have the auidence that 2K Games has, but it's not that dissimilar a non-penalty.

FFXIII is unrealistic. It should have permadeath because spawning a few feet away from the enemy that killed you doesn't properly show you the weight of being a l'cie. The death sequence should show you turning into cie'th and then being shot up by PSICOM.

idk. Like I said before, I think game overs should tie in directly to the goals of the game. Etrian Odyssey was meant to be hardcore, so you die and lose all but your map. FFXIII is meant to be a very fluid and fast-paced experience, so you only lose a partially-completed battle's worth of progress should you die. Wine & Roses was meant to be more of a trial-and-erorr sooorta puzzle rpg, so it used FFXIII's "respawn in front of the enemy" style. Does Bioshock have a disconnect between its design goals and the style of death penalty used?

edit: also next duel should include pianos as damage counters

edit2: Piano tokens as damage counters is basically how Magic the Gathering works. You're twisting an attack on Worrying About Realism into an absurdist counter-argument based on extremes that nobody is going to. If people don't understand what leads to their death, that's a communication and/or design issue separate from the false holy grail of ~REALISM~.

No, I'm fine with stress-free game overs, where you just get set back a minute or two. But in Bioshock, it's actually more than that. There's no repetition, no setback, period.

If the enemy was at 82% HP when you died, it'll start the fight at 82% HP after you respawn. Effectively this means you have infinite HP and there is no lose condition at all. For every 100 HP you lose, the game tells you that you "died" and "lost," but there is no actual setback at all. Ten seconds later you're continuing as if you didn't die. But the game tells you that it counts as losing. It makes you feel bad about it. And then it encourages you to keep playing that way, the way that makes you feel bad about losing.

And yeah, there's a very strong disconnect. Bioshock is a survival action game. In theory, the game is mostly about conserving resources and searching the environment for ammo and food. But with the way the game handles dying, you can win every fight without using a single bullet, and you never actually need to heal because it's faster to die. You just use your infinite respawns as, effectively, infinite bullets. Each "life" you fire at an enemy might only do one point of damage but you just keep launching yourself in, punching the enemy once, getting cleaved in half, and respawning ten feet away and doing it again, until the enemy dies under a mountain of dead yous. And because resources are so scarce, this is actually the best, optimal way to fight.

It's... unsatisfying. It doesn't feel like winning. The game is giving you negative feedback every step of the way as you move towards success.

Playing, say, a Contra game that has respawning like this - where you have infinite lives and dying does nothing except make you explode and then reappear in exactly the same spot two seconds later - wouldn't be as bad. Because although you still could launch dead bodies at the enemies until you won, it at least wouldn't be optimal.