Added poll :)
For me, it depends.
For strategy games like Civ, Europa Universalis IV, Hearts of Iron IV, etc, I’ll play ironman and stick with one save only. If I’m deep in a game and something goes horribly wrong, I may be tempted to quite and load from the last save, but I’ll only get to go back at most a month so it’s not typically a big help.
For games where I can get really invested in characters like XCOM, I’ll play a bronzeman-type game and reload a mission if it goes awful.
Everything else is just on a spectrum. For example, I play Torchlight and Diablo exclusively as ironman. I find games like those are so light on threat that playing without permadeath just leaves me bored.
If you view losing a game of Rimworld as wasting time, then don’t play with Permadeath. I view as a loss as an worthwhile game that happened to conclude in a state where everyone died horribly. It’s not a waste of time because I happened to lose. As an extreme example imagine playing Chess without ‘permadeath’ – infinite takebacks. That’s an interesting game against a challenging opponent, but regular Chess is also great, and you wouldn’t play Chess and say, “Well I lost that game of Chess. That was a waste of time.”
Without permadeath it just feels like an inevitable climb towards victory. That can be fun – hell I even enjoy pure clicker games – but I prefer to be able to lose a game of Rimworld of Civilization.
Where is the default forum poll option?
A game of chess doesn’t take me a week LOL.
A game of chess also doesn’t feel like a repeat. I mean it’s a challenge and interest from the start, not a slog. I understand some people love the challenge, but I can honestly say I’ve never played a game and said you know what would make this so much better, permadeath.
Also, chess is a multiplayer game. The concept of permadeath doesn’t really apply.
This is the inherent problem with implementing permadeath. Any game that has a long “grind” to get back to a point where you are making meaningful decisions, is a failure for permadeath (to me). It’s another one of the gaming conventions that gets slapped onto things it shouldn’t, in an effort to pad gameplay. It’s a simple mechanism to implement, and it gives you a lot more content, so it’s easy to see why people do it.
Permadeath is fun, when your choices and actions, right from the start, carry consequences and rewards. Far too many games just slap “hardcore” onto something that is not set up for it.
This is really, really good.