I’ve been playing a wide variety of games lately and noticed something. I hate games with hard fail states.
Take for example Assassins Creed 3. A open world game mostly, but there are several fail state missions. I just tried one where at the beginning of the mission you are chasing someone. Its down a single path they throw enemies and obstacles at you to slow you down. If you get too far away it’s a hard fail and you have to do the chase again. I’ve done this chase like 6 times now.
Or take Titanfall 2. The single player in that game is a bunch of jumping puzzles with fail states and starting over if you fall.
Compare this to a game like Just Cause 3 or Wildlands. Rarely does it put you in a fail state though it does so this ocassionally with a sneaky mission in Wildlands. Those are the worst missions for me but luckily there are other paths to move forward which makes those missions optional. That’s good game design to me. Tactical freedom. Backup plans. Other paths.
In general I see fail states like this as old, boring game design. To me the future are games that are designed well so there is at no point a time where you are just stuck and can’t progress without retry after retry.
I’m curious to see if I’m alone. If a game presents itself this way I just shrug and move on.
I know it’s not related to skill because I can still twitch my way through most games. It’s more of a “I’m bored with this type of game, I’ve played on a million times” mentality. Incidentally strategy games never do this unless it’s part of a scripted campaign mission (the most boring kind).
Am I asking too much, or can we move on from fail states already?
I completely disagree and there are many, many examples.
Chess
All card games
Darts
Every skirmish mode of every game ever
All open world games
All 4x stategy games
All crafting and building games like Terraria and Minecraft.
Every board game I’ve ever played.
Note losing or dying is not what I’m talking about. It’s “get past this or you can’t progress in the game” fail states.
Depends on the intended experience I guess. For open-world games, with a main plotline but a large degree of freedom, I think fail-state situations other than the general “oops, you took an arrow to the knee” type of organic outcomes, need to be kept to a minimum. I hate the precise kind of situation mentioned above, the chase or escort mission, where mispositioning or getting hung up on a rock or whatever means you have to redo it.
For games that are specifically built around stages or levels, well, fail states are kind of built in to the experience.
I dislike having to redo content over and over in general, it’s a shady way to prolong and pad gameplay. I’ve ended up quitting quite a few games because I couldn’t be bothered, especially if you’ve hit a bad difficulty spike, or gotten into a situation that the game didn’t prepare you for.
There are numerous games I can think of, that unless you made multiple saves beforehand, you could literally be permastuck. Those are severe outliers, but they do exist. Final Fantasy tactics has a few spots like that for example.
Repeating content because you didn’t do exactly what the designers wanted you to do, hence “game over”, is a major PITA. I’d love a game that handled it and made your life harder but not impossible because you didn’t take the optimal route for every scenario. I’ve rage quitted a few games after replaying the same scripted sequence 20 times.
Maybe a good example would be QTE’s. In some games, such as Tomb Raider, if you don’t nail the right button combo and the timing, you’ve impaled Lara on a stick and have to try again. Over and over. In other games, such as Heavy Rain, Until Dawn, and The Walking Dead, you might screw up the combo but the game continues on, albeit with a different outcome. I rather like that solution.
At least Tomb Raider has a little context to it, traps, climbing fails, etc. are fatal. The whole stay within 50 meters of the person you are chasing (even though you might know a shortcut), shouldn’t result in game over.
This sounds a lot less like “I hate fail states” (which does apply to the competitive games named - losing to your opponent is still a fail state) and more like “I hate QTEs and escort missions,” which I thoroughly agree with.
Yeah, you’re playing fast and loose with terminology here, dying and being reset to the last checkpoint isn’t a fail state that I recognize. Getting into an unwinnable situation and having to restart the game, that’s a knife.
Just for clarification, what would you prefer to happen? That even if your character loses track of the enemy that you still end up catching up to him somehow?
Speaking for me, yes! If I can’t do something after x number of tries I want the game to either guide me or to let me skip it or to allow an alternate path.
Maybe it’s the whole notion of checkpoints. I feel like we are stuck in a gaming design rut when it comes to corridor shooters. Live, die, repeat. Far Cry 5 suffered from this in spades with the Jacob (military guy) cooridor rushes.
I hate stuff like that. I think its terrible design. I bought AC: Black flag on sale, and once I got to the main port city, I had some quest to do exactly that, chase a guy through the city. This was a main plot quest, and after a few tries I gave up, and uninstalled the game. Lesson learned: Never buy another AC game again, ever.
I think I am with @TheWombat in that it depends on the experience. What you describe above in Assasin’s Creed and other “Dragon’s Lair” scripted missions, QTE’s, etc. are tedious to me as well. But then I get to games like Soulsborne’s or Roguelikes where failure is a part of the experience and integral to the way you play the game. OP points out that difference a few posts down between Win/Lose examples and Road Block examples.
The genre I most see Road Blocks are in games that have cinematic experiences. They are trying to tell a specific story, and steer you heavy handedly onto the path they wish to go. I think these games are trying to innovate in their products in some ways, but still are stuck in that single track cinematic experience. Games like Heavy Rain and Tell Tales change up outcomes to generate a different story and sometimes an abrupt ending, but no real “do overs” until you restart the game.
What strikes me as funny in the Ubi games in particular is how much they strive to be “open world sandbox” games, but when you come down to the story, it’s a full on rails experience. They are like two games in one, and Far Cry 5 definitely suffered greatly for this in my eyes. And it was jarringly two separate experiences that did not mesh well. Then you take a game like Uncharted, and you see a very linear experience start to finish, including fail states (which adjust when you start to get frustrated I think?) and I find myself less inclined to be pissed off at the fail states there because the game doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s a succinct short experience designed front to back to tell a cinematic story.
Sorry for the ramble! I think I where I am going is that maybe its not fail states that are the problem, but rather the environment you are wrapping the fail states into that is the cause of frustration. I think it adds a lot of frustration when you have parts of a game that you truly like, which are interrupted by a completely different game play style that impedes your progress in the game play you enjoy.
It seems to me that that’s more due to the segment just isn’t a fun type of difficulty (or the sequence as a whole just isn’t fun) and thus having to repeat it to actually win it is frustrating. It’s also not a core piece of the overall gameplay which adds on to the frustration.
So I don’t see it as a “fail states are bad” scenario, more of “bad gameplay deisgn is bad” scenario.
It entirely depends on the context for me. Trials without fail states would not be Trials, and would almost certainly be worse. Assassin’s Creed is infinitely better off without them. GTA would be better off without them, or at least with far fewer ways to hard fail. World Of Goo, though? Fail away.
As has been stated above, if you’re going to present yourself as a sandbox, then you’d better not throw it in the player’s face that it is not in fact a sandbox. But if you have a narrow design, then as long as you do it right, then by all means punish the player for failing to work within those constraints. It’s a fine line though. I couldn’t cope with Bloodborne because the horrific loading times meant I spent more time watching a spinning logo than playing the game. If Trials had similar loads each time you crashed, I’d hate it.
