:You slowly and carefully creep around a corner and BAM, a trap kills you in the blink of an eye. In your next incarnation, you’ll feel a strange urge to lob a grenade around that corner before proceding.
:You meet a new monster that - SURPRISE!- is invulnerable to projectile weapons. Your clone brother with all your memories will know he should be wielding an energy weapon when he meets that kind of monster.
:You have to pick one of three random doors to go through. You pick the door on the right. SORRY, that’s the one that led to the death pit.
Do you think first-person shooters should be designed this way? I may be too hard on myself, but I always feel like I’ve failed when I get killed; even if rationally there’s NO way anyone could survive the first time through. I think that a game should be challenging, but that a sufficiently intelligent and skilled player should in theory be able to get all the way through.
I agree that the game should be finish-able, but I don’t think that you should be able to run through the entire game without a challenge hard enough to stop you every once in a while. That would just be boring.
They’re definitely designed to make you insanely paranoid (is there another Deathtrap or Monster Horde around the corner?) and/or give you a severe case of the trigger finger. (If it moves, kill it. Heck, if it doesn’t move, shoot it a few times just in case.)
I don’t think you should be able to run through a FPS the first time through.
However, I do like to start a new game of Half Life and play it “Die Hard-style.” That’s where I try to get through it without dying or saving. If I die, I turn it off. After all, Bruce Willis only had one life to lose, right?
I seem to remember an interview with one of the creators of the Medal of Honor series. One of the games (the one involving landing on the beach in Normandy) was meant to make you die on the beach several times.
Disclaimer: I haven’t played any of the Medal of Honor games.
Medal of Honor is supposed to make you die on the beach?! Well, that’s a load off. When I first got it I couldn’t do anything but get killed on the damn beach! Then I got good at it and made it through. Maybe that’s the point? Forget the tutorial, play the game and don’t progress until you are good enough to do so!
I believe it was Hellcats of the Pacific… or was it an F/A-18 Hornet sim… anyway, in order to begin the actual combat missions, you had to be able to make two successive carrier landings… i.e., take off, land, take off again, and land again, all on a moving carrier…
And if you didn’t succeed, you died trying.
To be fair, they did provide you a carrier-sized landing strip on dry ground to practice on, but it wasn’t quite the same.
Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it was Hellcats.
Which, in effect, was another kind of 1P shooter… you just have a snarling 15,000 lb Grumman F6F strapped to your ass.
Dude, you’re forgetting Rule #1: Save early, save often.
Rule #2: See Rule #1.
Or you can try playing on an easier skill level.
Once you learn where the traps are and the right strategies for fighting enemies, you’ll die less often. I know people who have completed Doom2 on NIGHTMARE skill without dying once!
They put all these traps, ambushes and stuff into the games, all clearly designed to give you a sense of danger and keep you on your toes. And the result is that you have to get in the habit of hitting F5 every time you round a corner, thus making you lazy and completely eliminating any sense of danger.
Yes, I also find it highly annoying. Especially in survival-horror type games.
Although I found that mission really annoying, I immediately understood that it had been designed to be so difficult for the sake of showing how bad it really was for the actual people who stormed the beaches of Normandy.
Okay, they didn’t suffer a 90% fatality rate like I did (since it took me ten or more tries to make it past the beach alive), but the principle is certainly there.
Except here when you die, you hit F9, wait 5 seconds and do the exact same run again and again untill it works. I understand what they were trying to do, but it really doesn’t illustrate how it was on those beaches in even the most abstract way. Every time you die on that beach it just gets more and more trivial, and only serves to distance me from the realism that it tries to achieve.
A better example of this problem though, is the sniper level a bit later in the game. There’s no excuse for that one.
Yeah, it took me forever to get off the beach (the whole part where you step from behind a barricade and get annihilated in less than two seconds) and then it took me even longer to get through the stupid minefield past the beach!
So really, in a game where the stakes are the life of your avatar, you should only get one chance to survive the trials therein. If your avatar dies, the game uninstalls itself. When you reinstall it, you have a different avatar, and a completely different setup. The goal is the same, the controls function the same, but the setting and perils faced are just different enough to seem new. If you succesfully traverse the course and succed in your mission, the game uninstalls itself again (or possibly, loads a sequel game where you can take your now-experienced avatar through a whole new set of trials. If the same avatar completes a set number of new trials, it is retired, never to be played again, and registered in some Hall of Triumph, or something). There should also be (one or two) occasions where, instead of dying, you are severely injured, and rescued, and made to recover away from the game’s main playing areas. Once recovered, you get another chance to complete the trials.
I was so happy when I saw a German. I mean, he killed me right away, I didn’t even get a chance to shoot at him. But I saw one, and that was a huge step forward.
Yeah, but what’s the alternative? Save points? I’d rather have my F5 key. Save-die-restore may leech some of the tension, but it can still be interesting. Having to replay the same five minutes of game over and over and over before I even get to the part I’m having trouble with is infinitely worse. It’s anti-fun, and for this consumer, it’s often a deal breaker when I’m deciding what game to buy next.
You lie! The Nightmare difficulty level in Doom and Doom 2 doubled the speed of all the monsters and made them respawn after being dead for 30 seconds. And disabled the cheat codes!
The only way I came close to surviving in Doom 2 at the Nightmare difficulty level was when I used a “DEHACKED” copy of Doom2.exe where none of the guns required any ammo and the shotgun was super-rapid-fire. But even then it was a challenge.
