What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?
Asking because in IRL TTRPG’s, a lot of DM’s will find reasons to keep the story going, no matter how ludicrous because I mean… that’s why you’re there. Do games do this? What are some that do?
Project Zomboid is less narrative than what you’re looking for, I think, but when you start again in the same world you can find your previous character as a zombie.
Outward! A relatively low budget but very enjoyable action RPG with surprisingly non-annoying and actually fun survival elements.
Whenever you die in Outward, a random “defeat scenario” occurs. Sometimes you wake up rescued by a stranger, sometimes someone brought you to the nearby town. And sometimes you wake up as a prisoner in a local thug camp and need to figure out how to escape.Is there any scaled/linear progress in it? For example, I loved Subnautica because I loved the gameplay loop of finding a new resource, which let me craft a new item, which let me explore a new area and find new resources to craft more powerful items.
I wanted to like No Man’s Sky for similar reasons, but it’s too sandboxy, and there’s no sense of purposeful progress and growth.
Not exactly linear, but the progress is apparent. There are no character levels. Instead you improve your equipment, learn new food recipes (powerful and very important buffs) and learn new skills. The various types of magic are particularly interesting. One of my favorite magic systems in games ever.
Nice, I was looking at this a while back but got turned off by references in reviews to poor combat and general lack of polish. Sounds like the definitive edition may have smoothed the edges enough to push it across the line. I’ll add it to my list!
The combat is… unusual. Yes, “unusual” would be the best word. Not exactly great but it has its nice quirks. Things like traps and magic really shine. Melee is workable, but nothing amazing. It can be played in coop making traps and magic even more interesting, but it’s perfectly viable as a solo experience (that’s how I played it 90% of the time).
In terms of the polish I’d compare it to how the Gothic games felt back in the day. Low budget but with lots of heart. In addition to that, at first it felt weirdly empty, especially compared to the behemoths like The Elder Scrolls, but in the end I don’t mind having only these 8-10 dungeons per map (there are 4 maps in the base game with 2 more in the DLC) with each one being memorable. Doubly so considering the limited resources of this developer.
+1 Outward is actually my favorite game. It’s so so fun!
Kenshi. Though usually that means that your corpse was found by slavers, nursed back to health, and its up to you to find replacement limbs and then crawl/hobble/run away from the camp when no one is looking
Huh, is there an option for being immortal in Kenshi but in the “you are immortal but not invincible” way, so characters never die but they still need someone to come along to save them and fix them up before they can move again? I used to simulate this in Rimworld with the bleeding out mod that kept pawns from dying upon losing most vital organs for a very short time combined with a mod that made them regenerate lost parts at 10% efficiency until it fully regenerated, leaving them unable to do anything but still alive until recovery.
No. But it’s actually kind of hard to straight up die in Kenshi, most of the time you’re just knocked unconscious for a while, sometimes you enter a coma while you heal back up and that can be dangerous as wild animals or slavers might find you and if you’re bleeding out that could be a death sentence. The only real way to just straight up die is to get beat up so hard you get fatally wounded on either your torso or head, but that’s incredibly rare.
I’m not sure if it qualifies exactly as what you’re describing, but Metal Gear Solid 2 had a moment where they subvert the game over screen. At some point in the fight a game over screen comes up but it’s full of typos like “fission mailed” instead of “mission failed” and there’s a small window in the top-left where the fight is still on-going.
Also, notably, all the soulsbourne games kind of subvert the player’s death by making it basically required to continue most of the time.
I don’t think this qualifies. That moment you’re referring to is more a “breaking the 4th wall” situation for a sort of comic effect, which is a staple on most of the entries on the series, not an actual reversal of a failure state. Something similar happens on MGS1 on the fight with Psycho Mantis, for example.
Most of the comments focus on death states, as far as I recall you can totally beat TES 3 Morrowind after an essential npc dies. The game will tell you it’s doomed and will prompt you to load a save, but you are largely able to continue, just have to live with the consequences, it might be a pain to do or rely on cheese, but apparently technically possible.
Yeah, there’s a “back path” that was originally intended to be found with a breadcrumb left if you went rogue and killed Vivec, but thanks to UESP’s documentation, you can find your way there at any point. Very fun for roleplay.
In Chernobylite, when you die (either by getting killed in specific circumstances or by committing suicide in a special device), you get a chance to alter the past by changing decisions you made in the game, which will end up in changing the story and a whole lot of things like companions’ attitudes, weapons at your disposal etc.
I made some heavy mistakes in Act 1 of Baldurs Gate 3 and the game is still continuing, now with fewer options for characters that I can include in my party, because one died permanently, one left and one even refused to join.
If that’s want you meant?
Did you raid the grove?
Also I think what they meant is, that on a total-party-kill instead of having to reload a save, the game continues with a path to resurrection sub-plot or something like that.
Odd, I got TPK’d in a regular combat encounter and it just prompted me to reload a save.
Sorry, I might have confused you there. I was giving an example for a sub-plot that, afaik doesn’t exist in BG3. Having to reload is probably not what OP was looking for
No. Just killed too many Tiefling.
First they held my friend Laezael hostage.
Then they got aggro when I tried to read their mind. Then they wanted to imprison me for looting the corses - as if the corpses had any use for their possessions any longer. And in the end they interfered when I wanted to bring Zazza home through the remains of the Tiefling camp. As if they had not learned to that point…
But even though i helped defend the grove (and the few surviving Tieflings) and they showed great gratitude to me for helping them, Karlach was no longer willing to join my team.
Owlboy is a story about failure. Each time you “succeed” it turns out other events that were happening nullified that success.
It’s not really the same thing, but the choice to foist failure on the player even when they “win” was an interesting story device.
Prince of Persia (2008) is a game where you can’t die. You get a companion, Elika, early on and whenever you are on the verge of dying, she jumps in and rescues you. They even use that mechanic for a little puzzle later in the game where you have to find the real Elika out of a bunch of illusions and the solution is to
spoiler
jump of the nearest ledge towards your death, real Elika jumps in and saves you.
All the Wing Commander games featured branching story lines, where things would take different paths depending on if you lost or won a mission. Even if you got yourself killed you still got a funeral cutscene ending your story instead of just a Game Over screen.
Eurofighter Typhoon had an interesting concept where you took controller over multiple pilots at once across a lengthy war campaign. You could switch between them freely at any time, the remaining ones switch to AI when not controlled by you. If one got killed, injured or ended up as POW, you could just switch to another one and continue as usual. The missions you would have to fly were dynamically generated based on how the war progressed and your success and failures. Basically a flightsim with an RTS running underneath, along with story cutscenes for some important moments. The game had some rough spots and arguably EF2000 or Falcon 4 did the dynamic war campaign better, but at least on paper what Typhoon was trying to do was really interesting. Rather sad that 20 years later we still hardly ever see games that do the small scale and large scale simulation at the same time.
In Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, when a city guard kills you for the first time you get sent to prison instead of dying. It’s a cool “bonus” level many players can miss because city guards are the easiest enemies.
I think it would be a cool idea if they gave other factions (Pagans and Builders) their own bonus levels
They’re oldies, but both of the Soul Reaver games and the Raziel parts of LoK: Defiance have a two tiered death system. (Minor spoilers going forward, but I’m talking spoilers for the opening cutscene from Soul Reaver, so I’d argue not real spoilers.) See, after having his physical vampire form thrown into the well of souls and falling through an endless abyss for several hundred years, Raziel exists first as a structurally sound spirit in a world where most things don’t maintain any resemblance to their corporeal forms after death. After being salvaged from the well of souls and set on a quest, he gains the power to create a corporeal form that resembles wretched wraith he has become in spirit. But that new corpse isn’t him, and destroying it doesn’t kill him. It just releases him back to the spirit realm, where he can regain his strength and manifest a new corporeal form. You can be killed in the spirit realm and sent back to a checkpoint, but the spirit realm is by and large far less dangerous than the physical. Very few threats can follow you, and the soul scavengers who populate most the spirit realm are little more than fodder for a creature like Raziel to slay and eat at his leisure. So you regain your strength, find a nexus between the worlds, and manifest a new body. It’s probably my favorite unconventional handling of death or failure in a game because of its comprehensive and essential connections to the story and lore of the series. Raziel is the beating black heart of the mythos of the series.
Rogue Legacy! You are a knight invading an evil wizard’s castle. When you die, your children take up your mantle and try again.
Dying means you get to try again with a descendant that has different quirks, like “being left-handed” or “dwarfism”
Hades! Whenever you die, you get reborn in the “house” of your father Hades. Dying and being reborn is an integral part of this game and is what keeps the story going. You also get to upgrade and unlock weapons that way. Highly recommend this game if you like fastpaced and smartly designed action games!
That’s basically true of all roguelites, right? The whole genre is built around the idea of playing through, dying, and coming back stronger so you can go farther. I’m thinking Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, The Binding of Isaac etc. etc.
I played Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells combined at least 150h and only a bit of BOI. I know that in RL the shtick is that with every new run another one of your family is the character. And in Dead Cells you just use a new body every run. The stories in those games aren’t very elaborate and the games would just be as good as they are without story.
Hades is different in that the story parts of the game are an important part of the experience (you go around and get to know a lot of different characters and find different ways to upgrade stuff) and that the main character Zagreus doesn’t really die - he is also a god. When you lose all hp you just get transported back to Hades and almost everyone there has new tings to say and the relationships develop over time.
I don’t know how to explain it better but the main idea of a roguelite is clearly there the execution is way more elaborate and story heavy than RL, DC or BOI. Slay the Spire is on my imaginary backlog of games in need to play before I die.
The Stanley Parable has a window you can “glitch” through to escape the office environment Stanley Parable players will be familiar with and go “out of bounds”.
There’s about four minutes of narration that follows, including the narrator pushing the player to hit escape and restart.
In fact, the Stanley Parable has tons of gags about restarting/becoming stuck, like the part of the sequel where you fall into a shallow hole without the ability to jump. For a short moment the game will let you think that you’ve broken the game, before the narrator comes in and criticises your choice.
The whole game is a mix between an art project, a walking sim, and a choose your own adventure book where you fight the book. I haven’t been able to glitch or break the game without the narrator reading a specific line about what I just did and sarcastically congratulating me with how smart I must think I am. Every single choice in the game has been worked out, it’s honestly incredible.
Antichamber was pretty good for this. You would accidentally fall off a bridge or something and expect a game over, only to find an entirely new area to explore. There were no failure states as far as I remember.
