Epic Fail

The other day I was playing Arkham City, and I found myself in a tense hostage situation.  There were two evil henchmen left in the room, and one of them had a doctor held hostage, literally at gunpoint, in a position which made him more or less unassailable.  Being the experienced, sophisticated gamer that I am, I took the most subtle, complex strategy which my long hours of experience could render to me.

I dropped directly in front of him and tried to fire off a stun gadget as I bull-rushed him.

Needless to say, I failed to fire the gadget quickly enough once I had taken the half second to aim it, and the hostage was subsequently killed.  What came next surprised me, although it shouldn’t have: the hostage having been killed, I failed and had to restart the segment.

Given the Batman setting, the limitations of writing and a myraid of other problems, I understand why failing to save the hostage gained me a failure, for the same reason I understand why Captain Price isn’t dead throughout the Modern Warfare series if you fail the Chernobyl mission; the narrative in your standard game seemingly can’t cope with the idea that you don’t win.

My problem with this is that ultimately, at some point, there is a genuine comparison to be made between games like Arkham City, Skyrim, or really any other game made in the last 10 or so years (with the possible exception of Dark Souls) and the Super PSTW Action RPG.  For those who can’t or don’t want to click the link, the aforementioned RPG is an action rpg in which the controls consist entirely of pressing the space bar, by which combat, defense, movement, and quick time events are accomplished.  There is no cost to failure in this game, and there is essentially no way to really fail (except through the 2 quicktime events.)

This isn’t to say, either, that games should implement a cost to failure in the ways that has traditionally been understood.  I don’t want a life system, and I don’t want fewer and fewer checkpoints.  I don’t want to lose all of my powerups when I die, and I think it’s also ineffective to make failure cost in-game money.

All of these things are frustrating, and often enraging, but they aren’t a cost.  When you play a game like Kingdom Hearts, which has a final boss with something like five individual iterations and forms that you have to fight, it’s frustrating to lose and have to start over, but it still doesn’t cost anything.  If it accomplishes anything, it creates a kind of denial loop through which the player is even more satisfied upon the final defeat of the challenge at hand.  The same logic can be applied to life systems and few/no checkpoints.  As anyone who loves “hardcore” modes will tell you, these modes and the risks they bring don’t so much give cost to failure as they give incentive to skill.

Ultimately, the same can be said about pay-to-die systems, like those implemented in Bioshock (excuse me while I vomit off-screen) Infinite or Grand Theft Auto.  When you make dying impede my ability to progress or do well in the game world by taking away powers or money, all you accomplish is the exasperation of the unskilled player and the further reward of skill.  

I guess what I mean to say is that in all of these contexts, systems and situations, the systems on which developers have relied for years have still failed to communicate a genuine feeling of consequence for failure.

What I want to see is what happens when Batman can’t save the hostage, what happens when Jak and Daxter do not, in the end, take out Baron Praxis, or when Andrew Ryan does manage to kill Jack, or when Captain Price can’t quite pull off the hit on Makarov.

I recognize the problems in what I propose, namely a colossal increase in the writing demands of a video game and some genuinely cool plots that can, could, and definitely would turn shitty if the player was not good enough at the game, but I think there are some valuable insights here.

Although ZombiU isn’t exactly the most narrative game on the market, but it’s system, in which players assume the role of a completely different character upon each instance of death, shows a promise that I think is not seen elsewhere.  In that game, there is real, actual consequence to the death of a character, although this idea is perhaps discredited by the generally over-abundant and thereby meaningless iterations thereof.

All in all, I guess what I’m trying to say is that even in the games I already love, I want a better sense of consequence.  How are we supposed to feel like the weight of the world hinges on our success when all that failure renders is a retry with a full bar of health?