Board 8 > Metroid 5 Review Zone

(+) Yeah! (+)

TomNook posted...

I think the issue can be that it creates a feeling that nothing matters to the player. It causes them to play carelessly, because dying has no repercussion. For some games, they can be designed for rapid-fire deaths where you are gaining muscle memory, like Super Meat Boy and Celeste, and it works as valid difficulty there. But for other games, I think it fits what I'm saying. Like in Dread, people will feel like there is no urgency or importance to learn a boss pattern, so they don't really feel the need to be careful because they just die and start it over almost instantly. I think this makes the game vastly easier, because you don't need focus. It's like when I see people play Mega Man collections, and the instant they miss a jump near the end of the stage, before they even hit the spikes, they immediately use the Rewind feature and correct the jump in the next half second.

I mean, the frequency of checkpoints can have an effect of the challenge that is presented to the player, and if there's too many of them that can have a negative impact on the player's experience of overcoming a challenge. There are games that have mid-boss checkpoints, which feels lame a lot of times because I feel the goal of beating a boss is to overcome the entire battle. If you can't do it in one go (and it's not one of those 20+ minute bosses with multiple forms) then it doesn't feel like you actually beat it, you simply forced your way past it with the advantage of being able to restart at a better position each time. Similarly if you used a rewind or save state feature to take each individual jump in room or area with no real fear of failing then that doesn't feel like you're approaching the challenge the room presents properly.

But on the other hand there are games where losing at a boss doesn't give you the option to restart from the beginning of the battle, and instead you have to go back to the area that's a couple of minutes away from the boss for no good reason. That's just bullcrap. It doesn't add to the challenge the boss itself presents, it just makes it more difficult to actually complete the goal of defeating the boss, which in the end is simply a cheap and lazy way to make things "harder". Just because something is harder to actually do doesn't make it a good way to make a fun challenge for the player. You could make any game "harder" by putting in arbitrary penalties or limitations, but that doesn't mean the game is going to better for it even if you don't want the gameplay to be too easy. Like, some people complained that Mario Odyssey didn't have a lives system and that every time you died you only lost some coins and a small amount of progress. Meanwhile I'm like; so what would have instead? An actual ability to have a game over? All that would really change is that occasionally you'd lose all your lives and would have to start from your last save, spending pointless minutes to get back to the state you were for zero gain in challenge. Wasting the player's time does not make the game more challenging. And you can use the advantage of not having to worry about the variables of a lives system and whether or not players will want to stop playing because they lost interest from spending so much time recovering their progress than actually trying to complete a goal and instead put that effort into make the game's objectives more difficult on their own if you want to increase the difficulty, which would be more fun to play anyway.

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