It’s a scenario gamers everywhere are all too familiar with. Your character ran out of health, your timer ran out of time, you didn’t score enough points, and you’re given a very clear message in big, bold letters: You Failed. Game Over. Defeat. Try Again. Failing in games frequently means having to try the same segment of the game over again, repeating the same encounter until you finally succeed. But what if this didn’t have to be the case? What I want to look at this week is two games that buck this trend, and make failing a core part of the experience.
Shadow of Mordor
In Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (and its 2017 sequel, Middle Earth: Shadow of War), players take control of Talion, a captain of Gondor living between the events that transpire in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. During his adventures, Talion teams up with Celebrimbor to kill scores of graugs, goblins, and uruks to avenge the deaths of his wife and children. The twist is that Talion is also trying to avenge his own death, and he is only able to do so because Celebrimbor is a wraith keeping Talion alive by possessing him.
It is this post-mortem relationship that gives an excellent in-game reason for Talion to repeatedly return after being slain. When Talion is slain, Shadow of Mordor does not present players with a game over screen. Instead, they are simply given an opportunity to respawn at a checkpoint and try the fight again. Players are respawned at a nearby tower some amount of time later and are updated on what has transpired while they were incapacitated.
Shadow of Mordor famously included what they called the “Nemesis system.” This system makes several uruks and goblins more important by giving them names, strengths, weaknesses, personalities, and ranks within Mordor’s military hierarchy. Each time the players die, the uruk that killed Talion gets promoted and gains additional strengths, such as taking reduced damage from ranged attacks, or gaining extra bodyguards. Additionally, the other uruks engage in power struggles of their own, sometimes assassinating, ambushing, poisoning, or occasionally allying with each other. These uruks also react to seeing Talion after his death, calling him “the gravewalker,” or expressing their surprise at his willingness to face his killer again.
Changing death from a fail-state into a way to affect the state of the world is a fiendishly clever way to keep players invested in the game’s world. The lack of a punishment for dying helps prevent deaths from becoming a frustrating experience, since they are not being asked to repeat the exact same content they just failed. The Nemesis system helps keep the world feeling fresh after each death, giving players new minibosses to fight, relationships to exploit, and strategies to plan. In this regard, players are almost rewarded for being defeated, which is something I would love to see replicated in other titles.
Sea of Thieves
Sea of Thieves gives players an ocean filled with treasure, monsters, tall tales, and pirates of all flavors to sail around and explore. Many of these activities, when completed, provide treasure, which can be sold to the various factions for gold, which in turn can be used to unlock a myriad of cosmetics. The gold must be protected though, as other players are also roaming the seas, and the whole world allows players to attack each other.
In Sea of Thieves, there are a ton of things that want to kill you. Snakes, skeletons, phantoms, megalodons, sirens, sharks, krakens, lightning, fire, other players, and gravity all have your worst interests at heart. Though there are ways to recover health, death is still a fairly common occurrence. Upon dying, players are sent to “the ferry of the damned”, where they spend 30 seconds interacting with other dead players before they are allowed to return to the land of the living. Respawning returns players to their ship (or to the tavern if they are parked at an outpost), and allows the recently returned pirate to resume their adventuring.
Most of the time, dying is merely an inconvenience. Any resources, such as food or cannonballs, are not removed from dead pirates’ inventories. There are no penalties applied either, aside from the time spent aboard the ferry. If the player died fighting a boss or other monster, said enemy does not regenerate lost health or otherwise make the player lose progress. Furthermore, there are a few activities that require players to visit the ferry (such as activating the fort of the damned, or ), further reducing the feeling of being penalized for dying. All of these factors combine to make dying simply feel like a normal part of gameplay instead of feeling like a strict penalty for failing to accomplish a task.
In Conclusion
Failure states in games can be a lot more than the common “reset to your last checkpoint.” Whether you incorporate them into your core gameplay loop like Shadow of Mordor, or use them as a gateway into other activities like in Sea of Thieves, it can be worth taking a second look at how fail states are handled, and if there are any opportunities that may arise from their implementation.
In the meantime, there are no fail states here, so I’ll see you next week!
-Mark
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