Immortality in Video Games

[zyborg]

Obviously, you need a life bar in action games, RPGs, etc, right? Or do you? How many games do you know of that give you an immortal character and still have a challenge? I mean, in genres where you normally don't have immortal characters, obviously. The only one I can think of is the upcoming NeverDead. Know any others?

[Cogwheel]

Planescape: Torment.

Besides that? Nothing, I admit.

[zyborg]

Planescape: Torment, eh? I'll have to look that up.

[Cogwheel]

Planescape: Torment, eh? I'll have to look that up.

Do so. It's a good game. In my mind, it's the best story ever (that I've seen, anyway), in a game or otherwise.

[Draconi Redfir]

RTS games. you (the player) are immortal. evrything below you however? not so much.

[Lord Seth]

Wario Land 2 and 3.

[Innis Cabal]

Eternal Odyssey as well

[junglesteve]

In prey you are pretty much immortal

[Kyeudo]

Well, the epic flop Prince of Persia (not any of the Sands of Time titles) has a main character who simply cannot die, but that strips all challenge from the game. I can be in a fight with a boss, leave for 5 hours, come back and beat the boss to death by pressing only X.

Immortality and challenge are hard to make cohabitate in the same game.

[SparkMandriller]

R-Type with free play on.

[FoE]

There's that one Superman game where your life meter is the city of Metropolis.

[Mewtarthio]

Well, the epic flop Prince of Persia (not any of the Sands of Time titles) has a main character who simply cannot die, but that strips all challenge from the game. I can be in a fight with a boss, leave for 5 hours, come back and beat the boss to death by pressing only X.

Immortality and challenge are hard to make cohabitate in the same game.

Prince of Persia wasn't easy because of your immortality. It was easy because it was a really easy game. It's a parkour platformer where every move you have to make is literally written right there on the wall for you and the punishment for failure is having to redo at most ten seconds of gameplay.

I will admit, though, that having no punishment for failure strips a game of most of its tension (which is why I dislike quicksaves). Still, there are ways to punish failure besides killing the player character. Take the Wario Land series. Wario is invincible in the games, but he can still be temporarily thwarted. If you miss a jump, you fall to the ground and have to climb back up again. If you get hit by a flame, Wario runs around in a panic and dashes away from where you want him to be. If a boss's attack connects, Wario gets knocked out of the room and has to find a way back in. It's basically the same thing as forcing the player to restart from a checkpoint, but without Wario actually dying.

[Kyeudo]

Prince of Persia wasn't easy because of your immortality. It was easy because it was a really easy game. It's a parkour platformer where every move you have to make is literally written right there on the wall for you and the punishment for failure is having to redo at most ten seconds of gameplay.


The same could be said about Prince of Persia: Two Thrones or Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, but those games had challenge. Just because you see your way through the puzzle right away doesn't mean that navigating it will be a cakewalk.

In the Sands of Time trilogy (quadrilogy?), failure is punished rather lightly, but it is still punished, which encourages you to do it right the first time, and if you just sit there in a boss fight you will lose. Such things keep the challenge alive.

[factotum]

Descent 3 basically had the ship you were flying be effectively immortal--whenever you died you'd just respawn at the beginning of the section with no reduction in ship capability. Problem is, they decided to make use of this by making the game insanely hard. That made me give up on it because I simply don't find repeating the same section over and over again until you hit the right combination of factors to get through it to be fun!

Prey was another one that had your character be effectively immortal--you could die, but you'd just go to a kind of afterlife where you could shoot damned souls (or something like that) to gain health once you respawned back in the "real world". It had the opposite problem, though, being a fairly easy game to start with, so the fact you couldn't ever die just sapped any sense of challenge out of the whole thing.

[Cogwheel]

Building on Mewtarthio's example, we've got Planescape, again. Well, not so much the checkpoint thing, though you do wake up in the mortuary if you die. More that the plot in that game is really, astonishingly cruel. Only Terranigma can give it a run for its money, I think, in terms of plot-evil.

[Drascin]

Well, there is Kirby's epic Yarn, in which Kirby is absolutely, completely indestructible. The game is still downright delightful - and it's not like anyone played Kirby games because they're challenging, anyway! :smalltongue:

To be honest, Epic Yarn wouldn't be much harder to seasoned gamers (if at all) if you could die, but it makes it much more accessible to its target audience.

[Gralamin]

Immortality makes combat in which survival is the goal trivial. Thus, to create challenge, social issues, Skill based missions, and combat that requires achieving some goal would instead have to be used. The thing about immortality is it adds nothing to the game, except to take away challenges. Thus I could forsee it being used in the future on easier game settings when challenges become more diverse.

[Brother Oni]

There was a really old 16bit platformer where the protagonist had already beaten Death and was now looking for a way to die. Essentially it was like playing a normal platformer with an infinite lives cheat, so it got boring fast.

[potatocubed]

You can't die in Braid, since you can just rewind time until you're safe again.

Lost Odyssey features a handful of immortal protagonists, and I think the whole 'consequences of immortality' thing is handled quite well in the storyline - but it doesn't come up much in the game, since if your party is defeated it's still game over.

(Although if left 'dead' for long enough in combat, immortal characters will revive themselves.)

[Runestar]

Quite a few games today simply respawn you at a previous point when you die. Does that count as immortality?

I am thinking about soul reaver. Technically, Raziel never really dies...:smalltongue:

[factotum]

since if your party is defeated it's still game over.


That reminds me...your party would always come back from the dead if you died in the later Might and Magic games (VI, VII and VIII, at any rate). Thing is, you'd lose all your gold and would be transported back to the location where you started the game, which might be a couple of weeks' travel from where you died! That certainly made dying feel sufficiently bad that you wanted to avoid it, while still being really handy in the early game where you hadn't travelled far anyway and didn't have much gold.

[The_Admiral]

Come on nobody mentioned Pokemon?

[Blayze]

You can't die in Braid, since you can just rewind time until you're safe again.

You can completely screw yourself over and have to restart a puzzle, though, with the "magic" items.


That certainly made dying feel sufficiently bad

Didn't that have the potential to render you incapable of doing anything, since you needed food and/or gold to be able to travel? (The former to travel on your own, and the latter to hitch a lift)

[Om]

You can't die in Braid, since you can just rewind time until you're safe againI was going to mention that as a counterpoint to the idea that death/punishment is necessary to create challenge or tension

Edit: I will say though that the 'regenerating health bar' that's become common in FPSs is almost always unforgivable. Talk about a hopeless compromise

[The Valiant Turtle]

There was a really old 16bit platformer where the protagonist had already beaten Death and was now looking for a way to die. Essentially it was like playing a normal platformer with an infinite lives cheat, so it got boring fast.

I believe you are thinking of Chakan, The Forever Man for the Genesis. It was actually quite difficult.

[pendell]

Obviously, you need a life bar in action games, RPGs, etc, right? Or do you? How many games do you know of that give you an immortal character and still have a challenge? I mean, in genres where you normally don't have immortal characters, obviously. The only one I can think of is the upcoming NeverDead. Know any others?

Pitfall II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall_II:_Lost_Caverns). You literally could not die in the game, even if you leaped off the highest cliff into a piranha infested lake. All you could do was lose points, which you gained by picking up treasures and completing story tasks. The objective was not so much not to die but to finish with as high a score as possible. Since there were a fixed number of point awards in the game, it was possible to get a literally perfect game -- score every point, lose none.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Green-Shirt Q]

Well, there is Kirby's epic Yarn, in which Kirby is absolutely, completely indestructible. The game is still downright delightful - and it's not like anyone played Kirby games because they're challenging, anyway! :smalltongue:

To be honest, Epic Yarn wouldn't be much harder to seasoned gamers (if at all) if you could die, but it makes it much more accessible to its target audience.

To me, it depends how you describe "challege". If the goal of Kirby's Epic Yarn was "to beat all the levels" than it's VERY, VERY easy.

For me, it was "to beat all the levels AND COLLECT AS MUCH SWAG AS POSSIBLE". Which turns out to be a pretty difficult goal worthy of most hardcore gamers. Kirby drops a lot of his beads whenever he takes any damage which can make this very difficult and frustrating for any greedy basturds like myself.

[endoperez]

Obviously, you need a life bar in action games, RPGs, etc, right? Or do you? How many games do you know of that give you an immortal character and still have a challenge? I mean, in genres where you normally don't have immortal characters, obviously. The only one I can think of is the upcoming NeverDead. Know any others?

There are lots of variations where there's no life bar, but instead when you are hurt you lose some other resource you don't want to lose or run out of. Money, colour, equipment, time etc. Losing time in Mario Kart is bad enough, losing equipment in MMORPGs can be very bad, I think you have infinite lives in Demon's Souls but lose collectibles unless you can reach the place where you died, etc.

Abe's Oddyssee is a platformer where the player isn't generally punished for dying, and you have infinite lives, but the puzzles are tricky even so, and the game is quite long. Both the original game and the sequel, Abe's Exoddus, are available on Steam.

[zyborg]

I love Abe's Exoddus! Using telekinesis to control exploding farts FTW!

[Eloel]

Come on nobody mentioned Pokemon?

OP asked for challenging games.

[factotum]

Didn't that have the potential to render you incapable of doing anything, since you needed food and/or gold to be able to travel?

You'd be able to get some money somehow--the starting areas in M&M usually respawned quite quickly, so you'd be able to get some low-end gear from a chest and kill a few low-level mobs to get enough money to buy food at the inn.

[Arbane]

Eversion?

You can't STAY dead, at least. Not until the end.

[Starbuck_II]

Yeah, Planescape: if you died you would be back. You'd have to raise dead your allies as only you are immortal though.

[Knaight]

DROD is a one hit point turn based game, with several holds (level groupings) having it impossible to die. You can still lose, just not die.

[dgnslyr]

OP asked for challenging games.

Are you familiar with the term, "Nuzlocke?"

[Zevox]

Lost Odyssey features a handful of immortal protagonists, and I think the whole 'consequences of immortality' thing is handled quite well in the storyline - but it doesn't come up much in the game, since if your party is defeated it's still game over.
But that immortality is story-only. There are still hp meters, and as you mention you can still be defeated if the entire party is knocked to 0. The immortals' only benefit from it in combat is that they'll auto-resurrect after a few turns if they're KOed - but you'll still probably want to revive them quicker if you can, so that's not much of a benefit outside of the early parts of the game.

Zevox

[Thiyr]

Not exactly a full-length game, but for a flash game, Super Karoshi seems to fit the bill. Irony points: The point of the game (platform puzzler) is to kill yourself.

[Eldan]

Yeah, Planescape: if you died you would be back. You'd have to raise dead your allies as only you are immortal though.

Torment is also the only game I know in which you have to solve puzzles by dying.

[ShadowFighter15]

There was a Highlander game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander:_The_Game) in the works a while ago, but nothing's been shown of it for ages. Probably gone into development hell, but it would've been interesting to see how the player-character's immortality was handled in-game. At a guess; I'd say that if you were hit by something that would kill a mortal, Owen would collapse dead and then revive a short while later. Granted; not much of a hindrance, but you'd have a good reason to avoid 'dying' if you were chasing after someone.

[LordShotGun]

Bioshock can be pretty tough on higher difficulties simply because the enemies DO NOT MISS NO MATTER WHAT!!!! So it ends up being an endless reviving session when ever you get blindsided by a big daddy that you nicked with one bullet as you shot a splicer...

[Toric]

You Have To Burn The Rope. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/Mazapan/you-have-to-burn-the-rope) Your character can be stunned, but not killed. You'll need the immortality.
Only not really.
There's also Geist for the Nintendo Gamecube. While your ghostly self can die via slowly draining health meter, this meter is instantly, totally refilled when you possess any object or animal. The challenge of the game comes from solving puzzles and keeping your temporary hosts from dying.

The last game I can think of is Ghostbusters for the Wii. It may be possible to die and have to restart a section, but that never happened to me. You'll just faint and have to be revived by your AI teammates a lot.

[Callista]

Most games allow immortality by way of saves. And yes, that counts. Many of them are more interactive stories than challenging games.

[zyborg]

That's quite a lot of games. I didn't know there were so many. (Not counting Save files, or that would include the majority of games).

[Sipex]

Braid.

You die, sure, but you just rewind time and presto, no longer dead.

[Eloel]

Are you familiar with the term, "Nuzlocke?"

Yes, yes I am.
While Nuzlocke is also non-challenging, you're not "immortal" in Nuzlocke.

[Om]

Most games allow immortality by way of saves. And yes, that counts. Many of them are more interactive stories than challenging games.No. If you die in, say, Half-Life then you are dead and the game has ended. That you can step outside the game's narrative and load a save is irrelevant. Contrast with the likes of Planescape or Braid where dying is an integral part of the game mechanics and indeed a fundamental aspect of the narrative

And, as an aside, this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_I) is an "interactive story"; this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Sam) is not

[Lhurgyof]

Obviously, you need a life bar in action games, RPGs, etc, right? Or do you? How many games do you know of that give you an immortal character and still have a challenge? I mean, in genres where you normally don't have immortal characters, obviously. The only one I can think of is the upcoming NeverDead. Know any others?

Assassin's Creed?

I mean, you have to sit there for about 3 minutes to let them kill you, and then you just pop back in where you were as if nothing happened.

[Person_Man]

Although this is a matter of perspective, I would argue that you are immortal in most board and card games (most of which have been ported to video games). Chess, checkers, poker, etc. You cannot "die until the game is over. In particular, German style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-style_board_game) board games eschew conflict and/or violence.

[Mewtarthio]

Assassin's Creed?

I mean, you have to sit there for about 3 minutes to let them kill you, and then you just pop back in where you were as if nothing happened.

Assassin's Creed is an odd example. The main conceit is that you're playing Desmond, who is in turn playing Ezio or Altair in the Animus simulation. Thus, you're technically immortal, since if Ezio or Altair "dies" then it just means Desmond screwed up and desynchronized (unless you can die as Desmond; his segments aren't meant to be challenging, so I've never seen if it's possible). Still, I would argue that desynchronization by health loss is close enough to dying that it counts as such for most purposes. If nothing else, Desmond would certainly feel like he died in the simulation.

[Kane]

Eversion?

You can't STAY dead, at least. Not until the end.

Somebody hasn't gotten the good ending, it seems.

Any I'm not sure whether the infinite-lives is a game mechanic or a representation of something more disturbing. Knowing the game, I'm not sure.

[Forbiddenwar]

Legacy of Kain series. The games don't end on death and there is no game over. As Kain is a vampire, he escapes in bat form after taking enough damage. Raziel dissolves into the "spirit realm" a land of the dead and has to fight his way back into the material realm. The challenge of the games came from puzzles and significant set backs from "dying" In Raziel's case, being in the spirit realm meant having less health, no spells and sometimes still be fighting the thing that killed you. Death there brought you back to the very beginning of the game or at pre set way point at the beginning of the level.

edit: side note regard "Highlander" game. The clan Macleod sure had a lot of immortals in it. Must have been something in the water.:smallwink: