Board 8 > Are video game lives a dead concept?

(+) Yeah! (+)

With the release of Super Mario Odyssey, many people are saying that the concept of lives is DEAD! All because Mario no longer has lives for the first time since the 80s, just coins. Many people also point to modern trends where you simply die, get a game over, and then continue. In some cases, you don't even have a life meter, just a realistic bloody screen. But do you think that lives are dead like continues? Let's see what this board thinks.
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I don't know. I'm playing DKCR, and while at some point you can restock to 99 for cheap, it's a hard game and having that limit adds to the tension. As long as continues aren't limited I'm generally happy.
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This is actually an interesting topic. I think most games are too long for "lives" to really be relevant anymore. If you have 3 lives and die in an Uncharted game, you can't really expect someone to continue a level from the beginning when it may mean replaying something for another 30 minutes. But maybe it's just the p***iffication of America!
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I don't know, even in DKCR and Tropical Freeze I never felt in danger of a game over. Last time I can remember getting game overs was Mega Man 9. And thankfully we never get old style total game overs anymore.

And re the p***iffication of America, that reminds me of a Neogaf thread I saw about a month ago. The consensus was that games should let you skip ahead to wherever you want in the game.
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EndOfDiscOne posted...

The consensus was that games should let you skip ahead to wherever you want in the game.

The thought of this would have made me cringe years ago, but as my time becomes more limited and therefore valuable, I sort of get this mindset. If I play a 16-bit game now, I am absolutely entering cheat codes to skip levels so I don't have to replay the earlier stages more than once.
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Lives have been dead for a verrryyy long time, which is good.

However, traditional fail states have continued to stick around, so nothing has changed THAT much. The same gameplay is still there, it's just that you either have infinite lives, or some other number goes down instead of "lives".

What's more interesting is whether fail states in general are on the decline. There's lots of good and challenging games that have come out that do away with fail states recently, but it's still the default tool for adding challenge, especially in AAA.
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They've been dead.

The only purpose they served was for really old style games that kick you back to the beginning. Even in Super Mario 64 death only meant sometimes you'd start outside Peach's Castle, which is just more annoying than an actual punishment.
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i really enjoyed Prince of Persia 2008

Yeah Mega Man 10 is the last time I can remember it actually making a difference

Any game since then that had lives also made them plentiful enough to not matter
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The only games I play where 'lives' feel necessary are Super Smash Brothers titles. Stock mode 4eva

The only reason lives existed in the first place is to create a false sense of length and difficulty. But nowadays a developer can pretty much make any game as difficult and as long as they want it to be, without resorting to cheap tactics like that. So yeah lives are dead and for good reason.
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Eh there's something to be said about replaying nes Mario or castlevania stages.

They were designed that way and perfecting levels is something I find enjoyable.
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They're worthwhile in games that are built around the limitation (old school platformers) and useless in games where you can get so many that the mechanic is trivialized.

I was really glad to see Odyssey drop them because there's pretty much never a point in modern Mario where you're going to have less than 90 lives.

Really though something like Shovel Knight or Dark Souls where the punishment for death is losing a large chunk of your resources is more appealing than just losing the time it takes to get back to where you were.
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Xiahou Shake posted...

They're worthwhile in games that are built around the limitation (old school platformers) and useless in games where you can get so many that the mechanic is trivialized.

Even games like that I think lives aren't worth having

Playing Sonic Mania was fun, but the lives was one of the worst aspects. It made it feel outdated rather than retro, and having to restart an entire level (even if you're on the end of the 2nd act) due to a particularly cheap death takes a lot of the fun out of the game

I feel like lives existed primarily to get a lot more playtime from otherwise short games due to system limitations, which isn't an issue any more (or, it shouldn't be)
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Xiahou Shake posted...

Really though something like Shovel Knight or Dark Souls where the punishment for death is losing a large chunk of your resources is more appealing than just losing the time it takes to get back to where you were.

And even in those games it only really works because you have a way to "bank" resources... and in fact this mechanism encourages you to do so rather than hoarding.
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Johnbobb posted...

Xiahou Shake posted...

They're worthwhile in games that are built around the limitation (old school platformers) and useless in games where you can get so many that the mechanic is trivialized.

Even games like that I think lives aren't worth having

Playing Sonic Mania was fun, but the lives was one of the worst aspects. It made it feel outdated rather than retro, and having to restart an entire level (even if you're on the end of the 2nd act) due to a particularly cheap death takes a lot of the fun out of the game

I feel like lives existed primarily to get a lot more playtime from otherwise short games due to system limitations, which isn't an issue any more (or, it shouldn't be)

Haven't played it but I think stakes like this can make these games more fun than just breezing through the levels and never having to revisit them and experience different ways of playing.
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Yeah I definitely think retro style games can make good use of lives for challenge. You're expected to be able to clear the world with the number of tries you're given - if you can't do it, you go back to the beginning and get better. Getting better at a game is the most satisfying part of playing video games IMO.
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pjbasis posted...

Haven't played it but I think stakes like this can make these games more fun than just breezing through the levels and never having to revisit them and experience different ways of playing.

I think that's a bad way of going about it

Sonic Generations was excellent in this way. The lives were less restrictive so it was rarely an issue of having to restart (and when you did, it wasn't like you were going THAT far back like with Mania)

BUT there were collectible red rings throughout the levels, which you had to take various different paths to get.

This encourages you to replay the levels several times but doesn't force you too, which makes all the difference
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Not to mention, lives force you to replay the level immediately, rather than revisit them to go for a different experience. Redoing the levels you feel like doing at your own pace will always be preferable to being forced to redo levels repetitively to proceed imo
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The End Is Nigh for example is largely no lives, but it has special lives-based retro levels. Those are super frustrating and not that fun and I don't really want to play them, while the regular levels are incredibly addictive and awesome.

I guess the lives-based levels do challenge mastery a TINY bit more, but it's not worth the HUGE boost in frustration.

The other thing is that lives never provide any unique, unmatchable experience that might make them worth introducing into a design. You can get difficulty in so many other ways. I guess the 1 unique thing it provides is the "augh I need to do all that crap over again???" which is pretty powerful, albeit not enjoyable. But even that feeling has been explored in different ways that are pretty awesome.
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I wish cuphead went full-blown and featured 3 lives.

I miss the contras and metal slugs
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Lives are great and more games should utilize them.

Games where you can retry a single part of the game over and over ad infinitum until you fluke into getting it right once, and then never have to revisit it again, don't really have the same kind of challenge as games that force you to prove that you can complete a challenge *consistently.* That's really the whole point of making you do things over and over again.

I understand that that type of gameplay isn't for everyone, and not all games needs to have this kind of system. A lot of games don't need them - Super Mario 64, for instance, is a game where lives are a completely vestigial concept that only exist because they didn't realize they could get rid of them, and it's still challenging enough since you have to complete enough challenges on the way to getting a star that the "proof" that you can do something is still substantial enough.

Some games are more about exploration or puzzle solving or story or whatever and don't really need lives either. But a lot of action games could really stand to ask more of their players sometimes - I love games with lives and even old-school continue systems where you have to start the entire game over. It'd be nice to have more of them.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Games where you can retry a single part of the game over and over ad infinitum until you fluke into getting it right once, and then never have to revisit it again, don't really have the same kind of challenge as games that force you to prove that you can complete a challenge *consistently.* That's really the whole point of making you do things over and over again.

Lives have nothing to do with this, as proven by all the game without lives that are based on making you do things over and over again
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foolm0r0n posted...

Paratroopa1 posted...

Games where you can retry a single part of the game over and over ad infinitum until you fluke into getting it right once, and then never have to revisit it again, don't really have the same kind of challenge as games that force you to prove that you can complete a challenge *consistently.* That's really the whole point of making you do things over and over again.

Lives have nothing to do with this, as proven by all the game without lives that are based on making you do things over and over again

Depends on how exactly the game handles this

Lives are often handled as like, a 'soft failure' thing, where it doesn't send you back to the very beginning of the level until you fuck up enough times

Right, but so many games now just send you to the beginning on your first fuck up (i.e. 1 life). That makes for a harder and less frustrating game.
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Lives are a pretty simple way to do it.

Ranking systems are pretty great though. I learned every RE5 level perfectly to get S rank.
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foolm0r0n posted...

The End Is Nigh for example is largely no lives, but it has special lives-based retro levels. Those are super frustrating and not that fun and I don't really want to play them, while the regular levels are incredibly addictive and awesome.

The End is Nigh played with lives in some neat ways but absolutely deserves critiquing too. It's a fine modern case study.

Its standard levels were like Super Meat Boy's: expect to die a lot, then restart quickly to die some more too. This is great.

Its cartridges each introduced different philosophies:

*Glitched cartridges are like the standard levels but much harder: this is pretty well great, just some odd difficulty spikes here and there (some got patched) but it works.

*Nine cartridges asked you to beat ten screens with only twenty lives. I thought these were fair, given their difficulty. These also had achievements encouraging you to get better than necessary at them, which will help in the next category.

*+Super Mega Cart asked you to beat ALL of the twenty-life cartridges you already played as well as a tenth one you had no experience with in a gauntlet-type situation...with only thirty or forty lives total, and failure means you restart all the way back to the beginning of the gauntlet. My main problem here was the final ten levels being brand new after everything else. The rest of the gauntlet had its frustrations but I thought it was fine -- that last surprise was an unfair trap though, and this type of suprise is not the last of its kind.

*The four Nevermore cartridges asked you to beat five-eight screens without a single death. These felt impossible at moments but ultimately they feel good to beat so I think these are worthy.

*+Acceptance combines those Nevermore cartridges and adds a new final world of five-six screens to beat in another gauntlet...again, with only one life. This is fucking bullshit and it wasn't very satisfying to complete it. This is incredibly difficult and is certain to infuriate along the way even before springing those final new levels on you. I consider this an irresponsible challenge to put on a gamer.

One other neat way TEiN played with lives was how the tumors you collected throughout the game affected how many lives you'd have in its final two worlds. One of them simply totaled how many tumors you collected and said you had that many lives to use -- the other did the same, except it would take your first 450 tumors away from you so you had to respect your lives even more. This was exciting and I could return to past levels to collect more tumors as I needed more lives, so this worked well.
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Paratroopa1 posted...

Some games are more about exploration or puzzle solving or story or whatever and don't really need lives either. But a lot of action games could really stand to ask more of their players sometimes - I love games with lives and even old-school continue systems where you have to start the entire game over. It'd be nice to have more of them.

A good middleground is what arcades eventually came up with--allow limitless continues, but reward players in some way for achieving the one-credit clear. Sometimes an extra level, sometimes just a special ending, and of course any worthwhile game resets your score whenever you continue (or increments your ones counter as a mark of shame) so it's the only way to get to the top of those leaderboards.
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