It ain't over till it's Game Over

Source

It's only three more weeks until we finally get to play Super Mario Odyssey. Even now it's safe to say that it has been a very long time since a Mario Game has created such buzz. Of course every game the (now officially) former plumber has starred in was excellent and from the looks Odyssey will continue this trend, but it's been a while since even non Nintendo Fans looked forward to a new Mario adventure.
Odyssey aims to take everything we knew about Mario, throw it right ouf the window and start completely fresh. And I couldn't be more excited.

Still there was one piece of news lately that got me thinking. Some of you may have heard about it, while others are still blissfully unaware. Don't worry it's nothing spoilerish, so you can continue reading. The piece of Information I'm talking about was revealed by the game director Kenta Motokura.

If you die in Super Mario Odyssey you won't have to worry about your life count. Simply because there is none. So if you die you'll get send back to the last checkpoint and lose ten coins. And even if you don't have any coins left you won't Game Over. Simply speaking there is no Game Over in the game.

We thought about how a lives system would work in this kind of broad, exploration-focused game. In this sort of game, there would be a lot of different restart points. We decided not to use the lives system because it was not an element that was absolutely necessary. We also thought that it would affect some users’ desire to play because, while users who are good at the game would rarely see the (game over) screen that comes up when Mario runs out of lives, inexperienced users would probably end up seeing it frequently.

Source

Now some purists may cry out about this, but let's face the fact. When was the last time you saw a game over screen in a game? Well it was probably Breath of the Wild but just because the words are written on Screen doesn't mean that this is a true Game Over. So let me rephrase my previous question. When was the last time you saw a Game Over have serious consequences? Ahh now it gets more tricky to answer, doesn't it? So today I'd like to take a look back at the history of the Game Over Screen and how it's used today.

Money Please:

To put it simply that was the reason for the Game Over screens existance in the first place. The 80s and earyl 90s were the domain of Arcade machines. Home Consoles had started to grow in popularity, but if you wanted to play the best looking and most impressive games you had to head to your nearest Arcade. In the early days of the industry many games on NES and other consoles were simply watered down ports of the arcade version. That's why so many titles had highscores and simply felt ''arcady''.

So why was the Game Over important for arcade games? You paid to play. Yes just like with todays online gaming, in arcade halls you had to spent your hard earned money to play a round. And it influenced game design, just like microtransaktions do today. A Game Over simply meant you had to start and pay again.

Source

You may have wondered about the classic continue screen many fighting games still have. A countdown is, well, counting down from and you have to press a button to try again. Well in the arcade it worked the same, but instead of pressing a button you had to insert more money. The countdown was there to pressure you into doing so. You don't want to lose your hard earned progress, just because you hesitated for 9 seconds, don't you?

So during those days the Game Over Screen was tied to real consequences, namely losing your hard earned allowance. That's also partly a reason why so many arcade games are hard as hell. Harder games resulted in more Game Over Screens, which resulted in more money.

But with the rise of Home Consoles this started to change. Game Over couldn't have any monetary consequences anymore, so developers had to adapt. Now time lost was the measurement in which you payed for your game over. Which leads us to today.

Back to the starting line:

That's probably still the moste common Game Over penalty, if there is still a Game Over in your games. You simply get sent back to the beginning of the level to your last checkpoint or (in some very old games) to the start of the game. But while this method was quite popular in early days it quickly died down. Simply because it was very discouraging. While in the Arcade you had the chance to choose, pay for the continue or loose your progress, on the home console this choice was absent. This lead to frustrated customers quitting, which in turn lead to the developers gradually reducing the impact the Game Over had on the gameplay experience.

Another fact for the dwindling impact of the Game Over Screen was owed to the fact that games grew more and more diverse. Over the time the simply platforming gameplay, which dominated the early NES days, had turned into countless different genres. And with that new questions arose. How do you implent a ''Game Over'' into a sports game? Or you can't send the player back to the start of your game, if it's a hundred hour long RPG epic.

Source

The questions developers now had to answer was if they wanted a Game Over in ther game and if yes, how could they make it count? Many started to answer the first question with no. Games like Assassins Creed don't really offer a Game Over anymore. If you die you'll get briefly desynchronized before you can start again from a savepoint, which there are many off, meaning that in the end the only time you loose is on the loading screen. Even Breath of the Wild does this. When you attack an enemy camp and fail, you may see the words Game Over written in red letters over a black screen, but once you press Continue you'll start again at the same location.

The Idea is that a death shouldn't frustrate you instead. Instead it should allow you the learn from your mistakes and quickly use your new knowledge to this time conquer the task in front of you.

Game Over truly has become nothing more than some words written on the screen. So the question todays developers have to answer isn't really if they want a Game Over or not, but how much do they want death to count. How much should a death cost you?

To die, or not to die:

The Game Over has always been just the name for the most costly death. A ''normal'' death may send you back to the start of the level, but once you've used up all your lives it will send you to the start of the game. As we iterated the concept of finite lives and the Game Over has mostly disappeared from todays gaming market, but that doesn't mean the concept of a costly death has. But it's easy to make a death cost ''much''. It's not so easy to do this without creating a frustrating experiences for your customer. It's a thin line creating a death system that does punish your players but at the same time encourages them to keep playing your game. Luckily there are two games out there that impented that concept brilliantly.

Source

The first one is Dark Souls (it was probably Demon Souls but I've never played that game. Like with everything in the Game Dark Souls really punished you for your death. Souls are the core currency in the games world. You use them to level up and buy things from merchants. Because of that they're pretty important. Now if you die you loose all your souls and are send back to the last bonfire (savepoint). Now because this would feel really frustrating because you will die a lot in Dark Souls the developers implemented a genious trick. You can reclaim your souls if you manage to come back to the place where you died earlier and pick them up. But if you die again before that they are lost forever. They give you a chance to make up for your mistake. This has two effects. Frist it makes a stressful game even more stressful if you have to get through the deadly traps of Sen's Fortress to reclaim your one million souls near the top, and secondly because of it Dark Souls never feels unfair. You always have the chance to get back what is yours. Another Game that used the same concept was Zombi U for the Wii-U. If you died there you're character would turn into a Zombie and you'd take control of a new survivor. If you then returned to the place your former Avatar had died, you could find him(or her) wandering around the area as Zombi. Now you just had to kill your former self to reclaim all your equipment. But just like with Dark Souls if you died again before that all was lost.

The second one is the predecessor to a game which released the other day. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor was kind of a sleeper hit in 2014. The gameplay was an Assassins Creed rip-off, but quite solid and Monolith managed to create a Mordor that was interesting to explore. The hidden star of the game was, however, the Nemesis System. Many of the Orks in Saurons Army did have unique character traits and even without the players input the Army would change. Orcs would fight eachother and rise in rank. I don't want to get into to much detail for this system, but there was one aspect of it that ties into todays topic. If an Orc managed to kill you during your adventure this would have real consequences. Not for the player, you would still get send back to the last checkpoint and could start again, but for the Orc. Not only would they gain scars from the encounter but if they managed to kill you they would then rise in rank and grow more powerful. So as a direct consequences of your failure your enemies grew stronger. This wasn't just a great way to attach a real weight to your deaths, but also served to motivate the player. Finally killing an Orc that managed to slay you earlier is an extremely satisfying feeling.

But how does this all tie into Mario you may ask? Well I talked about this two examples to show that just adding weight to a death isn't enough today. It would be easy for the developers of Odyssey to just implement a life system and if you saw the Game Over just throw you back at the start of the world and delete all your Power Moons, but that would be bad game design and feel extremely discouraging. Death can still have weight in video games, but you need to be the right game for it. It shouldn't be an afterthought, but instead needs to be an integral part of the experience. If it isn't then you're better off simply kicking it out.

But what are your experiences with Game Over in Video Games? Which Game Over did turn you insane? Do you miss a meaningful Live and Game Over System in todays games? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

And as always

thanks for reading