Technically, of course, permanent death is the ultimate game feature, but that’s just an obvious pun. In terms of game dynamics, though, permanent death (or, like the trendy kids say, “permadeath”) is also an immensely interesting game feature, especially in a generation when winning a game is mostly a matter of reloading previous save games until you do, and any failures are effectively erased from existence.
Games have other ways to make up for this – an increased difficulty setting presents its own challenges, for example, while narrative exposition or puzzles or even complex level design might also take precedence over tests of player skill. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of that, because games can and do engage players on multiple levels, but permadeath is a whole other category of doing it.
Permadeath introduces meaningful consequences and real penalties for your actions in a game, and makes those actions that much more significant. The possible repercussions of everything you do must be carefully evaluated beforehand, which means engaging with the game on a completely different level than simply trying to avoid – at worst – going back to a checkpoint before an unskippable cutscene. Much of the time, that means not doing something, where inaction is otherwise incongruous in a medium which promotes constant progression as a design imperative. Permadeath breaks the rules and gets away with it.
Hatchet rampages. Not always a good idea.
On Wednesday night, my character in DayZ was killed. Okay, so it was entirely my fault* – I took a stupid risk, and in a single moment, all my progress in the game was reset to zero – but no less devastating for its predictability. It wasn’t the first time I’d been killed in the game, mind you, but it was the longest I’d survived until then, with eight days on the clock.
That’s a huge investment I lost instantly, and not just the time. I mean, I had at least four DMR mags in my backpack. Do you have any idea how hard those things are to find? And my night-vision goggles. And my morphine injectors, and my antibiotics, and my beans. And my ghillie suit that I couldn’t even wear because the game doesn’t support it on a female character model, but damn it, it was my ghillie suit.
None of that would matter, though, if I’d been able to reload a save game, and that’s the whole point. Without permadeath, DayZ would be just another zombie game in a market already way over quota with zombie games. Instead, it’s not really a game about zombies so much as it’s a game about consequences and penalties for failure, and the very real, totally unique tension those things combine to create. Just like a real zombie apocalypse, I’d imagine. Ha, and they said video games wouldn’t teach me anything useful.
* Shhhh, don’t tell my boyfriend that. I’ll deny everything.
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It’s not a new concept, a few games had perma-death long ago…
Uplink comes to mind, though it was not so much ‘death’ 😛
If you fail to erase your tracks after a hack and take unnecessary risks – you eventually get caught and your ingame server is confiscated. Thus you lose, having to start over – no loadable saves (except if you get clever with backing up files on pc etc…). It really gives you the drive to succeed and make correct choices beforehand.
I say it is only for a niche market, but it is interesting and i’d give it a try. They must however give you the option before you start (permadeath or not), otherwise a lot of money will be spent on games that will be played once or twice, before people stop trying.
I see this exact same thing with different difficulties in my own games games – I always start my games off on hardest difficulty (for the challenge) but some games are just brutal and i find that if i really start to struggle to progress in a game because of a wall of difficulty, I eventually get fed up and dont even finish the game (or come back to it much later). I can see the same with permadeath situations in more mainstream games.