What's the point of playing a game you can't lose?

[Hat_Truck]

Quoting a Diablo 3 Developer:

I don’t think death penalties need to edge into the ‘punishment’ definition (although I realize that’s a confusion of terms) to be worthwhile.
Making sure someone can’t endlessly throw themselves against monsters/die/repeat and eventually win is something we’d want to stop. To make the player take pause and realize they’re not going to get past them unless they straighten up and pay attention and play better, or take some extra measures to buff up, or simply come up with a different strategy, those are the types of death penalties that work. Those are the ones we like and that I’m talking about.

Taking gold away from people, or taking a full level of experience away, yeah, that’s a wake up call. It’s also the quickest way to get someone to uninstall the game. A very select few people will put up with something like that. It’s fine in Diablo II because gold has almost no use, but imagine if it did. You’d be encouraged through the mechanic to grind in easier areas where you’re sure you couldn’t die just so you could earn gold safely. That sounds terrible. Without a gold penalty you can play the content you want to play and meanwhile you’re finding items and amounts of gold that are relevant. That sounds like fun.

Yes, because it's all about not doing anything that wouldn't BE FUN isn't it? This excerpt sounds suspiciously like Riot Games' infamous anti-fun philosophy. Let's not punish the player for dying, or add any mechanics that could cause frustration, that wouldn't be fun!

Ironically, they haven't stopped people from endlessly throwing themselves against monsters, dying, resurrecting, then eventually winning the game.

10% durability loss, even on the hardest difficulty (Inferno) is a joke. What's the point of playing the game if you can't even lose? It doesn't matter how good you are/what gear you have if you can just keep resurrecting/repairing until you win.

Oh but of course there's hardcore mode where if you die once you're done forever. This is the kind of terrible all-or-nothing design philosophy Blizzard is famous for.

We waited 15 years for this? Hopefully Torchlight 2 won't be so bad.

[[SBT]NagiSoi]

Thats true, atleast i think there needs to be a punishment (even harsh one) for dying and the more times you die in short period of time the harsher the punishment is otherwise you just suicide run everything and eventually win.

[Beanybag]

Down with hardcore mode.

[KingIsRey]

What do you want them to do? Even in Darksouls it wasn't terrible to die as much as you did, as long as you learned from your mistake.

[Hat_Truck]

In Darksouls I'm told it got harder if you continued to die, so there was a very serious penalty to just throwing your life away over and over.

Also, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Wbq...ure=plpp_video

Stay classy, Blizzard.

[Lethe]

Tbh virtually all action RPGs play like this. Some just have more light/severe death penalties. Ultimately though a dedicated player will get through it regardless.

While D3 is acceptable, I would say it is highly overrated.

[Hat_Truck]

Maybe it's just me, but I find games without any danger of losing an utter waste of time. If it requires no skill to play, then you're just staring at a screen clicking buttons ultimately, no brain activity required. Go outside and jog or ride a bike, you can't lose at those activities, they're enjoyable, and at least you're improving your health while you're at it.

Tbh virtually all action RPGs play like this. Some just have more light/severe death penalties. Ultimately though a dedicated player will get through it regardless.

Well if you want to get technical, every game has a limits on its death penalties. At worst you just have to start over (PVP games) or reload the last save usually. At least ARPGs like Darkspore force you to restart the level for heaven's sake.

[EVA_Unit_02]

blizzard fell after warcraft 3, and died with the activision merge.

[[MiDO]HugoChavez]

not to mention that, it makes easier for bots..

[Lethe]

Well, in the end I think the question you should be asking is 'Did I get my money's worth?'

With a story that takes 12+ hours, I think most people will say yes.

GOTY material? Probably not. Lived up to the hype? Split, but I think more people are weighted towards no, albeit not by much.

[Apostate]

Quoting a Diablo 3 Developer:

Yes, because it's all about not doing anything that wouldn't BE FUN isn't it? This excerpt sounds suspiciously like Riot Games' infamous anti-fun philosophy. Let's not punish the player for dying, or add any mechanics that could cause frustration, that wouldn't be fun!

Ironically, they haven't stopped people from endlessly throwing themselves against monsters, dying, resurrecting, then eventually winning the game.

10% durability loss, even on the hardest difficulty (Inferno) is a joke. What's the point of playing the game if you can't even lose? It doesn't matter how good you are/what gear you have if you can just keep resurrecting/repairing until you win.

Oh but of course there's hardcore mode where if you die once you're done forever. This is the kind of terrible all-or-nothing design philosophy Blizzard is famous for.

We waited 15 years for this? Hopefully Torchlight 2 won't be so bad.

You should at least play the game before you bash it. Having played it, I'm going to say it's one of the most perfect games I've ever played.

If you get your rocks off by "winning", then that's fine. Not all of us need that incentive to have a good time. You shouldn't knock a game just because it doesn't fit into your particular design philosophy. And it is a HUGE, absurdly vast jump in logic to say that a game which has a smaller death penalty suddenly takes no skill to play. Let's also keep in mind that broken gear costs a huge amount of gold to get back, and that boss fights have to be completely restarted if everyone dies during one.

I have to say I'm fairly amused by how overly critical the HoN community has been thus far of D3.

[Meconium]

Dark Souls >>>>>>>> Everything.

No point in discussing it further. The game makes you a man.

[[G]Atrim3ntus]

I understand there's gotta be a challenge but to me, dying and having to repeat the content over and over because you can't get through the area is just annoying. I tend to play on the hardest to feel the challenge but repeatedly press F5 throughout the session because if I die, having to repeat the whole thing over again makes me become bored which only leads to putting away the game for days. As you repeat an area you start gaining understanding so the challenge it originally has starts to fade away. In some games I've played, Hard feels like playing on Easy after the 5th death.
It's a different experience walking through a hall and not knowing what's coming next than knowing a lethal trap is laying at the end or that a mob will do X after a certain amount of time.

What I'd want from a game is challenge, death penalties that aren't pointless but most importantly, the game to be dynamic and random enough that if I die due to a trap, I want that trap to now be sitting across the river and not next to the same rock I originally walked through. Or if a group of mobs killed me because they were too strong, I don't want them to be sitting in the same spot next time I come around and/or for me to have a way to walk around like a lot of games do. I want those mobs to now come running behind me when I get to that point and if they kill me again, I want them to drop from the ceiling or come out of the ground the next time. I can't name a single game that does this (modern ones at least). That's the main reason I almost never do more than two playthroughs. It feels pretty pointless if you already know what's coming next.

Edit: Another thing that bugs me is the abudance of healing. Some games may be hard but you can carry like 100 healing pots and pop them all during a fight. Others you can cast heals over and over or hide behind cover for a few seconds until your health comes back up (like in pretty much all FPS games). Some games heal you to full health after leveling and some you gradually heal after coming out of combat. There's a lot of different mechanics to heal the player but they're all easy to come by so even if you play on the highest difficulty the game loses part of the challenge.

[ArnoldRimmer]

Dark Souls is coming to PC gaiz

If you didnt already know

[Apostate]

I will say though that the rez tactics that the top teams are using to get through Inferno right now are really BS. I think of it has an abuse of a tactic, and I hope Blizzard makes it less easy to grind down bosses and mobs like this.

[[GnJA]Good_Apollo]

What do you want them to do? Even in Darksouls it wasn't terrible to die as much as you did, as long as you learned from your mistake.

Except it could be terrible. Dying twice in a row before you could get your bloodstain, for example. That was irritating but From Software balanced the irritating enough to still be incredibly challenging but still fun and rewarding. An example of doing it right.

Still waiting for that rumored DLC though...can't say I've ever been this excited for DLC.

I've watched enough people play D3 on twith to decide that it's just not even remotely that interesting, really. As someone who played Torchlight but never D2 I just don't see what the hype is about other than nostalgia. Not that Torchlight is perfect...but it's good enough to satiate my need for loot-finding games.

[KingIsRey]

Except it could be terrible. Dying twice in a row before you could get your bloodstain, for example. That was irritating but From Software balanced the irritating enough to still be incredibly challenging but still fun and rewarding. An example of doing it right.

Dying in Dark Souls was not the end of the world. OP is asking for MORE penalty than DS (which, as a game, we can all agree on was a great success).

[[Loli]Gohka]

inb4 hardcore mode.

[[DLGN]Bloodaxe]

Did you kill Diablo on hell with a hardcore character? no? Okay you go do that then get back on me about the difficulty of the game.

[[Poni]`Fluttershy]

Dying is annoying and the durability loss is enough of a punishment. Clearly you haven't gotten to hell where you can die several times on the same elite pack and on top of that if it's far away from the checkpoint you have to walk back each time. Dying isn't fun.