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Acorn Arcade forums: Games: Games that require courage
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Games that require courage |
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Phlamethrower (15:17 24/8/2010)
flibble (17:07 24/8/2010)
rich (08:47 1/9/2010)
Phlamethrower (09:47 1/9/2010)
Monty (10:44 1/9/2010)
rich (12:00 1/9/2010)
Phlamethrower (13:35 1/9/2010)
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Jeffrey Lee |
Message #115088, posted by Phlamethrower at 15:17, 24/8/2010 |
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As an offshoot to the endgames thread, here's what's been bugging me today: As far as I can tell there aren't many games that require/promote courage.
This is because the games either don't give you a choice over whether you're going to be courageous or not (e.g. a linear FPS won't give you the option of not rescuing the president's daughter), or the courageous route doesn't have any significant consequences if you fail (if you die, you can just reload your last save game and try again).
Open world RPGish games like Fallout 3 or the STALKER games do offer some kind of courage, as there are lots of side quests which you can optionally partake in, and they do have consequences if you fail them (unless your failure has resulted in your death). But I don't think the failure consequences really have that much of an effect on the player, so the player might not feel that it's a particularly important task that he's undertaking. And if the failure does affect the player significantly then he can just save-scum his way to victory instead.
Which makes me wonder if the only real way to offer the player a chance to be courageous is to remove or severely limit the ability to save the game.
The game I can think of that requires the most courage from the player is EVE Online. Although death isn't permanent it does have severe consequences, causing the player to lose anything from a few minutes of work to a few months of work. And there are plenty of situations where players can show courage without putting their own lives on the line, or they can show courage in order to attempt to save others from the penalties of death.
Elite feels like it should offer the player a chance to be courageous, since each time you jump to a new system it's a long and often dangerous journey to the safety of the space station. But the fact that you can't really play the game at all unless you travel means that you aren't given much of a choice over whether you want to be courageous or not.
Although Left 4 Dead looks on the surface like it falls foul of the linear FPS rule, it does offer some opportunity for courage - if you've made it to the saferoom, but another player has been incapacitated outside, then you're given the choice of the courageous route (with a failure penalty of restarting the level if you were the last man alive) or the cowardly route (although since the dead players will respawn at the start of the new level the only thing you'll lose by being a coward is the respect of the other players).
So are there any other games or types of games that people can think of that require the give the player the opportunity to show courage? And in a similar vein, are there any games that allow the player to be a martyr, and make the player feel satisfied that dieing was the right thing to do? Fallout 3 is the only game I can think of where the player is actually given a choice over being a martyr, but since I didn't really feel any connection to the storyline I wasn't really fussed about whether everyone lived or not. But if I had cared about the storyline then I think the epilogue sequence would have felt like a worthwhile reward for my death. |
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Peter Howkins |
Message #115089, posted by flibble at 17:07, 24/8/2010, in reply to message #115088 |
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The only game, that I can think of, that would offer that level of choice would be 'Deus Ex' (the first one). Your actions can directly affect which 'good' characters are alive at the end of the game *without* it blocking you from completing the game by making you go and save them.
Some of the 'bad' characters can also be killed or left alive. But it's not a free for all, you can't kill off people that are needed for the continuation of the story later, so the limits are a bit arbitrary. |
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Richard Goodwin |
Message #115185, posted by rich at 08:47, 1/9/2010, in reply to message #115088 |
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Raiding in an MMORPG often requires selflessness and even self-sacrifice in end-game raiding, as you're working together with a bunch of other people to achieve a goal, but whether this equates to courage...?
________
 Cheers,
Rich.
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Jeffrey Lee |
Message #115187, posted by Phlamethrower at 09:47, 1/9/2010, in reply to message #115185 |
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but whether this equates to courage...? I think it all comes down to whether you stand to lose something by failing. AFAIK most MMORPG's cater to the WoW crowd by having very light death penalties, so the only thing you'd stand to lose by failing is missing out on the loot/XP you would have got if you'd made it through alive, or the hour or two of lost time that it took to reach the last stage of the dungeon.
If you aren't going to lose anything by failing then there's no risk; if there's no risk then there's nothing to be afraid of; if there's nothing to be afraid of then it can't possibly require courage to perform the act. |
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Edward Rogers |
Message #115189, posted by Monty at 10:44, 1/9/2010, in reply to message #115187 |
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I intend to play 'STALKER: call of pripyat', restarting every time I die. Its not courage, but its about as close as a game will allow you to get to it, i.e. pretending to do something courageous whilst actually just wasting a lot of your own time. |
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Richard Goodwin |
Message #115193, posted by rich at 12:00, 1/9/2010, in reply to message #115187 |
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but whether this equates to courage...? I think it all comes down to whether you stand to lose something by failing. AFAIK most MMORPG's cater to the WoW crowd by having very light death penalties, so the only thing you'd stand to lose by failing is missing out on the loot/XP you would have got if you'd made it through alive, or the hour or two of lost time that it took to reach the last stage of the dungeon.
If you aren't going to lose anything by failing then there's no risk; if there's no risk then there's nothing to be afraid of; if there's nothing to be afraid of then it can't possibly require courage to perform the act.
I'm not sure when you last played WoW, but I dont think you've quite got how raids work.
In WoW, you don't actually lose XP faction reputation gains or loot for being dead, providing the boss goes down. You can't come back in while the fight is going on - you might as well stay on the floor and watch the rest of the fight, but you're done for that fight. You *might* even get a combat rez if you're important enough (tank or healer usually), but these are costly and rare.
So taken at face value, death is merely an annoyance - but only as long as that death doesn't affect the team as a whole.
If the boss doesn't go down, you do lose a substantial amount of time and effort - maybe a full hour of wrangling people back and running through it again - and if it happens too often (which might only be two or three times) then then whole raid might be called. A called raid could mean you've blown your chances for that week and everyone has to start all over again come Wednesday (when everything resets). You might even get kicked or demoted from your raid team. So less loot, bad feeling in the guild, locusts, cats and dogs living together, bad things can happen.
As for ad hoc (PUG) raids, they're more likely to fall apart on wipes (or just when an hour or so is up), so if you need lootz from later bosses, you're unlikely to get there even without a wipefest. Causing a wipe or just not knowing your stuff is bad here too, you might even get blacklisted by the guys that organise most of the PUGs.
However, as a fairly squishy rogue I'll still (for example) try to pull the mob off a healer, because healers are often more important than raw DPS. Especially that fight where the healers have to heal a dragon back to full health *and* look after the raid. Yeah, most of us died, but we still "won" because the healers survived. I went in knowing that I was likely to die, and that I wouldn't see the fight through - and as it was a new fight at the end of the night, didn't know that we'd eventually triumph that week at all, or get as far the next week. But we pulled together and did it.
Actually, I usually play as a druid healer who saves lives and occasionally raises the dead, when I'd rather be hitting things with swords, so I'm a big damn hero all the time 
________
Cheers,
Rich.
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Jeffrey Lee |
Message #115194, posted by Phlamethrower at 13:35, 1/9/2010, in reply to message #115193 |
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I'm not sure when you last played WoW I've never played it 
So taken at face value, death is merely an annoyance - but only as long as that death doesn't affect the team as a whole. Yes, if your death dooms the rest of your team to failure then that would be something worth being worried about.
How unpredictable are the raids? I'd assume that once you've done a particular raid enough times, and you're playing with trusted friends (who have also done the raid before) then there won't be any significant risk left, and neither will your friends punish you too much if you mess up. So the amount of courage/bravery needed will diminish each time you do the raid.
Unless there's some kind of upper level cap to force you to move on to bigger and harder raids once you reach a certain point? (I'd assume that this is the case... or that the rewards from the lower-level raids wouldn't be worth the time for higher-level characters to partake, so no higher-level characters would want to sit grinding away at the same level 1 gnomes anyway) |
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Acorn Arcade forums: Games: Games that require courage | |
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