OH GOD I COULD DIE ANY MOMENT HERE in combat is entirely inappropriate to say, Skies of Arcadia. It is entirely appropriate to say, Silent Hill 2. Unless random factors are part of your narrative flow (See Darth and Droids take on Episode 1! Fantastic example of it. The main person dies on dice rolls, but you know how that works? Because it it is a D&D session where the point of the time isn't to win, but to -make and be part of the story-.
You mean like how dying at any moment in a world filled with militant turned-to-demons cannibals or demons everywhere or a tower that only appears in an hour that doesn't exist to other people filled with horrible abominations?
Yeah randomly dying seems thematically consistant with the idea.
RPGs are so much more than just interactive fiction, this is true! What they are not is MOTHER FUCKING KENO WHERE THE FUCKING HOUSE WINS. Yes there is random elements in RPGs, no they should not be ultra high risk factor, yes they should be fair gambles. When you play it and yay you won this battle, when the enemy does it and oh you lost 4 hours worth of gameplay it is a DICK MOVE.
Again, you only lose that much if you screw up, in modern Megaten games.
Don't hit on a 20 in Blackjack. This is strategy. They are not ultra-high risk factor. SMT3 is bad about having a moderately high risk factor. This may appeal to some. But in general even it tends to only do so in the big optional dungeon. Optional risk for optional gain. You may lose an hour. An hour is to some an acceptable risk. If it's not to you, probably you shouldn't be playing it.
You know what is one of those niggling annoying points of bad design? How totally uneven Poison is in Pokemon. You use it on the computer, hey you won a match. The computer uses it? Yeah you have it permanently. Yay! Totally fair. But you know what? It is pretty tolerable because it DOESN'T FUCKING GAME YOU OVER (or render that Pokemon entirely unusable forever).
What the hell are you talking about, standard Poison in Pokemon sucks and in Generation 4 it wears off after about two dozen steps after a battle and you can use items and the enemy takes drat 6.25% damage from it and only Toxic is any good in a battle.
And even then if it game overed you you throw a drat item. All I can say is that permadeath and hax just hit very bad nerves with you personally if throwing a cheap-ass item once in a while, with large amounts of time to do so, to prevent them would be too much hax or permadeath for you.
I am going to get up here and draw a line in the sand and say exactly where the gambling starts to be acceptable. Roguelikes. ADOM is a well designed game that is brutal and harsh and will kill you into next Sunday. You know why the line is drawn there? ADOM has absolutely no plot whatsoever. It has a dungeon full of a million ways to kill you . That is the game. It is pure 100% unrefined gambling. It is chock full of high risk and reward and ultimately, the house always wins. You know why that is good? Because it is Keno.
Cross-genre=bad, to you.
Got it.
When we get an actual honest to god Survival Horror RPG out of the SMT setting, then it can be ball bruisingly brutal as it wants. They aren't there yet. So it will keep being bad design. So hey, there is your psychological effects for you, there is no logical reason for the gameplay to be that dicktastic. There needs to be Gameplay:Plot interaction there (WHICH HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT. IS SOMETHING THAT I HAVE BEEN POINTING OUT AND QUANTIFYING AS GOOD FUCKING DESIGN FOR YEARS NOW. LOOK LOOK, DO YOU SEE THIS LOGICAL FUCKING ARGUMENT MAKING GODDAMNED SENSE HERE? IT ISN'T BECAUSE I DON'T LIKE THE GAMES, IT IS BECAUSE THERE IS THINGS YOU CAN QUANTIFY AND POINT OUT AS TO WHAT MAKES IT GOOD AND BAD DESIGN).
Edit: Wait, this is more different of a point than I thought skimming it.
I blame all caps.
Anyways, that's an issue with writing. DDS1's writing is not that great. But still, I don't really see how it's setting is worse at survival horror than RE. It's surely the intent to have that kind of setting. Ruined world with demons everywhere and no memory of why the hell you're there is less survival horror than SPOOKY MANSION AND ZOMBIES!!! nah.
Early PC games didn't do it well. Shock! Horror! We might have to acknowledge that early PC games were poorly designed! How will we ever be able to do that? I dunno, the same way we did with NES Platformers I guess. Nintendo hard is bad. Early plot based dungeon crawlers (Outside of Wizardry 4! Plot relevance!) have some serious design flaws in them. Kay? Kay.
No, you don't get "kay", you don't get to change a genre into a new one based on games later in it. You don't get to say that all platformers are 3D because 3D platformers are popular now, the old platformers are still fucking platformers. Ahem.
You can say they were bad platformers, that's fine, a taste thing but fine. They are platformers.
I'm pretty biased against the whole "death by hax = good because it's challenging!" argument because I first saw it via Diablo II, where people on the internet were actually arguing that stuff like Duriel, MSLEBs, stair traps, and the beta version of Baal with his 800+ damage unresistable Magic Missle that he could use immediately after teleport were actually good things and should not be toned down or removed. This of course resulted in either a really trivial setback if you're playing softcore and placed your last tp intelligently (pfft exp/cash loss in D2) or permadeath in hardcore.
Needless to say most of these people went to on skip 99% of the game and just farm relatively safe areas like the Bloody Foothills or Cow Area all day long like everyone else on b.net, which is why online D2 is typically completely idiotic and crap to play. Meanwhile those of us who actually tried playing the entire game had to put up with significant numbers of complete bullshit bosses and stair traps sprinked within an otherwise easy game even on Hell (pre-1.10 path).
Yeah, see, Megaten has been cutting
down on the practical impact of hax, not INCREASING IT MASSIVELY. There is no real psychological necessity to make you lose 20/30/40/whatever hours when hax eats you, as it can in a hardcore run of D2. Especially when the game is not hard otherwise, killing the only point it would otherwise have(Freaks who like that kind of ridiculous difficulty, or, see ADOM.). This is just stupid, it's not self-consistantly evil in it's ridiculous hax and there's far too much of a gap between hardcore and normal and etc., it's just badly designed.
And if it hits a psychological niche, it's definitely by accident due to bugs. Regardless, not as good as it could have been if they'd DONE IT RIGHT AND TRIED TO MAKE IT LIKE THAT.
Of course, now with patches, since they stumbled upon something that the fans of it still like, they just went and tried to make the whole game like that. You can't blame them, they have no fucking idea what it is the fans want, so they just make the whole thing like that. The fans of the idea don't play Hardcore. So Hardcore is basically broken and worthless. Yay!
