> -Only having one or a few lives for the entire game
> -No saves/continues (usually combined with the above)
Sometimes these mechanics define a genre, such as roguelikes. Permadeath and single saves makes games like Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup nail-biting experiences that keep you striving to improve, even though these turn-based games give you all the time in the world to plan your next move.
Granted, the audience for this kind of game is self-limiting, and the games themselves are designed around replayability. But you see new games such as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use similar negative-reinforcement techniques to create truly engaging experiences that some people find fun and addicting.
I can't tell you how many times I've lost a Nethack character in the Astral Planes, losing hundreds of thousands of turns and sometimes weeks of effort just before the end. But each time I died, I learned how to counter yet another combination of states that resulted in my death, and Nethack finally became boring when I could ascend in a few hours. This point took me 16 years to reach. Very, very few modern games can reach that level of engagement.
> But you see new games such as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use similar negative-reinforcement techniques to create truly engaging experiences that some people find fun and addicting.
In fact, Dark Souls teaches you patience. You don't die a lot if you are sufficiently careful. There are a few unexpected traps but those are rare. Most of the time you will have to progress carefully, gauging the terrain, the aggro ranges of the monsters, carefully dodging and blocking their attacks until you understand their moveset enough to land counterattacks.
Dark Souls is a game of learning, but boy it is rewarding. You will find yourself storm easily through areas of the game that gave you a hard time once you have learned to take it slowly. But you could also die easily on very weak monster (like the torch Zombies when you return to the asylum) if you just think you can run and mash buttons without caution.
I have found it to be one of the most enjoyable gaming experience of these last years, and have poured much more hours into it that I would have liked to.
> -No saves/continues (usually combined with the above)
Sometimes these mechanics define a genre, such as roguelikes. Permadeath and single saves makes games like Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup nail-biting experiences that keep you striving to improve, even though these turn-based games give you all the time in the world to plan your next move.
Granted, the audience for this kind of game is self-limiting, and the games themselves are designed around replayability. But you see new games such as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use similar negative-reinforcement techniques to create truly engaging experiences that some people find fun and addicting.
I can't tell you how many times I've lost a Nethack character in the Astral Planes, losing hundreds of thousands of turns and sometimes weeks of effort just before the end. But each time I died, I learned how to counter yet another combination of states that resulted in my death, and Nethack finally became boring when I could ascend in a few hours. This point took me 16 years to reach. Very, very few modern games can reach that level of engagement.