I agree, letting the player easily reset to where things became unwinnable is a good idea. Back in the day, there was the expectation that people would manage saves for themselves, but I think now (when players are less willing to devote so much time to playing and replaying) taking away that particular pain point is generally not too hard, and has a big impact on playability.
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Shout-out here to A Train to Piccadilly which does exactly this in its “deadly” sequences (and is otherwise merciful with respect to unwinnable states).
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Spot on.
I came from a programming background (20 years back, mind you) and found researching and exploring the kinds of IF possible and the authoring tools available (and their strengths and weaknesses) to be a tremendous exercise in patience.
I think those who say otherwise had a helping hand from within the sacred circle… or are simply gluttons for punishment. 
And, yes, I’m fully aware that IF exists today on the awesome backs of passionate volunteers.
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The XYZZY Awards are dead.
Day of the Tentacle? It’s literally impossible (as far as I ever discovered) to encounter a game-over or unwinnable situation. It just requires good design. (Edit: You did say “almost never”)
It is a good idea, but there are plenty of games around that still require you to manage saves (although they are often helped/hindered by autosaves). Cyberpunk, No Man’s Sky or any game from Bethesda comes to mind. Generally it is found in but not limited to deep RPGs.
I may be a glutton for punishment then. My first IF experience was The Temple of Raaka-Tu. If memory serves, it was a particularly brutal game with no save feature which I completed in a couple sessions (after many, many death/restarts). I had no programming experience when I played it, and had just a few months of tinkering with basic on a Commodore Vic-20 when I first encountered Zork on my cousin’s Mac. I only got one or two sessions with it there and didn’t beat it, but I remember I did get as far as bringing the Sarcophagus to the house. I didn’t solve it until I got it for my C-64.
IF, just like any other kind of game, appeals to certain people. Reading and typing are slower-paced and require more concentration than wiggling a joystick while watching stuff happen. As difficult and brutal as Elden Ring is (I’m thinking battling Malenia here), people will try repeatedly dozens or hundreds of times. Yes, manual saves, no-win situations and having to retrace your steps are annoying and will turn off some people, but I can’t believe it is as big a factor as people want to think.
7 posts were split to a new topic: RPG Mechanics and Cruelty
I think there are plenty of graphical adventures which can’t be made unwinnable (LucasArts marketed this feature hard when it was a novelty, but it went on to be seen as standard). But the post you’re responding to was, I think, talking about something slightly more subtle: a situation where something is at stake (e.g. you might die and lose some progress or create extra problems for yourself) but not so extreme as the threat of losing all progress (which is essentially what happens when you enter an unwinnable situation, because your game state is no longer a useful one).
That’s why I mentioned A Train To Piccadilly, because it has life-threatening sections where you can die, but when you do, the game only returns you to the beginning of that section. It feels slightly less slap-on-the-wrist than a death you’re guaranteed to be able to UNDO out of, but you know that the game as a whole can’t be brought to an unwinnable state.
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When it comes to action adventure and graphical RPGs, I’m used to the player having to go out of their way to make the game unwinnable(what TVTropes calls Unwinnable by Insanity whereas a lot of Infocom games can be made unwinnable by mistake), with dying or a comparable fail state resulting in something like being returned to the entrance of the dungeon, returned to the last inn/healing location visited, or being forced to reload your last save, the first two typically limiting progress loss to the time it takes to get from the respawn point back to where you died, the third ranging from basically no progress lost to hours lost depending on the details of the save function(not bad in games that auto save right before major battles, absolutely brutal in games with manual saves if you aren’t a compulsive saver or only let you save at certain times or which suddenly throw you into major battles without a chance to save if you don’t know you’re about to cross a proverbial trip wire… or are presented with a gauntlet you can’t save during… spending over an hour trying to clear all 100 floors of a Legendary Item World in Disgaea Afternoon of Darkness or Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days only to get to a floor in the mid-80s or 90s, be on the verge of losing, and realizing you forgot to put a Mr. Gency’s Exit in your inventory before entering the Item World and having no means of surviving to the next multiple of 10 floor was infuriating… Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention changing Game Overs from forced reloads to dumping you at the Infirmary so you only lose the levels for the Item you went into instead of also losing all of the money, loot and experienced gained along the way was a godsend.)
Granted, I haven’t played a modern game since going blind in 2012, and pre-blindness, I was mostly a handheld gamer.
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Not just Infocom - a lot of hastily designed text adventures tend to be cruel. I remember one (Demon’s Forge?) which had rough CGA illustrations and a very rudimentary two-word parser. There was a stone in the first location that you needed to kill an enemy (scorpion?) several screens later. This was not described in the text, and the player was supposed to know of its existence based on the picture - it could have been debris, a tiny shrub, a mushroom, random art squiggles…at best you might eventually guess it as a rock since it was jagged. If you knew it was a rock you still couldn’t pick it up because the correct noun was STONE.
Also I think Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide has several moon-logic/cruel actions that if not performed will lose you the game. I believe the endgame requires items from the sink in the first location of the game which is destroyed in a timed sequence and are easily missed. And my god THROW CHEESE SANDWICH TO DOG to prevent a cosmic event hours later via the butterfly effect… 
Adams deliberately made the game cruel. You were supposed to start over if you’d missed something important. Meretzky recounts that, when he went chasing after Adams to say that some testers complained that the game was too cruel, Adams thought for a moment, then replied “F*** 'em.”
It’s worth remembering that mercy is a design constraint. There are (pretty much by definition) more puzzles that you can make in a cruel game than you can make in a merciful one. You could argue that this is a form of “fake difficulty”, in that the designer is artificially extending the game by making you backtrack and retry - but some puzzles are much harder to design in a way where they can’t be made unwinnable. Take Trinity, as a recent example of a game seeing some attention on this forum thanks to @Draconis ’ Let’s Play: a significant component of the overarching puzzle is (only mild spoilers) figuring out the correct order to enter the areas behind the doors. If you removed the constraint of only being able to enter each door once, the puzzle would be trivialised - but keeping that constraint while preventing the player from locking themselves out of victory would require changing the mechanics in some fundamental way that I’m not sure I could figure out how to execute without it feeling like an “obvious rule patch”.
While this is true, cruelty is also a design constraint in its own way! It means you need to make saving and restoring easy, which can trivialize puzzles like “you saw a clue an hour ago suggesting which of these six boxes to open”. The Partington games on the Phoenix mainframe solve this issue by setting a variable that makes the puzzle unwinnable when you save, but I doubt many modern players are going to have the patience to deal with that!
A merciful game can limit saving and restoring without being as frustrating, because you don’t need to save and restore except to leave and come back later.
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20 posts were merged into an existing topic: What do the XYZZY’s mean to you?