Penalty hit…now you’re screwed

[Dracos]

It's happened to us all at one point.  You've navigated through the level with consummate skill, blasting each enemy and acquiring a mass of power ups, and you come across the boss: a massive multilayered creature of doom that can practically fill the screen with ammo.  It's no problem, you know like all bosses that attention to the patterns, skill, and luck will carry you through!  But what's this?  A single, unlucky shot gets through and your ship, likely unshielded, can't get out of the way in time.  No matter, you've got eight more lives, you can take him.  Well, at least, you could, now that you know how to dodge that.  Excepting one thing, as now your power ups are all gone, and you can't do any diagonal shots, limiting you to being even more heavily on the defensive as his spawned drones get more and more difficult to take out until you die again.  And again.  And again.  Thus, you no longer are in a good position to attack him for the remainder of the fight, with only luck and skill carrying the possibility of earning a costly victory.

   It's not an uncommon story.  Gradius and all of its many clones tend to use such a system.  Contra, its sequels and derivatives did as well.  As did Sunset Riders, a game that I was recently playing.  Upon a player's death, bosses would transform from dangerous to overwhelming as your methods of attack and defense were crippled, and sometimes, as is the case in some Gradiuses, even your mobility would suffer.  It's something I'd like to term 'hit and then you're screwed' systems.  Some games offer a few hit points as a buffer, but often the setup is such that if you die, your ability to defend and survive is tremendously hampered; often, this is fatal.

This sort of system, even if well balanced, has a genuine issue.  The more skilled you are, the easier any boss balanced for basic firepower and stats will be.  Similarly, the more time you need to learn the bosses pattern, the more likely your skillful progress through the rest of the level will be nullified with a single mistimed dodge.  If a boss is intended to be difficult with said power ups, the challenge skyrockets without them.  This structure is inherently unbalanced and likely contributes to the decline of the 2d side-scrolling shooter, as it appears in it commonly.  It's even somewhat acknowledged in the most recent Gradius game, where they give you the chance to quickly retrieve certain lost power-ups; recognizing that going from a full set to zero is a massive and demoralizing setback, especially in a boss fight.

   There are, however, alternatives to balance this system out.  Mario offers what I think is probably the best of them: a 'chip off' system where every hit strips the highest level of power up, and then the next highest, and so on.  Apply this to a game like Gradius and you'd find that, despite the incentive not to get hit, bosses would still be manageable in the event of a lost life; a gradual progression in difficulty, with the player likely to run out of lives before power-ups.  This is generally a more stable, balanced variant of the system.  Another good one, albeit somewhat demoralizing in its own way, is scrolling back; meaning that when you die, you have to work back through a part or all of the level again, thus granting the player the chance to reacquire power-ups and such before the boss.  This can be a problem with harder attack patterns, as it means the player would have to deal with several long periods of delay between viewing and considering the pattern.  Still, it's far better than watching your hard won store of lives get swallowed by a single boss because you lost the firepower needed to beat it through a single mistake.  In either case, the frustration level is minimized while still providing the same major challenge to overcome.

   A different, but related variant of this problem exists outside shooters, particularly in RPGs and recent action games: the save point/cutscene/boss scenario.  You hit a save point prior to a boss, so you only have to deal with the boss and are at your peak.  Unfortunately, this is a big important story boss, and so there's a five to thirty minute cutscene before he shows up.  It's a typical mechanic, but it can make balancing a problem.  After all, if you lose, you'll have to see the whole thing again, which is frustrating/boring.  The common trend is to ignore this or make the boss easy.  In fact, the series that most prominently uses this, Final Fantasy, is famous for its easy bosses.  Though the specifics obviously differ, this is another variant on the penalty hit: you die, and rather than getting right back in, you've got this big delay before the battle starts again.  The workarounds for this are slightly different – such as Xenosaga's scene skip feature – but the premise is the same.  The delay is removed and the penalty for loss is reduced to simply replaying that section.  Frustration is thus kept at a minimum, which means the player is less likely to give up at a particular challenge, and more likely to keep fighting despite an unlucky setback.

[twentytwo]

Personally, I find the Movie Skip to be a pretty good one, but there are others:

For instance, there's Einhander (I love that game), where playing the game and stealing various weapons allows you the opportunity to select one as a default at the beginning of a new game: in other words, when you die, you don't start off empty-handed. Of course, in that game, even bosses dropped power-ups (and often times a good one to fight it with...)

Of course, I still prefer the Mystic Quest / Wild Arms format of battling, where losing doesn't mean game-over, as you can just Try Again. However, I plan to go one step further in my own games and offer a sort of 'rewind' feature that lets you reset your progress back to any one of several checkpoints, including the current fight (my reasoning for this is that even the Try Again format doesn't support backing out of a battle you aren't prepared to win...).

All in all, what players seem to want is to continue playing, or more importantly to continue their progression. Anything that can limit repetition would be seen as a good thing.

-22

[Dracos]

Pretty much. =)

Dracos