Okay here''s a stupid idea for any single-player game: If you had a nethack-like saving system (i.e. if you die you can''t get back to game with a savegame anymore) and a realistic damage-system, the game would be quite hard, right? But what about in movies, where every action hero has realistic amount of "health" (umm.. quite realistic), but they never die anyway? You should try to implement this to a game, too. Make the game so that the player will never die, unless he does something *really* stupid. There should be an AI monitoring what player is doing, and if the player does quite clever actions, he won''t ever get killed, no matter what. He will get injured of course but not killed. If he starts running quite blindly (like in james bond for example), the enemies can''t hit him. And if the enemies try to make a quick attack or the player is heavily injured, his friends will come to rescue. Every time the player gets in a really bad trouble, something happens that saves him. So you got the point? -Hans

Sounds like a good idea, but it might be more trouble than it''s worth implementing. From what I can tell, it would make the game exceptionally easy, so why not just have the player play on "Easy" where the AI is dumbed down to idiot status. And it would also quickly become apparent to the player that they would have little control over the outcome of the game, since as long as they weren''t intentionally trying to kill themselves, there would be a NPC there to save their butt.

Not a bad idea, though, I think it would take a lot of effort to get it to work right.

Ut

Like Nazrix said, you can''t die in Planescape : Torment. There is a reason behind this though : you play an immortal trying to find his memories back (and why/how he became immortal). However, this only applies to the main character (you), the other ones in the party can die.
Still, you can be knocked out (in fact, you die but you come back to life some minutes later). You will then awake away from the battle (because your friends carried you away) without loosing anything beside your HP. If there is nobody in your party yet, you''ll just be found by a dustman (they collect corpses, that''s how the world is) and awake in their place. One of the great things in PS:T is that it is sometimes necessary to die in order to solve a puzzle.

Now, this fits the story because you play an immortal. I''m not sure exactly how this would work if you''re supposed to be a plain mortal like James Bond.

The idea of being driven by an AI wouldn''t appeal me much as a player, as I''d feel like I''m basically doing nothing but watching. Not dying if not going into stupid action sounds cool though and would probably require some more thinking from the player. I''d really like to see it in action.

oops.. The anon was me.

Well, I wasn''t thinking that the player would be immortal in a way like in Highlander or Planetscape:Torment. I was thinking more like James Bond who has been in 18 (or more) movies and he never gets killed. But that Highlander-immortality doesn''t sound that bad either. You just had to watch that your head never gets cut off. Well, maybe this kind of true immortality would make the game too easy, because you could just go and kill everyone blindly and no one could hurt you (besides the head).

But it is true that the James Bond-immortality would probably make the game quite easy too. No matter if you play really well or really poorly, you''ll get equally wounded, because the AI always wants to hurt you. And after a while every good player would notice this, no matter how good the monitoring AI is. And then the good players could play very dumbly and still finish the game..

Well, of course you could have skill levels in this approach, too. If you play on easy skill, the NPC-buddies will always rescue you from trouble and the enemies will never hit you badly. And if you play on very hard skill, you are on your own and no one will come to save your ass unless you are really lucky. This way it would probably work.

So the skill level would only change how "lucky" the player is.


-Hans {home page} {e-mail}

Another example of an immortal character that doesn''t (really) die is Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain. This is one of my favorite games of all time. You are a vampire that can switch between the material and spiritual worlds. You DO have an energy force, but when that energy force runs out in the material world, you are cast back into the spirtitual world. If your energy force in the spiritual world runs out, you are thrown back to the start point of the game (but the game''s state is the same, it doesn''t _really_ start you over..just forces you to have to travel back to whatever interesting place you were before).

It struck a nice balance between having you play an immortal character that keeps progressing through the story and also giving you some incentive not to play stupidly.