As of writing, Sonic Mania has released and with it the joyous cries of multiple people, who are rightfully pleased with the fact that they got a proper sequel to the mechanics and gameplay established in… Sonic 3? Sonic and Knuckles? One of those. Frankly, I’m not too clear on what exactly happened between Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and the Adventure games, or how things like Sonic CD and Chaotix factor in. But that’s ok, I don’t intend to talk about Sonic history or lore right now.
The reason I bring it up at all is because, for the third time this year, the ensuing reviews of a game led me to question the way in which game reviews are done. Admittedly, this is a rather small one compared to the questionable “Game of the Year” hype from Breath of the Wild or the “Dark Souls of Platformers” meme from the Crash N. Sane Trilogy. And boy would I LOVE to talk about those . And yes, I very much want to sit one day and go all out about game “journalism.”
But for now, let’s talk about Sonic Mania and the life system. Why the life system? Because I continuously get the impression that there is oversimplification in discussing whether it’s bad or good design. Let me elaborate first.
If you were born in the 80s or 90s and grew up with classic platformers, the notion is immediately relatable: you start a game, and you have a life counter. Usually 3 or 4 lives (“is it a game over after dying at 1 or at 0?”), which when lost entirely lead to a continue screen. Some games offer continues, which pardon your failure by letting you go on from a reasonable checkpoint. But those can run out too, and if they do, that’s it. Game Over. Which in classic times meant that you had to start the game over from scratch.
Historically, we all understand by now the business logic of this. It meant that within the limited space of a cartridge developers could stuff a handful of seriously great content (ideally) that would be played over and over again due to the inevitable difficulty curve. More… let’s say, “adventurous”… game makers went full creative with this and would even make the third or so level absurdly challenging to REALLY make sure that kids would have to do and redo the same content for hours before being good enough to really complete the game. Or even further, to make sure that the kids would actually have to buy the game and not just play it entirely at the store or at a friend’s house or from a single Blockbuster rental. If you don’t know what I speak of, I suggest playing Virgin’s The Lion King game for the SNES.
But games are different now. We have memory cards, larger games, more involved storylines, more complex systems, etc. Which is where the argument begins and where I see a lot of people prompting the discussion: Should “lives” even exist anymore in this day and age? In the case of Sonic Mania, I’ve seen at least two reviews already that briefly mention the inconvenience of having to reload a zone after losing all your lives. So let me go into the design of this and how it can be terrible, but also how it can be good.
Bad Design: Tedium/Loss of Time
This is really the core of the problem that I see people having with the life system. Basically, the notion is that having to redo an area you have already completed is not really proper punishment as much as it is boring.
I know I have personally felt this pain, so let me just make it clear that I definitely agree that this can be horrifically bad design. However, it feeling terrible doesn’t feel to me like it’s a result just from having a life system, but simply the system not meshing well with other mechanics. Namely, the following:
Bosses at the end of stages vs. Bosses as their own stages
Basically, designers should make sure to critically think about the composition of the levels to ensure they actually make sense with a life system. If the game has a life system, then actual thought needs to be put into whether a boss should be at the end of a stage or on a separate stage of its own.
Classic examples of having a boss as a separate level are the Crash trilogy as well as the Donkey Kong Country games (both the rare trilogy and the Retro Studios return games). You complete a series of levels, which opens a path in the overworld to the boss of a region. You have the freedom to save the game before accessing the boss, meaning that you could take several lives and continues in trying to defeat a boss without having to touch any of the levels that precede that boss.
Admittedly, these games are known for having rather easy boss fights, but they can nonetheless remain as memorable experiences of player capability, they can help segment the world and maintain a sense of “danger” for the protagonists, and in existing they help craft narratives for the players who enjoy that.
Of course, because only the sith deal in absolutes, a game with bosses within the level also has merit. Sonic is the main example here, as the players learn to expect that after the last act in a zone, awesome music plays and Robotnik appears in his machine of the day. The natural advantage of this approach is that by including the boss in the level it allows for momentum to remain, and in some cases result in clever set pieces that play with the theme of the level. But then, if you have a life system in place, it is a design consideration whether it should be possible or not for a new player, at minimum number of health and/or lives, to beat the boss. It leads to a more delicate balancing act as the level AND the boss have to be designed jointly so that
- If the boss is too difficult, the player can redo the level more quickly and effectively on a second run, ensuring greater security when reaching the boss (what Sonic revolves around: the expectation to truly learn a level before being able to end it)
- The player feels it’s a better trade-off to keep on playing and trying again as opposed to just dropping the game, and
- Ideally, elements from the level bleed into the boss battle to provide advantages in the boss from learning the level. This, to me, is the Golden Ticket of how bosses should work. An example would be understanding the behavior of the pinball flippers in Sonic 2’s Casino Night Zone in order to perform more consistent damage to the boss of that zone.
Since I’m already talking about level design, let’s talk about that a bit more
Level design
For all of us that play games pretty much every day for multiple hours, it’s hard to really take the notion of “wasting time” seriously, but nevertheless it’s a feeling that constantly props up as a negative response to games. You know a game has mastered player engagement when hours can go by and player satisfaction continues. The pokemon games are particularly skillful at this, getting seemingly hundreds of people to run around in circles for hundreds of hours while still making them feel rewarded for their time.
What I’m getting to here is that losing lives and having to redo an entire section isn’t intrinsically a waste of time. The player will only feel like it’s a waste of time based on how fun what they’re doing is on repeat and on how fair the cause of their punishment is.
That’s where we get into an unintuitive thought. These days a lot of design focus goes into how fun something is on the first try since, ultimately, the life of the game revolves entirely around first-time players getting hooked and developing that sort of experience they’ll tell other people about. Having life systems that punish the players by forcing a repeat of the level means having to give thought to repetition being fun, in and of itself, which is a strange thought to an industry used to using collectibles and achievements as reasons for players to even touch a level more than once.
Through repetition is how a lot of fun concepts for levels begin to lose their charm. Things like:
- Auto-scrolling sections that keep the player from moving too quickly. These can be really fun and challenging to play, and sometimes they work pretty well, particularly if the scrolling speed is greater than the regular speed of the player character (See: chase sequences, minecart levels). However, if the scrolling is slow and forgiving to first-time players, doing them on repeat is painful as learning the stage won’t improve the speed of completing it
- Back and forth. Overall, a lot of players seem to respond positively to complex rooms with backtracking and puzzle-solving. That said, if playing on repeat it’s easy to grow exhausted of the same back-and-forth sequence having to be done to advance. This is particularly punishing if part of the backtracking involves carrying an object or escorting slow NPCs.
- Vertical levels. Verticality can add phenomenal variety to a platforming game. However, if the margin of error is high and there are possibilities of the player falling and as a result having to redo previous sequences, it can be exhausting for a player. That said, of all mechanics mentioned this one is the least intrusive, as learning the stage over repeats will likely lead to less falls and greater sense of accomplishment for the player. It’s also always good to wonder if there’s value in mechanics that can quickly return players who fall to heights previously reached.
- Water physics. It’s kind of a running line in games that “everyone hates water levels”… I kind of wonder myself what kind of data exists on this, but at least from personal perspective the water levels I hate most I do because of water slowing down fall speed, movement speed, and often times slowing down gameplay as a result. The DKC has probably my favorite water stages as a result: while in the water, the kongs are able to move differently but still at similar speed as on ground, Not to mention the Rare games also adding the bonus of Enguarde the Swordfish.
- Cutscenes. This is a huge pet peeve of a lot of people I’m sure: if you have a life system that boots back to a save point or to the beginning of an area, then either trim the cutscenes on repeat or let players skip it. Heck, any game that can trigger a “death” needs to consider this.
To be clear, these aren’t inherently bad mechanics. For each I can think of cases where they were done to great effect for both gameplay and emotions. What I want to get at is that with life systems that lead to repetition of an area as punishment, it bears thinking of ways to keep the players from feeling too punished by ensuring they have control over the pace of the levels they are to master. Because really, life systems should be ultimately about that: encouraging mastery and learning.
Lastly, I also lightly want to bring up the point that it’s not just about levels in isolation but also mechanics of the game as a whole that should work with a life system. For example, consider New Super Mario Bros. 2 for the 3DS, a mario game with game design revolving almost entirely on the collection of massive amounts of coins. To this day I fail to understand why they figured that even with this in mind they’d still have lives given to the player when collecting 100 coins, because the result is, obviously, lives ultimately becoming completely useless as a result of how many are handed to the player. Then again, Mario games are not exactly the best examples of games that give value to individual lives since all of them have included exploits or ways to farm several lives. It’s a shame too, considering how iconically powerful the Mario 1-Up sound is. On the good side, it seems that with Super Mario Odyssey they finally figured to just drop the system altogether.
Good Design: Learning at its finest
Now that I’ve talked at length about what people like to critique in life systems and how they can wind up being terrible design choices, I want to talk about why I defend life systems. Because as much as people like to think, it’s not a deluded sense of nostalgia, or a sense of superiority and wanting other people to suffer like I did. Because even with the frustrating bits, it was never suffering and was always fun. If it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t be still spending hours thinking and talking about these games.
People like to quote Shovel Knight as an example of why lives are unnecessary without realizing that that decision was tied to the design goals of the game. For those unaware, when you die in Shovel Knight you don’t lose a life. Instead, you go back to the last checkpoint and a lot of the treasure you collected will instead float around the location of your death. You could theoretically die, and collect the loot again upon returning to where you died and act as if nothing happened. Alternatively, you could be like everyone else and die again while trying to collect the money bags you lost on the last life, thereby losing more money. It’s actually a pretty elegant system that also plays along with checkpoints the player can either break for more money, or leave alone to return to. There are lots of things that are really smart about Shovel Knight design.
But to get back to my point, despite having no life counter or game overs the checkpoint system winds up being ultimately the same as a life system minus the ultimate punishment of redoing a level, or the game, from scratch. In the end, it is still acknowledging that the player made an error, and have to go back and attain mastery before proceeding. And in the context of Shovel Knight, this works, because Shovel Knight’s later stages get more mechanically creative and start including more objects that can kill immediately or unexpectedly. It’s a life system that works in conjunction with the design, in the same way Super Meat Boy acknowledges its ridiculous difficulty by having small contained stages, no lives and no lag in between lives. In the case of Shovel Knight it kept unfair elements from things like the Megaman games, such as insta-kill spikes, damage pushing the player back and thus potentially off of platforms and plenty of pits; but in order to allow these mechanics to remain fair, they removed the punishment of a game over and gave control to the players on where they would respawn.
Personally though, I don’t believe this means that the same logic should apply to every other game. Namely, because I don’t believe that success necessarily entails mastery. Classic platformer levels are pretty much built on this foundation: you introduce a mechanic, follow with variations to that mechanic, and then raise that by featuring that mechanic in combination with others, or in a grander scale, etc. Success for the entire stage is pretty much dependent on how well you adjust to that mechanic, and as such being forced to play the level in its entirety ensures that you truly mastered that mechanic, as opposed to possibly having gotten through out of sheer luck or fortune.
Yes, the notion that “if I beat a level once, I shouldn’t have to play it again” makes sense, but on that same note exists the fact that if you did it once, it is reasonable for the game to expect you to be able to do it again. Because it will make you better at the game as a result, and that’s the sort of cycles gaming grew up on.
To get personal for a bit, I still remember only being able to play Sonic 2 on the weekends. I’d go to my dad’s place, fire up the Genesis, and have x amount of hours between arriving and dinner being ready to beat the game. The first several weeks I could get as far as the fourth zone, Casino Night, before my lives got exhausted in that stupid boss battle with the pinball flippers. Cue frustration, game over, and back to scratch. Weeks later though, I got better. I figured out from doing the levels over and over little shortcuts to beating the bosses faster, learned better ways to deal with obstacles, and overall got a better grip on how the character moved. Which is how I got through to Hill Top and further, only to get stuck in Metropolis Zone with its evil enemy placements. Again though, more and more tries later, I made it onward to the final levels, got stuck at metal sonic for a while, and then finally beat the game. And when it did, it mattered, because I had gotten to the point where I could take anything the game could throw at me by then and easily do the game in a sitting from then onwards.
This is the experience I want to defend. Without life systems, it becomes too easy to throw yourself over and over at an obstacle until you get a lucky break and pass on through the next checkpoint to do the same. And I can see why people like this: it makes games instantly more accessible by lowering the entry bar from several hours of learning the entire game to several minutes of trying the same sequences over and over. It focuses the learning from figuring out an entire game to simply breaking down a single sequence.
To a degree, this is good for gaming, as it makes more people able to play games. Not everyone is a kid during summer with loads of free time. Not all of us can play the same game over and over until we master it. Not only are there more busy adults playing games now, but we also have a stupidly higher amount of games to play right now. To a lot of people, there’s no reason to deal with having to repeat something they already played when they could just play something new. Or better yet, play an online multiplayer game where the bursts of learning are short and the challenge is constantly adjusting as other players grow with you.
But I feel there’s value in defending that experience. There’s value in preserving that lesson about perseverance all of us felt with those games as kids. There’s value in that feeling of power and ability you feel when you really master a game and finally complete the very final segment. It’s like the joy of learning an entire song on an instrument, as opposed to just practicing the chorus in isolation over and over. In short, I encourage designers to not just see “life system” as a yes or no checkbox to hit if making a retro game, but as something intricate to the feeling and design of the game being made, or even to the personal empowerment of the player.