In the post from yesterday I went over a few of my complaints about the new Prince of Persia and the general trend towards less and less difficulty in games. One of the chief complaints with Prince of Persia 2008 is the conspicuous lack of dying by the prince. Rather than falling to your doom when you miss a jump or biting the dust if you lose in combat your partner Elika will save you from failure.
Quite a few players and critics are miffed by the removal of death from the game. Death has long been the de facto negative outcome in videogames. You miss a jump, you die. You lose all your health, you die. You touch a spike, you die. And so on and so forth death in most games is a constant. And usually death is a significant punishment. In most cases you return to the start of an level. In many cases you lose something of value due to death. And in the most extreme cases death ends your current game with a game over. Player death is nothing new to games.
But recently dying in games has become less, well, painful. Forget Prince of Persia which has decided to eschew with death almost entirely. Games like Bioshock where death means a quick teleport back to the vita chambers, Call of Duty where death returns you to a nearby checkpoint with your mission intact, and countless other titles where death is but a temporary nuisance. Dying in these games is still punishment in a sense, but not a particularly meaningful one.
Death has been neutered in large part because — again — it doesn’t pay to unnecessarily frustrate your audience with consequences that may prevent them from viewing the rest of the game. Additionally, the design of many games makes death almost unnecessary. Many games now have sequences and events where dying may be initially unavoidable. Players don’t want to replay section after section just to die and retry all the way from the beginning now. Old PC games used to have the quicksave/quickload mechanic where every few steps you’d save your game so in case you died immediately you could restart from a nearby position. Today’s death mechanics largely imitate this concept without the hassle on the player’s part.
So when people bemoan Prince of Persia’s attempt to remove death entirely as a mechanic, is it really a sign of removal of challenge or skill (I’d argue the linear, Dragon Lair-esque gameplay is more responsible) or rather a method of streamlining the almost antiquated way we use death now in many of these games? I believe its the later and complaints about Prince of Persia (2008) lack of dying are a little unfounded compared to other potential complaints with the game. Death can be a more meaningful mechanic, but its up to designers to figure out how to do it instead of making death a mere nuisance. If that’s all death is, then I welcome what the Prince is doing.
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