Collector wrote:I don't think we are as far off from each other as you indicate. I did say that an intentional dead end can be badly designed. To work, it has to be logical and you should never have to restore to a much earlier point to correct it. It should also be obvious that it has happened before you have spent much more time playing. With these considerations, it should not be much different than a death scene.
Fair enough. Though I think that when that happens, the player shouldn't be allowed to save, and it should either then have a "death" scene shortly, or it should be painfully obvious there's no point on continued play. If it works like that, deaths and dead ends, the two issues that really set Sierra games apart from LucasArts games, become one.
I've been going back forth about whether death in adventure games is a good thing or not. I think Sierra generally handled it very poorly, but at the same time, LucasArts games did lack something; even if there seems to be imminent danger, you can relax, because you can't actually die. My opinion these days is that death can be okay, as long as it follows these guidelines:
1. There must be either a "retry" button or an autosave system, such that dying doesn't set you back a lot and such that it's not the player's responsibility to constantly save the game.
2. The time between death and getting back to where you were should be a matter of seconds. That means no long, unskippable scenes upon dying or between the autosave and where you were.
3. Every death should be expected; the player should never be surprised that an action they took was fatal. That just means that you need to use the graphics, music, and text to make a threat of danger clear, rather than just "it's dangerous because if you do it, you die".
4. Death shouldn't reveal information. Hints about how to avoid the death in the future are fine, but only if it's something the player
should have known beforehand.
5. The death should somehow make sense within the greater context of the game. There has to be an actual reason to allow a fatal action rather than just giving a message that that action would be unsafe. Good reasons could include a challenge for the player to overcome or making the game more believable.
Sierra games didn't tend to follow these guidelines, to put it mildly.
) because that never bothered me, as the death messages were at least amusing (and different, depending on how you perished).