That bad.

Dishonored’s ultimate disappointment would not have been such a sucker punch if the game hadn’t opened with such promise. Here’s the thing: One hour in, I expected to give Dishonored a 10. You start out in a Skyrim-style cart-ride. You’re on a boat, and you can peer into the inky haze of the distant city. That city, Dunwall, looks fabulous, and not just in its graphical fidelity. Wealthy estates soar upwards and cast their surroundings into gloom. Poorer locales recede into the shadows and seem to roil with sweat and sorrow. The whole of Dunwall seems to cry out “I am a breathing, embattled world; explore me and be rewarded.”

This exploration is where the game began to lose me. In truth, however, the first few missions simply set a pace that the rest of the game failed to match. If you’ve ever played Half-Life 2, you’ll find some familiarity in the “living world” of these early stages. Dunwall thrums with possibility, and the intrepid adventurer will always find some new trinket or bit of story. Arkane Studios, developer of Dishonored, loaded these first levels with a staggering bounty of sidequests, treasures, dialog and lore. It all seems too good to be true.

And it is. At last, the sad truth: Dishonored is terribly front-loaded. For all the intrigue in Dunwall, the biggest conspiracy might be the brain-drain ray pointed at your home base. Early on, characters gab and bicker with a robust array of dialog. As the game progresses, they’re gradually reduced to robots, repeatedly uttering the same one or two lines needed to advance the plot. Characters are not alone in this dumbing-down. At the start, in-game books hint at certain dark secrets — grim deities in conflict with the church, the city’s immoral power supply on the verge of failure — that never come to fruition. For all its early promises, Dunwall never quite makes good.

Of course, a game is more than its setting. Dishonored’s gameplay is a delight, and tarnishes only slightly by game’s end. You enter the world as an assassin very similar to the protagonist of the Thief series, able to move silently, slay enemies swiftly from behind, and fall back on an Assassin’s Creed inspired block-and-counter melee when engaged head-on. As you progress, you’ll pick up game-changing spells that set Dishonored apart from its stealth-game brothers. You might reach the second mission without falling for the game’s shadowy aesthetic or assassinations, but if you don’t love Blink, you simply aren’t human.

Blink is a medium-range teleport, and the feeling of learning Blink is equal to the green shell in Super Mario 64 or your first flying mount in World of Warcraft. It embodies the caterpillar-into-butterfly feeling of giving up the earth and suddenly becoming free. You’ll ask yourself, “How did I ever live without this?” In 2010, Avatar audiences saw the real world as suddenly drab and gray in contrast to Pandora. After Dishonored, moving in the real world suddenly seems so slow. And yet, simply by being so awesome, Blink creates a problem all its own. Blink makes the game easy.

Dishonored is a game about player empowerment. Everything, from your powers to your silence to your effect on NPCs, is designed to make you feel like a vengeful god unleashing hellfire on an unprepared world. Throughout, Dishonored shows how frightened it is of breaking the player empowerment cycle by being too timid to challenge the player. Every task feels constructed through the lens of “what if the player doesn’t have X spell,” and is put in easy reach of a player with only the default spell: Blink.

Dishonored stresses, through its tutorials and menus, that you can “play your way,” by selecting spells that suit your style. I can’t disagree: the hero you play may be very different from mine. This is true, but it simply doesn’t matter. Every part of the game, every objective, every treasure, and every side-quest can be achieved with only Blink. By a few hours in, I would not have been the charming protagonist the other characters love and admire. I would have been a tired and muttering Sisyphus, doomed to perform the same task – Blink behind guard, backstab, Blink to safety – again and again and again.

I came to Dishonored with enormous hope. I have loved everything Dishonored draws from: gameplay from Thief and Deus Ex and story from The Count of Monte Cristo and V for Vendetta. At first, my hopes seemed well founded, but, by about hour five, I felt like Dishonored and I were both just waiting for the end. Me due to boredom, and Dishonored because it had nothing left to give.

7 / 10

You’re dead, and the way you feel about it has everything to do with the game that killed you. If it was NetHack, you’re scheming about how to get past that part next time. If it was Team Fortress 2, you’re hungering for revenge. If it was Diablo III, you’re probably already typing your complaint on the Blizzard forums.

What separates the bad deaths from the good? Some deaths remind us that we’re sitting, staring at a screen, and playing a game that doesn’t seem to like us very much. Some, though, make us feel like storybook heroes. Let’s looks at four ways games can make death feel great.

1. Organic Damage

Organic damage is meant in the most literal way possible. Damage. To your organs.

For the readers out there who aren’t Batman (I know we have one or two), real fights don’t mete out pain in discrete arithmetic hit point packages. Humans avoid damage so desperately because pain carries consequences. A blow to the head can cause blurry vision for the rest of the fight; a fall might mean shattered bones.

Doing it Right: Faster Than Light

Since we’re wired to expect consequences, organic damage makes game death frighteningly real. No game drives this home better than Faster than Light. FTL is more-or-less The Oregon Trail in space. Your ship lives and dies on its vital systems. If your weapons die, you’ll be harmless until they’re repaired by your crew. If your Oxygen is knocked out, your crew will be distracted from their jobs by their inevitable asphyxiation.

Dying in FTL is so good because you can feel it coming. The game never says “oops, your life dipped below 1, guess you’re dead.” Instead, you’re treated to the panicked horror-show of everything you’ve built blowing up piece by piece. Whether you scrape through on a thread or go out in a blaze of glory, you feel like something huge just happened, and you want more.

Doing it Badly: Spiral Knights

Even disregarding its spiteful pricing system Spiral Knights is an exemplary failure in terms of death in games. Put simply, Spiral Knights gives a hurt player no feedback that they’re at death’s door. Countless times, I and co-op friends let out an exasperated “what?!” after dying. Without some feedback – like that beeping in Zelda or the screen-reddening in Call of Duty – we were caught totally by surprise.

Organic Damage is so powerful because it goes one step beyond that normal feedback. Beyond just seeing or hearing your impending doom, you feel it through your rapidly closing options.

2. Panic Buttons

Everyone wants a second chance. Allowing a player to say “no, I don’t die now” just once can make even the most flailing newbie feel like they have control over their demise.

Doing it Right: League of Legends

No game puts panic buttons front-and-center like League of Legends. In a game where every kill can be a game-changing swing, a spell that puts off death is at a premium, no matter how many times it gets nerfed. LoL’s teleporting panic button, flash, is so central to gameplay that teammates routinely call out when it’s been used, announcing that an enemy is vulnerable as long as their flash is on cooldown.

Doing it Badly: Munchkin

Munchkin, a spoof of traditional tabletop RPGs, makes players race to reach level 10. As a player, you get a sick twisted subversion of a panic button. You get cards that prevent players from gaining levels.

Instead of saying “no, I don’t die now,” these cards effectively say “no, you don’t win now.” Getting smacked with these cards feels horrible. You’re denied the thing you’ve been chasing all game long. Munchkin does particularly badly because these “no, you don’t win” cards make up such a huge proportion of the cards in the game. Winning Munchkin isn’t about engineering a perfect victory, it’s about waiting (and waiting, and waiting) until your opponents no longer have the cards to stop you.

Panic buttons succeed when they give a losing player a way back into the game. “catch-up” mechanics are very emotionally positive, especially for newer players. See more on catch-up mechanics here.

3. Player Responsibility

The worst feeling in gaming (other than BSOD/RROD/YLOD) is that you’ve died and there was nothing you could do. A fast, random death is awful. A fast, random death that you could have escaped if you’d only leveled up your warp drive? That’s compelling, and demands you go in for round number two.

Doing it Right: Magic: The Gathering

Trading Card Games in general have a leg-up on player responsibility, since players build a fully-customizable deck before play even begins. With its 19 years of competitive play, however, Magic stands alone as a game where you can outplay your opponents before the game even begins.

Playing the metagame – that is, building a deck to beat decks you expect your opponent to bring – is a primary skill in competitive Magic. In the 2005 Magic World Championship, the Japanese player Kasuhiro Mori re-defined metagame play. He anticipated that one particular deck, which we’ll call “Rock,” would be massively popular, so he build his own “Paper” deck to counter it. His planning went further: he expected that decks similar to “Paper” would dominate the first half of the tournament, so Mori added cards to give him an edge over other “Paper” decks.

“Via this transformational sideboard in particular, Katsu knocked the age-old metagaming narrative on its ear.

“On Day One we will cover the ‘rock’… but on Day Two, we shall become ‘scissors.’”

-Mike Flores, A History Lesson: The Best Selesnya

Doing it Badly: Diablo III

Player responsibility only counts if the game encourages the player to want to be responsible. By asking players to work with six skill slots, Diablo 3 makes players choose between defense and offense. In a game all about loot-per-minute, offense tends to win. When death happens, it’s ludicrously quick and almost always inspires a “there was nothing I could have done” response.

Responsibility is all about giving the player a feeling of control. That feeling can come from tight controls (Super Meat Boy, Dark Souls), strategic planning (Starcraft, The Oregon Trail), and elements that can be predicted with experience (World of Warcraft raid bosses).

4. Story-Worthiness

Some games just kill you deader than others. Sure, not every game can kill you with a sudden vampiric uprising or a self-summoned nightmare god, but the ones that do, you remember.

Doing it Right: Dwarf Fortress

There’s a word in the Dwarf Fortress community that has weight here: “spiral.” When one Dwarf (who we’ll call Urist) gets so angry that he kills another Dwarf’s (we’ll call him McHammer) family, you’ve entered a spiral. From there, McHammer’s mood drops, and his own rampage incites the survivors of two additional families. Soon, your entire fortress is in riot.

Dwarf Fortress’s spirals are so special because of the many ways they can go. What if, during McHammer’s war, an explosion in cat population threatens your space and food stocks? What if goblins pick that moment to lay siege to your embattled halls? What if the levees break and you must somehow pull your bitter minions together to save themselves from the flood?

For a grander perspective on Dwarf Fortress deaths, see Boatmurdered, the internet’s most famous example of a fortress death gone terribly terribly right.

Doing it Badly: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (DOS)

Really, any game where death is cheap – and not really your fault – could go here. These are games with bad controls, unfair challenges, or incomplete instructions. When you should be reveling in the events that led to your death, you’re stuck trying to make sense of what happened.

I love using Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an example, however, because it goes that extra distance to frustrate and alienate its players. See that picture (above)? It’s from the DOS version of TMNT. That jump (right picture) is actually impossible. That’s right, no one has ever beaten tmnt (dos) without cheating. this shines light on the importance of fundamentals. if the game itself is a tragedy, how can your tale of martyrdom hope to take center stage?

Special Mention

Doing it all Right: NetHack

NetHack, a dungeon-crawler in the vein of the first Diablo, exemplifies everything that is right in game death. To beat NetHack, you must do a thousand things right. Don’t look at the gorgon. Do identify the potion before drinking it. Don’t eat meat you’ve been carrying for days. You’ll die countless times trying to pass each test. However, NetHack succeeds where similarly difficult games fail by making sure you know exactly why you died, bringing you back quickly, and rewarding you for overcoming obstacles that bested you earlier. It doesn’t hurt that NetHack boasts a creative suite of panic buttons. Whether you’re randomly teleporting to another dungeon area or blasting a hole in the floor to fall to safety, you’re not dying, and that’s what counts.

Actually, debate rages over whether it’s even possible to beat NetHack without consulting its excellent wiki. Maybe you’ll be the first.

Click here to try NetHack. it’s free.

Wrapping Up

Game deaths come in many forms, and not all can (or should) have all the elements above. However, a death should offer some reason for the player to come back and try again. The player should take something away from the death, be it a story, some bit of insight, or simply a failure well-deserved.

Fixing Your First Impression

I’ll start with a fairly safe assumption: sometime in your life, you’ve imagined that game. You’ve imagined crafting that original idea or that perfect blend of everything that makes you love games. Just maybe, you’ve shared the idea with friends. If so, you know the terrible reality: that idea, the burning beacon of gaming greatness, can blaze hotly in your heart, but be totally missed by those around you.

Your friends may just not be ready for your innovation. More likely, however, your game doesn’t yet have the charisma, the instant appeal needed to snare eager new players.

So, how can you give your game idea that instant appeal? Let’s examine popular games to find techniques that boost your game’s attractiveness. Today, we’ll discuss two strategies, color coding and playing-by-numbers, that give a great impression the first time a player sits down with your game.

When building a game, you’ll be forever pulled in two directions. One half of your brain, the elite gamer half, will coax you into greater complexity. The other half, which I call the “I want my mom to be able to play this game” half, will urge simplicity. These forces often oppose one another, but there are ways to bake in ease-of-play without compromising strategic depth. One of these is color coding (see How I Got My Mom to Play Through Plants vs Zombies for dozens of other ways to solve this problem).

Color Coding

The card game Dominion is at the apex of “easy to learn, difficult to master.” While the high-level strategy is hopelessly complex, teaching the game is effortless: Dominion explains itself. Dominion is easy to learn because the cards tell you exactly what to do.

You play Dominion by playing cards. Dominion guides you to play cards correctly through use of color. Though it isn’t mentioned in the rulebook, the color of a card tells you when you should care about that card. Crucially, this means that if the card isn’t a relevant color to the current game phase, you can ignore that card.

If you’ve ever played a card game and experienced information overload, you’ve played a game that’s bad at teaching itself. Take these cards from Agricola:

Imagine a hand full of these cards. Not only do they feel like something off of this list, they also don’t help you decide when to play each card. That feeling you get from these cards, information overload mixed with uncertainty, is called analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis, or AP, causes bad feelings, makes games drag, and worst of all, gives a horrible first impression.

To reduce AP, cut through decision-making detritus by guiding your audience with color. This idea is not limited to card games. Gabe Newell discussed the use of color in shooter games, saying “one nice thing about lighting is that people understand what to do without consciously being aware of it.” Further, Portal uses color and lighting to show you where to look.

Playing-by-Numbers

Color coding is only one area where Dominion shines. While colors guide the decisions made each turn, numbers guide long-term strategy:

That number in the lower-left of each card is the card’s cost in coins. Since you get richer over time, you’ll be able to afford different cards as the game goes on. At the beginning of the game, you can only pay for a small fraction of the available cards. This reduces AP by reducing the size of your early options. In fact, a newbie can play at a near-competitive level simply by buying the most expensive card they can afford each turn.

Magic: The Gathering is another example of playing-by-numbers. Every spell card has its cost in the top-right and again, you become able to pay greater costs over time. According to Magic lead designer Mark Rosewater, the cost system adds “great pacing… build-up and excitement [and] evolution” to the game. Best of all, it makes different cards relevant to different phases of the game, leading to simpler, more straightforward decisions.

Maybe your game already has costs. How can you tweak these costs to best guide players through your game? A few ideas:

1. Keep one corner reserved for costs. Magic and Dominion both allow instant understanding by always putting costs in the same place. Don’t make players work for information that should be readily at hand.
2. Use as few different costs as possible. Magic uses two costs: colored and uncolored mana. Dominion used only one costs, coins, until the Alchemy expansion. Perhaps tellingly, this expansion is the least-popular official expansion. If you must use multiple costs, imitate Settlers of Catan, which replaces play-by-numbers with play-by-type: some resources are valuable early, while others are only good toward the game’s end.
3. Use small, whole numbers. That’s it really. Use numbers that people can manipulate easily.

Meaningful Difficulty

Before we wrap up, let’s look at the broad effects of these guiding strategies. Using a play-by-numbers scheme eases players into that first game, just like color coding. Do these techniques take away from the skill needed to win your game? To that, I say that every game should be easy to play. A game’s difficulty should not come from understanding mechanics or grappling with controls. These are artificial barriers to entry, shackles on core gameplay. Free a player from these shackles, and you free them to explore and play within your world.

That’s all for now. Join me next time when I discuss randomness: how to improve (or ruin) your game with die rolls, shuffling, and RNGs.

Bonus Reading:

1. Games that teach while you play: EgoRaptor’s Vid on the GENIUS Mega Man X Intro Stage.
2. My intellectual heroes, and inspirations for writing this column: Mark Rosewater and David Sirlin.
3. How complex is Dominion, really? See the absurdly large collection of strategy articles on dominionstrategy.com.
4. Wikipedia article on Analysis Paralysis, most notable for the consequences of AP it addresses.