ITT: Games where you can't lose

Except in snap you can miss shit in a level and have to do it over again, so it does technically have a fail state even though you don't get a "game over" screen.

Practice practice practice.

There's only one instance in the latter and you shouldn't be getting hit by that anyway.

You can experience death

nanomachines son

Ok I've got a crazy idea but just hear me out, what if the health bar in cuhrayzee games like DMC or Bayonetta was completely removed? Any competent player will never take damage and the only "health bar" that matters to them is the style meter.

I think of the style meter as a health bar with the exact opposite of health regeneration, instead of encouraging you to hide and play safe it encourages you to get out there and constantly be active. This would also let new players know that the style meter is actually important so you don't get retards that start playing DMC and think its easy because many of the enemies hardly even attack you (as well as not making them restart when they die in fights, I think simply getting a terrible score should be the disincentive here).

Would this work?

If you bought ANY game in that bug-filled franchise, you already lost.

fable 1 was actually pretty good, at least for the time. 2 and 3 were shit, although everyone knows that already

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Mount & Blade is a god tier game but you really can't lose in the game. Even when all your territory is gone, you can always try to start back up again. Even when the entire map is Swadian and you are something stupid like the Khergits, you can still keep trying. You actually cannot lose. Even after getting a thousand arrows to the face you just get back up again.

How is this any different than Fable?

It just occurred to me. Since you can just try again or load a save does that mean that technically you can never really "lose" a game, I mean you get set back a bit but getting set back doesn't mean "loss" and you can even learn things from your set back that will help you later.

Its a little semantic but I wonder.

I feel there still needs to be a casual filter or else the games would feel too easy, no matter the score you get.

The health bar already does that. You do not regenerate health in DMC or bayonetta and you need enemies to be onscreen to see their attacks and dodge them. Hiding is a quick way to get killed.

You can do whatever you want in DMC/Bayonetta if you don't care about the score bar and only health. You can play it safe or dangerous because your health isn't regenerating or degenerating. The score bar on the other hand forces you to get active in the same way regenerating health does the opposite.

I just think that design by removal is the best way to go about making games, and if a system (health) doesn't matter to the players the game is intended for (skilled players) and only annoys new players then there is no reason for it to exist.

What's the difference between getting a bad score and just playing on a low difficulty then? If you wanted you could even say that in order to pass through a fight without having to restart you need a certain rank/point threshold in order to progress. That'd make it so the casuals absolutely have to learn the game (plus they won't be able to just spam consumables like they can now).

That's definitely worth a giggle, thanks OP.

Stardew Valley is Harvest Moon: PC Edition so I get that, but those 2 games are dog shit.

Just because you don't get a game over screen doesn't mean you didn't get fucking destroyed. You lose, you get captured, your party fucks off and you lose a bunch of shit. You keep losing and you lose the whole war, losing territory and allies. Eventually you could be left with nothing. Can you come back from that? Sure. But coming back from nothing is cancer to a degree few can comprehend. Better to not lose at all.

I know NG+ has one, I'm not playing this grindy shit again just for that

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any adventure game

any game

It's okay, Fable does do a few interesting things, trying to be a weird life-sim/RPG hybrid. It doesn't really wind up excelling at either of those things, but they're fun enough to romp through on a weekend.

I think the idea of a more permanent consequence for failure, that doesn't involve death, is kind of a neat idea. Permanent detriments for hitting zero HP could actually result in a system that's more punishing than simple death and reload. Not sure what kind of detriments one could come up with to apply to a game myself but it's a neat idea, but like a lot of Fable's neat ideas, it's pretty poorly executed and means virtually nothing in the end.

Looks like I need to git fucking gud.

I mean getting your whole party wiped out in a dungeon is failstate enough for most people.

Warband is a shit game single player, a complete grindy and repetitive waste of time, yet I still get the urge to play it, like some drug. Stay away from it.

I felt the grind, even from what little I played. But it's the only kind of game that I've found that scratches that whole 'leading my own personal army to fuck someone's shit and steal their land' feeling.

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