Can't Get it Out of My Head

Killjoy

This fit with the pulp adventure stories that RPGs were trying to replicate. Heroes almost never die in fantasy stories, especially not in mundane circumstances. Failure and setbacks are common, but they lead to exciting new situations, not the story's end. Indiana Jones doesn't die when he misses a jump; he scrambles against the pit's edge and pulls himself up by a vine, in a movie-defining scene.

This perspective of death as a storytelling tool did not make it into early videogames. Story was irrelevant to Pong and Space Invaders; lives were tokens, and running out of them set the player back to the start and reset his score. It is no surprise that the earliest cRPGs - games like dnd and dungeon - derived their gameplay from arcade contemporaries even while taking their names and settings from their P&P forebears. These games were about finishing levels or racking up a high score; it only made sense, then, that the player should die often, as he did in other electronic games, and that he should start over when that happened.

As cRPGs moved from obstacle-filled mazes to, well, more complicated obstacle-filled mazes, players began to become as interested in what came next as what was happening now. Ultima IV and Wasteland tried to bring a world to life and introduced a range of setbacks for players, such as losing virtue, acquiring an STD or having a party member die. Since both games limited how saves worked (both in where you could save and in how many saves you could keep), players were expected to play through such losses, and they usually did. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in Ultima IV, which pushed story especially to the fore, death was transitory: The player was immediately revived (back at the start of the game, reflecting the lingering "restart at death" model), though he lost reagents and gold. The designers realized that the more the player cared about his characters, the less justifiable killing them would be. Nevertheless, most RPGs (AD&D "Goldbox" games, Might & Magic, Wizardry, etc.) continued to use death as the primary penalty.

Save Yourself!
As stories became more complex, it became increasingly difficult to kill off party members (who were now characters, not merely faceless soldiers) or to justify automatic resurrection. At the same time, players became less tolerant of replaying the same areas over and over again, especially when those areas were mazes they had already solved filled with obstacles they had already overcome. Suddenly, none of the classic approaches to death and resurrection were viable.

Designers were faced with a twofold challenge. First, they had to fit player failure into increasingly complex, fixed stories. The solution was to make failure independent of the story - you could die as often as you liked. The second problem was figuring out how to penalize failure without requiring the player to replay substantial areas. Around the same time, LucasArts, faced with a similar conundrum in the adventure game genre, removed death entirely. But RPG designers could not give up killing the player, in part because cheating death is such an integral part of fantasy stories. Instead, they relied on saving. If the player saved his game regularly, death would not force him to replay much. And if death ended the game, failure didn't cause any story problems because restoring a saved game "undid" the death and reset the story.

The problem is, this approach made a shambles of a game's narrative, as the flow was routinely interrupted with loading and saving screens, and the hero went from Indiana Jones gumption to Pitfall Harry fragility. Even worse was what saving did to game difficulty.