Are Lives Outdated Game Design?

Are lives an outdated relic of the arcade era, or are they still relevant to game design in 2020?

=== Before you watch ===

Disclosure: Crash Bandicoot 4 game code provided by the publisher

=== Sources and Resources ===

[1] Super Meat Boy's McMillen Explains 'Why So Hard?' | Gamasutra

[2] Sonic Mania’s Save System Sucks | USGamer

=== Chapters ===

00:00 - Intro
00:57 - What is a Lives System?
02:54 - The Argument Against Lives
03:41 - The Argument For Lives
04:51 - Innovating on Lives
06:31 - Flipping Lives Upside Down
07:40 - Conclusion
08:19 - Patreon Credits

=== Games Shown ===

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (Toys for Bob, 2020)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Intelligent Systems, 2019)
Battletoads (Dlala Studios, 2020)
Pac-Man (Namco, 1980)
Super Mario 3D World (Nintendo, 2013)
Super Mario World (Nintendo, 1990)
Sonic Mania (Sega, 2017)
Kirby Star Allies (HAL Laboratory, 2018)
Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981)
Donkey Kong Country (Rare, 1994)
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (Retro Studios, 2014)
Rayman Legends (Ubisoft Montpellier, 2013)
The End Is Nigh (Edmund McMillen & Tyler Glaiel, 2017)
Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo, 2017)
Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010)
Streets of Rage 4 (Dotemu / Lizardcube / Guard Crush Games, 2020)
Mega Man 11 (Capcom, 2018)
Disney's Aladdin (Capcom, 1993)
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (Konami, 1993)
Super Mario Bros. 3 (Nintendo, 1988)
Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1988)
Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985)
Celeste (Matt Makes Games, 2018)
Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990)
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy (Vicarious Visions, 2017)
New Super Mario Bros. U (Nintendo, 2012)
Furi (The Game Bakers, 2016)
Kero Blaster (Pixel, 2014)
Sonic Generations (Sonic Team, 2011)
Spelunky 2 (Mossmouth, 2020)
The Messenger (Sabotage Studios, 2018)
Shovel Knight (Yacht Club Games, 2014)
Panzer Paladin (Tribute Games, 2020)
Ori and the Blind Forest (Moon Studios, 2015)
DoDonPachi Resurrection (Cave, 2008)
Sonic Forces (Sonic Team, 2017)
Trials Evolution (RedLynx, 2012)
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Inti Creates, 2018)

=== Credits ===

=== Subtitles ===

[tigger]

"Asking players to make fundamental game design decisions before theyve even started playing" - excellently worded

[Velkin]

Werent lives originally put into games to rob kids of their precious quarters in arcades which then carried over into console games?

[-Raylight]

_"This is 20 pages of software license"_
*"Dear God..."*
_"There's more"_
*"NO"*

[goat]

I loved celeste's take on it. You don't get punished at all for dying, you respawn in the same screen. The point is to beat short but hard platforming challenges and permanently save afterward. The difficulty doesn't come from being concentrated for long periods of time but rather from actual platforming. It still counts every death and shows them after each level so you will see exactly how bad you are.

[TheJadeFist]

Lives aren't expressly outdated, but the game has to be designed with them in mind.

[epicgamersaurus]

I really like how Doom Eternal has extra lives as an automatic revive when you die. They make a great collectible and raise the stakes even more because you obviously don’t want to lose your limited amount. In an already very high skill game, extra lives reward exploration instead of punishing repeated failures.

[jonnyeh]

The question is "what are the stakes?", e.g. "what do you lose when you fail?". In most games it's your time. In arcades, it's quarters.

[bebopblue]

Mario 64’s live system seems pointless. Game over and you’re yeeted all the way outside the castle. Now you have to go all the way back to the level, which isn’t much of a penalty either. Lives are also never saved, quitting will reset the number of lives. But the game does have some checkpoints, inside the pyramid, the volcano, and Tall Tall Mountain slide allow you start from inside those sub areas if you die. Lose all your lives and you’ll have to start the level normally once you get back to it. Even with these checkpoints, if you’re trying to get the 100 coin star, dying will reset the amount of coins you had. So everything you collected outside is lost since there’s no way back outside, except the slide, which is better to start collecting coins from there since you don’t want to spawn the star on the slide.

[TributeGames]

Thanks a bunch for featuring Panzer Paladin in this video!
This video also started an entertaining game dev discussion at the studio. :D

[cameronschiralli]

I want to give points to Celeste here for its golden berrries

The game never punishes you for constantly failing. Hell, I finished the Farewell chapter with over 5, 000 deaths and never felt punished for it.

However, the golden berries, in order to collect them, require you to complete the stage deathless, adding an extra challenge.

The game also never gatekeeps content behind the golden berries, they're purely there for those willing to seek the challenge

[Grapefruit]

The limited lives really made my palms sweat while playing those weird trippy levels in Super Mario Sunshine without the water gun. Because it's so annoying when you run out of lives in them. However, it seems like there's always an extra life hidden somewhere near the beginning.

[lionheart]

Let me throw in a perspective that probably isn't initially considered when discussing this; a girl I was seeing for a while really liked the Crash remakes. She wanted to play them whenever she was over, but she wasn't really great at them. She'd usually die a bunch of times, and then she'd get a handle on what she was missing, and get a bit better. She'd build momentum. Then, she'd run out of lives, and lose that momentum. Often, very disheartening, to the point where she'd hand me the controller to finish the level so she could move on.

I see a lot of comments about how the fear of restarting a level motivates them to play better, but I'd say we need to make sure we're not just designing for the most hardcore of the hardcore. Watching someone who was enthusiastic about games, but not good at them, get disheartened because the game wiped her progress in a level for dying too many times.. it just felt mean spirited if I'm honest. I remember as a kid it was the sort of thing that'd make me take the disc out and play a different game.

Of course, some games are meant to be hard. But if you're pushing your game as anything but a hardcore challenge, I really think you should at least consider *optional* toggles to make the game more accomodating and forgiving for players who aren't as quick, or can't play as often, but are still trying their best.

[boomboom]

Lives as a concept isn't outdated but how they are implemented are. I feel many game developers have to rework lives so that they actually mean something instead of just getting a game over screen. Really, it just comes down to what works best with your game.

[fakethiss]

I want to talk about Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze being in the "meaningless lives" camp. I agree that lives become so abundant in that game when you're playing on your own that they lose value. You can only ever lose one life per run and chances are you'll also be able to get at least one life per run before you do so, unless you're at an exceptionally difficult section. The single player experience in DK has zero need for lives, they're just a number that displays when you die that will probably never run out.

But in multi-player it's a totally different experience. Any time either player dies in multi-player you lose a life and respawn immediately. Unless both players die at once, you can keep going indefinitely so long as you have lives available. This can lead to real spirals in difficult areas where you lose dozens of lives in quick succession. I played through Tropical Freeze entirely in multiplayer, and it was frequent that we would have to go back and stock up on lives in order to finish levels.

Without lives, multiplayer DK would either be much too easy or much too hard, hinging on whether you would allow players to respawn during a run. Infinite respawning means you only have to make sure the two players aren't making risky moves at the same time and you'll always finish every run every time, but no respawns would leave it basically back to a single player experience much of the time, unless the two players are equally skilled and very well coordinated, except whichever player is alive is hamstrung because you don't get to control both Kongs.

So there's this dilemma, where you have the option of playing this game multiplayer, and a desire to not just leave one player as a spectator because that's boring, but some way to not trivialize the completion of levels or rewarding safe, guarded play that is frankly less fun than dashing through levels like a mad ape, and this has to coexist with the single-player experience because the same file can be used for single- or multi-player. And a solution to that is... lives. You never need them in single-player, so they might as well not be there, but multiplayer hinges on them. They even the playing field by maintaining that requirement for skill and memorization and setting the stakes, but making sure nobody is ever left out of the game for very long, because when you die you just pop a balloon and you're back in the action.

[ben_]

Lives are indeed outdated. The new way to do that is an energy-bar where you have to wait 24h or pay 5 bucks to keep playing ;)

[tessaminick]

I really like the idea of rewarding players for keeping their lives rather than punishing them for running out of them. It feels more motivating and less intimidating.

[davidbrickey]

I'm surprised you didn't even mention the whole Dark Souls style "recover your corpse" mechanic as an alternative to lives, considering that it is used for the same purpose and was copied by at least one of the games you showed in the video.

[dan]

So basically, both systems work as long as you actually put effort into working them into your game instead of lazily throwing them on top?

[russelldoty]

1cc's aren't exactly no death clears. They're just beating the game in question without losing all your lives and having to continue (or insert another credit, if you're playing IRL).

[brynfindlay-dykes]

This is the very issue I’m struggling with right now on my current little indie project, so pretty good timing! Gets the juices flowing