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Dying in video games: the retry time.
7 years ago
General
So most video games have a game over or death state depending on the type of game. Even something as simple as a puzzle game can have a game over status on it.
What I will be speaking of here is the time it takes from the moment you die to the moment you can retry the thing you were doing be it a boss or a level.
In some games this retry time is very short; I Wanna be the Guy, Super Meat Boy, The End is Nigh and Celeste are very hard precision platformers. As such the retry time in these games is VERY short, less than half a second in fact. This is a VERY good thing considering some levels in these kinds of games can have you experiencing well over 100 deaths.
Some games have retry times that are a few seconds as there is a death animation, appearing on the map/level select screen and then loading in the level. Games like the 2D super Mario games come to mind. Now of course there are romhacks of Super Mario World that are very hard, like Super Kaizo World. This approximately 6 second retry time starts to become an issue when dealing with that difficulty. After 11 deaths you of course have 10 retries in between: 6 seconds x 10 retry times = 1 minute of waiting. So in other words after 101 attempts of the level you have been forced to wait 10 whole minutes doing nothing!
Now the reason I bring this up is I have been dealing with an especially bad retry time in a game, Hollow Knight. During the main game this isn't an issue at all and I have no problems with it. But in the recent update they introduced not only a boss rush but a way to fight every boss on their own so you may practice. In one area there are statues of every boss and when you examine said statues you may choose one of three difficulties to fight the boss on:
1: Attuned: Basically the standard version of the boss.
2: Ascended: Some bosses have changed arenas and every boss now does double damage. So if a boss did 2 damage it now does 4. >_>
3: Radiant: Same changed boss arena from Ascended, but now you die in one hit.
What I have gripes with is the retry time in regards to the Radiant difficulty of these bosses. The MINIMUM retry time for every boss is 10 seconds. So by 7 tries you have waited an entire minute. Here's the problem though, some bosses have intros. >_> One such boss has an intro roughly 20 seconds long on top of the 10 second retry time. So after only 3 tries you have already had to wait a minutes worth of retry time!
After 11 tries 5 minutes.
After 61 tries 30 minutes.
After 121 tries 1 hour.
I have been struggling with this hard (and rather cheap) boss fight for roughly 5 hours, and the thought that I may have been forced to sit and wait for nearly half of that time is appalling!
It's worth mentioning that every attempt at this boss can be a few seconds or maybe a minute or two. So nothing hurts more than dying in a few seconds and having to wait 30 seconds before fighting the boss again. A quick retry in the pause menu sure would make a lot of difference here. >_>
So why don't I stop trying? I know I CAN get it that's why! I have beaten every phase of the boss damageless so I know I can do it, but getting it all in one run is the hard part.
Hooray for talking about something no one will care about. >_>
What I will be speaking of here is the time it takes from the moment you die to the moment you can retry the thing you were doing be it a boss or a level.
In some games this retry time is very short; I Wanna be the Guy, Super Meat Boy, The End is Nigh and Celeste are very hard precision platformers. As such the retry time in these games is VERY short, less than half a second in fact. This is a VERY good thing considering some levels in these kinds of games can have you experiencing well over 100 deaths.
Some games have retry times that are a few seconds as there is a death animation, appearing on the map/level select screen and then loading in the level. Games like the 2D super Mario games come to mind. Now of course there are romhacks of Super Mario World that are very hard, like Super Kaizo World. This approximately 6 second retry time starts to become an issue when dealing with that difficulty. After 11 deaths you of course have 10 retries in between: 6 seconds x 10 retry times = 1 minute of waiting. So in other words after 101 attempts of the level you have been forced to wait 10 whole minutes doing nothing!
Now the reason I bring this up is I have been dealing with an especially bad retry time in a game, Hollow Knight. During the main game this isn't an issue at all and I have no problems with it. But in the recent update they introduced not only a boss rush but a way to fight every boss on their own so you may practice. In one area there are statues of every boss and when you examine said statues you may choose one of three difficulties to fight the boss on:
1: Attuned: Basically the standard version of the boss.
2: Ascended: Some bosses have changed arenas and every boss now does double damage. So if a boss did 2 damage it now does 4. >_>
3: Radiant: Same changed boss arena from Ascended, but now you die in one hit.
What I have gripes with is the retry time in regards to the Radiant difficulty of these bosses. The MINIMUM retry time for every boss is 10 seconds. So by 7 tries you have waited an entire minute. Here's the problem though, some bosses have intros. >_> One such boss has an intro roughly 20 seconds long on top of the 10 second retry time. So after only 3 tries you have already had to wait a minutes worth of retry time!
After 11 tries 5 minutes.
After 61 tries 30 minutes.
After 121 tries 1 hour.
I have been struggling with this hard (and rather cheap) boss fight for roughly 5 hours, and the thought that I may have been forced to sit and wait for nearly half of that time is appalling!
It's worth mentioning that every attempt at this boss can be a few seconds or maybe a minute or two. So nothing hurts more than dying in a few seconds and having to wait 30 seconds before fighting the boss again. A quick retry in the pause menu sure would make a lot of difference here. >_>
So why don't I stop trying? I know I CAN get it that's why! I have beaten every phase of the boss damageless so I know I can do it, but getting it all in one run is the hard part.
Hooray for talking about something no one will care about. >_>
1. "Retry?" Screen. Just give us the option to retry instead of auto spawning us.
2. Skippable cutscenes. Just let us skip the intro we saw before we died.
I remember being frustrated fighting NKG. He's very hard, you have to dreamnail into his fight, he has a long hallway before the fight you have to superdash through, and he has a boss intro.
It just felt way too long between attempts.
I can definitely understand for godhome too, I haven't tried radianting any of the particularly hard bosses, but that bit of wait is definitely gonna pile up and there's no real reason for it when there could just be a retry screen, even if that might be a little immersion breaking (can't say it's any worse than the difficulty menu before the fight anyway. I don't think people are hugely worried about immersion during godhome anyway)
Time adds up quickly.
Immersion is such a silly thing for those of us who don't get immersed. =P But yeah, I get what you're saying there.
so I wouldn't be surprised if they kept menus to a minimum for that sake, even if it would be more convenient to have them
It's especially bad when you don't have much time in a day..
In any case I just beat the boss I spoke of in the journal. Only took me 10 hour to so, maybe 4 of those hours spent waiting for the intro scene to play out. >_>
Which boss was it?
Is that such that if you die somewhere along the way the any of the prior ones, you have to start from the beginning of the rush? THOSE pantheons?
WOW??
What I was doing was a room where you can practice the bosses alone or take them on on harder difficulties. I took on this one boss on that hardest difficulty.