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Comment by dharmab | Hacker News Reader

Some examples you should look into:

- Diablo 3's hardcore mode, where you have a single life and your gameplay and saves are on a cloud server

- Far Cry 2 permadeath journals

- Roguelike strategy games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld

- One chance, a browser game designed around a single playthrough (although the saves are hidden in a cookie that can be cleared)

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There's also the interesting looking One Hour One Life that I haven't had a chance to play yet. It will be cool if it gains enough traction to really see mass progression due to how the mechanics work.

The reviews are hysterical.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/

OHOL is fantastic and is, at heart, about parenting, aging, and death.

I'm a big Rohrer fan and death seems like a recurring theme throughout his games:

-Passage: where you pass through an entire life in 5 minutes

-The Castle Doctrine: a permadeath home defense MMO where you set death traps and try, often impotently, to defend your small family. When you fail to defend them, you'll get to watch the security tapes in detail and come home to their mutilated corpses.

I would also like to add x-com on Ironman. Losing a soldier because you got sloppy and arrogant; putting them in an indefensible position and watching them get slaughtered. Do that enough times and you literally cannot win with just rookie replacements. But yea, I felt actually bad for losing some soldiers in my Ironman runs.

XCOM no doubt. I once lost a veteran ranger and I was bummed for days. He was mind-controlled by the enemy and a panicked friendly shot him. Tragic.

XCOM has too much of an RNG factor for me. You can make the right choices (gearing, squad composition, positioning, targeting, etc.) and still lose soldiers due to streaks of misfortune. I personally hate being punished (usually brutally) due to factors outside my control, so I eventually gave up on the game.

Also Darkest Dungeon. But problem with DD is that though you may lose characters permanently, it is impossible to lose the game, as both time and number of new recruits are essentially infinite. Atleast in Xcom there is someway to lose the metagame, if enough countries withdraw support(I think), but in DD, it continues as infinitum.

Minecraft hardcore mode too. It's like permadeath in roguelikes; one bad move and everything you've worked on for hundreds of hours is insta-deleted.

In Moria/Morgul you spent forever to build your character, learning spells and getting nice equipment. Then you die of a poisionous rat and was presented with a gravestone and had to start over with a new character. It was painful to die to say the least.

re Diablo 3 HC-

Just focus on Vitality, pick a low difficulty level, and slowly grind the game.

Never died, had 1 close call due to Frozen.

That's probably a metaphor for reality.

The point of Hardcore mode is to play on the ranked seasonal ladders where you get permanent rewards for high scores, which means raising the difficulty.

"Games aren't hard if you lower the difficulty" is a strange argument to make.

If you're optimizing for not dying, that sounds great. If you're optimizing for a good time and a difficult challenge then that's not going to work.

Actually, the real secret to Diablo 3 HC is that characters are completely disposable, and only the equipment matters.

You can take a level 70 weapon with a gem of ease, jump in at Torment VI and level a new character from 1->20 in sixty seconds even when playing solo.

>had 1 close call due to Frozen

Let it go.

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