How does it feel like cheating? A proper RPG that forces you to start over on every death after 15 hours would be terrible, it's not an arcade game.
Aracades were actually designed as the opposite of permadeath in mind. As money making machines most would encourage you at the "game over" screen to pop in another quarter and continue playing (and dying). Early home game system games on the other hand were all permadeath. You would start with 2-3 lives, could maybe earn a few more through the game but the fact remained that if you died too often it was over and you'd lose all your progress. There were also very linear, repettitive and often tough as hell. At some point game catridges started to come with built in batteries to allow you to save progress but not as means to cheat death, but to allow you to play through large games on more than one sitting. Savepoints were limited and often 2 hours or more apart. Only quite some time later when games allowed easy (quick)saving and reloading would it start to get abused as a cheat. Now people quickload at death and bad outcomes automatically even without thinking.
See my -1 karma point? A while ago I made a topic asking if anybody else played Underrail permadeath. Guy called me a dumb no-life with too much time and neg-repped me. It's funny how in modern day video game culture it became not only accepted but actually a norm to be immortal in a game. If you chose not to play this way and express your distaste you are likely to get mocked, sometimes even seen as a threat.
Fact remains, in most games today - you cannot die. Period. You either respawn or magically go back in time moments before shit happened. What character you play, how you play it, the choices you make, they don't really mean much because whatever you do there are no consequences and in the end you'll make it anyway even if you're a casual gamer (nothing wrong with it) that doesn't bother to learn the game mechanics.
Do I think that developers should force permanent death in games? Absolutely not. Playing permadeath is a matter of choice and everybody should play the game the way they want, it's none of my business, but I do encourge people to also consider this. If a player ever wondered why games are feeling less and less fun maybe it's not simply him getting older or games bland. Maybe it's the general deal that without death, life is meaningless - the same in a virtual as in the real world. I still believe that most people actually seek at least some challenge in the games, after all not many take easy as their default difficulty. Chosing to rely on frequent saving/reloading without any restricion kills a big, big chuck of challenge.
I think that developers should encourage people to at least try permadeath/ironman runs as an entirely optional mode, maybe even by giving a little bit of an incentive like 5% extra xp or something. For some reason gamers are far more likely to try it out if it's offered as an option and some might find it more appealing than they originally thought.
you had to re-buy every time you died for the ultimate difficulty, lol
Shush! In case Bethesda might hear this.
