Quality of life

Limited lives used to be a staple of video games. Borrowing from their arcade roots, many home console games of the 80s still retained the limited lives mechanic. While this made sense for arcade games that needed to keep you pumping quarters into the machine, this made less sense for games you were meant to play in your home at your own pace, so games started moving away from this mechanic in the mid to late 90s. By the 2000s lives were seen as "outdated" and bad design. What's the point in making people repeat content over and over for no real reason? Lives felt weird every time they showed up in anything other than a score based arcade thing, a sign that the game's design wasn't really well thought out.

But the thing is, lives were not completely pointless. There is a certain tension that happens when you're at 1 life left. Even if the stuff in front of you isn't even a "hard part", that tension can impact the way you play and was a small part of the appeal of those older games. There was something was missing when games removed lives. What seemed like a purely good "quality of life" change wasn't just shaving off a rough edge of older design, it took a small bit of substance with it.

By the 2010s the modern Roguelike genre had formed, a genre basically based around "you only have 1 life". Limited lives are back! A few extra mechanics like random generation and deeply varied interactive systems that encourage exploration and experimentation really helped recontextualize "limited lives" into something that was more than just a way to rob kids of their quarters. It was a way to ensure that mastery of a game truly required understanding and mastering all of its systems, not simply practicing one thing over and over.

In 2017 Edmund McMillen and I released The End is Nigh, a game where (spoiler) the limited lives mechanic was a sort of core vision of the game from day 1 of development. We wanted to make a game that felt hard and forced you to play it multiple times until those hard parts felt trivially easy. The original design had 1 life from the start, and slowly earning more as you got better at the game and found the collectible tumors that would permanently grant you extra lives. We eased back on that, instead choosing to only introduce limited lives in the 2nd half of the game. This still accomplished a similar goal, people would reach the 2nd half of the game, realize they needed to collect tumors to have a chance at beating it, and go back to the first half to search for them, hopefully realizing in the process that things they thought were hard the first time were easy to them now.

Lives went from a medium staple, to "outdated and bad", and then came back when people realized that they still had use as a game design tool in the right contexts, with thought put behind them. "Quality of life" changes aren't just "shaving off the rough edges", they almost always shave something interesting off as well.

Dark Souls came out in 2011. Dark Souls has a big cohesive world but there’s no map and no fast travel (well, during the best part of the game at least). You die a lot. The stats dont make sense. There aren't checkpoints before bosses, you need to run back through a good portion of the level just to reach the boss again. The plot doesn't make sense unless you read all the vague flavor text on the item descriptions. This game has no quality of life.

Future games in the series and games inspired by it have offered many quality of life improvements. You can fast travel from the start now. Sekiro put checkpoints immediately before most bosses. Elden ring added a map. The games are smoother to play and make more sense and are just better in a lot of ways.

And yet, there is undeniably "something lost" when applying all of those quality of life changes. Dark Souls 1 offered an extremely unique experience that hasn't quite been replicated by its follow ups. The lack of a map and fast travel combined with its brutal difficulty meant you became intimately familiar with its world layout as you explored and backtracked and repeated the same tough sections over and over. By the time you beat the game you know the world, you know how to get from point A to point B, where everything is in relation to everything else, and can probably identify any specific location in the game from a screenshot alone. The lack of checkpoints before bosses make you feel anxious the farther away from your last bonfire you get. If you find a boss but haven’t found a bonfire in a while, do you attempt to fight the boss? Or do you explore for a shortcut first?

Even as a professional game designer it can be tough to recognize what the "point" of those janky mechanics are. Its hard to know what you'd lose by shaving off those rough edges without the future games that did just that. And maybe what’s shaved off isn't even that important to the experience. Lives in Mario certainly weren't. But they are in other contexts.

Hollow Knight: Silksong came out recently. Its a great game but there's some odd controversial designs carried over from the first game like a weird mapping system and sometimes long boss runbacks. There's a lot of discussion about it, and ways the game could do some quality of life changes to fix that stuff. And I mean, wouldn't that be nice... No boss runbacks! Compass not taking up a slot! I have no idea what would be lost with those edges shaved off. But I do know that something would.