You gunna be wrong three times right now? :-p
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@Glorgu @Anime idk what you two are talking about that game went as well as it could have gone! 
jesus why do i write so much on this dang website
Dittos on pretty much every Hitman game, but especially 2016’s due to its Elusive Targets and Professional Mode which often results in slow descents into chaos. Honestly, some of the best stealth games tend to key into this, I think. Getting caught isn’t an instant loss, but a slow crawl into demise.
A lot of rogue-likes and rogue-lites also key into this. Random generation I think naturally results in plans falling apart a lot of the time. Darkest Dungeon, being a game pretty much entirely about taking risks, constantly has awful sequences of self-destructs of bad luck. Sometimes cathartic, sometimes disappointing. Minecraft deserves a mention. Tumbleseed also have that kind of slow demise that I find bizarrely satisfying, and Heat Signature brilliantly manages to both instill the dissolution of those plans and the frantic successes that ensue. And of course, as @augmentalize mentioned, the classic esoteric games like Nethack/Dwarf Fortress (!!!)/my beloved Caves of Qud.
But hey: If y’all like fucking up please go check out Sub Rosa. It’s a game about plans constantly going awry, it’s engine is almost built for this kind of catastrophes. Instead of managing with random number generation or lack of clear foresight, it’s about trying to deal with people. There are three different teams (as of this current version), all representing different corporations, OXS, Goldman, and Monsota, who all spawn in with objectives, usually about acquiring a giant colored floppy disk from another corporation in exchange for money, or by grifting, or by shooting. The jank is hardcore, your characters wobble around and aiming is nigh impossible, but I truly think the experiences I’ve had are worth chewing through it. It’s a shame the community is pretty god awful. Lot’s of players will play for kills and ruin the experience for everyone else. Still, I’ve had some phenomenal experiences throughout it all; I’ve been in car chases, I’ve escorted briefcase couriers through gunfire, I’ve defended against sieges on our corporate garage. A completely singular game.
Here are three stories.
Story One:
We had finally made a perfect deal. There were no gunshots, no standoffs, we met up with the other team, Monsota, and traded briefcases, and that was that. It was a clean deal. We had been so chummy that I decided to climb into the other team’s car and go back to their base with them. A passenger was blasting music over the voice chat, and we shook our mouses to headbang along. We rounded the corner to the base, and they came into view: the third enemy team, OXS, M-16s trained on our car, pulling their triggers before we even had time to react.Needless to say, things didn’t go well for me & Monsota.
Story Two:
In this round, we had made a deal to meet with another team, OXS, nearby a hot dog stand. We were standing on top of a building nearby it, and had been waiting for a long time. Our teammate called them up on the phone and talked to them. I asked, “Where are they?”
“They’re almost here; they’re taking a shortcut.”
Suddenly, the sound of shattering glass from above us, and the screech of tires. Still holding the phone, our teammate is crushed under the weight of the OXS company van, taking both his body and the van tumbling to the concrete below. Some shortcut.
Story Three:
My team had left me behind at our base. (Unfortunately, rude players will often do stuff like this.) I grabbed another car, and since I had no phone, all I could do was drive around and hope I stumble on my team. Well, I stumbled on something in the end. In the mall, men and women in black suits strewn about the ground, among shards of glass and bullet casings. It was the top floor, and one of the windows was shattered, staring out over the city, one of the cars nearly teetering over the edge. I scavenged through the blood and bodies, seeing if I could find some money, or at the very least some ammo. Then, I hear it.
Ring, ring. Ring, ring. Monsota’s phone trapped underneath the car. I manage to get it out from under, and answer, “Hello?”
“Do you still wanna make a deal?”
“We can still try to make a deal. How many stacks?”
“We’ve got four stacks, how’s that?”
“No, how many do you want for the- wait, who is this?”
“This is Goldman.”
“Wait… But… I’m Goldman…”
Oops.
Sub Rosa is a fucking mess but when it works? goddamn does it work
This is the reason I absolutely love being the Zeus in an Arma mission/Campaign. To me it’s the closest I can get to playing D&D and being DM (as I dont have a group).
I creatd this ideal story and mission flow, but in an instant my unit use their freewill to just completely do something I never imagined so quickly I have to try and ensure they have a good experience and move units to keep it entertaining.
Also when playing a mission, theres nothing quite like when you dont space out enough and a mortar wipes a full fireteam, it just creates a real panic on the command channel
I think the Rob\Austin content on this site is some of my favourites. I love to watch them argue tactics and then it all go to shit anyway and have to pull a fast one.
I have always been a fan of failing in Dishonoured. People often play it by going stealth until they are seen and then killing everybody but I always like to play it by going stealth and when seen go into escape and evasion mode which can often result into some crazy creative clutch saves.
If none of y’all have seen Austin, Vinny and Alex playing Poly Bridge over at Giant Bomb (or any of Vinny’s forays into bridge building games, sans Austin and his exasperated Giant Bomb catchphrase, “Vinny??!!”), you might not understand just how outright entertaining failure is. It’s not just, like, having the fluidity and confidence to strike back from failure, or being handed the the ability to fail within the framework of a game’s systems, or the ludonarrative of any given failure and its impact on the stories we make of our games.
It’s that failure can often just be really, REALLY funny.
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I REALLY need to dig into some more but I definitely enjoyed fucking up in Heat Signature. I’m the type of person who will quicksave/quickload forever until things go exactly right if given the chance, so a game that doesn’t let me do that but makes me not care that I can’t has done something right for sure.
I played a bunch of Dwarf Fortress years ago, and in Dwarf Fortress, you’re not REALLY having fun unless you’re losing. And boy does that game give you plenty of opportunities to lose.
One time, I had built a pretty huge and decently impregnable fortress over the course of a week or so. A raiding party of goblins showed up, so I called all of my dwarves inside, sealed the fortress, and put my military on alert. It was no big deal - I had a huge stockpile of supplies and could more than outlast any siege, as I had already done numerous times.
Meanwhile, deep in the mines, my miners had finally unearthed a lode of adamantium, the best metal in the game. Adamantium is rare to the point that this was my first time ever seeing it in-game after playing through maybe a dozen fortresses. I was very excited. I set the miners to the task of digging out the ore.
[[SPOILER WARNING]]
They dug out a single piece of adamantium. Curiously, there was no ground beneath it. There was a hole. Suddenly a notification: “Horrifying screams echo from below!” Dozens of ampersands come streaming out of the hole, breathing fire, spitting webs, and scalding dwarves with steam. Dear lord, what is happening? I pause the game and look down into the hole. It opens into an absolutely massive chasm filled with eerily glowing bottomless pits. I’d dug into Hell. I didn’t even know that such a thing was possible.
Then I examine the ampersands. They are Ghosts of Steam, Specters of Brine, Flame Wraithes, and Boiling Specters, and they are ripping my dwarves to pieces. It’s basically Cabin In The Woods down there. Before unpausing, I set orders for my dwarves to remove the supports from some of the mid-level mine shafts that stand between the fortress proper and the carnage below. I also set orders to seal the entrance to the mine itself. Removing the supports will be a suicide mission for whoever goes down there, but I am not taking any chances.
But it wasn’t enough. I managed to collapse the tunnels, but not before three or four of the demons managed to make it through. Then they made it to the mine entrance before I could finish sealing it. I’d positioned my military around the mine entrance just in case, but even they were no match for the horrors I’d unleashed. In moments, my entire military was frozen in place by sticky webs and were being burned alive. And then, so was the rest of my fortress. The goblins were still at our gates, so there was nowhere for anyone to escape to. They eventually turned tail and ran once the ampersands found their way outside, but by that point it was too late for my dwarves. My stockpiles had been torched and everyone was dead. It wasn’t even worth starting a new game by sending in a fresh group of settlers to reclaim the fortress. But yeah, that’s Dwarf Fortress for you.
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I’m the guy who will stan for board and tabletop roleplaying game design in video games.
Failing forward, success with a cost, ugly choices, hard bargains, and worse outcomes.
There are definitely video games that capture the feeling of watching a handful of dice tumble after your Blades in the Dark GM tells you it’s a desperate roll.
I just keep hoping for more of them.
That is freaking cool. I was down on my luck when I saw my first Demon’s Souls review, talking about the openness of the stages and the tough difficulty, and I drove about 30 miles out of my way to find a GameStop that had the thing on Week 1. He’s right - the stability of the game environment and the fact that you’re okay after each failure and ready to learn, those were calming feelings (even if Flamelurker was a jerk).
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Helldivers is so good at entering and then sustaining that failure state; where everything starts coming at you slightly too fast and then your team mate respawns on your tank/turret/you (“I didn’t throw that anywhere near there!”), and you’re trying to fight a manged retreat but at some point you sometimes just have to abandon everyone and run for the exit.
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I totally have quicksave/quickload problem as well. It’s a terrible habit that I really need to break. I do it a ton in stealth games when going for perfect stealth runs, but since I don’t really care about the achievements or checkmarks at the end of the level, I definitely need to learn to embrace more organic play. Sometimes I find checkpoint systems frustrating, but I’ve also at times found it liberating to be free of the quickload impulse. That is, so long as the game is constructed in a way that suits the way I want to play.
With those stealth games, for example, I’d much rather the mechanics and level design allow for me to slip away when spotted and try stealth again with the consequence of more alert enemies, rather than force me to fight through everything. A lot of games with stealth play devolve into open combat the moment you’re spotted, unfortunately. Action games and shooters that implement very basic stealth mechanics are almost always guilty of this sharp gameplay binary (looking at you, Wolfenstein)
