I'm still traumatized by games that put me in XP debt for dying.
As long as there have been videogames, there have been penalties for dying in videogames. In the earliest days dying meant losing out on a high score or having to put another coin in the arcade machine. As technology progressed, so did our protections against the harshest deaths—we got saves, checkpoints, bonfires. But a few game developers decided all that progress was nonsense.
Or do you play it safe and settle in for the long grind? Your paltry experience gains will get you out of the red, to be sure, but when you’re paying half of your points to the alimony of gamer fail, it’s not a fun place to be. Perhaps XP debt was intended to be a gentler penalty than losing experience and de-leveling. After all, at least with XP debt there’s a cap—at a certain point you’re as indebted as you’re ever going to be. You can’t lose your level, it doesn’t take away your gear. But tell that to the poor bastard knifing komodo dragons in the head on a remote planet playingSomehow two decades on devs are still using this mechanic! It was in 2004's EverQuest 2, which came out not long after City of Heroes.
Death should matter in games. Not all games have to be hardcore, high skill ceiling, deathgrip-on-the-mouse extraction games, but much of the enjoyment from gaming comes from there being stakes. Ultimately games are a kind of story, and a story with no stakes isn’t much of a story. If there’s no chance the hero fails, then we don’t really care that much whether or not they succeed.
I still get a thrill out of games that make death scary, but XP debt isn't The Exorcist scary, it's"you're being audited" scary. I hope XP debt's appearance in Icarus doesn't lead to a resurgence of some kind. Let it stay dead and buried—or at least sequestered to theSign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors.
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