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Sin And Punishment In Games
Thanks to NTSC-UK for their article discussing how games punish players for dying. The article starts: "Repetition has always been considered to be a pretty basic form of punishment and is still quite commonly used form even today. Fail a task, go back to the start of the level. Fail too many times and you go right back to the start of the game." It goes on to highlight save/restart points as changing this dynamic, saying that "...the most controversial aspect of the save point's growing role in videogames was the confusion between its two roles: acting as a marker which players are taken to when punished, and as a point where players could stop in order to resume play later on." Is there such a thing as being able to save too often?
I like the quicksave option (a la Max Payne, Most shooters, etc.) you still have to do the section again, but in those especially tough sections you don't have to worry about how many lives you've got left.
an iron ball chained to your leg.
there's various ways to get rid of it including burying it(dig a pit and push a boulder into it) eating it(polymorph into something that can eat metal), scroll of remove curse & etc.
seriously though, there's no such game as nethack as far as punishment goes. you play unprepared for everything, you die and start again. and die again and start again. that's not the punishing thing, it's the addictiviness of it, just imagine playing a random rick dangerous game for 10 years and still liking it, there's just something that must be bad in that kind of thing.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"Is there such a thing as being able to save too often?"
Oh yes! Quicksaves are really convenient, but they take all the challenge out of some games.
- progress. save. progress. save. progress. die. reload. progress half as far. save. experiment. save. etc. etc.
There are two drawbacks to quicksaves, or saving too often in general.
- No risk experimentation.
The player really isn't afraid to jump out that window or off that cliff. They can dive into a room full of armed thugs without any fear at all. The lack of risk and fear of losing your "life" takes both immersion and reward out of passing an obstacle or event.
This is sort of a side-effect of having too many saves, but:
- Spoiled gamers? Not really, but in a way its really difficult to go back to games that don't offer such lenient save functions. I was just playing a game the other day who's title completely slips my mind, but it was a FPS with no quicksave function. It drove me nuts. Forced me to complete whole stages without using my magic F5 key (Oh the horror!). It really made me think of the impact it has on a player to be given such powerful tools and abuse them without knowing it. And when a game imposes stricter saving rules on the player (me), I get really peeved about it.
So in a lot of ways, saving too many times is more than just a placeholder so I can stop playing momentarily, or a punishment. It's a cheat.
Where death in games matter most is multi-player FPS titles. It is boring to wait for the next round once you have been killed. On the other hand, the game is pointless when there are immediate respawns. Counterstrike tries to solve this be letting you watch through the other player's eyes. RTCW tries to solve this by respawning in waves. The way I would like to see it done, is once you are killed in the 'real' game, you get transported to some secondary site with the other dead players. That way there is no down time when you get killed.
Even the newest sonic games still have this marker, you don't have to go back all the way to the start, and its a small goal to reach for on your way to completing the whole level. However you can't just arbitrarily save every 30 seconds so that you have almost *no* penality for a death.
Yes, there is such a thing as saving your game too often... Ever played games on an emulator? almost all of them have an instant save state key, that you can return to at any time. Using that feature, you can beat any game in about the minimum possible time, reach a hard part, save your state, die, restore the state and keep rying, no loss of life, verrly little repeat.
(Memo to me, lookup those 2.6 kernel instructions, running multiple file hashes in the background while typing is soo amazingly sluggish that I am taking naps between sentences...)
Anyway
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
How about Sin & Punishment AS a game?
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As a parent of two I know what a burdon a game with not enough save points can be especially when it is time for the other child to play (or time for homework or bed) Games without an easy save system are simply banned.
Personally, I think quicksaves are the absolute best solution to the problem. Agreeably they can be constantly used as you can save after every step you take in the game. However, it does allow people to save as much as they're comfortable with. If someone doesn't prefer to save as often, they don't have to. If someone's saves every two seconds then they have that option too. At least you're leaving it open for user choice.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
"save where you like" can make stuff too easy and it is hard not be tempted to press f6 after every success. And I'm sure everyone must have pressed quick_save instead of quick_load and saved yourself dead or in some hopeless situation.
:
In each new game I fear some mechanism that will lead me down a one way systems and my quicksave will be useless. Sadly, I've not found a game that does this, so all my file saving discipline is wasted.
I end up playing in bazai mode, run into every new room and spray bullets after so many times creeping round corners into no danger.
Seeing as games take like a zillion hours anyway anything that maximizes your chances you are going to take (well except invoke GOD mode, that's just *too* lame).
So, quick save good and bad. Be strong, don't save.
Remember this conversation (points for being either)
"Come on, we've got go now!"
"Hang on, I've got to get Cloud back to the savepoint."
Nowadays part of the skill of parenting has been the ability to asses the level of trauma proportional to the save point time expenditure. The boy used to try and hoodwink his mum by saying "I need to get to a savepoint" to get himself another 20 mins play-time. He didn't reckon on me knowing how to play video games.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
... what does that mean about playing Everquest?-)
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I think they have to make games much harder, because people can save so often.
There used to be a a sense of fear afraid you would die, now it seems you play to see how to avoiding dying.
Hrrrummph! As usual, everything in RL is backward from video games.
Do you people even realize, if RL had savegame capability, how many times I would have blown away the idiot at Taco Bell who can't get my order right beause he's too busy IM-ing his girlfriend to be interrupted with customers?
Save points as punishment, indeed! *NOT* having save points is the *REAL* punishment!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
In some games that enforce save points, even having to go back isn't really that bad. Final Fantasy VI returned te player to the previous save point upon death, but let him keep all experience and cash earned. (It made him lose items, however, which makes sense.)
But there is also a strong intuitive basis for save points, akin to not being able to rest just anywhere in a dungeon in a D&D adventure. A save point should be a "safe" location. Being able to put a bookmark in the middle of a series of tough battles breaks them up. If the player can just once get through all the hard parts of such a sequence without taking serious losses, then it's as if they don't exist! The player will then save at that point and not have to worry about going through it ever again. If those obstacles have a strong random (or not obviously deterministic) component, then this can break a level.
Let's say someone's challenged you to a little game -- if you roll a six-sided die ten times and never get a one, he'll give you a lot of money. In a computer game, the player would save after each successful roll and practically ensure an eventual win. Taken as a sequence, such an obstacle is more troublesome than if the player can bookmark after each roll.
Something in me kind of rebels against this question, actually, the assumption of "punishment." This question only makes sense if the listen intuitively accepts that all a "save" does is record the player's location and state, monster locations and states, which items are collected and the state of a few minor puzzles. In a more complex game (such as Black & White, where great portions of the game's environment is editable), you're saving and loading a lot more than just player location, and although B&W did have a quicksave feature, the idea of making a "bookmark" doesn't make as much sense. Although it is long, playing through the whole level each time makes a kind of sense.
Of course, understand that I'm a Nethack fanatic, and games which feature permanent character death appeal to me, so I'm obviously deranged.
I really liked the approach that the earlier (dunno about newer) Wing Commander games took. Rather than worrying about making the game full of traps and difficulty that forces the player to save often, they used a rather extensive tree-based storyline -- it was possible to fail a mission and still complete the game. Heck, it was possible to fail every mission and still complete the game, you would just get a very lackluster ending where the Kilrathi rule the universe and the humans run away with their tail between their legs. :)
While not a magic bullet, I think this approach has a lot to offer, but has very rarely been used since. Even Deus Ex, hailed for its exceptional storyline where what you did made a difference, it was still very linear. You could make small changes and maybe save a few people here and there, but it still didn't offer much incentive in the way of replayability.
While in Wing Commander, it was still possible to 'cheat' the system by saving before every mission, and playing the mission until you 'won', it was not always clear which outcome was a win. And in any case, playing the game that way would clearly be a lot more frustrating than simply playing through and not caring whether you always win, and just do your best. In effect the players who try to 'cheat' the system in Wing Commander are actually punishing themselves with repetition of missions. The casual gamer never has to repeat anything.
Food for thought. I'd like to see more games like this. Even Wing Commander's storyline was fairly primitive. Only two branches per mission. There were no partial wins.
Random and weird software I've written.
Though I love the games, the Tomb-Raider games are a perfect example. You can save as often as you want.
I think you should only be allowed to save at particularly difficult points in a level, where it wouldn't be uncommon to fail three or more times before succeeding.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
"And so, the Buddha sat beneath the bodhi tree, vowing not to rise until completing Planescape:Torment without using save."
If anyone's read Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," it offers a convenient future in which people can simply "back-up" their persona. Modern medicine isn't so focused on healing but rather on restoration. And so, you're only as safe as your latest backup.
The save game feature is as convenient, but it lacks one real-life phenomenon that lie at the fault of a backup. You forget everything that's happened to you since your backup. You don't know how you died. Any actions or conversations you've had still really occurred, only you can't remember them. Time has passed for everyone else...except you.
The videogame save tends to lack this fate. You might lose items or levels you gained from your last save, but the knowledge is still yours. You know where those chests are and you know what's around the corner.
It'd be interesting to see a game develop around saves with a similar hint. Everything that happens after a save still has occurred, even if you die. Your saved game guarantees a convenient point to restore, but nothing else. Persons you've spoken with re-act as if you should know what they've told you. Chests you've unlocked are still unlocked, and those items remain on your corpse. In fact, one interesting fate of death is you'd probably want to go find your old body and pluck the items off it.
I'd really like to see a new form of save point. Create a game that isn't overly impossible to complete with one life, but force the player to choose just when and where they'd like to cache that life. And if death catches you, then you've got all the more challenge to your quests.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
After playing 9/10 of the way through a particularly long and torturous Halo level, I ended up in a Warthog, sliding sideways of a cliff, exactly when the final monster was killed (triggering the autosave).
This gave me the joy, delight and reward of a hundred or so attempts leaping from the falling warthog and just failing to make it to the top of the cliff.
If developers insist upon disempowering the users, they should at least try to ensure the users are not completely sabotaged.
Personally I have always found that over-use of a quicksave function makes it relatively easy for game designers to create "gotchas" that force users to restart a level (used all ammo, didn't flick the switch, whatever) - so I don't believe it is the game destroying function that other propose.
Q.
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It's called life.
Cases evolve when you have saved a number of times and you need to roll back to a certain save to redo everything again. The more saves you have the more often you repeat the same task back to the failing point. That is until you find the right save that allows you to continue forwards.
I know I wasn't the only one who left FF7 paused while I was at work.
This has gotten a bit absurd hasn't it? If you don't want me spending 90% of my time playing the game hitting the "reload" button, then give me a better option. That's why I suggest the familar metaphor of a fast forward and rewind buttons.
How we know is more important than what we know.
and if I rewind too far, I want to be able to fast forward back up to where I was.. I want to be able to pause and examine what went wrong and then try again.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Some games (though I don't remember any off the top of my head) had a twofold saving system which I think usually did a good job at respecting the distinction between saving to get off and saving progress: save points, few and far enough between to present a good incentive to be careful, were the normal save/restore progress function, but you could also save at any point to get out- but doing so would exit the game, and you could only restore the 'save at any point' save the next time you got on the game- no going back to it after playing further.
How about this: Make it beneficial to NOT save. Resident Evil and Chromium both have the right idea: In RE, each save used up an item (an otherwise useless Ink Ribbon), which in turn used up an inventory slot. In Chromium, If you bypass a proctective sheild, you get another life. I like a combitation of theese ideas. Perhaps saving the game should require the sacrifice of a particularly powerful item (that may just save your life). This way you are left with two choices: Try to advance with the benifit of the item, or lose the item as an 'insurance fee,' with the benefit of being able to re-play that part.
Some games I've played have a save counter, where it keeps track of the number of times you've saved, challenging you to keep this to a minimum.
;)
Other ideas I can think of would be to allow you to save anywhere but only once per dungeon or level or whatnot, maybe more on a very large map. This lets someone who needs to get up and go do so, while requiring the people who try to use savegames to replace skill or luck to wonder if they'll be needing that one save right after this part of the map. Or have movable savepoints, where you can carry a save point with you, but you have to give up something else. (probably more for find-and-use-the-item type puzzle games than anything else)
Hidden savepoints that take work (or a strategy guide) to find would be an interesting twist also, but I think this fails to fix the "uhoh, mom wants to use the TV now" form of urgently needing to save
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Interesting, how in this more modern era of instant saving we now have more games with progressive defeats than with instant deaths. Does it break the skill necessary to play Warcraft 3 if the player is allowed to save after every weapon swing? Of course not, because with each encounter comes guaranteed damage, and the tradeoffs between taking and doing damage is what leads to success. Even in FPS shooters, one has to ask "did I take too much damage to save? Is losing 10% of my health for that encounter a bad thing?"
As we have moved away from the realistic one shot-one kill analogy to systems that are a bit more forgiving, the line between success and failure of an attack become blurred. But as games move online, the distinction becomes moot. If you don't like how an attack played out in Battlefield 1942, you have no option to restart. If you took too much damage running your UT2003 avatar into a room full of the opposite team, your recourse is nill.
This really hasn't been a problem in years.
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I hate all the games where you get punished, especially if it's from the computer, that's why I liked quake. You die, you hit the buttons and there you are playing again.
Sure, strategic games and such should be hard to, but since I know I can die and be forced to replay the level I always saves every now and then or just simply don't play at all since I actually get bored (that is probably more true of games like WC3 there the single player missions was so boring). Can't say it would be better if the levels where so simple you couldn't die either thought (the WC3 single player normal levels actually are..).
I've never been a friend of continues either, to play the same game all the time is just boring. I think we got two clear winners here, the multiplayer FPS games there you can just join the game again and the adventure games (probably space simulation and MRPG aswell) like Monkey Island II there the levels are hard but you can't die. Why should so many games contain the die element anyway? To not use it would require more creativity and a better game imho.
But to be serious for a minute or two, if you're going to have a "save when you want" feature, it should be like in GTA. You've gotta not be in the middle of a mission, and go out of your way to do a save. You shouldn't be able to save every 2 seconds. This takes a lot of the fun out of the game. At least with the GTA style saves you can die or fail in a mission, reload right before that mission and try again. There is still a punishment factor involved, whatever you might gain on your way to the mission, or after you finish it, if you die in between your next save, you've gotta weigh the costs against the benefits. Sure you might have just made $4000, but you just lost $100 in fees, and $10000 in all your guns and ammo. You might be better off repeating the mission, but then again, maybe that mission was a pain in the ass and you'll make the money back in 10 minutes anyway.
Another, in my opinion, good save game/punishment style is in Uplink. You can fail, and you can get completely shutdown if you do it enough times, that's easy. If you get busted you might get a game over, or you might get a fine, and you might get a demotion and only be able to earn less until you've proven yourself again. Also, the "save" feature isn't really offered in the traditional context. I haven't really seen a way to go back and undo something. If you get busted and you get a game over, that's it, you can't reload from your last startup. That account is locked, and you're basically SOL. This offers a nice incentive to not fail and to do well. Boring as the game might be, it's holding my interest fairly well and I feel compelled to evaluate possible risks very thouroughly before I just do something.
Just my one cent (hey, being unemployed means doing more with less).
I guess Save Points, and whether there are too many, or not enough, may depend on the player's skill level to begin with.
I can't say I condone the act of saving, then dying and reloading back to the save (so you don't lose the life, etc), in my books that's "cheating" regardless of skill level, but I do see Save Points as a valuable "safety net" for less skilled gamers, and a useful tool even for skilled gamers.
A very skilled and confident gamer is probably going to regard too many Save Points as "taking the challenge out of the game". And to some extent it does make things easier, but if that's a problem, I suggest that those same players simply bypass those save opportunities.
A less skilled gamer however is probably going to rely on Save Points fairly heavily. It provides a way for less skilled gamers to get through a game that they might otherwise give up on entirely.
Also, like somebody else mentioned, frequent save points are necessary for younger children, in part due to their level of skill, and also because their Console/Computer is probably shared with siblings and parents, meaning you're likely to need to save frequently as they tend to kick you off for various reasons (Homework, Dinner, parent or sibling needs/wants/bitched to mum/whined to use the machine, bed time, etc)
i won't bother to buy or play a game that doesn't let me save my progress reasonably. i have a life in the *real world*. games are for entertainment value. if you blame save-games for letting you cheat to avoid a challenge than you're an undisciplined dimwit who probably drives SUVs up 14,000 foot mountains and wonders why hikers piss on your "car" when you get there.
The I-Ninja demo included in Soul Calibur 2 for the PS2 illustrates a great example of non-silly punishment. On one level you must roll a barrel of gunpowder to a set spot, then detonate it. It's rather like monkey ball, except you control the barrel/ninja rather than the level.
If you fall off or the barrel explodes, it doesn't force you to back track or anything else. The barrel dropper drops another barrel, and I-Ninja hops onto the barrel -- ready for another attempt. It also has a lot of cool moves (ala Jet Set Radio Future). It's quick, neat, and unfrustrating. A pleasant switch from all the linear platformers that stick with the jumping-puzzle-frustraction-factor gameplay.
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There's another solution to the problem. In addition to the "savepoint," there also exists a notion of a continue point. The idea is that if you need to stop playing for a moment, it is simple to save your gamestate, but it retains the element of risk, and avoids the introduction of more loadtimes into the game. Basically, the game allows you to save anywhere and removes your save when you resume. This has existed for a long while in many games. Some of the Dragon Warriors, the Mario sports titles for gameboy, and probably the oldest of titles, nethack.
Of course this does result in some side effects. For starters, the lack of permenant "saves" means that if you die you'll be sent off to the beginning to try again. The Dragon Warrior and Mario games accomodate for this by mixing in save points at places like right before entering a cave, or starting a new tennis match.
What designers need to focus on is what gives the game purpose. As much as I hate those academic cooks who talk about video game narrative, almost every game follows the same structure. Go from level to level, retrying until you find the end of the game. Failure in this situation has nearly zero meaning in this repitition model. I hear the Wing Commander games featured a system like this. Unfortunately, academics never get a warm welcome, in part because they have little experience, in part because they make little attempt to be accessible, and in part because they stray from the people's notion of a game.
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I present to the jury exhibit A: Neverwinter Nights by Bioware.
You shall observe that upon death, the player is not forced to replay anything, or to restart the game. They are merely returned to the local temple, less a few XP and gold, ready to return to the fray if they so choose.
In my personal experience, the only times I will save the game, is when I must leave to do something else, since death is handled in the game in a just manner.
Leaving your playstation to the vagaries of family life is not that wise a strategy. 8)
The outcome was good though, the agreement became "Tell player 30 mins *before* you exepect playtime to finish. Then when the time is up, the time is up and no arguing".
When one hears of all sorts of stuff like the device a while back that rationed electricty so that the conflict didn't arise one wonders how the rest of the household conflict is resolved. That kind of living does no good for anyone.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The Killing Game Show on the Amiga (also released as "Fatal Rewind" on the Megadrive/Genesis) had a great feature that I haven't seen since.
If you died on a level, it would take you back to the beginning, but show you a replay of what you had just been doing on the level. You could fast-forward the replay and then take over at any time just by moving the joystick.
Simple, brilliant idea.
If you bite the dust, you return to the king, lose half your gold, and have to put up with the king asking you to be more careful this time.
The problem occurs when the importance or difficulty of the task doesn't match up with the severity of the punishment. Too little punishment or consequences and the game is seen as boring or easy (designers hate that perception), too much and the game is compared to prison rape.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
In LOZ:Majora's Mask the concept was this: the world was about to end in 3 days time, and you had to save it. THis was accomplished through a "groundhog's day"esque system by which at anytime, you could travel back in time and restart from the beggining of day one, but any events you had completed were undone. A lot of people loathed this game for this since if you were half way through a dungeon and time ran out, tough! you had to start over. Anyway, if you wanted to take a break from the game, you could create a "suspend save" which would save your current status and then exit the game. When you restored the save, it deleted itself and that was that. You could pick up where you left off but you couldnt use the save to restore and retry over and over again.
It is a great system, it provided the "save anywhere flexibility without the potential abuses.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Isn't quicksave really a way around designing reasonable checkpoints?
I define checkpoints as predefined points where you will respawn in the same state as when you entered them when you die, but that will not actually save the game for you. Optionally a player may be allowed to save at any point and in another session load+start at that checkpoint but that is not part of the checkpoint definition.
The reason for checkpoints is so that you can not quicksave in a dangerous location and so that any single game event is of reasonable length and difficulty (designing a game so that the only fair way of beating an obstacle is to quicksave every time you do the right thing in a battle and reload every time you get hit is bad in my opinion) and that you have a small enough distance between checkpoints (right before AND right after killing a major enemy for instance).
The ability to use quicksave does make the game more difficult to design and balance, and I think that leads to less entertaining games. Don't dislike a title because it doesn't have a feature you prefer if they have a fair alternative even if it takes a little effort to learn. Dislike games because of bad design or lack of balance instead.
I vote yes to savegames and checkpoints but no to quicksaves.
Like the article says, quicksaves/unlimited saves are a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allows players to leave at any time and come back to the game without losing too much progress (or having to go back to the last save point), but on the other hand players get complacent: save, try something, die, restart from save, try something else, until you've brute-forced your way through the whole game. Autosaving makes matters even worse by taking control from the player while still offering the same measure of safety.
Many people have posted many examples of the suspend save as a compromise: the player can save their game at any point, but as soon as that suspend save is loaded, it disappears. When you die, you return to your last "real" save point. The fact that you can save anywhere allows, say, the 8 year old to save as soon as his mom calls, but it doesn't allow people to game the system and keep trying something until it works, with no lost time.
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The severely underrated Operation Flashpoint solved the need to save and quit before reaching a save point by including an "abort" function. If you quit the mission partway through, you could return to the point where you left off the next time you ran the program. But the save couldn't otherwise be accesed.
The last FPS I really and truly adored single player was Alien Vs. Predator (the first one).
Every one since has been a "Quick save, quick reload" fest, rather than focused on actual play.
The game was ridiculously exciting, especially in the marine levels, because (at least before the save patch) no way to recover if you died, you had to start all over. This led to a style of play very akin the feel of the movie- Jerky glancing back and forth, staring at your motion detecter, firing wildly at any movement. A huge adrenaline rush, and a ton of fun.
Same with most RPGs that don't have save points every five feet- the deeper you get into the dungeon, the more exciting it gets. There's a sense that you will actually suffer a loss if you fail.
I suspect this is part of the reason why MMORPGs are getting more popular. It's more exciting when you're playing a game when you don't have complete control over it. Losses in MMORPGs are permanent (unless the servers crash, rollback, etc). In any case, getting in touch with what makes a game exciting, the sense of danger, that kind of thing, is important to making games fun.
skye
They need to have it so you go to lower level like heaven or hell and have to earn the right to come back to life.
I'd recently been playing the "Final Fantasy: Origins" (FF1 & FF2) re-release for the PS1 while I was unemployed, and found the game to be vastly easier with the introduction of the save-anywhere "Memo" save. Now this didn't actually save your progress if you turned the power off, so it was actually almost strictly a "cheater's" save.
But, given that the mechanic of the game seemed to be that yo had to be lucky enough to not face off against the "killer" monster groups in each dungeon, it was very welcome to me. (How Killer? My party could kill 95% of the monster groups in 1-2 turns, but these would kill or put my guys at critical levels) But, every time I used it because I had just gotten unfortunately destroyed, I felt the pang of guilt as I pressed the reload, but followed immediately by the relief that I didn't have to go through the first 3 floors again. That part was more fun (repetition is punishment), but the accomplishment wasn't as great because of it.
So, I've actually been thinking of this, and it hit me during the reading of the article, why not have a timed auto-save (in addition to the end-of-level saves)? For an RPG this might be more on the order of every 10-15 minutes, for an action game it might be every few minutes. The trick is finding a time that's far apart enough so that the player isn't going to sit around waiting for the save to kick in, but short enough so that the player doesn't feel like they've lost significant progress if they die between them (but still enough to be a punishment).
So, if it takes me 2 hours to get through a dungeon, and it saves every 15 minutes, I can feel safe in "expecting" to die once or twice from circumstances I wasn't prepared for. I'd "lose" about 15 minutes of time, which really wouldn't be that bad compared to having to re-do the whole two-hour bit. Much better, and I think it strikes a good balance between the designer's ability to put surprises in, and the player not feeling overly punished with each new surprise.
Kurdt
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