As a parade, the Parisian teams of Sloclap insist on this trick: with each defeat, the player is not resurrected at the start of the level but at the place where he dies. Only his age, indicated in a corner of the screen, takes a hit. As the Young Apprentice ages, he will have less health, making him more vulnerable to attacks. ” You don’t want something too hard that would lead to abandonment, nor something too easy that would create boredom. It’s all about balance », Comments Théo Caselli.
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Another option, more radical but less widespread: totally reject the principle of loose. So the imminent BACKFIREWALL_, from Naraven Games, where no “Game Over” screen is provided. Considered for a while, the idea ultimately did not fit enough with the story told (that of an operating system for smartphones refusing to be updated). ” In our game, the player cannot loseexhibit together Julia Jean and Lucie Robert, respectively creative director and chief designer at the Naraven Games studio. At worst, in the stealth phases, you can get caught by security and be brought back a little lower in your progress. But there is no failure, because we quickly realized that this posed a problem of concordance between the narration and the gameplay: inside a smartphone, technically, no program ever dies. »
From there to systematize this option for all games? This would require a giant step, which the pundits of the industry are not ready to cross overnight. Undoubtedly the most likely way is that of adjustment over time, after the first ever more detailed feedback from the players themselves. To take only recent examples, F.I.S.T. Forged in Shadow Torch, Lost Ark or Nioh 2 have announced, in recent months, updates to their difficulty systems. Making their interfaces more inclusive, without depriving the most experienced of the most difficult modes. As if accessibility were just child’s play.