How Videogames Make The Ultimate Sacrifice 

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one sacrifice in a game thats done rly well is, and hear me out,,, the monkey temple upgrade in bloons tower defence

Wildermyth does a great job with this. When a character dies, you get to decide how they go out, either dealing a lot of damage or buffing their allies. Then after that, you can build a monument to them that will let them appear in other stories.

It seems that the problem with this trope in video games is fundamental: a heroic sacrifice is fun to watch in a TV show, but it really sucks to play the role of the onlooker that lost their best friend or valuable ally. If you make the loss painful and dramatic, players will do anything in their power to prevent it. In strategy games, you have serious balance problems with sacrificing heroes because it's only worth doing if you're certain to do similar or worse damage to your opponent. Pokemon has had this problem, self-destruct attacks are only useful if they do completely overwhelming damage that will usually take their opponent down with them.

On the topic of Fire Emblem, I once saw a good solution in a D&D houserule to encourage permanent sacrifices: when a character who's on the brink of death/taking lethal damage/choosing to do so of their own volition in a dire situation, their player can choose to permanently kill their character while also getting a strong effect for doing so, like being able to persist several turns after they're "killed" continuing to take out enemies in a final stand, ensuring that enemies won't be able to pass a doorway for several turns, or overchanneling magic through their body to do a very powerful magical attack. Something like that combined with every character in your roster having special short scenes or dialogue afterwards if they sacrifice themselves in certain chapters could really make sacrifices something a lot of people do bc of the narrative it gives along with reintegrating the gameplay and story if the sacrifice helps save another character or lets everyone escape in an escape map, etc.. It'd make each FE playthrough more personal as circumstances come up from how you play a chapter that lead to moments of characters sacrificing themselves, so the story you experience and were involved in making is different every playthrough.

I think Frostpunk does this really well too. The game puts you in a situation where you *can* theoretically get through the game without anyone dying and everyone living happily and maintaining your moral code. But that's also *really* hard when you're in an end-of-the-world survival scenario. And constantly the game tempts you with easier options like allowing child labor or being able to force your workers to work for 24 hours straight and so on in order to make the game easier. Another one is Battlefleet Gothic. As a 40k game it's all about shit getting worse as time goes on. And you start out with a battle map that lists out all these locations and bastions that give you all of these bonuses. Except you're actually already in control of all of them and already getting all those bonuses. Because you're actually defending them, and very quickly the player is attacked on too many fronts at once to possibly defend them all simultaneously, and the player is essentially forced to choose which locations they want to defend or not, and thus what benefits they're willing to lose. Regardless of how well you play in the actual fight itself. That basically just determines if you lose even *more* stuff if you fail.

I think what might've helped Fallout 3's ending is if getting that massive dose of radiation still hurt rad-resistant companions, like they became insane or feral or something. It would at least justify the "asshole" comments. On the other hand, it would also encourage players to find rad-resistant companions if using them to turn on the purifier was a _good_ ending.

I really liked how sacrifice worked in Pyre, or how choices had consequences in general. When you choose a hero to be send back to the overworld you lose a big asset in your team but you also help them to finally realize their goal. Gameplay-wise you are handicapping yourself but narrative-wise you are doing the right thing. What I really liked is the new dynamic that generates out of this. Not only do you have to change your strategies in gameplay, your whole party has new and meaningful conversations and dynamics.

See I've been playing Wasteland, and i think the other big problem is when a sacrifice has really unintended consequences. Like not being able to recruit an NPC because you didn't destroy their home in an earlier choice. Its like WTF I'm supposed to destroy their town to get that NPC to join me!? The sacrifice and the reason don't work.

ending E of nier automata is a really good sacrifice imo. it gives you the choice with no incentives other than selflessness because that selflessness straight up has consequences for real human beings

My favorite sacrifice story was recently when some friends and I were playing through no mercy on left for dead. The helicopter had just arrived, I was barely hanging on and made a bad jump, becoming incapacitated in an extremely inconvenient place. I told them to leave me because at that point I had no intentions of surviving. Then I see one of my friends drop down, and barely manage to pick me up in time, and by picking up some adrenaline at the top of the ladder, we were both able to make it, then had to watch as another in the party got swarmed by zombies and died due to just sheer bad luck. The point of the story is, sometimes the best sacrifice is someone else's.

I was hoping you'd talk about LISA: The Painful when reading the title. I'm extremely happy you are talking about it, as it's much too slept on SPOILER: You also could've mentioned the option to attack Buzzo instead of accepting his dilemma, effectively not sacrificing anything if you ca win the battle. But you can't win the battle, it's impossible, so you lose and suffer both consequences of the dilemma

The problem here is simple: On any seemingly lasting stretch of game two things are true: The temporary sacrifice is too cheap to provide permanent upgrade. The permanent sacrifice is too expensive to provide temporary benefit. As a result, you get only three kinds of sacrifices players will take: Temporary for temporary benefit, temporary for permanent benefit, permanent for permanent. In the first case, sacrifice is cheap and thus pointless. In second case, sacrifice is cheap, stupid to dodge and thus pointless. In third case, people study out-of-game materials for optimal ways and consciously distance themselves away from those they need to sacrifice, thus rendering sacrifice pointless. It's all part of one neverending trait of gamers worldwide, which is being extremely good at damage control.

ME2’s Suicide Mission really isn’t a good use of the Sacrifice subject, because... well, yeah, it’s not about sacrifice. It’s a place where characters can die for good, sure, but its more of a Final Exam. How well have you been treating them (the Loyalty Missions), how much have you prepared (the ship upgrades), how well do you know who can do what best (the Specialist selections), all that ties into it. That’s honestly what makes the deaths hit harder, the general knowledge that it was your fault that they died, and they didn’t need to. I think one of the sacrifices that I distinctly remember kinda working was from Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the Trooper story, there’s a somewhat more important than normal NPC named Sergeant Jaxo. She’s funny, smart, good moral principles. You can have a fling with her if you’re a guy, or a Girls Night Out event if you’re a woman, but either way she’s really well developed. And then there’s a mission that’s a raid on an Imperial prison camp, and you’re given what’s probably the obvious choice: You can save like a thousand Republic soldiers, or you can save her. Pretty standard, sure. But what elevated it for me was that *she’s freaking the fuck out at you possibly sacrificing her*. She’s pleading to be saved. She knows she could be about to die, and she’s terrified. No stoic warrior falling on the grenade this time. It twists the knife just enough to be memorable, because it’s not quite what’s expected, and it really does make you feel bad either way it pans out. And yeah, you’ll never see Jaxo again if you save her, because story branches are a pain in the ass to handle, but it really is a good sign of how to do a sacrifice choice well: You kinda need both options to be bad ones that you don’t want to do...

One of or maybe the OG example of sacrifices in gaming is actually chess. Trading a stronger piece for a simple pawn and a positional advantage is a tactic used at every level since the beginning of the Game.

The problem with "sacrifices" is that it is a plotpoint often used in anti-war film or films where "herorism" is the main theme, the problem in games is that we're usually the people who climb to the top/at the top. And sacrifices don't work the same way if you're at the top of the heirarchy vs. at the bottom. Sacrifices is all about creating sympathy or admirerers afterall, and you've most likely been doing that throughout most of the game anyway. I think darkest dungeon and frostpuntk are probably the two that handle sacrifies the best, people won't necessarily get hte same sympathy out of it, but it's a different kind of psychological discovery. Are you willing to sacrifice children for efficiency? are you ready to throw people through dungeons for money, and just throw them away once they lost their usefulness. I like that the game makes most people do this, because it tells a lot about what you're willing to do to keep a few select "safe". I think those are the best times sacrifice are used, I don't think sacrifice is a good plotpoint outside of that. Since it is such a hero-focused thing, where you sacrifice yourself for some "notion" that the people in power will arrive at the "greater good" or something like that, but it is oftentimes just meaningless. That's just my take anyway.

I feel Pyre could have been covered here as sacrifice is it's core loop, well, not sacrifice but letting someone go.

The "sacrifice" in pyre worked really well for me. You travel with a party through an underworld and sometimes get the chance to release one person from your party into the actual world above. Letting someone go is hard because the people i cared most about were the characters i liked to play the most. But i still let them go so they can get back to a better life for themselves.

Fan fact: Inscryption is based on a Ludum Dare game (that Daniel made) called "Sacrifices must be made" It involves *MANY* permanent sacrifices

There isn't a better sacrifice in games than the Nier series and how it's interwoven both narratively and mechanically, it's gameplay as storytelling to the finest degree

Sacrifices are a great trope in books and movies because they’re being made by people other than us.

The game Into the Breach does this well I think. The game is so challenging that it is nearly impossible to beat with no losses (of civilians), and since your characters have permadeath, you won’t normally be willing to sacrifice them. I’ve had several runs where I got genuinely emotional over having to sacrifice a unit, despite the fact that they are all prebuilt personalities.

I love that Adan added his character's eyes to the enemy in the Darkest Dungeon scene at 5:49!

I've seen a really interesting sacrifice mechanic in the ttRPG City of Mist recently. Your character sheet is basically 4 mini character sheets and to do any of the advanced level ups you need to sacrifice 1 of your 4 character sheets and start a new one from scratch. The rest of the mechanics support this so that it happens at dramatically appropriate times. You can literally burn 1/4 of your character to take over the story and do a cool thing, which dramatically weakens and changes your character.

I thought of a good example myself. Heavy spoilers for Outer Worlds. There's a quest near the end of the game where the player character is tasked with stealing a bunch of chemicals needed to revive the rest of the colonists still in Cryo aboard The Hope. During the quest, the player learns that these same chemicals they intend to steal are being used to keep some people alive, and by taking them, they will be killing these people, who are presumably innocent. The game give you the option to only take a small amount of the chemicals, but doing so drastically reduces the number of colonists you can revive.

All this just goes to show that sacrifices (like other "negative" outcomes to player decisions) only work well when two things are satisfied. Firstly, they are expected, either from a narrative or gameplay perspective. Secondly, the player can somewhat mitigate them, but not circumvent them completely. This gives the player the sense that the sacrifice is fair and lets them take ownership of it, rather than feeling arbitrarily punished.

I think there is an element of the trolley problem as well. Most people will push a button to sacrafice 1 person to save 5 doomed persons. But much fewer are willing to push someone in front of the trolley to do literally the same thing. The reason why is supposedly because the more personnel or involved it feels, the worse their consciousness and the less it feels there's a right choice, even if the math disagrees. And video games are very involved and often very personnel. Also I second the shoutout to GiantGrantGames, those videos are brilliant and fun to watch.

One take on sacrifice that I've always found well is the honest narrative sacrifice. This is hard to set up reliably because you first need the player to truly buy in to the story. Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm has an excellent example of a great sacrifice that fails in that regard: Kerrigan's decision to return to the Swarm. If you're playing through the story of Starcraft 2, you hit this moment shortly after completing a whole campaign that concluded with you, as Raynor, managing to de-infest (well, mostly) Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades and ruler of the Swarm. This...doesn't work as well as it should, mostly because Starcraft 1 makes it pretty clear that Raynor's concern for Kerrigan was more of a war-buddy sort of thing than the very romantic take they're pushing in Starcraft 2. But it's a fun enough campaign and it's a lot of work. And, very early on in the Heart of the Swarm campaign, Raynor is missing, presumed captured or dead, and Kerrigan wants revenge....so she goes back to the Zerg to reclaim her power in persuit of vengeance, willingly sacrificing her humanity in the process. By the time she manages to rescue Raynor, she does it knowing she's so far gone that there's no reasonable hope for their relationship. If we had the whole series's worth of investment into that relationship, that decision would be powerful and painful. But...there's the differences in how Starcraft 1 and 2 handle that relationship that inject enough cognitive dissonance that it's hard to get invested in it. There's a couple of other games I can think of off the top of my head that handle this kind of narrative sacrifice much better: Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 10. FF4 has several moments that are real gut punches, but it makes a really annoying narrative choice late in the game that reverses most of them. Cid, Yang, Palom and Porom all go out like heroes, but they only hit hard on the first playthrough, because on a replay, you know what's coming. Tellah, though, his story is committed to, he goes out as the biggest hero of all of these characters, and when he dies, he's gone for good. He's introduced as an old man following his granddaughter, who eloped with a bard (if you know anything about this game, it's probably the "you spoony bard" line when they eventually meet). By the time he catches up with them, the town they were in was bombed by the Red Wings (a fleet of airships under the control of the antagonist, Golbez), and while the bard survived, his granddaughter did not. We leave him there to mourn his granddaughter, keeping the bard safely out of range of Tellah's powerful magic. When next we meet him, he's attempting to climb Mount Ordeals (a pivotal moment in the story for the main character as well - Cecil is there seeking to give up his Dark Knight powers in hopes of becoming a Paladin, since in this world, evil can never vanquish evil), hoping to find the ultimate destructive magic, Meteor, so he can avenge his granddaughter by killing the mighty Golbez. The newest members of the party immediately recognize him as the great Sage - a legendary figure among magic users, but also recognize that at his age, if he uses Meteor, it will cause so much strain on his body that he'll die. (The game handles this really well in the stats too: his MP is pinned at 90 - 9 less than the cost of casting Meteor, thus making sure you don't prove the game wrong by casting it outside of the proper story beat, and his frailty is further emphasized by the fact that his physical stats (strength, speed and ...vitality?) go down slowly when he levels up - he's old enough that physical exertion is slowly draining him, rather than training his body up.) And you succeed in that quest and later, when the moment comes, Golbez attacks the party, and Tellah stands against him, alone, casting Meteor again and again, then collapsing. Golbez turns out to be even more durable than believed, but he's still forced to retreat...and Tellah collapses, dead. It's a big loss for the player too - at that point in the game, his powerful magic and high magic stats make him an extremely powerful and versatile party member. So losing him sucks, even if you're not fully invested in the story. (In stark contrast to the Starcraft 2 example, where Kerrigan rejoining the Zerg and taking on her infested form again is a distinct mechanical benefit.) FFX's sacrifice thing is entirely reliant on you buying into the story, but there's so many themes of sacrifice that it's hard to point out any but the big two: the entire concept of the Summoner's Pilgrimage, and what happens with Tidus at the end of the game. Summoners (Yuna and others) all travel through Spira, from Besaid to Zanarkand, knowing they will die, but maybe they will defeat Sin, granting the world a temporary respite from the endless cycle of death caused by its attacks. This pilgrimage takes up the vast majority of story time, so we're treated to hours of examination this sort of sacrifice. Conversely, Tidus's fate is substantially less well developed, and only really makes sense if you connect some narrative dots that you likely won't on your first playthrough. But he goes in to the end fully aware that destroying Sin and Yu Yevon means destroying himself as well, and hides that fact from his companions until the last possible moment.

Low-key, probably the best sacrifice experience I've had in video games is during hardcore Nuzlocke runs of Pokemon. Having to decide to sac a pokemon for a free switch or gamble with everyone's lives and the whole run by trying to manually switch and tank an attack in the process is really engaging

the irony of saying sacrifices are inherently undesirable, while showing magic the gathering, were killing 1 creature triggers many other effects, usually better than the reward of sacrifice itself

I think the likelyhood of a "sacrifice" scenario having a positive payoff also depends substantially on the player's temperament. I always thought that I was the sort of person who much preferred games with permadeath or ironman modes - but over the years I've realised that selecting these options just means I'll put the game down sooner than I would have if I'd save-scummed mercilessly. For instance, when a character in DD dies I don't find it to be particularly interesting or meaningful. Its not like some incredible dramatic moment in a movie or a great novel - its just this funny little thing that went wrong and is fairly annoying and chips away and my interest in pressing on - less Iron Giant and more like "oh crap I burned my soup, thats irritating...". Of course the game really doesn't want me to save-scum and I know the creators of the game really want me to have to live with the consequences but the reality is that I'm just not very interested in eating burned soup when I've got plenty of perfectly good un-burned soup to eat. I assume some people experience the Iron Giant thing more than me - but for me its just burned soup all the way down. Luckilly I really enjoy save-scumming & modding, so all is not lost.

You explained it perfectly at the start, I feel cheated when a game suddenly cuts all my options or nerfs me for a scripted scene and kills a character that I could easily have saved.

I've seen this happen as well in Pokemon Nuzlockes here on RU-vid, where instead of treating Pokemon as valued companions, they're treated as fodder for "necessary" sacrifices. I understand specific runs require sacrifices, but because they're treated so callously, so much dramatic tension is lost and it runs completely counter to the idea that Pokemon are your friends. And the whole idea of the Nuzlocke was to make the game harder, both on a technical level and an emotional one.

I believe that you mix two different problems in this video. Narrative sacrifice and gameplay sacrifice. It's a bad writing to kill off character with Narrative use for cheap drama. But it is not the same as inscryption and darkest dungeon character as resources. The idea they are linked is fine on the surface but the problem is not the same. In game with Narrative sacrifice as you said it can make the game feel unfun, but this is due to a loss of agency and Narrative potential being lost. While gameplay sacrifice is more of a problem with too much agency. You could sacrifice the squirrel and goat for a bear now or maybe I can last one more turn and draw my mantis of a less risky win. Games do have problems with both issues but they don't stem from the same place.

My favorite type of sacrifice is when you have to sacrifice your own effort or power in order to do a moral decision rather than sacrificing a person or situation. In the end, sacrificing your own ability, time or effort will always hit hard straight through the screen and can end up with a lot of additional suffering but also often makes it feel rewarding and that you did the right thing. To me, this works a lot better than sacrificing one viritual aspect for another, although that ofcourse does have its place as well if it's well balanced enough and ow oof my feels... I have to mention one of my favorite games as an example; Gods Will Be Watching. The game is hard. *Really* hard. You often wont be able to make it out with everyone alive in the end and seeing the sacrifice you make at sny point last througout the game with a constant reminder of what you did really hits hard, even if it's still mechanically indifferent. You can still save everyone, but it will require you to give up a win in order to try again for a "perfect win" and that caused me so much pain and suffering and it really felt like a meaningful sacrifice. It is one of the aspects that makes the game so unique and ultimately what makes it one of my favorites throughout the times. This is a very complex topic and i'm glad you talked about it! I hope we get to see more games in the future with more well balanced and/or unique sacrifices that carries the impact! Cheers!~

NIce vid as always, but I would like to add another pretty important point which was only brushed over. Two games I feel have to be mentioned when talking about sacrifice in videogame are Nier (as well as Automata which was briefly featured in the video) and Pyre. At the end of the game, the first one asks you to sacrifice all of your save data so that your characters can have a chance at a happy ending. The second asks you at multiple key moments to choose one of your characters to be freed from the purgatory they're trapped in, which is a good thing for them in universe, but means you lose this character as a party member. In both cases you're asked to choose not between two options within the context of the story, but between what's good for your characters and what's good for you as a player. In Pyre, you could free Rukey, the lovable mustached-dog as he clearly doesn't fit in the Downside and want to go back to his family, but that means losing what's probably your best scorer for future challenges and the game is only getting tougher... That's what makes good sacrifices in videogames. Not necessarily that the dilemna be intesting, but that it involves you as a player. This ties back to a video by Innuendo Studio on the game Bastion (here's the link in case someone is interested: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IyhrKPLDCyY.html ) in which he states that, while movies, books or other forms of art can make you feel happiness, sadness or other emotions, only video games, due to their high degree of interactivity can make you feel things like pride and heroism. You are not just following a character doing the righteous thing, YOU are doing it at a (admittedly virtual) cost for yourself. That's why sacrifices in game should affect gameplay. Personally, I'm also not a fan of unavoidable sacrifices, like the end of the first ME and much prefer the suicide mission in ME2. I feel like, if the player is good enough, they should be able to overcome the obstacles they face and still manage to do what's right. Undertale does incite you to never level up during the game, keeping you health pool at a minimum and that's only how you'll get a happy ending for your characters. Even a much more grim and cynical game like Paper Please allows you to save your family without becoming too corrupt if you know what you're doing. It should obviously be much harder than the alternative, but that's what makes it a stronger moment when you do sacrifice something or someone IG, because you know if you played better, you might have saved them and that makes it much more gut-wrenching that the game just telling you "You're going to lose someone dear to you and there's nothing you can do about it except choose who." At which point you can just shrug, resign yourself to it and start coldly calculating the value of each option. I'm not saying this kind of choice should never happen, some stories are explicitly about loss and the fact sacrifices have to be made, but I think it cheapens the message in a way. It's a bit like Spec Ops : The Line judging you for being a complete monster when you had no input on the actions of your character beside guiding them through the levels. While it's pretty effective, mostly because of the awfulness it makes you go through, it doesn't have the impact of doing a no-mercy run of Undertale because in that case, you know that you have the option of doing the right thing. (Yes, I know, it's the second time I mention Undertale, but who can blame me ? It's freaking Undertale, there are a lot of things to admire there.)

In XC2's credit, while I agree that the situation leading up to the sacrifice could've been done better, the actual sacrifice itself does end up presenting a lot of narrative implications down the line and does actually have a pretty strong effect on the story

I was going to write a long comment about how brilliant Inscryption is mechanically and narratively, but it is impossible to discuss the game without massive spoilers. All I can say is that it is one of my top gaming experiences in the past few years and is certainly worth checking out.

I'm surprised there was no mention of Wildermyth: In that game when one of your characters drop to 0 hp you can have them survive with a permanent wound (usually a missing limb), or have them die but give a big advantage to the current fight. Given that there's no conventional overaching story you won't miss any story moment specific for that character, and there are ways to get more characters, making it a temporary setback on progression. At the same time their death not only has the mechanical weight of losing a memebr of your team, but through the game you probably built a narrative and a character to that miserable pile of stats, not only via the tactical combat gameplay but also with the various story vignettes the game randomly pulls regurarly, adding narrative drama to the sacrifice.

"It'd work much better if it weren't the two worst characters in the game: space racist and human-shaped piece of wet bread." -Adam, 2021

I'm still going to defend Mass Effect to the hilt. Not all games are supposed to be the same. The point of Mass Effect isn't to roleplay in a blind playthrough, it's to take the role of the director. You get to make bad decisions for the purpose of making a cooler story and the story you want *is* the reward for doing so. Yes, I've done a "perfect" run of the trilogy, but one of my favourite playthroughs was my Engineer run where I had to jump through hoops to make sure as many characters died as possible. That turned the entire story into a Shepherd desperately clawing every victory they could from overwhelming odds. *I* wasn't doing everything I could to win, but Shepherd clearly was as far as the story was concerned. I still maintain the story of the overpowered badass Shepherd who just gets everything done is also a cool story, however. That's the beauty of the trilogy, by taking the role of director, you get to decide whatever story you think is best for that playthrough.

I _never_ make tactical sacrifices in turn-based tactics games (except maybe Into the Breach, since campaigns are so short there). Maybe it's because I'm a perfectionist by nature. I'd appreciate some kind of "second chance" system to make this feel more like a viable choice with not-so-permanent consequences. X-Com: Enemy Unknown rolls a dice whenever one of your soldiers hits 0 HP to either kill them or put them in critical condition, allowing you to stabilize them with a med kit or by finishing the mission quickly. This makes the soldier unavailable for a few weeks, and I think there's a permanent debuff on them afterward, but at least they keep their skills and levels. I think it'd be great to have an option to eliminate that dice roll and make this happen to every soldier the first time they fall, and when it happens a second time, they're just dead. The debuff would help keep track of who's in this danger zone, and also incentivize you to not throw bodies at the wall haphazardly lest your whole squad be crippled.

Tbh sacrificing things is most fun in card games, because you can build you whole deck around it. So in the end you profit a lot from sacrificing.

I'm surprised you resisted the urge to put a clip of an accidental Spelunky self-sacrifice anywhere in the vid.

amazing video! i was reminded of SIGNS OF THE SOJOURNER, a deck building game in which the cards are the way the protagonist, a traveler, comunicates with other people during their travels. the catch: everyone only comunicates through two kinds of cards, and during the journey you accumulate Fatigue cards that no ones understands. it's impossible to nail every encounter in one playthrough and you have to choose and prioritize, which influences what kind of person your character becomes, the friends he makes, etc. it's a beautiful game. has stayed with me for a long time.

I loved the way pyre had you "sacrifice" party members by setting them free. You had to think about the gameplay and narrative reasons to pick or not pick each character, and there's no way to play it safe really

I would gladly sacrifice myself to bring Adam Millard into physical reality from the Dream Realm from which he delivers his videos.

The fact that games are bad at presenting sacrifice as interesting comes from the fact that they don't have a way to redefine the parameters of the game if you fail at something. Like for example in real life, if someone dies that you care about, then you have to deal with the emotional stuff, but you also have to figure out how to adapt your life to make it still have a notion of "success" that means anything to you. In games, that isn't an option: failure states mean you have to give up. There isn't a real problem with player engagement, because having such a problem suggests that games are still playable enough to engage with after a loss, and that simply isn't the case for any game that exists. You can't keep playing chess without your king, and you can't modify your goals to account for your lessened capabilities in Fire Emblem. Games all contain brick walls that funnel you towards absolute success or ending the experience. Once someone comes up with a game that's capable of redefining itself after a loss, then the idea of sacrifice can start to have actual meaning.

I'm happy some people still make high quality content on RU-vid despite it being less financially sustainable.

GGG is goated. Never thought I'd see him on here!

In magic, sacrifices are a little bit "balanced" on the fact that you can get "value" from something that was dying anyways... A deck with plenty of "removal" often looks pretty silly against a "sacrifice" themed deck. You can also body-block then sacrifice. But of course, sacrifice decks "truly shine" when you join pieces ("combos") which generate more value than was spent in mana.

Thanks for shouting out Giant Grant Games. I started watching his channel last month and has been quite a trip. I love how he manages to pull the impossible.

Wow. I have never heard anyone talk about the ending of Fable II positively. Ever.

When playing games like FE, it's like playing a stealth game for us, a single death is complete failure, and we have to start the mission again. Sacrifices aren't fun to make. Good story is often unfun to experience

Love how your videos make me think about ways I could improve the game I'm intermittently working on. Great thoughts to start the brain moving!

Just wanted to comment you can totally beat those two lanes of bears on Inscryption, me and my friend did it, every boss will do it until you lose at least once or so I've heard. We finished the first run, first try. Its an incredibly interesting and fun game with lots of secrets and its much more than meets the eye.

Not so much about scripted sacrifice choices, but more about losing characters/npcs in general: I continously bounce off hard from most D&D simulation games, like the first Bauldur's Gate that's so well spoken of, because death has no tangible narrative heft at all. I remember in my first playthrough, I lost the "childhood best friend rogue" lady in a street fight, and, well... there was nothing. I think I was expected to either pick the items off her corpse and move on, or just load a save, and both of these things sound just so unsatisfying, I immediately dropped that savefile. I guess what I'm trying to say is you really can't get the narrative experience of sacrifice without a proper denoument of some sort. If following through with the situation is meant to be an option, _you gotta write that in._

Can you imagine threatening to kill someone because you decided to not revive your digital dog? Completely wild

Oh sick GGG! You guys both rock! Its awesome to see youtubers supporting and shouting out each other

I always felt that Mass Effect 1's choice was both impressive and unimpressive. A rare, possibly the only, meaningful choice you can't paragon out of, but like you said, between the two worst characters. My only issue when deciding was trying to figure out if there was any reason to not sacrifice Kaiden, as Ashley's shitty arc is better than a nonexistent one. Now imagine if they had the same choice but made you choose between Tali and Garrus. That would have been a sacrifice.

For narrative driven sacrifice i think red dead redemption does an incredible job of making the sacrifice have an impact without sacrificing gameplay

Nier Automata the bittersweet sacrifice game

Your choice at the ending of nier automata is also an amazing example of sacrifice done right in video games. It's a pretty massive spoiler so I understand why it wasn't included in this video. It's what real sacrifices are like: you lose something and get nothing in return. But you do it anyways because it's the right thing to do. Before playing the game, I would've never made that sacrifice. But the story and message it gave me was so compelling that I had to do the right thing.

Thank you for all your great videos.

3:35 "objectively the right thing" _WAIT, THAT'S THE TROLLEY PROBLEM_

really good video! I'm glad unsighted showed up! honestly a whole video could be made on unsighted itself. there's a lot more to the sacrifice system you didn't even touch, such how the game's near unparalleled open ended structure effects your choices or the game's difficult hidden ending revolving around self sacrifice at a risky chance to save everyone (which makes me getting soft locked at the end of my hidden ending run that much more fitting)

My favorite youtube game design guy talking about my favorite 2021 game!!!!!!!

In Warhammer 40k : Mechanicus, there is an class of troops called servitors, that cost nothing and actually benefit you if they get hurt, encouraging you to play recklessly and send them on suicide attacks, because it ultimately benefits you in the end. However, you only got a limited amount of troops per mission, encouraging you to save some of them for future battles later in the mission. It also helps setting the grimness of 40k via gameplay, which I find interesting. I do which, though, that stronger units could have those kinds of mechanics, getting a risk and reward in getting a powerful character hurt (I’m still at the start of the game, maybe some characters do the same later)

This made me realise just how little I rememeber a lot of character sacrifices in games. period. We usually hear the classic one liner like "Can't wait to see my wife" and INSTANTLY write that dude off as dead. Emotional investment isn't an easy thing to create.

My favorite thing about Inscryption is that you can actually beat those grizzly bears. If you and ur deck manage to defeat that completely unfair shit, you can actually just keep moving on. I pulled it off on my third run through and felt like a genius.

Thank you for recommending GiantGrantGames his stuff is really interesting and I would love to see more channels you recommend

Enderal (a total conversion mod of Skyrim that may as well be it's own game) comes to my mind when talking about sacrifice in games. Its main story initally starts off as the usual save the world plot but as the plot progresses you deal with more and more sacrifices and deaths eventually leading to a point where I had to make a gut wrenching choice at the ending

A very interesting video indeed! It is true, a lot of sacrifice mechanics don't have the weight of sacrifice that other media might have, mainly because of gaming's power to turn back time so often to erase that sacrifice. Pathologic 2 (and 1, to a more poorly executed extent) are great at depicting that kinda sacrifice in a almost realistic scenario (while simultainously being very weird and alien in it's own unique way). From the same devs, The Void/Turgor is also very much about sacrifice too - every resource you spend, every choice you make, even every second you allow to pass in the game world - is a meaningful one, and it's very easy to fuck that up and lose the entire game as the world dies and falls into the abyss. I deffo reccomend looking that up if you haven't already! ^w^

I would love you see you do a video on video game sewer levels. They’re in every game and I don’t understand why. How did SEWERS become such a common level in video games, regardless of genre?

Such a great video asking an ever better question. Stellar work!

A correction to the after the video bit. The starcraft to no build challenges were done on the normal difficulty not the hardest difficulty (except for a few missions in the zerg campaign) and it was without building anything, including structures

I feel like Fire Emblem as a series is an interesting one in this context, as the problem of losing out on game content by letting a character die is a more recent thing, sure, starting with FE6 there were Supports but there was a maximum you could get on each playthrough so it only amounted to 5 small character interactions so for the most part characters were very much disposable and the games constantly gave you new ones to fill in for those that died, sure most players weren't playing it in ironman challenge mode but they didn't always reset either, I myself sacrificed characters, even ones I liked, because they weren't that big a loss, that changed quite a bit starting with Awakening having a bunch of Paralogues which extended the games content by a significant amount and required certain characters to be alive and have maxed out a Support, and with Three Houses' monastery and the Divine Pulse and stuff it feels they've started to design around Casual Mode and characters just never dying because they're more likely to be there the whole playthrough but in turn playing with permadeath feels more punishing. Which I assume is probably why they've turned down difficulty in general, many players would get way more frustrated about the difficulty of not losing units when losing them takes away from the game. When Casual Mode was introduced and there was a a surge in popularity there was a big push of old fans being "gatekeeping" and "elitist" for their preference of permadeath and how they can just play Classic Mode if they want it. But the thing is that the worry was about how the now more popular Casual Mode would affect the game design, in turn making it so if you play with permadeath on you could be playing a less fun version of the game, which is how I felt it because I haven't beaten any post-Awakening game letting a character die, opting to reset because I feel I'd lose way more if I let it happen, before I'd reset if it was a character I really liked or had invested a lot in or if it was the first turn of the map. Even though the games are easier than the old ones they're more frustrating for me.

Interesting topic, I've thought about it some and my current plan for a xianxia inspired game that'd incorporate character deaths without encouraging savescumming and keeping everyone alive too much is to have a reincarnation system where dead characters souls can be used and equipped in various ways and after a certain amount of time and after possibly going through some sort of afterlife they get to be born again inheriting some stuff from their past life.

Great video as always!

your channel is honestly amazing! Keep up your good work please, I really enjoy it :)

Ah, yes. I remember when a Bethesda-made game told me I'm a horrible person for refusing to kill myself

Yeah, I never actually finished Darkest Dungeon despite really loving playing it. It kinda sucked all the fun out of it for me when I realized my inevitable victory wouldn't be one of skill or heroism, but rather the economic victory of the town as its unstoppable commercial progress overwhelms the beleaguered cultists and eldritch horrors. Kind of a cool narrative, but not really one I wanted to sink a bunch more time into grinding out sacrificial low-level dungeons. And the unpredictable, high-stakes nature of high-level dungeons meant sending in my experienced adventurers really felt like forcing myself to play sub-optimally. Just kinda sucked all my investment out of the game.

I was hoping Life is Strange would come up. The life-support sacrifice halfway through the game was so well executed, despite not having an impact on the gameplay, that I was crying for ages afterwards. And what you mentioned about, as a player, making the harder choice for a more rewarding experience is definitely true for that choice, and especially for the final choice. I made "the hard choice" at the end and the ending was much more painful for also much more satisfying and emotionally challenging. It just felt right. The amount of mods that were made to circumvent the final choice in order to create a happy ending is an interesting thing to talk about in terms of players trying to avoid emotional confrontation and sacrifice at all cost, but thereby, as you said, 'sacrificing' a deeper experience. I think the interesting paradox that comes up with sacrifices is that you want the player to make the sacrifice for the sake of the story, but if you don't provide the option not to make the sacrifice, the sacrifice itself loses a lot of its meaning, because then it's no longer a choice, just a forced event. I feel like Life is Strange especially showed this, having a "right" ending, and the ending that only exists to make the "right" ending have more weight through the fact that you had to make a decision yourself as a player. But by doing so, the devlopers risked having a lot of players choose the cheap ending and miss out on the intense, deep emotional experience of the game coming full circle and wrapping up its themes.

Didn't expect to see GGG here, amazing channel. Oh and also great video.

I must admit, I've never cared for these kinds of 'sacrifice'-centric games. I'm too much of a perfectionist, always seeking the 'ideal' game, the golden ending, where everybody lives happily ever after. Looking at it from an in-story perspective, if you have to make sacrifices, it just means you weren't GOOD enough. If you'd been faster, or stronger, or cleverer, you could have avoided that situation. So if a game simply doesn't make it POSSIBLE to avoid such sacrifices, I automatically resent it for fencing me in and refusing to let me play 'my way'. In some cases, if the game is otherwise good enough to hold my interest, I've even gone 'outside the box' to achieve that theoretically perfect run to my own satisfaction, using cheats, save-editing, mods, glitches - whatever it takes to bypass the problem. I may be an extreme case, but I do think that aspect is part of the issue with sacrifices in games. In non-interactive media, those who wind up having to sacrifice for the sake of victory - or those left behind - tend not to be particularly HAPPY about it. Their regret, their cursing of the circumstances, their lamentation at having been unable to find another way, can be quite poignant. So of course, when it's happening to you, you're going to want to find a way around those sacrifices, as in the Fire Emblem example, and resent the game if it doesn't LET you, as in the Fallout 3 example. And because you aren't the CHARACTER but the PLAYER, there is ALWAYS a way to avoid the sacrifice... even if it is just 'turning off the game'.

"Fallout 3 was an... okay... videogame." Not even 10 seconds in and we're already into controversy :p

pyre is still one of my fav. Like each sacrifice is actually positive from a story perspective but hinders you from a gameplay perspective.

Fable 2 was a brilliant game which I loved playing. One of the first RPGs I really fell in love with, the aesthetic, the vibe, finding legendary weapons. Ahhh take me back to when life was simpler as a 14 year old lol

Is there anyone aside from a speed runner who doesn’t try to stay alive in Lone Wolf on Reach for as long as possible?

Despite how a major of players play Fire Emblem, its at least a better choice than to force Ironman mode I have played extreme casual and hardcore Ironman, and while i do highly encourage people to accept losses, im not going to force them to play recklessly because i wanted to goad them towards a certain path.

One game series that does the mechanic of sacrifice really well is The Banner Saga. For the entire trilogy you are journeying through a dying world with scarce resources and many people to save. All the sacrifices, whether it be named characters, civilians to protect, or supplies, build up to a fantastic climax that still keeps the initial world-is-ending pace together.

i think Pokemon nuzlokes have very good sacrifices because sometimes you have to switch in a pokemon as a sacrifice so that another can switch in safely.

The biggest sacrifice in *Inscryption* was the interesting story... Yea I'm salty :'( But in all seriousness, I think a game that has some pretty interesting sacrifices is *Cultist Simulator.* There's only a finite number of named followers in the base game that using one in a potentially dangerous and chanced based way, or intentionally sacrificing them makes for an interesting choice. Really you'd almost never actually _need_ to sacrifice any of them, but at the end of the day, they're ultimately expendable. *The Exile* DLC completely changes the gameplay where you're on the run from the eldritch mafia after stealing 77 years from the Cindered Tally, instead of building up a cult and amassing a fortune of knowledge and resources you are trying to keep as off the grid as you can and running to a new city when trouble eventually finds you. This makes for interesting planning where buying non-transportable goods (property, etc) is risky as you can't take it with you when you're found, on the other hand you can choose to send resources forward to one of your next possible destinations, meaning you can't use them until you actually go there, but you can evade your pursuers much quicker/without leaving as much behind as packing takes precious time you don't have at that point. Acquiring anything in the DLC is a bit of a sacrifice (if I may stretch the term slightly) as you only have your 77 stolen years, buying connections or healing wounds can cost *decades* and you have no way of getting more of them.

Good evening Mister Millard.

Ya know, one sacrifice in games that really stuck with me is Jorge in Halo Reach, the big man told us Reach has been good to him and wanted to return the favor by taking out the biggest threat to Reach in that moment... Only for us to learn he died for nothing, a nearly meaningless death in an even more meaningless war against a foe so numerous and advanced that his death barely mattered in the grand scheme of things... Carter stopped a Scarab and cleared a path to the Autumn for us (arguably making sure Cortana made it to Keys and the Autumn), Six stayed behind to ensure that the Autumn could escape (Buying the crew of the Autumn those few precious moments to launch and sealing Six's fate as one of the last UNSC personnel still fighting on Reach), but Jorge? He took out a Supercarrier only for the Fleet of Particular Justice to appear only minutes at most after his death and bring the Might of the Covenant down upon Reach.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Pyre, which I'm sure would have perfectly fit in this video. On the other side, I'm glad you talked about Unsighted. Never heard about this game and it looks really interesting so thanks for the discovery!

Gotta say, the forced sacrifice adds to the dystopian feeling for me :p

Didn't even know up until now that someone has to sacrifice themselves in "the sacrifice" Granted I played it like 5 times but still Didn't know that

For me the #1 issue with sacrifices in video games is the more often than not they reduce the amount of content in the game. (In this context think of content as mechanical choices/ability and story to experience). The problem is that generally speaking there is no straightforward solution to this problem. On the surface you'd think that the solution would be to make equal content both for the choice to sacrifice and not to sacrifice but content isn't infinite in supply. It takes a lot of time and effort to give a game good content and content divided between two different choices is always going to be less than the content one of those choices would have gotten if it was the focus. Of the top of my head I can see two choices, the first is replayability. A full game's worth of content divided across two choices might reduce a single playthrough's amount of content to half a game's worth, but if replayability is a core part of the game then you'll eventually get that full game's worth. I'm personally don't like this solution, however. A lot of the time replayability is done poorly in that it causes you to repeat a lot of the same things over and over again, wasting the player's time and diluting the content the game has to offer. On the other hand if the replayability becomes too streamlined and easy to access it can cheapen the sacrifices. You'll quickly be making "difficult" choices not because they're curious but because you want to know what will happen when you choose them. The second choice, and the one I much prefer, is to make your sacrifices nothing or little in terms of the overall content of the game, instead relying on good worldbuilding to carry it through. This however is incredibly difficult and requires the special skill to create believably breathing, living worlds. But when it is pulled off your choices no longer become dominated by thoughts of content but instead about more raw and emotional thoughts of how your choices effect yourself, the people around you, and the world you inhabit.

10:05 when you mentioned pathologic I got so excited that you were going to talk about the original game and how brutal it is but how engaging it can be if you stick with it but you just talked about the sequel