Limited Lives are Bad 

I should have put this disclaimer at the start of the video. For anyone about to comment, "You're just bad." Please actually watch the video. Also, two good arguments in favor of lives have cropped up in the comments. And I'd like to touch on them here. First is that lives can add tension and satisfaction to a game. Beating the final boss of a game with no lives feels much better because of the stakes. When losing means restarting the whole game in some cases, the payoff is greater. This I can understand. But I personally do not experience this feeling of tension in games. And the tension itself is created from a desire to not lose your progress, AKA not having your time wasted. Which I still don't think is a good thing. But the tension and satisfaction itself can definitely be of value to many. That's part of why BRs are so popular. Second is that game overs can force a minimum level of skill to be achieved to complete a game. Simply beating a level might not be enough. To finish the game, you're going to have to get good enough to not die too much throughout the whole thing. This is true, and can make a game more fun. Developing your skills in a game can be an enjoyable thing that players would miss out on if they were not forced to do it. But again, there are other ways to get this kind of effect in a game. The game Dustforce is a great example. That game ranks you at the end of every level, and higher ranks unlock more levels. Just playing through, you will eventually run out of new levels to play. You have to go back to old ones and do better to get better ranks to continue on. To even get to the hard levels, a certain level of mastery must be reached. And to get the final level, you have to get the best rank on every level. This forces you to get better at the game, but at your own pace and by your own choice.

A game that did this well, surprisingly enough, is Ghosts N Goblins. It's a very difficult and frustrating game, but when you pass a level, you actually make progress and pass the hump. You don't have to go back and do the level again if you fail another too many times. It's a great example of a game being extremely difficult without being tedious and wasting your time To quote AVGN: "Remember in high school? If you failed senior year, you just started senior year all over again; you don't go all the way back to freshman year!"

A little anecdote on a recent experience with video game lives: My little sister really loves the Sonic movies and asked me if she could try playing the games. I agreed and introduced her to the classic games via Origins. So far, she’s been playing in anniversary mode. This is her first video game ever, so she wasn’t very good starting out. Luckily, because anniversary mode just lets her respawn at the recent checkpoint, she was able to try sections of the acts over and over and get better and better. She’s been improving a lot since she started. She can now clear most of Sonic 2 on her own, whereas before she struggled to finish even green hill act 1 without dying. One time she wanted to try to play Sonic 1 in classic mode. She kept dying in Marble zone and got game over after game over. Eventually she got really frustrated and switched back to anniversary mode. That kinda made me realize that if Origins didn’t have anniversary mode, my little sister may have never given Sonic a shot. Heck, I almost gave up trying to beat Sonic 1 my first time because of the constant game overs. People improve at their own pace, and there’s really no point in punishing newbies for not “getting good” fast enough. It seems to only discourage in my experience.

There should always at least be an option for Unlimited lives. Lives style gameplay isn't fun for me, losing progress and having to restart is just the biggest fun killer to me personally.

I like lives in Sonic games because I want to see how many I can stack in one playthrough by holding rings, finding secret monitors and getting a high score in zones. In Mania I can get ~40 and it’s satisfying to see the number increase because it reflects your skill, it’s a goal beyond just beating the game. If you had infinite lives in Sonic games then collecting rings past 32 would’ve been pointless. But I do agree there should be an infinite lives option to introduce the game nicely to new players.

the best live system that I've ever seen is the one in the sonic unleashed wii/ps2 port, you start the act with a fix number of lives per act and you can't get more in the level itself but as a collectable in side content that increases permanently that fixed number, just like obtaining hearth pieces in zelda.

Lives discouraging experimentation feels like a limp point, considering that advanced techniques are by definition for advanced players. Nobody jumps into a game like Super Monkey Ball trying to pull off insane tricks without first knowing how to beat the stage conventionally. Advanced tricks like skips, shortcuts and exploits are something that you build on top of a foundation of pre-requisite skill. Lives demand that you meet that pre-requisite to at least a modest extent. A great example of a thoughtful lives system is Sonic 1. The game only has like an hour’s worth of content, but emphasises skill and replayability by being so demanding. Sonic showers the player with extra lives and continues for actions like exploring the stages, holding onto rings, entering special stages, i.e. playing the game optimally. If a player reaches Stage 4 with only 2 lives, the odds are they aren’t playing optimally, either because their grasp on the game’s fundamentals is weak or because they were having trouble with certain hazards. Eventually they’re gonna get sent back to Green Hill Zone, a stage designed to be a safe playground that teaches you the play mechanics. By your 40th run through Green Hill Zone, you’re gonna be a substantially more robust and competent player than your 1st, and you can apply that skill to every challenge in the game. You’ll naturally start building up a bigger cache of lives through playing optimally, which in turn gives you a *safety net* to perform more experimental and reckless stunts. The incentive to push the game beyond its limits is still there, you just have to earn it. In Sonic 1, a player with a tenuous grasp of how the game works will simply never see the later stages. Whether this is a flaw comes back to the different ways we view video games over time. In 1991, the goal of video games wasn’t necessarily to see new things or even just reach the credits. The goal was to play it over and over and over and over until you mastered its challenges. Nowadays video games are mostly about scope and variety; the idea of being stuck in the first two levels of a brand new game is unthinkable. In 1991, simply reaching Labyrinth Zone doesn’t necessarily mean the player is ready to move on to the next stage, because playing Labyrinth Zone is a very different thing from actually mastering and understanding Labyrinth Zone. In this sense, I think it’s fair to refer to this kind of lives system as “dated”, as it was designed to compliment a kind of play experience that is much less common today than it was in the 90s. Applying this kind of system to more modern game design, like Mario 64 or Banjo, is rightfully considered superfluous. In fact, Sonic 1 was considered a disappointingly easy game in its time, since the standard skill level of players was so much higher than it is today, undoubtedly as a consequence of how demanding games tended to be. (It’s also worth noting that way fewer people played games back then, likely as a consequence of the exact same thing.) I’ve watched in real-time how Sonic Origins upending the lives system has transformed the play experience. Armies of players trying Sonic 1 for the very first time were now beating it in a single sitting, and not getting much out of it. Now the challenge of the game isn’t mastering each stage’s design and play mechanics under a strict penalty, but simply making it to the next checkpoint. This lowers the game’s skill requirement to an unrecognisable state. An 8-year-old could pick the game up for the first time and comfortably beat it in a handful of hours, as long as they keep beating their head against whichever 1-minute stretch is giving them trouble. The unavoidable consequence of this is that the people beating Sonic 1 in 2022 possess substantially less skill than the people that beat it in 1991. They’ve put less hours into the game, are less familiar with the game and likely have much less of an attachment to the game. I guess you can make an argument that if the game is any good, players will choose to stick around even after the credits roll, because the act of getting better is just that much fun. But that doesn’t change the fact that the original game’s life system was implemented with care and attention to compliment the intended experience.

For me it depends on the game. Sometimes they can encourage you to play skillfully and stay alive instead of mindlessly ploughing through a game without thinking, sometimes they are just a nuisance and make the game way more tedious than it needs to be. They don't really bother me if the levels are short, but if the levels are long and you have to start over from the beginning, it's a pain in the ass.

Limited lives are much more exciting to me because I have actual stakes. The setback of a gameover feels like an actual journey. When I am finishing a game or level or something and I'm on my last life the amount of adrenaline is higher than anything else. Because you know it's your last chance and there will be real consequences

I thought games were supposed to give you the feeling or experiences of something you can't actually do. Having a life system in game allows some of us (like me) to finally have lives, something we wouldn't have otherwise! :D

This was a very good video. All I'll say is that there still needs to be a reward in Sonic games for getting 100 coins, cuz' otherwise there's really no point in collecting more than a handful. I liked what origins did in giving you rings to buy things with. It's just there really weren't that many interesting things to buy at the Museum.

I used to think lives were an archaic design choice, but I feel like I've become much more open to older design sensibilities because of how streamlined games have become recently. I'd think a lot of older designs can have value and shouldn't be dismissed because they seem bad most of the time. I think being afraid in a game can be fun and overcoming something with limited lives could be more cathartic than if you just had an infinite number of tries. some popular games and genres of games would not exist if limited lives was not a thing. For example the whole rogue-like genre is based on having limited lives. Often time you have only one, but in some cases in the games you can get additional lives or even recover lives you lost. So lives as a reward are still valuable in these kind of games. I also feel like almost every arcade game doesnt really work unless you have some limit on lives as well. I definitely enjoyed metal slug more when I had limited lives, which forced me to play better than when I had infinite and dying would reward me with more bombs and a machine gun.

I feel like hard games with infinite lives (like Celeste) are a good way of showing why games with no lives can be good. You will die A LOT but you learn from your deaths. You start doing better and better at sections and then after beating a level, you get shown how much you died. You then aim to get better on repeated playthroughs since you have gotten better at the game. Deaths aim to improve you at a game, not to punish you.

I think it depends on the game, sometimes limited lives work and sometimes they don’t

Personally I disagree. I think the setback of running out of lives gives me the opportunity to go back and master the earlier sections so I can be better and more set for the next part of the game. That being said there should always be an option in the menu for those who want infinite lives.

Big thing is that different games offer different challanges. Something like Celeste/Super Meat Boy is about insanely difficult individual challanges, while a Castlevania or Mega Man game is about endurance. The individual jumps and enemies in these games are easy, the challange comes from having to do lots of them in sucession while accumulating the least amount of mistakes you can. If you remove lives from them, than you have to make the individual jumps and such super hard to compensate, and all games will inevitabily just become Celeste/Meat Boy style affairs, which I personally just find a lot less appealing.

My problenm with limited lives is that, most of the time, they are either obnoxious because you get very few and the game becomes very punishing, or you get so many or die so little that they become pointless.

I completely agree with everything you said. The only reason I like lives is because the monkey living in my brain say "big number, me happy"

Only reason why those games have limited lives is to punish the player for their bad skills. Makes you more willing to not die and try your best for next time which when you complete a stage or the game overall you feel proud and happy that you achieved it after the challenge. It can be off putting, loosing progress and resetting the stages / levels. Frustrating and off putting to keep playing. Me getting stuck on chemical plant on sonic annoyed me alittle and stopped playing, i dont have the skills or knowing the layout off by heart so it makes it harder for new players.

Personally I would argue that the unlimited lives in Crash 4 are what allows it to be as difficult as it is. Because they don't have to accommodate for players having to go back to the start of the level they can ensure people won't get demoralised and frustrated about a bunch of stuff they have already done because they are having trouble with a certain challenge, that way they don't have to tone down the challenge to avoid turning too many people away from the game. Add to that what you mentioned about unlimited lives allowing for more experimentation and risk taking and it allows the developers to ask more of the player. You can tell that this is the intention with Crash 4 because they advise playing with unlimited lives and major challenges in the levels are bookended by checkpoints.

That depends on the game's design in my opinion - open-world sandboxes focused purely on slower-paced exploration like Super Mario Odyssey or precision platformers like Celeste, Super Meat Boy or Crash 4 work with infinite lives/tries because they are focused on individual moment-to-moment challenges (that's why those no-damage/perfect run gems in Crash 4 don't really work all that well) or, in case of SMO, the fun of exploration and experimentation. However, infinite lives can also lead to an almost save state-like approach of brute-forcing games instead of learning and appreciating their design. The recent Rayman games suffer from this, in my opinion. I'm not some kind of "git gud" kind of gamer, but I think there's a benefit to both approaches, and in an ideal world there would be a toggle of some kind to satisfy both kinds of players.

In my experience a lot of game overs just make you replay parts of a game that you've already beaten which makes learning the part you struggle at way harder

As someone who has a rapidly shrinking amount of free time to "Git Gud" at video games AND a rapidly growing backlog of games to play, THANK YOU. I'll happily choose to play a game with infinite lives. I play games to have fun, and I can't be bothered to restart whole levels over when i'm supposed to be learning *as I go*. As you said in your video, there are WAY better ways to incentivize players. The people mocking you in the comments just need to feel superior because they "Play Games Better", which is honestly very shallow while also ignoring the things you bring up in the first place.

You are correct about arcade games which were the foundation for many games in the 80’s and 90’s. What you didn’t mention is the option of purchasing additional lives, or that scores accomplished using more than one coin were generally not recorded on the high score table. Essentially you can have as many lives as you like provided you have the cash, but your accomplishment doesn’t mean anything until you can do it on one coin. So basically the arcades nailed it decades ago

15:21 this depends on the games length, and it depends on the player, different players have a different mindset to how they approach these things, some people are more willing to experiment in a game at the risk of having to restart the game depending on how long it will take them to get back to where they are, it's not that outrageous. Also, I mentioned my experience with metal slug in the other comment, I want to add to this, I can assure you, I would not have been as perceptive of what killed me every time I died, if death wasn't as punishing as it was, because it goes both ways, not being punished enough for dying will make you not care about dying, which doesn't encourage you to learn how to avoid it, it doesn't discourage you from it, but there's no reason to care about avoiding death if dying doesn't penalize you.

About two years ago, I beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the first time and had died right at the final boss one hit from winning. I did play through the game the next day and beat it with around two lives remaining and it felt pretty satisfying. However, I get people who don't want to deal with a game-over and I love the option for switching between the two modes. I feel like the best way to have lives is to link them to the level itself, rather than the entire game. For example, if you lose all of your lives, you have to restart that level, not the entire game. Along with this, getting extra lives won't add to your total life count everywhere, just that stage. Let's say you start with three lives initially, you get two extra lives and beat the level and move on to the next, now your lives are reset back to three. This would solve the issue of finding a way to get a high amount of lives, keeping the challenge of not dying while allowing the player to move on at their own pace.

Agreed. Lives are a old concept from the arcade era where the main aim was to suck money from its players.

The dumbest thing about lives in gaming is in some Sonic games, if you simply restart the stage in the pause menu, you will lose a life. That is the stupidest decision in connection with lives I have seen in any game ever. Especially because getting a Game over and clicking on ,,Continue >Yes

Seeing the crash bandicoot footage makes the game look so cool and fun... I didn't watch the crash review video cuz I didn't care about the games but I think I might pick it up

Its 2:00 am and a new Pariah695 video dropped, this is nice

For me I feel more happy with myself overcoming a game like Crash 1 because it will make a fluke impermanent to the playthrough. If I accidentally damage boost after losing a mask and exploit the invincibility frames to progress, it doesn't cheapen the experience because I'm likely going to be made to do it properly later on. And it's not like damage boosting like a scrub doesn't have value because I get to learn what's in store later in the level. I agree with everything you said about the system being exploitable. Grinding for lives is just an oversight. I think if I made a Crash game I'd replace lives with checkpoints that break after 1 use, and a game over would occur when you either run out of these checkpoints or don't get far enough to reach the first. Overall I think there are games like Crash 1 which operate best with a ''push factor'' (lives) because the focus is on surviving clean, completionist runs. Classic Sonic having lives is incongruent with that quote from Yuji Naka(?) where he said the incentive for playing well is learning to speedrun through repeated playthroughs - a ''pull factor''. Sonic 1 already has the big rings as a less important push factor which encourages clean runs, making lives redundant basically in the designers' own words. The worst thing about lives is being unsure if 1 or 0 indicates your last life.

So eloquently put. As someone who usually likes lives systems, this definitely convinced me otherwise in the majority of circumstances. I guess I had never really thought about it too deeply before beyond just liking the idea of the tension they can exert on the player in certain situations. Amazing video as always.

For a game like Sonic, lives are important to introduce the game to new players, the whole game was structured behind the concept of always improving your gameplay to get go the end as fast and as optimal as possible. Without lives you will just continue from last checkpoint or act, without ever seeing the other routes and paths that were made for players to always look out for in a way to conserve their lives. With infinite lives you are basically removing content from the game without ever the incentive of actually exploring different paths of the level design each time you get a game over. Lives some times aren't just a sort of artificial punishment, they did design their games with that system for a purpose.

I agree with pretty much everything you said. One example that shows how limited lives can make a game easier are the old Mega Man games. I really like trying to defeat all the robot masters with just the buster, which requires actually learning the fight and avoiding their attacks consistently enough. However, the game actively punishes you for trying that with the threat of having to play the entire level all over again, so it's much better to try and use their weakness or spam E-tanks to get past them. This way, the game steers you towards defeating all the bosses by essentially just mashing buttons, even if you would actually enjoy the process of losing the fight a few dozen times while you're learning all the patterns and eventually having a more rewarding victory. In Sonic Origin's case, people are probably so burned out by the amount of remasters and remakes that are significantly easier than the original, without even giving more experienced players the option to enjoy the original balancing, that it really is just a matter of principle for them.

I think the point of lives originally was to stop less skilled players from getting to harder areas and make them build more skill from playing earlier levels multiple times, but clearly lives are flawed

"Limited lives are always bad" [Roguelikes want to know your location]

There is a game that i think did lives pretty well : Sonic 3 & Knuckles. In this game you must complete a zone which has two acts and a boss at the end of each. If you lose all your lives and get a game over, you can restart from act 1 of the zone and since this is a sonic game, you can try to look for secrets or ways to finish the act faster or safer. the game is not too hard so you're not really punished and you can learn pretty fast by sometimes just slowing down, the game reminds you that it's dangerous, speed and success aren't granted. going back on the subject of exploration, there's a lot of helpful things that you can discover like shields, lives and even special stages which even if you fail, can grant you a continue by collecting enough rings. (which is very useful because not only it gives you three lives after a game over but it can also reset the clock so you don't have to worry about a time over) There's also Sonic Rush that i think did a pretty good job by letting you do two acts of the zone and then you can just fight the boss in a separate act and that progress is not lost, you just have to complete two acts before the progress is saved.

Therapist: cures someone's depression *Credit card declines* Therapist 8:38

I like lives because they discourage you from playing recklessly, but I think many games just need to be restructured for them to mean something again. A bad example of lives are most 3D Mario Games and the "New Super" Games because a Game Over only sends you back to the beginning of the level you're in and you can save at any time. A good example would be Sonic Unleashed on Wii which doesn't give you any lives in the levels, so you need to play cautiously. And I'd argue Mario Galaxy 1 actually uses the lives system pretty well, because they force you to strategize or lose all your progress in that level and if you DO lose them all, the game boots the player from the level which may encourage them to come back to that stage later. Overall I think lives are a necessary evil to give games more tension or else beating it becomes more of an inevitability than a challenge.

Limited lives in Crash 4 has never been an issue for me. Im basically perma stuck at 99 lives because each level has so many wumpas you get ~7 of em for every level you complete. An extra life crate has an extra life AND a big wumpa ~1.3 extra lives. You'd have to be DSP or some shit to get a game over in C4 IMO

I don’t agree that unlimited lives means there’s no punishment for dying. Cause dying IS the punishment

this is the main reason why i don't like levelling up in most games. it's just there to waste your time, and i think most designers seem to put them in (much like lives) - just because they can, and because other games they like are good in SPITE of having levelling. i think levelling up is either entirely arbitrary, grindy, and annoying. like lives. adding new abilities wouldn't be tedious, but just boosting the players' stats and then boosting enemies' stats... it all balances out to be meaningless because they all level up so evenly that it just forces the player to either grind which is OPTIMAL BUT BORING, or be underlevelled and make the game more punishing (i guess this is kind of irrelivant, but this video reminded me of that).

You made me think of a way to amend the lives system. If a player can clear a world/zone/whatever-else without dying once, a game over would only have to start the game from the world/zone/whatever-else you didn't not die on, meaning players can avoid needing to replay sections they've already mastered. This will leave them only to replay content they perhaps haven't bested; They will have only to climb what they have not mastered.

Personally I think limited lives are stupid but I want them as a option for the weird people that want to play like that

Hold on... Lives punishing bad/new players is now a bad thing? If they aren't good enough to cleanly beat the level, they aren't ready for later levels and need to remain in their current position until they get better. This is 100% a you need to get good moment if the lives are what gatekeeps your (using your as a euphemism here, not specifically you, the guy who wrote this video-essay) progress in a game. The problem here is that this video exclusively looks at this topic with a modern mindset, trying to best the game and that's the only goal. No care for leaning the game, let alone mastering it, or even replaying it at all. Lives came about in a time where replaying the game you spent $60 (or more) on was not only normal, but something everyone did. Games weren't the worthless toys they are today that were consumed to completion once and then discarded for eternity after.

Watching this video and your take on limited lives alongside your extensive coverage of Sonic games I can tell that you'd love Freedom Planet 2. This platformer has limited lives to every stage which you can increase by finding extra lives in the levels so it's actually worthwhile to collect the extra lives. ESPECIALLY since there's also a Streets of Rage style revival mechanic where you’d pay a set fee of gems alongside a life to instantly revive with 1HP, turning the life system into a resource you can use to keep going on that particular attempt.

2:02 This line reminds me of that AVGN line where he says that the Tiger Electronic games are so outdated, that they were never in-dated.

If the punishment for playing your game poorly is to have to replay the early game more, then you're saying that playing your game is a punishment. That doesn't sound like good advertising to me.

I want to ask, how do you feel about the implementation of lives in a game like Doom Eternal or the use of quicksaves as a resource in Wrath Aeon of Ruin? Also, if you haven't played Doom Eternal I'd really like to see your thoughts on it!

10:20 let me tell you about my experience with a series called metal slug. Metal slug anthology version allows you to play through the game with unlimited lives, as opposed to the original versions of the games which gave you only 12 lives for the 5 stages of the game, I had beaten some of them as a kid with unlimited lives, and while I loved the art style and the comedy of the game, combat with unlimited lives was boring, because the game doesn't take any progress away from you when you lose, you continue from the exact point you died in, the thing that makes a challenge exciting is the penalty for failure, and in videogames the penalty is generally a loss of progress. Important to note, metal slug games can be beaten in less than an hour if you don't game over, which is the biggest reason why limited lives work in a game like this. Just a few months ago, I decided to try and beat all the main entries in the series with limited lives for the first time, I started with the original version of the first game, so 12 lives for the five levels, the thing I learned very quickly was that every time I died, I made a mental note of what killed me, and I would make sure to remember it and be ready for it next time, and with this, over the course of a few days I continuously died, learned, adapted and persevered, and the further I got into the game, the more hyper focused I would get, the more my heart rate would rise, and I felt awesome for how skilled I was at the game, and after 5 days of starting the game from scratch, I beat the final boss on my last life, despite having gotten to him with a whole 10 of the 12 that I started with, damn near had a heart attack, it was awesome, i would never have gotten that feeling if the game didn't have limited lives, or even if the game gave me a checkpoint at the start of each level, because the more severe the penalty for losing, the more pressure you feel to not lose. The second game didn't go so glorious for me, I tried for like a week before I gave up and switched to anthology version, I managed to get to the final boss, but I was dying so fast to him, that I would lose all my lives before I could learn how to avoid any attacks, and it being the final boss meant I would have to fight through the whole game again which is already an intense task, so no matter how many times I tried, the original version was hopeless, so I switched to anthology which gives you 60 lives instead of 12, and it was barely enough, when I beat the final boss I had 12 left, I left the game feeling defeated, but I still went on to play the rest of the anthology, and for the rest of it, I was not as disappointed, cause they showed me that going forward with just 12 lives would never have worked because of how hard they all were, and I finished every single one of them, and it's currently my proudest gaming achievement, I'm very confident in saying that metal slug games are the hardest games I have ever played, and they are the only games I consider hard.

The souls games don't rely on lives to present players with a clear and present challenge. Lives feel like artificial difficulty and a time wasting feature in the modern day. Super Meat Boy is one of the hardest platformers I've ever played, next to Celeste, neither of which have lives or game overs, yet there's a clear sense of achievement and victory when completing their respective levels.

Playing Sonic Adventure 2 on Steam and trying to clear all the bonus missions is the first time I realized the lives system is broken. There's a "restart level" option should you screw up, but it costs a life. And when you reach 0 (your last life), the option to restart disappears. You have to exit the level and go back in, restarting from 4. It was annoyingly tedious.

I feel like this a case by case basis. I would prefer lives in a game like crash or sonic where the levels for the most part are short and sweet but there isn't as much of a reason to have lives in a more open game like banjo kazzoie or jak and daxter. In my personal opinion the best thing to do is making limited lives optional like what was done for crash 4 because giving people the choice for limited lives or unlimited lives isn't hurting anyone.

There's two types of players: the ones that want a challenge -above all else, and the one who just play the game without any further intentions (they don't care about getting the best ranks, mastering the mechanics, etc.). Everything we talk about has to acknowledge that fact. The argument of removing lives because it makes people have to replay sections is one that appeals to the players who don't care too much (which isn't necessarily wrong), but neglects the players that want a challenge. I, personally, like a challenge. If I can literally die 50 times to a boss and there's no consequences to it, it trivializes the challenge. It isn't necessarily bad itself, but it makes it feel like just a random task and not an encounter. It would only really be enjoyable for those players who don't really give a fuck about the difficulty, the mechanics, etc. There's also games that WANT to provide a challenge deliberately; In such cases the type of players who don't like having a hard time won't be pleased to begin with, anyway. Again, lives cannot be isolated from the fact that different players look for different things. I do agree that having a lives counter while being able to play any level that you want through the level selector (because you've already finished the game) is pointless. I also think that there should be some reward for those players who have mastered the game to a point where they can mass stack lives (because having the counter at 99 isn't enough IMO). Most of this can be reduced to allowing lives to be toggleable and not putting them in pointless parts of the game or games where lives would slow the game down significantly. Like most things when it comes to games is very subjective what option is best for we play videogames for enjoyment and although there are ALWAYS objective aspects, enjoyment is subjective in and of itself. In general, Lives can be good or bad depending on the demographic you try to appeal to.

Just thought of how to implement lives correctly...pull a "meta/undertale" on the player. Every time you game over something changes and if you explore enough you can progress differently...essentially you never lose progress even when the game tells you you lost progress...

I only game over in Banjo Kazooie once in my entire life, Rusty Bucket Bay; then again I was a toddler and didn't have real game skills yet. My dad had to help with the last level of Mario 64 when I was 4.

In arcades, lives were not really for padding the game out; that was just a bonus. The real purpose of lives was that if you ran out, you HAD to put in another quarter to continue the game where you left off. In a home console game, this would be slammed so hard, the game wouldn't even release before they revert it, but in arcades where the point of the game machines is to make money for the business, its a lot more understandable. Also a game I find does the lives system well is the Prinny series. You get 1000 lives right off the bat. You have absolutely no way to get any more ever. Your task is to go through this ridiculously hard game with your 1000 lives and try to complete it. If you lose all your lives, the challenge is a failure and you have to try again from the very beginning, but with how many lives you have, you have ample for experimenting with harder segments to better yourself. You CAN take the safer and easier route to preserve lives, but unless you are already extremely good at the game, this is short-sighted at best as later levels' "safe" routes are often more dangerous and risky than earlier levels' risky routes. The game has a host of other problems, but the whole thing was specifically designed with your many, many limited lives in mind, making it a challenge of get through this gauntlet of stages before it kills you 1,000 times. Oh one last thing: People absolutely did get a game over in Banjo-Kazooie... though an overwhelming percentage of them would be in Rusty Bucket Bay. I know I did a few times before I learned how to proceed THAT room.

As others have said: depends on the game. For instance, playing arcade games with unlimited lives feels like you take the challenge out completely, just mash buttons to win. In some games, limited lives can encourage you to up your skills, like old school shooters and run & guns. On the flip side, I've never beaten Sonic 1 because limited lives and no save / PW system, which can be frustrating.

lives are actually dated tho. they only exist because of arcade machines. they function as a way to get people to pay more to keep playing or let the other person in line play next. that's why it exists. now it is just a remnant of that design left over that no longer serves any purpose. it only fufills it's original function in some pay to win mobile games. it is a bad design because it only exists because of the time period it was in and the context. thus making it dated. also you could never go back to play previous levels in arcade games anyway

I do feel you're a tiny bit over kill on giving limited lives a negative place in design. You talk about stringing together a game into one long challenge, but something like Mario is often made up of levels with checkpoints. You progress, get a checkpoint, and if you game over you go back to the title screen and resume where you left off. When you die in this kind of scenario you go back to the start of the level, and giving more weight and merit to check points. If you fail too much you essentially lose that check point and step backwards, in this case it does sort of encourage mastery of the previous and not relying on luck to have gotten that far... otherwise you'll be able to brute force the entire game. However, I understand that liking or disliking that sort of thing is subjective. Implementation is everything from a design perspective, limited lives by default aren't bad. The way the devs implement it is key, its just that its harder to justify their inclusion. Take a SHUMP game, and remove their limited lives, something like Touhou would lose a lot of its core identity. (Just in case you dont know) You get rewarded for grazing bullets, aka getting as close to bullets without dying, the risk of dying is losing a life and getting closer to a game over. The game is designed around being hard, but fair, where you can memorize and practice patterns to perfection. Likewise, dying constantly until you get through the fight would really deprive you of the experience itself. This is the kind of game that benefits from multiple level difficulties. The more modern ones also allow you to continue despite gaming over, at the loss of score. It also helps to point out that dying also rewards you with extra bombs (aka the ability to become invincible and clear the screen of bullets' while doing massive damage). In this kind of scenario lives can also be strategic, or a means of ensuring the player may clear the stage isntead of dying literally every second. My point is that limited lives, by its nature, isn't bad. It has its place and a role, but its very easy to misuse as a means of artificially punishing players for performing poorly. If a game has limited lives, it kind of needs to be designed around it to enhance the experience, but rarely do you ever.

it punishes you beyond whatever checkpoint you've reached and also allows designers to add extra things like side paths that reward you with more lives or lil coins to collect

Furi has an interesting "lives" system. It's a bossrush game, so this won't apply to most games, but it's a very interesting solution nontheless. Both you and the boss have multiple healthbars. Depleting the enemy healthbar moves the battle on to the next boss phase, heals your current healthbar to full and gives you 1 extra if you lost one (you always start with the max of 3 full bars). If you lose a healthbar the boss heals their current one, basically restarting the phase. So on the surface it's just a classic "get the enemy healthbar down before he gets mine down", but not really. The immediate challenge is always limited to the current healthbar, not total healthbar. If you lose all health you have to restart the fight from scratch which adds a extra challenge and connects everything together. The best idea though is regenerating 1 healthbar after a success. That means you'll always go into a new boss phase with a minimum of 2 tries left in the bank, so if you die cause it's your first time and you took more hits cause you didn't know the enemy pattern yet you get a second shot.

Fantastic video, I kept trying to write a comment during the video, but backspacing it every time you said exactly what I was going to. I think everything "limited lives" are trying to do can only really be done well in roguelikes. Barring the game you mentioned at the end, as that is much closer to (as you said) just having multiple health bars, instead of the limited lives we're talking about. I've also gotta say, limited lives in games where lives are placed cleverly make me sad, because if they were just a collectible and their progress was tracked, I'd actually find all the little platforming challenges these lives are hidden behind! Like Sonic Mania!

Weird game to bring up and I don't know if you played it but Binding of Isaac has a really weird/interesting lives system that affects the gameplay so much more than the game just saying "try again". Lives in BoI are pretty strategic, I think my favourite example is the 9 lives one called Dead Cat. Where if you take Dead Cat all of your health immediately goes away and you're set on 1 heart but you get 9 lives. Although lives are rare and not really a main focus but you can use lives strategically a lot in this game like getting "free" devil deals.

11:37 OK is this whole video there because of Labyrinth Zone? "4th level" and "13 lives" are very specific amounts :P One example that often gets skipped over is in the first Actraiser on SNES. You'll get "lives" as one of the RPG portion's reward, and the action stages have like one checkpoint in the middle, then one before the boss. You always start with the full amount of lives on your stat sheet, and get booted if you lose all of them

For the most part I would agree that lives shouldn't exist in games anymore. However I do think there are some specific genres that really benefit from having them. Shoot em ups, bullet hells and stuff in that specific genre would not really work without a life system IMO. If I could beat a Touhou game by not even trying to learn the game properly and barely paying attention, they wouldn't be nearly as satisfying to beat. There's a reason why it feels so good to get a 1CC in a Touhou game (for those that don't know, which I'm assuming is 90% of the people reading this, 1CC stands for 1 Credit Clear. It means you beat the game without using a continue.), and it also benefits you by unlocking the Extra Stage and super boss, which tend to be ludicrously difficult. If you could gain access to that without putting in tons of effort, I don't think it would be anywhere near as satisfying. It helps that a run of these games is maybe about 30 minutes tops, so a run never takes *that* long. It also helps you think about items and resources a lot more. You have a certain amount of bombs (screen clearing moves that give you I frames) for every life, which makes you think about your split second decision making. Should I use a bomb to try and bypass a bunch of bullets, or should I save them for later and risk losing a life? The game also rewards you a big deal by picking up collectibles that drop from defeated enemies for stronger shots, getting extra lives by grabbing enough point items (I don't know what else to call them), as well as other game specific things that do things depending on which Touhou you're playing. I will say that this is admittedly a rare case overall though. Most of the time a life system isn't used like this, and instead just feels very tacked on. Mario Odyssey axed lives completely and it really didn't affect much of anything. I do like it when games like the Crash trilogy, or say like Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 drown you in lives, because then you very rarely if ever have to worry about game overs. Having lives be more plentiful doesn't make a game easier, it just removes the tedium of having to redo stuff as much. But at that point you may as well just cut lives entirely. It's still possible to make a difficult game without having to resort to lives. Rayman Origins/Legends, Celeste, Hollow Knight, etc prove that. I guess the point is, ONLY include lives in your game if it actually benefits the game design and makes sense. If all it does is make you waste your time, just remove it from the game and rethink the design of said game. That's my two cents anyway.

I like how in streets of rage 4 and shredders revenge they changed the main game up so you dont run out of continues but kept the outdated life system for an arcade mode for the option

I feel like lives could be interesting if people put more thought into them, rather than defaulting to the standard lives system. Like giving the player a set number of lives to beat a stage that resets for the next stage, or giving the player a reward if they beat it without dying too many times, while giving them the option to die as many times as they like. For example, in a New Super Mario bros. Wii, you could give each player a set of 5 lives in multiplayer, to stop them playing recklessly, as dying in those games just brings you back in a bubble without losing progress. You could also give everyone a shared lives (say 5x no. of players?) Pehaps you could approach lives like an extension of a health system.

I would agree with the "risk-reward" thing, but take the limited lives system away and there's barely any risk there.

To me there's a rush yoy get when you find a secret live hidden in the stage (for sonic anyway) and not having that feels off and unrewards you for exploring

New Sonic player here, bought generations and mania the day origins came out. Both had a lives system that exactly reflect what you said in the video: it discourages exploration, the count is easily exploitable via killing yourself etc. Sonic levels are (usually) fairly short and are meant to be replayed over many times so why am I punished to restart in generations by losing a life? Sonic levels also have a fair risk-reward outside of lives - you achieve faster times if you take the risk to go on the top path, and there's no reason to shoehorn in lives to add on frustration for no reason. I enjoy playing through life-less challenges in generations and it's more convenient for me to grind for an S rank as well, as opposed to normal levels where I need to restart after failing a jump to get a red star ring (and lose a life, while being circumvented if I quit the stage and restart instead). While hardcore players enjoy limited lives it's more important to know that there are different demographics to a game, including casuals. I bought the Sonic games with an open mind that I'm gonna replay it over even after I've finished the game, but now I can't even finish Mania it because of a skill issue. Sure I'm still committed to play through the game because I like Sonic, but some casual players might've dropped by now. And don't even try to defend it as some 'natural selection' or 'skill issue' bullshit, that's just gatekeeping and elitism at its finest. Asking the player for a minimum skill level is fine, but even if lives are removed checkpoints exist to fulfil that purpose; so it really sounds like they're complaining about the game not being difficult enough. In the end I still believe how Crash 4 and Sonic Origins handled it was a nice compromise: veteran players can still opt in for lives and relive the classic experience while newer players could have an easier time in learning the base game and even challenging themselves with limited lives later on. IMO Lives is just a bad and redundant game mechanic that is added for pure symbolism for the most part and detracts players from immersing in the game. It can be added as a challenge mechanic but in no way it should exist in the base game of any modern platformer. And idk, maybe if the game is well designed people will just naturally replay it instead of relying on lives to stretch out playtime?

back in the old days you have to start the whole game over when you lost all your lives

As someone who doesn't like lives, I think one genre of game that they could be good in would be roguelikes, akin to an easy mode. Since roguelikes are built on the premise that you lose your character if you die, adding a lives system to such a game can be a method at making it less extreme and therefore more accessible to casual players. However, big asterisk here because I haven't actually played a roguelike with limited lives, this is just me theorising.

I like insanely difficult games with infinite lives

Another insightful video. The reason I like your channel is that you talk about game design in terms of how the different elements work together to create a specific effect on the player. So it was strange to me when you said you don’t believe game design can be “outdated” only “good or bad.” You do a good job of explaining how you yourself approach games and how game design impacts you, but people in a different era had a different context and so different game design principles affected them differently. Players interact with game designers differently if they have to spend money at an arcade after every game over vs. us buying a video game once and playing it whenever we want.

The ember system in dark souls 3 (and to some extent the hunanity system in dark souls 2) is a good example of expansing upon the life system. When you are embered you have some bonus health. When you die you lose the embered state and can recover it by using an ember or killing a boss. Embers are somewhat rate but you'll stockpile a good number of them if you explore. It's completely possible to beat the game unembered at all times, but if you're struggling you can use one of your embers to make things easier. And I never use them because I'm the kind of person that stockpiles consumables I'll never use just in case

I think it depends on the game. If you have the freedom to chose which level to play like Mario 64, then limited lives prevent the player from getting stuck on a level, getting annoyed, and quitting. Even if you have the option to just leave the level people are way to stubborn for their own good.

Thanks for this food for thought. I’m on the fence on whether a 3D platformer I’m designing should have lives. If it does, it should avoid these pitfalls. What I have so far is: - You always start a level with the same amount of lives. Farming them is impossible. - If you die before reaching a checkpoint, you don’t lose any lives. It’s treated like a full level reset. Never a reason to kill yourself or induce a game over. - When you beat a level, your score gets a multiplier for each remaining life, which affects your rank for the level. This incentivizes even pros to go for them. - The game is designed around exploring the levels and having a high skill ceiling. Replaying a section isn’t just "going through it again" because you can try a different way through and/or get the satisfaction of improvement. Like others have said, lives can add a good sense of stakes and tension, and I think that fits the tone of this game. But for those who don’t want it, there could be a mode where you get unlimited lives but lose the score multiplier.

Actually... you're right... I mean I was never planning on implementing limited lives into any of my stuff. I just always looked at lives in games and thought "Oh those are there". Like you, I'm also pretty good at games and can handle much steeper learning curves, but I had never really thought about it until now, and you're right. Although now I think the "limited lives" opinion pendulum is swinging the other way. (After watching this) I'm glad that limited lives are not as common, but now removing lives is a big show. Honestly, removing lives should be a quiet and seamless process. What I would prefer from Sonic Origins is that they got rid of that part of the HUD completely. Now, it just looks ugly. Like, even if you only played the anniversary versions of these games, you would be able to tell something was there before. Anyway. I'm glad you brought this to my attention, for I'll be able to avoid it in the future.

"Boring and unfun" Those terms literally mean the same thing.

sonic unleashed wii/ps2 has a set amount of lives you can have when you start a stage and you can't get more lives than what the game gives you at the start of a stage. You can't grind for more (but you can kinda unlock more lives by completing small challenge rooms in the temples that need a set amount of emblems to access)

I always felt there was something wrong with lives so this video really helped flesh out my thoughts. I'm just gonna add something here, depending on how the game is structured, not having lifes might make the game more boring, since you're always spawning easily and infinitely you end up just mindlessly charging forward without a damn worry because there is no big punishment for that, in that case lives do help in giving more value to the level and encourages the player to be more focused, the cases you mentioned of people being too cautious could be said that the game does not give enough lifes so a new player can keep up with the challenge. I could say that lives system feels more like a safety net for difficulty, as if the developers aren't so sure if the challenge they created is gonna make the player bored or not so there is a life system for the player to be at least a bit cautious, I think it do work but for games that has actual good design it ends up not really having any reason to be there. And like you mentioned, I do agree that the vast majority of games do not need extra lives.

I think challenges in games should be looked at as learning experiences, and from that perspective, it's just extremely horrible pacing. The boredom thing is what really annoyed me growing up with these kinds of games. For that reason the only use of lives I've never personally minded was the Megaman games. I considered them the first games that ever taught me to be actually "good" at video games, because everything was so blocked off and digestible. I didn't even mind having 2 lives because it was quick to get back to the bosses if I needed to, and it still gave that exhilaration of needing to be careful. But importantly, it gave me the chance to actually study bosses, which was the fun part of facing the boss. Mega Man bosses are made to curb stomp you if you don't understand their patterns, and I would absolutely hate having to play through a massive game from the start just for not learning it in the few chances I had to do it.

It's 3:00 in the morning right now where I live and you just upload a new video. Nice lol

One of your criticisms is that grinding for lives is boring, and that you believe having the option to do something optimal that is boring is bad game design, so what do you think about grinding for levels, money, skills, etc in RPGs?

While I hold the opinion that lives still has it's place today, I'm not someone who will fight tooth and nail for every game to have them That being said, that comment about death doesn't equal failure isn't one I get, as it's quite literally a failure in every sense. You lose progress, you lost time and you have to do it over again. Plus the other point you made about game overs discouraging players from trying new things and that they'll play too carefully and not experiment: I'd say that's more on the players part than the game. Regardless, you're still getting through the level and progressing so it genuinely doesn't matter as long as you get through it.

What about in retro games like Battletoads? Imagine that game without lives, would it really have its legendary status?

I think the first time the dilemma popped in my head was when I was playing Super Mario 3D Land, when they added power ups that add invincibility to enemies or level skips. I initially saw it as bad because it made things too easy, but thinking back, I think it might as well be helpful in seeing how the level would had worked overall. You keep failing and losing lives but you are not punished. You are helped. Sure, one might argue lives in this game became useless. I personally loss the meaning of lives when I started using save states and the like. The only time I saw game overs affecting me was in Hotel Dusk, where you lack lives, but if you press Retry in a game over, you will be at the last position you were without save files, but you will miss an extra key detail in the ending of the game. Shoot em ups are probably the only thing where I felt lives were actually impactul when I wanted to do a 1 Continue run (1CC) to battle the True final boss. Yes, you need to go on hard or extreme and those require a massive grind and pattern recognition, but I chose to be challenged. And despite it all, I had joy in "proving myself". The issue here is that despite the easy difficulty option, one might still argue that barring the true boss for beginners is kinda gatekeeping, I guess. But shoot em ups were... built different.

One thing I feel like I should mention is that Doom Eternal does have lives. Though how 1ups work is that if you die, you continue to fight so it's basically like another layer of health. Otherwise, what's the point of 1up in the game where there is no game over. Unless you are playing Extra Life mode and Ultra-Nightmare. Also falling pits will not result in instadeath like in Doom 2016. Speaking of Extra Life mode, this mode does what you would expect, a mode where you have limited lives. Then again extra lives function as additional layers of health and if in Extra Life mode you run out of extra lives and die, you will start over. Extra Life mode is basically a softer version of Ultra-Nightmare. If you have problems with the perma death, then I am sure you have some bad things to say about Ultra-Nightmare. In a mode where you die at least once, you will have to start over. (and have to listen to King Novic again) And in Ultra-Nightmare, all 1ups have been replaced with mega armor. Doom Eternal also has a Horde Mode and in that mode, you can rack up a lot of lives. If you played well, got all lives you could possibly get, and without dying, you could have roughly 38 lives. There is also a neat scoring system. You could get a score bonus for not using BFG at all, a bonus score depending on how many extra lives you have by the end of the Horde Mode, and other bonuses. I do like the fact that Doom Eternal gives you the option to either play it normally or with limited lives.

Games like Pacman or Shoot 'em up do need lives in my opinion to add a challenge. I do believe that lives are a relic of the past, used in the past for people who want to get a high-score or something. It's definitively meaningless in modern single player games.

Most of the old games did not have saves. Playing the old turtle Nes games, you had to beat it with 3 lives and 1 shot or try other day. Sonic did not have a save state until the 3rd game.

Lives are fine for fighting games. Those are technically called Rounds or Stock but they limit the comebacks of each player like a fair sport.

I personally enjoy stakes, and when your decisions have consequences. Even with that in mind, in the Crash games, getting a game over doesn't force you to start from your last save or from the beginning of the game, but from the beginning of the current level you are already in. This is very forgiving and the risk of repeating a level isn't that big of a deterrent since most levels are quite short. What I find annoying and illogical is that the death count (in Crash 4) or losing lives in previous games starts before the first checkpoint in any given level. Logically, if I die before the first checkpoint and I don't want to lose that life, I can load up my save and repeat, or force myself to die to game over screen and start afresh. In the case of the death count, if I die before the first checkpoint, why force me to manually exit and enter the level? I think the death count or losing lives should only occur after you hit the first checkpoint.

I really agree with this video, lives have always felt like a way to incorporate permadeath (something I really like in games) into games that aren't designed for it. Of course lives systems aren't the same as permadeath, but they feel like a weird, barely thought mix of permadeath and permanent progress.

I understand where your coming from but it just depends on what game I’m playing some games I want limited lives and in others I just don’t care like there’s some situations where limited lives make you want to get better or like when you beat a hard area on your last life it adds some sense of accomplishment but that’s just what I think idk💀

Well remember, and this is for ppl complaining about lives: a lot of those game had check points. What wasn't there so often were "saved game" datas. And even if you had game data saved, some of those games erased your data after a certain amount of time.

With unlimited lives you would probably die less than you would with limited lives for the main fact you wouldn't be stressing out on certain sections of the game with unlimited lives

I think the only time lives REALLY excel is if you have a really hard game, and you have 2 modes, a beginner mode for players that just got the game, and an unlockable limited lives mode for players who already completed the game once. Kinda like hardcore modes in games except for really hard games where it's hard to not die.

limited lives in terms of arcade game design (shmups, bmups etc) is generally good but yeah outside of that not really

I think doom eternal did extra lives best. Instead of dying and going back to the checkpoint, you can keep the pace of the fight going by getting your health maxed and getting a couple seconds of invincibility to get out of dog piles or other sticky situations.