ZombiU and Fire Emblem devs talk about working with perma-death in story-writing
Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in 3DS, General Gaming, General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 1 Comment
In the latest issue of EDGE magazine there lays a feature about the inclusion of permanent death in a game– that is, when a character dies, they’re gone for good and you can’t do anything about it. Two notable examples of games that utilize permanent death (perma-death) have come within the last year or deux: ZombiU from Ubisoft on the Wii U and Fire Emblem: Awakening on 3DS from Nintendo. A designer from both games sat down with EDGE to discuss their experience with perma-death:
I think that all of the Fire Emblem games are fun, but a lot of beginner players stay clear of them because they think they are difficult. I think this is a real shame. A big reason for wanting to include this mode was so that those kinds of people could play Fire Emblem too…Since your characters come back when they die, one advantage is that you can play more aggressively or take more risks.
– Fire Emblem: Awakening director Kohei Maeda
[Writing ZombiU] was the toughest challenge I’ve faced in over ten years of writing for games. It took… the whole production team to find solutions for all the ‘But what happens if you die here?’ issues, which were sometimes mind-bendingly complicated.
I created the Prepper character and the survivors’ notes to establish a link and reinforce between the survivors who all fall under this mysterious character’s influence. Without a main player character, you need to embrace your main NPCs. Our character assemblage system produced avatars that were less gorgeous than a single player character would’ve been.
– ZombiU design director Gabrielle Shrager
