Diegetic death in Halo: Reach

[palfrey]

Spoiler warning: Unless you've already completed Halo: Reach, there will be spoilers within. I'm going to spend some time wittering on about other stuff first, but there will be spoilers later on. If you're intending on playing it, I'd advise doing so before reading this. I'M NOT KIDDING HERE. I WILL BE SPOILING THE ENTIRE PLOT INCLUDING THE ENDING

Comments

[nojay]

I'm sure I've seen the "You succeed then die" thing at the end of one of the original Dooms. The game engine switches off any God Mode toggles then drops your character into a dark room with waaay too many Bad Guys and you last short, to put it mildly.

[incidentist]

That is really interesting. I'd never heard the term deigesis before, and you're right: it'll be very useful in future geekery

[palfrey]

There's been some other games that play with reality (Braid for example), but I think also that the immersive nature of FPSes helps here as well. If a game is able to spend lots of time tying you to the reality, making you part of it, then there's suddenly a bunch of extra costs to actions e.g. the killing your friend scenario. Doing that tying is tricky, and that's one area Halo:Reach failed in. Actually, hmm, I'm now remembering bits where I was running around with only one AI partner, and they were a well established character by that point, and that was quite good. If I'd been partnered up with one other person from the beginning then I can see how that would be pretty effective.

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah. I'd thought similar things before, but until I saw that article, I hadn't realised that having a name for it would make it so much easier to think about it. I remember various instances of games trying to justify reincarnation or save points, and the convention settling down that they should generally just be ignored.

There's some other exampes in my mind as well, like games with alternative plot options, but where one of them is the default that "really" happened.

[palfrey]

Didn't discuss this in the main post, but having justification for reincarnation can sometimes make dying a sensible plan, and different from games with the time-reset scenario. If things aren't reset, then repeatedly running in with the stupidly large weapons and taking out a few bad guys at a time may sometimes be a workable plan v.s. only being able to add to your knowledge of what will happen and who's where in the time reset scenario.

This also applies for most FPSes in multiplayer co-op, as most of them (provided one of you is still alive) change to reincarnation rather than time-reset.

[rob_is_raze]

> This death, unlike all of the others is diegetic. It actually sticks this time, and that's something I've never seen in an FPS.
You mean you've never played either of the Modern Warfare games? Assuming the deaths there count as diegetic.

[palfrey]

Only briefly, and mostly in multiplayer at other people's houses. I had heard things about their plotlines which means I should get around to acquiring a copy of one or both at some point...

[rob_is_raze]

I'd play MW first. I think it's better and some characters appear again in MW2, so there is an order to them.

[amuchmoreexotic]

Good post. As other commenters have pointed out, there are many near precedents to this:

• The shareware version of Doom drops you in a room chock-full of monsters, leading inevitably to your death - but the intent here is to provoke you into buying the registered version and getting more episodes of the game (who said the episodic model was new?), not to provoke a deeper emotional response.
• The Modern Warfare games feature the diegetic death of your viewpoint character (twice in the first one: once in one of those barely interactive cut-scenes where you can only move the camera within a certain field of view [I'm sure there's a term for them], and once in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion). The difference with Reach is that these deaths are entirely scripted rather than the result of gameplay - although in "No True Russian" if you try to disrupt the airport massacre you do get killed in-engine - and you then switch to one of the other viewpoint characters and the game continues.
• Not sure about what the "pair of commandos working to