I play a lot of total war and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of players just reload battles until they win. It really seems like a lot of gamers don't want any negative outcomes when they play
IMO some games make the consequences so bad you may as well restart the whole game.
The XCOM remakes (not the OGs as much) have this issue. It takes a long time to level up your soldiers, and if you lose your good ones because an alien got a lucky critical from across the map, it will set you back a long ways, because now not only have you lost one of your best soldiers, but now you're even more outnumbered than before (because the remakes had a hard limit of a 4 person squad, then 6 with mid-late game upgrades).
Or maybe you don't lose anyone but you failed to meet the objective. Now you're short a scientist, and it's going to take twice as long to get laser weapons up, and now the aliens are fielding bigger aliens with more armor and health that the basic guns can't handle anymore. Each failure compounds on the last that all it takes is one or two bad missions and everything after that is just waiting for the game to tell you "so sorry you lost, try again from the start?". Some people don't have the time to play the long game anymore.
I'd say XCOM EW isn't too bad, but XCOM 2 WotC? One bad mission can RUIN you, and it doesn't help that Advent troops are stronger than the aliens in XCOM EW for a good long while. I'm in act 2 of EW with the detector troops, and they are still easier than WotC... and I'm on a higher difficulty than I'd played xcom 2 on.
You can TPK in XCOM2 really quickly if you're not careful, too. It's really rare to have less than 3 succeed with a mission that goes bad. Between the clock and the mobs, keeping just two soldiers alive can get into impossible territory fast.
I was doing a run of Darkest Dungeon after the recent DLC got dropped, a missclick on like week 3 sent my party to the farmstead to deal with the horde mode. I got out of that without losing anyone but the stress levels weren't great. I start my next dungeon, week 4, I've barely had any opportunities to hire new heroes, and the first room of the new boss I get jumped by a wandering boss that I think is from the farmstead's DLC who proceeds to kill my Crusader and my Vestal. I run back to the hamlet, and I now can't form a party because the game hasn't given me any tank or healer characters at all so I've got nothing but midline characters and no one for frontline or backline, so on like week 3 I just restarted the whole run.
It's a bit like how in XCOM 2 you can fail an entire campaign on the Gatecrasher mission at the start by getting your opening team massacred. It was even worse at launch if you played the tutorial because you only came out of gatecrasher with one squaddie, and the second mission it forced you into was kinda busted and dropped multiple sectoids on your rookies.
Does it have permanent consequences? I love challenge but do sometimes struggle with permadeath. I'm trying to psych myself up to play Fire Emblem next week with permadeath on.
It does, loosing a battle will put you in a worse position (Honestly, sometimes better by killing off an army and fixing your economy).
Overall, the reason you want to be okay with loss in a total war game is because it makes the whole campaign more engaging and distinct when compared to just an endless string of wins.
That sounds cool. I'm familiar with the idea of permanent consequences always being a bad thing if you cannot fully win a level. I like the idea of there being tradeoffs.
That really depends on the situation. The AI gets mega cheats if you play on a higher difficulty, meaning it can outproduce you in everything, despite having way less settlements, so losing 1 army could be a death sentence
I was playing a Dark Elf campaign in WH3 recently and decided to invade Aislin in his little islands. He had 1 major settlement and a vassal, holding the other 2 minor settlemets. I invaded with 2 elite armies and then proceeded to get swarmed by 5-6 armiess. If I had lost those battles, he would have proceeded to sail to my lands and run through them like a freight train.
Fire Emblem games are normally made with the idea of being able to lose some units and still win the game (the exceptions being Radiant Dawn and Three Houses that dont really feel made with the idea of losing anyone for diferent reasons).
playing and accepting losses and seeing how far can you get its normally called Ironman (based on the same challenge mode in Xcom), its a fun way to play the games, even if you lose there is a lot of fun to be had.
Yeah I cannot imagine a Nintendo game locking me out of winning. Permadeath just makes me feel like maybe I'm going to miss out on interesting characters or something. I think I am finally just going to play permadeath and live with the results. The previews seemed to agree that the game is a bit too easy on normal.
I do that sometimes but to me the negative consequence is having to restart the fight. I like trying to figure out and redo missions/battles in strategy games until I win them or do them perfectly. Like I play fireemblem with permadeath on specifically because it forces me to restart the fight if I lose anyone not because I want to go the rest of the game without that character as a negative outcome for me failing that stage. Same with Xcom I like having to spend hours and hours redoing the same mission on the hardest difficulty to avoid the negative consequences of losing a solider.
If you played any somewhat skill based online game on launch you quickly realize that majority of players struggle with simple mechanics.
I always bring up Lost Ark launch as my point because the game had tons of mechanics where one person messing up meant full wipe and also got unusual amount of hype attracting people who never played such games before. The amount of hours I lost because other players couldn't turn their character towards marked players, hit orb matching their color or walk clockwise was eye opening to me.
You would wipe, explain mechanics, everyone tells you they understood then mechanic happens and same guy or two would just freeze or do everything wrong, repeat that for hour or two straight till someone got enough and rage quits to get better party.
Been a long time since I've played any MMO but I still remember my WoW days and whole raids wiping because just a few people who don't understand the concept of "don't stand in fire".
18
u/abruptusabortis Sep 11 '26
I play a lot of total war and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of players just reload battles until they win. It really seems like a lot of gamers don't want any negative outcomes when they play