Game idea: squad permadeath system where death switches playable characters

I'm a strong proponent of permadeath, exactly because it creates more tension and higher stakes. Games with infinite respawn are safe and the only stakes are that you might have to try something again. You also play entirely differently and enemies & threats feel much more real, psychologically, when every encounter can end your run. I'm mostly talking about roguelikes in the initial sense here, as in, dungeon crawlers with permadeath, not the reskinned slot machines they make nowadays.

Games without real stakes only have challenges, but no actual threats or stakes. Back in the day, the game Realm of the Mad God was great (before the recent complete overhaul). It was a permadeath bullet hell PVE MMO roguelike. Diving into the dungeons and into the land of the gods was genuinely risky, and going there to grind for high-end gear could easily end your character permanently in a single moment of carelessness or bad luck. It was possible to solo-play it, but the late game was almost impossible to beat alone. A character could last a few minutes, or a few days, sometimes weeks. And then you mess up and die. It featured a small item vault where you could store items for your next runs, but it was very limited. So you didn't restart completely from scratch, but you mostly did.

I wouldn't get too hung up on making death feel meaningful. Use meaningful risks & stakes to make life (i.e. the gameplay between deaths) meaningful. Permadeath is one way of elevating the game to higher levels of emotional significance.

I also wouldn't really try to make characters in a game feel fleshed out and real. You're not writing a novel, you're building a machine that badly simulates people. You will never be able to write a character AI that makes a character feel anywhere near as real as in a novel, but it's easy to enter the uncanny valley territory where everything suggests to the player that he should be expecting that level of realness of a character, and then constantly be tripped up by how clunky the AI is. To prevent this from happening, I recommend making sure that your NPCs do not even suggest that they are real characters. The only exception to this is if you basically have a gamified movie where every part of it is pre-scripted and part of a handcrafted story, where nothing the writer didn't plan for can occur, keeping the lines the NPCs say completely coherent with the actual gameplay. Emotional attachment between NPCs, or emotional attachment between an NPC and the game world is one of those things that quickly turns uncanny, so unless you are really confident in your idea, I recommend intentionally leaving that part shallow to steer clear of the uncanny valley.

Getting back to your specific game idea: squad-based gameplay is good at lessening the negative impact of permadeath while still keeping most of the benefits it brings. Kenshi comes to mind. Ways to leverage permadeath properly would be make the player choose when to play it safe and when to risk loss, but also make it so that playing it safe has a cost in missed gains or something. Basically a choice between consolidation and expansion, where both choices have a trade-off. What I don't like, however, is games that constantly force you to progress and never allow you to backtrack (specifically, in dungeon crawlers, I hate it when you cannot go back up a level, and are forced to descend ever more while your resources constantly dwindle). Games that do this end up feeling like a slot machine, because your entire run is basically already decided by your initial luck of the draw, or any streak of bad luck you get later on. Offering the choice to backtrack and consolidate allows you to compensate for bad drops. Obviously, only playing it safe shouldn't be an option, and there should be some mandatory parts that force you to risk it, or during which backtracking is impossible until you overcome them. Otherwise, these games basically devolve into grinding runs until you get a run where you luck out on loot or other gains. This brings me to the second point: a game with permadeath should definitely not be entirely random, but have at least some skill-based aspect to things like combat, etc.. Turn-based games usually suffer from that, because every action is basically dictated by a dice roll, and you don't really have an influence over the effectiveness of your moves in combat. Which makes it very frustrating to play when paired with permadeath.

I talked about meaning in games (including permadeath) at length in this thread: Critique of MUDs, RPGs, DnD, MMORPGs, and immersive interactive adventures. Maybe it is helpful to you.

If I understand correctly, the player controls one of the squad members and the others coast forward as NPCs.

This could lead to a rather terrible incentive: players strategically abandoning "useless" characters or allowing them to die in order to take control of the important ones that would benefit from player control.

Another potential problem: the risk-taking of NPC squad members. If they can die too, the player risks undeserved defeat without control; if they are managed so conservatively that they are irrelevant, maybe openly inactive characters that are designated as player character successors would be a less frustrating mechanism.

LorenzoGatti said:
If I understand correctly, the player controls one of the squad members and the others coast forward as NPCs. This could lead to a rather terrible incentive: players strategically abandoning “useless” characters or allowing them to die in order to take control of the important ones that would benefit from player control.

If you can't switch at all without dying, then yeah, that's bad.

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Pfirsi wrote:

Later in the game, players can return to the place where the previous character died and find their body still there, along with their equipment.

I think you loose the steam at this point. By falling back to established mechanics such as getting your loot back from your former death location, the initial bigger idea of 'change your character' is no longer as interesting as it could eventually be.

Maybe the focus should be about what it means to play as another character, not so much about what's in your inventory.

I can imagine, if other squad member would have special abilities or powers, i might even decide to kill / sacrifice my current character intentionally so i can choose the other. This could be a strategical mechanic of the game. Ofc. it requires characters to feel replaceable without much loss or tragedy, eventually hindering some story telling goals. But that's just another opportunity to get rid of the boring establishment.

Pfirsi wrote:

The goal is to make death feel meaningful instead of temporary, creating emotional attachment to every squad member and turning player mistakes into lasting story moments.

Characters showing deep emotions to found former squad member corpses would be awesome imo. Much better than motion captured cutscenes telling some rigid story i'd rather like to see in a movie.

But personally i would not try to cause tragic emotions on the player himself. He does not need to care. He only needs to be entertained from the theater we show him. Imo, games are no books or movies where emotions of the audience are controlled. In a game, player emotions should be just as random and emergent as the game itself, ideally.

Thinking this way, i got rid of the worries coming from thinking about the player. I ignore the player now, and rather just think about NPCs. Making them emotionally expressive to each other should be a key system of a game, just like collision detection or rendering. And i can think about such problem much easier than trying to 'control the player'. It's also easier to work on 'what NPCs can do in the game', than on solving 'what can the player do, beside the obvious combat, survival, progression management, or other established mechanics which are nothing new anymore'.

LorenzoGatti wrote:

This could lead to a rather terrible incentive: players strategically abandoning "useless" characters or allowing them to die in order to take control of the important ones that would benefit from player control.

I read this only now. : )

But maybe it's more opportunity than problem.

We can do everything in games, including suicide.
Just give opportunity the player can cause a lot of damage to the enemy from the sacrifice of one squad member.

Pfirsi wrote:

the game continues naturally.

Continues, sure. Naturally, well that doesn't exactly follow.

If a TV show was sorta trying to depict this, and some sci-fi shows really have done it, it's more like you're ripped out of one body and suddenly in another body. Being in new circumstances where you don't quite know what's been happening before you landed in this body, are often a big problem. There are inherent trust issues for people who don't know that you're a new consciousness in there.

I'm not just trying to be a smartass here. It's a writing problem, whose perspective you're intending to maintain. A player's perspective is somewhat like an audience perspective. They generally have more access to information than the characters have. Sometimes that is reversed though, and you the audience are the one hoodwinked. Happens in TV, and an "unreliable narrator" bit was even done in Dragon Age II.

Pfirsi wrote:

Later in the game, players can return to the place where the previous character died and find their body still there, along with their equipment. Squad members may comment emotionally depending on who died and their relationship with them.

The goal is to make death feel meaningful instead of temporary, creating emotional attachment to every squad member and turning player mistakes into lasting story moments.

That's not gonna achieve the goal. In fact it's a great example of ludonarrative dissonance. How many TV shows have you seen, about some heroic intrepid party of adventurers, and one of their number dies? And they just leave the body and equipment wherever it fell. Yeah, uh, circle back around to it a few hours or days later. "Um, there's George. I feel really bad about George." "Think I'll take his boots, mine are worn out now."

No, TV and movies never do that. They bury the body and cry around the grave, like real humans do. Or if they cannot because it's too dangerous, they get the hell outta there and never come back. If they do loot the body immediately, it's usually because it's WW I or II in horrible conditions, like winter in Russia, and the still living soldiers would prefer not to get frostbite. Nothing personal, but gotta have your shoes, gloves, hat...

Circling back around to a body laden with useful adventuring equipment, that nobody has disturbed for any reason, is a gaming convention. Gaming conventions are rather silly and arbitrary if you step back from them. It's how ludonarrative dissonance happens, when you're trying to "seriously" pull those emotional writing harp strings... and instead you give them something completely silly and absurdist.

Another common example is how you treat other humans in so many games. You're all crying for your comrades... but you just committed pretty much genocide in a village of thousands? Well, I'm not sure if games really manage thousands. But My Lai didn't have thousands of victims either, so my point stands. It did involve hundreds though.

I suppose the SS can cry for their fallen comrades, and commit atrocities. But you might want to know and realize you're the SS if you're gonna go that way.

RmbRT wrote:

I also wouldn't really try to make characters in a game feel fleshed out and real. You're not writing a novel, you're building a machine that badly simulates people.

I think for the OP's likely intents, I'd probably agree. But I'd wait to see them confirm. Haven't read that far ahead yet.

You will never be able to write a character AI that makes a character feel anywhere near as real as in a novel

Dunno about that. You could try. BUT, the concerns of a writer would have to drive your design. You'd have to have the writing chops. You'd have to figure out how that goes into an interactive game. It's a very hard problem that has swallowed some people's careers.

RmbRT wrote:

If you can't switch at all without dying, then yeah, that's bad.

Dragon Age II went very very far with character switching. 4 in a party, and viable menu driven scripting for characters you're not currently in control of. Character switching primarily pertained to combat, not narrative. If everybody dies, well you're starting over from your last save point then.

The main problem of DA2 is they had a decent pauseable combat system, decent usable menu driven scripting for it, and enemy AIs that were totally stupid. They just run at you, or just shoot at you, or just sneak around behind you, according to the enemy's designated combat role. They all move and fire independently, there's no squad coordination between them. Eventually you figure out that the game reduces to tower defense, and then the tactical challenge is over. Fortunately, it took me until about the time I beat the main quest of the game to realize that.

JoeJ wrote:

I can imagine, if other squad member would have special abilities or powers, i might even decide to kill / sacrifice my current character intentionally so i can choose the other.

I might decide to have the other characters frag you for bad leadership, so that you lose the game entirely. I definitely would have to think about the real world implications of the evil despot running the party and treating everyone as disposable. Some science fictions have incorporated it, such as the Goa'uld in Stargate SG-1.

My concern is that the system could have the opposite effect. If players know they'll just continue as another squad member, deaths might start feeling routine rather than impactful. The concept sounds interesting, but making players genuinely care about each character seems like the biggest challenge.

bvanevery wrote:

I might decide to have the other characters frag you for bad leadership, so that you lose the game entirely. I definitely would have to think about the real world implications of the evil despot running the party and treating everyone as disposable.

I notice some critique of moral on my potential playstyle of sacrifying squad members to my advantage.

I also notice this critique comes from game devs, who have basically established mass murder simulators to be the primary entertainment media of modern society.

Congrats for being so hypocritical and short sighted, lol.
That's like butting some rainbow LGBTQIA+ logo on your game, claiming support, only to equip players with machine guns and the quest to kill absolutely everybody, including gays.

But jokes aside, giving some penalty to players lacking moral is something you can do ofc. Makes sense in many cases.

You can also take another direction, allowing players to explore their inner evil in a virtual environment, so they can eventually find themselves without harming anybody IRL.

Or whatever. I don't care. Maybe i will care if our media once becomes true art, or gains some philosophical value.
Though, right now we are very far from this point, be it for good or for bad.

However, i give the game Messiah as an example. In this game you played as a little angel, and you could enter enemy bodies to take control of them. Factory workers, whores, police men. You controlled those NPCs, and when you had achieved what you wanted using them, it made sense to commit suicide. Then the little angel popped out of their bodies, the dead enemy was no more treat, and you prepared to do the same thing to another NPC...

Maybe that's no guidance on good moral, but it was a fun and interesting game. It's a nice mechanic, which makes sense too.

sophie-talks wrote:

My concern is that the system could have the opposite effect. If players know they'll just continue as another squad member, deaths might start feeling routine rather than impactful.

You mean, something like, it's eventually just daily routine Putin sends young Russians to the front, drugging them so they run into death without fear?

I'm afraid you're right, and yes this sucks.

But maybe it's fun to be like Putin for a day?

Don't get me wrong. I'm a pacifist. And i do not driver over pedestrians when playing GTA. I dodge them. I can be even nice, some times.

But forget about all this for a moment. Forget about your expectations regarding moral, but also regarding how a squad in a game maybe represents a bunch of characters, who become partners, friends, helping each other out, eventually even die to save the other, causing some true Hollywood tears to the players which Sony wants to get sooo badly.

Forget about all of this, and consider in childish innocence, that maybe force can be fun. It really seems games confirm just that, even if we do not really like the fact.

JoeJ wrote:

Congrats for being so hypocritical and short sighted, lol.

Eh? You're speaking to me, not the entire game industry.

What's a way of creating emotional gravitas in a game, as the OP said they wanted? How about instead of treating the characters as widgets to be destroyed at your whim, they're actual people who have qualms about being treated as disposable? And who will kill you if they think you're gonna kill them.

JoeJ wrote:

sophie-talks wrote:

My concern is that the system could have the opposite effect. If players know they'll just continue as another squad member, deaths might start feeling routine rather than impactful.

Show less

You mean, something like, it's eventually just daily routine Putin sends young Russians to the front, drugging them so they run into death without fear?

I'm afraid you're right, and yes this sucks.

But maybe it's fun to be like Putin for a day?

Don't get me wrong. I'm a pacifist. ...

That's an interesting perspective, but my concern is more about the gameplay impact than the theme of violence itself.

What I'm wondering is whether the mechanic reduces the emotional weight of losing a squadmate. If death just means instantly continuing as another character, players might eventually stop caring who lives or dies. The challenge is making the system feel engaging without making loss feel disposable.

JoeJ said:
That's like butting some rainbow LGBTQIA+ logo on your game, claiming support, only to equip players with machine guns and the quest to kill absolutely everybody, including gays.

But if you do it while flamboyantly prancing around, it's fine! Representation and all that…

JoeJ said:
You can also take another direction, allowing players to explore their inner evil in a virtual environment, so they can eventually find themselves without harming anybody IRL.

Definitely do offer the player the choice to misbehave (this just reminded me of those games where you can shoot enemies dead, but all pedestrians are immortal, lol), and don't just give him bad boy points. Make the negative actions he did actually have negative causal consequences. I kill the traveling merchants, no more merchants travel on this route, the village is out of stock on all imported goods and people who wanted to export are stuck sitting on their wares. No need to shout “YOU'RE A BAD BOY” at the player and nag him. And maybe the player feels reasonably justified to have done that. He simply has to live with the inevitable consequences of his actions. Video games are games, not correctional facilities for the deranged.

JoeJ said:
Forget about all of this, and consider in childish innocence, that maybe force can be fun. It really seems games confirm just that, even if we do not really like the fact.

I've been loving the recent re-release of R.U.S.E., IMO the greatest RTS ever made. I love bombarding helpless enemies with dozens of heavy artillery units that shoot across half the map. It's just the same as loving cornering the opponent in chess and killing his king. If anyone thinks video games are real, they have bigger problems than game design. Because then all those crime TV shows and horror movies would be even more real to them.

sophie-talks said:
My concern is that the system could have the opposite effect. If players know they'll just continue as another squad member, deaths might start feeling routine rather than impactful. The concept sounds interesting, but making players genuinely care about each character seems like the biggest challenge.

That's why good game design is needed. Why should the player care about his characters and why shouldn't he view them as disposable numbers? Did the game actually do anything except make them vaguely look like humans and give them names? Did they actually behave in a way that makes them earn that recognition? Did they ever do anything that made them feel like people, rather than pixels on screen?

Or, going the other route: even if they didn't earn their humanity, is there any other incentive structure or mechanic in place that makes you care about them, and forces you to treat them as precious? Is there something that makes them mechanically unique and valuable, at least situationally, so that you don't want to lose them because of their inherent merit?

If it's no to both, then the game is simply badly designed and then it deserves human wave tactics.

sophie-talks wrote:

That's an interesting perspective, but my concern is more about the gameplay impact than the theme of violence itself.

Oh, sorry for getting this so wrong. I was still stuck in my own narrative from the former post.

sophie-talks wrote:

What I'm wondering is whether the mechanic reduces the emotional weight of losing a squadmate. If death just means instantly continuing as another character, players might eventually stop caring who lives or dies. The challenge is making the system feel engaging without making loss feel disposable.

You express some worries, but you actually begin with wonder. And that's the opportunity i see. If you wonder, there might be opportunity to find something unexpected and new, ideally.

And in this case, personally i was just thinking about the strategic potential of sacrificing your avatar to trade your current abilities against those from the other squad member you play next. Death would indeed become insignificant, compared to the standard. But why is this a problem? We try to play down death all the time. Just put in one more coin, continue from your last save spot, or loose only one of your many lives. It's maybe a problem for your current design ideal you have in mind, but what if the potential new mechanic leads to a different but better new design?

It's not that i have a strong belief in such avatar swapping mechanic. It's a minor idea i think about often, but not sure if i would ever use it.
But i do have a strong belief about exploring potential new paths. Discussing such ideas feels more fruitful to me than uderstanding established design principles.

bvanevery wrote:

Eh? You're speaking to me, not the entire game industry.

No, i was not talking to you, this time. I was talking about industry, or actually 'all' game devs, including myself.

The reason i'm a bit aggressive or at least sarcastic is simply: This is entertainment business. So we have to spice things up. No spice, no fun.
But maybe i'm on the wrong track and i should work on myself. Which will require some time...

bvanevery wrote:

What's a way of creating emotional gravitas in a game, as the OP said they wanted? How about instead of treating the characters as widgets to be destroyed at your whim, they're actual people who have qualms about being treated as disposable? And who will kill you if they think you're gonna kill them.

Now i think about having said swapping mechanic, but when i kill my avatar i'm always confronted with bitter responses from NPCs. "Oh, you damn god of evil! So now you killed Frank, and you possess Tilda? Who's next? When will i die?!?", says my squad member.

That's quite interesting. Could be extended with mechanics, e.g. my squad members refusing to share their power ups with me, or them turning away from me in case one sees me performing the suicide / possession action.

That's all good stuff. And i think video games would be a great medium to play with such possession topic. It's like mind fucks and plot twists, but for video games.

RmbRT wrote:

Definitely do offer the player the choice to misbehave

Yes! It is our primary promise and duty. "Do whatever you want - my awesome game enables it all for you".

If we want to add some statement about moral, we can do so only indirectly, by penalizing him for his bad deeds. But the player MUST be able to do them. As promised.

Ofc i have my red lines here. I would never add something like 'rape pedestrians' to my game.
But for some reason i do not understand - maybe it's Hollywood indoctrination, or just primal instincts about hunting animals - i am somehow okay with killing NPCs. And killing my own avatar can't be any worse.

RmbRT wrote:

No need to shout “YOU'RE A BAD BOY” at the player and nag him.

Sure. Ideally our world simulation is so good, consequences for bad player deeds would just emerge (or not) from the simulation, just like happening in the real world.

RmbRT wrote:

If anyone thinks video games are real, they have bigger problems than game design.

Personally i have two goals regarding computers. I want to make video games to feel like real. And i want to prevent the dystopian tech future where the real world becomes like a video game.

There is some dilemma i could not see back then, when i was a kid gazing at the Atari game on screen, decidign i want to make this too, but looking as real as those cool VHS tapes do. : /

RmbRT wrote:

If it's no to both, then the game is simply badly designed

I would not say that. You can have a game where humans are disposable and nothing worth, and it can be still a great game with brilliant design.

Anybody still seriously disagrees, for reasons which are not about ethics, which are no property of good game design?

I guess not.

(Now i think about a game like Populous, where life is nothing worth initially, but the player can eventually change this, turning NPCs to become proud and good humans... : )

JoeJ wrote:

No, i was not talking to you, this time. I was talking about industry, or actually 'all' game devs, including myself.

Right, but you quoted me, and noted me as a game dev critiquing your morality. Then you talked about game devs who critique your morality but implement mass murder. It's easy for that to be blurred. Anyways I am a game dev who has critiqued your morality, and has not offered any information on what I'd implement, so I cannot be convicted of hypocrisy. I did talk about taking the My Lai massacre and the SS seriously... an idea which you have resisted, in the name of "childish fun".

JoeJ wrote:

But i do have a strong belief about exploring potential new paths. Discussing such ideas feels more fruitful to me than uderstanding established design principles.

4X is my primary design focus before anything else. To me, there's nothing new about sacrificing peons. It's standard drill, and it means you're not a very nice ruler. It's not new to the game show Survivor either. Trust issues, alliance breaking, and backstabbing are the ordinary course of events. I call all these things "freeform alliance wargames". Without additional constraints, they all behave exactly the same way.

Having characters be conscious of your ability to kill them, and actually react to that knowledge rather than just being led as clueless lambs to the slaughter, is a substantial design area. In 4X it manifests as, faction leaders who are not diplomatically stupid. Who can tell that you're massing troops on their borders and are about to screw them over.

JoeJ said:
But for some reason i do not understand - maybe it's Hollywood indoctrination, or just primal instincts about hunting animals - i am somehow okay with killing NPCs. And killing my own avatar can't be any worse.

It's the simple consequence of the game allowing fighting at all. If the game allows you to punch enemies, why can you suddenly not punch pedestrians? makes no sense except for “it's bad”. If you can crash into the enemy car in a car chase and wreck it, why shouldn't the same happen to normal traffic when you crash into them? Also, the characters in a game are never real, so running over people in GTA is way different from imagining doing the same in the real world. Just like being in a shootout in Call of Duty is completely different from getting shot at in the real world. Or planting the bomb in Counter Strike. Nobody would ever want to do that IRL, but it's just a fun mechanic in CS.

JoeJ said:
I would not say that. You can have a game where humans are disposable and nothing worth, and it can be still a great game with brilliant design.

But that is only true for games where that's an intended outcome. Most games unintentionally design it that way but wish it were different and then just frankenstein-style bolt on some guard rails or punishments and call it a day, instead of designing it properly from the get-go.

bvanevery said:
Having characters be conscious of your ability to kill them, and actually react to that knowledge rather than just being led as clueless lambs to the slaughter, is a substantial design area. In 4X it manifests as, faction leaders who are not diplomatically stupid. Who can tell that you're massing troops on their borders and are about to screw them over.

Those are two different things you are conflating. One is about enemy AI that properly identifies threats, the other is about your own characters somehow being wary of you, the player. First of all, that's breaking the fourth wall in a way that I would not appreciate in a game, and also they are completely different problems. One is about somehow simulating a person that resists your commands because it thinks you're having bad intentions, and the other is about implementing a good AI for something like a strategy game, and making it grasp situations and come up with counter strategies. Having your own characters resist you is nonsensical unless that's the entire point of the game. Which it shouldn't be for 99.9% of games.

RmbRT wrote:

Those are two different things you are conflating. One is about enemy AI that properly identifies threats, the other is about your own characters somehow being wary of you, the player.

My aren't you entitled. Who said they are your characters? As opposed to being humans in the game, that you're interacting with. Officers in Vietnam who thought the soldiers in the squad were "theirs", to do with as they pleased, might have gotten fragged.

Leadership, morale, and doing a piss poor job of it, are things. Same thing in real life international diplomacy. How effective do you figure Trump is at it, for instance? Don't answer that, it's rhetorical... we'd go off rails for days and it might be against forum rules.

I don't know what your preferences are, but in an RPG I want “me” and “my character” to be one and the same conceptually. And in a strategy game, I want those to be my units, and impose my will on them. Not ask them nicely and have a vote or something. Things like morale effects can be useful in an RTS if the game is properly designed around that, but then it's not that they are rebelling against you, but simply demoralised and unable to fight properly.

bvanevery said:
Leadership, morale, and doing a piss poor job of it, are things. Same thing in real life international diplomacy.

Leadership effectively doesn't exist in a game because leadership requires interpersonal connections, rhetoric, charisma, etc. — none of which can be feasibly conveyed via mouse and keyboard, or gamepad, or touch screen. So if the user cannot possibly convey them, how can you quantify them in game, and have their effects measured? Do you want a game where you have to draft up a motivational speech alongside every order you give?

Also, if a planet is facing extinction from an alien invasion, and the losses are heavy, should the game call that bad leadership, just because the outcome is bad? If you then want to fight to the last man, because otherwise you get exterminated anyway, is that just sending pawns into the meat grinder, should they hate you for that? Or would you have to write up a speech where you explain to them that it pains you to send them to their deaths but it's the only, even if improbable, way that they and their loved ones aren't going to be exterminated? And how would the game distinguish that from someone who truly doesn't care about sacrifices and uses human wave tactics?

Social situations involving real people are way too complex for a game to represent faithfully. Your goal is simply unrealistic. As I always say: if you can't solve it well, don't even suggest you're trying to solve it. Disappointing the player because you raised false expectations is worse than not raising those expectations to begin with, even if that means doing something that is objectively worse. Because games are received subjectively, not objectively, and the player's impression and expectations of it are vital.

bvanevery said:
Who said they are your characters? As opposed to being humans in the game, that you're interacting with.

So you want The Sims but on the battlefield? And then you have to manage where your soldiers pee and poop and make sure they get time to write a happy letter to their wife & kids at home? And then you also have to simulate the family at home and their situation, and their worries, and the worries of the father at the frontlines, and then you need a widow & orphan system, and all that crap. Who would want to play a massively complex game like that? You don't even get any fun out of that complexity, at least not that I could imagine. And then you got right-wing patriotic soldiers marching alongside left-wing liberals who hate war anyway and also think their country is just a neo-colonial force and an oppressor? And then you have to consider how you talk to them individually because they are not equally obedient or willing to fight? And you gotta make sure that they don't start fighting against each other because they don't agree ideologically?