Thoughts about the Lives system

In an ideal world, I'd give the SP campaign a "legacy" playstyle which plays just like the classics, and a new mode that does away with lives and employs a death count or something of the sort that gives you some reward for avoiding dying too much (like Crash 4?). I know the "just make it an option" roadway turns some noses up, but I think this is a case that could work.

If we were going to go down that route, emblems would probably work to take the place of Crash 4's gems. In addition to being hidden in the level, you also get them for completing certain objectives such as getting to the end of the level without dying x number of times, or collect and hold onto x number of rings, or achieve x score through the course of the level, etc.

There'd need to be some sort of incentive to playing with lives on though, as otherwise the option would be kinda hollow. Perhaps the emblems that are locked behind completing the level without dying x number of times in "modern" mode could also be obtained in "legacy" mode simply for completing the level? Effectively, your number of chances to get the emblem would be potentially increased, but at risk of getting a game over if you aren't ready for it.
 
I think the lives counter should be disabled for a completed save.
(Perhaps with an option on the level select to reset the score)
 
tatsuru's idea about minimum death completion rewards is actually really good, and could provide for some very difficult emblems, which is always a plus.

i'd love to say there should be a stage locked behind beating the game under X amount of deaths, but i don't think that's going to happen, personally. it could either be way too easy or way too difficult depending on both the skill of the player and the difficulty of the stages themselves.
for example; i know a lot of new players have trouble with arid canyon, which would ultimately result in them losing most if not all of their remaining lives to get the reward.

anyway, i just think it's a cool idea, not much else to say about it, since tatsuru and time_gear both covered it better than i could lol
 
- This is a consequence of Tails having flight and the level design allowing it to be abused, not a consequence of having a lives system.

- That's also more of a quirk of the level design. The levels aren't really built with constant speed in mind like the classics in a lot of cases, and maintaining speed without stopping or getting hurt/dying can be quite difficult. A lives system does NOT force players to slow down, as even without a lives system players would still be running off cliffs or into hazards.

- This sounds more like an excuse to me. An overabundance of fear because of not wanting to lose lives isn't the fault of the system, it's just the player being paranoid. SRB2 is actually quite generous in handing out lives, and for every continue you use the more lives you start out with after a game over. If anything, the lives system actually encourages exploration, as doing so is rewarded with yet more lives.




hard agree with time_gear. plus i don't see how srb2 is "too hard for newbies" now, i hear that excuse all the time. It's not that hard, I don't even remember being a newbie (i guess i got better subconsciously). Were we stopped by whatever's stopping them from getting into the game?
And again, Death isn't too punishing and SRB2 isn't too hard, there's no need to do away with a life system.


They could tweak some of the levels to be easier though, I mean Red Volcano has some segments that are too tight, and egg rock has yet to be revamped. And I agree Arid Canyon has a lot of pits.
 
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For what it's worth, I'm fully on board with having an infinite lives mode for people who prefer that, especially streamers (since repeating content isn't good when you're playing for viewers).
 
As one of the starters of the most recent discussion on the MB, I was avoiding saying anything in this post to try and gather all my thoughts... Only to see Time Gear describes my view entirely.

While I do think Lives should be a bit more punishing, I don't think they're a dramatic point that makes a player struggle like some people seem to. The more you game-over, the more lives you start off with, and the incrementation continues to grow and grow until you eventually just have more lives than you reasonably should.

Lives are a reason to improve; if you don't want to be thrown back to the start of a level, improve. Don't blame it on the lives system. It's a punishment for the player not improving enough, but it also cushions the blow by giving them a new batch of lives, plus a small bonus that becomes larger each time they game-over. If the lives are keeping you from beating a stage and it's lives alone... Perhaps it's not the lives, but rather either you being bad, or level design being bad. It can be one of those three options in almost every case, and thusly blaming it all on lives alone isn't truly a good viewpoint either.

Blaming it for Tails abuse isn't accurate either, as that's an inherent flaw with how Tails works and how the level design lets him be abused- if it's really that big an issue, I'd just make it so that Tails can fly for a far shorter time when carrying someone rather than gut the lives system entirely.

If I had to suggest any interesting methods to soften the blow- the only idea that comes to mind that hasn't been said would be a 'minimum lives' system. Every time you start a new zone (Or Act), the game would check if you have under a certain number of lives, and would then up your life counter to a minimum to make entering a new level with one life left less daunting. Theoretically, this could be amped up by an extra life for every chaos emerald you collect- IE, at first the minimum lives you can have per new zone/act start is 3, but by collecting- say- 4 emeralds, your minimum life jumps up by 1 life for every emerald- so your new minimum on zone/act start is 7. And by having all 7 chaos emeralds, your minimum lives per new zone/act start would become 10. Even then, this idea is a wee bit iffy.
 
punishment is entirely arbitrary anyways so an option for infinite lives is good to have just to be respectful of the player's time

i don't like the idea of locking certain rewards to playing with lives on since that kind of defeats the purpose of making it a choice

the primary practical issue is that something will need to be done about the lives already placed in levels while playing with infinite lives mode on. i'm not really sure what to do about those, since if you make them give a different reward (such as score) that could actively incentivise playing with infinite lives
 
Here's a little bit of additional perspective that I've been thinking about, and that I think I'm ready to post:

When a game employs a classic lives system like SRB2's current system, it means that each individual attempt at a level section matters more, as there's the looming threat of a game over in the distance, approaching closer with every death. The player is as such incentivized to play more carefully and deliberately, you only have so many chances to do the current section before you get slapped on the wrist a little harder and get booted back to the beginning of the level. This can be intimidating at first, and I get that. However, in practice it's not actually as bad as it sounds and having to redo the level gives you a chance to think about where you went wrong so that next time you can do a little better. Or alternatively, you could search around for an alternative path that might be easier for you to progress through. Ultimately though, getting a game over isn't as scary as it seems on the surface, and isn't really that hard of a punishment. Just enough to let the player know that it's time to start playing more carefully so that they can get used to the current level and improve their skill to get past it.

A flat out infinite lives system is the opposite end of the spectrum. When there's no real punishment for death, individual attempts at a level section lose almost all value. You are given no incentive to improve, because the worst that can happen is that you get sent back to the last checkpoint until you get past the section. It becomes Hotline Miami; hammering away at what's got you stuck over and over with little thought put into it until you somehow manage to get through with pure luck rather than having learned from it. The individual attempts end up blurring together.

Tatsuru however brings up a good point in that there is such thing as a middle ground, and there are valid ways to compromise that don't take away from the significance of individual attempts. I feel that there is more value in pursuing the conversation in this direction than in trying to abolish lives entirely.
 
I agree with time_gear here.

If players lose a great many consecutive lives in a particular section, odds are the player wasn't quite prepared for the challenges that the section provided. If this is the case and the game's difficulty curve is positive, then the player will be unprepared for whatever is beyond the problem area.

Theoretically, sending the player back to the start of the level, or in more extreme cases, the beginning of the game, provides players with the opportunity to go back, learn whatever lessons they may have missed, practice what they know but may not be good at, and allows them to get back on their feet in an easier, more comfortable setting. The alternative can easily devolve into players repeatedly bashing their heads against the same wall, experiencing frustration, rather than fun, only to then plunge headlong into the next wall. Would you look back on a game more positively if your memories of it consisted primarily of having fun beating the first five levels of the game, or dying over, and over again in the sixth, only to get stuck in the seventh?

I'm open to seeking ways to improve the life system though, and into examining alternative system ideas. I'll write another response shortly to address some of the alternatives mentioned above.
 
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I think it should also be noted that SRB2 levels, as with most Sonic levels, have multiple routes for completion which softens the blow of being sent back to the beginning of a level in more than one way.

- First, the player has more content to explore that would have required re-entering the level anyway.
- Secondly, if players get sent back by some particular difficulty spike, they are provided with the means to skip it entirely and solve a different challenge instead, smoothing the difficulty curve.

---------- Post added 10-17-2020 at 12:56 AM ---------- Previous post was 10-16-2020 at 10:58 PM ----------

This is my response to Zwip-Zwap Zapony. It's a long one, so I'm putting it in spoilers.
I'd be happy with if the player has, say, 5 lives per checkpoint. Whether you die 0 or 4 times on the way to the next checkpoint, you'd have 5 lives after activating the next one. (See LittleBigPlanet 1 on PlayStation 3 for an example.)
This way, dying too much at one section will put you back to the start of the level, so there's still an incentive to not die, but you'll not be disadvantaged (nor advantaged) further the next time that you get back to this section after a game over.


I want to agree with you here, but I'm not yet sure how well this would work in the context of SRB2. My first impression of this approach is that it should work very well for games with streamlined level design, such as crash bandicoot, but I have no idea how well it would work in the context of a game with more open, exploratory design. I would like to test this out sometime soon as a lua script.





TL;DR: I think that accumalable lives punish bad players, since if they die too much, they may have to restart a level with less lives than they started it with at first.


While you have a point, I believe that you are overlooking an important advantage of accumulable life systems. When new players encounter sharp difficulty spikes, they have the option and incentive to retreat and gather more lives before returning to those challenges, allowing them to tackle them later with more lives, and more importantly, more skill than they had initially.

SRB2 may not capitalize on this feature as well as it might, however. Players are unable to or load a save in a previous level until finishing the game. While this certainly prevents farming lives - which can be a definite problem in some games with accumulating lives - it means that new players must begin the game again from the very beginning if they seek to tackle that challenge with a greater number of lives.

That being said, I don't think that having to restart a game to return with more lives is necessarily a bad thing. As I mentioned above, by re-doing the earlier portions of the game, new players can better establish their basic skills and experiment with more advanced ones in a safer environment, all while preparing for the more difficult one that they know is coming. By returning to these earlier stages, players get the opportunity to explore more of the levels than they had previously explored and, in this context, will have greater motivation to do so. These returning new players also have the motivation to tackle challenges that they may have skipped in their previous runs in order to find and acquire more life monitors.

In my own experience as a Sonic newbie, I could hardly beat the second zone of any of the genesis games for some time. In Sonic 1, 2, & Knuckles this would result in me replaying and winning in GHZ and EHZ repeatedly until I was skilled enough at the games to consistently overcome MZ and CPZ, respectively. As I did so, I was driven by my desire to overcome the next levels to overcome optional objectives in the first zones to aquire more lives. I felt that I needed these lives to beat the next zones. In truth, I needed the skill that accomplishing the optional objectives caused me to develop.

In Sonic 3, however, the save system meant that I had the choice to either keep grinding HCZ until eventually I could beat it, or begin a new save and start again from AIZ1. I usually opted for trying again from AIZ. I both enjoyed AIZ more at the time than HCZ (I still do, to be honest), and I hoped that, if I played it well enough, I could enter HCZ with a bubble shield and enough lives to make it through to the following zone, with similar results to S1, S2, and S&K.


Not that I would advocate for abolishing the save system in SRB2 by any means. Please don't misinterpret this post as such. I'm establishing the strengths of accumulating life systems right now, not trying to paint save systems in a bad light.





Is "the number of Game Overs" permanent per save slot, or just temporary until you beat a level? In the former case, I disagree; That's a negative statistic that can never be decreased (aside from deleting the save slot and starting all over), which I'm not a fan of, as that makes it possible to make a save slot permanently "not perfect".


I completely agree with you here. I've never gained anything but embarrassment from being told how many lives I lost in a game, and don't understand the appeal of the system.

---------- Post added at 01:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:56 AM ----------

If I had to suggest any interesting methods to soften the blow- the only idea that comes to mind that hasn't been said would be a 'minimum lives' system. Every time you start a new zone (Or Act), the game would check if you have under a certain number of lives, and would then up your life counter to a minimum to make entering a new level with one life left less daunting. Theoretically, this could be amped up by an extra life for every chaos emerald you collect- IE, at first the minimum lives you can have per new zone/act start is 3, but by collecting- say- 4 emeralds, your minimum life jumps up by 1 life for every emerald- so your new minimum on zone/act start is 7. And by having all 7 chaos emeralds, your minimum lives per new zone/act start would become 10. Even then, this idea is a wee bit iffy.


I like this idea. Having emeralds increase your minimum life count in that way further rewards exploration and the accomplishment of side objectives, as well as gives them increased value in regard to boss fights.

---------- Post added at 01:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:02 AM ----------

I don't think that it would be overpowered either. As has already been established in this thread, the current life system exists primarily for newer players. Newer players are unlikely to reach Brak Eggman with all seven emeralds, and are likely to die repeatedly during the fight. I'd say ten lives is a good minimum to give a new player a good chance of winning without a game over without being overkill. Furthermore, the player's minimum life count would not be a full ten unless the player had already gone out of the way to collect all of the emeralds, a substantial accomplishment if you're at the level where you need ten lives to win the fight.

---------- Post added at 01:22 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:15 AM ----------

@Zwip-Zwap Zapony: I'm having serious issues understanding this post. Are you talking about a scenario where a player starts a level with 20 lives, gets a Game Over, then gets placed back at the start with 5?

I'm pretty sure the system that Zwip-Zwap Zapony is proposing is as follows:

Players begin each level with a fixed number of lives. They then may lose lives as they play the level, but activating a checkpoint or reaching the end of the level refills their lives. There is no way for the player to acquire more lives than the starting number.
 
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[...] I want to agree with you here, but I'm not yet sure how well this [5 lives per checkpoint system] would work in the context of SRB2. [...]
Me neither, but I'm not sure what else would be an option besides "accumulable lives" and "infinite lives".

I would personally prefer the latter, but mostly I just want to avoid entering a level with many lives, struggling, dying a lot, and then having to restart the level with few lives, as if you're already struggling with many lives, few lives definitely won't help. Having a specific amount of lives per checkpoint avoids you being disadvantaged in this way (admittedly at the cost of not being able to gather lots of lives for an extra tough spot).

(Luckily, SRB2 already gives you more and more extra lives from repeated Game Overs, so it does become "less few" lives if you keep struggling, but the first one or two could still put you at a disadvantage, at least if you restart the whole level rather than from a checkpoint.)


[...] When new players encounter sharp difficulty spikes, they have the option and incentive to retreat and gather more lives before returning to those challenges, allowing them to tackle them later with more lives, and more importantly, more skill than they had initially. [...]
They don't always have that option (and even if they do, the extra life/lives may sometimes be quite far back).

And while yes, people can gain more skill by replaying (parts of) levels, whether by own choice or by force, is it worth the potential frustration? ("Potential frustration" depends on the exact player, so this question can't be answered "yes" or "no".)
[...] I'm pretty sure the system that Zwip-Zwap Zapony is proposing is as follows: Players begin each level with a fixed number of lives. They then may lose lives as they play the level, but activating a checkpoint or reaching the end of the level refills their lives. There is no way for the player to acquire more lives than the starting number.[/QUOTE]Yes, that's correct, that's what I'm proposing (except that maybe continues would increase the "starting number" for the rest of a level?).

However, Goldenhog was also correct, as what you quoted and replied to was responding to the first paragraph of my post, about the "start with 20 lives, get Game Over, start over with less than 20 lives" thing being punishing.
 
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Since this is the same thing that I saw on Discord I'll just copy paste of what I said in there.

When I played on the first time I honestly explored the levels first before completing the level. Cause looking at srb2 level structure it's a open level. It gives you that feel that you have to explore the level to know the right way and find the secrets that it has. It can be said of using the other characters too. You have to study the characters abilities and stats so you would have a view of how to do pass this part, know the secrets like the emblems and extra lives. Sure that Tails can skip easily but it doesn't mean that takes all of the fun, most people see it like that but some doesn't. Tails can be used to know the level structure and later one you can try other character to see if it was worth the exploration or not
 
I'm pretty sure the system that Zwip-Zwap Zapony is proposing is as follows:

Players begin each level with a fixed number of lives. They then may lose lives as they play the level, but activating a checkpoint or reaching the end of the level refills their lives. There is no way for the player to acquire more lives than the starting number.

Yes, that's correct, that's what I'm proposing (except that maybe continues would increase the "starting number" for the rest of a level?).

I do have a few questions about this:

- If a player already has "max" lives for the level, what is the incentive for exploration, since the player can't earn any more lives? Even if the player finds a 1-up monitor, it won't do anything for them.

- If reaching a checkpoint refills your lives, wouldn't even a player who has lost lives feel more incentive to hunt down the next checkpoint than to move off the main path and explore? After all, the value of the checkpoint would far exceed the value of a single 1-up monitor.

And here are a few potential answers I can think of:

- Rather than capping the player to a certain number of lives, perhaps excess lives could be converted into continues? For example: If a level starts you out with 10 lives, and you finish with 18, and the next level only starts you with 15, the player gains 3 continues for their extra lives.

- Rather than checkpoints refilling lives, perhaps reaching a checkpoint for the first time could reward you with some additional score? If combined with the idea of goal signs rewarding continues for score, this would cause checkpoints to contribute towards gaining continues.

As an additional note, I would say that using a continue would start you with excess lives, rather than actually raising the cap. This way, assuming the player can keep their excess to the end of the stage, they will be rewarded for their improvement with more continues.
 
I have to agree with time gear, the system proposed by Zwip-Zwap Zapony would discourage exploration. I also think it sounds way too restrictive. If a player wants to explore the levels and amass lives, let them. Nothing wrong with rewarding the extra effort.

Another problem I have is that it would present a paradigm shift in relation with the official Sonic games. SRB2 is supposed be the classic Sonic formula in 3d. The lives system is a major element in said formula (and Sonic games in general). The proposed system would make SRB2 less true to it, and may confuse Sonic players (both old and young).
 
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This is another response to Zwip-Zwap Zapony that is too long not to be in spoilers.
Me neither, but I'm not sure what else would be an option besides "accumulable lives" and "infinite lives".


Compromises are possible. Take Snowy's idea for increasing minimum starting lives for example. Merge this with checkpoint-based lives. Allowing certain collectibles to increase the number of lives players have upon beginning levels and activating checkpoints. This has two advantages over a static starting life count. Firstly, it encourages exploration and the completion of optional challenges similarly to accumulable lives, albeit to a more limited extent. Secondly, it means that the number of lives players have scales to some extent with their progression through the game. You can have players start GFZ with 5 lives available to them, but they can have 12 available to them when they're fighting Brak (if we are going with 1 emerald = +1 starting life).




I would personally prefer the latter, but mostly I just want to avoid entering a level with many lives, struggling, dying a lot, and then having to restart the level with few lives, as if you're already struggling with many lives, few lives definitely won't help. Having a specific amount of lives per checkpoint avoids you being disadvantaged in this way (admittedly at the cost of not being able to gather lots of lives for an extra tough spot).
I can see that. Keep in mind a few thing though. Upon each retry, you need fewer lives. Also, the fixed lives-per-checkpoint system does not eliminate struggling or frustration, it merely spreads out the struggle a little more and reduces the stress related to underdog scenarios.





They don't always have that option (and even if they do, the extra life/lives may sometimes be quite far back).


Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to suggest that players go backwards through the same level, but that they replay previous levels, or perhaps start again from the beginning of the level. Replaying previous levels is both good at this point for giving players practice in controlling their characters as well as giving them breaks from the frustration of trying to overcome challenges that they aren't prepared for.



SRB2 currently does not support replaying earlier levels in a save to gather more lives until after beating the game, meaning that if players want to try the challenge again with more lives, they must replay the entire game from the beginning. There is a good reason for this; it prevents life farming, which otherwise would be a boring, harmful optimal strategy. I'm trying to think of a possible solution to this problem, but am having trouble taking lives gained from rings into account.





And while yes, people can gain more skill by replaying (parts of) levels, whether by own choice or by force, is it worth the potential frustration? ("Potential frustration" depends on the exact player, so this question can't be answered "yes" or "no".)
[SPOILER="Potential frustration" example]I speak from experience with "replaying by force";

The first time that I played Sonic Mania, I entered Oil Ocean with more than 20 lives, reached the second act's boss with at least more than 10 lives, died repeatedly, got a Game Over, restarted the second act (not just the boss) with 3 or 5 lives, and got more Game Overs when reaching the boss again.

Eventually I ran out of continues, and had to restart the first act as well, further lowering my chances of even just reaching the second act's boss.

I did not appreciate, nor even consider, getting "more skill" from replaying the levels, while I was very frustrated about having to just keep playing over and over, with only a few chances at the second act's boss before having to start over from the first act again, when I had also failed the time that I had many chances.


(Again, SRB2 gives you more lives after each Game Over, so SRB2 at least does it better than Sonic Mania, but still.)


There are several things I would like to say in response to this.


I've been there, and it isn't fun to feel like you've lost progress, or that you have no hope for success. To this day I haven't actually beaten Sonic 2 because I keep running out of lives right at the final boss and the game doesn't have a save system (that, and I have far less time to play these days and I know that there isn't really anything waiting for me on the other side of the boss, which isn't particularly fun to fight anyway). I was stuck on the Stardust Speedway Act 2 boss in Mania's Encore mode for several months (I wasn't playing it frequently, mind you. I only sat down to play about three times in that period) because I would game over each time I fought it.


I do want to reduce player frustration if it is possible without reducing the overall fun of the experience, and I'm not a fan of trying to force players to play the way I want them to. I'm not opposed to things like infinite lives as options (though there are some things that should be made clear are cheats and players should be warned that using them may harm their experience of the game).


Even if you didn't notice yourself becoming better at the the game, you were becoming better at the game. Your mastery over controlling your character in that physics system was growing. You were getting a better feel for the level design patterns. You were developing your understanding of the application of your character's moveset. Even if only a little bit, you were a better player by the time you finally beat the boss than you were before you beat it. Unfortunately, players rarely notice their own skill increasing without noticeable result differences, such as learning a new trick, getting a special ranking or reward, overcoming a challenge previously seen as insurmountable, or thoroughly examining their own gameplay.


The game wasn't forcing you to replay Oil Ocean. You did not have to keep playing Oil Ocean. Most of the game takes place prior to Oil Ocean, and you probably enjoyed most of it, no? If you were given the option to skip Oil Ocean and jump straight into Lava Reef, would you have chosen it? Would the following levels and bosses really have been more fun to play in that situation, or would Mirage Saloon or Studiopolis have been more fun instead? While, as I said, I don't like it when games try to force players to play a specific way, I think that the issue here isn't necessarily the accumulating life system itself, but rather the way that accumulating life systems, game over systems, and savegame systems interact. While save states provide players with the choice to keep going, all but ignoring the game over screen and almost immediately trying again at the same challenges, they also make the message of the game over screen less clear. This harms the effectiveness of life accumulation systems.



If players accumulate enough lives in easy sections without gaining sufficient skill from those sections, they can potentially brute force several more difficult levels and find themselves repeating levels beyond their mastery of the game. Instead of acting as warm ups and practice, these levels act as a barriers. Every time a player is sent back, the player is repeating a section that is too difficult, leaving only the options of playing with little hope for success, or resetting. If the player doesn't think to reset, then all that remains is frustration. In a fixed-lives system, players don't make it to the more difficult levels unless they are, indeed, ready for them (assuming that the difficulty curve is smooth and the life count properly reflects the skill expectancy for both the player and the difficulty of the levels). This means that if a player gets sent back in a fixed-life system, the player is sent back to something closer to the player's skill level, rather than something that is still too difficult, mitigating the possibility of the player pushing too hard.



In a life system like you propose, you wouldn't have experienced this same kind of frustration. You would have roughly the same number of game overs in your playthrough, but they would have been more spread out, thereby individually less frustrating. Furthermore, you wouldn't have to worry about not having as many lives when you reached the boss.


Keep in mind though, that game overs in a game with accumulating lives are suggestions to restart the game, and that you were the one making yourself play through Oil Ocean so much, not the game. At the point of reaching a game over, especially if you spend all of your continues, it is worth considering starting the game again, rather than just a level, which should save you frustration, give you more fun, and should reduce the total number of game overs that you experience.
[/SPOILER]
 
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Back in Sonic 2 you had to start all over again if you lost all lives and Continues, but in this game (and Sonic 3 and Mania) you of course can retry from the same zone if you game over. This isn't an unfair game either. Currently I don't know the use of continues in this game, I've never used one. Some people can adapt to a game's controls much faster or easier than others.

Anyway the point is I don't think the lives system is flawed and needs to be touched. I don't think lives are the problem or what're causing newbies to go away from our game. If they go away from this game it wouldn't be "because they're bad", it's "because they were interested". I would say we were all noobs back then, and the reason we stayed is because we had some level of determination. We were interested in the game, and stayed.

If anything, the level design or how the player controls would be the problem. Tails is an easy mode, if people pick him is that wrong? No, the level design allows Tails to be heavily abusable and skip platform. That is just how Tails is. I don't get what Tails has to do with a lives system. People may pick Tails because he's easier?? Yes?? That's the point?? They can pick whoever they want??
 
Keeping infinite lives behind devmode cheats & 100% completion is dumb. We're all thinking it, deep down. It should be an option that you don't have to unlock. Maybe an easy mode.
 
Keeping infinite lives behind devmode cheats & 100% completion is dumb. We're all thinking it, deep down. It should be an option that you don't have to unlock. Maybe an easy mode.

Clearly based on the progression of this topic, not all of us are. A number of reasons have been stated for this, as well.

An easier difficulty mode isn't something I'm against, but I do think that if the only difference is that the easy mode has infinite lives, then save slots using that difficulty shouldn't be able to unlock secrets. Saving progression on that slot should still be possible, so it's not something that should be flagged as an outright cheat, but if you want unlockables you should have to play the game properly to get them. The exception to this is if significantly more is done than just removing the lives system, such as doing it the Crash 4 method.
 

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