While David Cage may be the cause of sleeping in high ranking Sony employees, he isn’t going to be causing people who buy Beyond: Two Souls to experience a ‘game over’ screen when they fail to succeed, as he explained to Joystiq:
I’ve always felt that ‘game over’ is a state of failure more for the game designer than from the player. It’s like creating an artificial loop saying, ‘You didn’t play the game the way I wanted you to play, so now you’re punished and you’re going to come back and play it again until you do what I want you to do.’ In an action game, I can get that – why not? It’s all about skills. But in a story-driven experience it doesn’t make any sense.
Giving a scene as an example, two police officers are chasing main character Jodie (played by Ellen Page) on a train. If you’re able to evade the police, you’ll then be taken to a standoff on the roof of the train (hopefully she has a helicopter). But if you aren’t successful, you’ll be captured by them and must escape. What this means is that people who succeed won’t play through the escape, while people who fail don’t get to go on the train’s roof.
Despite not having a Game Over screen, death will be a part of Beyond: Two Souls, with Cage saying, “It’s a game about death, so you can imagine that death plays a role in all of this. Actually, it’s one of the big discoveries, one of the big mysteries in the game is to discover what’s on the other side. And it’s definitely not a black screen.”
Beyond: Two Souls launches on October 8th in North America and October 11th in Europe.
What do you think of Beyond: Two Souls not having a ‘game over’ screen? Let us know in the comments below.
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