Tag ideas, 2017Q1 edition

Haven't started these threads for a while, but here I am looking for good names for tags again.

* Multiple playthroughs required. Player is required to play the game through multiple times to get the proper story, not including playing as different characters to get different story or similar.
... seen in: Nier:Automata, Everspace
* Cross playthrough elements. One playthrough affects other playthroughs. For example dying leaves a ghost behind the next playthrough can find.
... seen in: Nethack??? Some roguelike.
* Player leaves some object behind on death. Not counting recoverable death penalty or your gear. As in, something else the player did not have
... seen in: Terraria (player leaves a decorative gravestone)
* Player leaves some creature behind on death. Such as ghost of themselves.
... seen in: Salt & Sanctuary (salt bat), Hollow Knight (ghost), Nethack???
* Enemies turning neutral. Outside of mind control or conversion effects. Simplest example is games with faction reputation which can be played in either direction at any time.
... seen in: Hollow Knight (mantis and bees), some games with factions tag.
* Enemies turning friendly. Same as above, but they actually start aiding you.
... seen in: some games with factions tag.
* Inverse optimality. Opposite of normally optimal is the Actually optimal thing to do.
... seen in: Wasteland 2 (wearing armor multiplies energy weapon damage against that person and the armor soak is ignored)
... I don't recall seeing or hearing this in other games, so might be unique-ish case?
* Semi-death state. Character dies to non-resuscitatable state but can still be restored to normal by other means.
... seen in: Vermintide & Left 4 Dead (dead characters are found again in locked closets or similar and return to play upon being freed), kind of also several dungeon crawlers (e.g. Eye of the Beholder and Legend of Grimrock) where you can have dead characters in your party until you visit a shrine or similar that resurrects them.
* Semi-permadeath. Characters die for good. But does not tamper with saves, so you can reload game to undo this.
... seen in: Wasteland 2 (characters you fail to resuscitate die for good and can not be resurrected), Pillars of Eternity
* Environment interactions. Non-simulationist way of doing things like flammability, freezing, etc.
... seen in: Breath of the Wild (such as swinging a wooden weapon through a fireplace sets the weapon on fire)
* Character mutators. Player can choose a small subset of buffs they carry when these are not tied to other equipment, tho the equipment system may be tied to this. For
... seen in: Painkiller (cards), Hollow Knight (charms)
* Tampered random number generation. Such as in Dota 2 critical hit chance increases each time you fail to deliver critical hit and resets on critical. This increases actual statistical chance by about 10-20% or more over long period, but it also guarantees there's a crit within small sample size (because the chance increases to 100% eventually).
... seen in: Dota 2 (anything with "pseudo-random distribution")

Seems good, except for Semi-permadeath which doesn't seem like something that needs to be tagged. Any non-Permadeath game with saves would fall in that category, no?

Multiple playthroughs required reminded me of a related tag that I've been thinking about. TVTropes calls it Omega Ending: an ending that you can only get once you've completed other endings. Usually the 'true ending' in visual novels. Could definitely use a tag for those.

Same goes for those Enemies turning neutral/friendly tags. I've been looking for a tag for diplomancy: resolving combat with dialogue instead of force. Couple of examples: The Logomancer, which is built around that, and Renowned Explorers where you can choose to resolve combats by either force, guile, or diplomacy. Various roguelikes (such as Incursion) also feature this in the form of a diplomacy skill. The existing Diplomacy tag seems like a poor fit, because it's about diplomacy between nations and therefore quite different from this concept.

In "most" gamest the fallen allies can be resurrected or resuscitated after they die, the point was to identify games where you can't resuscitate them and the ally dying is not a fail state.

In other words: does the game continue on despite losing said allies with no way to restore them besides starting over or loading a save game.

There's also the few games which have both, though none come to mind (some D&D games? I keep thinking Baldur's Gate 2 had it, but disabled on easy?), where characters can be killed so bad that they lose their ability to be resuscitated when they normally have it.

It honestly makes only sense in combination with resuscitation tag.


True ending is also used in other games usually referring to the canonical one.


Alternate conflict solutions are poorly explored here due to how rare they are in video games. They definitely need more attention. There's alternate solutions tag, but its meaning is much broader. Tho honestly in renowned explorers force, guile, and diplomacy could be seen simply as incompatible damage types with separate health bars for each (such as how you in some games have mental and physical health separately tracked where depleting either causes death or equivalent).

The diplomacy tag was on purpose for political diplomacy than the more regular person-to-person persuasion, intimidation, etc. Since the two differ quite differently: diplomacy affects entire faction, while here we'd need something that affects a single encounter (possibly more, but that's besides the point).

---

Anyway, the point was to figure out some short, clear, but meaningful names for these concepts, not simply to look for acceptance. Some are probably good as is, but others are far too wordy (like the leaves-x-on-death idea).

Along the lines of moneybags and gold bars I'm think about how to tag out-of-place currency. Racing games sometimes lay money on the road to be collected by running them over. The pickups aspect is already covered by tags but the pile of money on the road is not. More than that though, individual notes, bank bound notes, and piles or stacks of bank bound notes are found lying around in strange places in videogames.
Is currencypickups an antiquate name?

In Skyrim and Divinity Original Sin 1, you could find individual gold coins that you picked one at a time when you normally deal with hundreds or even thousands stacked.

Should we have a tag for notable instances when a game encourages or even requires the player to non-honorably (but not necessarily dishonorably) shoot first?

I feel this would be better covered by something else than something related to the shooting if it's "notable". I mean, what it essentially boils down that the game notably requires player to be the aggressor in lethal exchanges. Most of these would probably be covered by the protagonist being malevolent, as it's sort of expected of such.

In short: better to go with something that puts the player character as the aggressor... when they're not identified as being malevolent in general.

Tho if it's only a single scene in a very long game or such, I don't think it matters enough.