Explainer

Permadeath, and what studios put in its place

In a squad tactics game permadeath does not mean game over. It means that one person is gone, the campaign carries on without them, and the hole they leave is the punishment. That is a harder thing to design than it sounds, and most studios now soften it.

A soldier you recruited twenty hours ago, promoted twice, gave the good rifle to and started thinking of as yours takes a hit and is dead. The mission continues. The campaign continues. The next mission starts with five people instead of six, and one of them is a recruit who cannot shoot.

That is the mechanic, and almost nothing else in games does the same job. It is not difficulty, exactly. It is a way of making the player's attention expensive.

Where it comes from

Rogue, written by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980 for Unix machines, made the decision that matters: when your character died the game was over, and playing again meant a new character in a new dungeon. There was no going back. The games that copied it ended up named after it, though the word roguelike only settled into use on Usenet around 1993.

Squad tactics took half of that idea. The loss is permanent, but the campaign is not. You keep playing with what is left, which means you live inside the consequence instead of restarting away from it. Fire Emblem (Intelligent Systems, 1990) built a whole series on that rule, and X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) and Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) are the versions most people in this genre remember.

Why it works, when it works

It works because of everything that happens before the death. Naming a soldier, choosing their specialism, watching them survive a mission they should not have, giving them the equipment you only have one of: every one of those is the player investing, and none of it is a mechanic. The game is quietly letting you build something it can later take away.

It also changes how you play minute to minute. If a bad order costs you a character permanently, you check the sight lines before you move, you keep someone in reserve, and you take the eighty per cent shot instead of the ninety. A game where the worst case is reloading does not get that out of a player, because the worst case is an inconvenience.

The problem nobody has designed around: the save file

Permadeath in a game you can save is opt-in. The player decides, in the half second after the soldier dies, whether it counts, and most people decide it does not. That is save scumming, and complaining about it misses the point: the game offered the button.

The honest answer to it was to make not-reloading a mode. XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games, 2012) shipped Ironman, which keeps one save slot and writes to it when you quit, so there is nothing to go back to. Firaxis also put the losses somewhere you had to look at them, with a memorial for dead soldiers and, for a while, a Facebook wall where players posted their own.

Ironman solves the problem by consent rather than by design. The player who wants the rule gets the rule. Everybody else gets a reload button and a slightly hollow version of the same game, and no studio has found a third option that does not simply remove the save.

The five things studios put in its place

Over the last fifteen years most of the genre has moved away from a plain permanent death towards something that still costs you but does not erase what you built. Five approaches cover nearly all of it.

Wounds instead of death. The soldier lives but is out of action for days or weeks of campaign time. XCOM: Enemy Unknown does this constantly, and the cost is real, because the mission next week happens whether or not your best shot is out of the infirmary. You lose the use of a character without losing the character.
Loss you can undo at a price. In Invisible, Inc. (Klei Entertainment, 2015) a downed agent is gone for the rest of the run unless another agent drags the body to the exit, which costs turns in a game where turns are the scarcest thing you have. Agents lost earlier can be broken out of a detention centre on a later mission. Death becomes a problem with a solution you may not be able to afford.
Optional permadeath. Fire Emblem added a Casual Mode in New Mystery of the Emblem (2010) and made it standard from Awakening (2012): a defeated unit simply retreats and is back next chapter. Classic Mode keeps the original rule. The series stopped arguing and let the player choose.
Losing the run rather than the person. Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018) ends a failed campaign by letting the timeline fall, and you start a new one carrying a single pilot forward. The stakes are real, the restart is short, and nothing you spent an evening building is destroyed.
Attrition instead of death. Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook Studios, 2016) keeps a plain permanent death and then adds stress on top, so a hero can come home alive and ruined. Battle Brothers (Overhype Studios, 2017) hands out permanent injuries that stay on the character sheet. The threat spreads out across a campaign instead of landing in one moment.

What the substitutes are actually for

The usual explanation is that permadeath is too hard and studios went soft to sell more copies. That is not quite it. The real trouble with permadeath is that it punishes the player who cared most. Someone who skims through a campaign loses a unit; someone who learned every character's name loses something they made, and a meaningful number of those people put the game down and do not come back. The mechanic is at its most effective on exactly the player it is most likely to drive away.

Every substitute in the list is an attempt to keep the consequence and lose that outcome. Wounds keep the shortage. Recoverable loss keeps the panic. Attrition keeps the dread. What none of them keep is the specific, unrepeatable feeling of a name going grey on the roster, and that is why the argument is still live thirty years later.

Where this leaves RAD Tactics

We are not announcing how RAD Tactics handles it. What is worth saying is what the question costs: it is not a difficulty slider you bolt on at the end. Permanent loss only means anything if the game spends the hours beforehand getting you to invest in a particular person, and it only works at all if a squad short of a member is still playable. Both of those are decisions about the whole campaign, not about one death.