You're always immortal. 99% of players (a scientifically tested result, I promise) reload as soon as a party member dies. I'm sure some people reload just because they didn't get an optimal result - maybe they lost too many hitpoints or used a potion or two more than they would prefer. If you aren't immortal, shouldn't dying be the end of the game? Start over?
Yeah, that's true. But that's my point - and why I asked if there's some kind of line you wouldn't want to cross?
I mean, personally I think it's vital to have that illusion of death being a threat - and my own tastes lean towards some kind of middle-ground where it's something you really want to avoid, but not so devastating that you lose all your progress.
Reloading might be the first option for the majority, but consider the reason. They know that if they don't they'll have to deal with player death. The reason that's not so bad, is that it actually provokes most players (or so is the theory) into playing smart, because reloading IS NOT desirable. It's a hassle to start over and reload, and players will automatically care less if they know they can win a fight without having to mess around with player death. Is that convenient? Yeah. But is it desirable from a gameplay standpoint? I honestly couldn't say, but I know that I personally enjoy a challenge and I enjoy playing smart and being rewarded.
Doesn't it seem wrong that you lose interest in whether or not your characters die? Because that's basically what happens - or at least that's what happened many times to me in games like NWN2. Is that really what we want in our roleplaying games?
I distinctly remember really not giving a shit in games like Mass Effect and KotOR - because the AI control is generally not good enough to make you feel you're fully in control. So you end up simply focusing on your own character, and you know they're gonna die half the time, so you don't really want to invest in their deaths. I can't say how many times I was the only one standing and not really caring because of this system. Of course, the AI is a big issue here - and it needs to be smart for you to want to care and setup the actions of your party members.
About perma-death, I think the "hardcore ironman" option is a very interesting one, and I'd support it in almost any game as a possibility if you're into that sort of thing.
I think Dragon Age strikes a good balance (as best I can tell without having played it). If my party is knocked down, they carry injuries as a consequence, which affects their performance and acts as an incentive to improve next time. With a traditional system, there are no real consequences - most people just reload.
I agree, it sounds like a decent balance - though I would prefer "dead" characters needing to be resurrected.
The reason being that I personally don't just reload if the battle was a tough one, and I spent a lot of time winning it without dying entirely. In such an instance, I'd rather just spend some resources or some time gettting my party member(s) back to life. I don't enjoy repeating a long tough battle, if I can at all avoid it. Also, it adds to the immersion that I have to actually work at getting my comrade(s) back in fighting shape as long as they don't overdo the hassle.
Again, if you remove the penalty of death, you start caring less - and then it will partially remove the motivation to build powerful characters and take tactical decisions seriously. I'm sure many players find that great, but I think it's kinda sad when so much work has obviously been put into the tactical aspect of Dragon Age.
Going back to your point - your sarcasm aside - standing there is clearly not what happens when someone is seriously injured in a battle. From a gameplay perspective, it also adds nothing. As I said, though, I don't see why an instant-death system is any more immersive than the dozens of other rather obvious breaks from reality.
But how would you measure the extent of immersion breaking? If something has become tradition - much like we all are ok with characters not going to the bathroom, then it'd truly be a questionable feature to have. But instant revival is relatively new, and for many of us represent a break of immersion that we're simply not conditioned to.
Does that mean we SHOULD condition ourselves to it, and that anything that can be argued to be "logical" in terms of gameplay should be auto accepted? No, I don't think so. That leads to games that play themselves ala Dungeon Siege where this kind of thing became too much.
Speaking of immersion, doesn't it make sense that some participants would be seriously injured and unable to continue fighting, rather than just plain dead? In that sense, everyone-is-always-injured is no better or worse than everyone-is-always-dead.
Certainly, and if they could implement a realistic and plausible system like that without messing around with balance - then I'd support it all the way. I think the problem is how difficult it is to implement a reasonable "injury system" where players gradually perform worse as their injuries increase - and the same would be true for the enemies. I mean, that's a bit too much to expect from developers, because it's a hard challenge. But I agree it's immersion breaking, and I welcome any alternative like the ones seen in Fallout and others.
Not having instant-revival - though - seems to me much less of a challenge, and whether it breaks immersion on the same scale as something else that's not realistic is simply not a logical reason for it to be left as is.
There are other reasons, though, like the modern audience not wanting actual death and breaks of that nature in gameplay, and those I can understand. I don't like them, but I can understand and accept them.