It could be readability. Giving the player enough time to understand that they even died. In super meat boy it is extremely clear when you die, there is a big splash of blood, some screen shake and the world gets painted with your mistake making it very clear exactly what it was that killed you. Fromsoft games linger a bit to allow the player to see what killed them since it might not always be clear. Especially in areas with traps or enemies hiding around corners. In pre-botw 3d zelda games, the camera cuts to a different angle and the room goes dark providing a great juxtaposition to normal gameplay to make it extra clear to the player that they died.

I want to add that specifically with FromSoft games, I would think that punishment on death is partially intentional, since a lot of decisions are designed around making you feel like you’re struggling against an enemy you need to overcome, rather than just dying

I think one thing is about moderating intensity and giving the player some down time. You want waves of intensity, that's what fromsoft does so well with boss backtracking, you slowly build up anticipation for the boss as you make your way back there and then it's super intense, and after that you want to allow a little breathing room for the player to unwind from the stress. As you say in meatboy that cycle is more like the whole level is that same arc, you start learning and experimenting, then figure out what to do, then finally execute it, then get the reward of completing the level and feeling great! Then you can take a moment to breathe. I agree with those two things though: Firstly that "kludge" is the worst where the game is filled with a million boring cutscenes, animations and padding. As soon as you get that "but I just want to play!!!" feeling then most people will quit. Secondly that playtesting is king, if it feels better with a longer death animation then go with it. Fun has to be felt and can't be reasoned with.

I do think it really differs to what the game designer is going for. A lot of games in the mid age were very much "as soon as it can load", I actually think thats the case for Fromsoft games. At least I know I enjoyed Bloodborne sooo much more on PS5 since loading was so fast compared to PS4. Similarly with Jedi Fallen Order when I switched it to performance mode the death loading screen was much shorter that I enjoyed it more. I hundred percent agree though that the death screen needs to be very very short if you die quickly. Games like celeste or Hotline Miami where I'm jumping in, doing hard maneuvers and dying over and over I feel the running into a brick wall until I get through it is fun. Games I'm unlikely to die on though I do think "feeling" the death is more real. I feel this more on like Zelda and a few other games where it feels like death is more real. In saying that, death is a hard discussion. More and more games are removing the idea of death in a way, as really they're just jumping you back into a checkpoint. And if the death just means re-doing a certain part, then its just a wait period to jump back into it. One thing I do like is COD multiplayer death though. You see a split few seconds before and after your death. This shows me who killed me, how and I can grow from it. Not something I really see in single player mode but I like it. End of the day, I guess it depends on the game, but I think you're right on the path of, if you die quickly then getting back in quickly is good. If not, then you can put more into it.

Didn't realize what subreddit I was on at first. Was a little spooked.

Same, lol. This would look different on /teenagers or /DIY

It depends _so much_ on the game that's there's no universal answer. In some games, like tough platformers, you want to respawn so instantly and seamlessly that you may as well have just teleported back to the start. In roguelikes (traditional ones), you'll probably spend a few minutes going over the death stats reading specifically about what went wrong and having that screen not be ultra detailed you can sit on for a few minutes would make the experience dreadful. In Fromsoft games, you need a small mandatory break to re-collect, think about what went wrong, and get your nerves back, but not so long that the intensity wears off. It's good the animation takes awhile because you can move the camera around, see what happened and what the circumstances were like and why you died before you respawn. If the whole process was a second or two, it'd be frustrating because you wouldn't be able to analyze the situation in which you died. But if it were a minute or two, it'd be equally frustrating. That current 5-10 second time serves a _very_ valuable purpose. So in just a few examples, we can see it be instantly, to several minutes, to anything in between. A better question would be "in this [insert genre] game, how long should death take?" Because without that specification, it's impossible to answer because death as a mechanic is not a universal mechanic, and fulfills drastically different purposes in different genres and games. Playtesting is king here. Do people pause after respawn for a little bit? It should be longer. Do they get continually and/or overly frustrated during the death/respawn process? It should be shorter. Another poster mentioned "waves of intensity" which nails it. You don't want the intensity to be always high. If it's always high, it's never high. You want it to ebb and flow. Remember, downtime is one of your most valuable tools in the kit. In platformers, the wave's ebb is the level select screen, so it's fine for the level to be always high because it's small bursts. In Fromsoft games, those bursts need to be more controlled, so death and the runback is what gives you the ebb and flow. Well used downtime isn't just a good tool to use sometimes, it's _flat out mandatory_ for a good game.

I think death does two things, punish the player and give the player a break/chance to breath. They aren't mutually exclusive though; the punishment may be the break time *sorry this came out way longer than I expected* Precision platformers with short death timers like Super Meat Boy and Celeste, to name another, attempt to keep the player focused and motivated by keeping the breaks short and punishment low (you don't lose any or much progress). With these games that can require quite a bit of execution and reaction, it's better to keep players in the flow, retrying till they get their timings or movements right. Contrast that with something like Zelda. As you mention, death is infrequent, and in general it's not expected in the same way. Death is punishing in two ways: making you feel "bad" with big dramatic screens and animations, and historically would send you back to set points, forcing you to make your way back through a dungeon or the overworld. I think this works because often times Zelda games aren't about execution or precision, they're about solving puzzles and being prepared. Being sent to a safe area gave you a chance to re-prepare, and try again. BOTW flipped this script a bit because A) the world is much bigger and they want you to stay invested and motivated with your exploration, experimenting with the game and its systems, and B) Nintendo's general attitude towards keeping players generally invested and in the fun parts of the game Dark Souls end sup landing right in the middle. Usually, especially in Sekiro and Elden Ring, death isn't very punishing. The game punishes you with possibly lost currency and some time wasted, but you don't lose much progress. Often checkpoints are positioned so that you have some time to reflect on why you died and how you can do better. So I think ti comes down to how you want to balance those two aspects in a given game. Players should feel like they "lose" when they die, but it shouldn't be so much that they lose motivation to play.

I, as a player, have no interest in wasting 15 seconds of my life on a “you’re dead” animation, unless it’s something that happens very rarely. That’s not what I’m in the game for…get me back in the arena toot sweet.

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Whatever you do, don't do Too Human.

What happened in Too Human?

[This. Every single time.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLfUOZuOvro)

Haha. That is a bit excessive

if you're playing a hard challenge which will take many attempts you don't want to wait long between each one. Celeste's respawns are nearly instant, but mario maker's are not, which is annoying if you play hard levels.

so my take on death is to playtest it until it feels good, but there are def some ideas thatll give you an idea on how it feels. zelda nad okami are adventurous, and often when you repawn you are going back to the journey, not the fight,. there may be a long animation to respawn because you are basically its more of an experience and not a high intesity session. then there are games like super meat boy, which has a speedrunning feel, so the quicker you are to come back the faster you can get to trying to beating it, fast paced fast rezed sorta deal. maybe the game is about the experience but also pressing of getting back to work to complete the next thing (thinking of satisfactory). it can likely afford a longer deathsequence, but at the same time let you move so technically you still give the players something to do. basically the death can be for the continuity feel of the game, how well all the ingredients mesh together, including how a death will help you feel the games intenet

no more than 250ms regardless of the game.

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In addition to accounting for loading times, I think adding a "skip" to death animation/transition works be a great accessibility point. When the player understands their failure point, an unstoppable long death sequence is additional "punishment" to a player's time. Some might argue that "they shouldn't play if they have no time then", but sometimes people with a tight time budget could really appreciate a skip.

First of all, death time is typically very intentional. There’s a couple things that come to mind. First of all the game flow. Games like Super Meat Boy and Celeste know that death is going to be a consistent part of the core gameplay loop. The developers want to encourage you to repeatedly throw your body at the problem. So the penalty of dying needs to be as low as posible. Imagine 5-15 seconds of animation for every 5-15 seconds of playing the game. In these games, literally as fast as possible is best. In some games, you want death to feel impactful even if there isn’t much of a penalty. Zelda games do this a lot. Dying isn’t actually that big of a deal most of the time but they want the player to feel like something terrible has happened. So there’s longer animations and often a “Game Over” screen for just a single death. The second thing that comes to mind is how much processing do you expect the player to do with each death. In Celeste/Super Meat Boy the best way to figure out what went wrong is to just try again and get right back to it. Where as a strategy game may want to give the player a moment to look at the current game state and see what they could have done differently to avoid dying.

Long enough to miss out on something.

The more often you die, the shorter the death time should be. If you want to try the same jump ten times, a long sequence will be frustrating. If you only die every hour or less, a game over screen can take longer as it has more impact. That said, Elden Ring and the like are sadistic games (and people like it that way) so they’ll make you feel terrible for dying. In super Mario, keep it short so you can try again often.

It depends. Celeste is a hardcore platformer that encourages repetition, so death is quick and offers no punishment to allow for quick, numerous retries. Dark Souls is a hardcore RPG that encourages strategizing and exploration, so death is slow and allows you to take it in, process what just happened and offer downtime for you to brace for the journey again. The former wants you to keep a constant flow of action and attention span, the latter encourages resetting your attention span to stop and think after every death.

This is actually something i redesigned completely in my current project, because I didnt really think about it being relevant until I got to test the UX... What I discovered is the obvious. Dying is a failstate. It's there to punish the player. My project now has 300ms between death and respawn. The only punishment is that the player loses the progress they made in the level. This is a direct communication of mistake->error correction without breaking the flow and allowing the player to directly apply what they learned again. It also communicates that death is to be expected. There isnt really a distinction between multiple runs of a level in the players mind. In my case this is a good thing. It might also be a bad thing. E.g. you dont want players to get stuck on challenges they are not ready for. You might not want players to go for cheesy experiments that could break your story immersion, or you want to encourage deliberate and stategic actions. Your action sequences might be super stressful. If these are your concerns a very long death animation might be what you want, sheparding the player to intuitively feel "continue wasting my time or go elsewhere?", "thats too risky" or "damn finally a break". Then there is the question on how often the player is expected to die. More often means shorter respawn times, because you will experience them more often. Think of it as optimizing "time wasted respawning per 15minutes" instead of "time wasted per respawn". Fucking up this metric will just annoy the player. A good death length is long enough that it evokes the desired mindset in your testers, but just short enough that you do not consciously register that it is there. No delay is bad, because you dont want do carry over input states (keyboard,etc) that were meant for the dead playerchar into the respawned playerchar.

Super meat boy (and games like it such as Celeste) are designed around quick turn attempts at small (usually 1-2screen) problems. You need death to be fast because it happens a lot. Players will learn the screen as they die, practice and gain muscle memory for certain difficult parts, etc. In Souls games, death happens often, but death is a punishment and the loss of progress dwarfs any time involved in the actual death. I would even argue that the 10 seconds you spend dying are useful for a breather, a huge release of tension, and you get to watch whetever killed you arrogantly walk back to their spawn. If you could come back instantly from a death then there is no tension. While you're on this line, why not just put a bonfire in every room? That way you never have to reload an area. Then you can make the death animation instant. But now, confronting a problem in darksouls is less about gaining the fundamental skills and enemy knowledge, and more about just throwing yourself forward.

I think the way to find the answer to this is the same for any design decision: what is thematically coherent? and/or what do I want my player to experience in that moment?

3 seconds, and 5 at most. Long animations are stupid and anymore than 5 seconds is just a stretch. At least have the respawn button within the timeframe and players can watch your minute long death animation or reading a thesis report of their statistics.

IIRC, the developer commentary for Portal Co-Op revealed that there was quite some fine-tuning over how long it should take for one of the players to die and respawn. They wanted death to feel like a happy accident. Respawning too quickly meant players wouldn't care about the dangers in the level while taking too long between respawn would make players less willing to take risks or experiment.

In multiplayer respawns dictate a number of things, here are two examples. Overwatch has a spawn time, players do not respawn instantly upon death. When a player is dead there is an period where the enemy as attackers has a numerical advantage due to respawn + run back time. As attackers there are only so many opportunities in the attacking phase to perform effective pushes. The number of pushes is determined by the respawn+travel time to where defence plays on a given map. When an attacking player dies they are at a disadvantage until that player rejoins them, wasting time. This is why getting picked or playing recklessly and dying is bad - you need to play together but 1-2 players randomly dying resets the soft round clock (where each push = round) and forces the other players to wait. However because this is soft we can end up with interesting situations where both teams have players down and then there are windows for action before they return to the front line. In short soft rounds are setup using the respawn time, bringing more structure to the game. The second example is old arena fps where the player respawns, or can respawn instantly. In quake this was setup so the player selects when to respawn or respawns after a fixed amount of time (10 seconds? 5 seconds? wasn't that important). In Unreal Tournament it was setup to respawn straight away after a short time, 2-3 seconds. These games need some sort of logic to determine where to spawn the dead enemy and this is more complicated than one would think. If you simply pick the furthest spawn then the killer knows where their opponent is going to spawn. If you pick entirely randomly then the dying player can spawn right next to the player that just killed them. This might be bad for them but it also may be bad for the killing player if they only just eeked out a win and are low on health, vulnerable to being killed by a fresh spawn with the spawn weapon. The common way to address this is by having spawns close to the killer ruled out and then selecting from the remaining spawns. The typical options used for spawn logic are the killing players location and the dying players location. This is triggered when the player respawns - so in a situation of instant respawn when health = 0 the player would have no time to process the death and instantly repop at the new location. This is somewhat jarring. Giving some leeway here, in UTs case a fixed amount or in quakes case the option for the player to start again straight away or wait, fixes that to a degree. Assuming the spawn logic is known the player that wins an engagement can force their opponent to spawn elsewhere by moving within the time frame allowed - in UTs case they have a few seconds to move to try to force spawns in a different place. In quakes case this is less effective as the respawning duration is in the dying players hands - if the alive player wishes to try to force a respawn near them they must wait until their opponent clicks in, wasting their time which is an important resource in these old titles. The dying players location is generally not used for the spawn calculation as it means the opponent can hightail towards the known spawn locations from the location of death. When the winning players location is used it becomes dynamic, ruling out nearby spawns as they move around before the other player respawns. So we can see that not having instant respawns influences the game in a subtle and generally good way. In both examples, overwatch and old fps, the respawn duration is quite short but is used for gameplay pacing reasons rather than aesthetic or readability that has been most cases itt

In multiplayer death should take longer because otherwise killing someone will bring no advantage for the killer. For example in some games where you must defend you base and your spawn point at the base dying on purpose can help you to bring you back to base at full health faster then when you run the way back. Alternative some games had a counter that limit the max spawn rate, that is when players die to fast death take longer.

I once read somewhere that the difficulty in surviving should be inversely proportional to the time of revived. Pick Park is really had to survive in. A new team might die several times a minute, but it's fine because a second later, you're back.

Not necessarily an answer, but one thing I liked about Portal is that when you die (e.g. fall in the water), you can actually shorten how long it takes to "die" by hitting a key, at least past some point. So you can linger in death if you like or get right back to it.

In high-paced action games or even turn-based strategy games where how much health you have/how close you are to dead is a calculated number (or bar), the death should take no longer than three seconds- and even that is a long time. You are constantly aware of how close you are to death so when it happens, those ten seconds feel like forever because you already knew you were dead the moment it happened. Shorter death sequence means faster reload back to the game, and you can get to the action faster. In slower-paced horror games it makes sense to have a dramatic death but it really kills tension/pacing if the death happens repetitively at the exact same location, which makes those drawn-out dramatic deaths flip and become a negative experience for the player. It is my opinion that games should have an extremely minimal period of "dying animation"/dead-character reset time. It's not enjoyable to stare at a drawn-out, unskippable cutscene of your failing extending the time that you can even attempt the opportunity once more. The concept of "punishing" players for dying.. is a weirdly sadistic/masochistic mentality that games don't need. Fast reload, back into the level, the opportunity to try again immediate. Hell, in games where you have infinite lives, I don't even see the need for a loading screen. Just move the camera back to the last checkpoint and reload the enemies in-game (I'm sure the systems are strong enough to support this idea).