In games, nothing can be said to be certain except death and… well, mostly that. Death as a consequence of failure has been a part of games since the days of , and what came after has stayed pretty much the same: a Game Over screen, a Continue? prompt (maybe with an exchange of quarters in there somewhere), and you begin again as if nothing happened. That's been the gaming standard for decades and it's practical enough, but it can make death insignificant.

But not all games play to that standard - some choose not to ignore that you were a corpse just a moment ago, opting instead to weave the reason for your resurrection into the gameplay. Death isn't merely an inconvenience that loudly reminds you you're in a video game!, but a real part of the game with a place in its world. It’s not the right fit for every situation, of course, but a creative workaround for death can genuinely enhance your playing experience.

As seen in: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Assassin's Creed, Tales from the Borderlands

We all know how it goes when you tell your friends some incredible personal story: you fudge the details and forget things, so you sometimes have to back up and correct yourself. Most of us stop short of claiming we died during our travels, but video game protagonists have a habit of trading in extremes. When they describe their adventures after the fact, they'll detail their own demise before remembering that they're very much alive, and none of that actually happened.

Being able to explain away death as overenthusiastic storytelling is a happy accident - the frame exists for bigger reasons, to keep you wondering how (rather than if) the hero escapes deadly harm to recount the story later. That makes this non-death a close cousin of the standard revert-to-checkpoint approach, but one thing saves it: its sense of humor. You get to feel like you're in on the joke, and hearing how the protagonist explains away their mistake can be worth the failure. It can even seem logical, if it's .

As seen in: BioShock, Borderlands, Crackdown

In the very near future (sometimes so near that it's actually the past), mankind hammers out all the ethical and biological ramifications of cloning and starts mass production on personal body copies. Now you can get clones like snacks out of a vending machine, which is convenient when your job involves being repeatedly destroyed by enemies who want to nail you into the ground like a tent spike.

This kind of death-dodging works best in games that are meant to be challenging, but also aim to create a certain feeling around each fight. For instance, the most satisfying conclusion to a Big Daddy battle in BioShock is watching a giant monster go down after throwing everything you have at it, which doesn't work as well if you have to completely restart the fight every time it kills you. Fighting your way through Rapture has to feel difficult if the struggle is going to be meaningful, but you don't want to lose out on the rhythm each fight is meant to have. Having another you waiting in the wings, ready to be spawned on a moment's notice, keeps you on beat.

As seen in: Dark Souls, Shadow of Mordor, Bloodborne

If used incorrectly, this can quickly become the narrative equivalent of the creators throwing up their hands and storming out of the room. Given that you do technically come back to life time and time again, immortality is the laziest possible explanation if nothing more is done with it. Thankfully, the games that use this concept best avoid that by making immortality an even bigger part of the game.

The immortality method takes some serious commitment from the game to avoid looking like a cop-out. By planting the concept deep in their world lore (the way, for example, Dark Souls does by making you an Undead out to destroy the source of your reanimation), unending life becomes as much a part of the plot as it is a gameplay device. It never feels like there's an unnatural break when the protagonist dies, because it falls perfectly in line with the storyline.

As seen in: Grand Theft Auto, City of Heroes

There's little way to play this one straight, but that's half the fun. Regardless of what sort of damage your character is subjected to - falling from a ten-story building, getting run over by a Jeep, slamming a jet into a suspension bridge and succumbing to the resulting inferno - nothing actually kills them. Instead, after the loading screen comes and goes, they trot out of the nearest hospital, with nothing to indicate their misadventure except a slightly lighter wallet.

This undeath is sure to get a few laughs on principle, which is part of its appeal: it's the game giving you a wink and a nod over your unfortunate and likely stupid demise while showing it doesn't really care to punish you. In fact, it purposefully moves you from the place where you died so you can start fresh somewhere else and not have to immediately deal with what just killed you. That's why you mostly see this in sandbox games - where it would be incredibly annoying to restart far away from your goal in a linear title, in an open-world it feels like a respite, so you're free to go cause mayhem elsewhere.

As seen in: Destiny, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Too Human

It's good to have friends in high places - or low ones, depending on your perspective. While the hero may not have a supply of body copies on hand, they do have a patron deity who's interested in keeping them alive. That means whenever they bite it, their connection to those divine beings is what raises them from the dead, just in time for to charge back into the fight and send their enemies into cardiac arrest.

This one can both be taken seriously or played for laughs, based on how the game frames the situation. The ethereal Traveler in Destiny is taken very seriously, so it's a matter of grave importance when its power is used to raise a fallen guardian. Same goes for Too Human, where you're resurrected by Valkyries. Meanwhile, in Conker's Bad Fur Day, a drunken squirrel makes a deal with the Grim Reaper to pay for new lives with severed squirrel tails, which everyone involved knows is weird. In either case, it gives the main character an even greater sense of importance: not only are they untouchable, but they have a patron god keeping them that way, because they're just that important to the survival of the world (or whatever's going on in Conker).

As seen in: Psychonauts, The Talos Principle, Ether One

We're getting downright here, when death adversion is based on the idea that you have no physical form to kill. Whether that's because you're a robot, or are projecting into a digital world, the result is the same: you get an infinite amount of 'lives' because dying kills the image of you, not your essence. Deep.

While that seems like a simple way to handwave in-game death, since your synthetic form can be mentioned once and never again, it takes serious legwork to implement it in any game with a hint of story. Portal's co-op mode gets away with it because the robot bodies are just there to facilitate you shooting holes in the wall, but something like The Talos Principle has to explain why you, robot, need so many bodies to accomplish your objective. Robot-projection death only works if it's built into the bedrock of the game, but when it is, your mechanical immortality can itself open up interesting questions. Reaching your goal is the only way for this all to end, but what could be so important that the game keeps endlessly rebuilding you to do it?

As seen in: Super Meat Boy

You're not a creature of this world. For whatever reason the laws of physics and biology don't apply to you, and after being mercilessly splattered against a stray sawblade, you're able to gather up your own remains and reconstitute yourself. There's no pretenses of logic here, no attempt to explain how you flagrantly defy the blueprint of the universe. Just you, reforming yourself at the end of every death, the game daring you to question it.

This approach only really works if a game is willing to commit to the levels of absurdity it demands. But once that's accomplished, this may well be the most indisputable death dodge out there, because it isn't really a dodge at all. You die, and have enough will left to rebuild yourself through a means that only the unforgiving cosmos understands. That, in a weird way, becomes the epitome of persistence. If the protagonist is willing to scrape what remains of their flesh off yet another death contraption and do it all over again, what excuse do you have?

The creative twists on death I've described here range from stiff-lipped serious to unapologetically silly, but all have the same aim: give in-game death as much consideration and coherence as every other part of the story.

When death is tweaked to fit the game, rather than the other way around, that attention to detail makes the world of the game feel so much fuller, and death itself more genuine. Many of these death-aversions are just as strange as time-reserved regeneration, if not more so. Most players will buy the idea of a restart without a second thought, while walking out of a hospital unscathed after falling out of a helicopter might be hard to buy. But it's the effort that makes it believable, to carve death into the proper shape that makes it fit into the overall puzzle. And so you have a better game, even when it involves a helium-inhaling Grim Reaper.

So today is turning out to be a really good day for Great Video Games That Aren't Out Yet. Following up this morning's , aka 'that game that loves letting us think we know how good it is so that it can suddenly look even better and laugh in our sweet, naive faces'.

What have I seen and learned today? Quite a lot. I've learned about a new companion character. I've learned about a new location. I've learned about the new levelling system, and seen the brilliant-looking new combat. I've also learned of the kind of names Bethesda expects you to give your characters, and good Lord, does Bethesda not expect a high standard of decorum from you at all.

No point beating around the bush here. That's legitimately a thing you can do in Fallout 4. Bethesda has recorded Mr. Handy - the game's plummy-voiced robot companion - saying 1000 of the most popular names players might want to bestow upon their character, in order to give the game that extra-immersive personal touch.

We were presented with a demo video of a few names to show off Handy's versatility. The final two of those names were "Mr. McFly" and "Mr. Fuckface". And lo, a million players who had never considered calling their character Fuckface will now be calling their character Fuckface. Because that is how humans work.

There are going to be around a dozen companions in Fallout 4. We already knew about Handy, Dogmeat, and Preston, but now we can add Piper <(i>not pictured above) to the list. Which is good, because she's pretty damned cool.

Initially encountered trying to get into a locked down Diamond City (built in the ruins of Fenway Park baseball stadium), she opportunistically uses the Sole Survivor's presence to get in, pretending he's a trader with valuable supplies to sell, in order to bluff past the guards. Once inside, it transpires that she's the editor of the post-apocalyptic newspaper, Public Occurrences (is it just us, or is Fallout feeling distinctly more civilised these days?). The mayor hates her, referring to her as a "devious, rabble-rousing slanderer". Clearly, she is not on message with the local political PR. We like her.

Yup, the leveling system has been given an overhaul. Customised via a brilliant, animated Vault-Tec poster in-game, perks (which can be unlocked at level-up, as usual) are tied to the various ability stats in your character's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. ratings.

There are 70 base perks, but each has a series of XP rankings of its own, meaning that it can be leveled up alongside its respective S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat in order to unlock greater abilities. With all graded perks taken into account, the total comes to 275. Happy grinding.

Later on in the Quakecon presentation we got an extended gameplay demo of a new town area, Lexington. With a lengthy new stretch of the game on show, it rapidly became clear just how radically upgraded Fallout 4's world is from that of its predecessors. In short, it makes Fallout 3 look like a game made out of cardboard.

It's not the result of any one change, but rather a raft of little tweaks that seem specifically designed to address the issues that cropped up in F3's world after prolonged exposure. There's the vast swath of vibrant colour. The sheer, open airiness, the sense of light and space. There's the amount of movement and fully structured environmental detail in each frame when exploring. There's the way that multiple camera angles during conversations make them feel like properly directed cutscenes, and the way your fully-voiced character reacts to even the most innocuous discoveries and events. As compulsive at it is to explore, navigating Fallout 3's world can at times feel like silently observing a diorama. Fallout 4 feels like having a real presence in a real place.

Speaking of real presence, holy crap, does Fallout's combat look to have improved. As in, it looks like a genuinely respectable open-world FPS now, rather than an RPG with a rather crap, rather static shooting model tacked on. The VATS slow-mo targeting system looks a whole lot faster and slicker for a start, but that's not the really exciting bit. The really exciting bit is that it doesn't look like you'll be wanting (or needing) to rely on it half as much.

While hardly as fast and flowing as its Quakecon sibling, , Fallout's gunplay looks much smoother and more dynamic than before. While enemies (Ghouls in particular) still have a habit of charging straight into your face, dealing with them is no longer a case of frantically back-pedaling while waiting for VATS to recharge. Sidestepping, strafing, and weaving all look entirely viable while shooting smoothly and accurately, and level design looks set up to properly accommodate that stuff this time around, with well-placed cover, choke-points, lines of sight, and exploding hazards aplenty. And throughout it all, the Sole Survivor looks delightfully capable and versatile.

Leading on from that last point, sweet crap, does Fallout 4 look effective as an action game. While the core combat mechanics look immensely improved, it's the stuff around them - the presentation and feedback of combat, and the bigger situational picture - that really pushes things to the next level.

We've seen hand-cranked laser muskets (effectively a clunky retro sci-fi shotgun) hit with delightful impact, and leave the burnt meat of Ghoul flesh billowing with smoke. We've seen crucial hits with bats shatter knees and set up skull-cracking executions, and that's just the start. The end of our demo sees the Sole Survivor dashing between cover points in an open street to avoid and retaliate against rooftop snipers, just as a Brotherhood of Steel gunship arrives. The aircraft starts peppering the road around him with cluster bombs, forcing a frantic, improvisational fight on two fronts, until the Ghouls above send it spiraling down into a nearby building. It’s still Fallout, but now it has set-pieces, and genuine, visual spectacle. Seriously.