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Author: Koveras

Mar 17th 2017 at 2:20:40 AM

My main issue here is that the "Incapacitation" part of this trope is basically the NonLethalKO, and the only additional thing (which is definitely tropable on its own) is the Revival system. The key difference between the revival subsystem and the regular NL-KO with AfterCombatRecovery is that teammates can revive each other ''during'' the fight, rather than after it. The gameplay trade-off here, meanwhile, is related to RestingRecovery, only instead of exposing yourself to danger (by standing still) to recover your own HP, you do so to resuscitate an ally. An important difference to healing positions, Phoenix Downs, etc., is that such a recovery system normally does not expend any resources except your time out under fire.

Another common variation not listed above, but commonly found in multiplayer games is a countdown during which a fellow player may be revived: after a player goes down, their teammates only have a limited window of opportunity to revive them, after which they are gone until the end of the round or some other extended period of time. Some enemies may also be nasty enough to proactively finish off downed players if not distracted from them in some way.

* In ''VideoGame/StarWarsRepublicCommando'', you play as Boss, the commanding officer of a Clone commando squad, and if you get downed, you can order your squadmates to either mop up the remaining enemies without you and revive you afterwards, or come to your rescue right away (exposing themselves to danger) -- this makes even going down a tactical challenge for the player. And, of course, if one of your AI teammates goes down, you can either revive him yourself or order another to do it for you using SquadCommands.
* The ''Franchise/MassEffect'' effect series introduced the revival system in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'' (the first game instead used medigels to heal squadmates), and used it to great effect in ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' multiplayer, which featured enemies that could immediately incapacitate you until the end of the current wave (e.g. Banshees) as well as enemies who actively finished you off after you went down and your teammates couldn't reach you (basically, every Cerberus enemy ever). Notably, the multi-player introduced revive countdowns, which single-player didn't have.
* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition'' introduced in-combat revives after the previous two games only featured magical resuscitations and AfterCombatRecovery.
* ''VideoGame/Payday2'' has revives with a timer, after which your character is "taken into custody" by the police and is not released until a random amount of time has elapsed (you can also be taken into custody if caught off guard by the police during stealth capers).  Revival usually requires proximity, but a high level Mastermind {{perk}} allows you to revive others just by shouting at them from a distance (even while you're downed yourself)--which is as broken as it sounds.