Permadeath is the one thing I would like to see implemented in an MMO more than anything else. The one important thing, though, is that levelling does not have to be removed or replaced. A permadeath based MMO does not have to have levelling stripped from it, but there are several radical departures that must be embraced for a Permadeath MMO to become a reality. Take the following ideas into consideration as a model for what might be an exciting change in an MMO in the direction of achieving an acceptable Permadeath model. 1. Character Aging: When you create your character, he is given a finite number of years which you as a player will not be told about. Depending on the race you choose, this could be a long time or not very long at all. 2. Character Slots: When you first start out in the game you are given but one character slot. You can earn extra character slots by starting a family. To facilitate this, developers could provide for in game weddings between characters (since you only get one slot to start this would be an agreement between 2 players or a player who has multiple accounts). Periodically, the female character would be allowed to have a child (new character slot), and the game could track your family tree for you. The two players would decide who got the new character slot, either divvying by gender or taking every other one, up to them. 3. Levelling: Levelling would would out of necessity have to be very rapid, if levels were indeed used. Even if levelling WERE used, higher level should not make one impossible to kill. A coupe de gras facter should always be included in a Permadeath game. 4. Diseases, Curses, and Other Infirmities: Ailments which can temporarily incapacitate a player, possibly even kill them if not treated, should be in a Permadeath game. This includes curses that can alter a player's actions or choices, poisons, impairments such as amputations, getting blinded or scarred, etc. 5. Legal Options: A player should be able to leave a will, granting his belongings to his loved ones (or alts) should he die. This does not necessarily mean everything he or she has on his person when he dies will necessarily make it into the proper hands heheh. Lands and other assets should inevitably revert to his or her alts. 6. Rule of Law: Players who violate the laws of the land should be subjected to jail time, floggings, or whatever punishments are dished out locally (yes there actually was a game once, by Sierra, called The Realm, that actually slapped you in jail if you were a PKer and got caught by the guards in certain areas). This would be especially useful if your personal belongings were stolen or your corpse were pilfered. The idea of rule of law also firmly entrenches the idea of a bounty hunter type of character. 7. Retirement Options: Since characters would be forced into an aging model, there should be included in the game the option to retire a character, ie the character could only be played after retirement in the direst of circumstances. Such retirement models should include things like starting up a business, or becoming ruler of a township or better. Again these are only my ideas or suggestions, but I feel there are valid points in here that any developer could make excellent use of in bringing Permadeath to the forefront of the MMO market. Were a majority of these ideas incorporated, I would be sorely pressed to not leave my current game for the new one.
OMG it's a game! we already have to worry about all of this stuff in real life lol why live two difficult lives when we are already forced to live one hahahha seriously?!!??!
might as well strap a camera to your head and call it a game if this is the kind of MMO you want
There will never ever be a succesfull MMORPG with "Permadeath", how to make your Game suck and your company fast out of business?
Create a permandeath-game! ROFL...
interesting opinion. Although lacking in any constructive criticism. You will not be laughing when the ideas become reality because the many different methods of perma-death are an inevitable reality of the evolution of gaming online. The market will soon be ripe for it and its developement will put another nail in the coffin for the existing templates for mmorpg. Any publisher/games company will be aware of the potential of incorporating some sort of permenant character death. Space Invaders has been doing it for years!
it's the evolution of gaming
in the old days, you paid a quarter and got to play until you lost. then you could put another quarter in and play again. starting over from scratch. only if you were REALLY good you could "beat" the game.
then they allowed you to put in more quarters as a form of a "continue" Why? kept you playing and hence kept you paying. or they gave you multiple lives or ways to earn more lives. same idea.
then after a while when games hit the consoles/pcs they started adding save points, so even if you lost you didn't have to go allll the way back to the beginning, just back to the last save point
now we have games where losing is kind of a slap on the wrist
point is, the entire video game industry has evolved to try and keep players playing, and thus keeping paying customers paying. The MMORPG is the end point of this evolution. creating a game where you keep playing and playing and keep paying and paying.
having an MMORPG with a permadeath system is just like going to the arcade and spending 15$ a month on quarters. it's tooooo old school for the majority of players. the point is to have fun, starting over from scratch over and over and over again and having to pay for it is not a worthwhile investment for the VAST majority of gamers.
it only worked years and years ago because video games were SO new and exciting (and the technology didn't exist to save progress lol)
Yes and no. Evolution is about filling ecological niches. The respawn-levelling-and-phat-loot dinosaurs are filling such a niche, while there are enough people wanting diferent forms of MMO's, including permadeath games, to allow for them to evolve and fill new niches. I for example, simply do not play MMORPG's because there are none with permadeath. I'm an untapped resource.
Many gamers here have suggested interesting ways of dealing with permadeath. In general, I'd just like to say that permadeath is hardly at home in a linear, ladderlike game design. This is where the "starting over" syndrome hits at its most pronounced, and I can definitely appreciate the frustration of it. In an open world game it's different however, provided enemies do not show up as respawnable mobs. An open world should allow players to influence that world, that hardly happens when the dragon resurrects in 5 minutes or the orc tribe can never be defeated, flushed out or sent packing. In fact, with today's mobs, permadeath wouldn't even be fair: how come you should die when the mobs merely respawn, like targets on a shooting range?
The point of the matter is that in an open world design type of MMO, you might to some extent lament "starting over", but you'll never have to "go through it all again", dealing with the exact same material, like endlessly watching the first half of a movie.
Such an open world would have "difficulty" (actually risk) follow geographical and ever changing political 'boundaries', where 'natural multiplication' is the base set for demographics on all sides, rather than a set course of level and loot advancement. For as long as you stay in the Shire, you'd be without risk, but also without actual opportunities for combat experience and glory (although you might still attract wealth, fame and honour). The world simply would not be filled with nasties to kill everywhere you go. However, if you travel up the Troll Shaws, you might encounter combat and glorious deeds to perform.
There should be injuries as an outcome of battle, naturally, not just mandatory death. Look at any war statistics, wounded always outnumber killed in action. This, as stated previously in the thread, makes death less likely.
There should also be a group morale system. When that force of orcs attempting to attack a town has taken enough beating, it should break down and flee. The essence of this is that you don't have to kill every last enemy to gain victory. Victory should in the game, as is the case in the real world, be decided on whose side is defeated, not exterminated. This also makes death less likely. You can lose and still survive and even comeback another day.
There should be heirs, naturally. Why not let characters take NPC wives, a matter in which their reputation as warriors and standing is also factored in, bring children and new blood to the familyline?
As for character advancement, in a permadeath game, there should not be the dramatic differences between avatars which currently is the norm. Experience should basically reward a player with increasing that character's abilities to survive even further, through parrying and dodging for example, rather than giving him super equipment and super levels of hit points, both of which on the face of it are physiological and gameplay absurdities (making for boring, incremental encounters, with fixed outcomes, the adversaries being just a few levels apart). I support a throwback to D&D paper and pencil times when it comes to special and magic equipment, when a +5 sword Vapour Weapon was the best you could ever hope to get (and very few players alive had something similar). In fact, in a game with heirs and possibly aging, this would be a family treasure to pass down the generations.
The idea of permadeath is certainly not a new one. The concept existed prior to the graphical mmorps, even in the older text based systems the concept was explored.
The best system I've seen to date was one in a text based mud called Gemstone III which gave you unlimited deaths for the first few levels, 5 as I recall. After that you had to obtain "favors" from the gods to survive a death. This pretty much amounted to giving some number of magic items, some amount of gold, or other various specific items to the appropriate shrine.
The appropriate overall cost, number or quality of gifts would give you one extra "favor". The cost for favors went up as you gained levels. The end result was that deaths were not free and you tried very hard to avoid them but if you kept four or five favors laying around it was unlikely that you would be unable to avoid permadeath.
The idea of permadeath is certainly not a new one. The concept existed prior to the graphical mmorps, even in the older text based systems the concept was explored.
And in PnP the concept wasn't even "explored", it was the default setting, and no one I ever played with in my teens questioned that if you got your head cut off or your hitpoints ran out in the chest, you would in fact die.
To me, a MMORPG is more or less simply Dungeons & Dragons on computer with a GUI. I'm merely waiting for a game that will honour the actual traditions of Pen & Paper, and not make special amendments regarding death.
I also think it's about time people stopped confusing permadeath with various composite mechanics regarding "death". Having 5 lives or whatever is not permadeath! Permadeath is precisely what it sounds like, that when you are supposed to die you should, permanently. Maybe we could call the compromise/composite ideas something different, like "quasideath", or "pseudodeath", or something.
I agree to a point with that sentiment. There are a couple fundamental differences between PnP and an online game, the primary in relation to death being network latency and the fact that the online game won't wait for the player to make a decision.
Network latency can spike at any time, often referred to as lag, or worse complete loss of connection can happen at any time. It is more than a little frustrating to players to loose ones investment in time to something outside the game mechanics and beyond ones control. Thus it is good to have at least some sort of safety net to help minimize the impact of such events.
The other major issue is that in PnP the player has the luxury of considering ones decision and even has other players around him to try to discourage some actions.
There is also the fact that the GM is human and as such is often though admittedly not always more flexible than computers.
All that said having the chance of being permanently killed adds a great deal to the game. People think much harder about dying and tend to do fewer stupid things. As far as griefers go, there are actually fewer. None of the games I've played that had permadeath had any significant number of griefers, the primary reason being that they would be ganged up on and would never be able to progress, thus would not be able to become strong enough to be a real threat to anyone.
Another example though not massively multiplayer are games like Sacred. Many people, myself included, would only play on the "hardcore" servers which were single life only, death was permanent. In terms of loss of time it was very much the same as an MMORPG in that your character was kept on a central server and as you progressed death became both increasingly more likely and increasingly more costly.
I still think this would be extremely comical to play and watch you wouldn't need an end game or even content for anything past lvl 20. The only thing good about it is i think ALL the casuals wouldn't touch this with a 100 foot stick. That the ONLY reason i would be there
Comments
OMG it's a game! we already have to worry about all of this stuff in real life lol why live two difficult lives when we are already forced to live one hahahha seriously?!!??!
might as well strap a camera to your head and call it a game if this is the kind of MMO you want
it's the evolution of gaming
in the old days, you paid a quarter and got to play until you lost. then you could put another quarter in and play again. starting over from scratch. only if you were REALLY good you could "beat" the game.
then they allowed you to put in more quarters as a form of a "continue" Why? kept you playing and hence kept you paying. or they gave you multiple lives or ways to earn more lives. same idea.
then after a while when games hit the consoles/pcs they started adding save points, so even if you lost you didn't have to go allll the way back to the beginning, just back to the last save point
now we have games where losing is kind of a slap on the wrist
point is, the entire video game industry has evolved to try and keep players playing, and thus keeping paying customers paying. The MMORPG is the end point of this evolution. creating a game where you keep playing and playing and keep paying and paying.
having an MMORPG with a permadeath system is just like going to the arcade and spending 15$ a month on quarters. it's tooooo old school for the majority of players. the point is to have fun, starting over from scratch over and over and over again and having to pay for it is not a worthwhile investment for the VAST majority of gamers.
it only worked years and years ago because video games were SO new and exciting (and the technology didn't exist to save progress lol)
Many gamers here have suggested interesting ways of dealing with permadeath. In general, I'd just like to say that permadeath is hardly at home in a linear, ladderlike game design. This is where the "starting over" syndrome hits at its most pronounced, and I can definitely appreciate the frustration of it. In an open world game it's different however, provided enemies do not show up as respawnable mobs. An open world should allow players to influence that world, that hardly happens when the dragon resurrects in 5 minutes or the orc tribe can never be defeated, flushed out or sent packing. In fact, with today's mobs, permadeath wouldn't even be fair: how come you should die when the mobs merely respawn, like targets on a shooting range?
The point of the matter is that in an open world design type of MMO, you might to some extent lament "starting over", but you'll never have to "go through it all again", dealing with the exact same material, like endlessly watching the first half of a movie.
Such an open world would have "difficulty" (actually risk) follow geographical and ever changing political 'boundaries', where 'natural multiplication' is the base set for demographics on all sides, rather than a set course of level and loot advancement. For as long as you stay in the Shire, you'd be without risk, but also without actual opportunities for combat experience and glory (although you might still attract wealth, fame and honour). The world simply would not be filled with nasties to kill everywhere you go. However, if you travel up the Troll Shaws, you might encounter combat and glorious deeds to perform.
There should be injuries as an outcome of battle, naturally, not just mandatory death. Look at any war statistics, wounded always outnumber killed in action. This, as stated previously in the thread, makes death less likely.
There should also be a group morale system. When that force of orcs attempting to attack a town has taken enough beating, it should break down and flee. The essence of this is that you don't have to kill every last enemy to gain victory. Victory should in the game, as is the case in the real world, be decided on whose side is defeated, not exterminated. This also makes death less likely. You can lose and still survive and even comeback another day.
There should be heirs, naturally. Why not let characters take NPC wives, a matter in which their reputation as warriors and standing is also factored in, bring children and new blood to the familyline?
As for character advancement, in a permadeath game, there should not be the dramatic differences between avatars which currently is the norm. Experience should basically reward a player with increasing that character's abilities to survive even further, through parrying and dodging for example, rather than giving him super equipment and super levels of hit points, both of which on the face of it are physiological and gameplay absurdities (making for boring, incremental encounters, with fixed outcomes, the adversaries being just a few levels apart). I support a throwback to D&D paper and pencil times when it comes to special and magic equipment, when a +5 sword Vapour Weapon was the best you could ever hope to get (and very few players alive had something similar). In fact, in a game with heirs and possibly aging, this would be a family treasure to pass down the generations.
The best system I've seen to date was one in a text based mud called Gemstone III which gave you unlimited deaths for the first few levels, 5 as I recall. After that you had to obtain "favors" from the gods to survive a death. This pretty much amounted to giving some number of magic items, some amount of gold, or other various specific items to the appropriate shrine.
The appropriate overall cost, number or quality of gifts would give you one extra "favor". The cost for favors went up as you gained levels. The end result was that deaths were not free and you tried very hard to avoid them but if you kept four or five favors laying around it was unlikely that you would be unable to avoid permadeath.
To me, a MMORPG is more or less simply Dungeons & Dragons on computer with a GUI. I'm merely waiting for a game that will honour the actual traditions of Pen & Paper, and not make special amendments regarding death.
I also think it's about time people stopped confusing permadeath with various composite mechanics regarding "death". Having 5 lives or whatever is not permadeath! Permadeath is precisely what it sounds like, that when you are supposed to die you should, permanently. Maybe we could call the compromise/composite ideas something different, like "quasideath", or "pseudodeath", or something.
Network latency can spike at any time, often referred to as lag, or worse complete loss of connection can happen at any time. It is more than a little frustrating to players to loose ones investment in time to something outside the game mechanics and beyond ones control. Thus it is good to have at least some sort of safety net to help minimize the impact of such events.
The other major issue is that in PnP the player has the luxury of considering ones decision and even has other players around him to try to discourage some actions.
There is also the fact that the GM is human and as such is often though admittedly not always more flexible than computers.
All that said having the chance of being permanently killed adds a great deal to the game. People think much harder about dying and tend to do fewer stupid things. As far as griefers go, there are actually fewer. None of the games I've played that had permadeath had any significant number of griefers, the primary reason being that they would be ganged up on and would never be able to progress, thus would not be able to become strong enough to be a real threat to anyone.
Another example though not massively multiplayer are games like Sacred. Many people, myself included, would only play on the "hardcore" servers which were single life only, death was permanent. In terms of loss of time it was very much the same as an MMORPG in that your character was kept on a central server and as you progressed death became both increasingly more likely and increasingly more costly.
I still think this would be extremely comical to play and watch you wouldn't need an end game or even content for anything past lvl 20. The only thing good about it is i think ALL the casuals wouldn't touch this with a 100 foot stick. That the ONLY reason i would be there