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Why do YOU want perma-death?
MikeJT
Member UncommonPosts: 84
First thing I should say in this thread is that it's not for people who don't want perma-death. If you don't want perma-death, stop reading now.
The reason I would like a game with perma-death is because I think it gives your characters actions more meaning. For example, saving another players life whilst sacrificing your own, is meaningful. Giving your life in defense of a town under attack by a horde of undead, is meaningful. But that being said, your actions actually need to have an impact on the game world for them to have meaning.
In a game like World of Warcraft, permadeath is pointless because dieing in an instanced dungeon doesn't make that dungeon any different the next time a player comes to it and the instance is restarted. So really, when I say I want an MMORPG with perma-death, what I'm really saying is that I want a game where my actions in the game world have an effect on that gameworld.
I want a game where the results of my characters actions can be seen when I start a new character. For example, a character (NPC or another player) is alive when they'd otherwise be dead. Or, a town is standing when it otherwise would've been burnt to the ground.
If a players actions have no affect on the game world, then perma-death is essentially pointless, and I don't want it as much as the average "perma-death is a ridiculous idea" naysayer.
Comments
Myself i would love it..even more now after playing Darkfall.
As long as you could keep some kind of history of your characters achievments..maybe a family hierloom that gets passed down to your next character...maybe a higher resistance to disease's due to a heredital passdown from your fathers constant battles against the dark magic of the necromantic mage attacking his home town for years. Maybe a handed down sword. That way it would even encourage heroic acts.
Just an idea!
Of course the longer your character survived the better the hierloom/skill/spell/whatever. this would encourage people to try not to die too.
I like your line of thinking. I think the key point is that an action is not truly heroic if there are no consequences to a player failing.
There are no heroic actions in World of Warcraft. No one is going to talk about the fact that you died in a dungeon once. No one cares.
In Fable II on Xbox 360, you can have a sculture of yourself erected in town for your heroic deeds. I can imagine, in a MMORPG with permadeath and actions that have a real effect on the game world, that you could even have a statue of yourself erected in a town square, by the NPC's, if your heroic deed is great enough.
If would be awesome to have a 'hall of heroes' in the main city of the game, and watch it fill up with statues of characters of players who've done truly heroic deeds. It would almost become an achievement in itself to die.
It would even help minimise the sting of loosing a character you might've poured months of gameplay into.
Of course, the glory wouldn't only be for the dead. It would be great if the king rewarded people for heroic deeds, and if players could hype up a single persons deeds enough (even make up stories!) they could run a little scam and make themselves out to be huge heroes. Of course if they got found out they would be shunned by all of society!
To get the adrenaline buzz ,perma-death would need to be sitting on your shoulder but while lag exists in these games any kind of single decision perma-death is no good imo, even for someone like me who would like it.
The compromise I'd like in my ideal game would be twofold:
1) PD would potentially be the penalty based on how many zones away you were from the nearest friendly healer i.e one zone away was safe but two zones was PD. You'd get an XP bonus or something if you were levelling in the PD zone but if the game started to lag you could jump back over the border.
2) At certain tiers in the game you get a quest for the best sword (or whatever) for your class. If you get the item it unlocks an optional "Hero" quest where you go into a PD instance to get an upgraded version. Winning the instance would allow you a title as well as the item. Totally optional but there if you want it.
3) I think lag-deaths would put me off shuke's idea in the end even though i like it a lot. No harm in thinking about it though so my take on a system like that would be something like:
Say the character stats comprise of 6 standard ones like strength, intelligence etc with 5 levels in each e.g strength can be puny, weak, average, strong, very strong.
Your base char starts average in everything (or even below average).
And say your first char you get two "fate points" which you can spend to increase one of your base stats to the next level e.g strength from "Average" to "Strong".
Then you could earn fate points playing the game based on various achievements e.g surviving to level 10 or becoming a master craftsman might get you 1 and 2 fate points respectively. Then when that char died you now have more fate points to spend on the new one. So eventually you could get to the point where you start the game with a character with Conan or Gandalf quality physical stats. (Consequently making them more likely to survive).
As well as potentially being used to increase base stats the fate points could also be used to buy other starting advantages like starting as the kid of a knight and not a peasant with more training and better gear, or finding some special sword as a kid that levels up with you, or some kind of special ability like animal taming.
Some kind of family element would be cool too.
I think you need to be able to choose and unchoose perma-death though because of lag.
Mainly for RP purposes, truthfully. So that when someone needs to die....they DIE, instead of just respawning a second later.
So much more substance would be realised in an MMORPG with perma-death. Even hunting lowbie mobs would suddenly gain weight....what if you pulled too many??
An open PVP game with perma-death is my dream. you'd have a lot less reds, a lot less asshats if they could be hunted down and put to death by player-run police forces, etc.
Battles would carry ENORMOUS weight...a siege would be incredible.
It could be done, it would just take some creative game mechanics.
edit: drunken spelling errors again
Gives death in game a meaning, makes me think about whether or not its really worth going down into that dungeon with a few friends, and if i do, keeps it real interesting.
Makes the game more of a challenge.
Firstly I am a mixed bag when it comes to perma death... i see both positives and negatives, I willl focus on the positives here thoughas that is what the thread is for.
Personally I see perma-death as a means to maintain a mature element in a game. One of the things I noticed in Hellgate london was that those that played Hardcore were mainly very mature players once you got past the first several levels. This might surprise some people who would think Hardcore=immature... but the truth is that immature players are often cowards, so in effect Hardcore=non-cowards.
Roleplay (as mentioned above) is also an excellent result of perma-death as it encourages peolpe to care about their character. While one of the oppositions to this is that a role-play when killed can hurt as you have put in quite a bit of effort, however a good roleplayer should be able to work around the death of a character in numerous ways.
I am all for a game that actually gives the option of perma-death (possibly a result for playign the hardcore version like better drops etc).
Open PVP with perma death would be, for a lack of better words Retarded. Don't belive me? all you have to do is look at what happened to AoC.You think by adding "perma-death" that it would drive away the people you don't like? It would do the excat oppisite.They could swarm to you in hordes, killing all the "Role play fags" and such. A mmo with perma death is not a good idea, that best be left to the table top.
Death has no meaning in modern MMO's. Often it is a lazy meaning for traveling. But on the other hand perma death is harsh. Not sure a one and done could work but perma death with an oppurtunity to earn extra lives might work. maybe a set number of lives between level 1 and max level. Or a permadeath for one specific class might work as well. Or in a game where people are only knocked unconscious and can be revived within a period of time perma death might work. If one dies can you make a will where your alts inherit your goods? I certainly do not see perma death working in a PvP game with the lack of maturity of modern players.
Despite its limitations the risk of some type of permadeath has always seemed appealing. I find myself often making one alt who I delete when he dies. Sadly they do not often make it much past level 20.
Open PVP with perma death would be, for a lack of better words Retarded. Don't belive me? all you have to do is look at what happened to AoC.You think by adding "perma-death" that it would drive away the people you don't like? It would do the excat oppisite.They could swarm to you in hordes, killing all the "Role play fags" and such. A mmo with perma death is not a good idea, that best be left to the table top.
at the beginning, sure. Same as real life.
But eventually, once the game's civilisation evolves, and "laws" are made, and enforced by players....not so much.
As time passes, you have more and more safety....and more impact and intrigue when someone dies. Bandits on the road, killing merchants traveling from town to town are hunted by player militia / police, and the whole game starts to get really good.
And fuck AoC.....carebear game. The harsher the death penatie, the less likely you are to have idiots and griefers. Risk vs Reward makes the difference. Who the fuck is going to risk their lives griefing some noobs if they know they can get killed and have to start over???
Like I said....maybe at the beginning, but eventually that would die down.
1st of all... any game can have perma death.. simply delete a character once you die.... Knowing you will be doing that should help with the adrenaline rush. I'm betting Diablo 3 will have a perma death option.. as far as MMO's I don't think any company will do it because its not a profitable idea... but like I said.. you can do it anyway
I think most games have permadeath guilds...
Remember Old School Ultima Online
Open PVP with perma death would be, for a lack of better words Retarded. Don't belive me? all you have to do is look at what happened to AoC.You think by adding "perma-death" that it would drive away the people you don't like? It would do the excat oppisite.They could swarm to you in hordes, killing all the "Role play fags" and such. A mmo with perma death is not a good idea, that best be left to the table top.
at the beginning, sure. Same as real life.
But eventually, once the game's civilisation evolves, and "laws" are made, and enforced by players....not so much.
As time passes, you have more and more safety....and more impact and intrigue when someone dies. Bandits on the road, killing merchants traveling from town to town are hunted by player militia / police, and the whole game starts to get really good.
And fuck AoC.....carebear game. The harsher the death penatie, the less likely you are to have idiots and griefers. Risk vs Reward makes the difference. Who the fuck is going to risk their lives griefing some noobs if they know they can get killed and have to start over???
Like I said....maybe at the beginning, but eventually that would die down.
Yeah then you and the ten other people playing the game will have a fun time policing each other, then the game will die because only you and your ten friends are playing. The audience that would partake in that would not be enough in number to keep a mmo alive because only a small amout of people will find that fun. I think thats something that in the Pre-WoW Mmo market(or lack thereof) this kinda game could really take off, but the state of todays players and community theres no way it would work.
you're missing the point though. Server-wide permadeath makes EVERYONE real careful about who, why, and when they fight. It changes the entire game.
Volunteering for it when it's not in the game's established rules is just gimping yourself. If everyone is bound by it, things get.....interesting.
Open PVP with perma death would be, for a lack of better words Retarded. Don't belive me? all you have to do is look at what happened to AoC.You think by adding "perma-death" that it would drive away the people you don't like? It would do the excat oppisite.They could swarm to you in hordes, killing all the "Role play fags" and such. A mmo with perma death is not a good idea, that best be left to the table top.
at the beginning, sure. Same as real life.
But eventually, once the game's civilisation evolves, and "laws" are made, and enforced by players....not so much.
As time passes, you have more and more safety....and more impact and intrigue when someone dies. Bandits on the road, killing merchants traveling from town to town are hunted by player militia / police, and the whole game starts to get really good.
And fuck AoC.....carebear game. The harsher the death penatie, the less likely you are to have idiots and griefers. Risk vs Reward makes the difference. Who the fuck is going to risk their lives griefing some noobs if they know they can get killed and have to start over???
Like I said....maybe at the beginning, but eventually that would die down.
Yeah then you and the ten other people playing the game will have a fun time policing each other, then the game will die because only you and your ten friends are playing. The audience that would partake in that would not be enough in number to keep a mmo alive because only a small amout of people will find that fun. I think thats something that in the Pre-WoW Mmo market(or lack thereof) this kinda game could really take off, but the state of todays players and community theres no way it would work.
never say never, man. lot of people are looking for something "more"...more immersion, more purpose, more story, etc.
You never know....a perma-death game with a real social structure might be the biggest game ever created. You just don't know until it's tried.
Open PVP with perma death would be, for a lack of better words Retarded. Don't belive me? all you have to do is look at what happened to AoC.You think by adding "perma-death" that it would drive away the people you don't like? It would do the excat oppisite.They could swarm to you in hordes, killing all the "Role play fags" and such. A mmo with perma death is not a good idea, that best be left to the table top.
at the beginning, sure. Same as real life.
But eventually, once the game's civilisation evolves, and "laws" are made, and enforced by players....not so much.
As time passes, you have more and more safety....and more impact and intrigue when someone dies. Bandits on the road, killing merchants traveling from town to town are hunted by player militia / police, and the whole game starts to get really good.
And fuck AoC.....carebear game. The harsher the death penatie, the less likely you are to have idiots and griefers. Risk vs Reward makes the difference. Who the fuck is going to risk their lives griefing some noobs if they know they can get killed and have to start over???
Like I said....maybe at the beginning, but eventually that would die down.
Yeah then you and the ten other people playing the game will have a fun time policing each other, then the game will die because only you and your ten friends are playing. The audience that would partake in that would not be enough in number to keep a mmo alive because only a small amout of people will find that fun. I think thats something that in the Pre-WoW Mmo market(or lack thereof) this kinda game could really take off, but the state of todays players and community theres no way it would work.
never say never, man. lot of people are looking for something "more"...more immersion, more purpose, more story, etc.
You never know....a perma-death game with a real social structure might be the biggest game ever created. You just don't know until it's tried.
Lol i wish i could have that outlook but im tom uch of a realist.
I think perma-death is a terrible idea for a mmorpg. You have everything to lose every time you do something and frankly, that rule set doesn't appeal to many people. Its something a select few would actually want.
Its fascinating to see people want things that are the exact opposite of whats the trend in most mmos. Currently, when you die in most mmos, there is hardly any penalty at all, then you've got discussions where in death, you lose everything. That in itself has to be interesting no?
I personally always liked some sort of punishment for death, especially in PVP. When there is NO penatly in death for pvp, it becomes a fight where people do outrageously reckless acts like rushing solo into a group of baddies because they have nothing to lose. They rez, rush in again doing the same thing hoping to clip one guy down, rinse repeat etc. That instantly becomes boring. The concept of having a risk is great because it adds that layer of importance to what you do, and forces you to rethink just how you approach the game. It would encourage group play more heavily and certainly would encourage intelligent and calculated gameplay rather than any bum rushing.
The vast majority of time in MMORPGs, deaths don't have meaning.
So while it's a great idea to have your old character's accomplishements remembered (one of the good parts of Nethack was finding ghosts of your old chars), you'd actually have to have a world where death accomplished something more regularly.
Sort of like a world where progression builds up the aura of your character, and this energy is released on death. A short-lived character might only do a little damage to melee creatures on death, but a long-lived one might nuke an entire invasion force.
As I said in the other thread, the big mechanic at odds with perma-death is emotional attachment. As people spend more time with someone/something, they develop emotional attachment to it. This includes their MMO chars.
So this "Advancement = big death explosion" mechanic would work directly against that. Short-lived characters would die and you simply wouldn't care. Long-lived characters you'd care about, but they'd die in a spectacular and often memorable fashion. Literally memorable, as the 1000-hour-old character who dies during the invasion of a town might nuke the entire invasion force, and truly save the town with their death (so the town erects a memorial plaque.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I have always wanted something along these lines as well. I also have always wanted an aging system, eventually my character will die of old age unless of course he is an elf...
But my suit of armor or my sword or my magic wand, whatever it is, could be handed down to a descendant of the family line, something like that would be cool if it was possible to pull it off.
Also the longer you live and rack up certain kills or whatever, you could go down in the annals with such and such title, which would make stepping into those shoes a bit daunting for the descendant. That stuff would be cool...if anything I just typed made sense that is...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
Open PVP with perma death would be, for a lack of better words Retarded. Don't belive me? all you have to do is look at what happened to AoC.You think by adding "perma-death" that it would drive away the people you don't like? It would do the excat oppisite.They could swarm to you in hordes, killing all the "Role play fags" and such. A mmo with perma death is not a good idea, that best be left to the table top.
Nope. Most griefers want ZERO risk. Absolute zero.
I would like a perma-death game as much if not more than anyone. I LOVE challenges. I live for them. But, even though this is the case.. I could probly not ever see myself playing a game like this because of things beyond our control. For example, what if I do lag and end up dying.. on a character that is say level 50 and I wouldnt have died otherwise.. I know I'd just quit at that point. Or what if for some odd reason, my power goes out. Two weeks ago, they shut the power off in grids for something they were repairing here, we had no idea or warning. Sure that don't happen often, but I could have been playing this perma-death game at the time. There is probly 10 million other things that could happen that is not even related to the game that is fluke and all my work would be gone.
Would I love to see it.. absolutly! Would I actually spend money on the game.. and a monthly fee to play it.. I highly doubt it. Re-doing anything in this world that I have already done, is one of my biggest pet-pieves, especiall and including my place of work. It is so repetitive and boring, and everytime you would die, your fault or not, thats what you would have to do. You might play for a year without dying, and plan on playing another year.. then you die.. do you really wanna put a year of work and effort back into the game JUST to get to where you already were?
So to answer the question, "why do you want perma-death" I want it because I love challenges and the adrenaline, if the game is done right, would probly give me an entirly new experience and feeling. I just wouldn't waste my money or time with it more than likely.
Lag seems to be a major concern for a lot of people who've been discussing this topic.
I think the first thing that a game with permadeath would have to have is a system whereby AI can take over if the client stops responding. That is, if the server suddenly stops receiving packets from you (eg. your power goes out for no reason, or your net connection fails on you) then AI will take over and your character will continue to fight or run away until the time restriction for logging out of the game runs out. Of course this time restriction needs to be there to stop people from just killing their net connection when they get themselves into a fight and then realise they're not likely to win.
Of course, I think that the server would need to keep track of client time-outs for each player. That way, if a certain player keeps conveniently loosing their internet connection every time they get into a fight against someone they're not likely to win against, the game would increase their log-out time so the AI would have to survive a little longer with each successive drop-out.
Despite all concerns, I think that 'lag' is hardly a reason to abandon the idea of permadeath entirely.
I think the main reason that it won't happen any time soon is that the total size of gaming market and the size of the hard-core RP market isn't great enough to warrant the decision to have permadeath in a game.
It comes down to a purely commercial decision.
There are people who are definitely not going to play a game because it has permadeath, but I doubt there are many people who are definitely not going to play a game because it doesn't.
However, like people have said, if the game is done right, it could be one of the best MMORPG's ever made and be much more involving for players compared to the current offerings.
The key factors that a game with permadeath needs is a world where players actions have lasting effects.
I think I should add (and I think I've previously mentioned), that the game should have substantial, and interesting, gameplay opportunities that don't just involve combat. Advancement of your character should not be limited to combat. There should be opportunities to make decisions and take actions that affect more than just your own character.
Introducing permadeath is not at all a challenge. The real challange is creating a game world where players actions are significant enough to make death meaningful enough for players to reflect on the life of their character instead of focusing on their death.
To achieve this, you would need a highly robust AI system which means NPC's can remember your character, and their actions, and communicate those deeds to other NPC's and players as well.
The only issue with trying to do that is that you can't exactly voice the NPC's. Is that of major concern? Not really.
It could follow as simple a structure as this:
If an NPC sees a player take a certain action, then the NPC will 'remember' certain things, like: "Player killed WOLF"
This would be somewhat meaningful. However if the wolf was attacking someone before you killed it, then the AI would remember "Player SAVED PERSON, from WOLF", which is more meaningful.
The AI would then say things like "I saw [player name if known, else "a man/woman/other descriptors] save [character name if known, else "a girl/boy/man/woman"] from a wolf."
The NPC would say these things to other NPC's, which would generate queries from other NPCs, and conversations would happen.
The NPC would say these things with decreasing frequency until the deeds are 'forgotten', unless the player takes other actions to reinforce the stories in their head. Sometimes, a NPC bard may sing about a characters deeds.
The person that a player saved will continue to tell the story of how they were saved for much longer than witnesses to the deed.
I'm not a programmer. But I know people who are. When I've told them about this idea they've expressed to me the complexity involved in programming such a system, but said it could be done.
I think the key point is, that if it was to be done, it can't just be applied to a single game. It's a system that needs to be designed and then licensed out to other game makers.
Has anyone heard of any system that is remotely like this?
Edit: Edited due to me completely forgetting to finish a paragraph!
As mentioned efore, Hellgate:london had a Perma-death method. I never experienced lag problems during gameplay that resulted in death. This may be related to the design of the game, not the design of the death.
My first thought was to dismiss this idea/thread (as the OP requested) as I thought permadeath was unworkable, because MMORPG's are all about character progression.
But, as suggested by others, if there was a reward for dying valiantly, or after certain achievements, and you could pass said reward down to your next character, it could make all the difference.
Scale the rewards so that the longer your character lives/more it achieves, the greater the hand down to the next one and you've created a viable progression system that I think players might just go for.
Then you'd be really motivated to see how far you could go before dying, but not so totally fearful that you never took any risks and ran at the first sign of real trouble.
It sure could be a new and interesting game mechanic (sort of reminds me of the old RPG Planescape:Torment) and breath new life into MMO's.
Wouldn't be for everyone of course, but I think it would be sustainable for a decent size population.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
1.
What if you had apprentices or henchmen. They group with you like a pet and level up with you. When you died you took over one of the apprentices which became your main, and you started a new apprentice. The apprentice can pick up stuff you dropped and knows your bank account etc. So it's not exactly perma death under current game mechanics but still a more significant penalty than current games. If there was a wipe and you all died, you'd err on the carebear side, and allow a res for the lowest level apprentice, or whatever.
2.
What if when you died you ended up on another plane. You could visit your last plane as a ghost and still group with others on that plane in ghost form, or play in normal form in your plane. There would be incentives to have a ghost in your group. For practical reasons, there is a set number of planes, say a dozen, and they are cyclic. If you had to play with your friend you could always commit suicide a dozen times or they could commit suicide. Again not exactly perma-death, but just something different.
3.
What if when you died you became the monster that killed you. Not all monsters do this, some just make you res like usual. When you become a new monster, only compatible stats are copied over. The NPC's that do this would have to be interesting enough to make people want to play them, with potential quest lines etc.
Maybe these ideas are crap, I'm sure you can think up problems with them, I just wish some games would try something different.
Yeah, COX. The system really isn't complex at all.
Complete a mission and a dialog line about that mission gets tracked by the MMO. When your character is near Townsfolk, they choose one of the dialog lines to say (more recent dialog lines get said more frequently.) Like, "I'm sure glad Doctor Fallout cleared out that Fifth Column base!"
The dialog is awesome and helps the immersion of the game, but doesn't make your actions feel like they have particularly lasting impact.
Lasting impact is tough to do in an MMO because the more frequent you make something the less players will feel it matters. And the more important you make something, the harder it is to have a massive amount of players doing it. In a non-massive game it'd be easy and we could do momentuous things all day long and be fine, but when you have hundreds of people on a server all at once it's trickier.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There are too many things that out of your control too make Perma Death in a MMO viable.
I know it myself, for example i played Diablo 2 back in the days on HC and i died with my lvl 72 Barb because my Anti virus popped up (the game alt tabbed out) and got a virus warning. I was really pissed off and never touched HC again.
There are many different things that could happen like lag,bsod (bluescreen) random i-net shit and so on.