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PVE Games: It's really all about the death penalty
pencilrick
Member Posts: 1,550
With all these new PVE games out, with their fantastical graphics and improved interfaces, so many fall flat in sales or serve only as stop-gap games until something better comes out. Quests, grim architecture, and demons with rippling muscles cannot incite fear and excitement without a significant and stinging death penalty mechanic in the game.
THIS is what sets the early MMO's apart from the recent releases. Now before someone says, "I don't like a death penalty, I play games to have fun", I must reply that without a death penalty, no PVE game is really that fun, and that the point of a death penalty is to encourage you to play better so that you don't die. In other words: in games with a stinging death penalty, you die less.
Yes, dying and a stinging penalty may not be fun WHEN you die, but while you SURVIVE, it is loads of fun. Escaping the grim reaper has its own thrills and rewards. It just all nets out to much more enjoyment and fun. The thrill of dodging a stinging death penalty, and the cruel pleasure of watching others fall to it, is akin to the same adrenaline rush players get in full-loot PVP; it's exicting!
Tens of millions of dollars have been wasted on these linear, storybook, Candy-land MMO's, and I have a feeling we will soon experience some great sandbox PVE games in which risk and reward are inseparable.
Here is to looking forward to 2010 and 2011.
Thoughts?
Comments
I honestly disagree. Its not about one or two features.
Death Penalty has its use, and can indeed make a lot of stuff more interesting, but its just one spice of many for the steak that is PvE.
One large problem, for example, is the lack of good itemization. The WoW item dump has created a playerbase which really needs to be showered with rewards in order to feel "paid" enough, and most games apparently dont realize to imitate that, if you even want it, you first have to have some semblance of itemization balance in the game.
If you absolutely must go for item-as-reward mechanics, which IMO isnt a good idea as it puts you square into the area of WoW motivations, you cannot have ONE tier of endgame armor, you cannot have lackluster randomized crap weapons when your game system basically revolves around pushing ONE stat, the BEST stat, forward, and you cannot have megatons of placeholder graphics so every item looks the same.
There are plenty of other pitfalls, but really, death penalty for example doesnt mean much if the game is designed in a way where you dont have to take a risk. DP also falls short if the penalty itself, for example cash, exp or item loss, is not affecting a primary avenue of progress. DP also isnt a good idea if it favors some classes over others, and is not shared within a group, as this encourages people to stay solo, and it encourages people to not play some classes.
DP is, imo, best used if you lose something context sensitive. You die in PvE grinding? You lose exp. You die in a dungeon trying to get to the boss? You get respawns or lose the ID (if you want to be harsh), you die in PvP? You are out of the fight for a while, maybe by teleporting to your bindspot, by getting a debuff, and so on.
No one DP is useful for all. Heck, I have long been a proponent of varying DPs based on location. Dying in big bad castle of evil hurts more than taking a dirtnap in happy fluffy bunnyland.
You're right.
Nobody enjoys Dragon Age: Origins because of save/load (zero death penalty.)
...right?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You know , its possible to create your own fun.
There is plenty of permadeath guilds in DDO, some dont even let you use rez skills in groups. When a character dies (and in DDO you die VERY easy) you just delete your character and reroll. They have very strict rules but some even reach high level raiding like this.
If WoW = The Beatles
and WAR = Led Zeppelin
Then LotrO = Pink Floyd
Talking MMO's here, not linear stories where the single player is occasionally allowed to participate.
Actually I think newer MMOs didn't do as good, though most of them didn't do bad at all, just not WoW good, which is a unreasonable standard anyway. Anyway they didn't do as good because a lot of them were rather short on content especially for higher levels. And when people speed through games as fast as possible they get bored with the ones that don't have tons of content.
About death penalties though I don't think they will make games more exciting. The reason is, and I am sure I am not the only one that does this, people don't think about the death penalty when they are fighting. It isn't like people are about to die and think "well the death penalty is really harsh in this game I should adjust my ammount of effort to avoid this harsh death penalty," They are think "oh crap I don't want to die," likewise when they survive they don't think "glad I avoided the harsh death penalty this encounter is more exciting than it otherwise would have been," more like "Yay not dead". So I don't think it makes it more exciting for most people nor does it make people try to avoid death more, because they are already trying as much as they can in the first place and they never think about the death penalty.
The only time I think people do think about the death penalty is when they die and are burdened by the penalty and when they are planning what they want to do, which leads to frustration.
So I think most people can have just as much fun, if not more, without a death penalty as with. Just have some way to keep people from rushing head long into something over and over and win by respawn zerg cause that is cheap and you should be fine.
The thing about risk and reward is the reward don't become better to people if they risk a lot while getting it, well not all people. The concept of risk and reward is that if you are compensated with increasing reward you are more willing take on increasing amounts of risk, to get the best stuff you risk more and such, not that people automatically like something more if they had to risk more to get it.
Don't you worry little buddy. You're dealing with a man of honor. However, honor requires a higher percentage of profit
Comparing a single player narrative driven, character relationship scripted game, to an MMO? Failure.
Darkfall Travelogues!
Comparing a single player narrative driven, character relationship scripted game, to an MMO? Failure.
Not being open world automatically forces the system to not be classical save/load. However that doesn't justify excessive death penalty. Nor does it necessarily prevent very similar systems from being used (like having a deployable respawn point you can set up (cooldown ability); but when you die everything you killed in the last x minutes respawns in front of you.)
If the excessive death penalty crowd's stance is "Our preferences are niche, but we still want a game," then that's completely understandable for the most part the Majority and the Excessive Penalty guys can agree to disagree.
However the burder of proof is still on the death penalty crowd to show evidence to developers why games need excessive penalty when so many other games are completely fun without it. (keeping in mind that even the majority wants some death penalty.) More accurately, they need to be able to prove that the benefits of excessive death penalty outweigh the drawbacks for an economically significant group of players.
And really there are games out there with significant death penalty (EVE among others). So this discussion might simply boil down to "I want this exact combination of game elements or I'm not happy." which borders on trivial whining. Nobody's going to make an excessive death penalty version of every type of MMO out there, because it really doesn't make sense for a lot of them.
"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 to strongly disagree here. Death Penalty plays little or no part in my decision to play a pve MMO. I usually don't even notice a death penalty until I die, then I go from there. There are so many other factors that attract/detract from my decision in playing in a pve MMO, like crafting, housing, community, and end-game content, just to name a few.
Sorry you are beating a dead horse yet again, same old lines of personal opinion.
This is the best answer to this issue, which has long been argued to the point of being boring.
A game is good if it is fun to play, with or without death penalty. If I enjoy the game all along, up to the point I died, and if I still enjoy it after that, it is the game I will log on and play. Its relativity. If I enjoy a game more than any other, even with death penalty, I enjoy it. I do not enjoy a game simply b/c it has death penalty. Graphics, gameplay, music, background story, community, crafting, adventures, gaming mechanism, ... so many factors adds up to gameplay, why focus exclusively on death penalty.
Fun, this is all that matters in a game. Fun comes from many aspects. For me.
None of these games stop players from invoking their own, more severe, death penalty. Let's say, every time you die, give a decent item and some cash to a newbie, then go chop down grey mobs for an hour for no exp reward.
Are we having fun yet?
No, these death penalty champions have no guts deleting their own character, or deleting gear and money when their characters die. They want others to suffer, so that they can feel the cruel pleasure of seeing others die. In other words, they want to ruin the fun of other games in the name of a "fun" they pretend to champion.
Most likely, they are the ones who will never venture out of safe spot, or find a hack to stay alive.
I see stuff like this and while a more strict death penalty might be fun short term, when you are actively trying to get stuff done and not purely concentrating on staying alive it just becomes annoying. If the designers have to resort to enforcing a strict death penalty people try and avoid. they lack imagination for content. Not going to log on a MMO and simply try and get the simplest stuff done without dying.
I just chalk this up to 'lets add 'realistic thing' here because i can't think of anything original to make a game fun' most of the time. Its a bullshit artificial mechanic to make a game 'more difficult', its the difference between a genuinely hard puzzle and someone randomly slapping the game piece out of your hand while playing candy land.
No one is stopping people from enforcing a stricter death penalty on themselves. The fact that they insist OTHERS also have to go through strict death penalties shows a different motive than simply a 'better game', you want a game mechanic that essentially tea-bags and berates people who die in PvE.
You have it a bit backwards actually. You don't design in a death penalty instead the overall game design results in the type and amount of a death penalty you will end up with and that game design is what is important not whether or not the game has a penalty associated with it.
One aspect of WoW for example is that when you die you don't lose experience (ignoring wear on the armor for the moment) but that you have to return to your corpse from the nearest graveyard. This death run is in effect a penalty that punishes the game player for failing in some aspect of the game. If you have done any raiding in wow having the raid wipe and then have to have everyone run back is quite a time burner especially if you then have to work you way back or if you have to wait for the raid to be resurrected and rebuffed. Many of the raid encounters are designed to be quite specific in the process you have to follow to win the encounter and learning the process is a trial and error one that can sometimes require you and your raid mates to die hundreds of times. Adding a death penalty to this would make raiding so undesirable as to effectively kill it which means the raid encounters would need to be redesigned so as to in effect cause fewer deaths and be easier to win.
Yes there are other ways to adjust the difficulty of a raid without making it an instant win but the point here is that in any particular game the developers are working for an overall effect and in WoW they choose not to penalize a player and to make the encounters the way they did. In the old Everquest game raiding was quite difficult but people didn't die as often on a raid plus the clerics got a 100% ressurection spell that restored the lost experience making raiding an acceptable practice.
To look at a single aspect of game design out of context of the rest of the game is going to generally be a mistake. And in this case every game has some sort of loss associated with dying it just may not be specifically a loss of experience points. But losing in game money is no less painful than losing experience just ask any high raiding tank in WoW about how much they spend on keeping their armor repaired.
Aion has a death penalty for PvE death which can be mostly recovered by paying a healer to restore you but then you need to earn the kinah which requires probably as much time to earn as earning the experience back would be. PvP death doesn't result in experience loss but does result in losing Abyss points. In Eve online you lose pretty much everything you have with you when you get your ship shot out from under you and if you get podded you lose your implants and possibly skill points if you haven't kept your clone up to date.
Actually, stopping to think about it very few games don't have some sort of penalty for dying. The penalty generally be an inconvenience of time and effort to the player for letting themselves get killed. The point you want to make seems to be that if someone dies that they should really, really suffer and why play a game if it is going to make you suffer? A good game design would be one that encourages people to experiment and try again not one that says if you make one single mistake you might as well quit.
A game with permanent death might be realistic but as you can imagine it isn't one full of very brave people pushing the boundaries of the game but one full of timid people and as they invest more and more time in their character they will become more and more afraid of losing that investment. One needs to remember that these are all just games and are all just for fun. The fact that you have reached level 80 or what ever the level cap is in a game has no value outside of the game. You are not better looking, brighter or more clever for having done it and all these virtual worlds are like writing in the sand and will one day fade away. Enjoy the moment but don't invest your life and soul into them and don't make them a job.
Ok I should have clarified to say 'HARSH death penalty', I'm not against death penalties all together.
I remember when EQ2 first came out you would have a kind of corpse run for exp/debt reduction and SHARED experience debt. Which in the end basically penalized the whole group unless your group did the dungeon run or w/e FLAWLESSLY. Personally I consider time to be the biggest death penalty, and a MMO would have to go a long way in design to avoid that kind of inherent penalty. If I spent 30 minutes on a MMO trying to get something done but ultimately failing I would consider that a HUGe penalty and it would strongly discourage me from what ever it was that ultimately made me waste that time, be it a PUG, playing with particularly bad players, trying to accomplish something out of my league for w/e reason, or any other number of scenarios.
Best part is that this penalty also applies to the developers. For example, If grouping tools are poor and trying to get a group together wastes time, I will be less inclined to group thus lessening the MMO experience for me and others, this is something they want to avoid if they want to make money.
Death penalties have nothing to do with the difference between the old school games and new ones. Nor does it really effect anything.
The difference is the games of old (UO, EQ, DAoC, AC...) were games built in a different time, a time when MMOs were pretty much a nerdy nightclub for us players to escape to after a long day of work, etc. Those games were pretty much simple worlds designed with tools that allowed the player to find their own fun. And it worked well that way.
Todays MMOs are aimed at the masses and are designed to give players something to do at all times. The worlds may be larger than our old games, but they are also a lot smaller due to everything being handed to you or having someone always around that next corner to keep pointing you in the right direction.
Also the newer games are full of more and more anti social players, and the developers cater to them more and more. Now im not talking about the sitting on a bell tower with a rifle and a backpack full of ammo anti social, I'm talking about the players who join a group, never say a word the whole time save for something like 'pulling, bio, afk' etc. So the developers add in features to accomodate this growing trend. Now we have instances that are hardly 15 minutes long, auto join LFG features and shorter level rates. Newer games just dont have that heroic journey feel the MMO genre once had.
In EQ people would have friends lists a mile long and pretty much end up knowing half the server and actually talking to most of them on a regular basis. In newer games you are lucky to have more than 20 people on your friends list that are not guild members/alts or real life friends.
Basically old school games felt like living breathing worlds with actual populations. People played to have fun and grow their characters. Newer games feel more like multiplayer Mario Brothers. Everyone is more focused on getting to the end and saving the princess.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
If the death penalty is so small that you can zerg mindlessly through the content, then it is a problem.
Wrong.
And I, personnally, would like "soft-core PD" (lives per month), this rank me among the peoples who would enjoy among the harshest penalties...and I concede the fact that the Death Penalties are merely 1 tool among many other.
Trying to simplify everything to 1 single data isn't realistic unless, this data is removing the fun from the game. I am sure, we can find plenty of peoples who would not mind not dying at all.
That's been said, I do believe each server should have a different death penalty. Where would most peoples flow and play? Most likely on the light penalties, at least at start. But eventually, the long lasting communities might show up on medium to harsh penalties servers.
See, IMHO, you need to find a system where the casuals and the hardcore both feel some dread about dying, without feeling dishearted if their character die. See, losing 10 XP to a guy playing 1 hour per month, this is all you need, it could even be a DEBT system. You don't need to punish him further. But to a guy efficient and playing a dozen of hours everyday...it COULD be a thrill to add more. I really believe that a server (not the whole game) where peoples who died too often can't play their favorite character for the remaining of the month, this would be a grand idea. To make this idea workable, you may want to give these players a "sense/reason" to want to play there, perhaps that server has a few more options on a layer or another, perhaps some rewards, or an option that isn't available on the "casual servers".
In fact, why does everything has to be available everywhere? I know, devs work hard. But, putting limits and restrictions beforehand on the players is also key to the success. Rewards have to be awarded approprietedly. Giving everything to everyone would make as much sense as the raiding system in EQ! See, players have to be able to be good and achieve stuff at what they care for. Raiding content might be available only on some servers, yet the loot tables on these servers might be working completely differently. Why prevent a soloer from earning the ultimate sword of utter obliteration if that player isn't going to do anything but solo? You want to lose a player? There should be means to acquire it, in his own way of playing, on the appropriate server. See, on the test server, everyone can be any level, any class, have any loot they desire...it is the test server. On the solo server, everything should be earnable by soloing, you don't like it, go play on a server with a higher challenge, where you know that peoples equipped with the items are "deserving" of it.
IMO, there could be a "I win button" server. As long as peoples on my server, earned everything by grouping...and peoples who died too often are prevented to play more this character for the remaining of the month...I would have a blast on such a server.
Now, having different servers rules bring many other questions...and 1 of them is, can friends from different servers play together, and if so, under which rules? IMO, there should be 1 instanced server, where peoples from every server play together their character...but what they bring there (levels, XP, gear, is subject to rules...for example, an item earned on your server might need a special tag to be brought over there, otherwise it is left on the homeserver...what you can earn there is also subject to rules).
This could become quite complex, while remaining extremely simple. Conversions systems aren't a hard thing.
But basically, hars death penalties, are 1 aspect, among many other, and IMO, it should be the case on SOME servers.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
Oh I agree there needs to be something to prevent zerging, But it should just be more like a speed bump, not a blown tire, messed up rim and bent axle.
People pine for the old days of EQ1 for death penalties and such, but now I look back theres no way I would have played it with what I know now. The game basically came down to getting a spot, camping it, pulling mobs to grind exp and not dying, grinding on puss mobs was more than acceptable if it meant you wouldnt die. I did maybe 5 quests in the YEARS I played the game, and those were my epic and access quests.
Restricted content is a bad idea on many levels. First it alienates people before they even get a run at it. Second in terms of business, its extremely ineffecient. If Mob A is contested, and usually on lock down by maybe 1 or 2 guilds per server, thats a HUGE waste compared to Mob B who is a instance zone and everyone can get to without interference. reason why its ineffeicent is that its takes roughly the same amount of work to make both these encounters, when one can be used by the entire population and the other is only used by a minority.
Any plan that would make a character unplayable due to approved in game actions (dying for example) that aren't optional (deleting your character being example of optional) would fail miserably. Would basically be a built in queue system with a MUCH longer wait time, and we all know how well queues go over in MMO's.
Only games that could get away with so many varied rule sets are ones with extremely high subscription numbers, otherwise the smaller pop MMO's would have a severly splintered population thats spread much too thin across these various rulesets.
With WOW's very light death penalty do you see much zerging happening? I sure don't.
I agree on most of your other points though.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
With WOW's very light death penalty do you see much zerging happening? I sure don't.
I agree on most of your other points though.
Actually WoW introduced a much better way to discouraging zerging, then death penalty. In ToGC raids, you have a total of 50 attempts to get the to end. Failing that, the tribute chest does not drop. Quite an original way of encouraging players to play wise. Fact is, if you get to the end with less than 6 wipes you got more drops, and if you have less then 26 wipes in the 10 ToGC, you would be given trophies ...
Instead of a penalty, they offer varying payoffs for progressively better gameplay.
Challenge and risk vs. reward.
Yeah I agree. Sometimes being seriously OP and just trashing a place is fun, but that's the exception... not the rule.
Ken
www.ActionMMORPG.com
One man, a small pile of money, and the screwball idea of a DIY Indie MMORPG? Yep, that's him. ~sigh~
EPIC quote!
Ken
www.ActionMMORPG.com
One man, a small pile of money, and the screwball idea of a DIY Indie MMORPG? Yep, that's him. ~sigh~
LOL .. why would a PvE game be about death penalty?
It is all about fun boss fight and dungeon crawls.
In their attempts to become more accessible i think modern MMOs have tended to become rather bland and uninteresting. The reduction of the death penalty is a fractional part of that development but certainly the whole of it.