Everquest’s death penalty is/was hardcore – I’m sure it’s changed slightly by now.
This right here made me quesiton the validity of the OP's perspective. It would take you less than five minutes to use a search engine for you to find out exactly what sort of death penalty EQ has now. What amazes me is that you weren't willing to do that but I suspect you want us to take our time to actually read what you wrote before we form our opinions. I am not talking about a change that happened this year or last... this changed awhile ago.
Anyway, early EQ death penalties were beyond hardcore and entering the realm of if you work in the morning or if you had class or any other responsibility outside of the game, it could become a hardship to play. If you go to sleep and your corpse rots while you are sleeping and/or working because you couldn't spend an additional 2-3 hours doing a corpse run (this after having played your allocated 4-6 hours of playtime already), then the game went too far. Now, however, the death penalty is almost nonexistent. When your entire party suicides off a cliff because it's faster than actually fighting your way down a mountain (LOTRO) it's too lenient. When the only penalty for charging full steam ahead with no tactic is an explosion and a pause before you get to respawn and do it all over again having learned nothing (STO) there is no death penalty.
It's a balancing act, and while the early games wanted to punish the hell out of players for doing something wrong instead of encourage them to learn to do it better or the exploration is dangerous, newer games dont' do anything more than slap you on the wrist, if that, hand you a ball and tell you to continue on burning through their content as fast as possible.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Upon reading "well of souls" I first thought they were talking about Jack L. Chalker's Well world series with such books as "Exiles from the Well of Souls" and "Quest for the Well of Souls".
Ditto. Time will tell. I don't mind generally hardcore DP as long as there are SOME options for solo play. I'll watch this game carefully.
Yep, nothing quite like seeing a Fantasy author rip off another author's material. R.A. the Well of Souls belongs to Chalker, go find some new material
Yep, nothing quite like seeing a Fantasy author rip off another author's material. R.A. the Well of Souls belongs to Chalker, go find some new material
Yo, Jack I'm happy for ya, and I'm gonna let you finish, but the Muslims had the best Well of Souls of all time.
R.A.'s "Well of Souls" we know very little about, nonetheless, so far it sounds absolutely nothing like what is found in the Well World novels.
Point is, just because it's named Well of Souls doesn't mean it's not going to be a new literary device. Any more than Chalker's "Well of Souls" is a cave where the souls of the dead gather to await the final judgement in Islam.
Now if it does turn out to be a direct rip-off then it would be appropriate to criticize, but not until then.
this one I don't get, the well of souls is a concept for all games? or is something more especific about one single game?
It's a specific thing with the game they are making.
Upon reading "well of souls" I first thought they were talking about Jack L. Chalker's Well world series with such books as "Exiles from the Well of Souls" and "Quest for the Well of Souls".
If people have not read these books I highly recommend them as they are some of the best science fiction I've ever read.
Chalker was a top notch author, may he rest in peace. I loved his Dancing Gods series and the Soul Rider series and the Changewind Series, all of them superb pieces of work. He and Frank Herbert are the only Sci-Fi writers that I like, the rest are fantasy.
A game developer with real vision is hard to come by. To me, that means taking another solid look at your pre-existing beliefs with respect to the way MMORGs can/should run prior to regurgitating the opinions you've long held or collected from others who pitch their tent in your own camp. The genre is still essentially in its infancy, folks.
I read through all of the posts on this discussion topic and as a hardcore MMORGer myself, I can and do see areas where almost everyone seems to have part of the picture logically 'right.'
Yeah, we play for fun (aside from platsellers...)--so yeah, it doesn't seem at first that we want "harsh" to be part of the experience...at all. The obvious problem with that idea is something philosophers have recognized for years, and which the U.S. is currently struggling horrendously with. Without penalty, there is no such thing as reward. Because taking penalty away simply makes "non-reward" equivalent to penalty. It is the same as an elementary school classroom in which one student gets an award and thus all the students must get a reward or else someone feels judged and/or cheated and/or left out. This is an entirely fallacious concept, and I for one would rather not see it spread to and infect MMORGs.
The reality of the fantasy should be exactly the way R.A. Salvatore seems to see it. A death penalty with bite. I'm glad someone is coming up with a reasonable approach to it before the gaming community is WoWified too much--taking nothing away from the popularity of WoW, the lack of any significant penalty for dying makes much of it similar to taking a walk through a virtual zoo. You're exploring and there is no limit to your ability to experience the game aside from the limits of your time--which you inevitably end up throwing into the fire in mass quantity, addicted to a world without consequence. Without even a semblance of reality. The really bad part about that is that like it or not, it provides us training that is artificial, and in some ways...oh god, can I actually say it?...in some ways even worse than television. Yep, you guessed it. Worse than television. Television has for years been detrimental to society because it is the only environment (that and movies) in which there is nearly always a happy ending. MMORGs will become worse than television on the same day that consequences are completely thrown out the window in a vain attempt to pander to the masses for what the latter believe they want/need. More and more now, "reality" tv is taking center stage, and a game designer with true vision will realize that a similar transition should be (and eventually will be) made with MMORGs.
You cannot and will not accomplish anything truly heroic if nothing REAL is on the line. More real than the quarters we old timers used to line up on the joystick sill of the standup arcade games which read "I got next." More real than simply a few minutes of annoyance, or corpse drags, or naked corpse runs. Go for it, Mr. Salvatore. We're reading your stuff. I'm captured by the idea that someone has the guts to call it like he sees it and back it up with his time and his dedication, to say nothing about cash. A poster on a blog such as this is not all too different than a poseur. You're not risking anything posting out your half-baked ideas here. The worst you'll get here is flamed by others or censored by the moderator. Posters here are a bad cross-section to sample because there isn't any risk here and so you're naturally going to get a selection of people that will argue for what they always keep coming back for: the ability to run free in the fields like Bambi outside of hunting season.
Permanent death in an MMORG. Irrevocable death. You lost it all. You must rebuild from scratch. Well now, rebuilding from scratch wouldn't be such a horrendous big deal if the game weren't otherwise designed in such a way as to BORE YOU TO TEARS by 'forcing' you to do the same thing over and over and OVER again because time-honored 'strategy' indicates that the haphazard "who gives a crap if my toon dies" approach is the most efficient for getting your levels and phat lewt the fastest. There wouldn't be geared out level 90 shadowknights with mythical weapons running in big wide swaths through two or three rooms in Runnyeye 1 gathering 30+ lowbie goblins to powerlevel your twink because you might actually die from that sort of nonsense. It wouldn't be such a big joke anymore, but it would be replaced with something different, and something, I would argue, much better.
Rebuilding from scratch would mean the higher, harder to come by lessons of the game would be cherished all the more, the game would play out more meaningfully, there would not be 1-50 or 1-60 or whatever races (at least not in the same style) because racing through content would be equivalent to suicide. Races such as these could not be won by a simpleton with a lot of time on his hands. They would be won by truly clever people, and thus the highest level people would be cheered for their wit rather than jeered for the number of hours they managed to feed into the MMORG fire in a short period of time. You also might not find people so freely willing to give up a lesson they learned from sacrificing the life of a toon. Or perhaps one of ten lives that they had--a ten life system which would essentially allow you to live dangerously while you're young and inexperienced but which would eventually result in a day of reckoning: when you had only two or perhaps only one life left to live and you're called out for the chance of a lifetime against a spawn that happens perhaps once or twice a year. Back down and become known as a coward or stake everything you have for a chance at success and glory--or perhaps a glorious end and a permanent place in the lore of your guild.
What makes it so hard to understand that changing one dynamic of a game would and does change other dynamics? What makes it hard for gamers to realize that if designers listened to their bellowing cries of "I WANT VANILLA!" all the time, we never would have gotten EQ, AC, WoW, or any of the brilliant products that have come along since the inception of video games? We might only have rock/paper/scissors which any caveman could probably grasp the concept of.
There is so much more that can be done with games than to stick with what is out there, regardless of whether it is popular. Sure, it was a heartless DM that put a permanent Darkness 15' radius spell on a 15' wide room along with a permanent Silence 15' radius spell on same, with a wraith that could instantly knock you down TWO whole levels right smack dab in the middle of it. You want to find out what's on the other side of that room? Figure out how to handle it. You want to blithely roam free in a field with sunshine that doesn't burn you, bugs that don't bite you, weeds that don't make your legs itch and pollen that can't make you sneeze? Then find your own damn field and stop trying to wreck the fantasy worlds of those of us who spend their time in both sorts of worlds.
BTW: My whole l/t post can be summarized by someone much wiser than me, in five words:
I played EverQuest for five years, beginning in the Kunark era (the first expansion). The death penalty was truly harsh, and that sense of *danger* made for an immensely more immersive feeling than any of the newer MMORPG's. In the early days, as others have mentioned, even travelling carried a good bit of risk, which you embraced for the sake of the possible rewards. It was an adventure, in a way that games with no real risk are unable to provide. I hope Copernicus has that kind of edge - I miss it. In EQ today, death is nearly as trivial as in WoW. EverQuest had it right in its original design, up through the first two expansions. Best MMORPG I've ever played, even with the limited graphics of the time. I hope thats the template that they use.
Comments
Everquest’s death penalty is/was hardcore – I’m sure it’s changed slightly by now.
This right here made me quesiton the validity of the OP's perspective. It would take you less than five minutes to use a search engine for you to find out exactly what sort of death penalty EQ has now. What amazes me is that you weren't willing to do that but I suspect you want us to take our time to actually read what you wrote before we form our opinions. I am not talking about a change that happened this year or last... this changed awhile ago.
Anyway, early EQ death penalties were beyond hardcore and entering the realm of if you work in the morning or if you had class or any other responsibility outside of the game, it could become a hardship to play. If you go to sleep and your corpse rots while you are sleeping and/or working because you couldn't spend an additional 2-3 hours doing a corpse run (this after having played your allocated 4-6 hours of playtime already), then the game went too far. Now, however, the death penalty is almost nonexistent. When your entire party suicides off a cliff because it's faster than actually fighting your way down a mountain (LOTRO) it's too lenient. When the only penalty for charging full steam ahead with no tactic is an explosion and a pause before you get to respawn and do it all over again having learned nothing (STO) there is no death penalty.
It's a balancing act, and while the early games wanted to punish the hell out of players for doing something wrong instead of encourage them to learn to do it better or the exploration is dangerous, newer games dont' do anything more than slap you on the wrist, if that, hand you a ball and tell you to continue on burning through their content as fast as possible.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Ditto. Time will tell. I don't mind generally hardcore DP as long as there are SOME options for solo play. I'll watch this game carefully.
Yep, nothing quite like seeing a Fantasy author rip off another author's material. R.A. the Well of Souls belongs to Chalker, go find some new material
Yo, Jack I'm happy for ya, and I'm gonna let you finish, but the Muslims had the best Well of Souls of all time.
R.A.'s "Well of Souls" we know very little about, nonetheless, so far it sounds absolutely nothing like what is found in the Well World novels.
Point is, just because it's named Well of Souls doesn't mean it's not going to be a new literary device. Any more than Chalker's "Well of Souls" is a cave where the souls of the dead gather to await the final judgement in Islam.
Now if it does turn out to be a direct rip-off then it would be appropriate to criticize, but not until then.
It's a specific thing with the game they are making.
Upon reading "well of souls" I first thought they were talking about Jack L. Chalker's Well world series with such books as "Exiles from the Well of Souls" and "Quest for the Well of Souls".
If people have not read these books I highly recommend them as they are some of the best science fiction I've ever read.
Chalker was a top notch author, may he rest in peace. I loved his Dancing Gods series and the Soul Rider series and the Changewind Series, all of them superb pieces of work. He and Frank Herbert are the only Sci-Fi writers that I like, the rest are fantasy.
A game developer with real vision is hard to come by. To me, that means taking another solid look at your pre-existing beliefs with respect to the way MMORGs can/should run prior to regurgitating the opinions you've long held or collected from others who pitch their tent in your own camp. The genre is still essentially in its infancy, folks.
I read through all of the posts on this discussion topic and as a hardcore MMORGer myself, I can and do see areas where almost everyone seems to have part of the picture logically 'right.'
Yeah, we play for fun (aside from platsellers...)--so yeah, it doesn't seem at first that we want "harsh" to be part of the experience...at all. The obvious problem with that idea is something philosophers have recognized for years, and which the U.S. is currently struggling horrendously with. Without penalty, there is no such thing as reward. Because taking penalty away simply makes "non-reward" equivalent to penalty. It is the same as an elementary school classroom in which one student gets an award and thus all the students must get a reward or else someone feels judged and/or cheated and/or left out. This is an entirely fallacious concept, and I for one would rather not see it spread to and infect MMORGs.
The reality of the fantasy should be exactly the way R.A. Salvatore seems to see it. A death penalty with bite. I'm glad someone is coming up with a reasonable approach to it before the gaming community is WoWified too much--taking nothing away from the popularity of WoW, the lack of any significant penalty for dying makes much of it similar to taking a walk through a virtual zoo. You're exploring and there is no limit to your ability to experience the game aside from the limits of your time--which you inevitably end up throwing into the fire in mass quantity, addicted to a world without consequence. Without even a semblance of reality. The really bad part about that is that like it or not, it provides us training that is artificial, and in some ways...oh god, can I actually say it?...in some ways even worse than television. Yep, you guessed it. Worse than television. Television has for years been detrimental to society because it is the only environment (that and movies) in which there is nearly always a happy ending. MMORGs will become worse than television on the same day that consequences are completely thrown out the window in a vain attempt to pander to the masses for what the latter believe they want/need. More and more now, "reality" tv is taking center stage, and a game designer with true vision will realize that a similar transition should be (and eventually will be) made with MMORGs.
You cannot and will not accomplish anything truly heroic if nothing REAL is on the line. More real than the quarters we old timers used to line up on the joystick sill of the standup arcade games which read "I got next." More real than simply a few minutes of annoyance, or corpse drags, or naked corpse runs. Go for it, Mr. Salvatore. We're reading your stuff. I'm captured by the idea that someone has the guts to call it like he sees it and back it up with his time and his dedication, to say nothing about cash. A poster on a blog such as this is not all too different than a poseur. You're not risking anything posting out your half-baked ideas here. The worst you'll get here is flamed by others or censored by the moderator. Posters here are a bad cross-section to sample because there isn't any risk here and so you're naturally going to get a selection of people that will argue for what they always keep coming back for: the ability to run free in the fields like Bambi outside of hunting season.
Permanent death in an MMORG. Irrevocable death. You lost it all. You must rebuild from scratch. Well now, rebuilding from scratch wouldn't be such a horrendous big deal if the game weren't otherwise designed in such a way as to BORE YOU TO TEARS by 'forcing' you to do the same thing over and over and OVER again because time-honored 'strategy' indicates that the haphazard "who gives a crap if my toon dies" approach is the most efficient for getting your levels and phat lewt the fastest. There wouldn't be geared out level 90 shadowknights with mythical weapons running in big wide swaths through two or three rooms in Runnyeye 1 gathering 30+ lowbie goblins to powerlevel your twink because you might actually die from that sort of nonsense. It wouldn't be such a big joke anymore, but it would be replaced with something different, and something, I would argue, much better.
Rebuilding from scratch would mean the higher, harder to come by lessons of the game would be cherished all the more, the game would play out more meaningfully, there would not be 1-50 or 1-60 or whatever races (at least not in the same style) because racing through content would be equivalent to suicide. Races such as these could not be won by a simpleton with a lot of time on his hands. They would be won by truly clever people, and thus the highest level people would be cheered for their wit rather than jeered for the number of hours they managed to feed into the MMORG fire in a short period of time. You also might not find people so freely willing to give up a lesson they learned from sacrificing the life of a toon. Or perhaps one of ten lives that they had--a ten life system which would essentially allow you to live dangerously while you're young and inexperienced but which would eventually result in a day of reckoning: when you had only two or perhaps only one life left to live and you're called out for the chance of a lifetime against a spawn that happens perhaps once or twice a year. Back down and become known as a coward or stake everything you have for a chance at success and glory--or perhaps a glorious end and a permanent place in the lore of your guild.
What makes it so hard to understand that changing one dynamic of a game would and does change other dynamics? What makes it hard for gamers to realize that if designers listened to their bellowing cries of "I WANT VANILLA!" all the time, we never would have gotten EQ, AC, WoW, or any of the brilliant products that have come along since the inception of video games? We might only have rock/paper/scissors which any caveman could probably grasp the concept of.
There is so much more that can be done with games than to stick with what is out there, regardless of whether it is popular. Sure, it was a heartless DM that put a permanent Darkness 15' radius spell on a 15' wide room along with a permanent Silence 15' radius spell on same, with a wraith that could instantly knock you down TWO whole levels right smack dab in the middle of it. You want to find out what's on the other side of that room? Figure out how to handle it. You want to blithely roam free in a field with sunshine that doesn't burn you, bugs that don't bite you, weeds that don't make your legs itch and pollen that can't make you sneeze? Then find your own damn field and stop trying to wreck the fantasy worlds of those of us who spend their time in both sorts of worlds.
BTW: My whole l/t post can be summarized by someone much wiser than me, in five words:
The risk begets the reward.
I played EverQuest for five years, beginning in the Kunark era (the first expansion). The death penalty was truly harsh, and that sense of *danger* made for an immensely more immersive feeling than any of the newer MMORPG's. In the early days, as others have mentioned, even travelling carried a good bit of risk, which you embraced for the sake of the possible rewards. It was an adventure, in a way that games with no real risk are unable to provide. I hope Copernicus has that kind of edge - I miss it. In EQ today, death is nearly as trivial as in WoW. EverQuest had it right in its original design, up through the first two expansions. Best MMORPG I've ever played, even with the limited graphics of the time. I hope thats the template that they use.