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How do you make death more fun?
wicked45
Member Posts: 59
I play MMO's for the immersion and large world atmosphere. Something that really takes me out of that is Inappropriate death penalties. In WOW a 15 sec run back to my body (and 10% durability hit which doesn't matter since everyone has so much gold now days) is hardly a "penalty". I don't mind the concept of "hardcore" corpse looting (and I even enjoyed UO back in the day), but it seems that the only games that offer anything similar cater to PKing or have an insane leveling curve, which for me doesn't really seem to mix well with that sort of penalty. There is a very fine line between making the death penalty meaningless and totally frustrating, mind you the end result is for the game to be fun. But I keep thinking to myself..."There has to be a meaningful death penalty that is acceptable." (And better than what's currently being offered)
So I thought I'd post and see if anyone here has any better ideas or had played an MMO with a death penalty that you really liked?
Comments
Personally, I can't stand dying in an MMO. Hate it with a passion. Any penalty whatsoever is too harsh for my tastes.
I am the hero! No mere minions should be able to defeat me, even in large numbers. I'd like to see an MMO where it was possible, without excessive caution, to go from level 1 to the top without ever dying once. The only way the hero should die is in some supremely self-sacrificing and intentional act.
I realize this is an extreme opinion, but at the very least I have never, ever, not one time in 30 years, found dying in a game to be 'fun'.
What about more things to do when you are dead?
Ghosts who give out quests, and you can actually do some quests in this other world? You have more thief like abilities too...just a thought..
WOW is doing it right. A mild penalty so you don't really want to die but not a hinderance to try stuff.
There is no point for a tough death penalty when people are wiping many times on some of the encounters.
By inflicting it on others
I kind of miss UO corpse runs
lol, how about if you hate dieing in MMOs so much and must be that hero among heros then how about no death. That's right, if your health drops to 0 you fall down and then get back up a few seconds later. No, I'm not serious.
There is one thing you could do... at least you can do this to trick the players mind:
Assign him some sort of martyrdom-points. He can use these to unleash some really cruel cool abilities, throwing wrath upon those who killed him. ;-)
Oh geez, I don't want SwampRod to feel that I'm stalking him, but once again, I agree with his sentiment!
I figure that failing is enough, don't need much of a penalty. If I failed, that's enough for me. Besides, I just don't see how you can experiment and play around if you have to worry about a big death penalty. Then again, I play to relax, so I have different playtime goals.
If you are going to penalize me, I'd at least like to see something interesting. I remember this one place where I was dying, a lot. Varying the animations would have been nice. Another cool thing would be, after you died several times, another way opened for you do the quest. That would be interesting. I"m not sure how that could work for group play.
Then again, I'm so not hardcore.
Regards,
mszv
"How do you make death more fun?"
By being the Killer, and not the one being killed....
While this obviously won't work for every situation, I thought of one system to use in a game featuring mostly instanced PvE. You can only die once, no respawning and arriving back. If you die, though, you can still participate and play in a "death world" in which you attempt to survive as long as possible until the rest of the group finishes. If you "die" again in this world, the entire instance is failed and has to be restarted. With this, death isn't trivial but neither is it "personally" offensive to the player by weakening or taking away from them.
It would frustrate too much. Just think of the situation a whole group wipes while doing the last boss?
They'd have to restart as no one managed to survive the encounter.
Seems I remember reading something on here about a game that allowed you to change into some kind of demon or something when you died similar to what you are saying. I can't remember the name of it. Might be a game still in dev. But I remember thinking it sounded interesting. Good comments though...
Dare I mention DAOC's penalties where armors used to break if you had to repair it too many times? lol
What I prefer myself, is that if you die, you get sent to a graveyard. There's no ghost or ways for you to travel while dead. You get sent to a gy, and you are protected with an invulnerability buff that goes away once you either 1) cast a spell or use an ability, or 2) leave the gy. This will prevent griefing, as well as make death sting a tad more.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
So what's the "sting"?...the run back? I actually thought of DAOC as well....but that wasn't too much of a penalty either since it took a LONG time for things to break...but at least you felt a small "loss"?
My favorite death penalty of any game would have to be the one used in EVE and Darkfall. Depending on the ship you are flying or the armor/weapons you are wearing, each death has a different level of penalty. There are already games out there that make death penalties fun so I dont see a real need to add anything else. As long as the game and death penalty are designed to work together.
I dont care for games like WoW or WAR that have virtually no death penalty because it feels like Im playing a slower paced FPS. Die, run, respawn, die, run, respawn with no consequences is really boring to me. If your gear was destroyed or someone else could loot it, crafters would have a real purpose in the game and people might actually try to be better.
I like the way the death penalty is done in WoW, where you have to run back to your body.
I played FFXI for years and the death penalty was very irritating and harsh (level down/exp loss) but I still loved the game, that kind of penalty just subtracted from my enjoyment of it. When I started playing WoW it was a sigh of relief and it made the game much more enjoyable/relaxing and care free for me. I remember my first death was outside the night elf starting area in the woods, I turned into a wisp and was thinking "huh this is different and kinda cool."
I like to have fun when I play games, not get stressed. Taking hours to recover from one death just isn't fun to me. I know that isn't very 'hardcore' of me but I would rather be progressing in those hours rather than backtracking. (:
Yes the sting of having to run back, or more importantly, the bragging rights of you kicking someone out of the area. With ghosts, people come back, they spawn on top of you randomly. You can not kick someone out of an area very well.
I do also support a debuff that reduce your stats when you die, and that debuff stacking up multiple times if you die so often within a set amount of time.
You want it to sting, but at the same time you don't want people to leave your game because your death penalty simply sucks & promotes griefing.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
It's amazing that I find myself having to point out something so obvious but...death isn't supposed to be fun.
Having cool quests to do as a ghost...earning martyrdom points to unlock abilities...making death FUN. Am I really so far out of touch with the mainstream that I'm the only one who thinks the very concept of making dying fun in a game is crazy?
I mean, WoW came along with no death penalty at all and that was bad enough. People saying that dying should not hurt is bad enough. But now people want to be rewarded for dying?
Well that's just great and the way things are going I'm sure it'll probably happen sooner or later. Weee, suicide into a pile of mobs over and over and each time you die you'll earn death points and when you get enough you can unleash the demons of Hell on your enemies. On top of that, each time you die you'll earn 50 gold.
Throw yourself off a cliff so you can explore the ulra cool Underworld! In the Underworld you'll find a plethora of fantastic quests for a wide assortment of phat lewts!
Yes, you heard right folks, in the brave new world of mmo's you no longer need to fear death. You will no longer be punished for carelessness or stupid mistakes...YOU'LL BE REWARDED!!!
Yayyyyyy, happy happy fun times for all!
I agree, it is totally ridiculous. But nevertheless, the masses really want to have some "reward" for dying. Though it should have some disadvantage / inconvenience as well. I'd still stick with hardcore rule set: Full loot!
It's not that the death itself is fun (but I actually thought there were some good death ideas already) but if it's too much of a penalty then it detracts from the game itself ...which is suppose to be fun. I tend to lean to the PVP/hardcore side where there should be a penalty that you feel, but clearly there are a lot of players out there that play "casual" and feel completely different. So aside from the "no penalty at all" death, I really just wanted to see how many people would see an actual penalty as acceptable. Seems pretty divided to me at this point.
I don't understand, when are video games "not suppose to be fun" I was under the impression they were made for fun entertainment?
I'd also like to know where you guys heard everyone thinks they should be rewarded for death? This concept is new to me, someone please direct me to where someone wanted to be rewarded for dying? O.o To me it sounds like so-called 'hardcore' kids throwing around false generalizations to increase their hardcorenesseseses.
o_O;? I read a lot of things on these forums but this is a first....
Personally I prefer the penalty used in the vast majority of all of gaming: failure to advance, or failure to complete the task at hand (level, boss, whatever).
Death in these games doesn't involve Daddy Game Designer telling you, "You've been bad, I'm going to take away your game for a while." Instead, you're back in the game immediately having fun gameplay again.
Especially in games where progression is marked by whether you kill something, failure to kill it is enough of a penalty. In games with proper reward schemes, you will progress at a rate completely dependant on your skill as a player. Note that many games (including WOW) don't reward challenge appropriately (especially while leveling in WOW,) and that's a bad effort vs. reward implementation.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
SWG..
The act of dying led to social oriented game-play. It never felt like a penalty because of that.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
When you die, that's when. Part of the fun is avoiding death. Are we really so far gone that there are really people out there who think dying in these games should not only <not hurt> but should <be fun>? Fun generally being something you want to do.
Jesus Christ, if people really seriously start defending that idea I think this will be the moment when I go over the hump and officially become a grumpy old man.
Umm... at level 1, with no skills, hardly any armor... No... you're not "the hero".
But that opinion is consistent with the overall point-of-view I see a lot these days... Players log in for the first time, create a character and are focused on only one thing: Getting To End Game As Soon As Possible If Not Sooner.
I guess End Game = When you get to become "The Hero". Though that's not even true... even then there's still things that are going to stomp you.
In fact, SwampRob... I'm curious what games you've played - in any genre - where you could (without knowing the game well enough to do so - most likely by dying a lot) get from start to finish without ever dying? I'd like to avoid them because, frankly, they'd bore me to tears.
Without "excessive caution"? What would that be? Not doing something stupid that you know will probably get you killed? When people in WoW - on their main characters - are dying deliberately to "graveyard hop" across the world because the death penalty is near non-existent... there's a problem there. Death is supposed to be the penalty for failure... not a mode of transportation.
I mean.. it sounds to me like what you want is a success-fest where you're always the winner! And never lose! And you're The Hero... even though you're doing nothing heroic because nothing can stop you... because if it can stop you, then you might die... and dying is not Heroic!
Frankly... I'd feel much more "heroic" (from the character's point of view) defeating a boss in a video game that has kicked my ass several times than I would if it was a cake walk...
And by the by... the idea of "dying" isn't what people consider fun. The idea of having to use your brain, reflexes, planning, or what-have-you to *avoid* dying is what people find fun. The harsher the penalty, the more dying sucks, the more you try not to and the more satisfying it is when you defeat that epic boss, or pass that seemingly impossible area without dying. That seems to be an alien concept to some people for some reason.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I've grown to absolutely hate most forms of death penalty, especially those that cause a time sink. Last night, I downloaded DDO again, I had heard they had made some changes and wanted to check it out. So far, not at all impressed, but that's neither here nor there. I ended up dying and that sent me back to the tavern where I just stand around healing. Where is the fun in that? I said the hell with it and logged out, I'll be healed whenever I decide to play again.
I'd much rather just pop back to the tavern, fully healed (although there can be an XP penalty or something) and I can just set off again without having to spend 20 minutes picking my ass. If that's the case, I've got too much else to do. Adios.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
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