From my post in the other thread, I feel this is away permadeath could work well, however it has been accused of being to carebear and not hardcore enough, which I see that angle. Figured I'd post here for any that didn't get a chance to read them yet. The came I picture is a more advanced Shadowbane/DAoC type faction world, only more driven by the players.
1)The world should have little to no grind. There are still some rpg leveling elements, just not as intense as today's existing MMO's.
2)Players should not be easy to kill. Can they be killed, yes. Are they as frail as humans are in reality, no.
3)A player defeated in combat is not dead. Once a player is struck down on the field of battle, it starts a crawl for you life minigame between him and his opponent. Will you be able to roll-dodge the killing blows and make it to safety?
4)A wounded pc takes time to recover. See points 5 and 6. During the recovery time, you play an offspring character that still lives with you (see point 8). Depending on your offsprings age, you could be confined to the house for awhile playing with toys or if a little older, doing chores for mom (or dad). Maybe you are a bit older and you go out of the house and pick fights with the other children or play a game of hide and seek. Even older still? Go out and harvest material for when mom or dad recovers. Maybe you are very capable and upon hearing of your parents situation, decide to seek out revenge, so you head to war.
5)Time is a factor in the game and characters age. The devs would have to work out a time scale, but I think one real life year could equal 100 game years. That means that about 3.5 months would pass in a single day. The dev's don't have to stick to a 12 month calendar, nor do they have to say seasons will change every 4 months. My main thinking is that a player character would have an average lifespan of 80-120 years based on actions in game. This gives us about a year real life time to play our beloved pc, barring no unfortunate "accidents".
6)Player characters are the Non-Player characters. There is no NPC king asking you to go to war for him. It's a real player character that makes the decisions. But what happens when the king logs off you say? I think a very robust attitude, emotion, and personality system needs to be in place for players to decide who they are when they are not there. Use your imagination here, I think you can see the applications. Maybe you log off and set your character to harvest food while you are gone with the attitude to work hard and disregard combat. You may come back to find your character wounded because he was too stubborn to run when the enemy attacked. Then again, maybe the enemy didn't attack and you have many materials to work with when you log on.
7)Towns are mostly safe havens to not die. A well backed army can bring ballista's and catapults to crush your city, but a well established city is going to be a hard thing to take down. Watchmen will ring bells to signal an incoming attack alerting noncombat specs to find refuge fast!
8)Offspring! When you create your first character, you get to decide whether you are married already and how many offspring you have. Be careful though! More offspring is more mouths to feed, backs to clothe, which all means you will profit less money. Of course as the offspring grow they help produce more (unless you raised some bad kids) meaning more profit in the long run. You could solo it from the beginning, relying more on your squire than family. With offspring also comes a social minigame of sorts. Not all of your children are content to do your bidding until you die. As they age, they may want to run off and marry other neighborhood offpsring. Do you throw them a big wedding or tell them good riddance? Who knows, maybe they will come back to you someday with money they have earned or inventions they have discovered. Maybe they get divoriced and they want to come back and live with you?
9)Squires. Squires are the attentive lads or lasses that follow you to battle, scoop up your wounded body and attempt to help you find a doctor should you need it. If you are sans family, they can do errands for you while you recover just as a family member would, however should you die with no family members, your cannot take over your squire, time to reroll!
The only good thing about permadeath from a MMO developer's point of view is that they could resale you the same content over and over again. But they know it wouldn't last long and anyway they already had figured another, much more acceptable, method to do it: Class imbalance & FotM rerolling.
"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."
The only good thing about permadeath from a MMO developer's point of view is that they could resale you the same content over and over again. But they know it wouldn't last long and anyway they already had figured another, much more acceptable, method to do it: Class imbalance & FotM rerolling.
Your missing the whole point that today's model of "content", "rerolling", "levelling", etc are incompatible with permadeath. A permadeath game, in order to be more than a masochistic grind, would have to move beyond the popular treadmill style of games.
Permanent death in an mmo will never happen. The idea alone is rediculous. Leave permanent death where it belongs - as a hardcore option in action RPG hack n slash games.
Why will permadeath never happen?
Why is the idea ridiculous?
Why does permadeath belong as an option in action RPC hack n slash games (isn't that what all current games are?)
How can permadeath belong as an option if the idea is rediculous and would never happen?
Forced permadeath will never happen because it's at odds with the purpose of MMOs, which is getting people to pay a monthly subscription fee for long periods of time. In a single-player game, it's fine because the developer already has their money, if people get frustrated and stop playing, they don't care. In an MMO, however, the whole point is to keep people coming back and anything that interferes with that isn't going to be a part of the business plan.
Permanent death in an mmo will never happen. The idea alone is rediculous. Leave permanent death where it belongs - as a hardcore option in action RPG hack n slash games.
Why will permadeath never happen?
Why is the idea ridiculous?
Why does permadeath belong as an option in action RPC hack n slash games (isn't that what all current games are?)
How can permadeath belong as an option if the idea is rediculous and would never happen?
Forced permadeath will never happen because it's at odds with the purpose of MMOs, which is getting people to pay a monthly subscription fee for long periods of time. In a single-player game, it's fine because the developer already has their money, if people get frustrated and stop playing, they don't care. In an MMO, however, the whole point is to keep people coming back and anything that interferes with that isn't going to be a part of the business plan.
It's sad that anyone has to explain that to you.
The "purpose of MMOs ... is getting people to pay a monthly subscription for long periods of time"? Really? According to who? you? For the sake of argument say that's true. How does that have anything to do with permadeath? It doesn't. You are presupposing that permadeath = frustration = stop playing. Simply stating this assumption over and over doesn't do anything to make it true. The idea of a game embracing permadeath is that permadeath is a fundamental mechanic of the game world. Is it impossible then that players may subscribe to participate in such a game world? How so? "Because you said so" doesn't amount to much.
What should be more important in this kind of game is character/story progression, not skills/stats/min maxing, right? I'm not sure the traditional levelup system would be worth even having. You should want to keep your character alive and doing things because you want to know what happens next, not for loot or a new skill.
2)Players should not be easy to kill...
The fragility is the only real reason for having permadeath, isn't it? It's supposed to make dying an intense, important event rather than an minor inconienience?l I can't see how making it hard to die aids in this really.
3)A player defeated in combat is not dead...
An interesting idea, but to be honest I don't see why a permadeath game even needs a combat focus. If you are moving away from traditional mmo grinding style gameplay, why not move away from the traditional practice of simply killing everything, looting and moving on to the next place to kill everything? Indeed, why would you even want to play a front lines grunt, instead of just ordering other people to do the fighting for you if necessary, avoiding any danger to your own life?
4)A wounded pc takes time to recover. See points 5 and 6. During the recovery time, you play an offspring character that still lives with you (see point 8)...
I'm not sure raising offspring to then possess and exploit them would give you much of an emotional connection to them. Would this really be any better than simply rerolling?It doesn't really seem different than raising an army of clones with customisation options/random characteristics or what have you.
5)Time is a factor in the game and characters age...
What happens to the character when they log out? If they were fulfilling a particular role (which an NPC would usually fill) who replaces them when they are offline? If they stay online when the player logs out, can they be killed? Should players come back to the game to find they have died in the game? If players can't die while logged out, what is to stop people from killing the game if they ever get into trouble to avoid dying? If they can die while logged out, what happens if their net connection is disrupted or congested for a time?
6)Player characters are the Non-Player characters...
Structuring the often menial, repetitive roles that NPCs usually fill would be challenging - you would have to somehow give players an incentive to do these types of things, or otherwise make the tasks themselves entertaining somehow.
7)Towns are mostly safe havens to not die...
So you have a person playing the watchman, whose job is to sit around waiting for people to attack? Another to keep the watchmen supplied, and another to repair the town when it is damaged? How far do you take the "no npcs" idea? Putting that aside, if realism is your goal, then disease, starvation, thieves and accidents are all more frequent ways of dying than from combat. If realism isn't your goal, then their may be other ways to handle death - you could be turned into a zombie, changing your objectives and gameplay. Or you could reincarnate as different things until you are reborn as a human again, perhaps keeping something from your old life or being able to unlock elements of your old life by "rebirth" quests. Of course, I'm not saying these ideas are any better or would have any fewer problems to work out than your described offspring system, but I think you could handle this in many different ways...
8)Offspring! When you create your first character, you get to decide whether you are married already and how many offspring you have. Be careful though! More offspring is more mouths to feed, backs to clothe, which all means you will profit less money...
Overall this game is sounding more like a strategy game... or a bit of a Sims/strategy crossover type of deal perhaps? It's certainly a shift from the usual mmorpg genre at any rate, which I think is what you were aiming for at any rate.
9)Squires. Squires are the attentive lads or lasses that follow you to battle, scoop up your wounded body and attempt to help you find a doctor should you need it...
So, the equivalent of a pet or sidekick then? I'd imagine you would have some kind of team or squad system anyway, and I'd assume the members of the group would all try to help each other in such circumstances. But why not?
You could make a game where you first grow up make offspring then the perma death is activated and try survive as long as you can to give knowledge over to your offspring when you die, so your next character have more knowledge and you become stronger untill to some limit you reach and you become a legend or hero.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
People don't play MMO's to die permenantly. A lot of the ideas I've read in this thread really don't sound attractive in my opinion. And while the idea of permadeath may sound "fun" on the forums, it most likely won't work out well in reality when people have to actually spend their money to play a game and be faced with death.
Gamers today can barely stomach losing anything when they die. We went from having item drops in AC1, to losing exp in EQ1, to having an exp debt in EQ2, to only having to repair armor in WoW. The evolution of MMO's is to make the death penalties as light as possible. Permadeath won't be able to make its way into the arena unless there's a popular game out there with item drops again.
You're trying to make a MMO as much as real life as possible. I just don't think majority of the people want to play something like that.
The idea of a permadeath MMO is to shift the main point of focus to the _world_, vs an individual character. Characters come and go and the world _changes_, and death is a fundamental aspect of this change. Surely there can be combat in a permadeath MMO. It's the mindless slaughter of 20 manbearpigs, etc that would most likely not find a place.
There is no need for a player's advancement to be identical to a character's advancement. Why must a character start as a weakling and then by magically killing 1M rats become a demigod? It's silly. Why not have some kind of point (character points, soul points, whatever) that are assigned to the _player_, who then uses these to create characters. These character points are not lost when a character dies. They become available for the creation of other character(s). Think of the player as the soul (if limited to one character) or an oversoul (if multiple characters are supported). The player plays to participate and fill a role in the world, not to progress a likeness of themselves that they are permanently bound to.
Sure, not everyone likes this. But to say that it can never be done because not everyone likes it pretty much boils down to an argument for not opening a restaurant because "everyone" would just go to McDonalds anyways.
People don't play MMO's to die permenantly. A lot of the ideas I've read in this thread really don't sound attractive in my opinion. And while the idea of permadeath may sound "fun" on the forums, it most likely won't work out well in reality when people have to actually spend their money to play a game and be faced with death.
Gamers today can barely stomach losing anything when they die. We went from having item drops in AC1, to losing exp in EQ1, to having an exp debt in EQ2, to only having to repair armor in WoW. The evolution of MMO's is to make the death penalties as light as possible. Permadeath won't be able to make its way into the arena unless there's a popular game out there with item drops again.
You're trying to make a MMO as much as real life as possible. I just don't think majority of the people want to play something like that.
But who cares what the majority thinks? There is not The-One-Peoples-MMO that all must play and no other is allowed to exist. All that matters is that there are enough consumers to profitably produce one. Profitably <> WOW financials.
On another line of thought, perhaps it is a _benefit_ to a permadeath MMO that the "majority" does not want to play. Perhaps the players of the hypothetical permadeath MMO would actually _prefer_ it's exclusivity.
No problem if you guys want to try this, I don't mind seein choices. But you have to first get funding to make such a niche game. And well, investors do care about what the "majority" wants. This is where the difference between talking, and actually doing it starts. The next is to see how many people who talk about wanting this on the forums, would actually spend $15 a month playing it.
It's my personal opinioin after reading some of your proposed ideas, that it doesn't sound interesting or attractive to me. But that's just one person's opinion that's all.
Permanent death in an mmo will never happen. The idea alone is rediculous. Leave permanent death where it belongs - as a hardcore option in action RPG hack n slash games.
Why will permadeath never happen?
Why is the idea ridiculous?
Why does permadeath belong as an option in action RPC hack n slash games (isn't that what all current games are?)
How can permadeath belong as an option if the idea is rediculous and would never happen?
Forced permadeath will never happen because it's at odds with the purpose of MMOs, which is getting people to pay a monthly subscription fee for long periods of time. In a single-player game, it's fine because the developer already has their money, if people get frustrated and stop playing, they don't care. In an MMO, however, the whole point is to keep people coming back and anything that interferes with that isn't going to be a part of the business plan.
It's sad that anyone has to explain that to you.
The "purpose of MMOs ... is getting people to pay a monthly subscription for long periods of time"? Really? According to who? you? For the sake of argument say that's true. How does that have anything to do with permadeath? It doesn't. You are presupposing that permadeath = frustration = stop playing. Simply stating this assumption over and over doesn't do anything to make it true. The idea of a game embracing permadeath is that permadeath is a fundamental mechanic of the game world. Is it impossible then that players may subscribe to participate in such a game world? How so? "Because you said so" doesn't amount to much.
According to every single company out there who runs one. Are you really that ignorant of basic business principles? If nobody subscribes, they make no profit, they can't pay their bills and they close their doors. They need to appeal to the largest number of people possible, thus being able to pay their financial obligations, make their investors happy and stay in business.
Now you're right, I am assuming that permadeath=frustration, which certainly seems to be the case for the vast majority of people playing MMOs. If it wasn't, then these games would already be permadeath because that's what the paying customers would want to play and games cater to their audience. It's not impossible that some people may subscribe to participate in such a world, but how many? 10,000? 50,000? Millions? That's the question that needs to be asked and if that number isn't relatively high, then there just isn't enough potential money in the game to make it financially viable. A game that is not financially viable is not going to get made.
Tha's really the problem with the pie-in-the-sky niche people who seem to think that these game styles, if they were implemented, would magically make millions of people want to play them. MMO developers, especially AAA companies, have done lots of work finding out what their audience wants. If they had found that they wanted permadeath, it would already be in games. The fact that it isn't proves that it just isn't a large enough minority to make it worth doing.
Comments
From my post in the other thread, I feel this is away permadeath could work well, however it has been accused of being to carebear and not hardcore enough, which I see that angle. Figured I'd post here for any that didn't get a chance to read them yet. The came I picture is a more advanced Shadowbane/DAoC type faction world, only more driven by the players.
1)The world should have little to no grind. There are still some rpg leveling elements, just not as intense as today's existing MMO's.
2)Players should not be easy to kill. Can they be killed, yes. Are they as frail as humans are in reality, no.
3)A player defeated in combat is not dead. Once a player is struck down on the field of battle, it starts a crawl for you life minigame between him and his opponent. Will you be able to roll-dodge the killing blows and make it to safety?
4)A wounded pc takes time to recover. See points 5 and 6. During the recovery time, you play an offspring character that still lives with you (see point 8). Depending on your offsprings age, you could be confined to the house for awhile playing with toys or if a little older, doing chores for mom (or dad). Maybe you are a bit older and you go out of the house and pick fights with the other children or play a game of hide and seek. Even older still? Go out and harvest material for when mom or dad recovers. Maybe you are very capable and upon hearing of your parents situation, decide to seek out revenge, so you head to war.
5)Time is a factor in the game and characters age. The devs would have to work out a time scale, but I think one real life year could equal 100 game years. That means that about 3.5 months would pass in a single day. The dev's don't have to stick to a 12 month calendar, nor do they have to say seasons will change every 4 months. My main thinking is that a player character would have an average lifespan of 80-120 years based on actions in game. This gives us about a year real life time to play our beloved pc, barring no unfortunate "accidents".
6)Player characters are the Non-Player characters. There is no NPC king asking you to go to war for him. It's a real player character that makes the decisions. But what happens when the king logs off you say? I think a very robust attitude, emotion, and personality system needs to be in place for players to decide who they are when they are not there. Use your imagination here, I think you can see the applications. Maybe you log off and set your character to harvest food while you are gone with the attitude to work hard and disregard combat. You may come back to find your character wounded because he was too stubborn to run when the enemy attacked. Then again, maybe the enemy didn't attack and you have many materials to work with when you log on.
7)Towns are mostly safe havens to not die. A well backed army can bring ballista's and catapults to crush your city, but a well established city is going to be a hard thing to take down. Watchmen will ring bells to signal an incoming attack alerting noncombat specs to find refuge fast!
8)Offspring! When you create your first character, you get to decide whether you are married already and how many offspring you have. Be careful though! More offspring is more mouths to feed, backs to clothe, which all means you will profit less money. Of course as the offspring grow they help produce more (unless you raised some bad kids) meaning more profit in the long run. You could solo it from the beginning, relying more on your squire than family. With offspring also comes a social minigame of sorts. Not all of your children are content to do your bidding until you die. As they age, they may want to run off and marry other neighborhood offpsring. Do you throw them a big wedding or tell them good riddance? Who knows, maybe they will come back to you someday with money they have earned or inventions they have discovered. Maybe they get divoriced and they want to come back and live with you?
9)Squires. Squires are the attentive lads or lasses that follow you to battle, scoop up your wounded body and attempt to help you find a doctor should you need it. If you are sans family, they can do errands for you while you recover just as a family member would, however should you die with no family members, your cannot take over your squire, time to reroll!
Lottery winners beware...I'm coming for you!
The only good thing about permadeath from a MMO developer's point of view is that they could resale you the same content over and over again. But they know it wouldn't last long and anyway they already had figured another, much more acceptable, method to do it: Class imbalance & FotM rerolling.
"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."
Your missing the whole point that today's model of "content", "rerolling", "levelling", etc are incompatible with permadeath. A permadeath game, in order to be more than a masochistic grind, would have to move beyond the popular treadmill style of games.
Forced permadeath will never happen because it's at odds with the purpose of MMOs, which is getting people to pay a monthly subscription fee for long periods of time. In a single-player game, it's fine because the developer already has their money, if people get frustrated and stop playing, they don't care. In an MMO, however, the whole point is to keep people coming back and anything that interferes with that isn't going to be a part of the business plan.
It's sad that anyone has to explain that to you.
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
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
The "purpose of MMOs ... is getting people to pay a monthly subscription for long periods of time"? Really? According to who? you? For the sake of argument say that's true. How does that have anything to do with permadeath? It doesn't. You are presupposing that permadeath = frustration = stop playing. Simply stating this assumption over and over doesn't do anything to make it true. The idea of a game embracing permadeath is that permadeath is a fundamental mechanic of the game world. Is it impossible then that players may subscribe to participate in such a game world? How so? "Because you said so" doesn't amount to much.
You could make a game where you first grow up make offspring then the perma death is activated and try survive as long as you can to give knowledge over to your offspring when you die, so your next character have more knowledge and you become stronger untill to some limit you reach and you become a legend or hero.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
People don't play MMO's to die permenantly. A lot of the ideas I've read in this thread really don't sound attractive in my opinion. And while the idea of permadeath may sound "fun" on the forums, it most likely won't work out well in reality when people have to actually spend their money to play a game and be faced with death.
Gamers today can barely stomach losing anything when they die. We went from having item drops in AC1, to losing exp in EQ1, to having an exp debt in EQ2, to only having to repair armor in WoW. The evolution of MMO's is to make the death penalties as light as possible. Permadeath won't be able to make its way into the arena unless there's a popular game out there with item drops again.
You're trying to make a MMO as much as real life as possible. I just don't think majority of the people want to play something like that.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
The idea of a permadeath MMO is to shift the main point of focus to the _world_, vs an individual character. Characters come and go and the world _changes_, and death is a fundamental aspect of this change. Surely there can be combat in a permadeath MMO. It's the mindless slaughter of 20 manbearpigs, etc that would most likely not find a place.
There is no need for a player's advancement to be identical to a character's advancement. Why must a character start as a weakling and then by magically killing 1M rats become a demigod? It's silly. Why not have some kind of point (character points, soul points, whatever) that are assigned to the _player_, who then uses these to create characters. These character points are not lost when a character dies. They become available for the creation of other character(s). Think of the player as the soul (if limited to one character) or an oversoul (if multiple characters are supported). The player plays to participate and fill a role in the world, not to progress a likeness of themselves that they are permanently bound to.
Sure, not everyone likes this. But to say that it can never be done because not everyone likes it pretty much boils down to an argument for not opening a restaurant because "everyone" would just go to McDonalds anyways.
But who cares what the majority thinks? There is not The-One-Peoples-MMO that all must play and no other is allowed to exist. All that matters is that there are enough consumers to profitably produce one. Profitably <> WOW financials.
On another line of thought, perhaps it is a _benefit_ to a permadeath MMO that the "majority" does not want to play. Perhaps the players of the hypothetical permadeath MMO would actually _prefer_ it's exclusivity.
No problem if you guys want to try this, I don't mind seein choices. But you have to first get funding to make such a niche game. And well, investors do care about what the "majority" wants. This is where the difference between talking, and actually doing it starts. The next is to see how many people who talk about wanting this on the forums, would actually spend $15 a month playing it.
It's my personal opinioin after reading some of your proposed ideas, that it doesn't sound interesting or attractive to me. But that's just one person's opinion that's all.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
According to every single company out there who runs one. Are you really that ignorant of basic business principles? If nobody subscribes, they make no profit, they can't pay their bills and they close their doors. They need to appeal to the largest number of people possible, thus being able to pay their financial obligations, make their investors happy and stay in business.
Now you're right, I am assuming that permadeath=frustration, which certainly seems to be the case for the vast majority of people playing MMOs. If it wasn't, then these games would already be permadeath because that's what the paying customers would want to play and games cater to their audience. It's not impossible that some people may subscribe to participate in such a world, but how many? 10,000? 50,000? Millions? That's the question that needs to be asked and if that number isn't relatively high, then there just isn't enough potential money in the game to make it financially viable. A game that is not financially viable is not going to get made.
Tha's really the problem with the pie-in-the-sky niche people who seem to think that these game styles, if they were implemented, would magically make millions of people want to play them. MMO developers, especially AAA companies, have done lots of work finding out what their audience wants. If they had found that they wanted permadeath, it would already be in games. The fact that it isn't proves that it just isn't a large enough minority to make it worth doing.
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
Now Playing: None
Hope: None