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Death Consequences?
chasemme
Member Posts: 7
Obviously this topic falls into its own category of random suggestions that really don't make the backbone of any game, but I wanted to hear some thoughts on this topic.
I was thinking about some of the MMO's I've tried out recently and kinda realized that one concept that made a big difference in my enjoyment of a game was the consequence of death. I played WoW for a long time, I think it's a well-made game, however, the fact that my dying does absolutely nothing but forces me to run back to a corpse which is clearly plotted on a map is extremely boring. It makes world PvP seem fruitless. Many other games seem to follow this formula.
Some friends and I tried Aion when it came out, and the fact that you lost a little bit of XP from dying I found... refreshing. Not anything even slightly painful, but just better than nothing. It made me have a slight discomfort in dying in the game. I was shocked to hear one of those I was playing with say that he didn't like it because it was "Too hardcore."
So my question is, what do you think about this? I played UO and I've tried EVE, both games had/have intense consequences for death, and I loved them. It made any engagement, even easy ones, far more intense given the price of failure in a PvP setting. I wouldn't try and force a full-loot ruleset on anyone, some people like that, a lot don't. But would anyone really be opposed to slightly more taxing penalties for death? Just to put a little actual emotion into MMO's these days.
And what limits would you set on it? Personally I think Runescape's system when I played for a week, (I don't know how it is these days) of keeping a few valuable items and the rest being lootable, was an ideal system, but even small things like Aion's XP loss (That I think EQ did? I know WoW had it in Beta) are a refreshing change and at least add SOME form of deterrent to death over a negligible armor repair cost.
Comments
Do you have any creative ideas or shrewd observations?
I suggest permadeath. Once you die in PVE you delete your character. By hand. When you die in PvP you destroy an item you wear, again by hand. If that is too hardcore for you, just go to lowbie zone and kill 1000 boars as penalty. You can do that WoW.
Do that and have fun in MMOs again, then come back and discuss.
I want genuine challenge, not tedious penalty.
Genuine challenge creates enough penalty through lost opportunity costs: skilled players beat tough challenges and reap great rewards, while unskilled players fail and are penalized by not receiving those rewards.
Most importantly when I play a game I want to play a game, not be hassled by unnecessary timesinks like corpse runs.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I think Tibia has one of the harshest penalties for death. It's not very popular these days but the death penalty is as follows:
Lose 10% EXP (Levels are milestone-based). If you're level 90 and you die, 10% could knock you back 3 levels.
Lose your backpack. This is your inventory.
Chance to lose 1 equipped item.
Everything you lose can be looted from your corpse. If you're lucky, you can run back and get your stuff(if nobody looted it yet)
Dying in that game could make the sunniest days turn cloudy. It made you fear death.
cool
I don't have to wait to do that, I've been there and lost gear for dying, that's why I'm discussing. I'm speaking from experience, not just a random idea that popped into my head. And no, it wasn't "too hardcore," I found it enjoyable, not destroying one piece of gear, losing everything you had on you, which is exactly why I qualified it by saying I understand that's too severe for a lot of people and I don't expect good reception on that exact system.
I don't have any suggestions or observations, if I did, there wouldn't have been much reason for me to ask you guys. That was the point of the topic.
While I agree that challenge in gameplay and being rewarded for skill is a more important start given the "show up and get stuff" mentality a lot of games have these days. Why is being penalized for bad performance such a problem? Most single player games I've played have penalties for dying, even if that just means starting a level over or losing an extra life and being put closer to a Game Over. I'm thinking small.
Obviously we don't see eye to eye on that issue, but being rewarded for every small accomplishment with a little gold star, and losing nothing from a failure except not getting that gold star seems like a pointless endeavor. And eventually, without any penalty, everyone is going to end up on the same level anyway, so then everyone's got the same gear, same stats, same level. If I wanted to end up at the same place in the end regardless, I'll play a single player game with a set plotline.
Edit: Swashed said it perfectly in his last line. It generates emotion, makes you actually care about the fate of the fight.
I understand the idea behind harsh death penalties but honestly they aren't a resonable detterent for myself so I tend to avoid games with harsh penalties for dying. I tend to take "life or death" in game seriously enough to not feel the need to be forced into extra care.
I remember playing STO when it launched and many times over flying carelessly into the fray knowing death would await me. But what I realized is that had as much to do with the fact that the game itself is not very engaging as much as to do with the fact that there was little consequence to failure.
I'm not sure how Aion does it's loss of exp but this is a tactic that bothers me in my experience which was simply with COH and it's exp debt, that is by far the worse death penalty I can think of, let's look at it like this. If levelling from 30-31 would take me five hours playtime by dying once I pretty much double that number to ten hours and so on. To me this is as much a cheap trick to keep people in your game as much as a reason to proceed with caution, besides these are video games we should be able to throw caution to the wind.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I will reiterate: you can have penalty in every game, nothing is stopping you, it did not go away. It just got optional and in most games you cannot force your preferences upon others.
I will also reiterate: we know the penalties, show us something new.
If you want to discuss that bullying is fun: yes it is, it is natural and mostly fun for sub-average players. We lost village fools and public executions and MMOs are poor replacements. But promoting bullying is topic not suitable for public game boards. Me, I tend to look up to alphas not down to omegas but I do understand the urge.
I am a fan of corpse runs with penalties.
I played EQ and basically if you died to needed to run back to your corpse naked. Once you were close enuff you could type/corpse to pull your corpse to you but if you were in a dungeon it might be very hard to get to the corpse.
Also there was experiance debt. If you died you would lose a percentage of experiance.
There were ways around this like clerics rezzing you. THe higher power the cleric was the more exp debt you would recover.
Also if your corpse was to hard to get where it was you could pay a necromancer to come with you to a safe spot in the zone and recover your corpse for you.
After a while of having this hardcore approach they started making things easier with graveyards where your char would pop to and finally there was a central graveyard you could get an NPC to summon your corpse to.
Man that was some hardcore play mechanics back then...hehe.
I play games to have fun, not to be penalised. Harsh "death penalties" are not fun. As other posters have already said, if you want such...just do-it-yourself. Life has a REAL death penalty and it says if you die you are done. This is not real life. Maybe the OP should experience real life outside of a game and then become aware of what the term "penalty" really means.
Let's party like it is 1863!
WoWs death penalty is way too light and Eve is way too harsch. In the middle I think are games like Asherons Call, where you drop a random nr of items and get a small stat penalty that goes away by earning experience.
Not too bad, since you really dont lose any exp, but also not too light as it takes maybe 10-15 mins too get rid of it. Too bad though that nine out of ten games are WoW clones and hence are using the same, next to zero, death penalty.
My gaming blog
I'm not forcing anything on anyone, I asked for opinions and stated my own.
My opinions never came from my desire to punish other players so much as a nostalgic rush I got from being on the losing side of the penalties. They lose their effect when optional, and I know that you know that, but it's what you're going to ride on for a while here.
It's a little contradictory to imply that I'm a "bully," a "sub-average player," and then proceed to claim you don't look down on people.
If some of the people here can only think in extremes then yes, this topic was a waste of time. I stated that Aion's slight penalties were refreshing, that was taken as I was thinking solely about the harshest penalties possible being acceptable.
To me a death penality helps create a mindset of danger. It helps players to become on their toes while in the heat of the battle and exploration. I also really believe it helps to prevent an infrequent flux of wipes. In my opinion you'd find better players within a game that indeed has a harsh death penality.
I think death penalties should be relative to the rate of progression. If leveling is easy, take EXP. And so on.
cool
Some of us don't merely want to play a game. I can play a game on my kid's Wii. I play mmos in large measure to enjoy the excitement and adventure of being in a virtual world. Many of the things you call timesinks are what make a virtual world credible.
Death penalties make players apprehensive about death. That apprehension makes the monsters in the game not merely colorful loot pinatas to beat on until the game candy falls out, but something scarier (like monsters should be). When something big and spooky pops out from behind a tree, it's not a simple inconvenience as in WoW, but more OMG. For some of us that makes a big difference in our enjoyment.
But as for challenge, there was a time when a player could not simply fail their way to success. If you kept dieing all the time, that meant you did not level up until you learned how to play well enough not to die all the time. Reaching max level meant you had achieved a baseline level of competence. Now that is no longer true in many games, particularly WoW. Just keep running back ....
When I see people complain about feeling "hassled" by whatever comes between them and their game rewards, I have to ask myself are they really playing a game, or merely pressing buttons for a predetermined, streamlined reward.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Here is an idea that works pretty well(I think Tibia[yea im bringing it up again] uses this mechanic)
Respawn rates are based on where the player stands. If you kill a monster and stand where you killed it, it will not pop up in 15 seconds for you to kill it again. This is to prevent monsters from killing you because you decided to look at your stats for a minute(or whatever).
cool
There is more between game and reward than Tedious Penalty. There is also Challenge.
If a boss is really frickin' hard, it doesn't matter if you can instantly retry or not -- if you're not skilled, you ain't beatin' it. Even if there's no death penalty (beyond a respawn/reset) a bad player will never complete the encounter until they're better.
Point being: even if you eliminate all the hassles between game and reward, you still have enough left over for the game to feel satisfying and rewarding.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I'm in favour of some kind of death penalty (just to keep players honest so to speak) but i'm not convinced that lack of death penalty is as big an issue as many seem to think. I guess I agree with Axehilt: Ideally, an MMO should be able to generate challenge and excitement under it's own power, without resorting to stiff penalties. In some respects a harsh death penalty is actually rather a cheap way of making a game seem more exciting.
Of course, it is hard to replicate the terror of permanently losing something valuable in FFA PvP but that only applies to a particular kind of MMO and probably not one to which I would personally be attracted anyway.
Yes and no. The depth of game immersion is strengthened by the possibilities that you will die and suffer many setbacks.
Example again.
Everquest
Everyone needs to be on thier A game, if a cleric, or other healer missed a rotation heal on main tank then druid or out of rotation cleric has to rezz while offtanks try to save the day.....if anyone fails for a moment the raid can suffer a domino effect in which case the assigned cleric logs off quickly while the assigned last man standing (usually a paladin) uses thier abilities to stay alive long enuff for the log off to take place. Once logged back in the cleric can go about rezzing everyone so they can get a percentage of exp back. There were some dungeon access areas and respawns that prohibited getting corpses rezzed and you had to eat the exp loss. Earlier on in EQ if you didn't find your corpse you could lose all your gear from your corpse rotting and dissapearing. All this stuff added to the already existing game mechanics. You could also get a corpse rod I think...it was like a tuning fork every time you used it, it would point you in the direction of your corpse.
Compare all that to WoW
You get ready for the battle and everyone fights but several people drop the ball and the raid dies. No real penalty at all. No experiance loss. No chance of losing gear. No major time invested in recovery.
Nope...all you get is a short corpse run as a ghost a slight bit lower quality to armor. Heck you don't even have to run to your corpse if you don't want to. You can get rezzed close to where you repop as a ghost.
This fluffy way of dealing with the worst thing that can happen to your character trivializes the accomplishments of completing an encounter in comparison to other games.
But then again you have to look at the target audience of such a game. It's the Wii of video games that appeals to ages 7 to 68 women and men and other....it's easy and accessible.
Question is.....can we have the penalties brought back into our games after not having them for so long with WoW?
I can see both sides of the arguement here. WoW defenders are saying that the penalties were just a time killer and not a needed part of the game and that...if you were good you would finish the boss and if you were not good at the game at that stage you would not beat the boss. But there is the other side of that coin. If you got kicked back a whole level and spent a week or two trying an encounter and finally beat it, you would feel an overwhelming sense of joy and happiness. So I think there is a different level of gameplay depth involved between the two mindsets.
It's not a question of "can". Of course companies could.
But why would a company want to? There's little motivation to create games for a tiny niche minority, and it's clear (based on trends) that the majority wants to spend their game time doing fun stuff (not dealing with excessive punishment.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I want to try and successfully invent a form of soft perma-death that is actually fun, not stupid or frustrating.
This requires a few things...
1) Rapid Advancement
2) Fun throughout all levels of advancement
3) Some forms of permanent progression (Gold, Bank Items, Being able to skip past being a complete newbie so at least a 20% or 40% permanent progression amount. Crafting, Harvesting, Trading-- none of these are permadeath.
4) A game design encouraging multiple character use
5) Upon death, permadeath is NOT always 100%. There is only a small chance of permadeath.
6) A possibility of getting some of your progress back upon death. Although this isn't permadeath and is instead stat-loss, if it is a possibility amongst other possibilities (permadeath, or no penalty) then it might work AND keep permadeath.
Soft Permadeath is my own professional term for permadeath that is softened as much as possible without losing the thrill and fun of possible risk in loss. It maximizes the fun of permadeath while minimizing the frustration.
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
To create a fun, entertaining, and thus successful game.
No one actually says "permadeath is not fun".
What they're saying is "frustration, repetitive gameplay, losing progress,.. THAT is not fun."
If permadeath was made to be 100% fun and 0% frustrating, people would love it. Heck, all FPS games have permadeath, and ppl get frustrated in dying but they still play it. Call of Duty just sold millions of copies...AGAIN! And it has permadeath and frustrating gameplay up the wazoo!!
No one wants to be frustrated. No one wants to be angered or annoyed, hurt or bullied. But everyone wants fun.
And no one said that if you make something FUN, it won't be successful because the idea isn't normally fun.
What matters is that you make it fun-- regardless of what idea is involved.
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
Having played many MMOs over 9 years I have my own thoughts on death penalty.
There just comes a point when one's skills just don't/can't get any better. Especially for people that refuse to use macros like me. So death as a marker to force a person to learn to play better can only go so far till they master their skills. Some games take this too extreme. It further hurts players cause sometimes you just can't help but die. Be it ganked by a high level or some giant dragon swoops down and obliterates you in a single hit. It just ain't fun to have a steep penalty if you're going to have that sort of gameplay. Lineage 2 for me was a game like that. Loosing gear because someone ganks you is pretty shitty. Especially when a single weapon or armor took weeks of grinding to get. EQ during the Planes of Power expansion was also extreme on it's death penalty under the right circumstances. Going to a plane to solo mobs there, only to die from a train and de-leveling so that you couldn't get your corpse back(with all your stuff on it) was a game killer if you couldn't get someone to rez you. Depending on the gear it could take a person over a year to get back the same gear through mobs/crafting.
The risk vs reward needs to be balanced upon the player base the company is trying to attract, then readjusted based on the player base they get. WoW has a very casual player base so a casual death penalty is fine for that game. Eve has a very hardcore average player base, so a higher death penalty can be used.
Aion is a rather decent example. They started with a death penalty that was perfect for the Korean market, which IS more hardcore than the NA market. They then readjusted the NA death penalty because they ended up with a less hardcore base.
The trains in EQ did suck but in the planes of power instance there were two factors. If i recall correctly, bear in mind this was 5 years ago when i played. That the Planes were never meant to be soloed. They were suppose to be the end game content to beat all (at least at that time) second didn't most, if not all planes have a graveyard your corpse went to when you died.
Granted some death penalties are too harsh (it's what drove me from runescape in less then 10 mins) but some are there to make the game more challenging, to literally put a halt in your gameplay and make you relieze you messed up and now you can't continue to play like you did until you recover and hopefully in that time understand what went wrong.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
This. A death penalty punishes poor play and lazy players, alternatively you can create another form of punishment. Timed Dungeons with loot that will expire after a set timer. If there are multiple bosses, the time will activate when you enter up until the first boss is killed, that loot is based on the time taken, the next boss timer will not begin until you activate switch which opens door to next corridor of mobs to next boss. Like Dark Poeta in Aion. You were graded by how many points you got from killing Bosses, collecting (Nex ore) and how fast you completed the run, which would grant you an opportunity to face off against a last boss that would drop better equipment given your groups grading.
Death penalty is one way to punish poor players, timed content is another way. Sure it is an artificial challenge, but it requires a group to communicate more efficiently, work well together, and provides significantly better rewards for more teams that work well. It also speeds up content, while people may rush and make stupid mistakes, you all know that wasting time dicking about will cost everyone, someone isnt pulling their weight, you actually give a shit in not taking them next time because tehy cost you a grading of loot. Need not make this apply to the entire game, it could be a challenge mode, which would be like WoW with its heroics, a seperate challenge mode with upgraded rewards in a timed setting. Mind you this just plays right into the Gear grind mechanic/treadmill, so idk if its the better option. But seeing as a game with a punishing death penalty (Exp/permadeath) I guess levels lead up to max level then gear grind.
lol lot of things aren't 'meant' to be soloed in EQ but a ranger or a bard could. The graveyards were in some of the planes, but most were added after enough people complained about not being able to get their body. I've had a couple times where I have de-leveled from dying and was send back to my bind point in PoK. I then couldn't get my body back and had to pay a cleric to rez me. The reward of soloing a group mob was that I got 1.5% exp per kill. The risk was body recovery, and anything that could stop me from running around during the 10 minutes it took to kill one lol. Score one for rollin a ranger. I only soloed up there when I knew a cleric was in zone that was willing to rez me. Some people didn't think that far ahead and spammed GMs about it.
Funniest damn thing to see was me kiting while my bro(an SK) followed whacking the mob from behind.
Lost dungeons of Norrath was a better expansion with the inception of randomized instanced dungeons.
I am absolutely saying permadeath is not fun. It isn't. This is especially true in any game where there's any real form of progression. I wouldn't want to play Halo, for example, if every time I died, I went back to the beginning of the game and had to do it all over again. That's what permadeath is. It's throwing away everything you've done in a game and starting over. COD doesn't do that. You usually go back to the last checkpoint and continue from there. Playing COD online, there's really little or no progression to begin with so dying means little, it's an inconvenience. Permadeath puts you back to the character creation screen, you've lost everything you've done to date and have to start again from scratch.
I don't know many people who would welcome doing such a thing.
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