Axe, not here to argue with anyone, but think of it this way. A player goes on a raid, spends 4 hours and wipes on final boss. What happens? They lose all that progression and if they want to kill that boss will start again. Maybe they picked up a piece of gear or two along the way, given them a chance to exceed their previous effort. If they wipe again, they start anew, maybe a little closer. Regardless, all progression is lost each time they wipe, but a litlle bit carrys over each time.
Would the raid be made better if they could never wipe? Just keep popping up until they inevitably won? Of course not, that is boring. Think of a life span as one long raid, with the ability to have a little carry over each time.
Repeating content is often not very fun. On an alt, with a new way to do things, that can be different enough to be considered possibly new content. A new area is definately new content.
Today's games allready have enough mindless repetition with end-game. Why would you purposefully put in repetition in the early game.
Great I"m level 1 again, I get to do it all again. No thanks.
edit - I start over often enough as it is because I screwed up or wanted something a bit different, being forced to do it on top of all that just turns me off.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Repeating content is often not very fun. On an alt, with a new way to do things, that can be different enough to be considered possibly new content. A new area is definately new content.
Today's games allready have enough mindless repetition with end-game. Why would you purposefully put in repetition in the early game.
Great I"m level 1 again, I get to do it all again. No thanks.
edit - I start over often enough as it is because I screwed up or wanted something a bit different, being forced to do it on top of all that just turns me off.
I agree that strict repetition of content would not make a lot of sense, and that's why you couldn't simply graft a PD concept onto an existing MMO. But I do think it could work in a highly non-linear game where a character can have a lasting impact on the world. Let's also not forget that nothing can eliminate player skill; you will be a better, wiser player after each character, and I think it would be right for such a game to appropriately reward the wisdom that comes with player experience through its mechanics.
Originally posted by MMOExposed Perma death leads to detachment from character. thats not what MMOs need.
It does not lead to detachment from characters, it leads to attachment to death and a inate sense of fear and wonder. Now you emerged, now you care if you die, that is true attachment.
What leads to a detachment from character is running him into a mob of goblins, dying, coming back to life, rinse and repeat 40 million times. That just makes your character seem in tangible.
Death is real, and it is coming. You always need a negative to understand a positive. You need ugly for there to be beauty. You need dirty for there to be clean. And you need to know what death is, before you can truely live.
It seams that the 2 biggest objections are 1) loss progression 2) replaying conent.
I believe long term progression is still there when you can carry over some things to your next life. Reputation, some wealth, housing,... Think of it more as progressing your family name. For Game of Throne fans, progressing House Stark or Lannister. It is not about that one singular life cycle, but progressing your house.
This also works to solve replaying the same content. As your house gains reputation, wealth, or whatever, new fresh content opens up. A NPC who had nothing to say to you before, tells you a secret the next time through. Mobs that were KOS, now allow you to pass or show you a secret tunnel.
Sure these things can be done in any MMO, but a life cycle gives the game a better flow than a high level charachter running through old zones and trash mobs...it is just more immersive this way. With a new life cycle comes new challenge, the world continues to be dangerous.
If a charachter had a life span in game, an MMO would offer a much richer experience and would solve many of the problems of todays MMO.
1. Risk vs Reward - If a charachter lost 1% of thier toons exsistance for every death for example, then each player's progression will ultimately end at 100 deaths. Suddenly the world is dangerous again.
2. Casual vs hardcore gamer - This concept works for both. It would be entirely possible for the casual gamer to be one of the most powerful on their server. The Hardcore gamer may reach power quicker, but is also more likely to die an early death. So wether you are the turtle or the hare, the same level of accomplishment is obtainable. Log on for half an hour gain some progression, log off....maybe 9 months later you are the elite of your path and in rare company.
3. End game vs dynamic game play - Take less development in end game and focus more on world alteration. Imagine at the end of a life returning to "starting areas" only to find the entire area is different then when you first traveled through. As players play, their actions affect the world around them, thriving settlements are now ghost towns, roads over grown. No two lives would be the same.
4. Guilds/Clans - Would rise and fall organically. A strong guild could lose their leadership to death, a master metal worker to death. A guild has always been the sum of their members, but what would happen if their two best soldiers died? The world would not be a stale, but ever changing.
5. True need for class/path diversity - With lose of life, comes a true need for healers, crafters, scouts, politics,.... With death a crafters come a real need to apprentice replacements, a healer is needed to prolong life. Imagine being the only Grandmaster weaponsmith in your area instead of everyone being one after 1 month? "yeah we had a weaponmsmith who could make that, but he died last week. Try the town down south, heard they had a guy."
6. True accomplishment - How much disovery, power, fame can I earn in my lifetime? Isn't a ticking clock the highest form of motivation. With some sort of acheivment system, a players life takes on true meaning. Ever play on a new server and get excited about being a sever first either solo or guild? I have and it is truely a great feeling, never to be felt again after a month. What if you could set new individual or guild records continually?
7. Solo vs group play - This is similar to casual vs hardcore. Regardless of your playstyle the risk will match the reward, without a race to a stale end game, your progression is your own. You will always be behind and ahead of your peers.
8. No useless zones - How many times do we see a starting zone packed for a month or two only to become a bunch of quest giving NPCs with no one to talk to? There would not be a need for "new players" to keep areas thriving, there would already be a circular mechanic of fresh adventures. As mentioned, by the time a player lives out one life, it is quite possible the world he remembered the first time through is completey altered...always offering "fresh content." Even a progressed player would enjoy revisiting where he started helping mentor a friend new to the game.
9. Community - Would receive a huge boost. Imagine a vet asking a newby where something is or for help progressing because the world he knew was gone? Crafting would mean something even at a very low level because of a new need for gear. This would bridge the vets to the newcomers instead of the core vs the noobs. Add to the fact the world is dangerous again, and there is a persistant need to help each other out.
So there are my reasons why toons need a lifespan to take MMOs to the next level. Something like this with an heir system (to keep your house or maybe add some form of continual improvement to the game)., and I think an MMO would have a good chance at a healthy population of gamers for more than a 6 month run. A game that would challnge and entertain for years.
So what would be the draw backs to this?
See any other benefits?
Does this form of MMO remind you of a game you have played?
There is a game like that - it is called RL!!! Sorry don't want sanything that real in a game I play.
Why would we need "life cycles" for characters ? All the reasons the OP gives are completely riddiculous and obviously wrong.
The result of life cycles of characters is more treadmill gaming. Its the exact same category as ideas like permanent item decay etc - we have something that we think has to go on, so introduce a mechanism that it may go on. Except there simply has nothing to go on in the first place !
Games are for fun, not for making some kind of simulation. For having fun, humans need challenges. Introducing treadmill gaming - repetitive elements you have to just repeat over and over and over - means killing the fun of games. Thats not a way to keep the most intelligent lifeform on the planet occupied.
Whats the result of character aging ? People have to restart their characters all the time. So whats the additional challenge ? Zip. People will have to see the same lowlevel content again and again and again. If they want to or not.
I'm sure the idea would be appealing to many.... But for me it's just a game I wouldn't play in the first place. I've already die a lot in games as it is, I'd hate it if it means my character is gone (even if it's for the 100th time). My internet connection can be unstable from time to time, I'd have to keep hoping that it doesn't go bad anytime I engage an enemy, or that the power doesn't go off, or that the baby doesn't suddenly wake up crying, and so on.
Axe, not here to argue with anyone, but think of it this way. A player goes on a raid, spends 4 hours and wipes on final boss. What happens? They lose all that progression and if they want to kill that boss will start again. Maybe they picked up a piece of gear or two along the way, given them a chance to exceed their previous effort. If they wipe again, they start anew, maybe a little closer. Regardless, all progression is lost each time they wipe, but a litlle bit carrys over each time.
Would the raid be made better if they could never wipe? Just keep popping up until they inevitably won? Of course not, that is boring. Think of a life span as one long raid, with the ability to have a little carry over each time.
I prefer the term "discussion" to argument. Unless you are only interested in listening to positive praise which ignores the games people generally enjoy.
My original post stated that less than 6 hours of deleted progression is completely acceptable. Your example in the OP was that of a long-progression game (implying more than 6 hours), while your example in this post is less than 6 hours.
(And 6 hours, specifically, is just an arbitrary number for the sake of discussion. It's more of a gradual spectrum of acceptability where even games which delete 6 hours of progression are super rare, and typically just unusually long rounds of a game like Faster Than Light or Nethack.)
Repeating little bits of progression near the top is simply more acceptable than repeating the entire 6+ hour experience due to a mistake (or even 100 mistakes; or due to character-aging).
I'd wager it relates to how when we screw up in real life we're not forced to attend grade school all over again and start completely from the beginning -- instead, we repeat the job we failed at until we get it right and advance.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It seams that the 2 biggest objections are 1) loss progression 2) replaying conent.
I believe long term progression is still there when you can carry over some things to your next life. Reputation, some wealth, housing,... Think of it more as progressing your family name. For Game of Throne fans, progressing House Stark or Lannister. It is not about that one singular life cycle, but progressing your house.
This also works to solve replaying the same content. As your house gains reputation, wealth, or whatever, new fresh content opens up. A NPC who had nothing to say to you before, tells you a secret the next time through. Mobs that were KOS, now allow you to pass or show you a secret tunnel.
Sure these things can be done in any MMO, but a life cycle gives the game a better flow than a high level charachter running through old zones and trash mobs...it is just more immersive this way. With a new life cycle comes new challenge, the world continues to be dangerous.
This is similar to how I feel as well. If my characters were just a piece of a bigger pie that was my overall character progression. The House or Family Name idea is a great one. If you were able to attain certain benefits on the singular character that partially remained after death. Wealth is a big one, but that could be a matter of having to bank your wealth or risk losing it upon death.
If my original character was a warrior type, who was also a master blacksmith. My next character should have some inherent benefit to blacksmithing (aka was an apprentice), so my jumping off point wouldn't be as far behind. You could even have a function where if you chose to not be a blacksmith on the next character, your third character would receive even less benefit from the blacksmithing, until you effectively lost that benefit all together (until you make another master blacksmith).
I imagine that after a few months of practice, your characters could last a very long time, but that risk would still be there. With the proper system, where it doesn't feel like you are completely starting over each time, "perma-death" might make for an interesting mechanic.
"Life cycle" implies a character that can die from old age. Slow down and lose effectiveness from a lifetime of battle-scarring, or just plain past-your-prime.
Pretty sure there aren't many players looking for that. Some of us are busy experiencing it.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
If a charachter had a life span in game, an MMO would offer a much richer experience and would solve many of the problems of todays MMO.
1. Risk vs Reward - If a charachter lost 1% of thier toons exsistance for every death for example, then each player's progression will ultimately end at 100 deaths. Suddenly the world is dangerous again.
Interesting idea.
How would you combat 'not your fault' deaths? Server-side errors resulting in death; griefer exploiting a feature such as training mobs, etc. If I lost 5 deaths due to a bug; it could be a source of real contention between me and customer service. How could you combat whiners looking for 'free' lives bogging down CS? it could be a public relations nightmare and nearly impossible to prove it wasn't 'your fault'.
Would an unintended consequence result in less 'ownership' in your character, if no matter what you do, the char will die?
How about to combat the above problem, add a 'lineage' feature; whereby, your subsequent character is the 'heir' to the first. This would provide a longterm continuity and replace ownership in your toon to ownership in your 'family name', especially if there were real and tangible benefits to being from a 'long line of heroes'. For example, if housing were a part of the game, it would be passed on and could be augmented over the 'generations'. Heritage weapons could be passed down the line, things like that.
Now imagine, you are on your second or third toon. Compared to a newbie, you've got some pretty good gear but you are weak. Now you are in the same starting zones, but you can do dungeons on 'lineage' mode; a newbie equivalent to heroics or something. Add a 'mentoring' feature so that non-lineage and lineage can group in a balanced way.
What would the timeline be? For example, on average how long would it take the hardcore player to die, on average how long would it take a casual gamer? Could you reasonably expect to have 1 character 'live' for 2 or 3 real life years? I purposefully say 'on average' because obviously, those at the high end of the bell curve could technically live forever if they didn't die. But the game would be designed around the middle of the bell curve where 'most' would expend their life in 'x' amount of time.
How about instead of death being the mechanic - just have a life cycle, but the game supports a take on 'real life'.
The first half of your char's cycle would be a process of physically and mentally getting stronger. Str, const, int, etc. would improve as you 'lvl' or 'age'; this could be weighted toward class, for example, wiz gains int in the first half of the cycle.
In the second half of the cycle, the reverse happens. As you get older, you get weaker, forgetful, etc.
But don't stop reading! This is combatted with how you gear and equip yourself. Your first half of existance is all about the talents you naturally possess. The second half is all about magical stuff to combat the aging process.
Eventually you die, from getting weaker, but the lasting effect is a character who in reality is continually getting stronger.
Add this to the lineage feature I mentioned, and your next generation would have a 'leg up' from the items passed down.
It would also take care of the grief/bug deaths, yet would still maintain the ultimate death penalty.
It would also maintain the incentive to do well in battle. Imagine your character is getting old. He is a tank but his str is failing. He needs the uber chest piece of ultimate str to remain viable. The group/raid fubars the encounter. Now the tank has to try again - but with less strength. That is incentive not to wipe.
One of the biggest problems I see here (in opposition of the original post) is the emphasis on acquisition vs experience. A video game used to be an experience people cherished as an escape from RL, but current MMOs are a cycle of grind, collect, maintain. Hey, guess what? That's a job.
If a modern MMO was created where the focus of the game was on what you did with the short time you had, at least for those who played it, there should be a greater drive for people to play a character as opposed to merely an avatar. MUDs like Carrion Fields have had life cycles, and the focus of those games is the life of the character. It's not mainstream, and I wouldn't want it to be. This type of game is supposed to attract people who play the game because it is more like an interactive book, like stepping into the Hobbit and being able to change the story.
In order to see something like this work, world change needs to be implemented as well. This means the structures and cities should be entirely player made, suffer degredation, and be able to be razed to the ground. New civilizations spring up, fall, and the cycle begins again.
I also believe that this life cycle would have to be timed. Penalties for death, sure, but a certain number of hours (400? 1000?) leads to death of old age. You know from the start your character cannot do EVERYTHING in the world, and choices are made.
Something else that needs to be implemented, then, is the ability for players to create (in game) scrolls, books, writing, banners, etc. The world needs to look and feel dynamic and also have a means for history and lore to take shape. In the CF MUD I mentioned earlier, players STILL talk about a character who hasn't played in 10 years, because he was that bad *ss. Can you imagine being able to say the same for one of your own characters?
That can't happen (except, maybe, for Leeroy jenkins) in traditional immortality styled MMOs because everyone becomes an elite collection of the same things. No true differentiation exists because there is a finite number of things to be collected and an infinite amount of time to collect them. Characters are differentiated by the actions they take, and what they do with the short time allotted to them. I'm totally in favor of seeing a game like this.
We have MMOs with character life cycles already. Nothing new here.We do need more features in MMOs brought over from what brought about MMOs, PnP gaming.Give us true MMORPGs back!
One of the biggest problems I see here (in opposition of the original post) is the emphasis on acquisition vs experience. A video game used to be an experience people cherished as an escape from RL, but current MMOs are a cycle of grind, collect, maintain. Hey, guess what? That's a job.
I agree; it would have to be carefully designed to avoid that. Gear acquisition in late game under my scenario would have to be balanced as just one of the many things you had to do. While it would be necessary for your 'living' toon, it would have a long term benefit to your 'line'. Think of eq when you saw someone with golden efreeti boots, you new they worked for it; the gear was a 'badge' not a 'job'. So I agree wholeheartedly, to turn my idea into a gear grind would defeat the true purpose. But we all have to admit acquiring magical items is a necessary component of the fantasy genre. If its the 'only' component, it is a gear grind, with its appropriate use, it can be part of immersion.
In order to see something like this work, world change needs to be implemented as well. This means the structures and cities should be entirely player made, suffer degredation, and be able to be razed to the ground. New civilizations spring up, fall, and the cycle begins again.
That makes me think of my 'guild' idea. What if it were more representative of a feudal system. What if what we traditionally consider a 'guild' is actually your 'realm'. The area of the map you have property on. You don't join a guild, but rather, automatically have to work with those in your 'realm' for a common good; defense, economy, etc. In addition, crafters of similar talents from a particular realm would automatically be in a 'merchants guild', a la feudal society. They work together for a common economic good, setting prices, tariffs, etc. Their competition is a competing realms merchant guilds.
I know there are thousands of red flags the above concept might raise, but think about the effects of making it work.
You belong to the weaponsmith merchant guild from your realm. You can't sell your items though because the merchant guild in the next realm have lower prices. Your guild has to figure it out...can you just lower prices? if your realm had control of more minable ore, could that lower production costs so you can beat their price? A guild may have to convince the 'realm' to secure more ore so that their prices are competitve. Talk about dynamic interaction.
Realms could be managed through a pseudo feudal style with a democratic component. You would have to be 'elected' lord. The realm would have to decide on governmental templates; direct democracy? representative? cede all control to the lord? The realm would be in charge of tax rates, work with merchant guilds to establish fair prices, there could be a whole set of different aspects of how the economy, culture, war, peace which would be given directly over to the players. Realms would be in competition with other realms for resources, consumers, favor of the deities, etc.
The dynamics of such a system should be as obvious as the number of problems you'd have to resolve to make it work.
I also believe that this life cycle would have to be timed. Penalties for death, sure, but a certain number of hours (400? 1000?) leads to death of old age. You know from the start your character cannot do EVERYTHING in the world, and choices are made.
Something else that needs to be implemented, then, is the ability for players to create (in game) scrolls, books, writing, banners, etc. The world needs to look and feel dynamic and also have a means for history and lore to take shape. In the CF MUD I mentioned earlier, players STILL talk about a character who hasn't played in 10 years, because he was that bad *ss. Can you imagine being able to say the same for one of your own characters?
Imagine, in your day, you are a great wizard. As such you build an awe inspiring mage tower as your residence. But eventually you pass on. The tower begins to crumble. Years later, passerby's all know 'the mage tower ruins at the crossroads'. As you walk by there is a message etched in the old stone walls. "Here lie the ruins of Blazmodius the Great".
With a dungeon builder feature. Your mage could create a dungeon beneath the tower, but even as the tower crumbles, the dungeon remains infested from the evil you released within. Even years after your death, players still fondly remember adventuring in the dungeon of Blazmodius beneath the Mage Tower Ruins at the crossroads.
I believe developers should read through this thread and hire some of us.
Like some of the ideas being posted. Yes, an heir system would need to be in place to offer long term progression and carry something of the previous play forward. That is why I do not feel this is perma death and used the term life cycle. More like Karma, how you live one life affects your next. If a player still feels their "house" is progressing towards new content...
As far as how long it takes to die, IDK. That would depend on content and I think it should be long enough to get invested in that life cycle, but not so long that a static upper tier formed. Part of the appeal to me would be that it would have a "king of the mountain" aspect...rise to the top and hold it as long as you can, knowing other houses are trying to push you off and take the spot for themselves.
I also feel it could bridge the community. Instead of the Elite hanging around raiding all day and calling others noobs, there would be a need to have a organic flow in members of a guild. Today's noob could be a guilds master crafter for a duration (like an apprenticship).
Also bring vet players back to a level and zones that in most MMO become barren. The key is making a starting area or zone vastly different then it was 2-3 month earlier (seasons, dynamic events, player made structures) each affecting the NPCs around that area.
I am sure there are plenty of holes to poke through it, but hey it was just a random idea for something different.
"You belong to the weaponsmith merchant guild from your realm. You can't sell your items though because the merchant guild in the next realm have lower prices. Your guild has to figure it out...can you just lower prices? if your realm had control of more minable ore, could that lower production costs so you can beat their price? A guild may have to convince the 'realm' to secure more ore so that their prices are competitve. Talk about dynamic interaction. "
And can all this happen in your lifetime? When you are master of your craft? The race against time has begun, a fortune to be made, but by who?
Also bring vet players back to a level and zones that in most MMO become barren. The key is making a starting area or zone vastly different then it was 2-3 month earlier (seasons, dynamic events, player made structures) each affecting the NPCs around that area.
I think the answer here is a robust set of tools for player made content with an element of decay.
The essence of the system would be on evaluation mechanics. What I mean by that, is player made content would have 'benchmarks' built in. Your purpose as a designer of content is to make reaching those benchmarks more difficult. The purpose of the player is to reach the benchmarks. The better the designer is, the more advanced features of the toolset become available; allowing the creator to keep making the content more difficult. Vice versa, the easier your content is, the faster its decay rate. The more people who visit your dungeon, in theory the longer it lasts. However, this can be altered by having the variable that the 'benchmarks' are too easy to meet.
It would provide dynamics in two ways. As a creator, you would constantly have to tinker with your dungeon, changing it and its content to keep the dungeon 'alive'. As a player, it would keep you returning to the dungeons which are at the right balance for you to reach benchmarks but remain a challenge, yet every time you went, there'd be something different, because the creator has to maintain a low rate of decay. And if you go back, and the content has been challenging before, chances are the creator has new tools available to make it even more challenging. But if it is too easy, you won't go back and the creator has to scramble with the existing tools to combat the decay and get people back and fighting.
Imagine bulletin boards around the realm where you leave 'challenges' for people, 'the first to defeat my dungeon gets.....x'. There would be tools available for you to drum up business, essentially. Your UI could have dungeon matrixes where you could see stats on how many players have done the dungeon, how many players have beat the content, kind of like leader boards for player created content.
On another level, some content would disappear after a generation or two. New ones would constantly popping up. The zones would be ever changing; and even the content with longevity would have constant change. As for the long term 'hero' feel.....well, imagine being able to have a dungeon that becomes a mainstay for generations, with your name on it. The toon that build it may be long gone, but by golly every one knows where he lived.
You could have dungeon toolsets, fortification toolsets (castles), tower sets (mage towers), overland toolsets, cave toolsets, etc.
I also feel it could bridge the community. Instead of the Elite hanging around raiding all day and calling others noobs, there would be a need to have a organic flow in members of a guild. Today's noob could be a guilds master crafter for a duration (like an apprenticship).
The fragmentation and noob-calling has more to do with how much a game rewards skill and how reliant players are on one another (and also the sizes of communities interacting with each other.) Even in a game where players are constantly resetting back to level 1, if a veteran can level 2x as fast as a noob, the noob is still going to be called out. In a game where skill strongly factors into accomplishment, a noob is going to be called out. In a very large game, a noob is going to be called out.
So yeah, there are a ton of ways to control how much of this name-calling goes on, but none of them are related to what you're proposing (you could improve any of the factors without involving a life cycle)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I also feel it could bridge the community. Instead of the Elite hanging around raiding all day and calling others noobs, there would be a need to have a organic flow in members of a guild. Today's noob could be a guilds master crafter for a duration (like an apprenticship).
The fragmentation and noob-calling has more to do with how much a game rewards skill and how reliant players are on one another (and also the sizes of communities interacting with each other.) Even in a game where players are constantly resetting back to level 1, if a veteran can level 2x as fast as a noob, the noob is still going to be called out. In a game where skill strongly factors into accomplishment, a noob is going to be called out. In a very large game, a noob is going to be called out.
So yeah, there are a ton of ways to control how much of this name-calling goes on, but none of them are related to what you're proposing (you could improve any of the factors without involving a life cycle)
You're right that perma-death won't eliminate this problem, and nothing will completely eliminate it. I think there are design choices that can mitigate this to a certain extent, and community-focused gameplay and highly incentivizing cooperation between players of varying skills are among them. At the very least, PD does give you a way to meaningfully retaliate against people who are irritating you, even if you have to call on your weenie friends to gang up on them .
Comments
Axe, not here to argue with anyone, but think of it this way. A player goes on a raid, spends 4 hours and wipes on final boss. What happens? They lose all that progression and if they want to kill that boss will start again. Maybe they picked up a piece of gear or two along the way, given them a chance to exceed their previous effort. If they wipe again, they start anew, maybe a little closer. Regardless, all progression is lost each time they wipe, but a litlle bit carrys over each time.
Would the raid be made better if they could never wipe? Just keep popping up until they inevitably won? Of course not, that is boring. Think of a life span as one long raid, with the ability to have a little carry over each time.
Repeating content is often not very fun. On an alt, with a new way to do things, that can be different enough to be considered possibly new content. A new area is definately new content.
Today's games allready have enough mindless repetition with end-game. Why would you purposefully put in repetition in the early game.
Great I"m level 1 again, I get to do it all again. No thanks.
edit - I start over often enough as it is because I screwed up or wanted something a bit different, being forced to do it on top of all that just turns me off.
I agree that strict repetition of content would not make a lot of sense, and that's why you couldn't simply graft a PD concept onto an existing MMO. But I do think it could work in a highly non-linear game where a character can have a lasting impact on the world. Let's also not forget that nothing can eliminate player skill; you will be a better, wiser player after each character, and I think it would be right for such a game to appropriately reward the wisdom that comes with player experience through its mechanics.
It does not lead to detachment from characters, it leads to attachment to death and a inate sense of fear and wonder. Now you emerged, now you care if you die, that is true attachment.
What leads to a detachment from character is running him into a mob of goblins, dying, coming back to life, rinse and repeat 40 million times. That just makes your character seem in tangible.
Death is real, and it is coming. You always need a negative to understand a positive. You need ugly for there to be beauty. You need dirty for there to be clean. And you need to know what death is, before you can truely live.
It seams that the 2 biggest objections are 1) loss progression 2) replaying conent.
I believe long term progression is still there when you can carry over some things to your next life. Reputation, some wealth, housing,... Think of it more as progressing your family name. For Game of Throne fans, progressing House Stark or Lannister. It is not about that one singular life cycle, but progressing your house.
This also works to solve replaying the same content. As your house gains reputation, wealth, or whatever, new fresh content opens up. A NPC who had nothing to say to you before, tells you a secret the next time through. Mobs that were KOS, now allow you to pass or show you a secret tunnel.
Sure these things can be done in any MMO, but a life cycle gives the game a better flow than a high level charachter running through old zones and trash mobs...it is just more immersive this way. With a new life cycle comes new challenge, the world continues to be dangerous.
Err.
Why would we need "life cycles" for characters ? All the reasons the OP gives are completely riddiculous and obviously wrong.
The result of life cycles of characters is more treadmill gaming. Its the exact same category as ideas like permanent item decay etc - we have something that we think has to go on, so introduce a mechanism that it may go on. Except there simply has nothing to go on in the first place !
Games are for fun, not for making some kind of simulation. For having fun, humans need challenges. Introducing treadmill gaming - repetitive elements you have to just repeat over and over and over - means killing the fun of games. Thats not a way to keep the most intelligent lifeform on the planet occupied.
Whats the result of character aging ? People have to restart their characters all the time. So whats the additional challenge ? Zip. People will have to see the same lowlevel content again and again and again. If they want to or not.
What can men do against such reckless hate?
I prefer the term "discussion" to argument. Unless you are only interested in listening to positive praise which ignores the games people generally enjoy.
My original post stated that less than 6 hours of deleted progression is completely acceptable. Your example in the OP was that of a long-progression game (implying more than 6 hours), while your example in this post is less than 6 hours.
(And 6 hours, specifically, is just an arbitrary number for the sake of discussion. It's more of a gradual spectrum of acceptability where even games which delete 6 hours of progression are super rare, and typically just unusually long rounds of a game like Faster Than Light or Nethack.)
Repeating little bits of progression near the top is simply more acceptable than repeating the entire 6+ hour experience due to a mistake (or even 100 mistakes; or due to character-aging).
I'd wager it relates to how when we screw up in real life we're not forced to attend grade school all over again and start completely from the beginning -- instead, we repeat the job we failed at until we get it right and advance.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
This is similar to how I feel as well. If my characters were just a piece of a bigger pie that was my overall character progression. The House or Family Name idea is a great one. If you were able to attain certain benefits on the singular character that partially remained after death. Wealth is a big one, but that could be a matter of having to bank your wealth or risk losing it upon death.
If my original character was a warrior type, who was also a master blacksmith. My next character should have some inherent benefit to blacksmithing (aka was an apprentice), so my jumping off point wouldn't be as far behind. You could even have a function where if you chose to not be a blacksmith on the next character, your third character would receive even less benefit from the blacksmithing, until you effectively lost that benefit all together (until you make another master blacksmith).
I imagine that after a few months of practice, your characters could last a very long time, but that risk would still be there. With the proper system, where it doesn't feel like you are completely starting over each time, "perma-death" might make for an interesting mechanic.
start over and over? how boring...
no thanks I guess
try before buy, even if it's a game to avoid bad surprises.
Worst surprises for me: Aion, GW2
"Life cycle" implies a character that can die from old age. Slow down and lose effectiveness from a lifetime of battle-scarring, or just plain past-your-prime.
Pretty sure there aren't many players looking for that. Some of us are busy experiencing it.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Sure sure.
Interesting idea.
How would you combat 'not your fault' deaths? Server-side errors resulting in death; griefer exploiting a feature such as training mobs, etc. If I lost 5 deaths due to a bug; it could be a source of real contention between me and customer service. How could you combat whiners looking for 'free' lives bogging down CS? it could be a public relations nightmare and nearly impossible to prove it wasn't 'your fault'.
Would an unintended consequence result in less 'ownership' in your character, if no matter what you do, the char will die?
How about to combat the above problem, add a 'lineage' feature; whereby, your subsequent character is the 'heir' to the first. This would provide a longterm continuity and replace ownership in your toon to ownership in your 'family name', especially if there were real and tangible benefits to being from a 'long line of heroes'. For example, if housing were a part of the game, it would be passed on and could be augmented over the 'generations'. Heritage weapons could be passed down the line, things like that.
Now imagine, you are on your second or third toon. Compared to a newbie, you've got some pretty good gear but you are weak. Now you are in the same starting zones, but you can do dungeons on 'lineage' mode; a newbie equivalent to heroics or something. Add a 'mentoring' feature so that non-lineage and lineage can group in a balanced way.
What would the timeline be? For example, on average how long would it take the hardcore player to die, on average how long would it take a casual gamer? Could you reasonably expect to have 1 character 'live' for 2 or 3 real life years? I purposefully say 'on average' because obviously, those at the high end of the bell curve could technically live forever if they didn't die. But the game would be designed around the middle of the bell curve where 'most' would expend their life in 'x' amount of time.
How about instead of death being the mechanic - just have a life cycle, but the game supports a take on 'real life'.
The first half of your char's cycle would be a process of physically and mentally getting stronger. Str, const, int, etc. would improve as you 'lvl' or 'age'; this could be weighted toward class, for example, wiz gains int in the first half of the cycle.
In the second half of the cycle, the reverse happens. As you get older, you get weaker, forgetful, etc.
But don't stop reading! This is combatted with how you gear and equip yourself. Your first half of existance is all about the talents you naturally possess. The second half is all about magical stuff to combat the aging process.
Eventually you die, from getting weaker, but the lasting effect is a character who in reality is continually getting stronger.
Add this to the lineage feature I mentioned, and your next generation would have a 'leg up' from the items passed down.
It would also take care of the grief/bug deaths, yet would still maintain the ultimate death penalty.
It would also maintain the incentive to do well in battle. Imagine your character is getting old. He is a tank but his str is failing. He needs the uber chest piece of ultimate str to remain viable. The group/raid fubars the encounter. Now the tank has to try again - but with less strength. That is incentive not to wipe.
Anyway.....tldr
One of the biggest problems I see here (in opposition of the original post) is the emphasis on acquisition vs experience. A video game used to be an experience people cherished as an escape from RL, but current MMOs are a cycle of grind, collect, maintain. Hey, guess what? That's a job.
If a modern MMO was created where the focus of the game was on what you did with the short time you had, at least for those who played it, there should be a greater drive for people to play a character as opposed to merely an avatar. MUDs like Carrion Fields have had life cycles, and the focus of those games is the life of the character. It's not mainstream, and I wouldn't want it to be. This type of game is supposed to attract people who play the game because it is more like an interactive book, like stepping into the Hobbit and being able to change the story.
In order to see something like this work, world change needs to be implemented as well. This means the structures and cities should be entirely player made, suffer degredation, and be able to be razed to the ground. New civilizations spring up, fall, and the cycle begins again.
I also believe that this life cycle would have to be timed. Penalties for death, sure, but a certain number of hours (400? 1000?) leads to death of old age. You know from the start your character cannot do EVERYTHING in the world, and choices are made.
Something else that needs to be implemented, then, is the ability for players to create (in game) scrolls, books, writing, banners, etc. The world needs to look and feel dynamic and also have a means for history and lore to take shape. In the CF MUD I mentioned earlier, players STILL talk about a character who hasn't played in 10 years, because he was that bad *ss. Can you imagine being able to say the same for one of your own characters?
That can't happen (except, maybe, for Leeroy jenkins) in traditional immortality styled MMOs because everyone becomes an elite collection of the same things. No true differentiation exists because there is a finite number of things to be collected and an infinite amount of time to collect them. Characters are differentiated by the actions they take, and what they do with the short time allotted to them. I'm totally in favor of seeing a game like this.
We have MMOs with character life cycles already. Nothing new here.
We do need more features in MMOs brought over from what brought about MMOs, PnP gaming.
Give us true MMORPGs back!
Can you give one example of a AAA MMO using this?
I believe developers should read through this thread and hire some of us.
Like some of the ideas being posted. Yes, an heir system would need to be in place to offer long term progression and carry something of the previous play forward. That is why I do not feel this is perma death and used the term life cycle. More like Karma, how you live one life affects your next. If a player still feels their "house" is progressing towards new content...
As far as how long it takes to die, IDK. That would depend on content and I think it should be long enough to get invested in that life cycle, but not so long that a static upper tier formed. Part of the appeal to me would be that it would have a "king of the mountain" aspect...rise to the top and hold it as long as you can, knowing other houses are trying to push you off and take the spot for themselves.
I also feel it could bridge the community. Instead of the Elite hanging around raiding all day and calling others noobs, there would be a need to have a organic flow in members of a guild. Today's noob could be a guilds master crafter for a duration (like an apprenticship).
Also bring vet players back to a level and zones that in most MMO become barren. The key is making a starting area or zone vastly different then it was 2-3 month earlier (seasons, dynamic events, player made structures) each affecting the NPCs around that area.
I am sure there are plenty of holes to poke through it, but hey it was just a random idea for something different.
"You belong to the weaponsmith merchant guild from your realm. You can't sell your items though because the merchant guild in the next realm have lower prices. Your guild has to figure it out...can you just lower prices? if your realm had control of more minable ore, could that lower production costs so you can beat their price? A guild may have to convince the 'realm' to secure more ore so that their prices are competitve. Talk about dynamic interaction. "
And can all this happen in your lifetime? When you are master of your craft? The race against time has begun, a fortune to be made, but by who?
The fragmentation and noob-calling has more to do with how much a game rewards skill and how reliant players are on one another (and also the sizes of communities interacting with each other.) Even in a game where players are constantly resetting back to level 1, if a veteran can level 2x as fast as a noob, the noob is still going to be called out. In a game where skill strongly factors into accomplishment, a noob is going to be called out. In a very large game, a noob is going to be called out.
So yeah, there are a ton of ways to control how much of this name-calling goes on, but none of them are related to what you're proposing (you could improve any of the factors without involving a life cycle)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You're right that perma-death won't eliminate this problem, and nothing will completely eliminate it. I think there are design choices that can mitigate this to a certain extent, and community-focused gameplay and highly incentivizing cooperation between players of varying skills are among them. At the very least, PD does give you a way to meaningfully retaliate against people who are irritating you, even if you have to call on your weenie friends to gang up on them
.