I just wish....upon death, you could (possibly) enter a world of undead , chock full of other players trying to acheive the same goal(s)..To get BACK to their bodies!.
all kinds of options can be derived from this.
Can a form of PermaDeath be used , whereupon you can RVR/PVP/QUEST back to your body in other fun areas of the game.!?
maybe a RTS style approach to that element.....or add in a FPS element instead....so much can be done:)
------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------ <insert gloat of ubar toon here> <insert random game here> <insert gloat of ubar toon here> <insert gloat of ubar toon here> <insert random game here> --------------------------- <insert witty anecdote here> <political/religious agenda here>
It won't work. Period. Because people don't want it, I myself don't want it. I want easy entertainment, fun, respawn and no frustration. And there are armies of players, young, old, console or PC, male or female, who just want to have fun... Why, for gods sake, why do you think PnP was never a mass phenomenon and was looked upon as being something strange freaks do in their basement??? Because it was fun for everyone?
BS, because it WAS/and is a hobby for strange freaks in their basement... While WoW for example broke free and invaded the PC of "cool kids", of the normal guy. I can totally picture my small cousin, head of the schools football team, tall, dark-haired, handsome young man... He plays World of Warcraft. He doesn't even know what roleplaying is ... and THATS tomorrows business model, if you wanna make money with an MMO, make it rewarding and fun in small blocks...
Meridion
EDIT: Oh, and finally, who the f*** gives a damn about sheets and pencils. I like they games the way they are, I don't need nerdy 35-year olds to tell me whats good and bad.
this guy is right ev1 I met that dared utter they play PnP are freaks of nature and social outcasts lol. and the one cool guy i know that did PnP he said he was forced to quit cause of the nerds playin'
I find it odd that all those players that post about needing a "hardcore" pvp game aren't backing this idea 100%. After all, what would be more "hardcore" than permadeath?
C'mon all you "hardcore" folks, here's your chance!
they can just go play EvE you can lose your ships and space stations foreva + there is Starport (2d space game). I cant figure out why thats not enough. I think ppl accept losing a 'shell' but not losing their skills they worked hard grinding for. it just depends on what type of PD we talking about here. if we're talking bout losing my toon I invested hours of tweaking and building up for PvP in one fight i might have to give that a firm hell no. but if we're talking bout risking some ship I'm more down for that. just not down for losing skills- unless I get all my skills upfront ro something.
so it just depends on what type of PD we're talking bout
Actually, MMORPG site polls show that about 50% of the responders would at least consider playing a permadeath game. Now, this is the hardcore gaming crowd that is responding in the first place - lets guess that is maybe 10% of the overall market, as various authors on the subject have asserted (Bartle, Milligan).
So, about half of 10% - 5% of the overall market - would at least consider playing a permadeath game. Let's suppose that 20% of them might actually stick with it. That's 1% of the overall market ACTUALLY interested in permadeath enough to stick around in such a game, assuming it was created well.
Now, ponder for a moment the size of the global MMORPG market, which is in excess of 20 million players.
So globally, there are about 200,000 players interested in permadeath. That's a little smaller than UO and DAOC at their peaks.
But a lot of those players are overseas! Suppose you JUST want the US market - or maybe North America + Europe; now you're looking at maybe 8 million total players, or 80,000 permadeath interested folks. Now, 80k players - or more likely, a big slice of that, since you have other games out there still drawing some of those players - is not a HUGE game. But it's more than enough for a strong moneymaking game. We've already seen that games with 3k total players can be decent commercial successes (ATITD's two creators earn at least 50% more than the average they would be making doing the same work for some Big Company). We know that plenty of games have managed to find financial success in the 10-30k player range.
It's a niche - a nice sized niche, and one which will almost undoubtably have someone work to fill it eventually. It's NEVER going to get targeted by the like of SOE, Turbine, EA, etc. They are the Walmarts of the MMORPG universe - they make games that target EVERYONE, and so they have to cater to the lowest common denominator of player; they cannot afford to target a niche. An 80k player game would be considered a failure for them - it would "only" produce annual profits of around 6 million dollars, after all.
*****************
Now that we've debunked the "YOU CAN'T DO THAT!" myth, what are the main barriers to PD?
There are two. Linkdeath, and barriers to exit.
Linkdeath is a big one. Players who enjoy PD don't mind so much dying for a noble cause, dying to save a friend, dying for some purpose. They hate dying because they had a power brownout that rebooted their computer. They hate dying because the phone line wiggled and their DSL lost connection for a second, causing the game to crash. They hate dying for reasons outside of their control.
We ALL hate it, really - think about the last time you died in any mmo due to a crash - didn't it tick you off? How much more so would it have, if you had lost everything in that moment too?
So, we need ways to limit the risk involved. Eve has 'permadeath', in that you lose potentially YEARS worth of skills when you die. But they ameliorate that loss by letting players buy clones which protect those skills. A fantasy version might be a "soul locket" which restores you to the temple you purchased it at on death. Another idea might be to have a Luck attribute; every time you leveled, you get a few stat points to spend on your attributes - you can spend them on Luck, or Strength, or whatever. Each time you die, you lose one Luck point, and when they are all gone, so is the character. So you could spend all your points on Luck, and have more staying power - or spend them all on other stats, and be more powerful. But you're putting the choice in the hands of the player.
Perhaps even more important is the idea of a barrier to exit. In current MMOs, characters serve as VERY powerful barriers to exit. You've invested 500 hours in building up that character, so you want to keep using him, keep building him up, keep going on new adventures with him. If he dies, you lose a lot of the reason, maybe MOST of the reason, to keep playing that game. If he never existed, because a character only lasted 50 hours or less, then you never built up that big reason to stay.
Suddenly, developers would need to add a real reason to play.
See, right now, MMOGs are largely skating by. They don't really need to be intrinsicly fun, or have good internal motivations to play them. They have The Character, which players will happily work away at for hundreds of hours to build up. The act of building the character is the fun part - getting the next level, beating the next boss, getting the next cool item. The gameplay itself is often trite, boring, uninspired. Which is why we talk about 'grinds'.
If you remove the continuous character element, you remove the 'easy mode' from MMORPG design, and would force developers to actually incorporate strong, fun gameplay into their games. You would need to have goals which extended past the life of one character to shoot for - the building of a lineage of characters, children following in their parents footsteps, perhaps. Or a Great Cause worth dying for, if your death furthers the end of the cause. But it would have to be something interesting enough to really grab people. And the leveling gameplay would have to be REALLY good, because players will have to go through it over and over. Tetris grabs tens of millions of game hours every year, because the gameplay is intrinsicly fun. It's truly not about the destination, but about the gameplay. MMOGs so far are the reverse - completely about the destination, with gameplay almost slapped together. That would have to change in a big way for permadeath to work well.
Basically, permadeath would work only in a really well designed game. And frankly, we haven't seen many of those yet.
It isn't a genre well suited to the RPG crowd however. For it to be a well designed competative PvP you pretty much have to remove all RPG elements from the game as you have described above.
The best way to limit the risk from permadeath is to limit the length of the game. All the most successful ones use from 5-10 minutes.
Arcade games are not RPGs. Arcade = getting the highest score RPG = developing your character The whole thing people are missing with perma-death is that it's just not made for RPGs. RPGs are about developping your character. If everysingle time you die you loose that development then what's the fun? It's like making an arcade where every time you die your score is set to 0. So you have to beat the game or get no pionts at all. Ow right, RPGs have no end. So you can only get 0 points. Or how about making a shooter with a ranking system ( tracks kills/deaths ) that is cleared everytime you die? Nope, that would be stupid. So why make a RPG where every time you die your character development is put back at 0? It's 100% against the purpose of the game. It's like making a bike with weels that can't turn. An automatic light that only goes on when it's already light. The only way I can see perma-death working is in some sort of reincarnation system. If you die your character is lost. But your soul, wich bears all your gained abilities is saved. You then create a new character wich inherits all those abilities. So part of your character is lost, part of him is saved.
Look, most of you are one dimensional players. Its not your fault. Theres not much more to do. Its hysterical to me when I hear people say, look bozo, RPGs are solely about character development...
They are? Did you read dragonlance? Was it soley about character development? If it was perhaps you would like an adventure log with intermittant character sheets. (Woot Raistlan leveled up! Camaron with mega hit points baby)
Its a BS line. RPGs are about Role Playing. Just because current games offer you ZERO EXCEPT character development you think thats they way it ought to be.
To me a real game would let me build my own adventures (In game, with my characters) Would let me hire MANY Npcs, would allow siegeing, town building, item creation, in game politics.
It would have SOME character development, but more importantly the game would evolve around the world Im in. If my character builds a safe haven with a bank and lots of players use that bank because even though there is an unrestricted full PvP system this bank is safe that is quite an acomplishment.
Perhaps I raise an army of undead slowly and bury them one by one. They all will rise and serve if they here a command word spoken. No one knows their there except me. Then I go on to play an elf and get involved in the orc wars and forget all about them. Then I go on vacation in real life and I'm on a cruise in mexico and I get a paniced phone call from a guildie... ACK our town is under attack. We are so outnumbered. Most of our guards are dead!
Relax dude... go out to the old moors where we were scoping to build our first outpost and stand near the maple tree and shout, "Nearv Mort Incant Victus" Have fun storming the castle. Then hundreds of undead rise to serve.
These are some fictional examples but there are a TON of things involved in roleplaying OTHER then character development. The fact that current games solely revolve around this 1 aspect of roleplaying is the reason the genre has become stale and played.
Like hit songs on the radio, game designers can only remake the last hit and are unable to objectively look at the actual design anymore. Meanwhile the rest of the PD naysayers are saying dude... if I lost my character or my runed totem staff I would totally quit forever. (Which is why in a PD system you dont make the game revolve around items and character development... Atleast not ONLY around that.)
Theres a corny saying rich people use... Think out side the box.
The MMORPG market is your box... Throw it away and start over. Think OUTSIDE the last hit and the last killer feature. (Post too long for most people to read.... Must divide points up into short quips... but then whole thread must be read to get meaning... does not compute.)
Anyways.... You get the gist of what Im saying. The game is not about a Vorpal sword and your 39 strength and the fact that somehow an orc swinging a sword can no longer hurt you even if your naked and afk. The game is a tad more realistic thus making it a lot more fun.
So I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about Guild Wars and I was telling him how much cooler the game would be with a "hardcore" option like in Diablo 2. For those of you that don't know, hardcore mode in Diablo 2 was where you kept your character on the server and when he / she died... that was it. Being a veteran Rogue-like player, this kind of thing is my bag baby!
So anyway, the conversation shifted to the old P2P vs. Item shop thing and then it hit me. Rather than sell items in F2P games, why not sell characters? The game would be free, but you'd have to pay something like $5 for a character and once they were gone that would be it. Think of it as an arcade game. You pay for X number of lives and when their gone... well, you had your fun now didn't you? The difference here is that you get on life per. It could last for 5 years or 5 minutes depending on how well you actually play.
I'm also not seeing to many downsides to this idea. Here are a few advantages:
Gold selling won't be as big of a deal because who wants to pay cash for something you're just one bad decision away from losing forever?
Grind will be no more. Since the player is paying per character rather than per month or for perks to make the game less boring, developers will be inclined to make the game more challenging. Imagine a game that holds your attention every minute that you're actually playing it! When you threaten to kill the l337 speaking asshat that's making everyone miserable, it'll actually hold some weight. Yeah, he can just buy a new character but most people don't have access to an unlimited amount of $5 bills. I'm thinking that you could actually sell $5 cards (kinda like phone cards) to sell characters with. You could actually have the games web site on the cards to keep from all the packaging overhead. This also keeps you from needing to give out your Credit Card information online. I've never really been comfortable with using that information online. Cash is always better IMHO. $5 is totally within even the tightest budget and that can last as long as you're able to play.
No more level cap! Most people aren't going to make it past a certain point anyway.
And the rest is just the standard arguments in favor of permadeath (achievements mean something, adds tension, is the default condition of human experience, etc.). I'm not sure if this would be the best way to charge for an MMORPG, but I'd bet good money that someone will probably try at least once within the next five years or so. The system has actually proven in the arcades of old. This would also be great for indie setups.
at any rate.... It's just an idea....
I think it is a great idea. If the game was made right it could work. If I was a developer I would not use it though because it sounds very risky. I would probably have it as an alternate method of paying and maybe have normal characters without perma death but, they would have a level cap. I think $5 might be a bit much especially if it includes pvp. 3 lives for $5 I think would be good. You could probably just have the game judge like if their ping was over X then that death doesn't count so lag wouldn't kill you off. Or if your ping was X above your normal ping. I think this model would actually encourage people to use a lot more tactics in pvp and pvm. If there was arena pvp though it would probably have to not count against your lives (or you are knocked unconcious in the arena instead of killed).
Your mind is like a parachute, it's only useful when it's open. Don't forget, you can use the block function on trolls.
Perma-death doesn't work in current games because they're all focused almost exclusively on killing.
If perma-death were to be used, death would have to be rare. If it happened all the time, it would become just as inconsequential as it is in current games. (if each new toon has an expected lifespan of an hour or two, that's pretty much the same as having one toon with infinite "lives").
For death to be rare, lethal combat would have to be rare too.
Perma-death won't work in a MMORPG setting until devs start trying to entertain us with something other than constant slaughter.
It's like making an arcade where every time you die your score is set to 0.
Yes getting it set to 0 every third death makes all the difference..... en stuff....
People don't want to lose and, condludingly don't want to die.
Wow, thank you for that observation. Now that I know that I'm amazed that chess, checkers, backgammon, spades, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, tennis, golf, or any other zero sum game where one or more players lose are actually still being played. All this time I thought that the definition of a game included that possibility of failure!!! Man was I wrong!
Means if they die, its the fault of the game and if they lose, they tend to quit, not play again.
Yes we see a lot of blaming others in real life too. I'm getting to this one though.
People are NOT masochists and not "archetypical fighters".
I agree with this completely. By that same token, people are not all spineless wimps that are terrified of adversity either. People are actually less adverse to risk when the stakes are incredibly low. The stakes in this case are a simple $5 and I've seen people waste way more than that on lottery tickets. Come to think of it, Lotteries are very popular games and you're almost guaranteed to lose. Hmmmmm.....
If dying meant losing all your points and highscores would you play?
If you don't make the highscore, you do lose all your points. There were also many operators that turned the cabinets off when the arcade closed; thus deleting the highscore table. This didn't stop people coming back the next day compete for the top spot again.
On a similar note, I think that a "Hall of Champions" that ranked the top characters in the game according to various achievements and allowed players to put their own names to those characters would be a great idea. Although you couldn't put your character in the hall until it died. The drive for notoriety is just as strong as the drive for the next cool shiny thing.
go flush $5 down the toilet.
This is basically what you do when you buy / rent / subscribe to games anyway. I'll never get back all the money I spent playing Gauntlet at the arcade. I'll also never get back that time. I might as well have just flushed all those quarters too. Most people here are flushing about $15 a month down the toilet on games that really don't provide engrossing experiences. I know that some people play these games for the social interaction and that's fine too. However, I wonder if we can't have good games and good social interaction. I don't really see Permadeath as being detrimental to either one.
I want easy entertainment, fun, respawn and no frustration.
Well then here is a list of games that will be right up your alley. Part of the reason why most of us are bored with this genre is because it is too easy and free of frustration to feel rewarding. BTW, that sense of accomplishment is what I consider fun. You cannot have a sense of accomplishment without adversity, i.e. the possibility of loss. Fun comes from OVERCOMING adversity, not from having new shiny things handed to you periodically.
There is not enough of you to support a perma death mmo for a company to make a success of it.
Depends on how you define success. If a small setup, say 10 people, made a game like this, they would get to take home more money per developer than WoW with a much smaller server population. It's hard to get people to give you $240 a year (WoW subscription + box + expansion) but it's fairly easy to get people to give you $5 every now and then. This is a niche game, to be sure. But it's certainly not undoable.
The vast majority of people do not want to spend days, maybe weeks working up a character only to lose all that work because of one death.
and yet there are scores of people that play (and are rabidly dedicated to) homebrew Rogue-likes. It can take months to get to the end of something like Sangband only to be killed and have to start all the way over from the beginning. We still play these games though, because death is always due to poor decisions by the gamer. That and the fact that the entire game world gets recreated randomly each time making every game unique....
BTW, I just wanna put in my 2 cents about the lag issue. Since I went broadband, about 4 years ago, I can count how many times I've gone linkdead in a game on one hand. Even when I was playing on dial-up, linkdeath was rare. As for lag itself.... These aren't exactly twitch games now are they? Going back to the "people will blame the game for losing" argument, I can definitely see people whining that ever loss they took was due to linkdeath or lag. Keep logs of network activity on the server and keep 24 hour backups of the character database and you can restore the people that really did go linkdead while ignoring the crybaby liars.
Defeat should be one thing and Death should be another.
Thank you!! So long as your in a group with other players, you can be rezed within a certain time limit. I also agree that 0 HP should just be passed out and - total HP should be dead. This allows for PvP without the risk of losing your character and also allows a margin of error.
I really enjoy permadeath, games however rarely last longer than 10 minutes.
You're thinking of shooters. Permadeath RPGs can actually go on for quite a long time if you know the game well enough.
These next comments I agree with wholeheartedly and they deserve to be restated.
If you remove the continuous character element, you remove the 'easy mode' from MMORPG design, and would force developers to actually incorporate strong, fun gameplay into their games.
Tetris grabs tens of millions of game hours every year, because the gameplay is intrinsically fun. It's truly not about the destination, but about the gameplay.
in a PD system you dont make the game revolve around items and character development... Atleast not ONLY around that.
This one particularly stands out. We've gotten WAAAYYYY to hung up on character advancement being the "end all, be all" of MMORPG design.
The game is not about a Vorpal sword and your 39 strength and the fact that somehow an orc swinging a sword can no longer hurt you even if your naked and afk.
I also like this comment because it points out the complete stupidity of current MMO design. I realize that these are fantasy games, but damn!! There is a limit to what you can get away with fictionally.
Do not let the naysayers convince you that it is a bad idea. I think any break from the status quo in games these days is a good thing. If they do not want to play a perma-death game that is fine. There are plenty of other carebear games for them to play.
I recently started playing nethack again. There is a lack of originality in games these days so I am revisiting some good old games.
I absolutely believe a game can be popular and fun even if it had perma-death in the game. But, the game has to be designed from the ground up with perma-death in mind otherwise it will not work. I would even go as far as making a game where characters age. So you have a limited amount of real world and in game time to accomplish the tasks that you want to achieve.
There is a benefit that people are not seeing to a perma-death game. It is casual player friendly. You can play for a few hours with your friends and if your party gets wiped you guys can log off and play the next evening. There will be less desire to try to play inside an MMO world 24/7. A character dieing is a good time to take a break and go enjoy Real Life TM. People are spending entirely too much time in games these days.
Ok I have rambled enough... I agree that if designed correctly a perma-death game can be popular and fun.
Hold on for a second... and let the question evolve... W - H - Y ?
When a hypothetical city I helped constructing was attacked by hypothetical attackers, and my hand-created weapons and my chosen character (with no level and no class) was to defend in a huuuuge battle of hundreds of players against hundreds of players - hell on earth, I would not care.
Fun? - Why? Why is this concept automatically manifesting the essence of fun in your mind? I didn't find SWG with player cities and skillsets or EvE with true economy and death penalty any more fun than the blandest session of WoW arena PvP. Actually, I had the hell of a time doing arena PvP with friends. because of the game? no, because of the friends.
Let's start over - do you guys still chat? Like in 96, when you entered #funbox on your next best IRC network and started typing away. And you got lost there, just talking over the internet... so lets BE serious here: What does permadeath, creation, grand playerstaged events, buildings and empires add to my fun-experience - Right, no - thing.
Give me a ball and a partner to play and I'm happy. What you guys are lacking in is the ability that was so crucial for the AD&D experience, the ability to just have a good time without any fuzzy whirly simulated realities.
Hold on for a second... and let the question evolve... W - H - Y ?
When a hypothetical city I helped constructing was attacked by hypothetical attackers, and my hand-created weapons and my chosen character (with no level and no class) was to defend in a huuuuge battle of hundreds of players against hundreds of players - hell on earth, I would not care.
Fun? - Why? Why is this concept automatically manifesting the essence of fun in your mind? I didn't find SWG with player cities and skillsets or EvE with true economy and death penalty any more fun than the blandest session of WoW arena PvP. Actually, I had the hell of a time doing arena PvP with friends. because of the game? no, because of the friends.
....
Meridion
What you speak of is content I see in my FPS games when I play an MMO I want to make an impact. You do not make any sort of impact in the game world by doing Arenas in WoW. Maybe you'll top some leader board thats it
In WoW, the terrain always looks the same and Developers cannot keep up with the demands of their subscribers to provide content
The solution is to let players drive the content. Let us impact the world (like Age of Conan is doing with player built cities to some extent). just because you did not have fun does not mean thats not many of us would not live for.
If you let people just build what they want well eventually you will most likely run out of terrain so it makes sense to provide some mechanism to allow players to form factions and go to war against each other.
Games like Doom, Half Life, and Unreal found out that allowing players to 'modify' content would indefinetly extend the life of their games. Even WoW allows this in a limited sense with their UI mods. Now if we can just expand this concept to MMOs that would be nice.
Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe The vast majority of people do not want to spend days, maybe weeks working up a character only to lose all that work because of one death. and yet there are scores of people that play (and are rabidly dedicated to) homebrew Rogue-likes. It can take months to get to the end of something like Sangband only to be killed and have to start all the way over from the beginning. We still play these games though, because death is always due to poor decisions by the gamer. That and the fact that the entire game world gets recreated randomly each time making every game unique.... BTW, I just wanna put in my 2 cents about the lag issue. Since I went broadband, about 4 years ago, I can count how many times I've gone linkdead in a game on one hand. Even when I was playing on dial-up, linkdeath was rare. As for lag itself.... These aren't exactly twitch games now are they? Going back to the "people will blame the game for losing" argument, I can definitely see people whining that ever loss they took was due to linkdeath or lag. Keep logs of network activity on the server and keep 24 hour backups of the character database and you can restore the people that really did go linkdead while ignoring the crybaby liars. I realize that these are fantasy games, but damn!! There is a limit to what you can get away with fictionally.
Developers have no way at all to determine if someone simply unplugged their internet cable on purpose or if their ISP dropped down. A disconnect is all they will see in their logs. on your server all you know is that the client has dropped the connection that's it. I'll checkout those home brew games
<edit> are those text based games?
why not look at Starport its graphically superior to that stuff and i believe its all perma. even when u logout your ship is always 'still in the world' and if not parked at safe place it can be reaped
Give me a ball and a partner to play and I'm happy. What you guys are lacking in is the ability that was so crucial for the AD&D experience, the ability to just have a good time without any fuzzy whirly simulated realities.
If all you want is a social club, then you would probably be happy with Habbo Hotel, Second Life, Zwinky, you local bar, etc....
Some of us -just some of us- want an actual game to go with that social interaction.
The current leveling treadmill is completely inadequate in this regard. I'll grant that arena PvP, when it's done right, is highly entertaining. But it remains a fact that the meat and potatoes PvE in most MMORPGs is duller than dirtwater. I find this totally bizarre when I consider that I can still play through thousands of battle in Final Fantasy 3 or Dragon Quest 8 and still be completely engrossed in what's happening. Although I think that a lot of why those old JRPGs were so entertaining was a combination of storyline and the fact that you were managing a whole party in combat and not just one character. The last part seems to be quite a bit of it since I don't really have any fun in MMORPGs unless I'm grouping with other players.
Grouping and socializing are a little bit different though. It's the difference between having a meal at the IHOP with friends and playing a game of football with the same friends. One is just conversation over adequate food while the other is focused teamwork. With modern MMOs, even the focus teamwork part gets really stale, really quick.
permadeath is just one way to add tension to the proceedings while encouraging the developers to make their games more challenging and therefore more compelling. If I was all about having a good time socializing, I'd just hang out on Yahoo chat.
Hold on for a second... and let the question evolve... W - H - Y ?
When a hypothetical city I helped constructing was attacked by hypothetical attackers, and my hand-created weapons and my chosen character (with no level and no class) was to defend in a huuuuge battle of hundreds of players against hundreds of players - hell on earth, I would not care.
Fun? - Why? Why is this concept automatically manifesting the essence of fun in your mind? I didn't find SWG with player cities and skillsets or EvE with true economy and death penalty any more fun than the blandest session of WoW arena PvP. Actually, I had the hell of a time doing arena PvP with friends. because of the game? no, because of the friends.
Let's start over - do you guys still chat? Like in 96, when you entered #funbox on your next best IRC network and started typing away. And you got lost there, just talking over the internet... so lets BE serious here: What does permadeath, creation, grand playerstaged events, buildings and empires add to my fun-experience - Right, no - thing.
Give me a ball and a partner to play and I'm happy. What you guys are lacking in is the ability that was so crucial for the AD&D experience, the ability to just have a good time without any fuzzy whirly simulated realities.
Meridion
Immersion. That is why. The need, or simply the desire to feel the world to a point you can beleive for a moment it is real. Roleplay does that, and a number of other things (pretty graphics, environmental sounds effects) help as well.
The idea behind perma-death is that it allows players to feel a real sense of danger. What thrill is there when you know that even if you get your ass whooped by that 12-heads hydra you'll come back as strong as before?
Imagine fighting this same hydra and knowing that you can defeat her just as she can gnaw your head off. Imagine knowing that if she does, there is no coming back. Now imagine you do defeat her. The thrill is something no ball game can give.
You say we lack the ability to have a good time without simulation. Matter of opinions. I say you lack the ability to immerse yourself into a universe and feel it.
It's not a matter of who's right or wrong, it's a matter of what kind of player you are. I play a MMORPG for the universe. I play my character for the dept I can put into it. I (role)play to feel for a couple of hours that I'm that paladin who is one bite away from lose his head to a hydra, a few rooms away to find that legendary sword, or words away from seducing that cute elf. During that time, I'm no longer sitting at a computer.
If something like perma-death can add that sense of reality to my game, all the better.
That you prefer a more immediate, accessible gameplay that just allows you to have a good time with friends from around the world is your right and it's all good, but there are other ways to play a game, especially a MMORPG.
Any MMORPG that has perma death as its major selling point will get an audience, however the size of audience it is going to be able to sustain past a 3 - 6 month novelty factor is questionable for all but the hardcore players, given that its unlikely that any game company would invest in something like this with a pretty good chance that they would be seeing losses after this period. People do put time and effort into characters and to run the risk of permanently loosing thqt character is more than most people would care for, especially in an online game where lag,hacks etc can have an effect that the player cannot counteract.
We all know the disadvantages. Why bother? What does it add to your gameplay?
We have many reasons for playing these games. Hundreds, really. But two very important reasons why many people play are for the adrenaline rush or excitement - and for the chance to play a hero.
Permadeath enhances both of these.
Obviously, greater risk results in greater excitement from gameplay. When more is on the line, the stakes are higher, and you have to fight as hard as you can or lose big, then everything is a big deal. There's a reason why every single sports movie climaxes during the final 30 seconds of the Big Game with the score tied - if one side or the other was winning by a landslide, no one would care. But in a close match where everything is won or lost RIGHT HERE, then everything you do matters.
Shadowbane created a higher level of intense excitement than perhaps any other MMOG before or since. It did this by creating massive risk around the major battles, massive risk around losing your city to another group of players. The greater the risk, the greater the sense of accomplishment when you succeed.
In a game like WOW, where success is merely a measure of time spent, and ANYONE can succeed if they grind long enough, then there is no real challenge, nor feeling of risk, nor feeling of accomplishment for anyone. Success without risk is hollow. Now, some people LIKE that, and - that's OK. But skydiving, surfing, skiing, snowboarding, car racing, and other high risk sports are extremely popular for a reason - people like risk. And people like WATCHING others take risks, because they like living that risk vicariously without having to actually risk their own life and limb. Permadeath MMOGs can give players that sort of experience - a feeling of great risk without actually losing their own lives.
Heroism is the other reason I mentioned, and is perhaps the more important.
Heroism requires risk of loss. It is absolutely necessary. You simply cannot ever exhibit heroism at any level if you do not have any risk of loss. To extend the above example, no character in WOW can ever act like a hero. The gameplay of the game simply prohibits the existence of heroism, because there is never any chance of loss.
Superman is not heroic when he rescues someone from a burning building. He is doing a good thing; but it is not heroic. When a normal firefighter runs into that same building to save someone, THAT is heroism, because s/he is risking life and limb to try to help someone else.
Loss of experience or items is some risk. AC1-Darktide showed some heroic moments, when players risked loss of items and massive vitae (which took time to recover from) to win battles. Shadowbane had some heroic moments, because acting true to your ideals often meant risking losing your city, which was a great risk. Permadeath is perhaps the ultimate in such risk - the greatest risk possible in an online RPG.
The greater the risk, the greater the level of heroism shown. Some people do not want that level of risk in their game, and sacrifice that level of heroism in exchange. Many people DO though. They know in their guts that they can get a deeper experience from a greater risk. And that's why permadeath keeps coming up, as the holy grail of greatest risk - and greatest chance to play a hero.
What is it? What does it mean? Will it work? If you follow the forums of any new MMORPG out there you have probably seen this buzzword brought up quite a bit. (Mayhaps even by me!) But though it is hotly debated it also very misunderstood. So lets define and discuss it.
‘Perma’ is a latin root which means to stay to the end, last or endure. Death is also derived from a latin root, most commonly Mort… but other roots are related, namely: “nex, mortalitas, mors mortis, letum, plecto aliquem capite, excessum, decessus”. (As a side note many of those would make great character names). So essentially we’re talking about a word that means to stay dead.
In a permadeath MMORPG the idea is to implement a system where a character could end up in a permanently dead state. Some examples are:
PdoT: You will permanently die over time. This has two subclasses, ‘Subclass A’ that accounts for skill and ‘Subclass B’ that does not. In the first you are given X lives and when you run out of them you must reroll but in the latter you are given X time and irregardless of your actions or skill you will reroll when that time is used up.
Iron Man Permadeath: You get one life. When you die you reroll. (There is the Dungeons and Dragons variation of this that allows you to be resurrected from the dead state by a friend but each resurrection uses up a hard limit. Commonly related to a physical attribute such as health or constitution.)
Watch your step: This is actually a combination of both Subclasses of PdoT. You are given X lives for X time. Commonly it is X lives per 24 hours. Should you die more then X times in this specific time period then you will reroll, however every X period of times that number will reset. Some allow roll-over lives like a cell phone plan and some don’t.
Permadeath is a great departure from current games that treat death like unconsciousness. You black out briefly and then awake at some distant spawn point. In fact there is no real death and the concept doesn’t actually exist in most games.
The fact that most MMORPGs don’t feature a state of permanent death is a big turn off for those that crave a virtual world. It is near impossible to accurately portray a virtual simulation of life that is missing something as common as death. It removes to a degree the concept of skill. Those with more time invested in the game will become more skilled and more powerful then anyone else. It indirectly places too much value on your avatar rather then your avatar’s actions and deeds. It allows players to win against other players.
Why are MMORPGs just now beginning to incorporate this exciting new feature? Well first of all it’s not really an exciting new feature. Anyone who has played pong or any other arcade game is familiar with the ancient feature. The question really is why has it taken so long for MMORPGs to begin to use it. Well likely because they are designed by older people who believe they will lose players if their ‘Main Avatar’ permanently dies. MMORPGs are designed around credit cards and thus most make it impossible for you to lose. Death can only slow you down, it can never kill you and you can never lose thus you must stick around to win, bubble by bubble, dollar by dollar until the end. Game expansions are designed to be so tedious that even the most skilled player could not conquer it before the next planned expansion can release. It’s a bait and hook tactic and it works for a large majority of the players. The rest get bored and move on to a new game. They normally attribute their move to a new game to boredom, graphics or their whole guild left so their going with them but few every analyze what it is they truly left for.
As a matter of personal opinion I like PdoT Subclass A in combination with unrestricted PvP and skill based character development. (As opposed to level based) I would like such a game to feature real world simulated physics. I would go so far as to say characters should have to eat, drink and keep their avatars appropriately dressed for their environment. Unrealistic features which turn games into chat rooms should be removed, that is things like Clan talk, Tell, gossip etc. Long distance communication should only be feasible through magic or messengers. The number of lives characters receive should be enough to compensate for lag deaths, network unreliability and bad decisions but few enough to bring about Challenge.
Hold on for a second... and let the question evolve... W - H - Y ?
When a hypothetical city I helped constructing was attacked by hypothetical attackers, and my hand-created weapons and my chosen character (with no level and no class) was to defend in a huuuuge battle of hundreds of players against hundreds of players - hell on earth, I would not care.
Fun? - Why? Why is this concept automatically manifesting the essence of fun in your mind? I didn't find SWG with player cities and skillsets or EvE with true economy and death penalty any more fun than the blandest session of WoW arena PvP. Actually, I had the hell of a time doing arena PvP with friends. because of the game? no, because of the friends.
Let's start over - do you guys still chat? Like in 96, when you entered #funbox on your next best IRC network and started typing away. And you got lost there, just talking over the internet... so lets BE serious here: What does permadeath, creation, grand playerstaged events, buildings and empires add to my fun-experience - Right, no - thing.
Give me a ball and a partner to play and I'm happy. What you guys are lacking in is the ability that was so crucial for the AD&D experience, the ability to just have a good time without any fuzzy whirly simulated realities.
Meridion
Meridion you are becoming one of my favorite posters around here.
I agree with you on the permadeath thing. Now from what I understand, the reasons people have for permadeath can be broken down into the following:
1) Death currently has no meaning, and permadeath will give it meaning.
2) Death currently is contrary to realism and immersiveness, and permadeath will make the game realistic and immersive.
3) Death currently emphasizes the character, rather than the gear, and permadeath will put the emphasis back on the character, and not the gear.
I actually agree that death should mean more than a simple respawn. I actually had that in SWG when it launched. To all of you that remembered that game, if you died, or even if you just kept on fighting for long periods of time, your character would wear down. You'd lose points off of your attributes, and you'd need to go to the hospital to see a doctor. You'd get fatigued, and needed to go to the cantina for some R'n"R. All of the healing and recreating was done by other players, and I thought it was totally cool, appropriate, and realistic. It certainly gave death some meaning, because you just couldn't throw away your toon willy-nilly without having to recover.
Death and injury had meaning in SWG, because it meant that a certain chain of events had to occurr to get yourself back "whole" again. It certainly was realistic and immersive in SWG. Its part of what made it seem like a living universe seeing players play doctors actually healing in hospitals, and players playing entertainers actually giving recreation in the cantinas. Of course the drugs had to be created to heal, and the instruments and costumes had to be created; all by players, and all because death had meaning in SWG.
You see, in the early SWG, your character had to be maintained to be in prime condition. The loot and the skills didn't mean crap if you had hardly any stats due to careless dying or injury. You had to find doctors and entertainers to tend to your characters needs, like we do with our needs.
We no longer have that in SWG. Frankly, death has very little meaning in SWG today, like the other MMOs. Why was the death system removed?
It wasn't the carebears and roleplayers (all the 'foofoo whiny' types who don't use TS/vent that the hardcore hates) who minded. In fact, most of them were the ones manning the hospitals and cantinas. They didn't mind going back to town, because they actually thought such a system added character and depth to the game.
The death system died because too many hardcores, like the ones I see here, thought it was just too painful, and was too distracting from getting into the action ASAP. Because when push came to shove, all the hardcore really wanted was to push their toon around as a vehicle for their own desires for loot and pwnage. They did not see their toons as things they were supposed to sympathize with, and respond to. They saw the death system as it stands as just another obstacle to the source of their fun: which wasn't connected to dying, but rather, running through content with as little artificial obstacles as possible.
If the hardcore folks can't even handle a death system as functional, realistic, and useful as was found with SWG because it was too tedious and bothersome, then how the heck are they going to going to respond to permadeath, which is far more inconvenient, and far less interesting from a play aspect? I mean, the hardcore clan combat types thought that going to the cantina for two minutes to hear music was too excessive of a burden. And the developers listened to this hardcore, and wussed out the death system despite the objections from the roleplayers and carebears. If they can't even like the prospect of going back to the hospital and waiting around for the doc, then how in the heck are they gonna like the prospect of rerolling another toon, starting from square one to get with their buddies who are all level 42, and fragging purples?
Now to be fair, permadeath can work in certain MUDs and MUSHs. I remember I played a Dune MUSH that had permadeath. However, combat was a secondary concern in those games, which were mainly about roleplay, developing plots, and character interaction. But I don't see how it can work in MMOs centered around combat as the means to do...well...everything important.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Now from what I understand, the reasons people have for permadeath can be broken down into the following: 1) Death currently has no meaning, and permadeath will give it meaning. 2) Death currently is contrary to realism and immersiveness, and permadeath will make the game realistic and immersive. 3) Death currently emphasizes the character, rather than the gear, and permadeath will put the emphasis back on the character, and not the gear.
No, no, no, no, no!!
Point 1 is wrong because permadeath is meant to make the character's LIFE more meaningful. I know that I'm going to die, this means that I try to make the time I have count. Same thing with a character in a permadeath MMO. No matter how good you are, inevitably you're character will die. It's not about punishing the player. It's about providing real threat that adds weight to the assessment of in-game risks.
Point 2 is wrong on the grounds that you seem to think that realism = immersion. While death is the default condition of our reality, immersion isn't the primary reason that we want permadeath. We want permadeath to add some much needed tension to the proceedings. When you play a game where every challenge is a foregone conclusion, it's boring. It's only when you DON'T KNOW the outcome that real dramatic entertainment can emerge.
Point 3 is wrong because we aren't trying to put the emphasis on character stats or gear. Permadeath is about concentrating on what the character is doing rather than what the character can do and how many XP points before s/he can do something else. We want to take the focus OFF of character advancement a put it squarely on GAMEPLAY.
There are a lot of arguments that reasonably support permadeath. It's just that most people have a knee jerk reaction against it without really considering all the implications thereof.
I see the pros and cons of perma death. But you have to take into account that most people who play MMORPGs would probably find perma death to be annoying. And you don't want to upset a large chunk of potential clients. That is just bad for business.
Jimmy i agree with your ideas and would definately subscribe to a game like this.i'm not so sure it would be a great business model though for an mmorpg;but it sure would be a lot of fun and I would probably be king of the server in a game like this.
From Wikipedia-
In multi-player computer games Due to player desires and the resulting market forces involved, MMORPGs (such as World of Warcraft) and other multiplayer-focused RPGs almost never have permanent death. Richard Bartle has compared player distaste for permadeath to player distaste for pedophilia.[1] For games which charge an ongoing fee to play, permanant death may drive a player away, creating a financial disencentive to include permanant death.[2] Diablo II is a noteworthy, mainstream exception that includes support for an optional "hardcore" mode when playing online. "Hardcore mode" in Diablo II subjects characters to permanent death. Star Wars Galaxies had permadeath for Jedi characters for a short period, but later eliminated that functionality.[3] The majority of MMORPG players are unwilling to accept the large penalty of losing their character.
Some MMORPGs experimented with permanent death as part of an attempt to simulate a more realistic world, but the majority of players preferred to not risk permanent death for their characters. As a result, while MMORPGs are occasionally announced that feature permanent death, most either never ship (so called vaporware) or are changed to remove permanent death so as to increase the game's mass appeal.
Now from what I understand, the reasons people have for permadeath can be broken down into the following: 1) Death currently has no meaning, and permadeath will give it meaning. 2) Death currently is contrary to realism and immersiveness, and permadeath will make the game realistic and immersive. 3) Death currently emphasizes the character, rather than the gear, and permadeath will put the emphasis back on the character, and not the gear.
No, no, no, no, no!!
Point 1 is wrong because permadeath is meant to make the character's LIFE more meaningful. I know that I'm going to die, this means that I try to make the time I have count. Same thing with a character in a permadeath MMO. No matter how good you are, inevitably you're character will die. It's not about punishing the player. It's about providing real threat that adds weight to the assessment of in-game risks.
Point 2 is wrong on the grounds that you seem to think that realism = immersion. While death is the default condition of our reality, immersion isn't the primary reason that we want permadeath. We want permadeath to add some much needed tension to the proceedings. When you play a game where every challenge is a foregone conclusion, it's boring. It's only when you DON'T KNOW the outcome that real dramatic entertainment can emerge.
Point 3 is wrong because we aren't trying to put the emphasis on character stats or gear. Permadeath is about concentrating on what the character is doing rather than what the character can do and how many XP points before s/he can do something else. We want to take the focus OFF of character advancement a put it squarely on GAMEPLAY.
There are a lot of arguments that reasonably support permadeath. It's just that most people have a knee jerk reaction against it without really considering all the implications thereof.
I think its just variations on a theme more or less, but we'll go with your variations.
1) Death as it is currently makes character life have no meaning, and permadeath will give character life meaning.
Now perhaps someone can explain to me how permadeath is going to spontaneously start making players play meaningfully, when there is really nothing in the games that is meaningful beyond combat? If the only activity in the game involves risking permanent death, and the thing that determines life or death is just a random number generator in the combat engine, then it seems to me that character lives are ultimately meaningless. What does it say when the blue MOBs you fought 1000 times before with no problem suddenly roll freakish numbers, and kill you? How is having your toon killed by freakish rolls from the random number generator "heroic," and how does that really make your experience meaningful in any way that it wouldn't be, had you no permadeath?
It seems to me that if we want to make player lives have meaning beyond just life and death struggles, we should make the game about more than life and death struggles. That means combat has to be so much in the background about what the game is designed to accomplish, that you could enjoy yourself for years, and never engage in it.
The games I knew that had permadeath (mainly MUDs and MUSHs) weren't about combat. They were about intrigue, roleplay, and plot development. Now if you are fine walking around with avatars ala Second Life spending 90% of your time in character chatting with other players, then yeah, permadeath isn't so bad. Then again, there is no incentive to risk death in those games under normal circumstances, because the games never emphasized combat much at all. But make no mistake. Those roleplay heavy MUDs and MUSHs didn't have players who played their characters meaningfully because of the permadeath. They had permadeath because they played their characters meaningfully, and had better things to do than simply do combat all day.
2) Death as it is currently adds no much needed tension, and creates predictable outcomes; thus permadeath is needed to add tension, and make the outcomes unpredictable.
If tension is so lacking in today's games, then I don't think it has to do with the design, as much as it has to do with how players play the games these days. Hardcores are actually the mosr risk adverse players I know, who are obsessed with efficiency, and do not leave anything to chance. I don't think this is going to change whether permadeath is instituted or not. If anything, it will only encourage more risk adverse behavior, more efficiency, and more repetition of established patterns, which eventually creates boring, stagnant gameplay.
Then again, if the entire extent of the gameplay revolves around what happens in the combat engine, then the entire game becomes nothing more than fighting PvP and PvE perpetually until you get bored. With permadeath, all you really change is make it so players have more reasons to leave other than natural churn.
Without some modicum of predictability, long-term games like these become pointless. How can you set goals, work toward them, make choices, and achieve them when it can all disappear upon one stupid dice roll at anytime? Yes its tense, and unpredictable, but then there is no real incentive to think beyond the mere moment toward anything in the future. Games don't become more meaningful when they are unpredictable and tense. If anything, I would think that games would become much more disposable and frustrating when they unpredictable and tense.
3) Death as it currently exists makes games about character advancement and gear; thus permadeath is needed to put the emphasis back on gameplay.
Describe "gameplay?" Is it roleplay? If so, how is permadeath going to encourage roleplay, when players don't roleplay now? Is it politics? Chatting? Artistic performances and self-expression? How are these all going to magically appear simply by instituting permadeath? See, the problem is that games today, and more importantly, the players who play the games today really don't offer anything amusing to do that doesn't involve either character advancement, or gear. But it seems to me that the solution to that problem isn't to institute permadeath. The solution to that is to include amusing things to do that aren't level or skill dependent, or loot dependent. But I don't see how changing the death system is going to help create amusing things to do. All it will do is just make the shallow things we do now just be that much more annoying, using a solution that is frankly, just not very creative.
Nothing is stopping people from doing what a poster said above me, and delete your characters upon death. Yet why don't we do it? Probably because its not very interesting to do.
And that about sums up a lot of the reasons players want permadeath. They think the games are uninterestingly designed, and uninterestingly played. But to me, the solution is to make the games more interesting, and play the games in interesting ways; both of which may not necessarily require a radical and counterintuitive mechanic like permadeath.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Comments
^ sound suggestions;)
I just wish....upon death, you could (possibly) enter a world of undead , chock full of other players trying to acheive the same goal(s)..To get BACK to their bodies!.
all kinds of options can be derived from this.
Can a form of PermaDeath be used , whereupon you can RVR/PVP/QUEST back to your body in other fun areas of the game.!?
maybe a RTS style approach to that element.....or add in a FPS element instead....so much can be done:)
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------
<insert gloat of ubar toon here>
<insert random game here>
<insert gloat of ubar toon here>
<insert gloat of ubar toon here>
<insert random game here>
---------------------------
<insert witty anecdote here>
<political/religious agenda here>
I play America's Army.
I really enjoy permadeath, games however rarely last longer than 10 minutes.
In an RPG character development is a big part of the fun, if not the driving goal of the game.
they can just go play EvE you can lose your ships and space stations foreva + there is Starport (2d space game). I cant figure out why thats not enough. I think ppl accept losing a 'shell' but not losing their skills they worked hard grinding for. it just depends on what type of PD we talking about here. if we're talking bout losing my toon I invested hours of tweaking and building up for PvP in one fight i might have to give that a firm hell no. but if we're talking bout risking some ship I'm more down for that. just not down for losing skills- unless I get all my skills upfront ro something.
so it just depends on what type of PD we're talking bout
So, about half of 10% - 5% of the overall market - would at least consider playing a permadeath game. Let's suppose that 20% of them might actually stick with it. That's 1% of the overall market ACTUALLY interested in permadeath enough to stick around in such a game, assuming it was created well.
Now, ponder for a moment the size of the global MMORPG market, which is in excess of 20 million players.
So globally, there are about 200,000 players interested in permadeath. That's a little smaller than UO and DAOC at their peaks.
But a lot of those players are overseas! Suppose you JUST want the US market - or maybe North America + Europe; now you're looking at maybe 8 million total players, or 80,000 permadeath interested folks. Now, 80k players - or more likely, a big slice of that, since you have other games out there still drawing some of those players - is not a HUGE game. But it's more than enough for a strong moneymaking game. We've already seen that games with 3k total players can be decent commercial successes (ATITD's two creators earn at least 50% more than the average they would be making doing the same work for some Big Company). We know that plenty of games have managed to find financial success in the 10-30k player range.
It's a niche - a nice sized niche, and one which will almost undoubtably have someone work to fill it eventually. It's NEVER going to get targeted by the like of SOE, Turbine, EA, etc. They are the Walmarts of the MMORPG universe - they make games that target EVERYONE, and so they have to cater to the lowest common denominator of player; they cannot afford to target a niche. An 80k player game would be considered a failure for them - it would "only" produce annual profits of around 6 million dollars, after all.
*****************
Now that we've debunked the "YOU CAN'T DO THAT!" myth, what are the main barriers to PD?
There are two. Linkdeath, and barriers to exit.
Linkdeath is a big one. Players who enjoy PD don't mind so much dying for a noble cause, dying to save a friend, dying for some purpose. They hate dying because they had a power brownout that rebooted their computer. They hate dying because the phone line wiggled and their DSL lost connection for a second, causing the game to crash. They hate dying for reasons outside of their control.
We ALL hate it, really - think about the last time you died in any mmo due to a crash - didn't it tick you off? How much more so would it have, if you had lost everything in that moment too?
So, we need ways to limit the risk involved. Eve has 'permadeath', in that you lose potentially YEARS worth of skills when you die. But they ameliorate that loss by letting players buy clones which protect those skills. A fantasy version might be a "soul locket" which restores you to the temple you purchased it at on death. Another idea might be to have a Luck attribute; every time you leveled, you get a few stat points to spend on your attributes - you can spend them on Luck, or Strength, or whatever. Each time you die, you lose one Luck point, and when they are all gone, so is the character. So you could spend all your points on Luck, and have more staying power - or spend them all on other stats, and be more powerful. But you're putting the choice in the hands of the player.
Perhaps even more important is the idea of a barrier to exit. In current MMOs, characters serve as VERY powerful barriers to exit. You've invested 500 hours in building up that character, so you want to keep using him, keep building him up, keep going on new adventures with him. If he dies, you lose a lot of the reason, maybe MOST of the reason, to keep playing that game. If he never existed, because a character only lasted 50 hours or less, then you never built up that big reason to stay.
Suddenly, developers would need to add a real reason to play.
See, right now, MMOGs are largely skating by. They don't really need to be intrinsicly fun, or have good internal motivations to play them. They have The Character, which players will happily work away at for hundreds of hours to build up. The act of building the character is the fun part - getting the next level, beating the next boss, getting the next cool item. The gameplay itself is often trite, boring, uninspired. Which is why we talk about 'grinds'.
If you remove the continuous character element, you remove the 'easy mode' from MMORPG design, and would force developers to actually incorporate strong, fun gameplay into their games. You would need to have goals which extended past the life of one character to shoot for - the building of a lineage of characters, children following in their parents footsteps, perhaps. Or a Great Cause worth dying for, if your death furthers the end of the cause. But it would have to be something interesting enough to really grab people. And the leveling gameplay would have to be REALLY good, because players will have to go through it over and over. Tetris grabs tens of millions of game hours every year, because the gameplay is intrinsicly fun. It's truly not about the destination, but about the gameplay. MMOGs so far are the reverse - completely about the destination, with gameplay almost slapped together. That would have to change in a big way for permadeath to work well.
Basically, permadeath would work only in a really well designed game. And frankly, we haven't seen many of those yet.
Owyn
Commander, Defenders of Order
http://www.defendersoforder.com
I own loads of great permadeath games.
The market is awash with them.
It isn't a genre well suited to the RPG crowd however. For it to be a well designed competative PvP you pretty much have to remove all RPG elements from the game as you have described above.
The best way to limit the risk from permadeath is to limit the length of the game. All the most successful ones use from 5-10 minutes.
They are? Did you read dragonlance? Was it soley about character development? If it was perhaps you would like an adventure log with intermittant character sheets. (Woot Raistlan leveled up! Camaron with mega hit points baby)
Its a BS line. RPGs are about Role Playing. Just because current games offer you ZERO EXCEPT character development you think thats they way it ought to be.
To me a real game would let me build my own adventures (In game, with my characters) Would let me hire MANY Npcs, would allow siegeing, town building, item creation, in game politics.
It would have SOME character development, but more importantly the game would evolve around the world Im in. If my character builds a safe haven with a bank and lots of players use that bank because even though there is an unrestricted full PvP system this bank is safe that is quite an acomplishment.
Perhaps I raise an army of undead slowly and bury them one by one. They all will rise and serve if they here a command word spoken. No one knows their there except me. Then I go on to play an elf and get involved in the orc wars and forget all about them. Then I go on vacation in real life and I'm on a cruise in mexico and I get a paniced phone call from a guildie... ACK our town is under attack. We are so outnumbered. Most of our guards are dead!
Relax dude... go out to the old moors where we were scoping to build our first outpost and stand near the maple tree and shout, "Nearv Mort Incant Victus" Have fun storming the castle. Then hundreds of undead rise to serve.
These are some fictional examples but there are a TON of things involved in roleplaying OTHER then character development. The fact that current games solely revolve around this 1 aspect of roleplaying is the reason the genre has become stale and played.
Like hit songs on the radio, game designers can only remake the last hit and are unable to objectively look at the actual design anymore. Meanwhile the rest of the PD naysayers are saying dude... if I lost my character or my runed totem staff I would totally quit forever. (Which is why in a PD system you dont make the game revolve around items and character development... Atleast not ONLY around that.)
Theres a corny saying rich people use... Think out side the box.
The MMORPG market is your box... Throw it away and start over. Think OUTSIDE the last hit and the last killer feature. (Post too long for most people to read.... Must divide points up into short quips... but then whole thread must be read to get meaning... does not compute.)
Anyways.... You get the gist of what Im saying. The game is not about a Vorpal sword and your 39 strength and the fact that somehow an orc swinging a sword can no longer hurt you even if your naked and afk. The game is a tad more realistic thus making it a lot more fun.
Take the poll today.
I think it is a great idea. If the game was made right it could work. If I was a developer I would not use it though because it sounds very risky. I would probably have it as an alternate method of paying and maybe have normal characters without perma death but, they would have a level cap. I think $5 might be a bit much especially if it includes pvp. 3 lives for $5 I think would be good. You could probably just have the game judge like if their ping was over X then that death doesn't count so lag wouldn't kill you off. Or if your ping was X above your normal ping. I think this model would actually encourage people to use a lot more tactics in pvp and pvm. If there was arena pvp though it would probably have to not count against your lives (or you are knocked unconcious in the arena instead of killed).
Your mind is like a parachute, it's only useful when it's open.
Don't forget, you can use the block function on trolls.
Perma-death doesn't work in current games because they're all focused almost exclusively on killing.
If perma-death were to be used, death would have to be rare. If it happened all the time, it would become just as inconsequential as it is in current games. (if each new toon has an expected lifespan of an hour or two, that's pretty much the same as having one toon with infinite "lives").
For death to be rare, lethal combat would have to be rare too.
Perma-death won't work in a MMORPG setting until devs start trying to entertain us with something other than constant slaughter.
Wow, got some pretty emotional responses there, but I'll try to answer some of the more common criticisms.
RPGs are about developping your character.
Really? The Legend of the Green Dragon and Progress Quest must be the greatest RPGs ever made!!
It's like making an arcade where every time you die your score is set to 0.
Yes getting it set to 0 every third death makes all the difference..... en stuff....
People don't want to lose and, condludingly don't want to die.
Wow, thank you for that observation. Now that I know that I'm amazed that chess, checkers, backgammon, spades, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, tennis, golf, or any other zero sum game where one or more players lose are actually still being played. All this time I thought that the definition of a game included that possibility of failure!!! Man was I wrong!
Means if they die, its the fault of the game and if they lose, they tend to quit, not play again.
Yes we see a lot of blaming others in real life too. I'm getting to this one though.
People are NOT masochists and not "archetypical fighters".
I agree with this completely. By that same token, people are not all spineless wimps that are terrified of adversity either. People are actually less adverse to risk when the stakes are incredibly low. The stakes in this case are a simple $5 and I've seen people waste way more than that on lottery tickets. Come to think of it, Lotteries are very popular games and you're almost guaranteed to lose. Hmmmmm.....
If dying meant losing all your points and highscores would you play?
If you don't make the highscore, you do lose all your points. There were also many operators that turned the cabinets off when the arcade closed; thus deleting the highscore table. This didn't stop people coming back the next day compete for the top spot again.
On a similar note, I think that a "Hall of Champions" that ranked the top characters in the game according to various achievements and allowed players to put their own names to those characters would be a great idea. Although you couldn't put your character in the hall until it died. The drive for notoriety is just as strong as the drive for the next cool shiny thing.
go flush $5 down the toilet.
This is basically what you do when you buy / rent / subscribe to games anyway. I'll never get back all the money I spent playing Gauntlet at the arcade. I'll also never get back that time. I might as well have just flushed all those quarters too. Most people here are flushing about $15 a month down the toilet on games that really don't provide engrossing experiences. I know that some people play these games for the social interaction and that's fine too. However, I wonder if we can't have good games and good social interaction. I don't really see Permadeath as being detrimental to either one.
I want easy entertainment, fun, respawn and no frustration.
Well then here is a list of games that will be right up your alley. Part of the reason why most of us are bored with this genre is because it is too easy and free of frustration to feel rewarding. BTW, that sense of accomplishment is what I consider fun. You cannot have a sense of accomplishment without adversity, i.e. the possibility of loss. Fun comes from OVERCOMING adversity, not from having new shiny things handed to you periodically.
There is not enough of you to support a perma death mmo for a company to make a success of it.
Depends on how you define success. If a small setup, say 10 people, made a game like this, they would get to take home more money per developer than WoW with a much smaller server population. It's hard to get people to give you $240 a year (WoW subscription + box + expansion) but it's fairly easy to get people to give you $5 every now and then. This is a niche game, to be sure. But it's certainly not undoable.
The vast majority of people do not want to spend days, maybe weeks working up a character only to lose all that work because of one death.
and yet there are scores of people that play (and are rabidly dedicated to) homebrew Rogue-likes. It can take months to get to the end of something like Sangband only to be killed and have to start all the way over from the beginning. We still play these games though, because death is always due to poor decisions by the gamer. That and the fact that the entire game world gets recreated randomly each time making every game unique....
BTW, I just wanna put in my 2 cents about the lag issue. Since I went broadband, about 4 years ago, I can count how many times I've gone linkdead in a game on one hand. Even when I was playing on dial-up, linkdeath was rare. As for lag itself.... These aren't exactly twitch games now are they? Going back to the "people will blame the game for losing" argument, I can definitely see people whining that ever loss they took was due to linkdeath or lag. Keep logs of network activity on the server and keep 24 hour backups of the character database and you can restore the people that really did go linkdead while ignoring the crybaby liars.
Defeat should be one thing and Death should be another.
Thank you!! So long as your in a group with other players, you can be rezed within a certain time limit. I also agree that 0 HP should just be passed out and - total HP should be dead. This allows for PvP without the risk of losing your character and also allows a margin of error.
I really enjoy permadeath, games however rarely last longer than 10 minutes.
You're thinking of shooters. Permadeath RPGs can actually go on for quite a long time if you know the game well enough.
These next comments I agree with wholeheartedly and they deserve to be restated.
If you remove the continuous character element, you remove the 'easy mode' from MMORPG design, and would force developers to actually incorporate strong, fun gameplay into their games.
Tetris grabs tens of millions of game hours every year, because the gameplay is intrinsically fun. It's truly not about the destination, but about the gameplay.
in a PD system you dont make the game revolve around items and character development... Atleast not ONLY around that.
This one particularly stands out. We've gotten WAAAYYYY to hung up on character advancement being the "end all, be all" of MMORPG design.
The game is not about a Vorpal sword and your 39 strength and the fact that somehow an orc swinging a sword can no longer hurt you even if your naked and afk.
I also like this comment because it points out the complete stupidity of current MMO design. I realize that these are fantasy games, but damn!! There is a limit to what you can get away with fictionally.
I recently started playing nethack again. There is a lack of originality in games these days so I am revisiting some good old games.
I absolutely believe a game can be popular and fun even if it had perma-death in the game. But, the game has to be designed from the ground up with perma-death in mind otherwise it will not work. I would even go as far as making a game where characters age. So you have a limited amount of real world and in game time to accomplish the tasks that you want to achieve.
There is a benefit that people are not seeing to a perma-death game. It is casual player friendly. You can play for a few hours with your friends and if your party gets wiped you guys can log off and play the next evening. There will be less desire to try to play inside an MMO world 24/7. A character dieing is a good time to take a break and go enjoy Real Life TM. People are spending entirely too much time in games these days.
Ok I have rambled enough... I agree that if designed correctly a perma-death game can be popular and fun.
When a hypothetical city I helped constructing was attacked by hypothetical attackers, and my hand-created weapons and my chosen character (with no level and no class) was to defend in a huuuuge battle of hundreds of players against hundreds of players - hell on earth, I would not care.
Fun? - Why? Why is this concept automatically manifesting the essence of fun in your mind? I didn't find SWG with player cities and skillsets or EvE with true economy and death penalty any more fun than the blandest session of WoW arena PvP. Actually, I had the hell of a time doing arena PvP with friends. because of the game? no, because of the friends.
Let's start over - do you guys still chat? Like in 96, when you entered #funbox on your next best IRC network and started typing away. And you got lost there, just talking over the internet... so lets BE serious here: What does permadeath, creation, grand playerstaged events, buildings and empires add to my fun-experience - Right, no - thing.
Give me a ball and a partner to play and I'm happy. What you guys are lacking in is the ability that was so crucial for the AD&D experience, the ability to just have a good time without any fuzzy whirly simulated realities.
Meridion
What you speak of is content I see in my FPS games when I play an MMO I want to make an impact. You do not make any sort of impact in the game world by doing Arenas in WoW. Maybe you'll top some leader board thats it
In WoW, the terrain always looks the same and Developers cannot keep up with the demands of their subscribers to provide content
The solution is to let players drive the content. Let us impact the world (like Age of Conan is doing with player built cities to some extent). just because you did not have fun does not mean thats not many of us would not live for.
If you let people just build what they want well eventually you will most likely run out of terrain so it makes sense to provide some mechanism to allow players to form factions and go to war against each other.
Games like Doom, Half Life, and Unreal found out that allowing players to 'modify' content would indefinetly extend the life of their games. Even WoW allows this in a limited sense with their UI mods. Now if we can just expand this concept to MMOs that would be nice.
Developers have no way at all to determine if someone simply unplugged their internet cable on purpose or if their ISP dropped down. A disconnect is all they will see in their logs. on your server all you know is that the client has dropped the connection that's it. I'll checkout those home brew games
<edit> are those text based games?
why not look at Starport its graphically superior to that stuff and i believe its all perma. even when u logout your ship is always 'still in the world' and if not parked at safe place it can be reaped
If all you want is a social club, then you would probably be happy with Habbo Hotel, Second Life, Zwinky, you local bar, etc....
Some of us -just some of us- want an actual game to go with that social interaction.
The current leveling treadmill is completely inadequate in this regard. I'll grant that arena PvP, when it's done right, is highly entertaining. But it remains a fact that the meat and potatoes PvE in most MMORPGs is duller than dirtwater. I find this totally bizarre when I consider that I can still play through thousands of battle in Final Fantasy 3 or Dragon Quest 8 and still be completely engrossed in what's happening. Although I think that a lot of why those old JRPGs were so entertaining was a combination of storyline and the fact that you were managing a whole party in combat and not just one character. The last part seems to be quite a bit of it since I don't really have any fun in MMORPGs unless I'm grouping with other players.
Grouping and socializing are a little bit different though. It's the difference between having a meal at the IHOP with friends and playing a game of football with the same friends. One is just conversation over adequate food while the other is focused teamwork. With modern MMOs, even the focus teamwork part gets really stale, really quick.
permadeath is just one way to add tension to the proceedings while encouraging the developers to make their games more challenging and therefore more compelling. If I was all about having a good time socializing, I'd just hang out on Yahoo chat.
I won't play a game that has mandatory permanent death.
Immersion. That is why. The need, or simply the desire to feel the world to a point you can beleive for a moment it is real. Roleplay does that, and a number of other things (pretty graphics, environmental sounds effects) help as well.
The idea behind perma-death is that it allows players to feel a real sense of danger. What thrill is there when you know that even if you get your ass whooped by that 12-heads hydra you'll come back as strong as before?
Imagine fighting this same hydra and knowing that you can defeat her just as she can gnaw your head off. Imagine knowing that if she does, there is no coming back. Now imagine you do defeat her. The thrill is something no ball game can give.
You say we lack the ability to have a good time without simulation. Matter of opinions. I say you lack the ability to immerse yourself into a universe and feel it.
It's not a matter of who's right or wrong, it's a matter of what kind of player you are. I play a MMORPG for the universe. I play my character for the dept I can put into it. I (role)play to feel for a couple of hours that I'm that paladin who is one bite away from lose his head to a hydra, a few rooms away to find that legendary sword, or words away from seducing that cute elf. During that time, I'm no longer sitting at a computer.
If something like perma-death can add that sense of reality to my game, all the better.
That you prefer a more immediate, accessible gameplay that just allows you to have a good time with friends from around the world is your right and it's all good, but there are other ways to play a game, especially a MMORPG.
WHY have permadeath?
We all know the disadvantages. Why bother? What does it add to your gameplay?
We have many reasons for playing these games. Hundreds, really. But two very important reasons why many people play are for the adrenaline rush or excitement - and for the chance to play a hero.
Permadeath enhances both of these.
Obviously, greater risk results in greater excitement from gameplay. When more is on the line, the stakes are higher, and you have to fight as hard as you can or lose big, then everything is a big deal. There's a reason why every single sports movie climaxes during the final 30 seconds of the Big Game with the score tied - if one side or the other was winning by a landslide, no one would care. But in a close match where everything is won or lost RIGHT HERE, then everything you do matters.
Shadowbane created a higher level of intense excitement than perhaps any other MMOG before or since. It did this by creating massive risk around the major battles, massive risk around losing your city to another group of players. The greater the risk, the greater the sense of accomplishment when you succeed.
In a game like WOW, where success is merely a measure of time spent, and ANYONE can succeed if they grind long enough, then there is no real challenge, nor feeling of risk, nor feeling of accomplishment for anyone. Success without risk is hollow. Now, some people LIKE that, and - that's OK. But skydiving, surfing, skiing, snowboarding, car racing, and other high risk sports are extremely popular for a reason - people like risk. And people like WATCHING others take risks, because they like living that risk vicariously without having to actually risk their own life and limb. Permadeath MMOGs can give players that sort of experience - a feeling of great risk without actually losing their own lives.
Heroism is the other reason I mentioned, and is perhaps the more important.
Heroism requires risk of loss. It is absolutely necessary. You simply cannot ever exhibit heroism at any level if you do not have any risk of loss. To extend the above example, no character in WOW can ever act like a hero. The gameplay of the game simply prohibits the existence of heroism, because there is never any chance of loss.
Superman is not heroic when he rescues someone from a burning building. He is doing a good thing; but it is not heroic. When a normal firefighter runs into that same building to save someone, THAT is heroism, because s/he is risking life and limb to try to help someone else.
Loss of experience or items is some risk. AC1-Darktide showed some heroic moments, when players risked loss of items and massive vitae (which took time to recover from) to win battles. Shadowbane had some heroic moments, because acting true to your ideals often meant risking losing your city, which was a great risk. Permadeath is perhaps the ultimate in such risk - the greatest risk possible in an online RPG.
The greater the risk, the greater the level of heroism shown. Some people do not want that level of risk in their game, and sacrifice that level of heroism in exchange. Many people DO though. They know in their guts that they can get a deeper experience from a greater risk. And that's why permadeath keeps coming up, as the holy grail of greatest risk - and greatest chance to play a hero.
Owyn
Commander, Defenders of Order
http://www.defendersoforder.com
Permadeath
What is it? What does it mean? Will it work? If you follow the forums of any new MMORPG out there you have probably seen this buzzword brought up quite a bit. (Mayhaps even by me!) But though it is hotly debated it also very misunderstood. So lets define and discuss it.‘Perma’ is a latin root which means to stay to the end, last or endure. Death is also derived from a latin root, most commonly Mort… but other roots are related, namely: “nex, mortalitas, mors mortis, letum, plecto aliquem capite, excessum, decessus”. (As a side note many of those would make great character names). So essentially we’re talking about a word that means to stay dead.
In a permadeath MMORPG the idea is to implement a system where a character could end up in a permanently dead state. Some examples are:
PdoT: You will permanently die over time. This has two subclasses, ‘Subclass A’ that accounts for skill and ‘Subclass B’ that does not. In the first you are given X lives and when you run out of them you must reroll but in the latter you are given X time and irregardless of your actions or skill you will reroll when that time is used up.
Iron Man Permadeath: You get one life. When you die you reroll. (There is the Dungeons and Dragons variation of this that allows you to be resurrected from the dead state by a friend but each resurrection uses up a hard limit. Commonly related to a physical attribute such as health or constitution.)
Watch your step: This is actually a combination of both Subclasses of PdoT. You are given X lives for X time. Commonly it is X lives per 24 hours. Should you die more then X times in this specific time period then you will reroll, however every X period of times that number will reset. Some allow roll-over lives like a cell phone plan and some don’t.
Permadeath is a great departure from current games that treat death like unconsciousness. You black out briefly and then awake at some distant spawn point. In fact there is no real death and the concept doesn’t actually exist in most games.
The fact that most MMORPGs don’t feature a state of permanent death is a big turn off for those that crave a virtual world. It is near impossible to accurately portray a virtual simulation of life that is missing something as common as death. It removes to a degree the concept of skill. Those with more time invested in the game will become more skilled and more powerful then anyone else. It indirectly places too much value on your avatar rather then your avatar’s actions and deeds. It allows players to win against other players.
Why are MMORPGs just now beginning to incorporate this exciting new feature? Well first of all it’s not really an exciting new feature. Anyone who has played pong or any other arcade game is familiar with the ancient feature. The question really is why has it taken so long for MMORPGs to begin to use it. Well likely because they are designed by older people who believe they will lose players if their ‘Main Avatar’ permanently dies. MMORPGs are designed around credit cards and thus most make it impossible for you to lose. Death can only slow you down, it can never kill you and you can never lose thus you must stick around to win, bubble by bubble, dollar by dollar until the end. Game expansions are designed to be so tedious that even the most skilled player could not conquer it before the next planned expansion can release. It’s a bait and hook tactic and it works for a large majority of the players. The rest get bored and move on to a new game. They normally attribute their move to a new game to boredom, graphics or their whole guild left so their going with them but few every analyze what it is they truly left for.
As a matter of personal opinion I like PdoT Subclass A in combination with unrestricted PvP and skill based character development. (As opposed to level based) I would like such a game to feature real world simulated physics. I would go so far as to say characters should have to eat, drink and keep their avatars appropriately dressed for their environment. Unrealistic features which turn games into chat rooms should be removed, that is things like Clan talk, Tell, gossip etc. Long distance communication should only be feasible through magic or messengers. The number of lives characters receive should be enough to compensate for lag deaths, network unreliability and bad decisions but few enough to bring about Challenge.
VOTE
Meridion you are becoming one of my favorite posters around here.
I agree with you on the permadeath thing. Now from what I understand, the reasons people have for permadeath can be broken down into the following:
1) Death currently has no meaning, and permadeath will give it meaning.
2) Death currently is contrary to realism and immersiveness, and permadeath will make the game realistic and immersive.
3) Death currently emphasizes the character, rather than the gear, and permadeath will put the emphasis back on the character, and not the gear.
I actually agree that death should mean more than a simple respawn. I actually had that in SWG when it launched. To all of you that remembered that game, if you died, or even if you just kept on fighting for long periods of time, your character would wear down. You'd lose points off of your attributes, and you'd need to go to the hospital to see a doctor. You'd get fatigued, and needed to go to the cantina for some R'n"R. All of the healing and recreating was done by other players, and I thought it was totally cool, appropriate, and realistic. It certainly gave death some meaning, because you just couldn't throw away your toon willy-nilly without having to recover.
Death and injury had meaning in SWG, because it meant that a certain chain of events had to occurr to get yourself back "whole" again. It certainly was realistic and immersive in SWG. Its part of what made it seem like a living universe seeing players play doctors actually healing in hospitals, and players playing entertainers actually giving recreation in the cantinas. Of course the drugs had to be created to heal, and the instruments and costumes had to be created; all by players, and all because death had meaning in SWG.
You see, in the early SWG, your character had to be maintained to be in prime condition. The loot and the skills didn't mean crap if you had hardly any stats due to careless dying or injury. You had to find doctors and entertainers to tend to your characters needs, like we do with our needs.
We no longer have that in SWG. Frankly, death has very little meaning in SWG today, like the other MMOs. Why was the death system removed?
It wasn't the carebears and roleplayers (all the 'foofoo whiny' types who don't use TS/vent that the hardcore hates) who minded. In fact, most of them were the ones manning the hospitals and cantinas. They didn't mind going back to town, because they actually thought such a system added character and depth to the game.
The death system died because too many hardcores, like the ones I see here, thought it was just too painful, and was too distracting from getting into the action ASAP. Because when push came to shove, all the hardcore really wanted was to push their toon around as a vehicle for their own desires for loot and pwnage. They did not see their toons as things they were supposed to sympathize with, and respond to. They saw the death system as it stands as just another obstacle to the source of their fun: which wasn't connected to dying, but rather, running through content with as little artificial obstacles as possible.
If the hardcore folks can't even handle a death system as functional, realistic, and useful as was found with SWG because it was too tedious and bothersome, then how the heck are they going to going to respond to permadeath, which is far more inconvenient, and far less interesting from a play aspect? I mean, the hardcore clan combat types thought that going to the cantina for two minutes to hear music was too excessive of a burden. And the developers listened to this hardcore, and wussed out the death system despite the objections from the roleplayers and carebears. If they can't even like the prospect of going back to the hospital and waiting around for the doc, then how in the heck are they gonna like the prospect of rerolling another toon, starting from square one to get with their buddies who are all level 42, and fragging purples?
Now to be fair, permadeath can work in certain MUDs and MUSHs. I remember I played a Dune MUSH that had permadeath. However, combat was a secondary concern in those games, which were mainly about roleplay, developing plots, and character interaction. But I don't see how it can work in MMOs centered around combat as the means to do...well...everything important.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Point 1 is wrong because permadeath is meant to make the character's LIFE more meaningful. I know that I'm going to die, this means that I try to make the time I have count. Same thing with a character in a permadeath MMO. No matter how good you are, inevitably you're character will die. It's not about punishing the player. It's about providing real threat that adds weight to the assessment of in-game risks.
Point 2 is wrong on the grounds that you seem to think that realism = immersion. While death is the default condition of our reality, immersion isn't the primary reason that we want permadeath. We want permadeath to add some much needed tension to the proceedings. When you play a game where every challenge is a foregone conclusion, it's boring. It's only when you DON'T KNOW the outcome that real dramatic entertainment can emerge.
Point 3 is wrong because we aren't trying to put the emphasis on character stats or gear. Permadeath is about concentrating on what the character is doing rather than what the character can do and how many XP points before s/he can do something else. We want to take the focus OFF of character advancement a put it squarely on GAMEPLAY.
There are a lot of arguments that reasonably support permadeath. It's just that most people have a knee jerk reaction against it without really considering all the implications thereof.
From Wikipedia-
In multi-player computer games Due to player desires and the resulting market forces involved, MMORPGs (such as World of Warcraft) and other multiplayer-focused RPGs almost never have permanent death. Richard Bartle has compared player distaste for permadeath to player distaste for pedophilia.[1] For games which charge an ongoing fee to play, permanant death may drive a player away, creating a financial disencentive to include permanant death.[2] Diablo II is a noteworthy, mainstream exception that includes support for an optional "hardcore" mode when playing online. "Hardcore mode" in Diablo II subjects characters to permanent death. Star Wars Galaxies had permadeath for Jedi characters for a short period, but later eliminated that functionality.[3] The majority of MMORPG players are unwilling to accept the large penalty of losing their character.
Some MMORPGs experimented with permanent death as part of an attempt to simulate a more realistic world, but the majority of players preferred to not risk permanent death for their characters. As a result, while MMORPGs are occasionally announced that feature permanent death, most either never ship (so called vaporware) or are changed to remove permanent death so as to increase the game's mass appeal.
Point 1 is wrong because permadeath is meant to make the character's LIFE more meaningful. I know that I'm going to die, this means that I try to make the time I have count. Same thing with a character in a permadeath MMO. No matter how good you are, inevitably you're character will die. It's not about punishing the player. It's about providing real threat that adds weight to the assessment of in-game risks.
Point 2 is wrong on the grounds that you seem to think that realism = immersion. While death is the default condition of our reality, immersion isn't the primary reason that we want permadeath. We want permadeath to add some much needed tension to the proceedings. When you play a game where every challenge is a foregone conclusion, it's boring. It's only when you DON'T KNOW the outcome that real dramatic entertainment can emerge.
Point 3 is wrong because we aren't trying to put the emphasis on character stats or gear. Permadeath is about concentrating on what the character is doing rather than what the character can do and how many XP points before s/he can do something else. We want to take the focus OFF of character advancement a put it squarely on GAMEPLAY.
There are a lot of arguments that reasonably support permadeath. It's just that most people have a knee jerk reaction against it without really considering all the implications thereof.
I think its just variations on a theme more or less, but we'll go with your variations.
1) Death as it is currently makes character life have no meaning, and permadeath will give character life meaning.
Now perhaps someone can explain to me how permadeath is going to spontaneously start making players play meaningfully, when there is really nothing in the games that is meaningful beyond combat? If the only activity in the game involves risking permanent death, and the thing that determines life or death is just a random number generator in the combat engine, then it seems to me that character lives are ultimately meaningless. What does it say when the blue MOBs you fought 1000 times before with no problem suddenly roll freakish numbers, and kill you? How is having your toon killed by freakish rolls from the random number generator "heroic," and how does that really make your experience meaningful in any way that it wouldn't be, had you no permadeath?
It seems to me that if we want to make player lives have meaning beyond just life and death struggles, we should make the game about more than life and death struggles. That means combat has to be so much in the background about what the game is designed to accomplish, that you could enjoy yourself for years, and never engage in it.
The games I knew that had permadeath (mainly MUDs and MUSHs) weren't about combat. They were about intrigue, roleplay, and plot development. Now if you are fine walking around with avatars ala Second Life spending 90% of your time in character chatting with other players, then yeah, permadeath isn't so bad. Then again, there is no incentive to risk death in those games under normal circumstances, because the games never emphasized combat much at all. But make no mistake. Those roleplay heavy MUDs and MUSHs didn't have players who played their characters meaningfully because of the permadeath. They had permadeath because they played their characters meaningfully, and had better things to do than simply do combat all day.
2) Death as it is currently adds no much needed tension, and creates predictable outcomes; thus permadeath is needed to add tension, and make the outcomes unpredictable.
If tension is so lacking in today's games, then I don't think it has to do with the design, as much as it has to do with how players play the games these days. Hardcores are actually the mosr risk adverse players I know, who are obsessed with efficiency, and do not leave anything to chance. I don't think this is going to change whether permadeath is instituted or not. If anything, it will only encourage more risk adverse behavior, more efficiency, and more repetition of established patterns, which eventually creates boring, stagnant gameplay.
Then again, if the entire extent of the gameplay revolves around what happens in the combat engine, then the entire game becomes nothing more than fighting PvP and PvE perpetually until you get bored. With permadeath, all you really change is make it so players have more reasons to leave other than natural churn.
Without some modicum of predictability, long-term games like these become pointless. How can you set goals, work toward them, make choices, and achieve them when it can all disappear upon one stupid dice roll at anytime? Yes its tense, and unpredictable, but then there is no real incentive to think beyond the mere moment toward anything in the future. Games don't become more meaningful when they are unpredictable and tense. If anything, I would think that games would become much more disposable and frustrating when they unpredictable and tense.
3) Death as it currently exists makes games about character advancement and gear; thus permadeath is needed to put the emphasis back on gameplay.
Describe "gameplay?" Is it roleplay? If so, how is permadeath going to encourage roleplay, when players don't roleplay now? Is it politics? Chatting? Artistic performances and self-expression? How are these all going to magically appear simply by instituting permadeath? See, the problem is that games today, and more importantly, the players who play the games today really don't offer anything amusing to do that doesn't involve either character advancement, or gear. But it seems to me that the solution to that problem isn't to institute permadeath. The solution to that is to include amusing things to do that aren't level or skill dependent, or loot dependent. But I don't see how changing the death system is going to help create amusing things to do. All it will do is just make the shallow things we do now just be that much more annoying, using a solution that is frankly, just not very creative.
Nothing is stopping people from doing what a poster said above me, and delete your characters upon death. Yet why don't we do it? Probably because its not very interesting to do.
And that about sums up a lot of the reasons players want permadeath. They think the games are uninterestingly designed, and uninterestingly played. But to me, the solution is to make the games more interesting, and play the games in interesting ways; both of which may not necessarily require a radical and counterintuitive mechanic like permadeath.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE