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Character death in MMORPG's
GrayPhilosopher
Member UncommonPosts: 78
So Chronicles of Elyria is coming up, and they're pitching a pretty interesting death mechanic with the whole aging and spirit walking thing. Essentially they've got permanent character death once you finally run out of life for good.
I've often thought about the idea of permanent character death in videogames, particularly MMO's. Mostly because death is often just a bump in the road, a time sink to "punish" you for making a mistake. I've often found that dying might not be the best way to implement a small insignificant slap on the wrist though, since actually dying is indeed quite a permanent state.
In regards to that, I've always played around with the idea of making a 'Permanent Character Death' system for an MMO type of game, and how I'd make it work. Now of course, you should be able to make a new character and keep playing, and the game would naturally have to be designed in a way, so that it's easy to jump into with a new character for it to work.
What's your stance on the potential of permanent character death? and how would you make it work?
What I've come up with so far (and feel free to give feedback), is what I call a "Legacy System". Combined with a series of other mechanics to make it work in the first place.
So you create your character and start playing. As you progress and level up, something equivalent to character-specific achievements are unlocked during play. These are all recorded in your character's history log, or whatever you'd like to call it, to create a sort of timeline of events during your character's "life".
When your character eventually dies, this history timeline becomes available for review, to preserve that character's story. Additionally, all those character-specific achievements you've unlocked, now turn into potential benefits or different skills or skill lines for subsequent characters.
Meaning, when your initial character dies, you actually gain something. You unlock things for new characters, that were previously unavailable. All depending on how well you do with the initial character. The greater your character was in life, the greater their legacy becomes.
Now, in order to prevent people dying all the time and never getting anywhere. It would have to at least be relatively easy to get out of trouble alive, or avoid it in the first place.
When your health reaches zero, you don't immediately die, but rather become incapacitated or unconscious etc. In this state most enemies would leave you alone to eventually recover.
In case of a PVP situation, when you're defeated (or you defeat an enemy player). The deafeated player becomes incapacitated, "kill" experience is granted to the victor, along with whatever reward you'd otherwise get. However, it would be up to the victorious player themselves whether or not to then execute the defeated player, permanently killing their character. There would be no objective incentive to do this, as there would be no additional reward, safe for perhaps a scalp or some vanity trophy. Instead, only a potential consequence in the form of infamy or negative karma or some equivalent that would make other players more likely to hunt them down without the same consequences.
This became quite a wall of text, sorry about that.
EDIT:
TL;DR:
Permanent character death in MMO's. Yes? No? Why? If possible, how would you make it work?
I've often thought about the idea of permanent character death in videogames, particularly MMO's. Mostly because death is often just a bump in the road, a time sink to "punish" you for making a mistake. I've often found that dying might not be the best way to implement a small insignificant slap on the wrist though, since actually dying is indeed quite a permanent state.
In regards to that, I've always played around with the idea of making a 'Permanent Character Death' system for an MMO type of game, and how I'd make it work. Now of course, you should be able to make a new character and keep playing, and the game would naturally have to be designed in a way, so that it's easy to jump into with a new character for it to work.
What's your stance on the potential of permanent character death? and how would you make it work?
What I've come up with so far (and feel free to give feedback), is what I call a "Legacy System". Combined with a series of other mechanics to make it work in the first place.
So you create your character and start playing. As you progress and level up, something equivalent to character-specific achievements are unlocked during play. These are all recorded in your character's history log, or whatever you'd like to call it, to create a sort of timeline of events during your character's "life".
When your character eventually dies, this history timeline becomes available for review, to preserve that character's story. Additionally, all those character-specific achievements you've unlocked, now turn into potential benefits or different skills or skill lines for subsequent characters.
Meaning, when your initial character dies, you actually gain something. You unlock things for new characters, that were previously unavailable. All depending on how well you do with the initial character. The greater your character was in life, the greater their legacy becomes.
Now, in order to prevent people dying all the time and never getting anywhere. It would have to at least be relatively easy to get out of trouble alive, or avoid it in the first place.
When your health reaches zero, you don't immediately die, but rather become incapacitated or unconscious etc. In this state most enemies would leave you alone to eventually recover.
In case of a PVP situation, when you're defeated (or you defeat an enemy player). The deafeated player becomes incapacitated, "kill" experience is granted to the victor, along with whatever reward you'd otherwise get. However, it would be up to the victorious player themselves whether or not to then execute the defeated player, permanently killing their character. There would be no objective incentive to do this, as there would be no additional reward, safe for perhaps a scalp or some vanity trophy. Instead, only a potential consequence in the form of infamy or negative karma or some equivalent that would make other players more likely to hunt them down without the same consequences.
This became quite a wall of text, sorry about that.
EDIT:
GrayPhilosopher said:
You guys have some good points. The primary argument I see against it, is the fact that nobody wants to lose the progress they've made, which is a valid argument.
The intention with this "legacy system" was to prevent exactly that. The idea is that you keep the progress you've made and even gain some when you die. It's only the character's "identity" so to speak, that dies. I realize this wasn't explained very well in the original post.
TL;DR:
Permanent character death in MMO's. Yes? No? Why? If possible, how would you make it work?
Post edited by GrayPhilosopher on
Comments
"Now, in order to prevent people dying all the time and never getting anywhere. It would have to at least be relatively easy to get out of trouble alive, or avoid it in the first place."
"and the game would naturally have to be designed in a way, so that it's easy to jump into it with a new character for it to work."
I do believe I quite clearly adressed this problem in the post. I see your point though, it's valid. But I think given the idea that the game was designed with it in mind, it wouldn't have to be an issue.
The intention with this "legacy system" was to prevent exactly that. The idea is that you keep the progress you've made and even gain some when you die. It's only the character's "identity" so to speak, that dies. I realize this wasn't explained very well in the original post.
I imagine the issue of "Identity Loss," is going to be countered by the player by making identical looking characters with the same name, "Boozer2," "Boozer3," etc.
Regardless of how its handled there will always be those who exploit it in some fashion or other, and if a characters 'heir' can be identified through a family name as it is in BDO, then the chances are that they will be 'forcibly' removed from the game in much the same manner as their original character.
if your character was killed/executed chances are that whoever did it, won't take the chance of leaving an enemy alive, regardless of their current 'incarnation'.
For PvP for instance, it won't be a question of whether or not you execute the person you've just been in combat with, you would be a fool if you didn't execute them, because if the tables were turned, and at some point thats likely, they would undoubtedly do the same to you, and as the saying goes;
'do unto others as they would do unto you, only do it first!'
CoE might be the first game to actually encourage 'blood feuds' either way there will be a lot of PvP, and i seriously doubt that the players will restrain themselves from choosing the execute option, after all, while there is no physical gain from doing so, you would be foolish indeed if you didn't.
Thus perma-death is certainly interesting to me. I think it should be done in a way that you can quite easily avoid it if you play reasonably skilled. After all we are heroes in the story.
But I think for typical mmorpgs serious death penalties are a better mechanism than permadeath. Multiplayer survival games are of course another story, there perma death obviously fits really well.