Such design is a cop-out - and it's artificial challenge. Essentially, you can take any pushover MMO and add severe XP loss upon death, and you'll magically have a "challenging" game.
In that same way, Dark Souls is a challenging game - because your ass is kicked when you fail.
That's not how I would go about creating challenge.
Instead of punishing people because they're not paying attention, make paying attention essential - and make overcoming challenges rewarding.
Essentially, make combat challenging and let death be the result of a lack of skill. But, more than that, make combat exciting and WORTH the investment.
The combination of challenge and an appropriate reward is what will motivate players and keep them motivated.
Why isn't it the norm? Because it's hard to make a great combat system - and it's hard to create content that feels rewarding.
Much, much easier to punish people for not caring about your shit game.
It's not really a cop out as you put it.
For instance if you choose to play Uncharted 4 on Crushing (I did that and beat the game) it will give you less checkpoints and more monsters. That means you have to be skilled enough to get through a large area without making any or very few mistakes. If you have checks points all over it's easier because you only have to do will for small segments. You can perfect each small segment one at a time. It's much more difficult to perfect a large area of game.
In Dark Souls 2 you have a death penalty on top of that. This makes the game harder by again forcing you to play better. You can't half ass it over and over again until you beat it because each time you die you loose a little bit of your health bar. Eventually your health will be so low that you won't be able to play. There are a finite amount of items that will restore said health.
Another example would be Resident Evil the original game. In order to unlock the Rock Launcher with unlimited ammo you had to beat the entire game without saving. I went through it once and I can say it really had an impact on me from an emotional stand point compared to just playing through in small segments. I couldn't afford to make one mistake the entire play through so I had to be on my toes the entire time. There was no way to play through it casually and make it. It was basically permadeath.
Having played through said games I can say those mechanics do stimulate those types of feelings. It might have less impact in this day and age because people can jump ship to another game easily, but I can say I definitely was fearful of death. I did usually choose a safe spot, but that only makes sense. First you have to find the safe spot. Old games didn't tell you what was safe and what wasn't safe. There was no guide to direct you around to the appropriate content. If you played Dark Souls you should know the feeling. You are playing through extremely cautiously and all of a sudden your panicked and running for your life because you know if you lose you will have to start at the beginning and suffer a penalty (which is not even steep compared to a game like UO or EQ). It is that fear of lose of time and effort that really stimulates emotional outbursts. Depending on what you are looking for in game that might be fun or not.
I don't agree with your reasoning on why those types of games have done badly so far. It is simply because the market is saturated and it's to easy to jump ship to another game. Adversity can be avoided easily as there is no need to overcome it.
I played most of those games as well, but I can't really do anything more then just disagree with you there. After dying a few times we usually spent a few hours grinding back the XP at some pretty easy farm spot in a group and to me at least it was just annoying, not something I feared but something closer to do the dishes after a meal or wash my clothes. It was neither challenging nor fun, just something you had to do.
As for the games you loose all your gear when dying, I can only think of 1 game that havn't done pathetic and that is Eve. Well, there was UO as well but UO basically only had M59 as competition originally and I don't think losing the gear on dying was what made UO a success. Eve is a rather different type of game.
Since then (Eve came out in 2001) have any game trying something similar crashed and burned. EQs corpse run was a different thing because there you could actually retrive your items unless you died in lava and that was far less draconic. The only thing I have against the corpse run mechanics is that it is so silly.
Item progress and losing all gear upon dying does not work, games like Mortal online and Darkfall that tried it the last 10 years never got close to 100K players and those games did not really have that large focus on gear, if you added it to a standard themepark things would be far worse. If you must have a draconic death penalty you might as well go for permadeath, it wont upset players more and would at least be more realistic.
Having played through said games I can say those mechanics do stimulate those types of feelings. It might have less impact in this day and age because people can jump ship to another game easily, but I can say I definitely was fearful of death. I did usually choose a safe spot, but that only makes sense. First you have to find the safe spot. Old games didn't tell you what was safe and what wasn't safe. There was no guide to direct you around to the appropriate content. If you played Dark Souls you should know the feeling. You are playing through extremely cautiously and all of a sudden your panicked and running for your life because you know if you lose you will have to start at the beginning and suffer a penalty (which is not even steep compared to a game like UO or EQ). It is that fear of lose of time and effort that really stimulates emotional outbursts. Depending on what you are looking for in game that might be fun or not.
I don't agree with your reasoning on why those types of games have done badly so far. It is simply because the market is saturated and it's to easy to jump ship to another game. Adversity can be avoided easily as there is no need to overcome it.
I played most of those games as well, but I can't really do anything more then just disagree with you there. After dying a few times we usually spent a few hours grinding back the XP at some pretty easy farm spot in a group and to me at least it was just annoying, not something I feared but something closer to do the dishes after a meal or wash my clothes. It was neither challenging nor fun, just something you had to do.
As for the games you loose all your gear when dying, I can only think of 1 game that havn't done pathetic and that is Eve. Well, there was UO as well but UO basically only had M59 as competition originally and I don't think losing the gear on dying was what made UO a success. Eve is a rather different type of game.
Since then (Eve came out in 2001) have any game trying something similar crashed and burned. EQs corpse run was a different thing because there you could actually retrive your items unless you died in lava and that was far less draconic. The only thing I have against the corpse run mechanics is that it is so silly.
Item progress and losing all gear upon dying does not work, games like Mortal online and Darkfall that tried it the last 10 years never got close to 100K players and those games did not really have that large focus on gear, if you added it to a standard themepark things would be far worse. If you must have a draconic death penalty you might as well go for permadeath, it wont upset players more and would at least be more realistic.
That's interesting as I never looked at it as an annoyance. It was just part of the game and something to have to overcome. I am surprised that you wouldn't have any emotion about loss of experience or items. Considering it often took a lot of time and effort to gain either losing it was not a fun time. That moment you are about to lose it is similar to when you are playing a sport and time slows down during and important moment. You are trying desperately to avoid losing that time and effort you put into the game. You also realize that you may end up dying more trying to recover your corpse (which makes it even worse because you are going to lose more). You also have the time lost that it takes to travel back to your corpse. At least for me this made those moments of near death very intense. It made those trains coming towards you scary. It made that mob that wanders bye and possible adds scary. I did solo a lot in EQ which made my progress even slower. Perhaps that is part of what made it an intense experience for me. My grouping mostly came from pickup groups where I was camping or happened upon a camp and had to share with other people. With that said I don't think most people are looking for that kind of intensity in a game. Most people are more casual and want to just relax.
I'm not really all that keen on harsh death penalties anymore. Such penalties seem a rather juvenile way for someone to claim "You died. I'm better than you", when your power goes out for 2 minutes. There's always that guy ready to gloat, even in a PvE setting. Call this a very definitive 'nay' vote.
I'm actually with @nariusseldon on this one. Let the player determine what penalties they want to face, not tailor the entire game experience to the harshest, most brutal extremes and force that on everyone. Such a mechanism, if there is one, shouldn't be able to be changed when a character is running from certain death with 8 HPs left.
I suggested something long ago in a game. At character creation have a slider for death penalty. Where 10 is permadeath and 1 is basically no penalty. Allow players the option to lower it but never raise it. Allow guilds to have a requirement of a specific setting (range) to join. So you can have permadeath guilds. Some still don't like it.
If someone don't like it, they are not being logical. No matter what DP they like, it should be between the two extremes.
There is a big problem with death penalties in mmos...
If you die due to lag, you just wasted your time. If you get ganked by max level griefers, you just wasted your time. If you play casually and happen to die over and over and over, you just wasted your time.
I think harsh death penalties are only good on hardcore pvp servers, nowhere else.
IMO i dont think its a good idea to have penalties in games where stats matter more than player skills either. An opponent with much higher stats(gear) will effectively waste your time.
EDIT: i like challenge in games, but penalties are not for all types of games.
It would work if everyone fought with honor. But we all know what really happens...
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
There is a big problem with death penalties in mmos...
If you die due to lag, you just wasted your time. If you get ganked by max level griefers, you just wasted your time. If you play casually and happen to die over and over and over, you just wasted your time.
I think harsh death penalties are only good on hardcore pvp servers, nowhere else.
IMO i dont think its a good idea to have penalties in games where stats matter more than player skills either. An opponent with much higher stats(gear) will effectively waste your time.
EDIT: i like challenge in games, but penalties are not for all types of games.
You said it yourself.
Just give players an option. They can choose what they can live with, and what they cannot.
There is a big problem with death penalties in mmos...
If you die due to lag, you just wasted your time. If you get ganked by max level griefers, you just wasted your time. If you play casually and happen to die over and over and over, you just wasted your time.
I think harsh death penalties are only good on hardcore pvp servers, nowhere else.
IMO i dont think its a good idea to have penalties in games where stats matter more than player skills either. An opponent with much higher stats(gear) will effectively waste your time.
EDIT: i like challenge in games, but penalties are not for all types of games.
You said it yourself.
Just give players an option. They can choose what they can live with, and what they cannot.
The problem than becomes, given the choice few players will flag themselves, causing hardcore players to complain and leave. There's a reason why this keeps being tried and the population ends up being low. The incentives just aren't there.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Give players the option to chose? How would that work.. ?
(Not counting having PVP/Hardcore-servers on top of existing ones)
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Give players the option to chose? How would that work.. ?
(Not counting having PVP/Hardcore-servers on top of existing ones)
"Giving players the option to choose" is just meaningless drivel that's being used for the sake of arguing.
Players already have abundant options, there's a wide range of games (and server types) available. Trying to make all games suitable for all player tastes is a hopeless pipe-dream that is guaranteed to ultimately fail.
Sigh. Thousands upon thousands of people will sign up for a one way trip to mars (permadeath), but can't face it in a virtual environment where they'll be able to continue going in some way after the fact. I guess suicide has better ratings than MMO's these days XD
Trolling, being trolled, getting banned, yelling at mods, getting perma banned, making new accounts, and still trolling this site since 2004 =D
My own opinion about death penalties in games, is that there are plenty of games out there that don't have them, and i'll play them instead. I play for fun.
Sigh. Thousands upon thousands of people will sign up for a one way trip to mars (permadeath), but can't face it in a virtual environment where they'll be able to continue going in some way after the fact. I guess suicide has better ratings than MMO's these days XD
I'm pretty sure none of them would have signed-up if they knew they would die as soon as they reached Mars, lol
The Mars trip is no more representative of permadeath than life here on Earth. The only real comparison would be that the Mars expedition has a significant risk of being a much shorter game.
My own opinion about death penalties in games, is that there are plenty of games out there that don't have them, and i'll play them instead. I play for fun.
That's a valid reason. Unfortunately, what happens is that IF a game comes out that has all the new cool stuff that everyone wants and has been wishing for, but has some sort of penalties/permadeath, the whiners come en masse and all but destroy the game before it's even in beta. It's happened, especially on this particular site, thus ruining what could have been a great game just because people didn't want to play for fun, they want everyone to suffer their same boredom as they do in the 'plenty of other games'.
Trolling, being trolled, getting banned, yelling at mods, getting perma banned, making new accounts, and still trolling this site since 2004 =D
My own opinion about death penalties in games, is that there are plenty of games out there that don't have them, and i'll play them instead. I play for fun.
Me too, but...
Different people... different ideas about what's fun. I mean there really are people out there who pay good money to a dominatrix to be humiliated for fun.
Just be happy that you're in the middle of the bell curve and you'll always have many more choices of what to play than the outliers.
I always find it funny though when people take their idea of fun so seriously that they jump up on soapboxes and attribute all kinds of unrelated benefits to their personal preference. I have no problem with them going about their business enjoying their punishment quietly. But when they try to tell the rest of us that this is what real gamers do or that it builds communities I just have to laugh.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
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Very bad design for an online game. A simple Internet problem, which may not even come from your provider but just a major lag spike, and you're dead, losing all your stuff and hours of gameplay.
Not entirely so, as has been discussed to death here in years past. In most games with an attack queuing system, a bad lag spike interprets on your screen as a rapid succession of those attacks after the spike, you just lose the ability to aim or stay mobile in a controllable manner. That's not a design flaw, that's the crap state of people's overpriced internet connections that the majority at large have accepted. Even in PVE games, I've watched nerdrage of hulk proportions when someone gets disconnected and comes back dead, so you can't blame a TYPE of game for a problem that affects ALL games with much the same end result from those with.... issues >.>
Trolling, being trolled, getting banned, yelling at mods, getting perma banned, making new accounts, and still trolling this site since 2004 =D
For me, personally, I'm fine with a modicum of XP penalty. Yes, those lag spikes will kill you. But they really aren't that common. More people die to mistargeting or miskeying than to lag. As for gear loss, even with games that give it a corpse run. Lose power/internet, and then have real life come up and all your gear can be gone, without a way to EASILY get it back. That is, unless, gear is easily obtainable. EVE does a good job on losing loot. Unless you already wasted all your money, you are able to regear yourself with the same items, with just a ISK loss. As for XP, at current, EQ1 still does a good job. The fights are "hard" but manageable, especially with proper CC. They XP loss hurts, but when you are high enough level, it basically gives something to aim for.....somewhat.
Difficulty generally gets to you to play better. The problem is to make something difficult for good players it's almost unplayable for bad ones.
In the old days you just played until you got better. Now players are going to whine or quit. Doesn't seem like the average MMORPG player has the fortitude.
Depends. If a game has at aleast somewhat complex boss mechanics and its about trial and error, like most PvE dungeons and raids these days, then harsh punishment would be a bad idea. There, dying is part of the game and is expected even.
In games that are more about individual skill, common sense and instincs are all thats needed to survive, then yes, extreme punishment would be ok.
I think harsh penalties suit certain games. The main reason I found Darkfall fun was it was tense as fuck just walking around because you didn't want to lose everything.
Hey OP, you can always accomplish these lofty ideas by simply deleting your character whenever it perishes in a fight. No need to push these over the top iron man game designs onto the rest of the player base.
Hey OP, you can always accomplish these lofty ideas by simply deleting your character whenever it perishes in a fight. No need to push these over the top iron man game designs onto the rest of the player base.
^^^^^ Same tired old reaction you'd hear if you wrote 'PVP' on a piece of paper, then handed it to him. OP didn't try to push anything, OP started a discussion. YOU have an agenda and bring nothing at all to the table. Best to delete yourself before the fight starts.
Trolling, being trolled, getting banned, yelling at mods, getting perma banned, making new accounts, and still trolling this site since 2004 =D
There is no one shoe that fits every foot in the world. Every game will be designed for a specific audience. If harsh penalties are fitting or not will be determined by that and have to be evaluated on a game by game basis. There is certainly a niche in which these features would be well accepted. Most games don't cater to this niche at all though. Thus my answer to the question in the title is "if a game targets this specific audience: yay, for all other games: nay"
Yes, personally would like to see death penalties if they are done
right.
ask yourself this: When was the last time you were afraid to die in a MMO?
The fear
of death adds to the immersion. It also forces people to plan ahead and think about their actions instead of being the proverbial "Leroy Jenkins" without care or consequence.
I don't approve of
permadeath, de-leveling, or 100% chance to lose everything for dying
(especially if you lag or disconnect). At the same time, I also don't want to have no
consequences at all. That makes death a trivial thing so nobody
cares if they die.
What I would prefer is some kind of
progressive death penalty. Like first death = minimum penalty and a
timer starts (everyone has unlucky lag and disconnect deaths after all).
If you die during that timer you get a worse penalty (xp loss?) and a
new timer. Die during that timer and it gets worse (item loss,
de-leveling, etc.) and another timer starts with a warning telling you
if you keep dying without waiting for the timers you will lose your
character. Final death = permadeath (because you deserve it at that
point!). This obviously wouldn't include pvp deaths and character
restoration by GMs would have to be possible incase a bug in the game
kills someone multiple times. You can avoid all the harsh penalties under this system by simply not running back in and dying right away. Nobody these days has time to wait for a timer so it may inspire people to carefully think about their actions so they get it right the first time. If you fail a dungeon and die? It is either "I'm out. lets try again tomorrow" or risk going in again and facing a penalty. That choice is entirely up to the individual player.
Yes, all death penalties are just a time sink in the end. Even permadeath is. Actually, permadeath is the ultimate timesink since it involves starting all over again from the beginning. Loss of time and effort is something to fear. Having something to be afraid of gives a sense of 'risk vs reward' which helps you feel like you accomplished something when you succeed.
Comments
For instance if you choose to play Uncharted 4 on Crushing (I did that and beat the game) it will give you less checkpoints and more monsters. That means you have to be skilled enough to get through a large area without making any or very few mistakes. If you have checks points all over it's easier because you only have to do will for small segments. You can perfect each small segment one at a time. It's much more difficult to perfect a large area of game.
In Dark Souls 2 you have a death penalty on top of that. This makes the game harder by again forcing you to play better. You can't half ass it over and over again until you beat it because each time you die you loose a little bit of your health bar. Eventually your health will be so low that you won't be able to play. There are a finite amount of items that will restore said health.
Another example would be Resident Evil the original game. In order to unlock the Rock Launcher with unlimited ammo you had to beat the entire game without saving. I went through it once and I can say it really had an impact on me from an emotional stand point compared to just playing through in small segments. I couldn't afford to make one mistake the entire play through so I had to be on my toes the entire time. There was no way to play through it casually and make it. It was basically permadeath.
As for the games you loose all your gear when dying, I can only think of 1 game that havn't done pathetic and that is Eve. Well, there was UO as well but UO basically only had M59 as competition originally and I don't think losing the gear on dying was what made UO a success. Eve is a rather different type of game.
Since then (Eve came out in 2001) have any game trying something similar crashed and burned. EQs corpse run was a different thing because there you could actually retrive your items unless you died in lava and that was far less draconic. The only thing I have against the corpse run mechanics is that it is so silly.
Item progress and losing all gear upon dying does not work, games like Mortal online and Darkfall that tried it the last 10 years never got close to 100K players and those games did not really have that large focus on gear, if you added it to a standard themepark things would be far worse. If you must have a draconic death penalty you might as well go for permadeath, it wont upset players more and would at least be more realistic.
If someone don't like it, they are not being logical. No matter what DP they like, it should be between the two extremes.
If you die due to lag, you just wasted your time.
If you get ganked by max level griefers, you just wasted your time.
If you play casually and happen to die over and over and over, you just wasted your time.
I think harsh death penalties are only good on hardcore pvp servers, nowhere else.
IMO i dont think its a good idea to have penalties in games where stats matter more than player skills either. An opponent with much higher stats(gear) will effectively waste your time.
EDIT: i like challenge in games, but penalties are not for all types of games.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Just give players an option. They can choose what they can live with, and what they cannot.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
(Not counting having PVP/Hardcore-servers on top of existing ones)
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Players already have abundant options, there's a wide range of games (and server types) available. Trying to make all games suitable for all player tastes is a hopeless pipe-dream that is guaranteed to ultimately fail.
Thousands upon thousands of people will sign up for a one way trip to mars (permadeath), but can't face it in a virtual environment where they'll be able to continue going in some way after the fact. I guess suicide has better ratings than MMO's these days XD
The Mars trip is no more representative of permadeath than life here on Earth. The only real comparison would be that the Mars expedition has a significant risk of being a much shorter game.
Different people... different ideas about what's fun. I mean there really are people out there who pay good money to a dominatrix to be humiliated for fun.
Just be happy that you're in the middle of the bell curve and you'll always have many more choices of what to play than the outliers.
I always find it funny though when people take their idea of fun so seriously that they jump up on soapboxes and attribute all kinds of unrelated benefits to their personal preference. I have no problem with them going about their business enjoying their punishment quietly. But when they try to tell the rest of us that this is what real gamers do or that it builds communities I just have to laugh.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
EVE does a good job on losing loot. Unless you already wasted all your money, you are able to regear yourself with the same items, with just a ISK loss. As for XP, at current, EQ1 still does a good job. The fights are "hard" but manageable, especially with proper CC. They XP loss hurts, but when you are high enough level, it basically gives something to aim for.....somewhat.
In the old days you just played until you got better. Now players are going to whine or quit. Doesn't seem like the average MMORPG player has the fortitude.
In games that are more about individual skill, common sense and instincs are all thats needed to survive, then yes, extreme punishment would be ok.
But I wouldn't want every MMO to be that way.
Same tired old reaction you'd hear if you wrote 'PVP' on a piece of paper, then handed it to him.
OP didn't try to push anything, OP started a discussion. YOU have an agenda and bring nothing at all to the table. Best to delete yourself before the fight starts.
Every game will be designed for a specific audience. If harsh penalties are fitting or not will be determined by that and have to be evaluated on a game by game basis.
There is certainly a niche in which these features would be well accepted. Most games don't cater to this niche at all though.
Thus my answer to the question in the title is "if a game targets this specific audience: yay, for all other games: nay"
If there is death than it is perma. Anything else is just senseless time wasters.
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
ask yourself this:
When was the last time you were afraid to die in a MMO?
The fear of death adds to the immersion. It also forces people to plan ahead and think about their actions instead of being the proverbial "Leroy Jenkins" without care or consequence.
I don't approve of permadeath, de-leveling, or 100% chance to lose everything for dying (especially if you lag or disconnect). At the same time, I also don't want to have no consequences at all. That makes death a trivial thing so nobody cares if they die.
What I would prefer is some kind of progressive death penalty. Like first death = minimum penalty and a timer starts (everyone has unlucky lag and disconnect deaths after all). If you die during that timer you get a worse penalty (xp loss?) and a new timer. Die during that timer and it gets worse (item loss, de-leveling, etc.) and another timer starts with a warning telling you if you keep dying without waiting for the timers you will lose your character. Final death = permadeath (because you deserve it at that point!). This obviously wouldn't include pvp deaths and character restoration by GMs would have to be possible incase a bug in the game kills someone multiple times.
You can avoid all the harsh penalties under this system by simply not running back in and dying right away. Nobody these days has time to wait for a timer so it may inspire people to carefully think about their actions so they get it right the first time. If you fail a dungeon and die? It is either "I'm out. lets try again tomorrow" or risk going in again and facing a penalty. That choice is entirely up to the individual player.
Yes, all death penalties are just a time sink in the end. Even permadeath is. Actually, permadeath is the ultimate timesink since it involves starting all over again from the beginning. Loss of time and effort is something to fear. Having something to be afraid of gives a sense of 'risk vs reward' which helps you feel like you accomplished something when you succeed.