Slashdot Mirror
50 First Deaths - On Designing MMO Respawning
Thanks to the New York Times for its article (free reg. req.) discussing the nature of death and regeneration in massively multiplayer gaming. The author points out: "Designing death is not a simple matter", explaining: "If the 'death penalty' in the game is too severe... you may stop playing the game and, even worse, stop paying the monthly subscription fee for it. But if the penalty is too light... what's to stop you from engaging in reckless behavior... and then growing bored and dropping out anyway?" It also reveals, courtesy Turbine Entertainment's CEO, that "The online role-playing game Middle-Earth Online, expected later this year, will exclude death entirely" - instead, characters "will collapse into unconsciousness and wake up in a safe place."
Ironically, the game without combat has permanent death. The only way to get yourself killed right now is through addiction to drug called "Speed of the Serpent."
:)
Here's how it works: When you're not playing the game, you accumulate "offline travel time" which allows you to instantly warp places. It's as if your character had been running the whole time you were offline. This offline time is very precious, and short of logging off, the only way to get more is to ingest Speed of the Serpent.
A single dose is the equivalent of being offline for 24 hours. The only catch is that you must then drink a shot of cabbage juice at least once every 30 RL days. If you ever fail to do this (including forgetting to log in), you die. Game over, we won't bill your credit card any more
You can drink a 2nd shot of Speed of the Serpent a day later for an additional 24 hours of travel time, but then you'll have to drink cabbage juice every 29 days.
So far there have been 8 deaths.
Most games do have penalties for being in a place you shouldn't be.
Lets take Turibines Asheron's Call. Part of the story line talks about lifestones created by Asheron to protect the Isparians in Dereth from dying, however there is a cost for dieing. If you die at any level you recieve 5% vitae penalty and drop X number items on your corpse. The vitae penalty is a temporary reduction in your stats that goes away as you earn more experience points (XP). The amount of XP you need to reduce your vitae by one point is a percentage based on your current level. The number of items you drop is also based primarily on your current level. Now, the noob areas have giant floating markers as a boundry that basically tell you if you go past this your chance of death increases. Which is great as far as monsters go because it's a clear warning. If you go past this place and die you might not be able to get back to your corpse and recover your items. So there is definite risk involved in going to those areas. Now, at higher levels most people carry enough high value junk items as death items. These items are almost 100% gauranteed to drop before anything you care about. This reduces the risk of dying significantly, but there is still some risk. If you don't recover those items you have to get new death items, this could be expensive or time consuming. Especially if you spent a lot of time getting very high valued death items to cover your equipment that is also very expensive. A second or third death could start costing you items. There are/were also some items which would always drop on death (Aerfalls Pallium comes to mind). I should also mention that when you are returned to a lifestone you are temporarily protected from harm. This is in part because some lifestones have monsters spawned on them, and also due to a dynamic on the full time PvP server.
Now, this is a decent system, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about it. Of course this is the dynamic on the carebear or non PvP servers. On the PvP server (Darktide) there are no protections from other players. If you are sufficient level to own a house you have a safe zone. Other than that you are safe only briefly right after dieing. Initially there was no lifestone protection and it was extremely common for some players to camp the lifestones and repeatedly slay people. Not exactly fun for the person on the recieving end of this dynamic. To keep the game realistic you can't really restrict areas of the game world based on level. With dungeons that is easy, and is done all the time, but in the game world outside the dungeons invisible barriers that ristricte based on level would be hard to explain in the games lore. It also prevents interaction between high and low level characters, and in the case of games like AC, it would prevent the creation of large monarchies and reduce the already minimal value of a Patron/Vassal relationship.
The biggest problem with perma death is that most players like to see that they are getting something for thier money. A lot of people don't like spending twenty or thirty hours a month leveling a character and learning the game system only to die one day because the devs changed the rules or the content change in an unexpected way. There have been numerous times in every MMOG I've played where the newest game additions have changed the dynamic in some way that made it harder either for the entire player base or, more often just for specific classes. Then those classes die more often as they readjust to the new dynamic or patiently (hah, right) wait for the devs to fix whatever they broke. With perma death you are going to see people losing interest if they achieve high levels and then one day loose everything. Why bother going through all of that again? You already know what the game is like at the low levels, it will take you a similar amount of time to get back to where you were so you can advance again. What is the motivation to continue playing at that point? There isn't much in my opinion.
Although now they've got back to no penalty. In a recent patch, there is no decay when you die from a PvP related event. So when there's a large Raid or Battle, everyone just clones nearby (to prevent the wounds), and zerg's the battlefield. It's entertaining, but not terribly realistic. But it is a game afterall.