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The Eight Stages of Permadeath Debate
MMOG Designer and commentator Damion Schubert has up an article on the constantly renewing Permadeath debate. Permadeath is the concept of permanent death for a character in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. The design hasn't shown up in any major commercial games yet but, to borrow a phrase, the soul still burns. His commentary is a great synopsis of the debate, from the rearing of its head to the final bitter back-biting threads. From the article: "3. Captain Obvious Speaks. 'People don't like to lose their stuff.' 'It isn't fun.' 'It's hardcore, and only hardcore games will ever use it.' 'Any game which depends on the internet for its reliability has no place permanently taking away all your stuff.' 'Why in God's name would anyone consider this idea a good or compelling idea?'"
My previous comment (which was a joke, thoguh it sounds a bit more mean spirited than I'd intended) aside, I think this would work in the correct game. Say, MMOGTA or something.
/goes to RTFA.
You'd have to seriously rethink (or more likely abandon) the idea of leveling and posessions, though.
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The hardcore market would love this. It's the ultimate sense of danger, lending reality to a fantasy world. Most everyone else, however, doesn't. The quote about losing your stuff is absolutely, wholly true. Case in point: the success of World of Warcraft. When you die, you lose a couple dozen silver each time at most. No xp, no lives, no item penalties. Nothing. The other night I must have died a dozen times or more in attempting a difficult raid without enough people and I racked up 3g in repairs (for those who don't play WoW, at max level you can make 3g back with 15 minutes' lightweight work or 10 minutes hard grinding).
People love that. Hell, I love that. It encourages raiding and confrontations and risk, and pretty much adds to the enjoyment of the game knowing that attempting something difficult or even stupid won't set you back. It's just fun.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Does Diablo II's old 'hardcore' option count?
Well a Permadeath-only game would be a failure, by why not have the option to make a permanent death or a regular character, and seperate the servers? This works in Diablo 2, the Permadeath (hardcore) characters are more fun to play with, the game is more challenging, you actually have to use your brain, and the best incentive, the items gained in hardcore mode are better than in normal. Plus it's a status symbol - "You have a Level 99 hardcore Assassin? Wow! I bow down to you."
It's not exactly an MMORPG, but it works alright. There are always those who seek to ruin the game by player-killing though, so anyone implementing Permadeath mode might want to take care of that, unlike Blizzard.
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Its not multiplayer or really online (nethack.alt.org aside), but it definately qualifies as a massive role playing game, and it not only has permadeath, but has stuff that will kill your high level character before you even have a chance to react. Of course it sucks to lose a good character, but without meaningful death you get people throwing their life away in an attempt to zerg something more powerful than them. Just look at diablo, you might be seriously outpowered mephisto, but as long as you can do more damage than it can self-heal by the time you get back, you'll kill him eventually. Even worse would be watching a game of team fortress where you'll die 12 times just trying to keep the flag alive moving it a few inches at a time.
For the record, I enjoyed all the games I mentioned here, but if you want to play a role, unless that role is already undead dying should kill it. (Though that is an idea.. make death force you to live your life as a zombie/ghost/whatever, with the ability to still transfer your items to a live player, but no ability to really level or continue as you were)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Well, I run a MAngband server, and we have a sort of perma-death there. If your player croaks, then he turns into a ghost... which can be revived, or die horribly. It seems like a good balance. The players don't mind too much. It works because hey, they had a chance to avoid perma-death. Most of the time.
I think permadeath will definitely attract the hardcore -- and I think there are a lot of those to be attracted.
Despite that fact that I agree that permadeath would successfully link skillful play with the level of one's character, I think there could be another way of achieving this.
The notion of permadeath doesn't really exist in warcraft III or chess, but a characters "level" is quite accurately reflected in both of these games (actually, the new rating system in WC3 isn't as good, because it purposefully rewards people that play more even if they don't play well, so I guess the chess rating sytem is the better example). So perhaps game designers could try and construct an mmorpg in which one's avatar level is a function of success percentage on tasks/quests or other, more meaningful metrics -- basically any metric that doesn't reward those who just play a lot.
A good way to think about such metrics is to ask oneself: "Would it be possible for a prodigy to come along and rise to the top of the level heap quickly?" Someone else posted that the game would have to be easy to level in. If he/she meant that the game would have to be fast to level in *if* one was good enough, then I agree.
Every time you read this, I am going against my principles.
There should be a permadeath server. It's funny that when the discussion began about permadeath, the idea that you could run multiple servers of the same game was considered unthinkable. Now it's standard practice.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Losing your hard-earned stuff makes people so risk-averse that it will freeze up the game flow. Will you likely try new things and explore with perma-death? Have you ever grouped with incompetent players and one mistake got the whole group killed? Would you group with people you don't know? Some say to just make the rewards much higher for the risk. But, these are the same rewards that you lose when you die. Once someone gets an uber item, their career is practially over due to the chance of losing that item. This sounds like the ideal game system for gold farmers to sell stuff to out-of-luck recently dead players, rather than a game for any type of casual player or someone looking for a good time. Since the cost of death is so high, this also sounds like a game system where only those in uber guilds will succeed where they have lots of help to stay alive. After you've spent 6 months to get your currently level and somehow you get killed, are you likely to go through the process all over again? Call me a skeptic.
I've thought about permadeath in games before, and it does add something that you can't get out of games where death has little consequence.
Without permadeath, there's no notion of sacrifice, daring, or true adventure. If you and your group run into a giant dragon that's going to destroy your sorry asses, your Paladin can't tell the rest of you to run away from the dragon while he holds it off and gives you time to escape. You can't have a hero in the game, because there's no actual danger. Dying is just the thing that costs you a few minutes of time and some minor frustration.
Now that said, I'm not sure that the addition of such a game concept is essential to good gameplay - in fact, it's provably not essential, since there are lots of great games that don't have permadeath.
The balance is trying to find a way to include permadeath to really make the game exciting, but not have it so often that people become frustrated at rerolling new characters. And, there should be at least some reward (a heroes list, or something) for being brave enough to throw away some of your time for the sake of adventure.
I think this is what I find annoying about the permadeath designs i've seen. The strategies and skill people talk about are generally overly causious. I mean to say a strategy is to disconnect from the game, stinks. It means the game isn't designed well for the punishments.
For permadeath to work the game has to be designed from the ground up to take it into account.
But the issue isn't really permadeath. There are plenty of ways, as mentioned above, to make it work without punishing the player. But then we would be right back to square one.
The people who want permadeath, don't really need their characters to die. They just want to risk EVERYTHING. They want the rush of knowing that 178 hours of gameplay depends on whether or not they live through this next encounter.
That's what they want, extreem risk at every corner. For all the suggestions "making it work" you are defeating the purpose of it by just making it an inconvience. Why have it there at all if the player isn't sweating bullets everytime 10 imps rush out at them?
Personally I prefer games that offfer you greater rewards the better you play it, rather then extreem penalties. But that is just me. Some people like to live on the edge.