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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?'"
Move/allow characters of a certain level into a separate world which is inaccessable to lesser characters and may or may not let the greater characters to leave and reenter. Sort of like an Olympus or Valhalla.
The definitely 'hardore' XBOX mech sim Steel Batallion did this a few years ago, as I remember. While that wasn't an MMORPG, it's easy to see how the feature would translate. People start getting overly cautious when they could stand to lose a creation they put months into. One thing that does do is allow beginners a small advantage, because they don't care if they lose their puny avatars. They can afford to be wild, in other words.
I only play diablo2 in hardcore. I started in softcore, but it just isn't as fun... mostly because softcore play dosent require any strategy, only time investment. But then again thats what a lot of these mmorpg'ers are into.
While there are MUDs out there that have Permadeath (PD), the most promising graphical game that will include Permadeath is Frontier 1859. The game is going to be an Old West adventure with as much realism as possible, and because of Player persistence via offspring, the possibility exists for a character in-game to die of sickness, wounds, or bad luck.
I played three hardcore charecters in Diablo II. Hardcore basically meant, when you died, you were dead...and there's no coming back. One of them lasted to level 74.
I'll tell you right now that every second of gameplay with those charecters was interesting. When your actions have great consequences, they also have great meaning.
Lag was just part of the game. If you started to lag out, a couple of quick health potions and an Alt-F4 was all you needed to keep yourself safe. Of course that's a double edged sword...die, and stay in the game, and you can have someone recover your stuff. If you were too slow on the keyboard, and quit after you died, you lost all your stuff too.
I say, being on the permadeath! I'd be nice to care about my RPG charecters again.
I think that in a permadeath game, the entire play mechanics would have to be shifted. For one, there would be no level 60 - well, maybe there would be, but it wouldn't be anything anyone sane would care to go after. Also, the characters would have to start out with more skills in the first place - I think we can all agree that nobody wants to play a game where you're tooling around with a level 1 weenie that can't do jack half the time.
You could make the penalty for dying something short of losing everything by giving you more skill points, hit points, etc. when you're creating your next character. So if you just lost a level 12 character, your next one would get to start at, say, level 8, and if you just lost a level 6 character, you'd be able to start at level 4.
You could also make it harder to die. I once played a tabletop RPG called Beasts, Men, and Gods where you were knocked unconscious at 0 hit points, and from there you would slowly lose hit points until you either got some medical attention or reached some negative number of hit points which represented death. I personally like this option because it makes those often-overlooked healers people you suddenly want to have in your party.
Personally, I think the above would be really neat ideas. I tend to look at permadeath as a great excuse for a friendly kick in the pants for MMORPG gameplay mechanics, which in my opinion aren't too different from the mechanics used in computer RPGs since the beginning of time.
Sadly, the thing that you would need most to make a permadeath game truly enjoyable is to include a way of making the game fun besides the usual level-grind. While I'd personally like a game of this nature, since I don't enjoy level grinding one bit, I realize that anyone who tries to create a game of this nature is up against 10 years of precedent and tradition as well as the incredible cost it takes to pay for people to make the game world come alive for new players and stay fresh for veterans.
Over at IBGames, while really a MUD instead of a real MMORPG, had permanent death in it if players weren't careful. Players started out with insurance for one life, and if they died, their cloned body would wake up in the hospital, good as new, except for dropping any items the player was carrying. The problem was that the player was now uninsured, and his character would be deleted if he lost again. Insurance was easy to get safely, but the problem was that the cost of it would go up with each purchase, and the price could get hefty after many deaths.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
I don't see any reason why you can't have variations within a game. Most areas where death penalties are light, some areas where the penalties are more severe, and some areas, that are hard to get to, allow for perma death. Then people could select the level or risk they want. Don't want to risk losing all your stuff and character, stay away from the extreme areas. I'm surprised no one has done this before, it's always a global death rule it seems.
Yes, this sucks as a business model because there aren't enough hardcore gamers to pay developers, but it should remove a lot of the hassle of playing MMORPGs. I also totally agree with you that respawning should be relatively painless. However, I eventually stopped playing Anarchy Online simply because I lost the patience to deal with a bunch of morons on a team. (Tank sees room full of high level mobs. Tank runs into room before party is ready. Tank gets raped. Party blames doc for tank's stupidity. Repeat as often as possible.)
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
The problem is that 95% of deaths are not heroic. They are crappy and random, like "My brother kicked my router" or "I was trying to send a message to Hagar the Destroyer and some guy snuck up on me and killed me" or "I had my inventory open and an Ogre spawned next to me" or "I wandered into the wrong area and was eaten by a grue".
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
Proposing some sort of real death in a video game begs the question "what about real life?" or to be even more diametrically opposed, "what about real birth?" Perhaps MMORPG's should start your character as an infant and make you spend some time growing up. And the best part could be that when you do finally have an adult (or irreponsible teenager) character, you could mate with another player and have babies who could be new characters inherriting traits from the parents. This might even be good practice for meeting women in the real world. Although I can just see some of the in game conversations resulting. Merlin: "Yeah so that elf chick I left the tavern with last night... Holy sh#&, she was an animal!" Hrianth: "Nice duuuude. I struck out with that Ogre girl for some reason." Merlin: "You're a 2 foot tall halfling and she was a 12 foot tall Ogre. You're way out of your league."
In every dice & paper RPG I run, Permadeath is "on". I don't give second chances, and if you do something stupid, make a bad roll, or generally just get ganged up on, you're dead. End of story, get a clean sheet of paper and roll up a new character. You don't find many D&D or Vampire games where the GM announces "Free rez for your character if they die, just gotta start back at the nearest town." I also don't have a problem with group dissension - ie, PvP. If one player decides to be a dick and "accidentally" pop another player's character in the back of the head when no one is looking during a firefight, and he makes his rolls, then it happens. On the flip side, the game system I run doesn't have "classes" or "levels", and character generation can pop out a 70 yr old War Vet as easily as an 18 yr old street punk. You can improve your character's skills and stats, But the net effect of all this is that a year old (real time) character doesn't have that much of an edge on a 5 minute old (real time) character, and if he slips up when he's offing his own party, he'll be next. I think permadeath in a game will greatly increase interest in role playing and team building, and PvP won't be much of an issue - because you won't respawn, and eventually the victims will team up against you. I'd play in a permadeath game in a heartbeat. More challenge, more fun, less grind. Just my take on it.
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No offense, but I thought the linked article was a discussion of the stages that every permadeath discussion goes through.
"Permadeath" comes up so often as a debate topic because of the general conservativism of gaming imagination. Just look at the debate here. As long as these games are about A) encouraging risk-taking (the "Supersoldier syndrome" , to borrow a term from military simulation speak) B) building prestige among one's virtual peers and C) levelling through boring activities, "permadeath" ain't gonna work. People want to be rockstars, and these games let them be rockstars and socially important, but only through the investment of a lot of time and suffering. If you somehow make that rockstar status risky -- so that people routinely lose it, and have to repeat the same old stuff to get to their peer level again, permadeath ain't gonna work. "Dead is Dead" is one of the most obvious gaps of realism in these games, and that's why people mention it. The problem is that it reveals one of the fundamentally attractive features of on-line gaming (or anything else online): the appearance of being able to achieve the glory without the risk. Most people are cowards (or, in other words, socially crippled by a fear of the consequences of their actions), and uneasy with that. Games give them a chance to be brave, where the penalty is pretty slight. Make the penalty major, and people will go play something else.
Now, if you did want to do permadeath, the way I'd do it would be to take advantage of the progressive development model of MMPORGS: since they're worked on for several years after release, make the "updates" reflect a temporal progressivism: players choose skills for their "avatards" at a fixed point, and that avatard can advance in those skills. But as time goes on, new and more interesting skills are developed, which can only be adopted by younger avatards. That way, you make the aging superplayers gradually become obsolete. They may bitch and whine and stage their million-gnome marches, but every virtual year their numbers will grow fewer, as they give in and explore the game from a different angle.
Definately, the concept of leveling as it stands in most mmorpgs would have to be rethought... but there are other things to consider as well.
More important would be to address the question of how you die. If certain characters could perform "saving moves", having perma-death could lead to much better balance between characters, and a need for balanced parties. Dieing should be something that's fairly difficult to do, unless you ignore the warnings and foolishly try to conquer the world on your own.
If it's implemented well, I can see perma-death working in just about any style of MMOG. Most of the arguments against it stem from "i don't want to lose what i've built up" - people value their virtual posessions. As long as the players know that there is a way to avoid that loss, and that their choices are going to be the ones deciding their fate (no magic giant feet squishing them at random!) it is a workable concept.
Personally, the chance of it all going horribly wrong would make it much more interesting. And the respect value of meeting a character who has been alive for so long would be a lot higher...
The 'inheritance' idea is an interesting one. Die and your next character will get X percent of the experience points.
Anyways, I think the key to getting permadeath to work is to put more emphasis on the player skill than on the character skill. Equipment could also be used to store the momentum you've built up. In real life, a toddler with a gun is more dangerous than a... real ninja. Assets like weapons and gold could be kept in a bank so the next character can use it. Stuff dropped in the field might get looted so there'll be some tactics in deciding what to use and what to keep safe.
A graveyard is a must, so you feel your character just didn't move to NIL. The graveyard could contain a little list of accomplishments the character made.
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I agree that perma-death could work. There are several problems that come from the lack of perma-death:
1) endless progress. The strong players can become obscenely powerful and lord over the newer players. While this provides a nice incentive to keep playing, it means that the fundamental concept of play balance is really impossible (which is pretty crucial for a multiplayer game).
2) fear. Fear is fun. This is why many people prefer Counterstrike to fast paced FPS games - CS has the fear of death because if you die, it sucks. It gets your heart thumping hard.
3) changing classes. These games often have a massive variety of player classes and species to play, and often no easy way to change. Death lets you roll up a new character, and lets the player explore the game more completely.
4) realism. How realistic is it to never die?
Of course, then there's the converse problem - nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to lose their stuff. Not losing their stuff also means there's no reason to kill anyone - you don't get to take anything. So PVP never becomes anything but a side-game.
Personally, I'd like to see a short-term MMO. Something that had thousands of players, but didn't focus on keeping them on the level treadmill. Something like a throne war - every man for himself, but you can form alliances, and the winner is the one who controls the Throne Tower (spoils of controlling teh Throne are divided among the members of the winning alliance, so pruning your ranks is encouraged). Various smaller towers allow control over areas with good resources that can be used to arm your players for sieging the main Citadel (and these smaller towers are, in turn, being raided by members of smaller clans as well as unaligned thieves).
Let the players have storage lockers for backing up extra equipment and spells and otherwise eliminate any concept of "level-up" besides your gear. Make it easy to escape/survive combat (but at the loss of some gear) so that death matters but is avoidable. Then make the equipment come easily with some hunting. Kind of a compromise between traditional action gameplay and MMORPG gameplay. You could have backstabbing, binding oaths of fealty, heroic wanderers, oppressive kings, tight squads of bandits, etc.
sure, every MMO game seems to have a similar tack: build up your character, get them stuff and levels. obviously if perma-death existed, this could mean a spot of net lag or a down router would mean perma-death for your character, and as many argue that is unacceptable.
however, let us imagine games "outside the tiny box" of current MMO. how about a game where your "character" is really just a soul, which possesses a mortal being. sure, you can upgrade this mortal with some gear, but the real "stuff" is being accumulated by the "soul" - that is where things like special skills, experience points, levels, or whatever "progress" constructs you want to have are attached. so when the mortal is killed, your soul escapes to possess another. so we have something like "perma death" where your "character" dies, period, but you go on in a different fashion from the majority of MMO which I have seen. you could even have it set up so the "soul" would die a permanent death if they wander too long without a mortal body, and if that is too harsh, you could have that soul be "recoverable" in some fashion.
MORTAR COMBAT!
You could also allow a form of passing equipment from character to character: inheritance. New character would need to come from the original character's lineage, or a newb character that had some contact to the original. A will gets produced beforehand. You could even stick in amusing instances like other players contesting the will.
The character gets the boost from the item, but should still be limited by their newb characteristics. Also, the game should favor experience & acquired skills, and less on booty.
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I think for games where the focus is on actual role-play instead of the hack-and-slash grind, perma death makes a lot of sense. Paper and pencil games use this concept. You die, grab a blank character sheet. MUSH'es pretty much follow the same approach.
One MUD I recall offered an interesting balance. The focus was on role-play, but there were MOBs (computer-controlled characters) to fight also. If you lost to them, you got knocked unconscious and suffered some penalties similar to what MMOGs have. On the other hand, if in the course of the role-playing with other characters or GM's, your character wound up dead, you were expected to delete them because they were no longer part of the storyline. This let you do a little of the griding type stuff when there was no RP going on without worrying about dying to out-of-character things like a bad ISP, and it also maintained a similar feel to paper-and-pencil, since if your actions in the context of the RP story lead to you dying, you were dead.
Wouldn't work for MMO's at all however. A lot of times, conflicts involved players role-playing and coming to a consensus about the consequences, which they all then accepted. GMs aren't always around to arbitrate, and letting the game engine decide things turns it from role playing events out into typing "kill soando". It really only works with a community of people are all willing to put roleplay and storyline ahead of their own ub3rn355 which isn't going to happen on a MMO.