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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?'"
It is hypocritical for this guy to keep bringing this idea up again every time it gets killed.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Answer: No. Otherwise they would already have it.
Permadeath might sound like a "cool" feature, but it's one of those features that, from a developer side, is far more trouble than it's worth. For every player that loves it - there will be three that die and can't accept that fact. The dialog will go approximately like this - several times a day, hundreds of times a week:The moral of this story: Users, because each has completely different opinion of how the game should work, do not always know what they really want.
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.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
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.
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.
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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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!
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.