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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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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 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
You were definitly cautious at times in Steel Battalion. But, due to the emergancy eject, you could still take risks and survive, as long as you had enough cash for another mech. Run out of cash, and you did have to end your career.
The most annoyning permadeath for me in that came came on a midrange mission. I was fignting in a canyon, came so close to finishing the mission, and got hit hard in the front of the mech. It fell onto its back, got hit again and blew up. Hitting the eject failed, because it ejected you out the back, not the top. So since my mechs back was on the ground I died, and had to climb up the missions again.
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.
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.
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.
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!
About 4 months ago I thought up a design document for an MMO that had everything I would like to see, and every couple of weeks someone comes out with an article about something I've already addressed in full, with improvements.
An easy solution to permadeath is to not include respawns at all. Try using the D&D system, where another player must come and ressurrect you (simplied explination). The challenge is making this fun for both sides and profitable, so you don't have tons of people spamming the few people capable of rezzing with tells (I know how to address this), and you don't have people quit when they die because it takes too long to get a rez (try including about a quarter of the game as content specifically for dead people).
In terms of inheritance, you need to have a system where people *WANT* to permanently die in order to gain inheritance. How do you do this? I'll leave that for you to think of.
The objective of any permadeath feature in a game is to encourage a player not to die. The problem with most such systems are that they arn't fun when you do die, and that is exactly the opposite of what you want a game to be. You want your game to be a challenge to a player, make them think and learn to play with skill. You do NOT want them to feel like they wasted their time at ANY point. No feature should be a hardship on the player, and every feature designed to make the game more difficult should be there to make the player think about how to use it to their best advantage and have fun at the same time. Almost all previous permadeath systems fail at this.