Hi all and welcome back to the grand re-opening of my blog. It has been awhile and the landscape here has changed a little, but all in all it is great to be back talking about one of my favorite gaming genres the MMORPG. So without further adieu here we go.
Perma-Death
Ok so I've been on my fair share of forums for MMOs in development in my day, and one theme that always seems to find its way onto the forum is the idea of perma-death in the game, or at least on a server of the game. Part of me wonders if this is the singular effort of one man to see this argued on every MMO forum, or part of a group effort campaigning for this idea until one day a Dev out there somewhere says in a meeting "What if when a character dies their really dead!" and everyone in the room replies "Brilliant!". I think it is time to break down why the whole perma-death idea is flawed and why it just doesn't work in the MMO space.
First off the idea of having to reroll my character everytime I die sounds a little frustrating in my opinion. What masocist wants to build up a character in a game only to die for any reason be it a PvE or PvP related incident and then have to reroll that toon and start over from scratch. I personally would go nuts having to play the same content over and over again hoping and praying I could make it to level 20 this time before my number comes up if you will. I wouldn't feel very enouraged to PvP either as one wrong move means *ding* I start all over again. I guess I fail to see how this type of system encourages players to keep up a script to a game.
What if we took this concept to a single player game? Let's say I'm playing "Bioshock" and I get to the very end without dying once and get killed by the final boss only to have to start all over again. I would be tempted to throw my computer out of my window with the obligitory profanities being screamed at the top of my lungs. While this would be great for the computer manufacturers I can't see any other benefit other than large populations of gamers on antianxiety meds.
How would content updates look in the perma-death MMO? Would you even bother adding more endgame content if over half of your palyer base kept dying before they got to it? I guess you could add more races and starting zones so as to break the monotany of having to start over at the same spot over and over again.
Soloing in the game would probably be nonexistent as the prevailing logic of safety in numbers would most likely prevail. Which maybe isn't all that bad. :) But thats for another post altogether now isn't it.
The biggest flaw I see with perma-death though is simply that it lends itself to exclusivity rather than acessability. If WoW teaches us anything it is that the more accessable the game the better. In a perma-death world we would probably see an exclusive group of payer that would make it to the end game and either attempt to hinder others progress or make money helping it. The Massive in MMO gives us a look into the priamry goal of these games which is to have alot of people playing them, and when you sacrifice accessability you lose population plain and simple.
Now don't get me wrong friends you are not reading the remblings of a carebear here. I still have emotional scars from "Ascheron's Call" getting killed and respawning in nothing but my undies knowing that some a-hole is looting all my great gear. I am all for a death penalty. Heck part of me keeps thinking about playing "Dark Fall" simply because of its death penalty, but even that is a drastic yet entertaining example. The idea of the death penalty to me is sound which makes me not want to die very much, but doesn't completely ruin my experience if I do.
In the end I'm sure that person or group of people will keep hitting up the forums with the perma-death argument. Maybe one day a poster will find solutions to my issues with perma-death, but I doubt it. This genre jsut wouldn't do well with it. Now one idea I do like is if I decide I do not want to play the game anymore to be given an option to do a perma-death scenario with my toon which would allow me to cancel my account with a bang. Now that I could deal with.
What are your thoughts on perma-death in MMO's? Feel free to comment below I'm a huge fan of feedback.
And that's all I got.
Eric
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Permadeath is a bit of a double-edged sword. It ensures you pay attention the entire time and kicks you into full-on survival mode, but like you said, if you come up against a difficult boss or you die for no reason, that's it. Game over forever.
Diablo II notably had this feature, but optional. You got no rewards for it (outside of different titles for beating the game), and when you die, you are permanently locked out of your character, who now stands in a hooded cloak from beyond the grave.
Fire Emblem is also a great example of perma-death in a single-player game. Sure, you have a great number of characters so when one person dies, it's not a big deal, but this unfortunately fires up the perfectionist gene in me. I would never advance the story if even one person died. This naturally got annoying due to the RNG screwage that series is notorious for, but I would never allow defeat in such a case.
I like the idea of a death penalty, just as long as it's not too severe (I'm looking at you, Maple Story!). I mean yeah, 10% EXP loss is fitting, but not when it takes you as long as you've been playing that session to even get that much. Diablo allowed you to respawn in town naked to go fetch your geared corpse in II, or in I you'd either have to reload or be playing online and hoped someone would res you (and not steal your junk that fell off your corpse).
I'm not an MMO player, but I still see where you're coming from and agree. The alterations that would have to be made to perma-death to make it feasible would make it no longer perma-death, anyway. It's a bad idea, in general.
Holy shit another MMO player?
Ah permadeath, how the uber l33t kiddies love to get all worked up over this concept. I've read whole rants where people demanded that the only way a game could have meaning was if death really meant something and what better way then to make it really mean death.
I agree more with you, that sure its fun to talk about, but there is no practical way to implement this without making huge sacrifices to content and gameplay. After all, what incentive could you possibly have to keep going back and starting over every time your healer went link dead or the mob respawned while you were afk for a second.
I'm all for death having penalties, XP loss, Rez sickness, ect. , but it would seriously ruin the MMO experience if you knew that if any of your teammates screwed up it could mean the end of all your characters. Who could you trust? Nobody, not even yourself, everyone would just sit around town, not dueling and talking about people they knew who had ventured outside the walls and died.
I don't want to be afraid to play and lose all the time I've invested in my character. That's not fun and games should above all else be fun, or what's the point?
Lag death would suck.
Also, Asheron's Call was awesome in its day.
I don't think perma death really belongs in an MMORPG or any game really for that matter. The only games that really seem to be able to take advantage of perma death is SRPG like Fire Emblem or the Tactics Ogre series.
It just wouldn't work in an MMO because you invest so much time into one character then outta nowhere die, you have just wasted hours upon hours of time that you'll never be able to get anything redeeming out of. I know I would probably stop playing after my character died and I had to start all over again.
Adding more end game content? No need to add high level content in the first place. The level cap could be 20(take a zero off if it was also an unrestricted pvp game) and no one would get there. The gameplay would acutally be more fun in some ways. You would start in a town you've never started in before, easily find a low level group, head off into the wilderness, kill some animals, get chased by some monsters, run into a dungeon, get lost, try to find another way out, get chased into an underground lake and drown. Perhaps 3 of you die, one of you finds some loot and survives to fight another day, that sort of stuff. Not a hardcore game at all, something for people that don't want to play all the way up to level caps and want a low level game with lots of good low level content, where you just pick from very many towns, go off on some stupid adventure and then die, sometimes your characters would survive for a few plays and it would get more intense. If you found it it too nervewracking once you reached a decent level, you could 'retire' your character and make them a guild leader or a crafter instead. How would that not be fun?
I guess the players would ruin it, fight the weakest stuff they could and not do anything risky. Perhaps starving to death while off-line is a good solution - you have to pay a certain amount of gold at each level every day, even if your not playing, or else your character gets deleted.This would force people to at least occasionally play like they have nothing to lose even if they have one of the most powerful characters in the game, it would prevent a lack of pking also.
I believe the biggest concern of this article can be summed up as the following:
1) From my experience of mmorpgs, building up a character requires a large amount of time investment, having to restart would be a huge burden and not worth the potential benefits permadeath offers.
Or a direct quote: "the idea of having to reroll my character everytime I die sounds a little frustrating in my opinion. What masocist wants to build up a character in a game only to die for any reason be it a PvE or PvP related incident and then have to reroll that toon and start over from scratch."
This is a very difficult point to overcome for a lot of people, and the main reason that this argument against permadeath is so commonly perpetuated is that it holds true with any mainstream mmorpg on the market today. The truth is, these games are based on a model that is solely based on character progression. Time investment or 'work' towards endgame content is the ultimate goal and henceforth permadeath is perceived only as a burden.
One point I need to get across here is, if you do see permadeath as a loss of a great deal of invested 'work', don't you see a problem with a game where any invested time is considered work in the first place?
What I'm trying to say here is it's not that the concept of permadeath is flawed, it's that this model itself is flawed (at least in regards to permadeath).
Permadeath would only work in a virtual world where character advancement is but one area of the game and not the basis for it. If the game allowed enough freedom to choose your own goals then permadeath just increases the difficulty of achieving them, along with adding to the level of depth and realism in the gameplay itself. All we need is a new model, please think outside of the box WoW (and it's clones) has placed you in. This IS possible to achieve once someone has the creativity and desire to achieve it (and obviously the funding).
With the current model being seen as the benchmark for mmorpgs I sincerely hope someone can come up with a permadeath concept soon, as games like WoW are unable to hold my interest for any extended period of time (and judging by the buzz this topic is sparking across the internet I don't believe I'm the only one).