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The suspension of mortality common to most RPGs today dilutes the sense of character and story, and results in creating an inflationary system of levels and loot, where character is meaningless, and players are defined by what levels and loot they possess.
Some common arguments why people would never play a permanent death game:
“Who would want to play a game where they lose a character they labored over for months who died because of lag, or a bug. ?”
There are a few iterations of this argument, essentially devolving around the idea that once a character dies the player looses their hard earned efforts to make that character successful.
The typically envisioned scenario is the player logging in to a game at which they have labored to advance a character, only to have that character die, rendering them unplayable, at which point the player, alienated and frustrated quits the game, and tells all their friends about it.
I have no doubt that in the context of current game design, introducing permadeath without any consideration for issues surrounding it would have exactly that effect. But that scenario is a shallow assessment, particularly in something as pliable as a computer game.
There are a couple of issues here that have more to do with how a player death occurs, and is handled in game. There are also questions about character success and advancement.
What is the nature of a ’successful character’ ? Is it their accumulated levels and loot ? The number of interesting quests completed ? Their active involvement in an guild or group ?
There are options for each measure of 'success' that would be applicable in a permanent character death game. An ‘account karma’ system could be used to award accounts based on playing style, group association, or quests completed. Thus advancement by a particular character accrues not just to the character, but to the player account, and any affiliated characters.
Karmic accounts could also affect the type of characters that can be created by that account, good, evil, legendary type character classes, inherited skill bonuses, or items, etc. A player would need certain account karma in order to unlock classes or abilities.
The benefits of level and loot could be attributed to an account, not merely to a character. In effect, one could have a character that attains levels and loot, some of the benefits of which are inherited by other ‘characters’ created on an account.
The question of levels and loot have a couple of aspects that could be addressed, particularly in the context of games where death is a temporary setback. Firstly is that currently level and loot are inflationary and need to be balanced. The iterative and inflationary nature of current games result in the use of levels as a 'counting system' for character meaning, and measuring character 'success'.
The inflationary nature of level and loot based 'success' in games means that there must be an ever increasing rate of creatures to harvest for xp and loot, allowing the ravening hordes of PC's to fatten on game worlds teeming with killable creatures.
A system of more realistic difficulty could mean a game of fewer levels, that are more significant, or no ‘levels’ at all, merely ’skill ranks’ which accrue based on playing habits.
Inheritance or allegiance systems could allow for a distribution of accrued benefits of play that could be lost through character death.
A second common objection to permadeath games is that dying ‘permanently ‘ could result from accidental forces, lag, bugs, griefing, player misadventure; think 'Leeroy Jenkins', and further alienate the player base.
An admin based arbitration, 'going before the gods judgement' could be presented to resolve accidental death issues and grant ‘intervention’ to save the character.
In game mechanisms, whether player based, or AI could handle events that would count as ‘intervention’, NPC's that like players are capable of magical healing, or resurrection.
Awarding xp to PC's that provide healing or acts of mercy to other players that have been defeated and are 'near death'. NPC's that provide healing, or will 'take a fallen person to the physic', can
Account karma and NPC/PC justice code can be an answer to the problem of griefing, with bounties placed on the heads of griefing characters, and a karmic ‘debt’ attributed to their accounts for actions towards players and NPC’s.
With regard to the ‘physics’ of ‘health’ in game terms, these are skewed by the inflationary levelling system of difficulties of current MMORPGs and require very specific limitations on combat.
Health and hitpoints, mortal injury, death (of the temporary respawning variety), all occur on a collapsed timeline. Mortal injuring and dying in most cases is actually a slower process (in most cases), often allowing for some type of intervention (health care) to occur.
In games driven by level inflation MOB/NPC difficulty is driven by a need to challenge super powerful characters, resulting in an overabundance of overpowered NPC's and creatures. The experience of having your 7 foot tall, 350 pound, claymore wielding lvl 1 barbarian warrior cut down in his prime by a single rabid rodent is not uncommon in contemporary MMORPGs.
Creature difficulty could be handled differently, allowing for hunting and adventuring with a different level of risk. A risk that would be felt all the more acutely given the possibility that the character could ‘die’. This ‘acuity’ itself however potentially adds great interest to the game.
Many MMORPG’s today offer epic and visually rich settings sparsely populated by story elements, with a superabundance of XP and loot generating ‘mobs’. This particular unbalance is necessary due to the mechanics of the game, requiring lots of creatures for exploring PC’s to kill and loot.
The same constant and overwhelming abundance of monsters undermines any presence of meaningful dramatic story, becoming instead a shooting gallery in which the attention of bored players requires constant additions of loot bearing creatures in order to maintain interest.
Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ talks about the need for risk and loss in order to add intensity to a story. An audience seeing a sympathetic character die is saddened, and becomes more focused on the story outcome, hoping for the preservation of other sympathetic characters and story elements.
Heros must suffer in order for their ‘heroic character’ to show, stories must involve a real sense of loss in order for an audience to show interest in the story, that loss has to be in terms ‘people’ can feel, or relate to.
The locale in which a player acts, and the need for their participation in the storyline must be framed in terms of suffering, loss and danger. There has to be some normalcy for players to relate to, and that normalcy endangered provides the basis for the dramatic tension.
But getting back to the idea of character meaning, and storytelling even in the current MMORPG context, the ‘Leeroy Jenkins’ story illustrates my point. Stupid and ridiculous as the episode was, it actually became a story worth telling, watching and referring to. It became for a time, a meme of the MMORPG culture.
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The big question I have about player mortality is "how much exactly do I lose when I die?"
I like the idea of every action you do with any character having an effect on your player profile, but it seems like the user is still going to lose SOME of his effort when he dies. If my character permanently dies in battle, and then I go back to my player profile and try to create the exact same character, what will be the difference in terms of wealth and power between the character who died and the clone that I just made? Obviously that's gonna be the measurement of effort lost. So how much do effort do you want me to lose?
The whole point about player mortality is really separate from your other point of the article about how in modern MMO's storytelling takes a backseat to loot-grubbing. Clearly permadeath isn't really all that necessary if you want to achieve a storytelling focus since there are plenty games without permadeath that do a great job of telling stories. Examples: Bioshock, Portal, Final Fantasy, Fallout 3 etc.
The other point of your article is about changing the focus of MMO's from loot/xp-fests into something more story driven like a single-player rpg. I think that would be profoundly bad for business. Rather than giving the player the motivation of improving his character, his motivation would be seeing the story progress. If the story's not interesting, he'll quit.
So if a developer makes this switch, he now has to create something with a story that stays interesting for the 500 hours a month that the hardcore MMO player plays. Try to imagine how much more expensive this would be. It's cheap to create a cave where the player can spend 5 hours fighting identical monsters. It's not very interesting from a story-telling perspective, but it could be exciting if you're motivated by the loot the monsters drop and the xp you gain. See the problem of trying to change the focus AND make a profit?
I'm not sure if this is all up to the developer, at a certain point the developer is just creating the 'puppeteer/paper-doll' framework for a story to be told, the rest is up to the 'story-tellers' whether they are the production-writing-design team, or the player, who contributes to the 'player-created-content' by their actions.
Of course, the community at large can have the same collective effect on the world as a single player, but as Ian pointed out above, this would mean that devs would have to churn out an infinite storyline (driven by a server, rather than a single player).
Mechanics that enhance the interaction and relationship between players are the sort of mechanics that would best improve the MMO genre. Giving players the tools to create "their own stories," which others can partake in, would certainly go a long way. I'm just not sure that perma-death would do this. It may, in practice make players too timid to take on greater challenges. Perhaps a lesser death penalty, like the ones of early Everquest, would be a better compromise. They don't "test" well, but they certainly spice things up.
You seem to answer your own question in the article; answering that question seems to be a large portion of your article. You seem to assert that adding permadeath will make people better relate to and care about the story, and that this is worth whatever people lose in terms of progess when they die. I'm simply asking you how much do they lose? Your article implies that the amount of effort lost would be trivial or nonexistant. I'd like you to expand on that claim.
Compare this to other online games such as TF2 or online CoD. If you are on a match where there is respawn, people are much more reckless about their play. They truly don't care if they live or "die" since they will be right back after a brief period in exactly the same form they were before.
On the other hand, if you are playing on a level where death takes you out of the game (until everyone else dies as well), then the whole experience of play changes. People are more cautious and even wary. People communicate more and work together with something that begins to resemble group survival tactics.
Comparisons can also be drawn to other genres and other issues. For example, in the NWN games, because you can "rest" after each encounter without much penalty or danger, there is no reason to be sparing with the use of your spells. Cast the most powerful spells you can in EVERY encounter because you know that you can get them back before you open the door to the next room... and the next... and the next. However, if you arranged the game such that "rest" meant 8 hours of sleep in a place that was relatively private (not the living room in a cave of a band of trolls), then those high level spells become a more precious commodity. No longer do people use the level 999 "Instant Death to the Universe" spell on an annoying pack of small rodents. They have to be more aware of the cost/benefit ratio. It changes the gameplay significantly.
To the OP's point, however, I agree that you can't just change one facet of the game (like adding permadeath) without also changing other portions of the gameplay. Just like, as I wrote in my Expert blog and spoke about at GDC Austin, you can't change the aggro model and the NPC AI independently of the rest of the game design. Of course, that negates many of the counter-arguments that many people make such as "changing ABC will break XYZ". What is often unsaid but necessary is that changing ABC would require a redesign (or removal) of XYZ.
Anyway, I believe that there is room for permadeath in MMOs. I also believe that it could do a lot towards developing that sense of character, roleplaying (such as it could ever really be), and even the sense of community and teamwork.
"Your article implies that the amount of effort lost would be trivial or nonexistant.
I'd like you to expand on that claim."
I think that the loss 'needs' to be non-trivial, but it 'could' be made somewhat trivial
using inheritance, allegiance, or account karma type measures.
It's undeniable that instant respawning, as in MW2, encourages more reckless play. However, the only reason for living is not the fear of death! Players may want to achieve kill streaks, defend objectives, or simply not lose their vantage.
This may seem like a minor point, but I believe it's at the core of what makes for "good" challenges in current MMOs. The player is trying to overcome the challenge, dying/losing means that their progress towards their immediate goal is lost. The real issue is that most MMOs don't present sufficient challenge to create this sort of tension. MW2's Spec Ops missions can become quite challenging, especially the last few. I found myself screaming at my computer when I was just a few kills from completing the mission and caught a stray grenade. It's very rare that I get so worked up about a challenge presented by an MMO.
Adding permadeath is about increasing the significance of every task, but this can be achieved by making them harder. If the difficulty is not there, the player won't feel like they've invested or earned anything. If they lose towards the end of a mission that was effortless, only time is lost. The more they struggle, the more they will feel invested in the game.
That said, I think there have been plenty of games where avoiding death significantly increases the amount of satisfaction received while playing. Games like Thief, Hitman, Operation Flashpoint, Mount & Blade, and various games that come across as role playing simulations succeed in getting the player to play their avatar in context. When their avatar dies, the feeling of loss comes from a sense that had they actually been doing this mission or quest in real life, they would've failed... died. Role-playing simulations succeed in making the players value their character's life without taking anything away from
them; they do it by (in so many ways) convincing the player to role-play.
But beyond that I can't think of any non-punitive ways to make a user want to avoid dying. I think it's a wild goose chase to try since afterall game death isn't real nor can it ever come close to making the player feel otherwise.
I also think it's a bit of a wild goose chase to try and inject deep meaning via stories and such in MMOs. IMO, stories are largely antithesis to what MMOs are all about which is simulating visceral, free form/open, virtual realms. The Leeroy Jenkins story is a great example of how freedom and flexibility in games (particularly social games) can lead to all sorts of memorable gameplay, events and behaviors. The key to successful MMOs is
increasing player freedom so that novel moments are constantly emerging. I think it's really just that simple (conceptually at least). Toss players into a living and breathing world and give them freedom to design, create, act, explore, socialize, emote, behave, and interact.
Monthly subscription MMOs have to focus on addictive gameplay to retain their subscribers. Maybe it's common knowledge, but it seems to me that addictive gameplay isn't just a bi-product of the genre, it's actively researched and designed into them. If a game is too deep and the payoff at any given time too satisfying, players might stop and take a break... a long break. An extreme analogy might be playing chess versus playing checkers. After a satisfying 3 hour game of chess, you'll probably not play again for days or weeks but a 10 minute game of checkers and you'll wind up playing best 4 out of 7. MMOs are McDonalds and something like Civilization, Hearts of Iron, etc are more like Home Cooking. I don't think we should be trying to turn a Big Mac and fries into a four course meal.
Just my $0.02 :)