Permadeath. The word sends shivers down peoples' spines. Developers cringe when the word crops up on their forums. Permadeath has only rarely been accomplished in a modern MMO, although it once had a much more broad following in the MUDverse.
Permadeath is the end of your character when you die. Diablo 2 called it "hardcore mode" - when you die, that's IT - roll a new character, start over, and do it again.
Obviously, in most modern games, permadeath (PD) would be a disaster. Let's pick one of the easiest leveling games out there - WOW. Imagine if you only had one life, in WOW. I think some people might grind their way into the 30s or even 40s before dying, but can you imagine doing it all over again once you did? Ugh. Now ponder a game like L2, where the leveling is dramatically slower than WOW.
It Just Wouldn't Work. There, anyway.
I'd like to suggest that a PD game could work, assuming a few things.
1) Leveling is fast. You can skill up a new character to "competent" levels in a very short period of time. Maybe not have every skill, or have peaked them all out, but for example have a skill based game that rockets you up to a strong level in a couple of skills pretty fast.
2) Remove the progression of the character as the main element of the game. In a game like Warhammer, the only things that really matters are how high your level is and how good your gear is. Nothing else really sticks around in the long run, so those things become the focus of all your gameplay. Make something else that focus - maybe a guild city that can be ranked, or an entire nation of them. Perhaps each player has some sort of personal fief they build, that is inherited by future characters. Something. Something that you advance over time, that ISN'T your character.
3) Make the early game interesting, too. Eve does something interesting, in that the resources dropped by "low level" mobs are still valuable even to the highest level players in the game. Make what the lower levels do relevant to the overall goals and objectives of the game, and the player won't mind doing them. Having to grind out the same rats, kobolds, wolves, and etc. over and over will bore people, so you need to make that content more meaningful somehow. For example, if you wanted to add PD in Warhammer (bad idea, but suppose), you could make the lower level keep conquests CRITICAL to taking the higher level ones. Suddenly, the lower levels are important because they are the only ones who can take those lower level keeps.
4) Make death a good thing. OK, maybe not a good thing - but at least, give players some reason to not completely dread it. For example, suppose that in your skill based game, players started with a hard cap of 50 in each skill. Every time they died, though, a percentage of how much they had skilled up is added to that cap. So someone who uses swords and skills up to 30 before dying gets say a +3 bonus to the cap next lift. Next life, he gets to 53 - lives a long time - and then gets a +5 bonus to the cap when he dies that time. Of course, skills that don't get raised, don't get bonuses at all (you don't want someone chain-suiciding to raise their cap). With such a system, PD actually ties into the overall development of character over time.
Those are a few thoughts, anyway. What do other folks here think? I think the genre is almost ready for a real PD game, a sandbox game with PD built into it from the get go.
I'm fine with permadeath as long as I don't stay dead permanently.
I... wait what?
I have to agree with Spare, watching everything you have done for months or years go away instantly just because you screwed up once, or hit a really bad lag spike at a bad time is not my idea of fun at all, would never do permadeath in a something I do to relax.
I still believe that PD is actually a really cool element. But for it to work, like you said, certain things would need to be set into place in order for it to properly work. In my opinion you would need:
1) Like you said, make leveling fast, make level prgression and gear LESS important, and make the early parts of the game interesting.
2) Icorporate a loot system based on freedom of loot items. Meaning, that yes, open looting is available, if you are killed, whatever on you dies with you on your corpse. Meaning, if you are fast enough to create a new character, you can make it back to your corpse to retrieve items and such.
3) Going on with that last one, I believe that since it is a sandbox a character can buy and create a home, and in that home items can be stored. And with this, I continue.
4) Create an element like cloning. You create an initial character that can never be lost in theory. You lose your skills, some memories, that sort of thing. But in your home you have a cloning device that works much like a save game in a console game. However, clones aren't created aged, they are reborn anew. So, in theory, you would have to start all over, but your experiences and memory would remain the same. (If any of you watched Stargate SG-1, it would be very similar to how the Asgard remain alive.)
So, you would have to be careful about what you had one your person when you were walking about. If you were killed you would lose all your skills and everything on your person. When you die, your cloning device would be activated in your home and it would then allow you to create a character anew, with the memories and experiences (not experience) of your past character. If you were wise, you've also accumulated spare gear to give to your newly created self.
I played Diablo 2 but was too chicken to try out Hardcore - the one time I did I got to level 7. I have often wondered in playing WoW how it would work and the furthest I got without dying from character creation was a paladin to level 13 before I died from...sigh...murlocs.
I know that the way WoW works a permadeath could not work - how would you raid dungeons or learn new encounters? Plus how do you deal with the PUG from hell? I think also the issue of lag would be a big problem - could you imagine a server crash and you dying? People would go berserk.
I think a new game could pull it off but the games now as it stands would be tough. On a side note imagine PVP in such a game. Talk about the ultimate challenge.
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The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
The problem is that long term players really want something to show that they are long term players.
It's the same case as saying people just do dungeons to do them, that's just not true.
By removing any kind of progression and making it all go the drain will never attract a large player base and rarely long term players, even in EVE people show off with their skills.
That's an element you must have, i can't see PD to be implented in any MMO out there now even with some adjustments.
And in comparison i don't believe those D2 servers were actually that populair either.
Don't get me wrong but the only type of 'fun' i can see in such games is the fun of ruining other people and anyone that ever did some GM work on PvP server would know people are rather touchy about Griefing and even those dedicated defenders of the system start to moan.
I simply can't see anyway to make it work and keep more then a handfull members at long term.
It certainly doesn't make much sense to do PD unless it gets us something. So - what does it get us? Besides dead characters?
First off, it removes the need for a grindy game. Since you're going to be going through character after character, players aren't going to want to do 'whack a mob'. They want to do something that matters, something more meaningful to the game world. Think ATITD, or Eve, or Shadowbane - something where the players are interacting with the game world more deeply than in most games.
Second, it adds an element of danger that most MMOs lack. Which allows heroism. Anyone here read Bartle's book, "Designing Virtual Worlds"? I don't agree with everything he writes there, but he has an interesting bit on heroism in MMORPGs. Basically, there isn't any, most of the time. We play games where we have the illusion of heroic action.
But for something to really be heroic, there needs to be both risk and the inability to do something an easier route. It's not heroic to swim across a croc infested river if there is a bridge there, for instance - it's stupid. For that reason, the "delete your own character to make your own permadeath" suggestions miss the boat, because while the person who follows their suggestion faces risk, they do so without reason.
With PD, individual heroism becomes possible. Trying to hold the bridge to buy the rest of your team time to flee into the castle is a real sacrifice, not an empty gesture because you will respawn in a minute anyway. Jumping in to save someone against a beastie that's about to kill them becomes heroic, because you risk permanent death of your character.
In most of today's games, all of these things are empty acts. We do quests and games call us heroes, but nothing we do in them really shows any heroism, not even in the context of the virtual world. And somewhere inside, we know those actions are hollow. The stronger the penalty for failure, the greater the chance to show heroism. And PD creates perhaps the greatest possibility of all.
I don't remember where this came up last (sue me for no link, go hunt, LOL).
I can't remember if it was when I interviewed Stieg Hedlund (D2 fame), or read it somewhere else. Anyway, one of the Diablo devs stated at one point that less than 5 percent of every single player to EVER go on Battle.net even tried Hardcore. That's just "trying it". The number of people that normally played on that setting was less than 1 percent.
With numbers like that, I simply don't ever see a company going that route in an MMOG - ever.
I tend to make a lot of alts so I generally play through content more than a few times in any given MMOG and there has yet to be a game that it hasn't gotten stale after the 3rd or 4th time through. That is going to happen regardless of how compelling it is made.
Honestly, I would only want something like this if it were optional. I think it would be a fun feature for retired characters and hardcore players but for most, time invested in a character is just not something you want to toss away.
Permadeath Discussion: the scariest MMOG feature
Now ponder a game like L2, where the leveling is dramatically slower than WOW.
Linear Mode
