Speaking of death (see post below), one thing I noticed while reading everyone’s 2010 predictions is that no one (that I saw) predicted an MMO would launch or be announced with perma-death. While MUDs exist or existed with perma-death, we have yet to see an MMO try the concept, and I’m starting to wonder if we ever will.
I don’t want to get into exactly how perma-death would work in an MMO, which is a topic in itself that I’ve talked about here, but more about the fact that today, with the genre expanding and new takes on the genre finally being seen (Fallen Earth and DarkFall among others), this concept still has not been attempted. With all the talk about innovation vs polish, and with titles seeming too familiar, would an MMO based around perma-death not be a stand-out title in the crowd? If someone today announced an upcoming MMO based around perma-death, would it at least not peak your interest? I know I would at least look into it.
We know games outside of the MMO genre feature perma-death, be it hardcore mode in Diablo or Torchlight, or characters dying and not coming back in countless turn-based strategy titles, so it’s not like the idea is one that instantly turns people away. Diablo 2 in particular has/had a very healthy population that enjoyed hardcore mode and what it offered. We also know that in today’s market, with self-publishing and lower start-up costs (if you play it smart), smaller niche titles can exist and turn a profit for their dedicated teams. So again, why have we not seen perma-death at least attempted yet? Is the concept just too different? Has it been tried internally and ultimately found lacking? Is it just too difficult/complex to implement?
Hardcore Casual 
MMOs don’t have a save point and you can’t just train a new unit. Unless they came up with a very innovative way to allow you to keep some kind of continuity going when you die, the game would suffer from a worse treadmill than even WoW. One raid boss gone bad could wipe out months of work.
I think a better tack would be to reward players who don’t die. Skill or Attribute buffs, special items, fluffy titles, and other unique things or abilities would provide plenty of incentive to keep your character safer, while preventing the time spent from being utterly loss in the event that catastrophe happens.
Umm.. because the stakes are too high for 99.9% of the audience. I think the closest you’ll get to this is what you see in EvE — which is to say, possibly severe but recoverable.
MMOs are fundamentally about character development. It’s character driven progression. An MMO that distances itself from being character driven would make the loss of said character unimportant (making perma-death meaningless).
Games (like Diablo) which have been successful with perma-death always allow the player some semblance of control. Mostly, they are SOLO games and the player chooses how much and when to risk said character.
Also, compared to modern MMOs, the depth of development to a character in a game like Diablo is pretty minimal. The only real loss from death ends up being your time.
In an MMO, particularly a PvP MMO, you aren’t going to have that control and the loss is going to feel much more significant than just your time. So not only are the stakes higher, but your control over the outcome is lower. That’s not exactly a bet most people would willingly want to make.
I doubt a PD MMO would ever get greenlit, much less succeed even as a niche.
It was one thing in the tabletop RPG days when PD was the norm, but you were also face-to-face with your GM who (usually, there were the occasional Killer GM’s too) who was working not only against the players, but with them. His goal was not to see how gloriously he could arrange for the group to die, it was to challenge them while they progressed through his storyline.
Videogames lack that personal touch and the immediate personal adjustment that can take place. CRPG’s in particular are governed by the mathematical calculations that replace the tabletop dice. No one wants to permanently lose a character because the math killed him and there was no GM playing God to “adjust” things on-the-fly.
DDO does have a PD subculture and there’s at least one PD guild on every server (haven’t heard if one’s been started on the new Cannith server yet) each with its own rules and its own take on PD. The playstyle is unique but certainly not for everyone. It’s niche even among the niche.
I totally agree that it’s a GIANT hurdle to get across, no doubt, and any MMO that has PD would likely play very differently than a ‘traditional’ MMO. I guess my point was more that since it would be such a unique feature, and possible open so many new doors, it’s surprising no one has at least attempted it. I would understand is one title was released and bombed, or one went into dev/testing and people realized the idea won’t work, but I don’t think we have even gone THAT far with it to this point. That just strikes me as odd.
Well Torchlight is coming out with their MMO version of the game, while it surely won’t be the open world type MMO, and will likely be closer to Dungeon Runners, it might have hardcore mode, as the single player version did
Just on one level I would think that perma-death would be pretty bad for immersion. You’d have an attachment to your toon in the form of “risk” but in reality you’d go through lots of them.
In any game that was semi-difficult you die pretty often. So you’d roll an alt and begin again….
What’s the point? Just want to keep rerolling alts? Doing the same intro content over and over again?
I think Diablo hardcore had stupid levels of pve leveling before you were “ready” to risk your toon.
I would imagine -most- people spent their time doing that pve most of the time instead of pvp’ing….
Graveyard zerg as in Warhammer, Aion, and WoW isn’t the right thing but perma-death doesn’t sound like a good feature either.
After all… most of the people I’ve seen asking for perma-death have been post-gank carebears failing at troll.
Darkfall appears to be about as hardcore as the internet can support anyway ;)
Not to mention that perma-death would bring /ragequit up to never seen before levels. Can you imagine the pure utter frustration you would experience because your router decided to have a brainfart at the worst possible moment causing your character to die permanently? **shudder**
Happened all the time in Diablo 2. Hardcore players generally have a totally different mentality. The challenge is to see how far you can get before dying. The normal player is trying to collect gear, or max out or whatever. If you go in with that mentality into playing a hardcore character, of course you will rage, but all you have to do is change how you approach the character.
Anyway, Hardcore mode, regardless of game, isn’t for everyone because not everyone can get into the mindset required to play it. Thats fine, but I DO wish more MMO games would have an optional hardcore mode, just because I’ve enjoyed the hardcore community in games that have had it.
People have been talking about Permadeath in MMOs for as long as I can remember. To me it seems like an utterly pointless gimmick, unlikely to appeal to more than the tiniest fraction of thrill-seekers, so it’s hardly surprising that no major MMO has bothered to try it.
Well, no, actually that’s not quite true. Everquest tried it a few years back, although only as a one-off experiment. For a few weeks there was a server called “Discord” with open PvP rules and permadeath from level 6 onwards. I played on it briefly, with several friends of the time. None of us got to level 7. I believe that the highest level got into the 30s before the server was removed.
(Also I see from my brief websearch to refresh my memory on the Discord server that there is a current MMO that has permadeath – Dofus introduced permadeath servers in December, apparently).
I would have thought that, by definition, permanent character deletion on first failure would destroy the business model for any MMO based around character play. And once you remove character play you are into another game genre entirely.
If devs want to make a MMO with permadeath they should take a look at how perma-death has been successful in other game genres.
The fact that I think people forget is that all video games started out with Perma-death. Games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Donkey Kong did not allow you to have a persistent avatar.
Another medium to look at is the “Roguelike”. If nothing else, these games are known for their Perma-death systems.
So what makes these games fun even when you don’t get to hold on to your character from play to play? One word: Narrative.
The old arcade games saved your character’s semblance by using “High Scores”. ‘Roguelikes’ take it a step further by saving a slew of data from past adventures for all to see and even implement your character’s “Ghost” in dungeons. Dwarf Fortress is a prime example of persistent character narrative working great.
Demon’s Soul is another great example. They use past player experiences and death to tell you a story about their success or failure.
THIS is the way Perma-death needs to be implemented for it to work in a MMO. I have been experimenting with this concept in my own creation (see my link above).
I hope MMO devs see that the answer to proper perma-death is already before them, they just need to take notice.
That would be the time to make an MMO where the players really do effect the world. Because if it is perma-death for you it should be for the named NPCs/mobs. A group kills that dragon, that dragon never comes back. …It would have to be a very different MMO. May need server resets occasionally or something.
MMORPG based on ‘never coming back’ could work imo. Kill a NPC and because of it another NPC gets their business, or their son takes over. Kill a monster in a dungeon and the next day it changes, with a type of random dungeon generator (picks out dungeon style, what abilities bosses may or may not have, etc) that looks at the server’s specifics at the same time (e.g. players decided to kill decent king X, and a whole list of other factors). An interactive MMORPG will work and I personally believe they will be the future.
Perma-death for players is a bit harder, maybe once you die you can recreate a similar character and call it Joe Flanger II, Joe Flanger Jr, Joey Flanger or anything Flanger. Of course this will probably require a family name system where players are known via Surname and the first names are the names for their characters/alts.
IMO, Perma-death is perfectly workable in a MMORPG that depends more on group and server progression more then single player progression.
I started playing D2 HC because some of my friends dragged me into that, and after some losses and adapting my playing style i just could not go back so Softcore, because the thrill was missing. But D2 had a very quick leveling progression and the combat itself was fun (mowing down masses of monsters, not the point and click with 2 different spells for an effective char build, mind you). So when you died, you just muled some stuff over to your new char and leveled it to 40 in a mere day. And around 50-60 you could find good stuff again, to be ready for another Chaos Sanctuary in Nightmare with a melee char.
So the recovery was much faster than any MMO i know of.
What made it frustrating were lags/disconnects and the shitty pvp-flagging system.
But a 100% permadeath system is detrimental to the core mechanics of an open world MMO. There are just too many possibilities you can hardly influence that may cause your abrupt death and when this occurs it is not thrilling anymore, it is just frustrating.
So either you do the heavy instanced, solo-MMO with quick progression and recovery and optional pvp (which is a concept most of us here are bored of) plus permadeath OR you do the sandbox.
A lineage system with heritage of skills could work with the permadeath of a character. So you play a bloodline rather then a single character(which is just a heavier version of statloss and no “true” permadeath). You might design a system where <=0 HP means just a "knocked down" state and not instant death, but in the end you have to put alot of systems in place to have the playerbase barely accept it.
Of course it opens up new gameplay possibilities, which can be quite rich if you ask me, but at the bottomline you will end up with a way smaller community to whom these concepts are appealing.
At least that is how i see it.
Ah, sry for the double post
Interestingly, I think that the important thing here that you glossed over a bit was that you mention that you were “recovered” after hitting level 50, a mere half way to max level. In the modern day “end game is the whole game” mentality, its easy to look back and forget that you could play a game like Diablo 2 and not be max level and it didn’t really matter. Its that key mechanic that would have to be replicated in order for permadeath to work.
That said, I think a Diablo 2-like “MMO” could make permadeath work (Hell, even Hellgate London had a dedicated Hardcore community until the day it shut down). We aren’t going to see any WoW-likes with permadeath though, because the mechanic would simply make no sense in that context.
D2 was also competitive-PvE-based but in the higher levels experience came very slow and most people didn’t care if their char would be level 89 or 99. Also D2 didn’t emphasize gating the player through the content as heavily as WoW did.
Just imagine the character progression in WOW didn’t switch from leveling to items-only-treadmill at 60/70/80 and your sole toon-lvl would not influence and limit your performance that much.
D2 also had their loot widely spread. You could get the (in)famous Buriza from a trashmob in Nightmare and not just from the last mob implemented in the game.
D2 feeled like a curve, WoW feels like stairs.
With the content-gating and hand holding it became more accessable and less punishing but also far less interesting to anyone whose first game was not WoW.
And as a conclusion of my little excursion and comparison between the two Blizzard games in this regard, I will emphasize the most important part:
The actual combat mechanics and the whole feel is much better and rewarding in D2 where you have movement and a little bit of aiming(with the different attack patterns of spells) as a factor(as long as you didn’t play a hammerdin). Plus mowing down mob-masses is far more fun then farming a single wolf after another. And beware, if your mighty hero in WoW adds a second or even third wolf, the math says you will die if you don’t have a crowd-control or escape spell at your disposal.
Of course the appeal of WoWs combat content is the group/raid instance, where inter-class-play shines ^^
But to me, target-locking, auto-attacking and pressing my max-dps/aggro/heal-cycle which goes like 1,2,3 is the pinnacle of boredom. Oh, and mind the ga… flamestrike under your feet. Thats about as involving as it gets.
The point I’m trying to get to is:
In WoW you’re playing to reach a goal(that is reseted every 6th month) and the actual path to that goal becomes shallow very quick for a seasoned gamer.
In D2 you were going for a goal, too. But the path was fun and you could even find useful items before you reached the supposed light at the end of the tunnel.
I’ll better stop my derailing rant here …
I started playing D2 HC because some of my friends dragged me into that, and after some losses and adapting my playing style i just could not go back so Softcore, because the thrill was missing. But D2 had a very quick leveling progression and the combat itself was fun (mowing down masses of monsters, not the point and click with 2 different spells for an effective char build, mind you). So when you died, you just muled some stuff over to your new char and leveled it to 40 in a mere day. And around 50-60 you could find good stuff again, to be ready for another Chaos Sanctuary in Nightmare with a melee char.
So the recovery was much faster than any MMO i know of.
What made it frustrating were lags/disconnects and the shitty pvp-flagging system.
But a 100% permadeath system is detrimental to the core mechanics of an open world MMO. There are just too many possibilities you can hardly influence that may cause your abrupt death and when this occurs it is not thrilling anymore, it is just frustrating.
So either you do the heavy instanced, solo-MMO with quick progression and recovery and optional pvp (which is a concept most of us here are bored of) plus permadeath OR you do the sandbox.
A lineage system with heritage of skills could work with the permadeath of a character. So you play a bloodline rather then a single character(which is just a heavier version of statloss and no “true” permadeath). You might design a system where <=0 HP means just a "knocked down" state and not instant death, but in the end you have to put alot of systems in place to have the playerbase barely accept it.
Of course it opens up new gameplay possibilities, which can be quite rich if you ask me, but at the bottomline you will end up with a way smaller community to whom these concepts are appealing.
At least that is how i see it.
Perma-deaths are perfectly feasible, just NOT in all the MMORPGs you are used to.
Sure you don’t want to raise a character to 80 and then die only to start again. But are we only talking about MMORPGs that focus solely the single player?
Like someone mentioned earlier, the ghost system. I’d like to expand on that. Instead of what your character does within itself, what about the RPG aspects of what your character does to the outside world? So you kill a NPC, then a week later you die. What your other character did to that NPC is still there and still affects the gameplay. Your guild conqueues an area and this totally changes the game world, this affect that you had will still be on the game world.
Anyway WHAT is perma-death exactly? What about other possibilities. e.g. while one of your characters die your account may be linked to all your characters, so your Joel Flanger dies, so you pick up on Mary Flanger. Mary’s family ties still affect the game world, so Joel killed NPC X who was the friend of NPC Y. So NPC Y still hates Joel and his whole family (maybe some NPCs are more forgiving to family members then others) and hence still hates your characters (being Mary).
Would the perma-death of Joel still be counted as a perma-death? I mean, you’d lose all your gear, and anything else that comes with your death. But other ties within the game still affect all your characters and everything Joel did is pretty much given to your whole account since you are the same person playing.
So I really do think it is how you define perma-death.
There are some successful Permadeath guilds in Dungeons and Dragons online. Its all voluntary of course but they are pretty strict. If you want to stay in the guild you need to delete any character who dies. Here is an example: http://compendium.ddo.com/wiki/Sublime_Permadeath_Guild
I think perma death would work well in Darkfall…. if they made the levelling of stats easier. A ultra Hardcore server anyone?
I’d try it but would last about 10 minutes until a gobo shaman whooped my ass.
http://www.glitchless.com/dawn.html
Didn’t some Java game, I think Wyrm Online, plan on trying that out? Or was that just open pvp with full loot (aka what we wanted before df released). The world may never know.
Wyrm I believe is full loot, but not perma-death. I played it a little bit to try it out, but it was a little too ancient for me to really get into it. Plus something about browser-based games just does not sit well with me.
It’s pointless.
Every time you die you need to reroll a character. How on earth would you party with anyone? One person could easily set you back days of progress by causing a party wipe. You couldn’t make any hard missions, because who is going to repeat something 5 times when in between each failure they need to make a whole new character?
You couldn’t even include pvp. You die so many times in it just learning that you’d either never play it, or it would be level one people fighting.
It’s a concept that just doesn’t work in a persistent world.