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General : Pacman Jesus and the Well of Souls
Posted Mar 15, 2010 by Jon Wood
MMORPG.com columnist Justin Webb attended this year's Game Developers Conference and took in the seminar presented by famous novelist and current MMO developer R.A. Salvatore. Today, Justin fills us in on Salvatore's love of a hardcore death penalty and the fact that death and resurrection will be directly addressed in 38 Studios' Copernicus.
One of the highlights at this year’s GDC was R.A. Salvatore’s talk about world design. While he stressed that the talk was about his personal gaming opinions, and that we shouldn’t assume that anything he talked about would be in “Copernicus”, he did drop one nugget regarding 38 Studio’s upcoming MMO, a system feature called the Well of Souls, which I’ll get to later.
Much of Bob’s talk revolved around ensuring that players feel like they are heroes. And many of his opinions were filtered through an old-school love of Everquest, which is understandable. All of us MMO players have a soft spot for our first game. It’s a cross between imprinting and a rose-tinted nostalgia for your first love. You are willing to overlook all kinds of things that are wrong with your first sweetheart. And for Bob, his first MMO love was Everquest.
I agree with Salvatore that a significant death penalty adds something good to a game. It gives some meaning to things. Uh, you know, not meaning in the sense that we're doing anything worthwhile from a real world perspective, but in-game it means that when we take a risk it really is a risk. When we do something daring it really is daring if we stand to lose something if things go badly. With no painful death penalty there can be no daring or courage because there is nothing to lose if you die.
Beyond that, just the knowledge that you have something at stake, that you always have your ante on the table to lose, makes every fight more interesting and makes the touch and go fights much more intense.
about the death penalty i belive you need to lose something, most of time is ok to lose some xp, what I really don't like is lose equips, the lose of equips is ok as penalty to criminals/reds/pkers since you can keep you game clean you can avoid it and if you want to have this kind of penalty you can just start to pk people.
this one I don't get, the well of souls is a concept for all games? or is something more especific about one single game?
It's a specific thing with the game they are making.
It's a specific thing with the game they are making.
Upon reading "well of souls" I first thought they were talking about Jack L. Chalker's Well world series with such books as "Exiles from the Well of Souls" and "Quest for the Well of Souls".
If people have not read these books I highly recommend them as they are some of the best science fiction I've ever read.
I loved the death penalty in EQ. Vanguard tried something close to it and wussed out in the end by trying to be like WoW...just like all the other games out there.
No death penalty makes MMORPGs just like single player games, where a player saves just before doing anything remotely dangerous.
What's the point? Where's the challenge? There can be no true reward without some type of challenge.
Travel in original EQ was fun for me because it was actually true travel (no porting or fast travel), it was dangerous, and that made it tense. Running a newbie character from Qeynos to Freeport was cool back in the day.
Sure dying got frustrating a t times...but hey...plan better, group, and/or don't do stupid stuff.
I soloed 95% of the time in EQ...and the death penalty never bothered me.
I like City of heroes approach, basicly you do not die/kill. If you are defeated you are teleported to the closest hospital via a special system but your public image takes a hit (you only earn half as much xp for a short time.) and when you have chopped the baddies up in small pices with your flaming sword they simply get teleported to jail. Just as the well of souls this is anchored in the gameworld and every one knows it. that explains how heroes dare to be heroes and villains dare to be villains.
I dont get that well part
but
I dont agree with the idea of harsh DP.
Why?
because it prevents players from exploring new things.
For example: the ps3 game Demon Soul,
you die and you have to start all over, lose all exp and everything. Well playing that game, why would somebody use weapon builds that arent the best//Avg if the risk was so damn high on death.
This is what I mean.
With harsh DP, people wouldnt dare explore the gameplay options outside the norm, nor would players explore the world with the risk of harsh DP at every turn.
This basically kills the concept of World PvP, because now you scare players off from joining. Then basically you have a small scale PvP but in a world instead of a instance.
think about it
Probably the best title for an article ever. good read, I would have loved to been at his presentation. I agree with the thoughts on death mechanics, I feel it is really something that is taken for granted and could be taken to the next level by a developer with the right vision.
Being R.A. Salvador is my favorite author I must say I was surprised a bit to find he played/plays EQ or games. Not sure why but I am glad to hear that.
With that said. Diablo was my first game but EQ was the MMO and I have to agree the death penalty was horrible. Running naked back to a corpse that may take some time to get all your stuff off of. Besides that having to group after a certain level.
I really like WoW and maybe it is a bit easy or less stressful but the game should be fun not like a job.
I am not sure about the well of souls. I suppose for the game it is being talked about . Might be fine for it.
I want something in between EQ and what has now become industry standard for death penalties, which is no penalty at all. I agree with Salvatore that death penalties add a sense of danger and accomplishment upon victory. From my own perspective, they also make me care a lot more about what I'm doing and how I approach a situation. If there's no death penalty, I'll often just rush in, take out a few guys, die, repeat until done with whatever I'm doing. That's a generic statement, but true for most games I'm playing or have played. No death penalty means I don't even care if I die, which shouldn't be the case.
But I agree it shouldn't be as harsh as EQ. Losing levels is rough.
Prax
Well of Souls, man why didn't any MMO ever come up with a concept that explained the death and resurrection before?
Like Asheron's Call did over 10 years ago with the lifestones which were created by Asheron. You attune yourself to them which is essentially putting a piece of yourself into the giant gem. This gives power to Asheron but at the same time allows you to resurrect with the pain of vitae and lost items. There is a lot of lore behind it and why it makes sense. But fortunatly everything R.A. Salvatore does is original an genius.
I played EQ mostly solo, and had no issue at all with the death penalty. In fact I had no issue with the death penalty of any of the original 3 (UO, AC, EQ) and I played them all extensively. And yes it 100% most definetly makes the game more enjoyable when there is the threat of a painful death if you screw up. I've said for a long time on these forums that is what makes beating a tough quest all the more exciting and enjoyable (although perhaps R.A. Salvatore came up with that too and not the thousands of people who have felt that way before him).
Sure they would. It's just that they would be more careful and thoughtfull when they do it instead of just blundering through suicidely because they don't care whether they live or die.
EQ used to have one of the harshest death penalties in MMO's (maybe the harshest there has ever been in a major title) and people in that game explored and tried things outside the norm. In fact, because of the nature of the game (it didn't lead you around by the nose and tell you what to do) I would bet that people did more exploring for the sake of exploring in it than people do in any of the new games.
As for PvP I don't know if the game in question here will even have PvP but I'm certain that PvP won't be the focus of the game. But there again, I spent a fair amount of time on the Sullon Zek server in EQ which was the nastiest of their PvP servers. There were no level limits on who could attack who and if a person close enough to your level killed you you lost experience. All kinds of dirty tricks were officially allowed. And yet it was some of the most fun I've ever had in PvP.
I think WoW's death penalty system is just about right, where you can either make a corpse run or have your stuff retrieved at a cost. My first MMO, Asheron's Call, also had a reasonable penalty (temporary loss of stats). I don't like how STO has no real penalty and actually restores you to full power immediately (its almost a bonus).
With no penalty for failure, there is little sense of risk and risk is what makes it exciting. On the other hand, to big a penalty makes it discouraging and creates an aversion to taking risks, so there need to be a balance.
Death penalties are a must in any MMO. I have played alot of diffrent games with very high DPs (chance of dropping item for others to pick up) to some that make it kind of a habit to put your nose in the dirt every half an hour. Or even like Star Trek ... you can blow up others by killing yourself !
I personally think WOW has got some really nice "hidden" penalty in form of repair costs. To me that repair cost shold also be in PVP content so that you actually loose something from dying. I would personally take it even one step further - in that items could losee PERMANENT durability (for example an item that has full 80/80 goes down to 79/79. This would aslo mean that items become worth less over time and you will have to look for new ones regularly. Thats more like the real thing after all. You wear out swords and armor over time - and it calls for new goals to get better items.
There is one thing about death penalty that devs should maytbe think about. Not every server needs to have the same death penalty. PVP and PVE servers could have diffrent ones for exmaple. I think devs are doing very little in terms of trying out diffrent things on diffrent servers. Why can there not be a really hardcore WOW PVP serverr ? As long as ppl know its there -then its up to them to deside how much exitment and penalty they are in for.
As was already said, they aren't the first group to try to tie regeneration into their storyline. COH/COV does it, as does SWG (cloning facilities). You don't even have to write a whole bunch to "make it work"...just put a little bit of an idea out there, and players will RP it the rest of the way anyway.
BTW: Aren't you the same writer who thought that regeneration couldn't be explained in a zombie mmo? I guess "being saved at the last minute" or "being immune to the virus" is a lot less realistic than a magical "well" technology that everyone uses to regenerate themselves, body and "soul". :rolleyes:
That is one thing I miss about EQ. Going above and beyond your class roles. Like CC as a ranger or druid. I remember root parking saving many a group back in the day. That isn't possible in these MMOs today. If your DPS or heal, that is what you are. No creative ways to play like back then.
Really? What was your death penalty if you had a cleric in the group? What was your death penalty if you were a cleric?
Playing as my cleric I was no longer scared of death. It meant nothing to me. In my later EQ days when I started 2boxxing a cleric I was never again afraid to die. EQ had the most worthless XP penalty if you played with a cleric, and at higher levels who didn't?
Well, it's even easier: there is that virus X raising people from the dead (npc zombies), then there can also be a mutation of virus X, the virus X-a, that allows you (those who contracted it, i.e. all the playing characters) to actually repair severe body damage without being an actual brainless zombie, so the zombies think they killed you and go away, and you can be saved and brought to a safehouse by a mysterious stranger...
It doesn't actually take being R.A.Salvatore to invent some technobabble (or magicbabble) to justify resurrection, i see nothing new actually, most MMOs tend to have a more or less logical justification, see Eve Online and the whole concept of "capsuleers" being a recent experimental advancement in cloning technology that is perfectly tied into Eve lore...
I enjoyed the read Justin and I agree that death penalties are needed. About Everquest tho, I left the game just before the latest expansion ( Underfoot in November ) came out and it is no where near as rough a death penatly as it was in the old days.
When death happens .. you simply go to a Hall in Plane of Knowledge and get your body summoned by an NPC priest. Hell you dont even have to find a priest to rez you, you just pay plats for the rez stone that you get from said NPC.
As for soloing, you now get to purchase Mercenaries ( a tank or a cleric ) with game currency that cost you plat every 15 minutes.
So why did I quit again ? Well for the solo people , it seems the only thing to do when you max lvl is grinding the same places over and over again for plat and gear etc. So it got old to me. Not to say i wont go back tho.
Sorry I didnt mean to EQ jack the thread, i just wanted to educate you a little on some of the changes that have happened since beta
.
Oh I won't argue that the penalty could be minimized under the right circumstances but "back in the day" most people didn't run around two-boxing with a cleric alt. I never did that at any point while playing EQ and I didn't play a cleric myself.
Also, cleric rez didn't return all of your experience and this was especially true in the lower and mid levels. So even if you had a cleric in your group you wouldn't get all the exp loss back.
And, of course, there was the corpse run. You had to go from your bind point back to the place you died while all of your good equipment was still on your corpse. If you died in some nasty spot it could be a easy, or a hassle, or downright miserable getting your body back depending on the circumstances.
Anyway, I only say it was one of the harshest penalties because that seems to be the consensus on this site (I certainly haven't played every mmo). And at the time I didn't think it was especially harsh. It just was the way it was. I sort of took it for granted. At the time it never even occurred to me that MMOs would come along which didn't have any death penalties at all worth mentioning.
Another great post and although I'd say I have to disagree to some extent I agree 100% with the argument that death REALLY needs to be fully integrated into the storyline (even if the integration is a bit of a mystery, it needs to be well known WHY it's a mystery).
My first MMO love is Asheron's Call (AC) and I truly feel that they have a well-integrated death and death penalty system; though I would have increased the death penalty a bit. Perishing and being resurrected meant 2 things: 1. Random Item loss and 2. Vitae penalty (a skill debuff worked off by gaining experience). I would have made it 1. Complete item loss and 2. Vitae penalty, but then again they didn't ask me (thankfully for some of you). Fortunately the system in Asheron's Call afforded most creatures the option to hit you in any one of 9 places. So, if you ran around with "some" armor, chances are, you were STILL going to take FULL damage for a swing depending on where the creature targeted. I digress, but the point is . . . you suffered.
All punishment aside, the resurrection of your body fit well into the story. Since you were a stranger on a distant planet filled with magic and shrouded in complete mystery the fact that Life Stones were erected by an insanely intelligent and immeasurably powerful native humanoid didn't come off as a complete impossibility. Well, that and the fact that most things that you encountered were new, original and often completely unknown made Life Stones an easy convenience to appreciate. Suffice to say that some things that came in through the portal were more than resistant to Empyrean (Asheron's official "race") magic and that's where you come in; and consequently why you'd be valuable enough to Asheron for him to have gone through all of the trouble to make you all but immortal. The cost to "power" the Life Stones? Merely a bit of your life and mana pool each time you died; but that was easily restored through healing and perhaps a mana potion (or alternately just a hint of patience and a nice patch of grass to lay down on).
Further blabbering aside, resurrection and death penalties should be harsh, sensible and integral; especially if some games have already convinced people (especially a skeptic like myself) that the core details of the process just aren't necessary; clever will do, it'll do just fine.
Seems to me that if each faction has a Well of Souls that when you die you have to belong to a Faction to resurrect in a timely way or you go back to the games Well and must run back to where ever you were if you are solo. You are forced to Group again-how is this different from Ever Quest?
Oh I won't argue that the penalty could be minimized under the right circumstances but "back in the day" most people didn't run around two-boxing with a cleric alt. I never did that at any point while playing EQ and I didn't play a cleric myself.
Also, cleric rez didn't return all of your experience and this was especially true in the lower and mid levels. So even if you had a cleric in your group you wouldn't get all the exp loss back.
And, of course, there was the corpse run. You had to go from your bind point back to the place you died while all of your good equipment was still on your corpse. If you died in some nasty spot it could be a easy, or a hassle, or downright miserable getting your body back depending on the circumstances.
Anyway, I only say it was one of the harshest penalties because that seems to be the consensus on this site (I certainly haven't played every mmo). And at the time I didn't think it was especially harsh. It just was the way it was. I sort of took it for granted. At the time it never even occurred to me that MMOs would come along which didn't have any death penalties at all worth mentioning.
I'm with you. At the time it never felt harsh to me. It was more of a nuisance on those rare occasions I didn't have a cleric. I just don't tihnk a game should be made with the thought "Let's make these fools suffer when they die." in mind. I doubt the makers of EQ thought this. It just seemed natural to take away XP. I think the EQ creators wanted it just like a saved game. You lost all progress up to your last save.
I also don't like having classes that are designed to be babysitters like the cleric was.
BTW, I started boxing a cleric in 2001, so that was still the glory days of EQ.
I agree, games need a reasonable death penalty to help make the experience more meaningful.
Although I'm primarily a PVE type player, I always sign up on PVP servers in order to increase the challenge of overcoming the content. Nothing more interesting that getting all ready for that big boss fight and having the enemy come roaring in and destroy you. (which is why I love open world combat, and not instances).
Its true, death penalties make things like exploring more dangerous and yes, they might even 'encourage' soloer's to group up in order to see the content.
Its what makes exploring fun, the fact that you've seen places that other never get to see if they don't group up and take the chance of dying just to get there.
One might be able to take a helicopter to the top of a mountain, but really, the challenge and fun is climbing to the top yourself.
This Well of Souls idea is interesting, especially if there is a way to delay or deny your opponents the ability to resurrect for a period of time.
nothing beats Arresting tugs with fire and nuclear radiaion
they even took it further
Manticore (a elite npc) taps the hospital grid to Teleport :P
I've never needed a harsh death penalty to play a game as if there was one. I don't like the idea of approaching situations by hammering through them, dieing repeatedly if it's the most expedient way to deal with it. Every encounter I play as if I'd lose my character if I failed, so tacking on some sort of gear or XP penalty on top of that failure is just irritating. It doesn't enhance the game in any way, for me at least, to be arbitrarily moved backwards a few steps to ostensibly teach me a lesson. It smacks of Monopoly-style mechanics, where if you have a bad die roll, you go to Jail (do not pass GO, do not collect $200).
Further, many games incorporate trial-and-error encounters that you can't reasonably be expected to have a decent chance of success until you've done it a number of times already. Couple that with a tough death penalty and it's a recipe for boredom.
I remember my first pvp experience in Wow. A high level character opponent came into a new player area and was killing people, he was finally killed, but res'd right away at a nearby graveyard and was back killing soon after. I was so disappointed with Blizzard at that moment. They seemed to be laughing at me.
Asherons Call had a much better death penalty. You would die and lose up to 3 of your most expensive items, so you carried very expensive items in you backpack to deter loss in case you could not get back to your body. You also lost exp, but could regain that just by gaining your normal experience. Running back to your body naked is just going too far. Did it in Ultima to many times and was why I just could not stomach EQ. UO subsequently added insurance on specific items so you could stay equipped.
We will just have to wait and see what 38 studios comes up with.
I'll agree that the goal shouldn't be making people feel like they are suffering unduly but I feel it's best if there is enough penalty to give people a strong motivation to avoid death.
The penalty in EQ didn't make me tear my hair out and cry to the heavens, "Why God! Why me!" but it was enough to make me want to avoid dying.
You could loose 3 then 3 again then again and again... Thats why everyone carried expensive robes to drop.
Copernicus sounds like it could be good. The problem at the moment is that most of the main MMOs are not even games anymore. No real gameplay and when any does come along too many people whine and cry.
Death penalty is just a gameplay mechanic. Anyoen with inteligence learns from gaming experience some peopel don't, in fact a lot of the current MMO players can't cope because they have never experienced any real game play.
We can just hope that Studio 38 can come up with a gem, they have the talent on board to create the World thats for sure.
I still think it's always better to punish failure rather than reward success.
I'm not too worried with the detailed mechanics, the people on board at 38 know how to make them integrate with the story well enough, the single reason I'm anticipating this game is that they have built a world for the game to exist in, 10,000 years of history were written up, a 100+ page wiki outlines it & all of the games & associated mediua are influenced by it even though they do not plan to give players walls & walls of text, it's there in the background for stories & situations to be woven around & from & relate to.
That kind of depth hasn't been around for a long time, fingers crossed the MMO lives up to that lofty aspiration.
I agree with R.A. and hope that indeed "Copernicus" is slanted more toward his "old school" views (as I am in that class) than yours (Justin). There is an overabundance of MMOs being made along the lines of how you like them and leaning more toward a "you can do no wrong" type forgiving ruleset. More variety please. More games that aren't afraid to hurt a players feelings by telling them no every now and then.
The first 25 games of Warhammer Fantasy I played (my beloved dwarves) I lost. The majority of so-called gamers today would just give up or whine. I didn't. I won game 26 and I learned and got better. I eventually went on some years later to work at GW, helping to teach others the hobby.
All I can say is FINALLY!
I've always played mmos and wondered why I resurrect when I die and if it at all makes any sense what-so-ever. Most games fail to make this aspect of mmos make sense. Take WoW for example. Why would I want to trudge back to my mangled body in ghost form? Why then do I magically come back to life with out harsh cut wounds.. a concussion.. severe sickness... It doesn't make as much sense as Mortal Online's death. That death made complete sense in a magical world. Also the original SWG when one had wounds for getting cloned. Those deaths made sense.
Nowadays, people would rather not have ANY penalty for dying and I say that if there is no believable penalty when one dies... then don't call it death. Call it something like "a defeat" when your faction teleports you away right before you're dead. The Well of Souls idea seems pretty good at making death an actual death and giving reason to why your character comes back to life.
I for one don't care how much death hurts (the more it hurts, the less people will use it as a quick teleport or simply as a means to avoid being killed by a player character). As long as it is a death, I'll be happy... this means it's got to have some penalty because coming right back to life without losing anything doesn't make sense to me.
LOL, I always carried at least 8 of those expensive robes at a time. They are extremely handy in a pinch! That brings back memories . . . no . . . must not . . . activate . . . account . . . again . . .
I didn' play EQ long enough to die so I don't know what thats like but I thought Vanguard was just right. You had to go back for your tombstone that had all of your soulbound gear and what was in your bags and would return part of the xp lost when you died. I think at the rez shrine you could recall your tombstone for your items but they would recieve damage and no xp would be returned.
But what made it really neat was that you could rope someone to your location that is within ~10m or receive the consent to drag someones tombstone back to them or a safe rez location. So that gave some classes with invis or feign a special job in the group that other games didn't have.
I am sure someone else has already replied and said this, but even EQ ditched the harsh death penalties. You respawn with all your gear and you can summon your corpse to the guild lobby, where (unless they've altered it since I last played) your merc can give you an experience rez.. You don't normally have to resort to that. You can get a 96% experience return rez a lot of the time just by asking and paying a cleric. (And some clerics do it free.)
Why did EQ1 end up ditching the hard, hard death penalty? The writing was on the wall. That style of play isn't coming back in a major AAA title. At least not in one that WANTS to succeed commercially.
That said, I sometimes miss the adrenaline rush of a close call and the group effort to recover the bodies from a massive wipe.
Fallen Earth tries for a more "believable" death/resurrection mechanic with the whole monitored brainwaves/cloning thing and I think they do it pretty well.
The EQ death penalty wasnt all that great and universally liked, it at the time was just all there was. Noone had tried anything new or different and people just took it as "the way it should be"
I happen to think WoWs death penalty is good enough. You still need to travel back to your corpse(in ghost form no need to fight naked) and take a durabilty hit or use the spirit healer are resurrect on the spot, take a larger dirability hit and have to travel back to where you were w/ fighting posssile.
Fallen Earth is actually the only game I have played in quite some time that does give me a logical disconnect. My brainwaves are being monitored, and when I die, a clone for me is built with all of my memories. Okay, that is not too far-fetched (ignoring for the moment that I believe this is not "resurrection" and is instead a new person with the memories of someone that is now dead, because that is a metaphysical concept not suited to a game, just something interesting to mention), except for the fact that my new cloned body has all the things I had on my now-deceased body. In what way does that occur?
Exactly, the Well of Souls concept in Copernicus is much more than just lore explaining player character death and resurrection. Yes, the lore will be deeply integrated into the gameworld, but the idea is that the Well of Souls will also be a core gameplay mechanic:
www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27645/GDC_RA_Salvatore_On_Building_Worlds_Copernicus.php
How this will all work we don't know yet, as no more details were given on the Well of Souls. But clearly death and resurrection has the potential to be affected not just on a personal level but on a factional and even NPC level. The implications this will have on gameplay could be very exciting if executed properly.
I am reluctant to even bother commenting because this really has been beaten to death elsewhere.
However, I think a core realization here has to be that there are MANY different kinds of MMO gamer now. Some of them (arguably even most) do not like harsh death penalties...and there are TONS of games out there for them. Others, like myself, feel that without a significant risk things like "heroics" and "exploration" have no meaning...and right now there is simply NOTHING on the market for us. I remember the "old days" of "old EQ" fondly because of the risk. The fear of wiping out deep inside Chardok or botching a Fear break-in; the sense of elation when we succeeded and depression when we lost. The thrill of skulking along the edges of a zone you probably shouldn't have been in or the fear of a random wandering griffon deciding to snack on you. None of the current games offer that because you lose NOTHING.
Not meaning to knit-pick, but in the article, Justin says "I’m a solo player. I much prefer to create my “heroic moments” on my own, not as part of a giant gang." I assume that his opinions have since changed from his EQ days, otherwise, I would be curious as to why he not only plays "Massive Multiplayer" games, but is a writer on a site that is dedicated to it.
As for what Salvatore said, it peaks my interest even though not much was actually said about the "Well of Souls". What I can do, is speculate based on his backgrounds that I am familiar with and my own. I would imagine that this approach would be like a lot of his writings: Some characters die, but the iconic one don’t die so easily. They have their fair share of close calls, but they don’t go down so easily. I think back to my days playing Dungeons and Dragons (not the MMO, the real tabletop/pen & paper RPG). When running and playing that, I'd always try to have things make as much sense, even with magic, so that there was suspension of disbelief and harsh death penalties as long as I still made it fun for my players.
I did make death quite severe. Yes, there was usually a resurrection spell that could be used, assuming that the party was high enough level or wealthy enough to hire someone powerful enough to do it as well as convincing that caster to resurrect said character. I also included into the equation the dead character: the faith in the gods, the actions done with the life that was given, what life would be lead if restored, etc. Even in the rules, there was generally no guarantee of successfully resurrecting someone. For example (using the Forgotten Realms setting): if you lacked faith or lived a life contrary to your patron deity, your soul belonged to whichever god of death ruled at the time. This means that you could end up in section of other realms if taken by an interloper, a resident or building material of the City of the Dead, attempting to become a servant of death, etc. If you were worthy to enter your patron’s realm, then there was also a choice of staying in a paradise or returning to the mortal realm.
With all of those issues surrounding death in my campaigns, I would not kill my players at a whim. I wouldn't change the battle results or alter reality to save them. I would ensure that the players were faced with tough challenges, but expect them to be able to succeed without dying, although only narrowly.
The issue with current MMOs is that the challenges created are created with the expectation of multiple deaths. Everywhere from solo, group and raid content is designed to kill you repeatedly until you've figured out the strategy to defeat it and even then, casualties are expected. So as long as I don't feel like I am expected to die thousands of times with the chance of my character to become permanently deceased so I just have to clone a new version and start all over. I've permanently lost characters before, so I'm not against it but the ones I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones that narrowly escaped death several times and go on to do amazing things, making me want to continue their adventures instead of just ending it.
Lol. +1 to Bountytaker.
Have you tried EVE? I don't like it but it sounds like you might.
The death penalty is a major part of the aspect of immersion, along with things like class roles and depending on a group is what truly made eq the game it was.
You know, you never here any of these 11 million + wow players ever talk about an event or aspect of wow that really impacted them like those of eq, eve, and the more old school/difficult mmos.
The difference is immersion... when you read a book vs watching a television show, which leaves a more lasting impression on you? Why are the memories of our favorite books and stories so much more powerful, and yet the average person would rather watch a tv show then watch a movie, read a forum post or email then read a book?
When you watch a deep movie, or read a good book the development of the character grows on you, the pains and weaknesses, the struggles and the times to overcome them develop a lasting impression. Tv shows are different, very few shows take the time and depth of developing characters, and go for the quick bang for the buck (mini series shows aside). All this is simple immersion in the story you are witnessing, and whether the emotion of the character draws you in.
Will most people prefer things like eq, which set you up for a road to pain and despair, stepping into the roles of a weak wizard that can be dropped in 2 hits from a mob 10 levels lower them him, fearing walking through massive zones constantly checking invis and huggin walls, dependent on other inhabitants of the area around you in an average game nowadays?
This choice brings so much development and achievement when time is devoted, yet most do not want the struggles that makes these characters seem real. Most prefer tv to books, They prefer to get a quick bang for their buck, cut the the action scene, skip through the quest logs, blast through a dozen mobs while eating a pizza dinner at the same time.
I think it's more that MMOs play out more like a TV Game Show than a typical game experience.
If you do a quest instance, it's less about absorbing the adventure as it is about getting prizes. You can almost hear an announcer, and if you ask me, I think if they made a Smash TV MMO it would work out fine - everything seems to be moving towards shorter/faster events with superfluous rewards. This is similar to the idea of disguising death respawns as a relatable function in that they are taking a primary function of the game an wrapping an aesthetic around it. Reincarnation machines better explain the *whys* of death just as much as a game show would explain who's giving you an item for killing something, and you can bet the game-show-game would have reincarnation machines or clones to explain how it's players die too.
You can have a stronger death penalty without having to go back to running around naked. Maybe you have to build up a rez fund in gold to go out into pve and pvp areas. Whatever the answer there is more than the polar extremes.
This is a great thing for everyone to keep in mind.
It seems like most of the death penalty discussions on these forums end up coming down to perma-death vs no death penalty.
Back in 2005 or so Everquest 1 had a special server made and ran a 2 week contest in which all characters made on that server had only 1 life. If you died , that was it, your character was done, permadeath. It was a very interresting 2 weeks. I did make a druid that lived up to lvl 20 but to make it that high you realy had to stick together.
The winner of the contest was a lvl 40 warrior if memmory serves me correctly.
All servers were allowed to participate on the permadeath server, it was a verry adventurous 2 weeks.
Does anyone else remember that contest or am I one of the few that thought that was a realy innovative and cool idea ?
Everquest’s death penalty is/was hardcore – I’m sure it’s changed slightly by now.
This right here made me quesiton the validity of the OP's perspective. It would take you less than five minutes to use a search engine for you to find out exactly what sort of death penalty EQ has now. What amazes me is that you weren't willing to do that but I suspect you want us to take our time to actually read what you wrote before we form our opinions. I am not talking about a change that happened this year or last... this changed awhile ago.
Anyway, early EQ death penalties were beyond hardcore and entering the realm of if you work in the morning or if you had class or any other responsibility outside of the game, it could become a hardship to play. If you go to sleep and your corpse rots while you are sleeping and/or working because you couldn't spend an additional 2-3 hours doing a corpse run (this after having played your allocated 4-6 hours of playtime already), then the game went too far. Now, however, the death penalty is almost nonexistent. When your entire party suicides off a cliff because it's faster than actually fighting your way down a mountain (LOTRO) it's too lenient. When the only penalty for charging full steam ahead with no tactic is an explosion and a pause before you get to respawn and do it all over again having learned nothing (STO) there is no death penalty.
It's a balancing act, and while the early games wanted to punish the hell out of players for doing something wrong instead of encourage them to learn to do it better or the exploration is dangerous, newer games dont' do anything more than slap you on the wrist, if that, hand you a ball and tell you to continue on burning through their content as fast as possible.
Ditto. Time will tell. I don't mind generally hardcore DP as long as there are SOME options for solo play. I'll watch this game carefully.
Yep, nothing quite like seeing a Fantasy author rip off another author's material. R.A. the Well of Souls belongs to Chalker, go find some new material ;)
Yo, Jack I'm happy for ya, and I'm gonna let you finish, but the Muslims had the best Well of Souls of all time.
R.A.'s "Well of Souls" we know very little about, nonetheless, so far it sounds absolutely nothing like what is found in the Well World novels.
Point is, just because it's named Well of Souls doesn't mean it's not going to be a new literary device. Any more than Chalker's "Well of Souls" is a cave where the souls of the dead gather to await the final judgement in Islam.
Now if it does turn out to be a direct rip-off then it would be appropriate to criticize, but not until then.
Upon reading "well of souls" I first thought they were talking about Jack L. Chalker's Well world series with such books as "Exiles from the Well of Souls" and "Quest for the Well of Souls".
If people have not read these books I highly recommend them as they are some of the best science fiction I've ever read.
Chalker was a top notch author, may he rest in peace. I loved his Dancing Gods series and the Soul Rider series and the Changewind Series, all of them superb pieces of work. He and Frank Herbert are the only Sci-Fi writers that I like, the rest are fantasy.
A game developer with real vision is hard to come by. To me, that means taking another solid look at your pre-existing beliefs with respect to the way MMORGs can/should run prior to regurgitating the opinions you've long held or collected from others who pitch their tent in your own camp. The genre is still essentially in its infancy, folks.
I read through all of the posts on this discussion topic and as a hardcore MMORGer myself, I can and do see areas where almost everyone seems to have part of the picture logically 'right.'
Yeah, we play for fun (aside from platsellers...)--so yeah, it doesn't seem at first that we want "harsh" to be part of the experience...at all. The obvious problem with that idea is something philosophers have recognized for years, and which the U.S. is currently struggling horrendously with. Without penalty, there is no such thing as reward. Because taking penalty away simply makes "non-reward" equivalent to penalty. It is the same as an elementary school classroom in which one student gets an award and thus all the students must get a reward or else someone feels judged and/or cheated and/or left out. This is an entirely fallacious concept, and I for one would rather not see it spread to and infect MMORGs.
The reality of the fantasy should be exactly the way R.A. Salvatore seems to see it. A death penalty with bite. I'm glad someone is coming up with a reasonable approach to it before the gaming community is WoWified too much--taking nothing away from the popularity of WoW, the lack of any significant penalty for dying makes much of it similar to taking a walk through a virtual zoo. You're exploring and there is no limit to your ability to experience the game aside from the limits of your time--which you inevitably end up throwing into the fire in mass quantity, addicted to a world without consequence. Without even a semblance of reality. The really bad part about that is that like it or not, it provides us training that is artificial, and in some ways...oh god, can I actually say it?...in some ways even worse than television. Yep, you guessed it. Worse than television. Television has for years been detrimental to society because it is the only environment (that and movies) in which there is nearly always a happy ending. MMORGs will become worse than television on the same day that consequences are completely thrown out the window in a vain attempt to pander to the masses for what the latter believe they want/need. More and more now, "reality" tv is taking center stage, and a game designer with true vision will realize that a similar transition should be (and eventually will be) made with MMORGs.
You cannot and will not accomplish anything truly heroic if nothing REAL is on the line. More real than the quarters we old timers used to line up on the joystick sill of the standup arcade games which read "I got next." More real than simply a few minutes of annoyance, or corpse drags, or naked corpse runs. Go for it, Mr. Salvatore. We're reading your stuff. I'm captured by the idea that someone has the guts to call it like he sees it and back it up with his time and his dedication, to say nothing about cash. A poster on a blog such as this is not all too different than a poseur. You're not risking anything posting out your half-baked ideas here. The worst you'll get here is flamed by others or censored by the moderator. Posters here are a bad cross-section to sample because there isn't any risk here and so you're naturally going to get a selection of people that will argue for what they always keep coming back for: the ability to run free in the fields like Bambi outside of hunting season.
Permanent death in an MMORG. Irrevocable death. You lost it all. You must rebuild from scratch. Well now, rebuilding from scratch wouldn't be such a horrendous big deal if the game weren't otherwise designed in such a way as to BORE YOU TO TEARS by 'forcing' you to do the same thing over and over and OVER again because time-honored 'strategy' indicates that the haphazard "who gives a crap if my toon dies" approach is the most efficient for getting your levels and phat lewt the fastest. There wouldn't be geared out level 90 shadowknights with mythical weapons running in big wide swaths through two or three rooms in Runnyeye 1 gathering 30+ lowbie goblins to powerlevel your twink because you might actually die from that sort of nonsense. It wouldn't be such a big joke anymore, but it would be replaced with something different, and something, I would argue, much better.
Rebuilding from scratch would mean the higher, harder to come by lessons of the game would be cherished all the more, the game would play out more meaningfully, there would not be 1-50 or 1-60 or whatever races (at least not in the same style) because racing through content would be equivalent to suicide. Races such as these could not be won by a simpleton with a lot of time on his hands. They would be won by truly clever people, and thus the highest level people would be cheered for their wit rather than jeered for the number of hours they managed to feed into the MMORG fire in a short period of time. You also might not find people so freely willing to give up a lesson they learned from sacrificing the life of a toon. Or perhaps one of ten lives that they had--a ten life system which would essentially allow you to live dangerously while you're young and inexperienced but which would eventually result in a day of reckoning: when you had only two or perhaps only one life left to live and you're called out for the chance of a lifetime against a spawn that happens perhaps once or twice a year. Back down and become known as a coward or stake everything you have for a chance at success and glory--or perhaps a glorious end and a permanent place in the lore of your guild.
What makes it so hard to understand that changing one dynamic of a game would and does change other dynamics? What makes it hard for gamers to realize that if designers listened to their bellowing cries of "I WANT VANILLA!" all the time, we never would have gotten EQ, AC, WoW, or any of the brilliant products that have come along since the inception of video games? We might only have rock/paper/scissors which any caveman could probably grasp the concept of.
There is so much more that can be done with games than to stick with what is out there, regardless of whether it is popular. Sure, it was a heartless DM that put a permanent Darkness 15' radius spell on a 15' wide room along with a permanent Silence 15' radius spell on same, with a wraith that could instantly knock you down TWO whole levels right smack dab in the middle of it. You want to find out what's on the other side of that room? Figure out how to handle it. You want to blithely roam free in a field with sunshine that doesn't burn you, bugs that don't bite you, weeds that don't make your legs itch and pollen that can't make you sneeze? Then find your own damn field and stop trying to wreck the fantasy worlds of those of us who spend their time in both sorts of worlds.
BTW: My whole l/t post can be summarized by someone much wiser than me, in five words:
The risk begets the reward.
I played EverQuest for five years, beginning in the Kunark era (the first expansion). The death penalty was truly harsh, and that sense of *danger* made for an immensely more immersive feeling than any of the newer MMORPG's. In the early days, as others have mentioned, even travelling carried a good bit of risk, which you embraced for the sake of the possible rewards. It was an adventure, in a way that games with no real risk are unable to provide. I hope Copernicus has that kind of edge - I miss it. In EQ today, death is nearly as trivial as in WoW. EverQuest had it right in its original design, up through the first two expansions. Best MMORPG I've ever played, even with the limited graphics of the time. I hope thats the template that they use.