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Editor's Note: Periodically, we will bring you an article written by a developer behind The Chronicle from Rapid Reality. In this first installment, Lead Creative Writer, Game Designer and Community Manager Nathan Knaack examines the concept of main and regular characters, a defining feature of their game. Please also note that the enclosed images are renders of actual in-game models, but not screenshots from the engine itself.
"Main and Regular Characters" by Nathan Knaack
The Chronicle, as well as the rest of the games Rapid Reality creates, will offer a unique new system that attempts to bridge the gap between different play styles, allowing them to coexist in one world without forcing a particular style on the other. During character creation, players will choose to be either “main” or “regular” characters. Regular characters are just like those found in any other MMORPG on the market today; they have a broad selection of customization options, can explore the world, fight monsters or other players, complete quests, join guilds, and gain all sorts of perks for advancing their abilities. They suffer the same kinds of penalties too, things like temporarily lowered stats and perhaps even some lost equipment when they die, but nothing terribly drastic or lasting. Main characters are an entirely new breed, unseen so far in the MMORPG market. They’re a bit hardier than their regular counterparts, able to sustain a bit more punishment before falling, but their benefits go far beyond that. Main characters are offered a wide variety of advantages, like an increase in attribute and skill advancement rates and caps, access to powerful new abilities, and epic quests. Main characters are also the only ones that can form and lead guilds, hold rank in NPC factions, and own land for developing. What’s the catch, you might ask? Permanent death. If ever a phrase struck a sour note in the mind of an online gamer, it is most certainly “permadeath.” In a genre where it commonly takes months or even years of monotonous level grinding and currency farming to reach any reasonable degree of competitiveness, the thought of having to start over and do it all again after one wrong move or untimely lag spike usually makes gamers reflexively discount any game that hopes to include permadeath. It’s unfortunate, too, because permadeath opens up so many doors in game design that would otherwise have to remain closed and funnel characters down the linear progression model. We have two systems that shorten the range of permadeath, giving main characters a few more chances to avoid it, but don’t go so far as to dull the pain so that permadeath becomes meaningless and easily ignored.
On the game mechanic side of things, it is important to note the properties of main and regular characters, obviously regarding death as the most important factor. It should first be noted that no character simply switches from alive to dead the second their hit point bar reaches zero; they instead enter a “near death” state, more commonly understood as “mortally wounded and bleeding to death.” Depending on the character’s durability attributes and skills, he or she would spend between three and thirty seconds slowly decreasing into negative health. This situation could end in one of three ways: either the character naturally stops bleeding, and thus begins a slow healing process, the character is aided by another with professional or magical healing, or the character dies. While this “near death” state is common to main and regular characters, the former will have a much longer time in which to be rescued. Additionally, main characters are a bit more difficult to disable in the first place than regulars. In player versus player situations, main and regular characters can fight normally, but it takes a main to kill a main. Regular characters may disable and loot main characters, but never permanently kill them. Naturally, most people immediately conjure up scenarios in which gangs of regulars drag around a main character just to land the killing blow, but rest assured that we’ve developed systems to at least balance out, if not entirely counteract that occurrence. One simple factor that limits this practice is that there is no visual distinction between main and regular characters, which significantly cuts down on the amount of grief that will be directed solely at mains.
So what’s the point of permadeath if main characters always get a second chance situation? The short and dirty answer is: they don’t always get that situation. Orcs are semi-intelligent enough to save a prisoner to eat later, usually, but wolves will just tear apart anyone that falls in battle. Tumbling off a rooftop in a crowded city might result in a main character waking up at the infirmary, but falling off a lonely cliff miles from civilization is another story altogether. Main characters will never be able to predict or rely on the second chance system, which keeps the risk high enough to justify all of the benefits they enjoy. - Nathan Knaack, Lead Creative Writer, Game Designer and Community Manager - Rapid Reality Many thanks to Nathan and Rapid Reality for providing this look inside their game's design. Please, give us your reaction in this comment thread and their hype meter. |
Developer Journal #1
