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And Miles to Go Before I End Game
By Corvus | January 31, 2007
With all due respect to Robert Frost, I present more musings on MOG “End Game” issues, continued from And They End-Gamed Happily Ever After (link).
Monday I talked about retirement as an end game solution. Another solution I’ve heard called for, less often perhaps but certainly more adamantly, is perma-death. If your character should happen to die — that’s it, roll up another. This makes a macabre sort of sense if you feel that your virtual world ought to emulate the rules of the real one (for an excellent examination of the term virtual world, be sure to check out today’s post on Only a Game (link)).
Perma-death, it seems to me, is a particularly sticky wicket. I have seen table top RPG groups simply fall apart because of an inopportune death… and really, are there any opportune player character deaths? Even when a group remains intact, the death of a character can have a serious impact on the player, often times leading to an overly cautious and protective approach to role playing their next character. Perhaps even worse, I’ve seen character deaths push players in the opposite direction, leading to emotional distance from the next character and the game in general.
I’d suggest that for perma-death to work in MOG’s as they’re structured now, it ought to be 100% opt in. I’m not just talking about a mentality of, “My game has perma-death and you’re playing it, so you’ve opted in,” either. I mean that it should be implemented so that the player must choose to be subject to it each time it’s a possibility. Not at the moment of death, but well before.
Two methods of managing this spring to mind. The first is zoned perma-death. Perhaps the majority of your cities and towns are safe from perma-death, as well as the more settled countryside. But the truly wild areas, or really corrupt neighborhoods, are places of no return. Signs and guards could alert players to this fact and even require them to acknowledge the danger by indicating assent (whether through a mimicry nodding of the head or clicking of the button). If your game has more segmented areas, like WoW, this is even easier to manage – simply make your high level instances a “must survive” experience.
That brings me to another possibility character level based perma-death, or even class based perma-death. The level based solution is obvious – all characters with X number of levels from the highest level available will be subject to perma-death. Once a character reaches the last “safe” level the player gets to decide during every gaming session whether they’ll acquire XP and run the risk of advancing to the perma-death levels. This way, players who don’t wish to die, can throw themselves against the higher level content without the risk of ending it all. Players who decide to chance it will gain the higher levels and fancy loot that are attendant to the risk. A class based solution would work in much the same manner, with membership to an “elite” class opening up at some point, which yielded new content, new loot, and the new risk.
This last solution has a couple of added benefits. Those who chose to opt in for perma-death would be held in quite high regard as long as they survived. Those that reach the highest level in the game would truly have earned and deserve the recognition of their fellow players. If the balance through the end game was maintained properly, death might actually feel like something of a relief to players, particularly if their death was a “good death.” The other benefit is that the awareness of pending perma-death choices may serve to slow players down a bit in their rush to level. The secondary effects of a slower pace would likely include more cooperation, more community, and (we could hope) more time for role playing.
Still, I am very, very, very certain that a perma-death solution simply won’t work for games designed along the WoW model. Even many of the players who opt-in are bound to be discouraged when their creation finally dies. And discouraged customers don’t tend to be repeat customers.
So what are your responses so far? I’m just thinking “out loud” here, so feel free to quarrel either it the comments or your own blogs. On Friday, I’ll talk about some design choices that might just take care of the end game problem once and for all.
Tagged:Design. | 7 Comments »
January 31st, 2007 at 2:18 pm
What the heck is a sticky wicket anyway?
I had like two paragraphs before deciding to just turn it into a post … sorry.
http://cathodetan.blogspot.com/2007/01/you-died-of-cholera.html
January 31st, 2007 at 2:22 pm
From the Online Etymology Dictionary (link):
January 31st, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Sticky brits!
As an aside – one idea I kicked around was having “Ages”. Sort like Guild War’s Pre and Post Searing concept – but more divided. Players start as youths with a subset of quests, skills, etc., and then they were adults and then veterans. The backstory would progress likewise. The real mechanic here is that most of the skills were learned when people were young.
To loop it back into inheritance/permadeath – part of the idea was be to able to have characters of multiple ages. So “older” characters could give advice/items to “younger” characters – even if they were played by the same person.
January 31st, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Jeebus Josh, care to go ahead and write my next post in the series for me?!
Seriously though, that’s very close to the approach I’d use… with a couple of key differences.
I think Friday’s post is going to be very long. Perhaps I ought to start writing it now and figure out how to break it into smaller chunks…
January 31st, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Interesting. I quite like the level-based solution, especially if the player has a way to either just turn off XP gain or trade XP away for other things (EQ’s Sacrifice spell and several D&D spells come to mind).
(…reads Josh’s article…)
I’ve used Afterlife and I’m personally fond of it, but that just pushes the end game back another turtle (or if you can fully return it becomes just another dungeon).
Another variant that I like but haven’t seen very often lately is the Wizardry approach: Your “avatar” is a party with several characters. If things went poorly, one (or more but probably not all) of those characters could die, permanently; characters aged, and the older they were the harder it was to keep them alive. On the whole, though, that wasn’t a terrible problem, because you were the party and could rebalance as needed by bringing in another character.
(Ahhh, Wizardry. Remember putting a new party together just to find and retrieve the corpses of the previous party? Remember when character-bound items were called “cursed”? Good times.)
I really enjoyed the Party games (Might & Magic comes to mind too, Diablo II to a very limited extent), it’d be nice to see more of them. Don’t see how it would work very well for a MMORPG though.
February 1st, 2007 at 4:27 am
I agree with you that the solutions mentioned would work, in principle (except the zoning solution – I see this as creating “murder zones” that no-one would enter!) but like you I just don’t see this working in a game like WoW.
In the MUSE I spent most time playing in, permadeath could happen, but not as the exclusive action of players. It required moderation by the directors of the game, according to the story. This worked suprisingly well. The most common cause of permanent death was having one’s starship destroyed in battle – this happened quite rarely, because no player wanted to lose their character, so reckless risk taking was uncommon. (Also, you really had to prove yourself to get on a ship crew – you had to go through months of academy training etc). It did make starship battle very exciting, and when a ship was destroyed, it was news that spread throughout the game.
For a MMOG that I was working on 7 years ago that never came about, we had a “class” type approach – there was one class of player that could fight – and kill – other players. However, they could only kill other players of the same class. These Duellists were the only source of PvP violence. (Other players could settle disputes by hiring Duellists to represent them, which would have hopefully added story depth).
The game was backed up with a cloning system that meant that when you died you could be resurrected, but the chance of succesful resurrection fell gradually from 100% the more you did it. This would have isolated most of the players from permadeath, but added it as a risk for PvP players. I have no idea if this would have worked in practice, but it seemed like a fun approach at the time!
Best wishes!
February 2nd, 2007 at 12:22 pm
…and the musing continues (link).