Death in MMORPG

Vermillion_Raventhal · July 2018

In one of my amatuer MMORPG designs I had decided to base one a lot around death and rebirth and afterlife. One of the main conflicts was based around the battle between the gods of life and death.

What do you think of a more involved death mechanics?

Basic back story is there was a unknown cataclysm a few thousand years prior wiping out most life and irradiating most of the earth. Except for growing mysterious shielded areas. No new life was born b

Interacting god's or dieties began appearing the first was goddess of life who granted immortality to all creatures and created a spiritual realm. All those who died prior spiritual energy was lost.

Those who died were placed in spiritual realm and reborn at temples inside the spiritual realm. Those who refused became lost souls(character deletion process). Those souls energy could be reborn.

Well I wanted the spiritual realm to be an adventure area. Protions of it could be traveled dangerously as a form of faster travel by the living or transfer servers(each server was a different shielded part of the world). Dead could also travel it but at risk of a perm death for being destroyed as a spirit or staying dead too long causing athropy. Also quest and raid could take place there.

ArChWind · July 2018

Let me say this,

Once upon a time a long time ago.. OH never mind.

Anyway I spend greater part of 15 years working toward a MMO and got about the same responses like zero. Most of the feedback was negative, tearing down of my work, so I took my knowledge elsewhere. In fact I made a investment in a porn site.

Now why would I do that? Well in 15 years of battling against all the financial demands, trying to keep a team together long enough to knock out a design that was different and fighting all the negative feedback. Not to mention never once gaining a following, I decided to put my investment in something that would make a return.

After 3 months I had 5500 followers and released 2 films, now going into our second year we see potential for an adult MMO with serious investments, made 200% return on my investment already which is enough to build a small scale functional demo.

OK so advice time.

Forget building MMOs unless you either have 10 to 20 million to throw into the works. Have a solid plan and backers or a kickstarter that is mass marketing. There are so many of them out there you have to compete against now.

Forget death altogether. Concentrate on making it non combat.

Vermillion_Raventhal · July 2018

ArChWind said:

Let me say this,

Once upon a time a long time ago.. OH never mind.

Anyway I spend greater part of 15 years working toward a MMO and got about the same responses like zero. Most of the feedback was negative, tearing down of my work, so I took my knowledge elsewhere. In fact I made a investment in a porn site.

Now why would I do that? Well in 15 years of battling against all the financial demands, trying to keep a team together long enough to knock out a design that was different and fighting all the negative feedback. Not to mention never once gaining a following, I decided to put my investment in something that would make a return.

After 3 months I had 5500 followers and released 2 films, now going into our second year we see potential for an adult MMO with serious investments, made 200% return on my investment already which is enough to build a small scale functional demo.

OK so advice time.

Forget building MMOs unless you either have 10 to 20 million to throw into the works. Have a solid plan and backers or a kickstarter that is mass marketing. There are so many of them out there you have to compete against now.

Forget death altogether. Concentrate on making it non combat.

Lol, I don't plan on making a MMO. Just talking about MMO theory using some designs I had. Helps me pass time at work.

iixviiiix · July 2018

It would be better if dead in MMORPG mean lost temporary progress instead of lost the earned progress .

For example if a party get wiped in a dungeon then they must spawn in far away place and have to reset the progress , no resurrect in middle of challenge .

Or if player doing field quests then the quest will fail and they have to take the quests again .

I like death mean "you dead , try again" instead of "you dead , you lost things"

When i gaming , even if i lost and don't get reward , it still fun to try it again and again , i lost hours of playing and no reward but still fun .

But shit hit fan when my hard earned stuff get blow up , at that time my feeling is "enough of this shit , i quit"

That's the feel of most of normal players . Basically fun play with no reward is better that get your stuff take away because some mistake even if it not your mistake .

Octagon7711 · July 2018

Risk equals reward in life and in death. Like pulling the handle of a slot machine or buying a lottery ticket they say the odds are against you but they also advertise the winners a lot. In short you can make anything work as long as the player feels he has a chance of winning something big.

Amathe · July 2018

The thing is, imagine I am playing a game with my friends (or perhaps Puggers who have zero patience with delay), and I die. Instead of doing my run back to rejoin my companions, I am off having some multi-stage, possibly time intensive, personal dead person adventure. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my still living companions sit and throw darts at the wall while cursing my name. That is a group killing mechanic, imo.

Sovrath · July 2018

Amathe said:

The thing is, imagine I am playing a game with my friends (or perhaps Puggers who have zero patience with delay), and I die. Instead of doing my run back to rejoin my companions, I am off having some multi-stage, possibly time intensive, personal dead person adventure. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my still living companions sit and throw darts at the wall while cursing my name. That is a group killing mechanic, imo.

I was thinking the exact same thing a few weeks ago.

The only way I can imagine it working is for a player to be resurrected and a spirt saying something like "go forth and finish the work you started because once you are done you will have to serve your time in the underworld."

And then you can join your companions until you are solo or a certain amount of time has passed and then you have to "serve your time."

Probably not for everyone but I'm all for something like this.

Lokero · July 2018

Amathe said:

The thing is, imagine I am playing a game with my friends (or perhaps Puggers who have zero patience with delay), and I die. Instead of doing my run back to rejoin my companions, I am off having some multi-stage, possibly time intensive, personal dead person adventure. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my still living companions sit and throw darts at the wall while cursing my name. That is a group killing mechanic, imo.

I believe it was Age of Conan that basically tried this very thing, during their beta. I think it basically went as you describe. Needless to say, it was scrapped before they even released the game.

On a more twisted fork of that idea, I think there could be a pretty cool mechanic which would allow your group to use your body to "portal" into the underworld to join and help you escape. Of course, that would require the actual "other side" to be fun to journey into.
If it were fun to go there, I envision groups designating one of the party as a sacrificial lamb to cross over and group in the other realm. Delicious brutality.

Darksworm · July 2018

I couldn't care less. It's a game. I don't take it seriously, so I don't really want to think that much about death. Give me a small XP death or take a small amount of XP if you want, but my days of corpse runs are pretty much over, among other things.

That will never fly in the larger MMORPG market these days. People have a lot better things to do with their time, and we don't have much time to play games. It's not 1999 anymore. People are busy. They savor the few hours or minutes they have to log in and hopefully have fun.

Not ride a boat for 30 minutes to drag their corpse out of a dungeon, or see days-worth of XP deleted from their bar simply because they died.

This has a bad impact on in-game content design, as well. With massive XP debts/loss/corpse runs people tend to avoid risk. This causes harder areas to be completely ignored unless the rewards are so massive as to be borderline imbalanced.

Lineage II was a good example of this. The harder areas of the game were barely visited by the majority of the player base, unless the XP was stupendous or the drops/drop rates were imba. Otherwise, those areas got introduced into the game and died [practically] immediately because people didn't see a point in taking the risk when the rewards were so small and the potential inconvenience was so great.

The developers ended up having to completely revamp and rebalance the areas to make it more worth it, which was often too little too late.

Darksworm · July 2018

Octagon7711 said:

Risk equals reward in life and in death. Like pulling the handle of a slot machine or buying a lottery ticket they say the odds are against you but they also advertise the winners a lot. In short you can make anything work as long as the player feels he has a chance of winning something big.

In life and in death... That sound scute, but makes little sense.

It's a video game. It's not life and death. It's a means of deriving entertainment. That's how most people look at it, and how everyone should look at it.

I think people here take these games far more seriously than the average person, which is probably why they are routinely stomped when their favorite games wither away as people move on to find more reliable forms of entertainment (or people don't like the game they're trying to hype up). No one cares about someone's philosophical theory on death in a video game. They only care about fun, and massive game play slow downs or stoppages are not fun in these games.

Developers need to stop trying to conduct social experiences. We pay you to deliver entertainment. We are not your guinea pigs :-P

Dwaaawfful · July 2018

MMO death, as in life, is a serious issue.

If there are no penalties for being dead, then there's little point hyping up the risk factor involved in throwing on your Armoured Codpiece of Protection and tooling up with an Anti-DeathStar Stun Gloves.

Without death, games become boring and pedestrian, like making a cheese sandwich for your granny.

Plenty newer games are re-introducing the concept of DEATH ACTUALLY MEANS DEATH, which adds to the risk and excitement, but can be more than a BUMMER when you actually die.

For the non-mortal versions of saying hello to the Reaper, the Pay-per-Death system has to be fair — penalties and equipment trashing in proportion to the extent players klutz out and risk annihilation on the part of the team.

As for on-screen messages intended to enhance the virtual death experiences of the slacker generation, I'd love to see something like ...

"Your eternal spirit has disengaged from your heroic mortal form and now floats in a wispy nowhere dimension between life and death. But while you've been adventuring in our uncannily realistic arena of death, we've found a way to electrify your gaming console, and unless you upgrade to the latest game expansion (for the knock-em-dead bargain price of $99) your IRL self gonna be BLITZED."

VengeSunsoar · July 2018

How difficult something is to achieve is separate from a penalty being applied for failure.

Regardless of what happens after you fail the encounter the encounter itself is still difficult or easy on its own merit.

Cryomatrix · July 2018

My mmo death mechanic.

Permadeath . . . Have 2 hours to be rezzed by another player. Only 1 class can rez and you can be rezzed once in a 4 hour period. You can be rezzed even if offline.

There would be built in mechanics to make it easier to survive and flee than usual.

Healing pots, ability to run away from others. There would be a number next to your level that indicates how often you have been rezzed.

centkin · July 2018

Cryomatrix said:

My mmo death mechanic.

Permadeath . . . Have 2 hours to be rezzed by another player. Only 1 class can rez and you can be rezzed once in a 4 hour period. You can be rezzed even if offline.

There would be built in mechanics to make it easier to survive and flee than usual.

Healing pots, ability to run away from others. There would be a number next to your level that indicates how often you have been rezzed.

People would stop playing for 4 hours when they got a rez. Every time.

alkarionlog · July 2018

ArChWind said:

Let me say this,

Once upon a time a long time ago.. OH never mind.

Anyway I spend greater part of 15 years working toward a MMO and got about the same responses like zero. Most of the feedback was negative, tearing down of my work, so I took my knowledge elsewhere. In fact I made a investment in a porn site.

Now why would I do that? Well in 15 years of battling against all the financial demands, trying to keep a team together long enough to knock out a design that was different and fighting all the negative feedback. Not to mention never once gaining a following, I decided to put my investment in something that would make a return.

After 3 months I had 5500 followers and released 2 films, now going into our second year we see potential for an adult MMO with serious investments, made 200% return on my investment already which is enough to build a small scale functional demo.

OK so advice time.

Forget building MMOs unless you either have 10 to 20 million to throw into the works. Have a solid plan and backers or a kickstarter that is mass marketing. There are so many of them out there you have to compete against now.

Forget death altogether. Concentrate on making it non combat.

your first problem you are fighting against feedback, feedback is not good or bad is just the perception of the people who did you a favor of wasting they time to give what you asked for

if you are incapable of understanding this you will never go far on anything you do with feedback you only do one of the 2 choices, learn from it or ignore, and you have to deal with it, if all feedback you get was then your ideas was not good, then yeah take a guess

Cryomatrix · July 2018

centkin said:

Cryomatrix said:

My mmo death mechanic.

Permadeath . . . Have 2 hours to be rezzed by another player. Only 1 class can rez and you can be rezzed once in a 4 hour period. You can be rezzed even if offline.

There would be built in mechanics to make it easier to survive and flee than usual.

Healing pots, ability to run away from others. There would be a number next to your level that indicates how often you have been rezzed.

People would stop playing for 4 hours when they got a rez. Every time.

The goal would be to reduce the rez bots that people will have. Or instead of can't be rezzed, you have rez sickness, where if you get rezzed again you will lose an attribute point permanently

Octagon7711 · July 2018

Dying and adventuring in another realm and returning when finding an alter sounds a little like Dark Souls if it were an MMO.

anemo · July 2018

You could probably get more social mileage out of a death system by displaying your death count in all of the places your level would be (instead).

centkin · July 2018

See, losing attributes permanently is something I *CAN* get behind.

One idea I had for a death penalty was you lost (say with everquest stats) 4 stat points every time you died. Rez could lower it to 2. The idea is that each death wouldn't be noticeable but it would accumulate over time to the point where it was bad. At that point you would take the second death option.

You could lose 3 levels and be able to reset your starting stats // traits // race // etc via a reincarnate.

If you decided to lose 5 levels, you could also change class to a similar class to what you were. A pure fighter could change to any of the hybrid fighters. A hybrid fighter could change to either a pure fighter, or whatever pure class the fighter was hybrid with... So a paladin could become a warrior or a cleric. A cleric could become a shaman or a druid or a paladin. etc.

xidbmi · August 2018

FFXI has exp penalty on death and it makes it feel painful when you lose. You don't want to lose. Why did Demons / Dark Souls do well? It brought back the pain in games and the difficulty.

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Death in MMORPG

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"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey

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Death in MMORPG

Comments

"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey

"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey