death-system
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Embers of Caerus death system revealed in video blog
With a plan of cranking out as many features as possible during this final week of its Kickstarter campaign, Forsaken Studios has released a video blog with over 17 minutes of video detailing the planned death system in Embers of Caerus. Technical Director Dave Belcher explains how Embers of Caerus is going well beyond death as a slight inconvenience. Death in EoC is actually a three-stage process: First, incapacitation (health bar drops to 0); second, a restricted state with its own health bar (10% of your main health pool); and third, body destruction (no resurrection, only respawn). Your body can also be looted at each stage of death. If your body is destroyed, you will drop gear, which can be picked up for up short time or become buried in the world. Embers of Caerus is also implementing two types of stat penalties upon death, one temporary and the other permanent (along with a system to counter the permanent loss). Dave continues on to discuss the karma system, body mutilation, and the chance of repentance. With so much important information, don't miss the video after the break. [Thanks to all who sent in the tip!]
Darkfall specializes magic schools, replaces death with limbo system
Aventurine continues its trek toward Darkfall's game revamp, aka Darkfall 2.0, and in a new producer letter, Tasos Flambouras drops a few interesting info nuggets to tide loyal players over until the job is done. He states that the team is retuning each of the game's eight schools of magic so that each one feels more unique and focused. For example, air magic will be specialized to do more damage in close quarters against fewer targets, while fire magic will excel at long-distance AoE attacks. The team also thinks it has figured out this pesky "death" problem by coming up with a more interesting limbo system. The way it works is that when players are taken down, they have a choice between either respawning back at a bind stone or waiting for a timer to count down to zero and initiate a respawn on the spot. If players opt to endure the limbo period, they can re-equip their characters from their bank boxes. Aventurine continues to hire on new team members for the project, including a designer who will facilitate communication between devs and the community.
Pathfinder Online takes a look at death
No matter what happens, sooner or later you're going to die in an MMO. It's pretty much a given. So it's probably for the best that the fourth developer blog on Pathfinder Online is all about death -- what happens when you die, what happens when another player kills you, and what you can do about it. The death system is reminiscent in some ways of what would happen on death in EverQuest. You respawn at a predetermined location, and while you keep any equipment you were wearing, the rest of your inventory is on your soulless husk of a body. Retrieve it first and you get everything back. If someone else loots your body first, though, he or she gest a random assortment of items from your inventory and the rest are destroyed. The blog entry also covers the issue of bounties, player-killing, and attempting to dissuade others from killing players in lawful regions. Players can set bounties on their killers, potentially refreshing the bounty each time said killer is successfully killed in retaliation, making a bounty hunter or group of same very rich indeed. Those interested in Pathfinder Online should check out all the details and keep watching as the game moves through development.
Should you lose experience when you die?, revisited
Yesterday we talked about the death mechanic in World of Warcraft and how gameplay might be changed by making death mean more to your character. Today, as a point of comparison, we're going to take a look at death in the MMO Vanguard -- and how it's about to be changed.Currently, death in Vanguard involves loss of experience (15%, and if you have no experience, you could go into debt -- i.e. you would need to gain 15% of the experience towards your next level before you could actually gain any experience again) and your body (tombstone) would remain where you died -- along with all of your soulbound items. Options upon death were to (1) be resurrected by another player, which causes minor experience loss and minor item damage, (2) to recover your body from where you died, which causes minor experience loss and minor item damage, or (3) summon your body, which causes the 15% experience loss and major durability damage. Though it sounds quite a bit harsher, this isn't that different from World of Warcraft's current system of "run back to your body and all is well" -- it has just added experience loss to the equation.However, on their test server, the death system is changing. First off, you no longer leave a corpse behind when you die -- you leave an "essence." No items are left on the essence, so retrieval is less important. However, if you retrieve your essence, you regain a large portion of your lost experience. And to top it all off, experience loss has been decreased. So while casual-friendly World of Warcraft players wonder if the death penalty isn't harsh enough, hardcore Vanguard reduces its death penalty to one not terribly harsher than World of Warcraft's.Forum poster prencher makes the obvious connection, "...we're back to 'wowified' raiding, where you just keep chain wiping until you get it right."Note to Vanguard players in the audience: I do not presently play Vanguard, so my information has come from IGN's Vanguard Vault and VanguardSphere's forums. I've done my best to understand how the death mechanic works in Vangaurd, but as I have no first-hand experience, I could be wrong -- so if you see any inaccuracies, I welcome corrections.
