death-mechanics
Latest
.png.cf.jpg)
MMO Mechanics: Exploring death mechanics
They say death must come to us all, and that inevitability extends to our characters in MMOs. The death of our characters may be inconvenient when we want to plough through content, but penalising failure is an essential part of any MMO and further incentivises success by making you learn from your mistakes. As much as players crave gratification through rewards and progression, they also need to feel that such progress has been well-earned and greatly deserved. Rewards become that much sweeter when we must risk something to secure them, and failure without consequence would render the gains made in our favourite MMOs insignificant. Without a considerable death penalty, it becomes possible to mindlessly crush content through brute force. I don't know about you, but I don't find fun in bashing my skull repeatedly with a rock in an attempt to crack it! In this week's MMO Mechanics, I compare various death penalties and the effects they have on the MMOs that employ them. I'll explore just how tangible death penalties such as corpse running, gear durability loss, and XP drain make our character's demise feel.
Nerd Kingdom details TUG's death mechanics
Nerd Kingdom has outlined its preliminary goals for death and death penalties in its TUG sandbox MMO. The devs are aiming at something that's prickly enough to discourage players from using it as ad-hoc transportation between spawn points and yet forgiving enough to avoid frustration. In a nutshell, your avatar's soul will vacate his body upon death, and it will do so in the form of a wisp. Wisps will gradually regain enough energy to reenter the avatar and awaken it, and doing so necessitates progressing through four distinct phases. Reviving your avatar in its optimal state is thus dependent on timing, and the importance of reviving in a weak state vs. a fully recovered state will vary depending on your chosen game mode. Nerd Kingdom is enabling corpse-looting in TUG's survival mode, but the devs are also intent on designing plenty of camping deterrents into the system. You can read all about these, as well as the rest of the death mechanics on the TUG Kickstarter project page.
R.A. Salvatore details the lack of death in Project Copernicus
"To be or not to be" is not a question asked in most MMOs. Characters don't die permanently, after all. But Project Copernicus wouldn't have waved that fact off as an irrelevant necessity of game mechanics. No, according to R.A. Salvatore, the game world would have explored the meaning behind a world wherein no one truly dies and everyone is functionally immortal. Players who enjoyed Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning will recall that the game opens with the player character returning from death thanks to the Well of Souls. In Project Copernicus, the Well of Souls would have been active not just for one individual but for everyone in the world. Returning from death would be something that happens not just to players but to every part of the world. It's not hard to imagine the ways in which a world would seem different if death was no longer something to be feared or avoided. Salvatore laments that the concept is unlikely to see execution now, even with buyers looking to purchase the 38 Studios assets from the state of Rhode Island.
