Underestimating Death Penalties

So I do not consider myself a hardcore gamer neither do I consider myself a casual gamer. I'm sure I fall somewhere in the middle of the two. I also like to think I can see all sides of the situation fairly adequately because I strive to see all sides of all situations to the best of my abilities in life. With this being said I am going to give my own personal options about death penalties. Not having a steep death penalty makes a game more too easy. Some of the best games... no THE best games I have ever played made me want to break something when I died. Not because I died but because of what was lost when it happened. In UO stood the chance to loose everything. When I spawn back its my main mission to get back to my stuff as soon as possible before even thinking about anything else. I have been playing Skyrim and Dark Souls a lot the past month so I have been comparing the two games. I think that Dark Souls is a much more enjoyable/satisfying experience if you have the commitment for it, Skryim is a more casually gratifying experience. I'm always trying to max my difficulties in Skyrim because if I die I dont lose much and can pretty much pick up where I was. In Dark Souls i'd rather chill in this area for a little bit because it's easier and I can get a little more out of being here before I risk losing everything i'm accomplishing because i'm too low. Wall of text and i'm sorry so in short. I would say adopt a system like Dark Souls for a more satisfying experience when a task is accomplished..... Though I would say a UO style death penalty would be the absolute best.

 

"Though I would say a UO style death penalty would be the absolute best. "

As said by Target_Vudu

I agree with that part. When I first started the game, friends of mine taught me to have an "emergency bag" ready
in the bank for when I got killed out in the forest for what ever reason. It would contain just a few things for me to
survive the journey back to my corpse. Well this is for if you had to run all the way back to a town to get res'd

Some armor, weapons/reagents, bandages, stuff like that. All you gotta do is grab that special prepped bag and
back out you went to claim your corpse and in hopes that you remember where it was that you were killed.

Suspense and fear, also loss of karma will be the fuel to fire the "I don't want to die" engine.

 

Finding the right balance between Death meaning some thing, and death making you just break your keyboard and quite the game is a very hard one to find.

UO you lost everything, but the way the game was built where it wasn't that hard to replace everything made it doable.

But D3 where you could die constantly and it have no real impact, heck that's how the game was beat on Inferno within like a day or two because a team of 5 just steamrolled in and died a LOT but because it ment nothing they didn't care and just kept pushing through.

I also played Asherons call where your suit of armor can take MONTHS to build, and weapons were even worse some times. Heck myself and a few friends would go hunt people that Macroed (on the PvP server) and kill them over and over to take their armor, on more than one occasion the guy quite the game because the loss of his armor was to great. Another person offer Real life $$ to buy his stuff because again the penalty was to great.

There are SOOOOO many factors into a doable death penalty that its a bit to early to discuss in to much detail. How itemization will work, will it be like UO in the beginning where you have 20 sets of armor stashed in a house (I did) or will it be like WoW/AC/DAoC ect... where you spend MONTHS building the perfect suit where if you lost it you would just quite. That alone could change how death is dealt with. Where will we be brought back to life? How long does it take?

Only thing I can say is, I want to fear death, BUT if it takes more than 2-3 mins before Im able to get back to what I was doing I think I might just kill rabbits all day instead. I hear talk of some "mini quest" or "Dantes inferno" thing for when I die? No thank you, just let me die, deal with whatever item/durability/vitality/XP loss and <b>get me back to the GAME quickly.<b />

 

Exceptionally well stated Solace Vale. I could not agree more.

 

On the other hand, having death penalties are are too steep discourages experimentation or anything that risks not being at peak performance.

I like playing around to try out unusual character builds. Most of the time, these are absolutely horrible, so I'll die a lot. I can't go out and try them with junk gear or I can't make a good comparison to my normal performance, but if there's full loot drop,there's no way I'm going to risk all the stuff I've worked so hard to get.

Similarly, back when I played WoW, I'd collected a really nice looking <a href="http://www.wowwiki.com/File:JudgementArmor.jpg">suit of armor</a> and <a href="http://www.wowwiki.com/File:Thunderfury,_Blessed_Blade_of_the_Windseeker.JPG">weapon</a> that were incredibly outdated. They were so out of date, that they were only marginally better than running around naked. However, any time I didn't need to work at peak efficiency, those were what I would wear, simply because I really liked the way they looked. The thing is, getting those items took me the better part of a year. If there was the risk of losing them due to an ill timed death (which happened a lot - that gear was really outdated), there's no way I'd wear them anywhere that wasn't completely safe, which would take a lot of the fun out of it.

So, if we look at it from the perspective of Bartle gamer types, Full Loot works well for Killers, but poorly for Achievers (who've invested a lot of time into getting those items), socializers (who are high risk due to a tendency for gear selection for reasons other that performance), or certain types of Explorers (who are high risk due to the dangers of experimentation)

 

Despite all the arguments here for it, a dev posted there would not be Full Loot on the PvP side, but there would be a heavy emphasis on gear loss and re-gearing yourself both PvP and PvE. I'm thinking there still may be corpse runs but everything remains on your body on death, or permanent breakage of gear if you do not keep them repaired. Maybe both.

 

That's really weird LordSlack, considering:

B(Dev) said: "We completely understand the fact that full loot helps crafting. We also have not made any final decision on loot rules.

I was more speaking to the fact that we do not want a PvE player to be killed by a PvP player unless there is proper risk/reward communication. I personally like the idea of a full loot free-for-all in open PvP."

**There's a search box in the upper right, type in "full loot" to get a proper answer.

And, I for one, agree with what the man is saying.

 

A death penalty should mean something. But I don't believe in one size fits all. Sometimes "full loot" is too hard. Sometimes it's not nearly enough. Maybe I have to restart a challenge with a stacking debuff...maybe I get a stacking "mercy buff".

 

@PrimeRib:

A debuff on rezzing typically means stopping playing for a time after death, more so if it's stacking. And a game that makes me feel like I should simply stop playing for a while after one, or a few, defeats is a game that I'm prone to just leave on short notice.

Heck, in WoW, whenever I had to rez at a spirit healer, it typically meant stopping playing for the rest of the day; I would rez and immediately log out due to the 10 minutes debuff that made my character useless, fire up another game for the rest of the time I had available to play that day, and only resume playing WoW the next day. If that debuff existed for all deaths I wouldn't have lasted a single month in WoW; a game that I have to stop playing for 10+ minutes after each death is absolutely unreliable as entertainment, so I would move on to something more "reliable".

There are ways to handle a debuff in an acceptable way, though. In the first Guild Wars, for example, rezzing gave the player a stacking debuff, but it could be cleared by either defeating enemies or by going to the city (and, thus, restarting the current mission). It provided an extra incentive to not die in the missions without preventing players from playing after death.

 

Yes. I'm aware of both of those systems. And in WoW today there are puggable raids "looking for raid" where you gain a stackable mercy buff to help your team through. Every failure is still going to cost you at least 15 minutes to try again.

That's my point. It's really hard to say one size fits all.

People that really only have limited playtime are simply not interested in harsh penalties. Squeezing in an hour or two between work and everything else is totally different from a kid that can spend 6+ hours at a time to play.

 

@Solace Vale - Well said Solace, could'nt agree more.