Permadeath Poll for future MMORPGS
Take a moment and read this to get a feeling for what I mean when I say permadeath and for what each system means.
http://shawn-gaming.blogspot.com/2005/03/permadeath.html
Permadeath is perfect for gaming? Every year Baseball gets their stats reset and try to fight there way back to the World series... And not every team is winner is it? There can be only one. Same with hockey, football etc.... By current game rules the logic goes if the yankees lost the World series they should get naked, have a time out and goto the locker room and come back ready to rock for another go at the world series.... When people lose THEY LOSE. Game OVER. The system Baseball uses now is almost EXACTLY what people are asking for in game. Think about it because it paradigms almost as well as boxing.
Like baseball there should be a short ramp up in terms of skills and a refocus of the game on actions. You can have a game with a progressive leveling system and a stuff system but you surely can't design the game to revolve SOLELY around that. If you do, you get wow... I guess there's money in it but to me its just a commercialized remake of the last game with no substance and nothing worthwhile to do. I had a max toon before and lots of stuff... you got something else to offer besides new graphics and classes?
Even the AI among games is the same.
People love it, they make millions for giving you a shiner model every few years with no innovation. Some of us want to get back to the CORE roots of the game and innovate and redesign it for the masses with a focus on the game and not all the focus just on yourself, your stuff and your level.
Think of the treadmills at your local gym... Now paint one blue and call it wow,
another green and call it eq2 and another brown and call it daoc. Some are newer
and have different levels of incline and various speed levels but their all
treadmills and players walk all over them ignoring all the shiny features after
the honeymoon and work on walking as quickly as possible to get them and their
avatar in shape.
These games, quite frankly, suck. The show a lack of imagination and exploit the honeymoon period as a way to sink the hook and reel your mastercard in. It works as a business model, but MMORPG is supposed to be filled with gamers who expect more then the last game regurgitated and reconsitituted as the New Coke. Even leaving permadeath aside, the industry has not innovated anything new since UO unless you count 2D to 3D and the two games that feature voice chat lol.
I expect more and Im passionate about getting a new game to entertain me before Im dead.
If you want more background I have another post here:
http://shawn-gaming.blogspot.com/2005/05/damion-schubert-and-permadeath.html
7 comments:
http://www.neenerneener.net/?p=629
Permadeath Podcast
Awesome poll. I voted yes and Ironman!
A good permadeath system could be hand-in-hand with an ordinary respawn system. Yes, it is possible.
A good way of doing this would be to separate different things in a character. Why do people PvP? It's mostly to do either A) Steal stuff or B) Show who's the best. In real life, how would you rob someone? Most people would knock them out, threaten them or just tie them to name a few examples. By killing someone, you've moved to an entierly different level of crime.
In real life, how would you prove you are better than someone else? You'd fight him, but not kill him. He'd give up at a sertain point.
Why can't death be viewed as something horrible in a game? Say you have a high level character. You own a few houses and are starting to build up a small company where you let people rent houses for a nominal fee (as you don't need all those houses at the same time). When you're walking to one of our houses one day, you get mugged. Some other player paralizes you and threatens to kill you if you don't give him any money. If death was really an issue, you'd pay him and hope he doesn't kill you anyway. If you give him money, there would be no point left in killing you and the robber would run away before you gain the ability to move and call the guards. If you hadn't given him the money, he might have killed you and taken all your money instead.
Well, you report the crime and the guards will be on a lookout (of course, the guards would be players, too) for a character matching your description. You wouldn't actually see a character's name without him having allowed you to do so, making anonomous incidents like this one happen.
When the guards find him, he will be prosecuted and might end up in jail for some time (a few days real-time, perhaps). IF he would have killed you, there would be some form of trace it was he who did it, so finding him would be easier. Depending on the local laws, he would be either executed or jailed. Imagine the fight where a lone, poor mid-level character is trying to run out of a town having a whole bunch of players (guards) after him shooting at him, and the bystanders dodging as they don't want to be killed, too. The imminent threat of being killed would make the hunted fear for his life and the hunter would also feel that good ol' adrenaline rush, as would the hunted. The murdered could have moved up on the castle wall and finally deciding to jump from it when the guards are closing in. He might die from the fall, but staying would mean certain death, too. Guards who are not risking their lives might not jump after him but instead run around to the gate. If he survived by landing in water, he would continue to run in to the woods and he might disappear before the guards were able to catch up on him. He would be a hunted man.
Anyway, back to you. You decide to go to the house you were on your way to, but once you're there you find out that the last one staying there have not paid and left without telling you. Of course you get furious, but get an idea. You walk in to a tavern and find a creepy looking fellow. You ask him to track down that "non-paying scum" and "warn him". You form a mini-quest/contract for the other player to accept.
This game would incorporate and very easily get underground societies of murderers, thiefs and other "evil" players. People would try to hire people from these societies, in secrecy of course - paying a hitman would be more of a crime than actually killing the player, perhaps.
Point being, killings should be hard to perform, have a lot of consequenses and actually be exciting. A player could perhaps have an alternative character that could inherit the other character's items and property. This way, you would only lose the character, per se.
On the other hand, killing you would not be neccessary as often. Instead you could do hit and runs showing them that you mean business by damaging them until they become uncouncious. In that case, the victim might not even be able to see what happens after that, leaving them with the agnoizing pain of waiting for the "You are dead" message to appear on the black screen, or to see the character waking up again after a minute.
If you want to loot characters, fine. Just knock them out by damaging them enough, take all they got and run away before they wake up. The victim will be angry he/she lost all the stuff, but will at the same time be relived to still be alive. You have lost your equipped stuff permanently, but not anything else. A form of hybrid perm-death.
Formal and informal fighting could also be to the point of players losing consciousness. This would make it possible for people to define their own rules for PvP. "No loot", "Take one item of choice" and perhaps "Winner takes all". Just make sure no one else loots your body before you wake up.
(Imagine a city where fighting is illegal. You'd have underground fights, too. Some of them might even be to the death and involve a lot of money. Some people would create a character to fight with and bet on it with another. This would be a huge risk as in the case of death with the gladiator character, the main character have not only lost the money, but also a [primary] source of income.)
The nice thing about permdeath and player-run worlds (player guards, player criminals, player suppliers (blacksmiths and the like), and even player leaders who controls the law for that location) is that it creates a level of immersion several magnitudes greater than WoW and it's parents. It also creates a need for other players. A king ruling over a small village must make sure he have enough guards employed, or else the city could turn into an anarchy, making suppliers leave and all hell brake loose. He will also invest in a huge number of body guards as he don't want to be overthrown.
I've talked long enough. Hope some of these ideas inspire someone. I am myself a game developer-to-be. Hopefully I could hook up with like-minded people and create a huge perm-death inspired world. :-)
PS. If you want to find anything similar today, try EVE Online. You are actually afraid of other players and generally distrust everyone and there is a massive amount of paranoia when playing it. You almost feel schizofrenic playing it. :-P
It's awesome.
Hi there :)
What are the greatest and also most used mmorpg as well as role play game games of 2010 and may be played for 2011?
If possible tell me the actual number of players play in mmorpg's as well as in case of rpg's tell methe system standards and some web page where there is rankings of those video games may be specified(same applies to mmorpg to).
Thx !
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