MMO Gaming

Does being part two of number two make this the Repairing Gears squared edition?

I do enjoy the square, lovely shape that one.

But wait, we were talking about death, a much more melancholy subject (though I suppose that description depends entirely on your state of mind).

What was I going on about again? Right, death penalties.

Last week I set up the two systems to compare against, and then said that my ideal death system would not feel like an interruption of game time but should rather be a natural extension of time spent playing. When I pay to play, I certainly don’t want to run around dead, especially when it is through no fault of my own (server instability for instance).

So what do you do to fix it? I think that an example of death penalty done right is best seen in Dungeon Runners. For those that haven’t played there is a system in place in Dungeon Runners that people can drop “waypoints” at any point in a dungeon (assuming they have the item) and instantly port themselves out to town, or back to that point. When you die in the game, you are resurrected outside of town and to continue your adventuring you simply head to a big stone in the center and warp back to your waypoint.

The frequency of the drop for the item to create a waypoint makes death in the game feel negligible though, which is not what I am going for, but I would certainly use this system as a basis for what I was doing. It needs some expansion though.

Let’s change topics for a moment and talk about realism of dying and coming back. It annoys me that when death occurs to major NPCs, in story changing ways, that death is permanent and really means something, yet I, just some guy, am allowed to have infinite chances at life? It feels a bit crazy. What we want to avoid here is the Aeri(s/th) effect. You know, from Final Fantasy 7, the one where she dies (spoiler!!) and they don’t just use a Phoenix Down to rez her. That’s annoying and inconsistent. I dislike inconsistencies, especially when they can be avoided.

Back to the system then. What do you do? I came up with a bunch of different options, all of which I liked to some degree, but none of which I loved. To be honest, none gave me that “eureka” moment. Onward though. First, that idea, as I mentioned, of Dungeon Runners and waypoints is a good one and a great point to start from. And graveyards, as seen in World of Warcraft, are another thing we combine into the system. Now, let’s throw some objectives in here. PvP seems reasonable, what if points could be captured where you could rez from in the world. Dungeons though, what do we do about that? Why break a system that works? What if dungeons were designed in such a way that they were taken back from whoever it is you were fighting against. Wouldn’t it feel like you were really working toward something (this could be especially true in the case of raids where a person is saved into a dungeon for a period of time and works to capture objective points by defeating the bosses that are there)? These points in dungeon then act as auto waypoints. There is no item that drops too much/too little to worry about, it is a system based on player accomplishment.

So that covers an idea of where players can rez from, but what about when they are in the world, how do they go about things there, other than just having a point to start from.

Here in the system we add in any number of things, depending on preference. An item could go here, a quest/mission (my personal choice) and an item or something along those lines, it would be completely up to a designer to figure out their perfect way. My personal choice is some sort of quest/mission and an item that is acquired from doing it.

The quest or mission here could again be designed a number of ways, but essentially you get an item that has a certain number of charges to it, that allow you to come back to life at a given checkpoint (whether that be inside a dungeon or outside). This item would have to be recharged, before it ran out, otherwise a steeper penalty would be enforced. If you die with no charges left you are rezzed at a location that can’t be captured near your closest city (similar to CoH/CoV) or zone, along with another penalty that relies more on specific game mechanics that I don’t want to get into at this point (it would open far too much up).

Of course, this isn’t my ideal system yet but I think it fixes some problems by allowing a degree of control and sway depending on circumstances of the death. Even if it was through the fault of the server/company and not your own this adds some leeway to allow a person to not necessarily be forced into spending extra money/time missing out on the game when they want to be playing.

Hopefully I will get that eureka moment yet, that one system that snaps everything together in just the right way so this topic is still open for some extra commentary, but next week, we’ll focus on something new.