The Death of the Death Penalty

[Halo Fanboy]

A punitive system and a reward system are not opposite, they are different sides the same thing. In order for superior players to be rewarded the lesser players must be punished for their inferior skill. Otherwise everyone skilled or unskilled would be equal and the game would be a joke.

 

[Negatempest]

Spoiler: @Lerxst

Sorry Shamus, you seemed to have missed the point of the death penalty. It's not there to punish or subtract from the experience - it's there to add to the other side of that experience!

What's the difference in WoW between someone who dies in an instance 3 times and someone who dies 0 times? Nothing. In the end they both come out the same. There's no reward for staying alive.

Death isn't the penalty - not dying is the reward.

UO rewarded people who would not die in any number of ways - you keep the loot you found on the mobs, you loot the corpse of a person you fought, or you simply get to a city without losing your house key. The consequences of dying are the exact opposite - you're corpse is free pickins' for anyone who walks by.

As they remove the death penalties from games, they remove the rewards as well. Now, in some games you get... coins, tokens, cards, points... bleh.

Ever play those older RPG's where you fight, say, 5 fully armored "Knights of Awesomeness"? When you make it out the battle alive, you get some token reward like 5 gold pieces and a cracked short sword. What happened to that full plate helmet? What about those over-sized two handed swords?

That's what MMO's have become. You go into a special area, fight other players and get points to be traded in for items later on. It fails the logic test. If your opponent goes down after a long battle, you have every right in the world to take anything you want from their corpse. That sword they were slashing your face with is now yours! That's your reward, not some meaningless token that can be traded in for a generic item everyone else will also be wearing once they kill X number of bad guys.

Oh, there is a HUGE difference in WoW when you die 3 times compared to none. It has everything to do with spawn time, especially in larger dungeons. If you die too often you start from the beginning with the mobs coming back...aka you wasted 1+ (Vary) hour of your time for nothing. I have gone through such a process so many times that I don't even keep track anymore. Also dying in an MMO depends on whether you team is good, bad or you accidentally glitch the entire dungeon to attack you.

Though I do agree. I would also like that shiny sword that mobs tend to have that I cannot equip for some reason. Must have the tech from MGS that the weapon only functions in the hand of the appropriate NPC.

Spoiler: @Calibretto

The harsher the death penalty the better
I think its time for game developers to seperate the wheat from the chaff.
If it gets any less harsher we will all be the equivalent of the space ship crew in WALL E fat bloated slugs that swish around on giant armchairs except THAT WILL BE YOUR BRAIN.
Its time to accept spartan law that some people are better then others and they shouldn't be punished for the weakest link.

Yes and no. Death Penalty should focus less on how the game should **** you over. (Losing equipment=spent time on the game for nothing. You know how in real life, if you do not insure your home you will lose everything from a disaster and you want that in a game?) It should be more of a learning experience. "How did I die there?" "How do I prevent it?" "Oh now I get how I died.". But a game has to have a good pace as well as an entertaining experience for the entire level. Games in the past had you start from the beginning like Mario, Megaman, and Zelda. You did not mind though because each level was enjoyable on it's own. You enjoyed the experience each zone gave you and didn't feel "**** I have to do this again..." like we do for a lot of games right now.

 

[Negatempest]

Oh and I also hate the "superiority" complex "hardcore" gamers seem to believe they have when they play a "difficult" game. Could that haloduty fan beat the game on hardest difficulty? Sure that would be impressive. I would like them to do the same on Tetris with the highest speed. Than I would like them to beat an RPG using the default weapon and armor given in the beginnig of the game. If they could do that....than yeah they would be hardcore, but have a lot of time too....

 

[Saris Kai]

I don't think Ive every agreed with a single opinion shamus has had in one of his articles. This article is no differnt. I dont care about making shit accessable.

I play NV on hardcore and a mod that gives cap and other forms of money weight though so I must be one of these masocists hes talking about though. Excuss me for thinking failure should be punished.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Without Death, we'd all be playing some version of WoW themepark where all our wildest dreams come true and circle-jerking together. No thanks.

Give me Death or ....give me death.

 

[tehroc]

I'm starting to think the entire Escapist writers are "baddies". They are always whining how nerfing the game for their benefit is always a good thing. Maybe they just all suck at MMOs and need to stick with something that has zero loss. Just think about the shitstorm of tears you'd guys cry over losing in EVE, where there's a real death penalty.

You know what guy? Most of us could give two shits about the rest of the industry. We like the game we play the way it is and get angry when everything is nerfed down so brain-dead morons can be rewarded for failure. All in the name of getting a few more subscriptions from more entitlement babies.

 

[Viik]

Recently played Adventure mode of Dwarf Fortress and got huge amount of fun. Game is featuring permanent death (unless you cheating with savegames) so you might spend several days of your RL on journey and then get killed by a single stab into your head. It might sounds horrible at first and you do rage when you get very unlucky as you fifth char in a row just died again. But because all of this, every victory that you score is extremely rewarding mentally. Basically as you progress you get to the point where you never been before, you face enemies that you didn't fight before, you really start to think, to look for weak spots, do decision "Do I get envolved or retreat?".
This kind of things you don't do in most of the nowadays MMO and single player games and it's a bit sad as I feel we are loosing something very important. We flattered difficulty, so games can be more accessable, but at the same time we flattered experince that we get from gaming. Journey full of emotions turned into time-filling activity with guaranty to get at least some fun.

 

[Girlysprite]

The harsher the death penalty the better
I think its time for game developers to seperate the wheat from the chaff.
If it gets any less harsher we will all be the equivalent of the space ship crew in WALL E fat bloated slugs that swish around on giant armchairs except THAT WILL BE YOUR BRAIN.
Its time to accept spartan law that some people are better then others and they shouldn't be punished for the weakest link.

so what's the chaff then? People who don't enjoy harsh death penalties? Are people who don't want them 'wussies'? There are still games out there that are harsh, so I don't really get the point - you aren't being punished because not everyone likes harsh deaths. There are still games for you.

Mind you, there are 'whiners' out there, but they aren't even close of the majority. They are just the most vocal people, but don't let that fool you.

 

[Viik]

WoW has a death penalty to add value to resurrection-capable classes. It provides incentive for the Warrior to team up with his Priest or Shaman buddy because they can keep him away from the penalty and help him bypass it much more quickly. In return, his superior damage-dealing and damage-soaking skills can be employed to their benefit.

It also adds value to the consumables trade. When you know that a health potion is often going to be the only thing standing between you and a long corpse-walk, you're going to pack some with you as you quest. Similarly, when your panic button is the only thing that's going to save you from that same penalty, you're going to invest in glyphs that lower its cooldown or otherwise make it more effective.

In short Shamus, the penalty can be harsher in multiplayer games because there are other players to help you bear that burden, and it encourages you all to work together. There is an unspoken camaraderie of "we've all been there" when it comes to rez sickness or long corpse walks.

While I see where you're coming from, comparing WoW to Too Human is overlooking this basic fact. So, I disagree.

With all do respect, but did you experienced situations when morale of people around leader has droped cause leader just died (real morale)? What about people routing cause they know if they die they need to re-roll char? How powerfull resurection spell become when it's not just avoid 2minutes respawn time but avoid re-roll of char? Will you consider starting a random fight with an oponent whos skills are unknown to you? Did you see a clan wipe-out cause they failed a single fight and all need to re-roll? Maybe people leaving guild cause they don't want to lose their char in battle that dosn't look possible to win. Can somebody called a hero if he tries to protect other guild members in need, putting his 2 month old char as price?
I don't see this in current MMOs. There is no feel of achivement or danger, nor accomplishment, soon or later everybody gets everything, sort of idialistic socialism in gaming ))

 

[tehroc]

I don't see this in current MMOs. There is no feel of achivement or danger, nor accomplishment, soon or later everybody gets everything, sort of idialistic socialism in gaming ))

What probably most disturbing is the people that want the handouts in game are diehard conservatives in the real world. Socialism is ok as long as they are benefiting from it, but as soon as it benefits someone else they are up in arms against it.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Haven't read the article yet, but I do agree that "death penalty" in gaming really needs to go away. I've always thought this, actually. I remember back when I first encountered a game that punished you for dying; Diablo 2 I think it was. The dialogue went something like this when I heard my friend griping about losing exp when he died to someone else doing something stupid:

Me: Why do you lose exp when you die?
Him: It's supposed to be a punishment for dying.
Me: Isn't dying a punishment in and of itself?

He didn't really have an answer for that, and honestly that's still how I feel. Too many games seem to feel obligated to punish you in some way when you die but really it's just over-kill. Take Counter Strike, for example. Now, granted that a lot (A LOT) of servers circumvent this now-a-days, but let's talk default mechanics. You win the round, you get (for example) $4000 to spend on the next round. You lose the round, you get maybe $1500. Makes sense on the surface, it's incentive to win the round. You get more money, you buy a better gun, you have a better chance to win the next round. But wait, let's back this up a little; isn't "not losing" the incentive to win a round? I don't know many people who load-up their favorite FPS title looking forward to catching a bullet with his teeth. Why should I be punished with a smaller reward for losing when said reward will only make it harder to win the next round? And the one after that? When you go into a multiplayer game, not losing should be the only incentive you need to win the round. It'd be like if you were playing Street Fighter with a friend, and only the guy who won the last round would start with full health, the other guy would get half health.

My thoughts are the same in MMOs or single-player games as well. I died, that my punishment. I didn't want to die, thus, dying is my penalty for not doing something right. After-all, even if the game doesn't punish me, there's the over-lying punishment of time wasted. I spent 30 minutes trying to do something, failed, and now I'm never getting that time back. I have to spend another 30 minutes trying it again. With MMOs that's only thrice-fold. I couldn't count the number of times I've seen someone get over-dramatic about dying while playing WoW because he didn't want to deal with the repair bills. It's a minor inconvenience, but it's still something looming over your head when you're already frustrated at failing at a hard encounter. Now you're annoyed, not only because you can't get the boss down, but now you have this sizable amount of gold that you need to flush down the toilet in order to keep your gear repaired. Then you add-on that you've been beating your head against this boss for the past 2 hours and still haven't seen any results from it.

Mind you, I'm not gonna rush to the WoW forums and start-up a post saying that repair bills need to go away. They're a part of the game, so they're a part of the game. However, I'd probably be the last person to start complaining if Blizzard decided to remove them from the game. In my opinion, dying is a penalty in and of itself. Plenty of gamers are hard enough on themselves when they fail at something without the game doing something to rub it in even more. There obviously needs to be some penalty when you die, like a platforming game sending you back to the start of a level when you die, but really that's all it needs. Even the tried-and-true Lives System is unneeded. You die, back to the start of the level. If that's too lenient of a penalty, then the designer failed at making the game itself decently challenging.

 

[Calbeck]

CONSEQUENCE, NOT PUNISHMENT
I think the point has been missed. Death is a consequence, not a "punishment". It's not even a consequence for failure, per se (dropping a quest, for example, is failure, but you don't get killed for it).


DEATH IN A THEME PARK
But as it stands right now, I stopped playing WoW and Star Wars Galaxies because there are in fact no real obstacles to ultimate victory in either, death or otherwise. By design, YOU CANNOT LOSE at WoW or SWG. While that sounds happy and fun on the face of it, it made me realize that I was not playing a game, so much as I was experiencing a multi-user theme park.

This was never made more clear than when Sony gutted SWG's city-building system, because players were actually working to control enemy territory via fortifications and occupation. Given that the whole point of SWG is purportedly to simulate a galactic civil war, this should have surprised no one. But because these player cities were succeeding at opposing enemy players, Sony stepped in to "ensure player access to game content". The Civil War was effectively defanged, made more of a slight nuisance than any significant threat to anyone.

This means that while you cannot lose, you also cannot WIN. Your actions do not and cannot have a lasting effect on the world, because if they did, other players would not be able to experience the same content you did.

This is not to say that making a theme-park MMO is wrong or bad. They're still, obviously, very entertaining...in largely the same way any other theme park is. Disney's not going to go bankrupt anytime soon, nor will Blizzard.

So what does any of this have to do with character death? Simple: in a game where no one can actually win or lose, and the entertainment value is constrained only to experiencing content, you don't want to prevent your customers from being able to enjoy that experience. Permadeath can and will do that, and therefore it is not appropriate for theme-park-styled games, whether MMO or otherwise.


DEATH IN DYNAMIC GAMING
Conversely, we understand and accept death, even permadeath, in games where we do not have to re-experience the same content we did before just to get back to the point where we died previously. It is that uphill slog that we dread, re-doing all the same quests and farming and so forth which is unpalatable, making the game into what amounts to a chore.

Dynamic games don't have this problem, because every run through is dramatically different even when the starting point is identical. You are not repeating your experience, except minimally, so the game remains interesting. While you may initially look back with sorrow on what you lost along with your last character, this is quickly replaced by looking forward to what you're doing with the new one.

Of course, the problem here is that the more dynamic the game, the more abstract it's going to be, because every single player in the game can make the same sorts of changes you can to its world. Detailed plots would be experienced by a handful of players, and then by no one else, because the changes effected would have to be written into the game.

So for a game like WoW, which relies on providing a rich and well-written (for the most part) first-person experience, dynamic gaming is off the table and so are player deaths.

But this doesn't mean that other games, particularly those with a more abstract bent, cannot or should not incorporate player death, even to the point of permadeath. It's simply going to be a case-by-case concern.

 

[Skyy High]

And what about when you can't get back to your corpse (or it's being camped), and you need to res at the graveyard? That's a 10 minute borefest that you can't skip.

Guild Wars had a nice system. Cumulative DP encouraged you to not zergrush challenges, but still allowed the player to be resurrected instantly and with very little penalty for a single mistake or wipe. The choice to go back to the outpost and start whatever you were doing over, with absolutely no long term penalty, was always there. It worked, because it fit with the other systems in GW1 (free map travel, free respecs so you could go back to an outpost and change your build to suit the challenge, instanced content so everything would be reset if you went back to town). It's certainly not a system that could just be plopped down into any persistent world MMO and work well.

Which brings us to GW2. In the parlance of Shamus's article, GW2 will have no punitive death penalty at all. If you die, you can either be ressed by any player, or instantly warp back to any waypoint you've discovered for the same fee it would cost you to travel there if you were alive (the fee is only there to prevent people from death-traveling for free). No long term penalties, nothing preventing you from getting back into the action except for the walk back to the content; it's like WoW's system, except with more widespread graveyards (and you can choose which one to spawn at), no corpserunning, no death penalty, and resurrection costs a few coppers. Tension may, in itself, be fun for some people, but it's not a prerequisite for fun, either.

 

[Ghengis John]

I had opined that there was no death penalty in Bioshock. People would die, re-spawn, run kamikaze at their enemies with a wrench and possessed absolutely no fear of death. That's not the way I played through the game, I figured it broke the narrative if the character died. After all, why is he some kind of immortal demigod when everyone else manages to make the Grim-Reaper's to-do list? I really really felt that after playing that game, or more appropriately hearing how OTHER people had played the game that modern games were just becoming way to lenient with us and that there needed to be some serious penalties to put the fear of death back into gamers. Of course I was pretty careful and thusly I never died.

And then I played Demon's Souls. I quickly realized that I was wrong and that massive penalties for death are obnoxious, aggravating and do nothing but create the feeling of tedium and aggravation for you, the player. Yes, I know, I've earned this for messing with that ominous foe, not possessing ESP for that trap or not knowing what would happen if i tried to get to what looked like a ledge but turned out to be a death-fall of about 3 feet after leaping 50 feet down at other locations where I was SUPPOSED to be able to. So I'm climbing this tower for the 30th time without the ability to pause my game, well it's not fun. Especially when the deaths are cheap and the only way to avoid them is essentially to have been there before. There has to be a happy compromise.

If there's not then I'll take hand holding over throwing you into a pit to die any day. As rewarding as it is to finally figure things out in an unforgiving game, I have other things to do.

 

[Viik]

I don't see this in current MMOs. There is no feel of achivement or danger, nor accomplishment, soon or later everybody gets everything, sort of idialistic socialism in gaming ))

What probably most disturbing is the people that want the handouts in game are diehard conservatives in the real world. Socialism is ok as long as they are benefiting from it, but as soon as it benefits someone else they are up in arms against it.

You know, I think you right, maybe that was a bad reference to RL but when I gave it a second thought, I've realized that MMO can have both, perma death and "easy" death at the same time. Good exmaple is old SW Galaxies (before that Sony crazy rehauling was made), everybody plays "easy" death and only one that have connection to Force have perma death (3 lives to be correct). So basically players decide for themselves, do they want to play hardcore or not.

 

[Infinatex]

A perma-death situation can create a whole new type of fun. I used to only play Diablo 2 on hardcore mode. For those who didn't play this, it basically meant that when you died that was it. It became an inevitable battle for survival. Looking at that you have died screen for a level 88 Necromancer was never fun but it just urged me on to make a better, stronger character next time.

 

[TomWest]

Two points - there are a fair number of people who like real-life challenges where the penalty for death is... well, death. Obviously not everyone finds severe "death penalties" to be a turn off. I might call them adrenaline junkies, but I wouldn't call them masochists.

Second, I'd say that minimal death penalties encourages game design laziness. I agree that heavy death penalties for most recent games would suck, but that's because the game designers do not make survival throughout the game possible. In order to make life & death meaningful in a game, it must be plausible for someone to make it through the first time without dying. And that hasn't been true for any game I've played in the last 15 years.

Having a heavy death penalty *not* suck means that the designer must *carefully* evaluate the difficulty of the opponents to provide a challenge that will neither be a walk-over nor an near-impossible challenge. Given the different circumstances (player skill, previously gathered weapons, etc.) that requires a balancing act that is *hard* to do. Likewise, you need to provide means for players to ascertain how difficult an opponent is, so that they can make real decisions about whether to attack or not. You also need to provide a means for backing out of encounters that go badly - and all of these need to be done in the context of the story.

All of these things are *hard*. So it's a lot easier to punt them, decide that players will get killed a lot and make the death penalty as mild as possible while still providing at least an iota of excitement.