The Death of the Death Penalty

[RvLeshrac]

Experienced Points: The Death of the Death Penalty

Is it time to retire the death penalty in games?

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No, death penalties make games more fun. Case in point: EVE Online the game with the best pvp combat that I've ever experienced. In EVE Online when you die you lose your ship, your ship's inventory, and even some skills if you don't have an up-to-date clone. That's like if in, say, WoW every time you died the only things you'd have left would be your money and whatever is in your bank. This makes the combat amazingly pulse-pounding. The threat of real loss gives a thrill in combat that makes the experience all the more worthwhile. It's a bit like the feeling of bungee jumping.

How, exactly, is it "fun" to lose hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of equipment, especially when that's often a result of being hammered into the ground by force majeure, rather than losing on merit.

People enjoy betting, and possibly losing, thousands of dollars on sporting events because, while there's a sense of danger in that you might lose your bet, there are things you can do to increase the odds of your winning. You can study the teams, study decisions they've made, and eventually stand a chance of coming out ahead.

Open PvP in an MMO is the equivalent of betting money on an unspecified event, with odds that are not provided to you and your bet being randomly placed on one of the outcomes.

*EDIT*

Oh, and anyone advocating harsher death penalties has never spent an entire week trying to recover a corpse in Everquest.

 

[QuantumWalker]

I would like to direct your attention to issue 100 of the Escapist magazine. In particular the article titled 'The slow death of the Game Over". In it their is a quote from Wired magazines clive Thompson that I feel pertains to this forum. [link]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_100/556-The-Slow-Death-of-the-Game-Over

"It [game overs w/i video games] forces you to put some skin in games". I got the impression that it means that the game must make whatever conflict that can potentially eject the player out of the game have some meaning and significance.

Imagine if the Devil May Cry series did not utilize traditional game overs, what meaning would all of Dante's flashy moves and killer combos have. Imagine what most MMO's would be like if you simply got up after dying during a raid. Sure game overs can cause frustration within games, but without them the game carries less weight behind the actions it asks of the players.

Does every game that comes out now a days need a death penalty, NO. However that doesn't mean that all games don't need them.

*EDIT* My post only adresses the use of game over screens or other examples of "Temporary" deaths within videogames.

 

[Therumancer]

Interesting, not sure how many messages you read Shamus, but I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on in-game economies in online games, given your thoughts here.

At least with MMORPGs the problem with having little or no penelty for death is that people continue to get bigger, and bigger, and increasingly more powerful, with nobody ever backsliding. You wind up with a situation where everyone inevitably winds up being a giant, and you have tons of stuff that enters the game and pretty much stays there. The result is a massive degree of inflation with prices for items and services, even those that are part of the game, swelling to ridiculous levels. This incidently tends to create an enviroment that is inherantly unfriendly to new players coming into established servers, and truthfully without an influx of new blood coming in I think it seriously hurts the game. It's one of the reasons why you see all those low level zones deserted and so many servers, because most people who are just starting the game do not want to come into an established server, or in many cases leave for a new one as soon as the oppertunity presents itself.

I'm not going to go into a giant speil on the specifics of all the problems created here, you apparently play these games yourself, but I think coddling players tends to do a lot of damage to the game enviroment, and it's damage that even casuals tend to have problems with. Heck, among other things it's this problem that helps fuels the existance of gold sellers. If need be I can tie all of this together a bit more tightly if I'm not explaining myself quite right.

At any rate, I myself am not a "super 1337" player, and kind of hated the free-PVP/player corpse looting system of Ultima Online. However understand that early on that game was designed to work on a resource bank system with only a finite amount of resources availible in the game at any given time. It was the free looting of players and the inevitable sale of items that were not needed or couldn't be stored (remember for a while the game didn't have a functional bank, and then for a while it was quite limited) pretty much kept the resources in motion. Complaints lead them to drop this kind of thing, but I can't help but wonder if they found some way to keep a similar system in effect. An enviroment where you don't wind up with 99% of the game population at the top level (or in possession of a top level alt) with an ever increasing pile of resources definatly has it's benefits.

I'll also say that I think having noticible death penelties, more so than just rezzing and perhaps paying item repairs, helps to encourage better game design. Right now you see games like WoW (and those inspired by it) creating these kind of ridiculous boss fights that are typically broken in some way for months after release, where people will die scores of times in a night trying to kill them. There is no incentive to provide reasonable, balanced, encounters, since death doesn't mean much the company can just churn out some fancy looking graphic that deals death like a machine gun until people master obtuse positioning and movements or the RNG decides it feels generous (at least to begin with, most bosses become a loot pinata when you gear up a bit after the point where you first meet them). It's sort of like running a PnP D&D game where you run 5th level characters up against Tiamat, except you let them keep doing it until they eventually roll enough sequential natural 20s. Entertaining to some extent, but it's kind of a lazy approach to things. Make the deaths more meaningful and the players are going to demand a higher standard of quality from the company, and for these encounters to be a bit more than an exercise in persistant zerging until they get all their ducks in a row. Of course by the same token, relatively easy game design probably has a lot to do with why there is a tendency towards light death penelties.

Truthfully, I think a middle ground needs to be established between super-harsh deaths an "death means nothing" for the genere to really evolve. I think things have really gotten themselves stuck in a rut.

When it comes to single player games, I think it's more or less a non-factor since you can generally choose to just go back to your last saved game at any given time, at least with RPGs. With action games, I think the "credits" system was a fair compromise, because if you just let someone continue constantly it takes a lot of the risk out of the game.

I understand the issue of frustration, but at the same time it's that frustration that leads to the euphoric sense of accomplishment when you finally manage to win. If you make it a simple matter of persistance, then it means a lot less, and I think since it means anyone can do it (for an accomplishment to be an accomplishment, it has to be something that many people are going to give up on before completing) it cheapens games as a whole and leads to less respect of gaming as a medium or hobby.

My opinion on things like this has waffled over the years, and perhaps at some point I will lean back more towards the current way things are, and view easy, penelty free games as having been the right thing. I'm well aware of why the saying "The grass is always greener on the other side of the pasture" exists, however it holds true here at the moment where I admit I'm growing a bit dis-satisfied with the state of things, especially in MMOs. I don't think there should be perma-death, but at the same time it's really beginning to hit me harder than it used to how silly it is that millions of people are wiping constantly on these bosses in WoW and yet somehow try and act like it means something when there was no real risk of failure. I also started a new Goblin character and looked at the auction house prices compared to when I first started playing and the economic situation hit me, if I wasn't able to twink, the game would be virtually unplayable. My first characters had poor luck with character-relevent item drops and relied heavily on an affordable auction house. To me it's seeming horribly broken.

 

[Rabidkitten]

Death in video games is very interesting topic. I've played some old NES games on emulators, and have said to myself "dear god, how did I play with out a quick save" Some of them are still ruthless and frustrating even with a quick save button. I remember tearing my hair out playing HL1 on hard mode even though I could save at ever step and turn. So a lack of a death penalty is hardly a sign of a lack of challenge. Look at Super Meat Boy, uhgg.

Now, what I feel is missing is a way to make death a mechanic in the game. What if death in the MMO just put you in a spirit world, and death was a way to transverse between the game states. Or what if death played into some type of karma system. Resurrecting too much leans you towards a certain moral compass type. Or certain deities would return you with different buffs/stat sets based on who you chose to bring you back, but in return you had to take up a quest. Blah blah, I feel there is a design space there that could be worked with.

 

[glenbruton]

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is an example of what happens when you remove the death penalty entirely. I have not hated a game I purchased as much as that game for a long long time. Possibly because it looked so gorgeous but failed in the design in every way.

 

[rXp]

Hmmm...
I think death penalty is perfect for solo games but should be worse for multiplayer games...
And there's why :
Solo Games :
A solo game is before all A STORY. You can't make (for example) a permadeath in a story... You can't take the book or the DVD of a person and burn it because of something, so it's pretty logic that you can't do the same with a interactive story.

Multiplayer game :
Here it's different, if you don't punish the player for dying there will be no real pleasure surviving because he won't (or his team) feel that dying is something bad.
Let's take some examples shall we ?
MMORPG :

WoW : First of all WoW. Blizzard took the casual way out to make more people play the games and it works great, but dying is a 2 minutes run to your corps or sometime you just rez yourself. Dying doesn't feel like dying it's feel like "I need to regen". You can dye a hundred times only your armor will be damaged and at a certain point in a game you make so much gold that it doesn't matter. Maybe if you could loot other player outside of PVP arena...
Eve-Online : This game took the hardcore way out. For those who don't know it, EVE is a scifi space ship game (an hardcore one). To dye your ship has to be destroyed and then your pod too (little ship where your character is).This means that dying costs you : your ship and everything on/in it (if killed by another player), it costs you the time to get back the money for the equipment of your ship and to get the money of your ship if it wasn't ensured.
There you have the satisfaction to kill in PVP because you know that the player potentially lost a lot of money and even experience if the player did not have any "backup clone". And surviving makes you happy.

FPS :
COD/BF :
There is a need of penalty in certain mod of those games, because even if you dye you will spawn 20m away throw a grenade where you dye and takes your point back...
CS :
In the very old Counter-Strike, dying was something to avoid before all for several reasons :
Giving money to the other team and losing money (you have to buy weapons...).
Having 1 men down in your team and so having a spot on the map not protected.
And potentially giving a better weapon to the enemy.

DoTA Like :
LoL :
League of Legend free to play dota like and casual game have taken from dota the penalty of death that made the game more slow but more deadly. Easier to learn because of this but makes the game unbalance, I think.
In the dota like games, every hero has a purpose and some has the purpose to be so "fed" (gaining a lot a of money and buying the best items to carry the team to victory) that they can be almost indestructible. But don't you think it should be hard to reach the level ?
Here you can dye has much has you want and STILL (if you play correctly, not even well) be indestructible.
HoN :
Following the line of DoTA Heroes of Newerth think that death penalty is a + in a game. Why ? There's why :
When a hero dye, he loses money, give money and XP to the hero(s) who killed him, and have to wait a lot of time before spawning depending on the level.
You also can deny your creeps (meaning that you can finish/kill your own creeps so the other team get less xp/money)
Why is that good ? Because in this games, you have to play in team and you CAN'T go alone and dye 10 times otherwise the other team will win thanks to you.


I think the death of someone in a multiplayer game should be visible or people should feel it. Because otherwise you could rush as much as you want and dye without having the feeling to dye and it would make a game unbalance at a certain point...
Death should encourage teamplay and should not makes the player want to rush alone...

 

[Firia]

you pop right back up at full health with no interruption at all and keep playing. Since this would basically make you invulnerable, I don't think that would be fun either.

This has happened. "Prince of Persia" [2008]. Really any PoP game, but it was moreso with the 2008 one. I personally LOVED it. The downside to "dying" in combat was that the enemy you were fighting healed. Depending how close to the end of the game you were, they could heal just a little, or a LOT! Dying in platforming put you at the last stable platform you were on (redoing most of the hard stuff). Elika was wonderful to me. And that one scene when I didn't have her at my side made me 100% EXTRA Cautious! Without her magic, I knew death was assured at the slightest of mistakes. The psychological effect she provided prior was amazing, having it just yoinked away.

 

[Firia]

Hmmm...

Eve-Online : This game took the hardcore way out. For those who don't know it, EVE is a scifi space ship game (an hardcore one). To dye your ship has to be destroyed and then your pod too (little ship where your character is).This means that dying costs you : your ship and everything on/in it (if killed by another player), it costs you the time to get back the money for the equipment of your ship and to get the money of your ship if it wasn't ensured.
There you have the satisfaction to kill in PVP because you know that the player potentially lost a lot of money and even experience if the player did not have any "backup clone". And surviving makes you happy.

I'm glad someone was thinking about Eve. I play Eve right now. Let me tell you, Eve can be the hardest of hardcore. Hardcore mode is built into the Clone rules. For anyone reading along, lemme go into more detail what rXp touched on.

You're a pilot in Eve. A special one (all players are). You buy ships, and these ships are essentually your character. Different ships do different things, fly faster, take more damage, cloak, etc etc etc. You buy and outfit (weapons, armor, specials) with hard earned cash. So that's how you field your character. If it helps you, the casual non-familiar-with-eve player think about it, imagine buying a racial character in WoW, and buying that characters equipment off of the (player) market, and then running out into the wild. All the while, a tiny person in their head controls them.

Now, if that ship explodes out there in space, either by player, NPC pirate, police (CONCORD), or space radiation, that ship is GONE!! All that isk spent is now space-scrap. All equipment stacks are subject to a 50% check to see if they survive (loot). In the meantime, your pilot ejects in a pod. Its where your pilot lives at all times- it's soft, squishy, and and their hard outer shell just cracked. NPCs don't respond to the pod, but a pod cannot loot, only manuver around space.

That right there is where MOST games would call it hardcore enough. Here's where Eve's true brutality lies.

Any ship worth their salt is in the mega millions. You can lose your ship, and suddenly have to start playing with cheap ships again cause you're to poor to field a new one (there's a whole discussion on that, but I'll skip it). That in itself can set you back a month as you work your way back up. But worse still is being exposed in your pod in the meantime. See, that pod contains your character. Your characters brain. And all the skills your character has been training.

In Eve, you can clone youself, and keep those clones stored away if your body is ever turned into Space Jam. The quality of knowledge those clones can retain varies based on the quality of clone. You "gain XP" through training timed skills. Something could take 30 minutes to train, up to a month! They train even when you're not playing too (bonus for me). But if your clones brain is lame, and your characters POD gets turned to SNOT thanks to some other player, space radiation, or whatever, you [strong]LOSE[/strong] skills! That means you lose time.

If you're lame, and haven't kept your clone up to date, and it gets turned to paste, your screams WILL be heard through space.

There's a whole slew of things to protect a cautious player, but someone that knows fuckall can really get boned. Or if you slack and forget to update your clone, that lvl5 skill that took 21 days to train up will go away. ;_;

 

[rXp]

Yes it's I think the fun way to go for Games
But don't forget that ship can be ensure (and must be), you can own planets or moon.
The games is way bigger than a few space battle. But yes the death penalty plays a big role in this great game

 

[VeNT666]

Needs to be more mentions of EVE-ONLINEs PVP really
it's quite harsh, and can be really debilitating if you're caught at the wrong end of it
lose a clone then get killed again with no clone? say bye bye to skills etc!
lose a ship that you're only just able to afford? back to the most basic of ships you go!
I've seen so many people say they are going to quit the game if they are about to lose their ship it's not funny!
they hardly ever do tho, that adrenaline rush you get from having something to lose (and a real sense to loss) just doesn't happen in other games.

 

[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....

Yes a very stereotypical view of people who play on hardest settings.. straight away they have " alot of time on their hand"
Well some people just play the game on hardest on the first playthrough because simply any other difficulty is the equivalant of typing a DOOM cheat " God Mode"..
And I reckon the default weapons and armor could be done ... if you were a mage!
Anyways my argument is pretty much it REALLY doesn't need to be any more DUMBED DOWN or less Penalty then games generally have now. Anything less of a death penalty in games then currently is being displayed and not even an " expert mode " will do much to give a challenge...

Games havn't been dumbed down in terms of gameplay difficulty. They have been dumbed down in terms of the save/load function as someone said before. A game player could always debate whether or not we should go back to the password function of yesteryear or even bring back the LIVES function. FPS? We die cheap deaths all the time and again save/load function saves us because we don't have to worry about conserving lives. Action/Adventure games like Uncharted have the same issue.

Can't use MMO's as an example for dumbed down gameplay because they are designed as time sinks. In one form or another whether the difficulty of the dungeon, the loot drop %, or how long the dungeon is, it's all about time sink.

OT(got a little de-railed) Punishing death is just plain stupid in so many levels. We already suffer enough from lost time and effort. If we didn't save we are already guaranteed to lose equipment that was difficult to find. Could some games bring in punishment to deaths? Sure, but don't force your enjoyment on other people who don't want it. I say "hardcore" deaths should be an option, rarely the design.

P.S. Yes, getting a "rush" from punishing deaths or lose is Masochism. There is nothing wrong with it though, no matter what people say. It is what you enjoy and it's not really hurting anyone. I'm a sadist myself but that is another story for another topic.

 

[2xDouble]

Okay! I get to toute Guild Wars again!

In Guild Wars there IS a death penalty. Every time you die, you get a semi-permanant condition called Death Penalty. It shows itself in the corner of the screen(or whereever you put your conditions) as a red box with a number percentage. What that number is is the percentage of your max heath and energy that is taken away from you. Each time you die, you take 15% DP, so if you had 100 health, now you have 85. And it's cumulative to a cap of 60%. Short of missions, if you die and there is nothing to raise you, you and everyone else that's dead will pop back to the nearest resurrection shrine and you can go at it again, but with that death penalty. The incentive to avoid dying is simply this: 15% DP is easy to live with. You can kill monsters and work it off easily enough. at 60% DP, you're minus more than half of your health and energy. Warriors no longer have the energy to use their skills. Mages no longer have the health to survive a battle. It can't go any higher than 60, but depending on where you are it doesn't have to. Now you can keep plugging away and you may be able to finish what you were doing, but each time you die it gets harder.

Agreed (Yay Guild Wars!), but even ArenaNet thinks this may be too much...
OT: I'll just leave this here [http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/healing-death/].

 

[Continuity]

No no no, Shamus you're wrong here IMO. The death penalty give you investment in the life of your character, you really care if you die and thus you play that bit more realistically, and so, naturally this gives a significant sense of immersion.
To take just one game as an example, counter strike, you die then you're dead for the round... just consider the immense life span of the game and its continuing popularity, would it be such a successful game if you re-spawned instantly? would it hell.

 

[Giest4life]

He always spell checks his romantic encounters.

I always thought that Mr. Young was married.
OT: I do agree, even in Fabl II where the penalty was minimal, I still went out of my way to avoid it. Similarly, in Mercenaries 2, it was a pain in hitching a ride back to the mission and even helicopters were disturbingly slow.

 

[Helmutye]

One of my favorite "death" mechanics is found in Sid Meier's Pirates. You don't actually die in the game, but instead whenever you are defeated your character is wounded and imprisoned (or marooned on a desert island), where you get stuck waiting around for months of in game time. Then you get released and start over with a crappy ship and small crew. What makes it interesting, however, is that your character has a finite lifespan in the game. You start out at age 18 and as you get older your character gets slower and slower and the different aspects of the game get harder and harder. So getting captured/marooned once will not have a serious effect on you immediately, but it is game time that you will never get back, which might cut into what you are able to accomplish with that character. If you're in jail for 6 months, that's 6 months you can't sail around, earning plunder and chasing your enemies.

I'm not sure how something like that would work in an MMO, since the appeal seems to be completely the opposite. Of course, when talking about MMOs you have to be specific about what you're talking about--do you want to find an answer that will be more fun and fulfilling for the player, or do you want to find an answer that is more addictive and will induce the player to play more? Because they're not the same thing.

I was at a gaming convention last year where Sid Meier himself was a speaker, and he gave a very interesting lecture about psychology and games. I'm not sure if people realize just how much study and effort go into designing these games, but virtually every aspect is carefully crafted to keep the player playing the game for as long as possible. The reload points are placed at just the right places(in a well designed game), and the "penalties" are figured so that they are just enough of a setback that it takes you time to get back to where you were, but not so much that you get frustrated and quit.

It's kind of like somebody playing hard to get--a certain amount of meanness and disinterest will make a person seem WAY more attractive than if they just gave in right away. If they are too mean or completely disinterested, it is a turn off and you'll give up. But just enough will paradoxically make you much more interested and much more willing to do things to prove yourself. I think that MMO game design is a lot like that.

 

[Optimystic]

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 ))

Why the hell would I pay every month to play a game where I couldn't get all the things I wanted?

There are games for players that like the environment you're describing, like EVE Online. Plenty of backs to stab there, and shipments of playtime to steal etc. WoW is not that place.

 

[Coles_Law]

Halo 3 co-op definitely needed a harsher penalty. Whenever we were low on ammo, we'd retreat somewhere safe and kill each other to get more ammo (you respawned with stock weapons w/ ammo).

 

[rXp]

Halo 3 co-op definitely needed a harsher penalty. Whenever we were low on ammo, we'd retreat somewhere safe and kill each other to get more ammo (you respawned with stock weapons w/ ammo).

Seriously ? (I am a hardcore PC gamer so I only played the first Halo)
You seriously kill each other and the game DOESN'T display "Game Over" ? That's insane ! (and stupid)

 

[rXp]

No no no, Shamus you're wrong here IMO. The death penalty give you investment in the life of your character, you really care if you die and thus you play that bit more realistically, and so, naturally this gives a significant sense of immersion.
To take just one game as an example, counter strike, you die then you're dead for the round... just consider the immense life span of the game and its continuing popularity, would it be such a successful game if you re-spawned instantly? would it hell.

Agreed and like I said before this is part of the gameplay. And this is why I played so many years on it. Killing a person and knowing he won't respawn is way satisfying that killing someone and never have the felling to have accomplished anything because you don't see any changes in the game.