Meaningful Death Penalties

[Executioneer]

Originally Posted by Capn Tucker

Agreed. I think the permanent death option makes the game plenty difficult. If you die you're dead, game over, end of story. If that doesn't make you play more carefully nothing will..

maybe, but next time you'll instinctively watch out to avoid repeating the same mistake.

[Calvin]

I actually enjoyed having to get my body in Diablo 2. It was almost like a minigame challenge, and if you wanted to bypass it, you just leave and come back. To lose experience and gold, with the chance of doing it again if you fail to get your body and return to safety made for a very interesting experience.

[koovan]

Originally Posted by Shoganai

If you don't make death hurt a bit, then there is no risk in dying. if there is no risk in dying, you take away some of the "challenge" in the game. it's the difference between dying and going "Damn!" and dying and thinking "oh well."

I think dying itself is oftentimes just a cheap mechanic disguising poor game design. To take away experience points or reduce the quality of gear as a result of death could be just exacerbate this - particularly as one would suppose that gear would normally reduce in quality over periods of extended use rather than death of its owner. Similarly as Executioneer suggests, dying in game will likely result in you adding to your experience and performing better in the next run.

When my avatar dies in game I tend to be annoyed without having a further arbitrary punishment administered.

This is somewhat different to having different levels of difficulty - the harder the difficulty the more often you are likely to die or the higher level of skill you have to deploy to avoid dying.

I am really trying to understand two things:

1) Why do we need to die in game at all - what is the purpose of this mechanic?

2) How does it benefit the gameplay experience to have a negative effect on stats as a result of death? Presuming the game has a properly scaling and challenging difficulty options.

[Roros]

I think corpsruns is something that's more fondly remembered than it is to actually do. I certainly remember some fun corpseruns in several games (in shadowbane you dropped all of your equipped gear and anyone could pick it up. Imagine the mad dash to get there before anyone found it), but nowadays I think I consider it more tedium than a penalty.

I definitely feel death penalties are important but I also don't have any good suggestions as to what makes a "good" death penalty.
It's tricky since you want to make the player avoid it, but you also don't want to make it unfun when it does occur.

One system I tend to like is one where you build up a type of bonus as you stay alive but is lost on death. Demon's\Dark Souls handled this pretty well where the stakes got higher and higher as you stayed alive, but you didn't feel like you got thrown back to the stone age if you died repeatedly.

[koovan]

I'm interested in the method you describe Roros as it seems that skilled play is rewarded rather than poor play punished. It seems that in most games, the risk of dying, is that you will be required to play the game longer i.e. if you lose experience or equipment, it will take you game time to replace or reacquire it. This doesn't always feel very imaginative.

[Shoganai]

Originally Posted by koovan

I am really trying to understand two things:

1) Why do we need to die in game at all - what is the purpose of this mechanic?

2) How does it benefit the gameplay experience to have a negative effect on stats as a result of death? Presuming the game has a properly scaling and challenging difficulty options.

1) I'm not sure if you are serious or not here I'll assume you are... If you can't die in a game, then what is the point? One of the greatest things for me is trying to understand what a boss does, how he attacks, what his "moves are" and then learning to protect myself and set myself up NOT to become gib-meat. If you can't die, then essentially you are running "god mode" all the time. Why bother upgrading skills, armor, weapons at all? Just run naked upto the final boss and punch him to death?

Dying tells you
A) You aren't strong enough yet
B) If you are strong enough, then you haven't figured out how to not stand in fire/frost/lava/path of attack
B) If you have learned the strategy, you just aren't doing it right, and need to work harder.

2) Negative status effects apply penalties to you that make you stop and say "Hey, am I really going to try to take on 10 enemies at the same time?" rather than just bolting headlong through the game without a care in the world. You need to think about what you are doing.

I, personally, would rather see small incremental negative status effects applied - or - damage done to the gear to represent some kind of financial penalty as opposed to the penalty of spending 5-10 minutes of running back to my body. Why? Because sometime when you up against something new, you need to spend 4-5 hours trying new things and dying in order to learn what not to do, and how to do better the next time. Constant long runbacks when you are dying to a boss inside of a minute is tedious and boring. I'd much rather face a monetary penalty. The "greying out" of experience acts as a penalty only so much in that you are held back from leveling for a time, and that you need to pay to "re-earn" that experience. At max level it is rather meaningless though, outside of the financial burden.

Some of my most memorable experiences in gaming come from nights spent wiping on a boss. Not so much because I loved to die to the boss, but because of the learning aspect of the encounter. What happened? Where could I have been better? Is there some kind of gear/potion/spell that I could have used to help mitigate that? The next time in you try something new and you either progress further - or you die horribly and go back to the drawing board It's the failure that sets us up for the joy of success because when you finally DO defeat the boss, you've felt you've earned it.

====

Roros - I've never heard of that type of bonus... but absolutely LOVE the idea. The idea that you develop a special bonus over time based on the length of time you've been alive is fantastic. And you'd lose it completely on death? Perfect. I really REALLY like the sounds of that because instead of punishing people for dying, you are instead rewarding them for staying on their toes and keeping their toon alive. Kudos!

[koovan]

Shoganai - that's really helpful, I was being serious when posing the questions. I am very interested in some of the aspects of gaming and the different beliefs and approaches of games players and designers.

It seems that the player begins a game such as TQ at a seriously handicapped level and her statistical development should bring her to the point where she is able, eventually to beat the game (enemies, unlike players, generally being fixed in terms of their abilities).

In TQ I can simply spam healing potions, should I have enough of them, and beat almost all bosses, eventually, regardless of my skill level or their mechanics. This to some extent is also a kind of god mode. Health potions I suppose are there to add a further layer of complexity tot he game mechanics and also reduce the level of frustration and disappointment that dying too regularly might produce?

So death exists as an indication to the player that as you said, she is not strong enough, not tactically astute enough and/or not skilled enough to win that particular encounter.

Negative status effects might indeed prevent you from bludgeoning your way through the game but might instead encourage you simply to buy and use lots of heal potions thus hindering the learning process.

I wonder if the existence of death in the game is not just to make it more exciting and difficult but also to help us to learn how to play the game better. That one of the the developers' aims when building a game is to include the tools within the game to make it beatable and death is actually a method of helping to achieve that.

I'd rather not be punished financially, in whatever way, as this is finally a time penalty, and I'm not sure that that serves the purpose of the designer i.e. to teach me to play the game better.

I really enjoy learning incrementally by degree and without realising it, developing my in-game skills. I also like learning boss mechanics even though it often takes me a while and I will sometimes end up using very basic methods to win. Sometimes when I defeat the boss I think I've in some way cheated by subverting mechanics.

Anyway - thanks again for your comprehensive response - it was much appreciated.

[Shoganai]

I understand where you are coming from - and I agree wholeheartedly in regard health pot spamming and feeling that I've cheated the game when using it. I think, for example, one of the best changes Blizzard ever did to Warcraft was restricting potion usage to just ONE potion per encounter. It really changed a lot of dynamics in the game (especially for me as a healer hooked on mana potions :P)

What did you think or Roros' idea? That instead of applying a "death penalty" for dying, that the game instead give a slight buff to those people who stay alive? The longer you are alive, the better the buff becomes until it hits a pre-determined cap?

You will enjoy that buff until your character dies at which time it is removed. You then need to re-earn the buff by staying alive.

I think this mechanic goes to meeting both our desires It promotes good, solid tactical gameplay, but doesn't really penalize you for dying. Instead, it rewards you for staying alive.

The more I think about the above... the more I like it tbh...

[koovan]

I really like Roros' suggestion, it seems like a very elegant solution that rewards skilled play or in my case extreme good luck. It also potentially contains a n element of genuine excitement and suspense that serves the purpose of improving the experience of playing the game.

I have also read in another thread, that Medierra has instituted some restriction of health potions in GD not unlike the one that you mention in Warcraft - a cool down timer of some type I think. This would be very welcome as long as it doesn't prevent those of us who are slow learners from progressing through to the end of the game. Hopefully, the game's difficulty levels will assist in making that possible for even the most hapless hack 'n' slasher.

[Citius]

Originally Posted by Roros

One system I tend to like is one where you build up a type of bonus as you stay alive but is lost on death. Demon's\Dark Souls handled this pretty well where the stakes got higher and higher as you stayed alive, but you didn't feel like you got thrown back to the stone age if you died repeatedly.

I don't see how this is really any different from the usual death penalty.

You die: you lose your alive bonus.
Consequences: Game will take longer (You are set back by your death).
You have to catch up to where you were (bonus wise)
You lost something that you had.
---------
You stay alive: you gain some alive bonus (up to a point)
Consequences: You are better than you would be if you had died.
You are not set back.

versus

You die: you lose x amount of experience
Consequences: Game will take longer (You are set back by your death).
You have to catch up to where you were (experience wise)
You lost something that you had.
---------
You stay alive: You don't lose any experience
Consequences: You are better than you would be if you had died.
You are not set back.


In both cases not dieing can be thought of as a bonus, and dieing as a negative consequence.

Originally Posted by koovan

2) How does it benefit the gameplay experience to have a negative effect on stats as a result of death? Presuming the game has a properly scaling and challenging difficulty options.

The fear of death just makes the game so much more intense and (imo) fun. Without that intensity and fear of death you don't get those adrenaline-rushing moments where you're like "OMG IM GONNNNAAA DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" which make playing epic, and all you get is "oh, I died".