adamsouza wrote:Multiple Lifes, Life Counters, etc... are par for the course in Video Games that aren't MMORPGs.
MMORPGs are suppossed to be RPGs on a grand interactive scale.
Most Pen & Paper RPG vets will testify that 9 out of 10 times when your charecter dies you just start a new one.
I'm all for a Massive Multiplayer Online Warhammer 40K experience, but if my Inquisitor can just pop back to life in a medbay after being exanguinated by a Chaos Demon then it's not really a Role Playing Experience, it's just a dumb video game that will let me whin through attrition as I can only be stopped momentarily.
The Nintendo Generation may need infinte lives to salve their ADD, but it doesn't mean it's the right fit for the genre.
The problem with this form of thinking is the limits of the medium. How playable is a video game where death is permanent? Not very. You are going to run into all kinds of problems.
1) If it requires lots of work to build up your character, one wayward moment of getting caught somewhere, lagging out, having to walk away from your keyboard due to your kitchen being on fire (or other real life “emergency”), or getting blind sided by something you just didn’t see wipes out all your work and you have to start from scratch again. That isn’t very fun.
2) If it doesn’t require much work to build up a character, anyone who does manage to get “high level” caps out and the sense of accomplishment diminishes. In addition, these people are likely to dominate any sort of
PVP environment
3) If death is permanent and they do put in a deep character leveling and building system, death is going to have to be really hard to come by since it will obliterate everything you’ve worked for. This will mean that characters end up well neigh invincible since the game can’t really kill you off without letting you play.
If you are going to liken it to a pen and paper
RPG, just think about how many times the
GM had to bail the players out of a situation where they really should have died. It happens a lot either because players picked a fight they couldn’t win or because the bad guys got some lucky rolls and the players couldn’t stand up to it. The thing is that in a video game, there is no
GM who’s devoted to keeping the game going by making sure the players don’t die off all the time. I’ve played in some D&D games were the
GM didn’t ever save the party and there were lots of deaths. It can be fun but there were issues too. No character ever made it past level 4 and only a few made it to level 3. That in itself shows that if you are playing such a game, having anything set up for levels past 4 is pointless since it’s basically impossible to get there. The other consequence is that there were plenty of times where the whole story had to be scrapped because the players who were driving it got killed and the remaining ones didn’t have in game motivation to continue on with things.
In a video game corollary, anyone play Diablo 2? Anyone ever play it on hard core mode where death was permanent? Well if you ever did, you quickly found that in order to play like that, you had to play like a complete wuss. You had to always fight monsters that were way lower than you so that you didn’t run much of a risk of death since the consequences for death were just too harsh. All in all, it wasn’t any fun.
So all in all, some sort of respawn system is really needed to keep the game fun and allow for real character development beyond just the initial portions of the game.
