Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Death mechanics and why there should be penalties
Hi all
In MMO's these days death is a non-event, a minor inconvenience.
I strongly feel that death should be a genuinely scary prospect and solid mechanics for player death have a hugely positive impact on player experience.
For example, I used to play a lot of NWN years ago. On the server where I played mostly there were some serious penalties for death. When you died, you spirit would be transported to the Fugue Plane, a realm of the dead where all the other dead players were. There were a few different ways to return to the land of the living:
1. You could pay for a resurrection with a piece of your soul, this would leave you with a hefty stat penalty and you would lose a large amount of XP, potentially deleveling. To restore your soul a large donation must be made to the temple of your chosen deity.
2. Another player could cast some variant of a resurrection spell on your corpse, this obviously required the other player(s) to recover your corpse first from wherever you died. This would reduce the penalties incurred but you would still lose a bit of XP.
3. A high level cleric could perform a True Resurrection which required recovering your corpse and bringing it to a temple of tour chosen Deity. This also required a Balm of True Resurrection which was an expensive item but you would have no stat penalties and lose only a tiny amount if XP.
Granted these mechanics might be considered pretty hard core by some (and I'm not necessarily suggesting that Ashes needs an XP penalty for death) but there should be some mechanics in place to make scary, not just click respawn and run back to your mates!
What do you guys think?
Any suggestions for potential death mechanics?
TLDR: Death should hurt and be f****n scary!
In MMO's these days death is a non-event, a minor inconvenience.
I strongly feel that death should be a genuinely scary prospect and solid mechanics for player death have a hugely positive impact on player experience.
For example, I used to play a lot of NWN years ago. On the server where I played mostly there were some serious penalties for death. When you died, you spirit would be transported to the Fugue Plane, a realm of the dead where all the other dead players were. There were a few different ways to return to the land of the living:
1. You could pay for a resurrection with a piece of your soul, this would leave you with a hefty stat penalty and you would lose a large amount of XP, potentially deleveling. To restore your soul a large donation must be made to the temple of your chosen deity.
2. Another player could cast some variant of a resurrection spell on your corpse, this obviously required the other player(s) to recover your corpse first from wherever you died. This would reduce the penalties incurred but you would still lose a bit of XP.
3. A high level cleric could perform a True Resurrection which required recovering your corpse and bringing it to a temple of tour chosen Deity. This also required a Balm of True Resurrection which was an expensive item but you would have no stat penalties and lose only a tiny amount if XP.
Granted these mechanics might be considered pretty hard core by some (and I'm not necessarily suggesting that Ashes needs an XP penalty for death) but there should be some mechanics in place to make scary, not just click respawn and run back to your mates!
What do you guys think?
Any suggestions for potential death mechanics?
TLDR: Death should hurt and be f****n scary!
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Comments
That is a penalty for PKing not for dying.
I think "the classic corpse run" as you put it is boring though and doesn't make death feel like I should care if it happens.
I agree though that over complicating things isn't a good idea but I just hope they come up with something fresh and, more importantly, something that makes me afraid to die.
True its not really that inventive, and its boring to be fair
Theres probably some interesting new mechanic luring around the corner, someone just has to come up with it
There was something great about being a rogue and sneaking past a high level raid boss to drag back corpses. Because most of the time, stealth is hardly used on instances and raids.
It also adds a little "spice" to mass PvP, so instead of, just rezzing back at base and running back, you actually need to be rezed in the battle, making it a balancing act between healers "healing" and "rezzing", people dragging back corpses from the front line, when maybe they need to fight etc.
Having to recover the corpse would be much better and more interesting as a mechanic.
- Loss of durability on death. Some guild items or profession skills repair gear to a degree, but the best way back to 100% dura would be a (potentially long) trek back to your node blacksmith/toolsmith etc. 0% dura would mean gear drop or even total loss. Death could result in variable amounts of dura loss, to add extra fear/tension when you do finally recover your corpse.
- Loot drop/loss on death. I'm not in favor of full loot in PvE (or PvP), but a graduating scale of loot drop percentage, along with increasing risk of loot loss for repeated deaths within a certain period of time.
Mounts and chests where you can stash gear and loot will help offset this (for higher level players), but beware the roguesThe Plane of Knowledge was often full of people running around dragging their corpses behind them, looking for a rezzer. Or you'd often hear "help needed for corpse run, such and such zone"
You would actual have a set of "corpse run" gear, journeyman boots (speedy) and other specialist gear sitting in your bank for just those situations.
But it was great, people would actual go out of their way, to come to a zone to help retrieve your body, or rez you in situ.
I'm guessing EQ was the inspiration for that
I think something like this would be great. It turns death into a whole other experience and promotes new kinds of player interaction.
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What do you want on your gravestone?
I remember the good old days; those were the days when you died, you felt pain. It was traumatic and frightening in ways that no one but another gamer could understand. Death was soul crushing. That last death just as you were ready to log out could have reduced Genghis Khan to tears. We all would swear next time we wouldn’t go for just one more mob to ‘top off’ our hunt. Sleep became as rare as that one drop that everyone else was finding in the first five minutes and you hadn’t gotten in over twenty-eight straight hours of camping.
I used to have to walk for miles through merciless, monster-infested wastelands to get my body. I always got lost. “Do you see that tree there? Look, which side is the moss growing on?” No moss for you! We didn’t have maps. We didn’t even know what the heck a map was. I swam through pools of lava to get my bodies and every single time I was scared I would die again.
Ok, to be honest, I didn’t really care that much about my body. Bodies were always a lot like Doritos. The monsters could crunch all they wanted we would always have another fresh body waiting for us. It was the shiny things on my bodies I wanted; my shoes, my cloak, my pride, my level, my sword. At the end of a hard day your alt’s back-up set of armor was gone. Perma-death would have been a blessing, but we didn’t have it that easy.
The only thing worse than having your loot sitting on one of the 16 million corpses you had strewn across the land, was knowing that your body had been looted; talk about the pain and agony of defeat. When that ogre rifled through your corpse you could do nothing about it. Revenge? If you were capable of revenge, you wouldn’t be dead now. You screwed up, you went down a path you shouldn’t have. Baby, you’re not in Kansas anymore, you’re in the zone from hell.
In those days, if it was out there, it was going to kill you.
In Ultima Online, the arrows shot by player-killers would endlessly circle the trees like heat seeking missiles zeroing in on your back.
For Asheron’s Call, I have two words; Ash Gromnie. When you were feeling good about your new metal armor, the Ash Gromnies were there to take you down a peg or two and show you why lighting and metal don’t mix well. (We should all pretend that death during the rabbit mating season never happened).
Everquest was a series of painful deaths from the very beginning. Fippy Darkpaw was waiting, just itching to kill you. Then, just when you were good enough to take your revenge, you knew it was time to head to Blackburrow. If somehow you managed to beat the train, excuse me, I mean TRAIN, out of Blackburrow, then you ran right into the jaws of that rabid grizzly. Yah, that’s going to leave a mark; hurts, don’t it?
Then over the years, deaths in MMORPGs started to change. New games came out and patches were added to old ones. There was a shift to make the games easier. When you died, you no longer dropped any loot. After dying a handful of times in a row, it stopped affecting your play. At the end of a hard day, you could log off, smug in knowing that when you woke up in the morning, your avatar would be as good as new.
At some point, it went from Death Rides a Pale Horse, to Don’t Fear the Reaper. Death traded his pale horse in for a My Pretty Pony TM; that nice, sky-blue one. Yeah, you know which pony I am talking about.
Death became a way to travel faster. Death became useful and almost enjoyable. What was the highest area you could leap from? When that club came and smacked you in the face, how far would your body get thrown from the impact? Dying became a form of recreation.
For Ashes of Creation it sounds like death is going to be a sting of experience somewhere between between a Bullhorn Acacia Ant and a Arizona Bark Scorpion.
What do I want on my gravestone?
Hopefully I won't want to die in Ashes of Creation, and that’s how it should be.This is how I feel exactly!
To increase the tension further, loss of gear durability could be slightly randomised to make it even less certain how many wipes the group can suffer before people start having 0% gear bonus, or losing gear entirely.
Yeah any mechanics that make it scary and make combat feel more tense and exciting are a good thing!
I used to play EVE a lot and the pvp in that is so intense because the fear of loss is real! You lose your ship it's gone forever and all the modules installed too. You get podded and your super expensive implants are gone too!
Millions of ISK gone forever...
But the exhilaration...
Can you make death scary and time-consuming and meaningful, but include a 'surrender' mechanic that's potentially usable by anyone (or anyone under a certain percentage health)? It could, perhaps, mean that a PKer intent on griefing a specific player cannot kill the character if that character is marked as a non-combatant and has also surrendered (maybe giving up money/gear in the process, and with appropriate checks so that surrendering cannot be abused as a mechanic). It, perhaps, gives the limited-time players a way to carry on with their plans for their only available play-time that week (while applying some sort of penalty for such 'cowardly' behaviour on the character's part, but a penalty, nevertheless, which is less than death). There's still the potential for problems, obviously, but I don't know if any MMO has the option to surrender in a fight and I think it would be a cool option if done well.
Can you make it possible to withdraw from combat, so you can (potentially, if you are clever/smart/quick enough) run away once you can see you are outmatched? For animals, perhaps you'd have to know something about them to know the best way to escape- maybe you'd need to try to run uphill, or downhill, or across water, or away from water. Maybe you could equip bags of dust/smoke bombs to help in your escape. Your gear might get a little damaged from the fight, but no other penalty (except as regards your character's dignity).