G33X Nexus Entertainment > Precursors

Gameplay... and Death

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Morgul:

--- Quote from: "Reaka" ---How can the smart ones weed out the stupid ones if most of the smart ones get killed by someone else's mistake?
--- End quote ---


Who says most of them will? The smart ones will recognise someone's an idiot, and leave the star system before the idiots blow it up :-P

contingencyplan:
Re. weapons and such: I've tinkered with Planeshift some, haven't played it a whole lot.  However, they have magic in their game (since theirs is a fantasy MMORPG).  They plan to have a deal where if you're inexperienced, the spell can backfire on you, damaging you or whatever.  We could have something like that - if your skill level with a particular weapon is too low, you could injure yourself with it.  Thus, we should have training booths, where you can pay to learn to use a weapon or other system without having to worry about killing yourself by launching a REAL mini-nuke grenade half an inch in front of you.  It's all simulated, so no real chance of harm.  However, simulation can only take you so far, so we should have both a hard ceiling on the amount of skill you can gain through training combined with a law of diminishing returns (i.e., harder to advance in skill through simulation).  I'll post my views on experience and skills in the appropriate thread.

Cross-topic question, though: should we make skills weapon-specific, or have classes of weapons?  I would advocate as wep-specific as possible, since two kinds of pistols won't always fire the same way.  

Re. death: I would say a good possibility that I was thinking about putting in my game (and y'all are welcome to use now) is teleportation - everyone has a "personal emergency teleport device" or something.  All it does is pull the person back to a friendly point.  However, if this occurs, it just pulls you back - you leave all the stuff you're carrying there on the ground.  This still allows for looting, without having the victim die.

Another possibility is cloning.  If you're part of an organization (e.g., the Terrans or whoever), then you're automatically cloned and put back in, though for a cost (perhaps a standard tax or something).  If you're independent (e.g., merc.), and die, then you have to pay someone to cloning you.  Perhaps a black-market cloning / revival system?  You could say that the cloned body, being manufactured, is weaker, and not all the information in one's brain can be transferred.  So, this would explain why you lose levels / skills / money / stats when you are returned to the game.

Death is one aspect of MMORPGs that is difficult to figure out, mainly because permanent death, IMO, is not particularly an option, esp. if people are paying to play this game.  (Seem to remember something on Gamasutra about this; I'll see if I can find it.)  People won't want to invest money and a lot of time building up a character, only to have that investment be turned to bupkis when your idiot teammate (or, insert another term here) decides it'd be fun to try firing this new rocket launcher he found... except, he doesn't have the skill, so it blows up.  And, of course, you're standing right next to him.

Take it easy,
Brian

Duffy:
The general problem with Death in any MMORPG is how much you lose by dying. The question that needs to be answered is "how easily can i die?". Going with a semi-realistic game means that you can probably die relatviely easily most of the time.  If you want to work perma-death into the game there must be at least some part of the game where you do not need to worry about some random person stitting in town sniping people cause he enjoys killing players off.

     The Law Enforcement suggestion is probably the best way to keep perma-death and offer some protection to new or weaker players, by giving a strong incentive NOT to kill other players in certain areas. Actual punishments aren't horribly important right now, but as long they are harsh enough to dissuade random player-killings it'll work. To take this idea one step farther, lets say someone has the ability to at least get away with an attempt on another player in a law-abiding city. Since its a city odds are good there is some sort of hospital, this could provide a chance for a player not to die from what would usually be fatal injury. Thus making it harder to actually kill a player in a city.

     Of course this would mostly be only in major organized cities, but major cities makes the most sense for starting player locations anyways, so until the player has the skills and resources to strike out into the rest of the game they are mostly safe.

Concerning weapons skills I've seen two systems:
1.) Flat skill lvl that increases with character lvl. Considering the thoughts of the devs I would discard this idea.
2.) The next most common is that you need to increase the skill from zero by successful use of the said weapon. Usually there is a skill cap for each character lvl, so then its not possible to max the skill to perfection by simple use on mundane targets (of course diminishing returns are usually included).  Since any hard lvls are going to be hidden anyways from what I've read, this system is probably the best choice. The skill lvls would affect the accuracy radius. The ability to increase precision would not necessarily be a character trait.  I would imagine this as a modification to the actual weapon, how this would affect actual in-game use would simply mean the weapon has a tendency to group shots in one area more then just anywhere in the accuracy radius. Think of the difference between a smooth-bore firearm and a rifled one.

fehknt:
Personally, I'm against the idea of the teleporation devices.  They seem too much like a cop-out.  If people are just going to respawn like in other games, then just let them respawn, and leave it at that.

Now, I think people should have to think about the risks involved in anything that they do.  Perhaps that's not something too often needed in a game, but we're trying to make a really realistic game, right?

I'd go for making ships pretty hard to blow up, but pretty easy to badly disable, so people only get killed if other people actually want them dead.  Also, people should get a reputation as a murderer if they do so -- with serious penalities in "civilized" space.

Rosencrantz:
I think that in addition to penalizing murderers in "civilized space" there should be some way of enforcing some of those penalties outside of "civlized space". So that, the murderer is just not sitting outside of "civilized space" waiting for people to kill.

Perhaps bounties could be used this, or special exploratory law enforcement teams.

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