Ekim's Gamer View: Die Another Way
Ekim, 2003-09-05

You have a sword hanging over your head

Death is a huge part of role-playing. Like it or not, a player is supposed to want to avoid death at all costs. At least that's how it should be. In the spirit of true role-play, death is the bane of any character. Imagine if you could never die when you played a pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons game? A dungeon master wouldn't be able to keep his players under control, so he has to always hang the threat of death over their heads so that they take care of how they go about solving any problem. Up to this day, most computer games have failed at doing that, because you could always save and restore, or respawn at an earlier point.

Granted, computer games don't have the same dynamic as pen and paper games. The dungeon master of a computer game is the computer itself: harsh, cold, and unforgiving. In a tabletop game the human dungeon master can adapt to certain situations, invent ways to give the players a chance in a particularly hairy situation. Computers can't do that yet. So how fair would a perma-death system be?

Death to the death sentence

Let's say that we don't have bandwidth issues. Let's imagine, for a moment, that we live in a world that has no lag problems, that going link dead is something that never happens. Let's say we are offered a game that is completely bug-free, that everyone enjoys, that is completely balanced and where all the different classes or professions have an equal population of players. Utopia in it's greatest form, if you can believe it could ever happen. The only problem that would remain in this perfect online game would be to decide what kind of death system would be implemented.

You could have the best game out there, perma-death would probably make your whole system crumble to dust. Sure, a small fraction of your players would like the idea. For the most part though, you would be left with a large portion of players that would suddenly be afraid of going out of the safety of cities. Why risk losing everything if you step on the wrong side of a cliff? Why even bother gathering all the best loot if one false move can make it all go away? Why spend dozens, even hundreds of hours on a character if it's to have it explode after a year? Sure, everyone would be terrified of dying, and they would want to avoid death at all costs! But that cost would probably end up being the game… Actually, casual players would probably just stay away if they knew about this feature before joining, or they would bail as soon as they found out about it.

Of course, I guess this really depends on how focused a game is on character advancement and equipment gathering. But then isn't that the point of most RPGs? To gather equipment, to further advance your character? To role-play while doing those things, and because of them? But let's say that our utopian online game isn't that focused on these things, making death actually much less harsh than it would otherwise be. Then aren't we left with Unreal Tournament? Or maybe a better comparison would be to mention Planetside. Those are not bad games by any means, but they are no RPG...

Death in a perfect world

I strongly believe that perma-death should remain in the realm of action games. CRPGs have no place for it until a computer can actually manage to analyze situations on a more human level. Yeah, right, see you in a couple of lifetimes from now! Perma-death would have an influence on gameplay, that's for sure. It would certainly have a positive effect on griefers since most players would be more careful about what they do. But let's just face the fact that a true griefer is always willing to risk everything to get on other people's nerves. They usually don't mind to be banned and having to start all over again later on. So what use would perma-death really have on our games? None… It would only be a great fear factor that could potentially kill a game and alienate players. It remains an elitist feature. No thanks.