Death in this genre is a fascinating area, it’s a place where the designers imagination can go wild. What happens when you die? Do you enter the netherworld as a spirit? unable to talk to the living ? Is your lifeless corpse pillaged for all it’s worth Is your heart weighed by your deity for its virtue and worthiness? Are you now stuck with some gruelling task, restoring your life, resurrecting your corpse What is the loss? Are you now weaker, more afraid, less than you were.? Who will help you in your hour of need old friends or new ones? Fascinating !! It’s just a shame that the current crop of new games opt for returning you unscathed to your last bind, insurance, nano replicating, cloning facility point how droll

That could get tedious. Imagine that you are on a quest to defeat some... dark... overlord or something. You finally meet up with Mr. Overlord and he pounds ya into Hades. Now, you have to spend the next 3 days working your way out of Hades. You get out, work up some experience and go back to the Overlord dude. Smack! You''re back in Hades. ARG!

Being that I''m a glutton for punishment, I would enjoy this. Beating the Dark Overlord would give me a great sense of accomplishment. But that''s just me. If you want to create a successful MMORPG, you have to appeal to the mindless MTV generation. A brat with absolutely no attention span isn''t going to repeatedly fight his way out of hades when he can just log on to EverCrack and be immortal.

We''ve argued this point to death already. But I do have hope for your idea. Some movies break away from the Steven Spielberg cookie cutter and become cult classics even if they weren''t really successful. I''d like to see this happen with computer games. Some games wouldn''t be popular but would have a following. Hmmm, maybe these already exist.

- Jay

There''s an old saying in Tennessee... well, it''s in Texas but probably in Tennessee too. It say''s, "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you... uh... ya fooled meh uh can''t get fooled again."
- George W. Bush

Get Tranced!

I''ll do a post on death penalty because I beleive i''ve sorted it once and for all

Cult following, just talk to anyone who swears up and down that Xenogears was the best game ever. But thats another subject entirely.

I personally would like to see some unconventional means of handling death in an MMORPG. Like, rather than just one world, and moving the player to another part when dying, you could pull a star trek and say theres another universe thats only open when you die. And as far as the players are concerned, this is the only real way to move back and forth. You could be further weird by having the player maintain two different characters that are unique to the respective worlds and by dieing, you move on to the other character.

-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.