One game I stumbled on recently is called UnReal World. It's basically a survival sim that throws you in midieval Finland (or some such) forcing you to survive in the wilderness.

Characters die. Alot. And there's no resurection or save points.

What makes it work for URW is that there aren't any unnecesary hoops to jump through, and each game is on a new map, and hence a new playing experience.

If you want the player to avoid death, you definately have to make it bad. Actual character destruction does this just fine.

But then you have to design your game with the knowledge that players will be dying. Alot. And it still needs to be fun for them to start over the umpteenth hundred time.

Most games have intros at the beginning of the game for example. This would be horrible for an idea like this. Likewise starting the game at the same place every time wouldn't work.

Likewise, you'd have to carefully design the game to be extremely fun at the beginning, which tends to not be the case. Generally the mid game is where the fun usually climaxes (for me at least).

It's all doable, you just have to think it through thoroughly.

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One example would be in an edutainment type game. If you die, you're faced with a short quiz on a relevant subject in order to continue. Otherwise you have to start from square one, or at least a bit further back. Taking this basic idea a little further, perhaps the quiz could be used to educate the player a bit more about the actual game. Pose them a question about the game mechanics. Something that would be in the manual somewhere. Not only would this enable them to learn more about the game (and help them avoid dying in future) but it could also double as an old-school type of copy protection, as players without the printed manual would have a much harder time answering these questions.

This is pretty much my plan now.

I never really wanted the lockout idea. Its just something if someone is decidedly against a test as an alternative.

My game is online so theres no uninstalling or reinstalling if you hate my idea. You can just go somewhere else for an hour or answer the questions.

My plan was to have a death world of 5 levels:
Easiest Questions
Easy Questions
Medium Questions
Hard Questions
Hardest Questions.

Every time you die you start on easiest. The first death you only have to answer that one right and you get out. The second you have to do it and an easy question. The third you have to do it an da medium question. You get the idea...

If you fail a question you go down a level and if you fail easiest Im not sure if it should be another easy question or game over permanently.

I would like to clarify this is a text adventure and traditionally they have tons of deadends in them.

That has exactly the same drawbacks as your old idea, except with an element of russian roulette thrown in. Players would be afraid to experiment, because they'd have the prospect of an unknown trivia question hanging over their heads. Worse, it actually ENCOURAGES players to go away for an hour rather than risk losing a level.

Ok after some thought I decided only 3 levels and to make the questions rather easy. The point of the questions:

-To discourage death and make you think more before you die.

-To help filter out non-human players.

-To get the player to know more about the game.

The game is text-based so its not like with other games where you have to make decisions quickly. You have plenty of time to think and plan to avoid death.

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Original post by azoundria -To help filter out non-human players.

You're expecting a lot of those, are you?



Actually, this entire threa is symptomatic of the 'Designer Vs The Player' line of thinking. You're NOT competing with the player, you're providing a product for him. Much like a McDonalds employee insisting that you have to drop and do 50 pushups before he'll give you the burger, it's just not a good idea.


Allan

I played Fallout on a woefully inadequate machine, and one of the side-effects was that it took about fifteen minutes either to save or load my game. Consequently, I'd play for an hour or more between saves, and if I died, I'd not only lose that big block of game time, but I'd have to stare at the load screen for a long time (or just go do something else while it loaded).

The effect this had on my gameplay experience was anything but detrimental. I weighed my options, chickened out and scouted enemies in a way I never would have if I could load to a minute ago with a click of the mouse. It actually enhanced the game for me, and made the whole experience for more rewarding.

However, every time I died, or waited for it to save, or otherwise was inconvenienced, I had the outlet of my inferior hardware to blame. If I could look at a "Fifteen Minutes to Character Regeneration" screen and know that the designer had imposed this inconvenience upon me, I'd be very displeased.

I think that a shutout would be good for players, but they won't take their medicine unless you show a fifteen-minute porno during that delay.

The worse death is the more precious life is. I want to create a challenge the user has to do to earn their way back into the game.

And yes I expect with my game it is quite easy to create a bot that will get a player huge advantages.

Isn't loosing the items you gained on your way bad enough already? For example, in a FPS, the longer you can stay alive the better equipped you'll probably be, making it more intense to stay alive. Because when you die, you know you'll have to work your way up again. You don't have to put a trivia before they respawn - they have other things to do than answering trivia (in fact, isn't trivia a game on its own? Then ask yourself, does my public like trivia games?). They want to play as soon as possible, it's bad enough they lost all but their most basic gear.
So I think it's the other way around: the more precious life is, the worse death is.

Besides, players play whatever they want to play. Sometimes what we as designers have in mind just doesn't work, because players don't like it. The things we think are important may just not be that important to players. Take Counter-Strike. I, as a level designer, put high value on looks. Un-lit maps are a terrible sight. Yet there's a (large) group of CS players that turns the lighting off, or increases their monitor gamma, just because they want to play without sneaky dark corridors. They enjoy the fragging. Would it be wise to emphasize on good-looking, tactics-encouraging maps if that's your public?

As for bots danger, wouldn't it be better to work on security measures players won't notice rather than implementing an annoying feature? I guess it's better to have players and bots rather than no players at all.

In Nethack (which I've become rather hooked on) you play a character, work your way through the game and when your character dies, it's permanent.

However, a neat feature is that sometimes when you start over with a different character and reach the level your previous character died on you can see their grave and all the items they had when they died (along with a rather annoying ghost).

If you are going to use a permadeath system, perhaps have the player start at the beginning, but they can make use of changes their previous character had made. Like if they beat a level boss then the boss is defeated when the next character goes through, if they opened the railroad, then the railroad is available, etc.

Then when you find their body, you can loot it for items they gathered before or you could see them in a nearbye shop or someting.

Basically, let the player go through and if they die they start at the beginning with a new character but their journey becomes easier because of the efforts the previous character made. It combines a sense of acheivement for the character with a little more risk than a simple save-spot.

Though I suppose this would replace save spots with "railways" which would be speedy paths for new characters to reach previously unlocked levels.

I dont know why everyone does not like my ideas here but everyone on my development team seems fine with it. Maybe I should have phrased it differently.

"You get the chance to earn back your life by answering 3 questions about the game. "
Once the questions are through you come back to where you died, or back a bit from that point to a safe place. You can then pick your items back up(if another player has not taken them) and proceed with the game.

I have considered the alternatives.

1) You loose your items and go somewhere else in the game. Where should the character go? Why if you die way in another town miles away does your character get reborn in the main town? Or if I have a seperate 'spawn spot' for each town it has to be programmed first before the town, and added complications of borders.

2) Death is permanent. The player then starts a new character. This makes extreme fear of death and most players will quit when they die.

3) A ghost? Well then I have to reprogram everyhting for this ghost walking through the town, which takes a long time and seems such a waste. If your a ghost can't you just walk by people and steal their stuff? Or if you can't do that how are you holding your own items?

If that doesn't convince you, remember this game is text-based, so the entire time you are answering basic questions of 'what would you do?' or 'what would you say?' in an effort to gain stuff for your character. If it were a highly-graphical game that was doing this I can understand players getting upset about it.

Hope this is convincing enough...