In most modern MMORPGs dying is part of the game. There's no "game over", your character will be revived or has to do something to get his life back(i.e. walk as ghost to your corpse). This seems to be a multiplayer only feature, only seen seldomly in singleplayer games. I think that the reason is, that making dying as part of the game is just a "design feature" to overcome a missing load/save possiblity in multiplayer games. So, what are the options to make dying a core feature of the game design, regardless of singleplayer or multiplayer games ? As one part, loading or saving at will is a problem. Take a look at bioshock. You get revived, but how often did you accepted the state after being revived ? I just reload the last saved gamestate, because I used up my medi-kits and ammunition. So, getting rip of multiple save games is a good way to start with. Lets save the game only if you stop playing and loading only if you continue playing. Well, here are some options: Permadeath One option encountered in single player games is permadeath. I just don't want to discuss the pro and contra of permadeath, but lets say that many people feel permadeath too hard. Direct punishment Often direct punishment in form of experience lost, equipment lost or a debuff . NPC behaviour I don't actually remember a game which uses this approach, but I'm quite sure that it has been already used. The conecpt is, that when a character dies and getting revived, he get be marked (i.e. tainted). NPC will start to react differently to marked character, i.e. they deny services or start to charge more cash from "tainted" characters. Characters should be able to remove marks. On the other hand some characters needed to be marked to "access" special npc. Fame This is variantion of "loosing is fun" (rogue like games). You get titles by dying in a certain way like "trap tester" or "troll dinner". Give and take Like in direct punishment you loose something, but at random occasions you gain special abilities until you die again. I.e. "resistence to teeth" if you has been eaten by an oger or "light like a feather" if you has been plunged to death. Comments ? Other options ? -- Ashaman

You could look into Planescape: Torment...

You play someone who cannot die and just respawns back in the mortuary. Dying in certain places or at specific times is actually required to complete the game. Of course, you also have amnesia, so you don't know why or how you became immortal until much later in the game.

You can use dying as an emotional drive, e.g. if you are killed by certain NPC, your friends will want to revenge you. For applying it a single player game, we can first give player control of main character, if he dies at some significant point of story, game give control to his son, or a friend which continue the journey. If he live on then story folds according to that scenario.

This will give non-linearity to game

~.~

yeah i've thought about permadeath before, and ultimately it comes down to this; i'm tired of designing games that cater to the player. It seems like every video game nowadays is more of an interactive entertainment experience. You never really die, because that would be frustrating. Everything is made blatantly obvious to you.

Old games were hard. The designers had decided ahead of time what the right thing to do was, and if you didn't do it, you died. And maybe you only even had 2 lives for the entire game, so you had to start all over from one simple mistake. I want my games to have that level of adversity. So I'm going to sacrifice prospective sales for the sake of the game. personally.

I guess it would depend on the context of the game material as well..

What about using Death as the only way for the player to complete the story? Either the player needs to be in "ghost form" to finish the storyline, or the very act of dying completes things..

But I agree that the pendulum has swung way too far in the player's favor by removing any type of penalty / effect from dying.

Hmm..building off of @sauyadav comment, what about Death being needed in order to have the player control a family relative who ends up becoming the "main character" of the story?

(eg. the very act of Hero NPC X dying, was the final straw for the local farmboy to throw down the bales of hay and pick up the large 3 pronged Trident ready for battle!)

It's quite interesting to see that almost all suggestions are a variation of permadeath. I can't believe that the game design world is just black or white, there must be more options to handle dying. We design games, realism is not a must have :)

Thanks Prince of Cats, planescape torment is an excelent example of a game, where dying is part of the game design.

--
Ashaman

It's hard to design the death of the main character... especially when he/she is supposed to stay alive until the end of the story (single player)

I have an idea, but I'm not sure how well it would work.

If the game is MMO and the character is in a party then the whole responsibilty falls in the hands of the party members, i.e. they are the ones who should take the character to a resurrect point (be it a priest, a cinic or something else). Otherwise the game just stops for some period of time and the character finds him/herself at the nearest resurrect point with the (wierd) explanation that someone found them and took them there (well there could be actual corpse collector NPCs that wander about and look for dead heroes or something similar). In single player games there isn't much point in making the player wait, unless of couse you want to punish them =]

It would be more than just strange, though, if someone managed to find you in the middle of nowhere, when there are no signs of civilization in miles... or in the final stage (for instance)... but as Ashaman73 said:

Quote:

...We design games, realism is not a must have...

I can't think of a game that used this method, but there probably is one. It is a sort of variation of the save point method, the only difference is that not the player but the game (or in the case of MMORPG - the comrades) deside where the character should resurrect. It is not permadeath but it is not instant respawn either (and there is still also room for other punishments as well).
I hope I'm being useful, anyway :)

[Edited by - Kvadrat on September 22, 2009 3:33:36 AM]

I like the idea of the player is only resurrected if the world wants them to be. If a level 1 adventure wanders into a cave and dies no one will be concerned. If that adventurer helps out a nearby village beforehand they may be worried and send a party to retrieve and treat them. Of course if that adventurer wandered into the level 99 cave of doom the townspeople would consider their own safety and leave them to die. So your reputation in the world would have to keep up the danger you wander into.

I'm actually going to err on the opposite side of discussion, and say I liked how the latest Prince of Persia handled it:

The princess had a limited ability to fly, so whenever you fall to your doom or are about to be sucked into murky darkness, there's this tiny scene showing her grabbing your arm, then she drops you back at the last "platform" you stood on. (I tried to find a video of what I mean, but I couldn't, sorry).

Essentially there's no "death" at all, and certainly no concept of loading from a save when you die. Even in combat, if you're getting beat up too much, princess pushes the baddies away from you temporarily.

To me that makes sense because survival isn't a gameplay mechanic. In POP the point is to figure out how to make it along these really tricky, acrobatic paths. This system allows you to focus on that without losing immersion, and the effect is the same as save/load/save/load/etc, except that it's faster for the player.

Games with long load times are terrible for this. The character dies, there's some kind of death scene that drags out, a menu comes up that maybe lets me load or just "continue," the loading screen comes up, I wait, and finally I'm back somewhere near where I died to try it again.

In POP, you fall off a cliff, a quick "arm grab" animation plays and you're dropped at the last sensible location to continue. It takes only a second.


Maybe in a game in which survival is actually a mechanic punishment makes sense -- like in Super Zombie Survival Game dying determines what score you achieved, but I think game designers focus too much on "punishment" in video games. I don't play to be punished.

In darts, the point is to hit as close to the center as possible, and the punishment for missing is that you missed. The score makes that part of the mechanic, but you can choose to ignore the score and just try to hit a bullseye too. When you don't hit the bullseye you don't lose points, or have to run around the room twice to pick up another dart, you don't have to pay--you just have to try again, simple.

Prince of Persia takes that approach, and I think it's the right one.

An idea to try: your character is a parasitic, non-physical existence that gains the control of whichever creature kills your current body. Some interesting gameplay possibilities here, although the whole game would have to be designed around this very fact.

Edit: IMHO, perma-death should always be an optional, opt-in preference. I hate games that force you to start from the beginning (for some definition of "beginning") when you die. I simply don't have the time - or the will - to regain the equipment, experience levels that I have lost. If I have to actually retrace the last dungeon (i.e. no quicksave/quickload option), I will likely put down the game for good.