It's been a while and a certain hurricane certainly didn't help matters, but here is, at last, the second part of Video Game Death Penalties. In this part, we'll be looking at common death penalties found in MMORPG's and how they differ in function from the penalties common to single player games.
Durability Loss: This is almost certainly the most common one. In such cases, equipment has a durability value which slowly goes down over time, but which decreases by a significant amount, usually 10%, upon death. Although this usually only results in needing to pay a small fee to a blacksmith NPC, sometimes the repair costs are significant and in rare cases the maximum durability on an item can even go down either through death or through repair. Like many other penalties in this section, this penalty is simply annoying and is designed as a timesink; even low repair fees can add up quickly over the course of a game and dying one too many times in the middle of a dungeon or simply when out questing means a player will need to make the long trip all the way back to town to repair just to then head back to where he or she was, assuming said player doesn't die yet again and incur even more durability loss during the trip.
Corpse Run: Before Durability Loss really took off as the most popular penalty, we had corpse running. In this case, you respawn in town, but all your gear is still on your corpse/tombstone where you died. So, unless you have a backup set of gear (unlikely), you are not going to be doing much in the way of combat until you sneak by all the enemies along the way to your corpse in order to recover your gear. This can of course take well over an hour if your corpse is far away from a town or if there are simply many aggressive enemies near it and chances are high that you'll die again even if you do get your corpse since, after all, something nearby killed you in the first place. It's a long, tedious process and was the perfect way to keep players occupied with a game which thrived off of monthly fees.
Ghost Run: This is a less severe, yet only slightly less annoying, equivalent of Corpse Running which was made popular by World of Warcraft. In this case, you still need to get back to your corpse, but you do so as a ghost which can't be attacked. This sounds better, but it also means you can't use a mount or anything else which grants a speed boost in the process of running back (unless the ghost form itself gives a small boost) and you can't do any non-combat activities along the way either, such as crafting in town or stopping to mine some rare ore along the way. You also usually revive with a low amount of health and mana with this penalty, so the chance of dying and needing to make the run again mere seconds after revival is even higher than with a Corpse Run penalty.
Wait to Revive: This is perhaps the most boring of all penalties, though developers generally try to 'validate' it by making it a progressive thing. In this case, a player can't revive right away and can't do anything at all until a timer ticks down to allow resurrection. The timer usually doesn't even appear unless the player has died multiple times within a few minutes, but once it starts racking up the timer can quickly rise to 2, 5, or even 10 minutes. This penalty is rarely found on its own and is most frequently paired up with Ghost Run and/or Durability Loss. When it's paired with Ghost Run the timer usually doesn't even start until the player is near his or her corpse and when all three penalties are present it can result in a nearly endless cycle of reviving with broken gear and low health only to die from one or two attacks a moment later and ever-so-slowly inching your way back to town as the amount of time you need to spend simply standing next to your corpse progressively rises.
Gear Loss: This is arguably the worst of the lot, though it's extremely rare at the current time. With this penalty, death has a chance to result in the permanent loss of a piece of worn equipment regardless of the item in question. Thus, a valuable weapon or piece of armor which may have taken months to either craft or to finally see drop from a boss can be instantly, permanently washed away by one careless death or even by something which the player cannot control, such as a disconnect or a large lag spike while in the middle of a fight. This penalty is likely one of the rarer ones because it's too harsh and a bit too obvious of a timesink and games which include it sometimes still grant a way to regain a lost item or to prevent a specific item from being lost in the first place, but it's never fun to deal with.
Corpse Looting: This is a favorite of PvP-based games, though it's not as common as it once was. Unlike Gear Loss where a piece of equipment can be forever lost, Corpse Looting allows any nearby players to loot your corpse upon death; in most games which include this penalty other players are limited to being able to take all of the gear worn by the dead player, but some games don't necessarily stop there and allow full inventory looting as well. This penalty can really be hit or miss since it can result in a single death leading to the loss of multiple items which took a significant amount of time to acquire, but it's just as easy to in turn loot valuable items from the corpse of someone else.
Experience Loss: One of the most obvious timesink penalties is Experience Loss. It pretty much does what it says; if a player dies, he or she looses a set percentage of experience points. In some games players can even delevel from this, which can be particularly bad if most of the equipment worn by a person was only usable at their former level, or go into 'negative experience', but usually the loss can only put players down to 0% experience into their current level. Oddly enough, this actually tends to be one of the lesser penalties since games which include it also usually have a way of mitigating loss or outright recovering lost experience and the penalty is virtually nonexistent if a player is only near the start of an existing level or is already at the level cap (assuming deleveling and negative experience do not apply of course). This penalty can, however, be particularly nasty if it's in a game which revolves around quest-based grind (i.e. simply killing normal enemies gives next to no experience compared to completing quests), though it is usually only found in games which rely upon more standard grinding methods.
Resurrection Sickness: A favorite of games which consist mostly or entirely of a town hub and instanced dungeons, though it can be found in others as well. Resurrection sickness allows a player to revive in town, or sometimes even at his or her corpse, with severely reduced stats. This means a player may be able to run around and gather materials, craft, or do other non-combat activities, but combat against worthwhile opponents is almost certainly out of the question, especially if playing solo. In games which rely upon a town hub system, Resurrection Sickness usually always occurs upon death for about 1-5 minutes, but more open games usually offer revival in town with Resurrection Sickness as an alternative to Ghost Running; it is usually possible to pay a high level-dependent fee to 'cure' resurrection sickness early, so players can choose between a timesink and a moneysink. Regardless of how it's implemented, Resurrection Sickness is decidedly one of the most notably boring penalties.
Money Loss: While this penalty is somewhat rare in MMORPG's, it's far from unheard of. Although this penalty is also frequently found in single-player RPG's, banks and jewels which buy and sell for the same price often mitigate the loss significantly. On the other hand, money loss in MMORPG's tends to be of a smaller percentage than in single-player games, but ways of mitigating the loss also tend to be limited (ex: a bank with a maximum gold storage) or outright nonexistent. Money also is usually far more valuable in MMORPG's than in RPG's due to not only buying gear and consumables, but also crafting materials, repairs, and various other often-expensive items such as mounts.
Back to Town: This is the final common penalty and on its own it is almost certainly the least severe. The player is simply sent back to town, either the nearest town or wherever they set as a return point and the only loss is one of travel time, not dissimilar to a checkpoint system in single-player games. Unfortunately, this is almost never the sole penalty applied to a player and Durability Loss at the very least almost always accompanies it.
In the end, the main difference between most single-player penalties and most MMORPG penalties seems to be one of just how they affect progress. Single player death penalties usually take away a certain amount of progress, either a small amount such as with a checkpoint system or a large amount such as with permanent death, while MMORPG death penalties tend to temporarily impede future progress, such as with respawn timers, resurrection sickness, or corpse and ghost running. Furthermore, MMORPG penalties have a much higher chance of being combined with each other, such as with resurrection sickness paired up with durability loss, or corpse running with money and durability loss, or other combinations of 'small' penalties designed to add up in order to hinder players both in terms of time and money.In short, single player penalties are at times frustrating, but motivating, while MMORPG penalties are almost consistently tedious and boring.
While it would perhaps seem ideal to not have any penalties at all, the fact of the matter is they serve a useful purpose in any game. In single player games, they give us an incentive to play well and raise the tension without usually having much in the way of actual consequence; the experience is a more potent one due to the risk of a penalty. For multiplayer games, they are designed more as deliberate timesinks, ways to help keep players attached to the same game for hundreds, if not thousands, of hours over a significant span of time, yet without such timesinks it is highly unlikely that any MMORPG developer could generate quality content at a fast enough rate to satisfy the majority of their audience; our death literally help contribute to keeping their games alive.
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