Permadeath-ish mmorpg?

[coenzyme]

Tell me what you all think of my idea for a semi-permadeath mmorpg.

It would be an mmo based on reincarnation. So you would have a character, a soul if you will, that goes through many lives. Every time you die you lose everything you obtained and go to a limbo/afterlife place with all the others who had recently died. From here you choose how you want to be reincarnated. You can choose a new class and appearance each life, but you will keep the same name/history. Then you will be reincarnated back into the game world in a location based off the choices of your past life like karma. For instance if you were a jerk you would spawn in an area of the map that was characterized by crime and chaos.

Each time you were reborn you would start at level 1 with none of your old items. I realize this would be a very frustrating aspect so I was thinking that each life you would earn some award (special item/skill/prestige) that you can take into next lives in order to create some continuity and progression. Also, to create a sense of history and continuity, from the limbo area you can access a room that contains statues of all of your past lives wearing the items you died in.

For this to work I thin the main world would have to have a culture that glorified death in combat just like the Spartans and Vikings. The game play would have to encourage glorious deaths. I was thinking there could be a pvp gladiator Colosseum for fights to the death and there could be large guild battles and sieges. Also dungeons that people can team up and crawl through to fight npc monsters for some treasure at the end.

So what do you all think?

 

[Infinatex]

Rough idea might work with the right type of MMO... maybe. All I can say is that I wouldn't want to loose all my stuff after hours of grinding etc to obtain it. There would have to be something to balance it all out.

The game play would have to encourage glorious deaths.

I really like this part.

 

[coenzyme]

I think the game would have to level up faster than most mmos so that way you feel a little less attached to your stuff.

 

[emeraldrafael]

Rough idea might work with the right type of MMO... maybe. All I can say is that I wouldn't want to loose all my stuff after hours of grinding etc to obtain it. There would have to be something to balance it all out.

^This

That would also be my problem, because you're gonna have players who wantto be dicks and live forever on one live and kill other players since trolls will be trolls.

Also, you're not going to have any items of great worth, since you're going to lose it, and if dying gloriously is an intention, its basically saying, "yeah, pick up your super awesome bad ass sword. Go ahead and show it off. Just wait till you die." So any perks and rewards will have to be non material, which means you wont be able to flaunt, which will turn some people off, and disappoint others. I mean, lets face it. We all have that small bone in our body that wants us to show off. Thats what perks and things are for. So imagine you play this game for months/years, and in the end, you have nothing of real value to show for it, since you either lose it when you die, or people laugh at you for how few times you died and how committed you are to your item.

 

[zero14777]

It Would need a low level cap so people don't rage quit the game when they and would probably be better if it was focused on collecting gear. Plus the only way anyone could make money off a game like this would bee if it was free to play with that good old "$5 for a double xp potion" pasted everywhere. Still it would probably fail because aside from Koreans most don't care about some sort of "in-game life", unless it was a social game, in which case I'd suck.

 

[p3t3r]

it seems sort of silly make this your guy all big and huge just to go die? i mean cool in theory bad in application

 

[Corven]

If your character is re-incarnated, wouldn't he/she have memories of their last stand, maybe going back to where they fell and finding their old body they can gain back their items, but they would be worn and rusted from time, and you would have to pay to get them restored.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

Permadeath or even semi-permadeath is never a good idea in games where dying is a central mechanic. Games where death is incredibly rare and outside of the general tone of the game can do permadeath a bit better, but even then it's often shaky (something like your system would vastly improve most of them though).

Given that you mentioned "glorified death in combat", combat and death seem like pretty central mechanics. You're basically creating a game that's unplayable. In order to make it whatsoever compelling as a combat-centric game, you'd need to make starting characters decently powerful, which defeats much of the purpose of making people restart. In order to give any semblance of progression, a character needs to become noticably more powerful if they survive. What this ends up meaning, especially in a game with PvP, is that people will grind safely until they're powerful enough not to die. From there, you have two possibilities. The first is that only a few people do this and they massively unbalance the game. Those people break any PvP they're involved in and, even worse, if they DO somehow die, it's going to mean an awfully unpleasant day and they're pretty unlikely to continue playing given that they're back at the same level as the people who DIDN'T put in all that time (if you make it so they retain an advantage, you break the balance EVEN MORE). The other option is that everyone grinds like that, in which case you'd managed to turn the most grind-oriented genre into an even bigger grindfest.

And then there's the more casual sort of PvP you mention, "Colosseum for fights to the death and there could be large guild battles and sieges". You just can't have that amount of death in a permadeath MMO. Again, you either need to make advancement unnecessary (in which case your system is meaningless) or you force people to be so cautious to advance that the game is considerably less fun.

As an aside, I've played permadeath and semi-permadeath games like you describe. These hypothetical situations are situations that I've seen play out in games numerous times.

 

[omicron1]

Have I got a game for you...

'Tis called "Mangband." It's a multiplayer take on Angband, which is a Tolkein-themed take on Rogue. So you have your ascii game in which you fight your way down to Morgoth himself, only you play it with other people in semi-realtime. And on most servers, permadeath is a standard feature - with a caveat: You respawn as a ghost, and must make your way up to the surface to reanimate.

Man, that was a fun game. Randomized levels and a relatively low moment-to-moment difficulty made it quite fun as an MMO concept, even with (or perhaps despite) permadeath. And when you saw someone at level 50, you knew they'd earned it.


Slightly more on topic, though, I think that would only work if the game was designed not to be repetitious. Glorious deaths are all well and good, but when you die the same way to the same critter for the tenth time, you're going to be more than a little irritated.

 

[ahappycamper]

Wow I only read the first paragraph and I thought of Yahtzee's mogworld, overall the concept is interesting but as a pitch I'm not sure it would be used as it breaks the action up too much, players would probably get frustrated, it's not about items etc, players want to be progressing all the time, an extended death scene could get repetitive. May work better as an rpg as opposed to an mmorpg, losing all those levels would be seriously frustrating if you were playing in a high level clan.