In today's RPGs death is balanced between being an annoyance and a punishment. This would have to be made completely over if a hard mode were to be introduced.
The goal of a hard mode is to increase the price of failure and add severe consequences to threatening actions.
This would only work in a world where the gradient between "Healthy as a horse" and "irreversibly dead" is rather large. In today's games you can have multiple hemorrhaging wounds, crushed organs, third degree burns, missing an eye and acute schizophrenia and as long as you have at least one hitpoint, you're fully capable of inflicting punishment, waging war and everything else.
A hardcore mode is only as good as long as the player fears the consequences of death but at the same time can blame only himself and his bad judgement for it and can have a limited certainty that good planning can prevent it. If death is cheap, you can afford to have cheap deaths. This works in the real world, as I have yet to see murder victims complaining about being killed by a cheap neighbourhood knife stab, but this kind of unfair attack would leave players raging behind their computers. This is the reason why PvP would have to get redesigned as well - making it more consequential, like in Eve Online. A world where some players are avoiding death at all costs and others are participating in a cycle of carefree PvP killing and respawning as if it was Quake Live will make for a very poorly designed world. PvP would have to be destructive - meaning high wages. To discourage normal players from ganking hardcore players, it would help if PvP with a hardcore player would be more dangerous and potentially costly to a normal player than if he'd PvP a "normal" player. Think mutually assured destruction.
A hardcore mode implies some tension is involved. Killing the player for a death outright is a simple, yet not a very thought out solution. Giving him temporary debuffs or reducing in level isn't much of a hardcore mode, neither is "one free death daily". I think much more tension would be created if the player would instead collapse and bleed, calling for help. Depending on the game design, the player would have from 15 minutes to an hour until he finally died, for real. Until that time, he'd have to call his friends, clanmates or random people on chat to revive him and carry him back to the dungeon exit. I believe that the choice here, as well as the pressure of the ticking clock and with the potential penalty in mind, would create perfect tension as well as encourage teamplay and expore the social part of MMORPGs.
It's not the pain of torture that makes it effective, it's the fear.
The goal of a hard mode is to increase the price of failure and add severe consequences to threatening actions.
This would only work in a world where the gradient between "Healthy as a horse" and "irreversibly dead" is rather large. In today's games you can have multiple hemorrhaging wounds, crushed organs, third degree burns, missing an eye and acute schizophrenia and as long as you have at least one hitpoint, you're fully capable of inflicting punishment, waging war and everything else.
A hardcore mode is only as good as long as the player fears the consequences of death but at the same time can blame only himself and his bad judgement for it and can have a limited certainty that good planning can prevent it. If death is cheap, you can afford to have cheap deaths. This works in the real world, as I have yet to see murder victims complaining about being killed by a cheap neighbourhood knife stab, but this kind of unfair attack would leave players raging behind their computers. This is the reason why PvP would have to get redesigned as well - making it more consequential, like in Eve Online. A world where some players are avoiding death at all costs and others are participating in a cycle of carefree PvP killing and respawning as if it was Quake Live will make for a very poorly designed world. PvP would have to be destructive - meaning high wages. To discourage normal players from ganking hardcore players, it would help if PvP with a hardcore player would be more dangerous and potentially costly to a normal player than if he'd PvP a "normal" player. Think mutually assured destruction.
A hardcore mode implies some tension is involved. Killing the player for a death outright is a simple, yet not a very thought out solution. Giving him temporary debuffs or reducing in level isn't much of a hardcore mode, neither is "one free death daily". I think much more tension would be created if the player would instead collapse and bleed, calling for help. Depending on the game design, the player would have from 15 minutes to an hour until he finally died, for real. Until that time, he'd have to call his friends, clanmates or random people on chat to revive him and carry him back to the dungeon exit. I believe that the choice here, as well as the pressure of the ticking clock and with the potential penalty in mind, would create perfect tension as well as encourage teamplay and expore the social part of MMORPGs.
It's not the pain of torture that makes it effective, it's the fear.
