[I'm still working on bugs, polish, and a bit more content for the next playable pre-alpha. I just got the camera controls fixed! I also added sliders and settings so people can tweak the camera behaviorI’ve talked about death penalties before — let me bring back an infographic from one of those blog posts. Next up: redoing This correlates an MMO’s death penalty with other aspects of the Quest and Crafting GUIs so you can tell what's going onMMO.
But while I work on mundane stuff, let's look far ahead... way ahead by like six months or so... and look at some features I want to add eventually.]
Player-Made Dungeons: Meh
My death penalty is lenient. My game is first and foremost about exploration, so I have mixed feelings about player-generated content in traditional MMOsneed a penalty that makes it easy to explore. GenerallyActually, players aren’t very good at making contentmy death penalty may be the most lenient in the MMO universe, so because there’s actually benefits to death: you have lots of trouble sorting wheat from chaff. This is very difficult because players don’t grade based on how awesome content earn Death XP, which isuseful for many things, they grade based on the difficulty-to-reward ratio of the contentlike necromancy.
And when MMO developers think about this idea, what they usually come up with is I’ll have a full suite of dungeonminor money-creation tools that let players remix existing dungeons in new wayssink, too, but nothing very painful. I really want people to be able to wander the world, try things out, and figure out how the game works. This The game is a ton of workreally complex, and the fun is generally pretty dullin figuring all these little systems all out. After a few years If you felt compelled to read the internet to learn how everything works, rather than exploring for yourself, you’d miss the most important part of updates, MMO developers have usually already attempted all the obvious things that can game. You’d be done left with these dungeon piecesthe stupid grinding part that every MMO has. So usually all you’re getting is a custom story scriptI would have failed. That’s not worthless — I like quests with good stories — but it’s also not worth all the effort it takes to make a dungeon-creation tool!
So yes, Project Gorgon has a very lenient death penalty. But at the same time, I have lots sometimes want games to challenge me, especially when I’m working in a small group to accomplish something hard. I like the feeling of overcoming tall odds — and getting that feeling of ideas about how to accomplishment is much easier if the stakes are high. A high death penalty does make player-made dungeons the game feel more excitingepic. But… that’s for a different game. Project Gorgon isn’t going to be able to support user-made dungeons. Maybe Can’t I have the next MMO…best of both worlds?
But let’s leave aside the creation of entire custom dungeons. There are still some great simple ways to let users create content for other usersI think I can, yes.The trick is that my graph up there represents a death penalty as a single axis, but actually death penalties have many factors, such as:
In fact, these features will be very easy : - How much time is lost before your character is “back to add normal” again: - How much of your resources are lost to almost any MMO. They play “within the rules” of the gamedeath (items, money, and require only minimal new GUI interfaces and database tablesetc. If you’re reading this and you’re an MMO developer, feel free ): - How far you have to travel to use these ideas!resume playing
Treasure Maps: Geo-Caching for MMOsIt turns out that even a lenient death penalty can be pretty painful in particular circumstances. The trick is to fiddle all these variables just right so that you get more nuanced behavior. I can at least give it a shot!
First up is I’ve played with lots of ideas, and I’m still working on it. Not every idea pans out. I thought for sure I could build upon the easiest one to codeunusual fact that my game knows how you die: treasure maps. All it knows if you do is go were arrowed to death, or burned alive, or poisoned by a snake, or whatever. Every kind of damage has a certain spot “cause-of-death ID” attached to it. So I figured if you died by the same cause too many times in the worlda row, or too often, “bury” an item in the groundpenalty would go up. That would fix zerging. But that was dumb because… fuck zerging, and receive that’s not even a “treasure map” for that itemreal problem. You can now give that treasure map to It’s a friendPvE game, and important PvE monsters can’t be zerged like that — they can go hunt for the treasure you placedheal too fast.
How do they find it? Well first, you can write a message on the map So I had to give them clues. (It’s stretch a tweet-length message, maybe a riddle or some general info about where it’s hiddenlittle further.) Second, whenever they activate the map, What exactly should my death penalty accomplish and what should it will tell them if they are getting “hotter” or “colder” compared to the last time they used the map. Tada! A very simple way to give your friends something to do.avoid?
I can implement this in a couple hours. The way it works is that the map actually stores the info about the “treasure” it contains. So internally, the map itself has the treasure “inside” itself all the time, but only gives you the treasure if you’re in the right spot. That way it doesn’t require any special world-state variables… just a couple of extra IDs stored in the item. Easy.Death Penalty Traps
But we can do better…There are a couple of well-understood “death penalty trap” scenarios that I must avoid in order to be successful. (These are the reasons that games have been gravitating to lesser and lesser death penalties for years! They hurt business.)
Legendary Treasure: - You log in to just chat with some friends and end up getting killed while running from town to town, and lose something valuable that is hard to get back. Odds are you’ll rage-quit over this: you weren’t expecting to be punished.: - You are soloing monsters and having a good time, but then you have some bad luck and get killed a few times too many, and now your character is too weak to keep fighting these monsters. Now you have to go to some earlier place and get strong again. Chances are dangerously high that you’ll just give up instead, and may not come back to the game.I need to avoid these and similar scenarios. Hence the very lenient penalty when you’re exploring. But I still want to get a feeling of accomplishment when people do hard things.
If we’re willing to spend more than a couple hours on the task, we can make it a lot more interesting. Legendary Treasure works basically the same way: you go some place in the world and “bury” one or more items. But this time you don’t get a treasure map. Instead, you write a “legend” (a tweet-length message).The Death Penalty Benefits
These legends automatically show up in taverns and message boards around The biggest benefit of a high death penalty is when grouping. You’re working as a team, you’re greater than the world. Players can read sum of your legend parts, you’re kicking ass and see the reward item they’ll get if they go there, along with how many rewards are left in overcoming tall odds! The death penalty can help make the treasure hoardodds feel taller. When I still don’t want an EQ1-esque “lose all the treasure has been given outyour items” death penalty, because that makes people too afraid to try new things. But I want the legend disappears from the message boardsdanger of death to give your successes a little bit more shine.
Now players The other good thing that death can propose simple riddles to do is bring scariness into the entire server shardgame. In most MMOs, with there’s a definite lack of scariness, because anything that can kill you is about the same. A 50-foot dragon and an automatically8-given rewardfoot ogre represent the exact same stakes: “either we win or we die. And again, this is very easy ” There’s nowhere else to implement. Maybe two or three days of work for the basicsgo.
Lady of the LakeDeath penalties are a somewhat unorthodox way to make some creatures scarier. I want to play with that idea, too.
Here’s a different riff on the same idea. Travel Time: The Lady of the Lake is an NPC in a special location. High-level players can give her items to give out to others if a certain key item is shown. For instance, “if a player presents a red ruby, give them this hypno-gem.” (The guessing player doesn’t lose their item, so there’s no penalty to guessing wrong.)Classic Casual Death Penalty
You My main death penalty is travel time. When you die you reappear in a central area in the zone. If you were just out exploring, this is no biggie — you can also create “legends” for thesego explore somewhere else. If you were trying to complete a particular quest, as abovethough, which gives hints about what item you’ll have to hoof it back. This is needed and see how many rewards are leftpretty typical for MMOs.
And I have But in dungeons and other difficult-to-reach spots, this penalty is more painful. That’s because my dungeons aren’t instanced — they’re like EQ1/EQ2 dungeons: shared areas. Each one is a half-dozen other mechanics in large labyrinthine place that’s big enough to support several groups of people exploring at the same vein (pseudo-programmable “golems”time, “bounties” you can place on specific boss with monsters, etcrespawning over time.) By combining these simple systems together, you can create some really interesting content, like multi-step scavenger hunts(This design has many great social benefits that I’ll talk about later, or guided tours of rarely-visited dungeonsbut also, or complex ciphers for players to decodemy server tech just doesn’t do instancing well.)
Paying So if you die deep in a difficult dungeon and have to work your way back down to the Pricebottom, that can be a big time penalty. If you’re lucky, some other group will have cleared the path recently. Otherwise the rest of your group will have to return to the surface and then fight back down again.
All these systems require generosity: the person creating the content has To make this penalty stick, I have to pony up be very stingy with resurrection abilities. Otherwise I lose the rewardpenalty! (This way there’s never is what happens in most games that try to use travel time as a problem with balance. It also means penalty — the content is always temporary: even if you bury 1000 items in designers are so desperate to give out useful abilities to healers that resurrection becomes dirt cheap… they end up throwing the groundpenalty out, only 1000 players will ever be able to experience your contentalmost by mistake. But that’s not such a bad thing. It means you get to create a new better version later) So my resurrection powers have long reset timers, and resurrection items are rare.
Does requiring generosity sound You may still quit over something like a deal-breaker? I doubt this — “we were almost at the bottom and then Andy died and we had to start all over, wasting another hour!” But your tolerance for it will behigher. I remember when I was You came into a highgroup-level AC1 playercombat area, creating “quests” for newbies was one of so you knew the most fun things I did. (“Bring me Tibri’s Fire Spear and I will give you a Peerless Atlan Claw!”)stakes were going up. And if the game helped you ever want to manage these questsgive up and go do something else, I bet there would be a whole lot of high-level people who enjoyed giving away you always can. It’s not like you ever lose levels or items creatively like thisfrom dying. And think of So the guild events!penalty is still very lenient and casual-friendly.
Bottom line is that players already do this. They just don’t get any support from the game to let them take it to the next level. And there’s no good reason why not.But I have one last trick up my sleeve…
Easy to Code… and Maybe Even Better OverallDeath Curses: Making Bosses Scary
The most powerful bosses in the game are supposed to be scary and horrible. These systems will need a bit are the stuff of polish and fleshing out: profanity-reportinglegends, a rating system (for content creatorsafter all, so you can sort legends by most-popular creators), should know what you’re doing before you fight these monsters — and a way the game is happy to give feedback teach you how. There’ll always be in-game lore or explanations of how to best defeat them. Unlike most of the game, the creatorbig bosses aren’t about “keep trying until you learn how things work”; they’re about “figure it out before you go. But ” One way I make this work is all pretty easy stuff, and most of it can be added incrementally over timewith curses. They selectively bring back a harsh death penalty.
Most importantlyA curse is just a debuff… one that lasts a long time, possibly even permanently, because and doesn’t go away if you die. The main way to get rid of a curse is to kill the transitory and un-abusable game mechanics involvedthing that cursed you. As long as you win the fight, no biggie. If you lose, I won’t need administrators to examine content and see if it’s “fair”that’s a problem. Hopefully the group can finish it off for you. It’s always If not, you’re going to be fair: it’s just players giving each other items. Admin intervention will only be needed in cases of profanity and similar abuse — which I already have to handle for profane chatwork your way back and try again.
And These curses range from losing 20 from your max health for the crazy thing is that I suspect these simple tools will give us more interesting content than Yet Another Player Made Dungeon Where Every Room Has Bosses In It And The Monsters All Quote My Little Ponynext 10 game hours to being stuck as a giant bee for the rest of your life.
[Also: thanks to MMO Melting Pot for giving me the 2011 Piggie Award for Most Charming Games Company EmployeeBut don’t worry too much about being stuck as a giant bee. Hey, bees can slow-fall! Though I do think that category is rigged against big-company employees who have Of course, bees can’t talk to filter everything they say, and often NPCs or use weapons… but you’ll never have to announce commandments worry about dying from on high which they don't agree with. And sometimes, they just have to be the bad guy. When I was working on AC2, I was always the Bad Cop so that the rest falling off of the team could be the Good Cops. Hmm for Gorgon, I need to remember to hire a Bad Cop. I ain't doing that thankless job again...]tall places!
[Sandra saysHeh, but seriously, there are always at least two ways to remove a curse. You can kill the thing that cursed you, or you can find an alternative cure. If you’re stuck as a bee, there is a rare loot-item from insects that can cure you, if it’s made into a potion by a high-level alchemist. (I admit that this part is tricky to get right… these back-up solutions need to always be rare, but never be so rare that they seem dishearteningly impossible. It’s hard to make the economy work out that way, but I’ll see if I can pull it off eventually. Or maybe it’s just one of those “medicine is almost as bad as the cure” things: Not you stop being a giant bee, but that curse is replaced by a more mild curse that lasts many days. Dunno, still poking at it!].)
These scary curses are just for the big bads — the ultimate bosses of the game universe, which take a long time to build up to. But much weaker curses are fun for occasional changes of pace when soloing, too. A few trash monsters have curses, but these aren’t too scary, because you can just kill any creature of the same type to remove your curse. If a Goblin Necromancer hits you with Fragile Skull Disorder, causing you to lose 20 from your max health and power, you can fix it by killing any Goblin Necromancer anywhere in the world. And even if you don’t bother, those curses only last an hour or two — long enough to notice its effects and be annoyed, but hopefully not long enough to really piss you off.
Death Penalties Are An Art
I think that most games don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about what they want their death penalty to accomplish. I know this because I’ve worked with lots of MMO developers, and they just… don’t really think too hard about it. They rightly assume that the game needs to have a casual-friendly death penalty, so they copy an existing MMO and call it a day.
They don’t consider the down sides of those existing death penalties. I mean, how often have you been about to die, and had a super-healing potion ready to drink, but thought, “nah… my life is worth less than this super-healing potion, I’ll just die instead.” My bank vaults are often full of powerful survival tools because it never feels worth using them. If death never has a sting, you shouldn’t bother giving out save-your-bacon items, because nobody will use them.
That isn’t to say we need entirely new death-penalty systems, because I don’t think we do. But MMO designers need to think about death a lot more instead of just slapping something in and calling it a day.
That’s one of the joys of making my own MMO, because I’m more than happy to try new twists on things and see if I can improve upon the problems of what’s come before.
If you don’t even try new stuff, it won’t ever get better.
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