The death penalty mechanic for an MMORPG like Age of Conan Hyborian Adventures can be a heavily debated topic for anyone familiar with the genre. The past incarnations of this mechanic have varied from a harsh penalty to virtually non-existent, but though some consider this mechanic tedious and boring, it serves a purpose and inspires players to learn from their mistakes and strive to avoid the sting of death by thinking their actions through and playing smart.
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style="font-style: italic;">A good death penalty or a lack of one can have an impact.
What is a good death penalty? In my opinion a good death penalty will punish the player for failing. It will make them improve on their game and learn their classes. It will make them want to avoid the sting of death at all times. A lack of a good death penalty can have the opposite effect. An effect I had the unfortunate pleasure of experiencing in World of Warcraft, but we'll get into that later. A good balance for a death penalty will be the one that can sting the player bad enough to inspire all of what I stated, but at the same time not be so tedious that players walk away in frustration and quit. A tough balance to say the least, but it can be done. Let's take a look at how some of the past death penalties have affected their respective games.
In the past some of the harsher penalties of death can be seen in the older days of Everquest. The penalty for death there punished players for failure by making them lose experience, and perhaps even a level if they were not careful. To make the penalty more harsh, players would have to retrieve their corpse from where they died. This made players cautious about how they played, but the mechanic itself often left the player vulnerable and in some cases unable to retrieve their corpse because all of their gear and items would be on it. Imagine trying to get your corpse from a deep dark dungeon in nothing but your skivvies. This punishment was perhaps a bit to harsh, but in my opinion was along the right track. With a few adjustments it might be right along the line of perfect. The problem with the Everquest penalty was primarily the corpse run. Many of us can look back and laugh on those long runs in to Karnor's Castle, or the Crushbone Throne Room and laugh, but many cringe at the thought of going through that again. If players were allowed to keep their main equipped gear after a death, the penalty may have been perfect. Still, a good death penalty will make you scream sometimes. They add an intensity to combat often lost in more recent MMORPGs.
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style="font-style: italic;">A good death penalty will sometimes make you scream.
KHAAAAN!!!
If Everquest was one of the extremes then World of Warcraft was on the complete opposite end of the spectrum with one of the most laughable death penalties I have encountered. When you die, you become an invisible spirit that no enemy can see or harm.You then run back to your corpse from the grave yard and resurrect yourself when you get close enough. The only real penalty there was the fact you got hit with a repair charge. Which from a players perspective only really made the gold farmers smile with glee. I never understood how valuable a good death penalty was until I actually played this game. I met up with a couple of players in a pick up group. We encountered a couple of enemies and this is where I became amazed. My two team members died. After they went down so did I. I was a lowly caster. They immediately ran back to their corpse and popped in, jumped on the creature, died, and repeated the same process until it was dead. No real death penalty allowed these two to flail themselves wrecklessly at the mob until it stopped flapping around. While I am sure not all people of Azeroth are that wreckless (I did group with some good ones), I did find in several cases during my time there that I encountered this sort of tactic all to often. I attributed this to the lack of a good death penalty.
Passing these two great games we come full circle back to our beloved Age of Conan Hyborian Adventures (AoC). How will death play out in AoC? I think Funcom is heading down the right path to make sure that death will certainly sting, and that is the main thing. The people at Funcom know that some penalties are disliked by some, but the need to make a player feel the sting is not lost on them. Athelan made a good post about this on the official forums here. When he stated...
Well on the same token a lot of games with severe death mechanics are not popular. Experience debt, experience loss, resurrection effects all of these tend to be unliked. Same thing with item durability loss or decay. I would venture to say that death is one of the touchiest subjects to design and in general people don't want death penalties in PvE, but designers don't want players throwing their lives away with no fear. - Athelan
Funcom appears to have some decent plans in place for the death penalty. With what we know it should provide that motivation for players to strive to avoid it, and improve on their game. The best bit of information on the death penalty may have come from the "Ask Kalanthes" segment on the official AoC site. When a question was asked about the death penalty, Kalanthes responded with a pretty enlightening answer...
This is something were still messing with in beta at the moment, so these words should not be held as Gospel truth, but as a statement of where we are now. At the moment, there are no corpse runs, but once you return to the land of the living at a resurrection point, there is a debuff (stat hits) for dying. This debuff can be taken away by running back to where you died, finding your tombstone, and clicking on it. This works the same in PvP, so it would only be a few minutes before youre back in the fray. However, the death penalty can be quite significant. If one guy has a huge death penalty and the other does not, the guy with the death penalty will probably lose the fight (all things being equal, of course). - Kalanthes
This may be one of the most debated mechanics in any MMORPG, but one thing is for certain. If you hate the death penalty and feel its to harsh, then it is probably working as intended. If past games have taught us anything it is that the death penalty can have a variation of incarnations. Some to extreme, and some way to light handed, but there are many that can strike the middle ground and find the perfect balance. That balance is to make the player hate and fear death while at the same time inspire them to improve. Maybe one day in the not to distant future we can all look back and laugh about some of our funny AoC deaths as we did with Everquest. Always remember one thing my friends. In the MMORPG universe, death is only the beginning.
- That's my thoughts. Tell us yours and vote in this week's poll on our forums.
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