by Jeff Woleslagle on Dec 20, 2005
Death Without Dignity
NotAddicted.com has a tongue-in-cheek look at the death penalty in MMOGs from Ultima Online all the way to World of Warcraft.
Player immortality is exactly what happened to Adventure gaming, and it will happen to MMORPGs.
All death penalty ratings and descriptions are based on the game at release. Most have had their penalties reduced drastically since.
Adventure games began with harsh deaths, one wrong decision, one misspelled word, and your game was over. Sierra and other early developers were especially cruel to players, though after a few years death penalties lost their harshness through save-points and alternate solutions. Each game that came out made the inconvenience smaller, until Lucas Arts sealed deaths fate in 1987 with Maniac Mansion, the game that killed death. Lucas Arts had such a hit that most major adventure games followed suit and weve rarely seen death penalties in a graphic adventure game since, 19 years and counting. Compare these death penalties to MMORPGs, study the trends, and youll be able to predict the future.
Check out this morbidly entertaining read at NotAddicted.com, complete with some goofy photoshop'd screens.