What do you want on your tombstone?*

by Shiver

Remember the good old days? Those were the days that, when
you died, you felt pain. It was traumatic and frightening in ways that
no one but another gamer could understand. Death was soul-crushing. That
last death just as you were ready to log out could have reduced Genghis
Khan to tears. We all would swear next time we wouldn't go for just one
more mob to "top off" our hunt. Sleep became as rare as that
one drop that everyone else was finding in the first five minutes and
you hadn't gotten in over twenty-eight straight hours of camping.

I used to have to walk for miles through merciless, monster-infested wastelands
to get my body. I always got lost. "Do you see that tree there? Look,
which side is the moss growing on?" No moss for you! We didn't have
maps. We didn't even know what the heck a map was. I swam through pools
of lava to get my bodies and every single time I was scared I would die
again.

Ok, to be honest, I didn't really care that much about my body. Bodies
were always a lot like Doritos. The monsters could crunch all they wanted…we
would always have another fresh body waiting for us. It was the shiny
things on my bodies I wanted: my shoes, my cloak, my pride, my level,
my sword. At the end of a hard day, your alt's back-up set of armor was
gone. Perma-death would have been a blessing, but we didn't have it that
easy.

The only thing worse than having your loot sitting on one of the 16 million
corpses you had strewn across the land was knowing that your body had
been looted; talk about the pain and agony of defeat! When that ogre rifled
through your corpse you could do nothing about it. Revenge? If you were
capable of revenge, you wouldn't be dead now. You screwed up; you went
down a path you shouldn't have. Baby, you're not in Kansas anymore; you're
in the zone from hell.

In those days, if it was out there, it was going to kill you.

In Ultima Online, the arrows shot by player-killers would endlessly circle
the trees like heat-seeking missiles zeroing in on your back.

For Asheron's Call, I have two words: Ash Gromnie. When you were
feeling good about your new metal armor, the Ash Gromnies were there to
take you down a peg or two and show you why lighting and metal don't mix
well. (We should all pretend that death during the rabbit-mating season
never happened.)

Everquest was a series of painful deaths from the very beginning. Fippy
Darkpaw was waiting, just itching to kill you. Then, just when you were
good enough to take your revenge, you knew it was time to head to Blackburrow.
If somehow you managed to beat the train, excuse me, I mean TRAIN,
out of Blackburrow, then you ran right into the jaws of that rabid grizzly.
Yah, that's going to leave a mark; hurts, don't it?

Then over the years, deaths in MMORPGs started to change. New games came
out and patches were added to old ones. There was a shift to make the
games easier. When you died, you no longer dropped any loot. After dying
a handful of times in a row, it stopped affecting your play. At the end
of a hard day, you could log off, smug in knowing that when you woke up
in the morning, your avatar would be as good as new.

At some point, it went from Death Rides a Pale Horse, to Don't
Fear the Reaper
. Death traded his pale horse in for a My Pretty Pony™
; that nice, sky-blue one. Yeah, you know which pony I am talking about.

Death became a way to travel faster. Death became useful and almost enjoyable.
What was the highest area you could leap from? When that club came and
smacked you in the face, how far would your body get thrown from the impact?
Dying became a form of recreation.

Now, death is making a comeback. Vanguard is here and it sounds like they
plan to put the sting back into Death's scythe. Instead of debt from death
being eliminated when you log out, they want to encourage people to play
the game; no sleeping off yesterday's mistakes in Vanguard. You're going
to have to go back to where you died to get the items off your corpse
again. Back-up armor will not mean that pretty set you wear in town when
you're playing Vanguard.

This isn't to say the developers are trying to reduce us to tears with
a death though. We will be able to find our corpses, even if we can't
necessarily get to it alive. Even when we have several corpses out there,
we can choose which one we want to follow the silvery cord to. This isn't
going to make getting our bodies easier, just finding them. Since I can't
tell my right from my left, this should be a good thing. As
Aradune said
, "Accept the cord... embrace the cord... love the
cord... live the cord..."

A lot of gamers out there look forward to seeing what Vanguard does to
put the fear back into dying. We are excited about death again. Thinking
back to those times when it sent a cold bolt of fear through us made us
realize we were in over our heads.

What do I want on my tombstone?

You must be joking. I don't want to die while playing Vanguard…too
expensive…and that's how it should be.

* Editor's Note: For the purists, this quotation is not taken
from EverQuest (which is "What do you want your tombstone to say?")
It is a play on words from a TV advertisement.



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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Karen is H.D.i.C. (Head Druid in Charge) at EQHammer. She likes chocolate chip pancakes, warm hugs, gaming so late that it's early, and rooting things and covering them with bees. Don't read her Ten Ton Hammer column every Tuesday. Or the EQHammer one every Thursday, either.

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