Thoughts on games with permadeath?

[OCNewbie]

I don't think I could ever play a permadeath game that is online-only (like Diablo 3). I'd hate to lose dozens of hours invested into a character/build because of an issue totally unrelated to the mechanics of the game (connection issues).

 

[jihe]

I agree that it's not for me.

Losing only 2 HC characters almost certainly means you never go into a fight without knowing you can win. HC forces you to be conservative. While you have grown to think of any risk at all as being a big risk taker, your thoughts would change without playing HC. You'd be willing to attempt harder things, or things which you just aren't sure what whill happen.

I realize you do enjoy it, and you do get that thrill. I simply do not like playing in that restrictive manner.

I don't get it, why don't you just turn on invincibility/god mode and just walk around one shotting everything then? To me save/load just takes all the excitement, tension, and character attachment out of a game.

 

[jihe]

I don't think I could ever play a permadeath game that is online-only (like Diablo 3). I'd hate to lose dozens of hours invested into a character/build because of an issue totally unrelated to the mechanics of the game (connection issues).

I'd only play turn based game.

 

[TeknoBug]

Some can be annoying, H1Z1 Just Survive and 7 Days To Die is like that and you start over again if you die. Star Wars Galaxies in the very early days was like that too, you had to run back to your body to pick up your gear and it sucked because then you'd get killed by the same mob that killed you in the first place.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Most of what's wrong with mmo's could be fixed with permadeath.

 

[HumblePie]

Perma death is something I like and dislike. It really depends upon the game and implementation. One of my favorite games from the past was a MUD with perma death of a sort. You bank "lives" or blessings in the game. Depending upon character level and how much you spend at that "altar" err bank you can get basically a "free life" to be resurrected with. Still there were a ton of stipulations around that.

You die, everything is still on your corpse and you have to get at it still. Which means losing a ton of good gear. If you have a "banked" life and resurrected by a player the chances of just being brought back to life are 100%. If you have to use the "public" altar to resurrect then it is like 95% chance you'll come back with always a 5% chance of perma death and that is if you didn't die recently and how much was spent when you made that banked life and your current level. More you move up, the more you have to bank or even re-bank. If you didn't have a banked life and died you still have a pretty good chance of coming back when being resurrected by a player, if your body can be healed up well enough before being rezzed. If not your character could be permed. If you have no banked lives and have to use the public altar as a ghost to be rezzed then there is a good chance of being permed. Like 50/50 so flip of a coin. Oh and you have to bank in the area you are hunting in. Meaning if you are in sector X with no banked lives except in sector Y, then sector Y banked lives don't count for sector X. Also banked lives degrade over time so you need to refresh your "donation" or re-bank lives.

There was a bit more to the death system as it was fairly complicated as well as the healing system. Most players that took time to bank lives, and work with a healer/rezzer could reliably not have to worry about perma death most of the time. Although there is a few hairy chances it could, especially with PVP.

 

[runzwithsizorz]

Simple...I just won't play them. I enjoy many games, but if I have to worry about dying and starting over, just not worth it.

The Wife

 

[JujuFish]

I don't get it, why don't you just turn on invincibility/god mode and just walk around one shotting everything then? To me save/load just takes all the excitement, tension, and character attachment out of a game.

I would say the same thing to you. If you have such an aversion to dying, why not just turn on invincibility/god mode and just walk around one-shotting everything then?

 

[bystander36]

I don't get it, why don't you just turn on invincibility/god mode and just walk around one shotting everything then? To me save/load just takes all the excitement, tension, and character attachment out of a game.

Ever play a game that is challenging, as in so challenging it might takes days or weeks of trial and error before you can figure out how to beat it? Failure costs farming time, or experience loss, or just aggravation of failure time and time again, until eventually you figure it out. High end raiding in MMO's are like that. Farcry (the original) was quite a bit like that, but in a single player game.

Then you have games in the middle, where there is no way you could possibly beat many encounters without first learning how to beat it, as the mechanics of a fight is not obvious. People who do play permadeath rules, don't play these in hardcore mode until after they learn everything about a game.

I personally prefer the ability to experiment, and try the impossible, where permadeath characters would never allow you to advance. I like to be challenged in a way other than avoiding anything that could possibly kill you and I'm not into cheating permadeath games by exiting them if something looks questionable.

 

[coldmeat]

I play games to relax and have fun, I really couldn't care less how hard or challenging it is, that just doesn't matter to me. The last thing I want when gaming is to get stressed out or have to waste time doing something over again.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Ever play a game that is challenging, as in so challenging it might takes days or weeks of trial and error before you can figure out how to beat it? Failure costs farming time, or experience loss, or just aggravation of failure time and time again, until eventually you figure it out. High end raiding in MMO's are like that. Farcry (the original) was quite a bit like that, but in a single player game.

Then you have games in the middle, where there is no way you could possibly beat many encounters without first learning how to beat it, as the mechanics of a fight is not obvious. People who do play permadeath rules, don't play these in hardcore mode until after they learn everything about a game.

I personally prefer the ability to experiment, and try the impossible, where permadeath characters would never allow you to advance. I like to be challenged in a way other than avoiding anything that could possibly kill you and I'm not into cheating permadeath games by exiting them if something looks questionable.

Yep. In a game with permadeath, you end up playing the first N hours again many, many times. In a game without permadeath you can "bank your progress" and only replay the parts where you mess up.

For example in a turn-based tactics game, you win 5 battles on your first try. Battle 6 is tricky, so you replay just that one battle 4 times to get it right. Then you play battles 7-10 just once. Then you run into another tricky one...

And as mentioned earlier, you can decide to go do something risky and/or stupid just to see what will happen, without losing your first 10+ hours of progress.

You're also safe from game bugs and glitches, and the times when an RNG-heavy game truly is unfair.

Neither way is the "right" way to play. I play to have fun, and for me permadeath is less fun because of the loss of forward progress.

 

[rstrohkirch]

Like I and others have already mentioned. I think it works best as a difficulty level modifier. You play the game in standard mode to learn the game and mechanics. Then down the road you try it again on hardcore mode, or whatever the game wants to call it. It's not that big of a deal when you've already played through the game. I doubt too many people would like a game that has a lot of mechanics and timed involved and then only allows permanent death as difficultly choice.

What I find interesting is when people play HC in things like PoE and then have scripts ready to fast close the game so they don't die. I could maybe understand it if the game was lagging, which PoE still does in a weird way. But to do it when things get tough seems to defeat the purpose.

 

[pmv]

I hadn't heard the term at all till very recently, and until this thread I was assuming it was just a further development of the trend to games being permanently internet-connected and provided as a 'service' rather than an owned-product.

(for example, I was playing Zombie Army Trilogy and was a bit irked to find you had no control over saved games, you just had the one and if you started a new playthrough it got over-written. Even worse, if you play it co-op you can't save at all so you have to play through entire thirds of the game at a time.

Which does seem to me part of a general trend for consolisation and a increasingly loss of control of how to play a game on the part of the user/owner.)

Anyway, I had assumed that permadeath meant meant they used this internet-connected aspect of games to mean that once your character died in-game, that was it, that was your lot, you were never allowed to play the game again! Seems like its not actually _that_ permanent!

I suppose super-double-permadeath might still happen.

I dread to think what the next step after that might be, though. If they take it any further I'm not playing any more!

Edit - I guess ZAT in co-op mode has essentially what OP means by perma-death? It seems very stupid in a game that requires 4 people go co-ordinate to play, as the chances of everyone being able to commit to enough time to play the whole thing at one go seem much lower than with a single-player game.

Edit2 - though ZAT does, I think, allow restart from last checkpoint in the event of a 'total party kill'. It just doesn't allow everyone to quit voluntarily and resume at a later date. Which seems very dumb.

 

[zinfamous]

I don't play games with the intent of the game making me angry. Not anymore, anyway--not since the NES days. Now, if a game makes me angry, I play some other game.

Ain't nobody got time for permadeath.

 

[Feneant2]

Permadeath in a single player offline game is great.
Permadeath because you have a lag spike where the game freezes and you come back dead 5 seconds later, not so great

 

[Red Storm]

There was a mobile game called One Single Life (or something like that) that had permadeath. If you died, I think you had to basically uninstall and reinstall the app to be able to play it again lol.

 

[gorcorps]

I'm in the camp that doesn't like it. I'm a much more casual gamer these days, so the idea of starting over again would just make me shut off the game. Also, if you like permadeath so much then you can make ANY game more interesting by just starting over on purpose after you die. Not sure why you need a game designed with that in mind to utilize it. Never quicksave, and when you die just delete the autosave and start over.

 

[HumblePie]

I'm in the camp that doesn't like it. I'm a much more casual gamer these days, so the idea of starting over again would just make me shut off the game. Also, if you like permadeath so much then you can make ANY game more interesting by just starting over on purpose after you die. Not sure why you need a game designed with that in mind to utilize it. Never quicksave, and when you die just delete the autosave and start over.

While this is the truth, it is not the TRUTH.

Truth: The reason people do hardcore mode, or perm death games is to show off to others. If you are just doing perm death for your own gratification then we wouldn't have threads like this. It goes back to the reason people setup scripts to auto logoff or basically save their butts in a hardcore difficulty level of a game. People want the epeen to show off to others what they "accomplished" without dying.

For reference there was a time I really liked challenging myself like this. I would specifically do things like play Contra on the NES as a kid and reset the game if I died. I eventually was able to beat the whole game with a single life. There wasn't a youtube back then to share it, or anyone that would really care if I told them. I did it just because I could. You can play literally any game like that. The people that complain the lack of "hardcore" only games really don't want hardcore games. They want games they can "exploit" that are hardcore to show others their epeen when they complete it all.

 

[bystander36]

I'm in the camp that doesn't like it. I'm a much more casual gamer these days, so the idea of starting over again would just make me shut off the game. Also, if you like permadeath so much then you can make ANY game more interesting by just starting over on purpose after you die. Not sure why you need a game designed with that in mind to utilize it. Never quicksave, and when you die just delete the autosave and start over.

While very true, I don't think it's entirely about the personal achievement of not dying, or else they wouldn't use cheats to exit the game before they die. I think it's more about winning the game in "hardcore" and showing others they did it, whether they cheated or not.

 

[desura]

Makes sense with MMO games. Otherwise, it makes no sense. SP games are like unfolding novels, and so should be scripted.

Permadeath in Eve Online looks like a huge success.

 

[paperfist]

FTL has been the only one that I've played lately that had permadeath. It really sucks when it's luck that gets you killed. Reminds me of the horrow stories of those playing D2 and losing internet connection.

FTL is more punishing then any other permadeath I've dealt with in MMOs. You literally start from zero.

I can deal with it when you get some stuff back after you die, but if it's FTL style then no thanks.

 

[magomago]

as an option, its great and can be a major challange for those who are really into a true challange.

as the only way to play, you'll limit your audience severely.

True permadeath would also erase your saves..then you would never want to mis-step.

 

[pmv]

as an option, its great and can be a major challange for those who are really into a true challange.

as the only way to play, you'll limit your audience severely.

True permadeath would also erase your saves..then you would never want to mis-step.

True permadeath would, on character death, exploit a hittherto unknown O/S bug to connect your keyboard and mouse directly to the mains supply. This would of course be mentioned in the user licence agreement ('in-game death will result in termination of this licence...and of the player - clicking OK implies acceptance of these terms').

 

[bystander36]

I'm not sure how making you not be able to play the game afterwards would make the game any more permadeath than the character being killed permanently. The rules are simply that the character you are playing is dead, and cannot be revived, i.e. permanently dead. What you are talking about is like killing off all relatives and family because you died.

 

[Scooby Doo]

Permadeath is a bad idea. Hey, you made a mistake... time to start the game over again LOL.
Ziggurat has it too... terrible idea for that game. It would have been fun except are constantly starting over again and again. This is like going back to the 90s games that didn't have a save feature.