In the game details next to this news bit I noticed that it says: SP + MP. I guess it should be SP only.

When you die in PS:T, you wake up in the mortuary (where you first start the game).

I think that could work well if done right. There just needs to be more of a consequence than burning a heal spell/potion when the battle is over.

Not always. Which is what makes it interesting.

I really think characer death with dire consequences is necesarry, for example in NWN2 I could never feel excited about the combats at all, it just feels like a "game" since I know the characters could rest 1 minute after being dead and tip top again. It is an important reason for realism that characters could die, and I want some realisim in my RPG games, ressurection just fits right in with the spells and other stuffs.

If the character can die and someone reloads at least it means they have to replay that fight, if the fight is very hard, the player might consider to take the consequence of a dead character since they don't think they could play through the fight and win again. ( Happend to me in wiz 8 for example)

Of course as I had suggested in another thread I want to remove the entire save / load thing, or at least change the way it works. But not many people appear to be in favor of this idea.

It makes me sad to hear about the gamers of today, they want the games so simpliefies and easy and with so little effort, that it removes the fun to play. Gaming without a challange for me is to play tennis without an opponent ( Booring ), if someone would say I only play for the choice and consequences, in that case combat could just be removed completely.

I agree -- but the important thing is that character death is dealt with thoughtfully in the game. Simply making death permanent and leaving it at that is a worse solution than Bioware nerf-death, since all it'll do is lead to the save-and-reload rhumba, which is a sure sign of lazy game design.

And this is fun, because…?

I am. My ideal game would only allow save on quit, with no going back to a previous save, ever.

Of course, this would mean that dying would have to be dealt with very intelligently in the game, since by itself it would make most games as good as unplayable -- without some way of dealing with character death, dying would mean starting the entire game over, and without some really good motivator (i.e., completely randomly generated dungeons à la Nethack) this would be much worse than the reload rhumba.

It makes *me* sad to encounter such a snooty attitude. I am a gamer of today, you know. It's also rather sad if, as it appears, you feel that the risk of dying is the only, or even the major, challenge a game can provide.

Not a bad idea, IMO, if well enough developed.

Their argument for no multiplayer IMO is selective because if they really wanted to stay focused on what an incredible experience this game would be they wouldn't port it to consoles.

The fact is, handling MP requires an even more systematic approach and an accounting (second guessing) of what those players will do. As Corwin mentioned on no-permanent death for party members its a way to get lazy, although if this were truly a return to the roots of Baldur's Gate they would take the time to do just that. Its one of the many things that series did quite well over say, IWD, where your party had no background stories.

Since the toolset looks to be so much like the NWN toolset I will go out on a limb and say groups like NWNX team could probably come up with something, provided the that data can be trapped and DLL's can be developed to capture them. However, it would be incredibly hacked and the base scripts probably won't accommodate MP very well.

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..because its challenging. After running a server with over 10000 unique accounts second guessing the complaints of my players over this sort of thing became a daily occurrence.

They were used to just dragging bodies to the nearest healer at a time when the economy was ruined and a 4th level player could get enough coin in on jaunt to the dungeon. Meanwhile the player could sit and chat in limbo until their buddy fixed them up. They could get it themselves with their other character if they wanted too. Effectively it destroyed any punishment and too many players were taking on things solo with fear of loss.

When I changed it to forcing them to lie on their back in the field of battle (waiting for a buddy) or until they got so annoyed they respawned I got hordes of complaints like that one for months.

But the same people complained month after month. They didn't leave. Meanwhile my average number of players went up. I also made combat AI even harder so it was much easier to die and nerfed a lot of uber spells in this time, took out a lot of free cash and increased the shop prices for uber goods.

Again, they not only didn't leave (but complained constantly) they almost all stopped "solo'ing" and made sure to bring buddies with them on a jaunt.

It seems counterintuitive I know but its a real paradox about game design. It can be summed up in one phrase: people want a challenge.

"Challenge" is pretty hard to define but that aside, I disagree standard permanent death is challenging. I die, I reload. Over 2 or 10 or 50 iterations, you either figure out the pattern or perhaps you get lucky with the die rolls. Other than wasting time replaying the same scenario, what is challenging?

[Note: thanks for the poll - I was thinking the same thing but hadn't found the time to put together the options]

GothicGothicness talks about "dire consequences". What dire consequences? Reloading? OK…that's real hard.

No reloading, save-on-quit-only is a different kettle of fish but I don't trust game developers…do you? I don't trust them to get the balance right and I don't have the time to replay the same thing over and over because someone stuffed up the difficulty. I mean, seriously, I'm sitting on the couch playing Neversummer Days: The Hardcore Hardening, 30 hours in, and I'm trying to ignore Kayla while she talks to me about the news flash that just came up on TV (sorry, honey), I lose my concentration and die. I'm just not going to start over - not going to happen.

We need a new, creative approach. Some of you guys need to accept, though, that many of us play for the experience rather than the challenge per se - and that doesn't make us new age console-ised pussies, either.

What game was/is this?

I find it challenging because I have to rethink my strategy over and over for the really hard fights before I even go into them. That's fun to me, but it certainly can get frustrating. As long as the possibility of death is done fairly, I think it is challenging. It becomes frustrating to me when, for instance, there is a creature that at random just perma-kills a party member (The BG2 mod, the darkest day had several of these).


I agree. I play more for the story experience than the combat (I'll admit, I generally am not that good at the combat strategy), but despite that, I found the non-death of NWN2 annoying (still loved the game though).

I agree totally with Dhruin here; not only do I play for the experience rather than the combat challenge (I'm not a twitch gamer), but living in a real world environment, I can readily identify with being interrupted in the middle of a battle and ending up DEAD. I wouldn't begin again either. I would NEVER buy such a game (did once and gave up rather quickly, so I learned my lesson). I quite like what happens in FO3; your last save is automatically loaded if/when you're killed. I actually enjoy the opportunity to keep trying different strategies until I find one that works; it engages my brain, instead of just my fingers!! :)

Well, I think in a challanging fight it should be that it is hard to complete with all characters alive, if you manage to you are rewarded and could move on with the game without a dire consequence such as paying gold , or losing XP. But if one character died you would prefer to deal with the consequences instead of replaying that hard fight. Of course you could also reload and try yet another strategy in the fight to win it easier.

If you play a game and never want to reload, it means each fight should be so easy that you win it. For me it is too boring since I want a big challange, so it is all about satisfying different type of players.

I think we can all agree on this. What makes me sad is so few games try to satisfy us hardcore players who wants a challange.

I do not mind if there are very easy games for the players who likes these, I understand it very well.

In a multi-character, real-time game (even with pause), it's just too likely that when a character goes down, it's not 100% the player's fault. There's a lot going on at once, and the AI can make some poor decisions. Or in the absense of even rudimentary AI, there are still moments where the player thinks he's told a character to do X, and for whatever reason, the character does something else.

It's really a different vibe than say Rogue/Nethack, where you have all the time in the world to consider each move, and where the player feels more responsibility for the end result. And even so, despite its cult status, and despite the carrying forward of other elements to games with wider audiences, one feature of roguelikes which developers have not rushed to copy is the "die once and you're done" system. Despite its clear basis in reality, most people don't like it.

Anywho, I was trying to say that in a real-time, multi-character games, like this one, players feel (and relative to a roguelike, I'd say are) less responsible for characters' deaths, and as a result players (or MOST players) are less enthusiastic about being permanently penalized by such deaths.

Agani, I think the 'character' of the game is important. In Dwarf Fortress, when I'm not paying attention to some lower level of my fortress and my idiot legendary mason walls himself in and dies of starvation however long later (withuot ever uttering a peep to protest his ridiculous fate), I don't feel particularly responsible, but I also can accept the permanent death because DF is a game with so many little characters that the loss of one is not such a big deal. In a game like DA or NWN2, it's just a much greater burden to permanently lose a character.

I agree with GG here. It makes combat more exciting and feels like its a big challenge. Whereas for NWN2 I was like, meh.

thanks to this thread Dhruiny and I were on the same page and we started this poll

http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5870

A couple of people asked me some questions directly on my comments and I'll try to answer them over there.