quote:What incentive would people have to avoid losing sight of their humanity?
I did point out this was the most difficult of my goals and I'm unsure how to achieve it. But I think the biggest key would simply be good writing that periodically reminds players what's happening to them and what they've lost. (I can't give an example cause I'm not that good a writer, but I think the TV show Dexter addresses the issue well, if you've seen that).
Another possibility is to have moments every so often where a player is given the opportunity to do something genuinely good, missing out on a reward, and the only thing they have to show for it is "Karma points" or something that have no obvious impact in the game. Later on when the demons start finding ways to escape Hell, Karma might end up getting used for something, or it might always just be a little token reward that only means something because we want it to.
quote:In an MMO such as this, however, both types of motivations don't work, or at least would not be plausible. Your character is all ready dead. And gaining levels or acquiring money doesn't really make much sense if you are in hell. Of course, the easy way out would simply be to provide those positive motivations and cover up the fact that players are in hell.
But I suggest a more revolutionary approach. (hehe...)
Here's what I'm suggesting: The main motivation for characters to play the game would be, simply put, control over their characters. As a newbie to the depths of hell, you are given a limited amount of will and restricted amount of freedoms. While stronger players have more actions and ability to exert their will on other players. As your character exists in hell, the gameplay becomes something similiar to what I would imagine happens in the real hell, demons war for control over each other.
The positive motivation is simply being able to exert other players to fall to your will. In other words, you can actually "control" other players characters, and at the same time, they are actively fighting you for control over their own character.
Another advantage to this is that the game fundamentally changes into two parts: beginners will focus on the positive rewards of acquiring control. And veterans will focus on the negative outcome of losing their power and control to newwer upstarts.[/QB]
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're suggesting. Genuinely losing control over your character is bad on the same level that permadeath is bad. The whole point of a game is having control, otherwise you're watching a movie. However, if your point was more along the lines of gaining "privileges" that represent rising through the ranks of Hell, I think that's doable. And it's pretty similar to how a lot of PvP works, and might be re-structurable to a PvE situation. Bear in mind though that this also sounds sorta like an "XP penalty" for death, which is something players actively hate.
That said, I don't see why the game doesn't work just fine under the standard MMO procedure. Bear in mind that I'm considering the structure of Hell to be closer to D&D than to Dante's Inferno. Hell isn't a carefully constructed series of punishments, it's a big wild unexplored place that souls are just dumped and left to figure things out on there own. The "Hell" part is primarily a "taste of your own medicine" thing because the evil souls only have other evil souls to interact with.
Claiming that death is "meaningless" in hell strikes me as silly when it's equally meaningless in World of WarCraft. The whole point was that rather than roll our eyes and ignore it, in Sinfall the stories and quests would be designed around the fact that 'death' (or 'destruction' more accurately) is not permanent, and is merely part of the overall torture of the place.
So there's still monsters to kill. There's still experience to gain, new abilities to find. There's still temporary death to avoid. There's still loot, initially in the form of capturing the souls of rogue demons, and later in acquiring items that have been made out of souls. There's still PvP, there's still PvE. All of it takes on a slightly different context, but I don't see why the emotional response of a player would be any less.
I did, by the way, post this in my previous thread about MMOs and using corpse runs, experience loss or item damage as penalties for death (all of which are essentially time sinks).
quote:I think a better death "penalty" would be some kind of minigame - the faster you complete it, the faster you can either choose to return to your corpse or go back to a sanctuary. Res Sickness and Durability loss (or similar penalties) also strike me as unnecessary for the Death Experience to be meaningful, and require you to spend extra time grinding to make up the lost money. In the first 10 levels of WoW before they took effect, I still felt like I died.
An idea I had recently was for the Death Penalty to be cosmetic. Say you're doing a game where you start as a bland ghostlike creature. As you level up you gradually gain the form of a more badass demon or angel (sorta Fable-like). When you die, you revert back to the ghostlike creature and have to re-earn your badassness. (It'd probably best be a sliding scale so as you go up in level, you can quickly regain a look that was close to your original within an hour or so, but getting back the full polished look could take a few days).
posted
Yes, I'd say you did misunderstand. Consider this: It's only like watching a movie when the player has nothing to do. Losing control of your character would become a very strong negative outcome then, because if the player did not fight it, it would be like watching a movie and nobody wants that!.
The difference, however, is that in this gameplay mechanic, while you can lose control of your character, you never quite lose control of things to do or, more aptly, ways to get that control back. It's a constant struggle in which the player has to exercise his wits to outmaneuver stronger players and usurp their power, which, I think, is far from simply watching a movie.
Now, if, once you lost control, that was it, no chance at redemption: yes, that would be similiar to permadeath. But if there's always actions the player can take towards gaining that control back... I would reckon that to be more similiar to a type of respawn system, albeit a very different one.
It's a completely different game mechanic. But to make sure that it's not like watching a movie, all you really have to do is present the player with a goal and ways to acheive it. It doesn't matter if the player loses partial control of their character, as the goal is to gain control, and as long as the gameplay allows ways for players to achieve that, the game will be fun and interesting.
posted
Hopper, that sounds like an interesting idea. Could you give an example of what you're envisioning limited control as being like? How would you both lose control and still be able to act in ways that would cause you to regain control?
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posted
The sense I'm getting is it would become a minigame of sorts to regain control, although "Minigame" might not be the best word to describe it. Depending on how you set up everything there might be a whole other alternate game just as complex that you're playing while your body is being used by someone else.
I don't think it's inherently better or worse for a game set in hell but it would certainly be interesting.
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