Nothing much else to say but to reiterate what others here have stated.
Cater to your target audience but please do oversee the consequences every choice you make has.
Introducing a permanent death mechanic to a game would in-fact not bode well with younger audiences due to their low-patience and low-persistence temperaments.
Perhaps providing an intriguing option to regain their lost progress could remedy this issue, just a suggestion.
I absolutely agree with what iysandir said. Id like to add on my reminding you that they come back if theyve invested something in the game. Thats why RLâs permadeath system works becauwe you tell yourselfâŚ
âWell, Ive already spent 350 robux. No sense in giving up this early.â
It allows trading to be a viable option to reduce inflation and prevents hacked currency from reducing the gameâs longevity.
You could have the base game, and more of a hardcore mode for those who want to take it to the next level. Be sure to warn them like 50 times, as people really donât pay attention to these things.
Difficult games attracts the group of challengers, the players who usually play hard games. It brings more competition between the players, which follows up on players who plays the game on a daily basis to attempt beating the other.
Might be great to pursue, my friend has played Realm of the Mad God in the earlier days and told me that the game was great for its size of the world and what you can explore(and the difficult quirk of it). Fanbase and the community will probably attempt creating some sort of guides for the game.
For the UX, people will experience rage upon death, but theyâll still attempt to hoard the awesome gear they could get their hands on.
Unfortunately, majority of the challengers usually belong in a higher age group than the median of Roblox, I think.
Depends on the execution, f.e @Soybeen âs booga has it where if you die than you lose all of your items however youâre given the opportunity to regain your gear if you manage to grab it within x amount of time.
Identified flaws in this execution:
One important factor in exploring the inclusion of permadeath mechanics in your game is your goal with this project. Is your goal to explore relatively uncommon game types? To create a rogue-like (hardcore) RPG with the intention of getting your name out there and building a fanbase? Or is it more focused on monetization rather than reputation?
In the latter case, itâs important to note a few of the things that other users have posted here. Younger audience members tend to have shorter attention-spans or patience tolerances than others. If risk of death is frequent and high, you will want to mitigate the high death rate by building the system to accommodate frequent deaths. By this I mean, making it relatively easy to get back into the game and into the grind. If you intend to have tiers of enemies of different strengths and difficulties, this would mean not restricting access to these enemies to specific players (like high level players). Thereâs a few games that deny weaker players even the opportunity of challenging late-game NPCs, such as Orthoxia.
Honestly, how you approach this varies heavily depending on how you structure the game, but if risk of death is high and frequent, then implementing features to help jump-start players who have recently died would be beneficial to help them get back on their feet and back into the grind.
In terms of monetization, it might be beneficial to sell aesthetic, permanent content as Operatik mentioned. Content that persists after hardcore death reset. If you pursue selling in-game advantages such as gear, boosters, or other perishable content, you run into the issue Intended_Pun mentioned and risk losing players who quit after losing hours of effort.
In response to the thread title question, I think permadeath is a fascinating mechanic, however, like many things, is only relevant in certain circumstances. Enabling permadeath features will undoubtedly narrow your target audience, as itâs a less-common and more punishing game type. Keeping monetization in mind when deciding whether or not to pursue these kinds of mechanics is important, as planning is a key phase of development and effective monetization relies upon effective planning.
Operatik and DataBrain bring up interesting compromises with the proposal of a âHardcore difficultyâ toggle, as that enables you to maintain a broad audience, but cater to those who desire greater challenge. You have quite a few options here, and I hope our input can give you the perspective you are seeking.
Yeah. Booga Booga does have permadeath but you can retrieve gear from your past life or have it salvaged by other users. Definitely something Iâve considered in terms of a somewhat lenient approach for permadeath.
That being said:
Apocalypse Rising also has permadeath. The player is punished for this kind of behaviour by having their saves wiped. AR itself is, by nature, hardcore. If I donât have a lenient approach to it, I find this to be an immersive benefit but a potential drawback for meta UX.
Prediction is not required, you can accurately get this by setting up situations which leaving the game results in a save wipe. For example, there is a game inspired by an anime âAttack on Titanâ run by SnakeWorl. Players are punished for logging while being near threats. They must be in a safe place to leave the game, however:
Fairly punishing for not seeing everything through while staying alive, but these arenât false positives. Theyâre decent scenarios which warrant penalisation for death or incomplete rounds.
If we have drops. Will definitely take this into account because it is a legitimate concern. Thanks for the note.
If you introduce a permadeath mechanic to your game, you must have things that save persistently outside of the play-session, such as cosmetics, achievement progress, acquired gold/xp, etc. This, and the mechanics in your game that lead to playerâs death must all be preventable by the player.
Permadeath doesnât necessarily have to occur on a player.
For instance in my game, Which takes place in the age of pirates. The best of the 1800s. You can build a ship. Albeit it takes quite some time to get a ship built. Itâs yours and you built it. And you can customize it how you like. Itâs your home, your home away from home. Your kingdom, your humble abode over the pearly seas if you will.
But every shipâs days is numbered my friend. Sure you can repair her. But eventually sheâll be a lost cause even to you. And when that day come, sheâll be joining the Black Pearl in her watery slumbers in Davy Jones locker.
Ofcourse, you donât have to build the ship, you can buy it already built if you can afford it. Also you can buy insurance which will reduce the cost of her replacement. But Iâm afraid your oleâ gal is gone.
And so is everything you stored on her. Good news though, you can go diving and recover whatâs rightfully yours. Or you can abandon it. Then one manâs X will become another manâs treasure.
So as you can see Permadeath isnât necessarily limited to characters. And its most appropriately used when it makes sense, or its up to you depending on what your game calls for.
I had actually become very interested in this subject as well; here was my initial thought process: to be implemented into a realistic game, such as a competitive shooter or rigorous RPG, where when the user dies, the game doesnât respawn the character and neither forces the player to completely restart, but for the player to have to close the game and press the green âplayâ button again, with of course their gear/saves. I was thinking about how this would be scripted, but have had no ideas on how. This is an interesting subject to work on, showing the internal fear of dying within the game, due to rejoining the game being time consuming.
Although a similar effect could just be just to create a set amount of time that needs to be surpassed to consume the players time and prevent more deaths, which I see in a couple games so far, for example, CBRO uses this technique by not letting the player respawn until the match is over.
An issue that I saw when theorizing about this subject was that having to X out of the game and rejoin ruins the entire atmosphere of the game itself, and possibly could ward off new players. But, I believe that nonetheless, this is a work in progress and a unique idea.
I wouldnât go this far, regardless of how I handle permadeath if I decide to incorporate it into my game. If a player wants to continue playing, you should interrupt their play session as little as possible. Forcing people to close a whole application to start again is bad UX design not only for games but for literally any other application that can reasonably exist.
This will chase your player base away so quickly. This is poor UX design and a waste of your own time.
The way Counter Strike (or CBRO) handles their game play loop makes this appropriate, though you donât see that it attracts very many casuals and even then, the market is really only up for those who are actually interested in those matches. That grounds us back to the several points that have been raised over the course of time of this threadâs lifetime. As well, this is not an implement of permadeath. The only thing you lose from a death is the guns youâve had, which others can pick up and use.
I personally quite like permadeath mechanics. Many donât, but permadeath encourages forethought and thatâs not seen enough in Roblox games. I donât savescum (normally). However, the biggest turnoff for me would be if death was not preventable with skill, and the cause was not easily identifiable.
Path of Exile is an example of a game I would NEVER tolerate permadeath in. Path of Exileâs gameplay revolves around one main interaction: oneshot, or be oneshot. This is horrible for hardcore or permadeath mechanics. While itâs great for intense gameplay, it just feels bad when either something is not threatening or it oneshots you, nothing in between. You have to memorize every tell for every attack (and even then, the tell might get covered up by GGGâs overzealous use of visual effects) in order to actually stand a decent shot at surviving it; and when you only live once, and said attack is a one hit kill, itâs a bit unfair (especcially if said tell is not big enough).
Permadeath in FTL, however, is welcome. A FTL run can be about an hour or so if you are quick. However, thereâs the fact that if you rush through everything to finish a run too fast, you may be too weak to face the end boss, the Flagship, making almost all your efforts for nothing (unless, of course, you unlock a ship). Thereâs no leveling, no cost to death really; you just have to try again.
What Iâm trying to say is that permadeath is situational in use. Some games, especcially where death is frequent and hard to avoid, should not include permadeath. Others, where death can be a stepping stone for a second run or isnât as penalizing/frequent can incorporate it quite well. It depends on what youâre looking at.
For a nonlinear game, permadeath would be a good addition if done right. (It could also be a big cash cow, if you asked for robux to resurrect players) However, I would be careful; you donât want to make death too easy to fall into.
Edit: If you want maximum profit, donât include permadeath, however. Most kids canât take the fact that they died and have to start all over. I wouldnât be surprised if an uneducated parent messaged you more than once asking for his stuff to be restored since âitâs roblox, your gameâs broken since he canât respawn like in all the othersâ or something like that. If you include permadeath, be ready for a lot of complaints from small children that canât comprehend the fact that death is final in your game.
That last issue is easily solved by defining the permadeath feature at the beginning of the game, be it in a tutorial or in an intro.
Not necessarily; parents likely wonât be around to know that so the kid could lie and depending on the parent set the parent on a one man crusade against you.
That doesnât really matter to me though. I am well prepared to handle situations that arise out of the nature of the game. I am concerned with whether or not the mechanic is worth the pursuit as it relates to the game, not regarding pointless outrages outside of it.
Please remain on-topic.
If you implement this I would keep an external log of character RIPs just in case. And I was on topic, just mentioning a concern i saw with permadeath mechanics
The only reason I would ever have to keep a log of characters would be for monetary concerns should bought items not be permanent or if a previous character needs to be used in the future (i.e. aesthetics, references, penalisations, unique features, so on). Otherwise, this sounds fairly pointless.
I will consider a log for necessity purposes though, otherwise this sounds like an investment in wasting time.
Logs would also be useful in other cases. Youâd know if your kill tracker was messed up, could potentially restore characters that died to a bug or exploit, and so on. The benefits far outweigh the effort, considering all the log would have to be at a bare minimum would be a dump of some character data (maybe all of it?) and the kill data. Also, if all of the sudden youâre getting five times the number of kills a day, and your game hasnât exploded, itâs a telltale sign of issues even if players canât/wonât/donât tell you.
Logs like that are generally just a great idea if you can store them. Doubly so in the case of permadeath games; cuz players dying to bugs really turns them away.
I already have enough of a backup plan to prevent those instances - exploits are a legitimate concern however, only if there is PVP interaction or some way that players can influence the survivability or health of others. In this case, there is nothing beneficial for either party. I donât find logs to be beneficial.
If youâd like to further discuss this, feel free to message me. Iâd like to focus in on permadeath as a game mechanic though, not zoom in on submechanics that stem from it. Itâs a fair discussion but I feel itâd be better to bring it in a different environment.
Probable, yes.
Iâd say permadeath has a few things that should be avoided:
Random oneshots
Lethal bugs
Lack of communication on death (players should know what happened)
Massive losses. (If someone gets to high level and dies, there should be a benefit of some form, or returning to that point should be quick. Otherwise, people may leave when they die.)
Lack of tells. If something IS gonna oneshot you, or put a massive dent in your character, it should be obvious where itâs coming from and when.
After death mechanics. Enemies should not be able to post mortem kill you. Another major gripe I have with PoE.
But generally, if the game would be more intense with a âyou only live onceâ attitude and not paranoia inducing (again, oneshots; players shouldnât be encouraged to grind all the challenge away just because your idea of challenge is a massive oneshot attack with a hard to avoid tell)
Some games donât benefit from permadeath. Sandbox games, particularly ones with environmental damage and no challenge once you master actually avoiding said environmental damage (Minecraft comes to mind) donât benefit at all. PvP games donât benefit either. In general, permadeath only really belongs in certain story games, games with fast progression, and the like (such as FTL and some RPGs, especcially ones that donât have bossfights designed to powder you into dust) You could pull off permadeath in other games, but itâd be hard.