I decided to do some long-term research on this post. I’ve been playing a popular permadeath game recently. So, after this month of research, here is what I, your average high schooler, concluded:
Permadeath is a great mechanic. It adds a sense of urgency to the game and gets your players involved; Your players can’t just AFK as they’ll never know when someone will come up and kill them. It is super immersive.
Also, this mechanic is super fun with friends. This is a mechanic that makes teamwork shine. You don’t want to die, and don’t want your friends to die, so you formulate plans for combat. It is super interactive. With this, communities are born where they all play with each other and help one another out. This is probably the best part of the permadeath mechanic: The teamwork.
But there are negatives. First off, there will always be those who are not good at the game. They will most likely storm communities with rage. This in inevitable as this mechanic isn’t for everyone. Nothing hurts more than losing 16 hours of progress in 30 seconds of combat (I speak from experience). But this shouldn’t turn you away from permadeath; just like any other mechanic, it has its cons as well.
But there is one big problem with permadeath that will make or break your game: Balancing. If there is a player who owns a severely unbalanced class goes on a killing spree, it is likely that people will riot. Imagine playing for 7 hours only to be killed by someone spamming an unbalanced item from a mile away (again, from experience). This is where the true rioting and salt comes from. If you have permadeath in your game, you must spend a lot of your time, not only making things, but on making sure it is balanced. Every single update has to be balance checked, or there will be big consequences.
That seems hard enough, but it is manageable. The game I played does an excellent job of it although there are a few outliers. But I lied saying that balancing is the sole thing that would make or break your game. There is one last thing that will completely kill your game if you don’t manage them: Exploiters. The game I played managed this problem by being paid access and having an excellent exploit detection system. In your game, if you don’t have a good system for detecting exploiters, you’re toast. Exploiters are already bad enough in games like Jailbreak; but at least the worst they can do is get you killed in that game. In a permadeath game, they can erase hours of work in a few seconds. Exploiters are the bane of permadeath games; nothing makes the community more mad than them. They are unbalanced, unfair, and, to them, easily preventable; they just think you’re lazy when you don’t ban them because they don’t realize how difficult it is to make a good anti-exploit system. You must spend a lot of time and money by testing your system. And more than that, you must keep it up to date: New exploits are being released daily.
TL;DR: Permadeath is super fun, especially with friends. But if you decide to implement it in your game, you better be prepared to spend a lot of time balancing everything. Sustaining a community built on a permadeath game is hard. But the payoffs will be immense: Immersing your players in the experience, getting players addicted, and giving players a fun time with friends.
Oh, and you better have a good exploit detection system. If you don’t, your community will get Thanos snapped.
These are just a few of the basic things. There are other challenges too like glitches and false deaths/bans which, in turn, bring their own trouble (moderation). If you want me to make another post diving into these problems, just let me know.
But permadeath can be implemented favourably. I know that you can do it, and I wish you the best on your project.
