Within the July 2022 Newsletter there is a piece titled "The Near Death Experience" (https://www.pantheonmmo.com/newsletter/_2022/july/dev-feature/). which states new ways for players to interact with, and partially-avoid the penalties of death. Alone, some of these features will not hurt the game if properly balanced, while others, if applied to the game incorrectly, may alienate a portion of the Pantheon's existing community.
What was discussed:
** Addition of "Near Death" state. A player is downed upon reaching 0hp but remains alive. Downed players will bleed out if unattended, and have significantly reduced actions. They may crawl slowly in their prone state. These players near death will drop to the bottom of the enemies' threat list (but enemies may finish off players that are repeatedly revived from a downed state).
** To aid a player in a near death state, another player may either sufficiently 'heal' them OR may 'revive' them outside of combat. Any class may attempt to revive another, not only healers, and the more players attempting to revive a downed player outside of combat the faster they will return from their near death state. Revival may be interrupted.
** Upon Death, players will lose a portion of experience with the possibility of leveling down.
** Equipped armor, gems, etc. will respawn with you (as discussed from previous streams), and may take a durability loss. Unequipped equipment, items, loot, and money will remain on the corpse upon true death.
** Players who experience true death will become "Remnances - or fully intact souls yet unreleased from their physical bodies", who can be revived for immediate experience gain, though Remnances will dissipate over time, meaning a rez must take place promptly [likely implemented as a timer before the player is forced to release to their bind point].
** An experience bonus ("soul memory") is provided to players rewarding them for recovering their corpse, assisting in recovery toward their lost exp. Players may still be resurrected for instantanious experience gain even after recovering their corpse.
** "...too many deaths in quick succession will ultimately exceed its limits and forfeit the experience lost altogether"
** Players may now "seek out a representatives of The Eternum... who for a "cost" will recover inventories and "even the vestigial sparks of fragmented souls" of faded corpses…for a price". The Eternum also has the ability to summon the [active] corpses, but it would cost your lost experience, and some item(s) may be lost in translocation.
Now for my opinion...
Firstly, this section was WAY overwritten and is complex for readers to comprehend, requiring multiple re-reads of this already controversial topic. It was not enjoyable reading through a novel that goes as far as refering to corpses as "yet-unfaded decaying vestigal forms". This level of over-writing is barely passable for lore, let alone major updates to death mechanics.
Secondly, and MOST IMPORTANTLY VR specifically states, "while it isn’t our goal to make Death an overly-steep obstacle in which players lose hours of effort in a single moment, it is important that we ensure Death has enough of a sting to cause players to think twice about the consequences of their choices", signalling that they are willing to water down the difficulty of the game to cater to a larger playerbase. Regardless of intent, that is how it reads. Death SHOULD be an "overly-steep" obsticle. It should be THE steep obsticle that separates the challenge of a menacing world like Terminus' from all of the other MMOs that have been released for the past 15 years. Pantheon should be doubling down on what makes it a unique MMO, not yielding to the pressures of people who have never experienced an intentionally-challenging MMORPG.
Lastly, I'll break down how I feel about the three major items described:
What can potentially be balanced: The "Near-Death" state is something that has been in D&D for ages, and many players are already familiar with this mechanic from games like Guild Wars 2. While potentially resulting in fewer player deaths, it does balance the deaths of a party, meaning you are a lot less likely to end up waiting for 20-40min for a single player to walk back because you don't have the ability to rez/summon. It reduces downtime, and means it will be much more likely that you end up with a full-party wipe. In my mind-this directly encourages group-play, as being dropped to the lowest priority target in a six-player group means your likelyhood of surviving is better than if you were soloing/duoing. This seems like it could be balanced through inclusion of steep death penalties, and is the kind of strong encouragement toward group-play that many people felt like this game still needed. I am hesitant toward this update.
While players who successfully retrieve their corpse will receive an experience bonus toward their lost progress, we do not know how much experience was lost to begin with, how significant the exp recovery bonus would be, or even if the player would receive a bonus toward all lost progress or just some of it. This can still be balanced through use of steep death penalties. I am neutral to this update without additional information.
What cannot be balanced: Cheating death by working with The Eternum [NPCs] to summon some items/experience without the need for recovering a corpse cannot be interpreted as anything other than a watering-down and potential avoidence of the death penalty AND the finality that should be associated with experience & item loss. Additionally, this is done without the interaction and assistance from other players. This is in direct conflict with Pantheon's plan for a reputation-based social game, as players who are known for being terrible to others AND players who purchase in-game money from RMT gold sellers will now have a method of getting help retrieving their experience/items (assuming the fee will be currency, and not something like faction). Using The Eternum also discourages player interaction, decreasing the need for requesting player help with corpse dragging, porting/rezzing, etc. This update scares me.
What wasn't clear: It is also stated that "[The Eternum] who are known to scour the lands for faded Remnances, offering to return recovered inventories and even the vestigial sparks of fragmented souls…for a price." Does this mean that players can recover items/experience from corpses that have naturally faded over time? I feel VERY strongly that No amount of experience or money should allow wealthy players to recover items from lost corpses. Death and corpse retrieval would lose all sense of finality when the player has the ability to recover items, money, and potentially experience from faded corpses, maybe even from the safety of a city.
While sitting behind the exciting news of a new large investment, depending on how this is implemented, these death mechanic changes have the potential of being the worst Pantheon news I've heard in years, and leaves me wondering what happened to that natural, wild Terminus where I could fear death around every corner? Players should FEAR death. And while death in Pantheon should not come often, when it does, it should set you back, it should cost you more than you can afford, because if not, then there was never any risk to begin with.
Let me know if I've misinterpreted anything.
(EDIT: Thank you, Desryn and Pantheon+ for covering this post and pointing out my omission: 'revival outside of combat'; additionally after hearing your coverage it feels worthwhile referring to the Experience Bonus by its actual name, "soul memory" -- these two items have been added to my post above. Furthermore P+ pointed out that there will be a difference between using The Eternum before and after a corpse fades. As I am sure this still requires much testing, I'll leave it to VR to clarify these further in future updates rather than providing my own interpretation.
(EDIT2: I want to point out that I agree with Therek's comment that the random element of (potentially) losing valuable item(s) from your inventory when using The Eternum would likely leave a bad taste in the mouth of players once implemented. Sometimes death wont feel bad if you only lose items you didn't care about to begin with (maybe even trivialized?), resulting in an even harsher feeling when players get bad RNG and lose their most valuable items/loot. Death may lose its 'consistancy' sometimes feeling arbitrarily worse?)
A lot of detail here.
I had the same general impression - death may not sting enough - but we arent even at alpha yet so a LOT will be refined and adjusted. I am not worried ...yet.
I do think that there should be an alternative to corpse runs. If the alternative gives a harsh enough penalty I don't consider that watering anything down. I just think of it as having two alternative penalties - either of which supports the core objective that death should sting.
"Players can be rescued from the Near-Death state by being healed..."
No, I have not checked the LoP yet, but will non-healers be able to rescue a near-death player with first aid or the like? What about a modified drag mechanic?
Thanks Donler, for making a thread on this topic so I did not have to.
Lots to the whole shebang, alpha should be interesting.
Note that there is a new pledge now that offers pre-alpha access. This hints that pre-alpha is not nearly as close to complete as some of us hoped. I do not see them selling a $750 pledge with pre-alpha as a highlight if there was just one pre-alpha session left. So alpha should be interesting but ...far from imminent. ((inserts obligatory comment that they should take as much time as needed to get it right - but no *more* than absolutely needed)
You touched on this, but I think the major missing link here is the "faded Remnance" part. So if you want to summon your corpse from the Eternum, and get XP to your Soul Memory bank (increased gain), and the items from your inventory, not only do you have to pay a price, but you have to wait for your Remnance to fade. If this is like, 30 minutes, sure - no big deal and it does conflict with the tenets. However, if you consider the (probably more likely) scenario where we're talking days for a Remnant to decay, ala classic games with corpse retrieval....that means this is only a last-resort option, targeting specifically the kinds of folks that aren't playing several hours a day.
On the other side, and I think the idea that you're running with, is the pre-fading Remnance summon, which has much more of a penalty. Not only does it "cost more," but you do NOT get XP to your Soul Memory, so you get none of your XP back, in any way. Also, the chance of item loss. This is not something meant to be a common "go-to" solution. In all cases, interacting with a player is far superior.
Couple that with the fact that you return to your place of binding when you die - not the "nearest outpost," or something like that. And, the confirmation of level loss.
I do agree with 2 things, though - and that's that it was a bit overwritten (though I do enjoy that there may be lore tie-in's and that death/resurrection is explained), which makes it hard to understand, and that a lot depends on the amount of XP lost on death. The latter of which is something they'll obviously tune during testing, but they're not stupid, and they're all fans of games with strong death penalties. So, among the other things, the point that I wholeheartedly refute is that this is a "watering down" and "appealing to the masses" decision, without actually playing it out.
The system described, without having tested it, I think does a great job of leveling the playing field: For those that can't play a ton, a full death doesn't negate the time that they can play, while the people that'll be playing every day still have good incentive (perhaps even a large incentive) to go through the traditional process of corpse retrieval.
Thunderleg said:
"Players can be rescued from the Near-Death state by being healed..."
No, I have not checked the LoP yet, but will non-healers be able to rescue a near-death player with first aid or the like? What about a modified drag mechanic?
Thanks Donler, for making a thread on this topic so I did not have to.
Lots to the whole shebang, alpha should be interesting.
Yes, it specifically says this in the Newsletter article. They are required to be out of combat, however, and any damage taken cancels the revive. It also sounds like it's meant to be quite a long process, without help from others.
Donler said:While sitting behind the exciting news of a new large investment, depending on how this is implemented, these death mechanic changes have the potential of being the worst Pantheon news I've heard in years, and leaves me wondering what happened to that natural, wild Terminus where I could fear death around every corner? Players should FEAR death. And while death in Pantheon should not come often, when it does, it should set you back, it should cost you more than you can afford, because if not, then there was never any risk to begin with.
Let me know if I've misinterpreted anything.
At no point in this project has there been an illusion death would be very painful. From 2015:
Will there be a ‘death penalty’?
We want the player to respect and even fear the environment, but also to be enticed by it. A big part of achieving this balance is making sure there is an incentive to avoid death. While the details of this system are not yet fleshed out (and will likely be tweaked and changed a bit during beta), you can expect death to be something you’d rather avoid. That said, if a death penalty is too severe, it can keep players away from some of the more challenging and rewarding content, and we are keeping this in mind as well. So death will sting, but it will also not involve losing an unreasonable amount of experience, or levels, or a permanent loss of items.
On top of that one should consider the challenge level of the content in the game and how frequent death is likely to be when it comes to penalties. I'd expect death to very much be around every corner and players to die far more often than older games like EQ etc.
The penalties are all still painful. Time lost, recovery, etc. Being able to spend (potentially large amounts of) currency to recover the items on a corpse and lose out on exp etc doesn't diminish things. It's all time lost and I'd bet players are still highly incentivized to retreive their corpses before considering engaging the NPCs.
While I agree with OP in that I had to read it through a couple times, overall I'm very happy with this new info.
First...A new investor....great news! Yay! I'm still gonna buy a lottery ticket once in a while. I'd like to invest too.
Overall investment to date is less than I would have thought. I think Joppa and crew deserve a big hand for what they have accomplished since 2020.
The new near death info, sounds fun and interesting. I'm sure I'll still find plenty of ways to die, in game. From what I've seen, death looks to be frequent although less likely now.
I personally love the way they are dealing with the balance of keeping death meaningful but allowing some flexibility. They had to do something to appease the masses and that may be the solution.
Now is it all I wanted? No. I was fine with the EQ style of (you died? Well tough trombones sucka, go get your raggedy butt back or loose it all)
So in the wider and more complex and diverse gamer population we need to try some things to see if it works. Bring on Alpha and let's test test test. Trial and error and conclusions and more tweaks and more testing. The feedback will become clear and they can work the issue . No one is leaving or being alienated. It's what they plan on trying and I'm happy they let us know. I'm sure the decision was hastily pitched in 2 minutes and they just threw up their hands and said f*+$ it who cares. (They had long long meetings on the subject I'm sure)
I may play a tank now, just be forewarned I'm a huge coward.
I think this system reinforces group play over solo play, not the other way around. It makes the chance of death almost guaranteed in solo play, while essentially removing it completely in group play unless the entire group dies. The ability to get your items back from the eternum is no replacement for retrieving your actual corpse. It is a way to lose xp but not permanently lose all of your non-equipped stuff if you can't get back to it in time. This is a good move, since perma-loss of your entire inventory is not just a few hour setback, it is utterly devastating and would be the single reason half of the people who ever play end up quitting.
I see some real fun potential in this (like trying to decide to drag and stabilize mid-figjt or DPS through. I can't really speak to how strict of a policy this is without actually testing it, so I will avoid falling skies prognostications.
It wasn't very clearly (or interestingly) explained, and some clarification could definitely help sell it better. But my initial thoughts are positive as I think it holds a lot of potential .
1. ** An experience bonus is provided to players rewarding them for recovering their corpse, assisting in recovery toward their lost exp. Players may still be resurrected for instantanious experience gain even after recovering their corpse.
2. ** "...too many deaths in quick succession will ultimately exceed its limits and forfeit the experience lost altogether"
- 2 balances 1,while 1 makes corpse runs a desired thing and encourages taking chances or going into risky areas- biting off more than you can chew. Exploring!
3. ** Equipped armor, gems, etc. will respawn with you (as discussed from previous streams), and may take a durability loss. Unequipped equipment, items, and money will remain on the corpse upon true death.
- not "naked" which is comforting but enough to make you want to go back and get your stuff! Although the purist in me likes the heightened fear of nakedness. No gear at level 50 makes you feel like a newbie again running through appropriate level zones with just your skills/spells to aid and is humbling in a good way.
4. ** Players may now "seek out a representatives of The Eternum... who for a "cost" will recover inventories and "even the vestigial sparks of fragmented souls" of faded corpses…for a price". The Eternum also has the ability to summon [active] corpses, but it would cost your lost experience, and some item(s) may be lost in translocation.
- a sneaky way to thwart corpse mules, while at the same time providing a convenience for responsible players. I would like to see this secretly tweaked so that the RNG on "some" items being lost in translocation being tied to a formula that looks at how many corpses are out there and how long they have been lingering and how close to level. Like stupidly high "lost" if someone is doing corpse- mules.
5. ** Upon Death, players will lose a portion of experience with the possibility of leveling down.
- ofc :)
6. ** "Near Death" state. A player is downed upon reaching 0hp but remains alive. Downed players will bleed out if unattended, and have significantly reduced actions. They may crawl slowly in their prone state. These players near death will drop to the bottom of the enemies' threat list (but enemies may finish off players that are repeatedly revived from a downed state).
- Yay! This is neat, this can allow some desperation saves- like a caster binding wounds, or maybe a non-healer has a silly 2hp regen every 6 seconds for 6 minutes insta clicky they got as a bonus item for a long and drawn out quest, they can target the near death person with this and they could pop up with 1hp- maybe?. Oh the drama. Hang on!
As someone who really does not want old school aspects like a feared death penalty to be rendered meaningless and mediocre, like other modern MMORPGs have done, I still think I'm in a worried, but wait-and-see mode after this announcement.
I like that the intention is for more interest, complexity and agency involved in death in Pantheon - some good potential - but, yes, I see that the concepts have the *potential* to ruin the feeling of excitement an umcompromised death penalty would have.
If adequate limitations are included and aspects tweaked during testing it can still be meaningful and exciting.
Some worries though.
"Among the tenets that govern Pantheon’s design philosophy, we strive to reward risk-taking and group play. With features such as Dispositions, Traits, and enemy Combat Awareness keeping players on their toes, it’s important for us to provide players with the means to test their limits, without unduly punishing them for individual failures even if their group prevails"
Yes, while Dispositions, Traits and Combat Awareness add some dynamism to encounters, the randomness could be quite punishing even to those that prepared well. Or did they? Knowing there could be dynamic effects, they should perhaps have reckoned on a higher safety margin. Should have brought more consumables to mitigate the unexpected. Should have... whatever. Should the death penalthy really be 'diminished' to avoid dynamic encounters feeling 'too hard'?
I think it's a dangerous concept, to make the game more 'dynamic' so it's more 'interesting' but then feel the need to dumb down the consequences so it doesn't feel too punishing. I'm not saying this is definitely bad, I'm saying it's definitely a concern. In my mind, a death penalty isn't 'punishing exploration' is it 'adding challenge and excitement in line with risk taking'. Repeating something you know is safe. Exploring is risky, by its nature. Let's not make adventuring feel 'safe'.
Near Death
Hmm. Yes, D&D did this. And D&D did a lot of dumbing down for recent rules in a similar way the MMORPG genre has done over the years, in order to 'widen its appeal' *shudder* Ugh... VR bucking modern trends is part of the reason I am here, backing Pantheon, so yeah, this is worrying too.
The basic idea to me sounds like "unless it's a complete group wipe, it'll mostly be like it didn't happen", which doesn't sound good to me, it sounds like a 'dumbing down'. It sounds like it may lead to things like players 'gamifying' death and intentionally sacricing/suiciding themselves as a 'tactic', knowing that, as long as they tip the fight in the group's favour, it doesn't matter if they 'die', because they don't actually die.
On the other hand... It makes sense. To one moment be 100% fighting fit (at 1 health point) then be utterly dead (at 0 health points) especially when you might have had dozens or hundreds of hp, is ridiculous.
On the third hand (huh?) if it *always* happens, even if you were just incinerated or fell 100 meters would also be ridiculous.
I would hope 'near-death' is not common or at least not an expectation such that falling in battle is greatly less feared.
Again, I like to see the addition of complexity and interest in the mechanics of death (or near-death), but not if it makes death meaningless or gamified.
"While it isn’t our goal to make Death an overly-steep obstacle in which players lose hours of effort in a single moment"
Hmm. Ok, maybe not hours per death, but if you can reliably 'reset' after a death in a matter of a few minutes, like it never happened, then it loses all meaning. Death needs to be more than "Oopsy, try again".
Part of the seriousness of death is where you die. When you choose to go to a relatively high level zone or into a deep dungeon those are such exciting places because, if you die, it will be hard to get back to where you were. In every good computer game ever, the further you progress into 'a level/zone' the more exciting and tense things got because, if you died, you go back to the start and you have further to get there again.
To mitigate or remove that is to severly diminish the excitement and worth of the experience.
Also, players aren't ever really losing hours of effort 'in a single moment'. Almost always, when a players dies, it was preceded by quite a while fighting to somewhere difficult, getting a feel for the difficulty, getting to know their group, planning their tactics, choosing their LAS, weapons, gear maybe and then pushing things a bit futher, a bit futher and then a bit further than they perhaps should. If they *didn't* spend quite some time preparing, planning and practicing before dying - if they just threw themselves into the unknown alone with no idea at all of their chances - then they deserve all the harsh death they get, but if not, they still need that death to give the experience meaning, else they will just throw themselves against it again and again, quick recover, again, again, and after a few more quick goes, get lucky.
Do we want to reward players because they were prepared and skilled, or just because death was so trivial they just tried repeatedly until they got lucky?
No, we don't want players to feel they are harshly punished for trying something new, but no, we really don't want players to feel it doesn't matter what they throw themselves at, because they can try again in just a few seconds. And again. And again. And watch Netflix while doing it.
Soul Memory
A good variant on XP debt. Fine with the idea. Can be tweaked to be as punishing as is needed. Clerics returning XP is not great, though, if it is significant. Should be a distant second to self-retrieval, else folks just sit spamming chat begging for revives and watching Netflix rather than do a corpse run.
The Eternum
I would be all for it if equipped gear was on the line and it was an absolute last resort, but this is sounding like a lazy option for rich, high-level characters. Death often becomes a 'nothing' for high level characters, when it should become more and more meaningful and scarey.
It will be a real shame if this turns out to just be 'an option' for those who prefer to not do a corpse run even if it costs coin and XP. Gamified again.
I pretty well agree with disposalist. Too early to panic and some good *potential* for the system but some very bad potential as well. From day one I have advocated alternatives to corpse runs but only on the very firm condition that the alternative came with a severe death penalty. Severe enough that if there was no such thing as a corpse run I would be content that the game made death painful.
The smart move is to make the "rested xp bonus" from dying and recovering the corpse initially an obvious net gain and then have it diminish upon subsequent deaths until it becomes a net loss if the deaths are too frequent. Make the system reward taking risks and failing, but punish them making the SAME mistake.
That way when people try and cry about it, they get told to shut up because they literally gained more than they lost. If they try and argue back or complain about actual losses they get hit with a wall of "it was a bonus until you KEPT dying. The game did not punish you for making a mistake, in fact it rewarded you, it punished you for not learning from your mistake."
Sure, somebody will 'game' the system and die on purpose for the bonus xp, but if they never die by accident then more power to them for having player skill.
If you punish death too heavily you have to balance it by making death more rare otherwise you will discourage exploration, discovery, and risk taking. I think they have struck a nice balance here, and look forward to seeing how it is implemented before I judge it too much. It sounds like they are leaving encounters as fairly deadly, and giving us some slack on the death side.
I'm dyslexic even, I read it once just fine. As for the mechanics themselves.. I didn't see an issue. We don't know what the "price" of the Eternum (could be 5%, 10%, 25% of your money or greater, who knows) will be and as for losing your gear? That rarely happened even in EQ.. you could summon your corpse. I don't think it's a big deal... yet anyway.
I love the fact they are bringing back death penalties. But what will really pop the minds of newer players.. is losing your level :)
Are we also bringing back "hell" levels? that would be awesome!!
I agree with disposalist's analysis pretty much and most of @Donler, as well as all of the concerns being brought up.
This has the potential for these dials and knobs to be tuned too far to the modern MMO side, but could be okay.
The Eternum has the potential to be a non-penalty fairly easily. Every game I've ever played with durability penalties becomes trivial to repair once you are no longer a poor newbie, even as low as like lvl 10-20 you stop caring about the mechanic (I'm also talking about gold paid to Eternum for summon, not just repairs). Exp loss % is easy to set at trivial levels. I'm doing my best to give them the benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't bother to mention de-leveling if the exp penalty was 1%, so hopefully it has teeth. Will it be 10 kills worth of gold/exp or 100? I know the answer is testing, but the feedback they receive in testing will be important. If that feedback is too far on the "this isn't fun because I lost something and I shouldn't suffer in a GAME" then we may be facing a no-penalty death.
Near death is basically like summonsed res stones in a couple of games, yea there is no such thing as a group wipe having to clear back down to your camp as long as someone survives. Whereas without this mechanic, you may be dragging corpses up to the zone-in/cleric or invising back down etc. I suppose if in either system of near-death-everyone revivies or traditional oldschool death, as long as you can get your res'r to camp or corpses to res'r, then it's the same thing. Except for the effort and "waste of time per modern gamers" of having to drag the corpses or clear back down, which was the real penalty (if you had a decent exp res). I wonder if the last agro player goes down if the mobs will Coup de Grace everyone.
Before you say "Oh VR knows all this and are going to have a stiff death penalty", I would have said the same thing prior to finding out every player now has revive.
To the comments in regards to if death is too severe people will not take risks, that certainly was not true in EQ in the way you're saying. Sure it made you think twice about what you were attempting and perhaps say "No we can't handle that yet, let's go to X or Y instead", but you would go once you leveled up. It made you not willy nilly zerg in to stuff. It made you consider strategies, want someone that knows the dungeon to pull, run a train to the zone instead of dying. But it did Not make people boycott dangerous content, because most content on-level with good drops was dangerous, it was the only option to take lol.