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Why are corpse runs bad?November 17th, 2008 |
In a recent discussion over at f13, folks are cataloging “design errors” from past MMOs. And one of the ones cited was the notion of a corpse run. For those not familiar with this concept, this is where your character dies, leaves all of their stuff at the corpse, and you have to run back to where the corpse is to pick up your gear.
I argued that corpse runs shouldn’t belong on this list. It’s like calling the telegraph a design gaffe because phones replaced it. Corpse runs were (mostly) all there was at the time, and under the philosophy of “don’t change what works” would have been everyone’s default choice back then.
More than that, though — corpse runs were part of a constellation of features that perhaps only worked well in text games. Frankly, a corpse run in Everquest was WAY more painful than a corpse run in a mud. Why was that? Because features do not exist in isolation. For example, some of the things that made corpse runs less onerous in muds:
- travel time in a 3d world vs travel time in text is vastly different. Getting back out to the place where you did in a non-aggro mob death was trivial. It was easy to get corpse recovery groups to the same place.
- global chat with a smaller, tighter group. Muds were smaller — peak concurrency of 60 was a typical thing. So asking for help on global chat was plausible and relatively easy. For those who have trouble picturing this in the world of massive games — imagine if you had a private WoW server for just your guild.
- donation rooms, wherein people would put fresh loads of gear for newbies or the newly dead. You didn’t need to run out to your corpse naked. In fact, there was generally a greater sharing of gear, because soulbinding was highly uncommon. Everyone had extra gear they could give away to someone in need.
- less emphasis on “perfect” gear, and more cases of equipment loss. Stuff like deathtraps which ate all your gear were more common, and thus gear was not as irreplaceable. A corpse run could in fact be optional to some degree.
Picture an Ultima Online with instant teleport back to your corpse (which gets rid of the tedious travel bit) and instant summon of friends to your corpse (which gets rid of the “I can’t handle what killed me” bit). UO already had a more disposable item mentality — there were no soulbound items, gear was traded more freely, and everyone had multiple sets of gear.
All of a sudden, corpse runs don’t necessarily seem like a supertedious thing. The above combined would potentially mean that you could very well show up to recover your corpse and find the monster was easier than when you died to it, making the corpse run a case of satisfying revenge.
This goes to show design choices don’t happen in isolation. I think a lot of design choices from MUDs were altered dramatically for the worse given the text-vs-3d-space issue in particular. In the mud scenario, corpse runs were a powerful social force, creating a mutual need and indebtedness that brought people together. Could they still work in a modern MMO? Probably, with the right design choices to compensate for the different environment the massive game provides. And with the wrong ones, well, they suck. 
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@Amaranthar
I don’t mean this as picking on you, but usually telling others what they will or won’t find exciting or rewarding isn’t a good idea.
There was a video linked to on this site a while ago about, of all things, spaghetti sauce, and about how Prego came to claim the market from then-leader Ragu by recognizing that people had different tastes: there wasn’t one perfect spaghetti sauce that was going to win the market by being the best, instead some people liked certain aspects of a sauce that others didn’t. Some wanted large chunks (and others didn’t care), some wanted a spicier sauce, and some wanted garlic. By making sauces that followed these broad trends in desire rather than assuming there was one perfect sauce, they not only claimed the market but led to the entire movement toward taste varieties in commercial foods.
It’s highly germaine to this sort of discussion. Some people do like harsh penalties for death as a “flavor”, some prefer a more difficult or taxing character advancement, some prefer crafting to adventuring, etc. But assuming that what you like is universal I think is risky.
Anyway, does anyone still have the link to that video?
Very interesting stuff. I agree that one of EQ’s more distinguishing features was the corpse run, and it’s definitely less EQ-ish without it. I resubbed to it just a month ago, and the first time I died I typed /loc, ran back to my corpse…and noticed I had all my gear on. At first I was pleased, but then after the second death, I realized something was missing.
There are a lot of good memories of corpse runs, just as there have been really annoying corpse runs that people have hated. It’s not enough to make them optional, it seems. DAOC removed gear loss, but kept XP loss, and a corpse run meant you could reclaim some of that lost XP. For me, that meant doing corpse runs because that’s “the way it’s done,” that’s what’s expected when you die. But it’s really not that big of a deal. They could have removed that XP-reclaiming mechanic, and it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference to me.
And then there’s UO and AC, where corpse runs were rather optional because you didn’t lose too much. Again, that’s just from my perspective, because I didn’t mind losing a couple things in AC, and I always had backup gear in UO. My comrades were often confused when I didn’t insist on a corpse run after every death. Maybe deep down, they expected corpse runs because they secretly enjoyed them.
Well…yeahah.
I mean, a game about tiptoeing through the most tulips just isn’t going to be too exciting, nor rewarding.
Eolirin, one day you’re going to deliver an argument that doesn’t include an assumption that the rest of the system will magically work great and I’ll have a heart attack.
You seem to have forgotten that the Story of a Tree was about a supposed player’s death and the community’s bonding through their mourning of it. Do try again; there is hardly a dearth to choose from.
Here, try this:
http://goofball.nytimes-se.com/2009/07/04/recruiting-tool-cancelled/
That’s fine. And as long as you don’t want something with a WoW like budget doing what UO did, that’s also fine.
Go play some smaller games with tighter more intimate communities. They still exist.
But never expect another UO. You’re never going to see it, because people have something that they didn’t before… the choice to leave at the very start. So if you want games to have meaning, you need to look for a different sort of meaning, or you need to accept a really tiny (comparatively speaking anyway) player base. You won’t find meaning in fighting against forces that make the game much less fun to play for the people that they’re being directed at, because there’s no force holding people in those worlds anymore. There are options now. So you need something else to bring people together.
What is that something else? Is it really impossible to find meaning in communal activity that isn’t a blow back against the system, be it other players, or corpse runs, or time sinks, or whatever, running the risk of ruining your day (or gameplay session really)? Do we really need to rely on negative situations to generate meaning? Do we?
I don’t think we do. I think we can build something that rewards a bunch of people getting together and working for the common good of the community in way that we’re not, and I think we can do it without relying on making people have a worse time if they don’t. I think we can turn away from bonds forged out of frustration and turn them into bonds forged out of building something, together, that endures and surpasses the individual. I think we can do with less corpse runs and less open world pvp and more Stories about Trees. Except rather than memorials to the passing of a beloved player, we’re talking monuments to the excellence of the current players. I think we can build with positive reinforcement, not negative reinforcement.
And I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s possible, and that it’s better in the long run.
Yeah, in UO people argued, bickered, and fought all the time. It was great.
Seriously, there was emotion, need, and desire to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women (AoC should have been made more like UO, and not a level grind. They ruined the ideal’s of Robert E. Howard from the get-go). There was also great celebration, wine and dance, feasts, and parties. And it meant something, most of it not about beating enemies.
I miss that. I’m human, not a bot. The sanitized games like WoW are so lacking in the social spheres.
@James, perhaps the value for surviving the encounter with the 30 foot rabid badger can be from defeating the badger, rather than from being able to avoid losing to the badger?
It’s not as tense, sure. But is tension the only way we can make the event meaningful? If the badger is really hard to beat, and it takes 40 tries, finally beating him is pretty satisfying, yeah? You get that “I finally solved the puzzle!” type rush. And you don’t need to do it via fear.
Granted, this does take a very different approach to content. And it does mean that you have to manage frustration at getting gated on content much more carefully, since that equation being out of balance becomes more of an issue, where fear of death is a much more generic thing. But I think that, if the fights are fair, and the player has the sense that the reason they lost was because they personally made a mistake, but they see a way to correct it, then frustration is less of an issue.
@Amaranthar, harsh is a matter of degree of course.
Corpse runs in UO suck. They suck less so because a lot of the sting was removed by making them more optional. If the reason why they suck less is because you can ignore them more often to a degree, what does that say?
If we want to build communities, perhaps we can find ways that give incentives based on positive experiences, rather than force them based on necessity due to having to deal with negative experiences? Sure, you probably won’t develop bonds quite as strongly in terms of the in game community, but you’ll have a bigger community to form bonds with.
As to your last point, you end up having to pick your friends based on skill, because anyone that thinks anyone can play a game like WoW at the high end hasn’t played a game like WoW at the high end… As a reference, I’d much rather have an NPC in my group in Guild Wars than I would most of the other players I’ve run into with pick up groups. Most of the time the AI does a better job, and the AI is pretty dumb and used to do things like stand in lava until they gave us the ability to tell them not to. But at least it doesn’t do stupid things like over pull, not pay enough attention to the party health bars, or ignore the monk that’s keeping them all alive while he gets surrounded by mobs -_-. I don’t necessarily think that skill is the greatest thing to end up having to use as a metric, since it increases the potential of severe interpersonal issues, but there is a metric, even if it’s not an ideal one.
You can make it a little closer to ideal by turning “skill” into responsibility, and there are a lot of ways to design systems that benefit from relationships where players are given opportunities to, but are not forced to, give aid to each other at a mild detriment to themselves (say they level slower), but at a net benefit to the group (helping out increases the content you’ll be able to go through later, and the ease at which you can do so, because now you’ve got extra benefits when you’re working with your buddies), and in those situations, the giving of aid becomes a metric for whether you can rely on the person.
Sure, you lose the crucible of being able to bond with other people in a very difficult situation, but arguably, that crucible’s already been lost. Because EQ is no longer the only Diku on the market, and because UO is no longer the only MMOG on the market, the sort of insanely frustrating experiences that those games used to bring people together no longer function. Instead of sticking with it, people are more apt to leave; there are more friendly places to be. So can no longer resort to unfriendliness as the basis for which you forge bonds of community among your playerbase. Those days are dead and gone. Instead you need to turn to something that works in the opposite direction, something built out of generating incentive for altruism and using that as the basis of your community rather than generating community through shared suffering and difficulty. It’s much harder, the bonds will likely be weaker, but that’s the best you’re going to get. The market won’t be able to bear a large scale niche product at the level of polish and scope that WoW has demanded all such games bring to the table from now on.
And if you’re fine with small scale, there are a lot of active muds left, and I’m sure there’ll be some nice things that come out of a lot of these world building start ups like Metaplace.
I do think that something needs to be there to make death a somewhat meaningful event, and therefore provide value to surviving the encounter with that 30 foot rabid badger.
Let’s take UO for example. I never had a problem with corpse runs, until the introduction of the Age of Shadows expansion and the increased emphasis on items. Insurance replaced corpse runs with monetary loss as the deterrant, and that just sucks. I think in it’s current form, if insurance were removed but items left highly valuable, corpse runs in UO would become way too punishing. This is actually something I’ve been sort of working on fixing on my gray shard, and it’s actually meeting with some resistance. Thread here. Basically the effect of my solution is making corpse runs backwards. The run is from where you die to the nearest healer, with little to no gear loss.
Items in UO – in it’s current state – are far from disposable, a design decision I never liked, because it obliterated my favorite playstyle, the thief. Stealing abundant Vanq weapons was always acceptable, but they’d lose players by the handfuls if thieves could openly steal those items that took millions of gold and several weeks to obtain. I still think there’s a place for item loss in UO, but it’s a very touchy subject.
For item-loss corpse runs to work, I think the items need to be widely available in the first place. The run needs to be optional, something that you can recover from fairly easily if you choose not to do it. It’s optional in WoW, where you choose between running back to your corpse and trying to fight things off, or resurrecting on the spot and taking a 10 minute break and a few gold worth of equipment damage – so, effort vs time/money. Perhaps having a viable alternative is the key to making corpse runs bearable?
@Eolirin over a couple of posts…
Ok, I’ll give you that, in a “Paint-by-Numbers” sort of way. And that’s all these MMOs have become.
I have to again give you the point here. It’s comparative to sports vs. little-girl-sidewalk-games (tiddlywinks and hopscotch). I mean common, “harsh death penalties”? Harsh would be starting over. Corpse runs are hardly harsh. “Time sink”? The idea of “down time” and it being bad is always something to think about, and I think Raph’s point that UO answered to that hits the mark. Most of the time in UO you had a very short corpse run, and if you failed to get your gear you had plenty more where that came from.
The important part of his point was the social gains to game play. I made new social contacts in UO by both getting help and giving. It was a challenge at times, and added a level of game play that the Paint-By-Numbers games can’t compete with.
There’s nothing stopping you from stocking up extras. With the exception of one of a kind quests designed specifically to give you an item you need to proceed in Paint-By-Number designs.
But haven’t you met people on the opposite end of that spectrum too? For myself, it’s hard to find people that I feel I “know” in today’s games. I don’t trust anyone because there’s no means to tell if they’re trustworthy, I don’t like anyone for their play style because there’s only one, I don’t admire anyone’s honesty because there’s no dishonest things to do, etc. The best you can hope for is to know what kind of music someone likes, for Christ’s sake.
But in the end, it all does come down to perspective. The arguments you are making are good ones for players who want that kind of game. The one’s I’m making are good ones for those like me. And the same for others posting here. The only problem at all is the lack of quality variety in the MMO scene.
michael chui: “It will be Spore + WoW and we’ll have Raph partner with Sid Meier to do it”
i think something like that would tear a rip in the fabric of time and space… i cant wait!
Corpseruns are more fun if other people can steal your stuff. Harsh on newbies of course, but who says the world shouldn’t be harsh? Oh yeah, it does discourage hanging out with people you don’t trust, which incidentally is a good thing, assuming that the game isn’t too hardcore. Social games are about getting to know other people, if it doesn’t matter who you can trust and who you can’t… where is the social fun in that? Stop spoiling gamers. Let them burn in hell for their errors!
@Michael, on that first point, you’re right, sorry, I should have said suit most online game players. (We can’t say large-scale, because that becomes a tautology. If they were built to suit small-scale mmog players, they’d be small scale games, no?)
On that second point, no… I think it’s more because it has a stat and leveling system and involves low player skill actions centered around the application of those stats while still focusing on a single player. Not because it’s about being in a world. Adventure games typically lack combat, and rarely have advancement of the characters, chatrooms lack gameplay. Personally, I think the only right that WoW has to be called a roleplaying game is because we don’t have a better term for what’s essentially a single character wargame. I certainly don’t log into WoW to be in a place, certainly. I log into WoW to level my character up. I’m only there to play a game, I don’t respect the world because the world is paper thin and doesn’t interact with me. Corpse runs were being presented as a way to make players respect the game world, I’m trying to figure out how that works, because I still don’t see it.
As to you last point… I have nothing against worldiness, except that I hate the people in those worlds.
I’m only sorta kidding. The biggest issue I have with worldy games are not that I think there’s anything wrong with them, but that I don’t enjoy interactions with strangers very much. I know that may seem a little odd, considering that I post here a lot, and this is pretty much interaction with strangers too, but I lurked a lot longer than I posted, and I know a lot of names here. There isn’t a similarly good method to “lurk” in a worldy online game, and that makes it really hard for me to enjoy myself in them.
And I think a part of it is because of what Bartle lays out as a path that players move through, as they play in online spaces. Where you start off experimenting with all of these different ways of exploring your personality; trying to be your ideal self, or trying out ways of behaving that are completely opposite of how you act, but that it eventually all converges and your online presence and your personality end up becoming the same thing. I was heavily into UO way back when, and I’ve gone through that whole trying out different skins thing. But I’m much closer, if not at, that convergence state now, and that means that a worldy game no longer has as much to teach me about myself, and my interest in them has subsequently fallen.
That being said, I still love designing for them, and I find the interactions of the players in them fascinating (which is sometimes not good, because I can get tempted to want to build ant farms, and not think in terms of player-centric services), but they’re harder to build for broader audiences, and they tend to have bigger scopes at the same time, which is a bad combination given the whole difficulty surrounding the funding thing. I think you can go in really interesting directions with them, if you either have lots of spare cash or you can find good ways to reduce scope and costs. But they’re harder, definitely harder.
No, they must suit most large-scale MMOG players. Most people don’t give a rat’s ass.
That was my point. WoW is still classified and generally understood and agreed to be an RPG. Not an adventure game. Not an action game. Not a chatroom. Why? Because the central premise of logging in is not “playing a game”, but “being in a place”. Because players “respect the game world”.
You’re right: players treat it like Zelda, not like Vampire:tM.
Believe in the worldiness. Come over to the dark side, and together, we shall simulate the galaxy and create an eternal spring of neverending, everchanging content. It will be Spore + WoW and we’ll have Raph partner with Sid Meier to do it. Mwahahaha.
Oops, I missed a line there @Ben, the last bit that I directed at you should end with “if you want to keep making games”
@Xuri, unless they happen to be camping your corpse, in which case it really really sucks.
(And I’ve had it happen enough times that it’s still annoying in WoW, even if it’s not nearly as bad as it could be.)
@Ben, again, why is it there? You can design your corpse runs so that my issues with them disappear, but then what purpose do they continue to serve? If we want them to be exciting and tension producing, that means they have to be annoying and frustrating to people that are interested more in the content, and less in the consequences of failing the content. Designing around issues that result from other system interactions only makes sense if there’s a really good reason for the system to be there to begin with. If there isn’t, designing around those issues may actually make the game worse, since the adjustments made to make corpse runs less of a problem may involve removing things that are more important than corpse runs to begin with.
Also, there is something intrinsic to large scale mmogs that say that they must suit ‘most people’. Huge start up costs. You could not build a game at 40-80 million dollars and then only have it appeal to a narrow set of people.
@Amaranthar, winning and losing as long term concepts have nothing to do with the definition of gaming. Harsh consequences for losing especially has nothing to do with what a game is. The mere fact that there is a challenge of any sort with a definable pattern you need to master to complete it is enough. You may not suffer anything more than having to try the challenge over again till you finally master the pattern, and this is enough. Harsh death penalties are time sinks and very little more. We can talk about respecting the game world, and there can even be some validity in that, but only if you’re talking simulation and not game first and foremost.
And items are just as important as they’ve ever been in a diku, because you can’t level up a few more levels if you don’t have your equipment. The mobs will eat you. Equipment in games like WoW are just as much vambrace shaped levels as they’ve ever been. Losing them means that the content you need to be doing out-levels you. By a lot. That means you lose to it, constantly. Needing to replace them every few levels is because of their importance in the overall design.
@Michael, um… we need to define RPG then I suppose. Because WoW doesn’t have much roleplaying going on for instance. Players treat it like a game, not like a world, despite the fact that there are time sinks involving ghost based corpse runs. That’s why I’m kind of having a hard time with the statement. Death penalties aren’t generating deeper roleplaying scenarios, or making players pay more attention to the world as a world… they’re making players pay more attention to the content as content. You take less risks, you do less crazy things, because if you mess up in the execution of what you’re trying to do, or if you bring on more heat than you can deal with, you end up having to run back to your corpse, and it becomes a time sink. I’m questioning why it’s necessary to have those sorts of time sinks for failing to surpass the challenges of the game. Other than the people that are heavily into the whole the game should punish me for even looking at it wrong, I’m not sure that it brings anything to the table, really at all.
I can understand if the answer is, “because it’s too hard to make the content genuinely challenging, and if we don’t have time sinks on failure the players will burn through it too quickly.” But I’m not sure how well that sits with me. I’d much rather the content be overhauled in some way.
@Amaranthar,
Level up some more while naked? Harder than you’re making it out to be.
(Not that you lose all your stuff on your corpse any more, but still. EQ1 flashbacks, yo.)
@Eolirin:
I think you’re looking at it from a rather unusual perspective and also as a feature in isolation. If keeping up with friends is so difficult, perhaps the other game mechanics are really not conducive to groups with wide skill variance. In that case it’s not really about corpse runs as such but more about the overall game difficulty and the differences (both practical and artificial) between player levels.
Also, saying that huge time commitments are unworkable for most people is a bit strange, because although it may be true, there’s nothing intrinsic to a corpse run that means it must take a long time, nor anything intrinsic to games that means they must all suit ‘most people’. Besides, there are many people who play very long hours in WoW. It’s rarely treated as a dip-in, dip-out game from what I can tell.
I think we have to be wary of trying to make a game that can accommodate all play styles simultaneously, because it may just be impossible. Corpse runs can add excitement and pleasant tension for some players and unhappiness for others, and I think balancing such features are a zero-sum game rather than one where the compromise is best.
I don’t know if MMOs these days can be called games. Just play, and you will succeed, no bones about it. There is no loss, only wins. Maybe that’s why they add point systems and factions, to add some sort of “game” elements to them.
I don’t know why items are even an issue these days. Worried about losing them? Heck, just level up some more and you have to replace your items anyways.
It is all opinion and perspective.
Corpse recovery sessions (mine and other peoples’) are some of my fondest memories of AC1. It was the only activity that had any feeling of altruism since quests were always partially or wholly for every characters benefit.
You died to a big ol’Tusker and you rustled up a posse of 15 and then ended up compounding the problem as deaths occured in the rescue etc. etc. The lower death penalty than EQ and the long time you had to recover (a VERY long time in dungeons) made all this fun at the time.
Of course, now I think it would drive me nuts.
Not so with me, I normally see it as a “gameism”, some strange thing that you only find in games, like shops that will buy wolf ears for 1 gold coin and sells magic swords for 10 gold. My question in corpse runs is always the same: “How can I loot my own corpse?” Clearly I’m alive.
The last thing I ever did in Asheron’s Call was die. I had the attention of a creature and tried to move away from it. I moved to a spot near the mountain that I had to jump to, and thought that maybe the computer couldn’t follow me there. Turns out I couldn’t stand there either. So it (the game world) moved me in tiny hops trying to find a place a could stand. Twelve hops later it threw me off the side of the cliff to a spot I didn’t know how to get to, or where it was, but was probably way too high level for me. Then, boom, I’m dead from the impact.
I don’t think you can have a high death penalty when death can be caused by things like loosing your connection to the server. What they did in WoW was keep the death penalty low in some areas, then in the instances it’s more of an issue.
Corpse runs – at least as a ghost – aren’t all bad, Eol. For one, it gives you a chance to bypass all those mobs that might have respawned since you hacked your way through to wherever you happened to die.
This sentence made me die a little inside. Ah, relativism.
When I chat with my friends about death systems, the first thing they always start with is permadeath, and I talk them down to interesting fictions for resurrection. Immersion. Hehehe.
The question is fair, Eolirin, but easily answered. Without respect for the game world, you lose the last basis you have for calling it an RPG. What makes a game an RPG is the dynamic between player and milieu. The most minimal form of RP is exactly that: respect by the player for the imagination of others, represented by the game world. (And the most involved is an identification with the world.)
If you’re not making an RPG, you don’t need it.
@hayleb, part of the problem is of course… that you bounce a great deal of people when you go down that path. It may have a much greater height of “fun” for a certain type of player, but it manages that because it’s specifically tailored to just that type of player. No one else really has any fun.
I mean, you’re saying that having corpse runs gives an additional penalty beyond xp loss, which is insufficient a penalty to generate the tension you want. Yet, for me, XP loss on death is already a deal breaker; I won’t play a game that has it. I have a hard enough time keeping up with friends, since they usually play more than I do, and XP loss means I have even less of a chance of being able to play with them. I despise being forced into pick up groups, and if everyone I know for any length of time is constantly outleveling me, there’s no longer any game to be playing.
Corpse runs often represent a huge time commitment. Huge time commitments are unworkable for most people, and they also eat into leveling time, which more casual players need to keep up. They’re also ungodly frustrating far too often. Even in WoW’s set up, where you run there as a ghost and don’t have to worry about getting killed on the way, you can still end up getting stuck in a loop of dying till you finally manage to get far enough away that you can hearth out. EQ was several orders of magnitude worse of course.
@Jojo, I think the question needs to be asked, why is it important that the player respect the game world? I’m not asking this out of a rejection of the concept, but because it’s never really been all that clear to me why it’s really all that important, other than that’s how it’s been before. Certainly, if you’re trying to make a certain type of virtual world, I can understand how that can be a valuable concept to have (though, I don’t know that WoW necessarily fits the kind of world that really needs that sort of thing), but it doesn’t make sense to me as any sort of global maxim.
I think corpse runs were good in UO. I don’t understand why that style of play can’t be recreated. Where death means something, but not everything, you know? You should really have more than one sword to your name.
In EQ, one reason they were bad was because of corpse decay. Don’t log on if you don’t have a few hours free– because if you die, you’ll need that time to get your corpse back.
Then again, that’s hardly the only one of EQ’s systems that discouraged casual play.
For what it’s worth, when Blizzard added corpse runs to WoW in the original beta, there was also a huge stink. People flooded the forums saying ‘but Blizzard, corpse runs suck!’ and eventually one of the primary designers (I think it was Tom Chilton, if memory serves) was forced to post a defense of their position. The defense basically boiled down to what hayleb said above: you have to have a mechanic that forces players to respect the game world. Corpse runs are one of the better of the current crop of implementations addressing that design problem. I think your argument needs to explain what alternative you prefer to resolve this issue. Currently it’s a bit weak from the lack of it. If there are no corpse runs, you have to punish the player in some other way for dying, otherwise your game’s structure is significantly weakened in a number of ways.
The same post that claimed corpse runs were bad design also claimed that raid dungeons are bad design. That just sounds like one guy’s opinion to me.
Shouldn’t “soulbound” items be bound to your avatar’s “soul” and thus eliminate the need to recover such items from your avatar’s physical body?
Hm, interesting post.
“I think a lot of design choices from MUDs were altered dramatically for the worse given the text-vs-3d-space issue in particular. In the mud scenario, corpse runs were a powerful social force, creating a mutual need and indebtedness that brought people together.”
I’ve been playing a MUD again lately, and I’m inclined to agree. While there are no corpse runs (instead, unless someone is around who is kind, you can expect everything you had to be gone), I’ve seen a lot of this to hold true. There’s a lot of things in MUDs that I doubt would work terribly well in an MMO these days. You know, like that death system.
Dying and leaving a corpse (especially when your corpse has the value of a house filled with items–to compare it to UO) made zones in Everquest feel more immersive than any other game I’ve ever played, single or multi. When you can run into a dungeon without worrying about a true penalty (temporary statloss or experience loss aren’t enough of a penalty) the game changes completely: you aren’t scared, so you don’t pay as much attention to your surroundings; you don’t care as much as you would really care if you were really in a dungeon. Everyone that played Everquest has a story where they are led deep into some place they have never been before by a more experienced player. The first time I was led from lower to upper Guk, I couldn’t keep track of all the turns, twists, ladders and water–there was no way I could find my out or in without someone’s help. Because if I made a wrong turn somewhere I could die–fall into the water with all the hostile mushrooms things or wander into an even more terrible part of the zone. And if I died, I knew I would have to retrieve my corpse; to retrieve my corpse I would have to get friends together, beg my guild, pray for the kindness of strangers. And this–where it was very likely I could get my corpse but it would take awhile–pales in comparison to guild wipes in the Planes–or even a place like Veeshan’s Peak.
I don’t think the developers for Everquest sat around thinking about reward and punishment and how leaving a corpse played into it, but I do think it is silly to dismiss corpse run’s in Everquest as a failure. To me they make Everquest a much better game than WoW or any of its successors. And I say all this as a person that thinks Everquest is terribly impoverished compared to the freedom of Ultima Online.
I read MMO developers posts, and I hear talk about making games that are fun; often I hear, only include a feature if it is fun. Please stop a second and think about what that means.
Is a theme park fun? I think a theme park gives you packaged, cheap thrills. It’s safe and can be amusing. But it’s completely different from the reality it so shallowly imitates. Not to say everyone should do xTreMe sports, or something with actual risk involved; but note that there are real differences, that with the loss of risk there is a loss of the potential for pleasure (and feelings beyond pleasure). I suggest the same trade off exists when you look at Everquest and WoW. Maybe WoW guarantees a certain minimum amount of fun for everyone, but I doubt that the maximum reaches so high as it did in Everquest.
So before features in games are dismissed for not being “fun”, think about the consequences–think about what game you’re making. If all you want is a theme park, go ahead and recreate the “fun” of WoW by eliminating all inconvenience.
Technically, pokemon mystery dungeon is entirely corpse runs.
So, if it is a design error, then how come you can build an entire game around it?