TLDR: in my opinion GD doesn’t punish players (enough) when the player dies.
In Diablo 2 for instance a player drops all items on death. You can mitigate this by having spare items in your stash (which offers choice: safety over stash space), and there are other ways like clever use of portals or even exiting the game (which again offers choice: have your lost items appear in town, minus the gold, but respawn all monsters). Point being: death is pretty annoying and should be feared and avoided.
Sacred 1 also had a good idea. No punishment on death but instead lose your survival bonus. That bonus goes up as long as you are alive and feeds into things like luck, crit chance and item drop quality. Once that bonus gets high you’ll be sorry to lose it.
I think death should be feared, but it shouldn’t cripple the player. Ideally it should be a punishment that can be made easier to deal with by allowing the player to make a sacrifice: like stash space for safety. Or by investing time/resources to prep for the eventuality.
And no, Hardcore is not the solution. While I appreciate the option it is simply nonsensical to lose a character after dozens of hours of game-play with nothing to show for it.
I can think of a few ways to make dying more punishing, to bring back that fear, but I’ve gone on long enough I suppose. Maybe modding will allow me to implement something myself, I’ll have to research that.
Thoughts on this are welcome, and thanks for listening,
take care.
I find the “drop gear on death” mechanic to be terrible. Not just in D2.
There is some incentive to recover your corpse (gain back lost XP), but if you drop all your gear, the game deprives you of the means to get to it via normal gameplay.
So you are playing a stupid mini-game of corpse running, until you have your stuff back and can play the real game again.
Much more a fan of the Dark Souls (and Grim Dawn) approach of giving you an incentive and also the means to go back.
If you want more threat of death, but not perma-death, I recommend going into skeleton key dungeons.
Mini-roguelike, if you die, you can’t go back in and your key is wasted.
Or farming SR, if that’s your thing. If you die, you lose a huge chunk of your timer and probably some loot, should you run out of time.
And yes, after level 100, you effectively lose nothing on death, but in current content, you shouldn’t really die often (on a solid build) unless you are fighting a very strong foe, in which case the monster’s health resets on death, which means you have to start from the very beginning.
I think the idea of losing time is already a punishment on it’s own.
Also, Bosses return to full HP (not all bosses heal to full hp, but they heal otherwise) in Grim Dawn (don’t remember for other games).
I would rather play challenges that the game has to offer to challenge any builds (SR, Celestial bosses, Crucible, and the upcomming Ascendant Mode in the next DLC).
Punishing any other way the player (at death) doesn’t add anything to the game in terms of challenges, it just make the death more annoying.
For me as an occasional gamer it is good as it is. Would be extremely frustrating trying to dig deep in SR and half framing your char to do so.
Figuring out game mechanics and the new one as Sunder takes time enough without needing another penalty on top of that.
Does it? I thought it did, but I recently died a few times on ultimate and the bosses never healed up. Only a little bit I thought I was misremembering how it worked, but maybe something else is going on.
Even if you being rewarded for not dying, it still feels bad when you do.
In other words, it still punish the player for dying more than it should.
I just looked at the survival bonus in Sacred 1 : Increase the damage dealt by the character. Increase the character’s chances to find special magic items.
I think the damage bonus feels bad, how can you even balance it and still feels meaningful.
As for the “Magic find”, Not sure it suits well Grim Dawn considering the amount of builds you can try.
Balancing the game around a decent drop rate makes you want to try new builds.
Having Magic find feels bad and gimicky (as in the survival bonus in sacred 1) because if your character is “weak” than you will suffer for a longer period of time since you Magic find is reset when you die.
And even if you add a litle bit, can you make it meaningful ?
If the added Magic Find is situational, than maybe. I could see that in SR, if you don’t die you get a higher chance to get double rares in the chest room. But if that happens (if the dev added that) the % would have to be somewhat lowish, low to the point you would get one or MAYBE 2 more double rares at the end (in the chest room).
That’s what I think for now, maybe you can change my mind
Death mechanic is fine as it is and if you forgot to open a portal (or can’t) the walk to your corpse could be rather annoying.
I don’t understand this need of punishment or the desire to have an incredible hard game. But if you desire such things, go to SR high enough and you’ll be rewarded by a very hard challenge. They ramp up until you die and you can always restart from 95, which is already a good difficult.
Something I reiterate constantly to everyone I can is “Do not punish players for playing your game.”
Note that I typically use this phrase in the context of minute to minute gameplay as a way to advocate against damage-dealing on-death effects of enemies, or any other mechanic that weakens the player for having interacted with game content as is expected of ARPG gameplay.
A game can be difficult, challenging, and brutal, yet not be punishing in the slightest.
Punishment for failure is a very 2000s-era design approach, back when dimly-lit basements were haunted by the garbled calls of the Butcher. We’re past that point now. Nowadays, there are enough games on the market that if a player feels like they’re being needlessly punished or having their time disrespected, there are plenty of alternative products to choose from that will better respect their gameplay.
Look at Dark Souls. DS1, death would Hollow you. DS2, death would decrease your maximum health. DS3 and Elden Ring? Nothing. Heck, Bloodborne even made taking hits less punishing with the Rally system. Over time, FromSoft learned only to ‘punish’ players for making mistakes in the moment of the mistake, and not afterward.
You can still fear death without punishment. Death is the declaration that your efforts were for naught, and that you must try again. Some bosses, such as Crate of Entertainment, are basically impossible to defeat once you’ve died to them once. The punishment, then, is needing to try again after a session restart, which involves an arduous trek to its arena once more.
You could try pushing 80+ SR in a non pet build with blues and non double rare, non MI items. Pretty sure that will give you a lot of “oh shit” moments.
Someone above already said it, but Hardcore mode exists for a reason. Losing a character and every item they have should give enough reason to fear death and the game supports it.
And how is wasting the player’s time with crap like “losing your gear and having to get it back” somehow better at instilling fear than permadeath? Leave the former crap out of Softcore.
Don’t disagree, but unhollowed DS1/DS2 is the same thing as being embered in DS3. The game is balanced around the lower threshold that you can bump up with humanities/embers/etc, it’s just a shift in presentation.
Humanity in DS1 did not affect your maximum health, but it did affect your resists, Luck (drop chance), and enable online play, and was required for kindling bonfires.
In DS2, death could reduce your maximum health many subsequent times, bringing your health pool quite low, in addition to the resist reduction of being hollowed. Funny enough, there is nothing a player can do to avoid being invaded in DS2; burning a Human Effigy at a bonfire puts you at the bottom of the invasion queue, but you can still be invaded while Hollow.
Embering in DS3 provided a means to boost your max health (by 30%) from base, with no real way to reduce it (other than very few items). Still required for online play.
Rune Arcs in ER aren’t super comparable as they have differing effects. No interaction on online play.
I thought I was misremembering how it worked, but maybe something else is going on.
Increase the damage dealt by the character.
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