If you’re late to the Star Citizen (SC) party and still catching up on the encyclopedic amount of published content and videos to wade through, let me draw your attention to the fact that there is permadeath (PD) in the persistent universe. This will be the first MMO I’ve played with PD. I’ve played the high stakes lose your ship mechanics of EVE Online, where I’ve actually heard men cry on voice chat after losing billions+ ISK ships and their rare implants. But even in EVE, your character at least, is immortal. That won’t be the case in SC.
Why art thou Permadeath?
Chris Roberts, founder of Cloud Imperium Games and Star Citizen’s visionary leader, wants to create a world where time moves forward – things are destroyed, people die and history moves forward. Below are some of his quotes explaining why he felt it important to include PD in the persistent universe design of SC.
“To achieve this sense of a living history, there needs to be a universe where time progresses, characters die, and new ones come to the front.”
“I also feel that if everyone can be cloned easily, it fundamentally changes the structure of the universe. You now have a universe of immortal gods that can’t be killed. Death is just a financial and time inconvenience that has no further consequences.”
“The life and death cycle of humanity is what has brought us our history, our need to “make a mark” in our time, to push forward. If I want a living, breathing universe that has a lot of the dynamics of a real world and is inspired by the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, immortality for all is problematic.”
One death isn’t the end of your character’s life. 30th century advancements in cybernetics and medicine allow medical teams to resurrect you from incidents that would be a final death by today’s standards. With that in mind, players will have a set number of near death incidents before their body/organs are simply too damaged for repair, which will result in your true and final death. Instead of waking up in a medical facility, your final death will place you at a funeral service for your former character.
Headstone and all, your character will be sent to its resting place. All of your assets will be transferred to a beneficiary, a character you identified when you created your first avatar in SC. You can role-play the beneficiary is a relative, if you want to continue the family line/succession. Or it can be any ole character that will be bound to your account, which in other games we call alts.
While you will retain your tangible assets, the faction reputation that is transferred will be slightly diminished. However, all faction alignments will remain intact so that death doesn’t become a mechanic to erase an unsavory past. This does NOT mean you keep your positions, ranks and achievements. Those are lost with the death of the character that achieved them. If you worked your way up in rank/standing within a NPC managed organization or achieved great deeds such as found the Crimson Kid or uncovered what really happened to the Artemis in the PU, those accomplishments are forever bound to the actual character that achieved them.
What Constitutes Death?
For those engaged in ship combat, not ejecting from your ship before it’s destroyed is a death. If you successfully eject but your escape pod is destroyed, you’re dead. A headshot during space / ship combat also constitutes PD. All of the above mentioned will decrement your “lives counter” by one.
Death in the single player module, Squadron 42, is not PD. It will behave like many console games with quests/missions. Your character will resurrect back at the starting point for the mission you died in. Note starting point – there are no incremental saves in S42. You complete the entire mission successfully, which triggers a save point, or you fail it and start over. But failing because you died doesn’t decrement your “lives counter”.
Yo that’s my Pod!
After successfully escaping in a pod, you can activate your rescue beacon. Your pod can be rescued by NPCs or friendly players, who can deliver it to the nearest medical facility. I would think friendly players with a medical bay and proper training can also “resurrect” your character aboard their ship.
On the flip side, an unsavory player can retrieve your pod and hold it for ransom or sell it to a slaver. In either case, you’ll need to negotiate a payment for your freedom. If you’re a criminal, they can deliver the pod to security forces or place you on a prison transport ship to await justice. I can smell the drama from here.
What about the Idiots?
If you’re concerned about player griefing - camping new players, destroying escape pods and the alike, doing either inflicts stiff negative reputation on the perpetrator. They will be flagged as a criminal in UEE space and a bounty placed on their head. This will make their life in the verse very difficult as they become an active target for NPCs and other players. I think this will be enough to deter some of the griefing that takes place in EVE. I also don’t think we’ll see kamikaze attacks either as the assailant is just as vulnerable to losing a life as their intended target.
Death in Arena Commander and Star Marine Don't Count
There will not be a mechanic for opting out of PD in the persistent universe, unless you’re playing on a private server, something that CIG will support in the distant future. However, death in simulation modules such as Arena Commander and Star Marine do not count toward you PD lives. These are training simulations where you’re meant to experiment and take risks.
I believe that SC will have more than enough content for players who don’t want to risk PD and/or avoid PVP. Similar to EVE Online, there will be “safe” areas where PVP isn’t allowed, so you can choose to restrict your movement to those systems. S42 is single player game where your death doesn’t have a long term affect. You can die as much as you want in AC and SM if PVP is your thing.
My Thoughts
I’m okay with the game mechanics as currently described. I tend to play MMOs cautiously and try to avoid stacking up needless deaths. I always enjoy seeing how many levels I reach before that first death. My only hesitation is that I’m not into alts.
I bond with my first/main character, and unless I play a game across a long period of time, that one character is me. From that point of view only, I’m not too enthused about permanently losing my main character even though her possessions are transferred to a beneficiary, that beneficiary isn’t me. It will take some time to wrap my head around the shift. I suppose I can make the character look exactly like the original and keep it moving.
That seems like a curious and rather pointless mechanic because, as you point out, it's largely avoidable in most ways that mean anything.
If you take careful note of your choices at character creation you can make an absolutely identical character in terms of what it looks like. That character then receives all the material possessions of the dead one and also nearly all of the intangible (reputation) assets. That's no different in essence to the loss of xp/levels/skills on "death" that we're all familiar with from many MMOs.
In fact the only thing that will "die" permanently appears to be your character's name. Presumably names will be unique, as they are in most MMOs - although these days it's possible to tie the identity of the customer to a log-in and allow duplicated names in game so maybe not even that.
Presumably all your friends/guild/alliance/whatever contacts will be retained or can be easily replicated so everyone will know it's still you.
It's hard to see how this device amounts to something that isn't just "immortality" with an occasional, brief hiccup. I think you'd need to lose a lot more than described above before it would feel like more than a minor, irritating convenience for most people.
Posted by: bhagpuss | July 06, 2015 at 09:29 AM
I think that depends on your priorities in the SC universe. I only touched on tangible assets and reputation. Upon death you lose your achievements, as they belonged to the other character. If youre that type of player, that could be a big deal. Im not that kind of player myself but know many that are.
I agree, you can reasonably avoid death by limiting your activity and where you go in the game, much like you can in EVE Online. However, even some of the professions executed in safe space can result in death. Mining for example, which Ill be covering soon, is dangerous enough that your ship can explode if youre not careful or good at certain of the required roles.
I like and dislike the mechanic. I believe some players will be emotionally and mentally impacted by simply knowing that theres a life counter present. Enough so that it will alter their behavior. Your reputations is still aligned but youre not the other person. The mechanic of NPCs reacting to you differently based on past deeds, never fully realized in GW2, is planned in SC. We shall see, however. If that is the case, you will lose those NPC relationships upon death.
I considered but decided against including that in my blog post because it wasn't explicitly called out the article itself. However, it can be construed based on dev responses to player questions.
I believe in the forum thread there was an example of a player having reached a certain rank/position within a NPC corp dying. His beneficiary would still be looked on favorably but they do not inherit whatever the former characters rank/position was. That has to be achieved again. For that matter, player organizations might choose to adopt the same policy. If an officer dies, theyre dead. The beneficiary comes in as a recruit. Now that would be interesting to see play out. I can smell the drama from here. :-)
Posted by: Alysianah aka Saylah | July 06, 2015 at 10:30 AM