Oh, sweet death.

Good old emo attention-grabbing title, eh? Well, I’ve been thinking about the various ways which games deal with the event of the character’s death. I’ve realised that different games want you to learn different things from dying. The old-fashioned DOS games would give you a few lives and put you back to the beginning (or to a save-point) upon death, but these days, death is a more different, especially in MMO’s. There are two lessons that various games want you to learn from dying. They either want you to lose items/experience from it and teach you that there’s risk to the game -or- they want you to learn the game through relatively mild consequences that help you learn by trial and error.  Let’s look at a few of the death consequences of the more popular MMO games:

Runescape: You lose all, but1-3 (depending on whether or not you’re skulled) of your items if you do not have a gravestone. Dying in Runescape is truly frustrating. I remember my first major death when my game lagged and I was training. I lost a Zammy kite and pirate hat, plus a good deal of other good stuff. If you aren’t a rich player, it takes a lot to get back what you lost and each time you die, you feel less and less into what you’re doing.

Tibia:  Tibia is a game very similar to Runescape in its design, graphics, and overall game play.  Dying is bit different in this game, however. In Tibia, when you die you lose a small bit of experience and you also have the chance of losing items. However, seldom does a player ever lose his equipment. Like Runescape, you’re teleported out of danger and sent to your home area.

Guild Wars:  When you die, your character is sent to the nearest respawn area which is guarded by an NPC to prevent monsters from attacking you in that area. The only catch to dying in Guild Wars is that you accumulate something called a Death Penalty (DP). The DP is a percentage that increases if you continuously die and only decreases when you or your party fights without any deaths. Basically what it does is limit your hitpoints in proportion to the percentage of the DP, preventing you from charging back into areas over and over with full hitpoints.

World of Warcraft: WoW has a very straightforward death system. When you die, you walk back to your corpse from a graveyard as a ghost (so, you can’t fight anything along the way), and respawn with half of your health. The “gotcha” part of this is if you die in an area infested with monsters that you cannot kill on your own. Your choice then is to fight and die or run. Most people know that running is not an easy option like it is in Runescape. Monsters follow you for quite a ways before leaving you alone. In cases where death is imminent, the game does not punish you for choosing it. When you’re sent to the graveyard, you have the chance to be “healed” by the Spirit Healer, saving you from the walk to your body (but, you do get 25% of your armour’s durability taken away).

Runescape and Tibia have deaths that are oriented to losing items or experience, but they take you completely out of danger when you die. Granted, in Runescape you’re really not that grateful for being in Lumbridge.  Tibia’s idea of death is actually pretty interesting. You run the risk of losing things, but not anything that’s too hard to replace (like armour). You do, however, lose some experience from dying.

Guild Wars and WoW have slightly more complex ways of dealing with death. They want you to go back and try to finish the fight, but you need to be hindered in some way for your past mistake. What I consider to be most beneficial is that you do not risk losing items or experience. Both of the games focus more on the problem at hand, rather than punishing the character for getting himself in a trap.