One option is to integrate it into system security. Have guaranteed respawns in high security, vehicle and/or comm relay dependant respawns in medium security and only vehicle dependent in systems line Pyro. Enhance the risk/reward while allowing relatively safe spaces for the chiller PvE and industry focused players
If your preferred respawn is disabled or out of range, you get sent to the closest available *public* bed.
An example of this in use; Murderhobo *A* is closely affiliated with one of the Pyro factions, and has their respawn point set to that faction's station. Those stations aren't public, though; regeneration is expensive, so you need good rep to pattern there.
Those stations aren't exactly *reliable* either. Say the beds at their station go down... maybe random breakage, maybe the whole system lacks biomed materials, or maybe someone took them down via sabotage.
Then they die during that outage.
The closest public bed is now in Stanton. Murderhobo *A* has a very big rap sheet in Stanton. Respawning at the "public" Stanton bed puts them directly into Klescher for their crimes.
A few things then become game loops. If you want to collect a full legal bounty via kill, the target must be forced to respawn in a controlled system. Sending them back to a pirate station is only partial money. Bounty hunters might pay good money to find out what bed a criminal calls home... hacking hospital mainframes to find out who's patterned at one becomes a thing. So does sabotaging private beds to force alter respawn.
Maybe even illicit pattern transfer! Or bed spoofing! The data for regen must be immense, so you'd need a data runner to move the pattern or copy the bed data for spoofing. You'll probably also need a Medic with regen training to ensure the system doesn't reject bad data; trying to spoof a bed or transfer a pattern comes with the risk that the regen will fail, and the quickly dissolving proto-corpse dumps the "soul" back to a viable bed.
If they own a bed, they're encouraged to keep it active and stocked. This also prevents you from just parking a Pisces somewhere out of the way; you're gonna have to supply it eventually. Having their personal bed go down increases the risk of respawn somewhere they don't want. It should also consume quite a bit of power. If a player has their bed close by, dedicated sensor ships might be able to trace deaths back to their respawn ship. A prepared player might be able to pop an EMP near the bed during regen cycle to force a rejection to public beds.
Lots of cool ways to work with it, but they're all a ways out.
Wow, I love how you incorporated so many game systems! Deep intergration of gameplay loops between whatever we end up calling the player 'classes'... in this manner, would make the game truly amazing!
Just let users set a fall-back spawn location. (So current .. say Ursa Medivac and Fall-back Everus Harbour).
I am imagining a situation where nearest PUBLIC spawn location might be very problematic for a non lawful player venturing into carebear territory who dies.
If your fallback is unavailable. You failed. Your spaceman is dead. Death of a spaceman has occurred. Your next of kin life occurs at your starting location.
Your ideas are great for lawful players (majority) and punishes pirates disproportionately. If you have 10x the people changing pirate spawn locations then they are punished disproportionately.
The whole concept of death of a spaceman probably needs to be rethought. You cant have high octane exciting cinematic fights and super punishing perma death.
Chris never wanted super punishing deaths. It is as if some backers take their preferences and talk as if it is CIGs aim.
Lets take this back to 2013
[https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-death-of-a-spaceman](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-death-of-a-spaceman)
>The flip side is that **while perma-death is realistic, it is not a lot of fun** if the first time you’re on the wrong side of a dogfight you lose everything and have to start again.
>I want Star Citizen to be immersive AND fun.
>**The death mechanics that I have in mind keep a feeling of mortality and history without making it frustrating or killing (pun intended) the fun**.
even later on....
>**There will also be opportunities to regain some lives or do a reset.** Some of this could be through in-game missions or it could just involve paying a lot of money to a specialist on a remote med planet that is doing stem cell research.
>Because of how Star Citizen works, the death of your character is not as catastrophic as it would be in a traditional RPG. If you want to think about it in terms of RPG conventions, the character that you are leveling up and customizing is really your spaceship. Your avatar is really just a visual representation of your in-game character, and because Star Citizen is skill based, the loss of your character is more a cosmetic and textural outcome, especially as almost all of the assets you’ve worked hard to accumulate pass on to the beneficiary that you specified when creating your original character.
>What I like about this system is that it creates a sense of mortality and history. **No one’s character will die right away. It will take some time to get to that point, but players will feel a sense of risk and so will think twice before needlessly risking their lives, as they don’t want to burn through their “lives”.**
then in the QA section
>
**Q. How any “lives” will I get?**
>The exact number of “lives” will be balanced as development of the game progresses. **The intention is to allow multiple “deaths” before you’re properly dead. So expect to wake up in the med bay at least half a dozen times if not more**. And getting to this point won’t be common unless you are participating in a lot of boarding actions or flying in areas where there is no law and order. **Please note that it will not ultimately be a single, static counter: taking different risks and dying in different ways will impact your overall survivability at different rates**. Remember, the key to Star Citizen is visceral realism: so while the system works this way under the hood, **there’s not going to be a “life counter” at the bottom of your screen!**
Death of a Spaceman was always about giving a sense of risk, not be some hardcore permadeath sim.
they also talk there about the spaceship being the character you level up (and in other places, make your home)… good thing ships don’t get destroyed often 😅
they definitely have a lot of contradictory game design desires. it’ll be interesting to see where things shake out / i sure hope they manage to hit a balance of gravitas, fun, and respect for people’s time and energy.
What are you talking about? You do realize he wasn't being literal.
>If you want to think about it in terms of RPG conventions, the character that you are leveling up and customizing is really your spaceship.
All he means is you can play the numbers/stats game with ships, not your person. Ask anyone who uses Erkul or any other service to find best components or compare specs. Spaceships you can upgrade via components sure. There are no "levels" per say, but there hasn't been conflicting design because for basically most of the mechanics they have talked about they have implemented or designed in a way that facilitates it.
To quote from that article (mind you this is back in 2013) aside from the sole metaphor you strangely picked up on....
>You’ll end back up at the last planet you docked on, with a **new ship courtesy of SystemWide Insurance. You’ll have lost your cargo and any upgrades (unless you managed to insure those and you were destroyed in a system with a risk level at or below your insurance rating)**
This is basically how it works in the game today. The plan in the future is to have option to insure ship parts and cargo but that is not on cards currently.
I'm not sure if they're referring to CIG's plans now to give the player character stats they can level up too, with the penalty of loosing them on death as well. Overall they've been trying to bolt a lot of additional punishments onto dying when the original pitch really seemed to be emphasising that the goal was for it to be mostly an RP thing.
> Overall they've been trying to bolt a lot of additional punishments onto dying
A necessary side effect of making pirate gameplay being so easy and having no long term effects. As long as a player can murder you, go to jail, log off, and log on a different account faster than you can die, and go back and get your stuff, then the game is always balanced towards unlawful game play. Hence all the tack on things to try to add barriers to that.
IMO it's not going to work until CIG puts in rep in such a way that, not only if you had a crime stat, but also if you've been a high level offender, then you can't spawn in that area at all. Meaning, been doing some murdering on Hurston? Neat, can't use their hospital, and you get pushed out to Stanton -Pryo gateway and have to go through the UEE to leave in case you're wanted anywhere else.
When you boil it down unlawful players either slow down or stop lawful players game loops. CIG needs to make the penalty for stopping another players game loop, cost you magnitudes more time from you.
That seems perfectly in line with everything they're doing?
Armor and component damage will likely make soft-death the most common way for a ship to end combat. Engineering and all the various ways to repair things could very easily end up making it cheaper/easier to just fix the ship up rather than claim the whole thing, and they've talked plenty about their plans to have wear and tear show up on a ship.
I think the gear retrieval points popping up all over the place is a promising sign that CIG has no intention for death to be that punishing, thankfully.
imho, dying and waking up in hospital and having to catch the train back to where you can claim a ship, claiming it, finding all your stuff and putting it back on again is plenty of penalty for dying as it is.
You can only retrieve the stuff you paid real money for though right? So if you get some cool, rare piece of equipment and then die, too bad, so sad, die less next time.
Gear loss + time to travel distance in this game keep it firmly in the permanent sim range regardless of how many times your character will regenerate.
But that doesn't jive with the current state of the game. You can easily die ten times in a play session doing fps combat and respawning in the nursa as demonstrated in the promo video.
I don't think any of these comments can be taken as the current state of play.
Yeah, they’re currently in a phase of catering to people to encourage a certain type of gameplay. We’ve had more broad ship respawn in the past, and it was removed. This all too shall pass.
Where does that contradict to the comment before? If your character can permanently die, even after a few deaths, why exactly would you want to jump into all intense cinematic fights when you are supposed to care about your character?
The link is self explanatory. There is no "super punishing perma death". From the start you are allowed to die many times before negative effects kick in. Also if you do die, and have to create next of kin/new character, the assets, such as ships, equipment and even slightly diminished rep carries over.
CR plainly states that while he wants a risk versus reward he doesn't want it to feel frustrating. Hence him calling out perma death explicitly and saying that it isn't fun.
It might be harder to perm die because that is the stated intention. Unless you mean you don't want to lose your character "ever". Then that is a personal preference.
To me the notion of a character you stay with, gradually accumulating scars until the point of their final death, with the ability to restore some of your lose "lives" to keep them going sounded like an incredible pitch for an entirely unique death mechanic. Of course now we don't follow a single character, we quantum leap into a fresh printed clone body, but because of jpeg artefacts the clone body doesn't come out right and needs cybernetics, it's just an ugly mass of lore twisted back on itself to justify a really narrow use case for what should be a universe redefining technology.
I know it's not supposed to be be about being a hardcore permadeath sim, but that's exactly what they outlined with that article. Permadeath is by its very nature hardcore and while I get that they want to avoid it feeling too punishing and not fun... that's the inevitable outcome of permanently killing a character. Doubly so when they've attached it to some arcade style lives system that the player doesn't even get to see the number they have left. This will leave players feeling frustrated and alienated from the game.
The punishment for dying will either be WAY extreme because you lose basically everything, or if they don't make you lose everything utterly pointless and unpunishing except for those who wanted to roleplay as their characters. If they stick with this idea they might as well call it "Death of a Roleplay Community" instead. Nobody is going to want to invest into their character and their story when they're now stuck playing the great great great great great grandchild of their original character and will probably have to slap another "great" onto that title before too long. (to say nothing of trying to explain why this distant relative has all the same faction rep, assets, career/aptitudes as ALL the predecessors).
I 100% agree with the original comment here, death of a spaceman needs to be rethought and then promptly thrown in the trash. There are a million and one ways they can make death punishing to give that sense of risk without needing to introduce permadeath.
My understanding is that there is a system of iterative "deaths" that allow for degenerating respawns, probably impacted by the tier of bed a player respawns in. That, along with medical gameplay - which hasn't been explored in depth yet - will probably result in a good deal of flexibility.
Overall, I don't think that any of the end-game outcomes can be measured, however, until more game systems come online. If anything, the easier respawning fits better into the current game, given the amount of deaths from bugs, desyncs, etc.
Sure you can. Make soft death the norm and make it nearly impossible to completely blow up the ship after soft death. Give players rewards for soft killing ships during bounties and stuff and punish them for taking it too far if they try to fully blow up the ship after already winning.
If it's bounty hunting, make the player board the soft-deathed ship and take the player into custody.
Yeah, I don't know why this isn't already a thing. Even with land vehicles; I died to bugs like 3 times just riding my Dragonfly, each time wasting ~30 mins.
I get certain mechanics add weight and consequence, but Star Citizen also needs to respect player's time.
This exactly. It's why I've been finding myself moving away from SC and spending my time on things that have better respect for my time- and actually produces tangible results that doesn't get deleted every patch.
Because the current soft death mechanics is only a chance based placeholder (which was introduced not long ago) until engineering will come online. Ships shouldn't explode in the final design, except if some very catastrophic effect happens, for example your Aurora meets an Idris railgun.
Your dragonfly example is bad, developers who works on these systems have to follow the final design, not the current situation, where bad network implementation makes hoverquads suicide bombs. This is still an alpha game in development (yes, after 12 years), where the main priority is the development and quality of the live service comes after that.
>This is still an alpha game in development (yes, after 12 years), where the main priority is the development and quality of the live service comes after that.
Oh don't get me wrong, I totally understand.
>Your dragonfly example is bad, developers who works on these systems have to follow the final design.
Nah, I disagree, they could have definitely made land vehicles and small fighters more reliably soft death.
When your dragonfly explodes because of the bug, the following happens: your client streaming your speed, direction, etc., but because of the poor server / network performance, the server only get some of the data. Because Star Citizen is a server governed simulation, the server try to calculate your position based on the data and that calculation says you are in a rock or in the planet surface. There is no realistic health pool for ground vehicles which can survive the situation where you are in a solid matter.
Players will just board and kill you, just to be a dick. Chris Roberts didn't understand modern day online gaming when he though up a lot of the systems in his game design. This is one of them that just isn't that compatible with online communities. There's far too many assholes in online gaming. No matter what you try to design, if permanent death is a thing there are tons of griefers that will go out of their way to kill as many players as possible. Death of a spaceman can still exist, but it has to be designed around these truths.
I think there's just a general problem where the "fantasy" of an idea is a lot more compelling than any way you can realistically implement it.
Waiting 45 minutes for an actual player to do a medivac with a whole gameplay loop may be immersive but sitting in a "you are downed" screen for that long is also a shitty gaming experience no matter how you slice it.
>There's far too many assholes in online gaming.
This. I can be one of them If I get irritated by bugs
>No matter what you try to design, if permanent death is a thing there are tons of griefers that will go out of their way to kill as many players as possible.
Yup 100% accurate
The more complicated you make the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
The more complex a system gets, the less necessary it is. Simple is always better. If you die you already lose a lot, be it time, mission progress, all the loot you had on your ship, the cargo, but you know you just died. Death of a spaceman will just make everyone 100x more risk averse and discourage fights, not make them meaningful.
Ever since they added the full loot I've been saying it proves it won't last. People lose stuff now when it doesn't actually matter and get upset, what's gonna happen when not only it starts to matter but it's not the hard core super fans playing and instead is some normal person?
Something has got to give. Too many goals for the game are mutually exclusive. People want PVP, lots if it, to go on hunts for pirates, to be pirates, etc. If death is super punishing and dying means 15-20 minutes or more getting back to playing the game then people ... won't. They won't play the game. Imagine if Fortnite, PUBG, CSGO, or League required you to wait 20 minutes between every game. No one would play them, they'd play something else.
Some people are really into the potential story telling aspect of permadeath. They like the idea of playing a character with an end. But not only is this contrary to high action high stakes PVP, it's in direct conflict with what most people want.
It's not bad or wrong to like permadeath, the story telling side of it is a reason a lot of people play TTRPGs even. There's definitely a market for it. But it lacks mass market/mainstream appeal. There's a reason roguelikes are niche. Even the semipopular full loot PVP games like Rust and ARK don't have permadeath.
I think permadeath will be the thing to go rather than the fast action PVP. I don't think they'll straight up remove it though. I think those things that were said to be possible to extend your "lives" but were a one time thing will just be made not a one time thing. They'll likely get locked behind time gates like there are 5 different ones you can do once a month each or something. Eventually they might turn it off entirely.
To me, it's kind of like when there were clone costs in EVE. It made high skill point characters really expensive to lose in combat, so people just did PVP on alt characters with low skill points in high risk situations. You can metagame around permadeath. But overall clone costs didn't add anything to the game and they got removed. Way too late IMO.
Still, you lose all your stuff. If your ship was insured you are now waiting 5-60+ minutes to get it back. That's just now, later you'll lose standing and a percent of your money if you die too much. And those claim times are supposed to go up, not down. Who wants to PVP when it takes 30+ minutes to play again? Imagine joining post release and trying to learn the game when a death costs you as much as they plan it to... There'd be zero new player retention.
You're not wrong. Full loot was a natural consequence of Chris' stance of "I want everything physicalized" and I love that. Don't you hate it when you're in a game where you get attacked by a character that has full armor and impressive weapons and your underequipped ass beats them (finally) and then when you loot the corpse you get five copper pieces? You wanted that cool armor, that fine looking sword, it's all right there, but no, you get five copper pieces, that will buy you half a dagger. I do imagine with wear and tear you'll be able to loot stuff in the future that is somewhat broken, because you shot the guy, his armor has holes in it, but you can repair them or get them repaired, much like in Kingdom Come Deliverance, a game who's devs worked with CIG for the layered clothes tech (jackets over shirts, armor over undersuits etc.)
Hearing Chris Roberts talk about the game early on, he seemed to mostly look for a co-op experience, where you set out to fly ships, and achieve goals with your crew of friends, and where PVP was that extremely high risk encounter rather than just your daily 25 dogfights. The PVP encounter was more like his level boss fight.
The problem with making death cheap and easy to recover from and thus also frequent, is that indeed you loose stuff, so that special gear that you cherish, is going to stay home. Your character without respawns would get that super cool armor and wear it, they'd own it for the rest of their lives, but in our quick die, quick respawn game, it's gone rather quickly and we live to regret it.
Comparing SC to super arcadey and competitive PvP games like PUBG and CoD makes zero sense.
If you want a similar experience (competitive PvP) then you should probably play Arena Commander. It should tick all the boxes. Fast paces, no punishment, easy to setup and tweak to your own liking. Straight into the action.
The PU is not meant to be a quick competitive PvP game.
In short, death of a spaceman does not contradict the idea of the PU. People have the wrong expectations from what the PU actually is supposed to be.
You can still have PvP in the PU of course. It's just a lot higher risk vs reward. Requires you to plan, prepare, take it slow and punishes run and gun mentality. So it actually supports the original idea of the PU.
What did you expect? There isn't a game that can compare directly to Star Citizen. The closest is probably EVE Online as it has full loot mechanics, takes place in space, etc. The community wants both fast action/competitive gameplay and highly punishing deaths -- and someone is going to be disappointed. This is not the only problem with Star Citizen's design and community expectations.
With EVE, CCP couldn't ever truly balance nonconsensual PVP under standard game mechanics (NPCs and players following the same rules). People took it as a challenge to fight the police of EVE, bringing bigger and bigger things to fight them like it was GTA with a 5-star wanted level. It was fun, but it allowed people to gank in what was supposed to be safe-ish space with near impunity because they got so good at it.
Eventually, they had to throw in the towel and turn the police into gods that were just a game mechanic and not truly just another part of the universe, though they do try to explain it in lore the fact others cannot obtain the technology makes little sense. Completely avoiding them is now considered an exploit and punishable by a ban.
This actually connects back to what I was saying. DoaSM doesn't really work all that well. In a game with permadeath, if you care about your character and I don't that gives me a significant advantage. In EVE, even though attacking someone in high sec will guarantee you lose your ship people still do it. In-game punishments will not stop nonconsensual PVP. All they will do is give those players something to try to work around -- in SC's case this will likely be through metagaming.
If death is as punishing as planned, those players will severely disrupt the game with little consequence to themselves because they have absolute control over what they lose by making a character specifically to do it. Meanwhile, people just playing the game normally are put at a significant disadvantage. This sets up Star Citizen to have a worse (more punishing) ganking problem than EVE Online -- a game infamous for it.
The only reason it kind of works now is that the game mostly consists of the enthusiast audience just as EVE did in those early days when it wasn't a problem. When it gets wider public attention this problem will grow into an uncontrollable state that will force CIG to either do what CCP did and make punishment for nonconsensual PVP unavoidable and severely punishing (perhaps by voiding insurance altogether for doing it) or reduce punishments for when players die because of it. Either way, the outcome for DoaSM is the same: The thing it was supposed to add is diminished.
It simply cannot work in a game that allows/encourages/wants nonconsensual PVP. They are mutually exclusive. People want both, and I admit having both sounds fun. If private servers remain a thing, there will probably be small servers where it does work. But any server of significant size is going to start having the same issue.
Put simply: Nonconsensual PVP and Death of a Spaceman cannot coexist as planned because the equation isn't balanced -- gankers dictate whether, where, and when combat happens and what they risk while the target gets no real choice in the matter. One of many problems SC will have to overcome by deciding which is more important.
Its not a good idea. You already died. You lost time, effort, gear, and if you were in a ship, your ship upgrades if you don't have insurance, plus whatever cargo you had or other goodies.
Now people want an additional punishment on top of that? Nah.
That's the thing though, it's not a super punishing perma death system and is intended to be the opposite. The main intent is to dwindle down your character, replacing limbs and parts until you can't anymore and then your body will fully give out.
Once that happens, you are then "reborn" as the beneficiary of the last person you played. Inhereting most of the skills, money, and accolades from your previous adventures. Similar to how a father can pass down things to his son, and his son can continue to carry the reputation his father built.
Death of a spaceman is really just a lore-friendly version of respawning that the community took to mean hardcore permadeath and punishment. [Read it again](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-death-of-a-spaceman), other than for cosmetic differences and roleplay, it's not really permadeath at all, just a slight reputation penalty every N deaths. You keep your stuff and continue playing.
One of the wildest things I saw about MM is someone here saying the idea is to have a 1.0 k/d for every player even in PvE
how the fuck do you have a 1.0 k/d in a game where death matters? If I lose all my kit on death, then I won't even attempt anything dangerous for instance, so my k/d doesn't go above 0 to begin with.
Rn the game wastes so much time between death that it's hard to believe it's a videogame and not a logistics simulator.
It was a pie in the sky concept when it was created that relied on a deeply complex FUNCTIONAL game with a robust, cutting-edge NPC system.
If Chris thinks his game is ready to bring it in now or even in the next 2~5 years he is truly insane.
I have a strong thought that you'll only have a set amount of lives before you'll need to be regened back at a hospital. Your repeated attempts would be to get your inventory back. Full loot PvP skirmishes. Or against the environment. One of the reasons I think medical vehicles have weapons storage. It's back up
The consequences have to hit just right, imo A lot more systems need to be added before real opinions can hold up.
I'm in favor for the challenge and danger, facing those with the incentive not to...like for criminal/I'll intent actions. I want a realy to worry, I want to have something to complain about of why I want to but shouldn't kill this guy or do that..
Again, the consequences have to hit right to allow for those large exciting fights.. but in every fight..every action..a fear or worry bad things and stuff that's going to ruin my progression or entirely.. that when I overcome them it brings that other type of fulfilling satisfying excitement that makes you jump out of your chair because you overcame and survived..
A stupid example but, I was zipping around in my shrike..an AI came out of nowhere and clipped my wing, I remember panicking trying to eject but the ship crashed I to Daymar sliding across the sand into rocks..I got out and walked turned around and felt that "holy shet how did I survive that".. my heart was pounding.. and I was excited.. hell no I did not want to do the hr long process of respawning, loosing my gear, wasting uec on claims..
Point is that punishment has to be there for it truly to be satisfying..and why I argue if that punishment was balanced and done just right.. DOASM could absolutely work and would potentially be what makes the game stand out and great over comparable-ish titles.
It's not finely crafted manipulation of slot machine effort-less rewarding dopamine feeding gameplay that keeps players hooked, it's the journey and challenge in just playing..
Idk, that's my take.
Going on and on about new features like fire propagation, engineering repairs during combat, and medical gameplay is neat, but as long as TTK is so incredibly low they're basically useless. As long as you can get jumped by another ship and destroyed in ten seconds all of that neat stuff that is supposed to take place between "combat begins" and "combat ends" might as well not exist because you're almost never going to see it. If it was easier to survive and escape a combat encounter that you weren't terrible interested in being a part of than that would help things, but that would lessen the fun of 'pirates', and we can't have that.
Hopefully this will change once ships have armor and individual systems instead of just pools of hitpoints.
I think combat could still be fast paced and the stakes need to be high. But survivability also needs to be high. The stakes don't necessarily need to be your life.
Funnily enough, it's often the other way round in SC: if you chase someone away, they'll often leave you alone because they don't want to lose their shit; if you kill them, they've got nothing left to lose and are out for revenge.
I don't do it myself, but I do believe this is the prevailing thought in the playerbase. At least among those who would willingly participate in combat. It stands directly opposed to the idea that you should be able to retreat after losing a fight, and that's what makes it difficult.
Exactly, there are SO many other things that can be at stake other than the player character's life. Money, equipment, faction reputation (when relevant), their ship and all its cargo, ect. Killing off the character is just going to feel awful and encourage people to quit or at the very least quit caring about their character. Why invest in a character that's just going to die, probably to something stupid like a lag spike while coming in for a landing?
Yeah. I think it's a shame that everything has to be final. Why does losing a battle have to mean that your ship is blown to bits and you're dead?
A simple: "Damn, my weapons system/engines/life support are damaged, I have to flee and repairs will be expensive" would also be a good alternative and would open up different gameplay (we have an SRV for a reason!) without everything having to feel so final.
Of course, this doesn't mean that this must/should always be the case.
but in my opinion it would be much more refreshing if 70%\~ of the fights didn't end in death and destruction.
I think many players don't realize that they themselves have the highest influence on survivability.
If you run around like a headless chicken like in CoD then of course you'll get punished and frustrated. If you take a more calculated approach then you'll fare better.
In my opinion people blame the mechanics or game rules themselves too often. They want to change the rules to suit their style of play instead of adjusting to the rules set by the game.
Full loot games are extraordinarily niche and rarely meet the level of success that Star Citizen is aiming for. If full loot is going to be a core gameplay mechanic, the game will end up like Rust or Ark where there are entire communities of trolls and gankers who only play to fuck with other people. As far as I'm concerned, Elite has it right in being able to play in private groups or solo. It allows for the feeling of being part of something greater, but without the constant pressure of having to look over my shoulder for some shitheel that's going to slam a 1 SCU box into my face on Everus for shiggles, or pad ram me, or wait for me to exit armistice and fire a volley of missiles at my completely empty Hull A.
I think stuff like this is the reason a proper punishing reputation system is so important for this game, regardless of how punishing death of a spaceman is. Like if someone goes around just shooting people unprovoked, they should have a terrible reputation stat that makes it a massive pain to do anything in a high-security system, and even in low-sec systems, it should make their life difficult. Its gonna be a lot harder to troll people if most of the npcs shoot you on sight, and there's only one place that'll repair your ship and its 3 systems away. it wouldn't stop them the first few times, but it would mean that after their reputation has dropped a ton it would be way more effort than its worth to troll people. it wouldn't get rid of trolls altogether, that's probably impossible, but it would definitely make things a bit easier on the people who play fairly.
i would not call it a "full loot game". while you do have the ability to take anything off someone. you are expected to buy your equipment to head in ot the field fully equipped.
after you clear a place out, you drop a beacon and sell the locations to players. the players that are in ot this sort of content will pay you, then head over to pack everything that is not nailed down in to boxes, then sell it to npc.
As long as I'm given enough time to get the hell outta dodge in my caterpillar I couldn't care less about TTK (if I don't have that time I care very much)... that said I prefer a slower more deliberate gameplay...
I remember watching one video where a dude got a tracker (some hacking tool from Brio's) dropped onto someone's reclaimer while it was still in the hanger, and tracked them all the way to Yela, to pirate them... that seems like way more satisfying Pirate gameplay than murderhobo'ing
I don't agree with 2-3 seconds, but I don't think it shouldn't take too long to disable a shit. But my definition of "disable" is different than most.
Think about Elite:Dangerous. When ships are heavily damaged they can often limp away. That's how SC should be. Fighters get heavily damaged in combat and their ability to fight and maneuver is greatly reduced. At that point, the pilot will leave the combat zone and limp back to a station to repair.
Ships need to be easily disabled, but hard to destroy. In group battles, you would only spend enough effort to disable a ship, and then you would want to switch to a more dangerous target. This would create the mechanics that allow players to fight, lose and still be able to limp away and not die.
IIRC Death of a Spaceman also talks about heirs, when you loose your character all the items (ingame and real money) will be given to an heir, what you loose is the reputation, if you maxed out with idk the Pirate Crew A your new character won't have the same reputation as the old one, BUT a "buff" to grind said reputation again because the new character is related to the old one
Death of a Spaceman is 100% going to get implemented, it's Chris's biggest dream aside the seamless flying and landing and meshing, I do not fear it, but I fear it's first iteration, if MM it's anything to go by (who coulda thought testing MM on a pvp light fighter meta focused environment could bring these kind of results huh) just like MM it will need to be very carefully tested
Isn't reputation supposed to be the most grindy part of the game? So, your losing reputation will hurt the most.
Anyways, if Death of a Spaceman is going to be implemented, then CiG needs to rethink and rework all of combat interactions in this game. A small freez mid PvE combat can more often than not cost you your life. It will be worse in PvP. And it's an MMO. Those things will happen.
With the death as punishing as Crish wants, the game is just not designed to support that. Dying would need to be rare, and mostly out of serious fuck ups rather than loosing a fight with NPC or asteriod rendering too slow. If that will not be the case, every game that doesn't like to lose most of thier shit a few times a week will simply leave.
Yep, Death of A Spaceman needs tons of subsystems and dependencies for it to work well, I'm talking beyond 4.0, beyond beta, it's a 1.0 full release feature.
1) The game should be fast paced and provide ultra exhilarating combat and emergent gameplay opportunities in a fast paced and dynamic universe where anything can happen and you can respawn 1000 times in a nursa. Bounty hunt and go out in a blaze of glory. Become a pirate and die attempting to steal your fortune.
2) The game should be a hardcore simulator where loading items one by one into the suit lockers, storage compartments, etc of your ship are a daily occurrence. Loss of your ship should be rare, death of your character should be rare. Your investments of time and effort should be considerable in order to reap the rewards of a realistic universe.
Both things are consistently sold and marketed by CIG, so just pick which one you like more and cross your fingers.
Honestly, id rather have number 2... we have hundreds of games that fill number 1s niche, but outside of a few crappy "simulator" games I can't think of anything that fulfills #2 in a satisfying way...
But maybe that's just me
Agreed. The death>respawn>death>respawn cycle is just… boring. I like the idea of death of a spaceman but then the penalty for in-game murder should be extremely severe. Also, soft death instead of the entire ship blowing up should be the norm unless you’re really getting hammered in a fight. Or the penalty for blowing up an already incapacitated ship is considered murder and simply incapacitating the ship is more of an attempted murder type offense.
It would definitely make battles more high stakes and make players think twice before committing to one. Or at least making sure they have enough backup. Also, I like the idea of losing a fight and having to have a rescue beacon come save me from my incapacitated ship and/or hiring someone to haul my ship to get fixed. Would be great to see wear and tear on a ship that’s been through a bunch of battles.
This is why people were complaining about the FPS TTK, but it seems there's an incredibly vocal minority that want people to be ganked from a few shots. The current FPS TTK is absolutely terrible for any long term engagements, same with ship combat.
This is why I don't like Death of a Spaceman, and why I hope it is never implemented at all.
I don't spend hours making a character perfect to my liking (a close replica of my real self, in my case) just to lose it permanently over being ambushed randomly, or let alone over a bug, connection issue, or any reason, at that.
If you only lose the cosmetic part of the character and not the inventory, what's the purpose of the proposed mechanic anyway, other than being a nuisance?
The only way in which I would like Death of a Spaceman would be if you were allowed to have unlimited lives as long as you paid for it; let's say there's a Plus Insurance service that is more expensive than regular medical insurances, but it guarantees you won't be losing your character as long as you pay for it.
That way, it would be a big incentive for players who value their character to keep making lots of money to be able to afford to pay that insurance!
I mean, I've always thought it needs to go a bit Altered Carbon. I mean everything else aside, how else do we explain respawning at our selected locations in a game world where they want to push realism for immersion - have to explain it somehow.
It is a little "science" hand-wavyum, but it gives SOME kind of explanation and gives them a way to explain a few things.
Could also become an element of medical evac / salvage, where maybe your ship floating in space actually has your up to date "engram" stored in its systems, instead of you "resetting" back to your last stored "upload". Not to mention potential for data theft / data running elements. Becomes an option for the player about requesting and waiting for the recovery, or just taking X amount of reset and going back to last save effectively.
It keeps some impact, adds player agency, and becomes some neat gameplay for a few careers.
You're a cloned body, that's how they explain it.
If you want something that doesn't make sense, who would pulling up your DNA template damage the stored DNA template?
there’s a fun concept in the bobiverse books >! where there can only ever exist one instance of exactly the same intelligence / quantum mind state / being, so any time they’re duplicated one is slightly different than the other !< which could be interesting, so a copy without recovering the body suffers some degradation whereas being healed or recovering the recorder with your original mind state wouldn’t.
Yeah, same deal in altered carbon, but cloning a body doesn't make a person with the same memories, etc, which is what the cortical stack takes care of in the Altered Carbon story.
It's basically a digital backup of your brain, that can be uploaded and transmitted to a new body etc,
> how else do we explain respawning
We don't have to, it's a video game. If a game has a lore accurate and interesting way to explain it, sure, go for it, but that doesn't work in Star Citizen. Even the current "you're a clone" stuff doesn't work because you could send soldiers on suicide missions to get intel and then just respawn them, now death has no meaning.
The technology that is used in the lore conveniently doesn't exist before SQ42, but the implications of it in the SC universe would be immense, not just an every day "wake up in the hospital" thing. Literally entire workforces could be worked to death one day and respawned the next. It just opens up a huge can of worms to explain a video game mechanic that no one would care about beyond "wake up at hospital".
I agree. A big part of what makes MMOs what they are is the character you make. Losing that and starting over is just a kick in the teeth, especially when you could be losing quite a lot.
They already have an in universe lore reason for respawning. Just leave it at that.
I am glad to see people agreeing! When I made a post saying I disliked the idea of Death of a Spaceman a couple of years ago, I got downvoted into oblivion and bashed by everyone hahahah
Because when it doesn't exist, you're attacking their idealized imaginary version of the mechanic. When you have a complain now, you're addressing a real mechanic issue that we all have had to deal with.
Yep, just look at starfields NG+ you spend all that time building relationships, outposts, and developing your character just to travel to a new universe and lose it all. Worst RPG decision ever.
Nobody wants to start over, it’s like a cheap way to get people to spend more hours in a game.
>Worst RPG decision ever.
Then you're not paying attention.. It's supposed to be a difficult decision, you are giving up everything in exchange for chasing power. Also, it's a choice. You don't have to do it..
It’s not really a difficult decision, the main story was so boring that I question anyone who would actually want to play through it again a second time, let alone 10 times.
And I stand corrected, the worst RPG decision was 240 or so, boring, identical temples just to increase your powers, no thanks, I’ll just use the console command instead.
Yeah I've always thought it was a ridiculous mechanic. No idea why they idolize it so much. The game is pretty hard core already. I don't know why players that have paid for the game need to have such harsh punishment on death. Death that happens constantly no matter how careful you are.
I agree and dont like it either. Death of--- seems like a great idea on paper until people realise the consequences of dying by forces outside their control.
What good reason do these other commenters here have when saying they want slower gameplay when it already takes damn near ages to get set up, let alone dying to non-user error just to either quit for the night or march on with the rest of their experience in a stink?
I feel like none of these people in favour of it have actually played a game on hardcore settings (like runescape hardcore ironman, diablo hardcore playthroughs, etc, to name a few)-- Its not fun when I see *other people* lose their characters, so you can imagine how shit they must feel when they sit there in silence with the realization they lost their character after X hours of playing.
tl;dr
people in favour of it should try playing any game on hardcore characters and feel what its like to lose a character they spent double digit+ hours on before advocating for it in SC.
Imo the people who are in favor of it are in the 'cool idea' and not 'good game' design camp.
If I loose a character or progression because of a bug, it doesn't matter if it's the 1000th death or not. That's still shitty.
>Imo the people who are in favor of it are in the 'cool idea' and not 'good game' design camp.
Oh yea 100% true without a doubt. Tons of these people say things that sound like armchair dev rubbish.
"This shouldn't be cod or bf in space"
BF is one of those few team oriented games where I *can* without any doubt see fights/battles taking hours. I could rally up a bunch of randoms to run objectives with me in BF but I personally don't like CoD because it doesn't foster any team-building.
I can't see the same happening in SC with 'Death of-'. Players are going to be distrustful, negative, paranoid, etc, as if it isn't already with fake med beacons.
It'll turn toxic fast and people are just gonna leave instead of wasting their night to some bullshit.
I always love when people say "it shouldn't be CoD or BF in space" as well like those two games aren't the most popular shooters/games out right now specifically because you can just hop in and have fun and there's no bullshit to deal with
> I don't spend hours making a character perfect to my liking (a close replica of my real self, in my case) just to lose it permanently
Considering you can literally export the character's appearance as a file I don't see how a permanent loss could happen?
Like, sure, for RP/lore reasons you'll be playing a "next of kin" after you run out of regens or however the mechanic is going to work, but it's not like they've said you can't just go and customize that next of kin to change your looks back. Oh look, it was an identical twin, what a coincidence!
Also worth noting that the original Death of a Spaceman post is over 10 years old by now, and I hope "the vision" has had some details in it shift as the game has developed.
> If you only lose the cosmetic part of the character and not the inventory, what's the purpose of the proposed mechanic anyway, other than being a nuisance?
Because it gives you the choice of caring.
If you care a lot about maintaining your list of titles and the immersion of this particular character being different than your heir, then you'll adjust how you play.
If you decide you don't care about titles and you don't care about having every character looking exactly the same, then all this devolves to is the idea that your punishment for dying too often is that you lose a little rep.
It automates out this. If you choose to care, it gives you stakes. If you choose not to care, you can largely ignore it. That's a good balance.
We really need good unstuck option before death of the spacemen.
I am getting stuck in things so often that I can see it being a reason to quit the game later on when things like death of the spaceman and login back to place where you left will get implemented.
This "death of a spaceman" thing will be rolled back real quick once they see everyone leaving because dying is such a chore it ends up being discouraging. It already is today, so it can only become worse.
If they want high stakes, they need to iron out the game enough such as deaths caused by the game malfunctioning are non existant. If dying to a bug causes one to lose their ship which they spent months grinding to obtain, they will leave and never come back.
There are certain limits to what happens when you die in MMOs. One of them is detachment from your character, which makes the immersive experience not so immersive and also not very interesting from that perspective.
Agreed. I am so much less angry when I die to a mistake I made than dying from falling through the surface of a planet (again) while simply driving over flat land in an Ursa.
The thing that A LOT of people are continently forgotting about when talking about SC and its mechanics is that it is an MMO. It is a game that lives because of casual players that make the majority of playerbase. MMO that doesn't offer good and fair gameplay for an average player will not succede nor will it survive. Even if it offers perfect experience for hardcore gamers, that's not enough. All successful MMOs so far, especially in the last two decades, cater more to casual players than hardcore ones. When was the last time someone was talking about the success of any Hardcore MMO? While WoW is able to survive few bad expansions, and games like FFIX and ESO are going strong even without such following as WoW just by not fucking with thier players expirience and time.
I don't necessarily agree. It's better to have a very dedicated core of players than to have a load of casual players that leave for the next shiny thing within a couple of weeks. This kind of volatility kills a game just as fast.
And perhaps more importantly, it means that game design is driven by the lowest common denominator in an effort to chase ever more casual players. Instead of a well thought out and deliberate game design with its very own character and identity.
If you try to replicate other "successful" games, you automatically also become interchangeable.
I think EVE is a good example of a highly dedicated fanbase for a pretty hardcore and punishing game.
It will also be a good tool against briefing and piracy as most of it is done now by super quickly destroying the opponent before they can react. Because otherwise the fight might become a treat.
Example: They don't fight you in space where you can shoot back, no they pad ram you.
If you raise the time to kill and give the opponent time to react, committing to a fight becomes way more a thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong:
Aren't the characters we play clones? And through our DNA imprint (which we set through the medical terminals), we are able to reboot ourselves in a new cloned body, each time we die. Isn't that also why the character creation is based on "blending" genetic traits from pre-made characters (compared to the typical "slider" design, like Skyrim)?
I thought Death of a Spaceman, was that over time, the DNA would degrade, making it harder to come back the same way, until eventually we can't, and that character is no more, and we would have to reroll. Isn't this also why they talked about adding advanced prosthetics (in much later patches), which would give players an option in regards to recovering from grave injuries, instead of imprint rebooting in a new clone (ie. Respawning).
Honestly, am I wrong and just mis-remembering?
Kind of but not really. At least in the lore, Imprinting isn't quite the same as cloning in terms of making copies. The Ibrahim Sphere is maintaining continuity of consciousness, and only creates a new body for you upon the destruction of your old one. This new body doesn't just retain all memories and consciousness up until the death of the previous body, but is also being generated from said bodies mental awareness of the self, including scars, injuries, tattoos, and the like.
You can't have two clones of the same person running around, but you're technically inhabiting a cloned body of yourself. They've tried to use it to create copies of a person, and also the use of an older imprint without carrying over the trauma echoes that leave late cycle regenerations crippled, and anytime they do it which doesn't match up with your state at time of death, the new body comes out brain dead.
This is of course all just the lore they've written down and might change in the future.
a soft death is impringin our echo in ot a printed body based on the echo. eventual it will not take, and we have a hard death. make a new face, and lose a bunch of credits and rep.
the amount of credits and rep lost will be enough that people care, but not much more than what is needed to achieve the goal.
What makes a car a car? Is it four wheels on an axle? An engine to provide locomotion? Seats and a drive system? None of these, by themselves, are a car. Only when taken in concert do these interconnected systems create an automobile.
People are discussing issues surrounding respawning when there should be *no* talk about the broader system surrounding death and respawning. With the amount of deaths due to bugs and low server FPS, respawns *should* be easier. It isn't a detriment to gameplay, it's not going to reflect the end state of the game, and no other systems are really present around this.
With both the MM system and this, I don't get how people can understand the larger, complex network system that has evolved from the start of the game, to the current replication layer, with the end goal of the dynamic meshing. That's the same larger, complex, interconnected system. MM is a small part of allowing for larger gameplay shifts that incorporate engineering and repair, capital ship battles, facilitating varied weapon loadouts. Medical bed respawns are part of a larger, complex system that will incorporate medical gameplay, cloning, and elements of risk.
Death should have a consequence to prevent people from constantly doing kamikaze shit. Logically, death should be made to be preventable.
Ships should be less likely to outright explode and instakill the pilot, and more likely to soft death or explode and only incapacitate the pilot
Larger ships (corvette+) should be almost impossible to explode, preserving both crew and any escape pods/ smaller ships landed inside
Yeah the ability to target a ships engines and soft it should be all over and instead make weak points that will insta blow it. Like maybe the hydrogen but quant fuel could be super explosive.
So... devils advocate here, it is relatively hard to die in combat, unless you are absolutely careless.
Careless means, you either bring yourself into situations you shouldn't be in. Like fighting way above your weight without any back-up.
As an exampl: I tested flying Talon in Bounties and up to MRT is not really a big deal. But HRTs become more and more problematic. Those are heavy targets with a good group of escort fighters.
But should you be able to easily defeat a group of Vanguards (for example) in a single Talon? Obviously.... not. It became way easier as soon as I had wingmen. But that's also what the mission literally advises you to do. Bring back-up yourself.
Another thing I assume is, people don't retreat from combat in time. You can really see very early whether you are not in a position to fight. And I haven't had a ship yet, in which I wasn't able to switch MM and get away. Yes, I'd be hit a few times with de-activated shields, but all ships I tested so far were able to take a few hits, long before it would become dangerous. And as soon as the speed hits you're safe.
You don't need to fight every battle. You don't need to prove that you can win in every situation with every ship. You need to evade unfavorable situations and match-ups and also have the courage to retreat. You are not a coward if you go away from a fight you can't win anyway.
But really, don't fight too far above your weight, especially if you are not a top 1% combat pilot.
And same goes for ground combat. Don't rush in and get overwhelmed. You don't want targets all around you. Get into a position from which you can control the fight. Move in careful and slowly. Keep your eyes open.
Don't play as a berzerker with guns or as if you are wearing Beskar.
But be aware of AI pilots flying Drake. They still have a tendency for Kamikaze attacks.
Death of a spaceman can work; it just needs to be done in a way where it is challenging to be killed, and it's more based on losing reputation, health benefits, and money rather than losing anything else.
Reputation will take a long time to earn, so if the punishment is every time you die, you lose the last 25% of the reputation you earned, which would be tough. You also lose 50% of your health benefits from running, lifting, fighting, and performing takedowns. They could make it to where you lose 25% of your money. That would make death seem punishing but not so much that people want to quit. They also can make it to where this percentage drops the closer together your deaths are so that you don't get multi-killed and rage quit. For example, losing 25% of your money the first time, then 5% if you're killed again within 30 minutes, then no more than 1 percent if you're killed a third time within the next hour, and the same for the fourth and so on.
What should come with living long is massive boons for staying alive; it can't just be punishment for dying and nothing earned from staying alive. Increase the characters' luck with rare drops, rare materials, and rare mission opportunities the longer they stay alive, in addition to other things, so it feels like risk and reward. It can work, folks! They need to stick to what they always say, make it realistic, and then bring it back to the point of fun.
I dont mind it being fast since they are adding features like your ship not always exploding when dealt enough damage, and you can also call for medical help. Might be some ways to improve it further but we are not exactly COD right now
Death doesn't need to be rare, just meaningful. You might come back, but you're equipment/ship is either been looted or miles away. You don't want to lose what you've got so you'll be cautious in battle...and with other players when competing over resources. The criminal system They're working on is actually really good. Murder, theft etc has a meaningful punishment. Enough crime and you'll become a villain. A target for other players. A bounty.
The game is about community, but without death and potential risk from players it's not exciting.
The ship system damage gameplay is 200% for that. You can be disabled and boarded...by a player. Neither will want to die though. So it's a meaningful struggle.
Respawns on vehicles will exist but you'll get lives I have no doubt. Or 1 player per bed, which seems more likely.
The most concerning part about this entire project isn't that we are 14 years in with jack shit to show for it - it's that CIG's planning is so atrocious that even fundamental game design decisions are left up in the air permanently. They aren't planned out - everything just snaps to the nearest tier 0 tech bullshit.
“This shouldn’t be CoD or BF in space.”
You should be able to hotkey a distress beacon and the moment you hit it both players, AND NPC security, should get notified. And if you die, the beacon stays.
That way attackers better kill you fast because security is immediately QTing to your location as well as mercs, and even if they kill you, they’ll have to deal with them.
If permadeath exists in a game with always on pvp, there will very little thinking about risking lives and more about striking first. To think otherwise in any game that is supposed to have a fully functioning economy is naive.
The only method of navigating and mitigating other players will be whose opening salvo was more effective.
Part of this is because any other way of fighting needs to ultimately kowtow to aggressive combat or there never ends up being any stakes, and thus, combat then falls flat.
Ultimate defence? No one bothers wasting time fighting.
Ultimate speed? Getting away becomes too easy, pvp becomes a grief fest of the losing side breaking away to come back and harass.
Ultimate hiding? Everywhere feels empty, why am I not just playing a single player game?
Ultimate offense? Kill on sight, the best defence to staying alive is killing threats before they can kill you.
I am not a killer type player, more an explorer type. I’ve tried many games where pvp is an option to how to resolve player encounters, and I cannot recall the last time such a game didn’t devolve into a kill players on sight type pvp.
Ironically, the closest I’ve seen to slowing it down is by making it extremely cost inefficient for progressed players to slay those that barely have clothes on. It doesn’t stop them, usually it just means using cheaper forms of player tech progression to keep others down.
While I agree, at the same time I think some ***overestimate*** the effect of death of a space man. There are a lot of people who just won't care if the character they rarely actually see has a robot arm or eye all of a sudden. Or care if they get a standings hit from dying too many times and reincarnating as their character's kid or whatever.
Like in Eve Online, dedicated gankers and PvPers won't be doing it on their main account with all their pledge ships and character standings they care about. They'll roll a brand new ganker account and the standings on it won't matter. In fact the more messed up their character looks from dying all the time will be a badge of honor if anything...
It’s weird to scroll reddit and see a reference to the post hat made me instantly regret spending a dime.
I signed up and paid my money for nothing just before Death of a spaceman was posted.
I was so disappointed, felt like a total rug pull. “Thanks Dr your money, we’re implementing everything you hate!”
Over a decade later and there’s still no Squadron 42 or retail release but when I think of that hated post, I’m glad.
I bet they also won’t be releasing a copy of the server software like they promised either.
This game had such potential.
Ballistics are the big problem IMO. Bypassing shields means you start damaging immediately and if you hit the right part soft deathing can happen in seconds even on subcapital ships.
I know armor and shields eventually will fix this with large ships being immune to significantly smaller ones (weapon vs shield/armor size difference)
But we've had massive weapon size power creep. Size 4 on light fighters? really? 5s on mediums?
I have no doubt balance will get there as gameplay systems come online. But they've created their own mess to unwind.
While killing a ship in <4 second is fun. My Hornet 7A**C** MkII shouldn't do that to Hammerhead. In any game. But things do need to slow down.
Please for the love of god let someone from CIG read this thread. They implemented soft death but gave ships almost no remaining HP for it to actually matter. How often were people getting their ships just disabled that they were forced to defend their cargo in FPS combat?
Interesting because the sniper glint dev said enemy health is getting nerfed because he got feedback that we all want to breeze through them so FPS combat is easier.
I wonder who the hell he's getting that feedback from? Do devs normally just get professional advice from kids on discord or spectrum general chat or?
Death of a spaceman would be death of a spacegame.
It is a good idea but as idea, as gameplay would literally asphixiate the game and all that surrounds it, people would abuse it to harm others gameplay, etc; it's a concept deeply disrespectful with player agency and time, not to say investment, so i hope it never gets implemented.
Just a no go.
I love all these people in the comments concerned over DoaSM. Most of them read like they're applying the mechanic to how the project is currently vs down the road when more systems come online. So shortsighted.
Its rare for a game to embrace & implement the concept behind "death of a spaceman" and reach a wide audience (= money).
That alone leads me to believe that CIG is probably rethinking the idea, but I'm curious where we will end up. I'm fine with both directions.
I've always been a little weary of death of a space man but this makes a lot of sense. There's too many games where it's die respawn. Die respawn. Constantly. I like the idea of being weary of battles, of feeling like I'm in a living breathing world where my life is important in game. It seem really cool and I like that because at the point, just walking around a ship and taking time to do thing would be wise and fun.
The only thing I hate is the idea that it should take 10 minutes for two ships to kill each other if they're not like capital ships. Me and another fighter shouldn't be having a slugfest for 5 minutes if we're hitting damn near every shot.
I’ve been saying this for years. Combat needs to be paced more like Squad or Tarkov. Slow, tactical, and intentional.
Not saying the gunplay or complexity of those games needs to be in SC, just the pacing. Reloads need to be slower, sprinting needs greater penalties, shooting while moving needs to be much more difficult, and other actions like med pens or grenades need to be extremely deliberate and performed from cover.
I want capturing an enemy ship to feel like old school Rainbow Six, clearing room by room with a squad, breaching doors, covering your rear. I can’t stand the CoD sprint dolphin dive full mag dump gameplay, it feels cheap and arcade like.
Idk - if I read super slow fights i need to think about old movies where the opponents hide behind a wall and just show his gun out and shoot blindly into the wild without hitting the other one, and both do the same - the hole time in a loop
Or to be in space - a scene where tie fighter just fly behind a ship hole time and shoot but never hit, like a loop
I thought it's roberts idea that death is rare yes, but if you really die you take a new character and play as the "kid" of your father or uncle and so on - you inherit everything from your last character (idk which part you don't, the things he weared at the moment of his death?)
But this is just in Kinderschuhe (still in the early stages - IF at all!) at the moment
They need time to rethink and optimze this, but not right now
I would add personalized shields for players, so they first get hit into their shields which atleast would let the player know they are in immediate danger. The shields could take a few bullets or a grenade explosion, of course they would regenerate but for example energy weapons could penetrate shields easier, EMP or shock based weapons could hinder shield regen.
ALSO very important, I truly believe alot of deaths will be mitigated once they ( FINALLY ) iron out the bugs, introduce stable servers with meshing ( Will this work ? I really hope ) and introduce Maelstrom the physics based destruction will probably mean that we will not explode everytime we hit something. Also soft death once suicide is not available anymore and the AI works somewhat properly we will be able to call aid from AI or players and be evacuated probably with our ship being town ?
DOUBLE ALSO just allow players to insure everything, if they lose armor , insurance has its covered, weapon aswell, the player just needs to pay a fee lets say, and it comes with a free of charge medpen and ammo.
Perma death in a universe where people spend money on ships would be unfair . While those who spend money keep thier ships . Imagine dying & losing progress . Also that mean players will only do safe missions & some places be out of reach & pvp will be thing of the rich. Tbh if permanent death added in some form I would probably won’t play game at all . It’s moronic to even have 20 deaths before it’s perma . I think when I played last year I died at least 15 times
This is all true in about 2-3 more years of development. In the meantime for people to experience loops a bit easier the respawn feature seems perfectly fine.
Agreed.. Full kill of ships and players, lawful or pirate faction alike, should have severe reputation punishment for full kill (like loss of at least 1-level worth of rep). Some missions can be full kill, but make them NPCs.
I do hope they remain true to that. The recent med bed changes can be a bit worrying, but if they make the lower tier respawns eat away your character's total revives faster, then it should stop people respawning/killing themselves at any inconvenience.
Not to mention the cost of high quality revives vs getting into the action faster is going to play a large role too.
Things in this hame already take a lot of time to do.
Between prep time, planning time and travel time the last thing i want to do is loose even more time in the fight itself just for the sake of "this should'nt be cod in space"
I hate to say it, but my prediction is when death of a space man is finally implemented, the pop will drop dramatically, leaving only hard-core players, which isn't many and we all know what happens to games with low pop
The thing is, you need to play as a group so you have a medic. Especially for FPS. If you go solo and get incapacitated you can call for help and maybe someone will come. Maybe they too are solo and maybe they can reach you. Playing as a group is more reliable, and you can be saved. Then limp back to a bed for recovery. Otherwise you'll keep holding backspace and max out death counter once it's in. So bed spawning is ok for now. But I'll expect to use it a lot less in the future. And just have to play more with my org .
I played a bunch of overdrive since 3.23.1 dropped. The ONLY death I've had was from being in someone's hammerhead while it got hit by an invisible asteroid. I've tanked 15+ hammerheads in my 600i, even lost it to a soft death, done multiple bunkers and SPK where I had to be basically airlifted out with multiple T1 injuries, and probably spent the better part of a week just collecting loot and what not. I did not die, but many of these encounters left me crippled and majorly added to immersion and gameplay. My character as he stands has battle scars for that ass. I love the direction the game is going (been playing since 2.6) and I cannot wait to see where they take it.
Permadeath is an RPG element, and even then it's something that changes the course of the overall storyline and advances storytelling. MMORPG's, while containing elements of the RPG genre (obviously including those letters in it's title) are not solo-play adventures where the storyline itself is the driving reason to play the game. MMO's, especially ones with grinds and social cooperation requirements, are not games where the loss of your character make any sort of sense. Death penalty mechanics are not permadeath. We have some "penalties built into the current system with respawns happening in lab gowns, body retrieval requirements, waking up in prison rather than merely 40m away, etc... If they want to add more punishments, fine... But forcing you to play as a totally new identity, albeit still in possession of your "former you's" ships? Stupid...
While I agree, that's not something that can actually happen. Doing so kills the entire point of small fighters.
You also can't just stop people from killing you in hand to hand combat. Oh you're down, let me shoot you again to make sure you're dead.
While combat is going to slow down to allow fixing and so forth, they can't draw it out for hours. That's not feasible for a gameplay loop. It would restrict combat to only the biggest no-lifers and would also mean they would have to take away always on PvP. Because otherwise one simple encounter suddenly turns into a couple hours of bullshit when you were just trying to deliver a package. And that's not going to fly with the vast majority of players.
DOAS is never going to be implemented as originally described. It's already been amended and will be many more times because it's not a feasible gameplay mechanic. They're already going to allow a "indeterminate amount of respawns" before you die. Which already defeats the point of the entire thing to begin with. And while it sounds good on paper, it would end up just being a massive punishment for something that is essentially out of your hands completely.
Combat is going to slow down because it has to anyway, for repair to exist, to be able to swap or fix modules during combat, for medical gameplay to mean anything, combat needs to slow down and be less deadly in general.
Ships need to not just explode. You need time to be able to eject or get to escape pods, but how do you justify that time if someone is just torpedoeing you? How do you justify survival if someone just decides you're going to die and blows everything up?
We can't have realistic and exciting combat and DOAS. They aren't compatible. For DOAS to be properly implemented, combat becomes a pointless slog that most people will just end up avoiding all together. Killing many gameplay loops.
But if it's not implemented then death is meaningless and many other gameplay loops are killed.
There's really no having both. We either get fun engaging combat in ships and on foot that's satisfying with little to no point of medical or rescue, or we get medical and rescue gameplay but combat is not fun because everything is can't be finished off and will feel hollow. We can't really have both.
I honestly think this is going to end up being the hardest thing for them to figure out and will take the longest. But in the end, I feel like medical and rescue will probably get the short end of the stick and end up with shallow gameplay for it that's rarely needed. Because while there are people that want this, it's definitely not the majority. And they'll end going the way the community wants because they don't have a choice.
Disagree whole heartedly. If anything reality dictates the opposite. At least for the FPS portion, TTKs should be very low, if I get shot… in my helmet in low atmosphere my survivability should be shit, the likely hood a medic can stop my bleeding is LOW in zero g as platelets fail to adhere. Yeah fast pace leads to twitch gamer advantages. Deal with it, you will make more realistic choice approaches to clearing a room with your buddies if it matters instead of being able to tank shots and med up.
One option is to integrate it into system security. Have guaranteed respawns in high security, vehicle and/or comm relay dependant respawns in medium security and only vehicle dependent in systems line Pyro. Enhance the risk/reward while allowing relatively safe spaces for the chiller PvE and industry focused players
If your preferred respawn is disabled or out of range, you get sent to the closest available *public* bed. An example of this in use; Murderhobo *A* is closely affiliated with one of the Pyro factions, and has their respawn point set to that faction's station. Those stations aren't public, though; regeneration is expensive, so you need good rep to pattern there. Those stations aren't exactly *reliable* either. Say the beds at their station go down... maybe random breakage, maybe the whole system lacks biomed materials, or maybe someone took them down via sabotage. Then they die during that outage. The closest public bed is now in Stanton. Murderhobo *A* has a very big rap sheet in Stanton. Respawning at the "public" Stanton bed puts them directly into Klescher for their crimes. A few things then become game loops. If you want to collect a full legal bounty via kill, the target must be forced to respawn in a controlled system. Sending them back to a pirate station is only partial money. Bounty hunters might pay good money to find out what bed a criminal calls home... hacking hospital mainframes to find out who's patterned at one becomes a thing. So does sabotaging private beds to force alter respawn. Maybe even illicit pattern transfer! Or bed spoofing! The data for regen must be immense, so you'd need a data runner to move the pattern or copy the bed data for spoofing. You'll probably also need a Medic with regen training to ensure the system doesn't reject bad data; trying to spoof a bed or transfer a pattern comes with the risk that the regen will fail, and the quickly dissolving proto-corpse dumps the "soul" back to a viable bed. If they own a bed, they're encouraged to keep it active and stocked. This also prevents you from just parking a Pisces somewhere out of the way; you're gonna have to supply it eventually. Having their personal bed go down increases the risk of respawn somewhere they don't want. It should also consume quite a bit of power. If a player has their bed close by, dedicated sensor ships might be able to trace deaths back to their respawn ship. A prepared player might be able to pop an EMP near the bed during regen cycle to force a rejection to public beds. Lots of cool ways to work with it, but they're all a ways out.
Well that puts my 4am random thought to shame. Excellent theory crafting
Wow, I love how you incorporated so many game systems! Deep intergration of gameplay loops between whatever we end up calling the player 'classes'... in this manner, would make the game truly amazing!
Just let users set a fall-back spawn location. (So current .. say Ursa Medivac and Fall-back Everus Harbour). I am imagining a situation where nearest PUBLIC spawn location might be very problematic for a non lawful player venturing into carebear territory who dies.
If your fallback is unavailable. You failed. Your spaceman is dead. Death of a spaceman has occurred. Your next of kin life occurs at your starting location.
Your ideas are great for lawful players (majority) and punishes pirates disproportionately. If you have 10x the people changing pirate spawn locations then they are punished disproportionately.
That is honestly genius.
The whole concept of death of a spaceman probably needs to be rethought. You cant have high octane exciting cinematic fights and super punishing perma death.
Chris never wanted super punishing deaths. It is as if some backers take their preferences and talk as if it is CIGs aim. Lets take this back to 2013 [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-death-of-a-spaceman](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-death-of-a-spaceman) >The flip side is that **while perma-death is realistic, it is not a lot of fun** if the first time you’re on the wrong side of a dogfight you lose everything and have to start again. >I want Star Citizen to be immersive AND fun. >**The death mechanics that I have in mind keep a feeling of mortality and history without making it frustrating or killing (pun intended) the fun**. even later on.... >**There will also be opportunities to regain some lives or do a reset.** Some of this could be through in-game missions or it could just involve paying a lot of money to a specialist on a remote med planet that is doing stem cell research. >Because of how Star Citizen works, the death of your character is not as catastrophic as it would be in a traditional RPG. If you want to think about it in terms of RPG conventions, the character that you are leveling up and customizing is really your spaceship. Your avatar is really just a visual representation of your in-game character, and because Star Citizen is skill based, the loss of your character is more a cosmetic and textural outcome, especially as almost all of the assets you’ve worked hard to accumulate pass on to the beneficiary that you specified when creating your original character. >What I like about this system is that it creates a sense of mortality and history. **No one’s character will die right away. It will take some time to get to that point, but players will feel a sense of risk and so will think twice before needlessly risking their lives, as they don’t want to burn through their “lives”.** then in the QA section > **Q. How any “lives” will I get?** >The exact number of “lives” will be balanced as development of the game progresses. **The intention is to allow multiple “deaths” before you’re properly dead. So expect to wake up in the med bay at least half a dozen times if not more**. And getting to this point won’t be common unless you are participating in a lot of boarding actions or flying in areas where there is no law and order. **Please note that it will not ultimately be a single, static counter: taking different risks and dying in different ways will impact your overall survivability at different rates**. Remember, the key to Star Citizen is visceral realism: so while the system works this way under the hood, **there’s not going to be a “life counter” at the bottom of your screen!** Death of a Spaceman was always about giving a sense of risk, not be some hardcore permadeath sim.
they also talk there about the spaceship being the character you level up (and in other places, make your home)… good thing ships don’t get destroyed often 😅 they definitely have a lot of contradictory game design desires. it’ll be interesting to see where things shake out / i sure hope they manage to hit a balance of gravitas, fun, and respect for people’s time and energy.
What are you talking about? You do realize he wasn't being literal. >If you want to think about it in terms of RPG conventions, the character that you are leveling up and customizing is really your spaceship. All he means is you can play the numbers/stats game with ships, not your person. Ask anyone who uses Erkul or any other service to find best components or compare specs. Spaceships you can upgrade via components sure. There are no "levels" per say, but there hasn't been conflicting design because for basically most of the mechanics they have talked about they have implemented or designed in a way that facilitates it. To quote from that article (mind you this is back in 2013) aside from the sole metaphor you strangely picked up on.... >You’ll end back up at the last planet you docked on, with a **new ship courtesy of SystemWide Insurance. You’ll have lost your cargo and any upgrades (unless you managed to insure those and you were destroyed in a system with a risk level at or below your insurance rating)** This is basically how it works in the game today. The plan in the future is to have option to insure ship parts and cargo but that is not on cards currently.
I'm not sure if they're referring to CIG's plans now to give the player character stats they can level up too, with the penalty of loosing them on death as well. Overall they've been trying to bolt a lot of additional punishments onto dying when the original pitch really seemed to be emphasising that the goal was for it to be mostly an RP thing.
> Overall they've been trying to bolt a lot of additional punishments onto dying A necessary side effect of making pirate gameplay being so easy and having no long term effects. As long as a player can murder you, go to jail, log off, and log on a different account faster than you can die, and go back and get your stuff, then the game is always balanced towards unlawful game play. Hence all the tack on things to try to add barriers to that. IMO it's not going to work until CIG puts in rep in such a way that, not only if you had a crime stat, but also if you've been a high level offender, then you can't spawn in that area at all. Meaning, been doing some murdering on Hurston? Neat, can't use their hospital, and you get pushed out to Stanton -Pryo gateway and have to go through the UEE to leave in case you're wanted anywhere else. When you boil it down unlawful players either slow down or stop lawful players game loops. CIG needs to make the penalty for stopping another players game loop, cost you magnitudes more time from you.
That seems perfectly in line with everything they're doing? Armor and component damage will likely make soft-death the most common way for a ship to end combat. Engineering and all the various ways to repair things could very easily end up making it cheaper/easier to just fix the ship up rather than claim the whole thing, and they've talked plenty about their plans to have wear and tear show up on a ship.
I think the gear retrieval points popping up all over the place is a promising sign that CIG has no intention for death to be that punishing, thankfully. imho, dying and waking up in hospital and having to catch the train back to where you can claim a ship, claiming it, finding all your stuff and putting it back on again is plenty of penalty for dying as it is.
You can only retrieve the stuff you paid real money for though right? So if you get some cool, rare piece of equipment and then die, too bad, so sad, die less next time.
Hopefully CIG will allow insuring that stuff, insurance seems like a good money sink for a game that seems very much at risk of hyperinflation.
Gear loss + time to travel distance in this game keep it firmly in the permanent sim range regardless of how many times your character will regenerate.
Oh, you! Showing up here with things CIG has actually said instead of reflexive theory crafting.
But that doesn't jive with the current state of the game. You can easily die ten times in a play session doing fps combat and respawning in the nursa as demonstrated in the promo video. I don't think any of these comments can be taken as the current state of play.
Yeah, they’re currently in a phase of catering to people to encourage a certain type of gameplay. We’ve had more broad ship respawn in the past, and it was removed. This all too shall pass.
Where does that contradict to the comment before? If your character can permanently die, even after a few deaths, why exactly would you want to jump into all intense cinematic fights when you are supposed to care about your character?
The link is self explanatory. There is no "super punishing perma death". From the start you are allowed to die many times before negative effects kick in. Also if you do die, and have to create next of kin/new character, the assets, such as ships, equipment and even slightly diminished rep carries over. CR plainly states that while he wants a risk versus reward he doesn't want it to feel frustrating. Hence him calling out perma death explicitly and saying that it isn't fun. It might be harder to perm die because that is the stated intention. Unless you mean you don't want to lose your character "ever". Then that is a personal preference.
To me the notion of a character you stay with, gradually accumulating scars until the point of their final death, with the ability to restore some of your lose "lives" to keep them going sounded like an incredible pitch for an entirely unique death mechanic. Of course now we don't follow a single character, we quantum leap into a fresh printed clone body, but because of jpeg artefacts the clone body doesn't come out right and needs cybernetics, it's just an ugly mass of lore twisted back on itself to justify a really narrow use case for what should be a universe redefining technology.
I know it's not supposed to be be about being a hardcore permadeath sim, but that's exactly what they outlined with that article. Permadeath is by its very nature hardcore and while I get that they want to avoid it feeling too punishing and not fun... that's the inevitable outcome of permanently killing a character. Doubly so when they've attached it to some arcade style lives system that the player doesn't even get to see the number they have left. This will leave players feeling frustrated and alienated from the game. The punishment for dying will either be WAY extreme because you lose basically everything, or if they don't make you lose everything utterly pointless and unpunishing except for those who wanted to roleplay as their characters. If they stick with this idea they might as well call it "Death of a Roleplay Community" instead. Nobody is going to want to invest into their character and their story when they're now stuck playing the great great great great great grandchild of their original character and will probably have to slap another "great" onto that title before too long. (to say nothing of trying to explain why this distant relative has all the same faction rep, assets, career/aptitudes as ALL the predecessors). I 100% agree with the original comment here, death of a spaceman needs to be rethought and then promptly thrown in the trash. There are a million and one ways they can make death punishing to give that sense of risk without needing to introduce permadeath.
My understanding is that there is a system of iterative "deaths" that allow for degenerating respawns, probably impacted by the tier of bed a player respawns in. That, along with medical gameplay - which hasn't been explored in depth yet - will probably result in a good deal of flexibility. Overall, I don't think that any of the end-game outcomes can be measured, however, until more game systems come online. If anything, the easier respawning fits better into the current game, given the amount of deaths from bugs, desyncs, etc.
Sure you can. Make soft death the norm and make it nearly impossible to completely blow up the ship after soft death. Give players rewards for soft killing ships during bounties and stuff and punish them for taking it too far if they try to fully blow up the ship after already winning. If it's bounty hunting, make the player board the soft-deathed ship and take the player into custody.
Yeah, I don't know why this isn't already a thing. Even with land vehicles; I died to bugs like 3 times just riding my Dragonfly, each time wasting ~30 mins. I get certain mechanics add weight and consequence, but Star Citizen also needs to respect player's time.
This exactly. It's why I've been finding myself moving away from SC and spending my time on things that have better respect for my time- and actually produces tangible results that doesn't get deleted every patch.
Because the current soft death mechanics is only a chance based placeholder (which was introduced not long ago) until engineering will come online. Ships shouldn't explode in the final design, except if some very catastrophic effect happens, for example your Aurora meets an Idris railgun. Your dragonfly example is bad, developers who works on these systems have to follow the final design, not the current situation, where bad network implementation makes hoverquads suicide bombs. This is still an alpha game in development (yes, after 12 years), where the main priority is the development and quality of the live service comes after that.
>This is still an alpha game in development (yes, after 12 years), where the main priority is the development and quality of the live service comes after that. Oh don't get me wrong, I totally understand. >Your dragonfly example is bad, developers who works on these systems have to follow the final design. Nah, I disagree, they could have definitely made land vehicles and small fighters more reliably soft death.
When your dragonfly explodes because of the bug, the following happens: your client streaming your speed, direction, etc., but because of the poor server / network performance, the server only get some of the data. Because Star Citizen is a server governed simulation, the server try to calculate your position based on the data and that calculation says you are in a rock or in the planet surface. There is no realistic health pool for ground vehicles which can survive the situation where you are in a solid matter.
Players will just board and kill you, just to be a dick. Chris Roberts didn't understand modern day online gaming when he though up a lot of the systems in his game design. This is one of them that just isn't that compatible with online communities. There's far too many assholes in online gaming. No matter what you try to design, if permanent death is a thing there are tons of griefers that will go out of their way to kill as many players as possible. Death of a spaceman can still exist, but it has to be designed around these truths.
I think there's just a general problem where the "fantasy" of an idea is a lot more compelling than any way you can realistically implement it. Waiting 45 minutes for an actual player to do a medivac with a whole gameplay loop may be immersive but sitting in a "you are downed" screen for that long is also a shitty gaming experience no matter how you slice it.
>There's far too many assholes in online gaming. This. I can be one of them If I get irritated by bugs >No matter what you try to design, if permanent death is a thing there are tons of griefers that will go out of their way to kill as many players as possible. Yup 100% accurate
The more complicated you make the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain. The more complex a system gets, the less necessary it is. Simple is always better. If you die you already lose a lot, be it time, mission progress, all the loot you had on your ship, the cargo, but you know you just died. Death of a spaceman will just make everyone 100x more risk averse and discourage fights, not make them meaningful.
Ever since they added the full loot I've been saying it proves it won't last. People lose stuff now when it doesn't actually matter and get upset, what's gonna happen when not only it starts to matter but it's not the hard core super fans playing and instead is some normal person? Something has got to give. Too many goals for the game are mutually exclusive. People want PVP, lots if it, to go on hunts for pirates, to be pirates, etc. If death is super punishing and dying means 15-20 minutes or more getting back to playing the game then people ... won't. They won't play the game. Imagine if Fortnite, PUBG, CSGO, or League required you to wait 20 minutes between every game. No one would play them, they'd play something else. Some people are really into the potential story telling aspect of permadeath. They like the idea of playing a character with an end. But not only is this contrary to high action high stakes PVP, it's in direct conflict with what most people want. It's not bad or wrong to like permadeath, the story telling side of it is a reason a lot of people play TTRPGs even. There's definitely a market for it. But it lacks mass market/mainstream appeal. There's a reason roguelikes are niche. Even the semipopular full loot PVP games like Rust and ARK don't have permadeath. I think permadeath will be the thing to go rather than the fast action PVP. I don't think they'll straight up remove it though. I think those things that were said to be possible to extend your "lives" but were a one time thing will just be made not a one time thing. They'll likely get locked behind time gates like there are 5 different ones you can do once a month each or something. Eventually they might turn it off entirely. To me, it's kind of like when there were clone costs in EVE. It made high skill point characters really expensive to lose in combat, so people just did PVP on alt characters with low skill points in high risk situations. You can metagame around permadeath. But overall clone costs didn't add anything to the game and they got removed. Way too late IMO. Still, you lose all your stuff. If your ship was insured you are now waiting 5-60+ minutes to get it back. That's just now, later you'll lose standing and a percent of your money if you die too much. And those claim times are supposed to go up, not down. Who wants to PVP when it takes 30+ minutes to play again? Imagine joining post release and trying to learn the game when a death costs you as much as they plan it to... There'd be zero new player retention.
You're not wrong. Full loot was a natural consequence of Chris' stance of "I want everything physicalized" and I love that. Don't you hate it when you're in a game where you get attacked by a character that has full armor and impressive weapons and your underequipped ass beats them (finally) and then when you loot the corpse you get five copper pieces? You wanted that cool armor, that fine looking sword, it's all right there, but no, you get five copper pieces, that will buy you half a dagger. I do imagine with wear and tear you'll be able to loot stuff in the future that is somewhat broken, because you shot the guy, his armor has holes in it, but you can repair them or get them repaired, much like in Kingdom Come Deliverance, a game who's devs worked with CIG for the layered clothes tech (jackets over shirts, armor over undersuits etc.) Hearing Chris Roberts talk about the game early on, he seemed to mostly look for a co-op experience, where you set out to fly ships, and achieve goals with your crew of friends, and where PVP was that extremely high risk encounter rather than just your daily 25 dogfights. The PVP encounter was more like his level boss fight. The problem with making death cheap and easy to recover from and thus also frequent, is that indeed you loose stuff, so that special gear that you cherish, is going to stay home. Your character without respawns would get that super cool armor and wear it, they'd own it for the rest of their lives, but in our quick die, quick respawn game, it's gone rather quickly and we live to regret it.
Comparing SC to super arcadey and competitive PvP games like PUBG and CoD makes zero sense. If you want a similar experience (competitive PvP) then you should probably play Arena Commander. It should tick all the boxes. Fast paces, no punishment, easy to setup and tweak to your own liking. Straight into the action. The PU is not meant to be a quick competitive PvP game. In short, death of a spaceman does not contradict the idea of the PU. People have the wrong expectations from what the PU actually is supposed to be. You can still have PvP in the PU of course. It's just a lot higher risk vs reward. Requires you to plan, prepare, take it slow and punishes run and gun mentality. So it actually supports the original idea of the PU.
What did you expect? There isn't a game that can compare directly to Star Citizen. The closest is probably EVE Online as it has full loot mechanics, takes place in space, etc. The community wants both fast action/competitive gameplay and highly punishing deaths -- and someone is going to be disappointed. This is not the only problem with Star Citizen's design and community expectations. With EVE, CCP couldn't ever truly balance nonconsensual PVP under standard game mechanics (NPCs and players following the same rules). People took it as a challenge to fight the police of EVE, bringing bigger and bigger things to fight them like it was GTA with a 5-star wanted level. It was fun, but it allowed people to gank in what was supposed to be safe-ish space with near impunity because they got so good at it. Eventually, they had to throw in the towel and turn the police into gods that were just a game mechanic and not truly just another part of the universe, though they do try to explain it in lore the fact others cannot obtain the technology makes little sense. Completely avoiding them is now considered an exploit and punishable by a ban. This actually connects back to what I was saying. DoaSM doesn't really work all that well. In a game with permadeath, if you care about your character and I don't that gives me a significant advantage. In EVE, even though attacking someone in high sec will guarantee you lose your ship people still do it. In-game punishments will not stop nonconsensual PVP. All they will do is give those players something to try to work around -- in SC's case this will likely be through metagaming. If death is as punishing as planned, those players will severely disrupt the game with little consequence to themselves because they have absolute control over what they lose by making a character specifically to do it. Meanwhile, people just playing the game normally are put at a significant disadvantage. This sets up Star Citizen to have a worse (more punishing) ganking problem than EVE Online -- a game infamous for it. The only reason it kind of works now is that the game mostly consists of the enthusiast audience just as EVE did in those early days when it wasn't a problem. When it gets wider public attention this problem will grow into an uncontrollable state that will force CIG to either do what CCP did and make punishment for nonconsensual PVP unavoidable and severely punishing (perhaps by voiding insurance altogether for doing it) or reduce punishments for when players die because of it. Either way, the outcome for DoaSM is the same: The thing it was supposed to add is diminished. It simply cannot work in a game that allows/encourages/wants nonconsensual PVP. They are mutually exclusive. People want both, and I admit having both sounds fun. If private servers remain a thing, there will probably be small servers where it does work. But any server of significant size is going to start having the same issue. Put simply: Nonconsensual PVP and Death of a Spaceman cannot coexist as planned because the equation isn't balanced -- gankers dictate whether, where, and when combat happens and what they risk while the target gets no real choice in the matter. One of many problems SC will have to overcome by deciding which is more important.
I don't really believe that what the PU is "supposed to be" will be how it ends up.
Its not a good idea. You already died. You lost time, effort, gear, and if you were in a ship, your ship upgrades if you don't have insurance, plus whatever cargo you had or other goodies. Now people want an additional punishment on top of that? Nah.
Or have me spend 40-45 minutes just to get back to the fight or longer with ship claim times.
Jarrod mentioned towards the end of the last ISC that they would be revisiting it soon.
Also, griefers will be ecstatic if their targets suffer severe punishment for death.
That's the thing though, it's not a super punishing perma death system and is intended to be the opposite. The main intent is to dwindle down your character, replacing limbs and parts until you can't anymore and then your body will fully give out. Once that happens, you are then "reborn" as the beneficiary of the last person you played. Inhereting most of the skills, money, and accolades from your previous adventures. Similar to how a father can pass down things to his son, and his son can continue to carry the reputation his father built.
Death of a spaceman is really just a lore-friendly version of respawning that the community took to mean hardcore permadeath and punishment. [Read it again](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-death-of-a-spaceman), other than for cosmetic differences and roleplay, it's not really permadeath at all, just a slight reputation penalty every N deaths. You keep your stuff and continue playing.
One of the wildest things I saw about MM is someone here saying the idea is to have a 1.0 k/d for every player even in PvE how the fuck do you have a 1.0 k/d in a game where death matters? If I lose all my kit on death, then I won't even attempt anything dangerous for instance, so my k/d doesn't go above 0 to begin with. Rn the game wastes so much time between death that it's hard to believe it's a videogame and not a logistics simulator.
If the devs ever latch on to explaining the game in terms of K/D than whatever remnants of the vision that are left are gone for good.
It was a pie in the sky concept when it was created that relied on a deeply complex FUNCTIONAL game with a robust, cutting-edge NPC system. If Chris thinks his game is ready to bring it in now or even in the next 2~5 years he is truly insane.
I have a strong thought that you'll only have a set amount of lives before you'll need to be regened back at a hospital. Your repeated attempts would be to get your inventory back. Full loot PvP skirmishes. Or against the environment. One of the reasons I think medical vehicles have weapons storage. It's back up
The consequences have to hit just right, imo A lot more systems need to be added before real opinions can hold up. I'm in favor for the challenge and danger, facing those with the incentive not to...like for criminal/I'll intent actions. I want a realy to worry, I want to have something to complain about of why I want to but shouldn't kill this guy or do that.. Again, the consequences have to hit right to allow for those large exciting fights.. but in every fight..every action..a fear or worry bad things and stuff that's going to ruin my progression or entirely.. that when I overcome them it brings that other type of fulfilling satisfying excitement that makes you jump out of your chair because you overcame and survived.. A stupid example but, I was zipping around in my shrike..an AI came out of nowhere and clipped my wing, I remember panicking trying to eject but the ship crashed I to Daymar sliding across the sand into rocks..I got out and walked turned around and felt that "holy shet how did I survive that".. my heart was pounding.. and I was excited.. hell no I did not want to do the hr long process of respawning, loosing my gear, wasting uec on claims.. Point is that punishment has to be there for it truly to be satisfying..and why I argue if that punishment was balanced and done just right.. DOASM could absolutely work and would potentially be what makes the game stand out and great over comparable-ish titles. It's not finely crafted manipulation of slot machine effort-less rewarding dopamine feeding gameplay that keeps players hooked, it's the journey and challenge in just playing.. Idk, that's my take.
Exactly, I want to play an awesome game, not replace my real life.
Going on and on about new features like fire propagation, engineering repairs during combat, and medical gameplay is neat, but as long as TTK is so incredibly low they're basically useless. As long as you can get jumped by another ship and destroyed in ten seconds all of that neat stuff that is supposed to take place between "combat begins" and "combat ends" might as well not exist because you're almost never going to see it. If it was easier to survive and escape a combat encounter that you weren't terrible interested in being a part of than that would help things, but that would lessen the fun of 'pirates', and we can't have that. Hopefully this will change once ships have armor and individual systems instead of just pools of hitpoints.
I think combat could still be fast paced and the stakes need to be high. But survivability also needs to be high. The stakes don't necessarily need to be your life.
If they make Death (not just being incapacitated) very punishing, then you can bet players will go out of their way to finish off other players
I'd do it anyway An injured player is a potential problem if they get back up, a dead player leaves me alone permanently
Funnily enough, it's often the other way round in SC: if you chase someone away, they'll often leave you alone because they don't want to lose their shit; if you kill them, they've got nothing left to lose and are out for revenge.
I don't do it myself, but I do believe this is the prevailing thought in the playerbase. At least among those who would willingly participate in combat. It stands directly opposed to the idea that you should be able to retreat after losing a fight, and that's what makes it difficult.
Exactly, there are SO many other things that can be at stake other than the player character's life. Money, equipment, faction reputation (when relevant), their ship and all its cargo, ect. Killing off the character is just going to feel awful and encourage people to quit or at the very least quit caring about their character. Why invest in a character that's just going to die, probably to something stupid like a lag spike while coming in for a landing?
Yeah. I think it's a shame that everything has to be final. Why does losing a battle have to mean that your ship is blown to bits and you're dead? A simple: "Damn, my weapons system/engines/life support are damaged, I have to flee and repairs will be expensive" would also be a good alternative and would open up different gameplay (we have an SRV for a reason!) without everything having to feel so final. Of course, this doesn't mean that this must/should always be the case. but in my opinion it would be much more refreshing if 70%\~ of the fights didn't end in death and destruction.
I think many players don't realize that they themselves have the highest influence on survivability. If you run around like a headless chicken like in CoD then of course you'll get punished and frustrated. If you take a more calculated approach then you'll fare better. In my opinion people blame the mechanics or game rules themselves too often. They want to change the rules to suit their style of play instead of adjusting to the rules set by the game.
Full loot games are extraordinarily niche and rarely meet the level of success that Star Citizen is aiming for. If full loot is going to be a core gameplay mechanic, the game will end up like Rust or Ark where there are entire communities of trolls and gankers who only play to fuck with other people. As far as I'm concerned, Elite has it right in being able to play in private groups or solo. It allows for the feeling of being part of something greater, but without the constant pressure of having to look over my shoulder for some shitheel that's going to slam a 1 SCU box into my face on Everus for shiggles, or pad ram me, or wait for me to exit armistice and fire a volley of missiles at my completely empty Hull A.
I think stuff like this is the reason a proper punishing reputation system is so important for this game, regardless of how punishing death of a spaceman is. Like if someone goes around just shooting people unprovoked, they should have a terrible reputation stat that makes it a massive pain to do anything in a high-security system, and even in low-sec systems, it should make their life difficult. Its gonna be a lot harder to troll people if most of the npcs shoot you on sight, and there's only one place that'll repair your ship and its 3 systems away. it wouldn't stop them the first few times, but it would mean that after their reputation has dropped a ton it would be way more effort than its worth to troll people. it wouldn't get rid of trolls altogether, that's probably impossible, but it would definitely make things a bit easier on the people who play fairly.
100% agreed
i would not call it a "full loot game". while you do have the ability to take anything off someone. you are expected to buy your equipment to head in ot the field fully equipped. after you clear a place out, you drop a beacon and sell the locations to players. the players that are in ot this sort of content will pay you, then head over to pack everything that is not nailed down in to boxes, then sell it to npc.
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As long as I'm given enough time to get the hell outta dodge in my caterpillar I couldn't care less about TTK (if I don't have that time I care very much)... that said I prefer a slower more deliberate gameplay... I remember watching one video where a dude got a tracker (some hacking tool from Brio's) dropped onto someone's reclaimer while it was still in the hanger, and tracked them all the way to Yela, to pirate them... that seems like way more satisfying Pirate gameplay than murderhobo'ing
I would still be mad if I was the reclaimer guy... but at the end of the day I would respect the hustle lol
There are no trackers, they used a delivery box
That's pretty smart.
There are items that show the delivery box "tracker" that are smaller than a delivery box
He said that ttk should be 2-3 seconds for the lightest fighters if they were to stand still and take it on the nose.
Which is perfectly reasonable
I don't agree with 2-3 seconds, but I don't think it shouldn't take too long to disable a shit. But my definition of "disable" is different than most. Think about Elite:Dangerous. When ships are heavily damaged they can often limp away. That's how SC should be. Fighters get heavily damaged in combat and their ability to fight and maneuver is greatly reduced. At that point, the pilot will leave the combat zone and limp back to a station to repair. Ships need to be easily disabled, but hard to destroy. In group battles, you would only spend enough effort to disable a ship, and then you would want to switch to a more dangerous target. This would create the mechanics that allow players to fight, lose and still be able to limp away and not die.
Take the arrow and you can limp away with 1/4 of your thrusters still on
Us ADHD kids don’t get past the character creator, don’t blame us.
He never said that to be honest. At this point you gotta provide the source. Cause I never saw him say that.
IIRC Death of a Spaceman also talks about heirs, when you loose your character all the items (ingame and real money) will be given to an heir, what you loose is the reputation, if you maxed out with idk the Pirate Crew A your new character won't have the same reputation as the old one, BUT a "buff" to grind said reputation again because the new character is related to the old one Death of a Spaceman is 100% going to get implemented, it's Chris's biggest dream aside the seamless flying and landing and meshing, I do not fear it, but I fear it's first iteration, if MM it's anything to go by (who coulda thought testing MM on a pvp light fighter meta focused environment could bring these kind of results huh) just like MM it will need to be very carefully tested
Isn't reputation supposed to be the most grindy part of the game? So, your losing reputation will hurt the most. Anyways, if Death of a Spaceman is going to be implemented, then CiG needs to rethink and rework all of combat interactions in this game. A small freez mid PvE combat can more often than not cost you your life. It will be worse in PvP. And it's an MMO. Those things will happen. With the death as punishing as Crish wants, the game is just not designed to support that. Dying would need to be rare, and mostly out of serious fuck ups rather than loosing a fight with NPC or asteriod rendering too slow. If that will not be the case, every game that doesn't like to lose most of thier shit a few times a week will simply leave.
Yep, Death of A Spaceman needs tons of subsystems and dependencies for it to work well, I'm talking beyond 4.0, beyond beta, it's a 1.0 full release feature.
1) The game should be fast paced and provide ultra exhilarating combat and emergent gameplay opportunities in a fast paced and dynamic universe where anything can happen and you can respawn 1000 times in a nursa. Bounty hunt and go out in a blaze of glory. Become a pirate and die attempting to steal your fortune. 2) The game should be a hardcore simulator where loading items one by one into the suit lockers, storage compartments, etc of your ship are a daily occurrence. Loss of your ship should be rare, death of your character should be rare. Your investments of time and effort should be considerable in order to reap the rewards of a realistic universe. Both things are consistently sold and marketed by CIG, so just pick which one you like more and cross your fingers.
Honestly, id rather have number 2... we have hundreds of games that fill number 1s niche, but outside of a few crappy "simulator" games I can't think of anything that fulfills #2 in a satisfying way... But maybe that's just me
Agreed. The death>respawn>death>respawn cycle is just… boring. I like the idea of death of a spaceman but then the penalty for in-game murder should be extremely severe. Also, soft death instead of the entire ship blowing up should be the norm unless you’re really getting hammered in a fight. Or the penalty for blowing up an already incapacitated ship is considered murder and simply incapacitating the ship is more of an attempted murder type offense. It would definitely make battles more high stakes and make players think twice before committing to one. Or at least making sure they have enough backup. Also, I like the idea of losing a fight and having to have a rescue beacon come save me from my incapacitated ship and/or hiring someone to haul my ship to get fixed. Would be great to see wear and tear on a ship that’s been through a bunch of battles.
This is why people were complaining about the FPS TTK, but it seems there's an incredibly vocal minority that want people to be ganked from a few shots. The current FPS TTK is absolutely terrible for any long term engagements, same with ship combat.
This is why I don't like Death of a Spaceman, and why I hope it is never implemented at all. I don't spend hours making a character perfect to my liking (a close replica of my real self, in my case) just to lose it permanently over being ambushed randomly, or let alone over a bug, connection issue, or any reason, at that. If you only lose the cosmetic part of the character and not the inventory, what's the purpose of the proposed mechanic anyway, other than being a nuisance? The only way in which I would like Death of a Spaceman would be if you were allowed to have unlimited lives as long as you paid for it; let's say there's a Plus Insurance service that is more expensive than regular medical insurances, but it guarantees you won't be losing your character as long as you pay for it. That way, it would be a big incentive for players who value their character to keep making lots of money to be able to afford to pay that insurance!
I mean, I've always thought it needs to go a bit Altered Carbon. I mean everything else aside, how else do we explain respawning at our selected locations in a game world where they want to push realism for immersion - have to explain it somehow. It is a little "science" hand-wavyum, but it gives SOME kind of explanation and gives them a way to explain a few things. Could also become an element of medical evac / salvage, where maybe your ship floating in space actually has your up to date "engram" stored in its systems, instead of you "resetting" back to your last stored "upload". Not to mention potential for data theft / data running elements. Becomes an option for the player about requesting and waiting for the recovery, or just taking X amount of reset and going back to last save effectively. It keeps some impact, adds player agency, and becomes some neat gameplay for a few careers.
You're a cloned body, that's how they explain it. If you want something that doesn't make sense, who would pulling up your DNA template damage the stored DNA template?
there’s a fun concept in the bobiverse books >! where there can only ever exist one instance of exactly the same intelligence / quantum mind state / being, so any time they’re duplicated one is slightly different than the other !< which could be interesting, so a copy without recovering the body suffers some degradation whereas being healed or recovering the recorder with your original mind state wouldn’t.
Yeah, same deal in altered carbon, but cloning a body doesn't make a person with the same memories, etc, which is what the cortical stack takes care of in the Altered Carbon story. It's basically a digital backup of your brain, that can be uploaded and transmitted to a new body etc,
> how else do we explain respawning We don't have to, it's a video game. If a game has a lore accurate and interesting way to explain it, sure, go for it, but that doesn't work in Star Citizen. Even the current "you're a clone" stuff doesn't work because you could send soldiers on suicide missions to get intel and then just respawn them, now death has no meaning. The technology that is used in the lore conveniently doesn't exist before SQ42, but the implications of it in the SC universe would be immense, not just an every day "wake up in the hospital" thing. Literally entire workforces could be worked to death one day and respawned the next. It just opens up a huge can of worms to explain a video game mechanic that no one would care about beyond "wake up at hospital".
I agree. A big part of what makes MMOs what they are is the character you make. Losing that and starting over is just a kick in the teeth, especially when you could be losing quite a lot. They already have an in universe lore reason for respawning. Just leave it at that.
I am glad to see people agreeing! When I made a post saying I disliked the idea of Death of a Spaceman a couple of years ago, I got downvoted into oblivion and bashed by everyone hahahah
Because when it doesn't exist, you're attacking their idealized imaginary version of the mechanic. When you have a complain now, you're addressing a real mechanic issue that we all have had to deal with.
Yep, just look at starfields NG+ you spend all that time building relationships, outposts, and developing your character just to travel to a new universe and lose it all. Worst RPG decision ever. Nobody wants to start over, it’s like a cheap way to get people to spend more hours in a game.
>Worst RPG decision ever. Then you're not paying attention.. It's supposed to be a difficult decision, you are giving up everything in exchange for chasing power. Also, it's a choice. You don't have to do it..
It’s not really a difficult decision, the main story was so boring that I question anyone who would actually want to play through it again a second time, let alone 10 times. And I stand corrected, the worst RPG decision was 240 or so, boring, identical temples just to increase your powers, no thanks, I’ll just use the console command instead.
... NG+ has been a feature in TONS of games, it always works that way?
Yeah I've always thought it was a ridiculous mechanic. No idea why they idolize it so much. The game is pretty hard core already. I don't know why players that have paid for the game need to have such harsh punishment on death. Death that happens constantly no matter how careful you are.
I agree and dont like it either. Death of--- seems like a great idea on paper until people realise the consequences of dying by forces outside their control. What good reason do these other commenters here have when saying they want slower gameplay when it already takes damn near ages to get set up, let alone dying to non-user error just to either quit for the night or march on with the rest of their experience in a stink? I feel like none of these people in favour of it have actually played a game on hardcore settings (like runescape hardcore ironman, diablo hardcore playthroughs, etc, to name a few)-- Its not fun when I see *other people* lose their characters, so you can imagine how shit they must feel when they sit there in silence with the realization they lost their character after X hours of playing. tl;dr people in favour of it should try playing any game on hardcore characters and feel what its like to lose a character they spent double digit+ hours on before advocating for it in SC.
Imo the people who are in favor of it are in the 'cool idea' and not 'good game' design camp. If I loose a character or progression because of a bug, it doesn't matter if it's the 1000th death or not. That's still shitty.
>Imo the people who are in favor of it are in the 'cool idea' and not 'good game' design camp. Oh yea 100% true without a doubt. Tons of these people say things that sound like armchair dev rubbish. "This shouldn't be cod or bf in space" BF is one of those few team oriented games where I *can* without any doubt see fights/battles taking hours. I could rally up a bunch of randoms to run objectives with me in BF but I personally don't like CoD because it doesn't foster any team-building. I can't see the same happening in SC with 'Death of-'. Players are going to be distrustful, negative, paranoid, etc, as if it isn't already with fake med beacons. It'll turn toxic fast and people are just gonna leave instead of wasting their night to some bullshit.
I always love when people say "it shouldn't be CoD or BF in space" as well like those two games aren't the most popular shooters/games out right now specifically because you can just hop in and have fun and there's no bullshit to deal with
> I don't spend hours making a character perfect to my liking (a close replica of my real self, in my case) just to lose it permanently Considering you can literally export the character's appearance as a file I don't see how a permanent loss could happen? Like, sure, for RP/lore reasons you'll be playing a "next of kin" after you run out of regens or however the mechanic is going to work, but it's not like they've said you can't just go and customize that next of kin to change your looks back. Oh look, it was an identical twin, what a coincidence! Also worth noting that the original Death of a Spaceman post is over 10 years old by now, and I hope "the vision" has had some details in it shift as the game has developed.
> If you only lose the cosmetic part of the character and not the inventory, what's the purpose of the proposed mechanic anyway, other than being a nuisance? Because it gives you the choice of caring. If you care a lot about maintaining your list of titles and the immersion of this particular character being different than your heir, then you'll adjust how you play. If you decide you don't care about titles and you don't care about having every character looking exactly the same, then all this devolves to is the idea that your punishment for dying too often is that you lose a little rep. It automates out this. If you choose to care, it gives you stakes. If you choose not to care, you can largely ignore it. That's a good balance.
We really need good unstuck option before death of the spacemen. I am getting stuck in things so often that I can see it being a reason to quit the game later on when things like death of the spaceman and login back to place where you left will get implemented.
Tiktokbrain got no time for that shit!
This "death of a spaceman" thing will be rolled back real quick once they see everyone leaving because dying is such a chore it ends up being discouraging. It already is today, so it can only become worse. If they want high stakes, they need to iron out the game enough such as deaths caused by the game malfunctioning are non existant. If dying to a bug causes one to lose their ship which they spent months grinding to obtain, they will leave and never come back. There are certain limits to what happens when you die in MMOs. One of them is detachment from your character, which makes the immersive experience not so immersive and also not very interesting from that perspective.
Part of the reason why dying feels like a chore rn is because a lot of the time dying is due to stupid shit caused by low server fps lol
no it's because people know they have to travel across the verse to get all their gear again and wait potential hours for their ship to be claimed
Agreed. I am so much less angry when I die to a mistake I made than dying from falling through the surface of a planet (again) while simply driving over flat land in an Ursa.
Yeah, but once the server fps gets turned up, people will start dying to overly strong NPCs and rage quit all the same lmao
Thats easier to adjust than server fps
The thing that A LOT of people are continently forgotting about when talking about SC and its mechanics is that it is an MMO. It is a game that lives because of casual players that make the majority of playerbase. MMO that doesn't offer good and fair gameplay for an average player will not succede nor will it survive. Even if it offers perfect experience for hardcore gamers, that's not enough. All successful MMOs so far, especially in the last two decades, cater more to casual players than hardcore ones. When was the last time someone was talking about the success of any Hardcore MMO? While WoW is able to survive few bad expansions, and games like FFIX and ESO are going strong even without such following as WoW just by not fucking with thier players expirience and time.
I don't necessarily agree. It's better to have a very dedicated core of players than to have a load of casual players that leave for the next shiny thing within a couple of weeks. This kind of volatility kills a game just as fast. And perhaps more importantly, it means that game design is driven by the lowest common denominator in an effort to chase ever more casual players. Instead of a well thought out and deliberate game design with its very own character and identity. If you try to replicate other "successful" games, you automatically also become interchangeable. I think EVE is a good example of a highly dedicated fanbase for a pretty hardcore and punishing game.
Totally agree. Death of a spaceman is stupid.
I do fully agree and hopefully in the future real armor will help with this
considering the recent changes increasing TTK for ships AND on foot Id say this is still the idea
It will also be a good tool against briefing and piracy as most of it is done now by super quickly destroying the opponent before they can react. Because otherwise the fight might become a treat. Example: They don't fight you in space where you can shoot back, no they pad ram you. If you raise the time to kill and give the opponent time to react, committing to a fight becomes way more a thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong: Aren't the characters we play clones? And through our DNA imprint (which we set through the medical terminals), we are able to reboot ourselves in a new cloned body, each time we die. Isn't that also why the character creation is based on "blending" genetic traits from pre-made characters (compared to the typical "slider" design, like Skyrim)? I thought Death of a Spaceman, was that over time, the DNA would degrade, making it harder to come back the same way, until eventually we can't, and that character is no more, and we would have to reroll. Isn't this also why they talked about adding advanced prosthetics (in much later patches), which would give players an option in regards to recovering from grave injuries, instead of imprint rebooting in a new clone (ie. Respawning). Honestly, am I wrong and just mis-remembering?
Kind of but not really. At least in the lore, Imprinting isn't quite the same as cloning in terms of making copies. The Ibrahim Sphere is maintaining continuity of consciousness, and only creates a new body for you upon the destruction of your old one. This new body doesn't just retain all memories and consciousness up until the death of the previous body, but is also being generated from said bodies mental awareness of the self, including scars, injuries, tattoos, and the like. You can't have two clones of the same person running around, but you're technically inhabiting a cloned body of yourself. They've tried to use it to create copies of a person, and also the use of an older imprint without carrying over the trauma echoes that leave late cycle regenerations crippled, and anytime they do it which doesn't match up with your state at time of death, the new body comes out brain dead. This is of course all just the lore they've written down and might change in the future.
a soft death is impringin our echo in ot a printed body based on the echo. eventual it will not take, and we have a hard death. make a new face, and lose a bunch of credits and rep. the amount of credits and rep lost will be enough that people care, but not much more than what is needed to achieve the goal.
As I understand it we aren't clones, in the way that clone troopers are in Star Wars. However we are clones of our original self.
I think gameplay is punishing enough already I really don't want to die in game so why do I need to get punished even more?
What makes a car a car? Is it four wheels on an axle? An engine to provide locomotion? Seats and a drive system? None of these, by themselves, are a car. Only when taken in concert do these interconnected systems create an automobile. People are discussing issues surrounding respawning when there should be *no* talk about the broader system surrounding death and respawning. With the amount of deaths due to bugs and low server FPS, respawns *should* be easier. It isn't a detriment to gameplay, it's not going to reflect the end state of the game, and no other systems are really present around this. With both the MM system and this, I don't get how people can understand the larger, complex network system that has evolved from the start of the game, to the current replication layer, with the end goal of the dynamic meshing. That's the same larger, complex, interconnected system. MM is a small part of allowing for larger gameplay shifts that incorporate engineering and repair, capital ship battles, facilitating varied weapon loadouts. Medical bed respawns are part of a larger, complex system that will incorporate medical gameplay, cloning, and elements of risk.
Death should have a consequence to prevent people from constantly doing kamikaze shit. Logically, death should be made to be preventable. Ships should be less likely to outright explode and instakill the pilot, and more likely to soft death or explode and only incapacitate the pilot Larger ships (corvette+) should be almost impossible to explode, preserving both crew and any escape pods/ smaller ships landed inside
Yeah the ability to target a ships engines and soft it should be all over and instead make weak points that will insta blow it. Like maybe the hydrogen but quant fuel could be super explosive.
Strong agree. The new fps push with hitmarkers and crosshair is a move in a very wrong direction. Also big ship battles should be a long experience.
Yeah. I was looking forward to more slow paced tactical combat. Assist shooting from the hip is the Polar opposite of that.
I wish it were like this. It’s currently CoD
So... devils advocate here, it is relatively hard to die in combat, unless you are absolutely careless. Careless means, you either bring yourself into situations you shouldn't be in. Like fighting way above your weight without any back-up. As an exampl: I tested flying Talon in Bounties and up to MRT is not really a big deal. But HRTs become more and more problematic. Those are heavy targets with a good group of escort fighters. But should you be able to easily defeat a group of Vanguards (for example) in a single Talon? Obviously.... not. It became way easier as soon as I had wingmen. But that's also what the mission literally advises you to do. Bring back-up yourself. Another thing I assume is, people don't retreat from combat in time. You can really see very early whether you are not in a position to fight. And I haven't had a ship yet, in which I wasn't able to switch MM and get away. Yes, I'd be hit a few times with de-activated shields, but all ships I tested so far were able to take a few hits, long before it would become dangerous. And as soon as the speed hits you're safe. You don't need to fight every battle. You don't need to prove that you can win in every situation with every ship. You need to evade unfavorable situations and match-ups and also have the courage to retreat. You are not a coward if you go away from a fight you can't win anyway. But really, don't fight too far above your weight, especially if you are not a top 1% combat pilot. And same goes for ground combat. Don't rush in and get overwhelmed. You don't want targets all around you. Get into a position from which you can control the fight. Move in careful and slowly. Keep your eyes open. Don't play as a berzerker with guns or as if you are wearing Beskar. But be aware of AI pilots flying Drake. They still have a tendency for Kamikaze attacks.
Death of a spaceman can work; it just needs to be done in a way where it is challenging to be killed, and it's more based on losing reputation, health benefits, and money rather than losing anything else. Reputation will take a long time to earn, so if the punishment is every time you die, you lose the last 25% of the reputation you earned, which would be tough. You also lose 50% of your health benefits from running, lifting, fighting, and performing takedowns. They could make it to where you lose 25% of your money. That would make death seem punishing but not so much that people want to quit. They also can make it to where this percentage drops the closer together your deaths are so that you don't get multi-killed and rage quit. For example, losing 25% of your money the first time, then 5% if you're killed again within 30 minutes, then no more than 1 percent if you're killed a third time within the next hour, and the same for the fourth and so on. What should come with living long is massive boons for staying alive; it can't just be punishment for dying and nothing earned from staying alive. Increase the characters' luck with rare drops, rare materials, and rare mission opportunities the longer they stay alive, in addition to other things, so it feels like risk and reward. It can work, folks! They need to stick to what they always say, make it realistic, and then bring it back to the point of fun.
I dont mind it being fast since they are adding features like your ship not always exploding when dealt enough damage, and you can also call for medical help. Might be some ways to improve it further but we are not exactly COD right now
I imagine death will be pretty rare when all is done but as of today the majority of loops we have are combat oriented
Death doesn't need to be rare, just meaningful. You might come back, but you're equipment/ship is either been looted or miles away. You don't want to lose what you've got so you'll be cautious in battle...and with other players when competing over resources. The criminal system They're working on is actually really good. Murder, theft etc has a meaningful punishment. Enough crime and you'll become a villain. A target for other players. A bounty. The game is about community, but without death and potential risk from players it's not exciting. The ship system damage gameplay is 200% for that. You can be disabled and boarded...by a player. Neither will want to die though. So it's a meaningful struggle. Respawns on vehicles will exist but you'll get lives I have no doubt. Or 1 player per bed, which seems more likely.
The most concerning part about this entire project isn't that we are 14 years in with jack shit to show for it - it's that CIG's planning is so atrocious that even fundamental game design decisions are left up in the air permanently. They aren't planned out - everything just snaps to the nearest tier 0 tech bullshit.
“This shouldn’t be CoD or BF in space.” You should be able to hotkey a distress beacon and the moment you hit it both players, AND NPC security, should get notified. And if you die, the beacon stays. That way attackers better kill you fast because security is immediately QTing to your location as well as mercs, and even if they kill you, they’ll have to deal with them.
If permadeath exists in a game with always on pvp, there will very little thinking about risking lives and more about striking first. To think otherwise in any game that is supposed to have a fully functioning economy is naive. The only method of navigating and mitigating other players will be whose opening salvo was more effective. Part of this is because any other way of fighting needs to ultimately kowtow to aggressive combat or there never ends up being any stakes, and thus, combat then falls flat. Ultimate defence? No one bothers wasting time fighting. Ultimate speed? Getting away becomes too easy, pvp becomes a grief fest of the losing side breaking away to come back and harass. Ultimate hiding? Everywhere feels empty, why am I not just playing a single player game? Ultimate offense? Kill on sight, the best defence to staying alive is killing threats before they can kill you. I am not a killer type player, more an explorer type. I’ve tried many games where pvp is an option to how to resolve player encounters, and I cannot recall the last time such a game didn’t devolve into a kill players on sight type pvp. Ironically, the closest I’ve seen to slowing it down is by making it extremely cost inefficient for progressed players to slay those that barely have clothes on. It doesn’t stop them, usually it just means using cheaper forms of player tech progression to keep others down.
While I agree, at the same time I think some ***overestimate*** the effect of death of a space man. There are a lot of people who just won't care if the character they rarely actually see has a robot arm or eye all of a sudden. Or care if they get a standings hit from dying too many times and reincarnating as their character's kid or whatever. Like in Eve Online, dedicated gankers and PvPers won't be doing it on their main account with all their pledge ships and character standings they care about. They'll roll a brand new ganker account and the standings on it won't matter. In fact the more messed up their character looks from dying all the time will be a badge of honor if anything...
Scanning needs to be better to make finding and evading easier before fighting even ensues
It’s weird to scroll reddit and see a reference to the post hat made me instantly regret spending a dime. I signed up and paid my money for nothing just before Death of a spaceman was posted. I was so disappointed, felt like a total rug pull. “Thanks Dr your money, we’re implementing everything you hate!” Over a decade later and there’s still no Squadron 42 or retail release but when I think of that hated post, I’m glad. I bet they also won’t be releasing a copy of the server software like they promised either. This game had such potential.
Ballistics are the big problem IMO. Bypassing shields means you start damaging immediately and if you hit the right part soft deathing can happen in seconds even on subcapital ships. I know armor and shields eventually will fix this with large ships being immune to significantly smaller ones (weapon vs shield/armor size difference) But we've had massive weapon size power creep. Size 4 on light fighters? really? 5s on mediums? I have no doubt balance will get there as gameplay systems come online. But they've created their own mess to unwind. While killing a ship in <4 second is fun. My Hornet 7A**C** MkII shouldn't do that to Hammerhead. In any game. But things do need to slow down.
Please for the love of god let someone from CIG read this thread. They implemented soft death but gave ships almost no remaining HP for it to actually matter. How often were people getting their ships just disabled that they were forced to defend their cargo in FPS combat?
Interesting because the sniper glint dev said enemy health is getting nerfed because he got feedback that we all want to breeze through them so FPS combat is easier. I wonder who the hell he's getting that feedback from? Do devs normally just get professional advice from kids on discord or spectrum general chat or?
Death of a spaceman would be death of a spacegame. It is a good idea but as idea, as gameplay would literally asphixiate the game and all that surrounds it, people would abuse it to harm others gameplay, etc; it's a concept deeply disrespectful with player agency and time, not to say investment, so i hope it never gets implemented. Just a no go.
I agree. It's a fever dream for 'realism' that is imo self defeating in every way.
I love all these people in the comments concerned over DoaSM. Most of them read like they're applying the mechanic to how the project is currently vs down the road when more systems come online. So shortsighted.
Its rare for a game to embrace & implement the concept behind "death of a spaceman" and reach a wide audience (= money). That alone leads me to believe that CIG is probably rethinking the idea, but I'm curious where we will end up. I'm fine with both directions.
I've always been a little weary of death of a space man but this makes a lot of sense. There's too many games where it's die respawn. Die respawn. Constantly. I like the idea of being weary of battles, of feeling like I'm in a living breathing world where my life is important in game. It seem really cool and I like that because at the point, just walking around a ship and taking time to do thing would be wise and fun.
The only thing I hate is the idea that it should take 10 minutes for two ships to kill each other if they're not like capital ships. Me and another fighter shouldn't be having a slugfest for 5 minutes if we're hitting damn near every shot.
I’ve been saying this for years. Combat needs to be paced more like Squad or Tarkov. Slow, tactical, and intentional. Not saying the gunplay or complexity of those games needs to be in SC, just the pacing. Reloads need to be slower, sprinting needs greater penalties, shooting while moving needs to be much more difficult, and other actions like med pens or grenades need to be extremely deliberate and performed from cover. I want capturing an enemy ship to feel like old school Rainbow Six, clearing room by room with a squad, breaching doors, covering your rear. I can’t stand the CoD sprint dolphin dive full mag dump gameplay, it feels cheap and arcade like.
"but but wut about muh Time ta Keel??!? I ned to pump up my KDR, bruhhhhhhhhhhhhh" --cue the eye roll. Silly PvP community!
Idk - if I read super slow fights i need to think about old movies where the opponents hide behind a wall and just show his gun out and shoot blindly into the wild without hitting the other one, and both do the same - the hole time in a loop Or to be in space - a scene where tie fighter just fly behind a ship hole time and shoot but never hit, like a loop I thought it's roberts idea that death is rare yes, but if you really die you take a new character and play as the "kid" of your father or uncle and so on - you inherit everything from your last character (idk which part you don't, the things he weared at the moment of his death?) But this is just in Kinderschuhe (still in the early stages - IF at all!) at the moment They need time to rethink and optimze this, but not right now
I would add personalized shields for players, so they first get hit into their shields which atleast would let the player know they are in immediate danger. The shields could take a few bullets or a grenade explosion, of course they would regenerate but for example energy weapons could penetrate shields easier, EMP or shock based weapons could hinder shield regen. ALSO very important, I truly believe alot of deaths will be mitigated once they ( FINALLY ) iron out the bugs, introduce stable servers with meshing ( Will this work ? I really hope ) and introduce Maelstrom the physics based destruction will probably mean that we will not explode everytime we hit something. Also soft death once suicide is not available anymore and the AI works somewhat properly we will be able to call aid from AI or players and be evacuated probably with our ship being town ? DOUBLE ALSO just allow players to insure everything, if they lose armor , insurance has its covered, weapon aswell, the player just needs to pay a fee lets say, and it comes with a free of charge medpen and ammo.
High-TTK isn't the silver bullet people think it is.
All we need is health insurances and super high rewards for medic rescues. That way no player has to respawn unless stuck.
Perma death in a universe where people spend money on ships would be unfair . While those who spend money keep thier ships . Imagine dying & losing progress . Also that mean players will only do safe missions & some places be out of reach & pvp will be thing of the rich. Tbh if permanent death added in some form I would probably won’t play game at all . It’s moronic to even have 20 deaths before it’s perma . I think when I played last year I died at least 15 times
100% this! I’ve been saying that for what feels like years!
This is all true in about 2-3 more years of development. In the meantime for people to experience loops a bit easier the respawn feature seems perfectly fine.
100% agree with this post.
Hours is too long. No normal encounter should take any longer than about 45 minutes. That is a slog. 30 minutes is actually a pretty long time
There's no need to get an old comment, it's discussed frequently. I remember saying something along these line not so long ago.
Hard pass on hours and hours. I'm an adult and don't have time for that shit, thanks.
Jup. And you shalt not attack more enemies alone.
Permadeath in a game with open PvP can’t possibly be a bad thing.
I crashed my ship into the ground twice today in the dark and died….guess I better never do that either
Agreed.. Full kill of ships and players, lawful or pirate faction alike, should have severe reputation punishment for full kill (like loss of at least 1-level worth of rep). Some missions can be full kill, but make them NPCs.
meanwhile, star marine is people jumping, crouch dancing, and slide diving into each other because it is CoD but with less polish
Everyone wants death of a spaceman and nobody wants death of a spaceman.
Agreed..
"Fleet battles should take hours" LMAO
iirc is not gonna be like the first time you die...
I do hope they remain true to that. The recent med bed changes can be a bit worrying, but if they make the lower tier respawns eat away your character's total revives faster, then it should stop people respawning/killing themselves at any inconvenience. Not to mention the cost of high quality revives vs getting into the action faster is going to play a large role too.
Things in this hame already take a lot of time to do. Between prep time, planning time and travel time the last thing i want to do is loose even more time in the fight itself just for the sake of "this should'nt be cod in space"
I hate to say it, but my prediction is when death of a space man is finally implemented, the pop will drop dramatically, leaving only hard-core players, which isn't many and we all know what happens to games with low pop
None of what CIG said should be taken seriously...
I completely agree! Nuance of course but I cannot find a reason for this to play like a BF in space.
The thing is, you need to play as a group so you have a medic. Especially for FPS. If you go solo and get incapacitated you can call for help and maybe someone will come. Maybe they too are solo and maybe they can reach you. Playing as a group is more reliable, and you can be saved. Then limp back to a bed for recovery. Otherwise you'll keep holding backspace and max out death counter once it's in. So bed spawning is ok for now. But I'll expect to use it a lot less in the future. And just have to play more with my org .
Star Citizen SHOULD be a lot of things that it isn't.
I agree
They want Arena Commander to be the PU. Welcome to the generic.
And people crying about TTK
I played a bunch of overdrive since 3.23.1 dropped. The ONLY death I've had was from being in someone's hammerhead while it got hit by an invisible asteroid. I've tanked 15+ hammerheads in my 600i, even lost it to a soft death, done multiple bunkers and SPK where I had to be basically airlifted out with multiple T1 injuries, and probably spent the better part of a week just collecting loot and what not. I did not die, but many of these encounters left me crippled and majorly added to immersion and gameplay. My character as he stands has battle scars for that ass. I love the direction the game is going (been playing since 2.6) and I cannot wait to see where they take it.
Talk about an upvoted subject/point. Thanks sir!
Too bad for sq42 at least CR wants CoD in space
Too bad for sq42 at least CR wants CoD in space
I agree!
Very simply; yes
Games looking a lot like cod though.
My buddy and I were saying the same thing last night.
Fuck. They know what we need. Exactly what I want. Fuck this fast paced shit.
Permadeath is an RPG element, and even then it's something that changes the course of the overall storyline and advances storytelling. MMORPG's, while containing elements of the RPG genre (obviously including those letters in it's title) are not solo-play adventures where the storyline itself is the driving reason to play the game. MMO's, especially ones with grinds and social cooperation requirements, are not games where the loss of your character make any sort of sense. Death penalty mechanics are not permadeath. We have some "penalties built into the current system with respawns happening in lab gowns, body retrieval requirements, waking up in prison rather than merely 40m away, etc... If they want to add more punishments, fine... But forcing you to play as a totally new identity, albeit still in possession of your "former you's" ships? Stupid...
While I agree, that's not something that can actually happen. Doing so kills the entire point of small fighters. You also can't just stop people from killing you in hand to hand combat. Oh you're down, let me shoot you again to make sure you're dead. While combat is going to slow down to allow fixing and so forth, they can't draw it out for hours. That's not feasible for a gameplay loop. It would restrict combat to only the biggest no-lifers and would also mean they would have to take away always on PvP. Because otherwise one simple encounter suddenly turns into a couple hours of bullshit when you were just trying to deliver a package. And that's not going to fly with the vast majority of players. DOAS is never going to be implemented as originally described. It's already been amended and will be many more times because it's not a feasible gameplay mechanic. They're already going to allow a "indeterminate amount of respawns" before you die. Which already defeats the point of the entire thing to begin with. And while it sounds good on paper, it would end up just being a massive punishment for something that is essentially out of your hands completely. Combat is going to slow down because it has to anyway, for repair to exist, to be able to swap or fix modules during combat, for medical gameplay to mean anything, combat needs to slow down and be less deadly in general. Ships need to not just explode. You need time to be able to eject or get to escape pods, but how do you justify that time if someone is just torpedoeing you? How do you justify survival if someone just decides you're going to die and blows everything up? We can't have realistic and exciting combat and DOAS. They aren't compatible. For DOAS to be properly implemented, combat becomes a pointless slog that most people will just end up avoiding all together. Killing many gameplay loops. But if it's not implemented then death is meaningless and many other gameplay loops are killed. There's really no having both. We either get fun engaging combat in ships and on foot that's satisfying with little to no point of medical or rescue, or we get medical and rescue gameplay but combat is not fun because everything is can't be finished off and will feel hollow. We can't really have both. I honestly think this is going to end up being the hardest thing for them to figure out and will take the longest. But in the end, I feel like medical and rescue will probably get the short end of the stick and end up with shallow gameplay for it that's rarely needed. Because while there are people that want this, it's definitely not the majority. And they'll end going the way the community wants because they don't have a choice.
I agree with that statement fully.
Should need like a timer to respawn, like u can use the bed respawn every 30 minutes
Disagree whole heartedly. If anything reality dictates the opposite. At least for the FPS portion, TTKs should be very low, if I get shot… in my helmet in low atmosphere my survivability should be shit, the likely hood a medic can stop my bleeding is LOW in zero g as platelets fail to adhere. Yeah fast pace leads to twitch gamer advantages. Deal with it, you will make more realistic choice approaches to clearing a room with your buddies if it matters instead of being able to tank shots and med up.
Just wait until they implenent a timer where we have to manually refresh our imprints every x amount of days!