Permadeath: If you’re an MMORPG player, you probably hate it, but hey maybe you’re one of those rare folks who don’t. Either way, it’s become an issue in the early access “tiny MMO” Book of Travels, and studio Might and Delight is doing something about it.
“Right now we gauge that permadeath is causing a lot of headaches for many players,” the studio admits. “We know that it has been a controversial topic for some players since the start, and we’ve expressed our thoughts on it in terms of the design philosophy behind it before. The real issue isn’t even that the game currently has permadeath, but that because of the nature of Early Access there are bugs in the game that could cause the player to die through no fault of their own. I’ve personally talked to some of you that have had hundreds of hours of playtime go to waste because of technical issues. Obviously, that’s not fair.”
MMO players are nodding their heads along at home since this is traditionally been the reason permadeath is off the table in virtual worlds with longevity. But the important bit here is that M&D is listening – and it’s nixing permadeath. In fact, it’s also going to revive dead characters.
“Starting beginning of next week, we’re going to turn off death entirely, making it impossible to die at all. This may seem like an inelegant solution to a larger problem, but we want to stop unnecessary loss of Traveller lives as soon as possible and preferably without taking too much resources from the fixing of bugs and polishing efforts of our team. We discussed several alternatives to this solution, but ultimately we decided that this would cause the least frustration for our players.
“We’re also going to revive every character that has already died up until this point. This probably won’t happen at the same time as death is disabled, but we’re aiming for this to be done within a few days of the update rolling out. Please note that while your dead characters indeed will come back to life next week, their inventory will sadly have been wiped. This is an unfortunate side effect of the revival that we couldn’t get around. However, any equipped gear should still be there, as should any items stored in a storage box.”
Do note that this isn’t a permanent solution. “Our goal in the long run is to have death play a role to give our game the sense of tension we strive for,” the team says. “We’ve been experimenting with various ideas of how to make ghost gameplay more interesting and we’ve talked about implementing cool ways for Travellers to revive fallen players through special quest lines or rituals.” But this’ll work as a stopgap until the studio – and its players – come to agreement on what the future of death will look like.
