A couple of years ago – yeah, I save weird things in my “ideas bin” folder – MMO designer Damion Schubert tweeted about a chat he had with a Vanguard producer way back in the aughts. “When we talk with [EverQuest] players about their best EQ stories, they’re all corpse runs,” the producer opined. To which Schubert reportedly replied, “Yes, but did you ever notice that all those stories end with ‘… and thank god I’ll never do that shit again’?”
Given Schubert’s general vibe and my own memories of early MMOs, I doubt the story is merely apocryphal. And as gamers know, in most of the MMOs that launched after EverQuest, corpse runs became more and more tame. By the time of World of Warcraft, they were reduced to a mild if humiliating timewaster. Many modern MMOs don’t even attach a moneysink.
This round of Massively Overthinking is multifold: Is Schubert right that MMO players won’t tolerate grueling corpse runs anymore? How is the new wave of throwback MMOs getting away with it? What gameplay tradeoffs would you need to be willing to put up with EQ-style corpse runs again? And what exactly should MMO corpse runs look like in 2025?
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog):Â I can really only nod along at Schubert’s snark because I definitely have some tales of incredible EverQuest corpse runs with plenty of thrilling heroics, and I was still relieved to finally leave the game when a fresh alternative came along. War stories are war stories, but I’d rather we hadn’t had the war, you know? Because the drama and broken friendships and toxicity and wasted time were not worth it in the end.
I’m not fully against penalties for death, mind you; I’m just not sure they serve a purpose in a limited themepark setting, and by themepark I mean a game with little effort put into the economic ecosystem and the top gear distributed through drops. Themeparks are supposed to be about throwing yourself against PvE encounters. Heavy penalties for failure are purely punitive – it’s just the devs screwing with you as in a roguelike. Just put a lockout timer to prevent zerging or whatever. Making people run naked back to their corpse to humiliate them is obnoxious.
In a full-scale sandbox MMORPG, on the other hand, where the game is balanced around a crafting economy, I fully expect death penalties, but I prefer them in economic form like gear decay. I expect more “realism” from every corner of that type of game, so I’m willing to pay (in annoyance or time) for it to push the turnstiles of a functioning ecosystem.
That doesn’t count basic survival sandboxes, though (most of which are really just themeparks, yeah I said it). There’s no functioning economic ecosystem in something like Valheim, so running naked to rescue your body is back to being punitive for no compelling reason than to be punitive and gate your progress and discourage you from exploration and curiosity. Hard pass.
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog):Â I kind of feel like acceptance of corpse runs stems from a few things. First and foremost, I think it has roots in the assumption that “dealing with” the removal of quality-of-life features means you’re a better gamer and can weather the storm of crappy design. Y’all know the kinds of people I’m referring to.
There’s also a subset of players who actually appreciate a bit of stakes in failure beyond gear repair – the kinds of folks who just like things a little more bitey without wearing it like some a-hole badge of honor. Which is fine, but it’s still a pretty niche group.
So to that point, I really don’t mind seeing corpse runs go the way of the dodo, especially if the objective is to cast a wide enough net that more players are invited in. There are other, better, and far more interesting ways to bring the genre back to its roots.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): I don’t think that death should be completely free of penalty, but the corpse run — having to retrieve all your dropped stuff — is a relic of the past and should stay there forever. It’s far too stressful for the game to dangle the possibility of you losing your gear because you can’t get back to it at all or in time. There are better death penalties out there, even for hardcore servers and games.
Sam Kash (@samkash@mastodon.social): I recall the crow flights in Crowfall that basically took the place of a corpse run. It was pretty annoying. Of course, we’ve seen what happened to that MMO.
Also, Pax Dei has a type of corpse run that is also super painful. At least as a crow you got to have the fun of flying. Actually, that was some of the best travel in the game. If I remember right, I kind of just wanted to fly around as a crow because it worked really well.
Anyway, I never played most of those classic corpse run games. I am not really a fan of mechanics built around punishing a player for failing, as if failing already isn’t enough of a punishment. So I say let players respawn and play on. If dropped loot is a must, leave a bundle of goods with a timer or some other way to be safely recovered or not so safely.
Tyler Edwards (blog):Â I’ve always thought death penalties were bizarre. They’re very rare outside of MMORPGs, and pretty much unheard of outside of RPGs more generally, and I don’t understand why this genre quirk developed. I mean, you already failed in what you were doing. The boss is probably back to full health, the mobs have respawned, etc. Why does there need to be an additional punishment tacked on top of that?
As I said in my recent soapbox on difficulty, death penalties don’t actually make games harder; they just incentivize people to avoid taking risks. It pushes people away from truly challenging themselves and thus works at cross purposes with any attempt to actually add difficulty to games.
Get rid of them all, I say. Just let me respawn at a nearby checkpoint with no further penalty. I see no reason why there should ever be more trouble than that.
Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!
