Table ronde n°13 : Pénalités de mort

La Table ronde n°13 est consacrée aux pénalités en cas de mort.

Sommaire

Sondage

Le sondage est visible sur le site officiel : There are many ways death could work in MMOs. What's your preference for EverQuest Next?

Résultats le 8 décembre 2013 :

Il existe plusieurs façons de mettre en place la mort dans les MMOs. Quelle est votre préférence pour EverQuest Next ?
Permadeath all the way! One death only, if you die, you start a new character.	8%
I want a hefty penalty such as a corpse run that might require an entire group to help.	21%
I want a fairly high personal-only penalty such as lost XP, de-leveling, or equipment damage.	32%
I prefer a minor penalty such as XP debt or a ghost corpse run that is essentially just a loss of time.	26%
There should be no penalty, just let me revive at a nearby location and go.	14%

Transcription

Cette transcription de la vidéo provient du site EQ Hammer.

Omeed Dariani: Hi, my name’s Omeed Dariani and I’m the Senior Brand Manager for the EverQuest Franchise. Welcome to the Round Table. With me today is Michael Mann, the Lead Combat Designer for EverQuest Next and Landmark. Today we’re talking about...the death penalty. Which is always a sad topic.

Michael Mann: Definitely a sad topic.

Omeed Dariani: No! We’re talking about it in MMOs, though, which is a little...nice?

Michael Mann: It is nice, yeah.

Omeed Dariani: Michael has a very nice smile, I’ve been told. So, we’re talking about the death penalty in MMOs, and I think it’s really important to say this is probably the earliest in the design process we’ve ever asked a Round Table question.

Michael Mann: Yeah, sure. We are really, really at the beginning; it’s the ground floor, or whatever, right? It’s just...super early in the process.

Omeed Dariani: Right. So, this is really... this question is really about seeing where the community was and what people think about death penalties in general. And I think we used it to come up with a set of guidelines for how we’re going to develop the death penalty, and where we’re going, so we’ll revisit this in the future, but we don’t have a definitive answer for you right at the moment.

Michael Mann: We wanted to start a conversation with you guys [gestures toward the camera], and amongst ourselves, about how we want to see the death penalty and the death mechanic roll out. We have reviewed you guys’ posts, and looked all over the place--Reddit and the EverQuest Next forums--and found all sorts of cool ideas. And we think that this is a good way to get a conversation going. For instance, there was a person on Reddit who talked about different death penalties based on the way you died [Ed. - highlighted in this EQHammer article], which is actually a really cool thought. It’s a good conversation starter for this whole process.

Omeed Dariani: Yeah, I think everyone’s really excited about that one. The thing I took away from the conversations that I read is how subjective the death penalty is. What is a painful, game-ending death penalty for one person is nothing to someone else.

Michael Mann: It’s super subjective. So, you know, what causes someone to not want to die, or makes somebody happy or unhappy or whatever in the mechanic has been really all over the place. And that’s pretty standard, I think.

Omeed Dariani: So, getting back to the core of it, why do we put death penalties in MMOs in the first place?

Michael Mann: We have death penalties mainly for risk versus reward, right? We want people to go out and risk something. We want them to feel danger and caution, and that creates excitement in the game world. Also, we want people to respect the rules of the world. We don’t want people running and jumping off cliffs and just running in areas and dying just to see what’s going on, right? We want them to feel like they’re in there, they’re playing their character, and they’re excited about it.

Omeed Dariani: So, we’re talking about that...we’ve started to come up with guidelines for what we think the EverQuest Next dental--ach, dental!--death penalty should look like.

Michael Mann: Dental penalty sounds terrible.

Omeed Dariani: [faces the camera] It’s going to be a dental penalty.

Michael Mann: Difficult to say as well, so...

Omeed Dariani: [laughs] Uh, but, guidelines for what the death penalty should look like. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Michael Mann: Yeah, of course. So, one thing that we talked about a lot, actually, is preventing what we call a ‘negative feedback cycle,’ or a situation that you can get into where you go out and you fight something and it doesn’t work out so well, you die, and then you’re less powerful than you were when you went to fight in the first place. And what happens frequently with this sort of mechanic is you go, you die, and you come back to kill something, and you can’t kill it because you’re less powerful. And it creates a negative situation where you’re really not having a lot of fun. You might have really awesome experiences or memories for things that happened in a certain situation, but frequently it ends in frustration. So, that’s one of the main things we wanted to avoid. We also have a goal to have a viable solo option, so that people can go out, and if they make a mistake or they misjudge something, that they’re able to recover from that in some manner. And, since we’re building a social game, we want you to be excited to see people and to group with people and play with them. And so we want more people than the standard MMO to be able to help you out if you’ve died. And so, those are kind of the three guiding principles that are happening at this point.

Omeed Dariani: Cool. So, before we wrap up, were there any comments on the thread that were particularly interesting to you?

Michael Mann: Yeah, there were a couple. I mentioned the guy from Reddit, and also Silogy [Ed. - Apologies for the guessed-at spelling] had a really good post that presented multiple options that seemed to be really pretty well thought out. It was interesting to read. And so, we encourage people to make posts like these and to get in there and join the conversation. Because it really is interesting, and it’s good to have dialog.

Omeed Dariani: I always like Silogy’s posts. And I’ve heard multiple people in the office specifically bring them up, which is pretty cool.

Michael Mann: Yeah, yeah. It’s awesome.

Omeed Dariani: So, like we said, we’re going to be revisiting this in the future--probably next year, I would say early next year as we get further into the design process. Right now what you guys can do to help us the most is, considering the parameters that Michael laid out, how does that affect what you think death penalties should look like in EverQuest Next? So, thank you guys again for your time. We really appreciate your feedback, and we’ll see you next time on the Round Table.