Difference between revisions of "Death"

Revision as of 22:22, 13 September 2008

Death and death penalties in games is a balance in terms of design. Diablo II had you loose all your carried money, and all your gear stayed on the corpse. You lost a percentage of experience, and could in fact even loose a level. If the corpse was not retrieved, the items were lost. Then again, death penalties in odler games are usually quite much more harsh than modern equivalence.

Special Death Animations

Besides the normal death animations of characters, there are plans to involve additional, random death animations for bosses, that shows a bit more spectacular events [1].

Will there be more boss-specific fatalities like the Barbarian head bite by Seigebreaker?
That's what we would like to do. We'd like it that when a player dies to a boss we may have a special/random event or death animation specific to that boss. So if you're going to die or have died to a boss, there's a random chance that you'll see something other than a normal death. That's the dream any way.

Death Penalty in Diablo III

'Death Penalty' is the phrase used to describe what negative consequences come from dying in a game. In old arcade games, you had one life, and then you'd have to start over. This has evolved over the years, and the death penalty is generally a lot more lenient today. This is what we know about the Death Penalty in Diablo III:

• A player character will not loose experience.
• Players will not loose durability
• Gold loss is probable.
• Time loss, such as running to corpse.

The following was said by Jay Wilson on death in Diablo III [2]:

When a character dies, will it lose gold and experience like in Diablo 2? Jay Wilson: We have not actually decided on the final death mechanic. I can guarantee that you will not lose experience. We are not urging to big penaltys for death. But we want enough of a penalty to be there, so that death has meaning! Like to lose a little bit time, some kind of decrement... We do not currently have a durability, but some kind of ... a gold cost is actually not so bad. And having the player to waste some time, that is certainly an element. Generally we kind of rely on the effect that players do not want to die. You know, you just do not want to. So there is no real reason to add a further "ding" to them for something happening that was already unfavorable to them. But we have not got our final mechanics on that, yet.