Death

Death comes to us all, especially in Diablo III. The D3 Team wants to make the game more challenging and involving than Diablo II, and they've incorporated numerous design ideas to create this, while avoiding punishing death penalties for softcore characters. Hardcore characters are as they were in Diablo III; mortal. One death there is the end of a character. Forever.

For non-hardcore characters in Diablo III, death is a very temporary setback. Dead players can be resurrected by other players on the spot, or after a few second delay they may choose to respawn at the last checkpoint they reached. When they respawn they are wearing all of their equipment and have full health; there is no corpse to retrieve or loot as there was in Diablo 2. Characters do not lose any experience or gold upon death, though the developers have said there may be a hit to item durability, which could result in expensive repairs.

When a character is very low on health, a reddish haze appears around the outside of the screen, providing an emergency visual indicator. The sound effects are tweaked also, with the sound of a heartbeat added to emphasize the danger of imminent death.

Death and Difficulty

Death in the beta in town.

The D3 Team has talked about balancing D3 to make it a more steady struggle, than was D2. The design goal with D3 is to make the game consistently challenging, rather than very easy most of the time, with spikes of super hard boss monsters, Iron Maiden curses, Cursed Stygian Dolls, etc. To that end, potion use will be greatly curtailed, life leech will be very rare, healing skills are uncommon, and there are no town portals.

These changes make healing from health globes the primary way to stay alive, and monsters will be balanced to drop health globes just often enough for players to survive, but not so much that they litter the screen after every skirmish.

Discouraging Reckless Play

Diablo II's death penalty cost some gold, and experience as well on Nightmare and Hell. This was painful for players who were trying to level up, but for a character who was totally devoted to finding items, the death penalties were meaningless, since no items were lost. It was therefore strategically wise to go full out on magic find gear and play with reckless speed, since you'd find more items, wouldn't die very often, and when you did the penalties were negligible.

Given that Diablo III will have even more negligible death penalties than Diablo II, won't this be a problem? It was never fun to party with a crazy player in Diablo II, since they just ran off on their own to find bosses, and made no effort to clear levels or play with any teamwork.

Bashiok said no, in an October 2010 post about the lack of death penalties in the game:

I don’t think death penalties need to edge into the ‘punishment’ definition (although I realize that’s a confusion of terms) to be worthwhile.

Making sure someone can’t endlessly throw themselves against monsters/die/repeat and eventually win is something we’d want to stop. To make the player take pause and realize they’re not going to get past them unless they straighten up and pay attention and play better, or take some extra measures to buff up, or simply come up with a different strategy, those are the types of death penalties that work. Those are the ones we like and that I’m talking about.

Taking gold away from people, or taking a full level of experience away, yeah, that’s a wake up call. It’s also the quickest way to get someone to uninstall the game. A very select few people will put up with something like that. It’s fine in Diablo II because gold has almost no use, but imagine if it did. You’d be encouraged through the mechanic to grind in easier areas where you’re sure you couldn’t die just so you could earn gold safely. That sounds terrible. Without a gold penalty you can play the content you want to play and meanwhile you’re finding items and amounts of gold that are relevant. That sounds like fun.

Most fans still feel that some sort of death penalty is required, so players are not penalized for playing recklessly and ruining party games. The developers clearly don't think so, and since at this point they know the game far better than the fans, we basically have to take their word for it.

Death Penalties

The "Death Penalty" is the term used to describe the negative consequences imparted to the player when they are killed by monsters or other players. The stated penalties have varied during Diablo III's development, and may not yet be written in stone. The most recent information came from Jay Wilson in August 2010 when he said that death now results in durability losses to equipped items, which may result in expensive repairs.

An earlier comment came from Bashiok in September 2008. At that point there was no death penalty at all, other than the loss of pride and some time spent to return to the sight of your failure.

...we've found that a check point system works really well. Throughout your adventures, and generally at the ends of each "floor" of a dungeon your character is saved to a checkpoint. When you die you're dropped back at the last checkpoint with a small amount of health, and the rest regenerates slowly. It's obviously a very forgiving system as it is. It's just too early to put a ton of thought in to what penalties there should be, if any, added on top of it.

Regardless, potential penalties aside, this is the death mechanic we're currently using and it's working really well so far.

Death and revive.

Bashiok also said this, regarding death in the BlizzCon 2008 demo:

We had a checkpoint system in the BlizzCon demo we showed, where you would die and pop back up at the last chekpoint you came across. Some of that was for the convenience of the demo, but we do like the checkpoint system and intend to carry that forward in the same or similar form. We're not looking toward corpse retrieval currently.

Any death system we do have needs to allow players to get back into the action quickly, but not be so meaningless that you’re just flinging your corpse against a wall of monsters over and over until you finally get through.

It's not known if there will be more substantial penalties on higher difficulty levels; presumably characters will be wearing equipment that is more expensive to repair, thus letting the team scale up the costs accordingly. It's unlikely that more harsh penalties will be imposed, since that runs counter to one of the team's main design goals.

"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 penalties 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 detriment... We do not currently have a durability loss (to equipment), 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.

No Gold Loss on Death

Players will not lose gold when they die, since the team doesn't feel this is a necessary or useful gold sink. Bashiok commented on it in October 2010:

You lost gold when you died in Diablo II and it was still worthless. Losing gold on death isn’t a necessary sink to make it worth something. Balancing gains and expenditures properly will make it worth something.

That said, I don’t think we’ve made any final determinations on death penalties. Though I wouldn’t expect it to take anything away from the player. Gold, experience, etc.

Hardcore characters, naturally, still suffer the ultimate penalty upon death.

Death in the Arena

Dead Barbarian.

Dying in the Arena is very common, and encouraged. Matches go quickly and without any pause between the rounds. A match last until all the players on one team or the other are dead, and this doesn't often take very long in the cramped confines of the arena. In early testing at Blizzcon 2010, most 3v3 games had a round more than every minute, with 15 minute battles winding up with scores in the vicinity of 10-7.

Dead players can no longer interact with the living. Upon death you become a ghost, able to move around and watch the action, but invisible to the others. In theory a dead player could scout enemy locations for his friends, if he had voice chat or they were playing in the same room, but this would be of very minor assistance, given the small size of the Arena and the fast pace of the action.

Dead, but only until the next round begins.

Hardcore Arena Death

Hardcore characters can play in the Arena, but the same rules apply there as in a PvM game. If you die, you're dead. Forever. Full details have not yet been revealed; it's not known if there will be corpse looting allowed, if all the winning team survives or only the ones who didn't die during the round, etc. But many Hardcore players are excited about this new option, and expectations are that LLD will be very popular, for high stakes, but not weeks of effort in building a character at risk.

Special Death Animations

Diablo III will have special animations for different types of deaths for almost every monster, as well as for characters.

Monster death animations vary according to the type of damage they die from, as well as whether or not a critical hit finishes them off. Boss monsters also have extra juicy death animations.

• Read much more about this in the in the Monsters article.

As for player deaths...

Fatalities

Siegebreaker chomps.

Besides the normal death animations, there are plans to include semi-random special death animations that are keyed to special bosses, such as the amazing decapitation death Siegebreaker inflicted upon one of the Barbarians in the WWI Gameplay movie.

D3 Community Manager Bashiok answered a question about this in a forum post.

Will there be more boss-specific fatalities like the Barbarian head bite by Siegebreaker?

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.

The Lead Developer Jay Wilson also made a good reply on this in BlizzCast Episode 6:

Well what we want to do with that, especially for particular bosses is have when essentially when the player is very low on health and they're about to die the boss essentially checks like when it attacks you, did I just do enough damage to kill you? And if so then instead of just doing his normal attack he'd actually play some kind of special I pick you up and eat you or I throw you up in the air and knock you around like a baseball or something like that. It's a system that really our announcement video we tested it for the first time, mainly just to see – can we actually do this kind of animation interaction between the characters but the actual system itself is still not in there but we do plan to do that and that's primarily where. We might do some other things, we've talked about physics based deaths we've talked about having the characters if they like die to a cold monster he might completely freeze solid into a statue and then shatter or things like that but we haven't decided at this point if that's exactly what we're going to do.

Unfortunately, this feature did not make it into the actual game, as revealed in January 2012. [1]

Unfortunately we never managed to get these implemented. They were a really cool idea, but a pretty huge amount of work. The one we showed of the [[Siegebreaker]] was a scripted sequence we set up specifically for that video. It was never implemented, and never actually worked without someone sitting there typing in a bunch of commands to get it all to fire off properly. It’s still something we’d like to do, though.

All things considered there are just higher priority tasks sometimes. We’d love, for example, to have the monk display his weapons during all of his skill animations. But it’s an enormous animation and effects investment to get it done, and we have to weigh all of these things against other features and polish. A lot of the skills we could improve have multiple animation sets, multiplied twice for each gender, and then multiplied by each weapon type he can equip. That can be 40 or more unique animations, and then there’s a full FX pass, approvals, QA testing, etc. etc. and that’d just be for 1 skill.

We have our wish lists, but it’s a balancing act of resources. Ideally our choices when balancing go toward setting realistic limitations, and producing the best game possible.

Hardcore Mode

Death in the final bonus room, Blizzcon 2010 PvM demo.

The inclusion of a Hardcore option was confirmed in August, 2010.

Just as in Diablo 2, when a Hardcore character dies in Diablo 3, they stay dead. Permanently. There will be some additional bells and whistles added to HC characters on Battle.net, since the team wants a HC player to be instantly noticeable in the chat channels.

At Blizzcon 2010, we also learned that there will be Hardcore options for the Battle Arena as well. Not for the faint of heart!