Guild Wars 2

So over the last week or so I’ve been playing Torchlight 2. In that game, and games like it, I always love playing in Hardcore Mode. Which means that when you die your character literally meets the true death.

I thought “Hey, why not carry that concept over to GW2?”

So I did. I went down the line of my characters and played it in Hardcore Mode, not literally since it doesn’t exist in game. When said character died I’d delete it. What amazed me is how much my characters actually died, which I never paid attention to during normal gameplay.

Another thing that really struck me is how much getting into combat situations scared the kitten out of me knowing that if I screwed up a dodge or didn’t manage my cd’s properly it would result in the deletion of some beloved toons.

4 days later and 8 characters dead I’m back at square 1. Which I’m actually not to upset about, personally I don’t play this game for any sort of end game or finished story. The one thing that hurt was watching my lvl 60 guardian get gang banged by a bunch of Flame Legion and die lol.

Has anyone else played the game with this personal mind set? If so what is your stories of heroics or utter defeat?

And if nobody has, then what do you think of this concept? Is it something you would ever do or am I completely insane?

That sounds interesting, but I don’t think I’ll try that or I’ll go crazy Lol. Don’t forget to bank your gold and items before you delete your character xD

It’s something I’d considered.. but then again, I’m reminded how silly you can be killed in this game.

IE: Capture a town from mobs, then play around in your inventory for a few minutes ~ get up, walk to the bathroom and come back to see that the town is being assulted.. resulting in your characters death while you were away.

Personally, if we had perma death.. I would REALLY be urked.. not really because I’d have to start over.. but because that “thrill” you talked about wasn’t experienced.

IE: I missed the whole fight..
#Isn’t that the whole point of perma death?.. to EXPERIENCE it?

lol, but I digress..

Beyond having to keep your character safe.. you’ve also got the “zerg” problem with combat.

IE: Events don’t get more tactical… they just spawn more mobs with more hp/dmg.. and people would rather sit there and spam their abilities then help you as you were downed by an errant fireball.

Thus you die and people move on to the next zerg event.

Basically what I’m saying.. is that GW2 isn’t true action combat.. and your “skill” to dodge is more often then not, simply NOT a factor in your death ~ due to the way events scale.

Not only that, the “rewards” you get are pretty trivial for the “risk” you’d be taking ta get them.

In the end, GW2 isn’t EvE.
More to the point, there are NOT systems in place that reward or are built around “perma death”. ~ in that you’ll be dieing a LOT of “cheap deaths” due to these “run and gun” systems.

IE: Run in like your life doesn’t matter, because that’s the way the game was built.

Since it is so easy to die in this game I made a few exceptions to the rules of permadeath. If I’m going afk and I die in the process then I don’t count it. Also I don’t count pvp in any situation as the true death since you are going to die a billion times over and over.

For it to have real meaning and excitement you have to be in a pve situation in full control.

EATtheDEAD.4768:

Since it is so easy to die in this game I made a few exceptions to the rules of permadeath. If I’m going afk and I die in the process then I don’t count it. Also I don’t count pvp in any situation as the true death since you are going to die a billion times over and over.

For it to have real meaning and excitement you have to be in a pve situation in full control.

Ya know… the more I think about it.. the more I think you’ve touched on the main reason why a lot of people are upset/disappointed with GW2.

IE: Lack of that “thrill”.

Even in normal MMOs you have some form of that “thrill” ~ usually in the form of extremely hard dungeons or mob encounters.

And even though, GW2 has some of the most annoyingly hard dungeons I’ve ever played in an MMO… they still lack that sense of accomplishment after beating them.

IE: There are no “white knuckle” boss fights where you have to use a crowbar ta break your ninjagrip from your mouse/keyboard.

The main culprit is that the spam combat mechanics and that if you die… so what? just rez at waypoint and run back.

This combo’d with no actual loot that’s worth anything from the dungeons *(not talking about gear treadmill.. but that the rewards IN GENERAL are lackluster) just compounds a more “meh” attitude about GW2 and your character/story.

Yeah it’s that in fact that drove me to forcing myself to play in Hardcore Mode. I was playing traditionally but was getting completely bored by 60 on my main and who knows on all my alts.

Give hardcore a shot though, it’s fun and really frustrating at the same time haha

I salute your willpower, being able to delete your characters after so much playing!

In GW1 I liked to play for survivor titles, even getting Legendary before the nerf where you could start over. But in that game you had lots of tactics and tools, and not nearly as many crappy ways to die.

In GW2 I’ve fallen to my death several times trying to reach a vista, died to veterans respawning on me before out-of-combat healing even kicked in, and of course lots of times in Personal Stories when 10 mobs spawn right on top of you. Also, Fire Elemental says hi.

Death comes too randomly and unpredictably in this game to make hardcore have any appeal. When 0.2 seconds makes the difference between dodging in time and getting one-shot, I’m not even gonna try.

Yeah I know about the Asuran Fire Elemental haha I stay far away from it. On the falling to the death tragedy I do count that as a true death.

I figure if my hero, not character since now in mmo’s your character is always a world/universe saving hero, fails and dies doing something in his/her mission to greatness then that mission is immediately destroyed by his/her untimely death at the hands of a mob and or vista jumping fail haha.

It’s actually quite funny. I’m a huge hero of the world! I’m killing undead and battling dragons left and right! Uh OH! I missed a ledge and fell to my death, so much for saving the world!

I think I’d actually play this if they added it. A nice reward would be your “immortality” upon reaching level 80; i.e, if you get to 80 without dying, you become a “normal” character.

I think that would be a great addition too. It would be really difficult to get to 80 without dying once. I think that in itself would be a greater achievement then anything else.

Edit: Crafting to 80 wouldn’t count haha

Ive always wanted each MMO that launches to set aside one server for Hardcore mode of some sort.

The risk is missing is the problem with all modern MMO. WIthout risk, reward means littles, a brief shiney flash that rapidly fades without making memories.

Archaeneoso, I agree. It’s this fact that has repeatedly been a thorn in my side while playing every single big time mmo that’s come about since I’ve gotten into the genre years ago.

I know a lot of people in the communities are against harsh penalties for death, but it was these harsh penalties that made me fear death at every turn while playing their games.

It really isn’t an argument of sandbox vs themepark, more so a watering down of literal immersion into each world. Years of hard work by devs go completely unappreciated in a sense of when playing in these worlds you just blindly slog through from birth to end game.

Personal stories can only hold so much impact on your gameplay and endearment. I don’t think that a hardcore mode per say should be a forced aspect because certainly millions of people might be turned off by it. But for those few, like myself, it should be an option. If not a return to old ways of fearing your mortality.

These worlds are not filled with immortals. Their stories and lore don’t have their main villains being never ending. Most of them are threats until you gain enough power or allies to take them down, even though these packs of content are repeatable.

The failure is the integration of actual life being breathed into your own characters soul.

Some might say a feature like a Hardcore Mode might be an even further push towards single player’ish gameplay into the mmo genre, but even having such options would I think just give the world and our own characters more attachment to the chaos of our worlds we chose to play in.

AlexanderFaust.4518:

It’s something I’d considered.. but then again, I’m reminded how silly you can be killed in this game.

IE: Capture a town from mobs, then play around in your inventory for a few minutes ~ get up, walk to the bathroom and come back to see that the town is being assulted.. resulting in your characters death while you were away.

Personally, if we had perma death.. I would REALLY be urked.. not really because I’d have to start over.. but because that “thrill” you talked about wasn’t experienced.

IE: I missed the whole fight..
#Isn’t that the whole point of perma death?.. to EXPERIENCE it?

lol, but I digress..

Beyond having to keep your character safe.. you’ve also got the “zerg” problem with combat.

IE: Events don’t get more tactical… they just spawn more mobs with more hp/dmg.. and people would rather sit there and spam their abilities then help you as you were downed by an errant fireball.

Thus you die and people move on to the next zerg event.

Basically what I’m saying.. is that GW2 isn’t true action combat.. and your “skill” to dodge is more often then not, simply NOT a factor in your death ~ due to the way events scale.

Not only that, the “rewards” you get are pretty trivial for the “risk” you’d be taking ta get them.

In the end, GW2 isn’t EvE.
More to the point, there are NOT systems in place that reward or are built around “perma death”. ~ in that you’ll be dieing a LOT of “cheap deaths” due to these “run and gun” systems.

IE: Run in like your life doesn’t matter, because that’s the way the game was built.

Yupppppppp. Dead on. Risk/Rewarding play is way off. (Reward not meaning item.)

That is a pretty awesome concept. I pretty much already do it, but I only play my main and he only ever dies in WvWvW or getting over-extended against a Clone Mesmer in sPvP. I can pretty much run through any part of the game, fight 10 on 1, with the exception of group events, and I even enjoy cliff diving to my death. (Don’t think Perma would appreciate that.)

I’ll consider trying that though.

I would love to see separate servers for Hardcore mode. Knowing everyone was in the same boat, would really push people to play together. Dungeons though… :/ Might want to spawn again in dungeons. xD

I don’t think I could bring myself to delete my chars if they died. Got me thinking of stuff I could do along similar lines, though. This weekend I won’t respawn at waypoints on death, if I die I’ll stay dead unless a player rezzes me =p

Hardcore status in mmo’s is a waste of development time. Especially in a PVE centric game. Multiple MMO’s have shown that despite people saying “oh thousands of players will roll there”, it rarely ever happens, and since there is no sub in this game, the cost to pretty much recode the game cant be justified.

That’s the spirit man! haha

We all just have to find ways to push the boundaries.

If I see a dead player on my minimap I’ll run over and pick em up just in case it’s you

I would roll on a hardcore server. That sounds fun and challenging.

Then do it yourself. When the toon dies….reroll another.

We put together a guild called “Permadeath” in EQ2. Played it for awhile. It was an interesting experiment. Completely changed the group dynamic. We became far more cautious in our approach to situations.

You’d be surprised how easy it is to die in these games. And when you lose a toon at level 40 or 50…wow..talk about disappointed. Most melee toons lacking viable healing died pretty early. As the experiment progressed, the group dynamic began leaning heavily to mostly melee healers and a tank…

Could do something like that here. Might be interesting.

I would be weary of perma death in GW2 because I feel that the whole Zerging events needs massive work. Maybe if I was playing solo. No group events, no Dungeons, nothing. Hardecore makes me think of Diablo 2, Hardecore in Hell. THAT was fun. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t feel rewarding enough for me to truly have any interest in playing another format.

As for re-coding the game, I’m sure the developers, enjoy creating little goodies on the side, on their own time. Not saying to ever expect something like that, but it can happen.

Sorry, in a rush. Pretty sure it was this thread though…

To Anet: Youuu should add an option for level 80 characters to enter hardcore mode. Where you are downleveled harsher (as someone else mentioned) *in exchange for greater rewards. *

It would awesome to be able to help my friends in low-level areas and hav the game still be difficult. In fact, this severe downlevel would give me a reason to re-explore the world! You know those silly river drakes that you smacked around? Try it when they are significantly stronger!

This method doesn’t have to put you in a different server. It would just change your personal stats vs. the monsters in that area, and their drop rate.

I know, that I would replay this game in a heartbeat if the noob areas were hard. Because if they were toughened up, they would be, in my opinion, much more of a threat than those silly undead!

I fall to my death too much to warrant trying this, I swear some jumps get bigger after my feet leave the edge.