WoW's death mechanic was pretty similar to this but you spawned as a ghost so you wouldn't get ganked or killed on your way back to your corpse. That doesn't stop you from getting corpse camped by either other players or mobs, however.
Bashiok divulged some information on as to what death mechanic Diablo III is using in the current development build :
Official Blizzard Quote:
Before I get in to what we are doing let me go over some things we want to avoid with a death mechanic. We want to separate being in town and being out on a quest/adventure/dungeon as much as possible. Leaving the safety of a town should not be a decision you take lightly. We don't want to remove the sense of suspense and danger by making town something you're always going back to pretty much whenever you like.
The intent is to create a greater separation from being in town, and not, and to make your time away from town a lot more tense.
On that same note we also don't want to remove the player from the action. Throwing them back to town for every death really breaks up the action, and not in a fun, interesting, or necessary way.
So, with these things in mind 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.
How do you feel about the checkpoint system? It does make the gameplay go a lot more smoothly, but does it make the gameplay less challenging?
(After some investigation, it was found that this citation was based on a very old news topic, viewable here, although the base source no longer exists or cannot be found.)
Where does it say they will have loads of checkpoints very close together?
And if they do have checkpoints that close together what will make death a punishment. Oh i forgot the low health which you can gain back by health orbs.
Oh no I died I need to get my health back up. I guess I will wait for my team members to kill a couple of things and wallah.
I read that already, a dungeon could be any length.
But if it is fairly close together how is that a punishment?
You die, respond at checkpoint, go and find team members and wait for health to regenerate.
Diablo 2 minus the need to go back to town and added low health.
You could still let your friends clear the path to the checkpoint. Thats what friends are for.
When you die you should lose % percent of your gold on hand(towards making gold valuable), % experience, and a durability loss(could be annoying) , and respond were you died at with 5 seconds of immunity were you cant get killed or kill, but can move around. Also after like 5-20 deaths you then are sent back to the begging of the checkpoint.
That way you are able to stay in the action without redoing a whole dungeon floor, death has a penalty and is something you don't want to happen, but wont cross the annoyance line(hopefully).
This is all just my opinion that I don't even know if I would like. One of those things you have to try out for your self.
I was playing super Mario world the other day and died after completing 3-4 levels and had to start back at level one. It was so annoying. I know this is an extreme example.
I like the idea of damaged items as well. Items in diablo have never been painful to repair. If they are severely damaged when you die and you make repairing items really expensive it will make people think twice about dying.
I also don't understand how picking up loot is going to work if you can't take it back to town to sell it. I tend to fill up my inventory space with charms. If I couldn't take it back to town it would seriously change the way I organize my player. I'd leave a lot of space and actually carry an identify tome.
Or the game is to hard.
Sorry I don't remember where I heard that. But I'm clearly sure of that. It's not in that new it's in an old new. I think it's in a video ?!
*slowly raises his hand in the back*
Weaksauce bro..weaksauce. I died like, maybe 4 times whilst leveling my Bone Necro to 75 before I lost my filed. 3 of those 4 times were amazingly nonsensical. Those fucking exploding fetishes in the Durance of Hate raped me to fucking shreds.
You can fill in the lines
(Immunities sucks.)
For instance, you would buy a "check point flag" from some witch doctor that you could place anywhere on the map that you wanted. You then would immediately return to that "flag" if you died. If done right this could maybe add some depth to strategy.
Personally I see permanently losing experience and gold is a bad design. I'm ok with the idea of having some experience and gold being temporarily left at the place of death to be re-obtained in whole. But not having the ability to re-obtain 100% of what is lost will cause extreme aggravation and won't do the game any good.
I agree with this idea. If you die during a quest, then any exp lost is recovered after the completion of the quest. This will encourage players to play together and weather the storm even if things are not going smooth.
Or if you die in a dungeon, exp will be recovered after killing the boss.
Well for one it prevents you from heading straight back to the other party members (Losing time). Secondly it prevents using the current system as a teleportation device/mechanism and lastly it creates incentive to stay in the game after death or when things become difficult, while if a player cannot retrieve his/her exp/gold they do permanently lose what ever was left in game. Again this is comparing itself to the current system obviously not one much more punishing, just a variation of.