Death of a Spaceman

[Clandestine]

Let me start by saying I did do a quick forum search for this topic, but nothing about "death of a space man" popped up on the first page, so my apologizes if there was already a lengthy discussion of this. Sometimes it's good to let the dead posts lay in their coffin.

So the "Death of a Spaceman" seems to be an interesting topic on the mind of Chris Roberts and what he envisions. In a condensed and synthesized version of his original idea, after a certain amount of deaths or aging of your character, there is a "straw (death) that can break the camel's back (your characters ability to resurrect). He wants your character to age and show wear and tear, just like your ship will be able to. Then after said final death, you must another character that you either create or already had created, to act as sort of a lineage or inheritance model (so that you're not penalized in any way, other than the loss of your beloved character).

I think it would be an interesting mechanic to be added into the game, which adds that extra degree of, "OMG this could be it for me!" during a dogfight or hairy situation. We do need a sense of danger to fully immerse ourselves into the verse, to appreciate those close call battles the most, or have that added layer of caution. It would certainly manipulate ones decision making process factoring such possibilities into each equation. But at the same time, I wouldn't want it taking away any of the fun either, so what are solutions or compromises that could be implemented parallel with this concept?

A few things come to my mind:

Medical Facilities: The ability to treat, cure, or heal the dying. The ability to reverse aging affects. This would certainly help the medical profession have higher demand.

Cloning Technology: A type of appearance and character saving option, using basically consciousness upload from the original character.

Life Insurance: Similar to ships, return the character to baseline via the options above, which depending on the characters reputation or age (some sort of significant factor denoting this person as amateur or veteran of SC), it may take addition time to "resurrect," like a few hours to a few days.

Any thoughts to add?

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Medical facilities - Many of your fine TEST friends have Hope Class Endeavor ships - floating hospitals where you can resurrect and get a small ship from its hangar to carry on from. There is also the Cutlass Red which is an ambulance and Search And Rescue craft.

Last I heared was as you said, the general idea was that your character karks it, your possessions are passed onto whomever is named in their will - the next character you create and play as. You then carry on minus death-taxes or whatever. That was last I heared, anyway.

I swear to Christ Chris there are going to be so many sons avenging their fathers deaths you might as well set up a photocopier.

EDIT - I do see the point of making a name for your character and having the risk of that notoriety being the end of you and having to start all over again - Say you become the baddest (as in most evil) pirate in Cathcart system and your name is known throughout the UEE, wow thats an achievement but you will be the target of every bounty hunter in the 'Verse... But for every Long John Silver, there were a thousand Mark Smiths. For every Black Beard there were a thousand Richard Parkers. For every Montoya there are a thousand NaffNaffBobfaces... There are 2 million backers, 5000 of them might make a name for themselves across the game finding jump points and exotic new planets or pulling off a spectacular cargo run or plough through politics into the higher levels of the UEE, but there will be 1,995,000 backers who, sadly, won't.

Perhaps it is a great way to stop people becoming notorious? You put in all that effort to become the most heinous pirate of all time only to die and have to start again. Yeah, you may be the player behind Dura-steel Jones of the Seven Systems, but your new character will need to go through all that rep work over again. It'd be quicker with all the gains from your previous but it'd still be a bit of a grind.

I'd say it's got the potential to be a very interesting game mechanic. The players will take UEE history up to the point the game launches and run with it in whatever field they want to play in... and then their names will be written into the Lore of the game based on what they achieved, if they achieved anything at all... TEST, for instance, has an agreement that the first Jump point we find is going to be named "Disco Landos Hole".

It's all theory-craft right now though.

 

[Montoya]

In a condensed and synthesized version of his original idea, after a certain amount of deaths or aging of your character, there is a "straw (death) that can break the camel's back (your characters ability to resurrect). He wants your character to age and show wear and tear, just like your ship will be able to. Then after said final death, you must another character that you either create or already had created, to act as sort of a lineage or inheritance model (so that you're not penalized in any way, other than the loss of your beloved character).

$10 says this never happens because he has a lot of ideas that are simply not good.

Nobody wants to continually recreate their main, or see it get old and die.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

$10 says this never happens because he has a lot of ideas that are simply not good.

Nobody wants to continually recreate their main, or see it get old and die.

Every single main I make i'll set the age to 105 and their lifestyle to sedentary and diet to sugar and fat. I'll see how many of them I can get through before I get out of the airlock of Olisar station.

 

[Montoya]

Every single main I make i'll set the age to 105 and their lifestyle to sedentary and diet to sugar and fat. I'll see how many of them I can get through before I get out of the airlock of Olisar station.

This is supposed to be fantasy, not a real life simulator!

 

[maynard]

immersion is hard

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

immersion is hard

If I can't start the game with a double chin, there is no immersion.

 

[Montoya]

If I can't start the game with a double chin, there is no immersion.

Drive to Manchester and demand a face scan!

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Drive to Manchester and demand a face scan!

In the finest tradition of Internet Jpegs (and to protect my anonymity) I have spent the last 30 minutes drawing over my own face in Photoshop from a picture of me pulling the above face that I just took:

I don't think they need a face-scan, they can just use the above.

EDIT - And the Chin-Map version just in case you missed 'em:

 

[Clandestine]

I think there should be some sort of control over the mechanic, if it did make it into the game. Some people become very attached to their characters, name, etc. Others will be too beautiful to fully destroy, thus should have sustained life, IE Montoya. I mean, once I blew up his ship (hopefully there's a one-way air valve to allow this to happen), I simply could not continue to fire upon the floating radiant energy of his angelic spaceman floating about, so though the blast may have "killed" him, his distress beacon was answered and he was taken to a medical center. Heaven forbid the marauding band of necrophiliacs catch him first...

There very well could be that 100 year old space fighter that lived to tell about it all and has one hell of a name for himself, but runs at 1/5 the speed he used to on his feet in a FPS scenario, and has a hard time taking cover due to his inability to control his bowels, not to mention his prostate milking needs. This could be where medical facilities being capable of a body's longevity and rejuvenation comes into play. I demand the possibility of Botox and implants too.

I think there are pros and cons to both sides of the argument. At the end of the day, maybe a person can select the "hardcore" character mode to play the game which comes with a faster REP ability (like 5% faster gain or something extremely minute) or the "vanilla sex" mode (no risk no reward).

 

[Jolly_Green_Giant]

Nobody wants to continually recreate their main, or see it get old and die.

You're right, but it's something you just gotta deal with that helps make the game what it is. I'm really pushing for this game to stick to the premise of it being ridiculously hard.

YOU DIED.

 

[DirectorGunner]

lol... real life simulator engaged!

 

[Vavrik]

In Science Fiction there is a mechanic, and in real life there is a potential mechanic, whereby you can actually achieve something approaching immortality. The process involves digitizing the mind, and transferring it to a clone upon your death. You would back up your mind, so to speak to a repository periodically, then if you died they could take a clone of you and upload your entire mind into it. You would know you "died" because you suddenly woke up in a creche, instead of in your ship, and some time would have inexplicably have passed. You might even be able to recover some of the missing memories electronically via implants that capture memories and experiences electronically and transmit them to the data store.

It's a little controversial an idea, some people think that the real you would be dead, after some time you'd have been dead for some time. But others see this as a continuation. If the clone had your DNA, your memories and personality - then that clone is basically you for all real intents and purposes.
Every Christian is now cringing in horror. Get over it. You'd be dead, so "you", the way you're defining it, wouldn't care.

 

[Montoya]

I'm really pushing for this game to stick to the premise of it being ridiculously hard.

I want it to be enjoyable before it is hard!

 

[Clandestine]

This seems like an appropriate time to quote the fabled duo of wise words, Salt N Peppa:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCadcBR95oU

 

[Jolly_Green_Giant]

I want it to be enjoyable before it is hard!

I understand that and I don't disagree. I think the game can be enjoyable and still be hard. Enjoyable and hard are both subjective in their own right obviously. Your main character dying and having to start over may very well not be enjoyable, but the reward of keeping him alive may overshadow that.

Some commentary from Chris that makes me push for high difficulty and really keeps me believing he will deliver the game I will enjoy playing:


How do you feel about modern games; which of them have interested or inspired you?

"I think there’s a lot to be admired about games today – the level of graphical fidelity and sophistication is mind blowing in comparison to when I was last making games. Games that I played, finished and loved in the last few years have been the Uncharted series by Naughty Dog – possibly the most cinematic games ever made (yet!) , Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 (love the whole team aspect, playing with your friends and the destructible environment), Mass Effect series (great cinematic story telling), StarCraft 2 (E-Sports!), Fallout 3 (great, deep FPS RPG) and finally Demon’s Souls – possibly the most frustrating yet rewarding game I’ve ever played. I’ve never put 200 hours into a game before but I did on Demon’s Souls. There’s some great design in the game, and I also think it harkens back to the old days of gaming where beating a level meant something. With too many of today’s games the difficulty is dumbed down so everyone can finish. Problem with this is that it’s just not as rewarding for the player. In most shooters I just charge in blasting in the single player campaign as I know if I die I will respawn a few seconds earlier. My play style is sloppy. But with Demon Souls I had to think, I had to be careful and the sense of accomplishment form beating the game was much more than I have gotten from a game in a long while."

 

[Vavrik]

Some commentary from Chris that makes me push for high difficulty and really keeps me believing he will deliver the game I will enjoy playing:

So, this I like. But SC offers something a lot of other games don't offer. That is it's a sandbox, so we can do a lot of things that aren't scripted, build our own game inside the game, and even have entire storylines that CIG hasn't thought of before. A game like that I could, and have, played for thousands of hours.

 

[Jasum]

I like the death of a spaceman concept, and I hope it is implemented in some form. There should be a cost for dying in the verse... Dying should mean more than just the small inconvenience of having to spawn your ship again. As has been said earlier in this thread, it forces everyone to truly think their actions through and have an incentive to survive. Having something to lose is part of the reason why Escape From Tarkov is so popular right now as an example.

I am curious how this would work in the reputation system though... If you spend dozens of hours building your reputation has a master miner, fearsome bounty hunter, or whatever and then you suddenly have to start from scratch, that would likely be the kind of punch in the gut that'd turn many players away from the game.

All that said, if CIG does implement this mechanic, I'm sure it will be well thought out and (eventually) balanced through testing and community feedback.

 

[Xist]

I like the death of a spaceman concept, and I hope it is implemented in some form. There should be a cost for dying in the verse... Dying should mean more than just the small inconvenience of having to spawn your ship again. As has been said earlier in this thread, it forces everyone to truly think their actions through and have an incentive to survive. Having something to lose is part of the reason why Escape From Tarkov is so popular right now as an example.

I am curious how this would work in the reputation system though... If you spend dozens of hours building your reputation has a master miner, fearsome bounty hunter, or whatever and then you suddenly have to start from scratch, that would likely be the kind of punch in the gut that'd turn many players away from the game.

All that said, if CIG does implement this mechanic, I'm sure it will be well thought out and (eventually) balanced through testing and community feedback.

I seem to recall CR suggesting that your reputation would be inherited by your next of kin, but also that your next of kin could pivot away from the legacy of their "parents."

 

[Han Burgundy]

I want it to be enjoyable before it is hard!

Generally, most enjoyment seems to happen AFTER hardening...

Spoiler

https://i.giphy.com/media/QnMJm9bVR9nDa/giphy-downsized.gif