Since I'm now happy with imagining players (and executives in general) as being flesh-and-blood, and since I believe it would be best for time in LT to pass at the same rate as real-life but have mechanics/events that caused leaps in time, I started giving serious consideration to Hyperion's reconstruction suggestion.Hyperion wrote:Permanent death, but you can rent clone points at various stations and planets. So can the AI. If you die without a clone point, game over, go back to a previous save or start new. If the AI dies without a clone point, they disappear and their remaining assets become a free for all. If they have a clone point they can come back.
However this was discussed in IRC, and we came up with the idea that if a player dies, the game advances by a significant portion of time to allow for "reconstruction" and to ensure you aren't always fighting the same players over and over again. For shits and giggles we said that it should be an in game year. If you Kill an AI, it disappears for a year off to some station or planet... blow up the station or planet, they are gone for good. If the Human player on the otherhand dies, the game reverts to a historical simulation for 1 game year... the world is a little different after that time. If you had a great empire and died, it may be crumbling to dust, or you may have been replaced with ease and pushed out, or you may be welcomed back at the helm. [insert more scenarios here]
Hyperion evolved this idea out of TGS' original idea of immortal agents in a way intended to resolve some of the issues with it. The reconstruction idea offered a nice way in which agents you "kill" effectively disappear from your game, because it takes a year or so to reconstruct them. If the player is killed, then he gets skipped forwards in time a year and continues on from there, which is a really nice idea because it both punishes the player appropriately, but it's an interesting kind of punishment - what has changed in the course of that year?
One of the major issues with TGS' proposal was that, if we assume agents to be rational, we will likely see many NPCs we "kill" cropping up over and over again if they have a lot invested in a particular region that they will want to reclaim, unless we implement something like a debt mechanic, although that's possibly not a good idea. We'd end up with something like a Team Fortress 2/COD game where people and agents will just respawn over and over again at no cost whenever they die, and carry on trying to achieve their objectives as before.
Hyperion's reconstruction idea seemed to resolve this issue because now it forced agents to be "out of play" for a length of time, so we didn't have to imagine agents behaving irrationally for the sake of the player, or rationally in a way that annoyed the player.
But there's an issue that I spotted with this and I really ought to have spotted it earlier: Let's say I kill Bob, Pete and Mary. They go out of the game for a year, and I've effectively eliminated them. Awesome! But then I get killed too - and what happens then? The game skips forward a year, and there are Bob, Pete and Mary again, and I have to go through the hassle of killing them again I suppose. And then eventually I get killed again, time-skipped forward again, meet and subsequently kill Bob, Pete and Mary again, ad infinitum. I don't want to keep encountering the same NPCs over and over again.
On the other hand, Hyperion's idea here is expanded beyond what I remember was discussed in IRC and, as he explains in the quotation above, immortality is no longer guaranteed for either players or NPCs - agents only respawn if they have clones and their stations aren't destroyed while they're being reconstructed.
But then, if we're not assuming agents are immortal anymore - that is if we're re-introducing permadeath - why all this complication? All of these issues arose with TGS' original idea only because we were assuming agents to be immortal. If agents can be killed permanently, then we can simplify the mechanics considerably and achieve the same result: if I kill NPCs, they die permanently. If NPCs kill me, I die permanently. It's the simplest implementation of death mechanics you could suggest, it doesn't raise plausibility or player-NPC disparity issues and it's far more psychologically satisfying (people you kill are dead "for real"). There's no need to implement things like reconstruction to circumvent issues that wouldn't even exist unless we assumed everyone were immortal (although as I've pointed out above, that doesn't actually circumvent the issue). It could very well be neat for other reasons, however, and there are certainly reasons why I would consider it neat, it's just that it's no longer necessary.
I am against player permadeath, though, which is why I can't settle for this much simpler implementation.
What's next - eliminating ‘start new game’ button? Replacing it with ‘being born’ or ‘being uploaded into the world’? And what about settings? They too may change your gameplay experience. Let's integrate them nicely into gameplay as well. Call them ‘adjusting your perception unit settings’, if we run with Thymine's mainframe dudes proposal.