Star Citizen Will Have PERMADEATH – How Does That Work?!
Welcome to Star Citizen looking at Perma Death, Medical Gameplay & Death of a Spaceman 2.0 and what’s been discussed recently and how the mechanics have evolved since the concept of the Persistent Universe.
Currently in Star Citizen when you die you respawn and you can easily reclaim your ship. The only real risk is losing a cargo ship full of loot atm… and there are going to be resets… so nothing really is lost and you can go straight back into the game… this is not going to be the case forever, in fact they want to have permadeath in game BUT don’t worry although you are going to want to avoid it, it’s not game over you lose all your stuff…
The Goal of the Death of a Spaceman Mechanics is to give consequence to dying in game and to have that risk help drive player actions.
Getting out of a risky situation or completing a goal should give you a sense of accomplishment and a story to tell.
Chris compares dark / demon souls to the type of death vs risk/reward feel they are trying to capture in Star Citizen.
This will cause players to plan for missions and encounters, to repair their ship, consider their loadout, the time in between missions will have players visiting hospitals or shops.
Players should be able to identify more with their character and feel a sense of fear.
When you perma die you’ll create another character as your next of kin and they will inherit the old characters stuff but with a death tax. Your reputation and assets pass down but not all of them.
With reputation this means you don’t get a clean slate… BUT it will degrade with all parties.
You will be able to “die” and be brought back a good few times before a permadeath tho,
These Mechanics have evolved somewhat:
You’ll have a certain amount of lives (or times you can die) and some deaths are worse than others and will be more damaging to your character’s lifeforce.
Sometimes you’ll be able to be rescued or got back up.
There may be gene-therapy or ways to get lives back that you pay for at Hospitals.
Wear and tear (kind of aging) will be a thing on characters, they will accrue damage, battle scars and effectively age from getting injured.
There are 3 types of “death state”
1 Being downed – Your Health is at Zero you are on the floor bleeding out BUT someone can come and get you back up or stabilize you. You’ll be able to choose to respawn IF you donn’t want to wait / dont think you’ll get back up.
Security forces might be able to save you.
You might be able to purchase services to come rescue you if you are downed.
Your friends might come save you. This can still leave you with wounds that need to be treated.
2 Respawn – If noone is coming or you bleed out entirely you’ll have to respawn – This is basically clones in eve online. You’ll spawn at a facility then be able to go back to where you died and even see your body (if it hasn’t been moved).
3 PermaDeath – If you die & respawn like this too many times like that then your character is perma-dead and you’ll have to pass their assets to their next of kin.
They are working the downed states into the actor status system currently (We have seen stunned and knocked out which are similar) AND are also working on spawning at hospitals.
They are going to be introducing Actor Status V1 this will have drugs giving you buffs, debuffs, treating statuses and healing. There is going to be a medical-gun (that they’ve been working on) these are a stronger version of medi-pens and medi-pens are going to become a quickfix stabilize, that doesn’t really give you health back or cure you fully, but gets you back on your feet briefly at least.
When in a downed state you might want to drag a body to safety or to a area for treatment.
You could get an injury to your arm that’s a fracture… which would require treatment at a medical facility OTHERWISE you’ll have a debuff until you do. Take more damage to that area and it could become a lot worse and you could have an entirely crippled/destroyed limb.
The treatment, cost and time needed to heal will be directly related to the amount of and type of damage taken.
Some damage (or status effects) might be able to be fixed by a field medic or items, others will require at least a med bay of a ship, others more advanced facilities.
There will be a large range of damage for individual body parts and limbs, ranging from minor to destroyed and typically it will be progressive, you are going to have opportunity to disengage and go heal BUT you can choose to push on and risk it.
It sounds like the plan is that you can set your respawn point by downloading your DNA into the medical facility you want to spawn at. One of the other side effects of spawning as your clone is that you might of inherited some of the injuries the previous character had or you may have a prosthetic arm or have a different eye color… there is a range there based on the stability of your DNA and nature of death. Also respawning in medical facilities may carry a reasonable cost to them too. At all stages players are incentivised to stay alive OR at least get rescued rather than respawn.
There will be a death or inheritance tax that players will want to avoid if that character perma-dies. The Reputation of the character will have degraded with all groups. So it might take time to get back to where you were with the bounty hunters guild OR if you were a criminal before you’ll have poor reputation with the UEE but not as bad as it was before.
Being in a group, being in safer space are genuine considerations and will help you stay alive BUT there may be less reward along with that risk.
This also ties into physical storage, what gear do you bring along with you, do you have enough food and drink or the facilities to make them?
There seem to be plans for support armors and items that help with being a field medic, charging the medi-gun more quickly for example.
They want players to be able to make money from being medics and doing search and rescue.
The Medical and Death of a SpaceMan mechanic are a collection of lots of elements coming together. They want Star Citizen to be a virtual life type simulator with lots of different gameplay opportunities AND it will be well beyond 2021 before all of those elements merge in the way they want.
They are pushing to do it with Chris saying “We see the matrix, it’s just not done yet”.
Feedback helps evolve the mechanics sometime even before they have finished fully concepting. These mechanics will be stepped in over time.
When?
They are building some of the pre-requisites and supporting features for death of a spaceman at the moment, medical gameplay, icache ect… BUT they are actively developing the DOaSm Mechanics now. This will have them testing various ideas and building towards a tier ZERO implementation that will then be further iterated on. There are a lot of features that will be coming online for this in 2021 HOWEVER there is more to do beyond that.
Body Dragging was the first part of these new mechanics or at least ones that tie into it.
But the short – mid term goals for this is Hospital and medical locations are coming next, setting these areas as your “save” point.
Actor Status T1 with Drugs will be after that like stims, black market drugs, alcohol (and getting drunk). Blood Drug Level is part of this, so you can’t just keep on using drugs… that’s dangerous and you could overdose and need reviving with that in mind Reviving Character from a downed state will be part of this too AND they would like to have physicalized inventories coming at the same time too. Player bodies will not be despawning (at least not for a long time).
What do you think?
If you don’t like the idea of something then it’s worth voicing your opinion in a civil constructive way.
For example I want to know that people can’t pad ram assassinate another player in safe space… I’d have “green zones” and safer areas be pretty much you are immune from losing a life if you are a lawful player… even if you are a criminal maybe you just go to prison but don’t lose a life…
My concerns also would be players making “danger” characters/alts…
My main character just lives in the safest place in the Verse like on Terra for example BUT my alts have nothing beyond what I have given them from my main character as to minimize any taxes if they die.
What if my would be attacker downs me, then keeps me alive and damages more parts of my body to maximise respawn truma?
I don’t think these things are sometime to worry about as I believe CI will address them BUT they are certainly something to identify and talk about.