The Death Penalty

There's a thread about a new "Pixel storage system" that's been rife with discussion, but not all of it has been relevant to the actual topic.

In this thread, we're going to discuss the death penalty in Starbound. Let's start with an explanation of what a death penalty is and why it's important to game design.

The Death Penalty and Game Design
"Death" is one of the most effective ways to introduce challenge into a game, right? The player needs to perform at a certain level or else they "die." Most deaths in modern video games aren't permanent, but they do carry a form of penalty with them. This penalty is a way to motivate players into rising to the game's challenge. Without a sufficient penalty, players won't fear "death" and may not be motivated to rise to the game's challenge.

In classic arcade games, for example, losing all of your lives meant that you had to start again from the game at the very beginning (or fork up another quarter). There were no saves, once your lives were gone... that was it. This type of penalty is pretty harsh by today's standards, but for those games it made sense because the objective of arcade games was to make money off of people's quarters anyways.

In some games, however, death penalties might not be severe enough. When a max level character died in Everquest, they merely had to return to the point in which they died at to heal a debuff that was applied to them for dying, allowing them to zerg (constantly dying and running back into the fight against a very difficult boss in order to kill it) tough bosses without suffering large penalties.

So what is an appropriate death penalty for a game? Of course, the answer to this question depends upon the game itself. Eddy Webb, a blogger who works in the game industry, made a brief blog post in June in which he talked about death penalties:

In our case, Starbound is a sandbox RPG, so we need to find a death penalty that's suitable for its genre.

The Death Penalty and Starbound
As of the time of this post, the death penalty in Starbound is that a player who dies will lose 20% of the pixels he is carrying. This is a decrease from a 30% loss of pixels which was in effect before the last update, though some people claim that 20% is still too much. On top of that, Chucklefish is planning to launch a special way to store pixels, essentially circumventing pixel loss on death (to an extent), which is being discussed in the thread linked at the very top of this post.

The question I would like to pose in this thread is this: Is the upcoming death penalty and the method that can be used to circumvent it appropriate for Starbound?

In order to answer this question, we need to think about what pixels are used for. Pixels have three main uses:

• 3D Printing
• Crafting
• Trading

3D Printing and Crafting are both sandbox elements, whereas Crafting and Trading are both RPG elements. Because of this, we can say that losing pixels on death is a pretty appropriate penalty for Starbound, which is a sandbox and RPG game. But is the amount of pixel loss appropriate?

Currently, crafting a T2 racial breastplate (such as the Avian's Sparrow Breastplate) costs 1200 pixels for a combine. This means that if you have 1499 or less pixels and you die, you'll be short of crafting the breastplate... but that also means that if you have 1500 or more pixels and you die, you'll still have enough to craft the breastplate. The T3 racial breastplate costs 1400 pixels, which means you can die and still be able to afford it as long as you have at least 1750 pixels. That's not a whole lot of pixels, especially considering that people who take their time in T2 can comfortably carry a few thousand pixels at any given time.

On top of this, soon there will be a system in place that will allow us to convert pixels into pixel blocks, which aren't lost on death. There is a cost, however. Only 60% of the pixels you convert into blocks will be retrievable, the other 40% is spent on material costs and is lost. (This means that if you turn 100 pixels into a block, 40 of those pixels will go into material costs and the actual value of the block will become 60.) Effectively, this is an insurance system that is most efficient if you die more than twice between periods when you receive a net increase in pixels.

So, now that we've got a good knowledge of how death penalties work in video games and how the death penalty is specifically implemented in Starbound, we can open up discussion: Is the upcoming death penalty and the method that can be used to circumvent it appropriate for Starbound? Is the penalty too safe? Is it too harsh? Please respond with your comments below and vote in the poll. Thanks for reading, and remember to keep comments civil. =)

 

Losing a few pixels is not really a big deal.

In Terraria I always played medium-core and I was always careful not to die. If I want pixels I just have to go grind a few mobs to get money, NP.
Whereas losing your best gear down in hell was a big deal.

What is the insurance system though?

 

I could just easily go and kill a few monsters and get my pixels back.

 

Check out the OP in this thread, Rarity does a good job of explaining it.

 

Could you mayhap include a "I don't really give a flying F*&k" option for your poll?

Edited and highlighted for clarity --> I should note (so you don't get offended) that this option is not a way of telling off the OP. Just some off-hand humor. <--

Just that this topic has been rehashed ad-nauseum, and I think perhaps it might be a good idea to wait to actually see its implementation in the game before making decisions on how something we've never experienced affects the game. Additionally, even if it does affect the game, it only affects if the player chooses to use it. Instead of legislating how everyone should enjoy the game, it seems that players can simply not use the new option and carry on. Hence, at the moment, I and a large number of other people, in my estimation, really don't care about this topic much.

 

Yea that seems like a better idea than making a new item to fill up my inventory.

 

There is an option for that. Don't respond. You don't have to be rude about it.

 

Where's the "statistical death penalties are a horrible mechanic that needs to be purged from gaming like that cancer it is" option?

 

Could you explain what a "statistical" death penalty is and explain why they shouldn't be in games?

 

Honestly, I could care less about any option because it is quite obvious they intend to add other modes. My guess is that at least one of these modes is going to be "1 life" mode where you die once and it just deletes your world, as to please people who think that the death penalty isn't harsh enough.

I feel, completely feel, that the death penalty is fine where it is, and the added bank makes it more forgiving in case you have a lot of pixels to spare.

 

You really should read the part right below the bit you quoted. I originally added a note to indicate I wasn't trying to be rude or offend. It was intended as a bit of off-hand humor. I've now highlighted it so it can't be overlooked.

 

Apologies, but saying "no offense" doesn't make something not offensive. It's like saying to someone, "No offense, but you're ugly."

 

For the... Fourth time? Not really. Getting sick of repeating myself. It should be obvious why punishing someone twice over for failure is bad, anyway.

Also, what does "statistical death penalty" sound like to you? It's a penalty for dieing that is statistical, I. E. loss of money, debuff, whatever. It's become necessary to specify either "statistical" or "unnatural" in order to curb the idiotic replies centered around comparisons to actual, good gameplay mechanics found in other and/or older games.

 

"Twice over." This makes for a good discussion point. Are you saying that teleporting a player back to their ship in addition to losing pixels is too much?

It's important that you clarify what you're talking about so that your argument isn't misrepresented. (It's why I defined what a death penalty is in the OP even though most of us are pretty clear on it.) I know you said you're sick of repeating yourself, but I'm interested on hearing your thoughts on why "statistical" death penalties are unhealthy for games. You could just quote yourself from other threads if you would like.

 

I see. If I further prepend the entire comment with a disclaimer that "The following comment is meant to be taken lightly" would that help? Because as far as I can tell, the only thing that should be offended by my not caring about this topic is the topic itself. I didn't aim anything whatsoever at you. It's a far cry from calling you names or commenting on your appearance

 

It's alright, you know how uppity this community gets. That's why I try to keep my language as respectful as possible.

 

Personally, I don't find the death penalty to be too harsh, or the weird banking costs and the banking system to be too easy/too expensive. No, what I find is that it's WEIRD. It doesn't fit into the game very well in my opinion; when I started the game I had no idea what pixels were, and learned over time that they were crafting materials and currency. But this is the weird part. Why are they currency AND crafting materials?

In Terraria (the easiest game to compare Starbound to, don't yell at me for it) You dropped money on death in the equivalent of normal difficulty. Okay, similar to what we have here... except that pixels are more useful than just hard currency (as a crafting ingredient) and there is no way at all to retrieve your lost pixels, except to get new ones. So, pixels are different in that A- they are more useful, and B- they vanish magically when we lose them. This system is not exactly punishing, because pixels are really easy to come by, but it's annoying. In my experience, people don't like it, on top of not liking having died. It's an unnecessary nuisance that doesn't add to the gameplay in any meaningful way.

The banking system adds to that, in that it's enforcing loss of our crafting materials/currency in this game. There is no real way to protect your pixels, short of never dying at all, but pixels are also incredibly expendable and easy to come by. They're useful without being valuable and they're either abundant enough to not care about or scarce enough that players have to put in extra time and effort to do something they wanted to do.

Let's look at Dark Souls for a minute here for comparison. Totally different game, yes, but it has a similarity. In Dark Souls, 'Souls' are what you do almost everything with. You upgrade items with them, you use them to level up, and you use them to buy things from vendors. They've got a lot of usefulness, like pixels do, for the same reason- you need them to do things. However, when you die in Dark Souls, you lose ALL of your souls... almost. You always have a chance to get them back, by going back to the place you die, in which case 100% of them will return to you. This means dying imposes an extra challenge; go back to what killed you, and survive this time. Starbound doesn't have this. It says to a player- "You died? Go back to your ship, give me some pixels." And that's the end of it. The player is not motivated by their death to continue doing anything, instead of being challenged to do better this time.

I get that it's beta and that things will probably change dramatically over time, but in my opinion, they don't need to add to the pixel system- they need to either overhaul it into something different, or make a new system. Because it doesn't work.

TL;DR- The pixel system, in general, isn't fun. It doesn't make much sense or mesh well with the game, and it's either inconsequential and vaporous or actively giving the player a hard time.

 

Alright, I'll bite.

That's always been one of the prime issues with this. Games have historically always punted you back to a checkpoint of some sort as punishment for dying. Some have lives systems where if you die too many times you get punted back to the start of a stage, which is actually almost as bad as what happens in Starbound if you die even once, providing you were deep enough underground.

But the thing a lot of people don't realize is it's not just punishment, it's a way to reset the player's momentum to prevent them from bashing their head against the same failure over and over. It serves an actual gameplay enhancing function that does as much to improve gameplay as potentially frustrate the player.

See, dying in and of itself is frustrating. Even when there's no real penalty involved at all. It's failure, and failure stinks. Games have momentum, and momentum tends to mount as things move around and stuff happens in a game. The natural momentum of the stage and whatever the enemies are doing in it, combined with the player's loss of momentum and being knocked off their feet can combine to create an irritating situation. Have you ever played a run and gun shmup where you respawn right where you died? Ever get locked in that loop where you die over and over to what feels like something really stupid, something you really should be able to handle? That is what this is in action, and punting you back to some kind of checkpoint on death exists as an actual function of gameplay to make the player take a step back and get a new handle on the situation, not just as punishment for failing.

Better games that respawn you right on the spot generally have their own way of balancing success against failure, and usually have other things in place to reset momentum, I. E. shooters often have a respawn timer (which Starbound actually sort of has) that gives the player a moment to chill out and reassess what they did to fail, and some old school beat-em-ups knock all the enemies on the ground when you revive to give you a moment to get your momentum back.

The problem with statistical death penalties is that they don't actually do anything but frustrate the player. Usually, they don't perform the very function they're intended to, which is the same function the above mechanics do. They're meant to encourage the player to slow down and stop trying to frustratedly headbutt the situation, but they fail at this because no component of their function actually does anything to ensure this result. What usually ends up happening is they're paired with the usual "penalty" of being punted back to a checkpoint of some sort, and end up being kick to the teeth when the player is already down. "You died, haha, here have fun being teabagged by game mechanics."

Also, I'm going to touch on this from the angle I went at it that was relevant to what was being discussed in a few other threads, but not so much in the context of this one, just because it still needs said:

In summary: Difficult and punishing are not the same thing. People fallaciously mistake them for being identical all the time but they're not. Difficult can be good, arguably, but punishing is almost never. Games that go out of their way to punish the player heavily for a mistake almost universally frustrate the wide majority of gamers, and more often than not games that are like this get patched, sometimes repeatedly, to be less so. Even if the game in question was designed like this intentionally. Why? Because it's hard to sell a masochistic experience to most people.

It's also why games like Super Meatboy manage to be hard but still see popularity: The game is difficult but isn't punishing AT ALL. Like, the game's idea of punishing you for dying is to make you play it more, it punts you back in instantly after dying and tells you to get back on that bike and ride, to the point where it's almost a detriment to the game for the reasons I stated above.

 

Both of you guys raise some good points, thanks for sharing! There's a couple things I want to comment on.

This is actually answered in the game's lore. Pixels are used in 3D Printing, which became so popular that societies started using pixels as universal currency.

You are correct in saying that pixel loss does not directly stop a player from trying to repetitively headbutt a situation, but I want to bring up USMC Penal Colonies. Currently, it's common for players to attempt to defeat enemies in high level USMC Penal Colonies because they yield high-level weapons. Because the enemies in the penal colonies are so much higher, players are at risk of dying a lot, and for some players, the pixel loss on death is the only disenfranchisement they have when thinking about zerging the colony for high-level weapons. What would your solution be to this problem if pixel loss on death were to be removed?