It gives a dis-satisfactory feeling as if you lost your real character and got a new one. It loses it's feeling of "closeness" as i will call it. It's story. You lose your "bond" or "connection" with your character. It will be especially enhanced by the fact that equipment determines all the stats of your character and he has no permanent changes. Also, i think the idea of reusing dead bodies would increase the minimum age required to play the game(because it would give a macabre/revolting attribute to the game. And the ratings are pretty strict, so i presume it would be enough that the game wouldn't be available(/recommended) for people younger than ~12 or so.). From what i read so far i got the feeling that the devs are avoiding that at all costs. Of course, i would be wrong, but it would increase the risk of it happening by a fair margin at least.
I doubt that it is more macabre than fencing pigs in a small area, breeding them, killing the parents when the children are born, and cooking the pork in the same pen, in front of the newly born piglets, and Minecraft doesn't have a rating that is very high. Then again, it would probably all depend on how graphic everything was as well as what you could actually do with the dead bodies (there are only a couple of things that may be considered for this game, and they are reanimation and dissection (...saying that, I doubt that being able to take someone's liver and sell it elsewhere would be considered, so reanimation is probably the only thing, as I doubt that you will be able to eat corpses like in the Fallout/Elder Scrolls games)). As it goes, what is the planned age rating for the game at the moment?
Guys, this is just a whimsical game. Technically speaking, one could argue that most video game characters with lives which you finish the game with are, in fact, NOT the same character you started with. I think you're looking into this a bit too deeply.
There's a difference. Go to http://www.esrb.org/index-js.jsp and see for yourself. There are different ratings for animals and humans for one. For another thing, there's a difference between eating pork to survive and using your own corpse for your own strange purposes. So yes, it is more macabre. In real world people do what you said with pigs and it's considered normal. But no one plays around with human corpses. That would be considered... Wrong(note the capital W). Also, even though there is a possibility of doing what you said in minecraft, but in a very mild(and non-macabre) way. Though you are right that if usage of dead bodies was executed right, it might not raise the age rating. It would, however, be very difficult to execute the idea that way. Especially with all the sick ideas i've seen in this thread. * shudders* I don't think most people who support this idea would be satisfied with something that wouldn't take the maturity required to play the game way up. And no, i haven't seen the exact age rating planned, though i did hear the devs were careful so it would be raised the least possible. There's a difference. When your character changes in the way he looks or thinks, it's one thing, because you are with him through all his improvements. When you are thrown a new character who just looks the same it kills the atmosphere. That's why i stopped reading "a Song of Fire and Ice". The author ruined and/or killed too many characters without a second thought
All cloning is is a gameplay mechanism, a unique spin on the death/continue system that I actually thought was pretty creative. Your character in this game probably doesn't have a particularly deep personality, in the same sense that most simple video game characters don't. They're bits and numbers in a piece of software, not a story or a movie. Y'know, if this is how people feel about the cloning system, perhaps keeping it would be better. It'd certainly make you play more carefully. If you want your original character to make it through the game alive, then keep them alive. I'm sure that would be a good enough incentive to promote careful playing.
Actually, those types of character can have a personality as deep as you make it through their actions (and, occasionally, words). Kind of like Gordan Freeman (from what I have been told), although mute, and there being no indication of his feelings about anything, it is really up to you what he really thinks when he does what he does (is he unhappy about having to kill other humans, or does he enjoy every minute of it? When people are being killed around him, is he vengeful, happy, or does he not care?). And some simple video game characters have more depth than some main characters of movies (even if they are just the ones at the start of a game that if you talk to them enough they will give you a (few) potion(s)). It is even possible to become attached to mindless NPCs, in the case of companions, it can be through the adventures you have had (and times where they have saved you (hell, even in Pokemon, there was a time where I had to sacrifice my Shinx so that I could revive my starter so that I could beat the leaf gym. It survived two blows, meaning that I was able to restore my starter to full health as well) that can make you sad if they die, in the case of merchants...well, that one is difficult to explain, but if you have played Dark Souls, then I can probably get away with just saying Andre of Astora, and then sometimes there are just times where regular NPCs have been a big help (can't remember the exact example)). Going back to my first point of the player character having a personality as deep as you can imagine, I can use my Fallout New Vegas character as an example, total kleptomaniac, gaining him a lot of negative karma, and yet he he helps everyone for the cheapest price he can, and only attacks people who are hostile to him (usually attempting to talk his way out of situations first). And there have also been times (too bad I can't remember the game names, but I think one of them may have been Suikoden: Tiekreis) where the character bears your name and does various things that can make you become attached to them, even with some tearjerker moments (and I was actually excluding most of the early Final Fantasy games from that, but I suppose that they still technically count because you can call the characters after yourself and people close to you). Then again, most of what I said really just depends on how deeply immersed you are in the game, and how well the game implements certain things, as well as how much stuff you can do in the game.
It's all about the emotional bond a player forms with the little coloured dot known as the character on their screens. Odd, when you think about it that way. Or, put in other words - It's all about how you perceive things. A human humanises the things he sees. Especially if there is emotion involved. I remember when i was just a little kid. I once found an oak leaf. I took it home, and had it for a long time. One day, i accidentally crumpled the leaf by putting a book on it or something. I was sad. The leaf got through a lot, and then it was finally crumpled by a simple mistake. I felt really sad for it, even though it was only a leaf. Unfeeling, and not even alive. Like a thing. And it was dead and dry for a long time either way. You see my point?
Alright, alright. I see where you guys are coming from. Still, I stand by what I said in that, if you form a bond with your character, you'll want to work that much harder to avoid death, so I still believe that the cloning system should be kept, regardless of how you view your character or, erm, their subsequent clones.
Wait, who said the cloning has to be visually graphic? I mean hell, it could just pop out in front of a cloning tube in front of your ship and say it was "cloned" it really seems like yall are just pulling stuff out of nowhere to argue against an idea because you disliked the original premise for a reason that actually equally applies to every single respawning system present in any game to this day.
Actually, he wasn't talking about the cloning part, he was talking about the whole playing with corpses side of things (unless there were other people in the thread who talked about graphic cloning).
*sigh* I really could care less about that, because it won't affect me in anyway if I don't use it. (also if the ability to use parts of corpses is an automatic M rating, several kids games for PS1 should be M rated not E, just saying nobody said it had to be violent or overtly graphic) I really don't see a point in this conversation anymore, it just seems absolutely redundant, people are just coming up with ridiculous reasons to not include cloning, and then it turns off topic into more random crap. Honestly I kind of feel like the world is becoming a bit too squeamish, a lot of first world citizens live shockingly insular lives, and get grossed out if they learn how their damn meat is made. I mean, this doesn't just apply to violence, as that one obviously isn't too stigmatized in some countries, but look at nudity, civilians or children dying in video games, etc etc it all causes a huge uproar when it happens in these games that are supposedly representing hellscapes and warzones. But nobody cares about realism, for all their talk. Nobody cares about immersion, for all their talk. Nobody cares about whats right or wrong, and what's natural, and what the world outside their damn living room is like, for all their talk. All I have to say is, wake up.
I don't really have a problem with cloning, but I can see the views of the people who do (caring less about the character (Crackdown being a prime example of this) etc. etc.). Most things in games never really affected me that much, in all honesty, it is about separating what you can do in games from what is acceptable in reality (i.e. on Fable, I slaughtered my home town and bought all of the houses/shops. I wouldn't do that in real life because I know it would be stupid and illegal). Seriously, the people who say something along the lines of 'it's monstrous that you can go around killing lots of people in this game, this stuff should be banned' are, in my opinion, idiots, and it never ceases to annoy me. The only thing more annoying than that are the times where parents scapegoat games for their own dumbassery 'my eight year old played Manhunt 2, and then he went out an killed someone', and when I see that, I just think 'well, it's your own stupidity for letting him play a game that he was far too young to play, not telling him right from wrong, not telling him that he shouldn't replicate things in games, and you technically did something illegal by buying it for him in the first place, you complete numpty, stop saying 'my son played this game and killed someone, it is the games fault' and admit to your own muck up' (although there would probably be more swearing in the actual version of what I would say). ...Oh wait, that went completely off topic, and I swear I wrote that in an essay at some point, sorry about that. My views on the actual topic are that I am fine with cloning (it makes sense given the setting, the other thing that would make sense would be having a member of your crew teleport you back to your ship/wherever you changed your spawn point to (assuming it has that kind of system (i.e. build a structure on a planet and use some form of item to change where you respawn)) and put you in some form of healing pod). It would be quite cool if there were some kind of reanimation type thing (that doesn't really require any precise tinkering with any body parts, it would be like a technological way of using a Phoenix Down on someone, and would mean that I could save someone if I had become very attached to them). The ability to be like Dr. Frankenstein would be quite cool, but that would probably be going a little too far (in technical terms. In my opinion, there shouldn't really be anything there that could increase the rating drastically, short of ultra realism and going into graphical details with each step rather than it being closer to the Spore character creation (well, that was the first thing I envisioned when I said about the Frankenstein thing, with the second being one of those Flash games where you create monsters).
I understand why some people want cloning. I just gave my thoughts on the matter. Because i myself disagree with the idea. And i'm not the only one for whom there is the same problem about the game feel being ruined. Perhaps for you the reasons looks ridiculous, but for some others(me for example) they do not. It's all about one's character. And you seem to not be able to see or understand those who think differently. I think there are better reasons to explain death, simply put. Also, about the rating and body usage. It is not i who created and set those ratings. I do agree that some people really are ridiculously "squeamish" as you said. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about it. About the rating. Someone once rebuked my idea about a creepy place(a kind of easter egg) because it included words written in blood on the walls. They said the bloody letters were a bad idea because they would increase the age rating. Now imagine if they made any of the things that were suggested doing with corpses here. In short - you are mostly right about age rating, but that doesn't change the fact that the devs are trying to keep the age rating low.
What about to make clones limited like up to 10 and purchasable? Starting with like a 5 clones. And for the guy above me, you doesn't have to be full clone, you can have some kind of technology that can transfer your mind into cloned body.
This vaguely reminds me an [awesome] RPG board game called Paranoia. It's a sci-fi themed game where the world you live in is controlled by the Computer. The Computer is your friend. Obey the Computer. You play as a Troubleshooter - your job is to find trouble and shoot it. It's a ridiculous game, very fun. However, due to the nature of the game, characters die left and right. But not to fear! The friend Computer keeps backups of all the Troubleshooters memories and makes clones of their bodies (for some nominal fee). When you die, your latest memories is added to one of your clones, and tadaa! Same character, same memories, same body (more or less). You even keep mutant powers and such. It's basically the exact same character. What wrong with this type of cloning in a game like Starbound? [The reason your post reminds me of the game is because you start off with 5 clones, and you can buy additional clones as you go. In fact, clones are cheap enough that they come in 5-packs!]
I'm fairly sure that cloning was confirmed by the devs somewhere -- an IRC transcript? Think it was in a random thread somewhere :\
Hey, i love that. It would be the solution for many problems if you send a clone instead of yourself.
Not sure if anyone saw it but one of the SB devs (forgot which one) tweeted the human respawn animation which appears to be cloning in the simplest terms.
