Game Mechanics Changes to Mediumcore (death penalty, 1-up lives)

[Cratar]

Mediumcore, though designed to be riskier and more exciting than going softcore, tends to fall through and reveals itself as merely a severe inconvenience. It is true that you take risks more seriously on mediumcore, but what happens when your luck runs out? You drop all your items and you lose them... until you inevitably make your lengthy recovery trip. Odds are that you're not just going to quit out and willingly let your current level gear de-spawn. That means the real death penalty is the inconvenience of retreading the same ground with your backup gear, retrieving it 10-20 minutes later and resorting your scrambled inventory. Now you're good, you've lost nothing, it's like softcore but with more work.

What I propose is a different penalty for dying which I hope is harsher but less boring. The best of both worlds. Instead of dropping your equipment upon dying, you should lose a life. Newly created characters start with a number of lives. When you run out, your character dies permanently hardcore style.

The consequences for dying now resemble what we're all familiar with, inching anxiously closer to the final game over, the rising stakes and taking the game even more seriously than before. You don't have to go back to where you died, you still have all your stuff. Getting killed and being brought back to your spawn point can wear on your patience, but at least you're free to either quit out or do something else in-game.

 

[Mjolnir]

I don't think this will be implemented. It would make it more like an arcade game. Plus, that is just a weak hardcore. Mediumcore players know the risks and decide to take them (like me). But it's a nice idea.

 

[ppowersteef]

I'm personally thinking the gravestone they drop should contain the items they lost. Though that's also rather tricky because the gravestones aren't guaranteed to be placed.

 

[Sigma90]

I don't think lives are the way to go, because that makes mediumcode like hardcore, but with more chances. In the long run, it's not that different.

I'm personally thinking the gravestone they drop should contain the items they lost. Though that's also rather tricky because the gravestones aren't guaranteed to be placed.

I like this idea. If there were a way to guarantee a container be placed... a floating bubble or something?

 

[Bry]

Kinda "meh" on this idea. Yeah, it's familiar, but I personally think the penalty should be immediate, and not long-term.

I like this idea. If there were a way to guarantee a container be placed... a floating bubble or something?

Something like the Money Trough's Flying Piggy Pank, but it doesn't despawn until you open it or you leave the world?
That'd be cool.

 

[Trench Baralski]

Spawn something like an herb bag or treasure bag but with all the items you've dropped. Call it a body bag.

 

[Baconfry]

One large reason why mediumcore exists is to enable user-created multiplayer game modes, like those you see on Pedguin’s server. So I don’t think we should touch that.

But I do like the idea of hardcore players having multiple lives if they wish. So maybe we could make it so upon creating a hardcore character, you could choose how many lives you’d have, and existing hardcore characters would just have that set to 1. Obviously the number of remaining lives would be displayed in-game for convenience, and also because practically no one plays hardcore unless they have something to prove.

I like this because it adds a playstyle while removing nothing. Even existing hardcore players benefit because they get an in-game affirmation of how hardcore they are.

 

[S'AraisVanu]

Could make a way to obtain additional lives, of course.

 

[neoselket]

Maybe when you run out of lives your inventory gets deleted. I play on mediumcore a lot, and i think the best way to change it would be to make items not despawn when exiting the world. I have many horror stories about that.

 

[Ranadiel]

Considering a gravestone that would gather all of the items the character drops, it would have to be bigger than any container we already have. Take into consideration that a player has a full set of armor, accessories, additional items like cart and hook, but also can have dies and vanity items to most of them. Take this and add the full inventory a player can have and we get a rather big storage.

Discussion on storage aside, having it as a gravestone would nullify the despawn of items, because they would be in a "container", waiting for the player. I would like to extend on the idea to have the said "container" contain a timer, after which it would disappear. This makes an incentive to run after your items fast enough before they dissapear.

A different topic i would add is dropping only the inventory, leaving the armor, accessories, and the quick bar intact. Combining this with the timer could pose an interesting change to the mediumcore characters.

 

[Purpulear]

I like the idea. And I agree its not really a challenge but more of just a inconvenience that wastes all your time. But I also agree with Baconfry. Its probably there for multiplayer games.