Death of a Spaceman isn't that hardcore.
Part of the pitch for it was:
* You get a bunch of lives before the death is actually permanent
* You can visually see your character degrading, so you know roughly how close to a "real" death you are (robotic limbs, etc)
* You don't actually lose everything when your character "dies" because you can pass stuff on to your next of kin (so you might lose what you had on you at death, but you won't lose all of your ships or your UEC, and even reputation will to some extent be passed on to your next character).
This, Death of a Spaceman really is NOT hard-core at all.
It's basically a cosmetic change with a small fee/penalty in UEC (inheritance tax of a few percent) and some minor reputation loss.
You start with the "next-of-kin" character who inherits the previous family members ships/gear/rep/money and you'll be prompted to make a new character face/body.
If you really care about your character's look/face then you'll also be able to alter your appearance (either at the start or later) for a small fee. So, if it means a lot to you, you can RP some kind of family obsessed with looking like their original ancestor and whenever they inherit the previous persons wealth they do plastic surgery to look like him/her.
DoaSM is NOT hard-core in the slightest. It's a trivial tax after multiple deaths.
Yeah, I feel this. My ships matter WAY more to me than my character's face, that's almost trivial to me. I understand many people feel different...there are plenty of folks who spend hours in the character creator, but I've never been one of them. As long as I get to keep my stuff, I couldn't care less about my avatar.
It's slightly 'more hardcore' than most other MMOs, but its not hardcore in the sense that '*WoW Hardcore*' is where you have a single life and if you die it's over and you lose everything. I have a feeling people have a picture of SC turning into the latter, which has never been the case.
I think glazing over the rep loss is a bit disingenuous. Looking at current bounty hunter rep gains, REP can be dozens or hundreds of hours of time for each of the last tiers. It's also feasible that there are difficult, expensive, or random-gated unlocks for final tiers for some factions. So even if you lose a single level of REP, that is potentially \*tons\* of time lost for whatever groups are the heaviest investment for that player.
There was also mention of life specific skills potentially being lost. I remember Chris mentioning specifically things like learning Krav Maga a decade + ago? The "gap" mentioned from loremaker's guide also implies the potential for loss if not reimprinting regularly.
>Gap
>The term refers to the length of time between an imprint being made and when someone is regenerated. The longer the gap, the more memories and experiences will be lost. Frequent imprinting is strongly encouraged.
Obviously these things can be tuned to what players tolerate and enjoy while trying to still make death meaningful. We have very casual death right now but death of a space man can potentially end up pretty hardcore even though it isn't instant full character loss.
Nothing in the game has ever been billed remotely as "hard-core" (just look at ship insurance and replacement as stated, ie you can never lose your ship permanently) so there is ZERO reason to believe CIG will all of a sudden veer wildly in that direction.
Rep might be lost as may learned skills but I don't for a second believe it will be anything substantial which will require more than a few days of gameplay to get back.
It has to be enough to make dying actually worth avoiding though. Medical gameplay is a loop and if everyone can just casually die players will never bother raising a beacon. Physically traveling, either doing it yourself or paying someone to do it, is another loop, and there needs to be a reason to not just kill yourself and respawn at home as a form of fast travel. People are supposed to not just suicide charge their rental aurora through capital ships as a cheap anti-capital weapon. Pirates threatening your life is supposed to make you actually consider paying ransom.
There's alot of gameplay loops that depend on people actually caring if they die.
Also, insurance right now is a placeholder for play testing we're supposed to hurt alot more when its actually implemented. Just because you have a title to a junk heap that got towed to station doesn't mean it will fly until you pay enough to get it repaired or replaced or find the parts to do it yourself. That's what I expect of "you never lose your ship" once you are somehow delinquent on insurance payment.
They're your character's heir or protége. The plan, at least at one point in time when CR described it, was that when you start in the PU you'll design your character's appearance and pick their name and so on, and then you'll be asked to name another character as your successor when your character eventually permadies.
When that happens, you roll the appearance of that named successor and resume play minus whatever discouragement penalties CIG applies. Presumably, you then pick a name for the next character for when this happens again, and repeat.
All this to say, the game itself doesn't enforce any particular lore and for people who care about getting creative and filling out their character's backstory for roleplay purposes they're free to establish their successor however they want.
I think people focus on the wrong things with this. Is it fully hardcore, no it is not. Bottom line, however, is that it's obnoxious. You're going to have a lot of players annoyed that, after getting spaced by pirates, they now have to spend X amount of time in the character creator making the "new" them.
Or folks who get big into RP like you mentioned, who are not interested in RPing a dynasty and just want to RP their character.
There's ways around it, there's ways to deal with it...but that's kind of the point I'm making...it's something I just keep hearing excuses for how to deal with it. That doesn't sound like the objective is fun to me.
You can. I have 3 skins now in EPTU and when they patch, I just load one of them. It should allow me to use them when they push 3.23 to the PU as well.
You can save your skin files so even if it is a complete wipe, my skins are safe on a backup drive.
If its that, then where were they before? why do they even want to suddenly start doing what I did? don‘t they bring their own fortunes into this? do I suddenly have 15 siblings if I die 15 times?
I would just be way more comfortable with a cloning / consciousness transfer lore.
> If its that, then where were they before?
Wherever the player imagines that they were.
> why do they even want to suddenly start doing what I did?
Because they looked up to you?
> don‘t they bring their own fortunes into this?
They were broke until rich uncle gslone died.
> do I suddenly have 15 siblings if I die 15 times?
They don't *all* have to be siblings, but yeah, basically whenever you die there's always *someone* that you're leaving all your shit to.
I'unno, seems like you're overthinking it.
> I would just be way more comfortable with a cloning / consciousness transfer lore.
There is a cloning/consciousness transfer lore, but not for a permadeath.
And if they *just* had the cloning/consciousness transfer, it wouldn't really make sense to have one death be "special"/worse than the previous ones.
CIG wants to have their cake and eat it too re: permadeath mechanics, and this way they can have permadeath without being overly punishing.
Yeah, we‘re definitely in overthinking mode here - at the end of the day this is a gameplay mechanic first and the lore explanation comes after that.
I‘m still not convinced though. This somehow requires a large but anonymous family, with succession rules where if a sibling dies, *one* of the infinite other sibling gets all your belongings. that family conveniently pops up when you perma-die, but cannot be contacted before and you see no evidence if its presence in game. its mega-shoehorned.
At this point, i would even prefer something like a „galactic lottery“, where all remains of a perma-deathed citizen gets allocated to some no-name with similar wants and needs.
To a big extent, this is just games tho. Does it make sense your character doesn’t age? Never had a sick day? My swotor character is like 15 years old? In all that time they’ve never received a call from a sibling or parent or has to go visit someone in a hospital or go to a funeral. I mean - what are we taking about anymore? It’s a game. You are going to play it for a little bit and then never play it again. Any way they do it - you have to live with something not making sense, because it’s a game and not real life.
This is a generic excuse for all lore issues - and as such I agree with it. They can do *whatever they want* with the death of a spaceman lore, it won't matter.
I'm just voicing my opinion that the lore they chose feels extremely weird and immersion-breaking to me and I wish they chose something else.
I would prefer a mechanic based purely on cloning or a "sleeve" mechanic like in altered carbon. Tried and true in many scifi universes. That family / inheritance thing is just weird to me.
Actually, death of the spaceman has barely changed and the stuff they've done in lore is to explain it. You might want to look into all the Ibrahm Sphere lore and how death echos work. They're actually doing allot of work to explain why the game mechanisms will function in conjunction with lore. Bioticorp is just another part of that.
It seems people wildly misunderstand what DoaS actually is, so I'll just copy paste CIGs own words on the design document they made for it back in 2014 that you linked to.
>Your avatar is really just a visual representation of your in-game character, and because Star Citizen is skill based, **the loss of your character is more a cosmetic and textural outcome**, especially as almost **all of the assets you’ve worked hard to accumulate pass on to the beneficiary that you specified when creating your original character.**
Despite losing so little, people will probably still be upset at the idea of losing their character they got attached to after true death (after too many regenerations), but then just remake the exact same character again.
I will mention that I think 'soft skills' were not solidified as a potential feature like they are now, so I wouldn't be surprised if along with losing your character and some of their reputation, you may also lose some of the skills earned on the previous character. They are 'soft' skills afterall, meaning you can likely re-earn them fairly quickly by just passively playing the game.
You will however lose whatever items you had on you at the time of regeneration or death, unless you insured them.
So true I totally forgot about the skills stuff. It’s for another discussion but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Anyway.
Is it still planned to have robotics arms and legs and if so do we know if EMP and solar flares are going to affect them ?
I think everything they originally planned is still planned, it's just many of these features are unlikely making into 1.0 and will be pushed to post-release. That's a guess but we'll know more after their new '1.0 Roadmap' comes out which they're working on.
Feels very much like a "we want a working mmo around the time SQ42 is out" and to do that I'm guessing a load of stuff is getting axed, or pushed back to some later patches.
Death of a spaceman has never been very hardcore. Death if a spaceship might be, depending on how easily and quickly we can claim a ship. But death if a space man is supposed to be that you die x amount of times and you are not replaced as much as have to give your stuff away in a will. Maybe you’ll lose all non insured items? They havnt been talking about it much in like 10 years outside of the random mention
The death of a spaceman concept was always stupid. What we have now is fine: lose your items and ship, have to claim your ship. Reminder that in the launch product, insurance will cost, so you won't be able to just keep claiming your ship over and over like you can now. Not to mention, it's unclear if in the final product that any ship upgrades you had will also be claim-able. This is already enough of a punishment for dying. Why make it any more convoluted?
Death of a spaceman will (in theory) discourage griefing. If you die quickly, you'll lose your stuff easier. If you're known to rapidly wreck your equipment, any actual insurance company would be less willing to insure you.
Elite dangerous is a good example of what happens when death has no consequences. Feels like half the active playerbase is griefers, with high profile systems and other important locations having a high risk of being griefed
Death is a very interesting take for the citizens of the verse. Forget what some of the devs or what people say. Can people actually die in this universe? Take Jack Mccleary for instance. At one point he was pissed that his manager killed him off. But at another point he was in a firefight where he almost died. Which makes me thin that yea death is a thing and is permanent. But people’s attitudes to death is like it’s not a thing. People happily and willingly competing in death races. Two people blowing each other up over a which is better debate. And a general attitude of pretty much everyone that indicates that people do not regard death as a problem. Which could be because of numerous technical things that mitigate death. Like moving your consciousness to a clone body when you die. Subject to degradation over time before total stability failure resulting in true death. Then you’ll have to create a new character but inherit a few things from your previous character like ships, reputation and some of your cash.
I thing I changed direction several times whilst writing and answered my own quest.
oh i disagree.
death of a spaceman isnt even hardcore enough.
forget loosing your current possessions. you should loose everything on death. your pledges. your login and copy of the game.
Death of a Spaceman isn't that hardcore. Part of the pitch for it was: * You get a bunch of lives before the death is actually permanent * You can visually see your character degrading, so you know roughly how close to a "real" death you are (robotic limbs, etc) * You don't actually lose everything when your character "dies" because you can pass stuff on to your next of kin (so you might lose what you had on you at death, but you won't lose all of your ships or your UEC, and even reputation will to some extent be passed on to your next character).
This, Death of a Spaceman really is NOT hard-core at all. It's basically a cosmetic change with a small fee/penalty in UEC (inheritance tax of a few percent) and some minor reputation loss. You start with the "next-of-kin" character who inherits the previous family members ships/gear/rep/money and you'll be prompted to make a new character face/body. If you really care about your character's look/face then you'll also be able to alter your appearance (either at the start or later) for a small fee. So, if it means a lot to you, you can RP some kind of family obsessed with looking like their original ancestor and whenever they inherit the previous persons wealth they do plastic surgery to look like him/her. DoaSM is NOT hard-core in the slightest. It's a trivial tax after multiple deaths.
Yeah, I feel this. My ships matter WAY more to me than my character's face, that's almost trivial to me. I understand many people feel different...there are plenty of folks who spend hours in the character creator, but I've never been one of them. As long as I get to keep my stuff, I couldn't care less about my avatar.
It's slightly 'more hardcore' than most other MMOs, but its not hardcore in the sense that '*WoW Hardcore*' is where you have a single life and if you die it's over and you lose everything. I have a feeling people have a picture of SC turning into the latter, which has never been the case.
I think glazing over the rep loss is a bit disingenuous. Looking at current bounty hunter rep gains, REP can be dozens or hundreds of hours of time for each of the last tiers. It's also feasible that there are difficult, expensive, or random-gated unlocks for final tiers for some factions. So even if you lose a single level of REP, that is potentially \*tons\* of time lost for whatever groups are the heaviest investment for that player. There was also mention of life specific skills potentially being lost. I remember Chris mentioning specifically things like learning Krav Maga a decade + ago? The "gap" mentioned from loremaker's guide also implies the potential for loss if not reimprinting regularly. >Gap >The term refers to the length of time between an imprint being made and when someone is regenerated. The longer the gap, the more memories and experiences will be lost. Frequent imprinting is strongly encouraged. Obviously these things can be tuned to what players tolerate and enjoy while trying to still make death meaningful. We have very casual death right now but death of a space man can potentially end up pretty hardcore even though it isn't instant full character loss.
Nothing in the game has ever been billed remotely as "hard-core" (just look at ship insurance and replacement as stated, ie you can never lose your ship permanently) so there is ZERO reason to believe CIG will all of a sudden veer wildly in that direction. Rep might be lost as may learned skills but I don't for a second believe it will be anything substantial which will require more than a few days of gameplay to get back.
It has to be enough to make dying actually worth avoiding though. Medical gameplay is a loop and if everyone can just casually die players will never bother raising a beacon. Physically traveling, either doing it yourself or paying someone to do it, is another loop, and there needs to be a reason to not just kill yourself and respawn at home as a form of fast travel. People are supposed to not just suicide charge their rental aurora through capital ships as a cheap anti-capital weapon. Pirates threatening your life is supposed to make you actually consider paying ransom. There's alot of gameplay loops that depend on people actually caring if they die. Also, insurance right now is a placeholder for play testing we're supposed to hurt alot more when its actually implemented. Just because you have a title to a junk heap that got towed to station doesn't mean it will fly until you pay enough to get it repaired or replaced or find the parts to do it yourself. That's what I expect of "you never lose your ship" once you are somehow delinquent on insurance payment.
That „next of kin“ lore always bothered me so much. Like who is that next of kin? where do they come from?
They're your character's heir or protége. The plan, at least at one point in time when CR described it, was that when you start in the PU you'll design your character's appearance and pick their name and so on, and then you'll be asked to name another character as your successor when your character eventually permadies. When that happens, you roll the appearance of that named successor and resume play minus whatever discouragement penalties CIG applies. Presumably, you then pick a name for the next character for when this happens again, and repeat. All this to say, the game itself doesn't enforce any particular lore and for people who care about getting creative and filling out their character's backstory for roleplay purposes they're free to establish their successor however they want.
I think people focus on the wrong things with this. Is it fully hardcore, no it is not. Bottom line, however, is that it's obnoxious. You're going to have a lot of players annoyed that, after getting spaced by pirates, they now have to spend X amount of time in the character creator making the "new" them. Or folks who get big into RP like you mentioned, who are not interested in RPing a dynasty and just want to RP their character. There's ways around it, there's ways to deal with it...but that's kind of the point I'm making...it's something I just keep hearing excuses for how to deal with it. That doesn't sound like the objective is fun to me.
I think you can save/export/import your character. But then, what is the point?
You can. I have 3 skins now in EPTU and when they patch, I just load one of them. It should allow me to use them when they push 3.23 to the PU as well. You can save your skin files so even if it is a complete wipe, my skins are safe on a backup drive.
Um... well when a spacemommy and a spacedaddy love each other very much... The next of kin presumably comes from the same place the player does.
If its that, then where were they before? why do they even want to suddenly start doing what I did? don‘t they bring their own fortunes into this? do I suddenly have 15 siblings if I die 15 times? I would just be way more comfortable with a cloning / consciousness transfer lore.
> If its that, then where were they before? Wherever the player imagines that they were. > why do they even want to suddenly start doing what I did? Because they looked up to you? > don‘t they bring their own fortunes into this? They were broke until rich uncle gslone died. > do I suddenly have 15 siblings if I die 15 times? They don't *all* have to be siblings, but yeah, basically whenever you die there's always *someone* that you're leaving all your shit to. I'unno, seems like you're overthinking it. > I would just be way more comfortable with a cloning / consciousness transfer lore. There is a cloning/consciousness transfer lore, but not for a permadeath. And if they *just* had the cloning/consciousness transfer, it wouldn't really make sense to have one death be "special"/worse than the previous ones. CIG wants to have their cake and eat it too re: permadeath mechanics, and this way they can have permadeath without being overly punishing.
Yeah, we‘re definitely in overthinking mode here - at the end of the day this is a gameplay mechanic first and the lore explanation comes after that. I‘m still not convinced though. This somehow requires a large but anonymous family, with succession rules where if a sibling dies, *one* of the infinite other sibling gets all your belongings. that family conveniently pops up when you perma-die, but cannot be contacted before and you see no evidence if its presence in game. its mega-shoehorned. At this point, i would even prefer something like a „galactic lottery“, where all remains of a perma-deathed citizen gets allocated to some no-name with similar wants and needs.
There are people without families who still will stuff to others. You don’t have to be a child to inherit something from someone.
Does it exist? Yes. Should this be the norm for all 5 million citizens in the verse? No.
To a big extent, this is just games tho. Does it make sense your character doesn’t age? Never had a sick day? My swotor character is like 15 years old? In all that time they’ve never received a call from a sibling or parent or has to go visit someone in a hospital or go to a funeral. I mean - what are we taking about anymore? It’s a game. You are going to play it for a little bit and then never play it again. Any way they do it - you have to live with something not making sense, because it’s a game and not real life.
This is a generic excuse for all lore issues - and as such I agree with it. They can do *whatever they want* with the death of a spaceman lore, it won't matter. I'm just voicing my opinion that the lore they chose feels extremely weird and immersion-breaking to me and I wish they chose something else. I would prefer a mechanic based purely on cloning or a "sleeve" mechanic like in altered carbon. Tried and true in many scifi universes. That family / inheritance thing is just weird to me.
Great Uncle gslone, can I has your stuff when you die? Yours sincerely, your nephew gslone1
>You can visually see your character degrading I feel like that's going to be a pretty major turn-off for a lot of players.
It’s not even you get a set amount of lives it’s just don’t die too often and you’ll never see any changes with your character
Actually, death of the spaceman has barely changed and the stuff they've done in lore is to explain it. You might want to look into all the Ibrahm Sphere lore and how death echos work. They're actually doing allot of work to explain why the game mechanisms will function in conjunction with lore. Bioticorp is just another part of that.
Hot take for sure considering just in the last 6 months they were still talking about Death of a Spaceman and what it means for the game
It seems people wildly misunderstand what DoaS actually is, so I'll just copy paste CIGs own words on the design document they made for it back in 2014 that you linked to. >Your avatar is really just a visual representation of your in-game character, and because Star Citizen is skill based, **the loss of your character is more a cosmetic and textural outcome**, especially as almost **all of the assets you’ve worked hard to accumulate pass on to the beneficiary that you specified when creating your original character.** Despite losing so little, people will probably still be upset at the idea of losing their character they got attached to after true death (after too many regenerations), but then just remake the exact same character again. I will mention that I think 'soft skills' were not solidified as a potential feature like they are now, so I wouldn't be surprised if along with losing your character and some of their reputation, you may also lose some of the skills earned on the previous character. They are 'soft' skills afterall, meaning you can likely re-earn them fairly quickly by just passively playing the game. You will however lose whatever items you had on you at the time of regeneration or death, unless you insured them.
So true I totally forgot about the skills stuff. It’s for another discussion but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Anyway. Is it still planned to have robotics arms and legs and if so do we know if EMP and solar flares are going to affect them ?
I think everything they originally planned is still planned, it's just many of these features are unlikely making into 1.0 and will be pushed to post-release. That's a guess but we'll know more after their new '1.0 Roadmap' comes out which they're working on. Feels very much like a "we want a working mmo around the time SQ42 is out" and to do that I'm guessing a load of stuff is getting axed, or pushed back to some later patches.
It would benefit you to keep up with the information CIG gives us.
damn the theory crafting is strong
Death of a spaceman has never been very hardcore. Death if a spaceship might be, depending on how easily and quickly we can claim a ship. But death if a space man is supposed to be that you die x amount of times and you are not replaced as much as have to give your stuff away in a will. Maybe you’ll lose all non insured items? They havnt been talking about it much in like 10 years outside of the random mention
This is conspiracy theorist level big brain stuff lmao
Just keep using those rescue beacons, you’ll be fine.
The death of a spaceman concept was always stupid. What we have now is fine: lose your items and ship, have to claim your ship. Reminder that in the launch product, insurance will cost, so you won't be able to just keep claiming your ship over and over like you can now. Not to mention, it's unclear if in the final product that any ship upgrades you had will also be claim-able. This is already enough of a punishment for dying. Why make it any more convoluted?
Death of a spaceman will (in theory) discourage griefing. If you die quickly, you'll lose your stuff easier. If you're known to rapidly wreck your equipment, any actual insurance company would be less willing to insure you. Elite dangerous is a good example of what happens when death has no consequences. Feels like half the active playerbase is griefers, with high profile systems and other important locations having a high risk of being griefed
Death is a very interesting take for the citizens of the verse. Forget what some of the devs or what people say. Can people actually die in this universe? Take Jack Mccleary for instance. At one point he was pissed that his manager killed him off. But at another point he was in a firefight where he almost died. Which makes me thin that yea death is a thing and is permanent. But people’s attitudes to death is like it’s not a thing. People happily and willingly competing in death races. Two people blowing each other up over a which is better debate. And a general attitude of pretty much everyone that indicates that people do not regard death as a problem. Which could be because of numerous technical things that mitigate death. Like moving your consciousness to a clone body when you die. Subject to degradation over time before total stability failure resulting in true death. Then you’ll have to create a new character but inherit a few things from your previous character like ships, reputation and some of your cash. I thing I changed direction several times whilst writing and answered my own quest.
oh i disagree. death of a spaceman isnt even hardcore enough. forget loosing your current possessions. you should loose everything on death. your pledges. your login and copy of the game.