I think blizzard should consider bringing the concept of “lives” or perhaps “heroic souls” to diablo. This could benefit the game in the following ways:
Lives Make death meaningful. Each player would start with 99 lives, distributed across all characters. Creating a new character would require a life or soul. Each death would inevitably bring you to the point of having zero lives, at which point you would be unable to play.
Lives could be recovered via PVP - Killing players is a way to replenish your lives. However, when killed by an enemy player, they harvest your soul into an extra life for themselves. This comes with a price though, since half of the soul harvested would contribute to a bounty on this player, and could be recovered by players who kill the player with a bounty.
PVP wouldn’t decrease the sum total of lives in the player base - PVE would be the only way for the life pool of the player-base to be diminished. Otherwise lives are conserved in terms of PVP and bounties.
Creates a meaningful PVP Arena - In an arena players kill each other for souls. It would be a way for players to harvest souls without the consequence of building a bounty penalty.
Players with a large bounty on their heads gain/lose privileges - Players with large bounties, or player killers, can interact with NPCs who are assassins. Likewise, certain cities will be hostile towards players with large bounties.
A monetization model to keep diablo flourishing for decades - Players would be given the option to buy additional lives. Alternatively, players with no lives would be given lives a few days after they have all been consumed. It may even be a throwback to arcade days where a life cost a quarter.
Rare NPC encounters generate lives - Some RNG based encounters should be included to allow players to gain extra lives.
you are right. I’m not sure how to articulate it efficiently, but the idea was that killing players with high bounties is more rewarding than a player with no bounty.
Dumbest idea I read. Go play Mario man. Hardcore already has that. You get one life unless your playing hardcore lite and using the cheat death passive lol
A simpler way to make deaths more meaningful would be to have a mode where if you die, your character is dead forever. We could even go as far as to call this mode, “hardcore mode”. We could have a separate mode where deaths don’t matter and call it “softcore mode”. This way, players who want death to have a meaning have a mode to play, and players who want to throw their corpses at monsters until they get worn out have a mode to play.
As for the OP, complexity does not always mean better.
Lives are a mostly pointless mechanic left over from an era where dying meant they could get another quarter out of you. The only thing they benefit if Blizzard’s wallet if you’re going to sell them via micro-transactions.
Unless this was an optional mode I could just ignore, this would be a deal breaker for me buying Diablo 4 in the first place.
Otherwise hardcode mode is for people who want death to have a heavy price.
Have it as an option for players that want to do it, but not make it a core part of the game that you have to partake in for those that don’t. I personally could care less for it, but that’s just me.
So let me get this straight : You buy the game, you have 99 lives and if you lose them all it’s … game over? You can delete the game? Unless…as you said, you PvP ( forced PvP & what PvP? ) , right ?
This is the best cool story bro i’ve heard it in 2020. Keep up the good work!
All in all, an interesting idea, but you cannot have character creation and death have the same penalty – a life lost. That just does not make sense to me. Creating a toon is something you have to do to get the ball rolling. No penalty, obviously.
It sounds interesting in a way, but I doubt it would be implemented, because D3’s developers don’t know how to make pvp work. Think about it, the 6 set bonuses are overpowered to the point where each player can one-shot each other.
I suggested that they remove the diminishing returns from extra armor/resists, but it didn’t go through. They gave up on pvp and that pretty much made players go away.
Your idea can be viewed as a pay-to-win game. If I am low on lives, I buy a new account and kill my new account for more lives. It’s also difficult to balance, because I can call up my boys to fill up the game and leave one slot opened. Whichever poor soul joins our game, we all will damage him and take turns getting the final hit.
So before they work on your idea, they need to work on balancing pvp, but they gave up on it, so your idea wouldn’t be implemented.
The “poor soul” should see that they have a large bounty on their heads to give him/her a warning that these are PKers. The player would have to be incredibly confident in his character or very naive to stay in that game. Tread lightly!
