So, I have a small idea that ballooned on me to ridiculous proportions in my head. It might make Hardcore less frustrating for casual players like myself.
What sucks when you die is that you lose everything you had collected, particularly the bags. No exceptions. Sure, you can mail your stuff to another character much of the time or only equip garbage for most of your leveling journey so you don’t lose very much, but these are workarounds, not real solutions.
I don’t want to make a habit of constantly sending everything of value to my bank alt any time I go out questing. That’s just tedious, and I don’t like that I have to keep sourcing new bags or materials with even less possible storage any time I get far and die.
The game wasn’t designed for death to be permanent, and it shows in so many different ways. The inventory handling for hardcore is especially punishing. I shudder to think what losing a level 60 character will feel like for me.
All that work and attention being lost would cause me to contemplate things I’d rather not. Feeling the stages of grief over a video game character or his things is just something that the game could do without, in my opinion.
I would rather spend my energy mourning real people. I would likely quit playing this game once I lose my first level 30 or 40 character. Hell, level 20 would be pushing it for me. That is if I get nothing at all back from them for my next attempt. I don’t know how you iron-man-style players do it. It’s insanity to me.
What I have been thinking of is something lore-appropriate that allows one to send all or part of a dead character’s inventory to another character they name, their next of kin. I know. This would make hardcore closer to soft-core, but hear me out.
This system could have a gold cost associated with it, either by making payments in towns to get a week-long insurance policy buff or with a price for accepting the dead character’s inheritance cash-on-delivery style.
Another implementation is to have the dead character’s ghost interact with a mailbox themselves and send some things out, more or less like normal, but it could have a significantly higher postage cost to send anything tangible. This would make it only worthwhile for those really invested.
Gold, especially, may be quite expensive to send via ghost mail or otherwise and could scale with the amount of gold being sent by the ghost, even up to 100% of the gold in postage. It could be made so that only half of the dead character’s gold is sent to a living character and no more.
Either way, the non-bound contents of the dead character’s bags can be sent, as well as a percentage of their held coinage and the equipable, non-bound bags themselves. You could also have the equipment they were wearing automatically sold for vendor value and let the proceeds be added to the old character’s other coinage.
If any item is unique or bound without any vendor value, just delete it. Some things should remain lost forever (for exploitation coverage), just not everything that is completely common and replaceable with some effort in a tedious manner.
There could be “legal fees” associated with how many items get sent, costing more to send more items. Any payments for the insurance effect could also be quite high, being viable only for those at level 60 or for alternate characters of a level 60 player.
One could also insure individual items for some smaller fee, like only the bags or some particularly valuable potions. The coinage itself could be insured to a limit, too.
You could frame it like some goblins or local guards found your old character’s corpse and found a note or letter with their stuff, the named character being the dead’s sort of successor.
On death, the player could input another character’s name, much like how they pass leadership of a guild on death, but this would be to send that other character some of the stuff they had on them at the time of death. It could be one of that player’s own alts or a character belonging to another player entirely.
It could even be random how much stuff is sent. Call it “the corpse was partially looted and in bad shape when found,” depending on how far off from town or the roads that character was found or whatever.
That way, casual players who are struggling won’t lose absolutely everything and feel better about the experience of starting over with a new face and/or name. It won’t be completely from scratch or demand the tedium of constant mailbox and inventory maintenance if they want to remain reasonably prepared for next time.
If you’re like me, you hate losing anything to chance encounters. At least this way, you won’t have to worry as much about losing it all in some contrived mistake or another.
For a more involved solution (development-wise), the inheritance mail could start the death-prompt named character on a quest to avenge their fallen relative.
This quest could require the new character to slay a disproportionate number of the mobs that either killed the old character or were in the vicinity of their death. It could even be an elite or rare mob from the location of death, chosen at random.
The catch is that the new character has to kill upwards of twenty of the common mobs (a random drop chance) to finally retrieve their lost relative’s belongings in an openable quest item, and they aren’t guaranteed to get everything back once the quest sack is found. A less harsh drop chance for the sack could be used when a rare or elite mob is selected for the quest.
This sort of gameplay loop mimics the popular formula in Dark Souls to a degree. The player’s lost essence or what-have-you can be retrieved in the world, provided the player can avoid dying a second time before finding the spot where they perished before.
The old character’s inventory will be entirely lost if the next character cannot reach the spot where their old one died and defeat the appropriate creatures that might hold the loot, incentivizing their further progress and more careful gameplay. Then, there is always the option to abandon this tough quest should the player choose.
While this quest-based concept might breathe new life into the Hardcore game mode, it would likely take too much development time to implement for the theoretical benefits of player retention to show up. So, the insurance and inheritance systems from before would likely be simpler than this quest-based alternative.
Thank you for reading, and I know that most of this will get laughed out of the forums or skipped over entirely because you refuse to read anything more than a sentence long.
Have fun. This is just me trying to cope with losing so many characters that I can’t get the stuff from even if I tried, including a bank alt (how?!) and several warrior farmers.
just don’t die