I think you'll find it difficult to gather a sizable audience if having a hardcore/serious experience and perma death together. There are actually servers out there that do to this, such as some very hardcore enforced roleplay player ran ultima online servers. Their population is quite limited (usually under 30 people online at once) but then they're kinda a niche of a niche of a niche. The right audience can certainly appreciate this, but ultimately their numbers are probably pretty limited.

Perma death is a core mechanic in the game I'm hoping to build, and it's not really a big deal in my overall design. Instead of only having one character, players will have hundreds. Some losses will be felt more than others. but overall it should be pretty difficult to be completely devastated, so obviously no open PvP. To further make up for the loss of permadeath, there is a genetic component, so the genetic makeup of each successive generation becomes more and more fine tuned.

Perma death is a core mechanic in the game I'm hoping to build, and it's not really a big deal in my overall design. Instead of only having one character, players will have hundreds. Some losses will be felt more than others. but overall it should be pretty difficult to be completely devastated, so obviously no open PvP. To further make up for the loss of permadeath, there is a genetic component, so the genetic makeup of each successive generation becomes more and more fine tuned.

maybe it would be easier to advise you if you had a better description of your game. for instance rts games have permadeath, but you have thousands of "characters" aka troops and ships that die and aren't all that important.

maybe it would be easier to advise you if you had a better description of your game. for instance rts games have permadeath, but you have thousands of "characters" aka troops and ships that die and aren't all that important.

I wasn't looking for advice. Was just commenting that if you're going to have permadeath, you can't take everything away. You need to have other aspects to the game so the player feels the death wasn't for nothing. Even though your characters die, there needs to be the feeling that their brief existence contributed to something greater. In the case of my game, yes, some characters will be expendable. But others will be more precious, and their loss will be more significant.

[quote name='AltarofScience' timestamp='1324709505' post='4897022']maybe it would be easier to advise you if you had a better description of your game. for instance rts games have permadeath, but you have thousands of "characters" aka troops and ships that die and aren't all that important.

I wasn't looking for advice. Was just commenting that if you're going to have permadeath, you can't take everything away. You need to have other aspects to the game so the player feels the death wasn't for nothing. Even though your characters die, there needs to be the feeling that their brief existence contributed to something greater. In the case of my game, yes, some characters will be expendable. But others will be more precious, and their loss will be more significant.
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That's not really permanent death though. Permadeath is a concept applied to the player's singular avatar. Perma death in your game would mean losing all your characters.

That's not really permanent death though. Permadeath is a concept applied to the player's singular avatar. Perma death in your game would mean losing all your characters.

Even perma death isn't perma death if you can just reroll another character. The game goes on for the player unless you go for the rules in that game world in Caprica, where if you die, you can't go back into the world.
My system isn't that different than hardcore mode in Diablo3 where if you die you still have a large cache of weapons and gold in your stash. You can't think of perma death as the absolute end, and need to provide ways for the game to progress beyond death.

Be careful making gameplay change instead of just penalizing and reinstating the character. In many cases, it's a half-measure that will be unsatisfactory to both permadeath fans and detractors, since you'll have to play some other, possibly crappier game for a while in order to get back to the game you want to play.

What I look for in all games I play is harsh death penalties as a foundation.
Perma-Death is the king of harsh death penalties but also hardest to make a game with harsh death penalties.

A perma-death game needs a very advanced, solid and fair combat system.

Imagine if it's an FPS game and you and your enemy both have uzi equipped just spraying and praying that you'll hit your bullets first.
All it needs is 20 bullets to kill you and the uzi shoots 5 per second. The weapon isn't very precise so all you can do is aim in the direction of your enemy and hope you're lucky... but you're not. Your enemy got luckier than you and you have now lost 2 months of leveling your character up.

So a perma-death game needs a fair combat system.
It shouldn't be class based either because 1v1 will never be balanced then..
Unless you want the players to be "forced" to play in guilds/clans.. Lonewolfs will just have to try and get along with others even if they don't want to.

So without classes, and without RNG (luck is not acceptable in perma-death)..
You'll be fighting players that have the same skills and abilities as yourself.

This will result in (if you are both equally talented players) that you both land the killing blow on each other simultanously
or that the fight never ends.

And once again, This is a perma-death game.. So we don't want any lame fights that end in both dying.

What can we do to make the fights not last forever then?
First of all, the more advanced and complex and hard to master the combat system and mechanics are..
the less likely it is that two players will be equally talented.

Second you can do is simply increasing the tempo of the fight, making it more fast paced.
(This will make low ping important for the player, So you must have NA + EU servers.. I guess oceanic players will have to find another game.)
With a high tempo, it will pressure the players, stress them and make the less experienced + worse player make more mistakes than the better and more experienced player.
Just make sure the hits that land don't do too much damage to the life bar.. They have to be able to take at least 5 hits.. 10 would be nice.
This is to make sure that it is indeed the player who makes less mistakes that wins.

Summary:
That harsher the death penalty is the more important it is that you have flawless gameplay.