Ask yourself: How many MMOs on the market truly have a punishing death penalty system? Games like Ultima Online, Runescape, and Darkfall have you lose most if not all of your items upon death, but when you become rich that is really nothing more of than a minor set back. Eve Online and Face of Mankind, to name two, have a near-permanent death system, but clones are so easy to come by that death in itself is still just a minor purchase. Very few MMOs have attempted permadeath, and practically none have had any success with it. In a genre where progression over long periods of time is key to extorting-that is to say, inspiring players to keep subscribing, the idea of losing your character because of a fleeting moment where a guild ambushed you in a 10 on 1 battle, or someone decided to turn on the old speed hacks and went on a murder spree before he was banned, or even in cases of random lag/server desync.
In an interview at the Electronics Entertainment Expo, Interplay did a Q&A where, albeit most of their answers being “we can’t answer that,” they did have this to say on player death:
Death is death in the Fallout world and there are no Resurrection spells or magic wands that bring people back to life. The Master in FO1 was on one path to immortality, but even he wasn’t immune to 9mm (or plasma rifles, whatever your weapon of choice was.)
We have a pretty good handle on how we handle player character defeat in PV13.
My immediate reaction is to assume that Project V13 will feature some sort of cloning mechanism, similar to Fallen Earth (wake up in a clone machine). With my limited knowledge of the Fallout Universe, I know that Vault City in the original games ran a cloning machine that could replicate human organs. In Fallout 3, Vault 108 has a partially functioning cloning lab, where the player encounters clones of one man. In Vault 108’s condition, the clones that the machine pumped out were increasingly violent, especially towards non-clones.
If Fallout Online is set years after Fallout 3, it is feasible that cloning technology could improve to explain a cloning system in the MMO to replace a permadeath system. More details are likely to appear in the coming months…hopefully. Don’t forget, the Fallout Online beta doesn’t start for two years.
MMO Fallout 