While last week I was extoling the virtues of permadeath in Rimworld, I have to admit that this mechanic isn’t really suitable for a lot of games, especially ones in which you sink a whole lot of time, effort, and even money. You know, like MMORPGs. Permadeath has always remained a very fringe ruleset for this genre, popping up most often in online ARPGs more than proper MMOs.
However, from time to time a game experiments with it, and this month we saw Dungeons and Dragons Online actually launch a “hardcore league” server that revolved around permadeath as a core feature. This didn’t come out of nowhere; DDO’s community has long had a reputation for embracing permadeath voluntarily as a sort of roleplay feature, and so I can understand why the devs would want to try this out for realskies.
The question for me was, is it really up my…
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