Thursday, July 10, 2008

5 Things I Hate, Part 2: Jeffe Edition - Fucking Corpse Runs

I still hate them actually. Not the fucking part. Don't worry, you haven't accidentally landed on a necrophilia blog. That would be creepy, no? I'll keep this short and sweet, because we all know that corpse runs suck. I guess thing to do, because it gets to my origins as an MMO player, is look at Raph Koster's Star Wars Galaxies design blog (from about 2000), where he says:

For example, knowing that we were looking at a broader audience than MMOs had likely seen before meant that we couldn't demand as much time per play session or as much time per week as other MMOs did. As a result, a bunch of design choices went right out the window: we knew that we couldn't have game design elements that involved spending tons of time online. No macroing, no camping, no lengthy corpse recoveries, no long waits for public transportation.

This would be what we players refer to as an EPIC FAIL. Ah, my first SWG character, the lovable human Bootsy Collins. Bootsy was born on Tatooine somewhere, probably Bestine. He was an intrepid explorer, even right out of the gate, and about 9 hours into play he wandered somewhere bad and got himself killed by I-can't-even-remember-what. I ran back to the corpse about 20 times, dying every single time. Then I deleted Bootsy, picked a different server (Bria, thank god), and rerolled a hideous scaley orange menace (that's a female Trandoshan to the layman) named Gorgoth Goc.

So not only did Raph waste an hour of time on corpse runs, he wasted 9 of my hours leveling up to that point, and 9 more levelling a new character. It's all good though. I have 18 spare hours (I only have two small children, a wife, a house to take care of, a full time job, and an adorable dog). I guess in the end I should thank him, because I loved that stupid orange lizard. Though one day when Bria was down I did recreate Booty and terrorize the fine citizens of Eclipse:


But back to the point...corpse runs suck. They sucked in Galaxies, they sucked in EQ2, they sucked in Vanguard, they suck in Age of Conan. They just suck, and I'd love for somebody to come on here and give me one compelling reason that an MMO should EVER have corpse runs. There are better ways to create consequences for death. I'd rather just lose a random item from my inventory, even if that means time lost somewhere down the road; at least I don't have to stop what I'm doing and go on some random jog to find my rotting dead body. The best is when it's buried in the bottom of some dungeon with a mountain of re-pops on top of it, with no possible way to avoid them. Super.

Some day I'll take Raph to task on that "no long waits for public transportation" comment too. Ask anybody who played SWG at launch what were the most memorable annoyances, and I bet they'll say 2 things: corpse runs and waiting for the goddamn shuttle.


4 comments:

Raph Koster said...

The corpse runs were supposed to be taken care of by insurance. :) And the wait for shuttles WAS short comapred to the length of the wait on existing titles at the time -- 40 minute waits for ships in EQ, for example? :)

jeffe said...

lol

Unagi said...

I got Raphrolled.

K Peterson said...

i remember being low level. i had a harvester on endor where the mobs were waaaay to high level. I got killed and spent about 3 hours trying to get my body back so I could sneak and get my uber resources.

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