Ghost Mode: excessive isn’t it? | Forums

[redsept]

Yep, just being able to die and lose all skills due to that would be so good in the main game! My biggest gripe with Wildlands has always been that you're not punished of death in any way. If death is punishable by losing the character and skills, that would make this game so much more tense and enjoyable, just perfect!

Like I said: The operative dies but the mission goes on with a replacement operative with 0 skills. This makes the harder bosses even harder if you die, which would encourage players to make smart moves and use stealth.


ps.
How about the body stays where you died, and you have to get to it to get your custom gear back? And if you could bury the body out of respect, that would be sooooo cool and add immersion, emotions and the characters would feel much more personable. And you would have to have a wall of operatives honored because of their contributions, with picture, stats, favorite weapon, way of death, etc. listed. Wildlands campaign is great, and this would add the soul to it that it still needs.

[Rivverrabbit]

Yep, just being able to die and lose all skills due to that would be so good in the main game! My biggest gripe with Wildlands has always been that you're not punished of death in any way. If death is punishable by losing the character and skills, that would make this game so much more tense and enjoyable, just perfect!

I agree with your assessment: right now, people say that death has meaning in Ghost Mode, it has consequences. But it doesn't, I don't think -- the whole world ends when you die and everything gets reset to zero. That's not a consequence, it's an inconvenience. You don't lose anything because you can get it allllll back again, in the same exact way.

However from a design perspective I think that just making your Nomad/Ghost be lost is a half measure. I think for this to truly work, all your Ghosts should be unique characters, with their own special skills and stats, and while you can customize them, who they are is locked. This would mean the skill unlock table should be shorter, with fewer items on it -- many of the options would be already unlocked, like max sync shots, and access to gear. And the trade-off would instead be that individual Ghost stats would be variable, like accuracy or bullet resistance.

The closest example I can think of is State of Decay. In that game, you have random survivors who have their own looks, and when they die, they're gone for good. Each has five or so main stats that govern stuff like shooting, melee, stamina, etc. Then they have a few traits that can be either good or bad. The traits don't change, but the stats can be improved (you can get better cardio or accuracy by playing with that character). So when you lose a character it really stings, because their death has had meaning to you. You don't want to lose your favorite person with a mix of awesome traits and stats because they truly are unique, but if you do, it's a consequence you have to live with.

The key here is that the skill unlocks need to be fewer, shorter, because going from zero to thirty is just too long a prospect, especially when you have to unlock things any Ghost should already have. To pull another example, I'd say it could be like MGSV, where you select your gear and team, choosing how advanced of a drone you want and how much ammo and how many gadgets, and then you deploy from a rally point at the cost of a certain amount of resources based on what you took. Then when you return safely to a rally point, you get experience and some resources back. If a ghost dies, deploying a new one will give you, say, a couple random ones to pick from, and you decide which you want based on their appearance or stats (also at the cost of resources).

The capstone on this design would be that each ghost has a special skill or ability that's unique to them, like an ability you'd see in one of the Ghost War classes. If the PvE ported over suppression and no healkth regen, then getting a ghost with the pointman's ability to not be suppressed might be very valuable to you. Or some of the perks would be good too, like mirror-mark (mark enemies who spot you, or mark enemies who damage you). This would further enhance the uniqueness of each ghost, while intensifying their loss.

But of course that's a pretty big overhaul. But it is actually permadeath designed from the ground up, rather than just bolting on a basic permadeath to a game that clearly wasn't designed for it.

[I___DRIVER___I]

Just add the GM settings on primary selection, magazines etc to the main game as an option with NG+ and leave PD in GM as is. Everyone is happy.

sounds reasonable to me

options are always a good thing. Always