Valley 1:Permadeath: It Means Give Your Health Bar The Respect It Deserves

This Isn't A Roguelike, Sorry

So... permadeath. Yeah, that's a loaded word. Whenever most people hear that word, they think of uber-hardcore roguelike games. But you'll notice that, in our What Genre Is This, Anyway? page, we don't list roguelike among the primary genre inspirations for this game.

There are a lot of ways permadeath can be implemented in a game, and a lot of them are... well, frankly they are punitive. Our goal with permadeath in this game is not to make it something that punishes you-the-player, but rather to make it an unfortunate event that happens to your character. And thus part of the story you are weaving through your actions.

Here's How Our Implementation Of Permadeath Actually Works

Thematically

1. When a character dies, that character is dead for good.

2. The world is a pretty brutal place. During the cataclysm that shattered reality, most of the people didn't survive. Those consciousness shards that you're picking up all over the place? Yeah, those are bits of the minds of people that didn't make it through the cataclysm.

3. Still on the whole brutality thing: whenever somebody dies away from the protection of the Ilari (aka, pretty much anywhere outside of town or the tutorial), a vengeful ghost of that person comes back to haunt you. We said death was permanent, not that an evil shade of yourself wouldn't come back to half-life to prey on the living.

4. Your characters are always glyphbearers, chosen by the Ilari... to... do... something. It's kind of mysterious, and you can piece it together through clues in the game. Without giving anything away, we can safely say that each settlement always has at least one glyphbearer. When a glyphbearer dies, which is pretty common, then that glyph passes to another.

5. Anyway, only glyphbearers can leave the areas where the Ilari are protecting them, or... well, that would be kind of a spoiler, too. But suffice it to say, Bad Things Happen To Them. So when you're out there in the wild, you're pretty well alone aside from any survivor who you might be able to rescue from death-coming-soon when you find them trapped inside a building or cave near an Ilari stone but not near, you know, stuff like food or other people.

Game-Mechanically

1. When a character dies, that character is dead for good. And if it happens outside of town, you then have to later fight and kill the vengeful ghost of that person.

2. When your character dies, the glyph he or she was carrying will pass to a new character that you must choose (none of these characters will be people you've already met in the game).

3. Along with the glyph, all of your inventory, enchants, and enchant points pass to the new character.

4. Your base stats do NOT pass to the new character (the new character will have different base stats of his or her own), and any upgrades that had been applied to the old character via upgrade stones are simply lost.

Mechanically Speaking, Why Does It Work This Way?

Well, permadeath was always something we wanted, because for a believable dangerous world it seems pretty important. And you're shepherding a whole settlement rather than one lone hero, which seems a lot more interesting and realistic. Various people go out questing, with mixed success, and pretty much all of them die eventually. Sounds about right to me!

So thematically speaking, this is exactly what we wanted -- but the problem is, if you're not careful, this just gets into punishing the player. Early alpha versions of the game had it so that when your character died, not only did a vengeful ghost spawn, but you also dropped all your inventory in a bag wherever you died.

In practice, that was super annoying -- because you'd first thing have to wind up getting all your equipment back (and the "corpse runs" tended to be either trivial annoyances or impossible blockages, rarely anything in between). Then there was the matter of getting your ability bars back the way you wanted it, which would involve a lot of interface fiddling, possibly some duplicative crafting, and a bunch of annoying stuff.

When the player dies, they don't want to feel like it's meaningless in a game like this, but at the same time they don't want twenty minutes of aggravation every time it happens, either. In a roguelike you don't have that problem because when your character dies, the game is over and you start again. But here the point was that the world and the settlement went on even after a particular hero had fallen. The two ideas didn't mesh until we started having the inventory and enchants stay with the glyph.

That made death feel a tad too trivial, though, so players were lobbying us for some sort of temporary buff to characters that could be lost on death. Hence upgrade stones were arrived at, and it was really surprising how much they added to the overall feel of the game and the amount of customization you could arrive at with the experience.

Tips On Fighting A Vengeful Ghost Of Your Old Character(s)

Yeah, these are pretty rough. Some monsters (or whatever environmental hazard) killed you, and now you have to go back and kill your old self again? Well, it's more than just that, actually -- whatever it was that killed you is probably still there, but now you also have to deal with the ghost of your old self. If you're not careful, you'll just get your new character killed, too, and now there will be two ghosts to deal with. And so on.

I've seen literally dozens of ghosts in one room, and it's not pretty -- miasma everywhere, and you can hardly move because of it. Vengeful ghosts home in on you and move through walls, making them one of the nastiest enemies around despite the fact that they don't have that much health. One vengeful ghost really isn't all that bad, but multiple ghosts plus whatever it was that killed you originally can be pretty crazy indeed.

Friendly tip: don't let vengeful ghosts stack up a bunch in a room that you absolutely have to clear. Say... the overlord's throne room? If the overlord keeps killing you, and ghosts keep stacking up there, you really might get yourself into a situation that is un-winnable. That's not really supposed to happen in this game (you getting into a place where victory is impossible), but if you work at it enough you certainly can make it so.

When faced with a room with a vengeful ghost in it, the best strategy is to try to hide from the other dangers of the room, then take out the ghost (which you can't hide from, remember), and then resume dealing with whatever else is lurking in the room. Otherwise, no matter how you cut it, you're going to be fighting the ghost, dodging its miasma, plus fighting whatever else is in there, all at the same time.

A Valley Without Wind