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