BreezyLumi Posted May 30 Report Posted May 30 One of the things I love in the game Project Zomboid is that the game is technically hardcore as in you only get one life. However if you die in a save, you get the option to continue that save as a new character. This makes the world feel more lived in as the player gets to decide if they go back to their old base and just continue where they left off, or go off somewhere new since the new character wouldn't know about the base. Lends itself to a lot more roleplaying opportunities as well since if you're playing a certain character, dying allows you to have a fresh start. So that in long term multiplayer servers, you're not locked into whatever choice you made when first joining Would be cool to see 4
Andael Posted June 3 Report Posted June 3 I generally like when games are designed around permadeath or harsh death consequence (usually pushing for design which avoids the lame loops of die-and-retry or save-scumming). In Vintage Story there isn't much character-development -- that is, when you "respawn" you are basically like a new character, depending on your on-death settings for what happens to armor/equipment. So, having a new character isn't really a gameplay change, is it? It would be like having the setting to lose all gear on death, but also with opening the character creation interface? I did a Valheim playthrough with a setting which is effectively as you say: fresh character in the same world... The good mix was it allowed for the hardcore death penalty (losing character and gear is a very major loss) while I wasn't fearful of spending time on nice builds. Builds involve a lot of creative work which is very heartbreaking to lose or re-do, whereas rebuilding gear is almost purely a progress-setback (more excuse to engage with the game-loops! ). But neither of these games really have their design based on the premise of such harsh consequence, which is what I really prefer... and what I assume Project Zomboid benefits from (I have it but haven't played it yet... keep waiting for that forever-in-the-future 1.0 release!).
LadyWYT Posted June 3 Report Posted June 3 (edited) 29 minutes ago, Andael said: So, having a new character isn't really a gameplay change, is it? It is, since it causes major issues with story integrity. The player is a specific person, with specific ties to specific characters, so it's going to get very confusing when said characters always keep referring to the player as the same guy. It also creates problems for adding opportunities for the player to have more in-depth interactions with NPCs, since respawning as a completely different character should logically mean that all prior relations cease to exist. For newer players especially, it would probably be rather disappointing/confusing to select the option that as clearly "be a new character on each respawn" only to have the story and NPCs completely ignore that. On 5/30/2026 at 5:18 PM, BreezyLumi said: However if you die in a save, you get the option to continue that save as a new character. This makes the world feel more lived in as the player gets to decide if they go back to their old base and just continue where they left off, or go off somewhere new since the new character wouldn't know about the base. It's a neat idea, but not really something that warrants a special option since it's already possible to achieve this kind of play in the vanilla game. All the player has to do is turn up the respawn radius significantly and never use a temporal gear to reset their spawn, as well as consciously make the choice to not return to their old base if they're playing with the map enabled(or disable the map to remove the temptation). Wilderness Survival and Homo Sapiens difficulties are set up like this by default. Edit: also welcome to the forums! Edited June 3 by LadyWYT 1
BurgerDaddy Posted June 3 Report Posted June 3 I think the actual in game differences, if I’m understanding correctly, would be the potential of choosing a new class, and also not keeping ones armor. Otherwise it would be respawn location dependent, and I could see that being kind of neat… if you knew the coords to your old base that would be kind of a potential “cheat” but it’s then up to the player as to whether that’s cheating or not in their own eyes. Though… if there are claims enabled I guess that’s a whole other layer… haven’t played w claims myself as I haven’t played w anyone other than my partner yet.
Recommended Posts