Weekly Update (1/26/18) — New Death Mechanics

Hello my loves, and welcome to another weekly update. Thank you as always for joining me, and a warm greeting to our newest Patrons:

• Amalia Kadarusman
• Arden M. Riley
• Dan
• Deric Frost
• Jacob Michelis
• James Higs
• Joery Pigmans
• Joseph Romness
• J. Robin
• Kumatora
• Matthew Capers
• Nkozi Cole
• Saurophax
• Science Panda
• Shiara
• Yannic Noah
• Zachary R. Long

This week's update is very special, because it involves an area we've been tweaking for a while now: death mechanics.

One of my biggest gripes with Skyrim is the way it handles death. The only consequence for death is reloading a save, which is both boring and disruptive of game flow. It also offers no real punishment and encourages save-scumming — another practice I detest, because it makes mistakes meaningless and makes it harder to reward players for skilled play.

To fix this problem, I designed US as a permadeath experience. With such a heavy death consequence, the game becomes much tenser and forces players to think critically about every action.

However, Skyrim was not designed with permadeath in mind, and with this new system came new problems:

• US's slow pace makes players become too afraid to take risks. Without balanced risk-reward systems, gameplay becomes boring. Players only fight sure victories, or risk losing their entire character.
  
• Skyrim can be wonky, and will kill you in bullshit ways. You might "trip and die" over a physics-enabled rock, or an errant spoon might freak out and end your life. This is unacceptable for permadeath.
  
• There is no easy way to transfer MCM settings between saves. Permadeath games typically offer quick restart times to reduce the sting of death and get players back in the action, but this is currently impossible in Ultimate Skyrim. Instead, you get to set up almost every MCM all over again.

For these reasons I sought alternative death consequences for 4.0, and for most of development, we've been working with a custom version of Death is Highly Overrated Redone to accomplish our goals.

However, after examining our options, it looked like a proprietary solution was necessary to ensure the experience we intended — and to this end, /u/SrGatonegro has been working on some new mechanics that we're ready to reveal today.

All of this is subject to change, but by default in 4.0, Death will work as follows:

• Players who die lose all of their belongings (except quest items). These items will be stored in a container at the location of death. Enemies will respawn in the dungeon/cell where you died.
• The player will respawn at a bed of their choosing, with a series of debilitating wounds (thanks to the mod Wounds). These wounds can be addressed in many ways, or left to heal on their own.
• The player can retrieve their items by reaching the location of their death, but if they die again before retrieval, their items are lost forever. (Dark Souls players will be familiar with this system.)

These features are currently planned as optional, meaning players can still opt for vanilla death mechanics OR permadeath, if they choose.

Our hope is that this will create an awesome risk-reward experience that provides punishing death consequences, without being overly punishing. 

We think this will also reward preparation and skilled play, since players can prepare for their inevitable death(s) by stockpiling medical supplies & other resources (to quicken the recovery process).

We're very excited for these features, and we'll keep you posted if anything changes.

As always, thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week!

BB