Can We Handle Permanency in Games?
The Weekend Gamer asks if the community is holding developers back from exploring permanency in games, sharing examples from the development of Fable 2. From the article:
"…But say you didn’t have any free XP left. In that scenario, your enemies would come and beat on your character, and when they finally awoke, their appearance would be disfigured in some way. If you allowed this to happen often enough (or failed often enough), your character would become so disfigured that NPC’s would begin to react to your unattractive appearance in different ways, possibly becoming less friendly, etc.
The focus testers hated it so much (save for those who went out of their way to disfigure their character), that at present that mechanic has been pulled from the game. Molynuex revealed that players were literally shutting off their consoles to force the system to reset.
So my questions to you is this? Do you like the idea of consequence in your games, or does the idea of permanency on your character and game world make you queasy?"
