Firstly, crashed landspeeder robots fire mini enemies that explode, and those explosions do damage background objects. Secondly, insta-gibbing is not unique to them. Dark octopi fire black projectile chaos canisters (which blend in nicely with darkness) that are usually somewhat easily avoided unless you fall onto an octopus in the dark - but if one touches you, it'll explode and trigger 16 or so shrapnel bits that will instantly gib you as well. Every single one of my deaths has been due to shrapnel-based gibs.
As far as I've seen from the feedback of others though, stupid instant deaths are actually intentionally part of the game design and they don't really matter. As an unintended side-effect of random deaths - I've stopped playing AVWW as it feels like an exercise in futility. Character death doesn't actually mean anything as individual characters don't grow with use - There's little incentive to keep players alive except to keep scaling some arbitrary world tier level - Continent 5 doesn't feel any different from Continent 4, except it has larger numbers and less of a feeling of gratuitous accomplishment (which is frankly the reason why I do anything at all). As far as character development goes, there's little of a long-term strategy and rather a lot of short-term tactics.
Rebuilding on every single continent just feels like starting a new house/city in SimCity or the Sims, except those games gave you the option *not* to, but AVWW has no horizontal progression - so if you don't strive to defeat the overlord, there's nothing much to do. I'd compare it to a Civ, or Master of Magic, but it's not quite the same feeling.
I personally find that dying adds nothing to the game except the minor frustration of clicking the reroll button (and if they limited respawns, I'd just suicide until I got a character I wanted to play, making it even more annoying). The game even encourages you not to develop any attachment to your main character whatever - they're just transient hosts for your glyph parasite.
The other issue is that I've been playing TSW and GW2 comes out soon - both have skill systems (similar to GW) that actually encourage build diversity through experimentation rather than randomness. I thrive off that kind of thing.
I could probably glean a sense of accomplishment in AVWW from turning up difficulty to masochistic settings and then attacking any suggestions that could potentially harm the artificial difficulty of the game (and completely ignore the purpose of difficulty settings), but I think I'm too haggard for a good old-fashioned penis-sneering competition these days. (Sorry, that paragraph is rather passive-aggressive, but I want it for catharsis.)
Fortunately, AVWW has been worth every cent I spent on it, so I'm satisfied.
Considering how ridiculously repetetive MMOs are (and I've played damn near all of them at some point, and been in a great, great many betas.... I've ALOT of free time), I have a very, very hard time considering a game like this to be repetetive in comparison. That being said though..... pretty much ALL games are, in some way. I like this one though because it lets *me* choose my path through it, and do things how I want to..... so many games do not do this.
Random deaths though..... I've been playing this game *alot* since it came out, as in, more than any other game (and again.... LOTS of free time, so LOTS of gaming time), and I dont think I've *ever* had a single death that I thought was random. Every single time, I knew what killed me, and I knew why and how, and I knew there was something I could have done to avoid it (and I mean something that does NOT involve the shields). And I'm playing on Master Hero & TCO. Any death that was "stupid" was due to my OWN stupidity. Die to shrapnel burst? Well, maybe I shouldnt have gotten hit by it (and shrapnel-canister projectiles tend to be slow-as-dirt to begin with...). Die to lava? Well, perhaps I should have jumped OVER the lava, not in it. Die to a boss? Maybe I should have fought and dodged better. The only enemy in the ENTIRE GAME.... and I do mean the ONLY one.... that I honestly think is a little "cheap", is the damn Eagles. And even then, they're not THAT bad. Mostly they just irritate me.
That being said though..... I think the game honestly loses something at lower difficulties. All those spells, for instance..... there's so many of them, a huge variety..... but on most difficulty settings, you simply dont need them. Not until I got to MH difficulty did I start finding good reasons to experiment with spells beyond the most commonly used ones (and on TCO they become ESSENTIAL). The game does encourage "build diversity" at this point (overall though, not really between individual characters), but it DOESNT at lower difficulties. Not even remotely. Playing on Hero or lower? Give me Ball Lightning, and..... Ball Lightning, and I can probably kill anything without too much trouble. And in all honesty, that's just not all that much fun.
I'll agree though that dying has no particular consequence right now (particularly with ghosts being stupid easy to defeat), but that one's a known issue, and pretty sure the devs have said they have things in mind for it. .....though, coming from playing as many MMOs as I have.... this game has more consequence than most of those do these days. Possibly though, that's a good thing (ah, the days of EQ's old corpse-runs....).
Also the Octopi had their Insanity canisters rather drastically nerfed. Frankly, the things arent much threat anymore...... Though they were so dirt slow that I'm not sure how much threat they were to begin with.
