Vengeful ghosts --- cool or whack?

[Martyn van Buren]

This is kind of niggling thing to bring up when the game's in intense beta (I'll leave off putting a Mantis suggestion til things have calmed down some), but what do people think of the vengeful ghosts?  They're bugging me for thematic reasons.

Everything we've heard about the permadeath mechanic so far has been about seeing death as a story event --- you die, and it doesn't affect what you can do in the game that much, but NPCs respond to it, they erect a gravestone, you can sit back and reflect on the cool things that character did.  I'm cool with that --- but then they turn up as a floating purple miniboss and you have to go kill yourself (or your previous self)?  Something about shooting fireballs at the person I was five minutes ago doesn't lead me to think about loss.

Does anyone else feel this way?  Personally, I think I might be happier if you could go and hold a funeral, or do something else to appease the ghost without blasting it.

 

[x4000]

My one note: we do hope to do funerals and things, as well as other ways to appease ghosts.  Just because the only way to appease them right now is to kill them isn't saying that's the only way we want to do it, ever.

[Martyn van Buren]

Cool, that's what I was hoping for!  Thanks, X. 

I think I kind of hope they're going to be kind of expensive and challenging --- doing a ritual while being harassed by the ghost, or something like that.  I'm a fan of having things in games that aren't worth the trouble from a gameplay perspective that you can do just to feel like a good person.

[x4000]

Yeah, I like that sort of thing, too -- we don't have concrete designs on that yet, but we've had a lot of ideas floating about.  There's more pressing stuff in the short-term, but it's on the list of things I'd like to do before 1.0 if at all possible!