The last single player game I played that give me an extreme sense of accomplishment in beating it was Demon’s Souls. How they handled death and re-incarnation of your ghost / body was consistent with their world and fiction and because I couldn’t save mid-level, clearing a level, especially after a difficult Boss fight was immensely satisfying. It was also one of the most frustrating games I’ve played! I think Demon’s Souls was too much on the “punishing” end of the difficulty spectrum, but it really did remind me of the value of having something to lose when playing. You can’t have light with dark and you can’t have reward without risk.

In Squadron 42, this is pretty easy to achieve. You need to complete the mission to move forward and you can’t save while in space. You die you just go back to the previous save point, normally before you launched on the mission.

The tricky part is really how failure is handled in the persistent universe of Star Citizen, as you can’t just set back the game to an earlier point.

The simple solution is that when your ship is destroyed, you manage to eject and drift in space, where you are picked up and returned to the last planet / landing location to claim your new ship sans any cargo and upgrades you had (unless you had bought additional insurance) and head out into space again.

This is the mechanic EVE Online uses, with the extra wrinkle that if another player blows up your escape pod, a stored clone of your character is activated, re-spawning your character and effectively making him/her immortal. In EVE, death is allowed for in the fiction and is balanced out by the cloning mechanism, which allows for loss of property but not your character’s skills (as unlike Star Citizen, your character in EVE has RPG skills that you learn)

The death mechanic in EVE is clever and well woven into their fiction.

But I’m not interested in making EVE 2.0 with cockpits.

One of my goals with Star Citizen is to make it feel very visceral and real. I want to feel the effects of physical damage on my character, loss of limb or other mishaps that can happen in the danger of space. If my character has been through several wars, I want to see the scars on him/her – perhaps a cybernetic arm because one was lost in firefight or the wrong side of a dogfight. I want to be able to walk up to another player in a bar and SEE that he or she is a grizzled veteran with the battle scars to prove it. This is the kind of detail, texture, and immersion that I want to achieve with Star Citizen.

I also feel that if everyone can be cloned easily, it fundamentally changes the structure of the universe. You now have a universe of immortal gods that can’t be killed. Death is just a financial and time inconvenience that has no further consequences. The life and death cycle of humanity is what has brought us our history, our need to “make a mark” in our time, to push forward. If I want a living, breathing universe that has a lot of the dynamics of a real world and is inspired by the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, immortality for all is problematic.

The flip side is that while perma-death is realistic, it is not a lot of fun if the first time you’re on the wrong side of a dogfight you lose everything and have to start again.

I want Star Citizen to be immersive AND fun.

The death mechanics that I have in mind keep a feeling of mortality and history without making it frustrating or killing (pun intended) the fun.

The life and death of a Spaceman.

The Character creation screen will be done “in-fiction”. You’ll start the game in 1st person view looking at two bathroom doors – one with a male sign and one with a female sign. Which door you walk through will determine what sex you are when you walk into the washroom. Walking up to the mirror, you’ll see your reflection. Wiping the condensation off of the mirror with your hand (or some similar mechanic) will change / reveal your facial appearance. When you’re happy with how you look, you will exit and return to the UEE recruitment office and officer. You’ll fill in your name on the MobiGlas form and also specify your beneficiary in case of death: this could be a family member, son, daughter, uncle, aunt or someone entirely new (although not another player character).

The UEE Navy has an opt-out option right up until you move onto advanced training (where you would start Squadron 42). So if you just want to jump into Star Citizen, you can opt out right away. If you want some basic pilot training, you could avail yourself of basic and then buy your way out. In this case, the player would just owe a small debt to the UEE that he / she has to pay within a year of game time or become a “debtor” (debtors are denied landing rights on UEE controlled planets and don’t receive any UEE protection until they’ve paid their debt).

A player enters the persistent universe of Star Citizen either after completing the Squadron 42 campaign (which doesn’t need to be successful), or by opting out before advanced training and going straight into the private sector.

Most players should have some kind of basic insurance, whether it’s lifetime hull insurance for everyone that has backed so far, or a limited duration insurance that will come with later ship packages. A player will even be able to take out a small loan to help finance his/her exploits (with the same penalties for nonpayment described above)

You will be able to run “training simulations” in the simulator module in your hangar (think of this like the arcade game in the Pilots’ Ready Room in the original Wing Commander) to practice your combat skills with no penalty (but of course there is also no financial reward here either).

When you venture out into space proper, you do put your character at risk, but it will be a long term one, not an immediate one.

I see each character you play having the ability to “die” multiple times before the character is finally put to rest. Think of this like “lives” in an old school arcade game. Science in the future is far more advanced than today. Medicine has the ability to bring people back from what would be considered dead in today’s world.