"Real" Permadeath

[michelzinho]

TL;DR: A mod that prevents the game from reloading the last save when your character dies. Instead, you enter spectator mode to choose a location to spawn a new character, or choose a random location. The character creation may include alternative-start-like features. Quests and dialogue lines are adjusted to take into account the fact that you may be playing with a new, never before seen character at any point in the game. This prevents redoing the same quests over and over when you're playing permadeath.

 

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Now, I've been a fan of permadeath in games since I first learned about the concept. Technically, you can already do permadeath on Fallout 4 (or any game, for that matter). Just restart from the beginning when you die. As much as I like permadeath, though, I recon there is a downside; having to restart everything. That means you will have to sit through the beginning of the game all over again (assuming you're not using alternative starts), will have to redo quests (depending at which point you died, A LOT of quests). This can get boring. I believe this is remedied in some games where the permadeath concept is in fact built into the game. I heard the Fire Emblem games, one of the pioneers (if not THE pioneer) of the concept, do this pretty well. Another thing that comes to mind is Battlefield 1. IIRC, when you die in that game (at least in the very beginning) you see the name of the solider you were playing as, his date of birth and date of death. Then you did respawn, but as another soldier. What if we had a similar thing in FO4?

 

The idea is that when you die, the game does not restart. Instead, you enter in "spectator" mode (just as if you typed 'tcl' in the console, or whatever the command is). You can see your character's dead body, and the world goes on. You can wait (with 'T') in this mode. What's the reasoning? Well, first, it feels a bit natural to me, game-wise. More importantly, though, the goal is to roam the world and choose exactly where you want your new character to spawn. At this point you can either press a button to spawn a new character at the point the camera is in the world, or you can click a button to spawn in a random location.

 

When you choose to spawn, you go to the character creation process, as normal. You could also (and I'd say ideally) have a similar process as the one you see in alternative start mods, where not only do you go through the vanilla creation process, you also choose initial equipment, faction alignments, etc.

 

After creating your new character, you spawn at the location of your choice. And here's the kicker: the world stays just as it was when your last character died. This means that the quests you've done (and therefore the events that transpired) will be completed. Story/quest-wise, you will pick up where you left off (more or less, see below). Of course, depending on where that is, the difficulty you're playing in, and your other mods, you may have to do a bit of leveling up. Nothing earth shattering, in my book.

 

Now, in order to make things more natural, it would be ideal that the NPCs treat your new character as someone they didn't know. If nothing was done they'd basically think you are still the old character. In here would lie at least half (most likely considerably more) of the difficulty of making this mod: adjusting the dialogue of NPCs to take into account the possibility that at every point in every quest they could meet a new person to take things where they were left by the (now dead) old character. Of course, this isn't strictly necessary for the mod to work, but it would make things considerably more immersive.

 

Those are the main points. There are details to be sorted, of course, this would be quite an impactful mod in terms of game mechanics. For example, the spectator mode idea may prove to be too difficult to implement. Maybe you'd have to right after death either choose a random location to reborn or, say, pick a location in the pipboy map. Also, non-started quests would probably benefit from being completely reset (i.e. the new character would have to pick them up again from the quest giver). Started but unfinished quests could vary: maybe some would benefit from a complete reset, but for some it may make more sense to be picked up where they were left off, story-wise.

 

I've made a number of very simple mods (GST changes) years ago. I'd have to learn quite a bit to make a mod such as this one, and I think it's very unlikely I'll do so. I'm barely gaming at all, nowadays. However, I like this concept so much that I wanted to put it out there. Who knows :smile:

 

Thanks for reading.

 

EDIT: Added TL;DR

Edited November 16, 2020 by michelzinho

[SKKmods]

My simple approach to avoiding permadeath re-grind is the SKK Fast Start series of solutions.

[michelzinho]

My simple approach to avoiding permadeath re-grind is the SKK Fast Start series of solutions.

Didn't know those, they do help in this regard. Thanks :)