Kickstart This: Das Tal, an Innovative MMO Where Regular Server Wipes are a Feature

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Typically, character wipes are a nightmare. When a game wipes everyone's characters for whatever reason (usually during its beta phases) all that hard-won loot and all those hard-earned levels evaporate into thin air, and everyone from the most hardcore to the most casual players are dropped right back at square one. Together.

It's infuriating.

Which is why it might seem a bit baffling that an MMO currently seeking development funds on Kickstarter is advertising its regular character wipes. They're not a grim necessity or an unfortunate by-product of development, but rather a feature. Something intended to improve the overall experience of playing. That's what PVP sandbox MMO Das Tal is promising, and that promise itself is fascinating.

Here's the heart of their pitch:

The feeling of exploring new places and experimenting with new systems is very special. Constantly changing worlds allow you to experience this feeling time and again. Das Tal has been designed to support hundreds of semi-randomly generated worlds at the same time. Each of those worlds is unique in both geography and rule set. When you first start in a new world you will know nothing about it. You will have to explore, learn about its dangers and find out where to settle down.

A multitude of worlds and systems will be yours to explore.

Game worlds in Das Tal are always time-boxed. That means that they will run for a set duration (around one to three months) and then end in a massive event. We plan to have about 2.000 registered players per world and expect about 10% of those to be online at the same time. This has many benefits:  

1) When a new world begins all players start on even footing. This gets rid of the power gap where players with months of playtime continue to grow stronger, while new players struggle to keep up and compete. As a new player you will always have the same chance at success as everyone else.

2) Time-boxing worlds allows us to remove a lot of grind that MMO developers often build into their game to prevent you from hitting the "end game" too fast. In Das Tal you rise to your full potential in a matter of weeks, and we don't block you with pointless grind.

3) Since we have so many game worlds with limited duration, we can easily experiment with new features for each new game world. If an experiment fails once, it does not endager[sic] the whole game. With multiple game worlds and flexible rule sets, we can tailor the game experience for very specific groups of players. For example:

A solo-player game world without mages where archery is king? You can have that. Increase run speed and XP gains but lower average health points? That's possible. A perma-death game world set in a continuous sand storm? Consider it done. We'll give players the opportunity to work with us on this so you can enjoy your favorite rule set.

A game where the rules change and all progress is temporary seems almost antithetical to what an MMO is expected to be these days. Between the regular resets, quick progress and lack of a grind, Das Tal almost sounds like a roguelike.

There's another massive advantage to these regularly scheduled apocalypses, as pointed out over on PC Gamer. One of the biggest buzzkills of starting out in a PVP MMO is getting outmatched. The people who have been around the longest and played the most are decked out in the best gear and fitted with the strongest skills. There's nothing less fun than getting slaughtered while you're still in rags by someone who's glowing and shimmering like some sort of mythical superbeing. Other MMOs with PVP elements have tried to mitigate this kind of experience. Some disincentivize player-kills outside of a certain level threshold, others raise all characters in a PVP area to the same level... But to my knowledge Das Tal is the first to opt for "time-boxing" instead. 

Will it work out? We'll have to wait awhile to find out, presuming the game even gets properly funded, but I'm certainly curious to see. If you'd like to read more about Das Tal's intriguing approach to the genre (or help back it) check out their Kickstarter page here.

Tweet

Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Guni]

Crowfall announced a similar concept during their Kickstarter in March. In their campaign video they provide a quite fun explanation why they want to reset/wipe worlds: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crowfall/crowfall-throne-war-pc-mmo/description

[Teriya LoD]

Das Tal May 31 Alpha PvP Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCj9HWvTe9Y

I’m afraid that gameplay footage does not do this game justice. To the casual observer the gameplay is skittish and extremely fast-paced and, in a word, overwhelming. There is so much happening in every frame that there’s no way to understand what’s going on and the video gets tuned out and is unappreciated for the sheer amount of heart-pounding action that the game entails. At least, that’s how I felt when I watched DT vids. Some crucial aspects of the game that gets lost in the video are the amount of battlefield awareness that is required at every moment and the critical precision of aiming.

A couple helpful tips when watching: try to follow my cursor (you’ll be able to see where my focus lies and what I’m doing to help the fight) and the big white circle that follows me is an AoE heal (I think technically it’s an AoE HoT.. or a HOT AOE)

I'm excited for this new game on the horizon: full loot PvP (you keep what you kill), skill-based combat (aiming is critical, friendly fire is off, no "Tab-Targetting"), and changing worlds (At some point the game is "Over," the world resets and different rulesets can be employed).