Suicide/Game Quitting

[Snaaty]

Hello Forum,

I had another (quite) morbid idea to implement into this truly awesome game.

Right now, if you’re tired of your character you can just Q/Y/Y, and you’re dead and everything is over.

Even if you’re buttnaked somewhere on a field.

So I propose, that in order to commit suicide (quit the game) you need some tool to do exactly that.
Have a gun? No problem.
Have only a stick? Well, you could try to bash your own head with it for a slow and painful death.

Soo, this idea is probably way too strange to ever make it into the game (yet we do have zlaves), but since realism is written in really big letters here, there is some hope.
In real life, you can’t just decide to quit, you actually have to do something that takes balls. Even if I know that it’s just a character and zeros and ones, deciding to actually end that virtual life (instead of going Q/Y/Y) is a somewhat scary thought.

As a major benefit, this can also incentivize players to stick to their characters instead of going, “what the hell, my next life is just a few button-presses away”.
If people don’t have a gun, but still want to quit the game, they can still charge into the nearest town or drive their car into the shelter or whatever, so I believe there would still be enough possibilities for players to quit their game that don’t involve a slow and gruesome death.

So tell me what you think of my idea and whether I should seek professional help!

[RipRoarinBoogerPenis]

I like it.

[Valpo]

the only slight problem i saw with suicide was the ability to steal other chars starting equip… but well thats not much off a problem either because if youd be so willing to cheat you could just raise your starting points or what ever. Aside from an Atmospheric effekt you gain nothing from changing the sucide system in that way.
If you chara would get the urge to kll himself due to longterm depression this might be a fun way to keep him from killing himself… keep away from sharp objects n guns…
Although i d rather not shoot myself all of a sudden cause i ate something funny n killed a zkid while in the rain… should be well thought through xD

[Snaaty]

the only slight problem i saw with suicide was the ability to steal other chars starting equip... but well thats not much off a problem either because if youd be so willing to cheat you could just raise your starting points or what ever. Aside from an Atmospheric effekt you gain nothing from changing the sucide system in that way. If you chara would get the urge to kll himself due to longterm depression this might be a fun way to keep him from killing himself... keep away from sharp objects n guns... Although i d rather not shoot myself all of a sudden cause i ate something funny n killed a zkid while in the rain.... should be well thought through xD

Well, “stealing” the equip of old characters may already happen with the current system. I am not making my suggestion to fix that, and I am not sure what made you think that.

I believe that “atmospheric effect” is quite large, actually. The ability to just “quit” is always somehow breaking the immersion for me in many games, not just Cataclysm:DDA.
If a game like this one has a goal of being “ultra-realistic”, making it neccessary to actually “do it” is just a logical step.

Although, I just noticed, that really most characters with a knife can end their life really quickly, so it doesn’t really change too much.
Still, I expect hilarious (in a Dwarf Fortress-y way) attemps at suicide.

I just like the idea that there is no “easy way” to quit (virtual) life. If you want to, you will have to end that very life.

The idea with depressive characters trying to kill themselves sounds somewhat fiddly. Especially with the almost-always neccessary knives and their possible uses.

[Paquito]

The ability to just “quit” is always somehow breaking the immersion for me in many games, not just Cataclysm:DDA.

This is why it’s called committing suicide, but if it took some effort to do so, they’d also have to add an option to just quit and delete a character, because that’s a thing people want to do, and we’d end up breaking immersion again.

[Valpo]

If people want to quit they can just close the game. making suicide harder on em will result in more forced game shut downs . thats why i suggested a reasone for making suicide harder a game mechanic revolving arround moral. Thats not easy to implement either but when this is added it should carry some gameplayvalue.
As i understand your suggestion it adds flavour to the game whcih you do preffer thus cou could simply decide on your own to not suicde unless you have proper means to do so… because i am pretty sure that lazy people will just bypass this by quitting the game and that shouldn t be the goal.

[KA101]

Folks who want to put effort into their DDA self-destruct typically use explosives, high-speed vehicles, fire, or some combination thereof. One of the blockers stopping 0.B is implementing a DeathCam so folks who opt for the Viking Funeral can watch it play out.

For those of us who bugtest and therefore quit/suicide a LOT of characters, being able to get into and out of the game in a hurry is actually a very important feature. 3 seconds per is a lot when you need to launch/quit the game 10 times (and that’s pretty low, actually) for one PR.

So from a dev perspective, this is a counterproductive suggestion, and I’m gonna downcheck it for that reason.

To be thorough: from a player perspective, I’m not sure what value making people waste time on a character they’ve decided Isn’t Worth It adds to DDA. If anything, it seems likely to increase tedium/metagaming, as the optimal solution would either be Debug>Item/Knife>QYY or Save&Out>Delete Char.

So this isn’t gonna fly. Sorry.

[kevin.granade]

In addition to agreeing with KA101’s points I’m not interested in putting a potentially triggering scenario in the game as a mandatory set of actions.

If you just want to stop playing a character, save and exit, or just kill the program.
Then just don’t play that character anymore or delete the save.
If you want to also nuke the save, 'Q’uit and exit, leaving a corpse and your stuff.
If you want to actually act out some kind of suicide, stage it up and do it, there are a lot of ways to make it happen, though most avenues for direct self-harm aren’t implemented. Most people don’t go that route anyway (other than shooting themselves)

I’m not personally interested in implementing direct self-harm like cutting or shooting yourself, but if someone added it I guess I wouldn’t block it, though it’s obscure enough that I don’t think it’d merit a global keybinding or a place on the normal menus.
Statistically speaking, the next most common option is hanging, someone could put that in as a constructable piece of furniture or similar, and I wouldn’t block it, though not particularly interested in doing it myself. I think those cover the most common methods, as you can already drug OD, though it’s unrealistically difficult.

[i2amroy]

I’d like to point out that it’s fully possible to commit suicide without anything else but your teeth (Biting chunks out of your veins in your arms?), which, while being incredibly painful, would still be a possible thing to do.

Also yeah, suicide is more of a “I don’t want to play this character anymore”/debugging type thing than something that is actually story-based IMO.

[Wuzzy]

I don’t like this at all. If the player doesn’t want the character anymore, it should be possible to get rid of it without hassle. There is no point in making it more cumbersome. It is called “suicide” somehow while in reality it is actually quitting the game.
There is no point in adding a game-mechanic if the player does not want to play this character anymore.

[vultures]

I enjoy the opportunity of quitting without saving, just as much as I like the Cataclysm RL. I don’t care if it’s called Cuckadoo or Suicide.