When my character dies will I have to buy a new character, or will the game give me one for free?
TL;DRCurrently dying carries no penalty; the team wants to eventually add respawn fees and character aging, which would need multiple-character support that doesn't exist yet, as described in the Death of a Spaceman article.
Interesting question. There's definitely a lot of layers to that, especially considering the technical developments that are going on and planned. Currently, there is not any kind of penalty. In the future, we want to start adding things like maybe a fee whenever you die and respawn, and then also have some other effects tied to respawning. So things like aging of the character, wear and tear, things that give the character a sense of a lifetime and meaning. And also another thing to take into account is that in order for this to be really meaningful, we need to have multiple characters in the game, and this is something that we actually don't support currently in the game, both on the dedicated game server side and in the back end as far as your persistence data. And so I think ultimately we want to have it to where you can have multiple characters and some of your characters age and get worse over time. If you want to know more about the ultimate vision of that, you should check out the article Death of a Spaceman from several years back, which lays out CR's ultimate vision for what we want this to be like.
I'm glad you brought that up. One of the difficulties in answering questions about development while you're in development is always speaking about the immediate, what we're working on now, speaking on the near future, what we expect to have in the coming months, and then, of course, the long-term goal. So I think we pretty much covered it there. We'll put a link up to the old Death of a Spaceman article in the video description, everybody. You should check that out if you haven't already. It's still the ultimate plan.