About death in RPGs in general, more development would be great in this area. For example (and pardon the rambling/different coinciding topics):
In a game that has a lot of party companions (which, IMO, RPGs should. Quantity > quality, or at least a high quantity of good enough quality), then the game should encourage losing a companion to be an "okay" game state, i.e. not an instant re-load. Maybe each character could have a short, scripted death sequence or death moment, i.e. say Jaheira dies in Baldur's Gate 1. She could have a scripted death "goodbye" after the battle. Say she gets KO'd for the battle and then afterwards, her and Khalid have a touching moment, or she gets to say her goodbyes, etc.. This would accomplish a few things. One, it would give the death actual significance, in the "create your own story" type of emergent gameplay. Your game would be unique to you because she died in your game fighting Elite Gnolls, etc. etc.. Two, it would encourage moving on with what you have. "Picking up the pieces and moving on", if you will. So now you would be encouraged to try a new party member. Of course this example is not taking into account Baldur's Gate 2 where Jaheira returns, but you could even have some metaphysical miracle reason for that happening written into the script if you so choose (Gandalf style, going from grey wizard to white, etc..)
The idea is to make it a sort of thing that you can live with, so to speak, rather than just being an insta-reload. In RPGs like Tactics Ogre for example, you had so many party members, all named and unique with story, dialogue, etc., but that you had unique characters waiting in the wings. So if a good fighter for your team died, they could be "replaced" and you could keep it moving. Some battles were so tough you may be 75% of the way to a victory (keep in mind this is some 45 minute knockdown, drag-out fight), and you'd roll with the losses just because you actually could win the fight. And so on.
Now you might think it would suck to lose an important story character, and I agree. But the characters in party-based RPGs, IMO, should not each have 250k lines of dialogue, etc.. I seriously think party-based CRPGs should have more quantity of characters. In other words, instead of spending all resources to give 6 or 7 total characters 250k lines of werds a piece, make 15 characters and give them each 100k. Take the resources you have and spread them out for more unique characters. Because that not only gives you more incentive to experiment with party builds, use characters you normally wouldn't or explore different characters more, it also would give death and permadeath more of an impacting, meaningful effect rather than "welp, time to re-load!"
I love in Baldur's Gate how there are so many characters (even if some are admittedly a little too underdeveloped), but it's cool to have so many characters that if a character or two dies, you can have that sort of "emergent story", go pick up another character and keep it moving. But if they added Death Moments to each character, some little "cutscene" or scripted few moments of dialogue (heck, maybe even have it somewhat randomized like banter. Maybe a dice would roll determining who would talk in the last few moments with the soon-to-be-dead character, or the whole party could chime in, lots of possibilities) that would give it more of a finalized feeling and also give incentive to keep it moving and accept that as part of your story.
In BG's example, a "chunk" where the character is blown to literal pieces and unable to be resurrected, that would be replaced with a "fatal blow" of some sort. So you could still resurrect your traditional "dead" or KO'd characters, but the final blow or final death would be just that, final, and would trigger the Death Moment for that particular character. Rather than a character exploding to pieces and then being very anti-climactic as well. Shoot, some dialogue could be randomized as banter, too, for certain characters to chime in later with who you should pick up. Imoen could say after 24 hours... "Gee, it was real sad Jaheira died. We're gonna need someone to help us now. Maybe we can head back to Beregost and see if Garrick is still around..." or something like this. That wouldn't be 100% necessary and more of a "luxury feature" but it could be cool.
I just would like more of this sort of thing and less of "you get 6, 7 max, characters, they each have 3 novels worth of backstory and your only choice is to use them or... not" in RPGs. There are so many story-based party CRPGs that neglect having a more gameplay-focus while still keeping bits of the story in tact (probably because story-based CRPGs with 6 characters sell well, since most of these games sell the characters themselves as being the game.)
Drunken rant but you get the idea. More Baldur's Gate CRPGs with tweaks to the formula would be welcomed. It could be done, man...
