Endgame vs. the neverending story?

[Chambers167]

I was wondering just how far in development this game is in terms of the basic fundamentals of gameplay. I understand that in terms of PR you wish to release the information in a slow fashion to build hype (although with your scaled back staggered launch it hardly seems prudent?) but i would like to ask about the leveling system in place.

I think that a typical leveling system such as those contained within SW:tor, WoW, GW (the list goes on and on....) is such a severe hamstring to developers and players a like in a much more obvious and restrictive fashion than the financing and development cycle you talk about in your blog.

It has a few typical advantages such as a more streamlined and direct leveling service and gameplay experience, a "cut and paste" leveling format that is applying throughout various expansions and new content releases thus increasing the speed these can be deployed (because the developers are familiar with the format). The main advantage of this system is that its easy to understand, bigger numbers mean more power, it is able to direct a player with ease and say in less than a second "this quest is too advanced for you", "stay away from this player he will kill you quickly".

Buts drawbacks are also numerous and imho they FAR outweigh the positive points. The first drawback from a developer stand point is that content becomes obsolete. When a dungeon is completed at level 9 and you become level ten that dungeon no longer holds interest for you, you instinctivley know that the items contained within will likely be a downgrade and to complete content in general below your "level" is not worth the time you put into it. Recently we have seen attempts by Blizzard to "re-do" several areas, instances, quests and even raids(!) so that a larger part of the player base experiences these things. Recognizing these failings why would any developer restrict there content in such a way in the future? Why would you consign months an in some cases YEARS of work to just be written off and ignored by a large part of the population and an INCREASING part of the population if the game is succesfull and grows?

The second drawback is that a finite leveling system forces people into "endgame", a series of repeatable instances/raids/quests/areas which must be added to every several months in order for the game to justify the subscription charge. It forces a cycle of development that almost CANNOT under any circumstances be diverged from (look at reaction to WoW's cataclysim expansion; revamping the "old world" heavily frowned upon because of less endgame content). In fact in most mmos that follow this formula the game before the endgame may as well not exsist, for all intents and purposes lvl 1-9 could be super mario brothers and then the real game starts when you hit level 10. The creative freedom of the developers is restricted towards how inventive new boss fights are and even then diversity is normally frowned upon.

The third drawback is the speed at which players digest said content. As time goes on and fan sites develop and players become increasingly more familiar with the game and its mechanics the rate of consumption will increase. A boss fight such as shannox in WoW considered to be "faceroll" even on heroic mode would likley have been dubbed unkillable in vanilla wow had he taken the place of lucifron (the original first raid boss). The developers are restricted more and more to create challenging fights within a severly restricted framework and severe deviation from said framework (which is no insult or slight towards the so called "holy trinnity") becomes impossible because you would essentially be changing the genre of the entire game. In a year or even three years down the line what will be the cost attached to developing a new raid tier that is bigger and better than the last tier yet will be consumed at a faster rate? When taking into consideration my first point (that content becomes obsolete)you are now looking at a considerable figure (likely the entire budget of the game each quater) of money that each 3 months is dwarfed by its sucessor while at the same time making said predecessor totally obsolete.

If a level system was eschewed content would stay relevant, as long as rewards were offered in some form. The cost of content would not increase on such a exponential rate because "out doing" older content would not be an issue. activities alternative to typical "raiding" (which is all MMO's are these days), such as exploring, crafting, political games, would offer true "alternative" styles of play as opposed to minor or simply inferior styles.

As opposed to leveling up you could allow for a stat system rooted in a base, say 10 str, 10 mag and 10 con. Each time you achived an objective, complete a full quest line, explore a hard to reach location ect a new stat point is granted up to a certain number, say 10 more stat points. When the player has achieved a total of his/her 30 base plus an extra ten specialisation can occur whereby he can reduce his mag by one to increase his str by one. Not only would this keep leveling at bay it would also allow newer players to catch up in a relativley short time, somthing that is impossible in game like darkfall or eve.

But anyway i wanted to talk more the theory of systems than recomend my own systems which im sure are also flawed to hell and back! What do you guys and gals think of the problems i have mentioned with typical leveling systems?

[Scott Betts]

I understand the drawbacks of the leveling system vis a vis content, but there are few things to consider here.

Character advancement is a requirement. It must be in the game. It doesn't have to be levels, but there has to be a concrete way in which players gain power. They have to be able to see the numbers go up, and they have to be able to experience becoming stronger than the enemies they used to fight. Otherwise the advancement is meaningless, and your character will feel static.

The problem with this is that in order to advance, the character must leave something behind - in this case, lower-level content. I'm not sure how you can avoid this. Even in your proposed stat increase system, those increased stats need to come with a similar increase in capability. At a certain point, the character's capability will outstrip the challenge of the content he was previously experiencing, and he will have to move on to "higher-level" content in order to be challenged.

The approach the WoW developers are taking to remastering older instances into end-game heroics is actually pretty cool. It addresses a lot of problems at once.

In order to accomplish your goal (which I understand to be creating a system wherein content is never rendered obsolete for a given character) you need to create content that can scale in both challenge and reward with the character's advancement. It's a noble goal, though I worry that scaling encounters will offend the versimilitude crowd.

[Jagga Spikes]

i'm a sucker for neverending story.

does character advancement have to happen? i think not. characters do not get old and do not die. they don't really need to get better either. it's entirely possible to lock character to specific set of abilities and have meaningful play experience.

it becomes easier to balance content. content never becomes obsolete. new and old players are encouraged to play together. pvp would be accessible to everyone.

game should be gameplay. abomination that is everincreasing stats is just silly.

if there has to be character customization, give out achievements. give out abilities to players to make their own titles. things that don't change mechanics, but give flavor.

now, some people might argue that role-playing game requires distinction between character. sure. what your character does is distinction. your gameplay need not be same as mine. maybe you want you character to be a miner. go mine. maybe i want my character to be a trader. i'll go trade. our gameplay made out characters different.

do we really need two miners to be different? well, we could have different kind of mining. maybe gold could be found in rivers as nuggets. mithril in deep veins. meteor iron in far off places. again, gold miner becomes different from mithril miner without any need for character difference.

honestly, i would go with basic abilities (like strength, dexterity, etc), and then just let players find out what they like to do.

it would be simple and easy to create character. and even if you mess up, you just erase that character and remake it. or there could be remap with cooldown (something like one month/subscription period; to prevent abuse).

no grind for xp. no wait for sp.

just move in and play.

[Scott Betts]

Jagga Spikes wrote:

does character advancement have to happen?

I think so, yeah.

[Jagga Spikes]

Scott Betts wrote:

Jagga Spikes wrote:

does character advancement have to happen?

I think so, yeah.

*queue metal riff* "you crit for 5 MEGA DEATH points of damage!" :)

[KitNyx]

I actually find myself in the middle here. I agree with Jagga Spikes that advancement is not necessary. In the end good gameplay will trump rewards in my opinion. If something is fun, I am going to do it whether someone pays me to or not. Likewise, if something sucks but has good rewards...well now it has become a job (funny, I just talked about this in another thread).

I do however hope they find a way to work advancement in...why not have fun and get paid for it!

And yes, I highly doubt scaling encounters is viable without instancing. I do hope there is no instancing, but...if they were to have instancing, as one who I assume has been lumped into the "verisimilitude crowd", I actually have no objections with scaling them.

[Scott Betts]

KitNyx wrote:

I actually find myself in the middle here. I agree with Jagga Spikes that advancement is not necessary. In the end good gameplay will trump rewards in my opinion. If something is fun, I am going to do it whether someone pays me to or not. Likewise, if something sucks but has good rewards...well now it has become a job (funny, I just talked about this in another thread).

I do however hope they find a way to work advancement in...why not have fun and get paid for it!

And yes, I highly doubt scaling encounters is viable without instancing. I do hope there is no instancing, but...if they were to have instancing, as one who I assume has been lumped into the "verisimilitude crowd", I actually have no objections with scaling them.

That's good to hear. I think scaling, instanced encounters is probably a bear to balance and test, but is also probably a great feature to have.

Of course, this likely falls under the umbrella of theme-park content, and it remains to be seen how much emphasis there will be on such content.

[Chambers167]

I think the problem with advancement as you see it comes from the fact that like i mentioned, in other mmos advancement means ONLY bigger numbers. What if advancement in PFO meant completing the questline to gain another point for your magic attribute, while not actually using that point because your a spear weilding warrior you COULD decide one day to retrain yourself into a mage build. Advancement would take place because as you advance your options become wider but your underpinning power does not expand past a fairly early point. So you might complete all the quests for a warrior and your STR might be maxxed out but you continue to play for the magic attributes so that in future you have that option, I guess it would be kind of like a raid in wow dropping titans grip as a reward even though the player is prot, that same player would still be made up with such a skill.

If you factor all the types of skills you might want, physical, constitutional, mental, stealth, charisma, exploration, crafting, first aid, cooking, building, fishing, hunting ect ect the options are wide open and indeed the time it takes to complete all of these would effectivley be the basis for the game with the higher stat points being available only for difficult content or group content.

Character development DOES have to happen but not in a way shown by any mmo i have yet played. People still play mario but there is no real progression there, or halo, gears of war even games like modern warfare only have the most minimal progression style perks thrown in. What if completeing a certain quest line gave you access to a trainer who will teach you to use spears? The basics are always over looked every char in ever mmo is essentially a god at lvl 1. They should not be able to use a weapon effectivley apart from a staff or a mace.

Further progression would come from the combining of skills although this would be much more difficult to implement. You might concentrate on your stealth attribute and max it out but then you are faced with another line of progression when done... do i then augment my abilities with STR to increase my swings or do i go for magic to enchant my dagger?

Even look at skyrim as an example. The actual strength of the character does not grow at such an exponential rate for a melee user. The same abilities you have at level 1 you will have at lvl 99. The only thing that changes is a couple of advantages, imagine if those advantages took the form of some kind of glyph so that they were limited, you can swap a strong forward stroke out for a strong back stroke if your more defensive.

I really feel the key to diversifying and prolonging a games content is limiting the skill set that players have. a perfect example is guild wars were people tout the fact that any player can just load it up and begin competative pvp, anyone who has played this understands that this isnt quite true, but the progression still stands, people are completing difficult quests and repeating them often to learn skills they may actually never even use or need.

On a more personal level i would rather see talents or abilities available that specialise deeper than what we see in current mmos, i hate the way warriors are adept with all weapons and shields at the same time, learning to use one weapon should yield positive rewards for a player for example using a spear for a prolonged time should increase its range as you become more proficient with it. Using a shield will increase your speed as you learn to use it more efficiently ect ect a system like this could be used to add further progression to a character . simply equip a new weapon type and you begin to learn its nuances, while the last one you equipped degrades. Why can't progression be based on a short term of a week or so but need repeating each time (allow players to remeber the last 3 weapons they used or some such). A similar thing with caster classes could be used also whereby they must memorize spells which takes time to do, in order for them to cast them on demand.

sorry for the rambling, merry x-mas everyone.

[Scott Betts]

Chambers167 wrote:

Even look at skyrim as an example. The actual strength of the character does not grow at such an exponential rate for a melee user. The same abilities you have at level 1 you will have at lvl 99. The only thing that changes is a couple of advantages,

My mind is too far into holiday-land to tackle the rest of your post right now, but this part isn't correct.

In Skyrim, the damage you deal with weapons increases as your skill with that weapon increases (which, of course, increases the more you use the weapon). A level 1 character who uses swords all the time will deal a LOT less damage than a level 20 character who uses swords all the time, even if they both wield the exact same iron sword. Perks can increase this, but your damage will go up even if you never pick up weapon perks.

[Chambers167]

Scott Betts wrote:

Chambers167 wrote:

Even look at skyrim as an example. The actual strength of the character does not grow at such an exponential rate for a melee user. The same abilities you have at level 1 you will have at lvl 99. The only thing that changes is a couple of advantages,

My mind is too far into holiday-land to tackle the rest of your post right now, but this part isn't correct.

In Skyrim, the damage you deal with weapons increases as your skill with that weapon increases (which, of course, increases the more you use the weapon). A level 1 character who uses swords all the time will deal a LOT less damage than a level 20 character who uses swords all the time, even if they both wield the exact same iron sword. Perks can increase this, but your damage will go up even if you never pick up weapon perks.

But the mechanics of skyrim make this not true since the game levels up with you!

[Scott Betts]

Chambers167 wrote:

Scott Betts wrote:

Chambers167 wrote:

Even look at skyrim as an example. The actual strength of the character does not grow at such an exponential rate for a melee user. The same abilities you have at level 1 you will have at lvl 99. The only thing that changes is a couple of advantages,

My mind is too far into holiday-land to tackle the rest of your post right now, but this part isn't correct.

In Skyrim, the damage you deal with weapons increases as your skill with that weapon increases (which, of course, increases the more you use the weapon). A level 1 character who uses swords all the time will deal a LOT less damage than a level 20 character who uses swords all the time, even if they both wield the exact same iron sword. Perks can increase this, but your damage will go up even if you never pick up weapon perks.

But the mechanics of skyrim make this not true since the game levels up with you!

Not to the extent that games like Oblivion did. The way Skyrim "levels up with you" is really no different than the way D&D levels up with you - as you gain in level, the DM tends to throw enemies at you who are stronger. This is different from Oblivion, which just sort of raised all the monsters' stats until they were on par with you. You can go do a Google search for Skyrim level scaling and Oblivion level scaling to see what the difference is.

[Shifty]

The thing I hated in almost all MMO's is that you really don't start playing the game until you have hot the max level.

Until you get to 'level x', you are simply working to get there so you can go do the cool stuff and the cool raids. All the other raids n the way through (if you even bother) are solely aimed at gearing you to advance to cooler content.

[Chambers167]

Scott Betts wrote:

Chambers167 wrote:

Scott Betts wrote:

Chambers167 wrote:

Even look at skyrim as an example. The actual strength of the character does not grow at such an exponential rate for a melee user. The same abilities you have at level 1 you will have at lvl 99. The only thing that changes is a couple of advantages,

My mind is too far into holiday-land to tackle the rest of your post right now, but this part isn't correct.

In Skyrim, the damage you deal with weapons increases as your skill with that weapon increases (which, of course, increases the more you use the weapon). A level 1 character who uses swords all the time will deal a LOT less damage than a level 20 character who uses swords all the time, even if they both wield the exact same iron sword. Perks can increase this, but your damage will go up even if you never pick up weapon perks.

But the mechanics of skyrim make this not true since the game levels up with you!

Not to the extent that games like Oblivion did. The way Skyrim "levels up with you" is really no different than the way D&D levels up with you - as you gain in level, the DM tends to throw enemies at you who are stronger. This is different from Oblivion, which just sort of raised all the monsters' stats until they were on par with you. You can go do a Google search for Skyrim level scaling and Oblivion level scaling to see what the difference is.

i dont need to do a search i played both games extensively and i recognize the difference. I would still say skyrim is more like oblivions leveling as opposed to DnD, the difference with DnD is that it requires more skill ( or luck if you like) to defeat a beholder of ilithid than it does a human.

[Scott Betts]

Chambers167 wrote:

i dont need to do a search i played both games extensively and i recognize the difference. I would still say skyrim is more like oblivions leveling as opposed to DnD, the difference with DnD is that it requires more skill ( or luck if you like) to defeat a beholder of ilithid than it does a human.

Similarly, defeating a bandit in Skyrim requires less skill than defeating a dragon.

(I'll note, however, that your example above depends entirely on what levels the human has - humans receive no racial hit dice, so they're entirely dependent upon levels. A level 20 human can easily be scarier than an illithid.)

In Oblivion, all monsters' statistics scale with your level. No matter how combat-focused you were, monsters would continue to gain hit points and damage. Even the really mundane ones.

In Skyrim, you just end up fighting more awesome monsters as you go up in level. You'll still encounter some mundane ones, too, and you annihilate them with appropriate ease. This is much more similar to how D&D works, where the assumption is that you will gain in power as you level, but the challenges that you face will be appropriately challenging. Your DM probably won't throw kobolds packed full of class levels at you, he'll just pick out more powerful monsters like those beholders and illithids you mentioned.

[Chambers167]

Actually defeating a dragon in skyrim is the same as killing a human. There is no alternative strats to defeating one. In order to kill every single enemy in skyrim you just wait till it is attackable, then attack it. Either you can deplete its hp quicker than it depletes yours or you have potions/magic on you. There is no tactics involved.

Its all semantics anyway since my original statment was correct, just because any enemies name changes and it gains a better axe or an extra ability (that doesnt change the fight at all). I wasnt really refering to the fact that the HP of an enemy does not improve (because it does, even on the base mobs you find) but rather as a level 1 char in skyrim i have all i need to succeed in the game, i do not need power attacks, and in fact me having them gives me no advantage as such. I do not need any spells outside the initial flame spell im given, and i dont need any potions other than the bog standard ones.

Progression in skyrim could be removed almost totally and the core experience would be almost identicle.

But this is totally off topic i didnt want to discuss skyrim even though thats what i ended up doing, i wanted to discuss what people thought of the benefits and disadvantages of a system that heards and forces players into so called "endgame" content, and what possible systems would avoid such problems?

[superfly2000]

Thats why I don't play Skyrim...

...aside from not playing single player games at all...

Tired of consoly games calling themselves RPG's...

[Scott Betts]

Chambers167 wrote:

Actually defeating a dragon in skyrim is the same as killing a human. There is no alternative strats to defeating one. In order to kill every single enemy in skyrim you just wait till it is attackable, then attack it. Either you can deplete its hp quicker than it depletes yours or you have potions/magic on you. There is no tactics involved.

Sure.

Unless you count debilitating shouts (like Marked for Death, for instance), spells cast to summon creatures, weapon enchantments like paralysis, using the appropriate resistances for the type of damage your opponent is dealing, managing your once-per-day abilities, keeping track of stamina for power attacks, and like twenty other things that you're choosing to ignore for the sake of your argument.

Quote:

Its all semantics anyway since my original statment was correct, just because any enemies name changes and it gains a better axe or an extra ability (that doesnt change the fight at all).

It changes the fight, because now they have a better axe or an extra ability.

If you're trying to tell me that dragon fights and bandit fights are functionally identical, I think I can safely ignore everything you have to say on the topic of game design.

Quote:

I wasnt really refering to the fact that the HP of an enemy does not improve (because it does, even on the base mobs you find) but rather as a level 1 char in skyrim i have all i need to succeed in the game, i do not need power attacks, and in fact me having them gives me no advantage as such.

Having power attacks gives you no advantage?

What game are you playing?

Quote:

I do not need any spells outside the initial flame spell im given, and i dont need any potions other than the bog standard ones.

You don't need any spells period, if you want to play melee all the way. But if you're playing a spellcaster, you're going to want more spells.

Quote:

Progression in skyrim could be removed almost totally and the core experience would be almost identicle.

I think your argument is basically trash, and you really could not be more incorrect about this.

[Scott Betts]

superfly2000 wrote:

Thats why I don't play Skyrim...

...aside from not playing single player games at all...

Tired of consoly games calling themselves RPG's...

I'm tired of people imagining that they get to decide what is and isn't an RPG.

[Chambers167]

Scott there are boards where they encourage people to stray from the core of any message posted you know, they even reward people who love to bash other people. Go find one of those boards, vent your clear frustrations then come back and address what im saying.

[Scott Betts]

Chambers167 wrote:

Scott there are boards where they encourage people to stray from the core of any message posted you know, they even reward people who love to bash other people. Go find one of those boards, vent your clear frustrations then come back and address what im saying.

Feel free to actually respond to what I said whenever.