Collection Progression

[DeathWyrmNexus]

I've always felt that if you spend the time to do the collecting, you deserve the bonus you get over those that just breeze through the game...

This system would actually invalidate the work since apparently the orbs disappear and won't come back until you reach the next tier. So you go back to grinding an area because you dared to level ahead of the curve.

Um what? Isn't that just slapping the collectors and making them rehash through an area arbitrarily because the campaigner wanted to breeze through? How about no. No works for me. Listen, the campaigner breezes through because that is what he does. If he cared about what the collector did, he would collect too. But he doesn't, so balance things for him and do an overall scaling for the enemies so the collector has some kind of challenge. If the collector managed to scheme his way ahead of the game, let him. Why? Because it is his experience. He isn't forcing this on other people, their sacred experience is spared.

If I want to powerlevel for the lulz, don't slap me for collecting what was put there to collect by rendering it invalid in the next chapter. Reinventing the wheel will just lead to frustration.

However, I agree that if achievements are attached, there is a group of people who would do it no matter what.

 

[DeathWyrmNexus]

IMO Things you find as secrets should have minor or no gameplay impact and instead provide a different yet still satisfying reward.

Alternative costumes or weapons, artwork galleries...

I agree, and I have a long-winded explanation on why.

When you play the game straight through, you're immersing yourself in it. You seek to become one with your character, to feel his victories and defeats, and to revel with him when the end comes. It's a certain way of playing the game, and it demands certain rewards all the way through. When someone plays the game like this, it makes sense to reward them with the power to play more effectively - stat boosts, new items, and so on.

When you're going item-hunting, you're no longer playing the game as a story to immerse yourself in, but as a gadget to tweak. The game is not something to be experienced, but something to be dissected. You're looking for different things. Now, if you devote a lot of time to probing the game world and if you tweak it effectively, you deserve rewards (or at least, the developers would be stupid not to reward you for using their product), but the rewards should be different from the awards in the immersion approach. Alternative costumes, artwork, funny hacks, and other things of this nature revel in the fact that the game is still a game in the end, and regardless of what its story is, it's a work of code that can be tweaked with.

Playing the game for the story is what the developers usually aim for, but playing with the game as an object is still a valid way to have fun, and it deserves its own kind of reward system.

And now I am going to call bullshit. I find myself very immersed when I item collect. I am doing it because it is in my character's interest. If I find a random powerful item that is part of a set, I can imagine that my character would realize the significance and pursue it as a sideroute. The path is long and arduous as it is, so finding things to make it easier is desirable.

So do me the favor of not telling me how I am experiencing the game and whether or not I am immersed.

 

[lodo_bear]

And now I am going to call bullshit. I find myself very immersed when I item collect. I am doing it because it is in my character's interest. If I find a random powerful item that is part of a set, I can imagine that my character would realize the significance and pursue it as a sideroute. The path is long and arduous as it is, so finding things to make it easier is desirable.

So do me the favor of not telling me how I am experiencing the game and whether or not I am immersed.

Whoops, it seems I have made a mistake. Let me reconsider.

Are we talking about the same thing when we mention item collecting? Let me review the examples John mentioned:

In Crackdown, every time you grab a green glowing orb your Agility stat goes up a little; you can also raise it by winning races and shooting punks from the high ground. Grand Theft Auto IV has you kill 200 pigeons in exchange for an Annihilator Helicopter spawn point; the same chopper is also available in five other locations without shooting all those pigeons. In MMOs, collections are either assembled from random dead-monster loot drops ("Collect ten rat fangs!") or by finding them in the environment (EverQuest 2's "Find the twenty different butterflies!" quests) and either way they give you XP for completing the quest and possibly a quest item.

The examples he brings up are all essentially game-breakers, especially the pigeon one, and these are the kinds of things I had in mind. I apologize for not making this clearer.

Hunting for the Masamune and the Prism Armor or whatnot is just part of prepping, get ready or get dead and all that, and you're right in that it's totally in character. Who wants to charge into battle with subpar equipment? Hunting for easter eggs and scavenger hunt items, on the other hand, is a different beast, giving you a different look at the world and justifying a different reward system. After all, you should get a reward for helping control the local pigeon population, but He-Who-Slays-Pigeons should not be rewarded the same as He-Who-Worked-Overtime-and-Saved-Up-for-the-Automatic-Shotgun. Immerser deserves immersive rewards (more powerful stuff, more sides to the story) while pigeon-hunter deserves rewards that reveal the inner workings of the game itself (easter eggs, trivia, DVD extras).

 

[VGStrife]

How about each 'tier' gives a plus 100 stat bonus, and each 'orb' gives a plus 1. That way you get an edge, but not game breakingly so.

Like the orbs add up to one extra tier.

 

[John Scott Tynes]

And suddenly, I regained all the respect for this guy that I lost after his article about sex in videogames.

It's a Christmas miracle!

 

[John Scott Tynes]

Thanks for all the thoughtful discussion.

One question a couple of you have raised is why being overpowered relative to the missions is a problem. My feeling is that being overpowered is fun only briefly. If the game remains a cakewalk too long, I think the lack of challenge kills your enjoyment. This is particularly true in an MMO where you are completing enormous numbers of missions. If players get too powerful relative to the power curve of the content, the game stops being fun and you wander off to play something else.

Brief periods of high power are fun. A Sekrit Technique of old-school games is to give you an outsized power boost when you acquire an important new weapon, so that temporarily you are slaying everything in sight. The boost decays back to normal over the course of 30-60 minutes and to you, it just feels like the difficulty is ramping up gradually. In fact, it's going back to normal.

This leads me to a thought I should have considered for the article: collecting items that give you a temporary boost. If every pickup gives me +5% for 15 minutes, with a cap of say +25%, then suddenly they are a consumable resource. I might pick up five of them just before a big boss fight so I have an edge. But because they are a *finite* resource (only 200 pigeons or whatever) I may run out of them too soon if I use them unwisely. And every X pickups I should still get some kind of permanent reward, which as some of you suggested could be a non-game item such as a new skin or a story moment.

There are drawbacks to that approach, too. Depending on where missions occur I may have to travel a ways to find more pickups before a big fight. If I find the content consistently difficult, I'll resent feeling like I have to travel further and further to grab more pickups and still make it back to the mission before they wear off.

Still, having them give a temporary boost is an interesting idea I wish I'd thought of before I wrote this column.

 

[carpathic]

This sounds a lot like complicating things soley for the sake of complicating things...

The whole point of collecting things is that it rewards you for the time spent. It is not to ad another layer of complication pointlessly...

This whole idea of a tier...it would really ruin the continuity.


Like in games where you advance 5 levels and suddenly the merchant remembers all about the fact that the guns he is selling out front are really pretty terrible and puts out the kickass awesome shotgun, because the other guns can't damage the monsters that surround you anymore.

 

[Hamster at Dawn]

Good idea but I think if you get to the top of your tier then you should still be able to collect orbs but they don't take effect untill you get enough XP. Those things can be hard to find as it is, we don't need them disappearing on us.

 

[jimduckie]

yeah sometimes it's a pain but it adds busy work to the game anc without it the game would be short ...

but what gets me is when you need a special item to get the last object and can't get the special item till the end of the game

and as for gta4 ,all that hunting just to get something a cheat code can give for less work is bullshit