Thoughts on a Game Concept

[Helmutye]

This is a game concept I dreamed up recently, and I thought I would get the thoughts and impressions of my fellow Escapists on it. Not sure if I will ever use it, but I would like to keep in mind for future projects.

The concept is basically an inversion of the way most games usually work. In most games you get stronger and stronger as the game goes on, starting at one level and then gaining skill, status upgrades, better equipment, and the like. The basic progression is start small end big, and to balance this the game difficulty gradually increases in proportion to your increase in awesomeness.

But for this new concept, the idea is that you start big and strong, with lots of powers and abilities, but over the course of the story you are put in situations where you gradually lose those powers. As the game progresses, you get weaker, and therefore the game becomes more challenging because of that, rather than just steadily cranking up the difficulty.

This concept could work for a variety of settings--it would be excellent if the protagonist is infected with some sort of disease, and as the story progresses so does the disease--of perhaps the story could even be a race against the disease, and you would need to get through things before the disease cripples you to point where things are impossible.

It would also work well as a way to make moral choice systems have a bit more weight--imagine you are playing this big, powerful paladin-like character who must choose between keeping one of his super paladin powers and letting someone die, or giving up the power so that the person will live. Sacrifice would be a big part of a game like that, the idea that doing the right thing can be very difficult. And to make a statement about how doing good is hard but ultimately better in the end, while doing evil is easy but will ultimately destroy you, the end sequence of the game could involve a really tough fight where the paladin gets the assistance of everyone he or she helped along the way--if you were good, you personally would be very weak but you would have a lot of help (and of course the help would have to be balanced so that it was really, truly effective!), but if you were evil you personally would still be very strong, but you would be fighting alone. This idea feels very Christian to me--a game about martyrdom.

So what do you think? Interesting concept or a little too fancy-pants-psychology-experiment? What other settings or situations would the idea of a gradually weakening protagonist be appropriate?

 

[Axeli]

Heh, I stated an idea like this on this forum some time ago, although I'm hardly the first one to come up with it.

So naturally it's an interesting concept.

 

[lack of self CTRL]

Wow, that sounds really good.

I like the idea of a moral choice systems having more impact than just changing the final bosses monologue but i'm wondering how the idea of people showing up to help you would work unless you only helped people who were already proficient fighters.

Its a cool idea, like the enemies would stay at the same strength and you would have to rely more on guile & skill rather that brute force. Maybe it could become more and more stealth focussed as time went on.

 

[Proteus214]

It's definitely an interesting idea. I've never really seen a full game use that concept, but there is one game that had a level like that: the Anthony chapter in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. In that level the player character has been afflicted with a curse that is slowly turning him into a zombie as the level progresses and your attack and movement speed slow down greatly at the end.

However, you do need to be careful here since there are a couple of pitfalls with this sort of design philosophy. Both of which are entirely avoidable, you just need to be aware of them.

"Brick Wall" Difficulty Curve
Increasing challenge and decreasing player ability can lead to sharp rises in difficulty that the player may or may not be prepared for. Yes, a challenging game is fun, but if you lure a player into a false sense of ease in the beginning and then smack them hard somewhere in the middle of the game, the potential for frustration becomes very real.

Hamstringing Player Possibilities
One of the great things about games like the Legend of Zelda is that at the end of the game, you have a wide variety of abilities and tools which you can use to solve puzzles, kill monsters, and generally break stuff. There is a big component to the fun of the game that comes from the player going, "Hmm, what gadget do I use to solve this problem?" Sure, you can make the final level of the game about a guy with no weapons and no limbs, but will it still be fun to have him only able wiggle around on the ground at the climax of the game? That's entirely up to your design. Personally, I would make the game so that the intricacy of environmental gimmicks is inversely proportional to the maximum ability of the player character.

Overall, I think that it is an interesting idea and does have potential for application.

 

[Proteus214]

"Brick Wall" Difficulty Curve
Increasing challenge and decreasing player ability can lead to sharp rises in difficulty that the player may or may not be prepared for. Yes, a challenging game is fun, but if you lure a player into a false sense of ease in the beginning and then smack them hard somewhere in the middle of the game, the potential for frustration becomes very real.

I think this problem could be avoided if the game is well designed enough. The decrease in your power should be gradual enough that the player can adapt to losing strength over time. I recall many times while replaying a Metroid or Zelda title shortly after beating. It was hard to adapt to be striped of all the health/power-ups/items/tools/ammo collected through the course of the game. I'd instinctively try to use the power up only to realize I no longer had it. This sudden sharp decrease in power was off-putting and made the game frustrating.

I agree, that kind of thing is totally avoidable with a good design plan revolving around exactly when a player is stripped of a certain ability, weapon, etc. To make for an interesting experience, I think the event should be alarming to the player in the realization that they now have to be thinking differently at their approach to problem solving, but it shouldn't punish them.

 

[Seldon2639]

It'd kind of depend on how you began to limit the powers. The thing you don't want to do is end up forcing the player to have a lack of options in how to deal with the challenges facing him. What might be best would be the weakening of the character's abilities, rather than stripping them away wholesale. You'll also run into the difficulty of either having to decrease the power of the enemies correlating with the decrease in player power, or you'll have to make them ridiculously wimpy for the starting character.

 

[wkrepelin]

That would work if it's balanced well. The idea has been explored a little in games but not to great extent to my knowledge. It has been successful in film though as a plot device. I don't know if you're a programmer or anything but I say go for it.

The only issue that I see with it is as your character looses abilities this may change game mechanics or eliminate them and it's annoying to lose a bunch of mechanics/abilities when that's how you've been training yourself to play the game. This is especially true since the ends of most good games are a sort of "cumulative review" of all the abilities you've learned thus far.

 

[eggy32]

It could be good. Though I'd rather play a game where I lose my abilities half way through because of choices like you suggested but having something happen later that would allow me to get some of them back which would help in a final battle or something.