What if We Leveled Backwards?!

[Laurie Barnes]

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw! YOU ARE A GENIUS! And I'm not just saying that because I finished reading "Mogworld" earlier this week. (Though on a slightly deviating note I must mention this book is worth ten times the price I paid for it). The greifer mentality to me has always seemed to be enforced by traditional MMO's and any multi-player RPG. However your idea would flip that on it's head and lend the Greifers to be seen as what they really are, NOOBS who have missed the true depth that the game offers. Why aren't you making video games Yahtzee?

Truly 'tis a disservice to the world that thou doth not.

 

[silasbufu]

This should actually be done in action games, because you can't just kill thousands of zombies/demons/soldiers etc. without breaking a sweat. Maybe introduce fatigue, accuracy penalties, the need to rest/feed (like New Vegas Hardcore Mode). Of course, this should be an option which you can disable at any time you want. God knows how many 10 year olds buy these games and without the disable option, no more huge sales for all you developers.

 

[Fiskmasen]

This also introduces another interesting thing: The game could easily be designed to award skill rather than time put into it. Consider levelling up, losing some of the default abilities and skills. Now you have to make due with fewer options as well as a gimped character. Start mastering your character, deriving magnificent tactics for each encounter. Boom - you're pwning the newbies despite their inherited upper-hand.

I like it.

 

[Nexus4]

Kinda reminds me of Shadow of the Colossus, where wanderer would constantly lose his humanity the more colossi he killed. Sure it didn't impact gameplay, but it was kinda similar.

 

[Gaarvaag]

Can't be bothered to check all the comments so excuse me if this has been posted already.

I think this idea does have potential, for example if you seriously injure your leg, reduce the speed you can run after you've recovered, or perhaps narrow the field of view when loosing an eye. Or maybe being unable to do certain spells when you receive a head injury.

I think this would make the experience much more personal as well, since you are responsible for the character and the injuries he or she receives instead of magically healing everything with medkits or spells.

This could even lead to harder moral choices, for example losing power when you save someone and not losing it when you decide not to. This would certainly make these choices more meaningful.

You should be able to compensate for it though, by example being able to hire henchmen, getting a higher position in an army or maybe becoming more cunning, like learning how to set traps or avoiding them and such.

That's what came to mind after reading this article.

 

[Corpse XxX]

Some car games does similar to this in the start..

Where you first start off with a souped up Nissan Skyline with endless amount of HP(horsepower not hitpoints), then after a while you have to start over, with a rusty bag a piss Huyndai Accident or something..

 

[smudgey]

woah, had a similar idea for a metroid game like this! set after fusion, samus is chased by the federation who, at various points in the game, manage to disable parts of her suit, meaning she could no longer rely on her abilities to progress, and had to find other ways to advance...

 

[campofapproval]

if i remember correctly, in wild arms 4 as i progressed and gained various skills my max hp would actually drop. granted it's been a long time since i've played that game but it certainly added a challenge; if you wanna use the good stuff, you gotta get weaker in the process.

 

[The Aimless One]

An interesting idea.

Though I feel it would soon start to feel gimmicky.
A single game based on this concept would be great but I don't see it becoming a part of every franchise that's currently based around leveling up.

It would also make the development of a sequel very difficult and I personally love a good sequel.

 

[the Dept of Science]

I think the system that would work best would use both levelling up and levelling down. To use the system proposed, firstly you would have to deal with a loss in the motivation caused by lack of levelling up. Secondly, you would have to contrive a reason for the player to start at a Godlike level then get consistently worse in all ways. While plenty of people have suggested stories where this could be done, many of them look pretty similar (powerful wizard/demigod suffers from a curse and needs to find the cure) and you would be pushed up to come up with more than a few games with this as the premise.
It would be much more flexible to come up with a system where you start as your fairly average man, jack of all trades, and the skills and attributes you use the most improve, the ones you use the least atrophy. This is in no way contrived, it happens naturally; the wizards body gets weaker as he relies on magic, the fighter's mind suffers from lack of use and a few to many clubs to the head. Furthermore, it deals somewhat with the loss in player motivation, as they will be thinking "well, I may lose some of my magic ability this time around, but soon I'll be getting more strength to compensate." Players can also experiment with what skills they would like to develop when they are the jack-of-all-trades, and which ones they find themselves not using much at all.
From a narrative standpoint, it means you can break out of the recurring scenario where a level 1 weakling is deemed best in the land to be the saviour of mankind (the inevitable "chosen one" trope), as instead you are "a talented man who has got an aptitude in combat, magic and sneaking, who just needs to hone his abilities to defeat the big bad at the end". For the dramatic tension Yahtzee talks about, it still holds up. Even though you won't be a complete weaking, you would instead be, say a wizard who has given up almost all his strength and endurance in order to have enough magic to win out in the end, or a fighter who sacrificed the magical abilities which he had developed.

The designers can also be flexible about how quickly the player improves/gets worse, depending on the scenario they want to create. My suggestion may have implied that the player gains 1 point for every one they lose, but they could, say, lose 1 for every 2 (or 3, 4,...) to still get the "classic RPG continually getting stronger" style hero, or lose 2 (or 3, 4,...) for every 1 they gain for the Yahtzee style hero.

 

[the Dept of Science]

Edit: Sorry, double post

 

[Jarelk]

A great idea, actually. I can imagine a game that starts out light-hearted and where the endless slaughter of hordes of enemies stands central at the start, which is basically fun, but gradually you lose powers and the game gets darker and edgier. Drama enters and the story turns around. The character loses heart and loses faith and in the end he succumbs to the darkness which corrupted him from the start.

I call it Cerebus Syndrome: The Game.

 

[Perfice]

Well, you have to consider if you're right about people really wanting to play a game for it's story and terrian exploration, rather than having the feeling like their a god. Having the feeling as though you're a god is the type of the majority of all players of WoW or any MMORPG.

Also, harassing other players will go up substantually if you can just start a character with all abilities. Noone will want to be a high level because they'll just be butchered by low level people non-stop just trying to do quest, more than low level people do now with high level people. That's probably the most annoying part of all about WoW, getting harrassed by high level characters that can simply butcher me when all I'm trying to do is quests.

This may work as a single player and as some new-aged design kind of game, and probably still not much fan-base. As a MMORPG, no chance in hell.

Instead I'm pretty sure that the majority of game designers are just going to try to make the final boss hard enough that all your powers are squandered and that he logically has a reason for having control of all these minions.

 

[II Scarecrow II]

Ahh, but see this is where the misconception is coming in. People are believing that the only way to play an RPG game is to "level up" thus improving your overall stats. Too many games, like Fallout 3, have a point where you are extremely vulnerable at the start, but by the time you complete Act 1, you have enough weapons and armour to take on most bad guys, that just help you get more weapons and armour to take out the rest. At this point, the game ceases to be fun, as all you are doing is slaughtering infinite respawning bad guys for no purpose. Dead Space 2 did it as well, where after you get the Plasma Cutter and Suit, you aren't scared any more and you can mow you way through most of the game.

What if these games had the enemy difficulty increase as you play through, but keep your stats the same? How would that affect the way you play? The same effect could be achieved by keeping the enemies roughly the same, but decrease the player's physical ability.

In my game suggestion above, it achieves this affect by forcing you to decrease your abilities progressively, making you think differently about how you play the game. The starting missions would allow you to learn how to use your key abilities against enemies that pose absolutely no threat to you because of your power. This sets the difficulty curve way down to ease players into the game appropriately. As it progresses, you get weaker and weaker, which in turn increases the difficulty of the game. You don't lose or gain any powers or abilities, but rather they get weaker overall. You can still use items appropriate to the RPG genre, like potions and armour to buff your temp stats, but overall, the game would focus on your ability to master magic and different ways of thinking. Gradually, by decreasing your powers the difficult curve would increase in a much more predictable and acceptable fashion, rather than the jagged line graph of other games, such as Halo or CoD.

Agreed, this would be a one off game with no sequel and this mechanic wouldn't be used in every game from here to the crack of doom. It would purely serve the purpose of a story built around that mechanic to create a thrilling and immersive plot.

 

[mattinkent]

This article is a work of genius. This is a game I want to play and I hate this shit.

Who do I give my money to?

 

[CitizenV]

I would perhaps change the formula to your protagonist starts off at the peak of physical fitness, content to simply smash through his attackers but lacking in finesse. As the story progresses he becomes more injured and older meaning he cannot rely on his perishing body and must instead use the skills he has gained and developed throughout the game.

Creating a transitional paradigm Strength/Finesse.

 

[babinro]

I highly disagree with this concept with some exceptions. The article relates to games getting easier as you progress with more and more powers being unlocked, some of which become useless or forgotten.

This is not a problem with the main character leveling, this is a problem with the difficulty of the A.I and the level programming behind it. If the game is easy compared to how it started...simply increase the difficulty as the game progresses. Many games accomplish this when leveling is not involved...Super Mario Bros 3 would be a classic example. That game truly increases its difficulty as your progress even with power ups like P-Wings.

 

[maninahat]

I would perhaps change the formula to your protagonist starts off at the peak of physical fitness, content to simply smash through his attackers but lacking in finesse. As the story progresses he becomes more injured and older meaning he cannot rely on his perishing body and must instead use the skills he has gained and developed throughout the game.

Creating a transitional paradigm Strength/Finesse.

Might have worked in FarCry 2, but it ended up being annoying. In the final act, your malaria gets progressively worse (for no reason). In practise, this could make the game harder and more desperate (in keeping with the story), but all it really did was make it even more tedious; you could only sprint for 10 yards at a time, so you had to sluggishly move around. You could still use all your guns etc.

 

[Shymer]

I could imagine a game structure about trading direct attack/special powers for more abilities with squad members, or the ability to teach skills to others, or rulership/strategic styles skills. As the character removes himself from the front-line of battle, his battle skills wither, to be replaced by leadership, development skills, strategic direction of the battle...

Hang on this sounds too much like work.