What if We Leveled Backwards?!

[Drawando]

interesting concept, but to implent it.....
hard to wrap my head around it, but i woiuld certainly play

 

[DYin01]

Ya know I think Yahtzee is wrong about this. His main argument is you get stronger and stronger in RPG's so the difficulty goes down...


He fails to realize that a developer with any skill gradually increases difficulty as the player gets stronger and more bold.


His theory = fail

And what you fail to realize is that this doesn't always hold true for a lot of games. The Witcher 2 is a good example. It's really challenging in the beginning, but you're an outright tank at the end and the game becomes incredibly easy. The toughest boss battles were in the beginning of the game. Skyrim is another good example. Your enemies do get tougher, but if you level properly you outfight them easily with your vast array of different skills and weapons.

 

[The Lugz]

I like the idea in concept but in practice I see it hard to make work. I think it would be better as a single player mechanic. The only thing I see able to motivate the player to give up power is to progress a storyline. The skinner box mechanics of an MMORPG doesn't work well with this because that getting stronger is a big reason to level. But if you can make a compelling story that needs the player to sacrifice something of themselves to progress the storyline.

this could be the perfect mmo storyline or starting area as in level 1-20 with endgame stuff, then get thrown in a dungeon for some reason and begin again as Bethesda style

at which point you know how to play the game

it's sheer genius I tell you!

 

[Dhatz]

to break the binary and bilateral thinking, we should develop systems with at elast 3 axes of development or such where xp and levels are only symbolic progress indicator and real changes are in the character development.

 

[Jfswift]

There is a small example of this being employed in Final Fantasy 7, at the gold saucer casino area. There's an arena mode where you select one player to fight for I think eight rounds and after each round you lose an ability. It was fun because it was challenging so I'll buy into your idea.

I've actually seen a game recently where overexerting yourself would physically hurt you, as in lower your stamina and that's kind of realistic actually. I think i'd be tired if I had to climb a bridge and I was already hungry/starving.

 

[Cerrax]

I've had an idea like this since I was little boy. I wanted to see a game where you start out completely healthy and normal, and then your character is struck with a horrible disease. In the struggle to find the cure, the game's enemies and obstacles remain the same difficulty, but the disease hinders your abilities further and further, gradually increasing the challenge. I'm surprised no one has done it yet.

One game that had a interesting mechanic was Maximo: Ghosts to Glory. Maximo begins the game with three slots which he can "lock" special powers in. He can gain more than three powers, but if he dies, he only respawns with the "locked" powers. The player gathers many different powers, but they must decide which powers are the most important to keep, because failure results in losing most of those powers. As each boss is defeated, Maximo is gioven and extra slot to "lock" an additional power. So you still grow stronger like a classic RPG and can amass an impressive arsenal of powers, but in a time of crisis, you can easily lose some of those powers, keeping the difficulty at a good challenge at all times.

 

[THE_NAMSU]

This idea sounds pretty awesome. I like to think of it as the player starting off with the game being "easy" - you have many unskilled, maybe fool-proof skills or attacks or what nots, but as you progress you have to rely on the harder to use skills as the others are removed or whatever as you level down. Also rely on experience you gained from playing the game for long.

That. Sounds. AWESOME!!!!

In fact, I have an idea. While every stat gets lowered, one should go up. Intelligence. That could help with the "Wise old man on a mountain top".

This is what I was thinking - as you lose weaponry and armour, you gain in other skills like stealth. It would be great in the context of a soldiering game. A very simple mechanic would just be to have a game with no ammo or health packs - start off fully equipped, then as you use up your weapons or your armour becomes useless, you have to leave it behind and rely more on skill. That would also give you the option to save up some of the weapons for later.

I second this!

 

[Skeleon]

Reminds me of WC3: Frozen Throne. In the Undead-campaign, Arthas actually grew weaker from level to level as the Lich King lost his power. It was a nice twist to the usual formula, although it was somewhat undermined by the fact that your bug-hero levelled normally.

 

[head desk tricycle]

This is a pretty old discussion, and I've had some dumb arguments with people over whether this constitutes an RPG, but whatever. Oregon Trail is exactly what you're describing, and it works out great. You start with a giant pile of money and you can buy yourself out of every problem, but over time the money runs out and you're forced to do more and more with less and less, until by the end you're desperately trying just to figure out a way to survive, maybe one of your guys randomly died of typhoid because you couldn't afford to take care of him right then so you've already given up on zero casualties, in any case you can't hold it together any longer and you're just praying for that finish line to come. I understand that you are an aficionado of FTL which I've been told is a similar kind of game except in a space setting, so maybe it's moot by this point anyway.