What if We Leveled Backwards?!

[craddoke]

Commenting on a Yahtzee article sometimes makes me feel like a raindrop falling on the ocean, but I just have to express what an excellent idea this is. I'm a sucker for heartbreak in entertainment, from Whedon television series to games like Planescape. I want to feel for my characters and then have them hurt - or, better yet, choose to be hurt for the greater good. Yahtzee's proposal makes that story arc part of a game's mechanics - I want a game like this right now. Please?

 

[HijiriOni]

"Spawn" attempted something like this. Not exactly, but you had a limited power reserve that you couldn't replenish and you used it to heal yourself among other things. All it resulted in were people becoming bitter at the challenge in the game and never picking it up again as a novice player couldn't get through 25% of the game without using all of it.

 

[odolwa]

Might work as a quirky concept for a mini-title, like Recettear - taking place from the perspective of an item shop owner in an RPG.

Didn't you say, however, that Elder Scrolls IV stayed pretty challenging throughout...? I certainly remember that being the case when I played. Also, look to Dragon Age as an example of maintaining challenge throughout. Irrespective of your level or which dungeons you aim for (the forest, the mage tower, the dwarf city), the monsters level with you. Levelling here is only to open up new spells.

Don't forget Yahtz, variety is the spice of life.

 

[BabySinclair]

I really like this idea. In a multiplayer game this means that the experienced players would rely on skill to overcome less experienced but potentially more powerful players, a self correcting balancing act. To reach level one the player must know every acting and button and execute his moves flawlessly. This to me says that willpower/wisdom, charisma, and dexterity style stats go up while intelligence, constitution, and strength decline, intelligence likely just tapering off. Loss of all but a few skills means that the player must have the foresight to plan their encounters and keep them short. New players would have the stamina to fight a long time, unlike their older counterparts.

Works better in single player as one goes from young adventurer to old wiseman, dangerous not for their strength but for their knowledge.

 

[DeadProxy]

The idea I had from reading this was youre some super strong sorcerer or whatever, and you get cursed in some way that slowly strips you of your powers, or sends just your body back in time (to explain, the body's age reverses, so its less capable of holding all his powers) and as you get weaker, i suppose you could pick which powers you have to sacrifice so you get left with the ones youre used to or are just too awesome to let go of.

So basically by the end of the game, you'd have a very small amount of spells, maybe some leveled up over the course of the game with some level up system, and maybe a huge AoE or 2 to back you up when you need it, or even just a couple AoE's to spam.

The enemies would have to get weaker too, just slower than the main guy so theres still a bit of challenge. And we all know in a gaming universe, a super strong guy is very well known, so i guess the game could either follow him trying to just disappear as a normal person in the world, meaning as he got weaker he would go to places that are less hostile, but it wouldnt work too well if he planned on getting his powers back cause that would mean going for something really rare to restore his powers and those are never easy to get, especially for weak pieces of crap....

But it could work.

 

[Moffman]

I can see your points but I disagree, purely because when Prototype takes away all your powers I became really bored of the game

 

[Peter Manning]

It's an interesting idea. Nearly impossible to pitch, but if you posted it independently on a free game site like Armor Games, got a good story and ironed out the bugs, there's a chance it'd work.

 

[blindthrall]

LAST!

 

[Diceman]

See now one of the main problems with this (NOT a game killing one, mind) is generally the enemies.

I mean, as you start in any game, the enemies are as weak as you, then you gain in power and find the next ones challenging, etc. etc. but there is the ability to... backtrack and fight some smaller ones again if you miss a quest or wanna help a friend (especially with MMO's). Which is lost with this, because once you get TOO weak or limited in some way, you simply might not be able to do anything. I mean, do you move onto areas as you level down till you're fighting boars and scarecrows?

The only idea that comes to mind is not just stealth (as with an FPS) but more an idea on skill. You get fucktons of weak skills, but as you lose more, the ones that remain are stronger than before.

I do agree with what others have said about your armour becoming more and more useless.
One thing a friend and I liked to do with Diablo 2, was unequip all our weapons and armour and simply see who could beat up the other first.

 

[LtWiesel]

Hmm, the undead campaign in frozen throne had this and i liked it a lot.

It's really good for new players since you won't die that easy, combined with the "non pvp zone" idea from wow you could prevent the griefing...
Sure you shouldn't end up having just a fireball as a mage but maybe while learning more firemagic you forget about the other kinds.
So you will end up as a firemage with a decent amount of firebased spells but nothing else, being not necessaryly weaker than at lvl 1 but more specialized.

In the end it's just a big metaphor for crappy scaleing in todays games but still...there is potential in this idea

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Normally I fully concur, but this reverse WoW is just... not fun to me.
You write that RPGs suffer from bad difficulty curves, which is only the case with BAD RPGs in the first place.

You level up so you can stomp on stronger monster's faces. If all the enemies are roughly equally strong there is indeed a decline in difficulty. But that should never happen.
YOU get tougher, and so do the challenges. And you get glee out of that fact.

"It'd avoid the common issue that I choose to call "Resident Evil 4 Syndrome," in which the final boss still attempting to come across as smugly threatening at the final showdown falls a little flat, considering that the hero has just one-man-armied his way through every single one of their allies and resources."

RE is not an RPG. It's a game that tries to incorporate some RPG elements and fails so hard at it that bits of brain probably fell out of the dev team's noses.
The final boss should always be an insanely stronger MoFo that only the most bad ass hero (team) can beat. Like Sephiroth and Emerald Weapon in FF 7. Basically it's get Knights of the Round or walk away

 

[sheah1]

I can see your points but I disagree, purely because when Prototype takes away all your powers I became really bored of the game

Yes but Prototype's fun lies in your constant progression until you're basically a God, this would be the exact opposite.

 

[Nieroshai]

Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne had Arthas level down and it was amusing since the last few levels required you to play as him alone with no armies. Also the concept of leveling backwards is good as long as there is no extreme, newbs aren't godlike and "pros" aren't frail little men that a squirrel could kill, but the starting level is the upper-middle styled level, and the first one still has you kicking ass but not through DPS and raw strength.

I was going to mention Frozen throne. Ninja.
But that degradation is scripted, you don't level Arthas down by gaining xp. It demonstrates the concept well though. You do have to rely more and more on your army instead of merely supporting your heroes, unlike the rest of the game where you can make a lowly orc as powerful as a god.

 

[hermes]

I will give you props for trying, but I don't think that system would work. Thinking outside of the box, while appreciated, doesn't mean thinking backwards.

At the beginning of the game, many examples give you all your powers to test and play, but its a tease, a carrot on a stick to keep you going, since you know you eventually will get as strong as that, or even more. To revert that mechanism would discourage people to keep playing, since they know they will progress from Superman to Jimmy Olsen.

The idea of a hero's journey is that the main character grows during its adventure, learns more skills and became more confident. The player is not overwhelmed with 1.000 spells and its variations, instead he/she plays with them and decide which ones he likes or likes to try better as he uses them. Your idea might work on some stage (maybe depower the hero before his battle with the final boss, or the Bioshock level where you loose all your upgrades one by one), but as an entire game concept its hard to sell the idea of "you are like Luke Skywalker... you start as a jedi and end up as a farmer"

Besides, I hope its not meant to handle the difficulty automatically. For starters, that is far a temptation for developers to keep using the same enemies... after all, a rat would be a little nuance at the beginning, but a veritable challenge near the end. For you to create bigger challenges, you don't need to think of harder obstacles, just throw the same obstacle you throw the last 10 hours and let the stats system work itself out.

Finally, the problem is that it restricts the options a player have to play the game. If you like to play as a stealthy, melee character, it might work on easier enemies (early in the game), but it won't work as you progress through the game. That means you can either experiment with the game, under the idea that you might have to replay large sections of the game if you get stuck in a place of the trimmed tree where you can't face the challenges ahead, or forget about playing the character you want, instead use a guide to see which character class is more useful and less likely to get stucked. If you put all the options on the player and a timer to lose them, you give them a sense of urgency and force them to play with guides, because they won't know how "less powerful" a weapon will became and how much that will that affect them.

I think you aren't really looking at it the right way, but instead of writing an essay I'll try to keep it fairly simple:

One: Time makes fools of us all, even Luke Skywalker as a master jedi will age and become less skilled as his prime passes, sure he will always be fairly skilled, but never as much as before and others will have the potential to be more skilled.
However Skywalker will have the skill of "experience," someone whose survived 1000 duels will most likely beat someone whose only survived through 100, even if the one whose beaten only 100 is more technically skilled.

That is why most stories are more interested in the hero's rise instead of its dawn. Even experienced game designers like Kojima has difficulty trying to reflect that, since games like MGS 4 doesn't show his character becoming any less skilled and are able to perform incredible feats while he was about to throw up his own lumbs 10 minute earlier...

Two: Character Growth isn't just reflected in skill. Character growth is also reflected in their outlook, their personality, their intelligence, understanding etc. It's qutie possible for this type of story to present a strong character arc with a compelling narrative.

True, but while most of those things can be told through dialog or cutscenes, character growth in terms of skills are reflected through gameplay.

I think you're being a bit too close minded, and attempting to push your idea of what a hero is or has to be into a neat little box. This type of idea doesn't even need to be restricted to say a "medieval" setting. It's conceivable to imagine it in a FPS, where as time passes, you get hurt more, you get a little slower, you ability to aim suffers, maybe you can't use as many big guns, or certain kinds of guns (i.e. guns with the kind of recoil that can break your shoulder if they aren't handled properly by a suitiably strong person), the game doesn't become unplayable, nor does it mean enemies can't still have an upward difficulty curve. You just start having to approach problems differently, and show your increased skill in aiming despite setbacks and so on.

Maybe. If someone would have told me 15 years ago that RPG elements would be the standard in FPS, I would have laughed. I am not closed to new ideas, but they have to prove themselves. I am not open to new ideas just because they are new, either. Some things only work on paper...
In other words, if a game releases with the reverse leveling system, I expect it to be all the way. I expect it to be an integral part of the experience, otherwise its a gimmick. Standard leveling system is the core of modern RPGs... Entire dungeons or enemies are made or deleted to match what the "expected" level of a player is at certain points. And even if its old as dirt, the most interesting part is... it works. For an RPG, the leveling system is both a gameplay representation of the coming to age hero becaming more competent and a very good carrot in a stick to keep players engaged: "One more battle, one more quest, one more level". It sounds symplistic, even macabre to aspire to that level of skinner box-like experience, but that is how most games (specially RPGs) are designed. If the new system works better, great... lets go for it. If it doesn't, if it does not make sense, either from a story or gameplay perspective, nor does it provides a way to engage players (because they know the more they fight enemies, the more side quests the complete, the fewer skills they will get left), then its just a way to diferenciate the game from any other game in the genre, a gimmick...

 

[duchaked]

idk about the idea with the MMO (not that I'd play it anyway), but with the RPG is seemed interesting
I mean, you get weaker and more beat up as you go (I'm thinking Frodo and Sam in LotR), but it could be a story opportunity with character spiritual growth?

 

[MrPanda_94]

The idea sounds like a brilliant concept. A concept which could make an amazing game.

But the real problem would be that although this concept would undoubtedly make a great MMO, the griefers mentioned would become intolerable. The sheer volume of them would make them impossible to play with and ruin the experience for the more advanced player. The method of slowly wearing away their abilities would never really solve the problem. The only way I can think of stopping them would be to give the advanced player some all-powerful PvP ability, and in the end isn't that just contradicting the whole purpose of this idea?

 

[TomOfTheCross]

Reminds me of Cohen the Barbarian and the Silver Horde from the discworld series.
They may be frail old men, but it's because they're badass, is how they're so old.
You could still have the oldbies trounce the newbies, purely on skill rather than powers.

 

[Dragonpit]

I wouldn't call the system of leveling up a failed system; just a poorly implemented one. I think a game can still have the leveling thing and still have that difficulty curve. Programmers just gotta stop treating bosses like !@#$ you just gotta beat up and turn them into puzzles of sorts.

That aside, the leveling backwards thing is an interesting idea, but that begs the question on how you would scale the enemies. Usually, the higher up the enemy is in the hierarchy, the stronger (or smarter or more skilled) they are. So by the end of the game, you have nothing left to fight with but your wits and a sharp stick and the final boss is the rough equivalent of a Gundam, with a weak point on his neck.

 

[Zechnophobe]

...which is failed design because games are supposed to have escalating difficulty curves.

I honestly think this is one of the biggest design fallacies in existence. Especially as it relates to RPG elements.

Consider: Many RPG games have choices for the player. They level up in certain ways, they choose skills, items, loadouts, what-have-you. Rewarding a player on successful choices should necessitate the game becoming easier. You grabbed skills with powerful combo synergy? Well, I guess this level will be easier for you then! Good job!

 

[YunikoYokai5]

I like the idea. It would show your skills and strategy planning far better than if you had 16 AoE spells, 100K damage weapons and armour that means you only lose like a 10th of your health under your belt.

Yes, when you start out you will have so many different skills you have no idea what most of them do, which can be very confusing. But what (I hope) some people do is take time out of the main storyline and go and experiment with the skills and spells you have on side quests or random enemies. See what they do, what ones are crap, which ones are amazing, which ones are handy in a tight spot and so on. You can then decide which ones you want to chuck and which ones you will cling to with every fibre in your body. Experimentation is a newbie's friend, and it is a close companion of mine.