What if We Leveled Backwards?!

[Dougomite]

I just remembered that Fight Night kinda does this. You level up your boxer and eventually get a shot at the Championship Belt, by the time you win enough matches to become Champion your boxer's age hits a point were your gains from training slow down and eventually your stats start to drop as you age more and more. The dropping stats make it harder and harder to hold onto your title. Eventually your stats will drop to a point where you're forced to use all the skills and cheap tricks you've learned just to survive till the end of the fight and hope the judges give you the win.

It worked great. All those skills that would often go unused because you had the speed and power to never need them are suddenly all you have left. I could no longer afford to just power punch through the opponents jabs or simply block his combos and wait for him to tire out. I had to parry and dodge much more often because getting hit hurt a lot more than it used to. I had to rely on my combos more because I'd lost so much power that a sudden knockout blow was pretty much no longer existent.

Leveling down might be a new favourite mechanic that I never knew I loved.

 

[punipunipyo]

actually... a friend long time ago talking about a manga/comic idea to me about a "self made demi-god" who terraformed a new planet, locked him self in a time-less warp. In the beginning of story, he was summoned as the creator of the world, having all these power, and as he take on the journey, to deal with a world wide crisis, something had to do with the world being tyrannized. His power depletes as the journey continues, and plots unfolds, he had to make due whit what he "have left"... and more dependent on his new found allies. like I said B4, it's all cool, for an idea for story, single player game... but put on to a MMO game, would just turn people off, it sounds like to me you are just being resentful towards leveling/grinding.
You should read my other common earlier, check out my idea for true MMO game "should be", where players make quests, all levels play together, and ultimate team work experience!

 

[newwiseman]

I had an idea like this a few years ago and even hammered out a story with a logical progression. I just couldn't think of a mechanic to allow players to "improve" as their abilities decreased that fit into the logical progression.

I tried an idea where you start off a a high born God and who wants despairingly for companionship and so must slowly descend until he finds happiness but couldn't think of an antagonist that could be at the end of the road as it we're that existed as a threat in the beginning, other than the 'good of the cosmos' which didn't make sense once you've gone down one tier and meet any other god.

I experimented with challenging and training players response times to scenarios but it always devolved back into a game of Mario where a single hit would be fatal requiring perfect gameplay.

I have to say I love the concept, but again, I could never think of a way to pull it off and remain interesting to the end. This is one of the ideas that fits the narrative a book or a movie so much easier because the struggle is all that would be required to hold interest instead of mechanics.

 

[Onion_Duck]

I like this concept I think it would totally work. My idea for it would be an epic, mostly hopeless quest into some sort of underworld or demonic realm. The forces from that realm are threatening your home so they send in You the strongest most skilled hero of the land, armed with the best equipment that can be found. Your alone perhaps because only one person can enter the portal before it closes, or better yet You, the hero, are cocky, believing you need no one else to accompany you, you can do it yourself.
Once your in there is no turning back, portal closes or by the time you would want to you've gone too far, etc. The first while will be a breeze you cut down your foes easily as warrant of your skills and items, but it all takes it's toll as you progress, your equipment becomes damaged, your food and medical supplies run low, there are no shops around for you to find more equipment, the terrain is hostile with nothing edible or drinkable around, so your equipment deteriorates to nothing, you become hungry, thirsty, injured, thus you become weak, your stats fall, skills and abilities become impossible to do at this state.
You realize your quest is hopeless, but you continue on because that is who you are, a hero. You reach the final boss, a demonic lord, or demi-god of sorts, all powerful. You are weak, hungry, injured, thirsty, little in weapons or armor left. You know it's hopeless your home with succumb to this entity, your family will die, the beautiful green fields will burn. But you fight, it's all you can do now, and by some miracle, perhaps your love for your home, or some colossal amount of luck, you throw down your enemy, your home is safe. Despite the hopelessness, the difficulty, and the hardships, you succeed, you still are a hero....

 

[DeathWyrmNexus]

I can see all the pros to this idea but all I can think of in the end is...

"Why would I want to play my life in a game?"

 

[Burnswell]

That backwards leveling XP article reminded me of Tron 2.0, you got fewer inventory spaces as you went and leveling your programs meant they took up less space so you had to work just to keep equipment you could use. Maybe it would work better if you were a decrepit old wizard trying to find the fountain of youth, you get better spells but your mind starts going on you.
There's keeping it a challenge and then there's keeping it fun. Having your toys gradually taken away isn't 'challenging', especially when a lot of players stick to a favorite weapon anyway.
Maybe if you gradually shrunk and needed an antidote...

 

[Clockwork Scarecrow.]

Hmmm, I'd play that. It would definitely work as a single-player game. As an MMO I could see the n00bs griefing so much that they level down too early thus causing them to lose patience.

.The Undead campaign in Warcaft 3 the Frozen Throne Expansion had you level backwards.

...Are you sure? I don't remember that. I remember him being a dick and stranding everyone and killing the only other good hero around but I don't remember him leveling backwards.

Come to think of it, this could work well in a tabletop RPG.

 

[ReroTheZero]

I can think of a game that kinda does this idea, and at the same time it doesn't; Makai Kingdom. It starts off you taking control of Overlord Zetta, one of the strongest Lords of the Netherworld in history. He seeks the Sacred Tome, a book that has detailed information of his world's past, present and future, hoping to find a way to prevent his world from being destroyed.

Before you find the book, you get in a fight and find out that the claim that he's the strongest isn't a joke. His level is a whopping 2000, and deals nearly 10k damage per attack. Naturally, he wins and finds the book, only to learn the tome foresees Zetta's stupidity as the reason behind his world's destruction. In an act of rage, he burns it for dare insulting him, causing his world to tear itself apart, for the Sacred Tome is essentially his world itself.

The only way to save his world (well, himself, actually)is to fuses himself with the tome before it burns away completely. Now Zetta is the new Sacred Tome, and can never fight again, instead turning random objects into warriors.

 

[Hamster at Dawn]

I think it would work well for a stealth game. Like in the Splinter Cell series, you pick up various gadgets throughout the game which help you get past larger and more aware groups of enemies. But what if you started with everything and lost gadgets throughout the game? Then you'd have to rely more on your pure sneakiness. And the story practically writes itself: your spy agency is under attack from terrorists so has increasing limited resources and the game ends where you're on your own with nothing but your basic survival instinct, facing the big evil mano-a-mano. I think that would actually work very well if done right - you get to mess around with silly gadgets in the early missions and then it gets more intense later on.

 

[The Harkinator]

I think I would like the idea in a Linear RPG, especially one that showed a characters progression. Maybe from novice to heroic legend of the world but eventually as a character gets older and their great deeds fade into obscurity, no longer seeming relevant in a day and age where fantastic stories of the past are just distractions from immediate problems like poverty.

Fable 2 to 3 has a setting I think could have been adapted with the building of a unified nation of Albion (except not using the actual setting of Albion because there were only 4 heroes). What if this new developing world had heroes at it's forefront, pushing back boundaries, clearing roads, rooting out dangers? A hero doing this would be idolised by communities for certain deeds. Maybe slaying a Bandit leader or terrifying scourge of the roads would make a hero celebrated across the land. Pubs named in their honour, books written about them etc. This is where the character develops to the peak of their abilities.

Then when a hero has done everything they can the time to sit on a pile of gold and ride the wave of fame all around. Jump forward a bit and the hero has lost most of their money, with no means to get it back as there is little need for a hero anymore you may travel to some frontier taking on the role of a washed up saviour. Think about Landon Ricketts from RDR. He was the greatest gunslinger of his time but when he gets old he lives in Chuparosa as an unofficial lawman. He is not as good as he was 15-20 years ago but he's still one of the best around.

This keeps a hero 'heroic' but with the feeling he is past his prime, longing for the days when he faced down the most terrifying creatures and individuals in the land, when his armour was shining and wherever he went people would cheer and shout his name. Eventually the hero runs out of fringe towns to save as regimented armies and defence forces grow in power and influence. The hero loses more of their money and becomes a drunken nuisance for the town guard. Reduced to a laughing stock in the people eyes those heady days of adventure and glory are a distant alcohol soaked memory when a character is reduced (in gameplay terms) to a less powerful being than when they started out, now with outdated equipment.

If you wanted to make a character arc the hero could rise to the challenge of fighting a new evil being, finally, tragically, perishing against something they would have defeated in their prime. Now remembered by the people for their good deeds rather than their later follys. Maybe inspiring a new generation of heroesto take up the sword.

So the process begins again. Alright I've rambled enough about that. Any ideas?

 

[Worr Monger]

I think the most disturbing thing about this article is that Yahtzee admitted to play World of Warcraft to level 60...

 

[acsoundwave]

Combine ideas. Make it more like real life. Specifically, aging.

Start off weak and useless. As you progress, you gain abilities. As you progress further, your abilities get stronger. But as you progress even further after that, your abilities weaken or become less effective. Thus the strongest guy is actually the one in the middle of the pack. To make this interesting, as your abilities lose effectiveness, you also gain some level of immunity from those abilities used by others, to simulate the "I once could do that" type of thing.

Now, combine this idea with items. Starting off you've got nothing. Later, you gain things. Later on, you trade them for more powerful things. Eventually, you've got a whole lot of powerful things.

So the end result is that the start game has the player weak, with a learning and gaining curve just like your average game. This provides the player with both tutorial mode and the ability to learn new things, to keep them interested.

In mid game, the player is powerful, but may not have the best stuff to work with. So he's got to rely on his skills and wits to pass the challenges facing him.

Finally, in the end-game, the player is once again weak, but with a ton of powerful items and a lot of knowledge of abilities and skills. He has still rely on his wits, less on his learned abilities, but he's got the gear to back it up, and those abilities aren't as effective against him, due to his prior knowledge of them.

That would be a hell of a lot of design though.

Quoted for AWESOMENESS. That would make a great turn based RPG.

 

[atomicmrpelly]

"Surgical nuclear strike"

Can you really be surgical with nuclear weapons?!

On a serious note though, the main problem I see with this concept is how confusing it would be at the start of the game trying to work out how to use everything! And actually it would surely make the game get less interesting as it progressed? Imagine if you had started Half Life 2 with the full weapon set (magnum, shotgun, smgs, rockets, and the upgraded gravity gun!), it would just be depressing every time one of them was taken away from you.

 

[masticina]

As long as it hasn't be done by well the usual "Right in the first level you have all the weapons, all the levels all the powers.. oh but at the end you lose it all" thrope.

But if instead you begin as a "born god" in a world and have limited energy to fix things. That you get weaker as you go along! Sure Would be refreshing

 

[Jsor]

I can think of quite a few ways to get this to work, narrative-wise:

The player is infected by some virus or curse. It gives him supernatural powers but has some Ill Effect?. It could be death, or something worse (like l'Cie from FFXIII). The point of the story is, of course, to cure yourself by finding vaccines, counter-spells, or whatever.

The player is some incredibly powerful wizard/demigod/whatever, and to cleanse the land of some new evil he must empower statues (or whatever) with his abilities, losing the abilities but defeating the boss or whatever.

The Planescape: Torment strategy, you're trying to kill yourself for whatever reason, go do that.

You're transferring your abilities to some god your zealot character worships, or some cultural leader for the greater good. Bonus obvious twist ending: said person is bad, now kill the guy who you gave all your powers to, hope you like that infinite combo you used half of the game, you'll be seeing a lot of it.

As for features, I do think it is a large problem that people like more features as the game goes, as such, I'd recommend some sort of feature trade off. For instance, perhaps in the demi-god or virus example as you lose powers, more people will talk to you. This could even be represented by some sort of persuasion skill. For extra flair, you could make the more powerful spells be more obvious features (like Evil Pentagram Soulsuck Horror could be your devil horns), and getting rid of those would vastly increase your score, compared to the moderate increase of making your fingernails a little less black and pointy. Of course, this gets into the issue of making sure the more "powerful" powers aren't outweighed by some broken combination of the weaker powers, but that's always an issue.

If you don't want to make it simple power swap, i.e. get better at things that aren't your powers the game could become more puzzly or stealthy as you lose powers. Switching from an action game with slight elements of those other genres with more and more complex portions, with bigger and bigger penalties for getting caught, simply by proxy of not being able to murder the guards. This would be difficult as well, due to the risk of making the late game too much of a genre switch, and thereby alienating the people who liked the early game, and making the people who are interested in the late game suffer early on. It would be difficult, but I think it's possible to pull off.

Edit: The main other problem I can think of is that the player may not realize a lot of good late game spells earlier in the game, and thereby give them up. This is especially a problem if the game has some form of crowd control. I'm not entirely sure how to solve this issue.

 

[Xer01]

An intriguing concept. i'm sure i'm not going to say anything that anyone else hasn't already, but i feel this would (and has) done well as a movie or a game by Square where you don't actually play, just kinda watch.

If by the end you are "a frail brittle helpless fop" then how could you possibly defeat the BBG? if i cant beat up a football player now, if you take away everything i own, break half of my bones, and blind me i am most certainly not going to stand a chance then.

 

[Missileman540]

Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't the concept he is describing pretty much the natural progression of anyones life after the ages of 18-mid 20's?

 

[scw55]

I think the idea would work.

Take for example Dota clones. You have on average 4 abilties (some passive, some sticky taped on). But gameplay is actually fun even though you have just 4 abilties (guild wars has 8).

The end gameplay would be fun.


The challenge is putting these mechanics in a setting that makes sense and will still be enjoyable.

 

[Goldspinner1992]

I'd give it a try.

Rather than ridiculously scaling enemies up to match the player and in the end taking more than one player to defeat a boss enemies stay the same as the player gets weaker.

 

[waywardsquander]

This made me think of the ending of the first God of War game where you have to fight Ares with a stupid giant sword instead of the f*cking chain weapons you spent the entire game mastering. It certainly made things "interesting". I do believe that was the last controller-smash inducing game I've played.
I get it from a design perspective. It ups the ante. But at least give the player a chance to practice with the damn sword before entering the final battle. But to be fair, there was a similar weapon that you get earlier on. But who the f*ck used it because it was short range and stupid.

I must concede, however, that its an idea worth further exploration. I think one of the most disappointing aspects of a game is becoming super powerful, and then the game ends. Why not grow powerful and then grow weak. And to whomever thinks the idea of leveling backwards wouldn't make any sense "lore-wise" clearly hasn't though of what it is like to grow old. It makes much less sense to continuously grow ever powerful because nothing in the world works that way. 'Leveling up' without a decline is something video games taught us.