This is an idea I have thought about before! I must say I like it! Sure it has its problems but so does the current RPG system. I wouldn't use in in an MMO but a game like fable it could be interesting, or even a game like Arkham asylum. Batman was always losing bits of his costume, why not some of his equipment as well!?
This is already implemented in the majority of games.
Its the common memoranda for them to get harder and harder as you progress(even if you have levels).
Theres a thing developers have discovered through aquiring there metric information, I think they call it. That the majority of gamers dont even complete their games. Or get very far.
Now I'm not saying they are connected but(they are).
Honestly a game which gets harder and harder as you progress. Firstly games are a whole different media to movies or books, you can emulate some things with them but, trying to emulate the experience of being in an actual action movie(or lord of the rings), no one would ever get through it.
Very few people are ever going to complete the game if it gets harder and harder. Its a hill, you have to keep climbing, all the way through, the entire long game,(40hours or so). Along the way many people will be got rid of just because their abilities do not match up with what the game requires. At the beginning they didnt know that the game requires you to be that good.
Even when I do have the abilities to complete the game, I get fed up with it. The effort required to continue, with what I'm getting back from it(its not equal or greater). I know I'm wasting my time.
I'm of the opinion that games should be getting easier. That they should lie to us. Make you feel like a real action hero, where the enemies bullets keep missing you somehow, instead of hit with pinpoint accuracy when your flying through the air on a parachute.
The middle part should be the most difficult part of the game, then the end should taper down and become easier and easier. Thats if you want anyone to play your games and enjoy them.
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In some ways, I agree with what he says, although I'm not entirely sold on his idea.
I would agree that far too many MMOs allow noob griefing; there should be some sensible system to deter it; of the top of my head, I can think of a couple of plausible, perhaps not practical systems...
1) Really powerful/numerous guards on the edges of lower-level areas which are nigh-on-impossible to defeat - from what I've heard, EVE has something like this where law enforcement ships arrive in ever increasing numbers until the griefer is dead or left. In contrast, I can't remember the number of times I went to Westfall and all the NPCs in town were dead because 5-20 level 70 Horde characters were camping there for 'shits and giggles'.
2) Have some form of physical separation between lower and higher level areas; say for example your MMO's story takes place over a period of time; every time you reach a point in the story, in order to keep levelling and progressing, you travel through an instance which teleports you into the next time period of the story. You cannot go back. It would also allow them to make a much more varied game world because they could level up the creatures, change the scenery/landscape to reflect the change of time or allow new technology to access new areas. Obviously this would make communication between lower and higher level players difficult, if not impossible (there would have to be some form of time-defying postal service). But imagine this; you are the highest levelled, most powerful character in the land; you've beaten every challenge there is, but once you travel forward, everything is as if you've started the game again, although obviously you've still got all your old stuff. You would be able to rediscover the whole game world again.
I agree that characters should not develop more powerfully than the challenges they face; I remember how Yahtzee mentioned in his Red Steel 2 review that the game became too easy because as you became more powerful, the enemies weren't (or as quickly anyway). The only way that could, in my eyes anyway, work is if those enemies are now meatshields for more powerful foes. Using the Lord of the Rings universe simply because if came to mind first; imagine you always fought the same orcs the whole way through the game, but after a while those same orcs are now protecting a chieftain or sorts or are now simply there to distract you from a massive troll trying to pulverise you with a tree.
The Two Worlds 2 system he mentioned is a good one; let people play around with everything, decide what they want to use and then encourage them to throw the others aside. There is something about giving everything to someone at the start of the game and then forcing them to sacrifice skills that does sound pretty workable. As they progress, they have to become more and more specialised. You'd need to make sure though that they can't screw up their build and then have to replay tons of hours of the game though. Fallout 3's skills would have worked so much better if they're acquisition wasn't tied to Intelligence and at the same time, a good number of the skills weren't relatively inferior to others.
As I read through the first few comments, I noticed a few people talking about the possibility of a character in a game becoming some form of wizened old man/ woman as the game progresses; perhaps better at some things, but not as good at others. This made a rather strange, random idea jump into my head, so thanks to those people, you know who you are.
Its 1959 and you're either a US or Soviet agent dropping in to Cuba to become involved in the revolution; from there the game crosses the Cold War battlefields over time until the game ends in the early 1990s. At the start of the game most of the work is physical; i.e. beating up guards, sticking explosives to sensitive targets and attacking enemy convoys with allied militia, but as espionage technology progresses, your methods of attack vary; now you perhaps find a safe spot and guide in an airstrike or sneak in and take out the HVT and no one else. As you progress through the game, your stealth abilities improve, as does your ability to pick locks, hack security, but at the same time, you become less and less capable of physically doing the job; instead of pulverising a guard, you need to remove, perhaps you need to use a taser instead. Instead of painting your face and putting on black clothing to infiltrate an enemy facility, you brush up on your language skills, disguise yourself as a senior military official and walk in through the front door, doing everything you've learned of the enemy to stay undetected. By the end of the game you're in you mid-late fifties; sure you can still kick ass, just perhaps not as good as you used to and not really in the same way. Now technology has made it easier for them to detect you, but your gadgets have improved at the same time; by the end of the game there are rooms of laser grids and doors with fingerprint locks, where as at the start, it was attack dogs and guard towers.
This actually reminds me of the old cop in Sin City. Everyone tells him he's too old for the job and won't last much longer, but he continues, getting weaker and weaker, bit finally "wins" and dies...
Mechanically, it could also work by letting you lose stats whenever you take a hit (especially in MMOs; noob griefers would probably still get a bloody nose from experienced players with weaker stats). You could also lose "honor" when fighting weaker enemies (or getting hit by them), so attacking old guys makes you lose stats even faster.
This idea is excellent, but not, I believe, perfect.
I think a more workable arc would be start mid-level, with a moderate array of skills, get more and more skills and become the highest level at around the mid-game.
It could work very well, I think, in a singleplayer setting. I just don't see enough people, used to playing traditional MMOs, enjoying the idea of losing all the fun stuff as time goes on to actually create a good-sized playerbase. It would be an exceptional way to reinforce the gravity of a story though. Especially if you get most of your powers back at the very end.
Already thought of this myself and decided it's a horrible idea and you've totally missed the point, didn't read all 400 posts before but here is my bit.
As the game progressive not simply difficulty but COMPLEXITY should progress which is why different options are introduced one by one after you have got a chance to master them and starting with everything has a vengeful learning curve and would simply take too long to set up at the beginning.
A good game either scales the enemies to match your level (think oblivion but hopefully better) or scales them according to your skill (max payne), the claim that RPGs becaome easier as time goes it is a very weak generalization but I'd expect that from yathzee as he doesn't like games and would prefer to play with books and storylines and other junk.
Alternatively you could do a guild wars with practically no leveling and instead just balanced skills that allow you to specialize instead of improving like a vast array of different level one characters to be earned in game. You were kidding about the degenerating to a pea shooter right? It would be novel for a little while then simply boring.
I think it would be a pretty interesting concept and would like to see it in action. It sort of follows the line of any epic tale -- for instance LOTR where Frodo and Sam can barely claw their way up Mount Doom and are about to die as they reach the end.
The only problem is that requires every ending, every defeat of the ultimate baddie, to be completely implausible and rely on deus ex machina or some other sort of miracle.
Reminds me a lot of my strategy game playthroughs. AI spams units with no need to maintain or pay costs, while my elite cadre of units is usually dwindling late to mid-game, while they keep creating more at a higher XP then mine.
@people above me: Are you not capable of understanding the actual play in a way that makes sense? YOu know, not eating for several days while you cleave cleave cleave through hundreds of soldiers ends with you drooling in agony instead of you grinding. In some ways, this game would remove the worst bits of a RPG, the grinding of levels in order to destroy things with little rhyme or reason.
Wonderful article. You can even pull this for shooters.
After hours or days of fighting, (assumingly) less and less food, and very little sleep, you should make it harder and harder to aim as the day goes on. Your character shakes, can't run quite as much as they could at the beginning of the level/game before being tired, breathes heavier, can't throw as far. Little touches to make a real "Realistic shooter"
Over a long period of gameplay, my major concern would be the fact that the player might cease to earn a sense of achievement. A sense that they're work has paid off in growing stronger.
Yahtzee just described the game and mechanics that will finally bring video games under that greatly desired and much sought after description of "Art." Someone MUST design this game!!!
This is a surprisingly well thought out idea (now surprisingly because it's well thought out-this is Yahtzee after all-but just because it makes so much sense).
Thanks Yahtzee, I had ideas for a game like this but now I can't make it because I'd be accused of stealing your ideas.
ScotRotum said:
Already thought of this myself and decided it's a horrible idea and you've totally missed the point, didn't read all 400 posts before but here is my bit.
As the game progressive not simply difficulty but COMPLEXITY should progress which is why different options are introduced one by one after you have got a chance to master them and starting with everything has a vengeful learning curve and would simply take too long to set up at the beginning.
A pure leveling backwards game woudl make you seek other solutions other than fighting.
Running away would become mandatory.
I once had this thought 3-4 yrs ago.
No one woudl want to do one though... except maybe Nippon Ichi.
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