AVERTING LEVEL GRINDING

Posts

author=LockeZ
Level cap! Most games that expect you to reach them at all only do so at the very end. The nice thing about a level cap that shows up earlier is that it makes levelling up an option during the first part of the game - in other words, the game starts off easy and lets you "cheat" if you need to early on by being too high of level, but then later the game gets harder and the player loses that method of getting around the difficulty. Games should start off easier and get harder, right?

I could do a whole thread on level caps. Maybe I will.
Love to read it. That's pretty much my setup :3
And in terms of easy into hard- I use my difficulty system for that. This allows me to make hard bosses without worrying about a dude rage quitting the entire game. It also increases the chance for one to replay the game...in theory
What I've done personally in my RPG to avert level grinding is to get rid of levelling up altogether. There is no experience gained through battles, only items. My RPG focuses on story and character development so I didn't want the player to get hung up on the battles and character stats. In fact, every character has the same stats HP and MP-wise.

At certain points in the game there is a Level Up Event which grants every character one level and a unique skill that is determined by the choices that character made in the story leading up to that point.

My design goal was to have the player focus on the game's plot and characters, and I feel this method of levelling up accomplishes that. It also has the added benefit to me as the designer of being able to test every single battle for balance since I'll always know what level everyone is at at any given point in the game. Win-win.
author=Mateui
What I've done personally in my RPG to avert level grinding is to get rid of levelling up altogether. There is no experience gained through battles, only items. My RPG focuses on story and character development so I didn't want the player to get hung up on the battles and character stats. In fact, every character has the same stats HP and MP-wise.

At certain points in the game there is a Level Up Event which grants every character one level and a unique skill that is determined by the choices that character made in the story leading up to that point.

My design goal was to have the player focus on the game's plot and characters, and I feel this method of levelling up accomplishes that. It also has the added benefit to me as the designer of being able to test every single battle for balance since I'll always know what level everyone is at at any given point in the game. Win-win.
I've seen this done before, and it's a good idea.
One thing could be said that without levels and free progression, one might feel as though their characters are really growing.

That feel of power you get loses its meaning a bit...Or at least, that's what I think.
In my game I'm taking an approach that's very close to what Temple of Elemental Evil does.

There is a fixed amount of enemies in the game, all in pre-placed locations and none of them ever respawn. Once you kill something, it's dead forever. And there are no random encounters.

On top of that, it uses a tweaked version of D&D3.5's experience formula, which automatically scales your XP gained per-character based on how the character's level compares to the level of what you just killed. Under-levelled characters automatically catch up fast (and the more under-levelled they are, the faster they will catch up) while over-levelled characters will tend to plateau in growth until they fight things that are actually challenging to them.

Those two things combined make it so not only do you not need to grind, you actually can't even if you wanted to. If a fight is too hard, the only thing you can do is leave and go find another area to explore or figure out a better strategy. You can't beat the game by just grinding until your numbers are big enough.

There are enough dungeon areas and optional content so that you can always skip hard fights and go fight things somewhere else to get a little stronger, but since in the end they still never respawn, even if you are doing optional content for the EXP, you're still always accomplishing something else while gaining that EXP (i.e. exploring a new area, completing a quest, finding loot you otherwise would never see, seeing optional story scenes, etc.), so it never feels like grinding. Even then, the content is still limited, so you still can't really grind however much you want.

And even if you do all the optional stuff, the EXP system will ensure you're never progressing very far from where I want you to be. And it's done without hard caps, which I think is really important.

I hate directly capping things, I feel it's a designer's way of saying: "You're not playing the game the way I want you to, so I'm going to punish you for it", which really isn't my job to be doing as a designer. My job is to just recognize that people will take the path of least resistance through the game, and make that path the most fun way to play the game.

If someone absolutely insists on circumventing or taking the most advantage of the mechanics somehow, then I'm fine with that too. It's my job to make sure you're having fun with the game; it's not really my business to be telling you what should and shouldn't be fun for you. If you want to kill every last living thing in the game, go ahead. You'll always get something out of it, though the rewards will taper off after a while. I think that's a good balance.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
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author=Kaelan
I hate directly capping things, I feel it's a designer's way of saying: "You're not playing the game the way I want you to, so I'm going to punish you for it", which really isn't my job to be doing as a designer. My job is to just recognize that people will take the path of least resistance through the game, and make that path the most fun way to play the game.
I definitely agree with you on the second half of this statement. However, I'm not sure these two things are actually different. Punishing them for doing something and rewarding them for not doing it are just two ways of looking at the same thing.

I guess that doesn't mean the distinction is meaningless, though. You can look at it either way, but how the player looks at it is what's important.

Whether the player views something as a "punishment" or just a smaller reward is totally a matter of their mindset - the only difference is whether they were expecting something better or worse than what they got. If you train them the entire game to expect experience points out of battles, and then suddenly stop giving them to them, I can certainly see how it could be disappointing and feel like something they "deserve" is being stripped away at the designer's whim. Whether they actually deserve it is irrelevant; they feel like they do, so they're pissed off.

Your method solves this by training the player from the very beginning of the game to expect the experience to come in a certain way, and then maintaining it. Reaching the level cap at the end of the tutorial segment of the game, maybe two hours in at most, also solves it. So does the method used in FF13 and Chrono Cross of increasing the cap every time you kill a boss. Hitting the final level cap halfway through the game or later is what creates the problem.

Of course, it's a matter of which problems you are willing to have. Limiting the number of monsters you can fight causes its own set of problems. For example, if you spent your gold on consumable items and then used them, and can't beat the next fights without buying more items, the only solution is to restart the game.
I'm doing something different (at least, for me) in my newest project (Memories Neverlasting, which is 75% visual novel and 25% gameplay). I'm basing battles strictly on item usage. There are a limited amount of items to be found during gameplay, and a limited number of non-respawning enemies to fight.

Also, the main player and the various party members level up normally through battles, but since you take on different party members for each mission, you're also forced to build relationships with them (doing favours, being nice to them, answering favourably) to level them up.

I wanted to constrict level grinding here by forcing players to worry more about conserving their resources than fighting as many battles as possible. On the other hand, completionists will undoubtedly want to fight all the limited enemies available, and if they've found all of the hidden items along the way, they should (even if it's just barely) be able to do so.
I'm surprised no one's brought up one of the interesting examples out there in JRPGs in terms of creating challenge/making things "easier" if the player decides to level-grind or not: Lunar. I'm not entirely sure about the second game, but in Silver Star Story, boss stats were determined by the main character's level. It's rather basic (a simple multiplier, which can make the boss either super easy or bullshit hard), but it's a neat idea that adds some variety.

There's also stuff like Final Fantasy VIII where grinding is discouraged due to enemy parties leveling up with you, thus gaining more stats and moves. I can tell you that personally I've had an easier time just breezing through FF8 and getting magic from items and such WITHOUT grinding for levels than I did GameSharking my characters to L100 (I was 14, what can I say?). Having such high levels made fights pretty terrible and actually rather repetitive - Aura -> Lionheart/Duel.

In terms of the phenomenon, though, I have to side with kentona on this one, and for the same reason. Dragon Warrior's completely warped my ideas about grinding and I actually enjoy it in some deranged, eyes-glossing-over way. I've actually been rather interested lately in the way the SMT games and the Etrian Odyssey games manage stats and levels, though EO's system is probably easier to replicate in XP/VX/Ace than in the non-scripting engines (thus making them kinda inapplicable to my project unless I want to spend even MORE time making up a CMS/leveling system).

An idea I've thought of adding to my project is what some of the later Wild Arms games do (or is it just WA5?) - it's still random encounters until you find a "Sol Niger," which is a stone-ish thing that will heal the party to full, but is "cursed," and if the player chooses to "purify" it, they're put into a battle that, if won, gives them the ability to turn off encounters in the dungeon. Not entirely sure how it would discourage or make grinding "interesting," but it's definitely a neat idea to make navigation easier plus if the player decides they DO want to grind, they can just turn the encounters back on if they've turned them off.
Grinding doesn't have to mean lvling only. I would rather focus on a more complex char development system, that isn't just based on lvls alone. Gathering materials to craft certain equipment, battles giving you additional points to learn skills with or boost your current once, things like that.
I personally like grinding, but it should always be rewarding and fun to do.
The more things you can actually achieve through fighting, the better.
Rave
Even newspapers have those nowadays.
290
I don't have time to read whole page, but how about making enemies visible on map, that after defeat despawns forever (ie. selfswitch/switch if you are on 2k3 and next page without events that engage you in battle)?
In Ill Will, I found myself grinding almost unconsciously. This was because I wanted to max out certain skills for certain characters- not because the game was hard but because I liked doing so.
So if you can't "avert" level grinding, find ways to make it feel fun and rewarding.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
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author=Clareain_Christopher
In Ill Will, I found myself grinding almost unconsciously. This was because I wanted to max out certain skills for certain characters- not because the game was hard but because I liked doing so.
So if you can't "avert" level grinding, find ways to make it feel fun and rewarding.


I have definitely played games that did this, but I really disagree with your conclusion here. To me, this is the worst-case scenario. Not only did you leave in the possibility of letting the player grind to too high of a power level for the challenges to be any fun, you are now encouraging it. By making grinding fun, you're ensuring that there's no chance that they'll ever stay at a low enough level to keep the game challenging. Why would you ever want to encourage the player to unconsciously mess up the game for themselves? Yeah, you made secondary aspects of the game more fun... at the expense of making the main game less fun.

This is the core problem with viewing levelling up as a type of difficulty setting: the player can only make the game easier, not harder. If grinding is boring then that's probably mostly fine, because they're not going to grind beyond the point they have to. But once you start making it fun to gain power, they are. They're going to start doing hunts and item synthesis and skill upgrading, and before they know it, the entire game will be beatable on autobattle.
@LockeZ
Ah, I see.
Now that makes me think about side quests "grinding," and how that could create level/strength gaps.
Though being able to grind JUST enough to make 1 or 2 bosses easy isn't a bad design choice.
author=LockeZ
author=Clareain_Christopher
In Ill Will, I found myself grinding almost unconsciously. This was because I wanted to max out certain skills for certain characters- not because the game was hard but because I liked doing so.
So if you can't "avert" level grinding, find ways to make it feel fun and rewarding.
I have definitely played games that did this, but I really disagree with your conclusion here. To me, this is the worst-case scenario. Not only did you leave in the possibility of letting the player grind to too high of a power level for the challenges to be any fun, you are now encouraging it. By making grinding fun, you're ensuring that there's no chance that they'll ever stay at a low enough level to keep the game challenging. Why would you ever want to encourage the player to unconsciously mess up the game for themselves? Yeah, you made secondary aspects of the game more fun... at the expense of making the main game less fun.

This is the core problem with viewing levelling up as a type of difficulty setting: the player can only make the game easier, not harder. If grinding is boring then that's probably mostly fine, because they're not going to grind beyond the point they have to. But once you start making it fun to gain power, they are. They're going to start doing hunts and item synthesis and skill upgrading, and before they know it, the entire game will be beatable on autobattle.


I don't think enjoying a fun gameplay element is flawed in any way.
Ofc you can totally shift the game balance if you encourage grinding too much, but giving the players a fun and rewarding way to gain power is definitely not wrong.

Lvls shouldn't be the way to determine difficulty, the battlesystem should dictate that.
Just because person A is a bit strong than person B, person A should not be able to beat everything with attack spamming.
The strategy to beat the boss is at fault there, not the grind.
Sure you definitely need to limit how strong a player can get at a certain point in the game, but saying that advertising character development is wrong, now that sounds wrong for me.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=Necromus
Ofc you can totally shift the game balance if you encourage grinding too much, but giving the players a fun and rewarding way to gain power is definitely not wrong.
Well, no, certainly on its own. The problem is when this allows them to gain more power than the battles are designed to accomodate while still being challenging.

But I don't think it's possible to make it actually fun to gain optional power, and simultaneously make it impossible to become overpowered. What you're talking about is only granting the player a negligible amount of power, which... makes it not fun any more. You're not really getting any kind of reward and so the skinner box effect vanishes. Why would I spend ten hours earning upgrades if they're not going to let me do anything I couldn't do before?

So if you don't like the idea of discouraging character development, and you don't like the idea of becoming overpowered, there's only one solution left. And that's to balance the tasks so that gaining the power is expected. In other words, if there's a real power difference between someone who grinded and someone who didn't, then it's just a matter of which of those two people you want to design the main quest for. And if you made the sidequesting and levelling really legitimately fun, that's an easy question to answer: you should expect the player to have done that stuff. So that this hunt for power, which is enjoyable enough that everyone's gonna want to do it anyway, now has to be completed before the player can do the main quests at a reasonable difficulty.
author=LockeZ
author=Necromus
Ofc you can totally shift the game balance if you encourage grinding too much, but giving the players a fun and rewarding way to gain power is definitely not wrong.
Well, no, certainly on its own. The problem is when this allows them to gain more power than the battles are designed to accomodate while still being challenging.

But I don't think it's possible to make it actually fun to gain optional power, and simultaneously make it impossible to become overpowered. What you're talking about is only granting the player a negligible amount of power, which... makes it not fun any more. You're not really getting any kind of reward and so the skinner box effect vanishes. Why would I spend ten hours earning upgrades if they're not going to let me do anything I couldn't do before?

So if you don't like the idea of discouraging character development, and you don't like the idea of becoming overpowered, there's only one solution left. And that's to balance the tasks so that gaining the power is expected. In other words, if there's a real power difference between someone who grinded and someone who didn't, then it's just a matter of which of those two people you want to design the main quest for. And if you made the sidequesting and levelling really legitimately fun, that's an easy question to answer: you should expect the player to have done that stuff. So that this hunt for power, which is enjoyable enough that everyone's gonna want to do it anyway, now has to be completed before the player can do the main quests at a reasonable difficulty.


I think you're thinking a bit too much in extremes, just because you can grind and can learn that extra spell or 2 (just an example, there so many different char development systems after all), doesn't mean you can do that indefinitely.
You could artifically limit progress like FFXIII did, you could create diminishing returns where experience from monsters (and/or skillpoints or what every you might gain from battles) declines the more you outlevel them - and the content you're supposed to be in.

Advertising grind shouldn't necesarily mean that you can absolutely overlevel (if the character level is actually the main thing to consider when creating boss battles) the area you're in/supposed to go next.

But the more possibilities you actually have, the better imo.
Like leveling your skills in grandia, getting a few more SP for the next skill in FF6 or FF9, those are examples of making progress without trvializing things.

You're definitely not wrong tho, hitting a balance is hard, like with everything.
But saying that there can't be a fun way to gain power is just not something i think can be applied everywhere.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Well, if you can't do it for long enough to really make a difference, then we're talking about completely different types of systems. If you're limited to becoming 10% more powerful than you're supposed to be, you've already got a perfectly good built-in system to avert level grinding.

I don't think making it fun to gain power is a bad idea. I just want the power I gain to help me get closer to the level of power I'm supposed to have, instead of further from it. Otherwise, it becomes fun to gain the power, but boring to have it.

If it seems like I'm making every other post in this topic, it's because this is probably my favorite discussion topic to argue about. I started a second thread about a subset of this debate, for god's sake. KEEP THREAD GOING FOREVER
author=LockeZ
Well, if you can't do it for long enough to really make a difference, then we're talking about completely different types of systems. If you're limited to becoming 10% more powerful than you're supposed to be, you've already got a perfectly good built-in system to avert level grinding.

I don't think making it fun to gain power is a bad idea. I just want the power I gain to help me get closer to the level of power I'm supposed to have, instead of further from it. Otherwise, it becomes fun to gain the power, but boring to have it.

If it seems like I'm making every other post in this topic, it's because this is probably my favorite discussion topic to argue about. I started a second thread about a subset of this debate, for god's sake. KEEP THREAD GOING FOREVER


But that's how most systems are actually, they are already limited.
I wouldn't know of too many games where lvl grinding would actually make a real difference, aside from the final boss, or rather the point where you have access to every other ressource in your game. Normally a few lvls only help a bit, 10% isn't actually too far of as a guess. You still won't necesarily have new skills and most like will never gain higher tiers of equipment through that.

And if it's just about minimizing the impact of that very special point, those are up to you/us after all. Lvl based final boss, limiting most additional power sources to the optional after story content etc.

I mean a lot of posts on RMN seem to be simply about straying away from your usual standarts, sometimes more, sometimes less.
But i don't know, it just feels like some "features" get described way worse than they actually are.

When did you actuall grind in old FF games? What is your definition of grinding?

If i find my self gaining a few extra levels/ressources, then because i want to, and it will always be because the very spot i'm doing this at is good for that, it's efficient and fast.

In a way, that actually isn't a tedious grind, it's clever use of the system.

Ofc i'm always gridnding up to 99 (or what ever kind of lvl cap) in most games at some point, but simply because i want to, not because i need to.

And what's wrong with you having a lot of posts here, it's certainly 1 of the major things people like to discuss, most likely for the very reason they feel it beeing a lot worse than it actually is.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
My definition of grinding is gaining power from repeating tasks I've already done, but to be honest at this point I'm talking about gaining power from non-repetitive tasks also. I'll try to avoid using the word grinding when doing so, though, because that's not really grinding by any definition, it's just... gaining power.

I'm not sure I ever spent a lot of time going out of my way to gain power in a lot of the older, simpler FF games because there was not only no reason to but also no effective way to. But I think you're underestimating the number of games where it does happen.

In FF12, though, I probably spent somehehre around two thirds of my time playing the game doing bounty hunts, earning license points, and amassing chain bonuses on enemies to collect the ingredients needed to get rare items from the stores. In FF Tactics and FF5 I definitely tried to learn all the abilities I could, which turned out to be about twenty times the amount I actually was expected to have. FF7 lets you learn new spells by APing your existing materia, and you can hunt down enemy skills to gain more skills, which doesn't sound like a ton of power but you have to consider that even if you're naked and skill-less the game is already too easy for most players - so even just hunting down all the treasure chests in each dungeon is going to put you over the top. In FF8, your only two ways of gaining power are to draw 99 times from the same enemy or to play triple triad for 20 hours and refine the cards into magic - both are almost as fast to do at the beginning of the game as they are at the end, so there's no reason not to do it up front. Other games like the Shin Megami Tensei series let you grind your level indefinitely; you can get new demons either by catching them or by combining your existing demons, and combining your demons works differently in each game but almost always requires levelling them up first, so you can just keep gaining XP to eventually get every demon and skill in the game. Disgaea games are built around giving you dozens of different ways to gain power, from powering up your enemies for bonus XP, to fusing your monsters together, to fighting enemies inside your items to level the items up. Suikoden games barely even have skills at all, much less new ones you can unlock, so the XP you gain makes up the vast majority of your power, and the rest comes from equipment - and when you have 50 characters to equip, it'll take a long time before you stop getting a benefit from grinding cash.

In all of the above examples except FF Tactics, the power I gained ended up making the main game too easy for me. It was only partially averted in FF Tactics because the enemies levelled up with me, so only the skills I gained really gave me any power - which was a pretty decent way of doing it, honestly, although eventually learning the best skills made most enemies pretty trivial.

So no, I'm not talking about theoretical problems that don't usually exist. I'm talking about recurring problems in games I've played.
Hmm, seems your only real focus in a game is "challenge" then.
Well, then we aren't really talking about grinding, or rather gaining power, but simply about playing the game, enjoying the gameplay beeing worth less than biting the dust a few times on some boss.

I played everything you mentioned above and i don't disagree with how you see the things you did in those games, they only get easier.
I however don't see that as a problem at all. Gaining power is fun, it is what most games are actually about. The only challenge in any game is getting better than what you're up against. If you decide to to that with a low ammount of power (low lvl runs, or almost everytime you play a game for the first time), instead of getting as strong as you can, then that's your decision.

You see gaining power as a problem, i see that as what the game is actually about.
We are talking about normal RPG's here, not about MMO's where you need to try to stretch out content as far/long as possible. Real challenges are something for optional content, not for the storyline imo. Doesn't mean it needs to be an aatack spamfest, but doubt anyone would see, for example a SMT game, as too easy, simply because the main gameplay actually is gaining power in an almost limitless way.

I think this thread is originally about games where you NEED to grind to progress, which isn't the case in any older FF games tho, you really don't.
I would definitely see that as a problem tho, albeit i personally wouldn't mind most likely, but i'm sure a ton of people would hate it and it's not exactly thrilling gameplay wise either.

But when gaining power is the major part of the gameplay, i wouldn't see it as a problem when boss battls turn out to be rather easy in return.

But let's be honest, i bet a lot of people will be quite the powerhouse when replaying older games, but when you first played them? Were they really that easy?
Even FF7, which is really easy if you look back now, the first time playing didn't leave an "man, this is way too easy" impression on me at all.
You always have optinal bosses for a challenge too, up to the point where you know how to beat them ofc, then they are easy too.

But there is definitely a difference between a player playing FF7 for the first time, leaving Midgar and getting crushed by the Midgar Zolom - like it is supposed to be- and someone who grinded up all the lvl 3 limits to turn the snake into dust.

I think our oppinions most likely vastly differ here, but i can't recall any game where i would say that were too easy the first time i played them.
Especially not something like SMT Nocturne (or Lucifers call for the version i own), too easy would never be something i would describe that with.
Even new FF games, as in X and onwards, have some kind of challenges the first time, altho they really do get easier overall, thats for sure.
author=Kaelan
There is a fixed amount of enemies in the game, all in pre-placed locations and none of them ever respawn. Once you kill something, it's dead forever. And there are no random encounters.


This is the approach I'm taking with my game. Granted, there are ways to grind; I put training dummies in houses that you can get from questing. The experience you get from using the training dummies becomes mostly insignificant at later levels, though, so grinding is basically impossible. There are a lot of powerful artifacts in the game that you can aquire pretty easily if you know what you're doing, so getting better loot has far more influence on your character's power than gaining levels.