UNLOCKING EQUIPMENT (AND OTHER UPGRADES)

As you play through a game with anything even remotely resembling an RPG style progression, you'll get upgrades as you go. Some of these will be better versions of things you already have, while others will be alternatives to things you already have, and others will be upgrades that occupy their own "slot" and don't take the place of anything else.

There are a lot of ways to obtain these things. Some of the more common ones in RPGs are:
- Bought with money, which is typically a common resource obtained in a variety of ways
- Obtained as part of the story
- Granted as a reward for an optional quest
- Found in a treasure chest during exploration
- Randomly dropped by enemies which can be fought over and over
- Randomly dropped by enemies or found in chests which there are a limited number of (randomly generated content, such as in a roguelike)
- Won from some kind of battle arena
- Crafted or customized via some kind of more complex system
- Won in some kind of minigame

Which of these do you prefer over others, and why? Do you prefer some of them for certain types of upgrades? It doesn't have to be on this list; I'm sure I forgot some.

For example, I find most minigames obnoxious, because they tend to be a wildly different type of gameplay than what I really turned on the game to play (racing minigame in an RPG), and they also tend to be far worse than real games of the genre they're emulating (I'd definitely rather play SSX Tricky than FF7 Snowboarding). As a result, if I have to play a minigame to get an upgrade that's irreplacable or that's really strong for the point in the game that it becomes available, I get annoyed. But if it's something I can easily skip, it doesn't bother me - because if I get sick of the minigame, I can play the real game instead, and eventually get the same reward.

On the flip side, I think most of the best stuff in the game is better suited to the more complex and time consuming methods like crafting, battle arenas, and sidequests. I actually think all types of upgrades become better suited to these methods as the game goes on - start it out simple, giving the player their early upgrades with less effort, and then require more effort as the game goes on. Basically this is a matter of expecting the player to get better at the game as he plays it, and thus find those things to be less of a burden. Also, it feels like the effort matches the reward better.

author=Muninn

author=supremewarrior
Why can't the player earn the special upgrade by defeating the special monster in a certain land? I think having some upgrades be one of a kind would add more value to them and would probably encourage the player to obtain them more. I really do think that special upgrades should be optional and not obligatory to progress further into the story as that would kind of ruin it.

You run into the Infinity+1 problem: If good equipment is given after optional battles, where do you give the best equipment? After the hardest battle, right?
Except this means that any player who can get the best equipment doesn't need it, because they've proven that they can beat the hardest battle without the best equipment, so they'd have no need for its help to go out and fight less difficult battles.

Well, the hardest battle is the final boss. Even if it's not at the end of the story, it's the final enemy you kill. So I don't think anyone is really hoping for it to grant an upgrade as a reward, unless you have a game with regularly released updates that expand the game and add new harder challenges (many online games do this). It should give some kind of reward, but not an upgrade; the most common reward is, well, the game's ending.

That doesn't mean every single enemy except the hardest battle can't give a special upgrade, though.

The idea that upgrades that take their own "slot" should be optional is flawed. In fact, this is almost never the case. They are almost always thing you get as part of the story and cannot avoid. Because when something is a key tool required to progress forward, it often makes sense for the player to always have access to it, and therefore it needs to have its own "slot" and not get replaced by a defense boost later. In several of the Legend of Zelda games, for example, think of the item that lets you swim underwater. This isn't something you want to have to swap out for the hookshot; it's something that you want to have access to all the time once you get it. So instead of taking a tool slot, it gets stuck on your list of permanent upgrades, alongside the gem that lets you walk through superheated areas, the power bracelet, the pegasus boots, the spin attack, the ability to turn into a wolf, and whatever else the game wants you to always have access to no matter what equipment you're using.

Not to say there aren't plenty of example of cases where it really is optional, though. The ribbon you get after fighting Atropos in Chrono Trigger simply boosts Robo's speed and mdef, for example. Speed tabs and power tabs in Chrono Trigger are another example. As a more interesting example, I've played games where if you learn a certain spell, you can summon a pet to fight alongside you. The pet becomes a permanent companion. But it's purely a combat upgrade, and you might never get that spell, because it costs a ton of money to buy the spell. So while the enemies are balanced more and more around the assumption that you'll have a pet as you get further and further into the game, it never strictly requires you to have the spell.

author=Little Wing Guy
Like, if you win at triple triad in FF8, you unlock more cards so you can continue playing triple triad, that’s what you get.

You clearly never actually played much Triple Triad. You can refine triple triad cards into magic spells. And it's the best way in the game to get magic spells, because you can get powerful spells much earlier than you can by drawing from enemies. You can get 99 firagas on everyone before you go to the first dungeon, with about four hours of playing cards.

I definitely don't feel like "press the A button on every tile in the game" is a compelling game mechanic. I also feel that as a designer you should try to make the most effective way to play the game also be the most fun way. Because even if blindly tile-searching is massively unfun, a lot of people are going to be compelled to do it if it's faster than getting the hints or if they can do it much earlier in the game than they can get the hints. And then as an end result, those people will not only be bored, but they'll also be overpowered and so the next part of the game will lack any challenge and so that will be boring too.

Therefore I really think that if you're going to include this kind of hidden item placement, including hints isn't a good plan. Making them invisible at first but giving the player some kind of "radar" later in the game has the same problem. The visual indicators admittedly lack a little bit of magic when you find them, since it doesn't feel like solving a puzzle, but it's outweighted by the fact that they cause far fewer problems in my experience. If you want to hide items due to puzzles and riddles, I'd make sure to always put the hint and the location in the same dungeon, and make sure not to make the hints be so obtuse that no one can figure them out and the player ends up searching every tile anyway (see: La Mulana).