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REPLACING LEVELING WITH DIFFERENT PROGRESSION IN ESTABLISHED GAMES
Posts
Craze
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Closebulma, i can't play Oblivion without Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul and Oblivion XP. You get XP for exploring, completing quests, etc. -- it works a lot better than the more "kill more to fight the next boss on a linear set of bosses" that I dislike in other RPGS.
GRS: I rarely drink but I think a need something hard after reading that.
LockeZ: I'd love that in a Suikoden game.
Radiant Historia
Every time you successfully create the best timeline for an area/time, Stocke gains a level (which is shared by anybody he has in his party whenever). This would help SO MUCH with Rosch...
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Remove mob XP entirely. Rely solely on quest/exploration XP to level up the Inquisition as a whole... you know what, just only use the Prestige or whatever that NotXP was for leveling your commanders. Just use that and tie stats to it.
FF XIII
Tie the crystarium entirely to espers and fal'cie. As the l'cie get closer to completing their purpose, unlock more crystarium options. Change the crystarium to have a certain amount of points you can spend and reset at any time, instead of growing via battles as NotXP. The game's mostly linear anyway, c'mon. This isn't even that far off from what actually happens in-game, I just want smaller but more frequent upgrades.
GRS: I rarely drink but I think a need something hard after reading that.
LockeZ: I'd love that in a Suikoden game.
Radiant Historia
Every time you successfully create the best timeline for an area/time, Stocke gains a level (which is shared by anybody he has in his party whenever). This would help SO MUCH with Rosch...
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Remove mob XP entirely. Rely solely on quest/exploration XP to level up the Inquisition as a whole... you know what, just only use the Prestige or whatever that NotXP was for leveling your commanders. Just use that and tie stats to it.
FF XIII
Tie the crystarium entirely to espers and fal'cie. As the l'cie get closer to completing their purpose, unlock more crystarium options. Change the crystarium to have a certain amount of points you can spend and reset at any time, instead of growing via battles as NotXP. The game's mostly linear anyway, c'mon. This isn't even that far off from what actually happens in-game, I just want smaller but more frequent upgrades.
I dunno, man. I think getting more powerful as a result of defeating something challenging is a visceral thing! I'm all for alternative means of gaining XP, but I'm not sure how I like the idea of REMOVING it for killing bad guys. If XP is a reward for overcoming challenges and doing things, why shouldn't the most lethal and dangerous part of the game reward you for the same thing?
author=Marrend
Wait, what? Am I reading that right? I don't recall this feature! Though, to be fair, I tended to clear rooms as much as possible before even getting to the boss. So, it might have been something I never observed?
Totally right about the Red Jewels, though. Some of them were in such Guide Dang It locations, it wasn't even funny.
That's correct! I didn't know about it either until I was watching somebody stream a speed run of it and elaborated why he wasn't clearing rooms. Things can still get tricky (he did die to the vampires, no stat gains from Mu and Will makes it a dangerous fight) but the game was designed that you can't get totally screwed on stats!
author=Craze
GRS: I rarely drink but I think a need something hard after reading that.
Yeah, Ultima 5 isn't a good game in a lot of ways. It's a product of its time though, it came out back in 1988. Never look up to see how combat works, I don't want you to die of alcohol poisoning!
Most of my ideas do reward you for doing the dangerous thing!
In Hellion, you have to kill plenty to get to the next floor.
Tales of the Abyss has a lot of cool systems that get kinda overshadowed by just leveling from 1 to 200. I'd like to focus more on those than levels.
Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a game that's all about poking around. The plot is silly, just there to move you from place to place -- you're meant to enjoy the ridiculous cast and find all of the unlockable skills they have to offer. Pushing even more of the game's progression onto that instead of the too-easy battles would benefit the game and maybe allow the Sanity system to play a bigger role if stats were mildly capped by the proposed progression.
FF1 idea is the same as "killing enemies for power," just with a limit that highly encourages exploring the large, open world (something that I've heard complaints about -- "I don't know where to go, I don't know when to leave"). It also keeps the Peninsula of Power intact, if you're into that sorta thing.
FF2 has a fun, ridiculous plot but COME ON.
Radiant Historia has battles, and they're pretty fun, but the game has a huge focus on time travel and puzzles based on that. There are some rather involved quests that take "years" to solve. Rewarding that with more than just the best ending would make the most sense to me. (Also it means players have more chances to see all the bad endings, which are spectacularly wonderful/horrific.) ((Alsoalso, the game has some serious problems with the amount of XP it gives out. It makes some characters useless without grinding and some characters god-tier without any real effort.))
Dragon Age: Inquisition has a lot of enemies to kill. It also has a lot of terrain to cover and people to talk to. The systems are already in place to remove the awkward "everybody has the same XP +-3%" experience; it feels like it's a vestigal system instead of something meaningful.
FF13 is mostly linear and even the non-linear portion has specific Things to Accomplish. Just give us power for hitting checkpoints so we can spend a burst of CP instead of fiddling around in the menu after every battle or two. (The same goes to the Sphere Grid.)
In Hellion, you have to kill plenty to get to the next floor.
Tales of the Abyss has a lot of cool systems that get kinda overshadowed by just leveling from 1 to 200. I'd like to focus more on those than levels.
Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a game that's all about poking around. The plot is silly, just there to move you from place to place -- you're meant to enjoy the ridiculous cast and find all of the unlockable skills they have to offer. Pushing even more of the game's progression onto that instead of the too-easy battles would benefit the game and maybe allow the Sanity system to play a bigger role if stats were mildly capped by the proposed progression.
FF1 idea is the same as "killing enemies for power," just with a limit that highly encourages exploring the large, open world (something that I've heard complaints about -- "I don't know where to go, I don't know when to leave"). It also keeps the Peninsula of Power intact, if you're into that sorta thing.
FF2 has a fun, ridiculous plot but COME ON.
Radiant Historia has battles, and they're pretty fun, but the game has a huge focus on time travel and puzzles based on that. There are some rather involved quests that take "years" to solve. Rewarding that with more than just the best ending would make the most sense to me. (Also it means players have more chances to see all the bad endings, which are spectacularly wonderful/horrific.) ((Alsoalso, the game has some serious problems with the amount of XP it gives out. It makes some characters useless without grinding and some characters god-tier without any real effort.))
Dragon Age: Inquisition has a lot of enemies to kill. It also has a lot of terrain to cover and people to talk to. The systems are already in place to remove the awkward "everybody has the same XP +-3%" experience; it feels like it's a vestigal system instead of something meaningful.
FF13 is mostly linear and even the non-linear portion has specific Things to Accomplish. Just give us power for hitting checkpoints so we can spend a burst of CP instead of fiddling around in the menu after every battle or two. (The same goes to the Sphere Grid.)
author=Craze
Most of my ideas do reward you for doing the dangerous thing!
To a degree, but they don't! For example, sure, Inquisition has a lot of ground to cover and places to go, so the idea of getting XP for things I'd have to expend effort for anyway is nice, but if I'm dicking around and I go "ooh, cave!" and I fight hordes of demons and a big one at the end, sure, it's great to get XP for finding the cave, but I want XP compensation for actually fighting through that cave tooth and nail.
The idea of taking away XP for killing things just diminishes the reward for killing things. Smacking shit around is my favorite part of video games and I want compensation for the experience of killing things!
There ARE rewards though. There's gold, there's loot, there's the chests you get access to, there are conversations between party members... you can get power (and less tangible rewards) from fighting even without a single, specific lever. I already discussed this earlier in the topic with unity.
I'm not saying that NO GAME SHOULD EVER HAVE TRADITIONAL XP. I just want to explore some different, more creative and tuned-for-the-project ideas.
I mean, have you played Wine & Roses? The game is literally just fighting. There are also no levels, but there is a definite progression.
I'm not saying that NO GAME SHOULD EVER HAVE TRADITIONAL XP. I just want to explore some different, more creative and tuned-for-the-project ideas.
I mean, have you played Wine & Roses? The game is literally just fighting. There are also no levels, but there is a definite progression.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=zeello
There is one downside to this i just realized however. With EXP/leveling you have a scaling effect. If you fight the same enemies over and over you gradually stop leveling up as fast. But with your method there'd be no reason not to fight the weakest enemy in the game over and over for endless buffs. It will be tricky to devise a method that takes that into account.
The same applies to leveling up in any game. Any game that allows you to keep getting experience from the first enemies you fight in the game allows you to grind to level 99 before leaving the first area, no matter how obscene the time sink.
The solution I've found to counteract the desire to grind off low level enemies for money is that stat boosting items become more expensive the more of them you buy. There's no solution to the items you get from enemies, however, but it's still a much more rewarding experience to be getting items from every monster you'll be able to use regardless of where you are in the game than to get garbage loot 80% of the time because you're just beyond the cusp of needing what they're dropping.
It's the same as getting material drops for a crafting system, only without the inclusion of a terrible crafting system.
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
Why would you want smaller but more frequent stat bonuses in FF13, you already have to open up the crystarium to increase your stats after every single battle in the game! The only way to make it any more frequent would be to make you gain EXP from every action during battle, and have the crystarium appear on-screen during fights so you can increase it as you fight.
Oblivion and Skyrim definitely needed some help with their level systems. Really they just needed to give you a combat level and a non-combat level. Then the combat obstacles could be scaled to match your combat level, and the non-combat obstacles could be scaled to match your non-combat level. Then I wouldn't feel the need to actively avoid all of the non-combat skills as much as possible until I reached the soft level cap where enemies stop scaling. Any game where I'm trying to avoid leveling up is stupid. See also Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls.
OK, let's fix the level system in Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls.
This is a game about getting loot. EXP should be tied to loot! Levels shouldn't just be required to equip stuff that you got from other characters, it should be deeper than that.
First, remove experience points from enemies completely. Add a new NPC in town: the hero forger. He is now the only way to get EXP. If you give him gray or white quality equipment, you get a small amount of EXP for sacrificing it. EXP gives you level ups, like normal. Once you are max level, EXP gives you paragon levels, like normal.
If you give him better quality equipment, you get more EXP, plus you gain AP towards the stats that the equipment has. So if you give him a hat with agility, you get some agility AP. Agility AP can be spent to permanently increase the agility of another piece of equipment. You can increase any stat that's on a piece of equipment up to twice its starting amount this way, and you can also add new stats to equipment. Green-quality equipment can have one extra stat added by spending AP, yellow-quality can have two extra stats, and legendary equipment can have four extra stats.
All of this EXP and AP can only be earned by giving him items that you found yourself. You can equip and upgrade items that you got on another character, but you can't sacrifice them for EXP/AP. Each piece of equipment also still has a minimum level required to equip it.
Also, I want to say that enemies should no longer scale to your level. Instead enemies later in the game can just be harder, like original Diablo 3, because who the fuck thought that scaling enemies in a game where most of your power and progress can be transferred to a new level 1 character was a good idea? However, with this system, leveling up is something you have to do manually instead of being an unavoidable automatic penalty that keeps happening to you every time you kill things, so the level scaling is probably fine to leave as-is now that you have control over it and aren't punished for killing things.
Oblivion and Skyrim definitely needed some help with their level systems. Really they just needed to give you a combat level and a non-combat level. Then the combat obstacles could be scaled to match your combat level, and the non-combat obstacles could be scaled to match your non-combat level. Then I wouldn't feel the need to actively avoid all of the non-combat skills as much as possible until I reached the soft level cap where enemies stop scaling. Any game where I'm trying to avoid leveling up is stupid. See also Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls.
OK, let's fix the level system in Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls.
This is a game about getting loot. EXP should be tied to loot! Levels shouldn't just be required to equip stuff that you got from other characters, it should be deeper than that.
First, remove experience points from enemies completely. Add a new NPC in town: the hero forger. He is now the only way to get EXP. If you give him gray or white quality equipment, you get a small amount of EXP for sacrificing it. EXP gives you level ups, like normal. Once you are max level, EXP gives you paragon levels, like normal.
If you give him better quality equipment, you get more EXP, plus you gain AP towards the stats that the equipment has. So if you give him a hat with agility, you get some agility AP. Agility AP can be spent to permanently increase the agility of another piece of equipment. You can increase any stat that's on a piece of equipment up to twice its starting amount this way, and you can also add new stats to equipment. Green-quality equipment can have one extra stat added by spending AP, yellow-quality can have two extra stats, and legendary equipment can have four extra stats.
All of this EXP and AP can only be earned by giving him items that you found yourself. You can equip and upgrade items that you got on another character, but you can't sacrifice them for EXP/AP. Each piece of equipment also still has a minimum level required to equip it.
Also, I want to say that enemies should no longer scale to your level. Instead enemies later in the game can just be harder, like original Diablo 3, because who the fuck thought that scaling enemies in a game where most of your power and progress can be transferred to a new level 1 character was a good idea? However, with this system, leveling up is something you have to do manually instead of being an unavoidable automatic penalty that keeps happening to you every time you kill things, so the level scaling is probably fine to leave as-is now that you have control over it and aren't punished for killing things.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=zeello
Tougher enemies yield bigger rewards, and all enemies yield diminishing returns. That's what you need with a progression system and why exp/leveling works as well as it does. The problem isn't if a player decides to kills cabbage bunnies until he's lv99, the problem is if the game offered no incentive to do it any other way.
Ultimately, you're leveling up so that you can smack the shit out of bigger, badder enemies. How you get there depends on you, the player. You can't squeeze the player through a press and demand that they do everything by the book if you still want for the player to feel like what they're personally doing matters.
In a system like I've described, it thins out the garbage loot and just gives you stuff that will always be beneficial. Sure, you could grind at a level 1 bunny all day, but that bunny will only provide level 1 amounts of gold, while purchasing stat boosts is a surefire way to level up as you need it, so you're incentivized to beat bigger enemies to get better gold in order to afford those stat boosts more frequently as they increase in price.
Gold can buy you anything in any RPG, while mob drops are random and sometimes unnecessary depending on what your current build is. If you wanted to make a mage character, having the enemy drop a strength herb/potion/scroll/whatever isn't going to do you any good, so you'll want to work with what you know in order to progress.
The option is there just to make the pain of grinding endlessly a little less of a pain in the ass by allowing instant results at the end of each battle. Some people may have a problem with this, but if you're strong enough to hold your own, you can go a few battles before you have to open your menu to heal/buff your stats, otherwise it's after every battle. Trust me, you're doing this anyway and adding one more aspect to the game isn't changing anything.
LockeZ
Why would you want smaller but more frequent stat bonuses in FF13, you already have to open up the crystarium to increase your stats after every single battle in the game! The only way to make it any more frequent would be to make you gain EXP from every action during battle, and have the crystarium appear on-screen during fights so you can increase it as you fight.
Reread plz. I said that I wanted smaller but more frequent crystarium segments that came with a burst of CP instead of CP from every battle. I know how annoying spending all that CP was, man... I was there....
I really like your D3 ideas. The current "set it to Torment VI and play greater rifts until you complain about them on reddit" endgame is... awkward. You should make that game idea into a game!
zeello
Tougher enemies yield bigger rewards, and all enemies yield diminishing returns. That's what you need with a progression system and why exp/leveling works as well as it does. The problem isn't if a player decides to kills cabbage bunnies until he's lv99, the problem is if the game offered no incentive to do it any other way.
This is a huge part of why I think traditional exp/leveling is horrid design. You should want your game to be as hand-crafted and tight an experience as possible. A system that allows you to (or heaven forbid WANTS you to) grind excessively makes me sad. Why should that even be an option!??
author=Craze
A system that allows you to (or heaven forbid WANTS you to) grind excessively makes me sad. Why should that even be an option!??
I mean, some people, or rather, a lot of people, really, really like to grind. A game that forces you to grind, yeah, it's bad, but if someone really enjoys fighting your battles and being rewarded with strength, why is that bad? I've played games like that.
As fun as FFXIII's battle system was, when the Crystarium got maxed out, I lost the drive to fight since I wasn't really getting anything for it anymore. XP, especially with what you're saying, is designed to reward the player for an accomplishment. Why take combat out of the equation?
long-term not short-term. and: you're still getting power from item drops and gold and chests that enemies are blocking. i've said this like three times now, there's so many different ways to offer power than just xp. my ideas in this topic are all about attribute growth via levels and capping that... but i mean. you can buy weapons or something??? idk man come up with some replacements for traditional leveling in some of the games you like. do xenogears and chrono trigger.
if you want to grind, go play a mobile game or a game with traditional xp or some shit.
if you want to grind, go play a mobile game or a game with traditional xp or some shit.
author=Craze
long-term not short-term. and: you're still getting power from item drops and gold and chests that enemies are blocking. i've said this like three times now, there's so many different ways to offer power than just xp. my ideas in this topic are all about attribute growth via levels and capping that... but i mean. you can buy weapons or something??? idk man come up with some replacements for traditional leveling in some of the games you like. do xenogears and chrono trigger.
if you want to grind, go play a mobile game or a game with traditional xp or some shit.
I don't mean to frustrate you man!
I know you're just tossing around ideas, but what I'm saying is, if XP is a reward for players doing cool, noteworthy, and especially dangerous shit, to give XP to players for doing everything but the most dangerous and though/sweat provoking thing they do is just going to seem arbitrary a lot of the time. Most cases, a player is going to scratch their head and go "I get better at fighting by doing...everything but fighting?"
I'm not saying not getting XP for fights is a terrible idea all of the time, and I applaud other ways of exploring progress, but what I'm saying is, at its core, the traditional mode of gaining strength isn't bad, and rooted in common sense; you get better at fighting by fighting. I just think a more productive path would be improving that, and not outright replacing it. I feel the mindset of "KILL THE GRIND" is just working backwards.
Actually, I like the idea that you have to fight to get the prizes but that fighting doesn't net you the prizes. Hell, you can just add drops as prizes for fighting or stolen items - no XP and levels required but suddenly fights have another reason for existing and you get more rewards for persisting with them.
author=Lib
Actually, I like the idea that you have to fight to get the prizes but that fighting doesn't net you the prizes. Hell, you can just add drops as prizes for fighting
Like a fighting tournament side quest or mini game? I'd be down with that (and many RPGs already do it), but I wouldn't want the entire game to play like that, though. Not saying that mode would be inherently bad, either!
No, I mean like a cave full of treasures where you have to fight in order to progress. What would matter is whether or not the battles are well-balanced, fast-paced and interesting. You don't need XP and gold from them because the rewards are behind them - new weapons and armour so that you can beat stronger monsters to get better weapons and armour to beat better monsters to beat the last boss. I don't see how that would be a bad idea, honestly, and don't see why you'd think it would be a bad base for a game. It's all about balance, as with any of the options explained in this thread.
