"What if we leveled backwards?" Article

Hello ^^, I stumbled upon this article from the Extra Punctuation, now I take Yahtzee's opinions with a significant grain of salt (I'm more of an AVGN fan anyways) but this idea did make me wonder how it would be implemented. I think the "leveling backwards" idea would probably be good for a survival horror rpg but not much else. What do you all think?

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/8661-Extra-Punctuation-What-if-We-Leveled-Backwards

edited 2nd Mar '11 8:01:07 PM by SoloWingPixy

Getting weaker as you go works, but making levelling result in getting weaker doesn't; players simply avoid levelling at all

Um... I think this is alredy a bit old...

I dont really rememeber what games, but I have seen a couple of them...

I'm pretty sure he meant getting weaker as the game went on, not as a gameplay factor involving grinding and all that.

The article used World Of Warcraft an MMO as an example, though. Pretty certain that involves grinding

It makes absolutely no sense because it's based solely on the idea that gamers want to make progress via level numbers or storyline, and nothing else. For many, a major appeal of games, especially (but not just) in RP Gs, is to build up your character and strengthen them. The same goes for action games - Imagine if you only got to use an incredible rail gun or something for the first level, and it was taken away, leaving you with less impressive weapons over time. That's another issue - If everything is given to you at the start and then taken away, there's no new abilities or weapons to be found. This concept pretty much would make any kind of exploration or sidequesting completely moot, as there's no sense to do all that work just to have it taken away in a few levels.

Not to mention how strange the balance would have to be to keep it fair - Watch how armored giants in the final level fall to your 9mm pistol in a single shot, while the unarmed grunts in the beginning shrug off rocket launcher blasts.

Really, this is a pretty bad idea, through and through.

Er, no thanks. I'd rather not start sucking as I get through the game.

That's why I think it would only be possible for something survival horror based, what with all the knife/pistol or one weapon only runs that pop up from time to time.

You could have a Far Cry 2 style FPS wher your character starts off escaping from some military base and steal a ton of their equipment and your main objective could be to escape the island/facilty and slowly throughout the game, as you get further from the base, your weapons and equipment would begin to run short and you'd start running into less and less heavy armed mooks (because they'd keep those guys closer to home and send the average mooks with the weakest weapons the furthest out with every other type of mook spread in between), potentially meaning by the end you could be left with nothing but a handgun and knife.

The only way you could get ammo for the BF Gs you were carrying is to go back to the base and risk getting destroyed by the mooks gaurding the place only to pick up like 2 or 3 shells/plasma bullets. Not worth the risk and you'd end up spending them trying to get back out of the base anyway.

edited 2nd Mar '11 8:22:40 PM by NULLcHiLD27

Not to mention how strange the balance would have to be to keep it fair - Watch how armored giants in the final level fall to your 9mm pistol in a single shot, while the unarmed grunts in the beginning shrug off rocket launcher blasts.

Why would you assume that the enemies would follow the usual progression? From the description in the article, it sounded like it'd be sort of like playing a game with the stages in reverse order

Maybe with the right premise and flawless execution it could work. Some ideas;

• Playing the fantasy villain. Destroying everything in your path at the start before the hero starts stealing your artifacts, discovering your weaknesses, and gets that damn Sword of Plot Advancement.
• A real-ish shooter were everything goes to hell. You start with a squad, your weapons, and toys like flashbangs, but the Black Hawk goes down and eventually it's down to you, your knife, and a salvaged AK trying to get out of Warzoneistan.
• A survival horror game. As the game progresses your psychological and physical trauma are getting worse and worse, you start out healthy but now you're hallucinating and have a broken leg slowing you down.
• Any genre, but it's a decade-spanning story with a character who keeps getting older but still goes out on adventures.
• A game where losing is a Foregone Conclusion. You can't win but people generally don't give up and die when they can try. You lose because True Art Is Angsty.

But again, execution has to be flawless. The game has to be damn fun and the story has to be compelling. Because in addition to the normal pitfalls of pleasing your players you're hitting them with a novel if not completely counter-intuitive concept.

Or what if your skill is expected to make up for it? At the start you'd be an inexperienced kid spraying rockets into crowds of weak enemies, by the end you'd be a hard-bitten veteran taking out 20-foot giants with precision 9mm rounds to the eyes.

Of course, a big problem with this kind of progression is that you have to predict how fast your players will grow, and it only works once.

I had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day, we were talking about Assassin's Creed and Ezio's aging, and he suggested that as he started getting older, he should start to get slower, not be able to hit as hard with weapons, and regenerate health at a reduced pace, but have accrued better techniques from his experience. I don't really like this idea very much. If I'm going to get A Taste of Power, only to get reduced to being a wimp, I want to be able to work back to being a nigh unstoppable killing machine by the end.

edited 2nd Mar '11 8:56:40 PM by sparkpoint

This is the sort of concept that gets turned into a game by an indie studio, receives critical praise and gets some devoted fans, but ultimately makes little money because most people don't like the idea

An indie developer is probably the only kind of developer that would bother to achieve the flawless execution Rotpar has in mind.

I like this idea. To answer an above complaint, you don't necessarily need enemy progression; the enemies and obstacles could stay the same.

This could work really well, especially for a game with good physics. Think of a combat-inclusive version of Amnesia, where your mounting insanity damages your combat effectiveness.

As you weaken, you have to deal with the same challenges, but in new and more cunning ways. What was towards the beginning a simple matter of swordplay might become a scenario where you build a barricade, create an obstacle, run away and hope to complete your objective before you're found.

Mostly a horror game thing, I guess. It would be fantastic to play an Aliens game built around this premise, where your weapons fire becomes less accurate and you begin perceiving false signs of Alien presence, including blips on the motion tracker. And what if, as the film suggests, only the pulse rifle and smart guns are effective weapons against them? A pistol, shotgun or flamethrower might slow them down or have them retreat out of pain for a while, but to put one down you might have to find a precious magazine of explosive, armour-piercing 10mm ammo. Perhaps there's only one magazine of pulse rifle ammo in the entire game? That's 99 rounds which, given your decaying accuracy, means you can only kill about 3 - 5 Aliens with certainty.
The rest would have to be avoided, trapped or otherwise dissuaded from following you. Since you can't really hide from them, you may have to use decoys. You don't need a whole lot of Aliens, either, just ten or so if you can take down five.

I wish I was a game designer.

edited 2nd Mar '11 9:08:36 PM by MadassAlex

Yeah, there is some massive online type game where everything else levels up as you kill them, instead of you leveling up, so you either get better at playing, or you die, and mook makers are your bane. ADOM works like that as well. Not a new idea, just not an often used one because games that did were not popular. Not popular enough for Yahtzee to research them at least.

I guess it's a question of niche. Some people like the kind of thing that's being discussed here while others like to outstrip the Big Bad over the course of the game and become a Showy Invincible Hero by the end. The vast majority of games have the latter progression or something like it, so I guess there's still lots of room for more games with 'inverse leveling'.

I thought the Frozen Throne Undead campaign made this work; Arthas starts at level 10 (max), then loses (on average) one character level per campaign level because plot.

OTOH, maybe the reason it worked was it was an RTS, and therefore you had units to use too. Also, he gets his levels back at the end.

I absolutely can not see it working in a MMO. The basic design of the MMO is using levels to entice you to play just a liiiiiitle bit longer...but if it penalizes you for playing, then why play?

That said, I can see it making a great thematic element for certain games.

Maybe the plot could be something like you're possessed by a demon. The possession grants you amazing powers, but you kind of like having your soul, so you go on a journey to cleanse yourself of his influence. At each shrine you visit, you wipe out a chunk of the demon's spirit, which results in the loss of one of the demonic powers he grants you. At the end, you're just a human, fighting for your life against the angry demon once it's finally separated from you.

That's pretty badass.

@ Enlong Reminds me of a story I wrote for an English class one time to spite all those demonic possession movies that always end with the possessee or the stock child of Satan who didn't know Satan was his father basking in their new demonic power.

But you're right that would fit perfectly for this kind of game!

edited 2nd Mar '11 11:24:29 PM by SoloWingPixy

I had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day, we were talking about Assassin's Creed and Ezio's aging, and he suggested that as he started getting older, he should start to get slower, not be able to hit as hard with weapons, and regenerate health at a reduced pace, but have accrued better techniques from his experience. I don't really like this idea very much. If I'm going to get A Taste Of Power, only to get reduced to being a wimp, I want to be able to work back to being a nigh unstoppable killing machine by the end.

Actually I think we careful implementation you could make your friend's idea work but still remain an unstoppable killing machine. You could probably do it with a mix of computer assistance (eg an increasingly effective auto-aim to represent growing marksmanship) and making up the loss of certain stats with bonuses in others (eg critical hit more often and/or harder with certain weapons/techniques to show increased skill in their usage).

A way of doing this would be to keep the Level Grinding, but with each level you take, you lose the Jack of All Trades aspects and take more steps towards Crippling Over Specialization each time you become more powerful.
At the end of the game how good you are depends on the matchup, you are better against something but worse against other things.
Like magic vs techology vs martial arts, but expand it enough so that you have enough to specialize in, otherwise you have 3 boring trees of boringness.

A bit more ontopic: I think Yatzhee has a point, there is a lot of bad game design running wild, especially when you are getting so much more powerful that the entire aspect of getting stronger is overshaded by that you are getting so powerful that it gets too easy. By the end of the game you are so optimized the Worthy Foe of a Final Boss is noting but another Mook.
Contrast: Look at Metroid, you are getting ridiculessy more powerful with each step, but you start out weak enough to appriciate it, AND there is still powerful enough enemies to provide a suitable obstacle.

edited 3rd Mar '11 1:11:45 AM by del_diablo