"What if we leveled backwards?" Article

I'd prefer a boss who is a challenge even with the Dragonfiregodraperopehellstorm attcck.

I have a message from another time...

Another possibility in an RPG: main character and the villain are cursed to share power. The weaker one is, the weaker the other is. Since the villain is orders of magnitudes stronger than you, every hit you take is accompanied by a much larger cut to his powers.

Could make for an interesting experience, especially if the game is split into two halves, where at first you're gaining power and thus adding to the villain's, and the second in which you're giving it up. Could have a lot to say about the nature of heroism, too.

But wait, wouldn't that end up with both of them dead?

Bittersweet Ending ahoy!

EDIT: Wouldn't that also make it really easy to solve by the hero committing suicide?

edited 3rd Mar '11 11:19:34 AM by Usht

The thing about making witty signature lines is that it first needs to actually be witty.

This sort of happened in 2004's Sid Meier's Pirates! (Vastly underrated by the way.) You started off in your 20's and are given a Wide-Open Sandbox to play around in. You can hunt down real life pirates, get hitched, or hunt down the villian who kidnapped your family.

However, the longer you play, the more time passes and your character ages. Theoretically you could keep playing but your attacks are slower, less people want to join your creew, you become a worse fighter etc. The goal is to accomplish as much as you can before hitting retire and seeing how well that character did before starting again to top it.

Heh..

^^Nah, say they don't share their power (magical ability or what have you) directly but rather they both get it from the same source. Say it's magic crystals: if a crystal's smashed, they both delevel; but if the hero dies, all the crystals would still be there and usable by the villain.

In a war setting, say you take control of the hero in individual missions where its just the hero and his or her party, and tactical scenarios. You could simulate the limited resources of the faction, say your army has a set number of soldiers, ammunition, supplies and, of course, morale... basically everything you need to run an army. And your party, including the hero, have psychological well-being; killing people, seeing comrades torn apart and physically suffering all wear the party down, and individual units can get worn down like this too; units that fall below a certain morale level simply become deadweight and unreliable, and are likely to either break or mutiny, which in turn drags everyone elses morale down. The party faces tough choices; do you let that unit go home, or force them to keep following the army in the hope they recover and can be reintegrated, all the while having that unit consume precious resources? Party members likewise can mutiny, desert, or outright try to rebel and kill the leader or veto his decisions. The result is the best weapons, units and characters have to be rationed; you have to use your crappy or unsuitable party members because Ivar von Killemall is destressing having cut his way through a hundred guys. I can think of a few ways this could be a really really powerful tool in the hands of a good team.

edited 3rd Mar '11 1:19:19 PM by GameChainsaw

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

You don't need a war setting for that. Just limit the total amount of anything in the game. If you never get more ammo or MP or whatever then naturally the entire game becomes a matter of attrition in which by the end you're extremely desperate. It'd need to be very tightly balanced to avoid becoming unwinnable though. And if you're anything like me you'd use the basic pistol for the entire game until you run out of ammo, then only use the shotgun or whatever, and finally end up against the final boss with only rockets left. Which isn't quite the same thing.

@Usht:

Yeah, I was thining about that. Maybe the curse ends with one of their deaths? It's not a fate bond so much as a conditional power limiter. That explains why the bad guy is still sending monsters and mooks after you.

I was just thinking that Kingdom Hearts did something like this whenever they would take your character's keyblade away. Sure, it may have been only temporarily, but it did weaken the character quite a bit. Heck, in Coded/Re:Coded, they had a bit of sideways leveling by having you get to command Donald and Goofy (but only after going for a little while without a way to fight).

Thinking of ideas to use with a literary work that is meant to be WikiWalked through.

There are already a number of games out there that give your character a comprehensive repertoire/arsenal that stays constant from start to finish while the enemies and levels get tougher (barring an 11th hour superpower at the end in some cases). Many older rail shooters used to do this.

True, but the others getting stronger isn't quite the same as you getting weaker.

I'm starting to think of what Shadow Of The Colossus would have been like if the horse had become lame in the end, Wander's stamina decreased faster with each colossus and his bow gained more and more reticule drift. Maybe he'd need to slowly sink his sword into a colossus' sigil instead of just plunging it all the way in like he does in the actual game.

I'd play a game like this. It'd be a neat twist on increasing difficulty: Instead of enemies getting tougher, you get weaker.

I especially like the suggestion one troper had about starting off with tons of weapons & ammo, but having no "refills" after the beginning. It'd require the player to be tactical about their ammo usage.

edited 3rd Mar '11 6:40:52 PM by RTaco

Just read this article.

The main problem with Yahtzee's design is that he wants to do it as an MMO. This is really something that would be better done as a story-focused, single-player game, like maybe an RPG.

I do think it would actually be kind of a neat idea. I once played an RPG with an equipment degredation system, and thing is all your abilities were connected to equipment, so if it broke, you lost the abilities. At times, this produced instances very much like what Yahtzee described, and believe it or not it was actually pretty fun.

So it could work... just, not as an MMO.

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The thing about making it an MMO is that griefing would skyrocket in the endgame if there was no way for older characters to prevent young and virile 12 year old kids P Kers from ganking them and grabbing all their shiny stuff. Teamwork and strong community are always solutions but most 12 year old kids MMO players dream of being able to solo the entire weaker half of a server by the endgame.

Anything can be done. The question is, would Joe Sixpack play it?

Any MMO like this would just be so full of Alt-itis...

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Why not return to standard plan and make the enemies more diverse and progressively harder, making you use your tactics better each time?

If the power gap between you and the enemies would stay the same, what's the point of weakening yourself? Apart from the fact that you would easily use cheap design tricks instead of designing new enemies and abilities. It's the same result but less fun, less reward. Easily winning over something you feared once is rewarding. Making your character's importance higher is rewarding.

edited 4th Mar '11 1:02:40 AM by Aminatep

   I will consume not only your flesh, but your very soul.   

Because some of us would like to see what happens when we avert, subvert, or invert the standard plan. Some of us want to see what happens when things are done differently. Some of us want to see what happens when reality hits an aging playable character.

Thinking of ideas to use with a literary work that is meant to be WikiWalked through.

@Aminatep, you're getting picky about this. The ultimate point behind this discussion is "Can we make it work?" It may not end up working as well as previously established systems, but that's alright we tried something new.

Percentile damage and ring outs instead of hit point loss? Smash Bros.

No jumping in a platformer? Hookshot instead? Bionic Commando.

A game where you can't defend yourself very much or at all in a survival horror setting? Clocktower.

All of these games were successes in their day for trying something different. Granted, there's many people who dislike them, but that's a given for anything you make. The point is, can we make this and make it fun enough to profit from it?

Now, we can argue about design all day, but when it get down to it, there's several ways to make it work and several ways to fuck it up and it's best handled by the actual designers, not some people debating on a forum who may not be completely understanding what the other is trying to get at (which I feel is happening here on both sides).

The thing about making witty signature lines is that it first needs to actually be witty.

This could work really well for a Die Hard game.

ophelia, you're breaking my heart

I could see this working good in an RPG with the same style of story progression as fable, but not for an MMO. Perhaps even for an FPS, but it needs to be a game where the story involves a long span of time to justify the aging process and the effects can't be some made up stuff that doesn't make sense.

Fable was the opportunity to really try this out. Unfortunately... well, my opinions on the latest Fable game are not very positive.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

Yeah.. I probably would have been kinder to it than Yahtzee, but not by much. I wish they hadn't gotten rid of armor, there wasn't a single damn piece of armor in all of Fable 2, just clothes. I couldn't make a male hero who didn't like a complete pussy, so I just made a sexy female swashbuckler instead.

She was smexy.

Part of the problem with this concept, however, is it disrupts the learning process. So, player plays, he learns, he gets better. Theoretically, this means he can take on bigger challenges and still win.

This gets shot to shit, however, if the reflexes and skills he's developed in the game grow progressively obsolete, as his character now moves slower, hits weaker, etc. The character is your interface with the game, how they respond to your actions and decisions is part of the learning process ( both in terms of muscle memory and tactical knowledge ). You may now be skilled enough to take on a group of ten enemies, five more than before. . . and bang, dead. Because your skills were based on your character being able to move at a certain speed, not 10% slower. Now you have to relearn your character, *and* figure out how to fight tougher enemies at the same time.

As for using finite resources as a source of growing challenge, all I can say is I am unconvinced. Until you've actually played through the game, you have no clue how and when to use your finite resources, leading to easy unwinnable scenarios. IMO, its horrible game design to make a game that you have to lose first before you can win. Also bear in mind the general unappealing nature of inventory management puzzles; this is a related concept.

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^

Maybe for the player skill appeal, but I would argue that the progression we're discussing means that your twitch skill and reflexes starts to matter less and less, and your tactics start to mean more and more.

It could be argued that most challenging concepts involving losing as part of the process of learning how to defeat said challenge, such as a pain in the ass boss that keeps killing you until you refine your tactics better each time until you win.

I'd rather have a game take things in this direction for once, where your actual tactics take priority over making some mathematical formula for how much punishment you can take and dish out in order to cook up a recipe made of win. In fact, that's one of the things that got me to stop playing MMO's and many RPG's altogether, it's like 10 percent skill now, 90 percent is about your build, items, stats, whatever, and not how you use those attributes and how you play.

So when you were young, you could take on that 10 man group of bandits trying to fuck you up. Now you don't recover from injuries as fast, you're a little slower perhaps, and a little quicker at becoming winded. That's when tactics come into play, when you decide you can kill 3, run them back through a hallway that has traps that you set which kill a few in order to reduce their number, and then fighting them in this narrow corridor in order to take away their numbers advantage so your experience and skill takes precedence. Tactics > Formulaic rinse/wash/repeat combat with the same old strategy being used over and over again. I'm sick of that tired old way of doing things in gaming.

edited 4th Mar '11 11:54:40 AM by Barkey