History Main / ChangingGameplayPriorities

** Monk gameplay in 5th edition. You start out with the most reliable bonus action attack at 1st level, get a whopping total of four attacks at 5th (where everyone else gets their second), and then you never get any more ever. Your damage dice still go up, but that's only an average of +4 damage every six levels. But you get more ki every level, so that unreliable Stunning Strike can be used more and more often. As such, you start out as a terrifying damager, then slowly transition to a controller that stunlocks the scariest enemy every fight at higher levels.

* In the early game of ''VideoGame/GoldenSun'' managing Djinn is very important and very difficult, because of the way the game assigns new Djinni that you find. Come endgame, you have enough Djinn to keep summoning various gods over and over again, and it's much easier to line up the correct numbers of Djinn for massive stat boosts.

* ''Videogame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim:'' Early on, players are likely to spend lots of money grinding and doing menial tasks to acquire potions that restore stamina, magic, and health. That's because at those levels, you'll likely be doing a lot of fighting and find it hard to survive against swarms of enemies without being prepared. Later, priorities will shift into spells and gear that can help you carry a greater load; that's because once you start finding good weapons/armor/valuables, you're going to want to bring ''everything'' out of the dungeon with you so that you can sell it or use it for crafting.

* In certain ''Franchise/ShinMegamiTensei'' games where you are rewarded for hitting enemy weaknesses, your initial priority goes to having a good spread of elemental skills so that you always have something to hit a weakness with. Later in the game as enemies and bosses stop having weaknesses altogether along with an inversion of LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards, the player would usually start fishing for bonus turns with a CriticalHit off a physical attack. Any magically-inclined attacker would end up specializing in one element, backed up with its corresponding boosting passives to squeeze as much damage out of a neutral hit as possible.

* In ''VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown'', your first upgrade can be either weapons or armor. At this stage in the game, your weapons are still killing enemies in one shot, so upgrading armor is more important. By the late game, RocketTagGameplay begins to emerge and you need to upgrade your weapons to keep from being outgunned.

*** While leveling from Level 1 to the LevelCap of 60 (70 with the ExpansionPack), the game is about unlocking new skills and testing new skill combinations, boosting passive stats, and getting new {{Loot}} in roughly equal measure. Upon reaching the LevelCap, while there are still Paragon Levels to be gained for small passive bonuses, the emphasis is much more on unlocking top-tier {{Loot}} and fine-tuning the character's skill loadout to match the bonuses it gives, making it a ''de facto'' case of LootBasedProgression. Additionally, by this point the player has likely completed the story mode and has probably moved on to tackling bounties and Rifts, randomized dungeons that remix assets from all parts of the game.

* The ''VideoGame/{{Borderlands}}'' franchise has a model where almost everything becomes obsolete quickly, meaning that you may well end up constantly redoing your Vault Hunter's build in order to take best advantage of the available equipment. [=Zer0=], for example, might respec from an SMG-focused character to a sniper upon receiving a sufficiently nasty sniper rifle.

* ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}} 5'' starts out with a single city, where you have to survive against barbarians and explore your surroundings in the bronze age, by the Renaissance you'll be forming trade deals with other countries and spreading your religion, by the modern era you'll be pushing Tourism and trying to win the Space Race.

* Early game ''VideoGame/GalacticCivilizations'' is about building colony ships quickly and rapidly moving them to inhabitable worlds, followed by a delicate economic balancing act as you try to afford this. Late game ''Galactic Civilizations'' is more defined by research, because that allows you to out-tech your opponents and thereby crush them. Militarily, the early game is defined by tiny ships with light weapons and maybe a little armour, while the late game is defined by giant slabs of metal covered in guns that can tear apart entire fleets of tiny ships.

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EuropaUniversalis has this in regards to combat. Early game your troops will break before they are all killed, which causes Morale to be very important. Later game, the combat skill of your units (Drill) is much better, because you can kill off almost an entire army before they break. Calvary dominates the early to midgame, while artilery such becomes a priority towards the end (with a few exceptions for strong Calvary nations, such as the Commonwealth or the Golden Horde).

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* ''VideoGame/CrashBandicoot3Warped'' has an interesting version of this that isn't present in the first two games. The first main chunk of the game consists of reaching the end of levels and obtaining crystals. After obtaining the running shoes, however, the game becomes all about completing challenges and time trials for 100% completion.
* In ''VideoGame/DynastyWarriors'', early game you'd want to maximize your characters' health and defense in order to survive. But as soon as better weapons and higher levels start rolling in, you'd want to maximize your attack efficiency and/or musou power in order to kill enemies faster. This is both for the GuideDangIt treasure acquisition missions and for the fact that enemies can combo-kill/musou you on any defense in harder modes anyway.
* In ''{{VideoGame/Klonoa}}'' the early game is a kind of easygoing, simple platformer with a few little wrinkles and hidden areas. By the end of the game, however, the focus is almost entirely on tricky timing puzzles and multi-jumps that require snagging new enemies in midair and using them as fuel for jump combos. Comparing the flow of the first and final levels, they almost look like different games. And this isn't even to bring up the hidden bonus level, where you spend more time with your feet off the ground than on it.

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* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZelda'' and all of its various sequels and remakes go about this in the same way. Early in the game you are fragile and lack the tools to overcome challenges. The entire game world tantalizes you by presenting you with doors you can't open, chasms you can't cross, and enemies you can't reasonably defeat. As you progress through the game and find heart containers and magical tools, more of the world becomes open to you, until you can go wherever you want at whim.

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* Most ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' games gradually introduce game mechanics. Often, this includes something like a system of magic or various [[LimitBreak limit breaks]] which can drastically change your priorities.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTactics'' has an odd kind of bait-and-switch. Early in the game, generic Wizard units will stomp all over most maps, only accelerating as you reach mid-game. Suddenly, in the late game, the whole focus changes to Special Units granted to you by the story who can do everything your generics can, but better, and physical attackers who can take a hit or two become much more useful than your fragile casters.
* Early in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTacticsAdvance'' you want your characters to have good strength, magic, defense and resistance. By the end game, all you care about is speed and accuracy as more or less your whole army has attacks that can [[RocketTagGameplay kill or disable an enemy in one shot.]]
* Those who enjoy the [[GottaCatchThemAll collecting]] and [[SocializationBonus trading]] aspects of ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' might be shocked to find out how differently the game is played between other people. Using a haphazardly [[LevelGrinding level-grinded]] team with [[ElementalRockPaperScissors decent type coverage]] (or [[OneManArmy a single max-level]] [[OlympusMons Legendary Pokémon]], along with the gym badge that will make it obey you) is more than enough to breeze through almost all in-game battles, but raising a team to seriously compete against other players and in postgame battle facilities (which both disallow trainers to use items mid-battle, by the way – so much for those Full Restores you splurged on!) requires so much micromanagement, from IV inheritance to EV allocating, that it's like playing a different game entirely.
* In the early game of ''VideoGame/GoldenSun'' managing Djinn is very important and very difficult, because of the way the game assigns new Djinni that you find. Come endgame, you have enough Djinn to keep summoning various gods over and over again, and it's much easier to line up the correct numbers of Djinn for massive stat boosts.
* Early in ''VideoGame/SecretOfMana'' your characters must carefully ration healing items and level up their weapon skills, and boss fights can be quite brutal due to the game's limited inventory system. After acquiring magic, however, healing becomes trivial and most fights consist of stunlocking your opponents with spells until they explode. Magic dramatically changes the game.
* Early on in ''VideoGame/RecettearAnItemShopsTale'' the game essentially boils down to keeping only the most profitable items of each kind in stock. However, as the game progresses, vending machines, customer requests and value fluctuations dramatically alter your purchasing habits. Late game, it's important to keep a huge selection of various goods on hand, because one failed sale will break your combo and squander your experience bonuses.

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* In ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'', you start off as a ''barely'' armed and armored chump, and the best way to play is to stay safe and avoid combat of any kind while performing menial sidequests for decent equipment and some money while exploring. Later on after a few plot-important missions, combat and stealth take first place, and money and equipment are of little to no concern since you find so much stuff on the enemy stalkers you kill and on the stashes said enemy stalkers have mapped on their PDA's. The latter always has equipment in full condition and at times more advanced than anything the shops have for sale, so there's barely any need to do any shopping [[BreakableWeapons save for repairing your gear]].

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* The early part of ''VideoGame/{{Elsword}}'' is about allocating skill points, practicing your play style and leveling up. However, the game gets less forgiving as you go, and you eventually need to focus on crafting powerful equipment and socketing them with the correct stats.

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* When you first start playing ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' the focus is very heavily on offense, causing the whole game to be a [[RocketTag blindingly fast damage contest.]] This makes "pub stomper" champions like Lee Sin and Master Yi ungodly powerful, and heavily snowballing champions like Katarina and Akali can be very hard to stop. As players learn more about how items work and how to use crowd control, however, the game becomes much more about solid defenses, teamwork and utility. Suddenly champions with highly variable kits are more important than champions who simply do a bucket of damage.

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* ''VideoGame/UniversalPaperclips'' has this in regards to the two stats: Processing (increases the rate of Operations gain, and rate of Creativity gain when your Ops hits the {{Cap}}) and Memory (maximum Ops you can have, 1 memory = 1k Ops). In the first phase, Memory is ''far'' more important than Processing since several upgrades can only ever be bought if your Memory is high enough. In the second phase, where you can gain {{Skill Point}}s far more easily, both stats are around equally as important. In the final phase, where the costliest upgrade is only 250k ops (and is entirely optional, the most expensive "necessary" upgrade costing 200k), you only need 200-250 Memory, and [[OneStatToRuleThemAll every other stat point goes into Processing]] since Creativity becomes a much more vital resource.

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* In early-game ''{{VideoGame/Disgaea}}'', every stat is about as important as it sounds. In late-game, the only stat that matters is the one you use to deal damage. In addition, magic and special abilities are almost useless in the early game with a few exceptions, due to the cost of using magic and restoring your spell points. In the later game, your magic use is much less limited.
* The early going in the old Roguelike game ''VideoGame/WizardsCastle'' involves fighting only the easy monsters (kobold, orc, wolf) and seeking three key treasures of the eight available: Blue Flame, Opal Eye and Pale Pearl. Once the player has the Flame and the Eye, books can be opened with impunity; books sometimes will max out Strength and Dexterity stats. With enough gold on hand, the player can buy Intelligence potions until smart enough to cast Fireball spells on gargoyles and dragons. Ideally, the player can level up to comfortably confront all the monsters, and even assault the Vendors. Finding the Orb of Zot, the quest's ideal, can almost become secondary to conducting a killfest.

* {{Civilization}} 5 starts out with a single city, where you have to survive against barbarians and explore your surroundings in the bronze age, by the Renaissance you'll be forming trade deals with other countries and spreading your religion, by the modern era you'll be pushing Tourism and trying to win the Space Race.
* In ''VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown'', your first upgrade can be either weapons or armor. At this stage in the game, your weapons are still killing enemies in one shot, so upgrading armor is more important. By the late game, RocketTagGameplay begins to emerge and you need to upgrade your weapons to keep from being outgunned.

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!!Non Video-Game examples:

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** The changing gameplay priorities are actually built right in to 4th edition in the form of tiers. Every 10 levels, your characters get a pretty significant growth in power plus new capabilities, such as flight, {{teleportation}} or, in the final tier, the ability to cheat death and resurrect themselves at least once per day. There are some pretty dramatic differences between the capabilities and priorities of a heroic-tier party, where resources are scarce and powers need to be carefully rationed, and an epic-tier party, who won't flinch for anything short of a mad god and who can fight regular enemies for days straight without resting.

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[[AC:Simulation]]
* ''VideoGame/UniversalPaperclips'' has this in regards to the two stats: Processing (increases the rate of Operations gain, and rate of Creativity gain when your Ops hits the {{Cap}}) and Memory (maximum Ops you can have, 1 memory = 1k Ops). In the first phase, Memory is ''far'' more important than Processing since several upgrades can only ever be bought if your Memory is high enough. In the second phase, where you can gain SkillPoints far more easily, both stats are around equally as important. In the final phase, where the costliest upgrade is only 250k ops (and is entirely optional, the most expensive "necessary" upgrade costing 200k), you only need 200-250 Memory, and [[OneStatToRuleThemAll every other stat point goes into Processing]] since Creativity becomes a much more vital resource.

* In ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsI'', the big change comes when you learn Cure magic. The game can be easily divided into "pre-Cure" and "post-Cure" sections. Healing magic is so overpoweringly useful that it single-handedly makes Magic Points the most important stat in the game. This is true of [[VideoGame/KingdomHearts most of the series]], but only in the first game is the difference so large and Cure learned so late.

* In ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsI'', the big change comes when you learn Cure magic. The game can be easily divided into "pre-Cure" and "post-Cure" sections. Healing magic is so overpoweringly useful that it single-handedly makes Magic Points the most important stat in the game. This is true of [[Franchise/KingdomHearts most of the series]], but only in the first game is the difference so large and Cure learned so late.

Used properly, this keeps a game fresh and fun over the course of its play time and allows players to experience the growth and change their character is going through on a more visceral level. Used poorly, this causes a game to become muddled or confusing, or worse, {{Unwinnable}}, as players realize that the skills they've honed and abilities they've sunk skill points into in the first half of the game are totally useless in the latter half. This is often the case in a DisappointingLastLevel that doesn't contain the things you need to make certain abilities beyond "hit it with a stick" work, like friendly NPCs for social abilities or poorly-lit environments that lend themselves to stealth action.

* In early-game ''FireEmblem'' you tend to play much more cautiously. Since your low-leveled characters can't take many hits and [[FinalDeath death is permenant]], you need to bait and lure enemies one-by-one, and check enemy movement ranges carefully, to ensure you aren't overwhelmed, while making sure to weaken enemies enough for your lower-leveled characters to finish off. Once your characters start leveling up, [[PrestigeClass upgrading classes]], getting better weapons and [[RelationshipValues raising their support levels with eachother]], battles become much more about positioning your characters right to cut down hordes of enemies on the Enemy Phase. It's for this reason most games in the series suffer from EarlyGameHell.

* In the first ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsI'' game, the big change comes when you learn Cure magic. The game can be easily divided into "pre-Cure" and "post-Cure" sections. Healing magic is so overpoweringly useful that it single-handedly makes Magic Points the most important stat in the game.

* Those who enjoy the [[GottaCatchThemAll collecting]] and [[SocializationBonus trading]] aspects of ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' might be shocked to find out how differently the game is played between other people. Using haphazardly [[LevelGrinding level-grinded]] team with [[ElementalRockPaperScissors decent type coverage]] (or [[OneManArmy a single max-level]] [[OlympusMons Legendary Pokémon]], along with the gym badge that will make it obey you) is more than enough to breeze through almost all in-game battles, but raising a team to seriously compete against other players and in postgame battle facilities (which both disallow trainers to use items mid-battle, by the way – so much for those Full Restores you splurged on!) requires so much micromanagement, from IV inheritance to EV allocating, that it's like playing a different game entirely.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Pokemon}}'', during the early game you have to more or less take what you can get in terms of mons and attacks. You start out with just a few monsters with low coverage on the ElementalRockPaperScissors table, and healing items are rare and expensive, if available at all. Having one of your monsters faint can absolutely cripple you, especially if that monster was your only answer to a specific problem. As the game progresses and you build your collection of monsters, this problem fixes itself. It also helps that you gain the ability to heal and revive your monsters more easily. The later games, especially in generations after the first, give you a huge amount of variety in what you can put in your team and new ways to learn attacks of different types.
** This also carries over after you beat the game, catch the local [[OlympusMons legendaries]], and gain access to the local battling facilities which offer all the best items in the game, especially if you get into competitive battling. The focus quickly shifts from "journeying across the land with your six best monsters and conquering the league and defeating the evil team" to "finding, breeding, and training a vast army of super-mons and gathering all the resources to do so, in order to gain every advantage possible to butt heads with the best of the best." Pretty soon, it becomes easy to forget the game ever had a story, and with access to every HM by this point, going to a specific location to pick up a Pokemon or TM or item you need but missed is no more trying than going to the supermarket.

Used properly, this keeps a game fresh and fun over the course of its play time and allows players to experience the growth and change their character is going through on a more visceral level. Used poorly, this causes a game to become muddled or confusing, or worse, {{Unwinnable}}, as players realize that the skills they've honed and abilities they've sunk skill points into in the first half of the game are totally useless in the latter half.

** The changing gameplay priorities are actually built right in to 4th edition in the form of tiers. Every 10 levels, your characters get a pretty significant growth in power plus new capabilities, such as flight, {{teleportation}} or, in the final tier, the ability to cheat death and resurrect themselves at least once per day. There are some pretty dramatic differences between the capabilities and priorities of a heroic-tier party, where resources are scarce and powers need to be carefully rationed, and an epic-tier party, who won't flinch for anything short of a mad god and who can fight regular enemies for days straight without resting.

* In ''VideoGame/XComEnemyUnknown'', your first upgrade can be either weapons or armor. At this stage in the game, your weapons are still killing enemies in one shot, so upgrading armor is more important. By the late game, RocketTagGameplay begins to emerge and you need to upgrade your weapons to keep from being outgunned.

* In ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublic'' you can get through most of the game with a balanced JackOfAllTrades build that focuses on social skills and nifty force powers. This grows more and more unwieldy as the game progresses, until the final boss is all but [[{{Unwinnable}} impossible]] if you aren't a highly specialized combat machine. Unless you just run away while throwing your lightsaber at him endlessly. It actually works better if you play as a character with a high level of Force points.

* In ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublic'' you can get through most of the game with a balanced JackOfAllTrades build that focuses on social skills and nifty force powers. This grows more and more unwieldy as the game progresses, until the final boss is all but [[{{Unwinnable}} impossible]] if you aren't a highly specialized combat machine.