Post by Hyper Kinetic on Apr 22, 2011 4:53:22 GMT
I hate the idea of levelling systems.
No, really.
There is no real place for them any more.
Why not?
The basis of the whole levelling system comes from a need to show that you have achieved something. And I am fine with this.
It was necessary in the older days of gaming with limited memory (both RAM and Hard Disk space).
My big problem with it is that it does not really imitate anything that actually works.
When levelling up, you suddenly get an improvement in power and learn something that you did not know before.
This does not actually happen.
You don't suddenly go "OK, I have lived 25 years. I'm gonna take a level in Quantum Mechanics and now I can hit things harder!" and gain knowledge.
I hate it when games have systems whereby you can allocate skills to things that never get used except against maybe a boss.
"I'm an expert Swordsman!"
"...you haven't used a sword since you defeated Grand Master Sensei 5 years ago and you only used a sword then because it had a special skill attached to it..."
"Yeah, but I kept placing skill points there and so I know how to divide MOUNTAINS!"
or, my personal "Favourite"
"OK, I have just gone up a level so I am now going to learn Insanely Powerful Fireball."
"You are aware that you have never used Light Fireball or, indeed, anything else from the Fire tree of skills... right?"
"Yeah, but I only placed a point in that so I could get to Insanely Powerful Fireball."
*10 levels later*
"Sweet, I'm now dealing OVER 9000!"
"Huh... so you are dealing over 9000 damage with your Insanely Powerful Fireball... but, when using the basic single fireball spell you aren't even in double digits?"
Ugh.
That is a bad system.
It does not reward actually learning things. If you do not physically hit things, or at least build your muscles, you can not possibly improve your ability to hit things.
Games like "Mount and Blade" have a good system: If you do a certain action long enough, you improve on it... and it is only ever a minor improvement.
Granted, it still uses the idea of levelling (i.e. "Your Sword Skill has improved to 102") but at least it is a gradual improvement. You aren't suddenly cleaving through entire hordes with one stroke for every level of improvement and there is no great difference between people from one level to the next.
And maybe that's what I am trying to get at.
Potentially, I don't think even that really goes far enough. I'd like to see something that causes you to lose skill, to a limited extent, if you don't use it enough.
Want to become an expert swordsman? That's cool, just remember that you are going to have to use a sword when fighting so that you don't forget some of the more subtle techniques or nuances when using a sword.
One way to do it would be to get players to select base skills and, as they use them, they get to select the different paths that allow them to enhance the base skill.
For example, let's take a basic fire magic.
Start with Basic Fire Knowledge. This allows you to use Fire-based skills. You choose to start with fireball. This allows you to hurl a generic fireball with 700-1000 damage against a single enemy with a 5% splash effect to enemies within 40 units of the initial target.
For each time you use it, you gain additional knowledge of how to manipulate fire energy and so get a 1 damage improvement to the skill.
After a little while, you realise that you are dealing quite substantial amounts of damage to a single opponent but you aren't really doing much to damage the hordes that are overwhelming you and you aren't doing a lot to affect the rest of the battle besides direct damage. You might decide that you want to add additional effects to the attack or alter the properties of the initial fireball, so you select that you want to focus in a slight slow effect and improved splash damage.
So you alter what you are learning: You lose the ability to gain damage after each use, but you start learning how to slow the enemy and increase your splash damage. So now, for every use, you might be increasing your splash damage by 0.1% and you are decreasing the opponent's speed by an additional 0.1%.
After a while, you are dealing something like 1500-1800 damage with 20% splash damage and 15% slow. Pretty good, but your character has gained enough experience with the basic fire to start experimenting with another branch of fire control.
You start trying to enhance their melee weapon with fire. At first, it's only a paltry 100 points of damage but after about 10 minutes of whacking away, you have improved it to maybe 400 points of damage (whilst improving your melee weapon's skill too, I might add). You decide that's enough damage, so time to try to enhance other properties of the enchantment. Again, you are being overwhelmed so you start adding splash damage to it. You also decide to try to branch off to a Heat Shield, additional armour and provides small damage per second to nearby opponents.
You realise that you like this melee element and basically reduce your use of fireballs to near-zero.
After another 30 minutes of gameplay (let's assume that this is quite a significant amount of time in-game), a boss appears, one that you know is a beast in melee. You want to stay as far away as possible so you fire a fireball... only, because you have not used it for so long, your damage level has dropped to 850-1150 and your splash is down to 10% with a 5% slow. Not good... but, because you have previous knowledge of how to use the fireballs (and this boss is particularly tough), after 30 or so uses, you are nearly back to your old power level with the skill.
You realise that you should have have a skill that deals a lot of damage on a single character but also one that deals damage to swarms. You set one of your hotkeys to the ranged spell that deals damage to a wide variety of enemies and another to the fire skill that you are improving upon... one that does not add to the splash damage but rather improves damage on an individual character.
Using one can improve the other, but not by much (say, for every 10 uses of the splash damage cast, it counts as 1 use of the heavy hitter and so you can maintain the limited splash damage on the heavy hitter).
Honestly, it should not be all that hard to implement.
Change the base starting health of things from 2 digit numbers to 4+ digit numbers, and this sort of system becomes really simple and intuitive. As long as you make an upper bound for how deadly attacks are, I see no problem with it. People should not be afraid of big numbers.
In short:
Get rid of levelling systems that dramatically increase the power of skills per point and/or allow you to learn things later on without actually using the prerequisite skills.
We surely can do better than that by now.
EDIT
Sidenote: Since when did game demos get over 100MB? I was just looking at a demo for Demigod and it's almost 600MB!
No, really.
There is no real place for them any more.
Why not?
The basis of the whole levelling system comes from a need to show that you have achieved something. And I am fine with this.
It was necessary in the older days of gaming with limited memory (both RAM and Hard Disk space).
My big problem with it is that it does not really imitate anything that actually works.
When levelling up, you suddenly get an improvement in power and learn something that you did not know before.
This does not actually happen.
You don't suddenly go "OK, I have lived 25 years. I'm gonna take a level in Quantum Mechanics and now I can hit things harder!" and gain knowledge.
I hate it when games have systems whereby you can allocate skills to things that never get used except against maybe a boss.
"I'm an expert Swordsman!"
"...you haven't used a sword since you defeated Grand Master Sensei 5 years ago and you only used a sword then because it had a special skill attached to it..."
"Yeah, but I kept placing skill points there and so I know how to divide MOUNTAINS!"
or, my personal "Favourite"
"OK, I have just gone up a level so I am now going to learn Insanely Powerful Fireball."
"You are aware that you have never used Light Fireball or, indeed, anything else from the Fire tree of skills... right?"
"Yeah, but I only placed a point in that so I could get to Insanely Powerful Fireball."
*10 levels later*
"Sweet, I'm now dealing OVER 9000!"
"Huh... so you are dealing over 9000 damage with your Insanely Powerful Fireball... but, when using the basic single fireball spell you aren't even in double digits?"
Ugh.
That is a bad system.
It does not reward actually learning things. If you do not physically hit things, or at least build your muscles, you can not possibly improve your ability to hit things.
Games like "Mount and Blade" have a good system: If you do a certain action long enough, you improve on it... and it is only ever a minor improvement.
Granted, it still uses the idea of levelling (i.e. "Your Sword Skill has improved to 102") but at least it is a gradual improvement. You aren't suddenly cleaving through entire hordes with one stroke for every level of improvement and there is no great difference between people from one level to the next.
And maybe that's what I am trying to get at.
Potentially, I don't think even that really goes far enough. I'd like to see something that causes you to lose skill, to a limited extent, if you don't use it enough.
Want to become an expert swordsman? That's cool, just remember that you are going to have to use a sword when fighting so that you don't forget some of the more subtle techniques or nuances when using a sword.
One way to do it would be to get players to select base skills and, as they use them, they get to select the different paths that allow them to enhance the base skill.
For example, let's take a basic fire magic.
Start with Basic Fire Knowledge. This allows you to use Fire-based skills. You choose to start with fireball. This allows you to hurl a generic fireball with 700-1000 damage against a single enemy with a 5% splash effect to enemies within 40 units of the initial target.
For each time you use it, you gain additional knowledge of how to manipulate fire energy and so get a 1 damage improvement to the skill.
After a little while, you realise that you are dealing quite substantial amounts of damage to a single opponent but you aren't really doing much to damage the hordes that are overwhelming you and you aren't doing a lot to affect the rest of the battle besides direct damage. You might decide that you want to add additional effects to the attack or alter the properties of the initial fireball, so you select that you want to focus in a slight slow effect and improved splash damage.
So you alter what you are learning: You lose the ability to gain damage after each use, but you start learning how to slow the enemy and increase your splash damage. So now, for every use, you might be increasing your splash damage by 0.1% and you are decreasing the opponent's speed by an additional 0.1%.
After a while, you are dealing something like 1500-1800 damage with 20% splash damage and 15% slow. Pretty good, but your character has gained enough experience with the basic fire to start experimenting with another branch of fire control.
You start trying to enhance their melee weapon with fire. At first, it's only a paltry 100 points of damage but after about 10 minutes of whacking away, you have improved it to maybe 400 points of damage (whilst improving your melee weapon's skill too, I might add). You decide that's enough damage, so time to try to enhance other properties of the enchantment. Again, you are being overwhelmed so you start adding splash damage to it. You also decide to try to branch off to a Heat Shield, additional armour and provides small damage per second to nearby opponents.
You realise that you like this melee element and basically reduce your use of fireballs to near-zero.
After another 30 minutes of gameplay (let's assume that this is quite a significant amount of time in-game), a boss appears, one that you know is a beast in melee. You want to stay as far away as possible so you fire a fireball... only, because you have not used it for so long, your damage level has dropped to 850-1150 and your splash is down to 10% with a 5% slow. Not good... but, because you have previous knowledge of how to use the fireballs (and this boss is particularly tough), after 30 or so uses, you are nearly back to your old power level with the skill.
You realise that you should have have a skill that deals a lot of damage on a single character but also one that deals damage to swarms. You set one of your hotkeys to the ranged spell that deals damage to a wide variety of enemies and another to the fire skill that you are improving upon... one that does not add to the splash damage but rather improves damage on an individual character.
Using one can improve the other, but not by much (say, for every 10 uses of the splash damage cast, it counts as 1 use of the heavy hitter and so you can maintain the limited splash damage on the heavy hitter).
Honestly, it should not be all that hard to implement.
Change the base starting health of things from 2 digit numbers to 4+ digit numbers, and this sort of system becomes really simple and intuitive. As long as you make an upper bound for how deadly attacks are, I see no problem with it. People should not be afraid of big numbers.
In short:
Get rid of levelling systems that dramatically increase the power of skills per point and/or allow you to learn things later on without actually using the prerequisite skills.
We surely can do better than that by now.
EDIT
Sidenote: Since when did game demos get over 100MB? I was just looking at a demo for Demigod and it's almost 600MB!
