There is a discussion bouncing around between several blogs lately regarding levels and progression in games, specifically MMORPGs. I’ve commented on most of them, but I wanted to write a bit over here as well.
I’m interested in alternate progression tracks in RPGs. The “level” paradigm works, but it seems so… arbitrary. Gain a level, ding, you have 10% more HP and 5% more MP, a bit more strength, dexterity, whatever. We eat it up as gamers, because we like being stronger. We like seeing progress. We like to see bigger numbers as we keep sinking our time into the game. We like that whooshy special effect and shouting “DING!” in Barrens Chat. Still, can there be something better?
Final Fantasy II took a completely different route for progression. (Please forgive some inaccuracies, I played the game years ago.) Some players call it the worst thing in the FF series, some look at it fondly as a min-maxer’s paradise. The heart of it was a philosophy that your characters got better at what they did, and worse at what they neglected to do. There were no experience based “levels” for the characters. If Firion whacked a blob with a dagger, he became more skilled with daggers, gained dexterity, accuracy and perhaps speed. If the blob whacked him with… um… whatever it is blobs use, Firion would take damage, and possibly gain defense and a higher max HP. (If he dodged the blob attack, he would gain dodge rating, and maybe agility and speed.) The characters seemed to gain stats at different rates. Guy gained HP much easier than the others, Firion gained speed easier, Maria gained magic easier, and the rotating cast for the fourth party slot did their own things.
On the surface of it, it’s a great system. It makes simple sense; characters get better at what they spend time doing. In practice, it was abusable. Players (myself included) would find low level enemies and kill all but one, then proceed to have the characters beat the stuffing out of each other, manipulating the advancement mechanics. It turned out that the fastest way to increase pretty much anything was to find a controlled environment like that and let your characters spar. (Final Fantasy Tactics had a similar effect; leveling up new recruits was often easier in very low level arenas, letting higher level characters keep the enemies at bay while the low level characters beat each other up with a healer nearby.) It was possible to have near-invincible players just by fiddling around for hours in the starting area. Yes, it was stupidly grindy, but the point is, players could abuse the system and destroy any careful pacing the designers might have put in the game.
I really like that sort of freedom. It would take longer to abuse the system than to just go ahead and play the game as intended. It’s not like that “abuse” was really a cheat, or a shortcut. It was just an unintended consequence of the way things worked. There’s a similar thing happening in Valkyrie Profile 2 (that I’m testing). Certain characters leave the party at certain points in the story, but they leave behind items. If they are at high levels, the items left behind are unique and astoundingly powerful. It just takes a long time to grind them to those levels. It would take less time to just play the game, assuming a modicum of skill. (The game isn’t exactly noob friendly, but neither is it insanely hardcore.) Final Fantasy X has optional super weapons for each character, but it takes a stupid amount of time, skill and frustration to get them all. (Stupid friggin’ butterflies, idiotic lightning, grumble grumble.)
I really like these systems, because they give players options. The completionist or min-maxer can go nuts and be rewarded for their effort. It’s often more effort than just playing as designed, but so what? That’s the player’s choice. Yes, the game balance may be thrown out of whack by these things, but again, that’s the player’s choice. Most Final Fantasies allow players to grind to near-omnipotent levels in the endgame. (Some players say they demand it, considering some of the bosses, which does lean to bad design, but that’s another topic.) Players can just play through the story and have a challenging but possible end boss, some grind for hours and blow the boss away. (Knights of the Round, anyone?) I like this; it gives players choices. Sure, it means some won’t play the game as a “purist” might, but it ultimately widens the player base and allows for different flavors of fun.
The trick is to make these optional routes interesting and powerful without completely breaking the game. Chrono Cross had an interesting mechanic where your party had a “star level” that determined character strength, determined purely by where you were in the plot (beating certain bosses and minibosses earned you stars). Characters could gain a few extra HP or other attribute points within a “star level”, and grind for as many loot drops as they would like, but the plot essentially determined your core strength. It made pacing tighter, and allowed for very fine tuning of difficulty. It also meant there were no experience points or character levels, and new recruits weren’t left behind. They automatically “grew” to the party level when recruited. They also grew even if they weren’t active characters, so you didn’t have to rotate characters to keep them all updated.
So, back to Final Fantasy II. How would a designer tune such a “use it to boost it” and “use it or lose it” system to allow players enough choice to make their party strong… without being so strong that it totally breaks the game experience? It’s a great system in principle, since it is a rough analog of real world exercise and development… but is that really the way we want to go in games that are fictional in the first place? I think that it’s worth exploring the FFII system to see if it could be refined, and it surprises me a bit that I haven’t seen more of that sort of progression model. I love RPGs, and I’ve played many, but not all of them. There are certainly other models out there, but it does surprise me that I haven’t seen a riff on the FFII system or a twist on the Chrono Cross system. They are different models, but each has a lot to offer beyond just character levels. The FFII model is one that might be especially interesting in an MMO setting, where players could theoretically have combat, crafting, subterfuge/strategy and even political tracks for character progression.
This suggests another, perhaps more important question: Is it possible to take a FFII system, with its potential for abuse, and make it “fair” in an MMO setting? Abusing the game isn’t a big deal in a single player game, since ultimately, it’s just the player “ruining” their own experience if they play outside of the designer’s expectations. In an MMO setting, things that can be abused for PvP shenanigans will be. Would a refinement of the FFII system, a use-based level-less character progression, work in an MMO?
I’m not sure I have the answers, but it’s something I’m thinking about. Maybe I’ll come back to this, but in the meantime, I’m interested in what others have to say on this.
Is it possible to take a FFII system, with its potential for abuse, and make it “fair” in an MMO setting?
I definitely think it’s possible to make it fair. Throw in enough constraints and you can make anything fair. Problem is with each constraint you reduce the ‘fun’. Finding the perfect balance is the tricky part.
How would a designer tune such a “use it to boost it” and “use it or lose it” system to allow players enough choice to make their party strong… without being so strong that it totally breaks the game experience?
Players love feeling like gods. The ability to just walk around an destroy anyone and anything that gets in the way is awesome. The problem is that this feeling only last so long and then you find that the game is no longer challenging and rewarding. I think the answer to not breaking the game experience is to make players stronger through skill and not through leveling and ominous items. This kinda breaks the whole Final Fantasy game design, but I think the ‘grind for more levels and power’ days are flawed and not as popular as they used to be.
Thanks for stopping by, CS! I agree with your assessments. I do wonder if we’ll ever really walk away from the idea of grinding for power. Some people certainly like playing games that are big skill testers, where success is a direct function of skill. WoW (and the FF mindset) banks largely on the idea that investment of time equates to progress, where the actual play skill is pretty rudimentary. It’s a way for less skilled players to get through the game and see the content, without requiring “Devil May Cry”-type controller skills.
I actually like that progression can be done both ways in some games. It’s nice to be able to progress largely because of skill, so I can feel that I’m increasing in my ability. This usually happens in something like Shadow of the Colossus. At the same time, there are plenty of players out there who don’t have the reflexes of a ten year old on speed, so it’s nice to effectively be able to grind out some more levels (or whatever) to level the playing field so that less-skilled players can get through the game. Players can pay in time or in skill, but both get through the content.
The trouble with that is that such a “grind for power” mentality is inherently dangerous in a PvP setting. In a solo game, it’s really no big deal, but as soon as you’re playing against another player, if the “level playing field” is based on, well, level, skill will always triumph. (Putting paper/rock/scissors design aside, anyway.)
Leveling tends to be an equalizer between those with more skill vs. those with more time. Is there a way to make a game system in an MMO that can incorporate both of those metrics to provide a fairer “level” playing field for PvP?
In terms of catering for people with less “skill” at playing a particular game, an easy way to go is with selection of difficulty level by the player. Think back to the days of Doom… my grandmother could probably complete it on the easiest difficulty, most people could on the middle difficulty, decent gamers could complete it on the second hardest difficulty, and the very hardcore could complete it on Nightmare.
Some modern games are taking this a step-up, where the game judges your skill and tailors the difficulty on the fly to suit you (see Left 4 Dead’s AI director).
In terms of making a level playing field between time and skill, I can’t really think of one. For example, say you had one class that required no time investment but was very hard to play, and another class that was easy to play but required a large time investment. Say those 2 classes were equal in power…. well, when your fellow with a lot of skill comes along and invests a lot of time in the latter class, he’s going to be more powerful than a guy of equal skill playing the harder class. So… yeah, seems difficult. But if you figure out I’d be very interested to hear it🙂
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Aye, I figure that there are handles to tweak for single player games. Difficulty levels are a great way to handle it, especially if a game is relatively short, as players can try again at a higher level… or if they can change the difficulty at any time. The idea of the game changing on the fly is cool… how well does it work in practice? If it’s fairly transparent and effective, I can see that as being a great way to go.
I’m still trying to work out how to build a system that can work in an MMO. Handicaps seem so… arbitrary, but that’s one route, especially if it’s known before the PvP match starts. (Like handicaps in Smash Brothers or the like.)
Hmm…
I did a little game document for an MMO idea i had and though my main focus was on the game world/races/magic system i also thought about making a fair non-level grindy advancement system that gave the players the ability to make a unique character.
By doing away with levels that increased your HP or attack power i figured that even the lowliest newbie could kill a veteran player if they were lucky enough. It would also have the effect of making players work together (though obviously those people who prefer to work alone would find the game much harder) as combat with more than one ‘normal’ enemy would most probably result in death. *Just to note, the enemies wouldn’t get more hitpoints than a base level enemy and would instead have better armour/weapons – both of which, along with magic allow the player to ‘level’ up…. though for most armours and weapons any ‘level’ of player would be able to use them once the knowledge of how to use that equipment was learned.
This skill-based levelling system was the core of the user experience whereby ‘what you did was what you were good at’ was the ruling mechanic. However, once you knew one skill that would open up new skills to be learnt. As long as you did those higher ‘level’ skills then the lower ones necessary to unlock those skills would remain available. If the player stopped using that portion of their skill tree then their proficiency with those skills would diminish. This might put some players off but since there were no skill points to assign and a skill could be practised even when you didn’t know how to do it this would allow players to stop their character doing one thing and change their direction of development at any time. *The rate of decay of the skills was quite low and so would take a month or more of real-time to be lost completely.
Skills would range from crafting to combat techniques and players could discover new skills by exploring the world and reading ancient texts etc. allowing them access to skills that perhaps were never on their skill trees (as classes would still make an appearance in some form).
I also had the idea of making crafting (and combat) a minigame event much like that in Fable 2 – allowing players to provide some simple level of skill for duelling with other entities in the world that would not alienate those with vastly slower twitch reflexes but would allow a level of finesse to an otherwise dull mechanic of point and click.
It’s something i’ve thought about in the context of MMOs but i guess it could just as easily be applied to single player games as well – allowing for a sufficiently skilled or clever player to make it through the game without grinding for loot at all.
For other games that use a similar system, check out Final Fantasy Legend 1-3 on Gameboy, Saga Frontier 1-2 on psx, and Romancing Saga: Minstrel’s Song on PS2. They all use a similar system of getting better at what you do.