Your Character is a Slacker.
I hope these two data points don’t mark a trend.
1. Oblivion makes enemies tougher as you level up. Unfortunately, leveling up doesn’t mean you’re better at combat. You could have leveled up via Speechcraft, which isn’t going to impress the now ultra-buff Orc.
2. Blizzard is sick of players using lower ranks of spells in World of Warcraft. It turns out, in a few cases the spell you learned back at level 40 is better than your shiny new one at level 60. In an upcoming patch, old spells will actually get worse as you level up. They’re doing a similar thing for items that help things like your critical hit chance.
Maintaining the illusion of getting beefier, better, and just plain awesomer has always been a dodgy proposition. You can’t make the game easier. You may even want to make it harder. So you have to throw nastier-seeming baddies in the way, and tease the player with just out of range content, without making it obvious the player’s on a sophisticated treadmill.
Making some numbers go down instead of up seems like a great way to damage this delicate illusion. The numbers getting bigger, the progress bars filling up: sometimes that’s all the player has! Now you’re telling me that when I jump through your hoops and my level number goes up, you’re going to make some of my other numbers go down? Some reward!
Beyond the satisfaction of growing numbers, there’s the hand-wavery behind the whole concept of leveling up. What does it represent? Your guy just got a lot better at stuff. That skill you just learned? Yeah, your guy’s been practicing that when you weren’t looking. Congratulations on killing 100 boars: now you’re faster, stronger, and can shoot fire out of your eyes. In World of Warcraft’s new system, my guy hasn’t been practicing while I’ve been away– he’s been off to the bar for a couple (dozen) drinks, and killed off some of those brain cells he needed for those elementary spells he learned so many dead orcs ago.
Get it together, RPG characters of the world. Hone your monster-killing skills to their finest, and save the atrophy for those of us still living in the real world.
October 31st, 2006 at 8:49 am
Balance seems to always be a pain in this sort of thing, or at least so I’ve gathered from my observations.
It doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard, though. If you want people to play with advanced powers/spells/mojo, it seems like you could probably figure out some basic formula for scaling purposes from the onset. Just graph out how you want the powers to behave against a couple different axes. Strength, effects, recharge, cost, etc. Make sure the baddies counter-attacks hit the preferred intersection, and let alpha and beta testers stats let you know how to adjust that intersection point. (take into account particular gripes, but don’t judge anything on stats or dissenting opinions alone)
Of course, it becomes more difficult when you introduce additional variables, like certain character combinations and whatnot, but I figure every baddie should have at least some detrimental effect upon every character class. That effect can be adjusted as necessary per discovered combinations. Heck, make the baddies slightly dynamic and make themselves slightly increase their resistance to certain things based on the statistics. Of course, you’ll need to make them lose certain strengths in order to maintain some balance, but if done right, it might slow down the usual “Wow! check out this combo! Wait, those assholes nerfed us!” cycle.
thoughts.
-transiit
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:13 am
In RPGs, I love going back to the starting town after I’m a total badass. I like chatting with the NPCs who say things like, “Wow, you sure have grown!” or “Thanks for taking care of those rats in my cellar!” after you’ve defeated the ueber-mega-world-threatening boss. It gives me a sense of nostalgia. Same with going into newbie zones and killing wolves.
Balancing dynamic fights in MMOs could be tough though. Eventually some guild will bring along Speechcraft-specced characters just to lower the average strength!
November 2nd, 2006 at 7:17 pm
Blizzard has been fairly open about their “budgeting”. They have certain targets for DPS by class, and then each item has a budget where each stat bonus on it costs a certain amount. It’s all calculated out from various formulas and, I expect, lots of magic numbers.
This all worked out well to level 60, but their system doesn’t have enough variables. For example, they have +hit gear that gives you, say, +2% chance to hit. Add up enough of this and you have 100% chance to hit, and the only counterbalance is enemy level. Given that enemy level in PvP is going to be the same as your level, how can they give you better PvP gear? You’ve already got 100% chance to hit.
Surprisingly, Blizzard has even demonstrated both the right and wrong way to deal with this in their expansion. Right way: characters now have a “resilience” stat that decreases the chance that an enemy can critically hit them. Wrong way: the bonus from your gear gets reduced the second you level up.