Hello Community,
Been developing an MMORPG game on paper as a hobby. I try to utilize Facebook to get feedback from my friends but they’re pretty boring and can’t do anything other than like my ideas. So now I’m hoping to gather some information from people who love games so much they actually develop them.
The game I’m designing is a vast departure of “traditional” game development systems. As an MMORPG, power is typically measured by the level of the creature. A level 5 creature is more powerful than a level 3 creature (at least it should be). The traditional way players advance in level is through the accumulation of experience points until they reach a certain amount. Once the amount is reached, they are awarded a level advancement. With it comes additional resources (hp, power, magic etc.). These advancements are supposed to reflect the increasing power of the player that allows them to take on more challenging opponents. My game design is more consistent with the Elder Scrolls skill system. There are no character levels, only levels for things the players can do.
I particularly like this system of advancement and thus why it’s why I’m using it. My initial question is to gather some feedback on how other players and developers feel about this type of Progression. Is it as rewarding as a player level gain? What are your gripes about it as a player, what is good about it, etc.
DragonRealms is a MUD that uses a system like that. It’s incredibly rewarding for your primary skills, and incredibly grindy for secondary and tertiary skills. They never bothered to balance the game so that the minor skills leveled at a pace commensurate with their usefulness.
Roleplay-wise, it led to my character being a rather good reflection of how I played it. I played a utility character who had some combat skills, and it showed. My non-combat skills were far beyond my combat, and I’d end up hunting way, way below other people of my level. Mainly because I didn’t hunt nearly as much as do other things, such as socializing, practicing magic, and teaching.
I think most RPG developers choose a traditional MMO-type system because it’s so much easier to design and balance, and they aren’t actually interested in roleplay at all, despite the name of the genre they’ve chosen.
Unlike most of my peers, I’m sick of pointless number gain. I don’t really enjoy losing to things bigger than me simply because they’ve got higher numbers. It’s actually more fun at this point to be massively overpowered and wipe everything out in a single blow than to grind and work on getting ‘better’ to defeat them.
But more satisfying than that is to figure out how to defeat something with skill, and do that a few times, and move on to something else. Once I’ve figured out that ice wolves really don’t handle fire well, I don’t want to kill 500 more of them.
it does seem a little more natural to me. i’ve thought about ways to do things where for instance, the more you walk and run the better you get at it and the longer you can do it, every time you swing a sword your arm muscles increase etc. thinking about how you would “level up” these different characteristics in real life.
@wccrawford- I think you nailed it when you said “most RPG developers choose a traditional MMO-type system because it’s so much easier…”
As I’ve thought about how I want something to work I find that reaching the result I want would require a great deal of creative solutions and lots of research. My advantage is that I don’t intend this game to be developed, so I don’t have a time table or pressure to crank out something that isn’t acceptable to my overall vision.
As players, we typically need some sort of reward for the amount of time and success we’ve completed. Diablo III has the problem of lacking rewards for the amount of time invested. I’m far from a casual player of games but don’t nearly have the attention span I used to sit on a game for more than 2 hours at a time, there’s no reward for playing a game like DIII. As far as player progression goes, they’ve essentially given players another 100 levels to obtain. The reward for achieving each Paragon Level is not worth the amount of time and success I’m investing into the game (I don’t mention gear as a reward because their itemization is so random that it’s all useless anyway). As a developer, achieving levels is a way to reward players. If gaining levels is too easy, the reward, no matter how powerful, will lose its appeal (and usually creates such a large power gap between players of varying time investments). If gaining levels is too difficult, no matter how powerful, players will lose interest and quit playing altogether (my feelings of Marvel Heroes, but that might be because there’s limited content).
Being that this game is intended to be a strong RPG, I could be worrying too much about the combat aspects as too important.
Computer role-playing games take all aspects of their system from pen-and-paper role paying games, and the same progression and incentive systems have long existed there. You should look at how a few of those pen and paper systems do things to get some more suggestions. Sure, the classic Dungeons and Dragons is the original source of the level and XP approach, but there are so many others. For an excellent purely skills based RPG system look at GURPS, it uses a wonderful skills and advantages/disadvantages points system that is brutally realistic. Advancement is slow but rewarding. Or there are the storyteller games, especially “Vampire the Masquerade” that have a simpler skills system but also incorporate an unusual level-like characteristic “Generation” that is not really earned, but stolen. There are so many others, and some very good free systems online.
I always enjoy the start of a RPG most (paper or computer), when you are weakest and really have to use strategy to win, later on you feel powerful, but the game has lost some feeling, when you can kill most enemies with one arrow and survive most hits without much worry. I think the heart of this is increasing hit points with level/experience gives you too much survive-ability (is that even a word) later on in the game. And its SO unrealistic, in many games you end the game with an order of magnitude or two more hit points than you started, this is silly. You are still a Human (or dwarf or elf or whatever).