- Whether you feel like your progress allows you to maintain your status as most powerful character in your environment (Diablo 3) or allows you to continue fighting to keep yourself from falling too far behind (late Diablo 2).
- Whether everyone progresses in the same way (Zelda) or whether everyone progresses differently (Path of Exile).
- Whether the player has the ability to completely ruin their own character's chance of survival (Diablo 2) or whether their choices amount to play-style preference and power is always kept at a level that keeps the game playable (Deus Ex: Human Revolution).
- Whether the player progresses by reaching milestones (Zelda) or whether the player progresses by building experience from any source available (Diablo 3).
- Whether your player is the sum of their gear (Diablo 3) or whether your character is the sum of their stats and skills (Diablo 2).
- Whether you are forced to live with every choice you make forever (Diablo 2 before 1.13) or whether you can respec or explore other paths that you haven't invested in from the start (Diablo 3).
- What happens with you level up?
And even between the alternatives outlined in those points, there's a load of middle-ground that's been explored in varying amounts by the game industry.
In some games, respec takes time and effort (Skyrim) but in others it might be instant and free (Diablo 3). Diablo 2 leaves you in full control of your character progression but some quest rewards are permanent additions to your stats or resistances.
So with all those possible directions, what things are pretty much tried and true?
One thing that is seen time and time again is the gentle encouragement to progress down some kind of path or story by making repetition of tasks increasingly unrewarding. Grinding the same area forever is a good strategy in nearly no game. Certainly none I can think of.
Another thing that's often seen is a situation where an enemy that once caused you significant difficulty becomes something of a "cannon fodder" enemy. This gives you a subtle reminder that you are indeed much more powerful than you were even though your daily challenges feel equally difficult. It's a nice, subtle way of reminding the player that they've progressed despite never really being "out of the woods".
Character level is usually what lets you know how far you should have progressed in the game. Dying one hit from everything you encounter? You rushed. Killing everything easily and gaining barely any experience? Move to the next area. It works well and despite the restriction it puts on players, it usually doesn't feel too restrictive. Maybe because you still feel like you can go anywhere you want it's just that the place they want you to be is the place that feels best for you right now. Contrived? So what; it's fun. Skyrim and similar games do things differently with a "world that levels with you" meaning you can be anywhere at any time and the balance of the game will always feel more or less "right".
Finally, what happens when you level up and what does character progression look like? Usually you see:
Finally, what happens when you level up and what does character progression look like? Usually you see:
- The increase in level being its own reward (e.g., unlocking the use of higher quality gear)
- The ability to increase the value of your player's stats
- The ability to unlock new skills or spells, both passive and active
Interesting combinations of these rewards have emerged as RPGs have evolved as a genre. It's also interesting to see different companies' ideas of where they went right and wrong. Blizzard, for example, gave the players of Diablo 2 partial control over their stats (by influencing most stats with 4 key stats) and full control over their skills. A level-up earned the player 5 stat points to allocate and one skill point to allocate. Different player classes benefited from different stats to varying degrees (e.g., +1 to vitality grants a Barbarian 4 life but grants the Sorceress 2 life). Diablo 3, on the other hand, too a big step backwards and a weird step backwards at that: stats were automatically allocated. It's not the automation that makes it weird, it's the fact that stats are no longer something that you care about. They happen entirely behind the scenes. You don't even need to really understand them because the game simply tells you when a piece of gear is better, in what way and by what percentage. They might as well remove the stat system altogether because you can only look at it; you can't interact with it in any meaningful way. Stats became part of the "behind the scenes" workings of Diablo 3 but they still left them on the surface. I'm still not quite sure why.
So what will Asciilands do?
Firstly, let me reassure you by saying that we have a very strong awareness and respect for how badly you can damage a game by implementing character progression poorly. We know that "poorly" doesn't mean something as simple as "difficult", "easy" or "weird" but that "poorly" is a feeling that you get from interacting the the progression system that usually can't be described in only a few words.
This what what we have so far:
When you level up in Asciilands, you increase your character's level and receive a number of "boons". These boons could be any of the following:
This what what we have so far:
When you level up in Asciilands, you increase your character's level and receive a number of "boons". These boons could be any of the following:
- A boon to stats which increases a few stats by some amount (e.g., +5 to strength, +5 to force and +8 to agility)
- A boon to a skill which will allow you to further develop existing skills or learn new skills (both passive and active)
- A boon to technique which allows the player to tweak which stats contribute to which kinds of attack (e.g., the opportunity to increase the extent to which finesse increases the critical hit chance of a sword attack). Technique boons will probably be late-game fine-tuning stuff and somewhat esoteric but I'm interested to see if people catch onto the whole "technique" system or if they tend to just let it work in the background
- Miscellaneous boons that might sharply increase some stats the cost of a mild decrease of some others or the ability to drop your character level in order to work towards a respec
There are many things we can do with this boon system since we're not tied to a format as rigid as "reward the player with 5 stats and 1 skill"; we're simply going afford the player the ability to change their character in various ways.
Here's a bit more on the actual implementation:
As it stands, leveling up gives you the ability to choose 2 boons from a list that grows by 5 each time you level up (with a maximum of 10). These boons will always be a mixture of different kinds of boons and the boons will be based on the way you play during the level that you've just completed. The technique system has been extended to record the frequency of use of each stat. When the level-up rolls around, the leveling system looks at what stats have been used and makes a series of "decisions". Different kinds of logic are built and and more will be added but at the moment it kind of thinks like this:
- The most frequently used stats will be clumped together in a stat boon and medium increases will be offered. This allows further specialisation in the player's current play style.
- The least used stats are potentially being used for a new style of play that the character is trying to break into. Offer a large upgrade to those stats.
- Offer random increases to random stats that fall in between.
- Offer the larges increases to randomly picked stats in exchange for a decrease to unused stats. This will usually be useless but every now and then it will be a golden opportunity to get ahead in exchange for something you don't use anyway.
- Offer skills that make use of the most frequently used stats.
- Offer skills that build on existing skills.
- Offer strong skill upgrade in exchange for unused skills or stats.
etc, etc. Basically: offer the player the ability to extend their currently play style, extend an emergent play style or trade unused skills and stats for boons more useful to the player.
Other things will be thrown in with boons such as stronger and more traditional respec opportunities or other weird stuff that we haven't thought of yet. It should also reduce the concept of "point sinks" when you just dump left over stat points in a semi-useful place or use left-over skill points to upgrade something you'll use as a back-up. If you don't want to upgrade your skills, upgrade your stats twice or vice versa.
Saving level-ups will also allow the player to have a larger pool to choose from and increase the chances of their being multiple strategically appropriate options for their character. There might also be NPCs that can tweak pending boons or other bonuses that tweak the number of boons in the boon pool or something like that. Possibilities!
That's basically where the skill, stat and level system are at right now and it's feeling pretty good to interact with. The challenge at the moment is to make a whole lot of skills to test how their relationships will be determined (e.g., how it will know that a huge fireball is the natural progression from a small spurt of fire and not the ability to summon a spider's ghost or whatever).
Even though content building has been continuing, I don't have a lot of new looking material to share and I don't like to finish a blog post without any pictures so I'll show you how the minimap looks in a more realistic kind of map (GrubTown):
Those who have watched the gameplay video might recognise the town and cave location.
