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| Disincentivizing Grinding and/or Incentivizing Variety |
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Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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Hey, So I'm working on a small game mechanically similar to some popular MMO, RuneScape. (My game is not an MMO. It's not even multiplayer.) One of the things about this MMO is grinding. It's a feature I guess, and it's cool in the sense that achieving something shows dedication. If you get 99 agility, you literally spent at least 100-some hours training. That's fine. Furthermore, the XP curve is really harsh--level 33 is halfway to level 40, level 92 (7 million xp) is halfway to level 99 (13 million xp). However, that only works in an online game. For a single-player game, there's no competition so achievements mean less. So taking 100 hours to get 99 agility is dumb since there's no leaderboards or whatever. Leaderboards aren't a solution because it'd be too easy to cheat without offloading the logic to a server, then suddenly it requires online to play, which is... also dumb. And much harder to implement. (I'm trying to finish a game My problem is breaking away from that kind of defeats the point of the game I'm making. It's supposed to be "Little RuneScape" (i.e., it's called Itsy Realm). The solution I've come up with is twofold: first, unlike RuneScape, there will be a lot of interplay between different skills. For example, mining a rock to get an ore will give XP in multiple skills (depending on the type of mining, it could give agility, strength, and obviously mining XP, among other things). This means that the overall XP/HR will be higher (for example, if it's 1:1:8, that means you'll get 10,000 strength XP and 10,000 agility XP for every 80,000 mining XP), while not eliminating a sense of achievement or specific training methods (i.e., training agility explicitly to get more XP/HR). The second part is an (optional) renown system. Basically, the more famous you are in-game, the more XP you get per action. Renown would be awarded for doing complex actions in the game. For example, some skills in RuneScape are a bit odd; there's slayer, which is literally a skill where you're given a slayer task (say, kill 140 greater demons) to get slayer XP so you can kill other monsters with slayer requirements (e.g., abyssal demons require 85 slayer to damage/kill; literally they're just a standard mob gated behind an arbitrary skill requirement). I'd eliminate the slayer skill and integrate it into renown in Itsy Realm. Other things that could increase renown would be quests, fighting bosses and minibosses, exploring, completing dungeons, helping NPCs, etc. Basically, complex gameplay actions would award renown which would help boost the simple gameplay actions (e.g., skilling). For example, say early complex actions in the game award 1-10 renown with an average of 5. Assuming a curve that looks something like this: 1.1x 518 1.2x 1,054 1.3x 1,608 1.4x 2,183 1.5x 2,777 1.6x 3,393 1.7x 4,030 1.8x 4,690 1.9x 5,373 2.0x 6,080 You'd need to complete about 100 complex tasks to boost XP by 10%. (Numbers are examples and subject to extensive tweaking when after playtesting). Complex actions, such as the aforementioned 'slayer tasks', would offer some extra buffs outside of renown to incentivize doing them over simple actions. For example, doing a slayer task could give a "loot chest" or some other reward afterwards. This means complex actions are both immediately useful and useful over time. I say the renown system is optional because there would be a "hardcore" mode where renown doesn't affect XP. A third, potential part is providing a small XP boost for taking breaks. It would mean someone wouldn't be punished for not playing. So basically, if you don't play the game for say a week, you'd get 7 hours of double XP. (Something like that). This is also necessary to prevent a gameplay mechanic I'm going to add later from being unfair to the player. (It involves in-world pseudo-players getting stronger over time; think of Animal Crossing, if the villagers had actual goals). tl;dr: Making game with harsh XP curve without traditional grinding. Solutions: 1. Have simple actions in game award XP in multiple areas to eliminate grinding specific areas Any other ideas? --- |
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bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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All I can say is that what little I did in RuneScape I mostly did because I was chasing some goal. The best ones were stories. The most motivation you could milk from me was "save the girl!" Those kinds of things are IMO the most motivational for the player. The stats are needed to play the game, but IMO it's best when the game is possible for a "pro" player to succeed without grinding, but grinding is a way for less skilled players to gain an edge on the AI (i.e., spend a few hours or days grinding and you can overcome the next boss with little or no fuss, whereas if you rush to the boss you better know its weaknesses intimately and maybe even get a bit lucky or you'll get destroyed). Grinding isn't fun. I mostly played RuneScape between college classes back in 2006 or 2007. I might have played a few times at home once I started making progress and probably following walkthroughs, but it wasn't something that I cared intimately about. IMO, the best strategy for an RPG style game is to use the story to drive the player. Grinding is grinding. They can spend 100 hours pressing buttons to increment counters in your game, or they can read a book or go outside and learn a real skill and do something with their lives. Grinding is a wasted life. A story, on the other hand, is intellectual. I think that's more healthy. That's my 2 cents anyway. I'm not sure the "renown" idea is solving any problems, but perhaps I just don't understand it. It sounds more or less like some kind of multiplier based on experience. The more experience you gain the easier it is to get experience? That seems to run contrary to RPG mechanics. Generally, it's more difficult as you advance and you may need to grind a little more the further you advance to beat the next boss, etc. Multiplayer has its own motivations which can sometimes encourage a longer play than single player. I can't estimate how many hours I poured into RuneScape, but probably a silly amount for the quality of the game (and the licensing model; it's all probably lost now). A single player campaign cannot and should not be so ruthless. I think you should figure out approximately how long you think it should take to realistically complete your game, or at least achieve all the things, or at least complete the main quest line. If you pick some stupid number then you better expect to deliver on some seriously high quality content. I think I spent approximately 600 hours on Skyrim. I never tracked how much time I spent on FFVII, but I know I overflowed the PlayStation save file counter in just one play through by a long shot. In any case, those are both very detailed games with intricate stories, loads of content, very high quality. Unless you have help or are planning to work for 20 years on the project before release you may want to aim significantly lower (and if successful and you gain a significant revenue stream from a first version you can expand upon it later). I think I'm usually lucky to get 10-20 hours of enjoyment from most indie games. There are probably exceptions, but they're rare. An RPG kind of is expected to run long, but it really needs to have the content there to support it. A grind fest without adequate story/quest ideas will likely fail. People know when they're grinding, and generally they despise it, but they are willing to tolerate it insofar as you reward them accordingly. Online fame is one motivator, but honestly normal people don't have the time to really grind in a game like RuneScape to achieve high levels. For a singe player game, fame won't do much as you said. So you better be rewarding the player with story ideas IMO. You can mix in some challenging bosses, advancing weaponry/magic/skills/whatever too. But if it's too frustrating then players will not want to play. Especially if the only reward is the gameplay itself. At least if there's a story, a damsel in distress, then players have some goal to chase that they can relate to. -- acc.js | al4anim - Allegro 4 Animation library | Allegro 5 VS/NuGet Guide | Allegro.cc Mockup | Allegro.cc <code> Tag | Allegro 4 Timer Example (w/ Semaphores) | Allegro 5 "Winpkg" (MSVC readme) | Bambot | Blog | C++ STL Container Flowchart | Castopulence Software | Check Return Values | Derail? | Is This A Discussion? Flow Chart | Filesystem Hierarchy Standard | Clean Code Talks - Global State and Singletons | How To Use Header Files | GNU/Linux (Debian, Fedora, Gentoo) | rot (rot13, rot47, rotN) | Streaming |
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Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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Thank you! I really want the harsh XP curve to be cosmetic--ideally you'd be able to max in maybe ~50 hours (assuming I implement everything I want) unlike RuneScape where it takes thousands of hours (I don't know the exact amount). The renown system lets you gain XP faster which is atypical but the XP curve is not linear. It's exponential. So you'd end up roughly taking say 30 minutes to level 20, and maybe 45 minutes to level 27 (arbitrary numbers), despite 20 being halfway to 27 (that's literally the case with the XP curve). It's not like you'd level up from 1-20 in 30 minutes with a 1x XP multiplier and 20-40 in 15 with a 2x XP multiplier. Also maxing would be unnecessary to win the game. You should be able to complete the main storyline with tier 30-40 gear which means if I make the max level 50 you'd probably be able to win it in 10-15 hours (level 30 is 13% of 50; so time to level up + time to do quests). --- |
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dthompson
Member #5,749
April 2005
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Heh, funnily enough I'm currently designing a hack-n-slash RPG where grinding is discouraged. I'm doing this by having an alternate model to the usual "higher-levels-need-more-XP". This'd work by setting a hard limit to which the player can gain experience, the value of which depends on how much of the story they've completed up until that point. The closer they get to the limit, the less experience points they receive from battling - so whilst some training between missions is good, grinding actually becomes impossible after a while. Advancing the story will then reward the player with points, but also raise the limit. Whilst this could be frustrating to lesser-skilled players, I'm planning on this game being non-linear, so that if the player finds a mission particularly hard, they can go and raise their level by completing other ones. I'd also recommend taking a look at Undertale, which completely reversed the experience mechanic such that extreme grinding got you the bad ending, whilst complete pacifism got you the good ending. (probably not really what you're after though, haha) ______________________________________________________ |
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l j
Member #10,584
January 2009
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In an MMORPG you'll generally find the holy trifecta of healer/tank/damage dealer or some variation of a support class/high endurance class/high damage class. Then at higher levels of play you might have bait and switch tactics where some tank takes a lot of damage and then retreats and let's another tank switch in or let some ranged class kite or whatever. This way an organized group of players could quickly take down enemies that are far more powerful than them allowing power leveling. If you're going single player none of the above is viable, however you could still have some weaknesses/strengths for enemies that might make some approaches more viable in some situations. Typically an RPG will reward large experience bonuses for slaying a monster that should be much more powerful than you are. A better player should then be able to gain experience points much faster than normal, thus having to grind less for the same result. They'll also might not have to reach the higher levels to accomplish their goals. Some things I can think of are:
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