So, there are a lot of developers on the website wanting to make a MMORPG (or MORPG if they're not ambitious enough for the "massively" part). I think one of the most important aspects of any good MMORPG is making character progression feel meaningful and natural.
I get ideas like this a lot because, while I'm not actively developing an MMO or anything like it, I love theorycrafting about what kind of systems an MMO I might develop or just love playing would use.
Basically, one thing I've been brainstorming is how to make the leveling or "character progression" aspect feel meaningful and impactful. More than just hitting a level cap or anything, how to make the act of progressing your character feel like a real accomplishment, not just a means to an end.
With this, I actually thought of a progression system that wasn't level-based at all, but instead was more naturally based around player stats and abilities.
The core of the idea is that players gain character stats by doing certain quest-lines; completing milestones or objectives out in the world; or by defeating powerful bosses in dungeons and raids that would grant players more power to progress to harder and harder content.
The world or the players would not be bound by a level-based system. There wouldn't be any level 1 or 20 zones, only areas that naturally ramped in difficulty and were balanced by what kind of stats players were expected to have to explore that region. While it accomplishes the same thing as a level-based zone, it gives a very different sense of progression.
Instead of players asking themselves, "how long before I hit level x so I can go quest there" players will be thinking more with an exploratory mindset: "Can I defeat those gate keepers yet so I can explore the next area?"
Basically I made myself a simple stat system with Attack Power for melee and physical ranged, Spell Power for magic, as well as Armor and Magic Resist for defensive stats. Health would be static since logically two humans aren't going to be that different in actual HP, like in real life.
Certain quest lines or objectives would grant you point in one of those four stats or maybe a combination of them. Certain solo-killable bosses would give you the same thing, but "raid" bosses which require multiple people to take down would grant everyone a number of every stat so it would be a useful kill for all players involved and not, for example, just good for players who used Attack Power.
I'd also do away with a "class" system and opt more for a natural play-your-way progression system. You'd essentially ask yourself, "Oh, if I do quests for the mages guild, they might teach me some magic and I can get stronger with magic!" and you'd be right.
You'd learn skills by obtaining certain prerequisites, either by having a certain score in a stat or number of stats, after completing certain objectives or a combination of the two, giving a very organic method to your character. Every ability, skill and trait would tell a story of where you've been, what you've done, who you've killed and so on. Doing quests and completing objectives for the mages guild would make you better at casting spells. Enlisting in the military and fighting on the front lines might make you better in melee combat and give you higher defenses. And etc.
Professions could add an additional layer of complexity by giving passive buffs to the user and his party or by being prerequisites themselves as the player wants to learn more skills, such as having a certain rank in blacksmithing to learn a special Hammer technique, just as a random example.
Just a really neat idea that I thought was really awesome and I'd thought I'd share it with you guys. Maybe you think it's a good start, but needs work, but I'll leave that up to you. This is more of a post to share inspiration and ideas that I find really exciting with people who are just as passionate about both playing and developing amazing games for people.
ID:2127407
 Aug 5 2016, 11:35 pm
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Aug 6 2016, 10:55 am
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Zagros5000
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It would be really hard to balance pvp if youre having a static health system with a progression system for attack/range power and skills. A naruto game did a good job on balancing with a static health system but they didnt have much progression aside from learning new skills and some passives that lets you use more skills
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It wouldn't be hard. Armor and Magic Resist.
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What's hard to balance is numbers being crazy high. The lower the values the easier to balance.
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Well, since in my mind, the skills and abilities would be very Diablo-like, meaning they can learn a ton of skills, but only bring a limited number into a combat scenario, I could literally just normalize everyone's stats, which isn't hard to do and have everything scale in proportion to their actual stats. This means that everyone would have the same amount of actual skill points, but their allocations and skill sets will be different.
This means that no one has an inherent advantage in a PvP scenario because I would design PvP to be entirely skill-based. Obviously there would be certain skill-sets which would be OP, such as two abilities which, when separate, are only moderately strong, but when used together are flatly broken, those can be outlawed to be used in the same kit on a case-by-case basis, or just nerf the scalings on the abilities to decrease their overall power to something more tolerable. There are a ton of options you can do to make this kind of system balanced and very fun in a PvP and PvE situation. | |
I always really loved this idea.
Dark Souls sort of does this, where each gear set is specced toward a certain type of resistance, and areas sort of fit a theme. Some areas, enemies do a ton of piercing damage, others do a bunch of blunt or slashing. Depending on which gear set you decide to use, you will have more or less of each of these basic resistances. Then there's areas like Blight Town that focus on poison and fire damage, while the undead burg focuses on bleeding damage and piercing damage. Then the gear also affects your motion. The ability to move quickly can be an asset, but you can also wear heavier gear to soak more damage. The actual character progression is in getting your stats to the point where you can wear certain gear or become strong enough to wield a weapon effectively. Late-game progression is about increasing your main weapons' stats to the point where you can get the biggest damage bonus possible out of your weapon based on stat-scaling. But really, Dark Souls lets you have two rings, a set of gear, two weapon loadouts that you can swap between, five items, and two quivers of arrows/bolts that you can swap between, and a limited number of spells that you can use out of your big list of learned spells (each with limited uses per life). These limitations and the wide array of choices makes loadouts and character development feel less about grinding to get stronger and more about learning the game and attacking it in a creative and satisfying way. Moving from zone to zone in Dark Souls requires actually progressing and beating the content. Each area is linked to the other, and minibosses and actual bosses are the gatekeepers, but there are also hidden ways between areas that let you sort of manipulate the order that you have to tackle by finding/buying keys or finding/opening shortcuts. I'd really like to see an MMO that takes a leaf out of the Dark Souls/Zelda book for how the world is tackled, and respects the player by not making them grind pointless points just so they can keep pace with the numbers game that all previous MMOs have decided to base their model on. In Zelda, content got harder not because the enemies had bigger health pools and couldn't be hit by a level 1 character. In Zelda, content got harder because there were less health drops and the rest gaps between segments got bigger and bigger with more complicated obstacles that you had to traverse. | |
I wanted to respond to this post specifically, because while I personally don't enjoy Dark Souls' gameplay, I have only heard interesting things about the design behind it all. This post was informative in gaining a better understanding of the game without having to play.
I'd chime in but have a bunch of ideas still on the stove. The OP and I seem to have a lot of similar ideas regarding interesting character progression and the like though. I may or may not ever post, but will certainly be paying attention. | |
I wanted to respond to this post specifically, because while I personally don't enjoy Dark Souls' gameplay, I have only heard interesting things about the design behind it all. This post was informative in gaining a better understanding of the game without having to play. I think the underscoring idea behind Dark Souls' gameplay that makes it satisfying for people, is that there is no difficulty slider. The game's difficulty is based the player's skill first, player's equipment loadout second, their ability to use their surroundings third, and their stats last. In MMOs, player skill is important, but no matter how skilled you are, if you aren't geared for a fight you will lose. If you aren't leveled for a fight, you will lose. If you aren't doing the mechanic properly, you will lose. Of course, you can do things in different ways and maybe soak one or two mechanics if you have a really OP healer, but it's not about skill. It's about numbers. Dark Souls' fun comes from the fact that there is no difficulty slider, therefore the game is as difficult or easy as you set it up to be. If you are struggling with the game, it's not because the game is too hard. It's because you as a player chose to use a suboptimal loadout or aren't understanding why you are losing. Admittedly, the feedback as to WHY you are losing is poor, so most players just assume that the devs made the game stupidly difficult for no good reason. In reality, you just aren't really being told: "Hey bro, there's a ring that makes this part of the game a cakewalk. Also, you can't kill skeletons with a bow and arrow, dingus." The thing that I hate about MMOs in particular is that they aren't difficult. They encourage you to tackle content when you are specifically prepared for it. You can't beat the game at level 1. You can't do low-level challenge runs, and content is tiered upward rather than encouraging you to explore outward. Dark Souls and Metroidvanias are sort of the antithesis of that. | |
That's a big thing that's always irritated me about MMORPG design. The caste is divided into people who have the time to grind out bigger numbers and people who don't.
I've always wanted a type of game where in an RPG setting there was a sense of seamless progression, but in PvP, it was 100% skill oriented. A place where it wouldn't matter at all if you'd been playing the same character for 10 years, if someone who'd just made a brand new character challenged you, they could outplay you in a skill-oriented match up. A place where raids weren't about having larger numbers necessarily, it was about playing against the mechanics using your own intelligence and skill with your character to avoid their attacks, deal meaningful damage and defeat them. | |
GW2 allows you to PvP like that.
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I've always wanted a type of game where in an RPG setting there was a sense of seamless progression, but in PvP, it was 100% skill oriented. A place where it wouldn't matter at all if you'd been playing the same character for 10 years, if someone who'd just made a brand new character challenged you, they could outplay you in a skill-oriented match up. While this sounds good, I'm interested in how feasible this actually is and how it would be balanced. It sounds like it'd be difficult emphasizing seamless progression when a fresh character can defeat an aged character. I think the question would arise whether there is merit in spending time on the game if you are essentially the same as the next new guy. @EmpirezTeam: Feel free to elaborate on the core of GW2's combat. | |
Well, my philosophy is that the core of character progression should correlate to PvE while PvP should be a skill-oriented medium where the point of progressing your character is to acquire more skills so you have more choices to bring to the battlefield.
A brand-new character can beat an experienced character in PvP, but the experienced character will have the advantage of having more skills to choose from when entering the battleground, while a new character will have very limited, very generic abilities. While neither one is more powerful than the other, the point of advanced skills is to be more difficult to use, while more rewarding to succeed with. It's a risk-reward system. The essence of "novice" skills would be intended to do easy to use and consistent in performance. Not much room for outplaying your opponent, but is very easy to use and becomes a safe pick. Veteran skills are harder to land or use, might have casting times, slow projectile speeds, longer cooldowns, etc, but might deal more damage, stun their target longer, be a stronger AoE and all other sorts of variations you could think of. A novice would have more success with novice skills while more advanced players could have the practice to use more advanced skills without failing. | |
@EmpirezTeam: Feel free to elaborate on the core of GW2's combat. but in PvP, it was 100% skill oriented. A place where it wouldn't matter at all if you'd been playing the same character for 10 years, if someone who'd just made a brand new character challenged you, they could outplay you in a skill-oriented match up. That's what GW2's structured PvP mode is. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Structured_PvP The only advantages ( if you can even call them advantages ) a player will have over you in sPvP are more rune sets available. So for example, let's say new accounts only have hp boost, crit rate boost, and like, revive people 50% faster rune sets. There are extra rune sets, can't remember exactly what they all are, but for example, "25% to summon a golem upon attacking an enemy ( 120 second cooldown ) rune set. You might have to play a few matches to rack up the points to buy that rune set, but it doesn't offer a significant advantage over people who don't have the golem rune set. It's merely a different play style. Similar to how in League, you don't need to unlock all the champs to reach Challenger, but they are there in case you want to grind the IP to unlock them so you can experience a different play style. So basically you can download the game ( its f2p now ), make a new character, do the tutorial quest, and hop straight into sPvP mode with people who have been playing since launch, and after a week of getting comfortable with any given class, you can stand toe to toe with anyone granted you know what you're doing. You don't have to run around and worry about getting one-shot by some guy who's dealing 500k damage per hit because of gear and stat advantages. | |
And aside from the PvP, I also really like the way they handled questing. So, in WoW, you acquire a quest by walking toward the exclamation mark on your map, talking to the NPC and getting the quest. Then you run far away from said NPC, kill your 10 boars or whatever the NPC wanted you to murder, and then run all the way back to NPC to get your 350 experience.
In GW2, you just explore and the quests just pop up as you're walking around. So you can be running up a hill, and all of a sudden, you'll get a quest pop up over to the right that says something like "Protect this area from the bandits! ( 5 minutes remaining )" and there'll be bandits raiding a specific area and you have to fend them off for 5 minutes. After the 5 minutes, you're automatically rewarded the experience and gold, so there's none of that stupid run back and forth to NPC nonsense. Some of those quests are really cool. There's this one area on the map where centaurs like to raid, and if no players are around when they decide to launch their attack, they can actually overrun that fort and then the only way to get friendly human NPCs to appear in that fort again is by clearing them all out. So sometimes you'll walk by and it'll be nice and quiet with humans in the fort, other times you'll see centaurs standing in there or charging at you if you get too close. Really adds to the immersion of the game to see these inner conflicts happening between NPCs and how they can directly affect parts of the world. Another great thing about quests too is there's no fighting over experience and loot. You know how in some MMORPGs, other people already killing an NPC will ruin it for you? Then you gotta wait till it respawns? Not in GW2. If a rare mob spawns, it doesn't matter if you did 100k damage to it or if you showed up at the last second and did 50 damage, if you were there to contribute, you will get experience, gold and loot for the kill, so there's no angry people, no fighting over kills. The game encourages you to cooperate and work together. Same with reviving. In WoW, people will see you on the ground dead and walk past you. In GW2 you're rewarded for reviving fallen allies, and there are even builds and rune sets designed specifically to help you revive players more efficiently. I remember on launch day, there were so many people in the human starting zone that every quest went by extremely fast, because every quest can be a solo or a team effort. There's this one little cave area where there were like 12 of us running through slaying bandits, and somehow I managed to get downed and a Ranger literally stopped DPSing, did a barrel roll in my direction, and healed me up so I could get back in the game. My jaw was on the floor. After a "ty" and "np", we all ran up to beat the shit out of the bandit boss at the top of the cave, then we all just stampeded to the next area like a herd of angry wildebeest. If you combined the convenience and cooperation-encouraged questing of GW2 with the quest length and sense of significance you'd find in Neverwinter, you'd have a recipe for a really fulfilling leveling experience. GW2 had convenient quests where players would work together, but they were still the generic "kill x" or "gather y". Neverwinter had fun quests ( specifically the ones created by the community ), however these were mostly solo experiences from what I could tell and so the "multiplayer" aspect in "MMO" was kinda nonexistent. | |
Then there's areas like Blight Town that focus on poison and fire damage Ugh i hate blight town :/. I'd really like to see an MMO that takes a leaf out of the Dark Souls/Zelda book for how the world is tackled, and respects the player by not making them grind pointless points just so they can keep pace with the numbers game that all previous MMOs have decided to base their model on. In Zelda, content got harder not because the enemies had bigger health pools and couldn't be hit by a level 1 character. In Zelda, content got harder because there were less health drops and the rest gaps between segments got bigger and bigger with more complicated obstacles that you had to traverse. I <3 loot based rpgs which is actually the opposite of this because you have to farm, and grind gear in order to be effective in a battle. It's the type of system thats not easy to get into and can take a lot of time before you can actually start enjoying the game completely but if you have a lot of time on your hands then its pretty guda. I once played twilight princess fooooor about up until water temple before i stopped playing(Mostly because i would rather play a hot princess named zelda instead of some farm boy named link) and totally not because of lame water based puzzles, and crappy wii remote controls or anything. THOUGH I WONT BE GETTING ANY ZELDA GAME IN THE NEAR FUTURE BECAUSE NINTENDO DECIDES THEY WANT TO RIP THEMSElVES A NEW ONE AND MAKE THE NX A PORTABLE CONSOLE Basically, one thing I've been brainstorming is how to make the leveling or "character progression" aspect feel meaningful and impactful. *Raises Hand* I like the way fallout 4 did their leveling thingy where you when you level up you gain a point and can spend that point for a perk like being able to sweet talk your way into someone's wallet ... or bed for magnolia's case. The world or the players would not be bound by a level-based system. There wouldn't be any level 1 or 20 zones, only areas that naturally ramped in difficulty and were balanced by what kind of stats players were expected to have to explore that region. While it accomplishes the same thing as a level-based zone, it gives a very different sense of progression. That sounds good, but you may run into the problem of players not really knowing where to go like 90% of the time. Fooorrr example the first day i played dank souls i had 0 clue as to where i was supposed to go. First there were skeletons that took 9 damage from my wimpy sword thingy. Then there was place called new londo or something what had these ghost like people who i thought wouldve been friendly to me but instead turned out to be enemies who i couldnt even hit because... their ghosts... Then somehow i ended up in blight town(Really hate that place e.e.)which had these really big fat buggers with clubs that took 15 back stabs to kill. I decided that must not have been right so i went exploring some more and came across a big sleeping dragon on a ledge figured nothing could go wrong if i attack it which i did, and regretted 1 second later when it one shot me. If only it showed enemies levels so i know that a level 10 shouldn't be buggering around in an area for level 45+ players. Can lead to some frustrations ;). The core of the idea is that players gain character stats by doing certain quest-lines; completing milestones or objectives out in the world; or by defeating powerful bosses in dungeons and raids that would grant players more power to progress to harder and harder content. Ever played destiny ;)? I don't blame you if you havent its a really terrible game, but the game does have one particular system that would interest you. So the game is a loot based rpg. Player's damage, and defense all depends on their armor and weapons and not individual stats actually it's just 1 stat called Light (Light level actually). There are 3 types of weapons, and 6 armor pieces. and all of these 9 things have a stat in common called Light a player's light level is the average of all pieces of gear light level. Then there are 3 other stats on the armor pieces called Strength, Discipline, and Intelligence. Strength determines the cooldown on a player's melee energy. Discipline determines the cooldown on a player's grenede energy. Intelligence determines the cooldown on a player's super/ultimate. Only armor have these 3 stats and each individual armor can only have 2 of the 3 max being 2 least being 1, and there there is some numbers. Most of the game is running around killing big dudes with big guns (Or swords in crota's case rip crota will never forget solo cheese) hoping they drop armor or weapons with a higher light than the ones you already have so you can reach max light level. That system has worked wonders for them, and other games like the division is using a similar system (Although for the division the light level is gear score and gear score doesn't actually determine how much damage you can do or how much you can take just basically telling you how good your stuff might be) Maybe what you're looking for is a loot based rpg :3? Dark Souls sort of does this, where each gear set is specced toward a certain type of resistance, and areas sort of fit a theme. Oh man in bloodborne certain bosses are quite hard if you don't have the right resistance armor. I remember my first time fighting rom and she bloody one shot me with her arcane magic. When i used o mighty google i found out the armor i was wearing had crap arcane defense, and i had to wear something more mlg like the white church armor set which have really nice arcane defense but low physical defense. So on my second fight with her i tanked one of her shots :D then her tiny spider dudes one shot me with their plunging attacks which were physical and hit like a cleric beast on steroids. So i mixed it up. TLDR; Google destiny's light system, and loot based rpgs | |
Same with reviving. In WoW, people will see you on the ground dead and walk past you. In GW2 you're rewarded for reviving fallen allies, and there are even builds and rune sets designed specifically to help you revive players more efficiently. I do believe i would do that in any game whether or not i get rewards for reviving people. Sorry for double post :P. | |
Actually, what I was talking about isn't a loot-based system. It's an achievement based system. Basically, when you complete a quest or objective, you don't get a piece of gear (though you might with passive buffs or something) but instead you actually gain stat points based on what kind of quest it was and who it was for.
There's no trying to keep up with gear and constantly swapping out for new gear, it's more along the lines of, "I did quests for these dudes and they gave me more points in Strength! or something like that. I'd end up normalizing it to where someone couldn't do all the objectives in the game and get max in all stats. Instead, with each stat point you gain, it makes gaining further stat points just slightly more difficult. This ends up where if you try going back to older content where you're above, you'll earn much less stats than before, as well as if you're already really high-end. This doubly is effective for making a person's choice in their character meaningful. Once you start down a particular path, it makes it easier and more rewarding to follow that path. So a soldier could do tons of quests as a soldier or warrior and get stats optimal for that archetype of character, but they couldn't go back and run through all of the magic objectives to get magic stats near where their warrior stats were. Even if they ran through all of the quests in the game, they'd have a stat spread that still favored their main "class", but would have plenty of other stats if they wanted to try hybrid builds for fun. | |
Oh :P. Though i still think you should take a look at destiny's light system $100 dollars worth of dlc and they've got a fun system going on. Especially the changes to infusion :P.
This doubly is effective for making a person's choice in their character meaningful. Once you start down a particular path, it makes it easier and more rewarding to follow that path. So a soldier could do tons of quests as a soldier or warrior and get stats optimal for that archetype of character, but they couldn't go back and run through all of the magic objectives to get magic stats near where their warrior stats were. Even if they ran through all of the quests in the game, they'd have a stat spread that still favored their main "class", but would have plenty of other stats if they wanted to try hybrid builds for fun. What if someone wants to try a new build entirely orr change their mind half way through? Does that mean i would have to make a new character QQ, and what about the meta sheeps >:l won't we get any support to quickly and efficiently switch player builds so we can pwn people in pvp with the cheesiest builds. Another question Instead, with each stat point you gain, it makes gaining further stat points just slightly more difficult. How does gaining a stat point become harder when they are rewarded from quests and boozes? Or am i misunderstanding and its more like stats itself has an exp system? And doing quests for fighter's guild would put exp into str and def stats? Or did you just mean that stats wont be given as frequently from quests when your average stats go over a certain point? Im guessing its the latter xD.  | |
Sort of like an XP system where your TOTAL number of stat points is counted toward the scalar. So it becomes slower and slower progression relatively the more TOTAL stat points you would have. Obviously higher-difficulty objectives would grant more stat points, but otherwise, to answer your question, yes, if you wanted a drastically different character, you'd have to make a new character.
Again, it would be a system suited for games that were much more roleplay heavy where players would feel attached to their characters and not so much just think of them like tools. The goal would be an attempt to design a system where there's no such thing as an invalid build path. The point of quests would be to unlock skills that coincide with the stats you gain. Doing quests that give more magic stats? You'll unlock more abilities that scale off of those magic stats. Like I said before, PvP is supposed to be the "level playing field" where everyone shows off their skill. not their numbers. Obviously if you brought items or equipment into the battlefield that gave you passive stat buffs, like +15% additional strength or something, those would be allowed to make a difference, but that's for little more than min-maxing while the bulk of the work is being done by the player themselves, not their gear. | |