Thursday, June 28, 2012

Power Creep or Versatility: The thing that draws us to RPGs is also their core weakness

Most games have RPG elements these days - that is to say, they use some kind of leveling system, or a way in which, as you play, you become more powerful. As you level up and grow more powerful, the enemies you face grow stronger as well, but in the good games, you're not merely on a treadmill of numerical difficulty - the array of powers you have changes your behavior and the enemies will serve to test you with more complex strategies.

This is not always entirely successful. While the world of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (haven't played Skyrim yet, so bear with me) is compelling in its freedom and size, every enemy leveled up with you, regardless of when in the story you were, so it became a totally viable strategy to simply prevent yourself from leveling up and simply deal with simpler, more easily vanquished monsters.

Remember that in typical side-scrolling Mario games, Mario never really gets any more powerful. Sure, you go back to old levels to "farm" up Super Mushrooms and Cape Feathers to prepare yourself, but ultimately the Caped Mario in Donut Plains is no more powerful than Caped Mario in the Valley of Bowser. The only thing that truly changes as you go through one of these games is that the levels get much less forgiving, demanding greater and greater perfection in your timing and reflexes.

WoW is an interesting animal in this regard. While perfect execution of your rotation does require practice, and each expansion makes subtle changes while adding new abilities, for the most part your character behaves the same once all the key abilities are in place. Despite the fact that, say, End Time is a level 85 dungeon demanding iLevel 365 gear, it's actually a lot easier than Magister's Terrace was. Everything does scale in WoW - someone in awesome gear at level 60 is going to be a dark stain on the floor if they try to fight someone with crappy gear at level 85. But - at least in PvE - it's not the numbers that make the fights challenging, it's the encounter designs. Despite everyone's obsession with gear, it's really not the determining factor of how well you do - it's just a barrier to entry.

Diablo 3 is a curious example, because there are aspects of the game I think are great and aspects of it that I hate. Diablo 3 is built on replayability. You only get halfway to the level cap when you beat the game on normal, and the expectation is that you'll then immediately soldier on to Nightmare difficulty, leveling up further and getting more loot. The problem I have with this is that it is truly a treadmill approach to leveling. The levels themselves are randomly generated, which does keep you exploring rather than just walking the path you've learned by heart, but it also means there's very little flow to the levels. You might encounter the toughest enemy in the dungeon just after setting foot inside, and the rest of it could be a cakewalk.

On the other hand, I think that the approach to ability Runes is pretty clever. It's kind of what Glyphs or Talents in WoW would be if Blizzard were to start over from scratch. None of them are inherently stronger than the others, and the fact that you have to choose one Rune for one Ability in a given key-bind (yes, I know you can technically reassign ability to other keys, but I feel this breaks the spirit of the design) means you have a very tough choice to make depending on the fight. The only problem is that the fights (other than actual bosses) are randomized, so despite the potential for a kind of puzzle to figure out the optimal strategy, you'll generally just sit with the same, versatile build and keep corpse-running until the elite spawn is dead.

I love RPGs, mind you, but in an ideal game, I think the plain-old power of your abilities and skills would remain at roughly the same level, but you'd be faced with more complex foes that require new abilities to take them down.

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