Opinion - RPG Mechanics for Scalability

[Silver]

Sinister Design has an interesting editorial on designing RPG mechanics for scalability.

There is a secret known only to RPG developers, a gleaming nugget of knowledge unearthed anew through long struggle by each succeeding generation of would-be Richard Garriotts and Shouzou Kagas. It is, simply: making RPGs is kind of a pain in the ass.

I love making RPGs, but it's true. The RPG is a ramshackle colossus of systems, each one stitched onto the other, and all forced to interact to produce something resembling a cohesive play experience. Exploration, dialogue, combat, character advancement, item usage, inventory management, party management, crafting, stealth...even the most focused of RPGs is guaranteed to have at least three or four of these systems, each with its own attendant design demands and opportunities for bugs to show up.

But forget those design demands for a moment-because the truth is, it's the content demands that are the real killers. An RPG with a play time of less than 20 hours is unacceptable to the market, and ideally, you should aim for 40 hours or more. You need to create so much art, and so much writing, and so many encounters to fill up those hours that even the most basic, old-school, stripped-down RPG can easily take years upon years to make.

A developer with limited resources at her disposal, staring down the barrel of a half-decade development cycle, might be inclined to wonder: "Is there some way that I can design my game's systems to alleviate the burden of producing all that content?"

Well, I have good news! I'm here to tell you that you can: by designing your mechanics for scalability. Before we get into the "how" of it, though, let's set out exactly what we mean by "scalability."

More information.

 

[joxer]

There is a secret known only to RPG developers, a gleaming nugget of knowledge unearthed anew through long struggle by each succeeding generation of would-be Richard Garriotts and Shouzou Kagas. It is, simply: making RPGs is kind of a pain in the ass.

It's neither a secret nor is known only to RPG developers.

Making and marketing nonRPG is super easy, poses no risk and there is no need to fund ruleset(s). Earning crapload of $ on nonRPG is even easier.
Ask Rockstar.

 

[ChienAboyeur]

The article deals with perfect products.

The RPG is a ramshackle colossus of systems, each one stitched onto the other, and all forced to interact to produce something resembling a cohesive play experience. Exploration, dialogue, combat, character advancement, item usage, inventory management, party management, crafting, stealth…even the most focused of RPGs is guaranteed to have at least three or four of these systems, each with its own attendant design demands and opportunities for bugs to show up.

RPGs usually do not show that quality of well roundedness.

Beside, quite a lot of other products have the very same elements with higher demands.

it's the content demands that are the real killers. An RPG with a play time of less than 20 hours is unacceptable to the market, and ideally, you should aim for 40 hours or more. You need to create so much art, and so much writing, and so many encounters to fill up those hours that even the most basic, old-school, stripped-down RPG can easily take years upon years to make.

Years of generic work.

Making and marketing nonRPG is super easy, poses no risk and there is no need to fund ruleset(s). Earning crapload of $ on nonRPG is even easier.
Ask Rockstar.

Poor example. GTAs take years of production. They have the elements mentioned earlier. Except for GTAs, the demand is more heavier. Usually, in a GTA game, the environment is an integral part of the gameplay, players explore it and later, learn how to use to meet gameplay objectives. All this is absent from RPGs.

There is one reason crowdfunded products are quite often ugoigo RPG products. It is because they are easier to do than other stuff.

 

[joxer]

Years? GTA takes years of marketing, I bet on game development they used just a couple of months.

Your years of production resulted in to worst (helicopter) controls ever in a game, boring content caused by repetitivenes, 90% of a game being Need for Speed clone and just selecting music for ingame radio stations.

GTA5 environment is merely a prop, there is nothing to gain from exploring it, it's not Tomb Raider reboot.

Yet, that mediocre product sells like a cure for cancer. Why, it beats me. All I can say about it is that it's not RPG and cannot suggest buying it.

 

[Deleted User]

I'll copy my post from the Codex here.

Kind of disagree with the first bits about goblins and stopped reading (not a diss on the writer, just will go back and read it later).

A scaling system like he describes is not that bad when done properly. For example, Lords of Xulima, a game I'm playing now. It has hard, static stats for each enemy and several "re-skins" of enemies that are tougher. However, the re-skin may add poison damage, or can cause wounds. You may say, big deal. But this is crucial to making combat have new experiences as you go. By adding small details, shifting the pieces with different amounts of enemies and enemy combinations, they can change the strategy in a significant way while only using somewhat subtle changes.

Another thing is, Xulima keeps the lower level enemies around for some encounters as well, but sprinkles them in with tougher monsters. So, while they aren't too much of a problem in most battles, a simple Askary Rider (archer goblin) can whittle away your life a bit more in this encounter because your focus is on the "big guys" who are stronger. The Rider can target your soft back-line casters, for example. Thus the encounter is changed in a subtle but important way.

Also, adding a second enemy of the same type often makes the encounter much more difficult, and you have to devise a different strategy to deal with them. If an enemy type is strong and causes wounds, for example, and now all of a sudden there is a second one in the encounter, the wounds stacking up will be doubled, thus if you don't keep a close eye on that, your front-line characters may even get wounded to the point they can't attack the enemy, or worst-case, they die entirely and you are in an unwinnable situation.

So, these types of scaling systems are not bad at all, they are just largely untapped. A clever developer can use the basic scaling system shown here and get very creative with it, making tons of different encounters by adding different pieces that they have created. Almost like a jigsaw puzzle.

P.S. Ask Celerity about this, I'm sure he knows much more about this stuff than I do. He did design Deepest Dark for Xulima, after all.

 

[ChienAboyeur]

boring content caused by repetitivenes,.

Gameplay is based on repetition. There is no other way.

 

[Jaguar]

To me, I guess this sounds too much like the hated (at least for me) level scaling. If a goblin I fought at level 1 presents the same challenge when I fight him at level 50 (because he leveled up with me), where's the fun in that? Where's the sense of progression? I don't deny that it sounds like a ton of work to make good, customized content - and I guess that is why level scaling was invented...

 

[Deleted User]

To me, I guess this sounds too much like the hated (at least for me) level scaling. If a goblin I fought at level 1 presents the same challenge when I fight him at level 50 (because he leveled up with me), where's the fun in that? Where's the sense of progression? I don't deny that it sounds like a ton of work to make good, customized content - and I guess that is why level scaling was invented…

I'm not a fan of level-scaling, either, but I think you can still "re-skin" enemies and make it interesting. If the new version has some new quirk and presents some new challenge that you have to think about; that's the important part, IMO.

 

[Jaguar]

I'm not a fan of level-scaling, either, but I think you can still "re-skin" enemies and make it interesting. If the new version has some new quirk and presents some new challenge that you have to think about; that's the important part, IMO.

Oh, I definitely agree with that. Maybe I didn't read the article carefully enough, but I thought he was actually criticizing the re-skinning you just described. I thought he was saying you can just increase the stats of the mobs "under the hood." Interesting that he used all JRPGs in his examples. I know you are a big fan of those. I'm not, as I hate the level scaling and random encounters. Xulima was superior in this regard because (a) no scaling and (b) there was a limit in the number of random encounters.

 

[Deleted User]

Oh, I definitely agree with that. Maybe I didn't read the article carefully enough, but I thought he was actually criticizing the re-skinning you just described. I thought he was saying you can just increase the stats of the mobs "under the hood." Interesting that he used all JRPGs in his examples. I know you are a big fan of those. I'm not, as I hate the level scaling and random encounters. Xulima was superior in this regard because (a) no scaling and (b) there was a limit in the number of random encounters.

I like Xulima's random encounters because they tie heavily into the overall resource management in the game, especially on the hardest difficulty. They are also not entirely random as the composition of each one is hand-crafted, and the easier ones are more likely to trigger earlier in the zone, and the harder ones will trigger later (it is based on how many steps you've taken, although there is also random chance within those parameters as well).

I prefer non-level scaled worlds as well, and Xulima is prime for that. Their encounter design and enemy design are excellent as well and would make a great case study for anyone interested in RPG design.

I do love JRPGs but what actually constitutes a JRPG is a different topic for me. If you are talking about Final Fantasy-style JRPGs, not all of them use level scaling. Last Dream, for example, is a modern PC JRPG that does not use hard level-scaling in the traditional way. Older games also had some difficult areas, as seen in Final Fantasy VI, VII, etc., that could be harder than you could handle if you went there early. Also, dungeon-crawler JRPG such as Elminage Gothic do not use level scaling, and there are many other examples of these types of RPGs that come from Japanese developers that do not use level scaling.