Your post reminds me of Kenshi and the fact that I should really get back to the grind. I understand that your interest is more in the nuts and bolts of design, but that's where my mind went.
What are you looking to take from TES's major/minor/misc system? If you're looking to 'break' from class as a unified system, what does that mean for the game world you're building?
Are you looking at having a screen or tab that 'lifts the hood?' For instance, there's a whole tab in Last Epoch dedicated to all of your modifiers, so you can track what your gear does and where your stand in terms of 'crunch' as far as your build goes. Maybe you can implement something similar?
The other game that's worth looking at would be Dwarf Fortress, where everything character is governed by discrete skills, ruled by math. The player has little/no direct control, but the system is probably worth examining in detail from a design standpoint.
I would ask whether the SwordSkill is capped or modified by your Misc/Minor/Major choice as well. TES was mostly about xp gain, with the level you got based on your skills moderating your gamestate.
I find myself wondering if there should be a hard coded 'edge' to your prioritized skills beyond that. Even a flat "10% better if it's a major skill, 10% less if for misc skill" creates a mathematically meaningful choice at character creation, representing the hard edge specialization might give.
The original mechanics aren't much of a standout in terms of interesting complexity. Warrior was just click and wait like watching paint dry. Mage was pretty fun due to good spell variety. Hybrid just didn't work with the skill and stat cap. Almost all skill benefits were linear so of the 700 skill points you had, you almost always wanted a 7x100 maxed skills. Most of the early UO autism manifested in reverse engineering the skill gain code to AFK grind faster, straddling the line between server chunks to double your per hour gain soft cap and exploiting how the RNG for skill gain seemed to use player location as part of the seed and walking in straight in a cardinal direction until you got a "streak". Some of the very early days were spent figuring out which skills added auxillary benefits too I guess. E.g lumberjacking increasing your melee axe damage.
Later updates changed things completely to add a bunch of limit breakers on skill and stat caps and be much more item based with D2-like item properties, and a bunch of complicated hybrid active skills introduced. But I'd fallen off by then so can't really vouch if they were good or balanced. The item grind and the grind for stat cap breakers was just way too much.
Heh, path of exile is pretty old now, but that's definitely been the butt of the PhD joke many a time. You might be thinking of Last Epoch that released this year that is sometimes called PoE lite.
The thing that makes PoE so difficult to get into is how disjointed it is, it's obvious that it is built up from many seasons of unplanned expansions. You get layers and layers of inter connected systems introduced as you progress through the game. But you have no idea what will be coming layer without looking up outside resources, even though it can drastically affect the build choices you might make in the earlier systems. And the currency is an absolute mess, it's all barter with no gold, only different crafting materials that you get in exchange for selling items in specific sometimes quite complex patterns. Again with no in-game info on what combinations sell for what, you've gotta go look up a wiki or have an obsessive autist's memory.
So yeah, it gets complicated, but it's largely from a lack of user friendly implementation and only about half of it is to the benefit of viable build variety.
The best way to play Path of Exile is to look up character builds that let you ignore as many resource cost and other negative mechanics as possible so you can focus on the 500 APM it takes to not get killed in one hit by basic white monsters.
Is that code for "morons get made fun of?" You ever notice only you and Bluestorm get shit around here (apart from shill plants)? You ever stop and think how much you have in common with him?
This is yet another post that should have been made on the rpgcodex or any other, less based forum. Shit like this has been discussed hundreds upon thousands of times by actual autists. Have you even heard of the rpgcodex? You must be one of the many self-ejected snowflakes, cause I can't imagine you lasting even one day with that crowd.
In the end it boils down to what kind of scaling you want. Linear, exponential or something like log.
In a linear system every skill point is worth the same. In an exponential system the later points are more impactful than the earlier points, while in a log system it's opposite. Just look at the graphs of those functions.
Math point would just be *skill (linear), ^skill (exponential) and log(skill). You can then freely add scaling factors (multiply by a constant) to adjust the exact growth you want to have.
Another thing you should consider is your RNG. Do you want a uniform distribution? Or a normal distribution? Think rolling a d6 vs rolling 3d6 and how likely each result is in each case.
Try Tales of Maj'Eyal. It's free or about a fiver on Steam. The first thing you do after making a char is go to the skills screen so you can see how the different points affect the skills. There's stat points (mag, str, etc), talent points, category points and generic points, and they all interact somehow to produce your dmg values and skill effects. Everything in the character sheet has info on mouseover or you can just check the formulae for everything on the wiki.
Playing it yourself to actually see the values pan out would probably require you to get past level 10 or so, when your char feels like less of an empty generic shell and you start amassing some points.
Another +1 for ToME. One of the best games I've ever played, bar none. I have quite a few wins but I've been playing it for like 12 years now. The pre-Steam days were wild.
TOME has such an autistic amount of crunch I love it even though I'll never invest enough effort to truly get an understanding of the system. Which hasn't stopped me from beating the game with several classes.
I haven't played it in a good while but I have 4 figures in hours of playtime over the years. I'm by no means a master of it and never beat it on any difficulty beyond Nightmare, but have plenty of wins on Normal.
Every time I remember it exists, it steals a few hundred hours of my life until I get burnt out or frustrated. Last big frustration point was that I can't get the random drop which unlocks the extra class in the last xpac I bought.
There are open source implementations of both Morrowind and Arx Fatalis. That should be a no bullshit way to figure out their level scaling.
An alternative, if you don't want to get bogged down with formulae, is just to use a curve. It's designer friendly and quick to adjust, which is great for figuring out early development balance. Something like damage and attribute scaling is going to be dependent on your implementation of game systems - DPS for example is determined by attack speed, which'll likely be influenced by animations.
I'd highly suggest looking at RPG systems specifically designed before World of Warcraft.
Regardless of how you feel about WoW, there's no denying that the impact it had created ripple effects that stretched far and wide throughout RPG's and gaming.
MMO's tried to emulate its design in a desperate effort to stay competitive (which arguably had the opposite effect) and even singleplayer games occasionally adopted a few inspired ideas. Pretty sure even D&D 4E's changes were inspired by certain WoW-related trends.
So if you want a wider palette of ideas, you might be better off looking back just a few years. Here's a few examples I could name that have mechanics that might diverge from what you're normally familiar with:
Star Wars Galaxies
(Pre-NGE, before they tried overhauling the gameplay to emulate WoW)
Spiderweb Software
(Specifically their slightly older games, at least in my opinion.)
Mortal Online 2
(Heavily inspired by SWG, with a dash of Bethesda "do thing to improve skill in thing" approach, and a rather unique skillbook related system)
And also look into some tabletop/pen and paper RPG's that aren't based on D&D or D20. A few that I've come across (though have minimal experience with):
Burning Wheel
The Riddle of Steel
Mythras
Guild Wars 1 is probably one of the most active pre-WoW MMOs and has what is likely the most unique class/skill building system there is.
A level cap so low its basically an afterthought, skill points that only exist for specialization purposes, going out into the world to physically learn your spells, a multiclassing system that basically allows for two simultaneous full classes instead of a main/sub like most do, and, as of the 3rd expansion, an entire separate set of characters to build alongside you main to allow yourself to become nearly self-sufficient.
And the ability to still go back and play most of it completely untouched with no sub fee of course.
Heh, I still have to go back and actually finish the final expansion on that thing. I loved what they did in base GW1 for the skills, although the bloat was getting almost too much to manage by the end.
I can understand how they ended up there, needing to make each expansion exciting and fun. But the PvE title skills they kept adding that were obviously OP but way more grind to make viable were too much time investment for the payoff, so I just peaced out.
Also playing PUGs in that game was formative in my understanding that most of the populace are truly too retarded to survive. All that practice did make my monk skills almost superhuman though.
I think the fact that most of the game is soloable, if not all, wipes away most of the normal MMO problems with grind and bloat. You have all the time in the world, thanks to no sub, and you are entirely beholden to your own desires. No "outdated" content because the levels are stuck at 20 forever and no need to git gud to go fast to keep up with impatient retards.
Just do what you want and if you don't care about being slightly more powerful you don't have to, as long as its fun.
But I do agree that some of the titles were ridiculous, probably as a result of the move towards the final expansions big hall thing regarding them (that directly leads into GW2 benefits).
However, players themselves did Legendary Defender of Ascalon entirely for fun and that was worst than any other grind by far and would take most of a year where you couldn't do anything else in the game. Its been nerfed now to be "only" a few months, but it only exists because players did it and that gave the devs the idea that players wanted that I think.
Aye. I was sadly late to the SWG game, only getting a taste of it within the emulation community, but even then I got an excellent impression on just how solidly they designed a lot of things. The camping system, housing, econ, crafting, etc. I'm not kidding when I point at how much inspiration Mortal Online 2 draws from it. Unfortunately, it has some brutally hardcore open world pvp, and not in a remotely forgiving kind of way. (A little too rage inducing for the amount of time I have to spare these days.)
Fucking Smedley, lol. Arguably he bears a fair bit of responsibility for Planetside 2 being such a faint echo of the first game. And then things went even further downhill for SOE.
Also going to split this off in a separate comment, since my comment was already getting a little text-heavy:
Another thought that comes to mind, loosely based on what I was reading about Burning Wheel, is how 7 Days to Die's internal dismemberment system actually works. I'd have to read through the game's XML's again to refresh my memory, but the TLDR of it was that each limb had a different minimum threshold that needed to be matched or exceeded in order to achieve a dismemberment. (Player-side modifiers include the weapon/item class, weapon quality, weapon upgrades, and relevant player skill levels).
I once considered adopting some kind of a core damage formula loosely based on that, but was on the fence given how in many respects, it's still a purely numbers game only with slightly different rules. Plus you end up going down a rabbit hole of trying to overcomplicate other things like bleed-out and trauma mechanics...
I've been looking specifically at skill points and how they work as well as the 'skilling up' process. I always find myself drawn to the RPGs that are about skill points rather than levels
Alternity.
It's that simple. You can find the books in Trove. No system was more completely into the "everything is a skill" philosophy than OG Alternity (1998 edition; keep clear of the 2018 printing).
There are no feats, or abilities, and classes are only really defined by getting a discount on skills. Certain skills have feat-like components but these are only to clarify specific mechanical situations specific to the usage of that particular skill.
I've always thought it's down to personal preference with that sort of thing.
Well this illustrates a difference between computer vs paper systems. "By doing" is inherently MECHANICALLY implementable in a computer based system (although a GM can approximate that by awarding skill improvements; but acts of GMing by fiat are their own discussion).
EVERY computer based system will lean into feats because evaluation of the complexity of achieving a narrative objective is not something a computer can do. It's in the realm of GM fiat.
I do like it when games add onto that with skillbooks systems of some sort. Basically offering different avenues for the player to build up their characters' skills and abilities, and allowing the player to stack or overlap those different approaches as they play.
(IE, chop wood, build small shack, skill improves, explore, eventually discover some home improvement book where you can learn more working knowledge on building, skill improves some more, etc etc)
Aye. I've seen a few games that manage to synergize exploration with the rest of the gameplay in pretty cool and natural ways.
Sadly there's a lot of other games these days that tend to rely on a lot of (fetch) quests to motivate or steer players into exploration. Which then often lead to achievement-styled checklists and "collectathons". Can't remember any specific scenarios I can describe, but I remember this sort of vibe in Darksiders 2, a lot of the Dead Island/Dying Light games, and some of Elder Scrolls Online.
IE, forcing players to follow along a linear path (usually with a dull and meaningless backstory), which often leads to a backlog of incomplete sidequests, which often don't flow intuitively with normal gameplay, and rarely is the reward even worth the level of hassle involved.
I've ranted before about how much I hate Xcom 2's RNG which is meme'd on for how bad it is and I hate on Rimworld as well really
What's the story with XCOM 2 RNG? I didn't notice, though I know the first one was infamous for those 90% shots.
What was super BS RNG was X2 long war. Random infiltration times forcing you to solo and duo missions, which is something that most people never signed up for. That really failed IMO, at least initially. I gave up .
I made a whole thread about it once because I decided to finally have a playthrough of it in my backlog lmao basically the only way to really win it is to be extremely autistic about getting everything setup beforehand. I got to the end game finally after taking my time to properly play through it and I could have maybe cheesed it but I simply could not be arsed.
Agreed. Though I liked the game. Just not as much as EU/EW.
No what pissed me off the most was they knew they had a bullshit RNG but they then tripled the HP on a lot of the bosses and other nonsense like that and like other players It seems like there's one set of maths for the enemy when it comes to shot chance and another set for the player.
Right. In EU/EW, the beefiest enemies had like 14 HP. In X2, they took it to 11. The whole thing demands combos. They overcomplicated it. IMO.
I hate games like that with a passion there's no getting round it, obviously there's going to be some degree of tweaking to account for the fact that you're up against NPCs that are never that amazingly designed. There are devs out there though that take it way too far. They also gave some special aliens extra turns when they could have picked literally anything else and it was so obnoxious. It's a shame because I liked the story, but you could never get me to play that kind of game again though.
I don't wanna say hey XCOM isn't hte game for you, but I do believe it is a game that is at its core risk management. It's somewhat self-tortuous. I don't always play XCOM. But it eases my mind sometimes.
Make sure that early game class decisions affect where the player's character reaches in the late game (statwise). Greatest downfall of western rpg style imo is class consolidation in late game. Half way thru you max out your most-used stat and branch out-which is quite fun and refreshing sometimes- but before the end of the game this has happened several times and despite your original class your character ends up being the same Superman he would have been had he started as a mage, thief, archer, etc
I really like when they decouple skill/class progression from level ups. Like Dragon's Dogma, you have XP and Discipline, and a separate class rank from your main level. Way more interesting than Diablo/Bethesda/Bioware style of streamlining everything into a single level progression. More ways to level up really adds to the depth and makes me want to grind rather than feeling like a chore.
I also like systems where you use XP to buy upgrades, like the Rad Codex games (Kingsvein, Horizon's Gate, Voidspire). You can work on lots of different boosts and upgrades without just one boring level grind.
Your post reminds me of Kenshi and the fact that I should really get back to the grind. I understand that your interest is more in the nuts and bolts of design, but that's where my mind went.
What are you looking to take from TES's major/minor/misc system? If you're looking to 'break' from class as a unified system, what does that mean for the game world you're building?
Are you looking at having a screen or tab that 'lifts the hood?' For instance, there's a whole tab in Last Epoch dedicated to all of your modifiers, so you can track what your gear does and where your stand in terms of 'crunch' as far as your build goes. Maybe you can implement something similar?
The other game that's worth looking at would be Dwarf Fortress, where everything character is governed by discrete skills, ruled by math. The player has little/no direct control, but the system is probably worth examining in detail from a design standpoint.
I would ask whether the SwordSkill is capped or modified by your Misc/Minor/Major choice as well. TES was mostly about xp gain, with the level you got based on your skills moderating your gamestate.
I find myself wondering if there should be a hard coded 'edge' to your prioritized skills beyond that. Even a flat "10% better if it's a major skill, 10% less if for misc skill" creates a mathematically meaningful choice at character creation, representing the hard edge specialization might give.
Just my two cents
In response to your Ultima Online musing.
The original mechanics aren't much of a standout in terms of interesting complexity. Warrior was just click and wait like watching paint dry. Mage was pretty fun due to good spell variety. Hybrid just didn't work with the skill and stat cap. Almost all skill benefits were linear so of the 700 skill points you had, you almost always wanted a 7x100 maxed skills. Most of the early UO autism manifested in reverse engineering the skill gain code to AFK grind faster, straddling the line between server chunks to double your per hour gain soft cap and exploiting how the RNG for skill gain seemed to use player location as part of the seed and walking in straight in a cardinal direction until you got a "streak". Some of the very early days were spent figuring out which skills added auxillary benefits too I guess. E.g lumberjacking increasing your melee axe damage.
Later updates changed things completely to add a bunch of limit breakers on skill and stat caps and be much more item based with D2-like item properties, and a bunch of complicated hybrid active skills introduced. But I'd fallen off by then so can't really vouch if they were good or balanced. The item grind and the grind for stat cap breakers was just way too much.
Heh, path of exile is pretty old now, but that's definitely been the butt of the PhD joke many a time. You might be thinking of Last Epoch that released this year that is sometimes called PoE lite.
The thing that makes PoE so difficult to get into is how disjointed it is, it's obvious that it is built up from many seasons of unplanned expansions. You get layers and layers of inter connected systems introduced as you progress through the game. But you have no idea what will be coming layer without looking up outside resources, even though it can drastically affect the build choices you might make in the earlier systems. And the currency is an absolute mess, it's all barter with no gold, only different crafting materials that you get in exchange for selling items in specific sometimes quite complex patterns. Again with no in-game info on what combinations sell for what, you've gotta go look up a wiki or have an obsessive autist's memory.
So yeah, it gets complicated, but it's largely from a lack of user friendly implementation and only about half of it is to the benefit of viable build variety.
The best way to play Path of Exile is to look up character builds that let you ignore as many resource cost and other negative mechanics as possible so you can focus on the 500 APM it takes to not get killed in one hit by basic white monsters.
Is that code for "morons get made fun of?" You ever notice only you and Bluestorm get shit around here (apart from shill plants)? You ever stop and think how much you have in common with him?
This is yet another post that should have been made on the rpgcodex or any other, less based forum. Shit like this has been discussed hundreds upon thousands of times by actual autists. Have you even heard of the rpgcodex? You must be one of the many self-ejected snowflakes, cause I can't imagine you lasting even one day with that crowd.
Its also full of the same "I'm just so deep and making the most amazing game ever" that every one of these posts are.
In the end it boils down to what kind of scaling you want. Linear, exponential or something like log.
In a linear system every skill point is worth the same. In an exponential system the later points are more impactful than the earlier points, while in a log system it's opposite. Just look at the graphs of those functions.
Math point would just be *skill (linear), ^skill (exponential) and log(skill). You can then freely add scaling factors (multiply by a constant) to adjust the exact growth you want to have.
Another thing you should consider is your RNG. Do you want a uniform distribution? Or a normal distribution? Think rolling a d6 vs rolling 3d6 and how likely each result is in each case.
Try Tales of Maj'Eyal. It's free or about a fiver on Steam. The first thing you do after making a char is go to the skills screen so you can see how the different points affect the skills. There's stat points (mag, str, etc), talent points, category points and generic points, and they all interact somehow to produce your dmg values and skill effects. Everything in the character sheet has info on mouseover or you can just check the formulae for everything on the wiki.
Playing it yourself to actually see the values pan out would probably require you to get past level 10 or so, when your char feels like less of an empty generic shell and you start amassing some points.
Another +1 for ToME. One of the best games I've ever played, bar none. I have quite a few wins but I've been playing it for like 12 years now. The pre-Steam days were wild.
Oh shoot, ToME, what a blast from the past. I gotta go dig that one out again.
TOME has such an autistic amount of crunch I love it even though I'll never invest enough effort to truly get an understanding of the system. Which hasn't stopped me from beating the game with several classes.
I haven't played it in a good while but I have 4 figures in hours of playtime over the years. I'm by no means a master of it and never beat it on any difficulty beyond Nightmare, but have plenty of wins on Normal.
Every time I remember it exists, it steals a few hundred hours of my life until I get burnt out or frustrated. Last big frustration point was that I can't get the random drop which unlocks the extra class in the last xpac I bought.
DDO did a great job translating 3E into 3rd person action RPG mechanics
My personal favorite RPG system which imo has the almost unique distinction of both thoughtful crunch and fun jank: https://classicmarvelforever.com/cms/universal-table.html
Old TSR Marvel Super Heros pnp rpg
There are open source implementations of both Morrowind and Arx Fatalis. That should be a no bullshit way to figure out their level scaling.
An alternative, if you don't want to get bogged down with formulae, is just to use a curve. It's designer friendly and quick to adjust, which is great for figuring out early development balance. Something like damage and attribute scaling is going to be dependent on your implementation of game systems - DPS for example is determined by attack speed, which'll likely be influenced by animations.
I'd highly suggest looking at RPG systems specifically designed before World of Warcraft.
Regardless of how you feel about WoW, there's no denying that the impact it had created ripple effects that stretched far and wide throughout RPG's and gaming. MMO's tried to emulate its design in a desperate effort to stay competitive (which arguably had the opposite effect) and even singleplayer games occasionally adopted a few inspired ideas. Pretty sure even D&D 4E's changes were inspired by certain WoW-related trends.
So if you want a wider palette of ideas, you might be better off looking back just a few years. Here's a few examples I could name that have mechanics that might diverge from what you're normally familiar with:
Star Wars Galaxies (Pre-NGE, before they tried overhauling the gameplay to emulate WoW)
Spiderweb Software (Specifically their slightly older games, at least in my opinion.)
Mortal Online 2 (Heavily inspired by SWG, with a dash of Bethesda "do thing to improve skill in thing" approach, and a rather unique skillbook related system)
And also look into some tabletop/pen and paper RPG's that aren't based on D&D or D20. A few that I've come across (though have minimal experience with): Burning Wheel The Riddle of Steel Mythras
Guild Wars 1 is probably one of the most active pre-WoW MMOs and has what is likely the most unique class/skill building system there is.
A level cap so low its basically an afterthought, skill points that only exist for specialization purposes, going out into the world to physically learn your spells, a multiclassing system that basically allows for two simultaneous full classes instead of a main/sub like most do, and, as of the 3rd expansion, an entire separate set of characters to build alongside you main to allow yourself to become nearly self-sufficient.
And the ability to still go back and play most of it completely untouched with no sub fee of course.
Heh, I still have to go back and actually finish the final expansion on that thing. I loved what they did in base GW1 for the skills, although the bloat was getting almost too much to manage by the end.
I can understand how they ended up there, needing to make each expansion exciting and fun. But the PvE title skills they kept adding that were obviously OP but way more grind to make viable were too much time investment for the payoff, so I just peaced out.
Also playing PUGs in that game was formative in my understanding that most of the populace are truly too retarded to survive. All that practice did make my monk skills almost superhuman though.
I think the fact that most of the game is soloable, if not all, wipes away most of the normal MMO problems with grind and bloat. You have all the time in the world, thanks to no sub, and you are entirely beholden to your own desires. No "outdated" content because the levels are stuck at 20 forever and no need to git gud to go fast to keep up with impatient retards.
Just do what you want and if you don't care about being slightly more powerful you don't have to, as long as its fun.
But I do agree that some of the titles were ridiculous, probably as a result of the move towards the final expansions big hall thing regarding them (that directly leads into GW2 benefits).
However, players themselves did Legendary Defender of Ascalon entirely for fun and that was worst than any other grind by far and would take most of a year where you couldn't do anything else in the game. Its been nerfed now to be "only" a few months, but it only exists because players did it and that gave the devs the idea that players wanted that I think.
Aye. I was sadly late to the SWG game, only getting a taste of it within the emulation community, but even then I got an excellent impression on just how solidly they designed a lot of things. The camping system, housing, econ, crafting, etc. I'm not kidding when I point at how much inspiration Mortal Online 2 draws from it. Unfortunately, it has some brutally hardcore open world pvp, and not in a remotely forgiving kind of way. (A little too rage inducing for the amount of time I have to spare these days.)
Fucking Smedley, lol. Arguably he bears a fair bit of responsibility for Planetside 2 being such a faint echo of the first game. And then things went even further downhill for SOE.
Also going to split this off in a separate comment, since my comment was already getting a little text-heavy:
Another thought that comes to mind, loosely based on what I was reading about Burning Wheel, is how 7 Days to Die's internal dismemberment system actually works. I'd have to read through the game's XML's again to refresh my memory, but the TLDR of it was that each limb had a different minimum threshold that needed to be matched or exceeded in order to achieve a dismemberment. (Player-side modifiers include the weapon/item class, weapon quality, weapon upgrades, and relevant player skill levels).
I once considered adopting some kind of a core damage formula loosely based on that, but was on the fence given how in many respects, it's still a purely numbers game only with slightly different rules. Plus you end up going down a rabbit hole of trying to overcomplicate other things like bleed-out and trauma mechanics...
Alternity.
It's that simple. You can find the books in Trove. No system was more completely into the "everything is a skill" philosophy than OG Alternity (1998 edition; keep clear of the 2018 printing).
There are no feats, or abilities, and classes are only really defined by getting a discount on skills. Certain skills have feat-like components but these are only to clarify specific mechanical situations specific to the usage of that particular skill.
Well this illustrates a difference between computer vs paper systems. "By doing" is inherently MECHANICALLY implementable in a computer based system (although a GM can approximate that by awarding skill improvements; but acts of GMing by fiat are their own discussion).
In a paper system "skills centric" is contrasted with "feats centric". A feat is a prescriptive action your character can take, whereas skills are typically a narrative mechanism. The player states their intent, the gamemaster evaluates the difficulty of that intent, and then a test is performed to see if the character has the skill to overcome the difficulty of achieving their intentions.
EVERY computer based system will lean into feats because evaluation of the complexity of achieving a narrative objective is not something a computer can do. It's in the realm of GM fiat.
I do like it when games add onto that with skillbooks systems of some sort. Basically offering different avenues for the player to build up their characters' skills and abilities, and allowing the player to stack or overlap those different approaches as they play.
(IE, chop wood, build small shack, skill improves, explore, eventually discover some home improvement book where you can learn more working knowledge on building, skill improves some more, etc etc)
Aye. I've seen a few games that manage to synergize exploration with the rest of the gameplay in pretty cool and natural ways.
Sadly there's a lot of other games these days that tend to rely on a lot of (fetch) quests to motivate or steer players into exploration. Which then often lead to achievement-styled checklists and "collectathons". Can't remember any specific scenarios I can describe, but I remember this sort of vibe in Darksiders 2, a lot of the Dead Island/Dying Light games, and some of Elder Scrolls Online.
IE, forcing players to follow along a linear path (usually with a dull and meaningless backstory), which often leads to a backlog of incomplete sidequests, which often don't flow intuitively with normal gameplay, and rarely is the reward even worth the level of hassle involved.
What's the story with XCOM 2 RNG? I didn't notice, though I know the first one was infamous for those 90% shots.
What was super BS RNG was X2 long war. Random infiltration times forcing you to solo and duo missions, which is something that most people never signed up for. That really failed IMO, at least initially. I gave up .
Agreed. Though I liked the game. Just not as much as EU/EW.
Right. In EU/EW, the beefiest enemies had like 14 HP. In X2, they took it to 11. The whole thing demands combos. They overcomplicated it. IMO.
I don't wanna say hey XCOM isn't hte game for you, but I do believe it is a game that is at its core risk management. It's somewhat self-tortuous. I don't always play XCOM. But it eases my mind sometimes.
Make sure that early game class decisions affect where the player's character reaches in the late game (statwise). Greatest downfall of western rpg style imo is class consolidation in late game. Half way thru you max out your most-used stat and branch out-which is quite fun and refreshing sometimes- but before the end of the game this has happened several times and despite your original class your character ends up being the same Superman he would have been had he started as a mage, thief, archer, etc
I really like when they decouple skill/class progression from level ups. Like Dragon's Dogma, you have XP and Discipline, and a separate class rank from your main level. Way more interesting than Diablo/Bethesda/Bioware style of streamlining everything into a single level progression. More ways to level up really adds to the depth and makes me want to grind rather than feeling like a chore.
I also like systems where you use XP to buy upgrades, like the Rad Codex games (Kingsvein, Horizon's Gate, Voidspire). You can work on lots of different boosts and upgrades without just one boring level grind.