A new video got posted in the Prototype thread and now a whole bunch of folks are in a tizzy over the sheer volume of concntrated awesomeness that was contained within, myself included. But instead of merely just renewing my interest (and increasing it from "day one!" to "HOLY SHIT LET ME FETCH MY FIRSTBORN CHILD" levels) it actually brought to mind something that's been sitting in the back of my head for a bit: the feasability of games with no traditional limits to player power.
Now limits are fine and dandy in traditional games - traditional RPGs, shooters, anything with multiplayer naturally - but there are some games where limits might only serve to constrain your potential fun, or where the concept of a limit is by its very nature against the ideas promoted by a game. Take Crackdown, for example - by playing and playing and playing, you develop your character further and further, taking them from a peak specimin of modern-day law enforcement to a block-bounding semi-tossing mile-sniping genetically-superior juggernaut - and then it stops. But though your development might, your
hunger for development hasn't - you've gotten a taste of power unlike anything else, and you want more and more and more, just as you'd
gotten more and more and more as you've played until the developer decided to cut you off and taken away that carrot dangling before you.
It's understandable that they had to do such, of course - with the content they'd given players, allowing them unlimited development would have made the end of the game a complete cakewalk or turned any sense of challenge into a matter of simply grinding out additional levels of ability. But what if a developer made a game that
embraced a lack of limitation (save those purely-mechanica caps placed in order to ensure stability), giving your in-game opponents the exact same potential for unstoppable growth as you? By playing well and smart, you'd be able to keep ahead of the competition and widen the gap until you could finally finish them off - but play poorly and you'd fall behind, and only a drastic shift upwards in terms of skill and smarts would be able to save you.
Say, for example, you had a space sim like X3, but instead of just a "simple" industry and manufacturing system, you also had the ability to improve your technological standing as well. Rather than static, pre-set ship and weaponry and equipment designs, things would be in a constant state of motion and development: models would be upgraded, re-released, or outright retired as new ones emerge to take their place, and with them the infrastructure to support such, better computers to handle more data at once and increase your ability to research things, new construction methods and methods of gathering materials, right on down the line, all of it giving you the freedom to develop yourself and your in-game holdings as you want.
Naturally, there are some games that are simply impossible to have without a set of distinct limits - could you imagine planying a baseball game where batters could hit to the moon and catchers could jump to it - but for many others methinks that traditional limits - especially in these days with technology improving the way it is - in many ways are
stifling game potential and player enjoyability. If a game promises me the world, why should I be yanked back by a chain instead of however far gravity reaches?
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I think he means something other than attack and hp numbers getting higher.
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A) Couldn't the fact that you gained power, even if less and less meaningful because of static opposing content, be its own reward? For some people, and some catagories, the fact that you can run faster, can jump farther, can punt things a greater distance is in itself the reward
Isn't it better for a player to stop playing a game because they've finally satisfied that desire for great power as opposed to always wanting more and knowing they'll never get it?
The issue of how developer content factors in is of course quite valid, but relies upon the assumption of static content: if a developer was able to find a way to generate content in-game to constantly give the player some new milestone to reach for (or a way to interact completily with the world like, say, being able to uproot buildings and other architecture and figure out all of their properties regarding their behavior versus the player's own capabilities) that wouldn't be nearly as much an issue.
Each time you hit level 101 (varies depending on the server) you can remort, putting you back at level 1, but with a slightly higher potential. On the PC-RPG server, one player had remorted around five thousand times. He's invulnerable at level 1, can use the best spells, best weapons, best armor at level 1, but can hit just a little bit harder than before.
The developer of PC-RPG is considering adding new abilities for players that reach those ridiculously high remort levels.
You might want to look into the Disgaea series. It's a strategy RPG that allows you to level up WAY beyond what is needed to complete the storyline (even the optional challenge dungeons). All characters can max out at level 9999, with millions of HP, and the game procedurally generates content to challenge these characters in the form of the Item World levels (difficult to explain: Each item has its own multi-level dungeon INSIDE of it, which are randomly generated when you enter).
The problem is, of course, finding a way to generate content like das uberrodent and ensuring it's got that kind of badassedness that can match the player's own.
what
what is this game
this sounds interesting
Glad you asked:
www.pcrpg.org
It's a modification of Tribes. And it's awesome. It's also totally free. Your first remort is always the hardest, it gets much easier after that, and eventually, you ignore players' levels and just ask what their remort level (RL) is.
The site I posted above is for the server I (used to, and sometimes occasionally) play on. There's a download file there that includes everything you need to get started, and then some. It has Starsiege: Tribes, the mod, and various scripts that help out quite a bit when playing the game.
The good:
You can bash enemies with a hammer, and send them flying a kilometer away when you get strong enough. You can track players and tell which direction they are, and how far away. You can teleport around. You can even fly.
The bad:
It's open PvP (sorta, you'll see), and some players can be total douche bags about it. There's rules against griefing, but you'll still run into players that ignore the rules (and get punished, and ignore them again, and get punished again, etc). Word of the wise, do NOT join a house, it flags you for open PvP for every other player in a house.
I think something like this could theoretically work, it's just an issue of the labor that would have to go into a thing. Having a sort of Crackdown thing going on with enemies, I mean. As this rat creature type scaled up with you, there would be certain stats that would change, and with that, a small visual modification to the character. By the time you've reached level a million or whatever, the rats would be buffed out and murderous-looking.
Meanwhile, the game world still has normal, every day rats running around to give the player perspective. I think that last bit is the most important; by keeping a recognizable amount of lower-level creatures around, it keeps the feeling of progression for the player. A big issue I have with Oblivion's system is that, late-game, I go into a cave and find shittons of Super Goblin Warrior Kings or whatever they want to be called, but there isn't a single normal fucking goblin in sight.
Still, like I said, the labor going into such a thing would be gross. Also, having big, hulking, Prototype rats running around still doesn't change the fact that at some point, there'd still be a limit to how powerful they can get without it looking as ridiculous as a normal rat leveling up with you in Oblivion.
sounds interesting
GS had gotten so many remorts it didn't even matter anymore
For instance, imagine a game engine where an entire Universe can be procedurally created if need be. Then, imagine that everything in this game is created out of voxels, and things could be blown up or destroyed and ripped apart down to tiny voxels.
When you start off in this world, you have very little power, you can't really blow up or deform anything but you can still cause damage to your enemies. You also can't really go very far from where you start off without devoting a long time to travel.
As you progress, your power level gets gradually higher until you can destroy small stuff with your powers. You can maybe fly around the continents a little faster too.
Then after a long time of playing, you will find your capable of blowing up entire worlds and maybe star systems and galaxies, etc... whatever. You could travel around worlds doing random quests or just killing civilizations here and there. Or just explore randomly created life.
Most people probably wouldn't play that far, they'd probably only get to a point where they can make huge craters, visit other worlds and stuff like that but it'd be cool if the game had no real limit other than hardware based.
The problem with a game that ramps upward toward unlimited player power relates to what makes a game.
Games, good or bad, are all essentially groups of nested player training exercises. A game mechanic needs you to master a certain skill. Maybe the skill is jumping on a platform and avoiding a pit, or it's aiming and firing accurately while leading your target, or it could be a number of things. When you start out you're unfamiliar and not very skilled. Each time you try to use this skill, either you succeed -- and you remember what you tried as success -- or you fail, and you observe your failure and make a plan to do something different next time. If the game's control system and interface are both good, you will get clear information about whether what you did really was what you intended to do, what mechanisms were at work when the game decided an outcome, and what that outcome actually was.
Different authors have different opinions about what fun is, but as game players we know what isn't fun. When you're trying something and failing, and the game fails to make it clear to you what you're doing wrong, why you're failing, or what you could try differently, you will get frustrated and that's not a lot of fun. When you're trying something and succeeding randomly and failing randomly, with no clear idea of what you can do to improve your success chances, you might conclude you've learned all you can learn and stop trying to improve that game mechanic. That game mechanic isn't so much fun any more. Or if you've mastered a skill and you succeed every time, that game mechanic has nothing new to teach you, so while you remember that skill and can use it on command, that skill alone isn't fun to play with any more.
If you're looking at game as games, not games as collections of artistic assets to be shown to a player, then games will always entertain a human for a bounded, finite amount of time, because we humans have limits built into our natural drives that make us want to play with things and master them. We will achieve burnout or skill mastery eventually because no matter how random or how dynamic-generated a game is, it still offers a finite amount of complexity. We human players will always, without fail, eventually drink our fill of whatever the game is offering and get bored of it.
Unlimited power in a game essentially represents a new type of challenge for the player. "Here is your expanded, final set of skills. Go play!" Eventually no matter how expansive the sandbox you put us in is, we will eventually run out of meaningful and entertaining ways to apply those tools. There will be nothing new to learn -- everything we experience will seem so similar to things we've already explored and gotten bored with -- and we will be done with your game.
Games which support user-created content are about the only exception to that rule, until you realize that each piece of user-created content actually forms another game with its own set of challenges and its own limits.
I'm not totally convinced that answered the question.
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See also: traffic checking in Burnout 4. There was no incentive to avoid traffic anymore. Completely sapped the fun out of the racing mode.
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griefing
griefing is always fun
My idea was a super hero action RPG. As you played, you gained levels, becoming more powerful with more tools to eliminate evil doers. The problem would be that while you could lift up a building and drop it on a bad guy to kill him, you'd be killing loads of innocents in the process as well as destroying city property. While defeating an opponent becomes easier, defeating him without destroying things around you (thereby, losing the mission, points, whatever) becomes more difficult. The real trick would be that the enemies get tougher too. So, sure, you could take down a bad guy by throwing him into a wall, but if you're too strong and throw too hard, you could kill an innocent guy sitting in a cubicle on the other side of that wall.
Could be fun.
edit:
Depending on the scale you want, it could be stupidly fun. "Oops! I just threw that mothership into a planet during the middle of its industrial revolution! I hope they've figured out how to deal with radioactive fallout!"
but traffic checking only happened with small cars, driving the same direction as you..
Wait...
Were you driving on the correct side of the road? In a burnout game??! For SHAME.
Seriously though I liked traffic checking. In the other games in the series you always drove on the wrong side to build and chain boost because there was no real benefit to driving "correctly". With traffic checking there is, which produces more choice about balancing about how you risk and reward.
This is actually a really neat idea. It bypasses the problem of continuing to make bad guy grunts a challenge by introducing the problem of how to safely deal with your crazy infinite powers. And then, the player would always have the chance to just flip out and wipe out a building if he felt like ignoring the pleas of the people. I guess the only issue here would be how to make sure the player doesn't just get annoyed by being told to not play the game that makes the most fun experience, like those GTA missions where you have to deliver a car to a certain area without denting it.
Making it fun would be another matter entirely. Some people think Scribblenaughts is impossible and it seems to me that an action oriented (as opposed to stat oriented) game would be a lot harder to do in this vein than Scribblenaughts .
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And put me in the category of people who really enjoyed traffic checking in Burnout Revenge.
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You'd play a guy with super strength to begin with, standard issue "pick up dude throw him at other dudes" sort of strength, but there'd be other guys with the same level of power as you in the same game world, and the more dudes they kill/arrest and the more quests they complete, the more experience they get to invest in new techniques or just enhanced strength
Eventually you'd end up like the Hulk, leaping into the air hundreds of feet to get around and running on walls and checking buses out of your way without flinching, and the fights you'd have with your super-opponents as the game progressed would get exponentially more destructive and awesome
The last thing you'd unlock would be flight and like, speed or something, so you'd basically be Superman, and then maybe once you'd beaten the main story or whatever you'd unlock more "hero" or "villain" missions that are procedurally generated and maybe they'd constantly spawn more superpowered dudes of a higher power level but who could still level up, so there'd still be awesome superfights (oh by the way there would be no real morality system with meters and shit the game would just remember how badly you destroyed shit in your superhero battle and how many innocents you beat up for no reason and how many bad guys you caught and judge you accordingly and invisibly, no fucking stupid GOOD KARMA MOMENT bullshit)
oh and also the environment would be a huge city that would be very destructable and which would repair itself slowly over time
This is the sort of thing I think about when nothing good is on television
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I think the experience reward system should be a combination of killing difficult guys, along with doing minimal damage. If you're slaughtering every bad guy without any care for bystanders, you'll progress very slowly, or maybe not at all. Same could be done for a villain role really. You need to make the people fear you, but you need people alive to be afraid. I could see it playing out well either way.
Both a hero and a villain would want people to see their deeds done. A villain could destroy a mighty hero without hurting a single person, as a display of his undeniable power. Or a hero could stop a meteor right before it hits the planet, showing how he can save the day when everything seems hopeless.
I think people need to repsect the fine tuning that developers do to a game. Sure they could have kept pushing the stats higher in Crackdown, but instead they deeply thought about them. Thats more important. The 'limits' need to be constrained by the developers.
The longer I stick with this hobbie the more convinced I am, that if developers listen to us, the public, we destroy their games.
That said there shouykd be more games about punching people through planets. Fact.
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Olivaw: I'd play the fuck out of that game on the proviso that you could choose between a Crackdown-esque cyborg, a psionic dude, or a giant freaking robot. Guns and nasty melee combos, telekinesis and mind control, smashing down skyscrapers and then using the skyscraper to smash down another a skyscraper. Class.
PnP RPGs have always been good for the concept of "limitless" power, what with people specifically developing campaigns and rulesets for PCs that just refuse to die and continue to accrue XP at such a rate that the default spells etc. just don't cut it any more.
I couldn't agree with that more.
I think developers should worry more about their own direction than what will sell. The problem, of course, is that it might not sell, and they're in it for the money. This is where the indie scene comes in, and so far, it's proven to be quite a great formula. Big name developers shovel the same shit every year, and indie designers come up with a few quirky ideas that the bigger companies sometimes consider seriously. Just look at Narbacular Drop and Portal.
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Procedural generation somewhat negates this problem, but the problem with procedural generation is that it's quite hard to create a system that doesn't start showing signs of repetition within a reasonable time span. That is to say, that randomized missions with randomized enemies all generated on the fly will always start to show some signs of repetition because they are all born of the same algorithms. The real trick is creating the illusion of infinite fresh content by making your algorithms so complex that the average player will never play the game for long enough to see any repeats.
Game design is always an exercise in controlled freedom. Make the player feel like they can do anything, but really create limits in order to make the game technically feasible, while simultaneously hiding those limits. So taking this into account, let's look at an example of a game that to a player will seem like they have infinite potential, but is still capable of being created.
Let's say you start out as a human sized being on an Earth sized planet. You have powers over earth, wind, fire and water. Initially you are just barely capable of causing a light breeze or a spark of flame. From this stage, the player will progress to being able to throw himself between planets with mighty gusts of wind, to lifting entire oceans and sending them crashing down on your foes, etc. The key is the following three rules;
- Do not make it evident to the player at any point the scope of what they can achieve
- Make the progress to the end of your programmed content slow and measured
- The player character has to start out being absolutely shithouse by anyone's standards, so that every small increase in power seems phenomenal. Somewhat conversely, every power gain needs to be bigger and better visually, aurally, and it just has to plain kill mans better.
These three design tenets work together to give the player the impression that they have unlimited power. So, in a way, yes a game without a visible power limit is entirely possible.Like this:
When you enter an area, cave, dungeon, what-have-you, the enemy levels are fixed. Say you enter Echo Cave at level 2, all the enemies inside are generated at level 3 (or, say, 4 or 5) and they stay that way for the rest of the game, regardless of any further leveling up. But any new cave or dungeon or area you enter reflects your current level.
I think it would in fact work better if the enemies locked in at a HIGHER level than the one you currently were, so you had to leave and grind a bit and then you could come back and destroy them, or maybe you could power through it and feel like an ultimate badass.
Yeah, you could game the system, but no more than I did when I set all my major skills to the spellcasting schools and steamrolled over everybody with my 136 Sneak, and 107 Marksman skills.
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Shove this together while splicing disgaea and ginormo sword, and you have a game I can just play forever until my eyes bleed.
As was said earlier, the main problem is repetition even in procedural content. Not that I mind it, but most people would probably turn pale at my epic item-diving in Disgaea.
Well see, this is the issue.
Oblivion's system is just fine for me. Know why? It was the only way to really pull off "you can do this game in any order you please." By scaling the enemies to the player, they didn't have to manually balance the level of the monsters in each dungeon, they just had to decide how much relatively harder a dungeon was going to be.
However, they probably could have executed it better by not simply upgrading the armor they are wearing, because that started getting a bit silly.