View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0007750 | Valley 1 | Suggestion | May 11, 2012 1:57 pm | May 11, 2012 5:30 pm | |
| Reporter | Terraziel | Assigned To | |||
| Status | considering | Resolution | open | ||
| Summary | 0007750: Removing Tiers amongst other changes | ||||
| Description | As mentioned elsewhere I having been considering the merits of removing the tiers system as a whole, and I think it can be done with minimal changes to the game, though not minimal effort, indeed whilst planning things out many of my conclusions actually left the spirit of the tier system intact. So to a degree this is actually about removing the tier system for the player not for the underlying game. The basic thrust of the changes are as follows 1)Remove tiers from enemies. 2)Remove tiers from things as displayed to the player. 3)Create a more defined enemy hierarchy. 4)Create a more defined, but loose, spell hierarchy. 5)To tie in with 3 and 4, a new enemy stat, lets call it Armour Class, a flat damage reduction. Alright for some more detail 1) The basic point here is that under normal circumstances a bat is a bat is a bat, they will only ever for the duration of that continent have X health and do Y damage. "normal circumstances" requires some explanation, places outside of normal are essentially limited to "The Deep" and deep caves places where it is specifically supposed to be harder than the norm. 2)As far as the player is concerned tiers do not exist. With the apparent minimisation of tiers this might seem like a strange thing to make a bullet point out of but for example continent progress and the mission structure are remaining largely the same, the difference is that instead of being told explicitly once you hit 200CP that you are in Tier 2 it is entirely implicit, new things just start happening. 3) This one is pretty simple, but to be truly effective requires a number of new enemy types, basically enemies are gated until certain CP is reached and balanced around the point where they appear. To use some current enemies as examples. 0CP (so by default) - Water Esper is unlocked 400CP - Ice Esper is Unlocked 800CP - Blue Amoeba is unlocked These wouldn't be replacements, you would still get water espers even after ice espers unlocked, and neither is this is a replacement for the elite system either which should remain in place (though balanced differently) More details on the balance of this are going to be left to number 5 4) Again Simple but requires more spells. Spells crafting as a whole would remain unchanged, the real difference is the application of the hierarchy it self, lets take the only current spell hierarchy as our example Launch Rock tier 3 is required for Launch Meteor Tier 1, which is balanced as if it were a tier 3 spell In the new system the main difference would be, for flexibility of spell choice, you wouldn't require to have crafted Launch Rock, what you would however require is a Tier 3 Spell Orb (which would along with other rare resources would still be rare mission rewards only acquired once you have reached a certain CP) this prevents you from getting it early whilst allowing people to switch spells midstream. This is basically expanded to All spells, again to arbitrarily apply it to some existent spells as examples. Light Element hierarchy Available by default, Plasma Bolt 1 Requiring resources only Available after 300CP, Energy Orb 1 Requiring resources only Available after 700CP, Energy Slice 1 An important thing here is that spell tiers would still exist. This means that if I get to 300CP and don't want to use Energy Orb (or any other 300CP spell) because I like the behaviour of Plasma Bolt, then I can still just upgrade and get Plasma Bolt 2 (which would be on par with Energy Orb 1), I am not forced into changing spells, nor am I punished for changing to a new one. To follow that, this would mean that spells wouldn't have to be entirely unique with in a element, if at 800CP you gained the ability to create Greater Fireball even if it was for the most part functionally identical to Fireball it would still be of value, assuming that I had NOT been using fireball, then I would be able obtain the ingredients for it a lot quicker than I would the ingredients to upgrade Fireball X times. 5) This is the foundation to the balance of both 3 and 4, this is the reason that you need to increase your spell tier, this is the reason a 400cp enemy is harder than a 0CP enemy if you are using low level spells. A flat damage reduction based on the assigned difficulty of the enemy. Basically to make up some numbers, using the examples above. (this is not taking into account...anything frankly, they are just example numbers) Plasma Bolt 1 - 10 damage per hit Plasma Bolt 2 - 18 damage per hit Energy Orb 1 - 18 damage per hit Energy Slice 1 - 25 Damage per hit 0CP - Water Esper - 100 Health, 0 AC 400CP - Ice Esper - 100 Health, 8 AC 800CP - Blue Amoeba - 100 Health, 15 AC What this means is that Plasma Bolt 1 will last you until 400CP enemies start appearing to which you will do negligible damage and will want to upgrade to either Plasma Bolt 2 or Energy Orb 1, but it also means that once you do all those 0CP enemies will be taking extra damage and going down quicker. Importantly it means that if you hit 800CP your Plasma Bolt 1 would actually be doing no damage at all, you can't just sit and attack for 10 minutes with a crap spell. This means that you get a sense of weakness and strength that is missing somewhat from the current system. This would also apply to elites and to enemies in The Deep and Caverns, all would have higher AC than normal, this would mean that certain depths of cavern would require high level spells for you to accomplish anything. It should be noted that AC is not something I would envision being used specifically to make bosses comparatively harder, a giant skelebot would have 0AC no matter what, enemies unlocked later could have higher AC but not higher than enemies from a similar CP range. ----------------------------- Those are the main real changes that would be required, though not all of them, other things that came to mind are What keeps you from killing the overlord and lieutenants early on? The basic answer to this that it would be populated with high CP enemy types, possibly with some elite early CP's for good measure. To say nothing of the overlord itself having a high AC. What about the various game effects gated by Tiers? My general opinion here is that most of them can simply be switched to CP (enemys firing multiple shots and migration for example), and that some of them can simply be ditched, the unlocks that require a certain tier for example would be unneccesary with the spell hierarchy, I do not need to prevent the acquisition of the resource to gate the spell to a certain point, it would simply be further into the hierarchy. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion | ||||
| related to | 0007748 | considering | How to do tiers in a cool way |
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See my comments on 0007748. Most of the same things apply there. We'd need vastly more spells and vastly more enemies before anything like that would be feasible. I also think that hiding the progression mechanic (CP) from players is a recipe for a lot of frustration. If some activities cause things to get harder but the player doesn't know what those activities are or when they have occurred, then that's really a recipe for some serious frustration and confusion. In terms of when we'd have the needed spell and enemy variety to even really contemplate something like this in a realistic fashion -- to be honest I can't see that being feasible for another 6-12 months unless something really surprises me. What you're basically describing is going from the scope of Metroid to the scope of Final Fantasy in terms of number of player spells and enemy options. That's basically sextupling the number of enemies and spells in my opinion. |
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Whilst I'm not going to argue, as you are the one that has to do the work, I just wonder where the 300 number for enemies comes from? Even assuming that is including variations and elites that is a pretty big number, even at say 10 unique enemies per region that is only like 90 enemies, and I'd say that that is a pretty high number, or rather as a comparison Castlevania games generally have about 110 including bosses and colour changes. |
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Well, the 300 number comes from the fact that we already have about 40-50ish enemies in the game (before we started adding a bunch more this week), and a lot of folks seemed to think we had about 5-10 enemy types. We're getting dinged on literally every review for that. So my goal is to make so that when the player first starts out in the world, there's 5+ unique enemy types per region right from the get-go. That's already a pretty tall order, but when you start adding in gating that gets a lot more complex; certainly the elites helps out on that score in a major way, but then we have the job of also thinking up literally new behaviors or attacks each time, which is something that simply takes a lot of time and effort. And meanwhile we also need new mission types and new spells and so forth, and that stuff doesn't happen overnight. There are two very-mildly conflicting things going on right now: on the one hand, we have to make sure that the variety really feels intense right from the start of the game. And on the other hand, we have to make sure that it increases as the players go onwards so that things always feel fresh. So far elites have been sort of a strategic reserve on that front, where random things pop in that you've never seen before even after 10+ continents if we carry that to its logical conclusion. But making the elites instead be part of the normal progression just means that you're spending less time with each individual enemy type, and the expectation of players becomes that they will constantly be treated to a neverending stream of new enemies with new behaviors as they play. Not in an "every once and a while" sort of thing, but in a "way more frequently than is sustainable" sort of way. That's my fear, anyhow. |
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The biggest thing I took away from this is that not all spell tiers are created equal. I like the concept that even the weakest meteor I could possibly summon is still stronger than the strongest plasma bolt I could possibly summon. Or, at least comparable. Enemies are a different matter, but as far as spells go, it sounds great. Behind the scenes, you'd just need to establish how much more powerful a given spell is than any other spell, and then gate it's materials or unlockability appropriately. So, for example, One cannot obtain meteor until the continent is at tier 3, due to needing rock launch tier 3, and also comet fragments. I would like to see more spells gated by material drops (tied to continent tier) than by prerequisite spells, just because I don't enjoy "wasting" materials on a spell that I am only getting to unlock the other one. I mean, it's an entirely silly thought, as you could say the same thing as, "I don't like having to waste materials on tier 1, 2, and 3 of a spell when I'm only going to be using tier 4," but it's a thought I have nonetheless. It helps that the previous tiers of the spell are unavailable for me to see, and are functionally identical to the later tiers. What I'm trying to say is that I think that some spells shouldn't get very good, no matter how much you pump into them, and other spells shouldn't start out crappy at tier 1. More spells, I mean. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 11, 2012 1:57 pm | Terraziel | New Issue | |
| May 11, 2012 2:00 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Relationship added | related to 0007748 |
| May 11, 2012 2:03 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0024071 | |
| May 11, 2012 2:19 pm | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| May 11, 2012 2:19 pm | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| May 11, 2012 2:54 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0024078 | |
| May 11, 2012 3:15 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0024085 | |
| May 11, 2012 5:30 pm | khadgar | Note Added: 0024101 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - General Idea => Suggestion - General |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - General => Suggestion |
