6 replies to this topic

[Alucard648]

Here is another concept for quest. As in-game time passes, Ganon gets more power. This means monsters all over the quest are getting more HP, deal more damage, having increased speed and Homing Factor, gain more abilities, all the way until they become nigh-invulnerable and uberfast, all-ignoring one-hit-killers. And Link must be really fast to finish this quest before it`s too late. Basically,time limit, but softer. And each death adds time penalty for instant boost to monster strength.
Loonking for opinions.

Edited by Alucard648, 13 June 2024 - 06:32 PM.

[coolgamer012345]

I mean i wouldn't do it for every quest but I think building a quest around this idea could be cool. It would be a soft way to force players to pick a route and make decisions and run with them (e.g. branching paths, choosing from different upgrades, etc.). I think the penalty on death might be annoying though, since the difficulty could very well spiral out of control and you just have to completely restart the quest. I would just not incur any penalty from dying. 

 

I think it would be good if there were visual indicators of the enemies getting stronger over time too besides them just moving faster. Scripted overlays or particle effects could be cool.

 

I also think in such a quest there should be upgrades that are mechanically complicated to use but help you progress faster (e.g. maybe a movement upgrade that requires you to do a special movement combination, sort of like a fighting game thing, but lets you dash or temporarily boost your walking speed or somesuch).

[Alucard648]

I think it would be good if there were visual indicators of the enemies getting stronger over time too besides them just moving faster. Scripted overlays or particle effects could be cool.

For visual approach, I would simply replacing certain enemies with strong variants after specific time threshold is passed, like Red Darknut->Blue Darknut->Mirror Darknut->Splitting Darknut->Death Knight->Instant Death Knight->Spectral Instant Death Knight->Nuclear Instant Death Knight.

[Orithan]

Look up feedback loops in game design. What you're describing creates a positive feedback loop - A gameplay loop which rewards players for doing well at the game with more power. The better the player is, the more time they have to get the gear they need before confronting Ganon or just allowing them to charge straight in and demolish him ASAP before he has time to gain sufficient power. This can be very good for making playing well feel satisfying to the player because they get goodies that make them stronger for it. However, if left unchecked like in this example, it harshly punishes players who struggle by making the game get progressively harder while they make little or no progress to help them deal with the difficulty increases eventually locking them out completely.

This is a problem with many games that reward tools to make the player stronger or letting them keep their current tools exclusively through doing well, to a much lesser extent in most cases. In the Super Mario Bros. games where getting a Game Over actually loses you progress, being good at the game leads you to acclimating an excess of 1-Ups that never get used thus making the possibility of losing progress through a Game Over irrelevant whereas weaker players who cannot get the 1-Ups have to contend with losing progress through Game Overs very frequently because they cannot get additional lives to replace what they lose. Players who are good at older Fire Emblem games are a lot more likely to keep their units than those who struggle with them because units are permanently killed when they die, thus permanently losing a part of their army (unless they reset, which can mean losing upwards of an hour of progress). At worst it can make the game feel inaccessible to anybody who struggles with it like say some Devil May Cry games (I forget which ones) because they won't get enough resources to buy all the good moves and resources to overcome the later challenges.

One way to get around this problem is to introduce an "out" for the weaker players. Newer Fire Emblem games introduce a "Casual Mode" that disables the permadeath, helping weaker players who struggle with keeping their units alive to keep up with the game. Recent FE games also introduce a "rewind" mechanic that lets you rewind a certain number of unit actions to save somebody from death due to a miscalculation you made or due to a string of bad luck which IMO is better for the game's core mechanics than Casual Mode on paper, although its implementation is typically not great. Some Devil May Cry games (I also forget which ones) also lets you spend some resources to "cheat death" so to speak, giving players who struggle a way to just survive the later content.

Another way to deal with this problem is to implement negative feedback loops; elements of a gameplay loop that either gives weaker players a chance to catch up with the game as it gets harder or mechanics that knock players who are getting too strong down a peg or two. The latter should generally be used only to keep players from getting a runaway lead in competitive games like Mario Kart because it can create a sense of invalidating progress but the former is effective at giving players the ability to deal with the nonsense of a game that makes them weaker and weaker the more they struggle. If you're going to make a game that makes players weaker the more they struggle, you should also give them stronger tools to help cope with the increasing difficulty so they won't be totally left behind.

Edited by Orithan, 18 June 2024 - 02:21 AM.

[Alucard648]

ZC has F6 to minimize death count. "F6 boots into file menu" QR is off. Better be safe than sorry. This is why instant-kill hazards are that fearsome.

[Moosh]

It's definitely something that'd depend heavily on your other design. As a speed game, I think this mechanic would actually hurt it long term. Once you've figured out the routing, the game's pretty much solved and the highest level of competition becomes stagnant. The players engaging with the most resistance will be ones who don't know where to go and what to do yet. This is a game with a definitive endpoint for mastery. That's not a bad thing, but you should keep it in mind.

 

You'll also have to put a lot of thought into the routing and progression as you design. Telling the player "okay, now do it again but better" does not on its own make a game replayable. You've gotta give them incentives, things to discover, a feeling of constant improvement. You'll also need to avoid the sort of design snags that create slow and unenjoyable dungeons. Things like filler rooms and backtracking sections can be fine on a first playthrough but agonizing on a third.

 

I also know you're a big puzzle enjoyer and I'll warn you: complex puzzles get absolutely ruined by replays. Once a player knows the solution to one, they will feel an obligation to be able to skip it on repeats. This is easily done with permanent secrets on a single playthrough but unavoidable in a quest like what you're suggesting. You need to pay careful attention to pacing so as not to have anything described as a puzzle turn into one of those slog sections. Not all puzzle types are created equal unfortunately.

[kurt91]

I don't know if I'd go with real-time scaling, but what about something like how Devil Survivor worked?

 

In Devil Survivor, the game takes place over the span of 1 week. You're given a list of locations and which people are at which location. Each person you talk to or major event you see advances the in-game clock by 30 minutes. However, there are more events than there is time, and some events only last for so long. So, if you notice two people having a conversation somewhere and you want to try and get information from them, you'll want to do so immediately because once their conversation is done, they'll each go their separate ways. The main challenge is that the game has multiple endings, and many characters will die depending on what you do or don't do, so you have to pay attention to what's happening and piece things together.

 

However, since the game is a strategy RPG, you can do Free Battles against enemies and it doesn't take up time, allowing for any necessary grinding or learning skills. (Think Final Fantasy Blue Magic. You pick an enemy with the skill you want, pick which character will attempt to learn that skill, and you need that specific character to kill the specific enemy to learn the skill. However, all units can then equip said skill once it's learned.)

 

Similarly, how about a setup like this. Major story events move up the "clock" and slowly bump up enemy strength. However, you can wander around and explore as much as you want without the "clock" advancing. Instead of linear story events, you occasionally have multiple ways to do things. For instance, lets say the game is something like Final Fantasy where there are four elemental crystals. At one point, you can choose to personally guard either the Fire or Water crystal. Whichever one you protect results in a unique boss fight against the enemy sent to destroy that specific crystal. The one you did NOT protect gets destroyed, and it's power is absorbed by the monsters in the game. This means that protecting the Fire crystal will grant some amount of Water-elemental power to the game's enemies, and protecting the Water crystal would grant Fire on the enemies instead.

 

So, this would reasonably mean that your weapons would start to follow a type-based system where your overall arsenal will change in effectiveness depending on your choices. However, to really add replayability, alongside tweaking enemy stats, you could add in occasional enemies that attack with the element that was spread around. What if, instead of giving the player the Candle to uncover secrets by burning things, enemy attacks would do that instead. So, allowing Fire to spread means you could start trying to make enemies uncover secrets for you by tricking them into shooting suspicious things. Or, have Water attacks push you back via jets of water, so you can stand next to a pit and try and get enemies to hit you and shove you across to a new area that you wouldn't have been able to access had you allowed Fire to spread around the world instead.

 

If you want to keep the real-time aspect, then maybe have something like Rings that power up your weapons to negate the enemies' resistances temporarily (like 15 minutes or something), so you can buy something to give yourself a boost, but if you don't hurry, you might end up somewhere dangerous with an arsenal that's not appropriate to fight with and no way to easily brute force your way through.