"Powercreep", "Endgame levelling", "Bonus stat rolls" and why it may actually be healthy for PvE

Hey all,

I was picking Taz's brain about ideas to make the economy and PvE build diversity/complexity better, and while I won't go into everything he suggested for that just yet, we got talking about why games like Destiny 2, Guild Wars 2, Diablo 3, WoW, ESO and the like are seemingly so addictive for progression-minded players.

Right now when you hit 40 and are at near BiS for the build you want to play on a civ, you're effectively finished with that civ, and you are doing legendary quests for the sole point of being able to say you've completed them COOP/Solo/in X time. This is all well and good for those of us wanting to put fancy clear videos on youtube, but it doesn't really incentivize the average player to keep playing on that civ any longer.

Have a look at the "endgame levelling" or post-character-max-level levelling systems of many of the MMORPG and Hack and Slash RPG games out on the market these days. While we may not need the infinite post-level-cap levelling system of Diablo 3's Paragon system, something akin to ESO's champion level cap, or GW2's Mastery system would be a great addition to players. Where you can hit your level cap for a civ, but then there's another 40/80/800 levels worth of tiny bonuses to accrue (and it doesn't even have to be a stat bonus or an item reward at every level, even getting something every 5/10 levels in the overlevelling system would be cool) and to encourage players to do any content that gives XP, not just a mix of the hardest content they can do to prove themselves, and the most reward-efficient clearable content for themselves to get the max-rolled pieces of gear to replace the same pieces they already have but aren't max-roll.

Also, getting to that BiS-piece-but-not-max-roll threshold is honestly not that hard if you are willing to do efficient elite/leg content and PvP for a month or two. What if all, or nearly all gear had a chance to drop with a bonus random stat on it? Yes, I want something like WoW's tertiary-bonus-stat roll system in the game. The actual stats that are in the pool of random-tertiary-stat can be debated, but it would be nice to see older pieces of gear in particular potentially drop with some of the new cool stats that have only been in the game in the past year or three. A Neith's Blessed Javelin for example has the current rolls of Damage: +33.3 — 36.8%, Max range +20.1 — 22.2%, Line-of-sight +20.1 — 22.2%. What if you could also have it drop with a 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 chance with those stats PLUS any one of health regen/ignore armor/snare/attack speed/other stat?

Yes, I understand both of these ideas "make the game easier" and "detract from the original gear and levelling vision of the game", but I don't give a damn. I don't want to see every "good" PvE player quit after 2-3 months of activity because they're as close to BiS in the current system as they care to be, then show up for a fortnight at the most once a new PvE content patch drops.

Plus, this also encourages the less skilled or less confident PvE'ers to stick around and try get the progression needed for them to be able to clear 3-5 star legendary content easier and more enjoyably.

In a similar vein to these suggestions, Taz also brought up the season system that Diablo and Path of Exile in particular use. While I don't think people would want to delete their level 40 civs and start over, what about a second copy of each civ for each player, that does reset to level 1 every x days/months, and the reward for hitting level cap, completing x/y/z quest chains, and/or reaching a certain gearscore value on the civ also translates to another bonus on the main/standard version of the civ? Again, while it would over time lead to powercreep, is this really that bad in a game where even the top PvE'ers say "bugger VoK and Clusium, it's too much of a slog, I'm going back to rebellion and easier content"?

We could also get into gear "socketing" (or stat-infusing), and a revival of the alliance faction currency systems, but that's a whole other kettle of fish that'd be more work to bring in and not quite add as much of a long term sense of progression that these two systems would add, so I think we should start with these.

Does this mean we're making a complete transition to "vertical" gearing over "horizontal" gearing? No, at least not once these changes have been implemented. I'm not about to suggest we have content patches that then bring in a whole new tier of "better" epics and legendaries over the ones (other than the proposed bonus-statted pieces) currently in the game. Now that would be a switch to vertical progression. Like WoW having higher and higher item level drops from every new raid patch.

Big thanks to Taz, and to anyone else I've talked with over similar systems from other MMO/RPG titles that seem to really give them a good shot at being a "lifestyle game" too.

(Acronym cheat sheet for above:
BiS - Best in slot, the most recommended final gear piece for a given build or unit in general
VoK - Valley of the Kings, considered to be the longest of the 5 star quests, and so the "hardest" quest in the game
WoW - World of Warcraft, the most long-lasting market leading title in post 2000's gaming, and the most innovative MMO
ESO - Elder Scrolls Online, Bethesda's competitor title to WoW. Formerly a bin-fire of a game but now that it has endgame levelling it's honestly the 3rd best MMO and 3rd biggest in the western gaming market behind WoW and GW2
GW2 - Guild Wars 2. The perfect casual MMO and the 2nd biggest MMO.
MMO - Massively Multiplayer Online, games where you're more or less expected to interact with a wider community
RPG - Roleplaying Game, basically any game where you're a character or faction that interacts with a wider world around you, and more often than not grow incrementally stronger to complete more difficult and complex challenges)

 

I like these ideas and I think they'd be good for the game once there's either or both of the semi-endless-progression elements added to the game. They'd mesh really well, and it'd remove holes in the gear pool and finally make medals more than meme conversion resistance vendor trash

Yeah these are very good points. Not only is the dev team pretty constrained in terms of labour power, this would involve much more drastic changes to the game than what are effectively content mods/expansions to bring in, like new items using the existing gear format, or new quests built out of the old ones.

From memory I'd asked about a post 40 levelling system before, around the time things were heating up with Romans development, to a similar answer. And I think you guys have also briefly thought about adding some form of seasonal or prestige/reset system to civs only to come to this conclusion we're at now. It's not that either of these things are in the "too hard" pile yet, but more that they're in the "we need to spend time we don't currently have to find out if they belong in the too hard pile"

Either way, thanks to both of you for the responses.

 

Hey Ex, good to hear you're no longer dealing with the chemo and can enjoy life and the game a bit more. Hope you've been well lately!

No worries, I was encouraged by the guys who had theirs uploaded first (Coward, Khan, Chaos, etc) and got back into it another year later when Coolblade released his too. Been over a year since I last mucked around with offline mode scenarios though so I'd have to go and study some of the existing ones to remember all the trigger work and tricks with terrain and water editing lol

Sounds like a nice idea to have any functional scenario playable in the live game and have some competitions to get more uploaded by the others that are handy with aoe map editor (it's essentially the same across AoE2, AoE3, AoM and AoEO aside from a couple of triggers and AoE3's support for their trading post system). It's just probably in the same basket as these other ideas. I remember you or someone else in the community has suggested a very similar idea to get offline mode content in the live game to ease pressure on the Celeste team regarding extra quest packs. And get more people making offline mode content too lol. Annoyingly, it'd take magnitudes more learning and work by the dev team than just pumping out another quest pack or two.

Generally the more alien and cool an idea sounds for the game, the more new code and the more issues with implementation (due to engine limitations or getting functioning correctly on the live server) occur unfortunately.

I'll have to try get a real job as an associate game developer, learn some things and come back

 

Thanks