Experience & Level Progression
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- Опубликовано: 21 авг 2024
- I talk about my thoughts on player level progression, including how experience points are earned, what is awarded to players when their levels advance, and how players spend those awards.
p.s. I think I fixed my camera settings right after I filmed this video. We will see tomorrow! 
Игры
The big problem I can already see with having to fail skills to upgrade, is that it robs you of choice. First makes it basically impossible to do anything other then a generalist, since the skills you improve you won't be failing at, and it makes it so you have to use and fail at something if you did want to improve it, meaning your pushing people to fail at as many thing as they can in order to raise as much skills as they want, or any skill they chose. Meaning the player will go about failing everything just so they can improve any skill they want later, which will likely make the player feel dissatisfied with their character and the game as they feel like they cant do anything. BRP and Call of Cthulhu require you successfully use a skill to be able to improve it, other then via training, and have a lot of these same issues of people doing "Skill Milking."
Whatever your game gives xp for is what you will incentivize the player to do. This is why original D&D, with its focus on dungeon crawls, awarded xp for recovered treasure. It communicated to the players that the point was to recover as much treasure from the dungeon as possible, not necessarily kill monsters to do it.
Watching your videos have genuinely become the highlight of my day.
Same
Camera looks fantastic apart from the color issue - looks like it’s gonna be a fantastic camera once you get those kinks ironed out! Love the content man, have a good one!
The only minor problem for me is that now I can hear the cars driving on the road in the background and other white noise
Even at with most tabletop RPGs I play today, we've all moved towards the milestone based leveling: Do enough of the major plot points and combats, we level. Not only does it save A LOT of book-keeping that gets silly after a point, BUT, it changed how we enjoy the game significantly. Overall, so long as we accomplish X, that's all that matters. The How is up to us without XP weighing it towards a combative route. The more I learn about game design, the more I realize how just even a little reward in the wrong place can go a LONG way to warping how people play a game.
Also, I've wanted to play around with "Fail To Progress" mechanics in my own tabletop game designs. It's just a little tricky in the pen and paper world, since you don't have the automatic convenience of a computer keeping the tallies in the background. Might try a "Flub Counter" or similar thing that grants you bonus skill points you can add in when you bump a skill up. Spend a regular point, drop a bonus one in, too. I can definitely see such a system encouraging people to try their skills more often, despite the lack of proficiency. Would definitely help with player engagement overall. If such was applied to a comedy RPG, I can just imagine the insanity that would happen. I know some people would purposefully up the difficulty of a task using their best skills, just to increase the chance of failure so they can get those bonus points.
I love your Flub Counter idea! That lets players spend skill points wherever they want, but they are rewarded if they spend them on skills they’ve failed at. It’s a great way to align the designer’s goals and the player’s goals.
@@CainOnGames Well, it's going on the growing list of stuff to put in the next revision now. I use a branching skill tree setup in a few designs that have increasing costs tracked per skill. Will definitely help players boost skills with a "Buy one, get one free" deal from the Flub Counter. Now to figure out the "Flub Threshold", since the system uses roll under difference mechanics. And... Gotta figure out how to rework the character sheet again to track this stuff.
Now that I'm thinking of a "Flub Threshold", I could totally see a perk called "Failing Forward" reducing that threshold. Feature creep, man...
Please add this to your list of things to do: go back in time 25 years and send a resume to Troika Games.
@@CainOnGames Isn't this how it already works in reality except for the rewards? Like in Bloodlines, only when you fail lockpicking or hacking you get told the difficulty level and then you spend the necessary XP to succeed on your next attempt :)! A reward would be a little bit much for a probably very common way people that play...
@@CainOnGames If I run into doctor with wild hair and a Delorean, I will get that sent out. After flubbing on so many other random creative pursuits, I think I might actually have enough experience and a portfolio now to go for an internship! (Which I totally would still go for.)
This solves an issue i noticed in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. As more xp was awarded for stealth KOs over stealth kills, I would avoid killing despite finding it more "boring" and I purposefully backtracked thru areas to find every permutation of gaining access to the objective room as there was xp awarded for each vent discovered, door picked etc.
It was problematic as it made me play inorganically.
So your point on just xp for the quest makes sense since the motivation then for player is "to follow their heart", to solve quests organically, to their own style with no contrived backpeddling. Sound design philosophy there.
Thank you so much for these vids 😊
Yeah that’s also my biggest gripe with the game. It forces you to do unnatural things over and over to maximise gains with almost no hurdles.
Talking about different exp system rewards, "Underrail" has player choice between classic exp and oddity exp. Combat and quest based vs exp awarded through exploration by finding unique items with some lore descriptions.
What suggestions would you have regarding player hoarding when it comes to items and skills throughout the game?
hi Tim!
we've heard a lot about Tim Cain the developer but not much about Tim Cain the game enjoyer. How about a video which covers your recent game experiences such as:
What's a game you were expecting to enjoy, but didn't?
What's a game you weren't expecting to like, but enjoyed thoroughly?
What game have you played which committed a lot of your cardinal sins, but still worked and you still enjoyed it?
What game did you play which didn't sound like your usual cup of tea, but was surprisingly fun?
What game do you feel could have been a whole lot better with the smallest changes?
Speaking on learning from failure, I’ve been working on a homebrew fallout tabletop for my dnd group, which uses percentile. The idea I had for gaining xp was that when you roll a skill check you gain xp equal to the number rolled. In the system to succeed on a check you have to roll under your skill percentage, which can be affected by things like armor, difficulty etc. so even if you fail the check, if you rolled really high you still get something out of it.
Might be useful, to help soften the blow of failure and help players be incentivized to try to use more skills, that when they fail a skill roll, still give experience, but only the amount they failed the roll by
From experience, that granular and common of an XP source can get a little burdensome when it comes to the bookkeeping at the tabletop. If your crew are good at handling those things, should be awesome. Otherwise, there's going to be a lot of XP forgotten and bad memory when it comes to totaling stuff.
@@Lakstoties yeah, I was also thinking of having a failure equal checking off a box like how other systems do it, and when you check off enough boxes maybe you get an extra skill point on level up and the main xp is through quests
@@LemonMoon Oh yeah, that feels a lot more manageable. If you want to have fun with it, you can make cards like customer loyalty cards. For every major flub, the game master hole punches it. On your tenth punch, you can turn the card in for a free skill point. A more physical manifestation of the Flub Counter idea.
What you have right now is a neutral color profile. For my camera there is a setting called "Creative Style" in the "Color/White Balance/IMG Processing" section of the Menu's. Or on the screen display there should be a button which will take you to the video settings with your ISO, Shutter Speed, Metering and focus setting, one of them should be Creative Style (for you it will be called something different).
For you I recommend using the Vivid color profile since you have a colorful backdrop, also to save you the trip to Premiere Pro or Final Cut. If the color is too saturated and you think it looks too much like Fallout 4 (LOL!) there should be other options a bit less saturated. It is a possibility that vivid will make your skin tone look a bit on the orangish side, so keep that in mind.
Otherwise you will have to bump up the saturation a tad, and the color temp a tad in the orange direction from the looks of it, in a video editing software. I don't want to give a detailed tutorial since you might not use or care to use adobe products and that is all I use myself. And my camera is a Sony.
A Neutral Color profile is meant for those who will adjust the color in the software after they import the video.
Tim's colour blindness means he's probably shooting blind when it comes to colour grading, but I agree that switching the camera setting to vivid will go a long way towards making the video look nicer.
I think he’s using Cine 2. Which is made for grading (kind of). And he’s not grading. It looks good… but it’s just not graded/saturated in post at all.
I had no idea you could configure a webcam to such an extent. I've never found any settings at all for mine.
@@kaptenteo He mentioned he was using a new Sony camera in a recent video.
I don't think he likes Trump so anything making his skin more orange will be a difficult sell
In games that allow it I always treated the stored skills and level ups as another element of roleplaying. Your character's potential built up until it can be galvanized in a flash of inspiration or bout of intense focus on a problem, or even just being pushed to their limits and discovering they can go even farther.
Its a lovely bit of fully self governed roleplay and dramatics in a medium where most of the time you can only express character or engage in drama through scripted options or sequences.
I also love the idea of failure progressing skills or characters, because yeah failure (at least when it has stakes that make it obvious) really is the greatest teacher. For soo long I thought TTRPGs should use that and eventually house ruled it in to my games. It really does take a huge sting out of bad luck on rolls and feels more organic. But I had never considered the curve it enables and through such a simple means.
One thing that always felt wrong to me in Morrowind was how every hit oriented combat skill after rank 40 or so would ramp up faster and faster and quickly turning into a damn cliff. It really cheapened the feel of the journey to mastering a skill.
UnderRail is a "crpg" that gives you an option for how you get experience, Combat or Oddity exp. Combat is straight-forward where you get points after u kill a npc/creature but Oddity exp is attained from finding important notes and scraps of information found throughout the game. Its interesting having progression so different within the same game.
I really like idea of progressing in skill when you fail! Learn from failure is a cool concept. When you're good you don't progress, because you can pass the checks anyway.
These videos have been invaluable to me, I've been slowly working on a tabletop rpg (that's an alien sci fi homage to Fallout 1) for a year or so now, and while it's likely something only a handful of my friends will ever play, these takes are so constructive, and more or less transferrable between mediums. So glad you're doing them!
As a designer in the industry I do think there are more interesting ways to handle gating through a nonlinear game than levels/experience, especially if we consider the general pitfalls of levels as a whole.
Experience as a whole is a bit of an abstract concept in general, because what exactly is it that causes someone at level 80 to oneshot something at level 1? is it "player technique"? is it damage (or damage caps)? is it an item? is it just stat bonuses (and if so, how are those grounded in the game)? I think grounding these questions in the world (and its narrative) can often quick show that levels as a whole don't really fit any world, other than as a metagame mechanic.
Instead of experience, understanding of elements (e.g. weaknesses of creatures, knowledge of items/weapons, understanding the culture and personality of characters the player comes across etc.) and allow these to proliferate as bonuses towards similar types.
So if you know how to operate one weapon type, maybe it's not so hard to learn another one? if you know how to read communicate with one type of NPC, maybe you can use that to leverage communication towards people that you haven't met yet despite not knowing their affiliation or culture? if you know the weakness of one type of mammal, maybe that applies to others as well?
Given that these bonuses are both stateful and could be expressed mathematically as well, it could be a scale value based on interaction. it could even be, just like you said, that the system could give more of a bonus for failing, to encourage players to get curious and experiment.
But I think the main takeaway from this is that this eschews the notion of levels entirely and provides opportunity to ground the progression system in the world, while at the same time allowing for a wide array of nonlinear interactions.
Firstly, thank you so so much for answering my question! Your pronunciation of my name was pretty good 😁
I really like the design you came up with by the end of the video. I find it hits all the right spots. One remaining question on my end with respect to how the individual skill progression bars fill up is:
Do you worry that these skill progression bars will incentivise the player to keep trying to utilize as many skills as possible during play in order to have enough options to spend their level up resources? In other words, does this approach incentivise the player to "break character/playstyle" in an effort to maximize progression?
That was one my concerns when I was arm-chair analyzing such a system in the past.
As always you are gold! Thank you so much for this amazing content!!
ps: I got Tim Cain to say my full name, yay 🎉 😁
I didn't see it mentioned in the comments, but there's a TTRPG system called Powered by the Apocalypse (main games that use the system are Dungeon World, Apocalypse World, the new Avatar game, and many more) where you gain experience when you fail a roll. Might be someone here's cup of tea.
Hi Tim really enjoying the series so far, it's extremely insightful. Thanks for all the great games you've made for us over the years, every one is a treasure, even the failures (Temple fan here)! Here's my question. Do you have any more games you wish to make and publish in the future, or are you done with that part of your career? You still seem to take a lot of pleasure in discussing game theory and design while also absorbing new ideas. Do games like BG3 for example inspire you with an idea to either try your hand at leading design again or even tackle your own smaller indie project? Kind regards.
Oh man, I could discuss these topics all day.
I'm gonna start off with some Devil's Advocacy. There are some serious shortcomings to the quest-based exp system, namely that it only rewards players for doing quests. If I want to go and do my own thing, it's not gonna help my character grow and evolve. If I want to go live in the forest or camp in a dangerous area for a few days, that should be a viable decision.
The polar opposite of quest-based exp is similar to what you did in Arcanum, where players are rewarded for every action they take. Obviously, it needed some tweaking, but other games have tried similar concepts. Most notably, the Elder Scrolls series, but MMOs have long grappled with it and come up with some unique approaches.
Ragnarok Online addressed this by having 2 separate exp bars, one for character and one for "job", or class. Character exp was granted primarily from kills, job exp from quests. Character level granted stats, job level granted skill points and class-based stat bonuses.
Guild Wars 2 shifted from a standard individual quest\kill exp gain system to an open participation-style system where you'd gain exp from the quest or kill based on your participation in combat or quest tasks, and from either damage dealing or support.
I strongly believe that players should be rewarded for whatever they want to do, as long as they're actively doing something.
Kenshi gets by without levels, perks or skill points by having your character physically evolve over time to reflect their personal journey. When you get to higher stat levels, your character looks like they went through hell and came out stronger for it.
On that note, Kenshi is also a great game for learning from mistakes. It's most unique stat, Toughness, is only leveled by taking damage and forcing yourself to get back up after being taken down. Your defense and dodge stats level more from getting hit than from avoiding attacks successfully.
All this adds up to an experience where you become strong by getting your face rubbed in the dirt, and never losing the will to get back up again, and I love it for that.
Imo character levels are plague (in most games). They always come with bullet sponginess (lvl 50 means a huge sponge, lvl 1 means a tiny napkin): If you need 10 headshots or 10 connecting axe blows to defeat a human just because of a level difference, it kills immersion. Point systems like Bloodlines or GURPS are my preferred options since they reduce the "bullet sponginess" and give more freedom to focus on what one wants.
These videos are really informative, I've got a list of games I'm working on, and an RPG is second in that list, so I've been taking a lot of mental notes throughout some of your videos. I'm trying to steer clear of straight up ripping off what you've done in the past, but it gets difficult when your ideas are so good! Keep up the great work, Tim.
Hey Tim, absolutely love the videos and the insight they give! I'd be super interested in hearing about your take on difficulty and level scaling. There are defiantly pros and cons to both and would be super interested in what you have to say. Personally I think the only way to play FNV is on Very Hard Hardcore, I think the game feels the most balanced that way. Of course at later levels you’re crazy overpowered but in general, most of the game feels good, difficulty wise.
The way that you describe this new system is really really interesting to me and I'd love to see it implemented into a game to see how it plays 👀👀
I primarily like the quest based xp system the most in my opinion, killing enemies for xp encourages me to grind and then i eventually end up coming up against a hard wall of bullet sponge enemies if i don't break the difficulty entirely and breeze through the rest
More combat focused games like dark souls (and to a certain extent maybe even s.t.a.l.k.e.r) that reward primarily for combat are fun and interesting as they lean really havily into that form of gameplay and the reward is the result of the player going through the primary gameplay loop
With more talky have, figuring out mysteries and resolving issues is what I have most fun doing, not so much blasting bad guys
When i play through mass effect I'll be doing so on the easiest difficulty :P
XP only coming from quests in Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines is one of the 12,000 reasons I love that game and play it all the way through once a year.
I like the "learn from failure" because you can then get real "jack of all trades" abilities. You are barely proficient in many areas. To be a true master, >95% rate, you have focus on just doing that thing.. meaning you don't learn other stuff. That feels natural.
While I'm actually a fan of level-less systems, I understand that it's extremely convenient for systems in which characters go through a massive power increase. Like D&D where you're an especially competent person at level 1, a superhero at level 5, and absurdly powerful at level 20. You could implement the same system without levels, but it'd be way harder to gauge a character's power level.
EXP for failing checks is an interesting concept. It's logical enough, and it does mean that it's harder and harder to get better as you progress, which is exactly how it should be.
It would be a shame I think to only gain XP from completing quests. It would lessen the player's ability to go off from the main story path (or even side paths) and just explore, or fight mobs for the hell of it. It would make freeform engagement less rewarding. I think if you removed combat XP in particular something would be lost. There are some great moments I've had in RPGs where, when you've just finished a difficult battle with lots of enemies and lots of XP and you're standing amidst the carnage, the XP bar tips over and you level up. It feels like a real moment of conquest and reward. F:NV was great for this.
Learning from failure is a real interesting concept. I wonder how that would feel to play - would it be satisfying? How would players looking to exploit XP for quick growth interact with it? I can imagine a strategy involving seeking out endgame enemies early on. They could be very hard to hit so you'd miss a lot, and you wouldn't need to finish them off - just attack them a bunch and try to stay alive.
The problem with xp only coming from quests is what if you set your own quest? Like: "I wanna kill all bandits in this camp". "I wanna explore that cave". There will be plenty of activities where player will not receive any progression from their actions.
Woaaah new camera looks awesome. You look wise and full of wisdom 😊
Big fan thanks for being apart of a lot of the things I like
I like the idea that failed skill attempts fill up a meter that needs to be full before the skill can be improved. As a player though, I sure an happy in Fallout to dump points into improving skills right before I need them.
From the title I thought this would be about career progression in game development, which left me wondering: What are your thoughts on career progression in game design? What separates a Game Designer from a Senior Game Designer? I ask because I've worked at 9 studios so far and there has been no consensus about how you can get to a Senior role. Out of those, a single one had that process outlined, and it was so specific that I would have to do stuff I was not allowed to do in order to achieve it. After 10 years in the industry, I had to look for a job and simply went for Senior Game Designer jobs and got one, but I feel like that was a bit of a cheat - even though I had more than enough experience. I've also seen people get to Senior in under 3 years!
New camera is producing a really good picture, Tim. Thanks again.
Have an awesome day!
That's an awesome idea to tie skill progression into failing, because then you actually get better when you need it rather than getting better when you're already good.
Would be interesting to have a game where you create a mostly finalised character on character creation, who doesn't learn much during the game - it's more a matter of figuring out how to get through the game with the stats and skills you chose, than looking for XP to raise skills during the game.
I've always looked at leveling as an end-first kind of problem. The way that the points are distributed don't matter too much to me as long as they follow the game design, but the end result should be that it serves as a regular break of the game loop (and a player reward, of course.) In most Square Enix games I've noticed a general rate of about one level per hour, so I apply that as a metric to all the RPGs I play. If I gain levels too fast I take it to mean that I did something too quickly, and vice versa. Or it could be a experience point balancing issue for either. It's so consistent that if the level cap is low, I take it as a metric for how long the game might be.
one thing I wanna see more of after Starfield is the idea of Exp debt for less than good characters who get caught or are punished for being "The Bad Guy"
XP gain should be a function of a random number generator that rolls once per second and additionally every time the character performs any action.
Hey Tim. Im really enjoying your content. I commented on you MUD video as ive been building one on and off for what feels like forever. Could you talk about the steps youd take when exploring and implementing a feature? MUDs are great because they have nearly endless possibilities. So i have a few features ive never saw in a MUD before. Its easy to program something youve saw coded before. Make one better, or in your vison. But can you talk a little about unquie ideas coming forth into your games. Thanks Tim
Framerate looks much better! Also camera perspective seems to be a bit tighter too. Color isn't too bad either. I think it looks more natural instead of oversaturated like before. I'm guessing it's just the difference from the older videos that makes it more noticeable.
I never thought about getting xp points for failing using skill or weapon and not when you succeed. That would be an insanely easy way and intuitive way to balance that.
I think progression should reward what the game is about. If a game has random combat encounters, then xp should be rewarded calculated on the challenge of the combat. If it is a "fedex" game, then you should get xp for delivering items to npcs. A game with xp for failure should be about creative and emergently complex outcomes from failing what you first set out to do, as in if you statistically can't fail any more then the game is over, stick a fork in it.
New camera looks great to me, the audio could use a little tweaking I think.
The previous mic sounds like it may have had some kind of baked in noise gating as there's dead silence in all the gaps between sentences. It also had a muffled-ness that suggests a bit of overzealous noise reduction typical of webcams and the like. This one sounds like a more natural and unprocessed recording from a much better microphone, richer in detail but more room noise and high end as a result. A noise gate might be enough to catch most of it, and then you could use EQ and/or multiband compression to tame the high end a little. Multiband compression has the additional advantage that it will help with any occasional harsh sibilance without uniformly turning down those frequency bands like EQ does, but it comes with the complexity of having to spend more time fiddling with it. In any case though if there's a magical setting on the camera somewhere that can optimize the audio for voice, I'd probably just try that out first!
I like the idea of getting skill XP from failing, firstly it is a reward for action and I think it will reduce save-scamming, since yes you didn't get that piece of content, but you still gained something from your action and it didn't go to waste. I think games like Disco Elysium and the latest Baldur's Gate 3 would've benefited from it.
I also like how Control went for their stimulation of spending skill points, by giving you passive abilities the more points you spend, that prevented me from stockpiling skill points and it was easier to decide on investing more in a skills.
One downside of giving XP on failure is it creates an incentive to fail, once a player gets close to leveling up they might actually prefer to fail in order to gain the next rank. I think increasing required xp as you rank up creates a similar pacing where higher ranks take longer without adding this mismatched incentive.
I'm all caught up on all videos, and now I'm just waiting for the daily video drop lol.
I started playing Fallout 1, but I have to admit I needed to watch a video on how to the play game.
"If anyone tried Arcanum". I installed it last night, but need to get settled in.
I don't know if you're familiar with Underrail (it's a love letter to Classic Fallout, you should give it a spin if you haven't!), they had an interesting spin on exp gain where instead of getting exp from kills you get it by finding "curios" while exploring the world (and completing quests).
In Fallout New Vegas I quit after maxing XP. I think XP is a currency. There should always be something to spend it on, or it should be exchangeable for another currency.
I like the idea that XP only comes from completing quests. 100% better than cheesing XP by building a million wooden posts in your settlement.
this schedule is so sick, i hope you never run out of things to make videos about
Timothy. I know your old microphone was much cheaper and less professional, but I liked how it sounded much more than current version.
Right now I can hardly hear you unless I increase sound volume way higher than I used to.
I'm personally not a fan of gaining XP only for quests. In games like Fallout where your character can be anything, I definitely understand the appeal of it, since a combat oriented player doesn't have a huge advantage over a stealthy or charismatic PC who doesn't fight much. But I think it depends on what your human player is there for. In Fallout, I was there for both the strategic combat and the story. And it rewarded both, which I think is extremely important. Likewise, if your game is an action RPG, the action part is likely important to players, and should reward XP. But when it comes to open-ended character designs, I don't have a real solution. Being a fancy talker in Fallout is not nearly as complex or difficult as fighting through a mob of raiders, so it would be strange if the game rewarded either approach equally. And I think that illustrates the problem. Fallout was a combat game that allowed other options. In a perfect world, dialog would be just as deep as combat, but I don't think we're there yet. However, stealth can be pretty complex, and I think it certainly could contend with combat in terms of XP. Thanks for the video, I love these types of topics!
Huzzah!
Love the videos to death. Hope to see more dev talk on people like Todd Howard or Michael Kirkbride. More so your opinion on how people work or do things well
One minor flaw I see in your proposed system is that if the skill bar ONLY progresses on skill failure, you can effectively soft-lock players out of mastery of a skill just by chance (or save-scumming, which really isn't a thing you as a designer should be preventing if the player wants to do that). It also requires a design where skill failure is non-catastrophic, which isn't something I've seen a lot of.
BG3 has skill failutre. All your Party can in theory not pass the skill check to see the cave they walk past. This is RNG though not a levelling or skills System.
@@cmdr.jabozerstorer3968oh interesting! So does that mean you need a high perception to actually see things like cave entrances just like in real Dungeons and Dragons?
@@wisdomcoffee I think so, yes. I had a situation where all 4 of my party failed to pass a check to see something interesting about a rock. Although I hadn't recruited everyone at that point, so I could perhaps go back later with different party members and pass it.
You can move the rock to find some treasure and a hint to a location for more treasure. So nothing important, per se but you can miss out on knowing there's a way to move the rock.
It's also not just perception. There's Lore checks too. So if you have a high Intellignece character, I think they may find those checks easier too. It's all automatic, so no dice rolling on the player's part.
@@cmdr.jabozerstorer3968haha I love the mental image of 4 people staring at a rock trying to work out why it’s interesting but just can’t 😂 i love it, actually gives more value to your stats beyond just combat
I personally like when game rewards for "fulfilling profession". As example: thief picking the lock.
Also I think there is such thing as "too much exp".
Once I've read Van Buren (canceled Fallout 3) design docs. Exp for this, exp for that, exp for checks etc. Prizes, prizes, prizes!
"How many skills there should be to justify such influx of exp?" I though.
On the subject of progression systems, maybe you have insight about this: I really like the souls games, but here's something I don't like: as you go through the game, you find upgrade tokens that make your weapons more powerful, and you need to use those to keep pace with the increasing difficulty of the game. But you also find new weapons, and some of them look really cool and maybe you want to use them, but you kind of can't because they aren't upgraded. So you end up sticking with some early game weapon and get more and more new weapons and think "That looks really cool, too bad I can't use it." It's to the point where I wonder if maybe weapon upgrading shouldn't even be a thing in souls games. Or maybe there should be a mechanic to refund your upgrade tokens at the cost of some more-renewable resource. More generally, how do you deal with progression systems effectively locking the player out of things they'd want to do that would be fun?
You could definitely say that for a lot of games, you just shouldn't deal with this and lock-in is actually a good thing. Maybe it just feels extra bad in the souls games because it's too much trouble to start a new game to try every new weapon, whereas in a different kind of game restarting to try a stealth-oriented playstyle rather than a combat-oriented one would be fine and there's no reason to add a way to respec to a stealth build mid-game. In other words, it's just a question of the number of things you're being locked out of, and how interesting each of those new alternatives is (stealth vs combat playthough is one of your 3 or 4 options for this game as a whole, and more of an interesting change in itself than going from very big sword to very very big sword). Also, maybe there's no good solution to the weapon-upgrade issue, since if you could just easily pull your upgrade tokens out of your current weapon and put them into your new weapon it wouldn't feel as fun. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if you knew something about this issue that I didn't.
I would love to hear your ideas on TTRPG's. Like, how would this idea for levels and xp translate to tabletop
I was thinking about asking a similar question. I'm currently designing a small, stupid, TTRPG and it would be interesting to hear how some of these lessons could be scaled to an analogue experience.
I find it interesting that the "accumulate xp, spend them anytime" system you're advocating was what Iron Tower did in the Age of Decadence and they decided to back from that in Colony Ship. Personnally, I found the system a bit frustrating. You get xp, and hoard the points until you need them to pass a test. That made for a lot of rather painful save-scumming as you didn't know which skill would be useful or which level you needed.
Overall, I think it's a good idea that should be ditched as it plays badly in practice.
The skills upgreadable only when you failed enough at them is very interesting. It makes failure feel good! Right now I'm playing BG3 and of course I'm save scumming the hell out of it, because most of the time skill checks failure are just cool things that won't happen. But if those failures went into an upgrade bank, I'd be fine with it.
Although honestly I think I would save scum even more, to succeed at the important ones and fail at the ones that don't matter so I can upgrade... Hmm... I also see myself fussing with my bonus object to influence when I succeed and when I fail...
Video Equipment Feedback:
Around 11:18, there is an audio artefact, which sounds a bit like ... electrical interference? I don't know, I'm not an audio engineer. It's very faint though.
The camera looks nice in this video, but it's clearly desaturated compared to your previous set up.On my PC, this video quality is obviously way higher. On my smartphone, it doesn't look great, to be honest. I'm guessing you're shooting at a higher resolution than before and that's just not translating over to a smaller screen.
I want to hear Tim talk about his thoughts on New Vegas
great point, in modern fallout I find myself always choosing combat just for the XP
Good morning Tim :^) Thanks for the video for my drive to work
do you really watch tv while driving .. good luck :)
🚨🚨ATTENTION ATTENTION🚨🚨
WE HAVE NOW STARTED THE DARK CAIN SAGA.
Jkjk I'm warming up to the new camera but I'll miss how colorful the last one was haha
you can use NVidia Broadcast to already record your footage with a noise filter pass, works quite well and you don't have to do any big editing afterward, new camera looks great, colors are a bit mute but you can probably tweak that in camera too (I get that being colorblind you probably don't notice that much). Great upgrade overall!
I've given Arcanum two tries so far, desperately tried to love it and get into it, but haven't succeeded yet. I gave up for the second time and started playing Baldur's Gate instead. After two unsuccessful attempts to get into it, I'm finally getting into the flow. Not an easy game to master for sure.
Its combat system is nothing like Fallout's, but it's manageable. So, I need to finish BG1 and BG2, and then maybe I'll give Arcanum another shot."
I don't have any question right now, listening to you is fun anyway. Thanks for sharing all that knowledge!
I feel crazy because I feel like I've never learned from failure. It's just left me confused and angry.
How about a progression System like in Morrowind (and to some extend Valheim) whereby you gain levels in individual attributes organically by just doing them? So jumping in Morrowind all the time increases your jumping (plus if I remember orrdectly, there's Perks too that can help). You still get an overall level system above that though, with XP. Whilst in Valheim there's no level/XP system but you can increase your attributes organically.
I've come to the conclusion that use-based skills, while seeming "realistic", don't really make a fun progression system because they take away the interesting choices of where and when to spend your limited skill points.
@@NamelessVoice There's nothing really that realistic about jumpng about in Morrowind and just being able to become a jumping God in a small amount of time.
Leveling individual skills by doing them is good to a point. After all, people do get better at stuff by doing the thing. But it’s open to really boring min-max strategies where the optimal way to level smithing is to smith 1000 steel daggers in one sitting and maxing the skill that way.
@@Mordrevious I remember my jumping increasing in Seyda Neen in Morrowind because I tried to climb up the wall as soon as I got off the boat. You can basically loot really good armour from the Armoury.
There's been quite a few different styles of handling experience and leveling in games. Gothic 1 used skill points you gained from completing quests. These went towards training from trainers in certain skills which improved your abilities and primary stats.
While overall I liked the leveling system in Skyrim, the lack of character class off put me a bit since it felt like there wasn't any restrictions that helped define my characters class, personality and strengths and weaknesses (Outside of what I chose not to level).
I really like the oblivion leveling system. Increasing your skills by using said skills. After increasing your skills a few times, you gain a level. What is your opinion on the removal of level cap? Imo, I feel like it's incomplete as you never reach the peak of the protagonist's potential and can't truly "100%" the game.
What he's describing as akin to some version of the BASIC (which we just called Chaosium system, in ye old days) system where failing at a skill test is how each skill progress. With the extra step of going through general xp and levels.
Which I still think are just bad, there's almost no situation a ruleset with hard levels is really simpler and better. It may shift the perception of simplicity early, so designers and players think the system simpler early on, but then they will have to deal with second and third order consequences, exceptions, bad synergies, corner cases... I always find it a mess. While the absence of hard level make things just flow naturally.
And in fact just keeping established, popular, tent pole rpg, almost none have hard levels. D&D sure does, as do clones like Pathfinder, but Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer FRP (and the 40K variants), Shadowrun, FATE, Runequest, World of Darkness, Star wars WEG, none have levels.
But, RUclips comments ain't the place to demonstrate that in depth. And as far as videogames ruleset goes, especially if level is a constraint, what's described here is one of the more interesting one.
Especially if there is the secondary mechanic of training/learning, as in the character can spend resources (like time and money) to train or learn specific things regardless of their localized xp spending authorized approved form thingie. To give both player and character agency, and reward preparation. At least if the pacing of the game allows it.
Really cool idea for leveling skills from failure.
I am curious how a RPG can balance consumables scaling
With healing you can make it % based, but then you run into the problem of not having a good upgrade for that healing since it always heals for a %
Other consumable have the problem of either being the weaker version of a spell (scrolls) or just not scale at all
I find it very difficult to play a consumable based character in any game, this is why I love Wasteland 3 and now Baldurs Gate 3, both games where using items is encouraged and where resources might be limited
Hi Timothy,
I'm writing for GameStar on a major article about Arcanum. For this I also have Drog as an interview partner, the creator of the most famous mod for Arcanum. Would you like to answer some questions for me and him?
Michael
This is why I really don't like the idea of milestones in TTRPGs. Like you said, XP gives you an actual sense of progression.
I HATE that FO4 got rid of skills. I miss them so much 😭
Ever since the new camera the videos have lost all color, or is that a problem on my end? Maybe I need HDR screen or something? Sound also sounds more tinny. edit: just noticed the line in description, ok fingers crossed
In the description Tim says that he thinks he got it right for tomorrow's video. Let's hope so, because this contrast is a bit sad.
no hes just getting older and greyer as we watch .. as are we all :)
0:15 Reminds me of Niklos Stavros from Red Alert!
I hadn't ever thought of saving skill points for a rainy day. It totally makes sense, and I'm gunna do that on my next Outer Worlds playthrough!
Would "quest" include just any sort of handmade (?) situation with possible resolutions? Like I can already think of things one can "solve" without even being told it was a thing to solve. I guess what I've disliked about *some* quest systems is that one has to actually GET a quest for the quest to exist as far as the game's concerned, like having to go to a job board and be told you could do it before you'd get rewarded for doing it (requiring you to do the whole thing over), or where you might find a key item but until a quest starts it has no significance to anyone who would otherwise be involved.
Learning from failure (or at least learning MORE from it) makes perfect sense from a progression standpoint because someone with a low level in a skill who wants to use it a lot should probably get the chance to improve the skill because they're essentially practicing, while someone who succeeds all the time might not gain much insight. Still I wonder if success could still bring other beneficial progress, like insight into unlocking a skill-specific perk/ability.
What about passive learning of a skill while being in a party with someone better at a skill than you if you, say, choose it as one of the three(?) skills you're studying
I kinda feel quest based XP is weird. As you explained, people can solve the thing very differently, and some ways may give more experience for character than other ways. When you complete the quest, why you are given XP; and not some other reward? I wouldnt get much experience by returning a wallet to some guy who lost it, but I might get a lot of experience when trying to find it... P.S. it's funny that everyone is talking about the color of the video... I kinda like it - you should actually "calibrate" it as you see the world, so we could see you that way.
how would some ways reward more exp given the context? iirc tim presented combat, actions, and quests as possible avenues, then settled on quests
Well, some people might just have talent, and straight up talk themselves through, not getting experience since they already have had that experience. Etc. I think nonlinear gameplay should have nonlinear progress of characters as well, but that might be too hard for many to like... And to make work well. Tim referred the ways as "game doesnt care how you do it, if you do it, and the reward is same" - right?
@@pheidian707 im still not understanding why you feel some wouldn't get experience. tim described leveling experience as granting skill points which could be spent on the skill progression bars. they're related but not exactly the same
@@Lakstoties I agree and that's how it should work on quest based XP. I just find it funny, since probably Jake got some more driving experience / had some close calls and his skills improved even more while Fred might have improved his barter skills at the liquor store. Or whatever. You know what I mean.
Man I’d kill to have a face to face conversation with you about video games.
Overall i like the failure to get xp idea, the main issue i see is that it sort of forces a jack-of-all trades character if theres no rewards for success. If you want to max out a stat it feels like you're going to be forced to do a ton of grinding to get those small chances of failure
Hmmmmm, this essentially what Starfield tried to do (but it failed bc they used Fo4's crappy perk system). I think this can work!
Did you play Elden Ring? If so what did you think of its XP system? It also works as the currency :)
Thank you!
I can say video quality improved from yesterday's video, looking very sharp now :D
Edit: I saw comments about colors not being right... I'm team colorblind as Tim haha.
I prefer strategy and execution over randomness and leveling, but everything has its pros and cons, and different people like different things. Sadly a lot of games are using leveling as a far too stretched tutorial, just filler to inflate game hours.
In my opinion Bloodlines worked fine without any levels, the whole player-needs-to-see-progression-and-wants-to-level-up is very close to using rewards-to-keep-the-player-playing tricks...
Outer Worlds gets easier as you progress and the hardest part of it is the pit of gorillas in Emerald Vale.
New camera is pretty sweet
Since you have the Arcanum source code, how hard would it be to implement your level progress idea into it?
Ok, well if you are doing advancement through failure how does that change the player story? For a someone playing a sneaky thief type character; they do a lot of sneaking but if they are good at it then they wont get caught but then they can't advance their skill? or does the game gets harder to sneak around and they get caught more... but then they aren't being the sneaky thief they wanted to be. Or if you look at lock-picking, if they want to be the good lockpicker, and they can only level up through failure... that means a player is going to spend a lot of time failing at what they wanted to be good at (and the player is not doing the things they don't care about so...). The biggest problem I see is that would mean the first hour or so of the game the player is going to, by necessity, have to suck at things they want to be good at to level them up. The thief player doesn't want to have to spend their first few gaming sessions failing at lockpicking so they will be a good lockpicker. I think you should let players start playing the type of character they want at level one (but they may have to be an opportunistic thief and only take easy marks; but they should be succeeding and building to a bigger score later on).
I also think this might push players to being more of a jack-of-all trades since it would be really easy to fail a lot of low level skills, but at some point there would be a threshold where it wouldn't be efficient to train them because you got too skilled (or got just above the average difficulty of the task, so you fail less and less and can't get skill exp bar up). This would be kinda weird because then players would be generally good at everything and not really have any weaknesses (skill-wise). I kinda feel like that is a missed opportunity.
So I think there are a few ways around these potential issues; and it's mostly just adding more ways to increase the skill experience bar. Tagging skills could allow success to slowly increase the experience bar. Also training could help players fill that progression bar. I would also consider ways to have partial success or failure; or a gradation between success and failure states. Like many times I do things successfully but not optimally, and so there is something I can learn from 'success'. I do like the idea that failure is the 'best teacher' because it helps remove some of the negativity of failure. The player doesn't get what they want but they get something else that they like.
I would also consider giving experience for certain kinds of achievements; or for exploring particular areas of interest (instead of just quests). Like if you talk your way through 25 different scenarios you should get a perk or some experience for something like that. I think when a game can recognize or react to the players actions it's almost always a positive experience.
I'm also interested to hear if anyone else has any ideas or thoughts about this. It's really interesting stuff to think about.
I think each level should be represented by a different t-shirt.
Hey Tim
Could you speak on how you made the interpreter for the scripting your team members made?
rewarding for failure is bad idea, people would simply fail on purpose to game the system and keep some commonly used skill as low as possible to progress with it and only upgrade it later when really necessary - so its both counter-intuitive and exploitable in a non-fun way (and if you want to compare to real scenarios - you learn by not repeating the same mistakes, while this system would only incentivize repeating mistakes)
Rhetorical question : Is there a better way to make encounter with high lvl /boss enemy then just more HP ?? It is 2023 and still was majority of RPGs use same old boring concept , bullet sponge , which makes game just more tedious not hard/challenging . Maybe you have some new ideas for Outer Worlds 2? Maybe video about it ?
In my experience as a DM with real life D&D, when I throw an encounter and my players obliterate the enemies too quickly, I under the Master Screen immediately rake up enemy HP, I assume I did a mistake estimating enemy power/defenses and just rake their HP.
But also you definitely need to show feedback to the players, if they just did 45 damage, a seemingly huge blow, maybe show the BBEG is just cleaning a little bit of blood from their lips.. make them flinch once in a while when more damaged, make them scream stuff in desperation, make them change tactics on-the-fly, deus-ex-machina save your boss with more henchmen, a powerful foe might have been invisible in the room all the time, any creative way to change and spice things up, and something kind of random that you won't be repeating with every single enemy later.
Other times you just let them die and automatically promote a henchmen/hireling into the real BBEG because you felt during the sessions the players responded better to a more charismatic enemy/etc
In gamedev you can do all that, just takes some time but original bosses can be done.
Rhetorical question means you don’t actually want an answer but the way you ask your question seems like you do want one 😅 curious which RPGs you’re playing too, I just finished Like A Dragon and Persona 5 and I found the boss fights kept me pretty engaged with trying to find strategies that worked and Persona 5 had you make choices during them that swayed battle
This camera look so post-apocalyptic.
Just watched this video: ruclips.net/video/7Z5WCV1Ey0I/видео.html
And it got me wonder which type of personality you are: introvert or extrovert. Even though people can be super talkative about their passion, they can still be an introvert fron inside out.
I'm curious if you are introvert how do you navigate your work that requries endless communication?
Thank you for considerring this question if it will be a topic of your future video!
i like your "xp for quest" approach .. but what if the players are just idly murder-hoboeing around a big world? no quest - no xp? like hunter gatherers .. I mean arent they just murder hoboes lol
Your camera is too low on saturation, it looks depressed
You pronounced it pretty much correctly, it's a Greek name
I dislike the concept of gaining XP only from quests. This forces every character to follow the developer's linear story lines in order to progress, which is the opposite of what I want from a roleplaying game. When I roleplay I want to create my own stories. Frankly, the stories told by developers are too often far less interesting to me than my own DIY stories and home-made "main quests" that I create for each character. I like to explore game worlds, craft my own stories. Quest-only XP discourages this.
That would depend heavily on the type of RPG. Some games like New Vegas typically give you 2 or more ways to solve a quest depending on things like your chosen morality or skill set. Quest XP doesn’t railroad you very badly in that type of game because you’re encouraged to do quests but you aren’t forced to solve them in 1 way.