“Every mob a giant monster” is what I’d hoped to do for the month-to-month epic story content in Ninth Domain. One of my issues with the meta-plot stuff I made for AC1 was that it always aimed for the uber levels. In 9D, I wanted to make it so a group of level 10s had the same chance to change the world as a group of level 100s.

I’m not sure I like the idea of using it everywhere in the game, though. Others have brought up Oblivion, but I think that’s a straw man — the problem with Oblivion was that bandits morphed into minotaurs as you leveled instead of becoming better bandits. Rather than simply scaling the difficulty, they altered content consistency of the world.

No, the reason I’d be leery of using it across the game is because some people just want to run by the grey shit the nth time they pass through a level, and others like the thrill of running through areas where the mobs can one-hit-kill them.

I think I could more easily get behind the idea of making all dungeons/missions use “giant monster” code. The world should be provide a fixed target for comparison, otherwise you might never feel truly powerful and/or daring.

I love the GM code in CoX, and I notice they’re employing it more often with the special event spawns of Rikti and zombies et al.

Coupla comments:

a) It would make for a different game. Thank god. It would lack the same feeling of advancement and power gain as trad MMOs. But it could replace that with other incentives to play – like actual enjoyable combat and other challenges. About time we got developers to start earning their keep in ways other than rehashing the same poker machine mechanic (see the Eurogamer Thief retrospective: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/retrospective-thief-the-dark-project-article).

b) Just make the starter rats -2 levels. You’ll still have few abilities and/or rudimentary gear, so they’ll still be a challenge. But when you’ve ‘levelled’, they’ll be a breeze.

c) Mobs simply fall on a spectrum of ‘easy’, ‘moderate’, ‘hard’ which can then be further complicated by rock/scissors/paper thrown in plus added difficulty from higher ‘level’ mobs having additional abilities and tricks up their sleeves: i.e. low level mobs don’t mez.

d) Otherwise, it’s just skill-progression in disguise. Thank god. Let’s get rid of the artificial and immersion-breaking ‘con’ system, where one giant enormous troll is -5 to you, so trivial, but a nearby orc is +5, so lethal. They’re all just mobs – some harder than others – and it’s your improved skills that make you more capable, not the fact that suddenly they clobber you for only 2 damage while you tap them for 200.

That said, I like the paradox of having an Endgame and I’ve often said I’d like to see a game give players the option to simply start at the Endgame and well, this could be something similar.

What puts me off a bit though, is the idea of balancing code. I know, I know, I act like procedural content is the devil. =P

Most definitely, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. A high-level player purposely and actively targetting/engaging a mob is not unaware of it. The character is not asleep, and we’re not talking about any self-generated disadvantage here. So when we hardcode a reduction his power, we put him in a system that punishes him (however slightly) for no good reason other than to have the system in place.

We should be rewarding success, not punishing it, and I’m of the opinion that (within the constraints of the game) a high level character -not player- is more successful than the low level one.

There’s another angle to this too: How do we rationalize in-game the cognitive disparity of this arbitrary power balancing? Extreme example: If a high-level player takes 3 minutes to fight and bring down The Black Beast of Aaaargh, and then the player turns around and takes maybe 2.5 minutes to kill Boobie the Lowbie Kobold, then it just doesn’t fit. It jars. The whole thing feels jagged. Most players would rightfully expect a challenging fight with The Black Beast and simply a stroll in the park against Boobie. When both are more or less equally challenging you’re fixing one thing (keeping content relevant and challenging) but breaking another at the same time (the player’s notion of character power)

Yes, we can always balance things in a way that Boobie is easy and a high-level player will have no trouble beating him, but that’s not the issue at all here. It’s not about Boobie being easy or hard to kill. It’s about acknowledging that players instinctively gauge encounters in relation to their own power and, because of this, while they fully expect a challenging fight from The Black Beast, they will not expect one from Boobie. That takes people’s interest out of the game fast; at first it’s a novelty, just as Oblivion’s system was. Soon enough you better hope your game takes mods, otherwise people will get tired of it.

This is not something that can be easily rationalized or explained using game factors, so it jars the whole thing. A high level player goes back to newbie land and engages tiny Hobgoblins, but he turns around and sees level 1′s taking the same time to kill them as he is. So how do we explain that with in game elements? Where has the high level character’s power gone? Why is he not vastly more effective in combat as the level one right next to him attacking the same monsters he’s attacking? Why is his weapon, crafted by the Ancients of Mu Mu and painfully wrested out of the grasp of the Purple Wereworm of Nga-Nga, doing about the same damage as the butter knife the guy next to him is holding? The Sacred Combat Techniques of Saint Buddy, which he learned from the Spaghetti Monks after much toil works about the same as the Bitchslap from the level one.

Sidekicking is probably the way to go. Other things might end up breaking too many things.

@Julian – I don’t think anyone was advocating Unreal Tournament. However, continuing the Bond example: IF Bond is caught unawares i.e. sleeping (or AFK) shouldn’t a low level henchman at least have a chance of putting him down?

I think sidekicking/mentoring is a much, much more palatable system to bring power disparity in line and get people together to play without messing too much with the content and the flow of the game for everyone else.

No system is perfect, but if we’re going to take levels away, we should at least choose something to replace them with that brings as much to the table as levels do (because even levels have their positive sides). I personally see more drawbacks than benefits in this, and a sidekicking system would be a great compromise.

This doesn’t mean we should leave levels as they are, that the concept and execution of levels can’t be revised, that they should remain the same and not more or less important. By all means, no. We should consider everything.

So yes, the bullet example is a good one. Hell, a very good one, actually. No matter how good a spy you are, one bullet can still do you in. Problem with this is that we’re not accounting for everything else. Both James Bond and a day-one greenhorn can be killed by one bullet, but if we leave it at that we’re not accounting for the decades of training Bond has, we’re not accounting for the tons of real-world mission experience he has, we’re not accounting for the gear he has, we’re not accounting for the resources he has at his disposal, etc.

We’re very, very close to asking players to forgo all those differences (which matter, and are at the core of being a successful spy) for the priviledge of dying from one bullet and have a ‘fairer’ game.

Addendum: Everybody hitting more or less the same and everybody taking more or less the same damage before dying gives us Unreal Tournament. Is that what we want?

(UT was a cool, fun game that I lost many days with, but we can do better than slightly jittered deathmatch rules by now, I think)

@ Julian – Re: Guild Wars, I think the problem you have with the game is one of the most common complaints of the leveling system. I don’t know how many developers I’ve read about who’ve debated the relative merits of level based vs. skill based vs. hybrids and how much or how little each incremental increase effects the characters abilities. And there is no such thing as one right answer. Each decision will have a different repercusions for your game. There is the reason A.net is changing the advancement scheme in GW2.

Darn it, Julian! I feel another blog post coming on! :(

I think that the reason that removing the level grind might seem unappealing to some (Julian) is that the gameplay of [insert game here] is not appealing, which means that once they take away the pretty dings and what-not that you lose motivation to play.

So:

nerf levels
buff gameplay

gg