Equipment can be upgraded, but only through an enormous amount of tedious grind for tiny incremental improvements.
By halfway through the upgrade tree, all the equipment is overpowered and will make any boss fight trivial, including the final boss of the game. All additional upgrades are meaningless.
You don’t get to see the real ending unless you fully upgrade all the equipment.
Ahhh the Ragnarok Online upgrade system! Safe up to… oh god it’s been a while… +7, then the upgrades get much more strong for the next three levels, but with a 50% chance for your weapon to break.
For armor, it was +4 I believe. I bought an insanely expensive card to make me immune to an element and ended up setting with a +7 coat to put it in after breaking tons of coats.
(i’m assuming that, as usual, managing your upgrades is a secondary part of the gameplay, and that we’re talking about a random chance based danger of failure )
why are random setbacks better than just getting out of the player’s way, and getting back to the main action of the game as soon as possible?
if upgrades are rewards for playing well enough to gather resources, why waste the player’s time and effort when they aren’t doing anything wrong?
“wasting” resources can be fine, if you learn something from it, even by process of elimination, like experimenting with different ingredients to find a recipe.
but it sounds here like your game would just slap the player in the face sometimes, to try to make them feel better about when they don’t get slapped.
To give some more details, this isn’t something that happens rarely, the chance of getting to the next checkpoint is actually quite low towards the highest upgrades. To get a weapon to max level (+15), it takes on average around 230 attempts (would be 280, but there’s a sort of pity system that very slightly increases the chance of success for every failure on that weapon). Though it’s also important to mention that this is something only really feasible in the mid to late game, and there’s a mechanic to do multiple attempts at once. Technically, I could also make it so that there is no chance of failure, and instead drastically increase the amount of resources required for the upgrades. But I’m designing the resources needed around the average amount of upgrade attempts it takes.
The reason I’m doing it this way is a similar reason to why I enjoy farming bosses or special enemies in games like Borderlands, it’s fun to get that rare drop (my game also has loot with rarities etc). So it’s not that you’re upgrading and rarely get unlucky and get a failure, but instead you’re farming enemies to get the resources and try to get to the next level checkpoint on your weapon. In looter shooter games (or any loot-based RPGs), you kill bosses again and again to get a special drop, and all the attempts where you don’t get it are technically a “waste”. I think that, because failure is the expected outcome, it’s not something the player gets surprised and annoyed by. Rather, it’s the hunt for getting that success that’s the focus.
I also remember playing older MMOs etc that had weapon breaking mechanics upon failure, but premium items that protected your weapon from breaking. Usually you could get some of those for free, but they were very limited, so those games always were quite P2W. But I did enjoy those systems, just hated the real money aspect.
ah, i was looking forward to saying “you’re not a villain” with more context, but… it seems like you’re making a gacha game.
this sounds just like, for example, Genshin Impact wishes.
the diagnosis stands :(
hmm, that’s kinda funny cause I actually play lots of Genshin. But the system in practice works and feels very differently. (I also started working on this before Genshin released, and didn’t know what a gacha was before I started playing that lol)
In Genshin, as F2P, you get 70-80 or so pulls per patch (6 weeks), but in my game, it should only take a few minutes to get an upgrade attempt in the late-game. And of course, you also get other resources like XP and loot for other stuff at the same time. Upgrades are only one part of progression, and you don’t need to collect dozens of weapons in the late game, like you do with characters in gacha games.
Also, I’d never wanna sell power in a game I made, not that I think I’ll ever get to a point to release this in the first place, it’s just a hobby project :)
There are also four normal endings and a true ending. You can only see the true ending after getting all four normal endings. There are multiple branch points in the story leading to the different endings so you have to start almost from the beginning to find a new one. The true ending is on a wholly separate route that is 99% identical to the one leading to Ending A. There is no new game plus, so you have to start from scratch each time. The true ending boss, unlike the other ending bosses, is absurdly over tuned and the only enemy in the game that requires you use or even know about several obscure mechanics, and even then requires you to have all upgrades maxed out and be near the level cap to even stand a chance.
Equipment can be upgraded, but only through an enormous amount of tedious grind for tiny incremental improvements.
By halfway through the upgrade tree, all the equipment is overpowered and will make any boss fight trivial, including the final boss of the game. All additional upgrades are meaningless.
You don’t get to see the real ending unless you fully upgrade all the equipment.
Upgrading the equipment has a chance to fail and waste all your resources. The chance to fail increases with every level.
Bonus points: Failing destroys the equipment and you need to start over from scratch.
Ahhh the Ragnarok Online upgrade system! Safe up to… oh god it’s been a while… +7, then the upgrades get much more strong for the next three levels, but with a 50% chance for your weapon to break.
For armor, it was +4 I believe. I bought an insanely expensive card to make me immune to an element and ended up setting with a +7 coat to put it in after breaking tons of coats.
Wait but I actually like this (without the bonus points part)
(I do have a system somewhat like that in a game I’m working on in my free time lol)
You’re a villain. Sorry, the evidence is incontrovertible.
nooooo ;-;
I guess to elaborate, the way I designed it, it doesn’t take very many resources to upgrade, and there’s something akin to checkpoints every 3 levels.
(i’m assuming that, as usual, managing your upgrades is a secondary part of the gameplay, and that we’re talking about a random chance based danger of failure )
why are random setbacks better than just getting out of the player’s way, and getting back to the main action of the game as soon as possible?
if upgrades are rewards for playing well enough to gather resources, why waste the player’s time and effort when they aren’t doing anything wrong?
“wasting” resources can be fine, if you learn something from it, even by process of elimination, like experimenting with different ingredients to find a recipe.
but it sounds here like your game would just slap the player in the face sometimes, to try to make them feel better about when they don’t get slapped.
To give some more details, this isn’t something that happens rarely, the chance of getting to the next checkpoint is actually quite low towards the highest upgrades. To get a weapon to max level (+15), it takes on average around 230 attempts (would be 280, but there’s a sort of pity system that very slightly increases the chance of success for every failure on that weapon). Though it’s also important to mention that this is something only really feasible in the mid to late game, and there’s a mechanic to do multiple attempts at once. Technically, I could also make it so that there is no chance of failure, and instead drastically increase the amount of resources required for the upgrades. But I’m designing the resources needed around the average amount of upgrade attempts it takes.
The reason I’m doing it this way is a similar reason to why I enjoy farming bosses or special enemies in games like Borderlands, it’s fun to get that rare drop (my game also has loot with rarities etc). So it’s not that you’re upgrading and rarely get unlucky and get a failure, but instead you’re farming enemies to get the resources and try to get to the next level checkpoint on your weapon. In looter shooter games (or any loot-based RPGs), you kill bosses again and again to get a special drop, and all the attempts where you don’t get it are technically a “waste”. I think that, because failure is the expected outcome, it’s not something the player gets surprised and annoyed by. Rather, it’s the hunt for getting that success that’s the focus.
I also remember playing older MMOs etc that had weapon breaking mechanics upon failure, but premium items that protected your weapon from breaking. Usually you could get some of those for free, but they were very limited, so those games always were quite P2W. But I did enjoy those systems, just hated the real money aspect.
ah, i was looking forward to saying “you’re not a villain” with more context, but… it seems like you’re making a gacha game. this sounds just like, for example, Genshin Impact wishes. the diagnosis stands :(
hmm, that’s kinda funny cause I actually play lots of Genshin. But the system in practice works and feels very differently. (I also started working on this before Genshin released, and didn’t know what a gacha was before I started playing that lol)
In Genshin, as F2P, you get 70-80 or so pulls per patch (6 weeks), but in my game, it should only take a few minutes to get an upgrade attempt in the late-game. And of course, you also get other resources like XP and loot for other stuff at the same time. Upgrades are only one part of progression, and you don’t need to collect dozens of weapons in the late game, like you do with characters in gacha games.
Also, I’d never wanna sell power in a game I made, not that I think I’ll ever get to a point to release this in the first place, it’s just a hobby project :)
There are also four normal endings and a true ending. You can only see the true ending after getting all four normal endings. There are multiple branch points in the story leading to the different endings so you have to start almost from the beginning to find a new one. The true ending is on a wholly separate route that is 99% identical to the one leading to Ending A. There is no new game plus, so you have to start from scratch each time. The true ending boss, unlike the other ending bosses, is absurdly over tuned and the only enemy in the game that requires you use or even know about several obscure mechanics, and even then requires you to have all upgrades maxed out and be near the level cap to even stand a chance.