Competition (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, February 02, 2017, 22:20 (2658 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Yeah, so much this. For some reason no one has figured out how to properly design an investment game

Why do you think that is? Oh wait, it's because investment games inherently suck. The proper way to design them is to make them something else. Aspects of your game are required to suck in order for an investment system to work.

I disagree. I think Diablo 2 is the pinnacle of investment archetecture. You have some bosses who are loot pinatas from specific loot pools (which are very large). The loot from boss 1 can gear you up for boss 2 which can gear you for boss 3 etc. along the way.

As you go with the linear progression, you're also unlocking access to non-linear progression in the form of runes and rune words. This seems, at first, like all RNG, but when you factor in that the player can modify items to give them sockets for runes using the horadric cube, and combine like runes to make better runes, you've created a parallel path of progression. The runes take longer to acquire, but the rune words are, ultimately, more powerful than most non-rune items, so it all works out. The progression game of D2 was fantastic. The only real issue with it was that it was very bot-able, which made lots of the game feel automated and samey instead of fresh and new.

Similarly, Puzzle and Dragons has a spectacularly good investment game, whereby you use your weaker minions to evolve them into progressively stronger and stronger minions. Each element is basically farmable in 1-3 runs of specific dungeons, so you have a strong element of agency in deciding what to improve first and which monsters to evolve (and how).

So there are two different models for investment games which both live on the long game investment, and they're both very, very good models. I am flummoxed as to why the D2 investment system was scrapped in favor of D3's "your choices are all the same" system, which led directly to "optimized" farming locations (whatever's easiest) rather than requiring specific player skill to beat designed encounters like D2 had. D3 remains a failure in my book.

Path of Exile is close to D2 in terms of investment game design, but I haven't delved deep enough to know if it really holds up in the same way once you're in the late / endgame.

My point is that your game doesn't have to suck in order for investment to pay off. If the investment, itself, is fun and rewarding, then you can just plug it right in. The Thorn quest would be a good example of the right and wrong ways to do this. The initial tiers of the quest were fun investment. Get void kills, do this other thing, a third thing I forgot about, etc... Fun! And then, prior to the latest patch, you hit the bullshit problem where skeleton keys never dropped so the last step was literally impossible for some of us. Before the patch, that was a great example of horseshit RNG screwage "faking" an investment game scenario. Post-patch when you get skeleton keys, it's now fun again.

As long as the player is able to see tangible progress when undertaking an investment, you're in good shape. It's when the progress is stalled despite the player doing everything right (RNG screwage) that an investment game because bullshit.