(04-24-2014, 02:23 AM)synaesthetic Wrote: The problem with that is it would incorporate a great deal of horizontal progression which is something Square seems to dislike (despite loving it in FFXI for years). I think part of the reason is it's much easier to keep the game "balanced" if every time a new tier of content comes out, all the old gear becomes obsolete.
It also tends to limit the amount of worthwhile content you have at any given point, which I feel is problematic. Square is trying to have their cake and eat it too by utilizing linear vertical progression and gate new content behind old content. This is not smart at all. I am really personally annoyed that I cannot attempt Turn 6 without completing Turn 5 first, or that people have to kill Titan and Ifrit EX to attempt Leviathan EX.
No, Square, this is not the way to do it. They should not have made the new tier i100-115. Linear vertical progression only results in two things: disposable content and power creep.
Honestly I would throw away the entire idea of "item level" in the first place. The whole "gearscore" situation is a stupid one to begin with. I know it's more difficult to design and handle, but the loot that drops from The Binding Coil of Bahamut, which is launch content as you know, should still be relevant... five years from now. When I played FFXI in 2007, where the current content tier was Wings of the Goddess, people still raided in Sky, Rise of the Zilart content that came out several years earlier.
I don't understand why MMO developers insist upon spending thousands and thousands of dollars and labor-hours on developing content they fully intend to "throw away" within three to six months.
Honestly, I think it's one of those old standbys that runs the RPG genre as a whole. Â It's been with us since the very first JRPGs that I remember, and even Zelda did have you slowly replacing a few pieces of gear. Â It's just burned into the corneas of game developers that your characters need to get stuff when they advance. Â What do they get? Â New gear to replace the old.
*fanfare* Â This is one of those times that I'll say how good the core game of EVE is! Â They have that same sort of progression, but it's a bit more nebulous. Â Obviously, you try to get to T2 ships and otherwise you don't get many advantages trying to take your cruiser 1 v 1 with someone else's equally equipped battleship. Â However, advancing in "level" if such a thing exists, generally just adds capabilities and responsibilities. Â You aren't always getting more powerful versions of the same weapon, suddenly you're talking about having drones and you have to have countermeasures for drones in what you fly.
I'll be forever disappointed that a game designed so well at a technical level applied it the way they did.
In any case, that's possible in any game including a fantasy game. Â Let's imagine you start with a sword and a shield. Â As you advance in the game, you can start picking up other weapons and adding skills. Â As you add them, you start adding situations where you need those skills. Â Maybe enemies start becoming larger or more numerous, and you need skillsets to deal with both. Â Maybe they start circling for position or the area you're accessing means you're having to learn ancillary skills like scaling palace walls, using disguises, and so on.
I may have played too much Shadowrun in my youth. Â I think games are maybe too objective-based? Â The concept of min-max gear has been in RPGs since the dawn of time, but that's because, in the broader scheme of the universe, damage is damage. Â When push comes to shove and all the math and modifiers are applied, it's just a number. Â Games seem to be fixated on changing the way that number is generated in as many different ways as possible rather than making that number less of a concern.
Imagine not being able to quickly heal in a game, so suddenly it isn't just about racing damage, it's about knowing how to avoid combat at times or how to generate a killing blow without taking any damage yourself, since you won't get it back. Â Maybe you could add more infiltration, siege breaking, or traveling so that getting to the objective (and needing the skills to get to that objective) are more important than what you do when you actually get there. Â Or maybe you can go the other way, making combat much more realistic by making more decisions about defense, position, terrain, and tactics rather than our current system. Â I'd love a game where you defend a castle with slings, arrows, oil, and catapults, the enemy breaks through and you need to form a ring around spellcasters with your melee or pin them at the bottom of a set of stairs. Â Very old-school Warcraft or C&C stuff, only it's played out by people playing a single player and focusing very much on the economy of combat.
That's just a few examples, but it would change things significantly so that gear isn't even really important. Â That way, there could be a lot more lateral progression by essentially customizing gear not to max damage (which would be dictated by skill and how the skill was applies), but to changing more interesting concepts such as weapon handling speed, attack range, elemental affinities, and so on. Â That way, the player could manually tweak stats individually in a zero-sum game to make a weapon "feel" right rather than having to use something predetermined by the developers.