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I was talking to a friend of mine today about RPG games, and it reminded me of a few things about RPGs which are both good and bad. One interesting thing that came up was the idea of experience points and character levels.
See, I had complained that the mini-games in Final Fantasy X simply weren't good enough to use as a requirement to find everything in the game. The difficultly and frustration of trying to win the races or dodge lightning 100 some odd times in a row is ridiculous and far from fun. We buy RPG games to explore the world the designers have created, find and purchase new equipment, find new spells, and use these items in interesting combinations to take out ridiculously powerful enemies. The strategic depth provided to us players by using a turn based system is immense, especially late in the game when the user has many options. Still, there are times when the user cannot come up with a powerful combination to beat certain foes, and this is where leveling comes in.
Leveling up a character can be a goal in and of itself, but in general players are often more interested in the next plot line, and next dungeon, and the next boss fight. They only become interested in leveling up when they have to in-order to achieve some other goal they have. What is interesting about leveling up and experience systems is that the player is rewarded by spending more time with the game. If you have trouble with a certain boss, just spend more time hunting around the area, looking for new stuff, and eventually the boss will become easier. That gives the player a chance to try out new tactics on lesser monsters, and in the worse case, lets the player beat the monster by brute force eventually. This makes character leveling the great equalizer. No matter how tough a fight may be, as long as the character can continue to increase in level, he or she will eventually be able to defeat a certain challenge.
And this is a good thing! Finding new stuff and exploring new places is the fun part. We don’t want a player to become stuck at any one part for too long. What this system of leveling up allows is that more skilled players can advance more quickly then non-skilled players, but that doesn’t mean the non-skilled ones are stuck. It puts emphasis on learning the game systems. Thinking about how to defeat any enemy for 30 minutes is far more worthwhile then 30 min of leveling up, but in case you can’t figure it out, there is a backup plan. Difficulty levels become less important in these cases because some level of error can be made up just by having the player level up.
Also, the idea of gaining experience and becoming more proficient at something is a very natural system. The more often we do something, we should expect to get better at it, and this system is immediately understandable to just about anyone. This system does need to be improved (The SIMS management of experience is far more understandable then the current experience points system that RPGs use), but it a great foundation to allow all types of players access to your game.
This isn’t to say that all challenges should be surmountable just be leveling up. There should be optional side questions that force the player to act in a skilled manner in order to achieve a 100% completion rate and say that they have truly mastered the game. Maybe add some extra monsters that are impossible to defeat unless you play intelligently (Ruby and Emerald Weapon, I’m looking at you), but the barriers between the player and the end of the story should be surmountable by leveling up. Again, we don’t want to punish players because they can’t figure out some subsystem we designed. They should be allowed to progress through the game. We just want to reward players that do have a strong understanding and use their brain before fighting by allowing them to traverse through the game faster, find extra secrets(which could expand their options, allowing them more strategies to think about), and the ability to defeat extra hard bosses for bragging sake.
The more casual user gets what they want out of the game by seeing the story to competition meanwhile the expert gamer has extra content to explore, more options to consider, and an altogether bigger experience if they choose to invest the extra time. This is a win-win situation for everyone.
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