Some adventure concepts

So I was trying to think of a story for a game, and instead thought of the adventure itself (*ahem*how most adventure games do it) ,and then a few more ideas happened, and I need to know if they'd be... fitting.

• A less linear adventure rpg?

You have a selection of places to go from the moment you leave your home village, and you can

choose any one you want to, to make a less linear adventure game.

• "What about the enemies?"

Well I think that they should be either the same level as your highest leveled active

member, or get averaged out according to the level of all active party members.

• Have every temple/dungeon become inactive?

"So you finish the temple/dungeon and get the thing, you could go to a new dungeon... or go back and-"

After realizing anyone could just level in the same dungeon (since enemies would be around the same level as you),

I thought about having each temple/dungeon collapse or have some dungeon block stopping the team from going back

in. You could try to keep leveling before the 'dungeon block', but what about the story and other temples?

So, those are the questions, but how do you think the concept of these sound?

Hello Mirpono,

This could definitely work. The first thing that came to mind was Dark Souls 1 and 2. Have you heard of those games? They are 3D action rpgs on the PS3 but you could do the same thing with RPG Maker. Basically both games are just big world maps with no restrictions, and the goal is to find 4 items in said world. Then when you have all 4 the final area is opened.

To solve your enemy/leveling problem, you could try making it so that leveling your characters doesn't drastically overpower them. I'm going to bring up Dark Souls again :/...what those games did was make it so every level up you got to pick one parameter to increase by a single point. That's it. That way enemies in the early game, while easier to defeat, were not total pushovers, and late game enemies were still formidable. This way all concerns are solved: there is no incentive to stay in one place to level, leveling doesn't make you overpowered and you don't have to collapse your dungeons.

Also, the Dark Souls games were designed to be incredibly difficult and were geared for a hardcore audience. Only make your game as difficult as Dark Souls was if you also want to appeal to a hardcore audience.

Hope this helps.

Level scaling is notoriously tricky to balance.

To use an example, if a rat you fight at the beginning of the game offers the same challenge 10 hours in, then any and all sense of character progression is lost. If everything stays the same relative to your characters' strength, what's the point of leveling up? What's the point of getting gear?

But wait! You could alter the power curve in such a way that the monsters scale slower than the characters! Actually, all that really does is make characters outscale enemies exponentially the further you progress. You'd have a lopsided game that's hardest at the start and easiest at the end, which is the direct opposite of what you want.

The "Go anywhere you want from the start!" concept sounds good on paper, but it's a logistical nightmare from a developer's point of view. That's why the "hub" design is so popular in RPGs (you have one hub area and a couple dungeons you can do in any order, then you move on to the next hub, and so on); it strikes a balance between linear progression and freeform gameplay.

Thank you Strict, I'll check out dark souls and see how they do it. Limited leveling options does sound nice.

Napdevil, It sounds like the enemy level idea would be the most difficult to work properly.

Should I just do something more like Zelda and give the enemy a 'number hits with the weapon would kill that enemy' (so the game would then be an ABS for that to work)?

Or maybe have a certain level the enemies in that area stop leveling? Like its maximum level would be 5, even if your party is level 7.

I thought about ditching the enemy level, but that wouldn't work with being able to choose where you want to go.

So maybe having this game be an ABS would work better.

I've been fiddling with the idea of making an RPG with the Megaman structure. You have 4-8 stages that you play in any order, and beating a boss gives you something that will make another boss easier. In my case, the new 'weapon' the Player gets for beating a boss is a new party member.

I hate scaling enemies, I think it's a ridiculous concept, but to prevent the last stage the player chooses from being so easy, due to gaining levels from playing the previous 7 stages, I need to include it to some degree. I'm going for "pseudo-scaling".

Basically, I have 5 stages, and so I'm going to create the enemies for each stage, and then duplicate them 4 times. The first set of enemies will be balanced with the idea that this is the first stage the player's selected. The enemies do NOT scale as the player levels, because as I said, I hate scaling enemies. If the player is playing this stage as their second stage, then I use the second set of enemies, because their stats will be adjusted to be challenging for the "average level" that the player will be once completing a single stage. This may sound like a lot of extra work, but really it's not much different from creating 20 different dungeons all with unique enemies, except I don't have design 20 different dungeons.

I call this pseudo-scaling because I'm reusing the exact same enemies but giving them 5 different "power levels". It allows the enemies to instantly scale to a strength that the Player will find challenging regardless of when they choose to play that stage, but prevents said enemies from infinitely scaling to negate the feeling that the Player is getting stronger as they level up. If I determine that the Player is going to be Lv.5 by the time they complete their first stage, then the second "power level" should be set up for the Player's Lv.5 stats. Since the enemies don't scale beyond these strict power levels, the Player will still feel like he's getting stronger because those enemies will remain with their Lv.5 stats as the Player starts reaching Lv.6, 7, 8, etc.

For a non-linear RPG that has non-scaling enemies, a crucial factor is that each single level up can't give too large rewards. The less of a "jump" in character strength between each level, the harder it is for them to "power level", and the longer it takes for an enemy to be reduced to 0-damage, 1 hit kill fodder. Power leveling in some games is being only 1 or 2 levels above the average level. Power leveling in other games requires you to be 5+ levels above the average level and this is simply because the power curve of the characters differs from game to game.